Currently viewing the tag: “candidate”
by Javier Manjarres
Former Florida House Majority Leader and probable U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hasner gave the keynote address to the Broward REC (BREC) on Monday evening in front of about 200 attendees. Hasner threw down the proverbial gauntlet in his address and spoke in no uncertain terms about the national security threats that challenge the safety and the soverignty of the United States, and he directly criticized President Obama’s “warped” view of foreign policy and his failure to act in the national interest.”The problem with President Obama is that he doesnt have a core belief, he doesnt have a national security philosophy.” Hasner also took a very strong stance against “Sharia-Compliant” Islam as well as on illegal immigration. Hasner has dropped hints that he will most likely enter the Senate race either later this month or early April, and he is considered by many as the “‘Tea Party” favorite were he to jump into the race.
“I believe in the Reagan Doctrine of peace through strength, I believe we have to restore that as our national security platform.”
With the threat of radical Islam and illegal immigration inextricably tied together, Hasner believes that the U.S.-Mexico border needs to be immediately sealed and that any form of amnesty will lead to the further deterioration of the sovereignty of the United States.
“We must secure our border, we must not allow amnensty,we must do a better job at protecting our country, that begins right there on our southern border.”
Ariel Barkhurst reports:
Joe Romero can finally campaign in peace.
Romero has run two campaigns over the last four months, and both have been dogged by accusations that he lied about living in Miramar for part of last year.
He ran and lost in November. Now he’s running again to replace Commissioner Yvonne Garth.
This race, he said, might have been tilted decisively in his favor if it weren’t for the residency issue.
“You’ve got a voter on the fence, and they see ‘residency issues’ in the newspaper, and they might think, okay, I’m not voting for this dude,” Romero said. “My own volunteers would call me and ask, what’s going on, are we on the ballot?”
And, he says, that’s why he wouldn’t return the Sun Sentinel’s calls to discuss his candidacy until now.
Now the four-time Miramar city commission candidate and aid to County Commissioner Barbara Sharief has been cleared of accusations. The Florida State Attorney’s office released a letter last week saying his residency papers were legitimate.
The Hotline: “As union fights continued throughout the U.S., Obama remained outside the fray from the legislative infighting in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio. The approach was widely seen as a good move by Democrats, who believed Obama would risk his bipartisan clout by jumping into the fight. Instead, Obama reiterated his support for a bipartisan deal on the budget before announcing his decision not to defend DOMA.”
“The one-two punch showed how effective Obama can be when he appeals to both his liberal base and moderates looking for bipartisanship. Obama is reaching into the ‘comeback kid’ playbook he perfected the week DADT was repealed and the Bush-era tax cuts were extended. This week ‘Obama the candidate’ showed up.”
Politico: “Just four months after posting historic election gains, Republicans are experiencing a reality check about 2012: President Obama is going to be a lot tougher to defeat than he looked late last year.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire
Herman Cain has won the Tea party straw poll with 22% of the vote. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) came in second with 16% and Ron Paul in third with 15%. Although Cain is a long shot with as OTB states little chance of winning, many of his views and opinions are exactly what this country needs. Who is Herman Cain you ask? He is a conservative talk show host and former Godfather’s Pizza chief executive and now straw poll winner.
Video: Herman Cain on the Sean Hanity Show
Former pizza executive Herman Cain won on Sunday a 2012 presidential straw poll of attendees of a Tea Party conference in Arizona.
Cain won 22 percent of the vote in a straw poll of in-person attendees at the American Policy Summit, the first-ever conference organized by Tea Party Patriots, one of the larger umbrella organizations for Tea Party activists.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R), meanwhile, won nearly 50 percent of the votes cast by 2,300 online straw poll participants.
The groups, including MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, USAction, the Service Employees International Union and People for the American Way, plan to hold “Save the American Dream” rallies in 50 state capitals on Saturday. “Instead of creating jobs, Republicans are giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich and then cutting funding for education, police, emergency response and vital human services,” the groups declared in their call to action. “The right to organize is on the chopping block. The American Dream is slipping out of reach for more and more Americans, and we have to fight back.” - Liberals to stage Tea Party-like revolts against GOP spending cuts
White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said recently about Gov. Walker’s union busting strategy that “This is a Wisconsin story, not a Washington one.” Unfortunately, there never seems to be a “Washington one” for the Obama White House, which was echoed by some in the Wall Street Journal.
If there is a more clueless, damaging Democratic message I haven’t heard it. This was in response to Republicans flooding the zone that Pres. Obama is “butting into Wisconsin’s business,” to quote a Newsmax blast this week. But if Pres. Obama isn’t going to fight for the middle class what good is he to the Democratic Party? The Left doesn’t have an answer for that question.
Once upon a time, Barack Obama did have an answer. In fact, the words still live on BarackObama.com. But that was before he got the job to which he applied. Daily Caller pulled out the video.
When I am President, I will end the tax giveaways to companies that ship our jobs overseas, and I will put the money in the pockets of working Americans, and seniors, and homeowners who deserve a break. I won’t wait ten years to raise the minimum wage - I’ll raise it to keep pace every single year. And if American workers are being denied their right to organize when I’m in the White House, I will put on a comfortable pair of shoes and I will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States.
Now, since some of you aren’t familiar with my role in the primaries of 2008, let me just say that not only am I not surprised not to be seeing Candidate Obama, starting in January 2007, I warned he never would. But that doesn’t mean the word salads Obama planted on the gullible ears of voters wouldn’t be wonderful to see manifest in action, because the middle class needs a hero now more than ever.
Mother Jones lays out why the union fight in this country is so critically important to the middle class. It’s because America doesn’t have one anymore.
I’m sure Pres. Obama didn’t mean to make the Republicans’ job easier for them, but that’s what he’s done. I have no doubt that Barack Obama’s heart is in the right place when it comes to workers. It’s just he doesn’t have the ideological instinct for when he’s being suckered, while his staff has the collective wingnut I.Q. of 2. They’ve also so fetishized Independent voters, as has the entire traditional media, that they don’t know a trap when it’s being laid.
No one has been a bigger sucker for austerity than Pres. Obama.
He was the right man for 2008, but it’s clear that the ideological battle brewing going into 2012 makes him a weak spokesman for what Democrats need, but he’s all they’ve got. So what’s going to happen as the Right takes aim at the heart of what Democrats are all about: supporting the working, middle class against all odds through policy? So far all Obama’s done is yield the field to the Right, which is why we’re now seeing an assault on public unions.
The Obama White House still hasn’t figured out how the Right, in whatever party it lives, wages political warfare. Look at health care and how they targeted women on reproductive services. Both Obama and Pelosi gave Stupak-Pitts the power to serve women up, which culminated last week with Rep. Mike Pence taking the Right’s war on women to target Planned Parenthood, while states like South Dakota and Nebraska tout “justifiable homocide” bills.
Maybe this all started when Sarah Palin beat Pres. Obama on health care messaging when she squealed about “death panels.” The lack of fight was evident, because Obama preferred making the deal with big pharma and private health insurance companes, instead of fighting for the public option in the open. The Right sensed he didn’t have the steel for the battle, which is turning out to be any battle at all.
One of the biggest moves from Pres. Obama that legitimized the austerity craze came when he authorized the deficit commission, teasing a bipartisan solution in the midst of all out ideological war coming from the Right. He even teased he’d put Social Security on the table.
Listening to Rush Limbaugh talk about “busted” unions and “Armageddon” for the labor movement this week, there can be absolutely no doubt the battle in Wisconsin is an ideological fight.
Same with Gov. Walker, who basically said on “Morning Joe” that it doesn’t matter what concessions Wisconsin unions serve up, he wants to break their ability to collectively bargain, which would make the public sector unions obsolete. Walker also said that any taxes would be wrong, including those for the wealthiest Americans. That’s likely because they’re the people who paid for Walker’s ride into office.
This tax message was aided by what Pres. Obama and the Democrats said in December when they extended the Bush era tax cuts. Coming after Obama’s deficit commission, the message Obama sent to the Right was that he was buying that the deficit was the main issue, but more importantly that the primary way of dealing with it is through spending cuts and tax cuts, basically adopting the Republican economic message that got us into this mess in the first place.
It was the set up for what’s happening in Wisconsin and beyond, with Republican governors and legislatures across the country primed to take unions out. The midterms were a Right rout, which is why I kept emphasizing the state houses turned over & the number of seats lost after November’s elections. There was simply no way Republicans would gain such an advantage and not use it through policy.
The minute Pres. Obama embraced the Right’s economic world view, as well as their austerity craze to cut spending, he emboldened Gov. Chris Christie, Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican Right to attack government spending as the only problem and make taxes the enemy of the public good, which Obama and the Democrats aided by extending the Bush tax cuts, but also by buying into the notion that the deficit should be handled through spending cuts alone, instead of including tax increases on multi-millionaires and billionaires.
Pres. Obama has miscalculated horribly by handing the Republican Right the biggest advantage on economic policy since Ronald Reagan won in 1980. Through the deficit commission and extending Bush era tax cuts, he handed the Right the only thing they needed to further threaten and weaken the Democratic Party worse than what the Tea Party did in the midterms.
It’s gotten so bad that last week on “Real Time” with Bill Maher, CNBC’s Michelle Caruso-Cabrera said that Social Security was one of the biggest problems we have today, while actually lauding Sharron Angle for saying it should be privatized. At one point John Heilemann looked at Bill Maher and said that maybe it was time to realize that Pres. Obama just doesn’t think the same things as many Democrats do is all that important, because he agrees with Republicans. It was the first time I heard someone in the traditional media world say what I’ve been writing since 2007.
It’s clear Pres. Obama has no intention of countering the austerity craze to tackle the deficit. The only hope is that the Left will see this as their own Tea Party moment and force the issue into reality. The super wealthy aren’t paying their fair share, because nobody in either party is asking them to.
It’s time to ask the comfortable what they can do for their country.
However, anyone waiting for candidate Obama to show up to do just that is going to be very disappointed.
Taylor Marsh is a political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.
UNION THUGS CRASH TEA PARTY RALLY - ASSAULT CONSERVATIVE PROTESTERS-
Far left thugs get out and get a little bloody…
Former Massachusetts Republican Congressional candidate Marty Lamb was assaulted and knocked to the ground by a union thug yesterday at a tea party rally.
VA Right reported:
DaTech Guy has more on this rally and latest assault by a leftist thug. He says the union members were signing in (so they could get paid?).
So what are the odds that our corrupt far left media will ignore this latest violent assault on a tea party protester?
Larry Barszewski reports:
Deerfield Beach City Commission candidate Ron Coddington’s past financial headaches aren’t behind him just yet.
Coddington declared bankruptcy in 2004, a public records search shows. He also accrued IRS tax liens of more than $ 800,000, which all have been satisfied.
“The bankruptcy was necessary primarily to divide the assets in a divorce … We were going to dissolve it anyhow,” said Coddington, who co-owned Team Land Development with his former wife. The business was also facing an insurance judgment against a bonding company of about $ 1 million, he said.
“There were no personal debts absolved as part of that,” Coddington said of the bankruptcy.
But now that he’s running for the District 1 commission seat against incumbent Joe Miller and Cody Loomis, his financial problems are gaining new currency on the Internet. “It’s no small wonder why Coddington wants to cut taxes,” blogger Chaz Stevens wrote in listing the bankruptcy and liens.
The IRS filed tax liens totaling $ 680,000 for the 1996, 1998 and 1999 tax years. Coddington said the liens stemmed from money he invested with Sterling Foster & Co., which fleeced investors of millions of dollars. Coddington lost more than $ 1 million in investments because of the fraud, but ended up owing tax money on the investments even after the money disappeared, he said.
“It took me about 10 years to pay it all back. The final amount was paid back after the bankruptcy,” Coddington said.
A $ 135,000 IRS lien for the 1990 tax year occurred because of the accounting method used by his firm’s accountant, he said.
“We incurred taxes on paper for money we hadn’t received,” Coddington said. An amended tax return eventually was filed, reflecting the actual income earned and reducing the amount of the lien, which was satisfied in 1993, he said.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and a handful of other tea party lawmakers have been pushing a plan to create a balanced budget amendment (BBA) to the U.S. Constitution. With little support for the idea in Congress, Paul traveled to the Kentucky Capitol this week to urge his state’s lawmakers to call for a Constitutional Convention in order to force the issue. On Tuesday, at Paul’s behest, the state Senate passed the measure on a near party-line vote.
But not everyone on the right is thrilled with the plan. Kentucky tea party gubernatorial hopeful Phil Moffett — who introduced Paul at CPAC earlier this month and whom Paul has endorsed — slammed Paul’s idea in a lengthy statement on his website:
Asking states to call a federal constitutional convention is fraught with peril. First this has not been attempted since the Constitution was passed. There are not any established protocols or limitations that can be placed on the convention, therefore the entire Constitution will be open for modification. I do not have confidence in today’s politicians to do the same level of work our Founding Fathers accomplished in the 1780′s.
Moffett goes on to explain, in detail, why a balanced budget amendment to Kentucky’s Constitution has completely failed in its aims.
Indeed, a balanced budget amendment is a terrible idea. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative columnist who worked for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, in addition to Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), has noted that a BBA is “just an election year ploy” to “fool people into thinking [Republicans] are fiscally responsible.” Bartlett cites over a dozens scholarly articles explaining the dangers of a BBA, and lists eight reasons why it is a “bad idea.” For example:
It’s doubtful that BBA supporters really understand the composition of federal spending. In fiscal year 2009, we would have had to abolish every discretionary spending program, including national defense, to balance the budget and that still wouldn’t have been enough without higher revenues. We would have had to cut more than $ 300 billion out of Medicare and Social Security as well.
“A BBA would force the federal government to make economic recessions worse,” he adds. And Bartlett is hardly alone among conservatives. Scott Galupo, a former staffer for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) called the proposed amendment “quite simply, insane,” in an op-ed he wrote last year titled “A Balanced Budget Amendment Is Still a Stupid Idea.”
Broward’s Floyd Johnson is a top finalist to run the city of Corpus Christi, Texas.
Johnson, a former Marine Corps captain from Richmond, Va., was Broward County administrator back in the day, that day being a long time ago, in the 1980s. In more modern times, 1998 to 2003, he was city manager of Fort Lauderdale. Even closer to the present, he ran the Community Redevelopment Agency in Riviera Beach, and right now he’s the northwest CRA director in Pompano Beach.
Corpus Christi officials narrowed their search to two, and Johnson made that cut. Click here to see that city’s webpage, where it posted video interviews of Johnson and the other finalist.
Click here to read a news account of the selection process.
Dan Daley, a 21-year-old aide to a state legislator, is already beginning his campaign for Coral Springs City Commission – in the November 2012 election.
Though he works as a legislative assistant to state Rep. Ari Porth, a Coral Springs Democrat, Daley is a Republican – and the invitation to his kick-off event includes some notable Broward Republicans, including Sheriff Al Lamberti and County Commissioner Chip LaMarca and Republican committeeman Joe Eikenberg.
Three current commissioners – Vince Boccard, Tom Powers and Larry Vignola, all Republicans – are on Daley’s committee as are Democrats Porth and state Sen. Jeremy Ring, D-Parkland.
The city commission contest is non-partisan, and Daley will be running without a party label in a mostly-Democratic city. The city’s voters are 45.8 percent Democratic, 27.2 percent Republican and 27 percent independent/no party affiliation.
Daley said he’s starting now because he plans to knock on “thousands” of voters doors.
“I have a proven track record of volunteering and working tirelessly for this community, on city boards, in the State Legislature, and in civic associations. I am ready and excited to take my service to the next level,” he said in a statement.
Daley owns a business, Equine Excellence Enterprises, which sells horse products across Florida and the Northeast. His campaign-issued biography is below, on the continuation.
Daley’s March 2 campaign kickoff is at a favorite spot for Republican gatherings in northwest Broward, Wings Plus in Coral Springs.
As the 2012 election draws near, Scott Brown is taking extra steps to differentiate himself from the predominant voices in his party:
WASHINGTON — Sen. Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts last year reverberated nationwide, early evidence of the power of the emerging Tea Party even in one of the most liberal states in the nation.
Now, as he prepares for a re-election battle next year to win a full term for the Senate seat long held by Edward Kennedy, Brown downplays the role the Tea Party played last time, expressing support for its fiscal conservatism but keeping the movement at arms’ length.
Is he a Tea Partier?
“No, I’m a Republican from Massachusetts,” Brown said in an interview with USA TODAY about his new book, Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances.
He calls himself “a Scott Brown Republican” — focused on jobs, the economy and national defense, and a fiscal hawk.
“I’m somebody who keeps an open mind on all the other issues,” he says, adding: “I’m not a social crusader.”
And, in the year he’s been in office, Brown has taken somewhat of an independent streak, much to the frustration of the Tea Party activists who saw something in him that clearly wasn’t there:
In office, Brown has voted with the Democrats on some big issues, including the financial regulatory overhaul and repeal of the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy on gays in the military.
“He’s generally positioned as an independent kind of Republican,” says Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report. That’s sensible in a state where Republicans make up 11% of registered voters, Rothenberg says, adding that Brown has “a decent chance to be re-elected in a very difficult state.”
It won’t be easy by any means, of course. Brown won in 2010 in a special election where there were just a little more than 2,1 million votes cast. In the 2008 Presidential election, there were nearly 3 million votes cast. That difference in turnout, plus a badly run campaign by Martha Coakley,obviously helped Brown win. Next year, though, he’s going to have the uphill battle of running in a Presidential election year in state that will, most assuredly, vote heavily in Barack Obama’s favor. If he’s going to win, its going to be not because he ran as a Tea Party candidate, but because he ran as the kind of moderate, fiscally conservative, Republican that has been able to win in the past, and which had nearly disappeared from the party until his victory and the GOP pickups that occurred in the 2010 midterms. Any Republican who gets annoyed at him for taking the positions that he does is putting purity above politics and simply handing that Senate seat back to the Democrats.
Lawrence O'Donnell on Monday made a prediction that most who hadn't heard of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker until a week ago might find astonishing.
On MSNBC's "The Last Word," the host told his perilously liberal guest Ezra Klein that if Walker's budget repair plan goes through, "He would instantaneously become the greatest hero in the Republican Party nationwide, I think would go to the top of Republicans' lists for possible presidential nominees in the upcoming election" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL, HOST: Ezra, it seems to me his,his personal and political ambition is served by trying to get the full deal. If he were actually to get this thing through and get his Republican senators a chance to vote on it, he would instantaneously become the greatest hero in the Republican Party nationwide, I think would go to the top of Republicans' lists for possible presidential nominees in the upcoming election because I don’t think there’s an accomplishment quite like this out there that any other Republican can point to that would thrill the Republican base as much as this.
EZRA KLEIN, WASHINGTON POST: He’d become a hero. I don’t know if he has enough time to go for 2012. But you know, Chris Christie’s become a very prominent Republican in part through some very well-publicized showdowns with union employees and union members at essentially press conferences. Walker is being able to do something he didn’t even dream of.
With no one emerging as the presumptive favorite, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who could fit that role claiming he's not ready, O'Donnell could be quite prescient in his observation.
As I sat there watching Walker's press conference last Friday, I was struck by his calm and obviously intelligent manner. With all the attention he's currently getting, a victory here could indeed catapult him to national prominence.
Consider, too, that President Obama, the Democrat Party, and all their media minions are now fully engaged in this battle.
If when this is all over, Walker is the man left standing, he will be perceived as the David that slew the entire left-wing machine in our nation.
As O'Donnell correctly observed, is there anyone else in the Republican Party today with those credentials?
With this in mind, it is a metaphysical certitude the Left and their willing accomplices in the press are going to pull out all the stops to defeat Walker's budget repair plan, for O'Donnell surely isn't the only liberal media member recognizing Walker's potential invincibility if his sling proves fatal.
New York state Assemblywoman Jane Corwin (R) was picked to be the GOP’s candidate in the special election to replace Rep. Chris Lee (R-NY) but Roll Call reports the nomination of an establishment favorite “drew an ominous warning from western New York tea party activists who immediately vowed to pursue a third-party candidate.”
“New York’s complicated election laws allow the tea party to seek a separate line on the ballot should they choose to. Specifically, the group would have to collect 3,200 signatures from 26th district residents in the 12 days after the governor formally calls for a special election.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire
This is going to be messy. Kathy Griffin, Hollywood's favorite D-list vulgarian, will apparently be playing a Tea Party candidate loosely modeled on Sarah Palin in an upcoming episode of Fox's "Glee", according to The Hollywood Reporter.
What could go wrong?
Griffin discovered not so long ago that bashing Palin and her family can help prop up her sagging career - without controversy, Americans might just be asking, "Kathy who?" After this gig, though, it will be sheer comedy simply to see the lengths Griffin will go to mock the former governor.
Here are the few details THR reported over the weekend:
TV Guide confirmed that Griffin will play Tammy Jean, a conservative home-schooling Tea Party candidate rumored to be based on Sarah Palin, while Devine will take on the role of a stripper-turned-nun named Sister Mary Constance.
Griffin took to Twitter to announce the news. When asked if she would be appearing on the hit show she replied, "So excited!! It's true!!"
This is the same Kathy Griffin who said she would "like to push Sarah Palin down the stairs" and was heartily booed at a USO event after mocking Palin's daughter Bristol.
Griffin's lowlights also include calling Sen. Scott Brown's daughters prostitutes, and telling both Jesus Christ and "View" host Elizabeth Hasselbeck to "suck it."
In short, Griffin's appearance will be exactly what you'd expect from a Palin impersonator on "Glee".
Miami-Dade Mayoral Candidate Llorente Comments On Possible Special Election
by Javier Manjarres
During a recent interview with Llorente at his Coral Gables Law Office, Llorente discussed his thoughts about the upcoming recall vote and his decision to run for the Mayor of Miami-Dade county.
*** Note If Mayor Alvarez is recalled, the Commission appoints may appoint an interim Mayor, but regardless, the Mayor’s election goes on as planned for later this year when Alvarez’s original term up.
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