At the State Convention

0938:  I’m at the Wisconsin GOP State Convention.  Paul Ryan is speaking now.  I’ll add thoughts as the day progresses.  It’s always hard at things like this because I have to make the choice between participating or live-blogging.  We’ll see how it goes.  If I choose to participate more, I’ll have a recap later.  One little rumor floating around that I don’t think is true… there’s a resolution for supporting McCain.  Rumor is that it will fail.  I don’t think that will happen, but I expect some debate. 

In other news, I’m very proud to announce that Washington County won the Top County award.  Congrats to the Washington County Republican Party!

Ryan’s speech is good.  I’ve heard chunks of it before.  He got loud applause when he said that the Republicans are sinking because they aren’t forcefully advocating a Conservative agenda. 

0955: Steve is here.  I think I took his seat. 

1002: Troy Fullerton is here, laptop in lap.  I suspect we’ll see some commentary from him.

1007: WisPolitics has coverage and audio.

1030: I was out in the hallway and happened to see Paul Ryan’s family passing by.  As his kid walked past one of the displays with a picture of him, the kid said, “DADDY!!!” and went over and pointed.  It was cute. 

I was given a heads up that Sensenbrenner’s speech will be worthy of note.

1049: Huebsch is being introduced.  Robin Vos stood up and yelled “WOOO!!!!”

1110: Van Hollen just got done speaking.  Gee, I think he might be thinking about being governor some day.  You heard it here first. 

There’s a resolution about making it illegal to desecrate the American flag.  I intend to speak against that resolution.  There are a couple of other resolutions that may get me yammering.

1124: Sensenbrenner is being introduced. 

1126:  Starts out with Republicans need to act like Republicans and vote like Republicans.  “We lost our way because we spent too much money.” Similar examples of losing our way followed.

1130: Sensenbrenner just hammered Huebsch for the budget repair bill and accused him of damaging the Republican brand.

“If we act like RINOs, voters will see no difference between us and the Democrats and we will lose elections.”

1133: I just got the text of the speech.  Some quotes…

“Unfortunately, Speaker Huebsch decided to push it [the budget repair bill] through the Assembly.  And he did so in a manner which does not fix the problems of overtaxing, and replaces transportation fees with more state borrowing - exactly the same move which helped destroy the Republican brand.  Everyone can see this is a political shell game that simply postpones the hard decisions. 

Sometimes, leadership consists of saying “NO” to bad policies, rather than going along to get along.”