Tag: California

Republican National Committee Meets in the Heart of Hollywood But Can’t Drum up GOP Stars to Lend Youth-Oriented Buzz to the Event

Jon Ponder
The RNC could not find a movie or TV star to attend its 2013 spring meeting in Hollywood as part of its outreach to young people, so Dick Cheney, the GOP’s favorite living war criminal, was flown in to deliver a lunchtime speech

The Republican National Committee is holding its spring meeting this week in a hotel in the heart of Hollywood. As these sorts of events go, this one has generated more speculation about the GOP’s rationale for choosing to meet in a place that is home to an industry Republicans revile, and vice versa, than it has actual news coverage on local outlets.

So what was RNC Chairman Reince Priebus thinking when he decided to hold his spring meeting behind enemy lines?

The answer comes from Beltway insider Politico.com, which notes that a key criticism in the Republican National Committee’s aptly nicknamed 2012 election “autopsy” report released last month was that the “party is seen as old and detached from pop culture.” To counter this, the autopsy committee recommended that the GOP “establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry to host events for the RNC and allow donors to participate in entertainment events as a way to attract younger voters.”

Preibus’ decision to hold the meeting in Hollywood appears to have been the first step in the party’s celebrity outreach — and, if so, this first step has clearly been an abysmal, even laughable failure, so much so that Priebus is now denying that reaching out to celebrities had anything to do with his choice of Hollywood as the meeting site.

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National Republicans to Hold Spring Meeting Behind Enemy Lines – in Hollywood

Jon Ponder

Here’s one for the WTF file: The Republican National Committee is holding its spring meeting in Hollywood, of all places, next week. It is a mystery why Chairman Reince Priebus would choose Hollywood, one of the GOP’s favorite punching bags, as the site of their meeting, especially since it is situated in a state where there is not a single elected GOP state official, where Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature and where Republican voter registration has cratered to 29 percent, the lowest it’s been since the 19th century:

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Rove Delivers Keynote Speech at the California GOP Convention – Only to Have His Message Stepped on by Wingnut Leader’s Assertion That Pregnancies Resulting from Rapes Are Rare

Jon Ponder
Left: Rove address California GOP convention: ‘Get off your asses’; right: California Republican Assembly leader Celeste Greig, left, with Birth Queen Orly Taitz

The California Republican Party is bankrupt, both intellectually and financially. Its voter registration has dropped to just 30 percent of the electorate. And last year Republicans lost so many seats in the Legislature that Democrats achieved super-majority status in both houses.

“Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized.”
– CRA President Celeste Greig

But hope springs eternal, as they say, and party leaders had pinned their hopes for reenergizing the faithful at their convention in Sacramento over the weekend with a rousing keynote address by Turdblossom himself, Karl Rove.

Channeling House Speaker John Boehner, who had the Beltway media clutching its collective pearls last week when he railed ungrammatically at the Senate to “get off their ass” and pass an anti-Sequester plan — even though the House has no viable plan on the table either — Rove rallied the 500 or so conventioneers with similar language.

“My message is this: get off your ass,” Rove said, during his keynote speech. “Get back in the game and fight. Don’t give in to what the other side wants.”

The flaw in that message, of course, is that the policies the “other side wants” — like a balanced approached to deficit reduction, gun safety measures and the rest — are also what majorities of voters want.

Rove recently launched the Conservative Victory Project, a PAC intended to drive tea-party and birther candidates and their ilk out of primary races, so it was delightfully paradoxical that his message was overshadowed in media coverage by Celeste Greig, the leader of the California Republican Assembly — a haven for tea partyists and birthers — who reasserted the Republicans’ magical thinking about “legitimate rape” and pregnancies in an interview with a reporter:

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Online Voter Registration Pushes Total of California Voters to 18.2 Million – GOP Share Drops Below 30%

Jon Ponder

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.

A Tale of Two Governors and Their Dogs

Jon Ponder
Left: Sutter coaches Gov. Brown, 74, doing push-ups; right, Reagan used as a prop intended to humanize Gov. Scott

You can tell a lot about a person’s character by the way they treat animals. For millions of dog lovers, for example, learning that Mitt Romney had once decided to force his Irish setter Seamus to ride in a kennel strapped to the roof of his car on a 12-hour family vacation, even after Seamus got sick in the kennel, exposed a man whose life of privilege had left him with a deficit of compassion and common decency.

The revelations this week that Gov. Rick Scott, Florida’s Republican governor, got rid of a dog that appears to have been acquired in 2010 as a prop for his campaign for governor is similarly a window into Scott’s character. And it stands in stark contrast with the the story of another big-state governor elected in 2010, Jerry Brown, and his dog, Sutter, who has become an unofficial mascot in California since the governor took office.

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With California GOP Bankrupt and Bleeding Voters, Incoming Chairman Signals No Significant Changes or Course Corrections

Jon Ponder

Brulte
Driven by what were perceived to be extreme anti-Latino policies in the 1990s, the California Republican Party began to lose new voter registrations in the 2000s. Financial backing fell off soon afterwards, and by 2008, the party found itself facing perpetual insolvency.

In November, voters put a Democratic super-majority in charge of legislature. Now, with its share of registered voters at around 30 percent and dropping, the California GOP appears to be circling the drain.

Even so, someone has to lead it, and now a former longtime Sacramento pol, Jim Brulte, has announced he is running for chairman of the state party. Since no one in his or her right mind would want the job, that makes him the state party’s new de facto leader.

Brulte is not talking to the press, but CalBuzz has the scoop — and what they have learned appears to be good news for everyone who wants California to continue to recover and prosper. To wit, Brulte ain’t gonna change a thing. His chairmanship of the state GOP promises more of the same old unpopular teabaggery and retrograde religiosity that has been slowly poisoning the party for nearly 20 years:

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California Projects Budget Surplus for 2013

Jon Ponder

Twelve years after Enron bilked California consumers out of $20 billion and the state coincidentally experienced a budget shortfall of roughly the same amount, two years after California replaced an incompetent Republican governor with an experienced Democrat, and two months after California voters raised taxes on the wealthy through a ballot initiative, Gov. Jerry Brown announced today that the state will have its first budget surplus in more than a decade:

After years of red ink, Gov. Jerry Brown said on Thursday that California’s $96.7-billion general fund is now poised to end next year with a surplus, thanks to years of deep budget cuts and billions in new taxes approved by voters last year.

“We achieved the position we’re in because of tough cuts … and then the people voted for taxes,” he said. “We broke the logjam by going to the people.”

Sonny Bono’s Widow and Her Current Congressman Husband Were Both Defeated Yesterday – an Era Ends in Congress

Jon Ponder

Yesterday Rep. Connie Mack, the Republican congressman and husband of Sonny Bono’s widow, Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., lost his race to unseat Florida’s Democratic senator, Sen. Bill Nelson. Today we learn that Mrs. Bono Mack has lost her race for reelection to the House:

Raul Ruiz, a Democratic emergency room doctor, eked out a victory over Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Palm Springs) in the race for the 36th Congressional District seat in the Coachella Valley.

The often-caustic political slugfest is the first defeat for Bono Mack in her 14-year political career, which began when she was elected to replace her husband, singer Sonny Bono, in Congress after his death in a skiing accident…

Ruiz assailed Bono Mack for supporting the budget plan of GOP vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin; Ruiz said the plan would decimate Medicare.

The political parties and outside groups spent more than $3.3 million in the race

Since Rep. Mack gave up his seat to run for the Senate, this means that next year, neither Mack nor Bono Mack will be returning to Congress.

California Democrats Gain in Sacramento, Super Majorities in the Legislature Said to Be in Reach

Jon Ponder

Nearly bankrupt both in funding and ideas, the California Republican Party suffered another round of defeats as Democrats gained seats in both the Assembly and the state Senate in voting yesterday:

Democrats were within striking distance of a supermajority in the state Senate late Tuesday, and were drawing near in the Assembly as well, moving the party closer to unilateral power to raise taxes.

The potential gains, a result of sweeping changes in California’s political system, captivated the Capitol on a night in which there also were unprecedented battles within the state’s congressional delegation.

If the Democrats achieve a supermajority, as party leaders believed likely, it would mark the first time either party has captured two-thirds of the seats in the Senate or Assembly in 34 years. It takes a two-thirds vote in each house to approve tax increases, which would have to be signed by the governor. Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez (D-Los Angeles) claimed early Wednesday to have achieved a supermajority in his chamber.