Bennet, Buck score wins in Colorado
In a primary drama that might have been subtitled “two presidents and a party,” incumbent Colorado Senator Michael Bennet won the battle for the state’s Democratic Senate nomination on Tuesday.
Bennet’s win was a welcome victory for President Barack Obama who backed the incumbent who battled both anti-incumbent fever and a challenger, Andrew Romanoff, who had the endorsement of former President Bill Clinton.
On the Republican side, Tea Party-backed candidate Ken Buck narrowly defeated former Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton. Buck, a former prosecutor, won despite being caught on tape complaining about Tea Party “dumb-asses” who question whether Obama was born in the United States. He will face Bennet in November.
In Connecticut, the anti-establishment outsider candidate Linda McMahon — the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment — beat former Representative Rob Simmons in the race for the Republican Senate nomination.
The Colorado and Connecticut Senate races were the highlight of Tuesday’s primary races. But voters also cast ballots in Georgia and Minnesota to pick candidates for November’s midterm elections.
In Georgia, former Representative Nathan Deal narrowly led Karen Handel in the Republican runoff for governor with nearly all precincts reporting.
Facing Democratic Governor Roy Barnes is the ultimate prize for Deal or Handel, both players in a proxy war between potential 2012 Republican presidential contenders.
Gingrich chides Obama for acting like a teenager with credit card
Extending unemployment benefits is this week’s battleground for Democrats versus Republicans.
Democrats look set to push the legislation through the Senate with the help of newcomer Carte Goodwin of West Virginia. They hope to show voters in an election year that they are the party responding to the plight of the unemployed.
Republicans had blocked the measure, demanding cuts elsewhere to pay for the $34 billion price tag and prevent it from adding to the U.S. budget deficit. They want to show voters that they are the party of fiscal restraint.
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich had a dig for President Barack Obama.
“The second biggest concern of the American people after jobs is deficit spending and the fact that this president has been like a teenager with a credit card … if he serves eight years under current plans he will double the national debt. He’ll borrow more than every previous president combined,” Gingrich said on NBC’s “Today” show.
(Democrats will quickly point out that deficits were on the rise during the former administration of President George W. Bush).
Gingrich, who has been mentioned as a possible candidate in the 2012 presidential election, put the chance of Democrats losing control of both the House and Senate in this November’s midterm elections at “about 50-50.”
Since when have Republicans ever tried to reign in spending? Budgets and deficits have exploded under every Republican administration since Eisenhower. Republicans only want to reign in spending that helps people. Borrowing and spending that enriches big business and the super-rich is fine by them.
Tea Party toughens up Republican Party – Gingrich
The Tea Party movement is a good thing for the Republican Party, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says. It toughens up the GOP.
(Anyone else thinking biker jackets?)
Rather than fragment the Republican Party in the coming November elections, the conservative anti-tax, small-government Tea Party movement will rev it up, says Gingrich, who helped orchestrate the 1994 Republican Revolution when the party won control of both houses of Congress in the midterm elections.
And wins by Tea Party-supported candidates in the primaries leading up to the November midterms will benefit the Republican Party, “if the Tea Party movement and the Republicans stay together to defeat Obamaism,” Gingrich said on NBC’s “Today” show.
“The Tea Party movement adds energy, it adds drive, it adds a toughness that the Republican Party needs,” he said.
The Kentucky Republican primary for Senate today will be one test of how well a Tea Party supported candidate (Rand Paul) can fare against a party establishment supported candidate (Trey Grayson) at the ballot box.
Gingrich would not pick a candidate in the Kentucky primary, saying he had friends on both sides but had a hunch that Paul has the edge.
(Anyone else thinking biker jackets?) Yeah, I’ve been seeing the Diva of the wingers wearing a leather jacket with lots of zippers and xtian bling lately. Typically tacky. And indieinfla is right, the Tea Baggers are nothing but the successfully relabeled Dubyanauts that the GOP recognized as a lead weight around their ankles after eight long years of retrograde motion.
Gingrich once again at head of Republican pack
Once, a first-term Democratic president failed to deliver on healthcare reform and found his party swept from office by a wave of voter anger that brought Republican Newt Gingrich to the forefront of American politics. Could this history lesson from the Clinton era be repeated?
Healthcare reform is stalled, voters are angry and Gingrich — who rose to prominence as House speaker after Republicans won Congress in 1994 — is again leading the pack, this time among potential White House hopefuls for 2012.
The Washington-based political news outlet, Politico, says Gingrich’s political action committee is raising money far faster than those of 2008 campaign veterans including Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
Gingrich’s group, American Solutions for Winning the Future, pulled in $6.4 million in the second half of 2009, says Politico, citing finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. That compares with about $1.6 million for Romney’s PAC, $1.4 million for Palin’s and $519,00 for Huckabee’s.
The PACs exist ostensibly to support Republican candidates, promote the party and advance conservative policy. But according to Politico, they also help boost the visibility of White House wannabes. (Gingrich’s PAC spent $585,000 just to fly him around the country.)
Meanwhile, Palin, whose PAC paid $50,000 for policy advice, wants Rahm Emanuel to resign for using the epithet ”f*#!ing retarded” to describe liberal Democrats who wanted to launch attack ads against party conservatives concerned about healthcare reform. The New York Daily News reports that Emanuel apologized to advocates for the disabled in the White House on Wednesday.
Palin, the mother of a child with Down syndrome, slammed Emanuel’s remark as unacceptable and heartbreaking and called for his resignation on her Facebook page.
This pseudo-intellectual clown hasn’t held public office since the ’90s. He was driven from his leadership post in disgrace — by members of his own party — nearly 12 years ago. The GOP must really have shallow bench if Gingrich is considered one of their front-runners.
Gingrich to Obama: keep word on televising healthcare talks
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wants President Barack Obama to keep a promise he made on the campaign trail: televise the final talks on healthcare reform on C-SPAN.
Eight times during the campaign, Obama said he planned to put the talks on healthcare reform on television, Gingrich said — and he even has links to YouTube clips to prove it.
Now that the talks have reached the stage of reconciling separate House and Senate bills, it is the time to deliver on that promise, he said.
“It is in the long-term interest of America to let the light in and let people watch what’s going on and have the whole process on C-SPAN,” Gingrich told a news conference in Atlanta.
“This is too important an issue and too big a bill to rush it through in secret in order to meet an artificial deadline so they can have the State of the Union as a victory speech,” he said.
Gingrich, who is starting a petition to persuade Obama to keep his word, couches his call in the most conciliatory terms – saying he “agrees” with the president’s earlier promise.
Still, the potential for embarrassment is lost on no one. The last thing Congressional leaders want is to hold such sensitive talks in public and there is no evidence that the White House thinks differently.
The president needs to make good on his promise. He needs to let C-Span in and televise the negotiations. Our leaders don’t want us to see these things because they don’t want the citizenry to know how they will be given the shaft for the sake of “deal making”. If these people were truly working in our interests we should be able to see the deliberations live.
What reason could the possibly have for not wanting the general public to see and hear the negotiations as they happen? This is an issue that will affect all citizens directly, so why are we not allowed to see the process unfold? Do we really have a government that is of the people, for the people and by the people? It’s not looking that way.
Unveiling the Obama Doctrine
President Barack Obama did more than collect his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. Besides the trumpet fanfare, the black-tie festivities, the pomp, the circumstance and of course the speech, he unveiled what Washington-watchers are calling the Obama doctrine. But what is it, exactly?
A quick online search shows an early mention of the Obama doctrine in March 2008, when Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton were still slugging it out for the Democratic presidential nomination. The American Prospect cited Obama speeches starting in January of that election year and talked to Obama’s foreign policy team to get an idea of what the future president’s world view might be. One key quote from the candidate on the Iraq war was seen as defining the doctrine: ”I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place.”
“An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda,” The American Prospect said. “Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It’s both and neither — an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.”
More of the doctrine emerged, according to a column in The Washington Post, after Obama’s handling of the rescue of a U.S. ship captain from Somali pirates in April 2009, in which Obama said little and relied on Navy SEALs to free the captive: “The Obama Doctrine seeks to regain the world’s sympathy by acknowledging that while the United States is a great nation built on worthy principles, it is not perfect.”
Fast-forward to Oslo and Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech, which is winning praise from perennial Obama critics Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.
The Atlantic’s political blog called it “multilaterlism with teeth” and described it this way: ”Obama sought to move past the liberal sentiment that Americans felt as a backlash to the Iraq War: the idea that America was engaged in an imperialist enterprise, militarily and culturally. His answer: we do not seek to impose our will, but we will stand for global security and rights.”
It’s not the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, but it’s not what some of Obama’s anti-war critics want either.
War is a means to a end. Those in power and in command of fighting forces will use those forces to get what they want. War happens when communication breaks down, or when one or both parties are hostile towards each other for emotional reasons.
Iraq was about oil. Afghanistan is no different. Bin Laden is no longer on the agenda. The taliban only need to be gotten rid of because they will not negotiate deals with us. They are not concerned with doing business with the US so they have to go. As a predominantly Christian nation, we should remove the log from our own political eye so that we can see clearly enough to remove the specs from the eyes of those we deal with.
When we as a nation learn to care for our own fellow citizens then we can talk about “human rights” in other countries. Then we can talk about the “liberation” of people in suffering. Just because we treat our citizens like well fed cattle it doesn’t mean we are any better than countries that treat their people like poorly fed cattle.
War is a waste of life, money, and time. Especially when there is so much work to be done.
Clinton, Gingrich, Lott share political war stories and laughs
While members of the U.S. Congress angrily debated bogged-down efforts at healthcare reform, three one-time adversaries shared old stories, pats on the back and laughs.
Former Democratic President Bill Clinton, ex-Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Senate Republican Leader Trent got together this week for the unveiling of Lott’s official Senate portrait.
“I’m still wondering why I’m here,” Clinton said, drawing chuckles and applause from a packed crowd on Capitol Hill of a few hundred people, including past and present congressional power brokers.
Indeed, it was a strange scene.
Clinton, Lott and Gingrich often engaged in front-page political battles during the former president’s eight years in the White House that ended in January 2001.
Most notably, Gingrich and Lott helped lead the failed bid in late 1998 and early 1999 to oust Clinton from office for lying about an affair with a White House intern.
None of them, in their remarks, made any mention of the scandal that rocked the nation and that tied up Congress for months.
I agree with Mufaso. Many, but not all, politicians tear each other to bits in public and get Americans all riled up for THEIR own political and personal benefit. Their passion is power. Ours is liberty and economic opportunity for ourselves, our communities, and our children. The citizenry needs to be smarter and wiser about the reality of politics and understand when it is being had and when the politician / lawmaker is sincerely principled. Until then, the majority of us will be played like cheap fiddles. Getting rid of the two major political parties won’t solve anything in the long run because parties will always form in a free society. Imposing term limits and getting rid of obvious problems (like the Charlie Rangels of the world) would be a good start.
“We Told You So”
Sarah Palin showed up but, did not share the stage with Newt Gingrich at the Republican Senate and Congressional Dinner in Washington Monday evening. Still, the Alaska governor and former Republican vice presidential candidate managed to have her say before a potentially huge audience.
While Gingrich was headlining the dinner, Palin took the spotlight in a taped Fox News interview that aired as the former House speaker spoke. It’s early, but both of them may be looking ahead to 2012 — or not.
In the twin speeches, Gingrich took on Obama and the Democrats on a range of issues and Palin took aim at the president’s economic performance.
“Kind of a ‘we told you so,’” Palin said when interviewer Sean Hannity brought up a “spread the wealth” comment made by the Democrat during the 2008 presidential campaign.
“When you consider that the federal government is about 11 trillion dollars in debt, and we’re borrowing more to spend more … it defies any sensible economic policy that any of us ever learned through college. It defies economy practices and principles that tell you ‘you gotta quit digging that hole when you are in that financial hole,” Palin said.
Palin said she was disappointed and quite frustrated that, four months into the Obama presidency, she has not seen action to rein in spending or slow the growth of government.
“It’s expanding at such a large degree that if Americans aren’t paying attention, unfortunately our country could evolve into something that we do not even recognize,” Palin said.
“Socialism?” Hannity asked.
“Well, that is where we are headed,” Palin said. “That is where we have to be blunt enough and candid enough and honest enough with Americans to let them know if we keep going down these roads… nationalizing many of our services, our projects our businesses, yes that is where we would head.”
Alaska is unique in having a vigorous wealth redistribution system. The state offers collective ownership of natural resources, which in turn generates revenue for the state. Using the Permanent Fund, the government distributes the natural resource rents to the general public.
Furthermore, Alaska’s Clear and Equitable Share (ACES) programs helps redistribute windfall oil profits, bringing in so much money that the state needs no income or sales tax. This year ACES will provide every Alaskan with a check for an estimated $1,200. Sarah Palin openly boasts about giving oil money “back to the people”, and then goes on Fox and accuses the Obama administration of “heading towards socialism?” The hypocrisy here is staggering.
Palin to attend big Republican dinner in Washington
WASHINGTON – Newt Gingrich, move over.
Sarah Palin is coming to town.
The latest word is that Palin is going to attend Monday night’s Republican fund-raising dinner for congressional candidates.
But she won’t be addressing the group gathered at the Washington Convention Center.
The Alaska governor, and possible 2012 presidential candidate, had gone back and forth on whether to attend the dinner, first say she would, then saying she wouldn’t and now saying she will.
The dinner is expected to raise an impressive $14 million or more for House and Senate Republican candidates in the 2010 mid-term elections.
for someone who the liberals say is so insignificant, and lacks any political importance,it will be interesting to count the amount of postings shooting her down.there are going to be worrying times ahead for the obama government as unemployment soars,any thing to distract from bad figures will be used as the bush excuse has now worn thin.
First Draft: From No. 54,000 to No. 2 — after a handshake
The handshake that set Washington buzzing — that awkward grip-and-grin between President Barack Obama and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez at a weekend summit in Trinidad — seems to be great for book sales. Specifically, the tome Chavez passed to Obama, “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent” leaped from Number 54,000 on Amazon.com to Number 2, almost overnight.
The anti-colonialist book is in some strange company atop the online bestsellers list. Five of the others in the top 10 are editions in the popular romantic vampire “Twilight” series. There’s also “The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World” at Number 7. The online description says it’s about how “the United States there has been a gradual drifting away from the Founding Fathers original success formula.”
Number 9 is “The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide: Protect Your Savings, Boost Your Income, and Grow Wealthy Even in the Worst of Times.” Number 8 is “The Shack,” billed as “a one of a kind invitation to journey to the very heart of God.”
What’s at the very top? “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto.” This one tells “how conservatives can counter the liberal corrosion that has filtered into every timely issue affecting our daily lives, from the economy to health care, global warming, immigration, and more.”
The handshake itself got a negative review from former congressman Newt Gingrich who said on NBC’s “Today” program: “It does matter to the world if the United States tolerates a vicious anti-American propaganda campaign and then smiles and greets the person who’s systemmatically been anti-American for his entire career.”
For more Reuters political news, click here.
Photo: Kevin LaMarque/REUTERS (Obama gets a book from Chavez during the Summit of the Americas, April 18, 2009)
Brian Lee. I am getting weary of my conservative viewpoints being censored and not allowed to be part of the debate. However, we have to endure the diatribes from the left.
