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Mickey: Stay down, Stay down Rocky 1974 John Rambo: Live for nothing or Die for Something Rambo 2008 I was watching Morning Joe today and as usual the entire table was united in asserting that Ted Cruz and the Tea Party caucus was wrong to consider fighting to de-fund Obamacare highlighting a piece by Krauthammer This is about tactics. If I thought this would work, I would support it. But I don’t fancy suicide. It has a tendency to be fatal. They stressed the wisdom of Krauthammer’s assertion that the GOP should not fight. It seemed an odd assertion since...

Thanks to some remarkable reporting from Big Hollywood, it has become increasingly clear the upcoming HBO movie "Game Change" is less a political melodrama than an all-out attempt to destroy the person and reputation of Sarah Palin. The movie is based on a poorly researched book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, and it was criticized at the time of its publication by Howard Kurtz, then a media reporter for the Washington Post, and the New York Times for its overreliance on unsourced "deep background" interviews that were difficult to verify. Two of those sources have been revealed, according to...

President Clinton, with Republican businessman Mitt Romney by his side, assailed GOP-controlled congressional panels yesterday for voting to abolish federal aid to the AmeriCorps national service programs, including Boston-based City Year. Meeting in the Cabinet Room with Romney and other AmeriCorps supporters and members, Clinton blamed partisan politics for the attack on his prized community service initiative. City Year, which has expanded to seven cities since it was founded in Boston in 1988, formed the model for AmeriCorps. In Boston, City Year involves more than 300 young people whose duties range from painting church fences to working in schools to...

The vice-chair of Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential team in New Hampshire told The Washington Times Wednesday that he thinks former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will take a pass on running for president. "I have no inside knowledge, but I would be very surprised if Gov. Palin decided to run this time," said Steve Duprey, a national Republican committeeman in New Hampshire. "She is tremendous at raising money, has a tremendous support in the base, but it would take an incredible allocation of time to do well in New Hampshire and I'm not sure she is gearing up for that."

Washington (CNN) - Mitt Romney has a message to Tea Party candidates nationwide: If you lose your Republican primary bids, stay on the sidelines. The former Massachusetts governor on Monday warned the grassroots movement not to mount third party efforts in general elections, which he said would siphon votes from Republican nominees. "If there is a conservative candidate that runs in the general election, then obviously, divide and fail is the result," Romney said in an interview with the conservative Web site Newsmax. "Hopefully Tea Party candidates will run in respective primaries and they will either win or lose. And...

Special delivery for President Obama: From Romney, with love? The former Massachusetts governor and all-but-declared presidential candidate sent his leftover pizza to President Barack Obama?a>??s election headquarters after a fundraising event in Chicago on Thursday. "Great deep dish at @ginoseast. Sending the extra slices to @barackobama and his Chicago HQ team," he tweeted, adding a photo of the deliveryman. Jeff Himmel, president of Bravo Restaurants, Inc., which owns Gino’s East, wouldn't take sides, adding Obama is no stranger to his home-town restaurant's famed pies. "I’m quite certain that the President has visited our institution on several occasions and is familiar...

CHICAGO, - Potential Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney finished a day of fundraising in Chicago by sending leftover pizza to President Obama's campaigners. Romney said he enjoyed the deep-dish pizza at Gino's East and sent some to Obama's Chicago re-election headquarters, ABC News reported Friday. "Great deep dish at @ginoseast. Sending the extra slices to @barackobama and his Chicago HQ team," Romney wrote on his Twitter feed. The message was accompanied by a picture of a delivery boy heading out of the restaurant. A source with Obama's campaign confirmed the pizza was received.

During the 2008 election cycle, Mitt Romney was often accused of treating politics more like a consumer-focused business than an exercise in leadership. “My view is, we ought to double Guantanamo,” he said, radiating the sense that if primary voters wanted something, anything, he’d be willing to sell it. His strategists obsessed about creating and selling “Brand Romney.” To many, these efforts made him look like a crass twit, a market researcher’s caricature of the perfect Republican candidate, even as he came in second-place for the GOP nomination. This election, however, Romney may have to compete with Donald Trump.

According to Romney family lawyers it doesn't matter if Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, Kenya, or even Paris: Because his mother was an American (and not even Donald Trump questions that), he is eligible to be President....posted using frpa

South Carolina Republican and conservative firebrand Sen. Jim DeMint introduced legislation to repeal Obamacare on Wednesday, the first official step in bringing the House-passed repeal bill fight into the staid upper chamber. But a slew of mostly moderate senators declined to support DeMint’s legislation, raising questions on the unity of the Republican caucus. Backing him are 34 Republicans including Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, and Republican Whip Sen. John Kyl of Arizona. Conspicuously absent from the list of cosponsors are Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Susan Collins of Maine,...

Saying that a woman engaged in feline fisticuffs might be called sexist. But when that woman actually accuses another of seeking to "claw" critics, illustrating her assertion with a cat-like hand gesture, well . . . It's no secret that Nicolle Wallace is no fan of Sarah Palin. But the former Bush communications director and McCain campaign aide perhaps took things to another level with her attack on Palin on today's Morning Joe. [snip] Wallace unleashed a hail of criticism of her own: * "Mistakes were made [by McCain in choosing Palin]." * "Her troubling deficiencies." * "Her incredible cynicism,...

Heavy spending for the 2008 national convention did not start until the summer and fall of 2007. By end of September 2006, the party had spent $35,500 on convention arrangements. That compares with the more than $636,000 spent to date. The total spent on preparations prior to July 2007 was $411,000. The arrangements committee is on pace to spend $2 million to $3 million by summer. "They're hamstringing the next presidential nominee," said an official familiar with past convention arrangements. He said money spent now cannot be replaced, potentially limiting the choices the next nominee will have in staging the...

The two Republicans whose names came up most often on the NR cruise? Sarah Palin and Chris Christie. In my interactions with only a fraction of the 700+ NR cruisegoers — mostly older, mostly well-off, passionate about politics, and many heavily involved with the tea parties — I found about two-thirds wildly enthusiastic about Sarah Palin; you could hear the gasps when Scott Rasmussen predicted she would not be the 2012 Republican nominee. Most of the remaining one-third said that while they personally liked Palin, they didn’t want to see her run in 2012, or anytime soon. An isolated few...

Joe Scarborough has a decidedly cynical take on Sarah Palin's public musings about the possibility of a 2012 presidential run. The Morning Joe host asserts that Palin knows she can't win and won't run. According to Scarborough, Palin is in it for the money, and is engaging in open speculation about a run for the mercenary purpose of keeping her brand alive. Joe offered his jaded view on today's Morning Joe after the show aired a clip of Palin telling Barbara Walters that she believed she could defeat Pres. Obama. View video after the jump.

Sarah Palin, the biggest loser. That seems to be the consensus of the grandees inhabiting Washington and New York and pockets of glitter beyond. There is a variety of interpretations of the midterm Republican wave emanating from the wine bars of upper Manhattan and the salons of Georgetown, but most include the notion that for Sarah Palin, this election was the political equivalent of the hit ABC show "The Biggest Loser." When push came to shove, she stood on...principle? Media and political elites may disagree on the many consequences of what the president called a "shellacking" by the voters, but...

Sarah Palin has officially “jumped the shark.” Last night’s premier of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” will be remembered as the moment the once-promising, conservative darling crossed over into the absurd. Part Alaska tourism promo, part window into the family Palin, TLC’s eight-part series features clips of the former governor at home in gym shorts and shots of the family enjoying the great outdoors while she calls out folksy comments like, “this is flippin’ fun!” If that’s not enough, Palin takes Kate Gosselin (of “Jon & Kate Plus 8” fame) camping in the Alaska wilderness - the two women reportedly didn’t get...

For many Republicans, the bright, golden haze of Election Day is marred by a thunderhead on the horizon -- the increasingly erratic political interventions of Sarah Palin. In the past, Palin embodied the populist style of the Tea Party movement while espousing a fairly mainstream Republican ideology. On economic, social and foreign policy, Palin seldom strayed from a simplified, popularized Reaganism. The mama grizzly may have been ferocious, but her talking points came from the Heritage Foundation instead of from darker corners of the right. But this election season has called that perception into question. Palin's endorsement of Christine O'Donnell...

Meghan McCain had a few choice words for Christine O'Donnell on 'The Talk' (weekdays, syndicated), questioning the GOP Senate candidate's state of mind, but declining to comment specifically on Sarah Palin. "I ... called her a nutjob," McCain said tersely of O'Donnell. "I feel the same way right now." When asked by Julie Chen whether she thought Palin was unfair to father John McCain's campaign team after the 2008 Presidential election, McCain was cagey and instead mentioned who she plans to support in 2012. "It's irrelevant at this point. I've so moved on," she said. "I'm looking at 2012. I've...

C’mon. Would it do any good at all? “I guarantee that, at the top of everyone’s list on how to differentiate your guy from Mitt Romney, the top of the list is health care — until and unless he takes the opportunity to say, ‘We tried, and it didn’t work. The individual mandate at the heart of Obamacare and Romneycare was wrong,’” said Bill Pascoe, a Republican strategist who wrote a post on his blog earlier this year titled “Say Goodbye to Mitt.”…An apology from Romney, or even an acknowledgement that the Massachusetts law has faults, could play into the...

In 2004, the Republican master strategist Karl Rove led weekly sessions at his Washington residence where he planned the re-election of President George W. Bush. In April, Mr. Rove summoned several of the important players behind Mr. Bush’s ascendance to his home once again, this time to draw up plans to push a Republican resurgence. The landscape has changed, with Mr. Rove at times clashing with potent new Tea Party-style activists, some of whom view him as a face of the old party establishment they want to upend. Already a prominent presence as an analyst on Fox News Channel and...