Tag: Fox News

Fellow Pensito Review editor Jon already chronicled the wildly discordant drop-in by Mitt Romney to a Martin Luther King Day parade staging area in Jacksonville. Jon posted the video which shows Mitt pointing at lots of black children but trying hard not to touch one, and most definitely not kissing any black babies even though he commented extensively on their attire — from about 12 to 14 inches back.

Last night I got to hear from a coworker what the formal Mitt rally was like. My pal, a 20-something Georgia-born Libertarian, has vowed to hear any candidate who actually makes a stop in Jacksonville. That lets out any Democrats, of course, but just this past weekend he took in both Mitt and Rudy. He had previously witnessed a rare Fred Thompson appearance, but obviously he won’t need to remember that one now.

When my attractive blond friend and his attractive blond wife arrived, they were grabbed by Mitt’s handlers. The goons asked if he and his wife wanted two seats together, and before he finished saying yes, they frog-marched the couple to the front of the crowd and deposited them directly in front of the podium. Before leaving, they slapped stickers on their chests that said, “Gators for Mitt” and shoved flags into their hands.

My friend, who forces me to watch episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, found all this entertaining in a Larry David kind of way. See, it’s like this. Yes, Florida is a huge college football state. But — and this is a very important “but” — not everyone roots for the same team. There are Gators and Seminoles and up this way, even quite a few Georgia Bulldog fans. Down in Buck’s neck of the woods, it’s orange and green Hurricane country. But in North Florida, even more polarizing than whether you’re a Democrat or Republican is whether you’re a Gator or a Seminole. A mixed marriage is not one where the couple differs racially, but one in which the husband or wife supports Florida State while the mate supports the University of Florida.

So just like Mitt’s yucking it up as if he was at a Saturday afternoon barbecue instead of getting ready to march in solemn remembrance of a fallen leader, this photo op fell flat. To the clueless Mitt and his handlers, it looked perfect. To those in the crowd, it looked like an idiot was cavorting in their midst.

My friend, an ardent Bulldog fan, wore the Gator sticker and waved the flag. Later that night, there he was, with his wife, out front on CNN, ABC, and all the local stations, just like Mitt’s crew intended. But I’m pretty sure the thoughts in his head were not what Mitt was going for: “What a putz. My God, what a putz.”

The first rat deserted the Fred Thompson campaign’s sinking ship yesterday when former N.Y. Sen. Al D’Amato — who famously loathes fellow New Yorker Rudolph Giuliani — scurried onto the more seaworthy vessel of John McCain.

A few hours later, Thompson announced he was leaving the race:

Thompson bowed to what became inevitable after his third-place showing in Saturday’s South Carolina primary. Less than an hour after the polls closed that night, when it was already evident he would be an also-ran, Thompson addressed his supporters in the state — remarks that walked right up to a withdrawal but stopped just short of it. Since then, he has been absent from the campaign trail.

Thompson’s campaign was fabricated in the lofty realms of the Beltway’s GOP ivory tower: He was an actor like Reagan, a Southerner and a conservative. Never mind the fact he was a K Street lobbyist for 18 years, which was twice as long as he served in the U.S. Senate. What could go wrong?

In a rare, funny moment on “Saturday Night Live,” a send-up of Thompson captured what was wrong with his campaign. When asked to rate his desire to be president, the actor spoofing Thompson said something like, “I’d give it about a six.”

In the five contests so far, Thompson’s campaign accrued just five delegates to the GOP Convention this summer.

Running exclusively on a platform of “9/11 24/7” appears not be working out so well for Rudolph Giuliani. Too bad (for him), it’s all he’s got.

“What happened is, it became a competitive race.”
– Giuliani

Rasumussen yesterday:

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds Mitt Romney with a slight lead in Florida’s Republican Presidential Primary. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are close behind in what may develop into a three-man race. It’s Romney at 25 percent, McCain at 20 percent, and Giuliani at 19 percent. Romney has picked up seven points over the past week while McCain and Giuliani each inched up a point … Mike Huckabee has slipped to 13 percent in the current poll.

But the worst news for Rudy may be waiting back home when New York state votes in its primaries on Feb. 5:

The WNBC/Marist Poll in New York shows McCain beating Giuliani 32 to 22 percent, followed by Mitt Romney at 14 percent and Mike Huckabee at 11 percent, with Fred Thompson trailing at 4 percent. Fifteen percent of 401 Republicans polled last week were undecided. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent.

A second poll, by Siena College Research Institute, found the former New York mayor trailing the Arizona senator by 12 points for the New York primary Feb. 5. Siena put Giuliani second, with 24 percent of support among Republicans, behind McCain’s 36 percent. Romney had 10 percent, Huckabee 7 percent, and Thompson 6 percent. That poll has a margin of error of 7.4 percent.

About six weeks ago, Giuliani had a commanding, 33-point lead over the then-number two candidate, John McCain. Yesterday, he explained the new dynamics to New York Newsday:

“What happened is, it became a competitive race,” he said during a stop at Daytona International Speedway, where he rode his campaign bus around the banked NASCAR track. He said all the candidates who recently descended here were “in a very similar situation” and called the race “wide open.”

“It’s playing out the way we thought it would,” he said.

Yes, all according to plan.

As if the current tempest in a teacup over who played the race card first in the Democratic primary weren’t stupid enough, The Politico ran an article today that sought to characterize the Congressional Black Caucus as fractured over whom to endorse. This is a clear example of the media (not sure Politico qualifies as MSM or not) going to some lengths to create a story ex nihilo.

The headline screeches “Obama Splits Black Caucus.” The lede breathlessly jumps in with:

Even though Barack Obama may become the first African-American ever to represent a major party as the nominee for president, many black lawmakers on Capitol Hill are not supporting him. And that’s creating tensions within the Congressional Black Caucus.

The way Hearn presents the information makes it seem like there’s a big problem here.

The writer, Josephine Hearn, goes on to note:

More than a third of the black members of Congress are backing Hillary Rodham Clinton or John Edwards in the presidential primary, a stance that puts them at odds with many of their African-American constituents, who, recent polls show, are beginning to shift to Obama’s camp.

Sounds pretty fractured, don’t it? Until you read down to the actual numbers:

Of the 42 black members of the House, 17 are behind Obama, 16 are with Clinton, two are with Edwards and seven remain uncommitted.

Ms. Hearn’s math is correct — 16 + 2 = 18, which works out to 42 percent of the Caucus is backing Clinton or Edwards. Heck, in the Pensito Review executive suite, what we call PR math (which we use to count readers) would have changed that to “nearly half of the Caucus.” But the way Hearn presents the information makes it seem like there’s a big problem here, with black congressional members who endorsed Clinton now being criticized by their peers and constituents for not backing Obama.

[…]

In a well-established pattern of the Bush presidency, the controversy over a missing 5 million to 10 million White House e-mails seems to be the result of either incompetence or a deliberate attempt to destroy potentially incriminating evidence. Sound familiar? You bet.

At the heart of the controversy is whether mixed in among those millions of messages were some regarding the exposure of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative.

‘We still do not know what was lost, why it was lost, and what steps we have to take to recover it — assuming it is still recoverable.’
– Meredith Fuchs, general counsel for the National Security Archive

The White House has been typically reluctant to comply with requests for information about how it handles and stores what are in effect presidential records, which are required by law to be preserved. But if it was a cover-up and the tapes were destroyed, then criminal charges could be laid. However, if it was just incompetence — seems the White House was in the habit of reusing the record tapes, meaning that while not purposefully destroyed, the e-mails were taped over, effectively making it impossible to retrieve them.

Finally, Tuesday the White House complied with a magistrate’s order to do some ‘splaining:

In their lawsuits, the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington suggest the e-mails were improperly deleted from White House computer servers. Over 5 million White House e-mails are missing, CREW alleged. Recently, the group said it has been told by reliable sources that the actual figure of missing e-mail is over 10 million.

Typically, the Bush administration takes the position that it is above the law:

In asking that the complaints be dismissed, the Bush administration says the president’s record keeping practices under the Presidential Records Act are not reviewable by the courts. Also, the Federal Records Act does not allow the far-reaching action the two private groups are demanding, the administration contends.

[…]

Since the outset of the presidential campaign, Rudy Giuliani’s strategy has famously been to hold fire during the GOP preliminaries, wait for a winner to emerge out of in Iowa and New Hampshire and then turn all of his guns on his opponent in the big states, starting with Florida on January 26.

The operation is so egregiously mismanaged that the budget is wiped out. But the people at the top take care of themselves while the people at the bottom get screwed. Sound familiar?

But now, just two weeks away from the voting in Florida, and a little over thee weeks until the “Super Tuesday” primaries on Feb. 5 — including votes in California, where his brand of liberal-Republicanism might work, and New York, his home state — he is out of money:

Some senior aides on Republican Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign won’t be paid this month so that the money they would have gotten can be spent instead on TV ads and other campaign expenses in Florida, CNN is reporting.

The news network adds that its sources in the campaign say Giuliani’s effort is “not in dire financial straits,” but that the former New York City mayor’s team wants to put all it can into the Sunshine State and that some staffers volunteered to go without pay. The state’s GOP primary is set for Jan. 29, and Giuliani has based much of his campaign on winning Florida and then placing first in as many of the 22 Super Tuesday contests as he can on Feb. 5.

And late on Friday came news that Giuliani’s campaign national finance chair is no longer working for the campaign:

Giuliani’s national finance chair, Roy Bailey, no longer has that position with the campaign. Bailey was not only Giuliani’s finance chair, he was one of the founding partners of Giuliani’s consulting firm.

Giuliani earned $16 million in speaking fees alone in 2006. He’ll be fine, so don’t worry — only the little people on his staff will suffer.

Let’s see. The operation is so egregiously mismanaged that they blow out the budget, so, naturally, the people at the top take care of themselves while the people at the bottom get screwed.

Sound familiar?

So much for the “change” election. This sounds like more of the Bush GOP same-old same-old.

CNN’s Bill Schneider:

Roughly half of Republican primary voters had a negative opinion of the Bush administration, and those voters significantly went for Arizona Sen. John McCain by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. Of the GOP voters who said they had a positive opinion of the Bush administration, 37 percent voted for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

And yet they voted for McCain who has been in a competition with Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney to see who can be the most like George Bush.

But the alarming take-away from this is that the other half of New Hampshire Republicans are so delusional that they still cling to the fantasy that Bush is not the Worst President Ever.

After smiting Rev. Mike Huckabee in the New Hampshire primary yesterday by relegating him to third place behind an Episcopalian-turned-Baptist (John McCain) and a Mormon (Mitt Romney), now the divine inspiration of God, which Huckabee claimed in November was the invisible force behind his rise in the polls, has put him in the lead in Florida:

One possible factor in God’s preference for Huckabee: At least two of his opponents, McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, are admitted adulterers.

A new Datamar poll in Florida finds Mike Huckabee leading the Republican presidential primary race with 24 percent support, followed by Mitt Romney at 20 percent, Sen. John McCain at 18 percent and Rudy Giuliani now back in fourth place at 16 percent.

Two months ago, Giuliani led the GOP race. With little chance of winning the other early states, he has been campaigning nearly non-stop in Florida for several weeks.

One possible factor in God’s preference for Huckabee: At least two of his opponents, McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, are admitted adulterers. Adultery is a sin punishable by eternal death in a pit of fire, according to the Bible. Huckabee and his wife are married by “covenant,” part of which requires Mrs. Huckabee to “submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”

In the Datamar poll, Hillary Clinton, whom God anointed in New Hampshire last night, has a 12 percentage point lead over Barack Obama:

The Democratic race is confused since the state was stripped of its delegates to the party convention for moving up the primary date and none of the major candidates is campaigning there. Nonetheless, Sen. Hillary Clinton leads the Democratic race with 40 percent, followed by Sen. Barack Obama at 28 percent and John Edwards at 19 percent.

In South Carolina, where Republicans vote on Jan. 19 (and Dems on Jan. 26), Huckabee has an aggregate 12.6 percentage point lead over McCain, according to Real Clear Politics. The three polls include: Insider Advantage which has Huckabee at 33 percent; McCain at 21 percent; Rasmussen, 28/21; and SurveyUSA, 36/17.

This is not surprising as God’s manifest destiny for South Carolina is a plan called Christian Exodus, which entails millions of Christian fundamentalists moving to the state, overturning its democracy and installing a theocracy and then seceding from the United States (again).

At 5:15 p.m., Hillary Clinton has a slight lead over Barack Obama, who was ahead in every poll leading up to today.

5:48 p.m.: MSNBC has Clinton still in the lead by 2,000 votes or so.

5:55 p.m.: With 24 percent reporting, Clinton has 40 percent, Obama 36 percent.

6:16 p.m.: With 37 percent counted: Clinton 39 percent, Obama 36 percent.

6:28 p.m.: The MSNBC panel hated McCain’s performance in his victory speech. I didn’t watch it.

Olbermann says the Democratic race is now 39 percent Clinton, 37 percent Obama.

6:32 p.m.: According to exit polls, Clinton has a double digit (47/34) lead among women.

6:50 p.m.: Clinton 39 percent, Obama 37 percent.

7:20 p.m.: Clinton 39 percent, Obama 36 percent.

7:32 p.m.: Clinton declared winner.

Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist preacher and governor of Arkansas, who recently asserted that “the same Power that helped the little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people” was behind his campaign’s success, has been projected to lose the New Hampshire primary tonight.

At 5:15 p.m., NBC has called the race for Sen. John McCain, with Mitt Romney second and Huckabee a distant third.

5:48 p.m.: Romney’s conceding. Just occurred to me that he has all the worst qualities of John Kerry and Al Gore but none of their virtues.

Now the burning question is, will Chuck Norris be standing behind Huckabee tonight like he did in Iowa. He and his big white teeth, not to mention his trophy wife, completely upstaged Huckabee during his victory speech in Iowa last week.

5:59 p.m.: Huckabee concedes with Chuck Norris nowhere in sight. I guess Norris doesn’t do losers. Not surprisingly, Huckabee does not mention God’s hidden hand and its possible relationship to his loss.

UPDATE: Good news from heaven for Rev. Huckabee this morning – Poll: God Puts Huckabee in Lead in Florida – Also Leads in S.C., Home of Christian Exodus