She did fine in the debate: ” Rick Perry’s HPV mandate returns to haunt him .” It’s the post-debate comments that weren’t Bachmann’s best moments. Ed Morrissey’s got the main story, ” Bachmann: Gardasil causes “mental retardation” .” (Via Memeorandum .) And Los Angeles Times has a medical report, ” GOP debates HPV vaccine, but medical community gives it OK .” I’ll bet Bachmann recovers on this sooner than Perry. The mandate calls into question his bona fides as a small-government conservative. And the debate got heated today among right bloggers and on the Twittersphere. AoSHQ has this: ” Bachmann: I’m A-Goin’ to Go Ahead and Push This Lunatic Vaccines=Autism Lie “: Michelle Bachmann is desperate. She’s an ambitious, egotistical woman who started running for President just two short years after she first ran for Congress. In the past two months her support went from 13% and rising to 4% and falling. So she needs something, doesn’t she, and Rush Limbaugh warned her off her planned Social Security demagoguery. So, instead, this bullshit. And Dan Riehl’s got this: ” Perry Doesn’t Look Ready to Lead America ,” and ” So Much For NRO Being Conservative .” And Tabitha Hale on Twitter : “I think maybe I should abandon Twitter until primary season is over so I still have friends.” It’s gonna get heavy like this on the right for a while. Folks are starting to really dig in behind their favorites. More here: Michele Bachmann Slams HPV Vaccine Mandate at GOP Debate
Read more from the original source:
Michele Bachmann Slams HPV Vaccine Mandate at GOP Debate
With a hat tip to Drew Ryun for the title of the post , Tim Carney brings word this morning that some Republicans think they are too important to have their budgets cut . The Republican Study Committee, the organization of conservatives in the House of Representatives, is proposing further cuts in spending to Congress’s budget. Some Republicans are flipping out and going to 12 on a 1 to 10 scale fo hyperbole. The latest among them is Dan Lungren of California. Here’s Tim Carney: RSC member Dan Lungren, however, is chairman of the Committee on House Administration, and he says no. Here’s a bit from his public “Dear Colleague” letter: This amendment would severely restrict the U.S. Capitol Police’s ability to secure the Capitol complex by slashing its budget 11%. A cut of this magnitude would force Capitol Police to face today’s ever-growing security threats with significantly fewer resources and officers. The Amendment would also hamper the House’s ability to conduct effective oversight and impede on Members’ ability to serve their constituents by cutting committee and Member budgets an additional 11% on top of the 5% cut adopted last month. As Carney goes on to note, Dan Lungren’s Chief of Staff says that if the RSC amendment passes, Lungren will cut what he pays to fund the RSC. I don’t think the RSC would have problems with that. If Congress is unwilling to make cutbacks to its own budget, it will never get serious about real spending cuts. And to use the Capitol Police as an example is silly. Can we never cut those budgets? Not even administrative costs? Sure we can. But not if Dan Lungren has his way. Ultimately, Lungren is probably worried about re-election in 2012. I’m sure he is concerned about constituent services and outreach. But what he ought to be concerned about is the appearance of a spoiled congressman telling others to make cut backs as long as he doesn’t have to.
See the article here:
House GOP to Tea Party: We’re Too Important to Have Our Budgets Cut
Here’s a rule of thumb — if engaging the tea party movement, focus on the local groups, not the big groups. Tea Party Express has one heck of an impressive track record this year at the national level and they need to be commended for that, but all things being equal it is the local groups that have the volunteers, get out the vote efforts, phone bankers, etc. And I think a number of the national group leaders would tend to agree. But here is another case in point for bypassing a lot of the national tea party groups. The Claremont Institute, a well respected organization that has one heck of a constitutional history course, is hosting an event for new members of Congress. The organization is being attacked by a tea party group as being filled with and held by “Washington Insiders.” For the record, the Claremont Institute is on the opposite coast of the United States from Washington and composed of some of the wingiest wingers in the entire wing-o-sphere. This handwringing about “Washington Insiders” is verging on paranoid. One tea party group is giving out the private cell phone numbers of freshmen congressmen to pressure them to avoid competing orientation programs, etc. Certainly there are legitimate concerns and there must be caution, but Good Lord people, by the time all the cards are on the table we’re going to have all the tea party groups labeling their competitors as Washington Insiders. This is nuts.
Excerpt from:
Malicious Mendacity in the Tea Party Movement
Filed under: Humor , Chaos Theory , Independents Keep that “different” drumming far, far away.
Thanks for the kind comments on my thoughts on Delaware. But I wanted to add a brief note about the views of Karl Rove, who blasted away at Christine O’Donnell before the votes were even all counted. It’s an instructive moment about how the old guard is failing to adapt to this new environment. It’s been a rough cycle for Rove. He’s provided behind-the-scenes consulting, and in some cases public backing, for a number of losing candidates — Tiarht in Kansas, Castle in Delaware, Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas — and he’s seemed out of his depth on radio and television appearances. Rove’s disappointingly bland memoir , released earlier this year, depicts a builder who was successful more because of his ability to identify the priority of grassroots targeting than any grand political strategy. Perhaps Rove was always better at understanding how to target and motivate people from the top down, rather than understanding why they would choose to motivate themselves from the ground up. In any case, Rove is still a voracious reader and a self-taught master of political history — so it’s puzzling why he’s having such difficulty identifying the trends of the moment. The similarly history-obsessed Newt Gingrich can still claim credit for the most prescient statement about the Tea Party movement when he spoke at CPAC in February, comparing the new wave to Poland’s solidarity movement. “We stood in the streets, and looked around, and realized — there are more of us than there are of them .” It’s just that instead of Gingrich’s “media elites” being the target, the group on the other side is the right’s own establishment. As Jonah Goldberg says this morning: “The message coming out of Delaware to everyone in the tea parties’ way, Republican and Democrat alike, is: Watch out.” Follow Ben Domenech on Twitter.
Originally posted here:
Karl Rove and the Tea Parties
