Update: Barton apologized because Speaker-to-Be Boehner threatened to remove him as Energy Chair if GOP wins in Nov.
House Republicans are roiling from Rep. Joe Barton’s apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward during a hearing today:
[National] Republicans, buoyed by what they see as a potential resurgence in California, pledged on Tuesday to send significant financial, logistical and strategic resources to the state in coming weeks.
[Steele], speaking to reporters on a conference call, said Republicans in years past have treated California as a “flyover” state because of Democrats’ electoral edge, or little more than fertile grounds for fundraising.
“The days of just grabbing and going or just ignoring altogether are over,” he said, after meeting with California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring in Washington. “We’re going to be full partners on the ground.”
Proposition 8 is back in the news in California. In San Francisco, closing arguments were heard yesterday in the federal civil trial in which opponents are seeking to overturn the anti-gay marriage amendment to the state constitution passed by voters in November. Whatever the outcome of the trial, the case will undoubtedly be appealed, and could well be heard before the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, GOProud, a new national Republican gay organization, has announced it has chosen the Grand Hyatt hotel in San Diego as the venue for an event next month, despite the fact that the hotel is under a boycott by gays and others because its owner, Doug Manchester, was an early donor to Prop 8.
If Manchester hadn’t given $125,000 to the mostly out-of-state anti-gay operatives seeking to prevent gays in California from marrying in 2007, it’s unlikely Prop 8 would have been an issue in the November 2008 election. The anti-gay activists used Manchester’s money to pay professional signature-gatherers to collect the 700,000 signatures required to get Prop 8 on the ballot that year.
At the time, Manchester, a Catholic, said, “When they say that we cannot say that a marriage is between a man and a woman, that’s where I draw the line.”
For at least six years in the 1990s before [Sharron Angle] held state-level elective office, Angle was a member of the little-known Independent American Party, a right-wing party that combines elements of Ron Paul’s doctrinaire libertarianism — pro-gun, anti-tax, anti-bureaucracy, pro-states’ rights — with Christian social conservatism and fear of the “North American Union” and other forms of “global government.” The small party attracted considerable controversy in 1994 when it took out a newspaper ad titled “Consequences of Sodomy: Ruin of a Nation,” which suggested HIV could spread through the water.
Three members of the Independent American Party tell TPM that Angle, a Nye County, Nevada, school board member at the time, was an active member of the party in the 1990s. They say she only left the Independent American Party and became a Republican out of political expediency when she decided to seek a seat in the state assembly, to which she was elected in 1998.
“It was because she wanted to run for office. And it was difficult for members of our party to get elected at that time,” Janine Hansen, executive director of the Independent American Party, tells TPM. “It was a strategic move on her part.”
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
