Tag Archives: republicans
By Dumping on Mitt, Is the GOP Making a Steal Plausible? | The Nation
10 JulIt’s actually good, from a Republican point of view, that party powers like Rupert Murdoch, his Wall Street Journal and Bill Kristol are piling on Mitt Romney as a lousy candidate now, in July. And not just because it gives Romney a chance to shake up his campaign and satisfy his overlords’ demands over the summer. (He’s already begun.) But by squeezing him through the Adjustment Bureau now, the top GOPers can, by November, sing another tune: Romney is a plausible candidate, he can beat Obama. That way, if he “wins” with the help of massive voter suppression, it won’t seem so much like they’ve stolen the election.
I’m not saying Romney can’t win fair and square; sure, he could, especially if the economy spirals downward. But the Republicans won’t risk giving fair-and-square a chance. This is playing out most nakedly in Pennsylvania, where Obama is up over Romney by a Real Clear Politics average of eight points. No problem, says state House majority leader Mike Turzai. In tallying up the party’s achievements last month, he brayed, “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
That’s no idle boast. As the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote yesterday, “More than 758,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania do not have photo identification cards from the state Transportation Department, putting their voting rights at risk in the November election, according to data released Tuesday by state election officials.”
via By Dumping on Mitt, Is the GOP Making a Steal Plausible? | The Nation.
For the Ron Paul Wing, Now What? – NYTimes.com
22 JunThere are now
two significant competing visions of what the Republican Party will be, a struggle, by the way, that is no longer between a vast majority and a tiny fringe. Paul people consider themselves not weird outsiders, but the true conservatives who actually want to rein in government within affordable, constitutional limits. Ron Paul’s campaign spokesmen are quick to distance themselves from any hint of the Paul movement being an angry, raucous anti-establishment rabble — the words “respect” and “decorum” flow from their lips as much as “limited government” and “end the Fed now.”
The Ron Paul Plot Thickens
8 MayWriting in Salon, Steve Kornacki reported that Ron Paul picked up a lot of delegates over the weekend, in maine and Nevada. Sorta.
Of course, not all of the Paul-ites who are winning delegate slots will actually get to vote for him at the national convention, since many are filling slots that are by rule designated for Romney. For instance, Romney’s overwhelming win in the straw poll that was conducted with Nevada’s February precinct caucuses guarantees that most of the state’s national delegates will be bound to support him on the first ballot. So Paul will actually have two types of delegates in Tampa: a relatively small group of delegates pledged to him, and a potentially much bigger group that wants badly to vote for him but can’t.
It’s that second group that is starting to make Romney’s camp, which sent its top lawyer to Maine for the convention this weekend, nervous. Romney-pledged Paul backers could try to change their states’ rules (or the rules at the national convention) to allow them to support Paul. But this probably wouldn’t work; the RNC is now threatening not to seat individual delegations that try this, and to pull it off in Tampa the Paul team would need an outright convention majority, something it’s not on course to have.
They could still stir up a lot of trouble, though. Even if they’re neutralized procedurally, Paul-aligned delegates could make their hostility to the GOP establishment clear during the convention’s prime-time hours. The potential for such an embarrassing, nationally televised spectacle is probably what the Romney team is most worried about at this point.
Ah, the Emperor has no clothes, is that Ron Paul’s role in this election?
Philosophy; Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP America)
31 MarCheck them out. These Republicans know that you can’t be conservative without conserving something.
How does REP answer those who assert that no “real Republican” wants to protect the environment or believes in conservation? How do we respond to those who insist that we must choose between a strong economy and protecting our natural heritage?
1. We point with pride to the great GOP leaders of the past who fought to save natural treasures, signed landmark environmental protection laws, and established many of the policies we take for granted today. We remember Theodore Roosevelt, who established our unmatched system of wildlife refuges and national forests. We remind people that Barry Goldwater, the father of conservatism, was a lifelong conservationist (and also a REP member). We recall that Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and also established the Environmental Protection Agency. We point out that Ronald Reagan fought for the Montreal Protocol, the most effective international environmental treaty ever adopted.
2. We talk of the bipartisan efforts of previous decades, which eliminated burning rivers, cleaned up smog, and preserved pristine wild lands for future generations.
3. We return to the traditional conservative ethic of stewardship, and keep alive the adage of conservative writer Russell Kirk that nothing is more conservative than conservation. True conservatives should safeguard the resources on which the health, security, and economic prosperity of present and future Americans depend.
via Philosophy; Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP America).
Centrist Women Tell of Disenchantment With G.O.P. – NYTimes.com
11 MarIn Iowa, one of the crucial battlegrounds in the coming presidential election, and in other states, dozens of interviews in recent weeks have found that moderate Republican and independent women — one of the most important electoral swing groups — are disenchanted by the Republican focus on social issues like contraception and abortion in an election that, until recently, had been mostly dominated by the economy.
And in what appears to be an abrupt shift, some Republican-leaning women like Ms. Russell said they might switch sides and vote for Mr. Obama — if they turn out to vote at all.
The sudden return of the “culture wars” over the rights of women and their place in society has resulted, the women said, in a distinct change in mood in the past several weeks. That shift adds yet another element of uncertainty to a race that has been defined by unpredictability, at least for Republicans.
via Centrist Women Tell of Disenchantment With G.O.P. – NYTimes.com.
The BRAD BLOG : Maine GOP Commits Massive Election Fraud in State Caucuses; Paul Supporters Justifiably Outraged
16 FebAn honest man just an’t get a break these days. . . .
The state GOP itself has stolen the state for Mitt Romney in Maine’s 2012 Caucuses. Period.
Might Romney be the actual winner once all votes are actually cast and counted? Perhaps. But the fact is, the Maine Republican Party has purposely blocked that from happening and the apparent loser in all of this — beside the voters of Maine — is Congressman Ron Paul who, according to the official results reported by the state GOP last Saturday night, “lost” to Romney by just 194 votes.
Adding to the outrage, the election fraud was perpetrated by the Chairman of the state’s Republican Party, Charlie Webster.
Readers of The BRAD BLOG may well remember Webster as the man who spent months attempting to wholesale disenfranchise thousands of legal student voters in the state of Maine, on the entirely fraudulent basis that they were committing “voter fraud” because they were out-of-state students who, living in Maine and going to school there most of the year, should be, nonetheless, barred from voting there.
The GOP hate-off continues – Mitt Romney – Salon.com
1 FebThe Republican Party is split between its two personalities: Predatory finance capital and angry white male faux-populism. That’s trouble enough. Add to that Gingrich’s fury at Romney’s bottomless pockets full of nasty ads, and this is a party headed for a crack-up.
November’s still a long way away, but it’s hard to imagine President Obama losing Florida after the slime-fest we’ve just witnessed. Both Gingrich and Romney are seeing their negatives go up as the campaign goes on, while Obama’s approval rating continues to climb. I think the president is largely responsible for his ratings rise, because he’s brought the fight to the GOP since the debt-ceiling debacle.
What They Don’t Want to Talk About – NYTimes.com
15 JanMr. Giuliani has one thing right: Republicans are indeed in growing trouble as more voters begin to realize how much the party’s policies — dismantling regulations, slashing taxes for the rich, weakening unions — have contributed to inequality and the yawning distance between the middle class and the top end.
The more President Obama talks about narrowing that gap, the more his popularity ratings have risen while those of Congress plummet. Two-thirds of Americans now say there is a strong conflict between the rich and the poor, according to a Pew survey released last week, making it the greatest source of tension in American society.
The Gulf of Morality – NYTimes.com
14 NovThe intensification of disagreements over moral values not only makes compromise difficult to achieve, but sharpens competition for scarce goods at a time when austerity dominates the agenda. If, as is increasingly the case, left and right see their opposites as morally corrupt, the decision to cut the benefits or raise the taxes of the other side become easy – too easy — to justify.
Truth and Traditions 