These are my links for December 29th through January 2nd:
How Gingrich Blew His Second Chance – Jonathan Martin looks at how Newt Gingrich “learned all the wrong lessons from his campaign’s collapse this summer and none of the right ones from his remarkable comeback.”
“Instead of seizing the moment and making an aggressive case for why the contest was now a two-man race between a movement conservative and flip-flopping moderate — a unique opportunity afforded by the endorsement’s implicit-but-unmistakable critique of Mitt Romney in his firewall state — Gingrich fell back to his familiar habits, a routine marked by too much self-assurance and not enough discipline.”
“Between that and some other key factors — among them, Romney’s super PAC blitzkrieg and his own weak fundraising — a campaign that seemed on the cusp of stealing the nomination barely a month ago now faces an ignominious fourth place finish or worse.”
Ron Paul’s Secret Plan To Actually Win – Ron Paul — poised to finish strong in the Iowa caucuses – has begun to implement a quiet, complex plan to force a long battle with Mitt Romney for delegates to the Republican National Convention in August. His advantages: Experience, organization, and the legacy of the 2010 Tea Party revival, which convinced Republicans that anti-government figures like Paul just aren’t as weird as they’d thought.
Paul is following the roadmap set by Barack Obama’s 2008 strategy: Start early, learn the rules, and use superior organization and devoted young supporters to dominate the arcane but crucial party procedures in states your rivals are ignoring — states where caucuses and conventions that elect the delegates who will ultimately choose the Republican candidate. The plan begins in places like Minnetonka, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb where Paul has based his state headquarters, and where staffers have already begun running “mock-auses” — practice runs for Minnesota’s February 7 caucuses.
Paul’s rivals dismiss his chances. “Ron Paul’s not going to be our nominee,” Mitt Romney said flatly in December. But Paul’s organization is girding for the long haul, and while the 76-year old Texan is vanishingly unlikely to be the nominee — primaries in big states like New York and California could shut him out — observers in the caucus states say they expect Paul to win, and perhaps sweep, dozens of delegates from unexpected corners of the map. Those delegates, in turn, will give him at least a prominent position at the Republican National Convention, and a plausible shot at emerging as a kingmaker if a strong mainstream challenger to Romney emerges.
Palin: “I did praise Rick Santorum and I’ll praise him again…It’s no surprise that he has the support that he has.”
Adds, “the field is what it is at this point,” and/but will not shut the door on a second VP bid.
Occupy protest follows 123rd annual Rose Parade – The 2012 Tournament of Roses brought its flowery floats and strutting bands to a worldwide audience Monday under clear blue skies, and in its wake came a scruffier parade – thousands of anti-Wall Street protesters.
The 123rd annual New Year’s Day event, with the theme “Just Imagine,” flowed along downtown Pasadena to the cheers of hundreds of thousands of sidewalk spectators.
An estimated 40 million people viewed this year’s procession of 44 floats, 16 marching bands and 22 equestrian troupes on U.S. television.
There were 10 arrests overnight, including four felonies, as thousands of spectators staked out viewing places along the route but that figure was down from the previous year, police said.
“Everything went very, very well. We’re very pleased,” police Lt. Phlunte Riddle said.
Sinaloa Cartel Shifting Meth Production to Guatemala – The Sinaloa Cartel, already thought to be the largest supplier of methamphetamine to the US, may be shifting production southwards to Guatemala. This forms part of a larger trend, in which Mexican groups appear to be shifting many of their operations into Central America.
The Associated Press reports that the seizure of precursor chemicals to produce methamphetamine is spiking dramatically in Guatemala. In 2011, authorities seized about 1,600 tons of precursor chemicals, four times the amount seized in 2010. Much of the trade is thought to be controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel.
InSight Analysis
Such reports point to a key trend previously identified by InSight Crime: the shifting of drug production into Central American nations that are not prepared to confront the Mexican cartels. There have already been some signs that drug trafficking organizes have moved their cocaine-processing infrastructure into the region, with laboratories discovered in Honduras and Guatemala. Nicaragua saw its first ever meth lab dismantled in 2009. If Mexico’s meth production is moving southwards into the Northern Triangle, it is one more indication that the region is increasingly seen as a safer environment for the drug trade.
The shift into Guatemala could also be a sign sign that law enforcement efforts in Mexico are working. Both US and Mexican authorities seized a record amount of meth along the US-Mexico border last year. Another deterrent was Mexico’s decision to ban imports of pseudophedrine and ephedine, key ingredients in meth production, in 2008.
The AP report also supports the hypothesis that the Sinaloa Cartel is expanding its hold on the methamphetamine trade. This includes taking over the network once controlled by the Familia Michoacana. The Sinaloans are now thought to be the largest distributors of meth inside the US.
(404) http://t.co/1uQoLWq5%E2%80%9D – Why, of course they did &who was fired at Verizon?“@verge: Verizon drops $2 ‘convenience fee’ due to customer feedback
Republican presidential candidate, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas speaks during a campaign stop in Fort Madison, Iowa, Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2011
These are my links for December 21st through December 22nd:
Grappling With Ron Paul’s Racist Newsletters – Did you know about the racist newsletters published in the late 1980s and early 1990s under Ron Paul’s name? As the Texas Congressman surges in the GOP primary, the story of the newsletters is garnering headlines, as it did during his 1996 House campaign and his 2008 presidential run. He’s always insisted that he didn’t write the egregiously offensive material, and long ago repudiated it (though not as soon as he should have). Is this an old story voters will look beyond, like Newt Gingrich’s affairs? Or a new story for the vast majority of voters and the plurality of journalists who are less familiar with Paul than the other GOP frontrunners? Is it coming up now “for political reasons”? Or because it’s a legitimate subject of inquiry despite having been aired before in the media?
It seems to me that the story’s reemergence was inevitable and necessary to fully inform primary voters about their choices. This level of scrutiny is rightly what comes with contending for the presidency.
City agencies have been ordered to calculate what was spent on the Occupy LA protests.
Repairs to City Hall’s lawn where the Occupy group set up camp on Oct. 1 will require an estimated $400,000. The police action to clear out the encampment on Nov. 30 cost more than $700,000.
Additional expenses are attributed to hauling away debris from the camp, and cleaning up graffiti that defaced City Hall marble walls and trees.
According to The Hill, the former Massachusetts governor was asked by radio host Howie Carr if Onyango Obama, who is allegedly in violation of his immigration status and was arrested for drunk driving this summer, should be deported.
In the Wednesday interview, Romney said the law must be followed.
“Well, if the laws of the United States say he should be deported, and I presume they do, then of course we should follow those laws,” he said.
Asked to clarify those comments in a press conference Thursday, Romney said his stance was not affected by the man’s relationship to the president.
Bush I: Read my lips, Romney’s the best choice – Former President George H.W. Bush, while stopping short of a formal endorsement, declared that Mitt Romney was the “best choice” for Republicans in 2012.
The Houston Chronicle reports:
“I think Romney is the best choice for us,” former President Bush told the Houston Chronicle this week. “I like Perry, but he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere; he’s not surging forward.”
Bush said he had known Romney for many years and also knew his father, George Romney, a former Republican governor of Michigan who ran for president in 1968.
Bush said he supported Romney because of his “stability, experience, principles.
He’s a fine person,” he said. “I just think he’s mature and reasonable – not a bomb-thrower.”
Huffington Post Miami accused of over-aggregating – When Huffington Post Miami launched late last month, Arianna Huffington promised to “dig deeper in an effort to tell the stories of all the people who make up this unique city.”
And how many Miami-based HuffPo journalists are doing that? Two, according to Bill Cooke. He reports that Miami Herald staffers are complaining that the HuffPo duo are rewriting their newspaper stories for Huffington Post Miami.
Miami Herald managing editor Rick Hirsch declined to discuss this with Cooke. “I’ll say what I have to say directly to the Huffington Post. There are some things we’ll be discussing soon.”
McConnell offers a way out of the payroll tax cut thicket – As I predicted, the perennial adult in Washington, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), has stepped forward with a way out of the payroll tax box into which the House Republicans have climbed. He sent out this statement:
“The House and Senate have both passed bipartisan bills to require the President to quickly make a decision on whether to support thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs through the Keystone XL pipeline, and to extend unemployment insurance, the temporary payroll tax cut and seniors’ access to medical care. There is no reason why Congress and the President cannot accomplish all of these things before the end of the year. House Republicans sensibly want greater certainty about the duration of these provisions, while Senate Democrats want more time to negotiate the terms. These goals are not mutually exclusive. We can and should do both. Working Americans have suffered enough from the President’s failed economic policies and shouldn’t face the uncertainty of a New Year’s Day tax hike. Leader Reid should appoint conferees on the long-term bill and the House should pass an extension that locks in the thousands of Keystone XL pipeline jobs, prevents any disruption in the payroll tax holiday or other expiring provisions, and allows Congress to work on a solution for the longer extensions.”
Ron Paul’s story changes on racial comments – Rep. Ron Paul has tried since 2001 to disavow racist and incendiary language published in Texas newsletters that bore his name, denying he wrote them and even walking out of an interview on CNN Wednesday. But he vouched for the accuracy of the writings and admitted writing at least some of the passages when first asked about them in an interview in 1996.
Some issues of the newsletters included racist, anti-Israel or anti-gay comments, including a 1992 newsletter in which he said 95% of black men in Washington “are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”
Paul told TheDallas Morning News in 1996 that the contents of his newsletters were accurate but needed to be taken in context. Wednesday, he told CNN he didn’t write the newsletters and didn’t know what was in them.
Video: Ron Paul in 1995: Say, have you read my newsletters? – Mitt Romney can breathe a sigh of relief, because Andrew Kaczynksi has shifted his attention to Ron Paul this week. Andrew dug up a 1995 interview with C-SPAN, a year before running for Congress after a decade out of office. Paul tells C-SPAN that he was ready after the long hiatus to return to Washington, but that’s not the big catch in this clip. Starting at 1:45, Ron Paul explains that his private sector efforts are keeping him too busy — and starts plugging his newsletters:
What Ron Paul Thinks of America – Ron Paul’s supporters are sure of one thing: Their candidate has always been consistent—a point Dr. Paul himself has been making with increasing frequency. It’s a thought that comes up with a certain inevitability now in those roundtables on the Republican field. One cable commentator genially instructed us last Friday, “You have to give Paul credit for sticking to his beliefs.”
He was speaking, it’s hardly necessary to say, of a man who holds some noteworthy views in a candidate for the presidency of the United States. One who is the best-known of our homegrown propagandists for our chief enemies in the world. One who has made himself a leading spokesman for, and recycler of, the long and familiar litany of charges that point to the United States as a leading agent of evil and injustice, the militarist victimizer of millions who want only to live in peace.
Flipper: Romney changes stance on Iraq invasion – Romney’s statement on MSNBC is not only a change from what he said on Fox a few days ago. It’s also a change from his position during his first run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2007-2008. In a January 2008 GOP debate in Florida, Romney was asked, “Was the war in Iraq a good idea worth the cost in blood and treasure we have spent?” Romney answered: “It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported it at the time; I support it now.”
Paul abandons interview concerning controversial newsletters – Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) took off his microphone and left a contentious interview on Wednesday when a CNN reporter asked repeatedly about racist articles published in his newsletter in the 1980s and 1990s.
“It’s been going on 20 years that I’ve been pestered about this and CNN does it every time,” Paul said, clearly adjitated by the line of questioning. “When are you going to wear yourself out?”
The Texas congressman said that the articles – which did not carry a byline – were written by his publishing staff and that he did not know about them at the time.
“I didn’t write them, I didn’t read them at the time, and I disavow them. That is the answer,” Paul said.
When CNN reporter Gloria Berger defended her questioning as legitimate – noting that some of the articles were “pretty incendiary” – Paul began to remove his microphone.
The newsletters, mainly a forum for essay’s on Paul’s brand of libertarianism, once referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as “the world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours” and who “seduced underage girls and boys.”
In another article, the author writes that “given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”
Mitt Romney Says ‘Yes’ To Deporting President Obama’s Uncle – Presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a Boston talk radio host on Wednesday that he supports the deportation of President Obama’s Kenyan-born uncle who was arrested this fall on drunken driving charges in Massachusetts.
When asked by Boston radio personality Howie Carr whether the president’s relative, Onyango Obama, should be deported, Romney said, “the answer is ‘yes.’”
“Well, if the laws of the United States say he should be deported, and I presume they do, then of course we should follow those laws,” Romney said. “And the answer is ‘yes.’”
When Carr brought up Onyango Obama case, Romney first sought clarification: “Who is Uncle Omar, Howie?” the former Massachusetts governor asked the radio host.
Carr explained that the uncle, nicknamed “Omar,” was recently arrested in Framingham, Mass.
“Now he’s claiming he’s got a Social Security number and drivers’ license and no one knows how he got them,” Carr told Romney, “but they’re apparently legit even though he’s in the country illegally.” (Onyango Obama had reportedly defied a 1992 deportation order.)
Said Gingrich: “I’ll tell you what. If he wants to test the heat, I’ll meet him anywhere in Iowa next week, one-on-one, 90 minutes no moderator, just a timekeeper. He wants to try out the kitchen? I’ll debate him anywhere. We’ll bring his ads, and he can defend [them].”
Ron Paul Storms Out Of CNN Interview – Ron Paul walked out of an interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger, following a heated exchange over the controversy regarding racist newsletters sent in his name during the 1990s. Borger asked the Congressman if he had ever read the newsletters. “Did you ever object when you read them?”
“Why don’t you go back and look at what i said yesterday on CNN and what I’ve said for 20 something years. 22 years ago? I didn’t write them, I disavow them, That’s it.”
“But you made money off them,”
“I was still practicing medicine,” Paul responded. “That’s probably why I wasn’t a very good publisher, I had to make a living.”
Tom Del Beccaro, Chairman of the California Republican Party Response to ProPublica Report – “The ProPublica report vindicates my repeated contention that the redistricting process was hijacked. That report, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. The corruption of the process went far beyond what was disclosed in that report. No fair minded person can now say the process or the result was fair. I am calling for an immediate and thorough investigation, by Congressional and State authorities, to get to the bottom of this obviously corrupted process. Beyond that, the Congressional and Senate lines as drawn by the Commission should not be used in any way for the upcoming elections.”
How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission – This spring, a group of California Democrats gathered at a modern, airy office building just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. The meeting was House members only — no aides allowed — and the mission was seemingly impossible.
In previous years, the party had used its perennial control of California’s state Legislature to draw district maps that protected Democratic incumbents. But in 2010, California voters put redistricting in the hands of a citizens’ commission where decisions would be guided by public testimony and open debate.
Democrats skew redistricting effort to their benefit, investigation finds – California’s congressional Democrats ran a secret effort earlier this year to manipulate the work of the independent citizen’s panel that drew the state’s new political districts, foiling the intent of reformers who sought to remove the redistricting process from the control of party bosses.
Democrats met behind closed doors at the party’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, hired consultants, drew their ideal districts and presented maps to the panel through proxies who never disclosed their party ties or “public interest” groups created specifically for the purpose. In many cases, the panel responded by doing just what the Democrats wanted.
The New York-based nonprofit investigative foundation ProPublica released findings Wednesday from a months-long reconstruction of the Democrats’ stealth redistricting strategy, relying on internal memos, emails, interviews and map analysis.
The success of the strategy has Democrats projecting they may pick up as many as seven congressional seats in 2012 under new district boundaries adopted last summer, far more than had been expected originally.
“Every member of the Northern California Democratic Caucus has a ticket back to D.C.,” crowed one internal memo. “This is a huge accomplishment that should be celebrated by advocates throughout the region.”
These are my links for December 21st from 08:15 to 13:30:
Perry Super PAC Smashes Mitt, Newt in New Ad – Texas-topper-backing “Make Us Great Again” buys IA and SC TV time for new 30-second spot dumping the oppo file on the two frontrunners.
Announcer: “Decades ago Gingrich goes to Washington. Romney runs pro-choice campaign for Senate.”
Read the script below.
SCRIPT: Decades ago Gingrich goes to Washington. Romney runs pro-choice campaign for Senate. Gingrich found guilty of ethics violations. Mitt creates Romneycare. Gingrich joins Pelosi in support of global warming. Support TARP bank bailout. Collects big bucks from Freddie Mac. Rick Perry creates a million new jobs, cuts taxes, reduces regulations; the proven conservative.
Make a deal on the payroll tax, and come back for more – The Journal editors suggest: “At this stage, Republicans would do best to cut their losses and find a way to extend the payroll holiday quickly. Then go home and return in January with a united House-Senate strategy that forces Democrats to make specific policy choices that highlight the differences between the parties on spending, taxes and regulation. Wisconsin freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been floating a useful agenda for such a strategy. The alternative is more chaotic retreat and the return of all-Democratic rule.”
Johnson is suggesting implementing seven of the spending-cut ideas from the Simpson-Bowles debt commission, which amount to a cut of $655 billion over 10 years. These are relatively noncontroversial items such as reducing congressional and White House budgets by 15 percent, imposing a three-year freeze on federal workers’ pay, reducing the size of the federal workforce and selling excess government real estate. In other words, Johnson is asking if his colleagues can’t at the very least agree to chop the low-hanging fruit in the budget.
Well, it would have been nice if the supercommittee could have managed that, or if that kind of package of cuts could have been presented as a full year offset for the payroll tax reduction. But that’s for next year.
The GOP, if it has not the wherewithal to oppose a payroll tax reduction (When will Congress ever have the nerve to increase it and stem further hemorrhaging of funds available for Social Security? Why not cut the entire tax, according to the Democrats’ logic?), then cut a deal and come back to finish the work in 2012. If the Democrats want another 10 months of payroll tax relief, then Republicans should get something for that (e.g. more cuts, a definitive decision on the pipeline). Just not now. In January.
Capitol Stand-off: Republicans Caving? – My prediction: House Republicans will soon – probably within 24 hours – cave in and accept the two-month extension of the payroll tax cut passed last week by the Senate.
I base this on conversations with House Republicans who know they are losing the public relations battle and losing it badly. They know they are taking the blame for a stand-off that threatens to raise taxes on 160 million Americans. And they cannot let that happen.
As one top House Republican aide just told me: “I do not expect taxes to go up on January 1st.”
At this point, there is really only one way for taxes not to go up on January 1st: House Republicans need to fold. Democrats won’t give in because they are completely confident that House Republicans will take the blame for the impasse. And Republicans don’t disagree.
Republicans are now searching for a face-saving way to give up. The most likely scenario would be for Democrats to agree to negotiations on a full-year extension to begin as soon as next week – but only after the House passes the two-month extension.
The Senate is gone. The House has left behind a few stragglers to sit on a conference committee that may never meet. The president’s still around but itching to go to Hawaii to be with his family. Christmas is coming. Hanukkah is here.
The decision by House Republicans to deep-six a bipartisan deal to extend a payroll tax cut has left that party divided and given Democrats an issue with which to hammer them throughout the holidays. House leaders insist theirs is the principled stand because they want a year-long extension, not a two-month one.
But right now, they are hearing it from all sides, including the influential Wall Street Journal editorial board, no friend to Democrats.
Texas Gains the Most in Population Since the Census – Texas gained more people than any other state between April 1, 2010, and July 1, 2011 (529,000), followed by California (438,000), Florida (256,000), Georgia (128,000) and North Carolina (121,000), according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates for states and Puerto Rico. Combined, these five states accounted for slightly more than half the nation’s total population growth.
“These are the first set of Census Bureau population estimates to be published since the official 2010 Census state population counts were released a year ago,” said Census Bureau Director Robert Groves. “Our nation is constantly changing and these estimates provide us with our first measure of how much each state has grown or declined in total population since Census Day 2010.”
The United States as a whole saw its population increase by 2.8 million over the 15-month period, to 311.6 million. Its growth of 0.92 percent between April 1, 2010, and July 1, 2011, was the lowest since the mid-1940s.
“The nation’s overall growth rate is now at its lowest point since before the baby boom,” Groves said.
California remained the most populous state, with a July 1, 2011, population of 37.7 million. Rounding out the top five states were Texas (25.7 million), New York (19.5 million), Florida (19.1 million) and Illinois (12.9 million).
Gingrich to House GOP: Give In on Payroll Tax – Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who famously lost budget battles to President Bill Clinton amid two government shutdowns, had some advice to House Republicans at loggerheads with another Democratic president: Give in.
“Incumbent presidents have enormous advantages. And I think what Republicans ought to do is what’s right for America. They ought to do it calmly and pleasantly and happily,” Mr. Gingrich said when asked about the clash between President Barack Obama and House Republicans over extension of the payroll tax cut.
Mr. Gingrich made it clear he favored a one-year extension of the two-percentage point payroll tax cut, which expires Jan. 1, not the two-month extension that passed the Senate with bipartisan support. He called the Senate bill “an absurd dereliction of duty.”
“Obama is so inept as a president, and the Congress is so dysfunctional as an institution, that we are lurching from failure to failure to failure,” Mr. Gingrich said.
He offered sympathy to House Speaker John Boehner for having to negotiate with “a Senate majority leader who is totally disruptive and a president who is basically campaigner-in-chief, who has no interest in solving the problems of the American people.”
But he said resistance was doomed.
“It’s very hard for the legislative branch to outperform the president in communications,” he said. “He has all the advantages of being one person. He has all the advantages of the White House as a backdrop, and my experience is presidents routinely win.”
Despite the candidate’s success in expanding his political brand in recent weeks and months, those who support him remain a very distinct segment of the Republican electorate, as evidenced by a new poll in Iowa.
The Iowa State University/Gazette/KCRG survey is the latest poll to show Paul leading in the Hawkeye State’s caucuses. His 27.5 percent-to-25.3 percent lead on Newt Gingrich is within the margin of error, but it reflects a race that appears to be headed in the good doctor’s direction.
News from The Associated Press – OUCH “@AP: France ponders drastic move: telling 30,000 women to remove risky breast implants: -CC”
Scribd Protests SOPA By Making A Billion Pages On The Web Disappear – The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is delayed in Congress, but it is definitely not dead. The media company lobbyists and their Congressmen (hello, Lamar Smith!) are simply regrouping. Some of the more controversial aspects of the bill include transferring liability for copyright infringement to sites that host user-generated content and blocking that content via DNS servers.
To highlight the chilling effect this legislation could have on free speech on te Internet, today document-sharing site Scribd is protesting SOPA by making every document disappear word-by-word when you vist the site. All in all, there are a billion pages of documents on the Scribd. “With this legislation in place, entire domains like Scribd could simply vanish from the web,” warns Jared Friedman, CTO and co-founder, Scribd.
GOP shuts down House on Dems’ payroll-tax gambit – House Democrats tried Wednesday to force a vote on the Senate’s two-month extension of the payroll-tax cut, but Republicans gaveled the House closed to prevent them from having a chance, as top GOP leaders huddled down the hall to try to figure a way out of the mess.
The House was set to hold a pro forma session, but two top Democrats, Reps. Steny H. Hoyer and Chris Van Hollen, demanded to be recognized to try to force a vote on the two-month extension. House Republicans have blocked that deal, which is strongly backed by President Obama, and are holding out for an extension that covers all of 2012.
Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who was serving as the presiding officer, banged his gavel to close the session Wednesday morning even as the two Democrats were demanding to be recognized.
“You’re walking out, you’re walking away, just as so many Republicans have walked away from middle-class taxpayers,,” Mr. Hoyer shouted after Mr. Fitzpatrick as he marched off the floor, leaving the two Democrats, both from Maryland, to themselves in the cavernous chamber.
These are my links for December 20th through December 21st:
Paul now top pick in new ISU/Gazette/KCRG Poll, but voters still uncertain – A new Iowa State University/Gazette/KCRG poll of 330 likely Iowa Republican caucus goers finds Ron Paul in the top spot among GOP presidential candidates with 27.5 percent, followed closely by Newt Gingrich with 25.3 percent. Paul’s lead over Gingrich is within the poll’s margin of error at plus or minus 5 percentage points.
Mitt Romney is in third place at 17.5 percent, while Rick Perry is the only other candidate to poll in double digits at 11.2.
Congress leaves town with an uneasy stalemate and looming payroll tax hike – “Let’s be clear: Right now the bipartisan compromise reached on Saturday is the only viable way to prevent a tax hike on January 1,” Obama said not long after the House vote. “Do not play brinksmanship. The American people are weary of it, tired of it. They expect better.”
House Republicans rejected the deal 229 to 193, with no Democratic votes, to set aside the Senate deal. GOP critics argued that the two-month deal would inject new uncertainty into a still-sluggish economy. They said they were prepared to work through the holidays to reach a deal.
WSJ: GOP a ‘circular firing squad’ – In a devastating blow to congressional Republicans, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board blasted the GOP’s leaders on the Hill Wednesday for botching the political battle against President Barack Obama and Democrats on the payroll tax issue, arguing the party has drowned out its small victories “in the sounds of their circular firing squad.”
The editorial was headlined, “The GOP’s payroll tax fiasco: How did Republicans manage to lose the tax issue to Obama?”
Reps. Charlie Bass of New Hampshire, Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington state, Chris Gibson of New York, Tim Johnson of Illinois, Walter Jones of North Carolina, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Frank Wolf of Virginia all voted against sending the bill to conference. The measure, which passed 229-193, continues the legislative stalemate on Capitol Hill.
Some of the votes against sending the bill to conference appeared to be a tacit acknowledgement of the political risks House Republicans could face in the year end fight over extending the payroll tax holiday.
“I support continuing the payroll tax cut, extending unemployment insurance and making sure Medicare patients have access to the medical care they need. I had hoped the Senate would have agreed that a year extension is better than 2 months. But I know that families in Southwest Washington [state] are struggling to make ends meet, and I wanted to eliminate any of their fear that this relief wouldn’t be in place Jan. 1,” Herrera Beutler said in a statement to POLITICO.
Why House Republicans Won’t Win on the Payroll Tax Cut Extension – With the Wall Street Journal editorial page already calling on House Republicans to surrender in their fight over a payroll tax cut extension, First Read gives three reasons why the House GOP is unlikely to win this fight:
“Reason #1: House Republicans allowed the Senate to break for the Christmas holiday without explicit orders it would need to come back. In fact, Politico notes that the silence from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is deafening. Reason #2: The Senate passed its legislation by a bipartisan 89-10 vote, raising the question whether a conference committee could produce a deal that could get 60-plus Senate votes. Reason #3: The House GOP didn’t allow an up-or-down vote on the Senate bill, suggesting that it could have passed if they did. Those three reasons will be hard for the House GOP to explain away if the tax cut expires after Dec. 31.”
SOPA online piracy bill markup postponed – The House Judiciary Committee confirmed Tuesday that it will delay continuing debate on the Stop Online Piracy Act until after Congress returns from its winter recess.
Committee spokeswoman Kim Smith said in an e-mailed statement that the hearing is expected to be scheduled for “early next year.”
After two days of heated debate last week, the committee adjourned its markup session on the measure without a vote. The debate over SOPA has been framed as a fight between old media and new media. Organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America have been backing the bill, while Internet firms such as Reddit have been mobilizing their users against it.
These are my links for December 15th through December 20th:
Obama’s job-approval rating is highest since summer – After a difficult summer and a contentious fall, President Obama’s job-approval ratings are showing signs of improvement — a crucial indicator of his reelection chances as he seeks to overcome voters’ doubts about his economic stewardship.A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that Americans are still broadly disapproving of Obama’s handling of the economy and jobs, the top issues, but that views of his overall performance have recovered among key groups, including independents, young adults and seniors.
Gingrich’s Lead Dries Up in National Polls – Newt Gingrich’s lead in the GOP presidential race is disappearing as the former House speaker comes under heavy attack from his rivals, according to three new national polls.Gingrich had surged to the top of the ballot in recent weeks, leading his fellow GOP candidates in several polls by double digits. But an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Tuesday finds him tied with Romney for first. They each receive 30 percent support from registered voters. The pair, though, holds a substantial lead over the rest of the field. Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who has been running negative ads against Gingrich, has 15 percent. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann receives 7 percent, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has 6 percent, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum garners 4 percent support. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman sits at the bottom of the poll with 2 percent.
Obama is the Fourth Best President? – President Obama told 60 Minutes — in a portion of the interview that did not air — that his accomplishments so far as president rank pretty high historically.Said Obama: “The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do. And we’re gonna keep on at it.”
What if Ron Paul wins Iowa? – If he should win, Iowa caucus goers will rightly be the target of widespread anger and disdain from the mainstream and conservative media as well as a great many in the party, both from establishment and Tea Party quarters. An Iowa state operative, rather defensively, insisted to me that it would be wrong to take a Ron Paul win out on Iowa or strip it of its first-in-the-nation status. “Ron Paul proves a point — if you run the three-pronged traditional caucus approach: advertise here, send mailers and visit often — anyone can do well — EVEN Ron Paul. Iowa isn’t a place that ‘wins’ the nomination it’s a place that ‘winnows’ the path to the nomination.” That’s just not going to fly when the flogging of Republicans begins, labeling Iowans as a bunch of racist loons. If Iowa can’t sniff out such characters, why put it in charge of the winnowing?As far as the race itself goes, it will certainly burst the Newt Gingrich bubble, suggesting that his 15 minutes (four or five weeks?) of fame are over and casting down on his organizational abilities. For the candidates who finish back in the back (e.g., Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum), Iowa would be a reprieve, allowing them to argue, in essence, that the whole thing was an aberration, before they move on to “real” contests in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida.
The Company Ron Paul Keeps – Yet a subsequent report by Reason found that Ron Paul & Associates, the defunct company that published the newsletters and which counted Paul and his wife as officers, reported an income of nearly $1 million in 1993 alone. If this figure is reliable, Paul must have earned multiple millions of dollars over the two decades plus of the newsletters’ existence. It is incredible that he had less than an active interest in what was being printed as part of a subscription newsletter enterprise that earned him and his family millions of dollars. Ed Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, said Paul told him that “his best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for the Spotlight, the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust denier Willis Carto.”This sordid history would not bear repeating but for the fact that the media love to portray Paul as a truth-telling, antiwar Republican standing up to the “hawkish” conservative establishment. Otherwise, the newsletters, and Paul’s continued failure to name their author, would be mentioned in every story about him, and he would be relegated to the fringe where he belongs. But Paul has escaped the sort of media scrutiny that would bury other political figures. A December 15 profile of Paul in the Washington Post, for instance, affectionately described his love of gardening and The Sound of Music and judged that “world events have conspired to make him look increasingly on point”—all without any mention of the newsletter controversy. Though present at nearly every Republican debate, he has yet to be asked about the newsletters. Had Paul’s persona and views changed significantly since 2008, this oversight might be understandable. But he continues to say and do things suggesting that, far from disowning the statements he has claimed “do not represent what I believe or have ever believed,” he still believes them.
Auto-insurance researchers: ‘Cell phone bans don’t help reduce crashes’ – All those fancy in-car docks and voice navigation? Utterly pointless. At least according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, who reckons that it’s not the phone that’s the issue, but “the full spectrum of things that distract.” The IIHS (funded by a group of car insurers) compared crash data between states that had instituted cell phone bans and those that hadn’t. According to its research, while the ban had reduced phone use (whoa, really?), it hadn’t helped reduce crash rates. The National Transportation Safety Board has presented several studies linking cell phone use to an increased chance of crashing and their latest proposals would ban most hands-free systems found in major car makers’ vehicles today. Hear that? That was the sound of hundreds of third-party accessory manufacturers recoiling in horror.
The 25 Best Social Media Books of 2011 – It seems like only yesterday that I was writing my review of the best social media books of 2010, a list that included only 15 selections. Time flies so fast and 2012 is just around the corner, so it’s time to reveal my picks for best books of 2011. Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for you, I had a hard time narrowing down the list to 15 so I have increased the number to 25 books. There were simply too many great additions to literature that exists on social in 2011 to be limiting. This is certainly a reflection of both the maturity of social media in the marketplace as well as the importance that certain publishers (notably Wiley) have placed on releasing books with social media as their main subject matter.Before I start off with my recommended social media books of the year, we always must first begin with those classics that were updated and revised for 2011 that should be on anyone’s wish list for the holidays. These include:
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies [Expanded and Revised Edition] by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web. Revised and Updated by Brian Solis
The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly [3rd Edition] by David Meerman Scott
The Social Media Survival Guide: Strategies, Tactics, and Tools for Succeeding in the Social Web by Deltina Hay
GOP Debate: Fox gets glowing reviews – Given that some of those dastardly “mainstream media” reporters within the Beltway have been known to rib Fox News’ journalism from time to time, it’s been notable to see a clear trend emerge from the Republican debates in 2011: The faceoffs hosted by Fox have been some of the most lauded by media observers – even by some liberal commentators.Thursday’s debate in Sioux City, Iowa, won four-star reviews.
In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011 – Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.
AP-GfK Poll: Obama Re-Election Odds Roughly 50-50 – Entering 2012, President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects are essentially a 50-50 proposition, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. It found that most Americans say the president deserves to be voted out of office even though they have concerns about the Republican alternatives.Obama’s overall standing in the poll suggests he could be in jeopardy of losing re-election even as the survey showed that public’s outlook on the economy appears to be improving. For the first time since spring, more people said the economy got better in the past month than said it got worse. The president’s approval rating on unemployment shifted upward — from 40 percent in October to 45 percent in the latest poll — as the jobless rate fell to 8.6 percent last month, its lowest level since March 2009.
The poll found Americans were evenly divided over whether they expect Obama to be re-elected next year.
For the first time, the poll found that a majority of adults, 52 percent, said Obama should be voted out of office while 43 percent said he deserves another term. The numbers mark a reversal since last May, when 53 percent said Obama should be re-elected while 43 percent said he didn’t deserve four more years.
Obama’s overall job approval stands at a new low, with 44 percent approving and 54 percent disapproving. The president’s standing among independents is worse: Thirty-eight percent approve while 59 percent disapprove. Among Democrats, the president holds steady with an approval rating of 78 percent while only 12 percent of Republicans approve of the job he’s doing.
Nikki Haley to Endorse Romney – RT @politicalwire: Nikki Haley endorses Romney, giving him a potential boost in South Carolina…
Carlos the Jackal sentenced to life, again – Carlos the Jackal, the flamboyant Venezuelan who symbolized Cold War terrorism, was sentenced to life in prison – again – in a Paris trial that ended late Thursday with him rallying for revolution and weeping for Moammar Gadhafi.Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, hasn’t seen freedom since French agents spirited him out of Sudan in a sack in 1994. He’s already serving a life sentence in a French prison for a triple murder in 1975, the worst punishment meted out in a country that does not have the death penalty.
Once one of world’s most-wanted men, the former gun-for-hire and self-proclaimed revolutionary was escorted out of his cell and back to court last month to face charges that he instigated four bombings in France in 1982 and 1983 that killed 11 people and injured more than 140 others.
Just before midnight Thursday, the court found Ramirez guilty in all four attacks, and sentenced him to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 18 years.
Combative and defiant throughout the six-week trial, the 62-year-old Ramirez denied any role in the attacks.
This section specifically affirms that the President has the authority to deny due process to any American it charges with “substantially supporting al Qaeda, the Taliban or any ‘associated forces’” – whatever that means.
Would “substantial support” of an “associated force,” mean linking a web-site to a web-site that links to a web-site affiliated with al-Qaeda? We don’t know. The question is, “do we really want to find out?”
We’re told not to worry – that the bill explicitly states that nothing in it shall alter existing law.
But wait.
There is no existing law that gives the President the power to ignore the Bill of Rights and detain Americans without due process. There is only an assertion by the last two presidents that this power is inherent in an open-ended and ill-defined war on terrorism. But it is a power not granted by any act of Congress. At least, not until now.
What this bill says is, “What Presidents have only asserted, Congress now affirms in statute.”
Gingrich Momentum Slows, Polls Suggest – National polls are less important than those in Iowa and New Hampshire, but there’s a worrying number for Mr. Gingrich here as well. The Gallup tracking poll, which has a larger sample size than most other surveys, shows Mr. Gingrich’s lead over Mr. Romney down to 5 points, 29 percent to 24 percent. A week and a half ago, when the Gallup poll made its debut, Mr. Gingrich’s lead was 15 points.What’s interesting about the Gallup poll is that Mr. Romney’s support has not increased very much; instead, the number of undecided voters has grown, which is fairly unusual at a critical stage of a primary campaign. This suggests that the race remains quite fluid, but that fluidity may no longer be working to Mr. Gingrich’s benefit.
The great Gingrich crash of ’11? – Primary doomsayers are a dime a dozen during the campaign season, but there’s enough evidence out this morning to suggest that Gingrich may — may — be going down in Iowa.First, the polls. On the Real Clear Politics aggregate polling data for Iowa, Gingrich has fallen from a 31-point high to 27.2. He’s still way out ahead of the pack (Romney has 18, Paul 16.7), but if history is any guide, falls in Iowa are irreversible. The three other candidates to surge in Iowa — Bachmann, Perry, and Cain — were never able to gain points on the RCP aggregate after they started losing them.
Second, the Intrade numbers: Over the last two days, Gingrich’s closing value crashed 15 points, his most precipitous fall on the online exchange site since his surge began.
Newt’s loot: Billionaire commits $20M – Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is planning to direct $20 million to an outside group backing Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, multiple sources told POLITICO – the first answer to urgent pleas from allies to the former speaker’s long-time billionaire supporters.After leaving Congress, Gingrich cultivated a network of a few dozen uber-wealthy backers who poured tens of millions of dollars into a network of groups that helped him maintain a foothold in politics. Now, operatives supporting his presidential campaign are asking those same donors to write fat checks to a suite of new super PACs they hope can spend big on ads to offset Gingrich campaign fundraising that had lagged behind his rivals.
Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax – President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.
In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).
To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees.
Acting Administrator Shipman had the temerity to say the 15-cent mandatory Christmas tree fee “is not a tax nor does it yield revenue for the Federal government” (76 CFR 69102). The Federal government mandates that the Christmas tree sellers pay the 15-cents per tree, whether they want to or not. The Federal government directs that the revenue generated by the 15-cent fee goes to the Board appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture to carry out the Christmas tree program established by the Secretary of Agriculture. Mr. President, that’s a new 15-cent tax to pay for a Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.
Nobody is saying President Obama doesn’t have authority to impose his new Christmas Tree Tax — his Administration cites the Commodity Promotion, Research and Information Act of 1996. Just because the Obama Administration has the legal power to impose its Christmas Tree Tax doesn’t mean it should do so.
Mitt Romney will be the nominee because the other candidates, right now, are a pretty pathetic lot.
The base will not forgive Rick Perry his immigration sins. In fact, that has hurt him far more than his debate performances, but his debate performances have hurt him badly. Perry, who came out principled and fiery with a record others could only envy, has left others with the impression that he’s a poor man’s version of the village idiot, which in the SEC we call “Aggies”. Maybe he can turn it around.
Newt Gingrich will not be the nominee because, despite his daughter’s rebuttals to the horror stories of how Gingrich divorced his first of three wives, Jackie Gingrich told the Washington Post on January 3, 1985, “He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery.”
Gingrich went on to cheat on the second wife with the third. Regardless of the actual facts or even the spin, he won’t win women.
Herman Cain won’t be the nominee because he can’t win women either. Regardless of what you think of the Politico story, Cain’s handling of the story has been an epic disaster. He’s down at least 10 points with women in Iowa. He’s falling even further and doesn’t even realize it. He’s largely been emboldened by a conservative media that is so used to standing by its men that too few are telling Herman that he is now at the point where he must actually sit and answer questions whether he wants to or not and whether he feels maligned or not and whether I think he should have to or not. If he loses women by as big as he is starting to lose the women, he cannot win.
So Mitt Romney will be the nominee. Conservatives will not rally together with the least of the bad alternatives and Romney, like John McCain before him, will run up the middle to the nomination. But, just like McCain, Romney will not beat Barack Obama.
Issue 2 falls, Ohio collective bargaining law repealed – Ohioans voted Tuesday night to repeal a Republican-backed law that restricted collective bargaining for public workers, a victory for Democrats and labor organizers both nationally and in the state.
AP has declared Issue 2 (as the law was called on the ballot) dead. As of this writing, with about a quarter of precincts in, repeal led by a whopping 63 to 37 percent margin.
Gov. John Kasich (R) took office in January vowing to curb unions’ power. But he appears to have overstepped his hand in curtailing the rights of 350,000 public workers — including firefighters and police officers — to negotiate over benefits, equipment and other issues.
The backlash against the law began as soon as Kasich signed it, in March. By August, when the governor asked for a compromise with unions, it was too late.
As in other states, the law became a battleground for an ongoing fight between labor and conservative groups over collective bargaining. In Wisconsin, after Gov. Scott Walker (R) eliminated collective bargaining for many public employees, Democrats and labor failed to take back the state Senate in recall elections. Now, unions have their first bonafide win.
By including firefighters and police officers in the legislation, Republicans in Ohio set themselves up for a far more difficult fight. Wisconsin’s collective bargaining law made exceptions for both.
Herman Cain: Harassment charge is ‘baseless, bogus and false’ – Republican Herman Cain directly confronted allegations on Tuesday that he had sexually harassed women, saying his latest accuser had lied and promising to continue his quest for the presidency.
Addressing the controversy before a throng of reporters in suburban Phoenix, Cain said he had no recollection of ever meeting Sharon Bialek, the woman who went public Monday and accused him of groping her in a car after the two dined together in Washington 14 years ago. Cain called her account “baseless, bogus and false” and said Bialek and three other women who have accused him of sexual harassment are part of a coordinated effort to attack his character and derail his campaign.
“We are not going to allow Washington or politics to deny me the opportunity to represent this great nation,” Cain said, adding that he would be willing to take a lie-detector test. “As far as these accusations causing me to back off and maybe withdraw from this presidential primary race — ain’t gonna happen.”
The controversy over the charges escalated just minutes before Cain’s news conference, when one of the previously anonymous women accusing him of inappropriate behavior decided to reveal her name after it appeared on news sites. She urged the other accusers to hold a news conference with her.
Karen Kraushaar, 55, now a communications official for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, filed a claim of sexual harassment against Cain when he headed the National Restaurant Association and she was an employee there in the 1990s. She received a payment when she left the organization, but Cain, who disputed the allegations at the time, was not a party to the agreement.
“The reason sexual harassment is so difficult to prove is that workplace sexual predators try to make sure the victim is alone when the harassment takes place,” she wrote in an e-mail after Cain’s news conference.
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But a CNBC spokesman tells me that the cable network has reserved the right to ask such questions at tomorrow’s debate in Michigan, which is supposed to be focused on the economy.
“The debate will focus on jobs, taxes, the deficit and the health of our national economy, but there are no restrictions on questions,” spokesman Brian Steel wrote me in an email. “As for Herman Cain, he is scheduled to attend.”
Asked whether the Cain campaign had requested any question restrictions, Steel said all conversations with the various campaigns are off the record and declined to say one way or the other.
DeMint endorses Stenberg, sponsors fund-raising drive – Republican Senate candidate Don Stenberg on Tuesday got the endorsement he wanted.
South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, sometimes described as a kingmaker for candidates seeking conservative support, said Stenberg is “a lifelong conservative with the principles, integrity and courage needed to stand up to the big spenders in both political parties in Washington.”
Stenberg is “not only the strongest conservative in the race, but we also believe he’s the most electable,” DeMint said in a statement issued through his Senate Conservatives Fund website.
The five-candidate 2012 GOP Senate field includes Attorney General Jon Bruning, state Sen. Deb Fischer of Valentine, Pat Flynn of Schuyler and Spencer Zimmerman of Omaha.
Stenberg, Nebraska’s state treasurer, is a candidate with strong name recognition numbers, but scarce financial support.
A Senate candidate for the fourth time — he was the Republican nominee in 2000 — Stenberg entered October with $18,000 in campaign cash on hand compared to $1.6 million available to Bruning, the presumed Republican frontrunner.
The Texas Republican Congressman says he has no intention of launching an independent run for president if he loses the GOP presidential primary next year. But, if he happens to change his mind, polling suggests he could have a major impact on the identity of the next president.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that an independent bid from Paul would garner 18 percent of the national vote. Perhaps more important, it would swing the popular vote toward President Obama by a large margin — 44 percent to 32 percent in a hypothetical three-way matchup that also includes former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
In a head-to-head race with Romney, Obama leads by a far more narrow 49 percent to 43 percent.
“Dr. Paul has strong crossover appeal, and could do very well as an independent,” Paul campaign manager Jesse Benton told The Fix. “He has, however, decided to remain in the GOP, as he has for over 20 years in Congress, and use that appeal to beat President Obama as the Republican nominee.”
But, what if Paul doesn’t wind up as the GOP nominee? It’s not hard to see how a Paul third-party candidacy could create a nightmare scenario — albeit an unlikely one — for Republicans.
As we’ve discussed previously on this blog, a third-party bid is a very difficult undertaking, and there are relatively few politicians — we’re thinking Paul, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and self-promoter Donald Trump here — who could actually pull it off. A politician essentially needs vast personal wealth, name recognition or an extremely devoted following — and ideally all three. And, even then, they have precious little chance of winning.
Kraushaar was one of the two women originally mentioned in a POLITICO story that appeared Oct. 30. Kraushaar and another employee of the National Restaurant Association had complained about Cain’s behavior to colleagues and senior officials at the NRA, and both women left the trade group with a cash settlement. Kraushaar received about $45,000.
POLITICO initially had shielded Kraushaar’s identity to protect her privacy, but on Tuesday, Kraushaar agreed that her identity could be revealed.
Kraushaar, 55, said in an interview with POLITICO that she would like to band together with the other three women accusing Cain of harassment.
“That would be my preference, that we all go together in a joint press conference,” she said, noting that she’s turned down interview requests from a number of TV news shows.
Kraushaar said she had not talked to the other women about such an idea and that such a plan would be executed by their attorneys.
Now the spokesperson for IRS’s Inspector General, Kraushaar has worked as a career federal government official for different agencies in Washington. A Brown graduate, Kraushaar received a master’s degree from the University of Michigan and began her career as a print journalist.
On the details of Cain’s allegedly inappropriate behavior with the two women, POLITICO had a half-dozen sources shedding light on different aspects of the complaints.
Poll: Cain favorability slips with Republicans as allegations mount – Forty percent of Republicans have a less favorable view of Herman Cain after watching the press conference in which Sheila Bialek accused the GOP presidential candidate of groping her in a car, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.
39 percent of Republicans polled said they believe the allegations against the candidate are true. On Tuesday Cain accused Bialeck of lying, and said he doesn’t “remember knowing her.”
While recent polls show that Cain continues to match up well against his GOP rivals, a Gallup poll released on Tuesday showed Cain’s “positive intensity score” has plummeted in the week’s since the sexual harassment allegations were first made public.
Bialek is the fourth woman to accuse Cain of sexual harassment but the first to do so publicly. Cain has strongly denied the accusations, and his campaign responded by attacking Bialeck’s credibility on Tuesday, saying she has a “long and troubled” history.
NBC to Air ‘The Biggest Loser: Where Are They Now” Special on Wednesday, November 23 – November 8, 2011 – It’s an inspiring Thanksgiving special unlike any before on “The Biggest Loser,” when the holiday treat “The Biggest Loser: Where Are They Now?” premieres on Wednesday, November 23 (9-11 p.m. ET). Viewers can catch up with some of their favorite contestants from past seasons of the series, but they’ll also be treated for the first time ever to hilarious bloopers featuring the trainers, host Alison Sweeney and the contestants.
Alison Sweeney hosts the special, filmed before a live audience, and trainers Bob Harper, Anna Kournikova and Dolvett Quince will all be on hand to share their thoughts about the current season of the show. Cameras will also follow trainer Bob Harper through “a day in the life.” And a blooper reel adds to the fun, giving viewers a backstage pass to some of the funniest behind-the-scenes moments with the host, trainers and season 12 contestants.
One contestant makes a big surprise announcement, and another shares her emotional story of competing in one of the most difficult competitions in the world. And “The Biggest Loser” family comes together to help one of their own – season nine contestant Sam Poueu – and give an update on his condition following his terrible accident. Plus, cooking expert Aida Mollenkamp will prepare a healthy Thanksgiving feast for the trainers and past season contestants, and share great cooking tips as well.
Fan favorites like Abby Rike (season eight), Tara Costa (season seven), O’Neal Hampton (season nine) and season five winner Ali Vincent will reveal what they are up to now, along with season eight champ Danny Cahill and season 11 winner Olivia Ward. Viewers can also catch up with Hannah Curlee (season 11) and Jesse Atkins (season 10) as well as other popular players like season seven’s Sione Fa and Jerry and Estella Hayes, who give their updates via personal videos.
I attended the taping!
Cain surrogate warns “elites in conservative media” – Niger Innis, the national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality and a “volunteer adviser” for Herman Cain’s campaign, goes on Fox News to attack a group that hasn’t been terribly sympathetic to Cain’s woes — the “elites in the conservative media.”
“I would caution Karl [Rove], I would caution members of the conservative elite that sexual harassment today is being used as a powerful, political weapon the same way that the race card today is used as a powerful, political weapon.
And I would caution these elites in the conservative media, as well as in the liberal media: do you really think it’s just going to end — this political tool — with Herman Cain? I caution them to be careful about what they say.”
A little risky. Cain needs all the friends he can get right now, and this won’t make an already leery portion of the media think more hospitably of him.
By the way, here’s some more small evidence of the Cain campaign’s notoriously inept handling of all this.
At the beginning of the interview, Innis takes care to say he’s not speaking for the Cain campaign, but Fox News host Jon Scott later objected, saying that Fox News was told he was speaking for the campaign. By the end of the chat, it was unclear whom Innis was actually speaking for.
Sharon Bialek, 50, is the fourth woman — and the first publicly — to accuse the Republican presidential hopeful of sexual harassment. In a dramatic news conference Monday in New York, Bialek, a former employee of the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation, said she had sought Cain’s help in finding a new job in July 1997 shortly after the organization had fired her.
Instead, Bialek said, Cain, who was then head of the restaurant association, reached under her skirt while the two were seated in a parked car and attempted to move her head toward his crotch. Cain’s campaign quickly issued a denial, calling her allegations “completely false.”
Bialek said she shared her allegations with her then-boyfriend and another male friend shortly after her meeting with Cain. However, the man she is now engaged to said she did not tell him about her history with the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO until Friday night, when she told him she was going to New York for the news conference.
Her fiance, Mark Harwood, said he was in “a bit of shock” but admired her decision to come forward.
“It’s not an anti-political thing. It’s not a money thing,” said Harwood, who shares a large, five-bedroom home with Bialek in north suburban Mundelein. “She’s just trying to do the right thing, and that takes guts.”
The campaign released a memo to the press detailing what it characterized as Bialek’s “long and troubled” history, including a 1999 paternity dispute, to argue the public should trust Cain over his latest accuser.
“In stark contrast to Mr. Cain’s four decades spent climbing the corporate ladder rising to the level of CEO at multiple successful business enterprises, Ms. Bialek has taken a far different path,” the Cain release said.
“The fact is that Ms. Bialek has had a long and troubled history, from the courts to personal finances – which may help explain why she has come forward 14 years after an alleged incident with Mr. Cain, powered by celebrity attorney and long term Democrat donor Gloria Allred.”
The Cain campaign goes after Bialek’s employment history and legal record in making its case against her. It lists six civil lawsuits against Bialek, and suggests she has had a troubled worklife.
“Ms. Bialek has worked for nine employers over the last seventeen years,” the campaign writes.
Bialek on Monday held a New York press conference to highlight an incident in 1997 in which she said Cain sexually harassed and attempted to grope her. Cain has denied the charges.
At the time, Cain headed the National Restaurant Association, where Bialek worked for a short time in 1996 and 1997.
Bialek said she approached Cain for help in finding another job after she left the National Restaurant Association.
With Allred at her side, Bialek said Cain, after a dinner in Washington, had put his hand under her skirt and reached for her genitals. She also said Cain had taken her head and moved it toward his crotch.
When Bialek asked Cain to top, she said Cain said, “You want a job, right?”
Cain Catches Flak, but Will It Shoot Down His Candidacy?- Washington was all a-Twitter (literally) Monday over Politico’s story about the sexual-harassment charges against Herman Cain — and about Cain’s serial self-contradictions.Faithful Fox News viewers saw him in the afternoon saying he didn’t know the terms of a settlement reached with the complainants and then saw him tell Greta Van Susteren in the 10 p.m. hour that he did.
The Politico story, quoting no named sources, described Cain’s alleged misconduct as “conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature” and “physical gestures that were not overtly sexual.”
Ron Paul Fever at Zuccotti Park- I hear many names bandied about in Zuccotti Park, and not just at the fringes. Among the most popular are Karl Marx, Hugo Chávez, Michael Moore, Paul Ehrlich, and Dennis Kucinich. But today I heard a less predictable one spoken more widely: Ron Paul.There are three key reasons for this, I think. The first is a good old marriage of convenience, the same sort of unholy alliance as arose in the early 20th century when Baptists and bootleggers came together to argue for the prohibition of alcohol in America. You see, Ron Paul is angry, too, and he wants to “restore” America to its old ways. The majority of Paul’s policy positions may be radically different, but much of his rhetoric is in line with Occupy Wall Street’s, particularly his anti-Hamiltonian conviction that the banks have callously denatured the United States. For many, this alone is enough to make him an ally.
The protesters I spoke to today were predominantly appalled when I told them of Paul’s attitude towards Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the federal government in general, not to mention of his deregulatory zeal and staunch pro-life commitment. But, ultimately, this didn’t matter as much as the fact that he wants “change,” too. Revolution first, details later — we’ll just leave the specifics to Working Group 48.
Who Dropped the Dime on Cain? – Fred Thompson- In a case of an untimely death, the first thing the cops do when they arrive at the home of the deceased is to try to determine whether the death was the result of a self-inflicted wound and, if it wasn’t, whether a member of the family did it. Statistics show that these are good places to start looking. If the recent events surrounding sexual-harassment allegations against Herman Cain sink his campaign, the same postmortem may be appropriate.First, Cain’s self-inflicted wounds. When the allegations became public, he started defending himself with an unloaded gun. Even an admirably unconventional campaign cannot defy certain principles. One would be never to eat at a place with an “Eats” sign in the window. Another is that when it hits the fan, you should get your recollection and your facts as straight as you can before you start talking. You can’t outwit the media at their own game if you don’t know the game they’re playing. Now it’s not just about whether he was overly friendly with Miss Molly at the Fourth of July picnic — it’s also about catching him in inconsistencies.
If Cain sinks, will Gingrich benefit? – In the early summer of 2007, an over-the-hill John McCain, his campaign in shambles, was given up for dead in his race for the Republican presidential nomination. He wouldn’t give up, though, and by sheer force of will managed to grab his party’s spot on the ticket — and lead it to a crushing defeat.
In the early summer of 2011, an over-the-hill Newt Gingrich, his campaign in shambles, was given up for dead in his race for the Republican presidential nomination. He wouldn’t give up, though, and by sheer force of will has managed to talk himself back into contention for his party’s spot on the ticket. But do Republican voters really want to be led to another crushing defeat?
That, alas, is almost sure to happen if Gingrich is the Republican standard bearer. Like McCain, he’s quite old by any non-Reagan presidential standards (indeed, if inaugurated he would be just four months younger than Reagan was on his Inauguration Day). Like McCain, he has a nasty temper (although, to be fair, it’s nowhere near as nasty as McCain’s). Like McCain, he has a sordid history with, uh, relationships, although his is more well known than McCain’s and does not enjoy the excuse of a “pass” to re-sow wild oats due to brutal years in captivity.Short answer is: MAYBE.
Poll Watch: Voters Evenly Divided As to Whether Allegations Against Cain Are Serious and True- Two-thirds of America’s voters recognize that Herman Cain is the Republican candidate who has been accused of sexual harassment. Voters are evenly divided about the allegations and most Republicans believe the public airing of the charges suggest Cain is considered a serious threat to win the nomination.The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 39% believe the allegations against Cain are at least somewhat likely to be serious and true. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree and 23% are not sure. Those figures include 17% who believe it’s Very Likely and 11% who say Not at All Likely.
The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election- In the last four national elections, generational differences have mattered more than they have in decades. According to the exit polls, younger people have voted substantially more Democratic than other age groups in each election since 2004, while older voters have cast more ballots for Republican candidates in each election since 2006.The latest national polls suggest this pattern may well continue in 2012. Millennial generation voters are inclined to back Barack Obama for reelection by a wide margin in a matchup against Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who has run the strongest against Obama in many polls. By contrast, Silent generation voters are solidly behind Romney.
In between the youngest and the oldest voters are the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. Both groups are less supportive of Obama than they were in 2008 and are now on the fence with respect to a second term for the president.
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