Tag: Campaign 2012
The Line: The GOP Debate in Iowa
- Andrew Sullivan, the Dish at the Daily Beast: “The winners tonight were the Fox interviewers, Baier and Wallace, who pulled no punches in this battle and asked some very tart and tough questions of the various candidates. I think Bachmann is the current front-runner in Iowa and the debate tonight will cement her status. T-Paw was better; Romney came across as even shiftier than usual; Huntsman let his nerves get the better of him; Ron Paul’s freshness has waned; Herman Cain was hopeless; Gingrich was very very angry; and Santorum is so exercized about Iran he even wandered into a defense of gays! Awesome.”
- Kevin Drum at Mother Jones: “I thought tonight’s debate was much closer than the last one. I didn’t really see any clear winners or losers … I’m obviously not the target audience for these folks, so it hardly matters what I thought about them. Still, what’s so striking about this group is that aside from Ron Paul there’s just hardly any real daylight between them. The questioners tried mightily to provoke some arguments, and they did manage to get a few small ones going over relative minutia, but for the most part they’re still just trying to out-tea party each other.”
- David Weigel at Slate: “It wasn’t the stiffest of competitions, but this was the best, most clarifying debate between the Republican candidates.”On Bachmann’s performance: “The best thing that happened to her was the question about whether she’d be ‘submissive’ to her husband if she was president. The boos lasted for an uncomfortably long time; she gamely, sarcastically thanked Byron York for the question. It was yet another moment for her to prove that the media treats her unfairly. And since it was the only question on social issues that was directed to her, she missed, one more time, a chance to respond to the damaging ‘ex-gay clinic’ story.”
- The Caucus at the New York Times: “As they tried to blame President Obama for the nation’s lowered credit rating, the Republican presidential candidates who squared off Thursday night in Iowa made several misleading, incomplete or simply false claims…Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota repeated her assertion that ‘we should not have increased the debt ceiling .. In the last two months, I was leading on the issue of not increasing the debt ceiling,’ she said. ‘That turned out to be the right answer.’ The ratings agency that lowered the credit rating, Standard & Poor’s …lamented in its report on the downgrade that ‘the statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.’ It was Republicans in Congress who made it a bargaining chip.
- Politifact: “Bachmann said raising the debt ceiling gave Obama a “blank check.” PolitiFact Virginia checked that when Eric Cantor said it about a debt ceiling plan from Harry Reid and found it False.”
- Tina Korbe at Hot Air: “In general, I prefer to reward action over inaction and I respect the willingness of these candidates to “put themselves out there” tonight, but I have to agree with the cliche: Rick Perry was the real winner tonight.”
- Ed Morrissey also at Hot Air: “I tweeted that [‘Rick Perry was the real winner tonight’] as the debate ended, Tina, and Chuck Todd followed it by predicting that sentiment would be the trite, cliche tweet of the night — but I think it was true to some extent. As the gloves came off between Pawlenty and Bachmann, then Santorum and Paul, and all night between Newt Gingrich and the same Fox News that employs him, it seemed that the entire debate ran off the rails.”
Palin Issued Primary Threat to House Tea Partyists Just Hours Before Vote on Boehner Bill Was Postponed
“Everyone I talk to still believes in contested primaries.”
– Sarah Palin, issuing a veiled threat to tea-bagger freshmen in the House
– Sarah Palin, issuing a veiled threat to tea-bagger freshmen in the House
Sarah Palin sent a warning to freshman Republicans on Thursday not to forget the promises made to voters in 2010, adding her outsized voice to the flurry of last-minute arm-twisting before a key debt ceiling vote in the House.
In a post on her Facebook page from “proverbial politico flyover country,” the former Alaska governor reprinted a letter she sent to newly elected members last fall, emphasizing the need to “rein in out-of-control government spending” and “check the growth of spending on our entitlement programs.”
…The message does not include marching orders for the proposal offered by House Speaker John A. Boehner that is on the floor Thursday. But Palin has said recently she was not convinced that a fiscal doomsday was imminent if the debt ceiling was not raised by Aug. 2.
“We cannot default but we cannot afford to retreat right now either. Now is not the time to retreat, it’s the time to reload,” she said on Fox News Channel earlier this month.
In a loaded postscript to her Facebook post, Palin reminds the House freshmen: “Everyone I talk to still believes in contested primaries.”
Later this afternoon, Speaker Boehner called off the vote on his budget bill, a clear sign that he does not have the votes to pass it in the House. Think Progress has been tallying the votes:
Perry a ‘Cheaper Imitation of George Bush’
Perry is a cheaper imitation of George Bush … and I think Perry has really studied Bush. But Bush’s brilliance with the religious right was that he did everything behind closed doors. There were no photo-ops, there were no press releases saying I met reverend so and so today. Bush did everything through intermediaries, and so there was no public trail of him reaching out to the religious right. The irony is that here comes along Perry, the dollar-general-store version of Bush, and here he is meeting with these people in public and you start looking at the line up of the people he’s cozying up to in public and all he is doing is setting himself up for trouble later on if by some miracle he actually wins the nomination … Some of these guys are really beyond the fringe — folks who George Bush would have never been caught dead within a hundred miles of.
— Shaun Casey, a professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary, in The Deseret News, commenting about Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).
Poll: Majority of Voters Would Consider Voting against Their Current House Member
63%
Of voters say they would consider voting for someone other than their current congressional representative in the House elections next year, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll. That is the highest anti-incumbency number recorded in the poll since the question was first asked in 1989. In 2010, by comparison, just over half of voters said they would vote against their incumbent representative, and on Election Day, Republicans won 63 seats and took control of the House, arguably making this an early indicator that control of the House could be in play again next year.
Good News for Dems’ Hopes for Holding Senate in 2012 – NRSC Has Hired Carly Fiorina
It’s no surprise that Fiorina — whom, it’s fair to say, California voters grew to like less and less as they got to know her — has opted not to run against Sen. Dianne Feinstein next year. (So has eMeg Whitman, who ran a higher profile, much more expensive — she spent over $100 million of her own money — and even more disastrous campaign for governor against Jerry Brown last year.)
What is surprising is that, despite the fact that Republican chances for winning control of the Senate next year could not be stronger — more Democrats than Republicans are up for reelection, for one thing — Republicans have recruited Fiorina to do high-level fundraising for their national committee.
Via Calbuzz:
Video Surfaces of Bachmann’s Out Gay Step Sister at Obama Inauguration
Helen LaFave and Nia Wronski at the Inauguration Jan. 20, 2009 from julie phillips on Vimeo.
Michele Bachmann is rapidly becoming a latter days Anita Bryant. In 2004, during a lecture at a conference, she referred to her gay step-sister, Helen LaFave, who is shown in the video above, saying “Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle — we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It’s a very sad life. It’s part of Satan.”
From Towleroad:
MICHELE BACHMANN: I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgendered. We need to have profound compassion for the people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life, and sexual identity disorders. This is a very real issue. It’s not funny, it’s sad. Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle—we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It’s a very sad life. It’s part of Satan, I think, to say this is gay. It’s anything but gay.
Obama Campaign Logs $86 Million in Donations
$86 million
Amount President Obama’s re-election campaign raised Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee between April and June, shattering previous single-quarter fundraising records and far surpassing the campaign’s stated goal of a $60 million haul. The funds were raised from 552,462 donors.
Sting on Bachmann Christian Psychology Clinics Uncovers Dangerous Anti-Gay Quakery, Ethical Violations
Thanks to an undercover investigation by Truth Wins Out, TWO, a group that exposes the “ex-gay” movement, it appears that Rep. Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, lied when he asserted that the Christian psychology clinics he and his wife own, routinely conduct so-called “reparative therapy” on gay Christians:
