Free Republic

@RudyGiuliani : A meeting is coming out in 1-2 days in State Dept. in which Hunter snuck in the back door ... That meeting took place with Tony Blinken."

While working on combat veteran and Gold Star husband Joe Kent’s campaign for Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District, I knew by early October we were in trouble. We had overcome a $10 million deficit in the primary—owing almost entirely to Republicans backing the incumbent—but that came at a cost. We had exhausted our $3 million war chest and went into the general election broke. Our Democratic opponent emerged from the primary unscathed with about $3 million cash on hand. We had about six weeks before voting began and we were ultimately outspent 6-to-1. While Nancy Pelosi’s super PAC spent a...

Steve Schmidt, one of the founders of the notoriously anti-Trump Lincoln Project, is a registered member of an ultraconservative political party, voting records show — just weeks after he claimed he was becoming a Democrat. In a post-election interview on Dec. 15, the longtime GOP strategist who former President Donald Trump once denounced as a “blathering idiot,” announced he was registering as a member of the Democratic Party after almost three decades as a Republican. “I spent 29 years as a Republican, I’ve spent two and a half as an independent, and later this afternoon I will register as a...

Last spring, after the governor all but declared war on union leaders and other Democratic interests, Republicans sat and watched as the unions led an offensive that helped drag down the governor's poll ratings, and doom his special election agenda. Under the watch of new campaign manager Steve Schmidt and communications director Katie Levinson, both fresh off the plane from the Bush White House, Team Schwarzenegger is determined not to make the same mistake again. "For California Republicans who were frustrated last year by the lack of an aggressive response out of the governor's operation, they'll be very pleasantly surprised...

WASHINGTON — The founders of the Lincoln Project, a headline-grabbing new anti-Trump political action committee formed by GOP operatives who describe the president as “crook” and “huckster,” have their own checkered dealings with Russia and the tax man, documents obtained by the Post reveal. Since its inception last November — announced with a blistering New York Times op-ed — the brainchild of George Conway, Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson and John Weaver has raked in more than $19.4 million dollars, according to FEC filings, and needled President Trump repeatedly with provocative TV ads. But the group — which the National Review...

PUTTING IT IN PERSPECTIVE   Monday's indictment of Paul Manafort, to which he and an associate have pleaded not guilty, has reverberated throughout the specialized world of US political consultants working in foreign countries. WASHINGTON—The indictment of Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager, has sent shock waves through Washington – and through the world of American political consultants who work in foreign elections. It is a world of talented political operatives from both parties who demonstrate skill in the American arena, and then parlay that into at-times lucrative opportunities abroad. Some work primarily to help ideological brethren and, in...

Trump has so many problems to resolve that he should address very quickly, I think he should contact all of the major management consulting firms and tell them to draft proposals to evaluate each of them individually. For instance, have 3 of them draft a proposal to evaluate and make recommendations as to how to improve the VA. Have economists and the major tax accounting firms draft proposals on tax policy. Find management consulting firms who are qualified to draft proposals on immigration control and reform. You get the point...stop relying upon political strategists to determine policy (which is fraught...

[snip]At the presidential level, Hillary Clinton’s push for the Democratic nomination was nearly derailed by a candidate whose campaign manager was a comic-book-store owner with no experience in elections outside of Vermont. And while Clinton’s staff-heavy operation ultimately prevailed, her worst showings came in caucuses—the sort of contests where on-the-ground organizing is supposed to make the biggest difference. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, is a field-organizing specialist. On the Republican side, the most expensive and professional presidential campaigns proved remarkably ineffective. Ted Cruz’s campaign paid almost $6 million to a state-of-the-art analytics firm that touted its slicing and dicing of...

Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was famously criticized for his ability to convince others to believe anything he said through a combination of hyperbole and bravado. One Apple employee called the effect a “reality distortion field” in 1981 and the term persisted ever since. It’s quite clear by now that conservative philanthropists and grassroots donors have been living in a reality distortion field as well, the creation of a cadre of political consultants who have failed repeatedly at their jobs and yet manage not only to survive but thrive. The ineffectiveness of television advertising and junk mail at...

While The Donald hits the hustings talking, yea, bellowing, about the jobs America has lost, academia has actually added to its payrolls, but kept mum about who is picking up the tab. "The number of jobs in higher education expanded in 2016 at the highest growth rate for the first quarter in three years," according to Higher Ed Jobs.com. Two emerging professions servicing the academic community are Title IX advisers and diversity consultants. The former show university employees how not to run afoul of the federal law which was originally intended to bar discrimination by gender that has morphed into...

Without getting into the odious profanity that Rick Wilson spewed the other night that has rightly been excised from the pages of Free Republic, he said something else that I think bears repeating, because it encapsulates the incredible disdain and hatred that the GOP consultant class feels towards the Republican base. "[The people who] think Donald Trump is the greatest thing, oh, it`s something . . . They`re not real and political players. These are not people who matter in the overall course of humanity."

Sunday night Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager, Corey Lewandowski, lambasted the GOP establishment consultant class, when he joined Breitbart’s senior political investigative reporter Matthew Boyle on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot radio, channel 125. Lewandowski explained that what most infuriates the establishment consultants is they don’t have any say in Trump’s campaign or platform. “It drives them crazy. They want to say ‘I’ve run a campaign in the past. Pay me for my knowledge. I’ve been involved with previously failed presidential campaigns,’” he said. With Trump “That’s not how his campaign works,” added Lewandowski. “We don’t want these consultants...

Looking for ways to save money, SEPTA has paid about $2.8 million to a Boston-based consulting firm, including payments of more than $500 an hour to some specialists. In the process, FTI Consulting Inc. has used 24 of its staffers, some of whom have collected more from SEPTA than the transit agency’s highest-paid official, general manager Joseph Casey, who makes $273,000 a year. The meter is still running, with additional payments expected to continue through the end of the year. SEPTA hired FTI in February 2013 through a no-bid contract to help the transit agency reduce legal costs arising from...

So my company had a downsize / RIF / layoff and my group got hit. Sad news but hey, it happens. Now I am looking at being an independent IT consultant. Since I have always been an employee, I was wondering if there were any words of wisdom from the Freeper community.

Via Politico: Ten of the consulting firms that formed the core of the push to elect Mitt Romney — reaping a combined $1 billion in the process — have survived a tea party assault and are again among the highest-grossing and best-positioned players in Republican politics.The firms and their consultants have been paid more than $19.6 million for 2014 campaign work through January, according to a POLITICO analysis. They’ve also cemented relationships with some of the GOP’s rising stars, setting up the firms for even bigger paydays headed into the fall, when costly advertising and mail campaigns begin, and for a 2016...

Last year, while writing about the sleazy and self-serving behavior at the IRS, I came up with a Theorem that explains day-to-day behavior in Washington. It might not be as pithy as Mitchell’s Law, and it doesn’t contain an important policy prescription like Mitchell’s Golden Rule, but it could be the motto of the federal government. Simply stated, government is a racket that benefits the DC political elite by taking money from average people in America I realize this is an unhappy topic to be discussing during the Christmas season, but the American people need to realize that they are...

Alvarez and Marsal, BlackRock, Oliver Wyman, Pimco: The names mean nothing to the average European, but the financial consultancies have played a central role in all the eurozone bailouts and have so far invoiced taxpayers in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain over €80 million. Their “independent” expertise is used by the “troika” of international lenders—the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—to decide how much countries or banks need to prevent a default. They are often hired without a public tender, posing questions on transparency and accountability. […] The end result is a...

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are seeking to stay relevant in the debate over ObamaCare, but they might as well be shouting in a hurricane. A hurricane named Ted. During this month’s fiscal standoff, Sen. Ted Cruz attracted the most attention of any possible White House hopeful on Capitol Hill. GOP strategists say Cruz, a freshman Republican from Texas, has seized the role of Tea Party standard-bearer, giving him an edge with conservative activists. The grassroots army Cruz built over the last few months could help him in Iowa and other primary battlegrounds if he decides to...

The Republican Party must oust its longtime consultants and replace them with advisers who come from a world of “reality," noted political columnist and author C. Edmund Wright. “It’s not just Karl Rove [who] has certainly been, for about 12 or 13 years, the face of the establishment messaging machine," Wright — author of “WTF?: How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost ... Again" — said on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show." "This is a group [of consultants] that called Newt Gingrich the devil and then turned around and called Obama a nice guy and they thought they could...

For as long as he’s been president, Barack Obama, has been the top target for attack at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. D.C. But this year, there may have been a close second: the Republican political-consultant class, which many CPAC attendees blame for the party’s poor 2012 showing. Newt Gingrich bashed them for being “out of step,” Sarah Palin called on activists to “furlough the consultants,” pollster Kellyanne Conway railed against a “staff infection,” and Brent Bozell, head of the Media Research Center, told me that “the last thing we want is for the anti-conservative professional class...