Kaslin, how dare you not post the link for the comic book version, complete with pictures.
That's a close resemblance to a younger Trump...lol!
Posted on 04/15/2016 5:06:12 AM PDT by Kaslin
Making sense of the 2016 Republican primary is a task best left to future historians, but here’s one rough measure of how crazy things have become: Results of one hotly contested primary in March are still being disputed. And the fight has gotten so bitter that negative campaign ads are being run on the radio—not against one of the GOP candidates but against one of the lowly 2,472 elected delegates tasked with going to the Republican convention and voting for the party nominee. The story involves a multigenerational rivalry between two Republican powerbrokers from Michigan, and at stake are six delegates awarded to the U.S. Virgin Islands—a primary most Americans likely don't even know exists.
Since neither Donald Trump nor Ted Cruz is likely to amass the 1,237 pledged delegates needed to win on the first ballot at the GOP convention, the nominee will probably be determined on subsequent ballots. Under that scenario, even a handful of delegates—like the six from the U.S. Virgin Islands—could prove surprisingly consequential.
On March 10, a slate led by Republican operative John Yob won the Virgin Islands Republican primary. Yob has a lengthy résumé of involvement in national campaigns and only recently moved to the Virgin Islands. Curiously, his slate of six delegates ran not on behalf of any of the four candidates on the ballot but as "uncommitted," so they could vote for whomever they want at the national convention in Cleveland. John Canegata, the head of the Virgin Islands GOP, has since tried to declare Yob's delegate slate ineligible and appoint alternates, but this is still being hashed out before the courts and within the local party's rules committees.
Aside from the 50 states, the U.S. Virgin Islands are among a half-dozen jurisdictions—the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands—that are awarded delegates and given representation at the GOP convention. Outside of Puerto Rico and D.C., which have significant populations, delegates awarded by the remaining territories might seem like an afterthought. But mathematically, these islands have been given disproportionate influence. For example, in the Wisconsin primary Ted Cruz was awarded three delegates for winning Wisconsin's 5th Congressional District in the Milwaukee suburbs, where approximately 190,000 votes were cast. In the Virgin Islands primary to award six delegates, about 1,600 votes were cast.
Yob, who owns a number of successful campaign-related businesses and was most recently national political director for Rand Paul's presidential campaign, has a reputation for being a brilliant political tactician. In fact, he all but telegraphed his plans. He moved to the Virgin Islands in December. On February 18, he self-published a book on Amazon—Chaos: The Outsider's Guide to a Contested Republican National Convention 2016—in which he emphasized the disproportionate influence at conventions of the island territories. And on March 10, his slate won the primary. The radio ads now being run against him in the Virgin Islands accuse Yob of being an interloper with his own agenda, unrelated to the interests of the Virgin Islands. They almost have to be heard to be believed. Canegata, who is behind the ads, is a native of St. Croix. The ads are narrated in a thick island patois: "Ya mon, what's up? Did ya hear da news?. . . The outsider who just move here and are tryin' to take us over. Dat guy? John Yob? Ya him."
But calling Yob an interloper isn't entirely fair. He's visited the Virgin Islands extensively and been in talks about moving his businesses for some time. His rumored scheme has been whispered about for years among politicos who know him in D.C. and Michigan. If you establish residency in the Virgin Islands, you may see a drastic reduction in U.S. federal income tax—a sweet deal for high-flying political consultants who do well-remunerated contractual work. Further, Yob's lucrative campaign businesses—polling, database management, and credit card processing—are all Internet-based. There's no reason they need to be located stateside. And when Yob did move to the Virgin Islands, he really took the plunge, buying a multimillion-dollar house and enrolling his kids in school.
There was just one small hiccup in Yob's brilliant plan. Another Republican operative, one Yob knows all too well, had already planted his flag in the Virgin Islands. "I have had a history full of friction with Saul Anuzis," he writes in Chaos. "Regardless of how you interpret those battles, Anuzis is one of the more talented operatives and leaders in the Republican party."
Anuzis is the former head of the Michigan GOP and unsuccessfully ran for chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2009 and 2011. When the 39-year-old Yob was still a kid, Anuzis was tangling with his father, Chuck Yob, who was Michigan's representative to the RNC for almost two decades. The Yobs and Anuzis have genuine, if grudging, respect for each other, and John Yob even helped Anuzis in his 2011 bid for RNC chair. Most of the time, though, they have found themselves on opposite sides of internecine party battles in Michigan. And ironically enough, those disputes often revolved around floor fights at the Michigan GOP's state convention. (See "High Noon in Michigan" in this magazine's July 3, 2006, issue.)
In fact, the Michigan state Republican convention on April 9 proved to be another noteworthy event, if you're keeping score on the national impact of local rivalries. When Michigan's 59 delegates met at the end of the convention—to elect eight representatives to the committees in Cleveland that will decide on voting credentials, nominating rules, platform issues, and convention operators—Ted Cruz's campaign was completely shut out. The result was more than a little shocking, because the Cruz campaign has been outhustling and outorganizing the Trump campaign at the state level.
But what happened in Michigan wasn't really a case of the Trump campaign getting its act together. Heading into the meeting, the Cruz campaign had a deal with the Kasich delegation to shut out Trump at the convention. Or so they thought. "We got nailed as we came into the meeting," Anuzis, who is co-chair of the Cruz campaign in Michigan, told the Detroit News. "We clearly got double crossed." As for who did the double crossing, well, it's probably not a coincidence that Chuck Yob got elected to the credentials committee at the national convention. (A number of the other Michigan delegates elected at the meeting for committee roles in Cleveland have ties to the Yobs as well.) This is the same committee that will be deciding which delegates are eligible to vote for the presidential nominations in the event that their status as valid delegates is disputed, and conveniently, that's exactly the situation Chuck Yob's son John is dealing with in the Virgin Islands.
Aside from Anuzis's work with the Cruz campaign, he also happens to have business interests in the Virgin Islands, where he has been visiting for years. Specifically, Anuzis is the go-between for the Virgin Islands GOP (VIGOP) and ForthRight Strategy, a D.C.-based direct-mail fundraising firm. If you look at the fine print on various fundraising appeals sent out by ForthRight on behalf of political action committees and other groups, you see disclaimers at the bottom of the page such as "Paid for by STOP HILLARY NOW-VIGOP."
As a nonprofit entity, the VIGOP is entitled to do mass mailings at a substantially cheaper rate than for-profit political firms. ForthRight, which sends out millions of fundraising appeals a year on behalf of political action committees and the like, struck a deal to use the VIGOP as a pass-through on their mailings. In return, the VIGOP gets a cut of the savings. It's a lucrative—and perfectly legal—arrangement for Canegata and the VIGOP, as well as for Anuzis and ForthRight.
But the arrangement is the source of some tension within the VIGOP. The way direct mail works is by "prospecting," that is, laying out huge expenditures up-front to send thousands or millions of mailers to identify the much smaller subset of people who actually respond to the appeals. As a result, the VIGOP, which is far from a large organization, has almost $350,000 in debt on their books from fronting the cost of ForthRight's mailings. Warren Bruce Cole, the treasurer of the VIGOP Territorial Committee, has been outspoken in his opposition to the business arrangement and refuses to put any of the money accrued as a result of it into the party's bank account.
That debt may be short-lived, but members of the VIGOP are antsy about paying it off. And it doesn't help that ForthRight Strategy used to be known as BaseConnect. The firm changed its name after it received a lot of negative publicity following accusations it unfairly bilked clients. Yob has intimated that the radio ads being run against him are being paid for with the party funds earned from the deal with ForthRight. Anuzis flatly denies this is the case and suggests that businessmen friendly to Canegata might be behind the deal.
Another wrinkle is that Anuzis's advisory role with Ted Cruz's campaign involved helping to secure delegates in the Virgin Islands for Cruz. When Yob swept in and captured the Virgin Islands' six delegates, in spite of Anuzis's close relationship with the VIGOP, it had to seem a little personal given Yob's "history full of friction" with Anuzis.
Last October, Politico reported, "For months, Cruz and his allies have been working the five U.S. territories—Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Virgin Islands," well aware of the advantage that might accrue to the campaign that scooped up delegates in these typically neglected places. Cruz thought the Virgin Islands delegates consequential enough to send his father Rafael to campaign there last fall.
But in one fell swoop, Yob came in and upset Cruz's plans while interfering with Anuzis's business arrangement—to what end, exactly? Bragging rights? Yob may be a great tactician, but no one knows what he plans to do with six uncommitted delegates at the national convention. Yob is also not one to go out of his way to make friends. He last made national news in September when Marco Rubio's campaign manager punched him in the face in a bar during the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in Michigan.
Still, no one disputes Yob got the votes to win the primary honestly. Virgin Islands election officials did initially raise questions about whether Yob and two others on his slate met a requirement that delegates must be residents of the Virgin Islands for 90 days ahead of the election. However, on March 22 the Virgin Islands superior court ruled them eligible.
Following the court ruling, Canegata started claiming that Yob and his slate had not followed party rules requiring a formal declaration of willingness to attend the GOP convention in Cleveland within five days of their election. Canegata then announced his intention to replace them with alternate delegates. This dispute centers on differing interpretations of when the results were ratified. So there are now two sets of delegates vying to represent the Virgin Islands in Cleveland.
Canegata has written a nine-page memo about the situation that raises as many valid points as unanswered questions. Yob sent The Weekly Standard about 200 pages of documentation from various ad hoc committees of the VIGOP that may or may not be authoritative on how the rules should be interpreted.
Not helping matters is the fact that the VIGOP itself is riven with infighting over Canegata's leadership. This appears to have been an issue long before the Yob-Anuzis rivalry blew up. Canegata's leadership was the subject of some controversy last fall, when he tried to change the rules for the 2016 Virgin Islands primary. The changes were decided on via email, and some members of the VIGOP complained this was a less-than-transparent process. In response, the RNC rejected Canegata's attempts to change the rules and mandated that the VIGOP stick with the same rules that were in place for the 2012 primary.
Canegata is also up for reelection as head of the VIGOP in August, and who's put in charge of the VIGOP is more hotly debated than usual, given that the once-backwater Republican organization is suddenly sitting at the nexus of potentially lucrative deals between competing political operatives. Yob is quick to emphasize that his decision to run in the primary was unrelated to the disputes with Canegata. "The turmoil in the VIGOP has been going on for years over the ballooning party debt, and presidential campaigns and delegate candidates are unfortunately left to pick up the pieces," he tells The Weekly Standard. For his part, Anuzis confirms that the power struggles and enmities within the VIGOP are not new developments, and says that Yob is just trying to exploit the rifts for his own gain. "He's good and I give John credit. He knows what he's doing, but he's overplayed his hand," he says. In Canegata's own memo, the VIGOP chairman quotes an email he received from Warren Bruce Cole, the local party treasurer. Cole prefaces an otherwise pleasant note by acknowledging, "I realize our relationship is not one of strawberries and ice cream."
Speaking of understatements, everyone involved in the Virgin Islands primary should at least be able to agree with John Yob about one thing. If the VIGOP dispute is at all a harbinger for a contested national Republican convention in Cleveland, chaos may only begin to describe what the Republican party is in for.
So very long, Got any Cliff Notes?
Dream on....
Well we’ll find out, won’t we?
I guess so, but your boy Cruz is sucking hind tit.
Weakly standard? No thanks. But Banana Republicans is quite a descriptive title for Reince , CRuz and company.
who cares what you think
Will you vote for Ted Cruz if he gets the nomination?
No need to be nasty, Kaslin. This isn’t personal. It’s about putting out information that make people think. And promoting discourse of those ideas. Which I try to do and you try to do. Just let people have their views. Be happy that many people are reading what you’re putting out.
Please accept my sincere apology.
Accepted, FRiend! Have a lovely day.
Thanks and you do too FRiend.
Kaslin, how dare you not post the link for the comic book version, complete with pictures.
That's a close resemblance to a younger Trump...lol!
Obviously this was a sleeping aid.
Yes. Very manly and handsome, indeed.
Republican leaders consider rewriting convention rules
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3421200/posts
Breaking: Ted Cruz makes outrageous statement on voterless election win in Wyoming
This is how elections are won in America."
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