GOP Pulls Support for Mark Sanford in South Carolina House Race after He Was Caught in His Ex-Wife’s Home in Violation of Court Order

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The National Republican Congressional Committee announced today that it will no longer support Mark Sanford’s campaign in the special election for the open seat in South Carolina’s 1st U.S. House District. This dramatic announcement suggests that the trespassing charge brought yesterday against Sanford by his ex-wife Ginny, who is a popular figure in Republican circles, is viewed as fatal to Sanford’s campaign within the party establishment.

One reason that the NRCC and other Sanford supporters may be irked is that the trespassing incident — which Sanford admitted to today — happened in February, well before voting in the primary for the special election, which took place on March 19, but was kept secret until yesterday. According to Politico:

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After Railing against the Individual Mandate for Years, Top Teabagger Jim DeMint Quits Senate to Lead Organization That Invented the Individual Mandate

In 2009, not long after Pres. Obama and the Democrats opted to forgo the single-payer option for health-insurance reform and go instead with the conservatives’ option of mandating that individuals must buy insurance from insurance corporations, the right wing abruptly disavowed their own plan, even going so far as to label it “socialism” and demonize it by referring to it as Obamacare.

Few pols and propagandists were more persistent in pushing the false narrative that Obamacare and its individual mandate were jack-booted socialism than the top teabagger in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Now, in one of those ironic turns in politics that you couldn’t possibly make up, DeMint has announced he is resigning from the Senate to run the same right-wing “thimk” tank that invented the individual mandate back in 1993, the Heritage Foundation.

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The Confederacy’s War On Christmas

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So what were South Carolina’s governor and other top conservatives doing on Christmas Day, 1860? They were not at home celebrating the birth of Christ by singing hymns around their Christmas trees with their families.

No, on Dec. 25, 1860, these progenitors of the conservative movement and the modern-day Republican Party — they called themselves Democrats back then but a century later would flock en masse to the GOP after liberals enacted anti-white supremacist Civil Rights legislation — were in the state capitol of Columbia committing the most heinous act of treason in United States history.

They weren’t just making war on Christmas, they were preparing to make war on America:

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Racists for Cain: Why Are Tea Party Voters Giving His Plan to Raise Taxes a Pass?

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It is a sign of the times that an African-American Republican, Herman Cain, is leading by double digits in South Carolina, the heart and soul of the Old Confederacy, a hotbed of the Neo-Confederate tea-party movement today and an early primary state next year.

According to an InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion Research poll [PDF] of likely South Carolina voters conducted for the Augusta (S.C.) Chronicle on Oct. 16, Cain leads second-place candidate Mitt Romney 32-16 percent. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a sometimes advocate of secession, is a close third with 12 percent, while also-rans New Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmman and Jon Huntsman bring up the rear in single digits. Rick Santorum, the single-issue, anti-gay candidate, failed to muster even 1 percent support.

(It is unclear why 17 Democrats were included in a poll about the Republican primary, but Cain led among these Democrats with nearly 55 percent while Michele Bachmann trailed among Dems, with 22.5 percent.)

So what does Cain’s ascendancy say about the Republican Party and its tea party base, with its nearly all-white, mostly middle-aged demographics? […]

Sanford Holds News Conference in Front of Busy Street, Parking Lot

I’m watching MSNBC right now as GOP S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford is holding a news conference to criticize his lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer, also a Republican, for suggesting that Sanford should step down in light of his extramarital affair and allegedly improperly traveling on private planes, etc.

Has Sanford never heard of stage management? Rather than holding the conference with the dome of the state capitol or the governor’s mansion as a background, there’s a busy street so close behind him that his statements are practically drowned out by the passing cars.

There was some anticipation in the media, we can assume, that Sanford was going to announce that he’s stepping down. Instead, he just held forth against Bauer, accusing him of using the publicity to set up a run for Congress.

Sheesh.