See The Simpsons Stonecutters episode, where the Stonecutters changed their name to The Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers to keep Homer Simpson out.
Do I hear the "Republican National No-Ron-Pauls Convention?"
Posted on 05/06/2012 5:07:18 PM PDT by redreno
See The Simpsons Stonecutters episode, where the Stonecutters changed their name to The Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers to keep Homer Simpson out.
Do I hear the "Republican National No-Ron-Pauls Convention?"
The rule makes sense until you realize Ron Paul's gang probably wrote in Mickey Mouse 15,000 times and you didn't check. "b. Deception and Misinformation - use any means necessary to divide and conquer our opponents."
Santorum and Gingrich were pretty minor shoestring campaigns at that point, so it’s not really surprising they didn’t make the ballot. Perry is kind of unfathomable though. I wonder if the GOP insiders didn’t try to keep a lot of competent people from joining the other campaigns through threats in order to help Romney. I’m sure they pulled every string behind-the-scenes that they could for Romney.
I was discussing the “Maine” video, not the Nevada picture. The Maine video at least gave verification that they were actually at the event and there were real people passing things out, but was as I described.
As I mentioned in another part of my post which you didn’t quote, the Nevada question is that, if you postulate “shenanigans”, you can’t tell whether it was a Romney operative passing out a false slate, or a Ron Paul zealot making up a “Romney” fake slate to complain about, or just some random guy who showed up at the convention and wanted to be cute, not sanctioned by either nominee. You’d need a video showing a person passing out the Nevada delegate slate, and identify them and then tie them definitively to a campaign.
I’m not “resisting you”. In fact, it’s funny that you used the term “resist me”, it sounds like the Borg “resistance is futile”, which so much painted me a picture of Ron Paul’s supporters that you certainly didn’t want me to have.
I hate conventions, because people play all sorts of tricks. In fact, I started this by pointing out that multiple posts and several reports have mentioned Ron Paul supporters pulling tricks with delegate slates at lower levels, or offering themselves as supporters of other candidates so they could get to the next level and vote Paul-supporters into the national group.
Nevada seems to prove that to be the case — because 50% of the people at district supported Mitt Romney, but we are to believe that those same 50% CHOSE to vote so many Ron Paul supporters on to the next level that Ron Paul had full control of the delegate slate. Who knows why, but it is more plausible that this was something Ron Paul did, than that Mitt Romney was actually trying to trick people and yet this happened anyway.
But you can believe what you want. The point I have been making is that I do not find it conservative to cheer on the idea of thwarting the actual votes people cast, simply because the process allows for the possibility. For whatever reason, 50% of the people who showed up for the Nevada Presidential Caucus voted for Romney, and 40% voted for other people than Ron Paul. And yet, at the national convention, if it makes it to a second round, Nevada’s voters, 90% of whom wanted someone else, will be “represented” by a near-unanimous slate of people voting for Ron Paul, somebody almost NONE of the people in Nevada actually wanted.
How anybody can say that this is a good thing, I don’t know. It certainly isn’t representative democracy. When we vote people to represent us, we expect them to faithfully do so, not misrepresent themselves and do something we don’t want as soon as we turn our backs.
You misunderstand the meaning of the word “rules”, you confuse the rules with the procedure used to enforce the rules, and you misrepresent what I said. Not very good.
The RULES are the same as they have been for a long time — for a statewide candidate to be on a ballot, they must get the signatures and addresses of 10,000 registered voters, of which 400 must be from each of the 11 congressional districts.
That is the only rule, and it was the rule in force in 2008, and in 2012. It didn’t change in “november or december”, it hasn’t changed in years. It’s not “harder” now than in 2008, it’s the SAME RULE.
The procedures for verification have “changed”, in that before it was an ad-hoc process, and now they actually wrote up the procedure they would use. This happened in October. As part of that procedure, in order to not waste time, they said that if there were 15,000 counted signatures, and 600 from each district, they would ASSUME that there were enough valid ones to meet the 10,000/400 rule, and so they wouldn’t individually verify the names and addresses.
There has never been a case where more than 33% of the signatures for a candidate were rejected, so this seems like a rational procedural step. Why waste the time of your volunteers — in this case, forcing them to count through the Christmas holiday), when it is a virtual certainty that the signatures will be sufficient. As I said, Ron Paul submitted 14,100 signatures, and his were all checked, and he passed the 10,000/400 threshold with no problem.
The fact is that only two candidates submitted signature petitions that met the requirements of Virginia law. The 15000/600 procedure didn’t keep anybody OFF the ballot. If the argument is that the RPV should have ignored the law, and not checked signatures for validity, I reject that argument — if the law is wrong, change it, don’t ignore it.
The problem in Virginia was the inability of most of the candidates to put together campaign teams that could get signatures. I can’t comprehend what Perry’s problem was — he had a major player as his campaign chief of staff, who should have been able to collect signatures.
Every Senate candidate collected enough signatures. It’s not trivial, but it isn’t that hard. I can’t help it that Mitt Romney had an actual campaign organization (they have been here since 2007, they collected enough signatures that year, and they had the lists of people to contact to do it again. And I don’t have to explain Ron Paul’s organizational skills).
I know McDonnell ended up endorsing Romney, but not until Perry dropped out. I still believe that if Perry had submitted enough signatures to get on the ballot, McDonnell might have endorsed him then.
I don’t understand Perry. He was here in September at the RPV luncheon, and they didn’t collect signatures. He had Jim Gilmore as his campaign chief — the former Governor and prior Presidential candidate, who certainly understood the process and knew how to make it happen.
We had a general statewide election, they just had to put people at the republican-strong polling places and ask for signatures. You’d know their districts, you’d know they were registered voters. We had hundreds of thousands of republicans vote that day. And yet at my precinct, the only form was Herman Cain’s.
I assumed Perry had it taken care of, because they wouldn’t return my e-mails, and they didn’t seem to be doing anything. I think that was my biggest dissappointment with the Perry group, when they failed to make our ballot.
I'm not much of a Paul fan given his stance on the military, but I do genuinely dislike Romney.
Still, I am curious. In what way are adherents of a smaller and limited federal government, constrained by the U.S. Constution like that of the Nazi party? Were the Founding Fathers brownshirts for meeting as a Congress and using British rules of parliamentary procedure in that body against the Tories?
Thank you in advance for your learned and illuminating response.
“As I mentioned in another part of my post which you didn’t quote, the Nevada question is that, if you postulate “shenanigans”, you can’t tell whether it was a Romney operative passing out a false slate, or a Ron Paul zealot making up a “Romney” fake slate to complain about, or just some random guy who showed up at the convention and wanted to be cute, not sanctioned by either nominee. You’d need a video showing a person passing out the Nevada delegate slate, and identify them and then tie them definitively to a campaign.”
That said, your comments are still valid. We don’t know if it was just some random schmuck or closet Paul-bot at two different conventions at the same time passing around fake slates promoting Romney delegates just for fun.
They DO have a photo of the guy at Nevada, so hopefully, if any of the media picks up on this, they’ll identify him soon. Any mud on Romney’s face is a happy day for me.
“You misunderstand the meaning of the word “rules”, you confuse the rules with the procedure used to enforce the rules, and you misrepresent what I said. Not very good.”
You were specifically accusing Newt, Perry, and the other candidates of being incompetent since the rules had always been the same and they “knew” about it beforehand. When in reality, the rules were changed one month before the deadline, when before they were in compliance and would have been on the ballot, until that fateful change which, coincidentally, aided the Big Money Candidate and the other one who had a fan base with lots and lots of spare time on their hands with no day jobs. Sorry, doesn’t pass the smell test.
That is false. There was no rule in the last decade under which they would have made the ballot. The rule, based on the law of Virginia, requires, and has required, 10,000 valid signatures of registered voters, with 400 in each congressional district.
Two conservative candidates failed to even collect 10,000 signatures. Two other conservative candidates failed to collect 10,000 valid signatures.
You can keep SAYING that the rules changed, but it is false.
I’d find you the links that were posted here in previous months, but I don’t know which threads they were, and you can’t easily find them on the web, because one thing Paul’s supporters are very good at is google-spamming, so that you can find hundreds of references to the supposed Romney actions in Nevada (where Paul, having one 10% of the support of the state, somehow won all the delegates).
You have to give them that, the Ron Paul supporters are very dedicated and know what they are doing. It just isn’t very representative of the will of the voters, or respectful of the process.
The conservative movement will be in sad shape if the republican party is overtaken by the Ron Paul supporters, as it seems it is happening now. Fortunately, they are highly unlikely to actually do the job of running the committees they have taken over, so once the nominations are done, things will probably get back to normal.
BTW, I find it kind of depressing doing any searches with the name “Ron Paul”. As soon as you put “Ron Paul” in a search, all you get are hundreds of repeated stories from the dailyPaul or RonPaulRevolution.
That they are so good at making it impossible to find any unbiased information about Ron Paul is disconcerting.
Also is the number of threads from Ron Paul supporters talking about getting Rachel Maddow to help them out.
“That is false. There was no rule in the last decade under which they would have made the ballot. The rule, based on the law of Virginia, requires, and has required, 10,000 valid signatures of registered voters, with 400 in each congressional district.”
“...prior to the 2012 elections it was Republican party policy in Virginia to simply deem any candidate that brought in ten thousand raw signatures as having met the primary ballot requirements under Virginian state election law. So, for example, Alan Keyes (a popular negative example for people making the ‘any competent campaign’ argument) apparently did not actually have his petitions checked in 2000 and 2008; absent going back and looking at the paperwork (assuming that it even still exists), there’s no way to tell whether he would have survived the scrutiny of 2012. And that’s true of every other candidate who has appeared on the primary ballot in Virginia. None of them qualify for an apples-to-apples comparison – and this remains true no matter how many signatures were collected. If you know that your signatures will not be checked if you get above 10K, you are simply operating in a fundamentally different environment than one where you know that your signatures will be checked.”
Now either this is BS, and everything I’ve read on the subject is BS, or the rules did radically change one month prior to the deadline.
“I’d find you the links that were posted here in previous months, but I don’t know which threads they were, and you can’t easily find them on the web, because one thing Paul’s supporters are very good at is google-spamming, so that you can find hundreds of references to the supposed Romney actions in Nevada (where Paul, having one 10% of the support of the state, somehow won all the delegates).
You have to give them that, the Ron Paul supporters are very dedicated and know what they are doing. It just isn’t very representative of the will of the voters, or respectful of the process.
The conservative movement will be in sad shape if the republican party is overtaken by the Ron Paul supporters, as it seems it is happening now. Fortunately, they are highly unlikely to actually do the job of running the committees they have taken over, so once the nominations are done, things will probably get back to normal.”
And this is relevant to your double standard... how?
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