The conservative movement continues to suffer problems, within the Republican Party, without, and, well...
posted by StrikeTheViol on Jul 17, 2009 - 125 comments

The Curious Case of Alex Latifi. "We don’t care if Latifi is innocent. Our goal is to put him out of business." Feds knock; a business is lost: all charges dropped years after the company was charged with violating U.S. export law by sending to China classified drawings of an Army Black Hawk helicopter part and falsifying related tests. "It appears that the principal offense committed by the defendant, Alex Latifi, was breathing while being of Middle Eastern extraction.” [more inside]
posted by Non Prosequitur on Apr 1, 2009 - 17 comments

Democrat's efforts to paint Rush Limbaugh as GOP leader pay off. Since Rush Limbaugh famously stated that he wanted Obama to fail, Democrats, led by President Obama, have been trying to paint him as the intellectual and spiritual head of the GOP. Eyeing his low 25% approval rating amongst independents, they have hoped to equate the Republicans with Limbaugh. [more inside]
posted by Ironmouth on Mar 3, 2009 - 304 comments

Have the wheels come off the straight talk express? At least one sleeping giant woke up today: the NYT finally gives Sarah Palin a thorough vetting and the results aren't pretty. The McCain campaign's aggressive - and many say dishonest - tactics in promoting Palin may have sparked the beginnings of a media backlash. Camp McCain's reaction: We don't care and intend to stay on offense. And about that offense, they will soon have some help: Group With Swift Boat Alumni Readies Ads Attacking Obama. How low will things go? At this week's Values Voters Summit, 'Obama Waffles' with racial stereotypes were all the rage.
posted by madamjujujive on Sep 14, 2008 - 1755 comments

Party Faithful. Can the Democrats get a foothold on the religious vote?
posted by semmi on Sep 7, 2008 - 224 comments

Fox, the BBC and CNN have all revealed that Republican US presidential candidate John McCain has picked Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate on his 72nd birthday on the eve of the start of Republican National Convention. Despite being wildly popular in Alaska, Palin has recently been involved in an investigation over whether she dismissed a public safety commissioner because he refused to dismiss her former brother-in-law.
posted by HaloMan on Aug 29, 2008 - 5555 comments

Want to live it up at the U.S. party conventions and get access to Senators and Congressmen? USA Today has posted the campaign committee price lists:
Democratic Senate and Congress
Republican Senate and Congress

If you've got the dough, you may conveniently request a convention package online from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the NRSC have other price lists on their sites, but it seems like the DSCC and DCCC sites keep theirs under wraps.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim on May 1, 2008 - 10 comments

One nation under God. The "bold conservative" GOP Congressman Paul Broun from Georgia is intent upon removing a vexing comma from that phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance, which was amended in 1954 when President Eisenhower was moved by a sermon by one Reverend George M. Docherty on the need to defend America from the "militantly atheistic communism that has already enslaved 800 million of the peoples of the earth, and now menaces the rest of the free world."
posted by digaman on Apr 15, 2008 - 147 comments

The hidden factor in Hillary Clinton's rebound: committed Republicans voting in open primaries who want to prolong the messy battle for the Democratic nomination, encouraged by right-wing radio hosts like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh. Or is Hillary just suddenly more palatable to conservatives than multi-culti Obama?
posted by digaman on Mar 17, 2008 - 112 comments

Michigan Democrats for Romney is an effort by mischievous Michigan Democrats to take advantage of the uncompetitive January 15th "beauty contest" primary on the Democratic side by encouraging Democratic voters to vote for Mitt Romney in the Republican primary so that Romney won't drop out of the primary race after making his last stand in Michigan. Similar hijinks by Michigan Republicans in 1972 led to George Wallace's victory in the Democratic presidential primary that year.
posted by jonp72 on Jan 14, 2008 - 62 comments

Pat Robertson Endorses Giuliani for President Back in mid-2001, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani was busy committing adultery, lurching into his divorce and third marriage and rooming with a gay couple he promised to marry as soon as the law allowed, who among us would have imagined that one day he would be endorsed for president by Pat Robertson? Truly, Sept. 11 changed everything. Odd though this may be, it raises the question of what an endorsement actually means.
posted by psmealey on Nov 8, 2007 - 63 comments

"Bill Maher: The Decider" [Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, YouTube]. Maher at the top of his game.
posted by McLir on Jul 27, 2007 - 87 comments

Described as "the View meets the Daily Show and takes a right turn," The America Show, Episode 1 and Episode 2 are pilots that are being floated for possible TV broadcast. Weigh in on their potential. The driving force behind the show is conservative comic Julia Gorin, who also recently launched Political Mavens as "a celebrity-studded conservative answer to Arianna's Huffington Post."
posted by madamjujujive on Nov 27, 2006 - 247 comments

The Democrats' Sonny Bono? When George Bush used the 1970s Orleans hit, Still the One, as a campaign song in 2004, John Hall issued Bush a cease and desist order for using his song without permission. A founder of the antinuclear group, Musicians United for Safe Energy (best known for the 1979 concert film, No Nukes), Hall decided to run for Congress in upstate New York, winning upset victories this year in both the Democratic primary and the general election against GOP incumbent, Sue Kelly. Before his Congressional victory, Editor & Publisher posted From Soundchecks to Soundbites, an interesting discussion with Hall about music journalism vs. political journalism.
posted by jonp72 on Nov 10, 2006 - 30 comments

"Stay the Course," R.I.P. (1885-2006).
posted by homunculus on Oct 29, 2006 - 28 comments

CNN confirms that Tom DeLay, the scandal-embroiled Republican Congressman from Texas and former Republican House Majority Leader, has dropped out of the race for the 22nd District House seat.
posted by teferi on Apr 3, 2006 - 144 comments

Vernon Robinson is a Republican candidate for Congress in North Carolina's 13th District. This is his campaign ad. (Links to 2MB Quicktime movie). Both bitterly racist and homophobic, it's straight out of, err... The Twilight Zone. (Via WFMU)
posted by huskerdont on Mar 9, 2006 - 101 comments

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald says emails relevant to the Valerie Plame leak investigation have gone missing from the White House. "In an adundance of caution," Fitzgerald wrote [PDF] to "Scooter" Libby's lawyers on January 23, "we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system." Might this help explain why Alberto Gonzales -- now the Attorney General, and lately so busy mustering arguments to assert that Bush's NSA domestic-spying program is "legal" -- waited 12 hours before instructing White House staff to preserve documents relevant to the leak investigation after telling Andrew Card about it? Shades of the late, great yoga instructor, Rose Mary Woods. [More on Plame here.]
posted by digaman on Feb 1, 2006 - 54 comments

Be in the "Republican Values" TV Show Featuring President Bush, and the Wit & Wisdom of Sean Hannity Coming soon to Fox and CNBC. (possibly a hoax.)
posted by rodney stewart on Oct 18, 2005 - 12 comments

A news release by the american institute of physics details the "unprecedented" bullying by republican senators of scientists studying climate change. The committee's letter asks for private and public sources of Mann's research funding, location of his data, computer codes, and his response to critical reviews of his work, including "Did you calculate the R2 statistic for the temperature reconstruction, particularly for the 15th Century proxy record calculations and what were the results?" The House web site has a collection of related materials and news articles.
posted by about_time on Jul 25, 2005 - 46 comments

Invest $50 million of a workers comp trust fund in rare coins and collectibles. Lose some of the coins in the mail. Havoc ensues. Prominent Ohio Republican fundraiser and Bush-Cheney 'pioneer' Thomas Noe is under state scrutiny for $10-12 million in missing funds and subject of a federal probe for potential illegal Bush campaign contributions. Oh, and did I mention his wife Bernadette was chair of the Lucas County Board of Elections during the 2004 election? Suddenly the once-popular donor finds himself a political pariah as heads begin to roll - could this be the tip of an iceberg that will unravel the red state infrastructure? Follow the Toledo Blade's stellar investigative journalism as this story unfolds. Maybe the national media can watch and learn.
posted by madamjujujive on May 31, 2005 - 25 comments

"In the Name of Politics" (NYT) Rev. John C. Danforth, the outgoing US ambassador to the UN, Republican Senator for 18 years, native Missouran and Episcopal minister worries that the Republican Party is turning very literally theocratic. In this short editorial he states "the only explanation ... is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law."
(Just as a side note, we're taking applications.)
posted by blacklite on Apr 10, 2005 - 52 comments

Recent neuroscience research suggests that Democrats and Republicans are not nearly as far apart as they seem (NYT). Will an awareness that we are conning ourselves to feel alienated from each other help to close the political gap? Or, are we conned by science and the media?
posted by semmi on Jan 18, 2005 - 16 comments

CNN's "Undecided" Voter Turns Out To Be A GOP Operative CNN gets duped by Edward Martos. They thought he was an "undecided" voter, but he turned out to be a GOP operative.
posted by Postroad on Oct 12, 2004 - 24 comments

The summer of Republican discontent. The sudden decline and eventual fall of the GOP.
posted by four panels on Oct 7, 2004 - 11 comments

The Power of a Blog: take one conservative Republican Representative from Virginia (a co-sponsor of the Federal Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment and representing a district that includes Pat Robertson's homebase), mix with gay sex phone lines, and you have it: his resignation, over "allegations."
posted by amberglow on Aug 30, 2004 - 83 comments

Urban Guerilla Warfare. The upcoming protests outside the Republican National Convention are becoming less notable for the expected numbers and more notable for the extremes each side will go to. The GOP has decided to blame everything happening outside on the Democratic Party. Liberal groups are feared to be infiltrating the convention's own volunteer staff. And some right-wingers, feeling "compassionate conservatism" means abandoning people in the middle of New York, have taken to pretending to offer housing to out-of-state protestors. Has anyone else started to dismiss the idea of a terrorist attack simply as "too obvious?"
posted by XQUZYPHYR on Aug 23, 2004 - 65 comments

Is the GOP tampering with Florida elections? The New York Times reports that State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November. Also, see here and here. Why do we even put up with this?
posted by black8 on Aug 16, 2004 - 61 comments

Bush camp solicits race of Star staffer. President Bush's re-election campaign insisted on knowing the race of an Arizona Daily Star journalist assigned to photograph Vice President Dick Cheney.
The jounalist's name was Mamta Popat. She sure sounds like a terrorist.
posted by JeffK on Jul 31, 2004 - 30 comments

A political party urges Miami voters to use absentee ballots because electronic voting has no paper trail and cannot "verify your vote." The Democrats? Nope -- the Florida GOP.
posted by tregoweth on Jul 29, 2004 - 13 comments

Frustrated Republicans: President on vacation while Iraq burns got you down? Feeling loyal to the party, ideas, or repulsed by the Dems? Agonizing over voting Bush to stay true? Sign the petition, Maybe you won't have to. And Dems, if you can promise to be open minded in November you can sign as well. via Blogging of the President
posted by daver on Apr 10, 2004 - 16 comments

How the left's fear of a right-wing Christian conspiracy gets George W. Bush -- and today's evangelical Christians -- all wrong. Alan Jacobs (more from him here and here) suggests that the idea that President Bush's evangelical Christianity has an impact on his politics is really a misunderstanding of Bush, fundamentalists, and evangelicals.
posted by marcusb on Apr 10, 2004 - 20 comments

Its a vast left wing conspiracy! It seems that the RNC (Republican national committee) is seeing conspiracy everywhere. There are lots of stand alone groups that have been trying to get rid of this administration before Kerry showed up on the scene, and now that there is a target they want to hang everything on him. Its almost like flattery. Of course it reminds me of when SCO claimed IBM was orchestrating all the bad press about them.
posted by MrLint on Apr 3, 2004 - 8 comments

The Republican National Committee is warning television stations across the country not to run ads from the MoveOn.org Voter Fund that criticize President Bush, charging that the left-leaning political group is paying for them with money raised in violation of the new campaign-finance law.
posted by jasenlee on Mar 8, 2004 - 74 comments

Republican Dirty Tricks "From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics. The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November." They just can't get Nixon out of their system, huh?
posted by owillis on Jan 22, 2004 - 124 comments

A challenger to Bush for the Republican nomination?
posted by gregb1007 on Jan 2, 2004 - 25 comments

Astroturfing gone bad. Why aren't newspaper editors fighting this? They've seen it before. Its one thing to offer a press release and another to ask visitors of the Bush-Cheney website to mail their newspapers the same form letter.
posted by skallas on Dec 29, 2003 - 35 comments

The Wingnut Debate Dictionary - spice up your political screeds with some colorful new terms like Colmestrato (n.) - an emasculated, harmless "liberal" stand-in included for purposes of fairness and balance and Condiment - a statement that needs to be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. I am so adding Deus ex rectum and Stepford Democrat to my vocabulary. And how is it that fucksimilie hasn't found it's way here long before now?
This is a game that MeFi wags of all political persuasions can play...anyone have any terms to add to the lexicon? (compiled by Ethel the Blog)
posted by madamjujujive on Nov 7, 2003 - 25 comments

House Democrats Storm Out of Ways and Means Committee Chairman Calls Capitol Police to Restore Order - ARRRGGGGH! This government is so frustrating. No side is right they are all wrong. Is anything being done for the good of the nation anymore or do they all just do what they want? Poor impulse control all around.
posted by dirtylittlemonkey on Jul 18, 2003 - 66 comments

The Young Hipublicans. "Still searching for their identities, many of these kids are not yet prepared to declare a particular political affiliation. This is where the conservative campus activists come in. Having recognized the importance of conservativism to their own lives, they have committed themselves to the task of bringing out the unacknowledged conservatism in other students. The mission of today's activists involves less an act of persuading their peers to accept an ideology than in awakening them to the fact that they already embody it." Welcome to Room 101.
posted by The Jesse Helms on May 23, 2003 - 32 comments

“There has been a cover-up of this.” Ah, well, why should we be surprised. The Republicans already have decided to co-opt September 11 to their political advantage by rescheduling their convention in New York so close to the anniversary of that day, so why not keep the report on the actual events of September 11 secret - to avoid any sort of embarassing political fallout?
posted by kgasmart on May 1, 2003 - 35 comments

Democrats finally speaking out? "Today the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives announced that -- and I quote -- 'Nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.' Let me make this clear: Never in its history has the United States passed a big tax cut in a time of war. We have always believed in shared sacrifice. " Sen. John Kerry's speech at the Jefferson Jackson Dinner April 3 in Georgia. (Salon article, click the free day pass to view)
posted by Espoo2 on Apr 6, 2003 - 29 comments

Political Fratricide: The GOP is reportedly [+] proposing $15 billion of cuts — or is it $25? — in veterans' benefits between now and 2007, and groups like the Veterans Against the Iraq War are hopping mad. Hell, I imagine the pro-war wing is pretty peeved, too. It's part of a plan with delusions of grandeur to deliver massive tax cuts AND kill the deficit ... you know, the one that did not exist before W was elected, as I understand it ... in six years. The original tip is from Stand Down. The actual status of the cuts is nebulous at this point, however, with the SF Chron reporting that they will likely fail in the Senate as the tax cut is halved and others reporting that the die is not yet cast. The House budget resolution, for metafilter accountants who like these things, is here.
posted by hairyeyeball on Apr 1, 2003 - 12 comments

Senate Defeats Treaty, Vote 49 to 35; Orders it Returned to the President (NY Times reg. req.) "America Isolated Without Treaty: Its Defeat, Washington Feels, Will Add to Our Unpopularity Abroad" (83 years ago today)
posted by boost ventilator on Mar 19, 2003 - 13 comments

Spinning the Environment
One section of the memorandum, "Winning the Global Warming Debate," asserts that many voters believe there is a lack of consensus about global warming among scientists. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly," it says. "Therefore you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." Among the ways to "challenge the science," the memorandum says, is to "be even more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view and much more active in making them part of your message" because "people are more willing to trust scientists than politicians."

So much for science based decisions regarding the fouling of our nest. Sounds Green = Is Green in the bizarro world of spin.
posted by nofundy on Mar 4, 2003 - 35 comments

Powell's address to the UN. In a direct, long and rich presentation, Colin Powell has laid the cards on the table, and presented what's likely to be our most explicit case for war. While it's difficult to separate the larger issue of War on Iraq from just this presentation, I'm interested in other takes on Powell's speech. Anything substantially new? Truly irrefutable? Strong enough to justify immediate action? Does this have more heft coming from Powell (considering he's more trusted than Bush on this issue), or is he acting as a mouthpiece? Or, to be succinct, did Colin change anyone's mind? At the very least, he satisfied my need to know more about why our administration is acting so urgently.
posted by kokogiak on Feb 5, 2003 - 227 comments

It's thoughtful, not angry or insulting. It appears to make sense and it doesn't upset me. Is this really how they think of themselves? Required reading for the liberal opposition: A Republican's View of George Bush, Compassionate Conservative. (NYTimes, free registration required)
posted by alms on Jan 5, 2003 - 30 comments

What the hell? Republican leader of the Senate, Trent Lott, says that the United States would have been better off if then-segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond had won the presidency in 1948. Wow...I want to hear Fox News, Rush, etc, spin Lott's way out of this. Also, does saying this have anything to do with the election in Louisiana on Saturday?
posted by BarneyFifesBullet on Dec 6, 2002 - 61 comments

GOP Looks To Move Its Social Agenda. And something you can do about it, if you so inclined.
posted by semmi on Dec 4, 2002 - 22 comments

Torricelli Considers Dropping Out Of His Re-Election Bid ...and Republicans' hopes to reclaim the Senate brighten. Why drop out now, with only 5 weeks left? Is Torricelli guilty of even more ethics violations than previously thought? (more inside...)
posted by jennak on Sep 30, 2002 - 67 comments