Ex-Senator Rick Santorum endorses President Barack Obama: I love this guy!

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor 

 

Ex-Senator Rick Santorum said yesterday that Romney is so much like Obama, voters in November should just  stick with the incumbent.  In Texas, the candidate once again held up front-runner Mittens as the Etch A Sketch candidate, who will change his positions after the primary.  


"You win by giving people a choice," he said. "You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who's just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you're going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future."  I effing love this guy!

Romney's top political strategist suggested that Ex-Senator Santorum's continued presence in the race makes him President Obama's "most valuable player."   

---o0o---

New Public Policy Polling results show Mitt Romney less popular than George W. Bush

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor

A new survey from Public Policy Polling shows that Ex-Governor Mitt Romney is viewed favorably by 33 percent of voters, with nearly double that number—58%—viewing him unfavorably.  Ex-President George W. Bush, who reached Nixon-style lows while in The White House,  fared far better in the same poll—45% favorable and 46% unfavorable.  As Public Policy Polling wrote, "The former president has seen something of a rehabilitation in his image since he left office and memories of his administration have begun to fade, but for him to be stronger than Romney among independent voters just a few years after an economic meltdown and disaster in Iraq is striking. "



This poll also seems to put the lie to Romney's oft repeated claim of electability and inevitability: "Romney is actually not the most electable Republican candidate on this poll. Ron Paul and Rick Santorum both do a point better than him, trailing by 3 points at 46-43 and 48-45 respectively."

—o0o—

All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).

Rick Santorum: "I've got such a raging clue right now"

This captioned photo, source unknown (or maybe the quickmeme.com guys actually did create it), was sent to us by Jeff Clinton.  /Pablo

---o0o---

In the face of mounting calls for his withdrawal, Speaker Gingrich vows to stay the course

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor
illustration by Jack Brummet

"We are staying in this race because I believe it's going to be impossible for a moderate to win." 

Following his shellacking in Alabama and Mississippi yesterday, Speaker Gingrich held a rally today in a Chicago suburb. 75 people showed up.

---o0o---

Hold your noses and vote, GOP/Tea Party—there is no man on horseback on the horizon

Steve Schmidt, on MSNBC: 


"Four years ago with Democrats, the tension in that race was which of two historic candidates the Democratic party voters all liked. who were they going to put forward in the general election contest? They liked both of them. They would have been happy with both of them. The longer this goes on, Republican voters are saying, 'We don't like any of them, we want somebody new in the race.' And that new person isn't going to appear in the race."

—o0o—

Election night rumination: BHO is going to win; Mitt Romney is desperately out of touch; Rick Santorum is in touch, but insane

By Jack Brummet, Editor-in-chief

Since Pablo Fanque, our National Affairs Editor and political whiz is M.I.A.(after promising to live blog the Michigan and Arizona primaries), I wanted to mention a couple of things.

In his speech tonight, Rick Santorum once again shows he has what it takes to connect with the voters.  I disagreed with nearly every clause of the speech, but he has a way of reaching out that Mitt Romney will never achieve.  Listen to the cadences and delivery of Mitt Romney's victory speech tonight.  It sounded like his basic $35,000 speech to an insurance convention. 

This should have been Mitt Romney's night. And he blew it.  He came from way behind in his home state to triumph.  But he never even talked about Michigan, or growing up there, or his deep connection to the people of that state.  He didn't mention it at all.  There was no real joy in his speech.  It felt like a candidate that resented he'd been forced to work so hard to win.  He should have laughed and expressed his great delight that his home state pulled through for him.  And he did not.  I don't think Mitt Romney's a scary guy, but I do think he is seriously out of touch, as we've seen over and over again in his foolish, unscripted, utterances. Mitt needs a new speechwriter.  He needs to think about retail politics.  He needs to read Chris Matthews's masterful book on political strategy, "Hardball."

Tonight President Obama delivered a masterful speech to the U.A.W. in Washington (the other Washington).  It was brilliant, inspiring, and it reached out to the voters. . .and connected.  BHO, like Romney, needs to remember to connect.  And he can; it's second nature to him.  Unfortunately, this is the only clip that's online at the moment.  If you get a chance, check out the entire speech.  The crux of it was that "you, the American people, did this."  He didn't talk about his brilliance as a manager; he talked about how people pulled together.  The President is back.  Now, it's on to November 6th!

If you get the chance, look for the entire speech...

---o0o---

All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).

Ex-Senator Rick Santorum leads by 4+% in early returns from Michigan

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor

We've been a little down since it looked like Ex-Governor Mitt Romney might actually pull off a victory tonight in Michigan after trailing in all the polls earlier.  In the very early reporting from Michigan tonight, Santorum leads Romney by four+ points (40.8% v. 35.6%).

1% of the precincts reporting:


Santorum 3,622 votes       - 40.8%
Romney 3,162 35.6 votes  - 36.8%
Paul 1,074                       - 12.1%
Gingrich 1,361                 -   7%

Why do we want Santorum to win?  a)  We would love to see him run against BHO; b)  it's kind of fun to watch the Romney campaign unravel; and c)  a Santorum win should make Super Tuesday a whole lot more interesting.

---o0o---

Mitt Romney reaches out to voters, saying, yeah, I like NASCAR. . .well, the owners

By Jack Brummet

Ex-Governor Mitt Romney was asked by a AP reporter the other day if he follows NASCAR, and Romney responded, "Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners."

 "I don't know people who fish but I know people who own yachts," tweeted Brad Woodhouse, communications director of the Democratic National Committee.

---o0o---

Santorum: Satan has his sights set on the USA

—o0o—

All This Is That contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make these materials available to advance the understanding of political, economic, literary, artistic, and social issues. In some cases we satirize, parody, or lampoon materials from other sources. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of copyrighted material as provided for by section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research, educational, and entertainment purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', please read and follow our Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and attribute the work to All This Is That, along with our URL (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com).

Kos Announces "Operation Hilarity: Let's keep the GOP clown show going!"

Announcing Operation Hilarity: Let's keep the GOP clown show going!

---o0o---

Rick Santorum visits Seattle

The Ex-Senator swings through Seattle today. 

---o0o---

Mitt Romney: Fading Fast

---o0o---

Pants on fire: Mitt Romney tells another whopper today

by Jack Brummet, primary and caucus stringer

“I am the only candidate in this race, Republican or Democrat, who has never worked a day in Washington,” Mitt Romney said in a speech today.  “I don’t have old scores to settle or decades of cloakroom deals to defend.”

Mitt has plenty of deals to defend.  Just this week, he said he'd a been a fool not to look for Federal money.  Today, in The Morning Call, Colby Itkowitz writes:  "In a 2003 article in Boston-based Commonwealth Magazine, Romney’s chief of legislative and intergovernmental affairs, Cindy Gillespie, discussed the state’s Washington lobbying office and is quoted saying it “exists for one reason: to increase the amount of federal funding coming back to the state.”

In the same Commonwealth article, Gillespie says Romney’s team in Washington would seek aid from the federal highway bill and new homeland security funds.  Of course, Romney also fought hard for (and won) federal funding for his Big Dig project in Boston.

The bottom line is, Mitt Romney, when he was Governor, often worked in Washington, usually trying to cajole money for Massachusetts from the President and Congress.  The record shows many dozens of trips to Washington by Mittens during his governorship.  He wasn't going there for the parties and nightlife in Georgetown.

---o0o---

The Twilight of Newt Gingrich

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor

Newt is spending today in Ohio, whistling past the graveyard

After three contests today where he achieved total irrelevancy, Newt has been spending his time in Ohio, in hopes of salvaging his candidacy. 

But. . .not only Newt is on the ropes.  Suddenly, and unexpectedly, Rick Santorum swept all three contests today...just after Ex-Governor Romney scored back-to-back wins in Florida and Nevada.  Those two victories led most pundits to predict that Romney was on a straight march to the nomination.  Wednesday will be an interesting day.  Maybe not everything has changed, but much has changed.

As for Newt himself,  he'll hang in for a while, and go through the motions in Washington State, Arizona, Maine, Michigan before Super Tuesday on March 6th.  In fact he claims--but, then, don't they all?--that he is staying in throughout the primary-caucus season, all the way to the convention.  But sometime between tomorrow and that convention, he will drop out, get to give a dramatic speech at the convention, and then become become a revived, if not beloved, senior statesman, and go to work for a think tank or as a sort-of-but-not-really-lobbyist.

The end of the road?  Or on the trail to Comeback Number Three?

---o0o---

It was four years ago, almost to the day, that Mitt Romney ended his first quest for the White House

By Mona Goldwater

Four years ago yesterday, Mitt Romney bailed out of the 2008 Republican Presidential contest.   The people had spoken.

Things were looking better than they did back then until Mittens took a serious body blow in the heartland of America last night.  Sure, they shrug off these primaries and caucuses off beauty contests, but that's not what they were saying last week. . .

What are his spinmeisters saying tonight?  "It's always darkest before the dawn," or "we've only begun to fight?"  The Missouri and Minnesota losses weren't that shocking--these folks are going to vote mainly for the conservative candidate.  But Colorado?  What the Eff happened?  A few days ago, Romney was polling ahead in the double digits.  And tonight, Ex-Senator Rick Santorum whipped him by more than 5%.  Romney had plummeted 16% in a few days?  Maybe you can attribute this to his recent comments about the poor, or his recent financial disclosures, on top of his earlier verbal slips?  Or maybe people are just finally coming to their senses?  But that's not it, because those votes are going to Rick Santorum.

Mitt has been regularly tarred and feathered by his opponents as practically a Molotov-cocktail throwing Bolsheviki, or at best, a shameless flip-flopper and closet liberal, he walks into these next contests almost crippled.  As Bob Dylan wrote "It's not dark yet/but it's getting there."

In the battleground states, however, Mitt Romney and President Obama are polling neck and neck.  And, in the end, the battleground states are all that matter.   The center of the party would like to get focused on Romney and away from the opponent du jour.  But those damned voters keep getting in their way.

This could change rapidly, but in general, Romney now has to score in Arizona, Washington State, and the other states that vote/caucus before Super Tuesday, not necessarily to win, but to at least show he has some stuffing left.  But Super Tuesday is where his focus will be.  Super Tuesday is not as big as it has been in the past, but ten states is a pretty significant data point.  It may tell all.  But that's hard to know in this genuinely fragmented and bizarre nomination contest.

If anything, as a political dweeb,  this is all great news.  We now see the race, presumably with all four candidates, head into the next primaries and Super Tuesday.  No one is going to bail out before then, not now.

---o0o---

The Romney Express

---o0o---

Drawing: The contestants Paul, Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich

By Jack Brummet
[hand drawn on india ink scratchboard; digitized and captioned]

click to enlarge

---o0o---

Newt's South Carolina win::::::::::The Republican ship is taking on water

By Jack Brummet, Paranormal, Art, Poetry, and Persiflage Editor (filling in for National Affairs Editor Pablo Fanque, on vacation in Belize)

I very much enjoyed Ex-Speaker Newt's win in South Carolina.  Why?  Because it was nice to see a cannonball blown through Mittens's aura of inevitability.  It's also nice to see the GOP in disarray/upheaval.  We have a different winner in each of the contests so far.  I don't know what the real pundits are saying, but I think this also bodes well for Ron Paul. 

The Mittens juggernaut has been slowed down--the ox is mired in the mud.  Do I want to see Newt as President?  No.  But as for the GOP itself, I enjoy the confusion and chaos.  Neither the establishment/money elite, or the Tea Party faction, or the fundamentalist wing seem able to right the Republican ship...and they're taking on water, fast. 

Why do I enjoy this SO much?  As Alfred Pennyworth said in another context "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

---o0o---

Our 2010 Predictions on GOP candidates (all things considered...not bad)

By Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor
and Jack Brummet, Arts Editor

In late 2010, we guessed who would be running for President from the Republican (and Tea) Party in 2012.  Of our candidates, three are still in the race.  Many of our picks didn't even get off the ground; we missed Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann; Sarah Palin performed a protracted will she?/won't she skit; and several of our picks faltered before the Iowa caucuses.  On the whole, we did a lot better job of guessing than we did in the 2008 contest.

Who is the next candidate to bail?  We are guessing Rick Santorum.  The South Carolina contest is extremely volatile.  Newt has incredibly, surged ahead in the last few days, and in some polls is besting Romney.  But then he was hit with some new dirt from his first wife.  And he even made some hay with that in the most recent debate. 

Despite everything he has said and done, we somehow prefer Newt to Rick Santorum.  We think he will nudge Santorum out in SC.  Ron Paul will remain stable, but will stay in the contest because he has rabid fans that keeping pouring money into the campaign. 

It looks like Florida may be where the rubber meets the road.  Let's see what happens in South Carolina this weekend. . .
---o0o---

Barry Goldwater pilots a 737 between Seattle and Everett, Wash.

Thank the Lord he wasn't piloting a bomber!  The original caption to this photo:

"1964 GOP Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater pilots a Boeing 737 twinjet during a visit to Boeing facilities. Goldwater flew the plane from Seattle to Everett, Washington, and back, including take-off and landings, while touring Boeing plants assembling the 737 and 747 superjet."

---o0o---