Trailer for ‘Game Change’
Wow.
Month: February 2012
Welcome to the Twitter Election
Candidates who don’t participate on Twitter while the debates are going on will be left behind because the next morning is too late to respond.
— Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, predicting that 2012 will be “the Twitter election,” reports Tech Crunch.
Mitt Romney Poor-Mouthing S.C.Loss
You know, in South Carolina we were vastly outspent with negative ads attacking me and we stood back and spoke about President Obama and suffered the consequence of that.
— Mitt Romney, now saying he was “vastly outspent” in South Carolina and that’s why he lost to Newt Gingrich. But Politico notes independent analyses show that Romney’s campaign and associated Super PACs “spent nearly double what Gingrich’s forces did in the state.”
Rubio Hedges on Romney Endorsement
The winner of Florida is in all likelihood going to be the nominee of our party.
— Boy Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), quoted by the AP, endorsing Mitt Romney without actually endorsing him.
Enthusiasm Gap: Voter Turnout in Florida GOP Primary Down 287K from 2008
-287,674
Difference in number of voters who turned out for Florida’s Republican presidential primary in 2008 — 1,949,498 — and this year’s turn out of 1,661,824. If there was a nearly 300,000 dip in voter turnout in a Democratic primary, the corporate media would be tut-tutting about depressed voter enthusiasm, but since it is a Republican primary, Beltway pundits view the dip as a blip that is not worth mentioning.
Occupy the Super PAC: Credo Targets Tea Party Freshmen
Here’s an idea for turning the Citizens United lemons into progressive lemonade, via The Hill:
A new liberal super-PAC called Credo has announced its first six targets of the 2012 campaign: GOP Reps. Joe Walsh (Ill.), Steve King (Iowa), Allen West (Fla.)*, Sean Duffy (Wis.), Chip Cravaack (Minn.) and Frank Guinta (N.H.).
All six are vulnerable: Walsh and West face uphill battles for reelection, while Duffy, Cravack, King and Guinta are all top Democratic targets.
A group spokesperson said it will release the names of its donors, and that it already had more than 13,000 individuals backing it. The group plans to eventually get involved in 10 House races and spend at least $3 million, with campaign offices open in each member’s district.
In Florida GOP Primary, 41% of Tea Party Supporters Voted for Big Government Republican Romney
Just two years after Florida Republicans elected a corporatist tea-party candidate Rick Scott as governor, with a narrow, 48.9 percent to 47.7 percent win over his Democratic rival Alex Sink, these same voters tacked decisively to the left in their presidential primary election yesterday, giving Mitt Romney, the former liberal Republican governor of Massachusetts, a decisive 14-point win over tea party-aligned, disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
All four Republican presidential candidates support criminalizing abortion, which would require a huge new government bureaucracy to monitor the medical records of the 4 million American women who become pregnant each year
Granted, pickings were slim for Florida’s “true” conservatives. In a field of four, two of the candidates — Romney and Gingrich — have big government records. In the past, Romney has supported women’s reproductive rights and gay rights and imposed restrictions on guns. He also implemented the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s individual mandate as a big-government solution to health-insurance reform when he was governor of Massachusetts. Gingrich, who took millions in lobbying fees from federal housing agencies after he was forced out of Congress, has supported climate science in the past and advocated for NASA, the government-run space agency, while campaigning in Florida last week.
