You mean the Republican party is being a republic instead of a democracy? Call the authorities! Democracy doesn't work when 80% of voters are uneducated or skewed by the mass media.
If “Republic" is the way the GOP politely refer to the "banana republic" that they seem to be running over there, sure.
Mitt probably brought Santorum into a back room and downed diet sodas with him until the two finally saw eye-to-eye.
What's with all this talk about RP's delegates? Romney has 796 and Paul only has 63. What am I not understanding?
I haven't seen any of the totals, but my guess is that you're looking at it as though popular vote within the states = automatic distribution of delegates (or winner-take-all in some states). But in a lot of the states the popular vote (which is what the media reports regarding who wins) doesn't really affect who the delegates go to. RP's camp is claiming they will be taking a large majority of delegates from Maine, Iowa, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and some other states that I forget. One of them he pretty much swept in terms of delegates in support of him (it was 25 out of 28, with the remaining 3 being automatically assigned to certain party members of the state), but I forget which one. I think it's hard for most of the states to say that any candidate "has delegates" until the convention is held. Of course, some states are binding, winner-take-all states, and Romney has won some of those I think, so those are certainly his delegates. It would be nice to see an explanation of exactly how many delegates are 100% certain for each candidate. In other words, how many of the chosen delegates have explicitly stated "I'll be a voice in support of Romney" or are otherwise required by the rules to be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_presidential_primaries,_2012 "Delegate Hard Count: This only includes bound delegates that have to vote for a candidate even if they support another candidate." Romney - 796 Paul - 63
So there's an obvious discrepancy between that information and this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/ron-paul-delegates_n_1473035.html?ref=politics RP's camp is claiming 20/28 delegates from Iowa. If you look at the wikipedia page and scroll down to the last big chart, it lists Iowa as non-binding, and says there are currently 25 officially unallocated delegates, so I'm not sure how they can conclude that Romney has them locked up.
Spoilers: No delegates are bound. tl;dw: Any delegate no matter how the state caucus or primary turned out, can vote for Ron Paul if he or she so chooses. This is a proven fact and written on paper, available to anyone, by the RNC's own legal team and top administers. All delegates may legally vote for Ron Paul if they feel he is the better candidate. Again, delegate binding isn't illegal and is not enforceable by any means.
I hope he splinters off and goes as an independent. If it meant getting enough votes to participate in the debates even I'd pretend to support him. I'd like to see a real alternative- even if a bad one- to Romney/Obama.
There is a perfectly viable libertarian candidate out there. I realize RP supporters are lemmings and will only vote the way he commands them to, but they should give Gary Johnson a second look.
He'd just split the republican vote with Romney if he did that. It would be similar to what happened with Ross Perot in 1992
He splits some from Obama, as well. I'd prefer Obama to Romney (barely), but I plan to vote for GJ, mostly because of the socially liberal views and non-interventionist foreign policy. He's claiming he might actually take more from Obama voters than Romney voters, because his social views are closer to what people wanted Obama to be than his economic views are to Romney supporters.
I am hoping he takes enough votes from Obummer to throw the election in Romney's favor. But if it's a close one I can see Obozo convincing/scaring up a lot of disaffected progressives to stick with Obowmao re: social issues and Mitt's creepy 1950's mindset on them. I just hope GJ can get a word in edgewise.
I just read one of the best op-eds I've ever read. Written by two Washington observers, one from a liberal think tank, one from a conservative think tank. Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates. It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted. We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. “Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach. It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct. The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post. What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. From the day he entered Congress in 1979, Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House: convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority. It took him 16 years, but by bringing ethics charges against Democratic leaders; provoking them into overreactions that enraged Republicans and united them to vote against Democratic initiatives; exploiting scandals to create even more public disgust with politicians; and then recruiting GOP candidates around the country to run against Washington, Democrats and Congress, Gingrich accomplished his goal. Ironically, after becoming speaker, Gingrich wanted to enhance Congress’s reputation and was content to compromise with President Bill Clinton when it served his interests. But the forces Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines, activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base — most recently represented by tea party activists — and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress. (Some of his progeny, elected in the early 1990s, moved to the Senate and polarized its culture in the same way.) Norquist, meanwhile, founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 and rolled out his Taxpayer Protection Pledge the following year. The pledge, which binds its signers to never support a tax increase (that includes closing tax loopholes), had been signed as of last year by 238 of the 242 House Republicans and 41 of the 47 GOP senators, according to ATR. The Norquist tax pledge has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible. For Republicans concerned about a primary challenge from the right, the failure to sign such pledges is simply too risky. Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented. In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade. On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices. Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations. The results can border on the absurd: In early 2009, several of the eight Republican co-sponsors of a bipartisan health-care reform plan dropped their support; by early 2010, the others had turned on their own proposal so that there would be zero GOP backing for any bill that came within a mile of Obama’s reform initiative. As one co-sponsor, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn’t have voted for it.” And seven Republican co-sponsors of a Senate resolution to create a debt-reduction panel voted in January 2010 against their own resolution, solely to keep it from getting to the 60-vote threshold Republicans demanded and thus denying the president a seeming victory. This attitude filters down far deeper than the party leadership. Rank-and-file GOP voters endorse the strategy that the party’s elites have adopted, eschewing compromise to solve problems and insisting on principle, even if it leads to gridlock. Democratic voters, by contrast, along with self-identified independents, are more likely to favor deal-making over deadlock. Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures. No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking. The GOP’s evolution has become too much for some longtime Republicans. Former senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraskacalled his party “irresponsible” in an interview with the Financial Times in August, at the height of the debt-ceiling battle. “I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics.” And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site. Shortly before Rep. West went off the rails with his accusations of communism in the Democratic Party, political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP. If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change. In the short run, without a massive (and unlikely) across-the-board rejection of the GOP at the polls, that will not happen. If anything, Washington’s ideological divide will probably grow after the 2012 elections. In the House, some of the remaining centrist and conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats have been targeted for extinction by redistricting, while even ardent tea party Republicans, such as freshman Rep. Alan Nunnelee (Miss.), have faced primary challenges from the right for being too accommodationist. And Mitt Romney’s rhetoric and positions offer no indication that he would govern differently if his party captures the White House and both chambers of Congress. We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public. Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends? Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support. Look ahead to the likely consequences of voters’ choices in the November elections. How would the candidates govern? What could they accomplish? What differences can people expect from a unified Republican or Democratic government, or one divided between the parties? In the end, while the press can make certain political choices understandable, it is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better.
I wish that was a yahoo news article so I could respond with a fake ultra-tea-party response for some good lols.
Anyway, it's a good article, but I think there needs to be more talk about how to solve the problem. I think that the suggestion of voting for Democrats has limited potential for success because most of the GOP voters can't be convinced that the Democratic Party isn't communist these days. A better suggestion, in my opinion, is for EVERYONE to participate in the Republican nomination process. Register Republican if necessary, and have a say in who the Republicans nominate. I don't know, it seems like Democrat voters are so ashamed to have the R brand on the books by their names that they would rather have a chance of an extremist like Santorum being in charge. What has to happen is for the Republican party to be completely infiltrated with moderate views, to push back the buildup in extremism to the dark corners where it was before. So why isn't this happening?
I think you're right about Democrats (like me) not wanting to go through the process of registering Republican to vote in their primaries and also not wanting to actually vote for any Republicans. But I also believe you can't solve problems like this until you can acknowledge the source of the problem. Articles like this one might help to get the attention of independents and moderate Republicans who are fed up with the bullshit. Problem is, public action doesn't seem to line up. Decent, moderate Republicans are dropping like flies to whackos like Allen West.
In line with that article: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/15/debt_ceiling_showdown_boehner_promises_more.html I agree that Obozo, should he be re-elected, just just issue an executive order of some kind negating Boehner's faggotry.
Right, that's why I think Democrats should infiltrate the GOP and then we can put a stop to that. The problem is that the extremists are deciding the primaries, and then the moderate Republicans and others who are unhappy with Obama end up feeling like they have no choice but to support the extremists. I guess I'm just saying that the Democrats have it completely, 100% in their power to destroy the influence of the tea party and extreme neo-conservatives, and they're not taking advantage of it at all.
I don't know if it's really that simple, though. You're talking about a sea change in attitudes and millions upon millions of people actively changing their voter registration just so they can vote in the opposing party's primaries in an effort to sway the candidate selection to a more moderate flavor. It would be the grandest conspiracy in the history of the planet
This will hopefully make RP's lemmings open their eyes: A top campaign official for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign says there’s “no chance” that the Texas Republican congressman will endorse Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson for president over presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney.“No,” campaign chairman Jesse Benton said in a response to a question from The Daily Caller about whether Paul would discuss the possibility of an endorsement with Johnson during a conference call with reporters on Tuesday. “There’s no chance of that.” …While that’s good news for Romney, Benton said he does “not believe that that is likely” Paul will endorse Romney, though he kept the option open.
Do the math. This is just my opinion and nothing more. I think it's time to stop the BS and just start telling everyone Ron Paul is going to win. Here is why. We have won. Iowa Massachusetts Minnesota Missouri Louisiana Colorado Alaska Maine Nevada States we are looking to win and doing VERY well in Oklahoma Michigan Washington South Dakota Montana Hawaii Virginia New Mexico Texas California Remember DELEGATES, not beauty contest. States we are going to have some delegates in if not a good amount. New York Delaware Pennsylvania Idaho Wyoming Arizona Mississippi Alabama Georgia Oregon Nebraska Tennessee Some of you are probably thinking how do you come up with this junk? It's easy look at the track record of what is going on here. Most of us did not think we could even make it this far. This is a mass grass roots movement and people are taking the correct steps in order to put themselves in place to have their voice herd. This is what it's all about. They can say Romney delegates are BOUND all they want but truth have it, WE CAN abstain! Romney should not even be considered the favorite. Ron Paul is going to win! Spread the good news!
Are you admitting RP is just a vanity candidate whose lemmings are willing participants in a personality cult?
Every single post Rathma makes about RP implies that the dude and his whole campaign are basically just a secular-ish megachurch now.
