links for 2008-12-04

Who will Sarah Palin endorse for RNC chair? Who's the Palin candidate? Saxby Chambliss's victory has certified the Palin wing of the party as the center of its gravity — at least, that's how the GOP seems to be treating things. If Chambliss's words are indicative of GOP thinking, Republican activists and conservatives, then Palin must have a pretty tight grip.

The answer to the question is that Palin hasn't endorsed an RNC candidate, and her political advisers aren't saying whether she will.
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Who is the high-profile candidate that will enter this week?

In a highly unusual move, 37 self-identified conservatives on the 168-member Republican National Committee have formed a group to vet candidates for the $200,300-a-year, elected post of Republican national chairman, The Washington Times has learned.

An e-mail in which the group dubbed itself the RNC Conservative Steering Committee defines its goal as to ensure the election of a reliably conservative national leader. The group of vetters, however, itself includes several of the candidates for national chairman.

The group was the brainchild of Solomon Yue, an RNC member from Oregon and himself a supporter of one of the candidates for national chairman, sitting RNC Chairman Robert M. "Mike" Duncan.
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Conflirct of interest for this group.

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is constitutionally ineligible to serve as Secretary of State in the Obama administration.

According to the Ineligibility Clause of the United States Constitution, no member of Congress can be appointed to an office that has benefited from a salary increase during the time that Senator or Representative served in Congress. A January 2008 Executive Order signed by President Bush during Hillary Clinton's current Senate term increased the salary for Secretary of State, thereby rendering Senator Clinton ineligible for the position.

The initiative’s proponents submitted 1,120,801 signatures for “The California Marriage Protection Act”; they needed only 694,354. The measure qualified on June 2, becoming Proposition 8.

Yada Yada Yada Why the Gay Marriage California Campaign failed – post mortem.

Election postmortems have been quick to scapegoat minorities for the loss. The right pointed out that African-Americans voted overwhelmingly against gay marriage; the left blasted Mormons who obeyed an unprecedented dictate from the church's leadership in Salt Lake City and donated 45 percent of the funds for a campaign to pass Prop 8.

But evidence of entrenched homophobia and religious intolerance obscure a more difficult truth. Prop 8 should have been defeated — two months before the election, it was down 17 points in the polls — but the gay-rights groups that tried to stop it ran a lousy campaign. According to veteran political observers, the No on Prop 8 effort was slow to raise money, ran weak and confusing ads, and failed to put together a grass-roots operation to get out the vote.

As an early step toward addressing the effects of Proposition 8, the anti-gay ballot initiative that amended the California state constitution and stripped the existing right to marry from gay and lesbian families earlier this month, the No on 8 campaign hosted a Virtual Town Hall meeting to discuss strategy and examine the ways in which the battle to preserve marriage equality failed.

In the wake of voter approval of the marriage ban, the No on 8 campaign has seen its advertising and its leadership criticized. A blog covering the meeting posted at Queerty providing a "play-by-play" account that started with a critique of the way the meeting was set up for computer users, with "Windows users who download proprietary software" able to join in while others were instructed to use phones.
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They question the messenger but not the message.

My LA Times email box exploded. (I was told by a bunch of folks that there were zillions of comments to the column, but when I checked this moring, the comments string seemed to be gone). For every "thank you" from a Mormon or a conservative (or a conservative Mormon), there was a "you filthy bigot" or "or you're a pinhead moron" email from the Left. For every "thank you" from a liberal or gay (or gay liberal), there was a "you're a pinhead moron" from the right because I'm not up in arms enough about the possibility of gay marriage. Amongst the hundreds and hundreds of missives there were thoughtful criticisms from all sides and generous praise, but also an enormous amount of vicious, ugly nastiness.
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An emotional issue for sure.