Sarah Palin: I’d vote for Gingrich “to keep things going”
Sarah Palin gave a qualifying endorsement of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Tuesday, a week after her husband also endorsed him.
In an interview with Fox television host Sean Hannity on Tuesday, Palin said that if she were a South Carolina voter she would cast her ballot for the former Speaker of the House in Saturday’s primary.
“If I had to vote in South Carolina, in order to keep things going, I’d vote for Newt,” she said. Using a quote from the bible she said she wanted the race to continue because, “iron sharpens iron, steel sharpens steel.”
Rivals have been unable to dent Mitt Romney’s status as the frontrunner of the Republican race for the party nomination. Gingrich is one of several candidates who have risen up as a more conservative alternative, and challenger, to Romney.
While not a ringing endorsement, this is the closest Palin has gotten to formally siding with any candidate. Palin, a popular Tea Party conservative, started her own political action committee and toured the country giving speeches and raising money before announcing in October that she would not run for the nomination.
Her PAC website includes a list of “Palin Picks,” but no presidential candidates are listed.
Santorum staffer questions whether God wants women presidents
A staffer in Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign is under fire for an email suggesting a female commander-in-chief could be at odds with the Bible’s teachings.
The Des Moines Register last week reported that Santorum’s Iowa coalitions director, Jamie Johnson, sent an email over the summer asking, ‘Is it God’s highest desire, that is, his biblically expressed will … to have a woman rule the institutions of the family, the church, and the state?”
Michele Bachmann, a social conservative who campaigned heavily in Iowa, competed with Santorum over the conservative evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses. She dropped out of the race after a dismal finish in the Iowa race.
This weekend Peter Waldron, Bachmann’s faith outreach coordinator, said the email was proof that Santorum had engaged in a “sexist strategy” to sabotage Bachmann. He demanded an apology from Santorum and called for Johnson’s firing.
The recent spat brings the issue of sexism in conservative politics to the fore again. When Bachmann ended her campaign, political observers wondered whether conservative perceptions of women and Bachmann’s own alignment with the Christian right and disavowal of feminism had been her undoing.
The Des Moines Register said that in the final weeks of her campaign Bachmann’s aides began to complain that sexism was a problem in Iowa’s religious conservative community, even as her aides deflected questions from reporters on the topic.
Perry stands ground on Turkey
Given an opportunity to revise (back down or retract) his comments he made in Monday’s Republican debate linking Turkey to “Islamic terrorists,” Texas Governor Rick Perry stood his ground on Tuesday.
The Republican presidential candidate made no apology for nearly touching off an international incident with his take on the long-time U.S. ally. Perry defended his view in a CNN interview, hours after Turkey’s response.
Here’s the video:
Apparently “edumacation” is not a Republican strong point. They dont need all that fancy book-learnin.
Rick Perry lags in home state of Texas
Tuesday only got worse for Texas Governor Rick Perry whose comments about Turkey in a debate last night got him lambasted by foreign policy experts, the Turkish press, and the Turkish government in Ankara.
Perry, the longest serving governor in Texas history, polled only third in a survey of his fellow Longhorn Republicans, according to a poll released Tuesday.
Less than a fifth of those polled by the Democratic polling firm, Public Policy Polling said they would choose Perry over his rivals. He lagged frontrunner Mitt Romney as well as former Speaker of the House Gingrich.
Romney polled at 24 percent and Gingrich at 23 percent, compared to Perry’s 18 percent.
Perry’s conservative credentials once endeared him to Republicans looking for a candidate other than Romney, suspected of moderate leanings. He shot to the top in August when he first entered the race but fell back after consistently fumbling debates and interviews.
“Republicans aren’t simply looking at which of these candidates most ideologically is appealing to them. They’re really focused on who has the political skill set that they think will be required to beat Obama,” said Thomas Hollihan, an expert in political campaigns at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School School for Communication and Journalism. “Perry’s performance in the debate suggested that he just wasn’t a very capable candidate. That probably more than anything else drove his support down.”
Perry’s national favorability rating is 7.0 percent, according to RealClearPolitics.com.
Reuters Washington Extra – Behind the numbers
At last night’s debate, Mitt Romney said he’d be happy to release his tax returns in April. But today he disclosed a crucial piece of information as the clamor grew for him to come out with his returns. The frontrunner to clinch the Republican nomination has a tax rate that “is probably closer to 15 percent than anything.”
That’s a low rate, but it is in line with what is paid by wealthy Americans who earn much of their income from capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent. So, now the number is out and we will see how American voters (and wage earners) react.
Another interesting number from Romney today concerned speaker fees, which he says he collects “from time to time, but not very much.” Campaign financial disclosure forms indicate that Romney was paid more than $374,000 in speaker fees from February 2010 to February 2011. Not very much, if you are Mitt Romney.
The final numbers to discuss today come from our look into the PAC attacks. The pro-Romney Restore our Future is the champ PAC with $8.1 million spent in this campaign so far. Much of that went toward attacking Newt Gingrich. Restore our Future and other PACs have spent $7.8 million to try to sink him. Compare that to the $3.2 million spent by PACs against Romney. Watch those numbers change, or rather run up, this week in the final charge in South Carolina.
Here are our top stories from Washington…
Mitt Romney may not release tax returns until April
Huntsman’s face still on Republican “Mt Rushmore” sand sculpture
The city of Myrtle Beach went all out for Monday’s Republican debate, even getting sand sculpture artists to build a mini Mount Rushmore of Republican presidential candidates out of sand.
The only problem?
The 1,175,100-pound horseshoe-shaped sand sculpture has the face of Jon Huntsman smack in the middle. His decision to pull out of the race came after the Myrtle Beach area Chamber of Commerce unveiled the sculpture.
Apparently there were no plans to pour water on his image or erase him from the sculpture. After he formally pulled out of the race and endorsed frontrunner Mitt Romney, Huntsman’s face was still there with a big toothy grin smiling at all who walked by.
Photo credit: Nick Carey Photo credit: REUTERS/Eric Thayer
Inside the Obama fundraising machine: leadership circles
By Eric Johnson
CHICAGO, Jan 14 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign and its key supporters are looking to grow on a national scale a fundraising concept that was successful in its Democratic stronghold of Chicago, sources familiar with the program said on Saturday.
Eager to widen its donor base, the Obama campaign is using its team of top fundraisers and donors to distribute marketing materials to thousands of potential top-dollar donors across the nation. Those among them who donate $5,000 — the maximum legal contribution to a presidential candidate in the 2012 cycle — will gain a stream of perks large and small, sources said.
The benefits could include free entry to campaign fundraisers featuring the president, access to strategy sessions at headquarters, and pizza parties at the homes of supporters to watch upcoming voting contests to pick the Republican candidate challenging Obama for the White House in 2012.
The campaign hopes to draw thousands to this category of donor, which so far includes roughly 80 people in Chicago, the Democratic bastion where Obama has supporters with deep pockets.
Members of the pilot group, called the “Chicago Leadership Circle,” paid $5,000 either in a lump sum or over five months to get “unparalleled networking opportunities” to meet with campaign officials and key political operatives coming to Chicago for events and strategy meetings, according to sources and the program’s marketing materials.
Gingrich mocks Romney for speaking French
Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich may have backtracked from a recent campaign ad attacking Romney as a job-killer during his tenure at Bain Capital, but he’s still accusing him of another act that may nettle some conservatives: speaking French.
In a web ad titled “The French Connection,” a deep-voiced narrator describes Romney as a liberal governor who authored government-mandated health care and raised taxes in his state of Massachusetts but who now masquerades as a conservative.
The narrator says, “Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney, he’ll say anything to win — anything. And just like John Kerry, he speaks French.”
The ad then cuts to a video of Democratic Senator John Kerry saying haltingly, in French, “Let the good times roll!”
During the 2004 presidential campaign, Kerry was criticized for his connections to France, where he spent summers during his childhood. Romney, too, lived in France, where he served as a missionary for more than two years in the 1960s.
The ad closes with indisputable proof that Romney is Francophone–a shot from a video of Romney speaking in French to volunteers for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, which he helped organize. He says, in French, “Hello, my name is Mitt Romney.”
Here is the video, via Gingrich’s campaign site:
Oops again? Rick Perry revises his list of three departments to cut
Lagging Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry can’t seem to catch a break. The Texas governor is facing criticism across the blogosphere for again flubbing the federal departments he would eliminate if elected.
On a radio show on WTKS in Savannah, Georgia, a listener asked Perry how many and which federal departments he would cut.
“Three right off the bat. You know, commerce, interior, and energy are three that you think of right off…” Perry said, making a point not to miss a beat.
During a Republican debate in November, Perry couldn’t name the third of three departments he had repeatedly said he would disband. Political observers said the blunder, captured on video with Perry uttering “I can’t, sorry…Oops,” effectively ended all presidential ambitions for the candidate, who was once the frontrunner in the Republican race. It dawned on him later in the debate: the department of energy.
The problem with Perry’s answer today is that though he remembered the DOE, he forgot one of the original departments, the Department of Education, which he has consistently criticized throughout his campaign.
Perry spokesman Mark Miner said that the governor’s answer was no mistake. “It shouldn’t be surprising the governor is talking about another federal agency that needs to be looked at and cut,” he told reporters.
Listen to the exchange below, via WTKS. The question and answer is around 03:48 min.
The governor could use a prop in the form of The Wheel of Misfortune, on which all federal departments have space, with each department’s space in proportion to the size of its budget – estimated where classified. Then, he could invite members of the audience – if any – on stage to spin the wheel and take out a department, determined by the department that the pointer lands on when the wheel stops, with no need to remember anything – except the wheel. ‘Round and ‘round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows!
Stephen Colbert: Exploring run for president of USA of South Carolina
Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert announced on his show Thursday night that he is forming an exploratory committee for a “possible candidacy for the president of the United States of South Carolina.”
“This is a difficult decision. I’ve talked it over with my money. I’ve talked it over with my spiritual adviser,” said the comedian who puts on the persona of an ultra-conservative news anchor on his late-night show “The Colbert Report.”
Colbert said he would try to compete in the Republican primary in South Carolina, his home state, on Jan. 21. The filing deadline is long past but Colbert may be able to participate as a write-in candidate.
During the show Colbert transferred his Super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, to fellow Comedy Central host Jon Stewart of the “Daily Show.” The move exempts Colbert from election law barring candidates from also managing political action committees.
Colbert formed his Super PAC, which was approved last summer, largely to ridicule the contradictions in laws that allow corporations to spend an unlimited amount of money on elections.
On the show the Colbert announced that the PAC would now be called The Definitely Not Coordinated with Stephen Colbert Super PAC. In a back and forth with his legal adviser Trevor Potter, a real-life former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, the two established that Colbert could still volunteer for the PAC.
A recent poll from Public Policy Polling showed Colbert ahead of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who has spent most of the campaign at the bottom of the polls and just finished third in New Hampshire.
Requiring voter registrations in the South is returning to pre-Civil War days. Lincoln’s big mistake which cost around one million lives was fighting to keep the South in the union. After more than a century and one half the issues remain. The South remains dedicated to slavery mentality.
The great mistake was preventing the South from secession.
How very interesting….. Her wishes that this bloodbath continue are in direct opposition to most Republicans. And it makes it pretty clear she doesn’t like Romney. WHICH IS A POINT IN HIS FAVOR as far as I’m concerned. I’m an Indie and, as much as I don’t want Obama re-elected, with Newt’s background and inconsistent statements (as well as the anti-capitalist ones) I couldn’t vote for him.