Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2010, 12:37:59 PM

Title: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2010, 12:37:59 PM
I'm sensing we are getting to the point where this thread will help the coherency of the forum.

I must say at the moment I am utterly devoid of any hope or any emotional reaction to CA's gubernatorial race or Boxer vs. Fiorina.

Title: Nevada Senate race
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2010, 05:26:22 PM
WSJ:

By STEPHEN MOORE
Sharron Angle first realized the extent of the brewing revolt against Washington in late March, at a tea party protest in Searchlight, Nev. A "Woodstock of the West," she calls it. "More than 30,000 people sojourned to this tiny rural town of 900 people," Mrs. Angle says. "The highways were jammed up and became parking lots."

To get to the stage, this 60-year-old grandmother of 10 says she "climbed on the back of a Harley Davidson Road King bike and rode through the immense crowds." Once there, she reminded the throng that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must be replaced.

Now, after sprinting past two better-known and better-funded opponents in the June Republican primary, the party has chosen Mrs. Angle to go up against him. "I knew that if we were going to actually defeat Harry Reid," Mrs. Angle says, "we had to have a candidate who would offer a sharp policy contrast. Someone who would not just pay lip service to limited government principles, but had a solid record of voting that way time and again. I'm that candidate."

Thus has Sharron Angle—a former teacher, business owner, state legislator and political rabble-rouser—emerged as one of the three most prominent figures in the tea party movement. Sarah Palin and Rand Paul of Kentucky are the other two. Her campaign to become the next U.S. Senator from Nevada figures to be among the most closely watched, and surely among the most colorful, contests this November.

Liberal groups and Mr. Reid are gleeful that a "right wing extremist" has won the GOP nomination. At a recent fund raising dinner for the majority leader in Las Vegas, President Barack Obama labeled her "extreme, even for a Republican." Some Republicans privately grumble that she may be unelectable because of her staunchly conservative stands. And to be sure, some of her positions, such as banning fluoridated water or providing massages to rehabilitate convicts, seem a bit, well, odd.

But is she the kook Mr. Reid portrays her as in his TV ads?

I met with Mrs. Angle twice, first in Washington, D.C., late last month, then again during the Freedomfest conference last week in Las Vegas. In person, she seems anything but a threat to the American way of life. She is petite, has Irish red hair with and a pretty round face. She's friendly, but businesslike, and unlike most politicians, comes across as sincere in her convictions. Her husband, Ted, a 35 year veteran of the Bureau of Land Management (he explains that he's a conservative who worked to protect property rights, not violate them), stands constantly by her side as a confidant and de facto campaign manager.

When I ask whether it is really possible to knock off a Senate majority leader, she laughs and replies, "only Reid thinks he's too big to fail." Her strategy against the Reid attack machine is to link him to the lousy economy in Nevada. When I ask her if Nevadans want to give up Mr. Reid's clout in Washington, she replies: "When Harry Reid got to be majority leader, the unemployment rate was 4.4%. Now it is 14%, higher than even in Michigan. . . . What has Harry Reid's power done for our state?" Her new TV ad, unrolled this week, hammers this message. "We know he is going to attack me constantly," she says, because "he can't possibly run on his record."

Despite the deep recession, Mrs. Angle is not impressed by Mr. Reid's desire to extend unemployment benefits. "This only incentivizes folks that could work," Mrs. Angle says, "but can't, because they're making more on unemployment than they can by going back to work. The longer they're out of the work force, their skills become less marketable." Not too many Republicans even in safe seats are willing to speak that truth.

Regarding jobs, she points to Mr. Reid's role in killing three clean coal-fired plants in rural Ely, where she and her husband have lived since 1971. After years of opposition by Mr. Reid in league with various environmental groups, NV Energy halted development of a $5 billion plant in February 2009.

That meant the loss of 5,000 jobs, Mrs. Angle says. "That's really when we realized Harry Reid doesn't care about jobs or people losing their homes. And it's also when 'Anybody but Harry Reid' signs first began to sprout up all over the state."

Sharron Angle's first foray into activism was when her son was held back in kindergarten in 1983 and "the poor little guy was made to feel like a failure. He hated school." She wanted to home school him, but the school system and the courts said no. Her response was to open a one-room school with a Christian-based curriculum. It soon had 24 students.

"I didn't realize how many other parents were angry with the school system," she recalls. She charged $125 a month to cover the cost of supplies but taught for free. (Mrs. Angle has a degree in education from the University of Nevada, Reno.)

In 1985 she rallied hundreds of parents behind her successful effort to pass a bill through the Nevada legislature allowing parents to home school anywhere in the state. The result of her effort is that in Nevada home schooling has become a popular alternative to the public schools, and Mrs. Angle is referred to as the "home school heroine."

"I was just a mother, and the government had gotten between me and my child, and that's like getting between a mother bear and her cubs," she says. "I think that's what activates the tea party movement. What they see is the government interfering with their lives, and with the inheritance of their children. Are we going to pass down liberty or deficits? And that's really what this movement is about." The cub—her 6-year-old son—now has a masters degree and teaches high school history in Yerrington, Nevada.

***
Mrs. Angle was later elected to the county school board, and in 1998 she ran for state legislature, where she served for eight tumultuous years. She gained a reputation as a crusader who wouldn't flinch in a battle with the leaders of either party. Critics lampoon the times she cast the lone "no" vote for spending bills. They began to call these votes "62 to Angle," she tells me, smiling.

Mrs. Angle's most legendary fight was within her own party. In 2003, then Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican, schemed to raise the sales tax by half a billion dollars. Mr. Guinn declared that anybody who opposed his tax was "irrelevant, irresponsible and cowardly." The governor seemed to be pointing directly at her, says Mrs. Angle. "He knew from the start I would be against it."

The frustrated governor couldn't get the constitutionally required two-thirds vote of approval without her. As she tells the story, "at one critical point, the minority leader asked me: 'So, Sharron, what's your number?' That meant how big a tax increase could I tolerate? And I told them my number was zero."

When the bullying failed, the Nevada Supreme Court, in a spectacular abuse of the constitution, allowed the tax hike to go through without the two-thirds vote. The justices decreed that the money was needed for the schools and that the right to an adequate education took precedence over a procedural safeguard.

The next day, Ms. Angle recalls, "I went into the conference room and was told there's nothing you can do, Sharron. It's all over. The Supreme Court has the last word. And I said, 'No, it's not over.'"

She spearheaded a movement to get the Supreme Court replaced. In the next election in 2006, voters threw out five of the seven members of the Nevada Supreme Court; the other two had retired. "It was a referendum on that tax increase vote," she argues. "And the new court came in and reversed that decision and made our constitution whole."

Democrats think Ms. Angle is a piñata they easily defeat. The attacks run the gamut from her antifluoridation views ("my constituents all opposed" fluoridation), to her desire to abolish the Education Department, to favoring private Social Security accounts.

Mrs. Angle stands her ground: "I support voluntary personal retirement accounts for Social Security," she says. "It should be people's free choice." But she also notes that her 83-year-old mother and 84-year-old mother-in-law are on Social Security and Medicare. "I certainly will work to protect their benefits," she says.

Mrs. Angle is not bashful about wanting to take a knife to what she labels "C-priority programs," including federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. She thinks such bodies should be funded "by the states under the 10th Amendment." As for federal education funding, Mrs. Angle believes it's a drain because control of the schools "should stay as close to the local level as possible, where the child, the teacher, and the parent are the main stakeholders, and make the majority of the decisions.

"If we did that," Mrs. Angle contends, "we would see a lot more money actually spent in the classroom."

The explosion of federal debt under President Obama and Mr. Reid, according to Mrs. Angle, is a moral and economic calamity. "We simply have to stop the Obama-Reid spending and bailouts—now," she says. It's a simple message that resonates with the tea party faithful and Republican voters.

But the key in this Senate race are swing voters—the 20% of Nevada independents who went for Mr. Obama in 2008. The political pros I talked to in the state are skeptical she can win those voters because of their liberal-leaning social views.

Mrs. Angle takes exception to my suggestion that her pro-life and antigay rights positions could hurt her. "This is a state that twice has voted to ban same sex marriages," she reminds me.

***
Still, the attack ads seem to be hurting her. A Las Vegas Review-Journal poll this week has the majority leader pulling into the lead for the first time by 44% to 37%. But his approval rating remains well below 50%, which always spells trouble for any incumbent, especially in this agitated political environment.

To win, Sharron Angle is going to need a major money influx from the conservative groups that pushed her over the top in the primary to counter the $25 million Mr. Reid is expected to spend. What Mrs. Angle has going for her is a contagious optimism that Nevadans would never send Mr. Reid back to the Senate given the fiscal carnage in Washington.

Nevada voters, she says, "are disillusioned, disappointed and disgusted with what had happened since the 2008 election. They are tired of this establishment machine that doesn't understand that we—the people— are in control. They are saying 'We don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat. We don't believe either one of you.'"

She is banking on the depth of this discontent to help her topple the most powerful man in the United States Senate.

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Title: 2010 Elections: Rand Paul in Kentucky
Post by: DougMacG on July 25, 2010, 12:58:36 PM
I had my first chance to see Rand Paul, I watched on CSPAN a debate sponsored by Kentucky Farm Bureau.  The presumption was Paul would do terribly because he opposes farm subsidies.  I think the opposite occurred.  Every question looked like a softball favoring the pro-freedom, pro-business candidate.  Estate tax.  EPA defining any water collection as a federal wetland.  Carbon tax.  Deficits and debt.  National Healthcare.

I come from a blue state.  Interesting to watch red state Democrats run away from their national leaders.  Finally the issues really came down to which side are you going to support for leadership?

Paul looked very good.  The Democrat was conservative, sharp and articulate.  Too bad their is no place in Washington for a level-headed conservative Democrat to organize.

Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: prentice crawford on August 24, 2010, 08:40:09 PM
 
  McCain is reelected, I don't know why; but the people have spoken, I'm sure they'll get what they deserve. :roll:
                         P.C. :-P
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on September 03, 2010, 08:12:51 AM
Roughly Labor Day, if the election were held today - and it isn't - the Republicans would take the House.  Discussed elsewhere are some things they could do, but they could pass nothing that would be veto proof. 

The senate today is still in question.  Real Clear Politics has it at 48 Dems, 45 R's (already a nice gain) and 7 highly contested, 6 of those 7 were Dem seats.  The vice President breaks the tie so 50 means nothing.  R's need 6 of those 7 for a majority and still would be nowhere near 60 to force any vote and nowhere near veto-proof.

Here are the seven most contested: 
CA: Boxer (D)
CO: Bennet (D)
FL: Open (R)
IL: Open (D)
NV: Reid (D)
WA: Murray (D)
WI: Feingold (D)

All would seem impossible for Republicans a short time ago, even Florida with 2 (alleged) Republicans running.  Logic might assume even races break randomly.  History might give the close race to the incumbent for that advantage.  The energy and movement this year may say the opposite - that they all break against the failed and unpopular ruling regime.

As a partisan, I will take any win I can get, but Republicans might be better positioned into 2012 for congress and President to still be fighting as the outsiders.  For the good of the nation IMHO they must take at least one chamber to at least slow this train wreck.

If that many blue states swung against Obama and his big government 'spread the wealth' economic policies were still failing, it would be interesting to see if he would still hunker down on ideology or read the message, adapt and try to survive as Clinton did by partially working with the other side in the direction of economic growth.  At this point, I think everyone sees Obama as unbendable and every key issue would be an unsolvable stalemate.
Title: What's at stake....
Post by: G M on September 03, 2010, 10:17:43 AM
After The Fall
posted at 12:51 am on September 3, 2010 by Doctor Zero


The November elections may well be the most historic reversal of political power in modern history.  Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics thinks over 60 seats in the House could go Republican.  Dick Morris is ready to toss another 20 seats into the ante.  A more restrained estimate in the high 40s comes from Larry Sabato, who also reminds us the Senate almost always switches parties when the House does.

The usual caveats apply: campaigns will stumble, local issues will come into play, unforeseen events could change the minds of jittery voters, and skeletons have a habit of tumbling from closets around Halloween.  Still, it seems very likely the GOP will at least take the House.  Thanks to the Tea Party influence, some old RINOs will also be replaced by tough new war elephants.

What then?

The highest priority for Americans is the repeal of ObamaCare, whose damage to our dignity, economy, and health care system is absolutely intolerable.  Outright repeal must wait until Obama has been replaced in 2012, but a Republican Congress can neutralize the worst provisions of the bill, sealing its toxic waste into lead-lined containers until we can shoot it off into space and be rid of it.

There is some concern that a successful Republican Congress will engineer enough prosperity to pump air into the Obama re-election campaign.  Knowing ObamaCare was dead would send a euphoric surge through an economy that has spent the last couple of years curled up in the corner, hugging itself and whimpering as it awaits the next beating from Democrats.  ObamaCare killed tens of thousands of jobs almost immediately, and the weight of its mandates has been crushing job creation, especially among smaller businesses.  It seems reasonable to believe its repeal would produce a far stronger surge of payroll expansion than any of the gimmicks being kicked around by statists today.

This is why the election of solid, articulate conservatives to Congress is so essential.  If the Republican wave in 2010 is an isolated outpouring of voter anger, we’ll have trouble finishing the job in 2012, and could soon find ourselves right back where we started.  It’s not enough for the electorate to “throw the bums out” this year.  We have to teach them to build electrified fences topped with razor wire around the federal government, to keep those bums from ever returning.

It takes nothing away from Obama’s failures as President to point out that he did not create our current situation on his own.  He bankrupted us, but we were already on shaky financial ground when he arrived.  He detonated the deficit to pay off his political allies in the historic “stimulus” heist, but his crew wasn’t the first to roll out of the Treasury with bags of taxpayer swag in their fists.  Barack Obama is the absurd final extension of a system that has been dying for longer than most of us have been alive.  He didn’t change the course of the State.  He just stepped on the gas.

Conservatives underestimate the inertia of that gigantic, doomed engine at their peril.  The apparatus of the federal government is like nanotechnology: self-sustaining and self-replicating.  Powers it has seized are never returned.  Its budgets are never cut.  It howls in agony if the rate of budget increase is even slightly reduced.  In the past two years, trillions of dollars in new commitments have been added to its bulk.  The media will eagerly assist Democrats in strapping the poor and destitute to its hide as armor, to turn away budget-cutting knives.

What will be crucial for Republicans after 2010 is leadership. It is essential to make the voters understand how we got here, and restate the Constitutional principles that render so much of this bloated government utterly immoral, as well as ineffective.  Encouraging voters to pour unfocused anger at Obama is ultimately counter-productive, because he didn’t create the crumbling system he presides over.  Its foundations were laid long before his birth, and it won’t magically improve as soon as he’s gone.

In fact, letting the voters work out their frustrations on an Obama punching bag is dangerous, because once they’re exhausted, there are far too many ways he could talk them out of their anger.  No matter how unpopular he might be now, a Democrat president who enjoys the slavish devotion of the media will always have potent protection against personal criticism.  We will be told that failure to re-elect Obama is a sin… an unforgivable act of racism and bigotry, and a hate crime against the vulnerable people he supposedly represents.  It is necessary to run against the corrupt and venal system he truly represents.

Look beyond that campaign to 2013, and imagine a political environment in which the signature “achievement” of the Obama presidency is seen as one of the worst mistakes in recent history.  The Democrats invested every drop of their political capital in passing it.  They twisted arms, cut seedy backroom deals, and ultimately shoved it down the throats of a protesting majority of Americans.  Imagine a jubilant nation celebrating the repeal of this disaster, and the defeat of the party that inflicted it on us.  Nothing like it has happened in the modern era.  Political parties dissolve after that kind of defeat.  There will never be more solid ground for conservatives to stand upon, as they begin the daunting task of dismantling the out-of-control system that produced the poisonous notion of socialized medicine.  There will never be a better time to return to the just, and effective, principles that guided us before we lost our way in the New Deal and Great Society.

If we fail to create and use that opportunity, our next appeal to the voters will come among the ruins, after a collapse that every one of us should be united in our determination to prevent.  There is nothing patriotic about allowing our fellow citizens – even those who hate us – to live through what is coming next.  Nothing like it has ever happened in the modern era, either.  We stand within a dozen years of watching this mighty nation devour itself in a frenzy of non-negotiable, utterly impossible demands.

Jim Geraghty of National Review relays some sage advice from his political mentor: “This election is not about Obama.  It’s about what Democrats have been since 1972.”  It’s also about preventing them from assuming their twisted and ravenous state in the future.  We need healthy opposition parties.  The long-term prosperity, and perhaps survival, of our nation requires the improvement of the Republican Party… and the transformation of the Democrats.  That is the great task awaiting us, after the fall.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org
Title: No R's for Lib's
Post by: prentice crawford on September 12, 2010, 05:21:15 PM
Woof,
 Look out Libs in the GOP the Conservatives are doing their best to take back the party.

 www.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100912/ap_on_el_se/us_delaware_senate

                  P.C.
Title: POTH editorial
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2010, 06:22:54 AM
Pravda on the Hudson's take on things:

Democratic operatives are ablaze with excitement over the victory of two particularly dubious Tea Party candidates in Tuesday’s Republican primaries, envisioning smoother paths to victory in the races for governor in New York and United States senator in Delaware. But for voters of all stripes, Tuesday’s primaries should illuminate the growling face of a new fringe in American politics — and provide the incentive for level-headed voters to become enthusiastic about the midterm election.

Republican leaders have to decide if they want the tiny fraction of furious voters who have showed up at the primary polls to steer them into the swamp for years ahead. They have a chance to repudiate the worst of the Tea Party crowd and show that they can govern without appealing to the basest political instincts. So far, they have preferred to greedily capitalize on the nuclear energy in the land without considering its destructive effects.

Democrats, especially beleaguered incumbents and the White House, need to counter the toxic message of the Tea Party so voters have an alternative.

For both parties and certainly the broad swath of independent voters, defeating this new crop of Tea Party nominees has become imperative to avoid the sense of national embarrassment from each divisive and offensive utterance, each wacky policy proposal.

Take the new Republican nominee for United States senator from Delaware, Christine O’Donnell. She founded a group called the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth, with a curious focus on sexual purity, and claimed there was scientific evidence that God created the world in six 24-hour periods. She lied for years about being a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University, having earned a degree only in recent weeks, 17 years after she left campus. She has no steady source of income and has a substantial trail of unpaid bills, battles with the Internal Revenue Service and questionable use of campaign donations for personal expenses.

Ms. O’Donnell defeated Mike Castle, a veteran congressman and example of the moderate and conciliatory approach that Northeast Republicans once brought to Washington. Her campaign ridiculed him for being 71 years old with a history of heart problems. Ms. O’Donnell called Mr. Castle “unmanly.”

Or consider Carl Paladino, the Republicans’ new nominee for governor of New York, who has transfigured the state’s justifiable disgust with Albany into a malevolent snarl at the world. It is one thing to promise to shake up state government; it is very much another to thuggishly proclaim that he intends to clean up Albany “with a baseball bat” and turn the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, upside down to get his blood flowing and then send him “to Attica.” This is the man who has vowed to send welfare recipients to state prisons to pick up their checks and be given lessons in hygiene. He has defended an ally’s comparison of Mr. Silver to Hitler or the Antichrist and is known for forwarding e-mail messages to friends with racist or pornographic images.

In both cases, the Republican establishment did everything possible to avoid having the party be represented by these two, lest the link to the Tea Party become evident. Karl Rove, long the party’s tactical mastermind, dismissed Ms. O’Donnell as “nutty.”

But, in fact, the party’s hopes for retaking Congress are deeply bound up with the fate of Tea Party candidates across the country, and the party’s leaders have done little to distance themselves from the extremism that now constitutes mainstream conservative policy.

When the House Republican leader, John Boehner, voiced a possible compromise on tax cuts, he was immediately shouted down by other party officials and pilloried as weak by right-wing blogs. Mr. Rove noted that Ms. O’Donnell is unlikely to win in November, possibly preventing the Republicans from taking over the Senate. He is now a pariah himself in those same circles.

On Wednesday, Mr. Boehner invited Tea Party activists to help “drive the debate” in Washington and shape the legislative agenda. That invitation act should be a dose of adrenaline to dispirited Democrats, independents and mainstream Republican voters who had not fully grasped the stakes in November’s election.
Title: Twas the night before elections
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2010, 11:47:05 AM
MERRY CHRISTMAS

November 2, 2010
                                                                                               
Gift wrap them and send them all home

 

'Twas the night before elections 
 And all through the town
 Tempers were flaring
 Emotions all up and down!
 
 I, in my bathrobe
 With a cat in my lap
 Had cut off the TV
 Tired of political crap.
 
 When all of a sudden
 There arose such a noise
 I peered out of my window
 Saw Obama and his boys
 
 They had come for my wallet
 They wanted my pay
 To give to the others
 Who had not worked a day!
 
 He snatched up my money
 And quick as a wink
 Jumped back on his bandwagon
 As I gagged from the stink
 
 He then rallied his henchmen
 Who were pulling his cart
 I could tell they were out
 To tear my country apart!
 
 'On Fannie, on Freddie,
 On Biden and Ayers!
 On Acorn, On Pelosi'
 He screamed at the pairs!
 
 They took off for his cause
 And as he flew out of sight
 I heard him laugh at the nation
 Who wouldn't stand up and fight!
 
So I leave you to think
On this one final note-
IF YOU DONT WANT SOCIALISM

GET OUT  THERE & VOTE!!!!

                           AMEN BROTHER
 
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on September 16, 2010, 12:08:46 PM
 poem is a riot :-D

I also like the short and sweet, "throw the bums out" line.

Fascinating in-fighting to those on the right of center.  It was a *shock* to watch Rove on Hannity a few nights ago *trashing* O'Donnel!!! :-o  Now he is trying to do damage control by coming on several shows since.

I tend to agree with Krauthammer though on electing candidates who are not strictly conservative if that is what it takes to win and not because I don't agree with them in principle.  I am not sure if I agree with Rove or not. 

Chris Christy would never have been elected in NJ if we were looking only for strict "conservatives".

Only time will tell if the strict conservatives can appeal to enough indepedents to pull in the less than red states.
Title: Rove on Delaware's O'Donnell
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2010, 12:23:03 PM
Karl Rove: “I think the questions about why she had a problem for five years with paying her federal income taxes, why her house was foreclosed on and put up for a sheriff’s sale, why it took 16 yers for her to settle her college debt and get her diploma after she went around for years claiming she was a college graduate — these and other troubling sort of personal background things, she thinks she has explained them. I think she’s got to — I think a lot of voters in Delaware are going to want more than she’s offering to them right now.”
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on September 16, 2010, 12:25:54 PM
O'Donnell is not my idea of a good candidate. Her character should matter. We don't want to be like the dems.
Title: Left Angeles Times (POTB) GOP ditches CO gov. candidate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2010, 02:20:05 PM
Republican Party ditches GOP nominee for Colorado governor
Dan Maes won the primary, but the party is withdrawing its support, saying the 'tea party' candidate is not running a professional campaign.



Reporting from Denver —
The Republican Party is walking away from Dan Maes, a small-time businessman and political novice with "tea party" backing who captured Colorado's GOP gubernatorial nomination, scrambling the race less than seven weeks before election day.

Maes has been disavowed by pillars of the Republican establishment — including former Sen. Hank Brown and current U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck. The chairman of the state Republican Party flatly said Maes is not running a professional campaign and called on him to drop out before ballots were printed Sept. 3. The Republican Governors Assn. refuses to help fund his campaign.

Several tea party groups have withdrawn their backing after it was revealed that Maes misrepresented how he left a Kansas police department, incurred record campaign fines and called Denver's bike-swap program a United Nations plot.

The question now is who will benefit from Maes' hemorrhaging support — his Democratic opponent, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, or former GOP Rep. Tom Tancredo, who is running as a third-party candidate because he thinks Maes is unelectable?

"What may happen is that, with a bit of time, Tancredo becomes viewed as the other major candidate," said Kenneth Bickers, a political scientist at the University of Colorado, who added that he is still reeling from the latest twists in the race. "I didn't see this coming 10 days ago."

Janet Rowland, a Mesa County commissioner who is active in the tea party movement, was one of nearly two dozen Republicans who announced recently that they were switching allegiance to Tancredo.

She said in an interview that this is the first time she hasn't backed a GOP nominee. The entire saga, she added, is a cautionary tale for the insurgent tea party.

"There is a belief by people who are fed up with government that, if they get somebody who hasn't been in politics, they will somehow be more pure," Rowland said.

Maes spokesman Nate Strauch said the establishment's abandonment of the candidate was worrisome.

"The Republican Party in the state has a very specific process for how it chooses its nominees," Strauch said. "It's a process that Dan Maes won fair and square." To turn around and say the votes of those 200,000 people who voted for him "don't count, to reward someone who circumvented the process, sets a dangerous precedent."

Strauch added that many tea party groups still supported Maes.

Maes was a long shot in the Republican primary, up against former Rep. Scott McInnis. He touted himself as a successful businessman, but tax records showed that some years he made little money. A supporter said Maes asked her for help paying his mortgage. He received a record $17,000 campaign fine for paying himself more than $40,000 from his campaign contributions for mileage.

Still, when McInnis acknowledged that he plagiarized a paper on water issues that he was paid $300,000 to write, Maes' support surged. He won the nomination by about 1% of the primary vote.

Two weeks later, the Denver Post reported that Maes' story about how he left a small-town Kansas police department was false. Maes had said he was fired because he had been working undercover for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, but Kansas officials said Maes never worked for them.

Right away, prominent Republicans began calling for Maes to drop out of the race before ballots were printed, including state party Chairman Dick Wadhams. Maes refused. He raised only $50,000 in August — less than a quarter of Tancredo's haul and an eighth of Hickenlooper's.

In an interview, Wadhams noted that Maes is still the party's nominee but worried that he has yet to assemble a professional campaign team. "To run a real, competitive race in Colorado, you have to have a real campaign," Wadhams said.

Strauch said Maes was not planning to hire any political professionals: "He won the nomination on a shoestring and he's using a similar strategy in the general."

Bay Buchanan, a veteran Washington, D.C.-based operative who is now Tancredo's campaign manager, contended that the onetime congressman, best known for his hard-line stance against illegal immigration, is the only real conservative opposition to Hickenlooper. "We've had enormous movement in the last five to six days," she said last week.

Hickenlooper spokesman George Merritt said the Democratic nominee "is focused on creating jobs, finding ways to support Colorado business, and promoting education."

Former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart, who teaches at the University of Colorado-Denver, said that as the GOP nominee, Maes will inevitably receive a large number of votes in November and split the conservative electorate, handing Hickenlooper a victory.

"Tancredo is whistling past the graveyard," Hart said. "What's interesting about the race is the disarray in the [Republican] party in general. It sought to embrace the tea party movement. When it did, it bought a whole lot of trouble."

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

 

Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on September 16, 2010, 03:11:20 PM
Typical Left Angeles Times spin. Maes and McInnis were both flawed candidates.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on September 17, 2010, 06:14:29 AM
Hopefully Maes drops out so Tancredo can take it.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on September 17, 2010, 06:19:33 AM
"There goes one possible seat change?"

From a national point of view, it is the Gov. race that is screwed up, not the Senate race though trouble could certainly spill over.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on September 17, 2010, 12:33:00 PM
Marc Levin's (who mostly I like) ranting and raving aside I will be very pissed if all this conservative stuff winds up keeping the Reps from winning the Senate.  OK O'Donnell lets see what you can do besides raise money for a perenial late payer of your own bills.  OK Palin lets see what you can do if you are a serious national candidate.  I couldn't agree more with Charles on this one:

****The Buckley rule

By Charles Krauthammer

 http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Tuesday in Delaware was a bad day not only for Republicans but also for conservatives. Tea Partyer Christine O'Donnell scored a stunning victory over establishment Republican Mike Castle. Stunning but pyrrhic. The very people who have most alerted the country to the perils of President Obama's social democratic agenda may have just made it impossible for Republicans to retake the Senate and definitively stop that agenda.

Bill Buckley -- no Mike Castle he -- had a rule: Support the most conservative candidate who is electable.

A timeless rule of sober politics, and particularly timely now. This is no ordinary time. And this is no ordinary Democratic administration. It is highly ideological and ambitious. It is determined to use whatever historical window it is granted to change the country structurally, irreversibly. It has already done so with Obamacare and has equally lofty ambitions for energy, education, immigration, taxation, industrial policy and the composition of the Supreme Court.

That's what makes the eleventh-hour endorsements of O'Donnell by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Sarah Palin so reckless and irresponsible.

Of course Mike Castle is a liberal Republican. What do you expect from Delaware? A DeMint? Castle voted against Obamacare and the stimulus. Yes, he voted for cap-and-trade. That's batting .667. You'd rather have a Democrat who bats .000 and who might give the Democrats the 50th vote to control the Senate?

Castle wasn't only electable. He was unbeatable. Why do you think Beau Biden, long groomed to inherit his father's seat, flinched from running? Because Castle, who had already won statewide races a dozen times, scared him off. Democrats had already given up on the race.

O'Donnell, a lifelong activist who has twice lost statewide races, is very problematic. It is not that the Republican establishment denigrates her chances -- virtually every nonpartisan electoral analyst from Charlie Cook to Larry Sabato to Stuart Rothenberg has her losing in November.

Nor is opposition to O'Donnell's candidacy a sign of hostility or disrespect to the Tea Party. Many of those who wanted to see Castle nominated in Delaware have from the beginning defended the Tea Party movement from the mainstream media's scurrilous portrayal of it as a racist rabble of resentful lumpenproletarians. Indeed, it is among the most vigorous and salutary grass-roots movements of our time, dedicated to a genuine constitutionalism from which the country has strayed far.

And its complaint that it is often taken for granted by the Republican establishment (interestingly parallel to the often-heard African American community's complaint against the Democratic Party) is not to be dismissed. Tea Partyers should not, as many of them fear, simply be used by the Republican Party as a source of electoral energy while their own candidates are ignored and dismissed. But the question is: Which of their candidates?

Marco Rubio in Florida is strong, serious, dynamic. He has a great future as a Republican leader. Joe Miller, who upset the Murkowski dynasty in Alaska, is a man of remarkable achievement: West Point graduate, decorated veteran, judge. Both will win.

Moreover, geography matters. Rand Paul may not be the best candidate in the world -- it is not a very good idea to start your general election campaign by expressing reservations about the Civil Rights Act -- but he is running in Kentucky. He will almost certainly win.

Delaware is not Kentucky. If Republicans want to be a national party, they cannot write off the Northeast, whose Republicanism is of a distinctly moderate variety. Scott Brown broke Republican ranks to vote for Obama's financial reform. Are conservatives going to now run him out of the Senate? Wasn't it just eight months ago that his victory in Massachusetts was hailed as a turning point in the campaign to stop the Obama agenda?

You don't stop that agenda by nominating an O'Donnell in Delaware and turning a Senate seat from safe Republican to safe Democratic.

If DeMint and Palin want to show that helping O'Donnell over the top -- she won late and by six points -- wasn't a capricious spreading of fairy dust, perhaps they should go to Delaware now and get her elected to the Senate.

You made it possible. Now make it happen. I would be happy to be proved wrong about O'Donnell's electability -- I want Republicans to win that 51st seat. Stay in Delaware and show us you were right. The beaches are said to be lovely in the fall.***
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 17, 2010, 03:08:04 PM
I don't have the data/quotes in front of me, but apparently Glen Beck is saying that there is some pretty remarkable Marxist language in the Dem candidate's background.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on September 17, 2010, 03:51:37 PM
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/17/days-decidedem-candidate-comes-scrutiny-delaware-race-bidens-old-senate-seat/

Coons, 47, has already been targeted by Republicans for an article he wrote for the Amherst College newspaper when he was 21 -- a piece entitled "Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist."

Coons wrote about his political evolution from a conservative college student who founded the Amherst College Republicans into a Democrat suspicious of America's power and ideals. The transformation, he said, came during a trip to Kenya.

Coons alluded to his past in a debate Thursday with O'Donnell, saying Delaware residents are interested in what candidates will do to create jobs, reduce the national debt and fix what he called a broken political system in Washington, and that they're not "particularly interested in statements that either of us made 20 or 30 years ago."
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 17, 2010, 05:10:38 PM
I didn't realize the quote was that old.  I too said plenty of things around that age that don't represent me now at all.
Title: Gotta love Iowahawk
Post by: G M on September 17, 2010, 05:12:24 PM
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2010/09/fight.html

If It Is a Fight These Jacobins Want, Then It Is a Fight They Shall Have

T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII
Conservative Intellectual At-Large

Such are the vicissitudes of our current political zeitgeist that Homo Republicanus is each day forced to endure a fresh assault on his intelligence somehow more insulting than the last. Doubly insulting, as you no doubt imagine, when the Homo in question is me. Contrary to what you may assume, the gift of intellectual acuity and foresight can in times like these prove to be an almost unbearable cross; I shall not use this space to recount the many unheeded warnings I have issued to fellow Republicans regarding the growing menace of the soi dissant "Tea Party" faction, other than to note that as a Cassandra I have, if anything, proven to be insufficiently alarmist.

The latest proof of this assertion came with Wednesday morning's grapefruit and New York Times, borne as always on the old family serving cart by Farquhar the old family butler. According to Van Voorhees lore the sterling conveyance was acquired by T. Coddington II during some long-forgotten 19th century Panic, from a newly destitute Albany canal boat nabob to whom he had lent a small ransom. Unable to repay his bonds, the man offered great-great-great grandpapa the serving cart in a desperate act of supplicancy to stave off a well-deserved thrashing from TC2's diamond-tipped swagger stick. Although it would not so avail him that day, the old tarnished trolley now serves as a handsome household heirloom. And, if the appraisers of Sotheby's are to be trusted, a lasting tribute to the Van Voorhees' famed financial clairvoyance. As for Farquhar, I would note that he has become in his own way an equally treasured family keepsake, having now faithfully served four generations of Van Voorheeses without complaint and without once taking a holiday. Though well into his late nineties and afflicted with the St. Vitus Dance, the old Irishman continues to do so today. As a lad I once queried my grandfather as to Farquhar's remarkable loyalty; in reply he explained that Farquhar was a penniless immigrant beggar waif when TC5 first discovered him at the Cunard docks in 1921; a wretched urchin possessing neither passport nor prospects, and with a Sinn Fein bounty on his head. In pity TC5 remanded young Farquhar to the custody of his household staff, who tutored him in the fine points of servantry and US deportation laws. Although his duties have for the most part been delegated to other members of our current household staff, I still request that he bring me my morning paper and grapefruit; for even as Mariska complains of his smell, the sight of the dear old chap hobbling into the breakfast room with the old serving cart provides a comforting reminder of a saner era when living was gracious and Republicans knew how to comport themselves.

But I digress. I was, as you might imagine, eager to read the results of the previous evening's Republican U.S. Senate primary in Delaware. Normally I would have followed the returns by live television, but Mariska and I were otherwise engaged as hosts of a black-tie fundraiser for our new charity program, Inner City Badminton, along with our dear friends from the firmament of conservative punditry, Kathleen Parker and David Brooks. Together we passionately believe that by introducing the "grand old pastime" to the hiphop community, we will in some small way begin to repair the incalculable damage done to Republican-African American relations by the racially tactless Tea Party idiots. Spirits were quite festive, especially after Parker, Brooks and the Rev. Sharpton became entangled in a badminton net during a Tom Collins-fueled limbo tournament. By the time they were freed we were all too giddy and exhausted to worry about election returns. Indeed, why should we? For the most part, the damage inflicted by the Tea Partyists has been confined to the hinterlands west of the Alleghenies and south of Washington, so it seemed somewhat absurd to suggest that their benighted candidates might actually find success in one of the better states like Delaware. Yes, I am aware of Mr. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, but as I have noted before, that particular electoral fluke can be readily explained by Brown's erotic appeal to his state's famously nymphomaniacal womenfolk. Once Senator Adonis suffers the ravages of time and gravity, I have every confidence Massachusetts will return, chastened, to its traditional progressive heritage. But Delaware? With its long record of electing deep, gravitas-laden men such as Joe Biden (who, despite suffering over 1500 sun strokes, cerebral infarctions, and hematomae over the last 10 years, retains a reputation as one of Washington's brightest minds) the 'First State' seemed the last state to be seduced by the Tea Partyist's inane lowbrow "smaller gubmint" hillbilly bunkum.

Thus I assumed when the Delaware Republican party approached me last week requesting high-level strategic advice it was in regards to the November general election. Mr. Biden's elevation to the executive branch created an open Senate seat and, mercifully, a rare moment of kismet for moderate and intellectual conservatives; here, at last, the right kind of seat, for the right kind of state, and the right kind of candidate in Mr. Mike Castle. With his nomination a forgone conclusion and a voting record scarcely distinguishable from Mr. Biden's, Mr. Castle would be undoubtedly competitive in November and could be supported by a better stripe of conservative without fear of Washington social embarrassment. Better yet, his nomination would represent a return to the rational conservatism which has been all but eclipsed by the dark moon of Tea Party lunacy. All that remained to formulate a strategy to position Mr. Castle further to the center for the general election, and to make arrangements for cocktails; two task for which I am eminently qualified and brimming with ideas. Instead, I was mortified to learn from party officials that they were in fact seeking help in parrying a primary challenge to Mr. Castle from a dark horse Republican who was in the midst of a last minute charge in the polls.

Who was this mysterious rival, I inquired - some heretofore unknown Machiavellian prodigy from Harvard poli sci? An old-money interloper from the Philadelphia Mainline? Neither, they said. The challenge, they explained, came in the form of one "Christine O'Donnell," a financially destitute 37-year old Tea Party schoolgirl whose intellectual heft by comparison made even la Palin look Obamanesque. I then watched in abject horror as they played a video of her crusading against teenage onanism. I admit no great pride in my own occasional participation in that unseemly adolescent pastime, but what sort of person declaims it on MTV? And what sort of party allows her name to appear on an official primary ballot? And that is when it struck me: I was obviously now witnessing the premise of an elaborate practical joke. Delawareans have long been known as the irascible pranksters of East Coast Republicanism, and to be selected as the target of their good-natured japery is in some fashion an honor. Even though the stunt nearly led to his untimely demise, the very first T. Coddington Van Voorhees himself reportedly enjoyed a hearty laugh after his waggish Delaware friend E. I. du Pont replaced his trusty dueling pistol with a replica that egested a comical "BANG" flag. Not wanting to spoil their fun, I did not let on to the Delaware party officials that I was wise to their little joke. Instead, I played along and counseled them to run a last minute, no-holds-barred negative media blitz against their impossibly fictional "Tea Party candidate."

And thus I awaited with wry anticipation as Farquhar slowly traversed the breakfast room with the cart bearing the punchline to the Delawareans' clever prank. This was followed by gales of riotous laughter when I discovered the wags had printed an entire mock edition of the New York Times announcing their satirical "Miss O'Donnell" had actually won the race! I was so overcome with mirth that I kicked over the cart, spilling grapefruit across the marble. As Farquhar trembled back to the kitchens to retrieve the mop, I reached for the ringing telephone prepared to hear the voice of the Delaware GOP chairman crowing about his ingenious drollery. Instead I was greeted with the panicked entreaties of none other that Mr. Castle himself, joined by the Republican National Congressional Committee brain trust, insisting against all rational evidence that Miss O'Donnell was in fact real and that she had indeed won the contest. I conducted an incredulous review of the cable news channels, which confirmed their wild story. I called the kitchen intercom and bade Farquhar fetch me a stiff drink on his way back with the mop.

What followed, I will state with no small amount of confidence, was the birth of a mighty counterrevolution to wrest the cause of conservatism back from the would-be mobs.

"Gentlemen, at long last it is time to draw a line in the sand," I announced. "For too long we have stood by idly while these insipid cretins - the Palins, the Limbaughs, the Becks - have run roughshod over our once proud party, making it a mockery and ruining our social standing, advancing the insane notion that years of Washington experience and good breeding are somehow trumped by idiotic pledges to dismantle the very government on which their very existence depends. Well, my friends, I say unto you, with this Delaware disaster they have gone a bridge too far. Today we begin the counterattack, and we will make it plain to the insurrectionists that they shan't see another dime of our inheritances."

The polite huzzahs and claps emanating from the speaker-phone indicated to me that my call to arms was striking a chord within the heart of traditional Republicanism. Heartened, I pressed on.

"If it is a fight the Jacobins want, then it is a fight they shall have," I added with a pugilistic flourish. "And let this be their warning - I once took 4th place in the East Hampton Silver Gloves boxing tournament."

My battle cry was greeted, as you might imagine, with a lusty cheer the likes of which had not been heard since the eve of Agincourt. And justly so; for in the course of human events, there comes a time when a well bred man must roll up his cashmere sleeves, grab the old family swagger stick, and remind the rabble of their proper place.

Take Farquhar, for instance. I swear the old fool just offered me an obscene gesture.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on September 17, 2010, 05:19:07 PM
I didn't realize the quote was that old.  I too said plenty of things around that age that don't represent me now at all.

The key thing is to see if he seems to have shifted from the beared marxist phase or not.
Title: Harry Reid's pet
Post by: G M on September 18, 2010, 09:20:44 AM
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/09/16/seriously-o%E2%80%99donnell-can%E2%80%99t-beat-the-%E2%80%9Cbearded-marxist%E2%80%9D/

O’Donnell will be only half the equation in November.  The other half is New Castle County Executive Chris Coons.  As this Delaware blogger observes, Coons is a virtual unknown for Delawareans outside New Castle County. His national fame has been growing exponentially in the past 48 hours, however, as the blogosphere explodes with link upon link to excerpts from his 1985, Amherst-student-era oeuvre “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist.”

Now, we all wrote stupid stuff when we were 22.  But it seems almost laughably hapless of Coons to have written his because he went to Kenya (yes) and came back with thoughts like these:

    “I became friends with a very wealthy businessman and his family and heard them reiterate the same beliefs held by many Americans: the poor are poor because they are lazy, slovenly, uneducated,” wrote Coons. “I realize that Kenya and America are very different, but experiences like this warned me that my own favorite beliefs in the miracles of free enterprise and the boundless opportunities to be had in America were largely untrue.”

Naturally, Coons’ prior experience in the classroom had prepared him for this enlightenment:

    A course on cultural anthropology, noted Coons, had “undermined the accepted value of progress and the cultural superiority of the West,” while a class on the Vietnam War led him to “suspect…that the ideal of America as a ‘beacon of freedom and justice, providing hope for the world’ was not exactly based in reality.”

Fortunately:

    Coons wrote that upon his return to Amherst for his senior year he realized that, while he had discovered the faults of his country, he had also “returned to loving America.”

Awesome, dude.

The thing about Coons, Bearded Marxist, is not so much that he underwent the celebrated, if-you’re-not-a-leftist-at-20 rite of passage.  It’s that he checked every block then, on the official One-Note Leftist list – and he has just kept checking them ever since.  Coons appears to be about as politics-as-usual, more-of-same, tax-and-spend-and-spend-some-more as it gets.  He’s an archetype.  He is, in fact, what an astonishing number of Delaware voters considered themselves to be rejecting, by voting for O’Donnell on Tuesday.
Title: Won for Tea
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 18, 2010, 10:57:15 AM
Tea Party’s already won
By A.B. Stoddard    - 09/15/10 05:56 PM ET


Even before Christine O’Donnell handily defeated Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) in an epic upset Tuesday night, the Tea Parties, all of them, had already won. No matter what happens in the midterm elections on Nov. 2, the Tea Party has moved the Democrats to the right and the Republicans even more so, and President Obama’s agenda is dead.

Anger from disaffected conservatives who sat quietly through eight years of the surplus-to-deficit presidency of George W. Bush bubbled up immediately after Obama took office. All it took was the unprecedented $787 billion stimulus package, and before Obama could mark his first 100 days in office, a movement was born. Some of the already angry yet newly active were libertarian supporters of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), and almost all of them were fuming over the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008, the bipartisan bailout of Wall Street that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) voted for and that his running mate, then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), supported.

What debuted in nationwide protests on April 15, 2009, has taken less than 18 months to become the current driving force in American politics. The Tea Party insurgency will not only cost Democrats dozens of seats in Congress, and likely their majority — it will define the coming GOP presidential nominating process, determine the direction of the GOP for years to come and threaten any remaining plans Obama has for sweeping reforms of education, energy policy or our immigration system.
Last March, Republicans joined Democrats in calling on Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) to end his filibuster against the extension of unemployment benefits paid for by deficit spending, embarrassed he was blocking aid to the jobless. But it took just three months for the grassroots pressure to reach the Capitol — Bunning was a Tea Party hero. By the time the $30 billion expired on June 2, Senate Republicans had united behind a nearly two-month filibuster of the next round of $34 billion in “emergency spending” for unemployment insurance. They were joined by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), and some House Democrats warned their own leaders at the time that the days of votes on “emergency spending” would soon have to come to an end.

As of last week, before the House and Senate even reconvened, it was clear there were enough Senate Democrats joining Republicans seeking an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest earners that the Democrats don’t have the votes to pass President Obama’s permanent extension of the middle-class tax cuts without passing cuts for the top two tax brackets as well.

When Obama introduced his latest economic proposals earlier this month, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), an ally of the Obama White House, immediately put out a statement not only criticizing Obama’s newest infrastructure plan but knocking the original stimulus as well. “I will not support additional spending in a second stimulus package. Any new transportation initiatives can be funded through the Recovery Act, which still contains unused funds,” Bennet said.

Obama won’t get his infrastructure plan through the Congress, and he knows it. Next year, when he is running for reelection, tax and budget reform will be the only issues he could realistically work on with a GOP majority or a razor-thin Democratic majority. In other words, the Tea Party agenda.

The Tea Party candidates themselves — like O’Donnell, whom Karl Rove called “nutty,” — matter little. Only a few will actually get elected this fall. Yet the Tea Party has won without them. There are no tea leaves left to read. Democrats have been spooked and Republicans threatened, cajoled or cleansed. The results are already in.



Stoddard is an associate editor of The Hill.

http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/ab-stoddard/119061-tea-partys-already-won
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on September 18, 2010, 11:08:05 AM
Were I a political cartoonist, I'd have an elephant wake up to find a severed rhino's head in it's bed.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on September 18, 2010, 12:05:44 PM
http://biggovernment.com/sright/2010/09/17/dem-congresswomans-supporters-participate-in-palin-as-hitler-rally/

Waiting for the MSM to cover this.....


**crickets**
Title: witchcraft in high school
Post by: ccp on September 20, 2010, 08:00:26 AM
I agree, no big deal.  MSLSD covers this like it is some sort of major scandal.  Yet when da bamster spoke about using cocaine there was silence.  Got to protect the ONE.

****ABC News By RANDALL CHASE, Associated Press Writer Randall Chase, Associated Press Writer – Sun Sep 19, 5:24 pm ET
LINCOLN, Del. – Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell is making light of comments she made more than a decade ago when she was in high school about having dabbled in witchcraft.

"How many of you didn't hang out with questionable folks in high school?" she asked fellow Republicans at a GOP picnic in southern Delaware on Sunday.

"There's been no witchcraft since. If there was, Karl Rove would be a supporter now," O'Donnell jokingly assured the crowd.

Rove, the former GOP strategist and adviser to President George W. Bush, has suggested that O'Donnell's win in last week's GOP primary cost Republicans a chance to retake the Senate seat long held by Democrat Joe Biden before he was elected vice president.

O'Donnell, a conservative Christian activist, rode a surging tide of tea party activism to an upset victory over GOP moderate Michael Castle, Delaware's longtime congressman and former two-term governor. She faces Democratic county executive Chris Coons in November.

O'Donnell's comments about witchcraft were made during a 1999 taping of comedian Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" show.

"I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven," she said on the show, a clip of which hit the Internet as O'Donnell canceled Sunday appearances on two national news shows, citing commitments to attend church and the GOP picnic in Delaware.

"I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do," O'Donnell told Maher.

"One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that," she said. "We went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar."

Russ Murphy, executive director of the 9-12 Delaware Patriots, a group that joined in the tea party effort to propel O'Donnell to Tuesday's primary victory, said the focus on her comments about witchcraft was just another attempt by pundits and political opponents to discredit her.

"They're going to be pulling for straws from the sky to do anything to stop this momentum, and they don't realize it's not going to work," he said.

O'Donnell's victory in the primary came after a bruising campaign in which her supporters and Castle's, led by state GOP chairman Tom Ross, traded attack ads, with Ross saying O'Donnell was a liar and a fraud who couldn't be elected dogcatcher.

Ross did not attend Sunday's Sussex County Republican Committee picnic. Sussex County GOP chairman Ron Sams said Ross was in Washington trying to drum up support from the national GOP campaign committees.

Despite her improbable primary victory, O'Donnell sounded upbeat about her chances in November.

"We're going to win this by uniting the party," she told supporters. "I'm very confident that we're going to win this election."****

Title: Murkowski
Post by: ccp on September 20, 2010, 01:50:24 PM
The arrogance of some the politicians is truly annoying.

Appointed to the Senate to begin with by her father?!

Bought a property well below value - a popular bribery scheme apparantly rampant amongst those who bribe politicians.  Look at the bamster.  Another is cattle futures.  Another is owing property near where the house member gets approval for federal money to build a highway there  (several examples of this scheme).   Another is having contractors fix up your house (ala Stevens).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Murkowski
Title: GM Donates to Dems
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 22, 2010, 06:49:04 PM
Well isn't this special:

Government Motors Makes Political Donations ... Mostly to Democrats
Hmm.

BY DANIEL HALPER
September 22, 2010 2:45 PM
 SHARETHIS

The Wall Street Journal today reports that General Motors has "begun to once again contribute to political campaigns, lifting a self-imposed ban on political spending put in place during the auto maker's U.S.-financed bankruptcy restructuring last year." That means, the automaker that Americans purchased in 2009, because it was too big to fail, is now giving money to American politicians.

Corporations, and individuals for that matter, give political donations to show support for politicians and their policies. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But this is an extraordinary case: The U.S. government owns more than half of the company that's giving to political causes, hoping to influence, or at least support, political causes that it believes are favorable to GM's cause. But that's happening on the U.S. taxpayer's dime.

And guess which political party is the greatest beneficiary of GM's political donations? That's right, the majority party (for now). As the Wall Street Journal reports:

The beneficiaries include Midwestern lawmakers, mostly Democrats, who have traditionally supported the industry's legislative agenda on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) and Rep. John Dingell (D., Mich.).

The list also includes Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Republican Whip, who would likely assume a top leadership post if Republicans win control of the House in November.

For more on the government take over of General Motors, watch this video from 60 Minutes:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/government-motors-makes-political-donations-mostly-democrats
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on September 23, 2010, 11:37:23 AM
Interesting theory.  Those Dem districts that are in trouble for the Dems were those where the Dems favored the Hillary and not Bamster in 2008.  It may be that those Dems are not running away from the Bamster as much as they were not strongly for him to start with.  More weight to my theory that there will be a dem groundswell of voices calling for the return of the Hill.  It is just a matter of time till Obama's poll numbers fall so much and  hit a ciritical mass that the lame stream media will pick up on this. 

****Victory in paradise?

By George Will

 http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | LANGHORNE, Pa. — From the 1930s through the 1950s, Bucks County northeast of Philadelphia acquired a glamorous reputation as a retreat for Manhattan celebrities, including Oscar Hammerstein, who, according to local legend, was inspired by the view from his Doylestown front porch to write "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," the opening song of "Oklahoma!" Today the county, which is 93 percent of Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District, figures in Republicans' plans to sing that song on the morning of Nov. 3.

The district has about 209,000 Democrats, 189,000 Republicans and 66,000 independents. The seat is held by a Democrat, Patrick Murphy, 36, the first Iraq War veteran to serve in Congress. He was elected in 2006 when he defeated the one-term Republican incumbent, Mike Fitzpatrick, 47, an attorney, who is Murphy's opponent again this year.

More than half of the 7 percent of the district that is not in Bucks County is in northeast Philadelphia, where a lot of the city's police and firefighters live — they are required to reside in the city — and many conservative Democrats, too. The remainder of the district is in suburban Montgomery County. Lower Bucks County is primarily blue collar, the upper county is agricultural and the central portion is an upper-income bedroom community for Philadelphia.

Fitzpatrick, who had been a Bucks County commissioner for 10 years, won in 2004, a good Republican year. He lost in the Republicans' annus horribilis of 2006, when they suffered the first of two consecutive wave elections. (In a wave, a party gains or loses a net of at least 20 seats in the House of Representatives.) The Democrats' 2006 candidate for governor was Ed Rendell, the former Philadelphia mayor who was much loved in the suburbs for making the central city — he was called the "mayor from Pine to Vine," two downtown streets — safe for them to go in for meals and entertainment. Rendell defeated his Republican opponent in the 8th District by 40 points. So, 2006 was a Republican nightmare: incumbent U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum lost the district by 20 percent.

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Still, Fitzpatrick lost by just 1,518 votes out of 249,817 cast, and he carried the Bucks County portion of the district. He did not attempt a comeback in 2008 because he was receiving chemotherapy and radiation for colon cancer. He is now well.

Although Bill Clinton campaigned for Murphy in 2006, perhaps with his wife's 2008 presidential candidacy in mind, Murphy became the first Pennsylvanian holding federal office to endorse Barack Obama's candidacy. Today, the Clinton-Obama contest still reverberates.

Political analyst Charles Cook doesn't hire dummies, and one of his talented associates, David Wasserman, has this theory: Democratic members of Congress who are in peril are disproportionately from districts where Democrats preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008. She decisively beat Obama in the 8th District with 63 percent, and in November 2008 her voters were not Obama swooners: They simply hired him to fix the economy.

Murphy has voted with Speaker Nancy Pelosi 97 percent of the time, including on the stimulus, health care, cash for clunkers, the cap-and-trade climate legislation and organized labor's priority, "card check," which would abolish workers' rights to secret ballot elections in workplace unionization decisions. Fitzpatrick is a centrist in a Republican Party where the center is migrating to the right. He favors extending all the Bush tax cuts and rescinding to the Treasury all unspent TARP and stimulus funds.

The 8th is a swing district that should swing in a year like this. Polls indicate, however, that the race is not yet settled.

Fitzpatrick says that although he was his family's first Republican, his seven siblings have all seen the light. He and they grew up in the 8th District, in Levittown, one of the instant suburbs (the first, also called Levittown, is on Long Island) that were mass produced after World War II by William Levitt. They were incubators of the postwar middle class, many of whose members' bought their first homes from Levitt for $7,990.

Bucks County is emblematic of not only 20th-century America, but 18th-century America, too. It was from the Bucks County bank of the Delaware River that George Washington, on Christmas night, 1776, launched the boats that carried the attackers that surprised the Hessians in Trenton. Republicans hope that on Nov. 2 a piece of another, if rather less momentous, moment in America's political evolution will occur.****
Title: Krauthammer: Visigoths at the Gate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2010, 01:27:38 PM
Visigoths at the gate?
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, September 24, 2010

When facing a tsunami, what do you do? Pray, and tell yourself stories. I am not privy to the Democrats' private prayers, but I do hear the stories they're telling themselves. The new meme is that there's a civil war raging in the Republican Party. The Tea Party will wreck it from within and prove to be the Democrats' salvation.

I don't blame anyone for seeking a deus ex machina when about to be swept out to sea. But this salvation du jour is flimsier than most.

In fact, the big political story of the year is the contrary: that a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement with no recognized leadership or discernible organization has been merged with such relative ease into the Republican Party.

The Tea Party could have become Perot '92, an anti-government movement that spurned the Republicans, went third-party and cost George H.W. Bush reelection, ending 12 years of Republican rule. Had the Tea Party gone that route, it would have drained the Republican Party of its most mobilized supporters and deprived Republicans of the sweeping victory that awaits them on Nov. 2.

Instead, it planted its flag within the party and, with its remarkable energy, created the enthusiasm gap. Such gaps are measurable. This one is a chasm. This year's turnout for the Democratic primaries (as a percentage of eligible voters) was the lowest ever recorded. Republican turnout was the highest since 1970.

True, Christine O'Donnell's nomination in Delaware may cost the Republicans an otherwise safe seat (and possibly control of the Senate), and Sharron Angle in Nevada is running only neck-and-neck with an unpopular Harry Reid. On balance, however, the Tea Party contribution is a large net plus, with its support for such strong candidates as Marco Rubio of Florida, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Joe Miller of Alaska, Mike Lee of Utah. Even Rand Paul, he of the shaky start in Kentucky, sports an eight-point lead. All this in addition to the significant Tea Party contribution to the tide that will carry dozens of Republicans into the House.

Nonetheless, some Democrats have convinced themselves that they have found the issue with which to salvage 2010. "President Obama's political advisers," reports the New York Times, "are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists."

Sweet irony. Fear-over-hope rides again, this time with Democrats in the saddle warning darkly about "the Republican Tea Party" (Joe Biden). Message: Vote Democratic and save the nation from a Visigoth mob with a barely concealed tinge of racism.

First, this is so at variance with reality that it's hard to believe even liberals believe it. The largest Tea Party event yet was the recent Glenn Beck rally on the Mall. The hordes descending turned out to be several hundred thousand cheerful folks in what, by all accounts, had the feel of a church picnic. And they left the place nearly spotless -- the first revolution in recorded history that collected its own trash.

Second, the general public is fairly evenly split in its views of the Tea Party. It experiences none of the horror that liberals do -- and think others should. Moreover, the electorate supports by 2-to-1 the Tea Party signature issues of smaller government and lower taxes.

Third, you would hardly vote against the Republican in your state just because there might be a (perceived) too-conservative Republican running somewhere else. How would, say, Paul running in Kentucky deter someone from voting for Mark Kirk in Illinois? Or, to flip the parties, will anyone in Nevada refuse to vote for Harry Reid because Chris Coons, a once self-described "bearded Marxist," is running as a Democrat in Delaware?

Fourth, what sane Democrat wants to nationalize an election at a time of 9.6 percent unemployment and such disappointment with Obama that just this week several of his own dreamy 2008 supporters turned on him at a cozy town hall? The Democrats' only hope is to run local campaigns on local issues. That's how John Murtha's former district director hung on to his boss's seat in a special election in Pennsylvania.

Newt Gingrich had to work hard -- getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America -- to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-Tea Party campaign would do that for the Republicans -- nationalize the election, gratis -- in 2010. As a very recent former president -- now preferred (Public Policy Polling, Sept. 1) in bellwether Ohio over the current one by 50 percent to 42 percent -- once said: Bring 'em on.

Title: senate:dems51to55;rep45to49
Post by: ccp on September 27, 2010, 02:43:19 PM
So says Rasumussan polling thus far:

Election 2010: Senate Balance Of Power
Senate Balance of Power: Dems 51 GOP 45 Toss-Ups 4
Monday, September 27, 2010 Email to a Friend ShareThisAdvertisement
New polling in Delaware moved that state's senate race to Leans Democrat from Solid Democrat.

Current projections suggest that the Democrats would hold 51 seats after Election Day while the Republicans would hold 45. Four states are in the Toss-Up category (Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, and Wisconsin). All four Toss-Ups are seats currently held by Democrats.

Republicans have the edge in four Democratic-held Senate seats--Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania.

At the moment, no Republican-held seats appear headed for the Democratic column.

The state results and overall projections will be updated whenever new polling data justifies a change (to learn how Rasmussen Reports determines its Balance of Power rankings, click here).

In the table below, the states marked in red currently have a Republican senator. Those in blue currently have a Democratic senator.

Solid Dem  Lean Dem  Toss-Up  Lean GOP  Solid GOP 
Hawaii
 California
 Colorado
 Florida
 Alabama
 
Maryland
 Connecticut
 Illinois
 Missouri
 Alaska
 
New York
 Delaware
 Nevada
 N. Hampshire
 Arizona
 
New York (S)
 Washington
 Wisconsin
 Ohio
 Arkansas
 
Oregon
 West Virginia
   
 Pennsylvania
 Georgia
 
Vermont
     
   
 Idaho
 

     
   
 Indiana
 
 
     
   
 Iowa
 
        Kansas
 
        Kentucky
 
     
   Louisiana
 
        North Carolina
 
        North Dakota
 
        Oklahoma
 
        South Carolina
 
        South Dakota
 
        Utah
 
         
         

Recent changes include:

Date
 State
 Shift From
 Shift To
 Dem
 GOP
 Toss-up
 
9/27/10
 Delaware
 Solid Dem
 Leans Dem
 51
 45
 4
 
9/21/10
 California
 Toss-Up
 Leans Dem
 51
 45
 4
 
9/21/10
 Alaska
 Leans GOP
 Solid GOP
 50
 45
 5
 
9/20/10
 West Virginia
 Toss-Up
 Leans Dem
 50
 45
 5
 
9/16/10
 Washington
 Toss-Up
 Leans Dem
 49
 45
 6
 
9/16/10
 Delaware
 Leans Dem
 Solid Dem
 48
 45
 7
 
9/15/10
 Delaware
 Leans GOP
 Leans Dem
 48
 45
 7
 
9/14/10
 Ohio
 Toss-Up
 Leans GOP
 47
 46
 7
 
9/10/10
 North Carolina
 Leans GOP
 Solid GOP
 47
 45
 8
 
9/9/10
 West Virginia
 Leans Dem
 Toss-Up
 47
 45
 8
 
9/8/10
 Kentucky
 Leans GOP
 Solid GOP
 48
 45
 7
 
9/2/10
 Washington
 Leans Dem
 Toss-Up
 48
 45
 7
 
9/1/10
 Alaska
 Solid GOP
 Leans GOP
 49
 45
 6
 
8/31/10
 Ohio
 Leans GOP
 Toss-Up
 49
 45
 6
 
8/30/10
 West Virginia
 Solid Dem
 Leans Dem
 49
 46
 5
 
8/26/10
 Florida
 Toss-Up
 Leans GOP
 49
 46
 5
 
8/25/10
 California
 Leans Dem
 Toss-Up
 49
 45
 6
 
8/18/10
 Nevada
 Leans Dem
 Toss-Up
 50
 45
 5
 
8/17/10
 Pennsylvania
 Toss-Up
 Leans GOP
 51
 45
 4
 
8/17/10
 Ohio
 Toss-Up
 Leans GOP
 51
 44
 5
 
8/13/10
 Connecticut
 Solid Dem
 Leans Dem
 51
 43
 6
 
8/5/10
 North Carolina
 Solid GOP
 Leans GOP
 51
 43
 6
 
8/4/10
 Ohio
 Leans GOP
 Toss-Up
 51
 43
 6
 
7/30/10
 Washington
 Toss-Up
 Leans Dem
 51
 44
 5
 
7/30/10
 Pennsylvania
 Leans GOP
 Toss-Up
 50
 44
 6
 
7/29/10
 Missouri
 Toss-Up
 Leans GOP
 50
 45
 5
 
7/28/10
 Nevada
 Toss-Up
 Leans Dem
 50
 44
 6
 
7/20/10
 Ohio
 Toss-Up
 Leans GOP
 49
 44
 7
 
7/19/10
 Pennsylvania
 Toss-Up
 Leans GOP
 49
 43
 8
 
7/15/10
 Delaware
 Solid GOP
 Leans GOP
 49
 42
 9
 
7/7/10
 North Carolina
 Toss-Up
 Solid GOP
 49
 42
 9
 
7/6/10
 Balance of Power Published - Initial BoP Data
 49
 41
 10
 
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Rasmussen Reports is an electronic media company specializing in the collection, publication and distribution of public opinion polling information.  We poll on a variety of topics in the fields of politics, business and lifestyle, updating our site’s content on a news cycle throughout the day, everyday.

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Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, has been an independent pollster for more than a decade. To learn more about our methodology, click here.
United States Senate  Balance of Power Tables:
Current Projected Result 
Democrats
 51
 
Republicans
 45
 
Toss-Up
 4
 
 
Election 2010 To Date 
Solid Democratic
 6
 
Leans Democratic
 5
 
Toss-Up
 4
 
Leans Republican
 5
 
Solid Republican
 17
 
 
 
No Senate Race In 2010 
Democrats
 40
 
Republicans
 23
 

 *Independent Senators and candidates in CT, FL and VT are counted here as Democrats


U.S. Senate Snapshot: 
Held/Solid Democratic
 46
 
Leans Democratic
 5
 
Toss-Up
 4
 
Leans Republican
 5
 
Held/Solid Republican
 40
 

 

TOP STORIES
Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

Senate Balance of Power: Dems 51 GOP 45 Toss-Ups 4

 Connecticut Senate: Gap Between Blumenthal (D), McMahon (R) Narrowest Since May

 Delaware Senate: Possible Castle Write-In Drops Coons (D) Below 50% Against O’Donnell (R)

Nevada Senate: Reid (D) 48%, Angle (R) 48%

What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls

Governor Scorecard: GOP 27 Dems 13 Toss-Ups 10

California Senate: Boxer (D) 47%, Fiorina (R) 43%

Most Voters Continue to Favor Repeal of Health Care Law, Expect Costs To Rise

Race Pits Dream Prosecutor Against S.F.'s Nightmare DA By Debra J. Saunders

 
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Title: WSJ:
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 29, 2010, 09:20:16 AM
Democrats seeking to boost voter turnout this fall are beginning to sound like the late comedian Chris Farley's portrayal of a "motivational speaker" on Saturday Night Live. Farley's character sought to inspire young people by announcing that they wouldn't amount to "jack squat" and would someday be "living in a van down by the river."

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who prefers sailing vessels to vans by the river, recently tried out the Farley method. Said Mr. Kerry, "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening." Bay State voters are surely thrilled to be represented by a man so respectful of their concerns.

This week President Obama chimed in with another uplifting message about the American electorate. Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone that the tea party movement is financed and directed by "powerful, special-interest lobbies." But this doesn't mean that tea party groups are composed entirely of corporate puppets. Mr. Obama graciously implied that a small subset of the movement is simply motivated by bigotry.

The President said "there are probably some aspects of the Tea Party that are a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the President." The tea party is now supported by a third of the country in some polls.

Perhaps advocates for smaller government shouldn't take Mr. Obama's comments personally. In the new Democratic attacks on the voting public, not even Democrats are spared. Vice President Joe Biden recently urged the party's base to "stop whining" and "buck up," a message echoed by Mr. Obama in his Rolling Stone interview. The President demanded that his supporters "shake off this lethargy," warning that it would be "inexcusable" for liberals to stay home on Election Day.

Mr. Obama added that "if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place." Making the case for left-wing voters to show up in November, Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone that he is presiding over "the most successful administration in a generation in moving progressive agendas forward."

We'd agree, but his problem is that most Americans don't like that agenda and millions of voters in both parties wanted him to oversee an economic expansion instead. Blaming the voters is not unheard of among politicians, but usually they wait until after an election.
Title: Vote 'stache 2012!
Post by: G M on October 02, 2010, 12:08:05 PM
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/GuyBenson/2010/10/01/john_bolton_very_seriously_considering_2012_presidential_run


This morning he waded further into the subject, telling me he's "very seriously" contemplating a White House run in 2012 and that he's begun consulting with high-level campaign operatives to discuss feasibility and logistics.  Bolton cited what he described as President Obama's failures, the "wide open" Republican field, and the knowledge and experience he could bring to the table as the primary factors that sparked his interest in running

**Oh yes!**
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2010, 12:24:21 PM
Though I suspect Bolton lacks the touch necessary for domestic issues, he certainly would raise the quality of the discussion on international issues.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 02, 2010, 12:32:42 PM
Listen to him discuss economics, he's just as sharp there as geopolitics. He'd eat captain teleprompter for lunch in a debate.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2010, 12:41:23 PM
I have not really heard him discuss economics, so I will keep an ear open for that.

That said, my intended point is a bit more amorphous than that.  :lol:

Following Carl Jung's analysis, people have one of four dominant functions:  Thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.  I suspect most of us here have thinking as their dominant modality, yet thinkers are about only 10% of the population.   A good politician must be able to communicate in the language(s) which most voters understand e.g. emotion.  Reagan was great at this.  So was candidate Obama.  Alan Keyes (inter alia, BO's last minute opponent for US Senate from Illinois) is brilliant, yet he is virtually 100% thinker and as such is utterly tone deaf to human emotion and therefore a poor candidate.  I suspect a similar dynamic with Bolton, though to a far lesser degree than Keyes.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 02, 2010, 01:01:46 PM
Bolton was a diplomat. Just one that would not lick the boots of evil nations like the careerist state department mandarins and democrats insist upon doing.

America is teetering at a tipping point. We have a very narrow window in which to reverse the end of the American experiment. In 2012, we need an executive with the skillset to pull us out of the death spiral. I think the majority of Americans are seeing firsthand that no matter how you dress up an empty suit with inane slogans and fake greek columns, the office actually requires intelligence and competence.
Title: re. 2012 Presidential: John Bolton
Post by: DougMacG on October 02, 2010, 10:40:52 PM
GM wrote: "He'd eat captain teleprompter for lunch in a debate."

On that same vein, whoever wins the R. nomination (if not Bolton) will have to debate and defeat him.  They better start seriously preparing now.

My introduction to Bolton was the liberal uproar when he was picked for UN Ambassador.  He seems to be a consistent hawk, which is mostly good to me but with less appeal over on the RINO side of the party.

UN Ambassador I think was George Bush senior's highest job when he was thought to be so highly qualified in 1980.  He was widely respected for being a moderate but when the party and the nation needed a sharp u-turn toward security and growth, they didn't pick the moderate.  They picked a conservative clear in his convictions.  Maybe Bolton can be that, he has a clarity and confidence about him, but I don't think he will start near the front of the pack - nor does he.

He will be ridiculed for his call to bomb Iran, but that criticism may backfire by Nov. 2012.  By then the threat posed by Iran's nuclear reality could be a serious concern.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__jVRnmmHJs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/2182070/Israel-will-attack-Iran-before-new-US-president-sworn-in-John-Bolton-predicts.html

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/17/bolton_israel_has_eight_days_to_attack_iran
----
http://american-conservativevalues.com/blog/2010/09/john-bolton-on-obamas-%E2%80%98we-can-absorb-a-terrorist-attack%E2%80%99/
----
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/246806/checking-bolton-campaign-rich-lowry
Checking in with the Bolton Campaign
September 16, 2010 11:23 A.M.
By Rich Lowry     

We mentioned our favorite dark-horse candidate for president, John Bolton, yesterday. I checked in with him about the state of his campaign.

First, on its rationale, “We just don’t have enough discussion on national security. Obama views it as a distraction. None of our candidates are talking about it on a serious, sustained basis.”

On the long odds: “I have absolutely no illusions as someone who hasn’t run for elective office before. But I have been talking to people about it to find out whether they break out laughing. I’m sometimes met with a dumbfounded look when I mention it, but most of people then say, ‘Well, why not?’”

On his foreign-policy focus when a presidential campaign will have to be more wide-ranging: “Before the Bush 43 administration and since I left, I spent all those years at AEI,  surrounded by the best economists in the country. I have absorbed a lot of that. And don’t forget: I worked in Ed Meese’s Justice Department when he was formulating the case for originalism and I was a student of Robert Bork’s and the law-and-economics school of thought.”
----
I will be giving Bolton a serious look.   - Doug
Title: 2010 Elections; NT Times on Christine O’Donnell
Post by: DougMacG on October 03, 2010, 11:15:12 AM
My first time posting a Frank Rich opinion from the NY Times.  He makes the point that her trouble in finding jobs, paying bills, keeping a home, even writing a resume, may resonate with more people than some would expect.  (More so than others with maid problems etc.)
-----
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03rich.html

"The more O’Donnell is vilified, the bigger the star she becomes, and the more she can reinforce the Tea Party’s preferred narrative as “a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement” (in the recent words of the pundit Charles Krauthammer) populated only by everyday folk upset by big government and the deficit."
-----
Rich's real point is that she is an idiot following a Palin script and the movement is phony, has links to billionaire backers etc.  (No mention of Dems like the MN Dem Gov candidate whose biggest contributor is his ex-wife, a Rockefeller big oil money.)

Title: Job available....
Post by: ccp on October 06, 2010, 09:22:31 AM
For man or woman who has a command of the English language, has good expression of thought skills, charisma, charm, leadership qualities, conservative views, and adaptability. 

Doug writes:

"whoever wins the R. nomination (if not Bolton) will have to debate and defeat him.  They better start seriously preparing now."

I couldn't agree more.  I really think it will all come down to who sounds better and can out talk the other.  Presentation appears to win out over substance, at least in the short term.  Schwartzenegger who I no longer have much admiration for, recently predicted Dah-bamster will win in 2012 did so for just this reason (speaking ability).  Terminated does not feel there are any Republicans who can out speak Bamster. 

Bolten clearly has an excellent command of the English language (like another Harvard grad - Bill O'Reilly) and can think and speak his mind fluently.  Gingrich is close.  If only Gingirch had the touchy feely effect that Bill Clinton is able to con some people with.  The "I feel your pain thing" apparently does sell to many.  Roosevelt had that I think.  Almost the loving fatherly touch.

I don't think Bolten has that - or at least he doesn't portray that.  But I have a sense from him he is able to adapt and learn.  He has certainly had my impressed ear whenever I get the opportunity to hear him being interviewed. 

ON another note, I know some don't like him, but I think Dick Morris would be s much better strategist than Karl Rove.  I would like to see Morris and Bolten or Morris with whoever has the best chance of debating the one.  Morris clearly got Clinton re-elected.  Getting him to go out every single day and connect with the "people" with touchy feeling nanny statist stuff.  I think Morris could do the same thing from the political right.  He is in my opinion that shrewd.

The Chosen One is not as great a debator as he gets credit for.  Someone who can study him and think "on their feet" quickly, emote warmth and concern, and can express their ideas with command of language would kick his behind.  Bamster is all canned and teleprompter porduct.  He memorizes his lines fairly well.  Of course the MSM don't really question him much either.

I thought O'Reilly, who without a doubt is a genius, kicked his butt.

The repubs need someone like that.  Bolten *may* be that one in my singular humble opinion.  Though Bolten sounded just a *tad too* rough around the edges on Red Eye last week.

"He will be ridiculed for his call to bomb Iran, but that criticism may backfire by Nov. 2012.  By then the threat posed by Iran's nuclear reality could be a serious concern."

Yes, like they did to Barry Goldwater who said if we go to Vietnam we should use nucs and do the job right.  They made him look a nut.  I remember my father, who voted for Johnson was afraid of Goldwater for this reason.   My father is long dead but I am pretty sure he would feel differently with the Iran-Israel situation.  Yet the left will try to do to Bolten the same "he is nuts" thing. 

Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2010, 04:26:17 PM
I find myself feeling concerned that we may come up short when compared to some of the cocky euphoria wafting around at present.

For example, if we lose Nevada and/or Delaware the RINOs will use it as an anti-Tea Party wedge. 

Even if we do as well as projected, we are essentially 50-50 with liberal fascism.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 06, 2010, 04:36:58 PM
At this point, the country is like a seriously injured person with a severed femoral artery. This Nov. is our chance to apply the tourniquet. 2012 is when we can begin to address the rest of the trauma.
Title: 'stach-tastic!
Post by: G M on October 07, 2010, 08:06:25 PM
http://townhall.com/columnists/GuyBenson/2010/10/07/john_bolton_2012/page/full/

“Who was our last moustached president?” I ask John Bolton as we chat in his American Enterprise Institute office in downtown Washington, DC. “Taft,” he responds without hesitation, “And the last candidate was [Thomas] Dewey—not a comparison I’m excited about.” With a twinkle in his eye, he deadpans, “I think the American people would say it’s a complete non-issue.” The former US Ambassador to the United Nations may be willing to joke about his trademark facial hair, but as the 2012 election cycle looms, he sounds like a man who is seriously evaluating his own presidential aspirations.

Up to this point, Bolton has merely piqued the chattering class’ interest by refusing to foreclose the possibility of a presidential bid in a recent Daily Caller profile piece, and again during a Fox Business Network interview. Citing his chief priority of ensuring Republican gains in the 2010 midterm election, Bolton still won’t say if he’s planning to toss his hat into the ring, but now at least allows that he is “thinking about it very seriously”—a fairly significant rhetorical step toward to taking the plunge. It isn’t a new consideration either, he says. “I’ve been thinking about this really since it became clear early in the Obama administration that [the president’s] national security policy would be as bad as we feared it would be.”

Although Bolton denies he’s doing any heavy groundwork to set up a 2012 campaign, he’s not sitting still either. “What I am doing is talking to people who are experts on presidential campaigns because I’ve never run for elective office before,” he explains, before parenthetically pointing out that he is familiar with campaign finance law by dint of his work on the landmark 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. I ask if he’s planning any trips to Iowa in the relatively near future, a question that he adroitly sidesteps with a chuckle and a change of subject.

If anyone doubts Bolton’s ability to withstand the rigors of a presidential bid, they ought to look no further than his grueling daily regimen. The 61-year-old Yale graduate wakes up every morning at 4 to read newspapers from across the globe, write, and prepare for media appearances and speeches. By the time most Americans slog into work, Bolton has already been absorbing information and generating content for five hours. As someone who requires very little sleep to function at a high level, Bolton finds the very early morning to be an especially productive period in his day because “the phone doesn’t ring at that time.” According to colleagues, Bolton also possesses a near-photographic memory, a quality he denies. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he says, chalking up his ability to retain enormous amounts of information to his training as a litigator.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on October 08, 2010, 09:37:11 AM
Compare this kind of intellect with Sarah Palin and it is undertandable why the left has a point about her.

While she is talented at the "attack dog" talking points I have seen no hint of any intellect beyond that.

I really hope we can come up with a better candidate than her.  I believe she has no chance to attract beyond hard core right.  I would only vote for her as a last resort.

(At least from what I have seen so far.)

Bolten is a real genius/intellect.

Palin is like Hannity - they have a genius *sales* mentality.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 08, 2010, 10:38:58 AM
Palin is an intuitive conservative, not an intellectual/scholar, and not a policy detail person like perhaps Paul Ryan or Gingrich.

She governed as a pragmatic conservative, not an ideologue.  That record is gone now and replaced with the quitter ending.

She wasn't ready for Gibson and Couric.  I don't know if people get a second chance.  She was about 12 times more accurate than Biden in her debate.  Still she came across there as trying too hard to stick to a few repetitive themes. 

She rubs liberals the wrong way that's too bad.  If she rubs our ownresidient conservative-centrist wrong - even a couple of years later - that is an electoral problem.

She is not the one I am looking for but acceptable to me.  I place a high value on winning though so how well she brings people in is just as important as how she can energize the base.  We need to do both!
----
We both pointed out that Bolton's stand on bombing Iran is controversial yet may become accepted wisdom.  It proves he not just a follower of polls or pundits (though maybe a warmonger, kidding).  People are war-fatigued so it will be hard to exude strength, though easy to contrast with Obama.  Bolton was a recess appointment to Ambassadorship IIRC because the senate would not confirm him.  That too may become a badge of honor but not a great early indicator of crossover appeal.  I like that he understands if he wants to be considered, to step forward now. He already forced palin's hand in that regard.  Regarding foreign policy, he was in the room for a period during most of the tough issues.  Regarding economics, it sounds like he learned from some of the best conservative minds.  There is plenty of time and we will see.

I am anti-Huckabee still and I can't see how Romney who signed different government healthcare is the guy to repeal-replace federal healthcare, no matter his stated positions.  Giuliani got a nice decade off his name following 911 but disappointed last time and seems very out of the picture now.  Gingrich...? Again acceptable to me but I don't think the winner.  Huntsman was the centrist they were supposedly grooming for the job.  It took 2 pages on google to even find him.  Most of the new faces emerging now are too new to be President in '12.  Obama lacked experience but he had burst onto the national political scene by 4 years previous to his election.

Too bad we can't get a pro-growth, pro-strength, pro-freedom, pro-constitution Democrat (why is that an oxymoron?) to win the nomination, hold his/her feet to the fire from congress and live with divided / bipartisan government.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: michael on October 08, 2010, 10:42:38 AM
Of all the perspective candidates for '12 that I see now, Mike Pence is my pick at this stage in the game. Very articulate, ultra-conservative, and very principled. I think he would make an excellent POTUS.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on October 08, 2010, 12:47:28 PM
Michael,

I see Pence on the talk shows and I like him too.

Have you ever seen him in a debate?

Do you think he could debate the One?
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on October 08, 2010, 12:59:55 PM
" If she rubs our ownresidient conservative-centrist wrong - even a couple of years later - that is an electoral problem."

I am not sure if I am a conservative centrist.  In theory I am right.  But I don't agree hard right could win in the US. This is where I disagree with Hannity, Levin.  But I could and would not even mind if I am wrong.

Candidates that are very conservative but unpolished like O'Donnell, and less so like Palidino, and even less so like Palin are flawed in this sound bite age.  That said perhaps a strict right candidate could win in 2012 if he/she could express him/herself well.

While I like Dick Morris as a strategist much more than Karl Rove, Rove was right about O'Donnell.

For goodness sakes it looks like we have a high school girl (even if she is 34?) who could never pay her own bills running for the US Senate.  She isn't much better than that guy Green in NC.
Title: Better than a bearded marxist
Post by: G M on October 08, 2010, 02:22:17 PM
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/10/08/seriously-ii-odonnell-foe-bearded-marxist-checks-all-the-blocks/

Even with all of her considerable flaws, O'Donnell is still better than her opponent.
Title: Barney Frank
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 09, 2010, 08:13:06 AM
WSJ

By JAMES TARANTO
Fall River, Mass.

'I don't consider myself a tea party candidate," Sean Bielat tells me over dinner. "I don't know what it means." But an hour later Mr. Bielat, Rep. Barney Frank's Republican challenger, receives a hero's welcome at the Spindle City Tea Party, a gathering of nearly 200 citizen- activists in this economically depressed mill town. As he approaches the stage, they stand, applauding and chanting "Go, Sean, go!"

What he tells them is consistent with this reporter's view of the tea party: "I'm starting to think that people want to take this country back—that people no longer believe that the government has the answers for our betterment, that the government can tell them how they should use their money. People believe that they have the power to create their own opportunity, if only they are given the chance. . . . There is so much wrong in Washington, I almost don't know where to start."

Mr. Bielat holds some views that this crowd would find uncongenial. For one, he favors raising the "cap" on wages subject to the Social Security payroll tax—a glaring exception to his opposition to tax hikes. Another comes up during the tea party event, when a portly man with a white beard asks him: "Will you introduce legislation creating term limits in the federal government?"

The crowd applauds the question, and Mr. Bielat tries to duck it. He points out that the event isn't supposed to be a Q&A and offers to speak with the man one-on-one later. "I think people are interested to know," the man persists, and others shout in assent.

View Full Image

Associated Press
 
The longtime incumbent calls on help from Bill Clinton.
.Mr. Bielat relents—and responds with aplomb. "The answer's no. Here's why. I think that there's a real advantage to us bearing the responsibility of ensuring that there's turnover in the Congress. I think there's real advantage for us ensuring that we don't allow congressional staffers, who aren't elected, to have power because they stay there for generations. So I do understand the arguments for term limits. I personally oppose term limits." It's clear that he hasn't convinced everybody, but about half the crowd applauds. Not bad for a 35-year-old first-time candidate.

A native of Rochester, N.Y., Mr. Bielat caught the "political bug" as a teenager, when he did a stint as a House page. After earning a master's in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he went to work as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. and an executive for iRobot Corp., a defense contractor based in Bedford, Mass. He's also a new father; his wife gave birth to their son, Theodore, over the summer.

Before Harvard, Mr. Bielat served four years as an officer in the Marines. He's still a major in the reserves, but he left active duty in 2002 and hasn't served in combat. I ask if that is a source of regret, and he says yes: "I disagreed with us going into Iraq, but all my Marines were there, all my friends were there. I wanted to be there. Instead I was sitting at Harvard, watching it on TV."

Mr. Bielat's varied résumé is quite a contrast with that of Mr. Frank, who is twice the challenger's age yet has spent more than half his adult life in Congress. "Of his 45 years of work experience, 44 have been either in political office or working for somebody in political office," Mr. Bielat says of the incumbent. "The other one was teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School." (No, Mr. Bielat did not have the congressman as a professor.)

Can he win? In a district that gave 63% of its vote to Barack Obama, Mr. Frank has to be reckoned the heavy favorite. But Mr. Bielat's quest does not look quite as quixotic as it did last October, when he quit his job at iRobot to pursue it.

Then, Massachusetts had the biggest single-party congressional delegation in the country: 12 Democrats and no Republicans. By the time Mr. Bielat made his candidacy official in February, the numbers had improved to 11 to 1 with Scott Brown's election to the Senate the preceding month.

Mr. Brown narrowly outpolled Democrat Martha Coakley in the district, which is politically more diverse than the Massachusetts stereotype. In addition to the ultraliberal Boston suburbs of Brookline and Newton—where Mr. Bielat and Mr. Frank, respectively, live—it includes more conservative outer suburbs and the blue-collar area just east of Rhode Island, beset by unemployment (13.3% in Fall River) and rife with Reagan Democrats.

Mr. Bielat says Mr. Frank "hasn't been tested. His support isn't nearly as strong as people assume, because he hasn't had a real opponent since 1982." Last month Mr. Bielat released an internal poll showing Mr. Frank ahead by only 10 points, 48% to 38%.

Mr. Frank dismissed the survey, but his own actions suggest he is worried. Two weeks ago Bill Clinton traveled to the district to stump for Mr. Frank—a visit that backfired, to hear Mr. Bielat tell it: "The minute I heard that he was bringing Bill Clinton to campaign, I shouted for joy, because it said a lot about the state of this campaign. . . . I don't think Bill Clinton being here won him a whole lot of votes. It got me a lot of money and coverage." Mr. Bielat raised some $400,000 just in the two weeks after the Sept. 14 primary.

Mr. Bielat notes that Mr. Frank has "pretty steadily maintained a 10-to-1 advantage" in funding. But some of that money has helped Mr. Bielat's name recognition. In the car on the way to dinner, we heard Mr. Frank's first radio ad of the campaign, which attacks Mr. Bielat by name for opposing the eponymous Dodd-Frank "financial reform" law. Mr. Bielat laughed and said he's grateful to the incumbent for letting voters know who he is.

Mr. Taranto, a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: michael on October 09, 2010, 02:15:41 PM
Michael,

I see Pence on the talk shows and I like him too.

Have you ever seen him in a debate?

Do you think he could debate the One?

No, I have not yet. I have seen him on several news programs and also subscribe to his Facebook page, which he updates daily. I do believe he could debate the One, because he has something the One does not. He speaks openly, honestly, and with conviction, hence he does not have to try and tailor his message to his audience. I think Pence holds great promise, if he gets enough support to make a genuine run at POTUS.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 09, 2010, 03:36:31 PM
What is Pence's background/experience/story?
Title: "Dead Aim"
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 11, 2010, 01:18:52 PM
Wow, and this guy's a Dem. . . .

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/ad-watch-candidate-brandishes-rifle-promises-take-obama-admin_501290.html
Title: GOP + 9 in Senate so far
Post by: ccp on October 11, 2010, 03:43:14 PM
http://realclearpolitics.com/
Title: Morris
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 11, 2010, 08:16:17 PM
Sure hope he's right , , ,

By Dick Morris And Eileen McGann10.11.2010Share this article
 
The mainstream media is peddling the line that the Democrats are staging a comeback, slicing Republican leads. It is absolute nonsense. A close review of polling in every close House race in the nation indicates that Republicans now lead in 53 seats currently held by Democrats and are within five points in 20 more.

And the trend is Republican, not Democrat. Of the races where comparative data over the past few weeks is available, Republicans have gained in 33 while Democrats have gained in only 10.



On the Senate level, Republicans now lead in all ten states that are necessary for GOP control of the Senate, the smallest margin coming in Nevada where the Rasmussen Poll has the Republican, Sharron Angle, four points ahead. In West Virginia, Wisconsin, Washington State, and Illinois, the Republican has surged ahead dramatically in recent days and only in Colorado and California has there been slippage. The ten states which are now represented by Democrats where Republicans have the lead are:

North Dakota = +45

Indiana = +18

Arkansas = +18

Wisconsin = +12

Pennsylvania = + 7

West Virginia = + 6

Colorado = + 5

Washington State = + 5

Illinois = + 4

Nevada = + 4

Republican gains should be even greater than this polling indicates. The trend lines are decidedly in the GOP’s favor and Gallup Poll indicates that Republicans are twice as likely to be enthusiastic about voting as Democrats are.

The only note of caution for Republicans is that their leads in Democratic House seats are not substantial. In only 14 seats does the Republican candidate lead by more than ten points and most of those are open Democratic seats. But the Republican turnout machine – animated by Tea Party activists — will likely outperform its Democratic rivals.

And the Democratic Party has no message. Its campaigns are a hodgepodge of personal negatives and fabricated issues. No Democratic candidate is even trying to defend Obama’s health care legislation or argue that his stimulus program is working. Cap and trade is never mentioned by Democrats on the campaign trail. We have the spectacle of the most substantive legislative program in generations having been passed by Congress and now finding that it has no defenders in the election campaign, only Democrats scurrying to prove their independence.

All signs point to a growing Republican landslide.

The gigantic Republican gains of the past week indicate that party trend is now beginning to kick in big time. The Republican leads until this past week are largely due to the voting decisions of people who closely follow the process. The surge in Republican support in the past seven to ten days indicates that the less educated voters who do not follow politics as closely are breaking for the Republicans. Normally, these downscale voters are Democrats, but the economy and the alienating values of the Obama Administration (e.g. Ground Zero Mosque) seem to be driving them to the GOP.

Also boosting Republican prospects is the absence of social issues in the national debate. These elections are turning on unemployment, deficits, the economy, health care, and the national debt, not on gay rights or abortion. So, social liberals and libertarians see no reason not to vote Republican. Only in California are these traditional issues working in driving voters to the Democrats.

A landslide without precedent appears to be in the making.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 11, 2010, 08:22:09 PM
Imagine the damage Barry and the lame dems will do after the election. Nothing left to lose.
Title: POTH plugs Coons in DE
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 12, 2010, 08:44:43 AM
NEW CASTLE, Del. — When Chris Coons was asked last week about a new television commercial in which his rival in this state’s Senate race, Christine O’Donnell, assured voters that she was not a witch, his smile was controlled and very, very brief.

“That’s got to be one of the more memorable ways to introduce oneself,” Mr. Coons said. Then he quickly steered the discussion toward the economy.

In a subsequent interview here, when Ms. O’Donnell’s past denunciation of masturbation came up, he said only this: “I have 11-year-old twin boys, and this campaign has allowed us to accelerate awkward conversations.”

Ms. O’Donnell, whose warm embrace by the Tea Party helped her stage a surprising Republican primary upset, has given Mr. Coons, her Democratic opponent, plenty to pounce on. What he does for the most part is avoid it, on the apparent theory that she generates ample ridicule without any extra from him.

In fact, his campaign frames her in a strikingly deadpan manner. On his Web site recently, the opening image was not of him but of her, with these neutral words: “Meet our G.O.P. opponent.” There was no further commentary, and the picture — shiny hair, sparkling eyes — was decidedly flattering. For the Coons campaign, the mere fact of her was fodder enough.

This Senate race has drawn enormous scrutiny, and will be watched with special interest this week as the candidates have their first televised debate Wednesday and President Obama arrives Friday to help Mr. Coons raise money.

But the coverage, focused on Ms. O’Donnell, has mostly overlooked the unlikely, peculiar position her foe is in.  At the start of the year, Mr. Coons, the New Castle County executive, was not even supposed to be on the ballot. Now he is an utterly accidental (and exceedingly cautious) front-runner figuring out how to take on someone who is in many ways his near opposite.

She: awash in disputes about what her educational credentials are and whether she has exaggerated them. He: a double major in political science and chemistry at Amherst College with graduate degrees from both the law and divinity schools at Yale University.

She: cheerleader pretty. He: science-club-president plain.

She: accused of using campaign donations for rent. He: affluent enough to have pumped $250,000 of his own money into his bid.

In a second television commercial Ms. O’Donnell released last week, she told voters: “I didn’t go to Yale. I didn’t inherit millions.”

And while she has for many years thrust herself before TV cameras, he still seems unaccustomed to them.

Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC talk show host, showed up with her crew for a Coons event last week, attaching a microphone to him for much of it. When a technician bent down to change the battery pack on Mr. Coons’s belt, he tensed up, fidgeted and, in an impatient voice, asked what the problem was.

The technician, John Blackman, later observed: “He’s not used to being the talent. That’s O.K. I’m here to break him in.”

Until January it was assumed that the state attorney general, Joseph R. Biden III, the vice president’s son, would run, and Mr. Coons could not foresee any political promotions on the near horizon. He said he figured he would maybe work at some point for Gov. Jack Markell, whom he assured, “I don’t have to be the top guy.” Then Mr. Biden begged off the race, and Democrats gave the slot to Mr. Coons.

His campaign was seen by many of them as “a suicide mission,” in the words of Jim Jordan, a veteran Democratic strategist. But that thinking presumed that his opponent would be Representative Michael N. Castle, a popular Republican moderate.

On the night the primary returns came in, Delaware’s senior senator, Thomas R. Carper, called Mr. Coons to relay two thoughts. One was that his life was about to change drastically. The other, Mr. Carper said, was that he should be sure to speak kindly about Mr. Castle, whose centrist supporters were now up for grabs.

Two recent polls, by Fairleigh Dickinson University and the University of Delaware, show Mr. Coons ahead of Ms. O’Donnell by more than 15 points.

Mr. Coons, 47, grew up in a Wilmington suburb. Although his family endured some financial hardships around the time his parents divorced in his early teens, he described his childhood as “fairly sheltered, privileged” in a personal essay in the Amherst student newspaper.

His mother married Robert Gore, whose family founded W. L. Gore & Associates, makers of Gore-Tex fabric, and Mr. Coons went to high school at Tower Hill, a prestigious private academy where he ran cross-country, wrestled and “read a lot of books,” said Charles Chesnut, a close friend since elementary school. J. R. R. Tolkien was a favorite author.

In his junior year at Amherst, when he went abroad to study, his destination was not Western Europe but East Africa: Nairobi, Kenya, to be exact. And he returned with newly liberal political beliefs, as he wrote in that essay, which has drawn fire from Republicans because of its title: “Chris Coons, the Making of a Bearded Marxist.”

Mr. Coons has said repeatedly that the title was humorous hyperbole. And while he writes in the essay that Kenya forced him to examine whether his “beliefs in the miracle of free enterprise and the boundless opportunities to be had in America might be largely untrue,” he goes on to say, “I have returned to loving America, but in the way of one who has realized its faults.”

A devout Presbyterian, he flirted with the idea of becoming a minister and has long been active in humanitarian work, both personally and professionally. He rounded up $400,000 in contributions from family members to start the Delaware chapter of the “I Have a Dream” Foundation, and, after law school, took a job in New York City with the foundation, which supports higher education for children in low-income communities.

In the mid-1990s, he moved back to Delaware; married (he and his wife now have three children); and went to work as a lawyer for the Gore corporation, a position he kept while serving in the part-time, elected position of president of the New Castle County Council from 2000 to 2004. In late 2004 he was elected to the full-time post of executive of the county, which includes Wilmington and is by far Delaware’s most populous, with about 535,000 of the state’s roughly 885,000 residents.

He cut spending while raising taxes three times and calls himself “a fiscal conservative.” He has said that he would have voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program bank bailouts but in favor of the health care overhaul. He speaks elegantly and confidently on a broad range of issues, but he shows flashes of irritation with aspects of campaigning.

In the interview, he groused that in talking with a local reporter about time spent in South Africa in the 1980s, he had to provide an education on apartheid. “Let the record not reflect any disrespect” for local journalists, he added.

As a photographer zoomed in, he winced. “I’m just not used to people taking 100 pictures of me while I’m trying to be thoughtful,” he said. “I’ve had six months of no one paying any attention to my campaign whatsoever.”
Title: Protest Signs
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 12, 2010, 10:41:00 AM
Hmm, some interesting protest signs here. Surprised to see this in that Democratic Party bastion Chicago:

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/protest-signs-i-listed-the-federal-government-as-a-dependent-on-my-taxes-this-year_10122010
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 12, 2010, 11:16:56 AM
53 seats recaptured would be nice.  If true, it makes a 106 vote swing- from 77 seats down to 29 seats up(?) or something like that.  Too early though to start counting totals before elections.  Send money instead and call people.  As Obama used to say, get in their face, lol.  Volunteer to be a poll judge.  There will be important close races and we will no doubt slide back into recount wars again.

O'Donnell never should have spoken out against America's favorite pastime; not the business of a small and limited government.  People should handle that decision on their own.  Still, I like O'Donnell.  You would think the opponent's flirt with Marxism would be worse for the country than a little youthful witchcraft.

If the momentum continues, the next races that need to swing are Calif. Senate (Boxer) and the MN Governor race.

Regarding likely voters and off-year elections, I honestly don't understand why someone rational would care about the Presidency but not enough about the congress to go out and vote.  A no-show is a form of a no confidence vote.  The lesser of two evils is still a very important decision.  
-----------
From BBG's link: Slavery Begins with Mandatory Volunteering
Right Wing Extremists: Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Me
Freedom is a Right, ( I like: Freedom is MY Entitlement Program)
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 12, 2010, 11:39:31 AM
At the moment here in CA it looks like Fiorina will lose to Boxer, and my guess is that RINO Meg Whatshername will lose to Jerry Brown.
Title: 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 12, 2010, 12:42:13 PM
Michael wrote: "Of all the perspective candidates for '12 that I see now, Mike Pence is my pick at this stage in the game. Very articulate, ultra-conservative, and very principled. I think he would make an excellent POTUS."

Thank you for posting that.  I will add Mike Pence to my short list to consider for first choice, and for certain I will support him if he is nominated.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 12, 2010, 04:32:51 PM
Another perspective on a defeat in 53 seats of the House, a shift previously in 4 seats would have killed ObamaCare. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703440004575548234125768478.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
Title: 2012 Presidential: HRC
Post by: DougMacG on October 12, 2010, 09:14:48 PM
Sorry to report this, but nothing with the Clintons happens by accident.  This AP story looks like a story they wanted written:

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20101012/D9IQ3S900.html

"As Democrats and Republicans fight for control of Congress in next month's midterms, the former first lady and senator will be sitting it out...barred by convention and tradition from partisan political activity as America's top diplomat...

"I am not in any way involved in any of the political campaigns that are going on up to this midterm election," Clinton said last week."
-----
She was answering a question I think no one was asking. Wow, does that sound like someone who will soon be attacking the failures of this administration!

Please, please please, moderate and sensible Democrats, pick someone other than BO or HRC in 2012.
Title: Hope he is right!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2010, 04:49:36 AM
Dick Morris:

With the Internet, we have all become fixated on that day's polling, following the most minute changes in the swing districts on Realclearpolitics.com. But we are overstating the importance of polling in determining the outcome of the coming elections. (Odd thought coming from me!)

The fact is that while Republicans lead in 53 House seats now held by Democrats and are within five points in 20 more, the margins are very thin. In only 14 Democratic seats is the Republican leading by 10 points or more. In all the other districts, it is turnout that will determine the victor.

Going into the election, it would seem that the GOP has a big advantage in turning out voters. Not only is its secret weapon -- the tea parties -- outworking and out-hustling the Democrats, but polls show that Republicans are twice as enthusiastic about voting as are Democrats.

All indications from the field suggest a big GOP turnout, while Democrats tend to stay at home.

In Ohio's First Congressional District, where Democratic Rep. Steve Driehaus is trying to fend off a challenge from Republican Steve Chabot, the ratio of early ballots requested by Democrats and by Republicans is, so far, about even. In 2008, it was a three-to-one Democratic edge at this time of year.

So, in analyzing polls to determine whether Republican challengers will defeat Democratic incumbents, three variables are coming into play but are not yet showing up in the polls, all of which work to the Republicans' advantage:

-- The undecided vote usually goes against the incumbent.

-- Republicans are a lot more motivated to vote than Democrats are.

-- While normally late deciders tend to be Democrats, the levels of unemployment and discontent among undecided voters would indicate that they are likely to break Republican.

So what should the Republicans do with this information? Obviously, they need to work harder to bring out the vote. But they also need to adjust their sights higher and aim for more seats. To confine themselves to the races in which they hold slight leads or are within five points would be to leave on the table dozens of Democratic incumbents who could be defeated in this landslide year.

The danger here is not overconfidence but underconfidence, and that Democratic incumbents who could be defeated will skate to victories. Despite a massive victory in the offing for Republicans, there could be great gnashing of teeth when they see how narrowly some of the icons of the Democratic Party are re-elected.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on October 13, 2010, 02:19:49 PM
Speaking of Dick Morris he was asked if he is a Republican or not, I think by O'Reilly.

Excellent question because of course he spent the 90's as we all know keeping Clinton relevant.  Is he just an opportunist looking for whoever will hire him or what?

I can't quite recall but I think he answered something to the effect that he agrees with conservative values and more or less that is where is heart is.  I liked the answer.

A guy who day after day gets up there and points out Repubs are aiming to low is exactly the type of guy I would want as a leding strategist.  And if the Repubs take the Senate Morris was way out front calling it!

Heck, get him the girls with nice toes - who the heck cares.

Unlike an opposite player - Arianna Huffington who when she couldn't get a job with Bush went liberal just to spite him (my theory anyway). 
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2010, 07:25:57 PM
AH?  No wonder her husband went gay-- or maybe she went liberal to spite him for having spurned her for  , , , ? , , ,
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: michael on October 13, 2010, 07:36:07 PM
Crafty, I apologize for not getting this posted here sooner. Mike Pence:

Why He Matters
At a Glance
Current Position: House Republican Conference Chairman (since November 2008)
Career History: Chairman,Republican Study Committee, 2005 to 2006; Member, U.S. House of Representatives, since 2001; Radio Host, Mike Pence Show, 1994 to 2000
Birthday: June 7, 1959
Hometown: Columbus, Ind.
Alma Mater: Hanover College, B.A., 1980; Indiana University, J.D, 1986
Spouse: Karen
Religion: Protestant
DC Office: 1317 Longworth House Office Building, 202-225-3021
District Offices: Anderson, 765-640-2919; Richmond, 765-962-2883; Muncie, 765-747-5566
Though he’s now one of the most prominent Republicans in the House, Pence never forgot his radio roots. As chair of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), Pence worked to promote the conservative agenda. He is a popular guest on television and radio and  knows how to use a press conference to his advantage. Friends have nicknamed him “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”(1)
Pence’s profile rose in the 111th Congress as he assumed the title of House GOP Conference chairman, a post to which he was elected in November 2008 after Republicans were thrashed in the elections. As the face of a new House GOP leadership, Pence is charged with resurrecting Republicans’ battered brand and trying to sell it to a broad swath of voters. The new role seems tailor-made for the media-savvy Republican, who has challenged the party leadership in the past. “If you can’t communicate, you can’t govern,” he told Biz Voice magazine in 2007.(2)
Pence was first elected to Congress with 51 percent of the vote in 2000, and has been reelected easily since. He was named "Conservative of the Year" by Human Events in 2007.(3)

Path to Power
Pence was born in Columbus, Ind., one of six children. As a teenager, he was a supporter of President John F. Kennedy, in large part because, like Kennedy, he was raised Catholic.

Pence received his undergraduate degree from Hanover College in 1980. It was at Hanover that he experienced a conversion of sorts — from Democrat sympathizer to Republican, and from Catholic to evangelical protestant.
He attended Indiana University law school, where he received his J.D. in 1986.

Pence started working as an attorney, but quickly found his way into the political spotlight. He ran unsuccessfully for the House seat he now holds in 1988 and 1990, losing both times to Rep. Phil Sharp (D-Ind.), a moderate Democrat.
After his second defeat, Pence wrote a piece called “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner” for the Indiana Policy Review. In it, he quoted St. Paul and apologized for accusing his opponent of shady business dealings. “It is wrong, quite simply, to squander a candidate's priceless moment in history,” he wrote. “It seems more grievous that I left my supporters so few clues as to how I would have governed differently.”(4)
After his second defeat, Pence took a break from campaigning, but not from politics. He was the president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the radio host of “The Mike Pence Show, a right-leaning talk program that was syndicated across the state from 1994 to 2000.

U.S. House
When then-Rep. David McIntosh (R-Ind.) left his seat to run for governor in 2000, Pence jumped into the House race. He defeated five other candidates in the Republican primary. In the general election, he was opposed by Robert Rock, an attorney and the son of a former lieutenant governor. At the last minute Bill Frazier, a former Republican state senator, also entered the race as an independent.

Rock attacked Pence for his lack of military service and Frazier argued that he would offer more relief for middle- class families. But Pence’s call for across-the-board tax cuts and Medicare reform resonated with voters. He won with 51 percent of the vote.

Leading House Conservative
Pence quickly became one of the party’s leading conservative voices, railing against the dangers of big government. In 2005, he was elected unanimously as chairman of the conservative and powerful Republican Study Committee. In that job, he vowed to put more conservative federal judges on the bench, limit abortion rights and cut spending and entitlement programs like Medicaid.

Pence ran for House minority leader in 2006, arguing that the party needed to return to its “small government ideology.” However, Pence couldn’t overcome Minority Leader John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) popularity and his own reputation for opposing Republican legislation. He lost, 168 to 27.(5)
In 2008, former rival Boehner convinced him to run for GOP conference chairman. According to Politico, Pence had promised Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) he would stay out of the race, but  changed his mind. He ran unopposed.  (6)
Pence declined a run for retiring Sen. Evan Bayh's (D-Ind.) Senate seat in 2010.


The Issues
Pence is one of the most outspoken conservatives in the Republican Party. He is a particular champion of controlling the federal budget and cutting government spending, and also supports free markets and “traditional” values.

His decisions are guided by his religion — he tells people “I am a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.”(7)
Pence voted with his party 91 percent of the time during the 110th Congress.(8) However, he has opposed his party on some key measures when they don’t conform to his political beliefs. He voted against President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behing, the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit and a bankruptcy bill because it included a measure supporting abortion rights.(9)
Pence gained notice (and was attacked by many colleagues) when he challenged former Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s (R-Texas) assertion that it would be impossible to compensate for spending in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina with budget savings elsewhere. Pence and his conservative colleagues proposed numerous ways to save money in the federal budget through an initiative called Operation Offset.

Though the House GOP leadership was furious, “Operation Offset” sparked a debate in Washington and ushered in a renewed effort to limit government spending.

"Katrina breaks my heart," Pence said in 2005. "Congress must do everything the American people expect us to do to meet the needs of families and communities affected by Katrina. But we must not let Katrina break the bank for our children and grandchildren." (10)
Immigration
Pence was at the forefront of the 2006 immigration debate. He worked with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) to draft a plan that would appeal to hard-line Republicans and proponents of a guest-worker program. The legislation would have required illegal aliens to leave the country and then return on a two-year visa, which could be extended if the recipient passed an English proficiency test.

The measure also proposed creating a privately-run database that would match immigrants with openings companies were unable to fill with Americans.(11)
The proposal was seen as political blasphemy by many in the GOP base. Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan likened Pence’s involvement with the plan to a scene of betrayal in the "The Godfather". Team America, a conservative political action committee, launched a web site feature called “Pence Watch.”(12)The measure ultimately failed.

Protecting Journalists
In 2008, Pence surprised conservatives by supporting a federal shield law that would have protected journalists from revealing their sources to federal officials. “What’s a conservative like me doing passing a law that helps reporters?” Pence asked during a House debate.

He explained “the only check on government power in real time is a free and independent press … it’s about protecting the public’s right to know.”(13)

Pence works closely with other conservative members of the House. He is especially close with Hensarling and Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.). He worked with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) on the 2005 federal shield law to protect journalists and has allied himself with prominent senators such as Hutchison.

Pence was the only House member to file a lawsuit charging that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law was unconstitutional. At the time, he said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) “was so deep in bed with the Democrats his feet are coming out of the bottom of the sheets.”(14) Their relationship has remained chilly.

Soiurce: http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Mike_Pence

Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 13, 2010, 07:36:46 PM
I remember Ariana when she was a conservative. I think her true allegiance is to being in the spotlight.
Title: 2012 Presidential: Mike Pence
Post by: DougMacG on October 13, 2010, 09:44:01 PM
Michael, I approve of that message.  :-)

Positives that I see at least from reading this:  He is a consistent, common sense unapologetic conservative with the ability to articulate wise policies.  He is an adult who has been on the scene for quite a time, not a newcomer.  He is in leadership at a time when republicans stood united against Obamanomics , ObamaCare and ObamaDebt. No mindless follower, he opposed his party at all the right times it sounds, he voted against expansion of the federal government in Education, he voted against the new entitlement program and a bill supporting abortion rights.  "Conservative of the Year" by Human Events in 2007" probably means he is conservative enough and pro-free-trade means he is on the pro-economic-growth side of an issue that sometimes divides conservatives.

The flip side of that, like with Bolton, Palin and others, is he so conservative that he cannot attract independents and moderates?  I would say no, he will do fine being consistent and articulate as opposed to people like McCain and Romney who had to jump around on key issues.  Dems could compete for the middle by nominating a moderate, fiscal conservative, strong America centrist - but that would be a good thing.  Make my day.

Key factor missing IMO is executive experience.  Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Carter (and FDR and so on) were governors.  OTOH, Obama had none when elected, and nothing but a negative recin now. i would put an experienced House member in leadership on an equal footing with being a prominent senior senator.  HRC and Obama were junior senators but so was JFK.  Bush Sr and Truman were sitting VP's. Eisenhower general/war hero.  In context, no one on either side today is running with a full set of credentials so that question will all be comparative.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2010, 10:34:22 PM
I will keep an eye out for him.  I'm not seeing enough preparation there yet for the Presidency, but there are intriguing hints of potential.  An ability to communicate effectively, seasoned by years of talk radio and the ability to converse with regular folks, are valuable attributes.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 17, 2010, 08:02:15 AM
Interesting note that seemed to get lost is that Bill Clinton has been out there supporting Democrats.  Makes sense that he would go to places where the Clintons are popular.  Also true that politics is pay back and to buy favors forward.  Kind of a tough observation follows that he is only supporting candidates that backed Hillary.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8068167/Bill-Clinton-back-out-campaigning-for-everybody-that-helped-Hillary-run-for-president-against-Obama.html

Bill Clinton back out campaigning 'for everybody that helped Hillary run for president' against Obama

"Speculation about Hillary Clinton's continued presidential ambitions is rife. Husband Bill is back on the campaign trail, offering thanks to those who backed her in 2008 – and laying the foundations for another try in 2016."(?) [the story is theirs, the question mark on the year is mine.]
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: michael on October 17, 2010, 08:05:29 AM
Doug, excellent analysis of his positions.

I agree that he does not have the executive experience, and that is often a deal-killer. I hope his other attributes make up for it, but only time will tell.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on October 17, 2010, 10:44:15 AM
"Please, please please, moderate and sensible Democrats, pick someone other than BO or HRC in 2012."

I couldn't agree more.  Yet we both know Hillary is next in line and I also agree the only question is which year.  I don't get it when I keep hearing what a "great job" she is doing.  Why?  What has she accomplished and what specifically is so great about it?  I have not heard one specific accomplishment to support this conclusion.  It is almost like some sort of urban myth running around the media.  I really do not find her impressive.  I think a John Bolten could run circles around her with his intellect compared to hers. She is extremely careful as to what she says all the time with running in 12 or 16 obviously always in the back of her mind.  But I have NEVER heard anythin earth shattering genius coming out of her. 

By the way what is Condi Rice doing praising Clinton and Bamster?

I guess she wants another job.   :cry:
Title: 2012 Presidential: Mike Pence
Post by: DougMacG on October 17, 2010, 11:02:50 AM
"I agree that he does not have the executive experience, and that is often a deal-killer. I hope his other attributes make up for it,"

First I think we call it 2 sets of rules.  Obama was a neighborhood activist, not a problem!

There is no perfectly positioned candidate that is going to appear this time so looking closely at each of these choices is extremely important.  These governors come in and study hard on national and especially foreign policy where they have no experience, while congressional members often have not governed or led a major organization.  Romney I think has the most executive experience but part of that was to usher in new government health care.  Given imperfect choices, I will take a candidate who is high on character, intellect and communications ability with clear, consistent and conservative stands on the issues over one who governed based on political shrewdness but without consistent, guiding principles.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 17, 2010, 11:11:55 AM
CCP hits another home run: "By the way what is Condi Rice doing praising Clinton and Bamster? I guess she wants another job."

I was just going to say she is selling a book.  I know she wants foreign policy to be non-partisan and the diplomats are always less hawkish than the conservative candidates and like Ge. Powell we don't really know her politics, but CCP nailed it.  She is the next Sec. of State, possibly very soon. 

Obama wanted very much to have one or two Republicans in his large cabinet and they need to be in places where they can't hurt him.  We know Gates is leaving.  We don't know Hillary is leaving, but is there enough writing on the wall?  Condi would be perfect for him politically and not harm his agenda one bit.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 18, 2010, 05:33:13 AM
What has Condi Rice said about Clinton and Bamster?

BTW, she did not impress me as SoS.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 18, 2010, 07:33:56 AM
"she did not impress me as SoS."

 - Should fit in fine with this administration.  I believed there was something more to her thinking and her non-strategies that we would find out later.  No so. This book is about people in her early life.

"What has Condi Rice said about Clinton and Bamster?"

Rice said, "Nothing in this president's methods suggests this president is other than a defender of America's interests."

 - Isn't that pretty much the way candidate Obama spoke of the Bush administration? (sarcasm)

she praised her successor, Hillary Clinton: "I think she is doing a lot of the right things. ... She is very tough ... I think she has done a fine job, I really do."
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/10/16/Condi-Rice-defends-Obama-foreign-policy/UPI-71061287249448/
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 19, 2010, 05:39:08 AM
Woof All:

I find myself worrying about how cocky some of the reporting by our usual sources is getting; if Angle loses in NE, if O'Donnell loses in DE, the Reps do not take the Senate and the Tea Party will be blamed by the RINOs and the chattering classes.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 19, 2010, 08:21:26 AM
I think Angle will win in NV. O'Donnell will lose in DE and I do not anticipate the reps will take the senate.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 19, 2010, 08:38:12 AM
I expect Obamacorn voter fraud will be in full effect in NV, doing their best for Dingy Harry.
Title: We're just too stupid to grasp Obama's greatness
Post by: G M on October 19, 2010, 09:08:12 AM
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/kausfiles/2010/10/17/obama-clings-again-blames-scared-voters.html

WEST NEWTON, Mass. - President Barack Obama said Americans' "fear and frustration" is to blame for an intense midterm election cycle that threatens to derail the Democratic agenda.

"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared," Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. "And the country's scared."

Obama told the several dozen donors that he was offering them his "view from the Oval Office." He faulted the economic downturn for Americans’ inability to "think clearly" and said the burden is on Democrats "to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling."
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 19, 2010, 09:16:13 AM
Have no fears Crafty.  :-) This is a major shift of the landscape no matter what the final score is.  RINOs ran with, not against the so-called tea party movement.  McCain moved to the right instead holding his ground.  Lindsey Graham backed out of cap trade sponsorship and he isn't up until next cycle.  Fiorini said she welcomed Palin's endorsement. It was the success of the inexperienced tea party newcomers in the primaries that stole the whole campaign theme from the Democrats, which was to run against giving power back to the people who got us in this mess.  They have been mumbling with total incoherence ever since.

If Sharron Angle wins, the takedown of the majority leader in his own state is the cover story, and it won't be by some wishy-washy-sounding Dem-lite.  The campaign was waged directly against the major policies he supported.  The sound byte isn't some lofty better tomorrow theme, it was 'man up Harry Reid, these entitlements need addressing'.

If Reid wins, then the powerful majority leader barely held his own seat against a neophyte.  Hardly a victory.

Obama needs R's to take the house.  A bunch of scared Dems with a 1 vote margin won't give him cover for everything sure to go wrong for him.  When the moveon.org recount artists finished stealing the 60th vote in the senate, Al Franken, they lost their bogeyman. Not George Bush, not Rush Limbaugh, not Republican senators blocking votes, nothing stopped them from doing whatever they wanted. So they did and we are now able to hold them accountable.  

It is not just our side reading the polls this way.  Gibbs gave away what he sees in the polls with a comment about how their wins in 2006 and 2008 were so widespread that they now have too many members defending seats (as Democrats to defend a liberal agenda) that are a mis-match in these (conservative, heartland) districts and states.

Look at Indiana.  Look at North Dakota.  They had no business trying to sell this agenda in those locations.  For a long time moderate Dems had carved out a thoughtful tack in states were heavily conservative.  But not possible with a Pelosi-Obama full speed ahead agenda.  Evan Bayh saw it first.  Then Byron Dorgan. "In his statement, Dorgan said his retirement was borne out of the desire to spend more time with his family." http://www.politico.com/blogs/scorecard/0110/In_shocker_Dorgan_announces_retirement.html  The Republican now leads by almost 50 points in this open Dem seat.  http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2010/senate/nd/north_dakota_senate_hoeven_vs_potter-1419.html  In Indiana, it is almost 20 points.

Look at Wisconsin.  Feingold is a legend.  Down by 7.  Colorado is a hugely indicative battleground state. Obama won Colorado by 9 points.  Here is the latest Ken Buck ad, gives voice to both conservatives and independents: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF_cftQJvmM[/youtube]

The real problem is that if this turns out to be true, there still is so little policy change that can be accomplished quickly.

The real test in this campaign was about 6 months ago.  When they finished passing health care they thought people would breathe a sigh of relief and then jump on-board. The popular President will come to your district and support you if you support him.  Instead the polling kept getting worse.

The other test was the economy.  We pumped $3 trillion of crude, Keynesian deficit stimulus into this economy.  That should at least mask some of the underlying problems employers and investors face, yet unemployment stayed near 10% and the new taxes of Jan.1 and health care haven't even kicked in yet.

These policies are tied to failure.  After Nov. 2, we are still in an election year with the Presidential talk and candidates breaking out soon.  We will have divided government, with momentum on the issues and a crucial new election cycle looming.  Their side will no longer control the debate.  Neither side will control the senate in terms of 60 votes.  If popular legislation gets through both chambers, these will not be easy or cost-free vetoes for a man presumably seeking reelection.

2012 is a big test for the senate as well.  That is the 6 year mark for the 2006 sweep.  Blue senators in red states know that.  They are far more likely to triangulate than Obama.  That is the story i would watch.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 19, 2010, 09:24:45 AM
"We pumped $3 trillion of crude, Keynesian deficit stimulus into this economy."

Well said!
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 19, 2010, 09:55:38 AM
Thank you GM.  That would be far more clever if it wasn't so true.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2010, 10:02:48 AM
I continue to worry.

I saw yesterday that Murkowski has pulled to a statistical dead heat with Miller in Alaska.  Engle can lose NE (and Reid IMHO is just the man to cheat to help make that happen).  I read that O'Donnel in the debate bobbled the whole issue of teaching creationism in science class and came off looking like an ingnoramus on the first amendment and separation of church and state.   Paladino is looking quite the ass in NY.

If the promised tsunami doesn't happen this will all get played as an intramural squabble between the whacko tea partiers and the Rinos.

Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 20, 2010, 11:55:37 AM
The goalposts have been moved so often, they aren't even in the same state as the football field. Remember how the repubs were nothing but a regional political party in the southeastern US after 2008. Remember how Obama was to usher in 40 years of far left dem dominance in American politics?

The actual survival of the US is in doubt. There is an ugly, looming crisis that isn't going away and won't be fixed by politics as usual.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 20, 2010, 12:09:58 PM
GM, I agree.

"I continue to worry."

Crafty, I will get back to you on Nov.3 with more about this.  :-)  There are some lousy polls out today. Basically we still have conservatives running even in blue states which is amazing and Dems getting crushed in red states.

Losing NY is normal. Merkowski is a Republican so RINOs too are playing a role in the divisiveness.  Merkowski and Castle lost but didn't accept the results of the process that got them there. We have been losing to Harry Reid since 1986. There are some serious drawbacks to having a person like Castle win in Delaware - to say he is a Republican and then vote against our interests 50% of the time - it gives future Dem candidates nationwide bipartisan cover for those positions and votes.  Castle lost because of lack of voter support, not some back room party decision.  Only a back room deal could have prevented the primary challenge, hardly preferable.

Taking the fight to both parties was the only way to a) get any positive change, and b) disrupt the argument that this is nothing but a 2006 or 2008 rematch, our reckless spenders against theirs.

The intra-party squabble fear is valid, but unavoidable. Taking the fight to them means you piss a few people off, but what was the alternative?  Without the rise up of the grass roots, the so-called tea party, we would 2-6 more years Pelosi-Obama leftist business as usual and maybe the collapse of the republic.  Because it was all grassroots and no leadership, we have some very inexperienced candidates. The damage done to the old Republican party by this uprising overall is a very good and necessary thing.  The brand name is partially repaired (being a Republican now means something) and we will have a whole lot more good candidates available at all levels in the future because of the events of this year.
Title: O'Donnell, the 1st and the WaPo's memory hole
Post by: G M on October 20, 2010, 02:37:14 PM
http://patterico.com/2010/10/20/wapoap-caught-revising-the-o%E2%80%99donnell-story-without-issuing-a-correction/

Purged, not corrected.
Title: This is our future
Post by: G M on October 20, 2010, 06:18:33 PM
http://minx.cc/?post=307131

This is our future

This is our future if we don't change our ways.

Exhibit A: England faces the largest budget cuts since World War II.

Exhibit B: France is tearing itself apart over a move to bring state pensions under control.

This is the end result of the welfare-state. The Europeans (and Democrats here at home) want a utopia where all needs are met, all the hungry are fed, all the children warm and safe, all the sick made whole, all the evil punished and the innocent made free, a land where all is peace and all live in harmony. Instead, the welfare-state is waste and weakness and impoverishment and upheaval and ennui. It is generational warfare, class warfare, enormous debts, squalor, meanness, shortages, selfishness. It is, at base, the end of civil society. Communist economies fall faster because they take the poison pure; it takes the merely socialist ones more time to sicken and die.

It is not clear to me that either England or France will be able to make these reforms "stick". England might perhaps have more of a chance than France does, but even in Albion the days of Dame Margaret Thatcher are well past -- much of the country not only relies on the dole (and I count the NHS as part of that), but remembers nothing else. Entire generations of citizens have been born and grew to adulthood in a land of a debased civil society, outlandish political promises and a hidebound, near-moribund private sector. A country with "free" healthcare, a generous welfare system where it was often more remunerative not to work, and a private sector so sclerotic and union-infested that a structural unemployment rate of 8-10% was accepted as perfectly normal. Young people pursue endless, meaningless degrees (using state-provided funds more often than not) and have basically given up on the antiquated notions of marriage and family, to say nothing of religion. (No building in England is so empty as a Christian church nowadays.)

It's no accident that Germany is doing so much better in relative terms than England and France. Germany had to re-assert the traditional Teutonic work-ethic after World War II out of absolute necessity. The re-integration of East Germany in the 1990's forced them to be even more efficient, more productive, more financially conservative. England and France, contrarily, went the route of social welfare -- the more "liberal" route. And in the end instead of reaping "fairness" and societal harmony, they reaped instead penury and unrest. The redistributionist route led -- as it always, always does -- to a dead end.

We see our future playing out in England and France right now. Only our upheavals are going to be much larger and more violent than theirs. Our population is larger, more diverse, and more polarized; our politics more fraught; our debts and obligations massively larger. Our passions are harder to rouse, but once aflame, take a long time to burn out.

As in France, we have let an enormous segment of our population -- perhaps as much as half -- fall into a state where they depend on government largesse for a substantial part of their income. This is not money they earned themselves, not wages or savings, but rather money squeezed from the more productive half of the country. Half of our citizens pay no income taxes at all. An increasing number will draw public-sector pensions, Social Security, and medical insurance (Medicare/Medicaid) in amounts that far exceed what they contributed to those plans. Half of the US population, in short, lives not by the fruits of their own toil but by the (coerced) charity of others, as filtered and distilled through the hand of the government. This can not -- it can not, by the laws of economics and simple physics -- continue. The mathematics of the problem trump even philosophical issues of fairness, of governance, of ethics or law. The mathematics simply will not allow it.

Consider the French. They are rioting over a proposal to raise the national age of retirement from 60 to 62. Germany's is 65 (going to 67) -- how happy will German workers be to subsidize the early retirements of their French neighbors? The French labor unions are on a rampage, denouncing the move as a violation of a "promise" the country made to the workers. (If this reminds you of California, New Jersey, New York, and Michigan -- well, the situations are closely analogous.) The word "promise" is illuminating: people have stopped thinking of social welfare as a "benefit" or a "perquisite", and have begun instead to think of it as a "right" or a "promise". A legally-binding promise which cannot be broken, though the heavens fall. Well, the heavens are falling, and the sovereigns will discover a universal truth: a government "promise" is not a suicide pact. Reality will assert itself, one way or another.

Governments the world over are discovering that the river of money is not endless. That seemingly-inexhaustable mountain of wealth has been turned into an ocean of debt that will take decades to pay off. The spendthrift habits of the Western nations will put burdens on our children, and other generations not yet born, that should outrage us as a people. We are investing in the old rather than the young, and are punishing risk-taking and entrepreneurship rather than rewarding it. Our tax regimes seem to be deliberately crafted to kill innovation and long-term thinking. (What does "legacy" mean if the wealth I have accumulated in my life cannot be passed on to my children or heirs, but is instead eaten by the all-consuming government?) Young people -- young families -- are the foundation upon which Western Civilization is built. Neglect them, overburden them, cheat them, and you are committing societal suicide.

One measure of how self-destructive Europe has become can be seen in the birthrate. In developed countries like France, the birthrate among natives has plummeted to below the replacement rate (though some dispute this). Among immigrants who share little cultural affinity with the French (or are actively hostile to it), the birthrate has soared. What this means in 20 or 30 years is that what is "French" (or "English" or "American") will be determined by those same children. The same goes for Spain, for Portugal, for Germany, for England -- indeed, for the entire continent. (America at least has a positive population growth, albeit not by much. And our immigrants are also outbreeding the natives by a wide margin.) Demographics is a game of last man standing: the people who make the laws 20 or 30 years from now are the babies being born today. If you don't produce children, you have no voice in the future.

If the governments of the West have an excuse -- however weak and puling -- it is this: they meant well. It is not wrong to wish that every citizen have free health care, free food, free housing, and some money to spend even if they have no job. It's not wrong; it's just impossible. Health care is a service that has huge costs associated with it. These costs cannot be "magicked" away just because we find them inconvenient. Food must be grown, transported, packaged, and prepared -- all costs that must be accounted for. Shelter does not precipitate out of thin air. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that "the government" can provide these things to us at no cost, because "the government" must pay for these things just as individuals do, and because the government has only one source of wealth -- the citizens -- that's where it must go for the money. So if Bob is given 'free' health care, 'free' food, and a 'free' apartment, the government isn't paying for it; Tom, Jane, Howard, and Sue are paying for it. And at a vastly inflated cost due to the innate governmental inefficiency that dilutes every dollar that passes through their hands. Soon the social welfare costs eat up the money intended for good and necessary governmental expenditures like the military, the police, and infrastructure. Social welfare becomes a beast that eats everything.

We are living in an age where citizens will have to re-think their basic relationship to their government, and to each other. The government is not -- cannot be -- the cornucopia that provides for all needs for all citizens. It cannot even provide for most needs for most citizens. The math only works if the producers outnumber the welfare recipients, and by quite a large margin; but this margin is long gone. France and England blew past the 50% mark long ago. The United States is teetering on the edge of a 50/50 split.

Citizens must once again be taught that they, and only they, are responsible for their lives. A civilized nation provides for the helpless, the weak, and the defenseless. But it does not expand the definition of those words so broadly that it encompasses half of its citizens. A nation that values self-reliance and ambition must accept that "opportunity" emcompasses the possibility of failure. Failure -- even ruin -- is a necessary and inevitable part of any market-based economy. You cannot engineer failure out of the equation without rendering it meaningless.

As I said, I am not hopeful for most of Europe (and even Germany is weaker than it seems). England may yet surprise me, but their culture is weaker now than it has ever been. The primary ingredient of recovery is will, and I just don't know if the dependent scions of Albion have enough left to climb out of the hole they're in.

Which brings us to America. Do we have the will to climb out of the gargantuan hole we have dug ourselves into? It remains an open question. I find encouragement in the rise of the Tea Party, but discouragement in the sweeping victory of Barack Obama. Half of my fellow citizens would prefer to bleed the body politic until it dies; as long as they do not outlast the flow of money, they care nothing for what comes after. But I care about legacy, about culture, and about the whole idea of America as a place where you can go as far as talent and ambition can take you. The unfortunate fact, though, is that much talent and ambition will have to be expended in simply paying off our massive debt, and in reforming our nonsensical entitlement programs. (I've said it many times, but it bears repeating: if you're not going to reform Social Security and Medicare, then don't bother doing anything, because it won't matter anyway.)

We are poised on the edge of a knife. On one side: bankruptcy, insolvency, and dissolution. On the other: a reinvigorated individualism, a sense of the government as servant of the people, not the master.

France is lost; England is sinking. America must survive if Western Civilization is to have any hope at all of surviving the perils yet to come.
Title: 2010 Elections; Rep. Keith Ellison D-Mpls.
Post by: DougMacG on October 21, 2010, 11:14:57 PM
Thanks GM for the Muslim Brotherhood Ellison connection - moving this over from govt. spending.  He had some very bad friends before his affiliation with the jihad.  The al Qaida threat in Minneapolis is real with dozens Minneapolis area Muslims linked to Al-Qaeda indicted on terror charges in the last 2 years: http://pibillwarner.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/20-minneapolis-area-muslims-linked-to-al-qaeda-indicted-on-terror-charges-21-year-old-abdifatah-ise-or-abdifatah-isse-arrested/  http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/08/05/breaking-feds-to-announce-terror-arrests/.

It is strange that he has no apology for his affiliations with terror in the face of this threat.  Even more strange that in the electoral world he faces no real challenge from any direction.  Gays will vote for a man because he is Democrat even though he won't renounce Muslim intolerance of gays.  Blacks will vote for a man whose policies since his first election doubled their unemployment etc.  One party rule and no challenge within his own party. 

No challenge, but also no enthusiasm.  Hard to get excited about the ideology of economic destruction during worse times.  The electoral difference this year is that a lot of urban liberals and black voters in Minneapolis will presumably not vote, and their absence could swing the gubernatorial election the other way.
Title: Potential Gubernatorial Game-change in CO
Post by: G M on October 22, 2010, 01:46:03 PM
http://michellemalkin.com/2010/10/22/the-tancredo-surge-colorados-best-hope-for-defeating-hickenlooper/

We Coloradans already know that Democrat gubernatorial candidate and Denver mayor John Hickenlooper doesn’t think much of folks outside his liberal metropolitan jurisdiction. Now, it’s documented on video. My friend and fellow Colorado resident Michael Sandoval at National Review has the scoop on Hickenlooper’s public contempt for “backwards” rural Colorado residents — which he shared with a left-wing interviewer late last year.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 23, 2010, 06:31:33 AM
1:  I'm thinking like Ellison is worthy of continued observation, perhaps on the Islam in America and/or the Homeland Security threads.

2:  I continue to really not like the way that some races are tightening.  Spreads in the polls that used to be in the double digits are now often in mid single digits or in the margin of error.  After all the cockiness about the coming tsunami, anything that underdelivers is not going to be good for the cause of freedom.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on October 25, 2010, 07:54:23 AM
 "I continue to really not like the way that some races are tightening.  Spreads in the polls that used to be in the double digits are now often in mid single digits or in the margin of error.  After all the cockiness about the coming tsunami, anything that underdelivers is not going to be good for the cause of freedom."

Agreed.  It is getting me nervous too.
The nanny state is like a cancer.  Look at the mess in Europe.
Now the crats in many localities are calling for *non* citizens to have the "right" to vote.
It is always the crats who want to increase their political power with goodies courtesy of taxpayers.

We are giving it all away.


Title: Fox: Dingy Harry rides again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 25, 2010, 06:14:11 PM
An aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid repeatedly lied to federal immigration and FBI agents and submitted false federal documents to the Department of Homeland Security to cover up her illegal seven-year marriage to a Lebanese national who was the subject of an Oklahoma City Joint Terror Task Force investigation, FoxNews.com has learned.

Diana Tejada, Reid’s Hispanic Press Secretary, admitted to receiving payment for “some of her expenses” in exchange for fraudulently marrying Bassam Mahmoud Tarhini in 2003, strictly so he could obtain permanent U.S. residency, according to court documents.

Tarhini, now 37, was held in jail and at an immigration detention center in connection with his 2009 indictment on felony charges, documents show. He pleaded guilty to entering a fraudulent marriage to evade immigration laws — a Class D felony — in November 2009, and he was deported in March 2010.

Tejada, now 28, was never charged for her role in the crime.

“We did not charge the woman, and of course we don’t discuss the reasons we don’t charge people,” said Bob Troester, spokesman for the Western District of Oklahoma U.S. Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, which began as an FBI investigation out of the Oklahoma City Joint Terrorism Task Force.

“There’s multiple factors that go into charging decisions. She wasn’t charged and we can’t go beyond that.”

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement would not comment on why it took five years to investigate the couple's marriage.

As recently as five weeks ago, on Sept. 21, 2010, Tejada appeared as a guest on a Spanish-language radio program in her official capacity as a spokeswoman for Harry Reid.

Monday evening, Reid’s spokesman Jim Manley said Tejada was no longer employed by Reid’s office. When asked when Tejada left Reid’s services, the spokesman had no comment.

Manley provided this statement to FoxNews.com:

“Our office was not previously aware of these allegations and, following an internal investigation, the staffer at issue is no longer with our office. The conduct alleged, which took place several years before the staffer worked for Senator Reid, was clearly wrong. But the bottom line remains that this story was a desperation measure by partisan Republicans, who have stooped to slinging mud about junior staffers to score points in the waning days of her campaign.”

In court documents, Tejada, who was also the Press Secretary of Hispanic Media for the Senate Majority Conference Committee, is referred to as “an uncharged coconspirator in the crime of perjury, filing false immigration documents, the crime of sham marriage.”

According to interviews and court records obtained by FoxNews.com, Tejada knowingly filed false documents with the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services; lied in in-person interviews with ICE and FBI agents; and submitted fraudulent visa application affidavits and marriage license documents — all in attempt to use her status as an American citizen to get Tarhini permanent residency.

As a result of her actions, according to court documents, Tarhini was able to obtain a work permit.

“I don’t honestly know the reason why they chose to prosecute Bassam and not her,” said Jeffrey Byers, Tarhini’s criminal attorney.

“I don’t think they could’ve prosecuted the case without one of the two of them saying something, but I suspect they chose to work with the American citizen other than Bassam.”

A Justice Department source familiar with the investigation said:

"As exhibited in the court documents, the case prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's office in Oklahoma City was a straightforward case involving two individuals who entered into a fraudulent marriage during college in order for one to evade immigration laws and obtain lawful residence."

Tarhini entered the U.S. in 2000 on a student visa to attend Oklahoma City University, where Tejada was also a student. They became friends and married in September 2003 so he could avoid compulsory service in the Lebanese National Army, Tejada later told officials. She was 21 years old at the time; he was 30.

Click here to see a copy of Tejada and Tarhini's marriage certificate.

Two months after their marriage, Tejada submitted an affidavit sponsoring Tarhini’s request for adjustment of status, affirming on his I-485 application for a green card — under penalty of perjury — that she was his wife.

Court records show that Tejada signed numerous affidavits fraudulently representing her marriage, including forms documenting her financial and employment information along with a signed obligation to support Tarhini.

As part of the process, documents show, she and Tarhini attended an August 31, 2004, meeting at Citizenship and Immigration Services in Oklahoma City, where they misrepresented their marriage to immigration officials.

The next year, Tarhini stayed in Oklahoma while Tejada moved to Washington D.C., where she began working as a spokeswoman for the National Council of La Raza, court and public records show.

In 2008, five years after he filed his visa application, Tarhini filed a suit against ICE officials to force a decision regarding the application — a strategy commonly employed when visa decisions appear to be taking an inordinate amount of time.

In 2008, sources with knowledge of the case told FoxNews.com, the FBI — working with the Oklahoma City Joint Terrorism Task Force — sent what’s called a collateral request to ICE, asking them to track down Tejada to interview her about Tarhini.

At this point, Tarhini was a subject of interest in an Oklahoma JTTF investigation, sources said. 

In May or June 2008, a source told FoxNews.com, Tejada was interviewed by ICE and FBI agents in Washington, and she maintained that her marriage was legitimate.

In October 2008, Tejada began working for Reid.

On Nov 3, 2008, ICE and FBI agents re-interviewed Tejada in Washington, according to documents and interviews.  This time, sources said, agents presented a slew of evidence against her and Tarhini, and Tejada broke down and confessed that her marriage was a lie, carried out to get Tarhini U.S. residency.

According to court records, she also told authorities that she and Tarhini had never dated nor consummated their marriage.

She told officials that she and Tarhini had discussed divorce, but they agreed to wait a while longer — until December 2008 — to see if his visa would be approved, records state.

In the presence of the federal agents, Tejada withdrew her visa petition for Tarhini, stopping his application to become a permanent resident, and signed a sworn affidavit saying that the marriage was a sham.

Tejada, according to sources with knowledge of the meeting, expressed concern about her job and said she was worried about Reid's reaction to her sham marriage.  The federal agents told her she had an obligation to tell Reid, and sources said they believed she would inform her boss.

The highest level of management inside the Department of Homeland Security was aware that she worked for Reid, multiple sources confirmed, and following protocol, the majority leader should have been informed of the investigation through those channels, as well.

But in July 2009, when an ICE agent testifying at Tarhini’s preliminary deportation hearing was asked specifically about Tejada’s employer, the agent did not say it was the U.S. Senate.

ICE Special Agent Rebecca Perkins: “Currently she is employed with the — a Hispanic center organization.”

Tarhini's Defense Counsel, Jeffrey Byers: “Is that La Raza? Does that sound familiar?"

Perkins: “I don’t know.”

Byers: “It’s a — it’s a — it's something that is a public service group for the Hispanic community. Is that a fair statement, or something to that degree?”

Perkins: “Yes”

According to sources with knowledge of the November 2008 meeting, Tejada also told ICE and FBI agents that she was concerned about some of Tarhini’s associates, including the best man at her wedding, a Pakistani national named Amer Awli, whom she described as “very secretive.” Awli's current whereabouts are unknown.

Following Tarhini’s arrest in 2009, he was interviewed by FBI agents who sources say asked about his ties to extremists groups. Some sources said they determined he did not have ties to any terror group, but other sources close to the case said that could not be ruled out.

“Not all of my cases involve the FBI,” said Tarhini’s immigration attorney, Timothy Lee Cook. “Certainly, there was something out there that caught their attention.”

When asked what that might be, Cook said:  “FBI’s not going to tell anybody that. And believe me, I asked.”

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told FoxNews.com via email, “We have no comment.”

ICE provided details of Tarhini’s deportation but referred additional questions to the Western District of Oklahoma's U.S. Attorney's Office.

On March 20, 2009, Tarhini’s visa application for status as a lawful permanent resident was denied due to fraud and misrepresentation of his marriage to Tejada, court records state.

That same day, Tarhini was administratively arrested by ICE "due to failure to maintain his non-immigrant student status and fraudulent marriage," court records state. "He was no longer attending the Oklahoma City University, thus violating his immigration status." 

In August 2009 Tarhini was indicted on two felony charges: Entering into a marriage to evade immigration laws, and subscribing to false statements.  As part of a plea deal last November, he pleaded guilty to the first charge, and the second was dropped.

Tarhini was sentenced to time served and three years' supervised release. ICE spokeswoman Gillian Brigham confirmed to FoxNews.com that Tarhini was “removed” from the U.S. on March 3, 2010.

Tejada made $52,451.60 last year working for Reid.

Last month Tejada spoke in her official capacity as Spokesperson, Office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, as a guest on a Spanish-language radio program’s immigration-themed special on the DREAM Act, which included a section in which the host answered listeners’ questions “about the do’s and don’ts of applying for residency and naturalization.”

Tejada filed for divorce, “alleging incompatibility,” on March 16, 2010. The divorce was finalized on July 6.

Tejada did not return requests for comment on this article.

Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 25, 2010, 06:20:00 PM
It looks like there is about five different felonies Tejada could easily be charged and prosecuted for, but like Michelle Obama's violation of election laws, they don't apply to dems or the New Black Panther Party.
Title: 2010 Elections - Sen. Boxer: call me ma'am
Post by: DougMacG on October 25, 2010, 10:25:08 PM
An ad or a spoof?  I don't know but very funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixiYZ9DPk8o

In the comments someone has the title I think she earned.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 26, 2010, 07:28:29 AM
ROTFLMAO
Title: POTH: Alaska Senate race
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 26, 2010, 10:01:54 AM
BANKS, Alaska — The candidate treated like the front-runner in the Alaska Senate race is one not actually on the ballot.


Among the ways Senator Lisa Murkowski’s campaign is trying to encourage people to write in her name on the ballot — and spell it correctly:

• Rubber wristbands that read, “Lisa Murkowski. Fill it in. Write it in.”

• A jingle that spells out her name and features the words, “Fill in the oval, write it on the line.”

• Campaign posters made to look like ballots with her name written in and the oval beside “Write-in” filled in.

• Small handheld signs depicting a hand with her name on it.

• T-shirts depicting a ballot with her name written in.


 
JNeither Joe Miller nor Scott McAdams, for instance, was invited on stage here at the annual convention of the Alaska Federation of Natives last week. The only candidate allowed to address the 4,000 in attendance — and the candidate the federation eventually endorsed — was the incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, the Republican now running as a write-in candidate.

“You humble me, you honor me,” Ms. Murkowski told the crowd. “I will fight for you as long as I am able.”

Just weeks ago, Ms. Murkowski’s bid looked like a long shot. And it still may be — reliable polls in Alaska are few and far between.

But since being embarrassed in an upset by Mr. Miller, a protégé of Sarah Palin’s, in the Republican primary, Ms. Murkowski has defied conventional wisdom and her colleagues in the Republican establishment by waging a credible race as a write-in candidate. Analysts and Alaskans now say she could overcome the odds and logistical hurdles to win, something no senator has done since Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in 1954. Or she could be a spoiler.

Democrats insist that their nominee, Mr. McAdams, can pull out a victory in this heavily Republican state if he can paint Ms. Murkowski as too conservative, and her write-in campaign as too risky, for Democrats who might defect to her out of fear of a victory by Mr. Miller.

The night after the federation conference, it was Mr. Miller and Mr. McAdams who appeared together for a debate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Ms. Murkowski was nowhere to be found, but that did not stop the other two from attacking her: She is too liberal. No, she is too conservative.

“Maybe we ought to debate Lisa for the rest of the night,” Mr. McAdams quipped at one point. “‘What do you think, Joe?’”

A few moments later, when the candidates were supposed to ask each other questions, Mr. Miller said, “Scott, I’m tempted just to ask questions about Lisa.”

Later, the moderator inadvertently addressed one of them as “Scott Miller.”

Ms. Murkowski has attended most debates, but in a year filled with unconventional races across the country, hers is among the most unlikely. She has shed her sometimes mechanical public presence and struck populist notes — she even sang during a stump speech in Fairbanks last week.

“Fill in the oval, write it on the line,” the senator sang in a shaky contralto, striving to create an Election Day anthem out of a supporter’s original tune, called “Cinderella.”

Mr. Miller remains the presumptive favorite, but his lead has narrowed after a string of setbacks since his surprising primary victory.

News reports in Alaska have raised questions about everything from farm subsidies, unemployment and government health care benefits and even a low-income fishing license that Mr. Miller or his family members have received. Critics say the reports have undermined his credibility when he argues against the federal health care bill and unemployment benefits or vows to eliminate the Department of Education and eventually privatize Social Security.

Over the weekend, after Mr. Miller refused for weeks to answer questions about disciplinary action taken against him when he worked as a lawyer for Fairbanks North Star Borough, a judge ordered records of the incident released as soon as Tuesday. (The ruling also came after Mr. Miller’s security guards handcuffed Tony Hopfinger, the editor of Alaska Dispatch, an online news site, when he tried to ask Mr. Miller about the matter at a campaign event.)

Mr. Miller may still fight the judge’s order, though in a debate in Anchorage on Sunday, he admitted to being suspended from work for an ethics violation in 2008 for using government computers for political purposes. He left the job in the summer of 2009.

Questions about transparency have followed the candidate. In addition to his reluctance to discuss the ethics violation, he has also brushed off the handcuffing of the journalist, saying he played no role in the incident. Mr. Miller lives down a series of long gravel roads at the edge of Fairbanks. Security cameras are positioned to monitor the entrance to his house, which sits out of sight.

Asked about the security cameras in a brief interview, Mr. Miller initially asked a reporter to identify who revealed their existence. When the reporter declined to do so, Mr. Miller noted that he had once been a federal magistrate judge.

“There were security issues on occasion while I was U.S. magistrate judge,” he said.

While Mr. Miller worries that Ms. Murkowski will win Republican votes, Democrats hope to cast her as too conservative.

Alaska’s other senator, Mark Begich, a Democrat, who has had several staff members join or volunteer for the McAdams campaign, noted that Mr. McAdams, the mayor of Sitka, might need only a third of all votes to win. Presuming a 60 percent turnout, that is about 100,000 votes.

Underscoring both sides’ concerns over the Murkowski campaign, lawyers for state Democrats and Republicans have joined in a lawsuit accusing the State Division of Elections of improperly providing lists of write-in candidates to all voting locations and, in at least one polling place, in Homer, posting the lists inside voting booths.

A letter from the state elections director, Gail Fenumiai, written last week before the lawsuit was filed, said the lists were intended to be provided only to voters who requested them, not posted inside booths.

On Monday, after weeks of silence in the race, Ms. Palin used her Facebook page to attack Ms. Murkowski for comments the senator made in a televised debate the night before in Anchorage. Ms. Murkowski had raised the subject of Mr. Miller’s military service and questioned whether his conduct in the campaign was honorable.

“I find it astonishing that a sitting U.S. senator from Alaska would challenge the honor of a decorated combat veteran,” Ms. Palin wrote.

Ms. Murkowski is having to position herself carefully.

Asked whether she would do more to win Democratic votes, the senator said in an interview that she would not change her party. But, she said, “I’ve made it very clear that when I go back to Washington it will be because Alaskans have sent me back, not Republicans.”

She went on to name a range of constituencies she was courting, from libertarians and environmentalists to Democrats and Republicans. A moment later, just to be safe, an aide leaned in to clarify that she was indeed still a Republican.

Title: Sente Close
Post by: ccp on October 27, 2010, 09:12:43 AM
Baed on the latest polls the repubs need all six tossups to get to 51.  Of the four the republicans hold leads.  OF the other two the Dems Washington and WVirginia are ahead by 2to 6 points.  Both Dems are under 50% in those races.  Morris thinks that if the Dem leader is under 50% and the Rep is within two or three the Rep will win.
So the Rep may come up one seat short.  Another wild card is the vote manipulation of the Demcocrats.  The gift cards, the false write in ballots, the ballots (mail in ) that will disappear etc.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2010/senate/2010_elections_senate_map.html
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 27, 2010, 10:47:57 AM
I gather than DE (O'Donnell) is going to fall Dem?
Title: BO on Stewart show
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 27, 2010, 07:48:35 PM
For Obama, election politics no laughing matter
         
AP – President Barack Obama is pictured during a commercial break as he talks with host Jon Stewart as he … .By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Darlene Superville, Associated Press – 1 hr 14 mins ago
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama apparently thinks politics is no laughing matter, even when he's staring down a comedian. Obama barely cracked any jokes during an appearance Wednesday on "The Daily Show" despite host Jon Stewart's attempts to draw out the president's humorous side with a few of his own snarky wisecracks.

Less than a week before the critical Nov. 2 congressional elections, Obama said he hopes Democratic lawmakers who made tough votes will be rewarded with another term in office. He promised more accomplishments in the two years left on his own term in the Oval Office and urged people to vote — early if they can.

Stewart asked how the political environment got to the point that Democrats "seem to be running on 'Please, baby, one more chance'" just two years after Obama ran a successful presidential campaign built around "very high rhetoric, hope and change."

"Are you disappointed in how it's gone?" asked the Comedy Central satirist.

Obama seemed to suggest that he wasn't disappointed. He said his advisers had told him during the euphoria of his 2008 election to "enjoy this now because two years from now folks are going to be frustrated. That is, in fact, what's happening."

He listed as reasons a 9.6 percent unemployment rate, sinking housing values and an economy that is growing but not fast enough. But Obama said his administration has also stabilized the economy, noting it has grown for nine months in a row. He also signed major health care and financial legislation. Obama suggested that his administration did so much that "we have done things that some folks don't even know about."

The comment seemed to catch Stewart by surprise.

"What have you done that we don't know about?" he asked. "Are you planning a surprise party for us, filled with jobs and health care?"

Obama cited legislation extending health care to more children and broadening a national service program as examples.

"Over and over again, we have moved forward an agenda that is making a difference in people's lives each and every day," Obama replied. "Is it enough? No. And so I expect, and I think most Democrats out there expect, that people want to see more progress."

The interview, which allowed Obama to take his campaign message to the type of audience that gets political news from programs like Stewart's, seemed more wonkish than slapstick.


Ask America: Learn. Listen. Be heard.
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The Fast Fix

Map snapshot
Stewart pressed Obama on the changed political climate in the country and questioned him about the new health care law. The president defended his record as well as Democrats, who are expected to suffer a drubbing at the polls Tuesday. Obama was the guest for the entire show. Stewart is taping the show in Washington this week ahead of a rally he's holding Saturday on the National Mall.

At one point, though, when Obama asked to say something about members of Congress, Stewart prompted laughter by asking, "Are you going to curse?"

Stewart poked at Obama for saying during the presidential campaign that "we are the ones we've been waiting for."

"So here you are, you're two years into your administration and the question that arises in my mind: Are we the people we were waiting for or does it turn out those people are still out there and we don't have their number?" the comedian intoned, suggesting that someone in the White House needs to call them up.

There was even more laughter when Obama used a now-notorious Washington phrase to defend Lawrence Summers, a top economic adviser who is leaving the administration at the end of the year. Stewart reminded Obama that he'd once said that different results won't come from the same people. Then Obama hired Summers, who had served in the Clinton administration.

Obama said Summers "did a heck of a job," to which Stewart said, "You don't want to use that phrase, dude."

That's because in 2005, then-President George W. Bush used the phrase to describe the job his emergency management director, Michael Brown, was doing after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters had devastated New Orleans.

On the "Daily Show," Obama said he hopes voters will reward some Democrats from largely conservative districts who took votes they knew would be bad politically but did so anyway because they thought it was the right thing to do. He named freshman Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia, who voted for Obama's health care overhaul and is in a tight race re-election race. Obama plans to campaign with Perriello on Friday.

"My hope is that those people are rewarded for taking those tough votes," Obama said. "If they are, then I think Democrats will do fine on Election Day."

Title: AFSCME Spends Big
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 27, 2010, 08:05:56 PM
Public Employee Unions Funnel Public Money to Dems
By Michael Barone
Washington Examiner
Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Who is the largest single political contributor in the 2010 campaign cycle? You can be pardoned if you answer, erroneously, that it's some new conservative group organized by Karl Rove. That's campaign spin by the Obama Democrats, obediently relayed by certain elements of the so-called mainstream media.

The real answer is AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union's president, Gerald McEntee, reports proudly that AFSCME will be contributing $87.5 million in this cycle, entirely or almost entirely to Democrats. "We're spending big," he told the Wall Street Journal. "And we're damn happy it's big."

The mainstream press hasn't shown much interest in reporting on unions' campaign spending, which amounted to some $400 million in the 2008 cycle. And it hasn't seen fit to run long investigative stories on why public employee unions--the large majority of which work for state and local governments--contribute so much more to campaigns for federal office.

The problem is that, as Roosevelt understood, public employee unions' interests are directly the opposite of those of taxpayers.
Nor has it denounced the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision last January allowing unions to spend members' dues on politics without their permission and without disclosure.

AFSCME's No. 1 status is emblematic of a change in the union movement over the years. Before public employee unions won the right to represent employees in New York City in 1958 and federal employees in 1962, almost all union members worked in the private sector.

But unions today represent only 7 percent of private-sector workers. In 2009, for the first time in history, most union members were public employees.

This would not have gone down well with President Franklin Roosevelt. "The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," he said in the 1930s. A public employee strike, he said, "looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable."

It still is at the federal level, thanks to presidents of both parties and especially to Ronald Reagan's firing of the striking air traffic controllers in 1981. But successful strikes in many states and cities have given public employee unions huge clout and hugely generous salaries, benefits and pensions.

Even more important is the political reality that, as New York union leader Victor Gotbaum said in 1975, "We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss."

The anomalies don't end there. Public employees' union dues and contributions to union PACs come from directly from taxpayers. So if you live in a state or city with strong public employee unions, you are paying a tax that goes to elect Democratic candidates (plus, perhaps, a few malleable Republicans).

The problem is that, as Roosevelt understood, public employee unions' interests are directly the opposite of those of taxpayers. Public employee unions want government to be more expensive and government employees to be less accountable.

Yes, some union leaders like the late Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers have been concerned about the quality of public services. But they have been the exception rather than the rule.

Public employee unions have collected big time from the Obama Democrats. The February 2009 stimulus package contained $160 billion in aid to state and local governments. This was intended to, and did, insulate public employee union members from the ravages of the recession that afflicted those unfortunate enough to make their livings in the private sector.

How it benefited the society as a whole is less clear. State governments in California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey are facing enormous budget deficits and much, much greater pension liabilities. Much of the life of their private-sector economies has been sucked out by the public employee unions, with a resulting flight of middle-income citizens unable or unwilling to bear such burdens.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, elected in 2009, has become a kind of folk hero for his defiance of the states' teacher unions, which expect 4 percent raises in years of no growth or inflation and balk at having members pay any share of health insurance premiums.

Public employee union members have become, as U.S. News Editor in Chief Mortimer Zuckerman writes, "the new privileged class," with better pay, more generous benefits and far more lush pensions than those who pay their salaries--and who are taxed to send money to their leaders' favored candidates.

Franklin Roosevelt thought public-sector unions were a lousy idea. Do you?

Michael Barone is a resident fellow at AEI.

You can find this article online at http://www.aei.org/article/102704
Title: Even POTH notices something is happening here, thought it isn't exactly clear
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 27, 2010, 08:07:29 PM
Yet more inconvenient facts ignored by Team Obama:

Parts of Obama Coalition Drift Toward G.O.P., Poll Finds

Critical parts of the coalition that delivered President
Obama to the White House in 2008 and gave Democrats control
of Congress in 2006 are switching their allegiance to the
Republicans in the final phase of the midterm Congressional
elections, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News
poll.

Republicans have wiped out the advantage held by Democrats in
recent election cycles among women, Catholics, less affluent
Americans and independents; all of those groups broke for Mr.
Obama in 2008 and for congressional Democrats when they
grabbed both chambers from the Republicans four years ago,
according to exit polls.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/us/politics/28poll.html?emc=na

Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 28, 2010, 07:42:16 AM
"I gather than DE (O'Donnell) is going to fall Dem?"

Yes, but many inexperienced newcomers are making a huge impact elsewhere.

RCP has the best coverage.  They moved largely to polls measuring likely voters.  I don't trust polls but you see where different polls show very similar things.  They are all trying to get their final poll accuracy up right now for that is what their professional reputation will be based on.  http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2010/senate/2010_elections_senate_map.html

If held today, Republicans (at 49) fall short of 51 but pick up 8+ Scott Brown making 9 since the Al Franken travesty giving Dems 60.  That is a big deal. And that is conceding Boxer, W.V., and Patty Murray which are still possible.

There are some big, big stories in this.  Tossing out incumbent Republicans was part of it, in Utah, Alaska (maybe) and Pennsylvania, anybody remember Arlen Specter (R-PA)?  Sends a message to the others. Tossing out Harry Reid is HUGE.  If he wins close he is still permanently injured.  Feingold - Wisconsin?  Out!  And a common sense conservative businessman in! Obama's seat in Illinois - possibly lost.  

Watch for recount troubles and legal challenges.  This isn't over when the polls close.

Look at what is still on the table for 2012 senate races.  Those senators know it won't be 2006 over again in states like Montana and Virginia and that should affect their wish to separate from the leftist agenda, dead in its tracks.

Generic poll gives probably the best overall look.  http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/generic_congressional_vote-901.html  From -12 for R's in Jan 09 to about +6 now, an 18 point move in underlying philosophy separate from the individual story of the local candidates in less than 2 years.  Wow! 

That did not come from having Republicans sound more like Democrats to win as many wanted in Delaware.
Title: Obama’s “Enemies” List Includes You
Post by: G M on October 28, 2010, 08:49:30 AM
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/10/27/obamas-enemies-list-includes-you/

Obama’s “Enemies” List Includes You
posted at 12:44 pm on October 27, 2010 by Howard Portnoy


Are Americans who oppose the policies of the Obama administration enemies of the president and by extension the state? Obama seems to think so. In a shocking audio clip captured at The Blaze, the president can be heard telling an unidentified interlocutor that

    f Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us’ … then I think it’s gonna be harder. [Emphasis added]

So much for the antiquated notion that the president of the United States is elected to serve all Americans, and not just those who voted for him or accept his current views.

In a separate address to an audience in Rhode Island, Obama made a similarly outrageous statement. Drawing upon his tired “car in the ditch” metaphor for perhaps the ten thousandth time, he told voters that now that progress has been made[!],

    we can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.[Emphasis added]

At least the president deserves credit for openly admitting that he views those in opposition to his policies as second-class citizens. During the year-long debate on health care reform, he forced the Republican minority in Congress to “sit in the back,” refusing to entertain even one of their ideas, then accused them of obstructionism when he couldn’t cobble together enough votes from his own party to get the bill using approved measures.

When George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office, opponents of his policies obscenely burned the president in effigy, then excused their actions by claiming that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Now we are told by no less than the president himself than even peaceful dissent is a no-no. Disconnect, anyone?

Cross-posted from Libertarian Examiner. Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on October 28, 2010, 12:15:51 PM
"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, elected in 2009, has become a kind of folk hero for his defiance of the states' teacher unions, which expect 4 percent raises in years of no growth or inflation and balk at having members pay any share of health insurance premiums."

A relative of mine is a teacher in NJ and a Republican - very rare.  I ask her what gives with teachers?  She states all they care about is themselves.  Their hatred of Christie is legendary so to speak here.  She states their dues are collected whether they want in or not.  No choice.  And NO say how it is spent by the union.  All of it goes to Democrats - ALWAYS.  And the crats are then beholden to them.  She states none of them seem to care that the state will go broke if changes are not made.  It is all about themselves.

I asked her who do they think is going to pay for all their benefits as we already have the HIGHEST property tax in the nation?

What do they want us to pay more?

She says, they all "scream" that "the rich" should pay them.

In Jersey the dependent class is led by teachers unions.
Title: Cargo cult
Post by: G M on October 28, 2010, 03:14:31 PM
http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2010/10/27/barry-o-he-go-the-cargo-cult-presidency-of-barack-obama/?singlepage=true

The "rich" have the magical money tree.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 28, 2010, 06:56:43 PM
I knew the basics of the story, but lots of wonderful details in there; a great little piece to post elsewhere.
Title: 2012 Presidential - Gingrich?
Post by: DougMacG on October 29, 2010, 09:39:38 AM
Washington Post weighs in on Gingrich.  Pretty fair and it takes them until internet page 3 to say: "Then there is the question of whether the religious conservatives who are an important part of the GOP base could embrace an admitted adulterer who has been married three times."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102807414_3.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010102807419

Obama had his birth certificate question, his Marxism ties, his radical reverend, past cocaine use, no college records, no executive experience, no foreign policy experience, no senatorial experience, etc. etc. but they never got him for being unfaithful to his wife.  Clinton is his own exception, no one can get away with what he can.  Everyone knows that Republicans are held to a different standard.  Reagan was a divorced and re-married man, but that was 3 decades before running, 4 years between wives and at a different time and had no other reason to make anyone look any further into it.  Gingrich's issues were during his power and during Clinton's impeachment.

I honestly think this is a deal-killer.  Newt is brilliant - the closest we have to someone prepared to step up, run and lead.  If John Edwards and Gary Hart can't come back on the Dem side, no one can overcome this on the R side.  Obama can lie cheat and openly steal and then run for reelction as the more moral alternative.  Characters matters for the highest office.

Crafty, CCP, others, what say you?
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 29, 2010, 09:45:17 AM
Agreed. Gingrich is damaged goods. We need someone with a comparable intellect, but without the personal baggage. Someone who can survive the MSM vetting and Alinskian attacks.
Title: 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on October 29, 2010, 10:16:13 AM
"Agreed. Gingrich is damaged goods."

I have to say same for Palin.  She had a choice of continuing to make a huge national impact or completing her term as Governor.  I think she made the right choice but a resigned Governorship, her strongest credential, is not the path to the Presidency.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 29, 2010, 10:22:16 AM
Yup. She is more valuable as a pundit rather than a candidate.
Title: Our turn
Post by: G M on October 29, 2010, 10:29:53 AM
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYh5sXSaQOg&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYh5sXSaQOg&feature=player_embedded
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 29, 2010, 10:38:40 AM
Well, its kinda hard for the Dems to argue about the importance of fidelity, and Newt has gone Catholic and his the portion of his base that cares about such things is based upon a religion of forgiveness and redemption.

As for SP, I think it remains to be seen.  FWIW my wife (and therefore I :lol:) watches DWTS and it is very interesting to see the reactions to Bristol Palin;  a girl from a town of 10,000 whose teenage pregancy by a dingleberry was a subject of ferocious MSM attention during a bitter presidential campaign has gone far further in the contest than her actual dancing skill has earned  (it must be noted she is competing against pro-athletes and professional entertainers like Brandy).  This means there is a sizable demographic that is supporting her.  I think it is no co-incidence that when Sarah was there to watch and something happened that left the inference that she had been booed by the crowd that on the next show, DWTS made a very particular point of showing that the booing had been directed at a decision by the judges and not SP; not a snarky note to it to be found-- quite the contrary.  

This suggests to me that the Hollywood folks are seeing the power of pro-Palin deomographics and has decided not to fcuk with it.

Anway, Sarah  has the spotlight and it is up to her what she does with it.
Title: Some thoughts on Newt
Post by: ccp on October 29, 2010, 01:05:55 PM
"I honestly think this is a deal-killer.  Newt is brilliant - the closest we have to someone prepared to step up, run and lead.  If John Edwards and Gary Hart can't come back on the Dem side, no one can overcome this on the R side.  Obama can lie cheat and openly steal and then run for reelction as the more moral alternative.  Characters matters for the highest office."

Character does matter to me as it does to you and  alot of us.
Nonetheless my own guess it matters less to others.
I could be wrong but I think what really did Newt in with his tanking personal poll numbers had nothing to do with leaving his wife (?with cancer) or the hypocracy of his going after Clinton for impeachment while he himself may have been dallying around but was his leading the charge to "shut down" the government.  If I recall it was THIS that temporally correlated with his drop in approval ratings.  It appears "the public" doesn't like government to shut down.

(I certainly am happy to shut down government with Bamster in charge!)

I think he could come back but I am less sure how he deals with his past issue of appearing to "shut down" the government.  Even if it was at least a MSM hit job on him.
On one hand we on the right do not want Republicans to compromise and "work" with the other side.  On the other hand many voters I think want to stop the sides from never ending fighting and to work "together" to solve the countires problems.

I am not sure how he shoudl/could deal with this.  If he can I I think he has the mouthpiece to resell himself. 
Then again his mouthpiece has also gotten himself into trouble if for no other reason that it gives fodder for the liberal MSM who love to crucify him.




Title: When the dems talk about their "ground game".....
Post by: G M on October 29, 2010, 01:49:33 PM
THIS is what they mean:

http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2010/10/chicago-way.html

Wednesday, October 27, 2010
The Chicago (and Pennsylvania) Way

According to political legend, John F. Kennedy didn't really know he'd won the 1960 presidential race against Richard Nixon until he received a late-night phone call from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

"Mr. President," Daley intoned. That greeting told JFK that the Chicago Democratic machine had worked its magic, voting enough tombstones and "ghosts" to put Kennedy over the top in Illinois and into the White House.

Fifty years later, Democrats are still up to their old tricks. As Chuck Goudie of WLS-TV reports:

An Illinois county election official says that thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands, of voters who are expecting a ballot sent to them by mail may be disenfranchised.

Chicagoan Rosia Carter is one of 404,000 registered Illinois voters who recently received vote-by-mail requests that were sent by the Illinois Democratic Coordinated Campaign.

"By the time I filled it out and sent it in, my vote would not get counted," Carter said.

She and others called the I-Team when they noticed the return address is not their local election official but instead a PO box for the organization. IDCC officials claim they are entering ballot request information into their own database before sending the mailings on to election authorities who then mail voters the ballot.

The Lake County clerk received a shipment of 500 ballot requests from the IDCC Tuesday. By law, her office has two days to process the ballot requests. The problem is, Thursday is the deadline for election officials to get the ballots out.

IDCC told the clerk that another 1,500 ballot requests are headed to her office, which, she says, may not give her enough time to process all the ballots, potentially disenfranchising voters.
[snip]

Carter and others who contacted the I-Team are furious that their vote may also be thrown out because the IDCC put the registered voters' wrong birthdate on the form.

"My birthdate is wrong," said Carter. "That means it doesn't match the election board of commissioners' records."

In case you're wondering, a spokesman for the IDCC told WLS they used their organization's post office box as a return address to "better track the process and make sure there are fewer problems." And apparently, he said it with a straight face.

But the potential for political chicanery doesn't end with the potential disenfranchisement of thousands of voters. As Erick Erickson of Red State postulates, the Dims could simply rush to a (friendly) federal judge and demand an extension of submission times and tabulating periods so that "every vote counts." When that happens, the Democrats can tap into a pool of thousands of additional votes. It won't elect (or re-elect) a president, but it could be enough to sway hotly-contested Senate races in Illinois.

The remedy for conservatives is simple. Turn out in such huge numbers that it becomes impossible for Democrats to steal the election. But in the blue states, that's easier said than done. Besides, if the machine can't conjure up enough votes on election night, there's always Step Two in the Democratic playbook. Flood the zone with lawyers and start recounting until you achieve the desired result.

If you can, make a last-minute donation to Mark Kirk or Bill Brady, or volunteer some time for their campaigns. They need all the help they can muster in defeating their opponents--and the Democratic machine.
***
ADDENDUM: And oddly enough, a similar scandal is unfolding in Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District, where Democratic incumbent Patrick Murphy is in the fight of his political life. Hundreds of voters in the district were warned that their votes might not count unless they returned an enclosed absentee ballot to a post office box in Bristol, Pennsylvania. The box was controlled by Murphy's campaign manager, who then "re-mailed" the ballots to the local election board.

As National Review has learned, there was a sudden surge in Democratic absentee ballots in the district last week, and many were mailed in identical, pre-labeled envelopes. Local GOP officials say some of the suspicious ballots were post-marked as far back as August, suggesting they had been held by a third party--perhaps the same individual who controlled the P.O. box where they were mailed? You know, the same guy running Murphy's re-election bid?

At this point, there's no proof that Congressman Murphy was involved. Officials with his campaign insist that no ballots sent to the post office box were discarded or tampered with.

Riiiighhhtttttt.....

Title: I had forgotten about this.....
Post by: G M on October 29, 2010, 01:58:24 PM
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi6n_-wB154[/youtube]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi6n_-wB154


Ugh.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on October 29, 2010, 03:25:20 PM
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/10/unreal-radical-rep-mccollum-says-tea-partiers-are-anti-american-racist-haters-for-posting-video-of-her-omitting-under-god-from-pledge/

Remember the left's rules, when you cannot debate a point, call your opponent racist, sexist, homophobic or islamaphobic.
Title: Enemies
Post by: G M on October 29, 2010, 06:58:00 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102806270.html

By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, October 28, 2010; 9:45 PM

In a radio interview that aired Monday on Univision, President Obama chided Latinos who "sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.' " Quite a uniter, urging Hispanics to go to the polls to exact political revenge on their enemies - presumably, for example, the near-60 percent of Americans who support the new Arizona immigration law.

This from a president who won't even use "enemies" to describe an Iranian regime that is helping kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. This from a man who rose to prominence thunderously declaring that we were not blue states or red states, not black America or white America or Latino America - but the United States of America.

This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends - not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution.
Title: Lines between dems/communists continue to blur
Post by: G M on October 30, 2010, 07:05:46 AM
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/10/30/its-come-to-this-communist-party-usa-openly-collaborates-with-democrats/

 

 
It’s Come to This: Communist Party USA Openly Collaborates With Democrats
Title: POTH on Reid vs. Angle
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2010, 08:19:38 AM

October 29, 2010
In Nevada, It’s Hold Nose and Cast Vote
By DAN BARRY and MICHAEL COOPER


HENDERSON, Nev. — The knock on the front door elicited the annoyed yapping of an unseen dog, followed by the appearance of a gray-haired man busily eating chips from a bag. His callers were two union workers, canvassing the neighborhood on behalf of Democrats, especially Senator Harry Reid.

The man said that he knew Mr. Reid, and that Mr. Reid was an idiot. So was his Republican opponent, Sharron Angle. In fact, said the man, a retired steelworker named Mario Mari, he might very well choose a third option here in Nevada: the phantom candidate known as None of the Above.

“This country is going down,” Mr. Mari said, before closing the door to a bleak Nevada landscape, where jobs are few and foreclosures many.

This is the up-for-grabs Third Congressional District, the most populous in Nevada and the most contested in this state’s contentious Senate race, sprawling across the dry terrain to form a kind of martini glass around the olive of downtown Las Vegas. It is here, in this packed suburban stretch of terra cotta roofs and crushed-rock yards adorned with Halloween skulls and campaign signs, that the battle for the country’s direction is being waged.

The two candidates could not be more ideologically different. But in these last frantic days of an extremely tight and unpleasant campaign, one with implications for the balance of power in Washington, they are united by the same problem: the voters of Nevada do not particularly like either of them.

“More people in Nevada dislike these candidates than like them,” said Ryan Erwin, a Republican consultant in Las Vegas. As a result, he added, “It’s going to be about which side is going to persuade voters that the other candidate is worse.”

On one side, the incumbent of two dozen years: Mr. Reid, 70, the Senate majority leader, a close ally of President Obama and, behind the scenes, a flinty, old-school Nevadan. But if a microphone appears, he assumes the persona of a wan, Old West undertaker whose own pulse needs to be checked.

In addition to giving interviews and busily visiting key racial, ethnic and union groups, the senator is counting on a highly disciplined ground game — put in place after Republicans swept into state offices in 2002 — that does everything from sending out door-knocking union members to providing hotel maids and blackjack dealers free bus rides to early voting sites.

Finally, the Reid campaign’s closing-argument commercials are casting Ms. Angle as a flaky, even dangerous extremist. The most recent commercial for the Reid campaign ends with: “Sharron Angle? Pathological.”

On the other side, the challenger from out of nowhere: Ms. Angle, 61, this season’s anti-Obama Tea Party standard-bearer. A former schoolteacher, state legislator and competitive weight lifter, she has choice words for Washington and curious words for the rest of the country, as when she suggested that Islamic religious law had taken hold in two American communities. But if a microphone appears, she begins to play hide-and-seek: she hides, reporters seek.

Ms. Angle has emerged as a candidate wary of some of her Republican colleagues, and the feeling is often mutual. Sometimes she listens to the professional Republican consultants who have descended on this race; sometimes she does not. While they want her to avoid the press, they do not want her to be seen running away from cameras — which has become a common sight on Nevada television, one that some Republicans say is entirely of Ms. Angle’s design.

Although Ms. Angle usually flees microphones, she speaks clearly through her campaign commercials, which question the source of Mr. Reid’s wealth and portray him as a calcified Obama toady who all but invites thuggish undocumented immigrants to your family’s Thanksgiving.

In their own ways, then, both candidates are asking the same plaintive question in this close race: What are you thinking, Nevada?

In one of the storefronts of a tired, partly vacant shopping center blessed by the bright lights of a central Las Vegas casino called Arizona Charlie’s, a clutch of Republicans spent Tuesday night making telephone calls to registered Republicans. Words on a grease board underscored their mission’s importance:

“Dirty Harry won by 428 votes in 1998. How many calls did YOU make today?”

Jesse Law, 28, a mortgage broker with Tea Party credentials, sat among a half-dozen other volunteers who, by the end of the day, were to have made more than 2,200 calls from this office alone. When not working at a Republican phone bank, he is leading groups of canvassers through the almost identical subdivisions carpeting the southern Nevada desert. His message is consistent:

Oust Reid.

This mantra binds the various bands of Nevada Republicans and Tea Party members, who normally find their oxygen in internal squabbling. It is a strange moment of unification, though, given how divisive a figure Ms. Angle has been.

According to a profile in The Las Vegas Review-Journal this spring, the deeply religious Ms. Angle underwent a political conversion after surviving a medical crisis — a tumor blocking her spinal fluid — three decades ago. A friend confided that she had seen Deborah, a heroine from the Old Testament, while dreaming about Ms. Angle, who interpreted this as a sign.

“Deborah was really the first woman politician,” Ms. Angle told the newspaper.

Ms. Angle went on to become a pro-gun, anti-tax state legislator from northern Nevada who relished being the antiestablishment outsider. In 2008, for example, she unsuccessfully challenged a veteran Republican leader from Reno, State Senator William J. Raggio, in a mean primary. Then, in the Republican primary for the United States Senate in June, she came from far behind to beat several established candidates, including Sue Lowden, a former chairwoman in the state Republican Party.

The hurt feelings created by her audacity have not eased. Mr. Raggio, who is among several prominent state Republicans reluctantly supporting Mr. Reid, recently issued a statement that criticized Ms. Angle’s unwillingness to work with others, even those in her own party, as well as “her extreme positions” on a range of issues.

Some Republicans fear losing such a powerful ally in Washington — no matter that his name is Reid — at a time when Nevada is in precarious economic shape. And Ms. Angle’s relationship with Republicans in Washington is complicated. She eyes them warily, while they fret that their overt help might offend her Tea Party supporters.

Even so, Ms. Angle is not above accepting the help of the Republican establishment, whether by receiving significant financial support from, say, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, or holding an event on Friday night with Senator John McCain of Arizona. She melds the inside with the outside, as when, during a recent appearance with Newt Gingrich, she told her supporters — “Nevada patriots,” she called them — that she wanted to cut any federal spending not provided for in the Constitution.

Still, it seems that no adviser can stop Ms. Angle from being herself, as when she suggested to a rural community that Islamic religious law had taken hold in Dearborn, Mich., and Frankford, Tex., which no longer exists. (“I think that’s arguably the craziest thing that she has said, and the most dangerous,” said Jon Ralston, who writes the state’s most influential political column for The Las Vegas Sun.)

Her candor has caused advisers to suggest that she lie low in these last days, so low that reporters have relied on the Twitter messages of a Democrat dressed as a chicken to track Ms. Angle’s whereabouts.

But Ms. Angle’s outlandish comments and harsh commercials — juxtaposing menacing, dark-skinned men with anxious white people — have not affected her ability to raise and spend money. From July 1 to Oct. 13, her campaign spent $16.9 million, well more than the $11.2 million spent by the Reid campaign, and her advisers say their ground game is better than people might imagine.

“If you include the enthusiasm advantage that we have, we’re feeling quite good,” said Jordan Gehrke, Ms. Angle’s deputy campaign manager.

In a union hall tucked among subdivisions and wisps of desert, some steelworkers, letter carriers and culinary workers filed in to get their Saturday morning coffee and marching orders before heading out to canvass for Democrats. Many of them passed a handwritten sign suggesting how to respond to “Reid Distrust.” It advised:

“Acknowledge: ‘I hear you, but despite what the media says ... Harry brings it home for NV.”

Mike Reinecke, the state political director of Labor 2010, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s get-out-the-vote program, gave a pep talk and released them with: “See your captains, grab your packets and let’s hit the pavement.”

Union members have knocked on 200,000 doors and made 48,000 calls as part of a one-vote-at-a-time effort by Democrats to counter a general disgust with the establishment — personified these days by Mr. Reid, who might otherwise be seen as a Horatio Alger character from Nevada: a poor, pugnacious kid from Searchlight who rose to become a power broker able to secure federal money for large, jobs-creating state projects.

Well aware that polls show Ms. Angle slightly ahead, Mr. Reid has been forced to shed his dour Washington persona and stump like a challenger. At a recent rally in Las Vegas’s Chinatown, he posed for photographs for 45 minutes with any supporter who wanted one, then left to shake hands and share hugs at a barbecue with black supporters.

Still, Mr. Reid cannot deny being such a creature of distant Washington that he made the tone-deaf decision years ago to move into the Ritz-Carlton — a name that, in these hard Nevadan times, smacks of exclusive luxury. And for all his kisses and embraces, he still has that undertaker’s parched look; he still has that propensity for clumsy statements, as when he recently suggested that: “But for me, we’d be in a worldwide depression.”

With all this in tow, Richard and Tracy Griffin, a married couple who, as letter carriers, know how to calm barking dogs, headed out into the key Third Congressional District, where the chocolate-brown Black Mountains loom in the distance, the deep cuts in their sides all that exist of luxury developments never completed.

In recent elections, the global-positioning systems used by the union door-knockers could not keep up with all the new roads. Now the district is the foreclosure capital of a state that is the foreclosure capital of the nation — and Mr. Reid needs the votes of its anxious, angry electorate.

“In the beginning it was very tough,” Ms. Griffin said as she went door to door, talking to laid-off workers, cranky retirees, homeowners nervous about the future. “It seems to be changing now, as we get closer to the elections, and the realization of putting her in office is starting to hit people. We have rarely heard a pro-Angle, it’s usually —— ”

“Anti-Reid,” said Mr. Griffin, finishing the thought.
Title: 2010 Elections: No October surprise - Let's Get Out The Vote!
Post by: DougMacG on November 01, 2010, 10:32:05 AM
I am amazed that there has been no change in the political fundamentals since the health care bill passage in March, against the will of the people.  The gulf oil spill came and went.  The opportunity for Dems to steal a couple of pro-growth economic ideas from their opponents and at least partially fix things came and went.  The only thing that has changed has really just been voters becoming more and more certain that they don't like what they see.

Republicans released a governing agenda that went by largely unnoticed.  Divided government will be a mess but better than most of the alternatives.

Tomorrow, everyone needs to call everyone they consider like minded with their own 'get out the vote' campaign.

I was thinking that for your liberal friends and family you might want to check in on them in person tomorrow, fairly early, buy and drop off a couple of DVDs each of maybe a season of their favorite show or favorite concert DVDs and a couple of bottles of nice wine (or Jack Daniels) to make staying at home for the day more comfortable and enjoyable.
Title: Enemies
Post by: G M on November 01, 2010, 11:14:46 AM
In remarks prepared for delivery to a rally in Cincinnati with Rob Portman, the GOP nominee for Senate in Ohio, and John Kasich, the GOP nominee for Ohio governor, Boehner says:

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a president in the White House who referred to Americans who disagree with him as ‘our enemies.’ Think about that. He actually used that word. When Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush used the word ‘enemy,’ they reserved it for global terrorists and foreign dictators — enemies of the United States. Enemies of freedom. Enemies of our country.

“Today, sadly, we have president who uses the word ‘enemy’ for fellow Americans — fellow citizens. He uses it for people who disagree with his agenda of bigger government — people speaking out for a smaller, more accountable government that respects freedom and allows small businesses to create jobs. Mr. President, there's a word for people who have the audacity to speak up in defense of freedom, the Constitution, and the values of limited government that made our country great. We don't call them ‘enemies.’ We call them ‘patriots.’”


Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44476.html#ixzz143WMjPzO
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 02, 2010, 05:43:03 AM
 :?
Title: New Obama slogan!
Post by: G M on November 02, 2010, 02:02:36 PM
Well, we tried.....*shrug*
Title: There's a metaphor in here somewhere
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 02, 2010, 02:55:43 PM
from The Economist)


Pornography and politics
Rising to the occasion
Electoral victory brings a surprising consequence: the winners look at smut
Oct 27th 2010

WHEN Barack Obama won the American presidency in 2008 his supporters cheered, cried, hugged—and in many cases logged onto their computers to look at pornography. And, lest Republicans crow about the decadence of their opponents, precisely the obverse happened when their man won in 2004.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a study by Patrick Markey of Villanova University, in Pennsylvania, and his wife Charlotte, who works at Rutgers, in New Jersey. The Markeys were looking for confirmation of a phenomenon called the challenge hypothesis. This suggests that males involved in a competition will experience a rise in testosterone levels if they win, and a fall if they lose.

The challenge hypothesis was first advanced to explain the mating behaviour of monogamous birds. In these species, males’ testosterone levels increase in the spring, to promote aggression against potential rivals. When the time comes for the males to settle down and help tend their young, their testosterone falls, along with their aggressive tendencies.

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Something similar has since been found to apply to fish, lizards, ring-tailed lemurs, rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees—and humans. In many of these animals, though, there is a twist. It is not just that testosterone ramps up for breeding and ramps down for nurturing. Rather, its production is sensitive to a male’s success in the breeding competition itself. In men, then, levels of the hormone rise in preparation for a challenge and go up even more if that challenge is successfully completed. Failure, by contrast, causes the level to fall.

Previous research has found these hormonal ups and downs in male wrestlers, martial artists, tennis players, chess players and even people playing a coin-flip game. In evolutionary terms, it makes sense. If a losing male continues to be aggressive, the chances are he will be seriously injured (it is unlikely natural selection could have foreseen competitive coin-tossing). Turning down his testosterone level helps ward off that risk. Conversely, the winner can afford to get really dominant, as the threat of retaliation has receded.

For most species, determining that this actually happens requires a lot of boring fieldwork. But the Markeys realised that in the case of people they could cut the tedium by asking what was going on in those parts of the web that provide a lot more traffic than their users will ever admit to, on the assumption that men fired up by testosterone have a greater appetite for pornography than those who are not.

To do this they first used a web service called WordTracker to identify the top ten search terms employed by people seeking pornography (“xvideos” was the politest among them). Then they asked a second service, Google Trends, to analyse how often those words were used in the week before and the week after an American election, broken down by state.

Their results, just published in Evolution and Human Behavior, were the same for all three of the elections they looked at—the 2004 and 2008 presidential contests, and the 2006 mid-terms (in which the Democrats made big gains in both houses of Congress). No matter which side won, searches for porn increased in states that had voted for the winners and decreased in those that had voted for the losers. The difference was not huge; it was a matter of one or two per cent. But it was consistent and statistically significant.

If the polls are right, then, next Tuesday’s mid-term elections will see red faces in the red states for those furtive surfers who are caught in the act. In the blue states, meanwhile, a fit of the blues will mean the screens stay switched off.

Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on November 02, 2010, 03:00:03 PM
If that's true, then there will be a surge in heterosexual porn and a serious drop in homosexual site visits in the next few days.
Title: What you won't see on the MSM
Post by: G M on November 02, 2010, 03:22:24 PM
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPIP-i3sdVk&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Remember, the tea party is violent and dangerous while dems are smart and peaceful and tolerant.
Title: Rand Paul Wins!
Post by: prentice crawford on November 02, 2010, 04:26:33 PM
Woof,
 Rand Paul wins Kentucky Senate race!
                              P.C.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on November 02, 2010, 04:33:59 PM
Glad to see that. I'm waiting to see how Florida goes. Fingers crossed!
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on November 02, 2010, 05:06:20 PM
Marco Rubio wins and Charlie Crist loses. It's like a double win!
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on November 02, 2010, 05:53:19 PM
Very nice to see Grayson handed a well deserved loss.
Title: Same Place, Same Tactics . . .
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on November 02, 2010, 07:11:48 PM
. . . different clothing:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z8MAAG9EYk&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on November 02, 2010, 09:21:48 PM
Speaking of double wins, Feingold OUT of the senate ... and available to run for President.

Sampling the heartland, North Dakota is currently a Dem Senate seat (equal in value to the Boxer seat).  The R leads 78-22.

Republican Gov for Wisconsin.  Republican Gov for Michigan - by 20 points!

Kristi Noem leading slighlty for the South Dakota house seat - too close to call.

Hennepin County (Mpls), home of Keith Ellison and where all the shenanigans for Al Franken took place, is reporting a 400,000 vote overcount.  Details to follow.  :-(
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 02, 2010, 10:28:02 PM
Doug:

Keep us posted on that please!
Title: I'm sure Holder will get right on it.....
Post by: G M on November 03, 2010, 12:15:16 AM
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/breaking-video-soon-new-black-panthers-commit-outrageous-violations-of-texas-voting-law/

BREAKING VIDEO: New Black Panthers Commit Outrageous Violations of Texas Voting Law
They spoke with election officials inside polling places. After these discussions, white poll watchers were either denied admittance or ejected. White election judges were also removed, under threat of calling the police for trumped-up complaints.
Title: The Chronicle 11/03/10
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2010, 08:46:23 AM
Chronicle · November 3, 2010

The Foundation
"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." --James Madison

Editorial Exegesis
"Republicans celebrating yesterday's ballot-box drubbing of Democrats should not be lulled into thinking their virtues carried the day. The election was first and foremost a referendum on the policies of President Obama and congressional Democrats. That verdict was clear: The American people want change. Not the empty phrases promising 'change' that scrolled across Mr. Obama's teleprompter during the 2008 campaign. By now, voters have realized there is no difference between the statist policies of FDR and LBJ and those on offer from BHO. The public is demanding an immediate change away from the big-government direction of Congress and this administration. That's why California Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi's brief four-year grasp on the speaker's gavel will come to an end in January. ... Newly elected Tea Partiers are likely to remain true to their platform of reducing taxation and regulation so that the economy might have room to grow. But if history is any guide, establishment Republicans will need to be continually reminded why they were given a governing majority. The Republican congressional sweep in 1994 promised to shake up the way things had been done for decades, and the new majority delivered in the early years. By 2006, Republicans lost their way. Instead of standing on principle, most devolved into business-as-usual politicians desperate to retain office by spreading around the public's money in earmarks and other pork. They lost sight of why they went to Washington in the first place, and their fall was inevitable. When the contest is over who can spend the most, Democrats are going to win every time. Republicans who run on a message of fiscal restraint have a chance because Americans realize families and individuals will be the ones paying for the government's spending spree for decades to come. That's why fiscal conservatism has now carried the day. Should the new Congress hold true to the principles of limited government, Republicans will build upon a lasting majority as future ballots are cast for them, rather than against their opponents." --The Washington Times

It's Morning in America
"Well, the big difference here and in '94 was you've got me." So said Barack Obama earlier this year on the campaign trail. He made a difference alright, just not the one Democrats were hoping to see.

As of this writing, Republicans are expected to pick up between 60 and 70 House seats. They needed 39 to gain control of the chamber and oust Nancy Pelosi from the speakership. In the Senate, the GOP picked up at least six seats, with three races too close to call. Democrats will hold onto the Senate, however, with at least 51 seats.

Republicans also picked up at least 10 governorships from Democrat control: Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Along with numerous state house pickups, Republicans are now in position to control redistricting after the 2010 census.

Here are a few highlights (and lowlights) from congressional races. Republicans picked up Barack Obama's former Senate seat in Illinois, but lost Joe Biden's in Delaware. Marco Rubio easily won Florida's Senate seat over two challengers, while Republicans ousted Democrat incumbents in Wisconsin (Russ Feingold) and Arkansas (Blanche Lincoln).

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the night was that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid beat Tea Party-backed challenger Sharron Angle. Then again, on the bright side, inept Harry Reid is still the Democrat leader.

On the House side, half of the Blue-Dog caucus of so-called "conservative" Democrats lost, dropping their numbers from 54 to 26. Of course, only 24 of those 54 voted against ObamaCare, which gives us an idea of just how "conservative" the caucus is. Numerous other Democrats went down in defeat, including longtime incumbents and even some committee chairmen.

We'll have more as the week unfolds, but to be clear, yesterday was not an embrace of the Republican Party. Far from it. But it was certainly a repudiation of Barack Obama, who personalized the election around his cult of personality. He even told Latinos that they should be inspired to "punish" their "enemies" on Election Day. More important, it was a rebuke of Democrats' hard push to the left with ObamaCare, cap and trade, financial regulation, looming tax increases for all Americans and massive deficit spending.

Yesterday, voters stood athwart history and yelled, "Stop!"

(To submit reader comments click here.)

Upright
"I think that the message is unmistakable that the Obama agenda is dead. ... [N]ow it will depend on how Obama proceeds. He has now tried a two-year experiment in hyper-liberalism, and the country has said no." --columnist Charles Krauthammer

"Democrats will spin Harry Reid's victory and cling to it like the American people allegedly cling to their Bibles and guns, but I see a huge silver lining here for conservatives. ... Yes, Reid would have made a great trophy on the GOP's mantle. But cheer up: He's even better as a leader of Senate Democrats -- depending on your point of view." --columnist Stephen Spruiell

"I so want to believe that the tea party marks the beginning of a comeback for small government. But I'm probably deluding myself. I know that big government usually wins. Remember the last time the Republicans took power? They promised fiscal responsibility, and for six of George W. Bush's eight years, his party controlled Congress. What did we have to show for it? Federal spending increased by 54 percent. That's more than any president in the last 50 years." --columnist John Stossel

"[T]he GOP still faces significant challenges. Heck, an electoral bonanza notwithstanding, Republicans are still fairly unpopular. But if the first half of the Obama presidency proves anything, it is that straight-line predictions lead to political hubris. Events change and attitudes change with them, for every demographic." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

"The Constitution cannot protect us and our freedoms as a self-governing people unless we protect the Constitution. That means zero tolerance at election time for people who circumvent the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. Freedom is too precious to give it up in exchange for brassy words from arrogant elites." --economist Thomas Sowell

"America, its founding principles, its Constitution, its robust liberty tradition and its strength are being stolen out from under us by a man who has no appreciation for America's greatness and who has contempt for ordinary Americans (we're 'enemies'), whom he considers beneath him and unworthy of their sovereign prerogative to preserve this nation. The people have had enough. Consequently, absent unimaginable, comprehensive voter fraud ... we're going to see an unprecedented housecleaning." --columnist David Limbaugh


The Demo-gogues
Clinging to "hope": "Across the board, things have gotten better over the last two years. The question is can we keep that up. We can only keep it up if I've got the friends and allies in Congress, in statehouses. So even though my name is not on the ballot, my agenda -- our agenda -- is going to be dependent on whether folks turn out to vote today." --Barack Obama

Delusional: "The early returns show so far that a number of Democrats are coming out and we are on pace to maintain the majority in the House of Representatives." --soon to be former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Nial) early on election night

"We see high levels of energy on the Democratic side, we saw this early on in the early vote that were submitted, the Democratic votes, the early projections and now you are seeing strong turnouts by Democrats across the country in voting today. All this talk we heard from Washington trying to project the outcome of this election was so obviously immature. This is not over. Voters are sending the opposite message." --Democrat Congressional Committee Chairman Chris VanHollen (D-MD)

Huh? "I still carry this missionary zeal to transform the world." --California Governor-elect Jerry Brown, who seemed to be smoking something that didn't end up being legalized

Bitterly clinging to elitist thinking: "It's absurd. We've lost our minds. We're in a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don't weigh in. It's all short-order, lowest common denominator, cheap-seat politics." --Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)

Faith in government: "Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive." --Joe Biden

Believable ... and scary: "We have done things that people don't even know about." --Barack Obama

Dezinformatsia
Unfortunately, no: "Am I the last person in America who still adores President Obama?" --Slate columnist Curtis Sittenfeld

Who said it is? "A right-wing Republican takeover of Congress and state capitals isn't something to accept with indifference." --Newsweek's Jonathan Alter

Taxes are just great: "No one will talk about taxes. They are terrified. Somehow the religion, the anti-tax religion has gotten so bad that if you -- if anybody says, 'We're just going to have to [raise taxes],' I mean, it's as if, you know, you killed a baby or something." --CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl (That shouldn't be a problem for your side, which advocates killing babies every day.)

Inevitable Nazi reference: "I mean it isn't far from what we saw in the '30s, where all of a sudden, political parties started showing up in uniform." --MSNBC's Chris Matthews

Title: West-Bolton-2012!
Post by: G M on November 03, 2010, 09:37:13 AM
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP2p91dvm6M&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP2p91dvm6M&feature=player_embedded
Title: Looks like Pence will be running for Prez 2012
Post by: G M on November 03, 2010, 09:53:48 AM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/breaking-pence-wont-seek-another-term-house-leadership_514643.html?nopager=1

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained a letter from Mike Pence, who is believed to be considering a presidential or gubernatorial run, informing his colleagues that he will not seek another term as chairman of the House Republican conference. "Now that we have restored a Republican majority to the House of Representatives and I have fulfilled my commitment to the Republican Conference, my family and I have begun to look to the future," Pence writes. Full letter here:
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2010, 09:55:37 AM
GM:

PLEASE tell me Allen West won!
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: DougMacG on November 03, 2010, 10:24:10 AM
This was an amazing year. Historic wins but also some key losses and a sitting President not likely to change much.  Maybe 65 seat gain in the House (which I see as a 130 vote swing).  Huge wins in swing states Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida.  Disappointing losses in Colo and left coast.

One reason R's did better in house seats than senate was a shortage of qualified and experienced conservative candidates due to the big losses the last 2 cycles and that the House is better suited for entry level candidates.  Crafty posed the question a few days ago regarding the fight between tea party and establishment GOP.  That will certainly play out strongly in the upcoming Presidential contest as well as with policy positions and votes in the meantime.

A few of the tea party surprises turned out to be disappointments, but some of those were no-win situations.  O'Donnell was the focus, but putting a RINO in for 6 years who votes with your opponents half the time has its own drawbacks, would not have won the senate and gives permanent bipartisan cover to those votes taken by Dems, whatever the issue.  It was worth a couple losses to send a message to BOTH parties.  Delaware is frankly not a red state and Nevada Hispanics I guess will have to live with 15% unemployment while they negotiate their border and amnesty differences with the party that supports their legal, economic freedoms. 

Next time, in most of these cases, there will be better candidates available for senate races due to all these wins in the House, the Governorships and the state houses, though I fear we face a similar lack of readiness for a qualified Presidential candidate this cycle through most of the field.  (Very interesting development regarding Mike Pence!)

Some stars were born: One is to give credit to Chris Christie (IMO) for starting this.  Rubio! and may I be the first to nominate Mrs. Rubio for First Lady. Ron Johnson changed Wisconsin, first time candidate, ran like a pro and never flinched or looked back. Kristi Noem, already mentioned. Alan West!  Rand Paul ran a tough race with everything thrown at him and will be quite a thorn if RINOs start talking about new entitlements or expanding federal programs.

Give credit where credit is due (from the NY Post),  Democrats stubbornly built this backlash.

Among the OUT, Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN)  Chairman of the powerful House Transportation Committee, representing an old time blue district from Duluth to the iron range cities for nearly 40 years ... OUT!

Republicans gained votes in every congressional district in the country!  Unfortunately, any Dem that won this year is likely safe forever so don't look for any bipartisanship in the House. 

I am wondering which of the Dem Senators from red states up in 2012 will be negotiable with the 48 R's and the House to move any legislation to Obama for key vetoes to be challenged in the next election.  Here are 11 possibilities:  Bill Nelson of Florida, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey, of Pennsylvania,  Jim Webb of Virginia, Joe Manchin of West Virginia (has to run again), and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin.

I will love to see how the new Congressional Black Caucus Meetings go with the new members joining (see Alan West video).  I don't see a teleprompter writing his script.   :-)
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on November 03, 2010, 10:26:36 AM
Crafty:

He sure did!
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2010, 05:57:52 PM
Anybody have a feel for whether Miller in Alaska has a chance on his legal challenges or not?
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: G M on November 04, 2010, 06:20:08 PM
I feel that there was a lot crooked shiite that went down in various races and the candidacy of Murkowski was just one example. It seems that AK is operating like Huey Long's Louisiana.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; Miller/ Murkowski
Post by: DougMacG on November 04, 2010, 09:18:44 PM
Seems to me this goes to Murkowski. Margin of victory matters. Total write-ins lead Miller by 41 to 34%.  Of those 41%, how many are not Murkowski or no good?  Who knows but this was a hotly contested, 3-way race.  I don't see why people would bother to go vote if they didn't have a clear preference.

81,876 write in votes
68,288 votes, Joe Miller
47,414 Scott McAdams, Dem. in 3rd place

13,589 Number needed to disallow for Miller to win.

The officials did not say the name has to be perfect.  But they need the arrow shaded and to make intent clear with the name. Here is the list to compare with: http://www.elections.alaska.gov/ci_pg_cl_2010_genr.php

Seems to me that maybe several hundred will be wrong or not Lisa with maybe several hundred others to argue over, but not 13-14,000 to be disqualified.  The rules were clear and well-publicized. The name is familiar.  The list is available, long but not that hard to read through.  Seems to me that maybe several hundred will be wrong or not Lisa and several hundred others to argue over, but not 13 or14,000 to be disqualified. 

I think Lisa, when she gets to Washington, will make us appreciate why people were taking such a big chance supporting inexperienced tea party candidates.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2010, 10:06:28 PM
Ugh.  Murray wins in WA  :cry:
Title: Mort Zuckerman
Post by: ccp on November 06, 2010, 09:45:56 AM
A rare Democrat who will publically state the obvious:

http://politics.usnews.com/opinion/mzuckerman/articles/2010/11/05/mort-zuckerman-americas-love-affair-with-obama-is-over.html
Title: 2010 Elections: Sen. Murkowski
Post by: DougMacG on November 17, 2010, 10:57:49 AM
Looks like Murkowski has the votes.  A so-called loss for the so-called tea party, but Miller became the endorsed Republican and Murkowski promised to sign again with the Republicans.  Combined they took 75% of the vote and the Dem took less than 25%. 

My initial thought was that Murkowski will retaliate against tea partiers who snubbed her.  But it makes more sense to make peace with her own side.  Running for nomination unopposed and staying out of jail will give her a seat in the senate for life if she wants it.

Murkowski draws a 'C' from the Club for Growth, she is not Pat Toomey but she is no Susan Collins either.  Most likely she will continue on as she was, as a run-of-the-mill Republican, not visionary but right from my point of view on most of the issues: http://www.ontheissues.org/senate/Lisa_Murkowski.htm

Pick any issue you want, I see these 4 -  Voted NO on Sonia Sotomayor and NO on Elena Kagan, Voted YES on Samuel Alito and John Roberts  - and say... welcome back Lisa.
Title: Re: 2010 Elections; 2012 Presidential
Post by: ccp on November 29, 2010, 11:30:10 AM
John Bolton on Aaron Klein radio this weekend and he reaffirmed he is thinking about running for Pres.
His stance is Obama is no paying attention to foreign policy as he works to reconfigure our country at home.
Sounds overall like a winning point.  He has not come out and spoken of the domestic "issues" (pardon the phrase) yet.