Watch live: Newt Gingrich speaks at CPAC
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich speaks at CPAC at 4:10pm ET.
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Watch live: Mitt Romney speaks at CPAC
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at CPAC at 12:55pm ET.
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go “Romney” because now your turn and definitely “YES YOU CAN” but not Barack Obama !
Watch live: Rick Santorum speaks at CPAC
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum speaks at CPAC at 10:25am.
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CPAC victory in hand, Ron Paul takes on Tea Party
Libertarian Ron Paul, a godfather of the Tea Party movement, isn’t altogether happy with his political progeny these days.
Fresh from victory in last week’s CPAC presidential straw poll, the Republican congressman from Texas laments to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that some Tea Partiers aren’t measuring up when it comes to the tough defense and entitlement program cuts he believes are needed to save the United States from economic cataclysm.
“They don’t want you to touch Social Security. They don’t want you to touch anything but Obamacare,” Paul says. “Some of them are real Republicans and they wouldn’t dare touch Bush’s increase in medical care costs, you know, prescription health programs.”
“They treat the symptoms and they don’t look at it philosophically,” he adds.
This sounds like a new fissure in the divisions emerging among Republicans. The Tea Party movement swept Republicans into the majority in the House of Representatives last November, while narrowing the Democratic Party’s hold on the Senate.
This year, newly elected Republicans with Tea Party backing have embarrassed the party leadership in the House on high-profile votes and pushed to expand initial 2011 spending cuts of $40 billion to more than$60 billion.
Differences between Republicans have appeared to turn on degrees of conservatism and aggressiveness about spending cuts, with some balking at the prospect of reducing popular programs that could cost votes.
Fox News has been busted yet again editing video to misinform its viewers.
“Fox News. We distort, you buy it.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwo0Iyrh1 Zk
Trump accepts high marks for CPAC
Donald Trump went to CPAC this week and aced his performance as a prospective White House Wannabe. Any doubts? Just ask him.
“I tell the truth. I tell it like it is, and people understand what I’m saying, and the place did go crazy,” The Donald tells MSNBC’s Morning Joe today. ”That’s what I said in the speech. And that’s why I got 10 standing ovations.”
Remarks like that, taken out of context, might sound like the words of a talking ego.
But the billionaire New York real estate developer’s speech did get high marks from Politico. An A-minus, in fact, which put him right up there with Newt Gingrich and out in front of former Senator Rick Santorum (C-plus) and House Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann (B).
Bully for him, especially when you consider the seemingly tenuous circumstances that brought him to Washington.
“I was sitting in my office building buildings and doing things,” he says. ”I got a call from CPAC: Would I come and speak? And I just happened to be in the right mood. I got on my plane, I went down to Washington.”
In the right mood … just happened to be.
LOL–Well, he certainly knows a thing or two about bankruptcy…
Pawlenty calls Tea Party push for more cuts “good news”
House Republican leaders may be concerned about turmoil among newly elected Tea Party colleagues who want bigger spending cuts. But potential Republican White House hopeful Tim Pawlenty sees only good news.
As the Conservative Political Action Conference prepares to hear from 2012 White House Wannabes, the former Minnesota governor tells NBC’s Today show that conservatives of every stripe should be proud.
“The good news is, and this is I think the story for CPAC and for conservatives more broadly, reducing government spending and dealing with the deficit and the debt is now mainstream,” he says.
“And so the fact that the Tea Party and others are pushing for more cuts, deeper cuts, faster reform, that’s a good thing. I don’t discount that, I applaud it.”
He is due to address CPAC on Friday.
Pawlenty says he is “a month or so” away from deciding whether to run for office. As a Minnesotan known for his mild manners, he faces a considerable challenge at winning recognition against Republican rock stars like Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.
But Pawlenty sounds undaunted: “As people get to know me, I tend to get support. I got elected and reelected in probably the most liberal state in the country as a Republican.”
Republicans have a preoccupation with cutting programs that affect women and their children. They are proposing cutting $758 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which amounts to about a 6 percent cut to a program providing food assistance to low-income women and their infants.
They are cutting $210 million from Maternal and Child Health Block Grants, which amounts to about a 33 percent cut in a program giving low-income pregnant women, mothers and their children access to health care.
They are cutting $27 million from the Poison Control Center, which would essentially eliminate a program supporting local poison control centers and funding a hotline directing residents to their local poison control office, despite the fact that poisoning disproportionately affects children, with half the exposures at the National Poison Control Center last year occurring to children younger than six.
Republicans want to cut $1.1 billion from community health centers. In 2008, about one-third of community health center patients were children.
Good news for Tim Pawlenty. Look at him smile.
These cuts will do absolutely nothing but have extremely detrimental effects on those who need the targeted programs the most. They don’t even add up to 1% of the federal budget. This shows the callousness of the GOP’s approach to budgeting, which leaves huge parts of the federal budget like the Pentagon immune to cuts while taking an axe to non-defense discretionary spending that serves far more people, and does far more for them.
