I'm writing a policy position paper on Romney for a family member who made a contribution to his campaign. This family member only did so in order to get in the good graces of a potential business client who supports his campaign. As a result, I'll be attending a dinner at a private home in River Oaks with Romney as the featured guest, only to help avoid any embarassing conversation between this family member and more informed attendees. I was hesitant to accept, because I was afraid it would be a convention center type dinner, but a private home? You'd think that would be pretty intimate, right? I'm trying to find out how many people will be attending this thing. Hopefully I'll be able to relay some insight on the guy to any interested parties on here. Then again, maybe I'll just get hammered and go on a diatribe against Joseph Smith to his face.
Rudy's campaign is going to die before the GOP convention unless he falls into 2nd place and becomes a non-threat to win. The easiest thing is for him to self-destruct, otherwise he will turned into swiss cheese.
Batman, I will eventually vote after I read the question more carefully Though all of a sudden I am reminded of a joke (Must be the word ? "GOP". The joke/cartoon that an old law prof had on the outside of the door to his officat school. It had this poor shabbily dressed little guy standing in front of this unaturally enormous, huge gigantic bench w. the Judge looking down at the little guy. The Judge ( I assume) said: "i'm sorry, sir, but crime does not pay at your level." I think of this frequently when I think about Cheney- Bush, Alberto, Colin, Donald, Karl etc.
Fred, #3, with a bullet: http://blogs.usatoday.com/gallup/2007/03/the_thompson_fa.html [rquoter]The Thompson factor Our latest weekend USA Today/Gallup poll is full of interesting insights into American public opinion. Tops among them may be the changing landscape of the Republican primary field. Of course it’s early and much can change. But, as I noted here, that’s the point. We do not hold out that the candidates you see in the lead now are going to get their party's nomination. But the process by which the candidates move up and down in the minds of their party faithful in correspondence to what’s happening in the real world is fascinating and important. This most current poll of Republicans included in the list, for the first time, actor, lawyer and former Senator Fred Thompson. I’m not sure what voters may think about Thompson's performance in The Hunt for Red October as the rather stilted Rear Admiral Joshua Painter. But he’s certainly creating a mini-stir of attention from rank and file Republicans. Thompson now gets getting 12% of the GOP vote. At the same time, Rudy Giuliani is down 13 points, and Mitt Romney has sunk from 8% to 3%. Given that John McCain comes in at 22% -- little changed -- Thompson is suddenly in third place among Republicans. We’re doing some research now to find out what people think about Fred Thompson in more detail. It's hard to imagine that Republicans have a finely-tuned understanding of his positions on the issues and so forth. But a Republican candidate like Duncan Hunter would probably yearn for 12% of the GOP vote at this point -- no matter what its origin. [/rquoter]
this is pretty funny, via techcrunch.com [rquoter]Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files. McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site. Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement: Today I anounce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay mariage…particularly marriage between two passionate females. The story is also up at Newsvine here. This reminds me of a similar situation when Microsoft used an image hosted on Flickr on one of its blogs without the permission of the owner, Niall Kennedy. Niall replaced the picture with a pornographic image, which was then published on the blog. His idea was to send a message to Microsoft on the importance of respecting licensing of IP, although some people thought it was childish. McCain’s MySpace page is significantly higher profile than the Microsoft blog, and Davidson isn’t posting p*rnography to the site. He’s making a political statement while also sending a message about respecting the property rights of others. I expect the hack to be taken down very quickly, unless the wrong person is sick or out to lunch today. Either way, we’ve captured the hack above. [/rquoter] http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/
I'm putting my full support behind this guy, as I am his campaign manager. (Damn... I am not doing a very good job...) http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=103734018 And why does everyone keep calling me David Hasselhoff?!?
It was the biggest collection of old money WASPs you'd ever meet. Spotting a minority was like playing "Where's Waldo?" Both my family member and I are politically apathetic, so we drank some red wine, took a picture with Romney (surprisingly tall), and slowly made our escape mid-way through his speech, which I would characterize as typically vague. The Q&A was like the military and President Bush- planted and rehearsed. I considered throwing him a curveball, but didn't want to bring more attention than my young age already attracted. My question would have been something like, "How exactly would you expand healthcare without a tax increase? What areas of spending would be slashed in order to accomplish this in light of your reluctance to borrow more money?" It might have been worth it just to see him squirm. I also didn't follow through on my Joseph Smith threat, although if I had stuck around and continued on the red wine, a "breaking news" moment may have been in the works. One of the funnier aspects of the night were his security detail, which was composed of three guys who didn't pat anybody down (likely because they were all old money WASPS) and looked like some college undergrads playing dress-up. I seriously think I could have taken them. I'm not even sure if their ear pieces were real. He is pretty charismatic, and despite his current abysmal numbers, I think he could gain momentum when the primaries come around. He's telegenic and articulate, and with McCain being "used goods" and Guiliani inevitably finding it difficult in overcoming an accent loaded with meaning to many of the faithful he'll be seeking to convert, Romney stands as good a chance as any Republican candidate. I still think it's a lost cause for Republicans this time around, which is why I don't see why a guy described as a "rising star" in the party is going to expend his political capital so soon. He didn't run for reelection as governor, and it may have been motivated by the very real threat of defeat. He understands his chances are fading with each second he remains out of politics. Even if he ran for Senator of Mass. (a tough task in itself) and was elected, he'd only be the Junior Senator: no real power as far as commitees are concerned, and therefore nothing to hang your hat on.
Thanks TPL. That's cool. Glad things didn;t get out of hand or you'd be on somebody's No-fly list by now. Anyway, why exactly is McCain running and why is anyone supporting him?
Someone should ask the good senator exactly which neighborhoods in Bagdad are safe for Americans to walk around in.
Demand that John McCain name that "safe" neighborhood in Baghdad UPDATE: Now McCain is denying he ever said any of this, even though he said it on camera only yesterday AND in his denial today he repeats the claim that there are several "safe neighborhoods" in Baghdad, though he qualifies his statement by saying that they are very dangerous safe neighborhoods (I'm not kidding). So name those very dangerous safe neighborhoods. Not to mention, it's not very straight-talking to deny something you said on camera 24 hours earlier, and something you repeated on Bill Bennett's radio show. This is a man who wants to be president, and he is basing his justification for the Iraq war on a lie. Sound familiar? (NOTE TO MEDIA: When presidential candidate John Kerry made a similar unsubstantiated claim - that several world leaders opposed Bush's re-election - you dogged Kerry relentlessly to name those leaders. Well fair is fair. If you're not all a bunch of conservative suck-ups, then do your job and demand the same answer from John McCain. Name those neighborhoods.) GOP Senator John McCain, who is running for president, said yesterday that it's an absolute lie to suggest that Baghdad is unsafe. In fact, McCain says that there are several neighborhoods - more than one - in Baghdad (outside of the Green Zone, of course), that are totally safe for an American to travel alone with no security. Here's what McCain said: “There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today." CNN's Baghdad correspondent, Michael Ware, who is actually IN BAGHDAD, says that McCain is flat-out wrong: "Honestly, Wolf, you'll barely last twenty minutes out there. I dont know what part of 'Neverland' Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad." But John McCain was quite emphatic about it. There are "some neighborhoods" in Baghdad that you can travel around by yourself with no security and be perfectly safe. The only reason you don't know this, McCain told CNN yesterday, is because the media is lying to you. Wow. Hell of a charge. McCain must know something that we don't. If McCain is right, if the media is lying to me, I want to know what the media is hiding. Won't you join me in asking Senator McCain to reveal to us the names of these non-Green-Zone Baghdad neighborhoods that are so darn safe that an American can travel alone with no security whatsoever. Call John McCain now, and ask him to name that neighborhood. (202) 224-2235 http://americablog.blogspot.com/2007/03/demand-that-john-mccain-name-that-safe.html
Thanks for the info, you should have asked him those questions. I am a Romney supporter, think he will be a good president, but I would like to hear what are his positions on real issues. He actually did some cost cutting as the governor to balance the budget, being from the private sector probably has something to do with it. Oh and he absolutely would have been re-elected as the governor if he wanted to. I think he pretty much made up his mind to run for president a while ago.
McCain is a shell of what he once was. He sold out what made him unique, and ambition got the better of him. I didn't like him that much before, but I respected him. Now he's just another run of the mill politician.
And that bullet just hit 20 feet of reinforced concrete... Meanwhile, here comes slow but steady Newt around the first turn whipped by his jockey, the American Mullah, who also throws water on Romney and Rudy...
isn't there a date when you must have formed an exploratory comitee or declared? like march 31? or is that march 31 of 2008?
dobson has no where near the influence you like to suppose, but if it makes you happy, and continues to blind you to the unending variety of today's republican party (see the mandingo thread), then party on garth. personally, dobson's rejection of thompson makes ole fred that much more attractive.
You have the influence that people allow you to have and like it or not, in today's Republican Party, Dobson is influential... he's not quite on par with the amount of power Ward Churchill holds over us Dems, but he is a force. If you're arguing that his influence is diminishing, I would say I hope so.
whoa, you're sayimg a nutcase like ward churchill is actually a driving force of the democratic party? if true, that's really scary.
I find it odd that you would want to cite a bunch of rich white people whose wives have a secret black man's fetish and whose husbands can't satisfy their wives as being a good thing for the Republican party. For that matter the Mandingo article wasn't specifically political.
