Hey, if it worked in the 2004 presidential election, when George Bush got the courts to hand him the presidency on a platter despite what the electorate said, why not try it again?
That was what came to mind, as I read about what one of the Republican candidates are trying to do in Virginia. Rick Perry has filed a lawsuit, demanding that the courts put him on the ballot.
“Virginia ballot access rules are among the most onerous and are particularly problematic in a multi-candidate election. We believe that the Virginia provisions unconstitutionally restrict the rights of candidates and voters by severely restricting access to the ballot, and we hope to have those provisions overturned or modified to provide greater ballot access to Virginia voters and the candidates seeking to earn their support.”
Perry was unable to get the required amount of signatures necessary to be included in the Virginia Republican primaries, and apparently, he’s not happy.
In a new Washington Post / ABC News Poll, President Obama’s job approval is seeing its first positive light since last summer. The poll, conducted between December 15 to 18th of 1005 adults showed that 49% of Americans now approve of how the President is doing his job, while 47% disapproves.
In November, the this same poll showed the president in negative territory, with 44% approving while 53% disapproved. The last time President Obama saw a favorable rating was in May 2011, with 56% approving and 38% disapproving of the President handled his job.
Why this have to be a rule or law is beyond me. There are many professions where background checks are conducted on potential candidates, and if an applicant is found owing child support, he or she is automatically disqualified.
Well, as of now, Congress is different.
We all remember Republican Representative and Teaparty favorite, Joe Walsh. At the time when he won his House Seat representing the 8th congressional district in Illinois, Walsh was a deadbeat to the tune of over $117, 000. He hadn’t paid child support in over 9 years!
A bill clearly inspired by U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh’s child support issues would forbid people owing more than $10,000 in back child support from running for office in Illinois. House Bill 3932, filed Tuesday by state Rep. Jack Franks, D-Marengo, would require statements of candidacy to include a statement that the person running for office is not delinquent by $10,000 or more.
Walsh, a tea party Republican freshman representing the 8th Congressional District, is facing allegations in court by his ex-wife that he owes her more than $100,000 in back child support. Walsh has not been found delinquent or in contempt of court in the ongoing dispute.
The bill would have no effect on Walsh, but it is a step in the right direction. If regular jobs disqualify a deadbeat, why should that deadbeat be able to get a job making laws in the United States government?
Then again, the House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans. Don’t expect this bill to see the light of day.
President Obama was joined by the First Lady for a joint address this weekend, as they both wished the American people a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. The couple especially thanked the men and women in the military, as some of them come home from the war in Iraq while others still serve in other areas of the world.
“This holiday season at the White House,” the First Lady said, “we wanted to show our thanks with a special holiday tribute to some of the strongest, bravest, and most resilient members of our American family – the men and women who wear our country’s uniform and the families who support them.”
The President continued, thanking the troops for their service, and expressing his joy with the families of those returning home for the Christmas holidays.
For many military families, the best gift this year is a simple one – welcoming a loved one back for the holidays. You see, after nearly nine years, our war in Iraq is over. Our troops are coming home. And across America, military families are being reunited.
Since winning the House of Representatives in November 2010, Republicans have been on a rampage trying all they could to suppress the votes of minorities throughout the United States. Republicans would have you believe that voter fraud is crippling our political process, and they are the only ones with the willingness and ability to fix it.
If you listen to the Republican logic, you will believe that on election day, millions of dead people come back to life and vote for Democrats. So to solve this dilemma, Republicans governors across the nation began implementing various forms of voter ID laws.
But the facts show a different story.
A recent Washington Post article found that “prosecutable cases of voter fraud are rare.” The report said that in Ohio for example, out of 9 million votes cast in the 2002 and 2004 elections, only 4 cases of voter fraud were reported. And “from 2002 to 2005, the Justice Department found only five people were convicted for voting multiple times.”
But what about on the national scene, the voter ID fraud cases must be ridiculously rampant, right? Well you’d be wrong to think that too. Another report, this time by the New York Times found that during the first five years of the Bush crackdown on voter fraud, from 2002 to 2007, “about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted” nationwide.
This is just a manufactured issue by Republicans claiming that we are under attack by illegitimate voters from beyond the grave. That’s just not the case and these Republican governors know it. What they are actually trying to do, is suppress the minority votes for the 2012 election.
The U.S. Justice Department has blocked South Carolina’s controversial voter ID law, saying it would prevent black people from voting.
It was the first voter ID law to be refused by the federal agency in nearly 20 years.
The decision means voters will not have to show a Department of Motor Vehicles-issued driver’s license or photo ID card, a U.S. military ID or a U.S. passport. And it means the state, which says it plans to appeal the decision in court, will spend time and taxpayer dollars on the second such lawsuit during Gov. Nikki Haley’s term.
One man cannot be this incompetent. I think Rick Perry is now dumber than even Michele Bachmann, and she took dumb to a level we hadn’t seen, even in the era of Sarah Palin.
So Perry is trying to win the Republican nomination to go against President Obama in the 2012 presidential election. In order to get the nomination, Perry must compete. His campaign tried to beat Thursday’s deadline in Virginia by claiming to have successfully submitted 11,911 signatures to get Perry’s name on Virginia’s ballot, but this is where Perry had the second “oops” moment of his campaign.
This doesn’t bode well for Rick Perry: the GOP presidential candidate will not appear in the Virginia primary ballot after failing to submit enough valid signatures, Republican officials announced Friday evening. Perry’s campaign told state election officials that it had submitted 11,911 signatures, but the Republican Party of Virginia confirmed on Twitter that Perry didn’t submit the 10,000 signatures required to qualify.
“Hopefully, he will do better in other states,” a chairman of Perry’s campaign in Virginia told the Washington Post on Friday night. Perry was one of four GOP candidates who submitted ballot petitions on Thursday, along with Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich. Romney and Paul have both been confirmed, and the Virginia GOP is expected to announce whether Gingrich will qualify later tonight.
The writing is on the wall. The only question is, can anyone in their already failed campaigns read? And if they can read what is written, do they understand?
Along with Mr. Gingrich, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas were able to get signatures to the State Board of Elections in time to qualify for the primary, which will be held on March 6.
Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania failed to turn in the necessary signatures by the deadline and won’t be competing for the Old Dominion’s delegates to the nominating convention.
Virginia’s stringent standards require candidates to amass at least 10,000 signatures of registered voters statewide and at least 400 from each congressional district to qualify for the ballot.
Sorry Virginia, you won’t get your chance to vote for any of these three losers. You’re stuck with the other four.
We all know that Mitt Romney is a ga-zillionaire trying to convince Americans that he is just an average Joe, someone you can sit and have a beer with. His financial deals at Bain Capital – where he mainly bought smaller business, fired the employees and shipped those jobs overseas because of cheap labor markets – are no secret.
Yes, his record is clear. So why not release his tax returns?
Mr. Romney made the statement in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday, but the network did not show that part of the interview. Mr. Romney, a multimillionaire who made his fortune running a private equity firm, was asked whether he planned to release his tax return.
“I doubt it,” Mr. Romney said, according to a transcript of the interview provided by NBC News. “I will provide all the financial info, which is an extraordinary pile of documents which show investments and so forth.”
“But you won’t do the tax returns?” asked Chuck Todd, host of “The Daily Rundown.”
“I don’t intend to release the tax returns. I don’t.”, Mr. Romney responded.
Chalk this one up as a win for the hard-working middle class families. Earlier today, John Boehner, under excruciating pressure from members of his own party, caved and agreed to the payroll tax cut bill the Senate passed last week – a move that would save American families $1000.00 a year.
It was the kind of pressure that could make one appear red in the face!
Under a deal reached between House and Senate leaders — which Speaker John A. Boehner was presenting to the rank and file in an evening conference call — House members would accept the two-month extension of a payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits approved by the Senate last Saturday, while the Senate would appoint members of a House-Senate conference committee to negotiate legislation to extend both benefits through 2012.
House Republicans — who rejected an almost identical deal on Tuesday on the House floor — caved in under the political rubble that accumulated over the week, much of it from members of their own party, who worried the blockade would do serious damage to the party brand heading into an election year. The new deal makes minor adjustments to make it easier for small businesses with temporary new caps on the wages that are subject to the tax relief.
On news of Boehner’s reversal, President Obama issued a statement, saying “Because of this agreement, every working American will keep his or her tax cut – about $1,000 for the average family. That’s about $40 in every paycheck. And when Congress returns, I urge them to keep working to reach an agreement that will extend this tax cut and unemployment insurance for all of 2012 without drama or delay.”
The Gingrich flirtation lasted only as long as voters knew little about what he might do in office. His tirades against the federal judiciary might play well with the ultra-conservatives, but they seem to be non-starters among the more moderate voters who will come out in later primary states. Also, his lack of organization is showing, but that shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Gingrich never seemed to be in the race for anything other than to get his ideas in the marketplace. He succeeded. Now there’s a 50% off sticker on them and they’re not long for the discontinued bin.
Republican voters have sampled all of the candidates over the course of the last few months and they seem to be coalescing around Romney, despite conservative suspicion that he’s not fully committed to their causes. There’s a good reason for this; he’s not, but he’s the only electable candidate in the field. So that leaves us with a volatile race in Iowa with Romney, Paul (my favorite to pull out a win), Bachmann and Perry able to cobble together enough caucus voters to move on to the next set of states. Rick Santorum is getting a little love this week from evangelicals, but that will all come to naught after Iowa.
Then the serious race will begin in earnest. Depending upon what happens in the next few days, Romney will have to defend Republican obstruction that led to the end of the payroll tax cut, or he’ll have to run against it as flawed policy, despite the cut being popular among voters and economists. He’ll also have to harness the Tea Party faction that doesn’t want to compromise on anything, and is losing support, even with Republicans. Add on the fact that President Obama’s poll numbers are improving, and Mitt suddenly has a more daunting task ahead of him than he did in October (did he just announce his first major policy decision?).
But that’s all in the future. Right now, we should be thanking Newt Gingrich for a spirited campaign that ultimately showed his best days to be behind him. His rise and fall was swifter than Herman Cain’s and the reality of a Gingrich presidency was always going to present problems in a world that’s moved beyond the 1990s. Perhaps Romney can find room for Newt in his administration as, say, ambassador to Libya?
“I’ll tell you what,” Newt Gingrich said when responding to a question posed at an NBC interview, “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].”
The question Gingrich was responding to, was in reference to a previous statement made by Mitt Romney, that suggested Gingrich couldn’t stand the “heat” of negative ads. Romney told NBC’s Chuck Todd, “If you can’t handle the heat in this little kitchen, the heat that’s going to come from Obama’s Hell’s Kitchen is going to be a heck of a lot hotter.”
Gingrich continued;
“And we can bring the Washington Post indication that his ad is filled with lies and he can defend it. So let’s test this kitchen. I’m happy [to]. I’ll go in this kitchen. Go back and ask Gov. Romney, would he like to come and play in the kitchen? I don’t think so. I don’t think he wants to do anything except hide over here and pretend it’s not his fault that he is flooding the people of Iowa with falsehoods.
“That’s his money and his staff. And it’s his responsibility. I can take the heat plenty well. There were 121,000 ads run against me in 1995 and 1996. I went through two government shutdowns. I actually stuck to my word. I opposed Republican tax increases in 1982 and 1980. I think I’ll do just fine with the heat from Barack Obama because frankly, it’ll be a fair exchange. He’ll get a fair amount of heat in the process.”
Like the others before him who once led the group of Republican misfits charge up the hill to become president of the United States, Newt Gingrich has fallen by the wayside. Recent polls now have him in third position behind Ron Paul and Mitt Romney.
After a bipartisan effort in the Senate where both Democrats and Republicans voted to approve a payroll tax cut for hard-working Americans, House Republicans led by John Boehner voted to raise those taxes. A move that would result in a $1,000 tax bill for every working poor and middle class American.
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