Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of October 17, 2013. Give me your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am. Remember, you can listen online at KFYO.com or on your iPhone/Android with the radioPup App.

U.S. Capitol building
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Don't Give Up

The battle to defund or delay Obamacare was lost yesterday but that doesn't mean it's time to give up. If you really believe that Obamacare is terrible for this country and terrible for our economy, how could you give up?

Sure, the Republican Party is in the gutter right now. It's a party that is split and seems to be floating around without any direction. However, there are some bright spots. Republicans have fighters now! For the longest time it's been the Democrats who have had the loudest members, those who are willing to fight and even go down in flames. But they still fought for what they believed in. Because of the fighters on the Democratic side, look at what it has gotten them. Bigger government, more spending, entitlements, healthcare, etc. They have fought for what they wanted even when in the minority.

Republicans on the other hand didn't like the fight. They gave up and looked weak because they were. Don't get me wrong, Republicans still have the weak and spineless in office. Lawmakers like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Rep. Peter King to name a few. These lawmakers stand in opposition to the fighters in office.

It's time for Republicans to make a decision. Before you can defeat Obamacare and roll back government, Republicans have to decide which direction their party is going in. Will they be a party that throws out the politicians that refuse to fight? Or will they sit back and continue to lose the battles because they are worried about what NBC will say?

I believe the fight must continue. Lawmakers like Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee should be and are the future. The 87 Republican members of the House that voted in favor of last night's bill are part of the problem and should all face a primary.

It's a new day. Time to fight.

Recall Effort Against Castro

According to the National Review, an effort is underway to recall San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro.

If San Antonio grassroots conservative activists have their way, Julian Castro’s career in politics could be cut abruptly short. Organizers of an effort to recall the mayor say their push is picking up steam, and tell National Review that they’re confident they have a shot at voting the mayor out of office. They’re targeting him because of the passage of an anti-LGBT discrimination ordinance that conservatives worry will hamstring freedom of speech and religion. (Katrina Trinko laid out concerns about the ordinance here.)

Weston Martinez, president of the Bexar County Conservative Coalition, lays out the strategy this way: To recall a mayor or council member, you have a 180-day window to get one-tenth of the number of voters from the last election to sign a petition. That means, per Martinez, that activists need about 63,000 signatures from San Antonians to have a recall election. They’re also trying to recall city councilman Diego Bernal, who authored the ordinance, and they’ll need about 6,000 signatures from his district to pull that off.

Martinez says activists have collected more than two-thirds of the signatures necessary to recall Bernal. And he estimates they’ve gotten about 6,000 signatures so far on petitions to recall the mayor. They have volunteers camped out in front of Bernal’s office every day getting signatures, Martinez adds, and the councilman has called the police about their presence there. But that hasn’t deterred volunteers.

“We had a great outcry from the city,” Martinez says. “By our estimate about 80 percent of the city is opposed to the ordinance: Castro clearly is bringing national politics to the local level because of obvious future aspirations, the most liberal ordinance in the country into a very conservative town.”

Martinez says that between 80 and 100 people have already put in time gathering signatures. And Gina Castaneda, who’s helping coordinate the recall efforts, says 300 people have signed on to volunteer in the future. Ultimately, she hopes to recall all eight members of the council who voted for the ordinance.

Martinez says the effort has galvanized many of the city’s Hispanic voters.

“On a national level, the Democratic party doesn’t really represent the traditional values of the Hispanic community,” he says, “and they’ve just kind of inherited their loyalty even though they don’t deserve it. And so you have a lot of traditional, Catholic, always-voted-Democrat individuals who are signing the petition for the recall and are promoting the signing of the petition for the recall.”

If they can pull off the recall vote, it will come on the heels of successful efforts in Colorado to recall two state senators who voted for stricter gun laws. But the prospect of ending Julian Castro’s political career holds special appeal for conservatives: not just because of their qualms about the LGBT-discrimination ordinance, but because it gives them a chance to show that, national Democrats’ ambitions for the state be damned, the Lone Star State is redder than ever — and certainly not an incubator for national Democratic talent.

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