Tag: California Republicans
Where’s Marco? Senate Foreign Relations Committee Member Missed ISIS Briefing to Attend Fundraiser
It was more important to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to attend a fundraiser on the “left coast,” as conservatives call it, than a high-level briefing on the recent terrorist attack on Paris.
That left the Republicans’ self-styled foreign policy candidate out of the loop on the biggest story in global news.
Rubio said that he gets regular briefings from staff and sends surrogates to meetings he cannot attend. That worked out great for George W. Bush.
At 10 a.m. Wednesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee went behind closed doors for a briefing titled, “The Aftermath of Paris: America’s Role.” But Sen. Marco Rubio was not there…
The absence illustrates how Rubio is not just missing floor votes but also key hearings on national security and foreign policy — issues he has presented as chief credentials of his presidential campaign. He’s also skipping a Paris briefing this afternoon for all senators. His office said he attended an Intelligence Committee meeting on Paris held Tuesday.
GOP Donor Handicaps Kashkari’s Chances at California Governorship
I have a better chance of being pope than he has of being governor.
— GOP donor Mark Chapin Johnson, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, on California gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari (R).
Online Voter Registration Pushes Total of California Voters to 18.2 Million – GOP Share Drops Below 30%
Although California’s new online voter registration system did not open until September last year and was only available for 45 days, it accounted for more than half of the 1.4 million new voters who registered in advance of the November elections.
The number of registered Republicans in California dropped below 30 percent for the first time in over a century.
Not surprisingly, since this was its intent, of the 590,788 voters who registered online, 46 percent were 18 to 29 years old. Thirty percent were between 18 and 24.
The new registrations put the number of registered voters in Californian at 18,245,970, or 76.7 percent of those who are eligible [PDF].
This good news for democracy represented yet more bad news for the California Republican Party, which saw its percentage of registered voters drop below 30 percent for the first time since the 19th century. The party now represents 29.3 percent of the state’s electorate. That’s down from 31.4 percent four years ago.
Democrats represent 43.66 percent of registered voters in the state, while 21 percent are independents.
Paging GoDaddy’s CEO – Elephant Down: California Republican Party Attempts Suicide
“I once shot an elephant in my pajamas,” the old Groucho Marx joke goes, “how he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Speaking of shooting elephants, last week GoDaddy CEO Bob “Dumbo” Parsons posted a video from his African safari vacation showing him stalking and gunning down a perfectly healthy elephant. On the video, Parsons is heard saying, “Of everything that I do this is the most rewarding.” Unlike Groucho, he was not joking.
This caused blowback for Parsons and GoDaddy, the massive domain registrar and web services company he founded, mainly because it’s been decades since hunting animals as huge and non-threatening as elephants was considered “sport.” (You can weigh in here by signing a petition titled “Real Men Don’t Kill Elephants.”)
Instead of killing a real elephant, it’s too bad Parsons can’t act out his Great White Hunter fantasies in a virtual world by grabbing his gun and elephant pajamas and heading to Sacramento, where a figurative old bull elephant called the California GOP is on its last legs and needs to be put out of its misery.
Final Election Results Give Dems a Clean Sweep in California – Post-Election Polls Suggest GOP Is Walking Wounded, Maybe Walking Dead
Go ahead: Accuse me of shooting the wounded. But it may be that the body already is dead.
I’m referring to the California Republican Party.
How alive could the state GOP be after suffering the pounding it took on Nov. 2, a day of historic party triumph elsewhere across America?
“It’s not just wounded, it’s in a coma,” says Republican Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado.
Maldonado was one of several Republican victims on election day. He lost the lieutenant governor’s race to Democratic San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Later in the week, just before Thanksgiving, results from the last two close races came in. Democrats won them both. San Francisco D.A. Kamala Harris is now the state’s attorney general, and Rep. Jerry McNerney in the 11th District beat a tea bagger whose single issue is abolishing public education in the United States.
Now it’s official: No California Democrat lost a race on November 2, and Democrats even picked up yet another seat in the already lopsidedly Democratic-controlled state legislature.
One out of Five Californians Say They Would Never Vote for A Republican
1 out of 5
Number of Californians who said they would never vote for a Republican under any circumstances, according to a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll.
Gov for Sale
Californians, you are cool and hip;
You have granola and relationships.
But would one of you please tell
For how much you plan to sell
Meg Whitman the governorship?
Verbatim
For reasons some of you know, I don’t want people to just see my hair.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), joking at a press conference. As the vertically challenged Boxer climbed a stool to reach the microphone, she recalled once seeing the Queen of England give a speech with only her hat visible to reporters. Boxer’s Republican challenger, Carly Fiorina, refuses to walk back her comment that Boxer’s hair is “So yesterday.” A July-end poll showed Boxer ahead by nine points in popularity, and a more than 10-to-1 lead in fundraising.
CA Sen: Fiorina Leads Tom Campbell 38% – 23%, Campbell Campaign Goes Dark Six Days Before Vote, Tea Bagger Trails Fiorina By 22 Points
With the California primary election in less than a week, the race to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken a harrowing turn for Republicans. It appears that failed former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina now has an insurmountable lead over former Rep. Tom Campbell. The Campbell campaign reportedly ceased television advertising as of June 1.
In the 2000 U.S. Senate race, Campbell lost to incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein by 19 points, but Democrats considered him to be much more electable against Boxer this year than Fiorina, a self-financed political novice who was fired from Hewlett-Packard after a scandal that included allegations she wiretapped members of the HP board of directors.
Interestingly, in the month or so since right-wing celebrity Sarah Palin dissed the tea bagger candidate Chuck DeVore by giving her kiss-of-death endorsement to Fiorina, his polling has almost doubled, from 9 percent in early April to 16 percent now.
It’s hard to prove that Palin’s endorsement of Fiorina — whose gaffes as a McCain-Palin surrogate often dominated headlines in the 2008 campaign — has helped DeVore. It’s just as likely he’s gotten a bump among extreme right-wing voters from a web ad in which he compared himself to Jack Bauer, the lead character in the Fox terror-porn series “24.”
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