I've been monitoring some of this - don't have as much time as I'd like to post, but I've become almost convinced the endeavor would be useless.

As a conservative, I've spent untold hours, perhaps most of my adult life, arguing my viewpoints with any/everybody who would engage me.

Most of the time I've been preaching to an empathetic choir, bitching about liberals, as have many of you, but if I can make peace with the essential necessity of a solid conservative/liberal alliance on any unifying issue that presents, why can't any of you?

While I am less than sanguine about the possibility this might work, I'd like to request this thread be reserved for replies formulated to flesh out the "how" of getting this done.

I spoke at a tea party on the subject, and began by inquiring of the attendees as to their ideological leanings, only to discover we had no liberals with us at all.

Our ensuing local roundtables will be dedicated exclusively to this end (I'm proposing a "free-breakfast bounty for liberals who can be persuaded to attend) until we achieve a workable balance; if we don't get it done in the next few months, I am going to pull the plug on my involvement, because I've already done enough of what hasn't worked.

The need to make the right choices at the voting booth goes without saying but I would add one thing:

It is a tremendous waste of time to debate the opposition with the intent of changing their minds; that is NOT going to happen...neither do we regularly have the opportunity to debate in the presence of those who who are interested but hold no opinion owing to their ignorance.

The key is to listen to the things others say which indicate this ignorance (which I here characterize as a lack of relevant information - not meant as a pejorative), and then pounce with facts and a coherent argument.

You'd be surprised how many people are merely waiting to be invited to "join the choir", so to speak.

Share ideas, reading suggestions, and start converting the uninformed; don't waste time arguing with the opposition, 'cuz they aren't interested.

Term limits?

How about this:

Make service in the House or Senate the equivalent of two or six years of indentured servitude, or jury duty - "OH, CRAP...I GOTTA GO TO WASHINGTON!!"

The penalty for poor public service?

ANOTHER TERM.

It's a pipe, dream, but it's a good one...

No BS from Obama?

Your detector needs calibration, I think.

Obama is ALL BS, ALL THE TIME - the fact is, the lite, lo-cal version he offers is so amorphous and inconsequential as to be, well, uh....what'd he say?

Hope?

Change?

That's all I can remember.

As to your recollections regarding Democrat control, the operative condition extends back to the end of WWII (1945), and in the intervening 64 years, Republicans held the Senate for ten years while the Democrats held it for 54 years.

In the House, the Republicans held the reins for all of 7 years, while the Dems controlled things for 57 years.

Perhaps you'd care to reformulate your assessment of the relative responsibility of the two parties for the mess we are in.

All of this is not to recommend Republicans, whose only positive aspect is that they are not Democrats.

Here's a tidbit for you:

Democrats have co-opted the black vote for decades, and are universally perceived as champions of the civil rights movement, correct?

I'll bet you weren't aware (and I don't really blame you, no, wait...yes I do) that more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than did Democrats.

Glad to have relieved you of you ignorance - class dismissed.

The obvious public-address access-point is the major media, but the major media is willfully ignorant of any view perceived as even marginally conservative; they'll turn out in force to cover five liberals protesting the death sentence outside your local penitentiary, but ignore 30,000 people showing up to see a Sarah Palin campaign stop in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, a town with a population of slightly over 12,000.

How do we breech this resistance?

Absent liberal the methodologies (the liberal "playbook" is abhorrent, after all), we must concoct our own.