Free Republic

On my Twitter feed, I spotted a post by Patrick Ruffini asking a pertinent question… "What's up with Barack Obama writing out dates euro-style?" Check out this photo as hosted on the White House website… Notice that the president signed his name and then penned the date as "11 June 2009"? That is the European way to note dates, not the American way. In America we always put the month, then the day, then the year. Obama hates America so much he can't even stand to write dates like Americans do!

Many prominent young bloggers say its time conservatives altered their fortunes and cast off those intellectual dead weights who stir up irrational fear. Time to throw off those whose intellectual bankruptcy has left the conservative movement with no credibility in the eyes of the American people. No, they’re not calling for the removal of those writers and political leaders who told us that if we didn’t give the Treasury $700 billion to distribute to corporate America, the world as we know it would end, thus undermining free-market economics. Rather, the talk from young political guns Patrick Ruffini and Jon Henke...

"In "The Joe the Plumberization of the GOP," I argued that conservatives have grown too comfortable with wearing scorn as a badge of honor, content to play sarcastic second fiddle to the dominant culture of academia and Hollywood with second-rate knock-off institutions. A side effect of this has been a tendency to accept conspiracy nuts as a slightly cranky edge case within the broad continuum of conservatism, rather than as a threat to the movement itself."

This site may have been posted somewhere else but I missed it. Came across this the other day on Twitter and saved it. We can sit back and say we were cheated and the media was unfair and we can blame it on an uneducated, self-indulging , pop-oriented electorate, whatever. But we need to start rebuilding and here are two people who jumped on it right away

The Obama campaign has turned its security settings for accepting online contributions down to the bare minimum -- possibly to juice the numbers, and turning a blind eye towards the potential for fraud not just against the FEC, but against unsuspecting victims of credit card fraud.

Patrick Ruffini admonishes the Dems: --------------------- "The most important thing about a good attack is not the attack itself. It's baiting your opponent to respond the way you want him to respond, because only the things that come out of his mouth will ultimately stick. Obama seems to be falling into the trap of response-centrism. If only they could respond the right way, they figure, all will be well. But it won't be. Because the game they are playing is reactive. Instead of changing the subject off Palin by launching some explosive new attack on McCain, all they do is...

Patrick Ruffini brings us the Obarrogant story of the day This is pretty extraordinary. A candidate for the American Presidency is using flyers printed in German to turn people out for his campaign rally in Berlin on Thursday. This flyer can be found on a bilingual page on BarackObama.com advertising the event: Say, Barry? Buuuudy? No matter how much you want it, German citizens cannot vote for you. I know you folks on the left take the whole worldwide opinion thing a bit too seriously, but, I do believe you are over-doing it. “It is not going to be a...

According to my initial projections off this crowdsourced spreadsheet of Obama donations I set up after the Wisconsin victory, Obama has already raised at least $45 million for February and is on track to raise $60 million for the month. A source who tracks Obama’s public donation number like a hawk tells me that Obama had tallied about 256,000 donors for the year as of the end of January. Those donors produced $36 million in receipts, for an average contribution of $140. Obama’s public donor count stands at 583,525, meaning about 327,000 people donated in February. With the same average,...

In fairness to Team Romney, they did more right than not. They rose from single digits in the national polls to receiving 32% of the primary votes cast to date. They became the conservative establishment’s choice. They leveraged mechanical and resource superiority into solid leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, giving Rudy Giuliani pause about competing in the early states and chasing John McCain from Iowa. They leveraged their candidate’s mastery of pat, 60-second answers into dominance (and rising poll numbers) out of the first debates. They met their goal of winning Ames, and got a bump. They met their...

OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers makes a convincing case: "From this point, quick math shows that after Super Tuesday, only 1,428 pledged delegates will still be available. Now, here is where the problem shows up. According to current polling averages, the largest possible victory for either candidate on Super Tuesday will be Clinton 889 pledged delegates, to 799 pledged delegates for Obama. (In all likelihood, the winning margin will be lower than this, but using these numbers helps emphasize the seriousness of the situation.) As such, the largest possible pledged delegate margin Clinton can have after Super Tuesday is 937 to 862....

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 From Rudy to RomneyPosted by: Patrick Ruffini I’m a longtime Rudy guy. In 1989, I remember staying up late on Election Night watching his losing battle with David Dinkins, and cheering four years later when he put New York back on the road to recovery. Even before 9/11, he was a fighter who brought his city back from the brink, and he wasn’t embarrassed to publicly shame the corrupt and depraved New York left. I remain convinced that had he brought a little of that pugnacity and grit to this campaign, he would have won...

T-minus 24 hours and counting until, in all likelihood, his political career’s over. I can’t resist one last poke at the Fredhead beehive for old time’s sake. The argument comes from Patrick Ruffini: Since Huckabee probably doesn’t have the money or organization to run the table on Super Ultra Mega Tuesday but McCain does, shouldn’t South Carolina’s Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson supporters defect tomorrow and vote for Huck to blunt Mac’s momentum heading into Florida? That’s an easy yes in the first two cases but in Fred’s case it would mean the end. Has the time come to take Ol’...

Right Wing News has done another Rightosphere temperature check on the Republican race for the Presidential nomination. Over half preferred Thompson as the Republican candidate — these folks must have been very happy with last nights debate, where Thompson finally woke up and realized politics ain’t bean bag and you can’t win if you don’t play. RWN’s does some helpful breakouts on relative preferences among the candidates, so do check out the temp check. The two candidates the bloggers don’t like are McCain and Huckabee. I’d pick it strongly the other way, but bloggers actually prefer McCain over Huckabee. My...

Let me first preface this by saying that I write this as a Rudy Giuliani supporter. For a period of time earlier this year, I was officially consulting with the campaign, and I have remained a Rudy supporter since, though I’ve mostly put on my analyst hat when writing about the primary in this space. ---snip--- Now, Rudy was never going to do well in South Carolina. Perhaps the same was true of Iowa. But New Hampshire? If someone like Rudy can’t win in New Hampshire, where can he win (save for the winner-take-all states of New York, New Jersey...

He won’t win the nomination. He won’t win any primaries. But for Ron Paul’s quixotic bid for the White House, it’s “Mission Accomplished.” In the past few months, Ron Paul has dramatically raised the profile of libertarianism inside the Republican Party. My small-l libertarian friends seem more comfortable describing themselves as such, even though they’ll go out of their way to disassociate themselves from Ron Paul and the big-L kind. Libertarianism in the GOP took a big hit on 9/11, and it’s slowly coming back, with Ron Paul as the catalyst. Its underlying ideals still have appeal well beyond the...

So it turns out the Clinton camp didn't tip after all. Kos is running with this: Esterday said "nobody got tipped that day," and NPR should have checked with the Clinton campaign before the story aired to see if any tip was left and how it was done. We regret that this was not done. On Thursday, Esterday was sticking by her story. "Why would I lie about not getting a tip?" she told NPR. She also maintained that her co-workers at the restaurant had not received tips. A Clinton campaign staffer called on Esterday at the restaurant Thursday after...

With less than two months to go until the Iowa Caucuses, there is plenty we can learn from the doings of the fullest field of Presidential candidates in modern history. As my fellow blogger Soren Dayton is fond of pointing out, "Elections are experiments." We get to see, in real world practice, what works and what doesn't. The lessons themselves are revealing and well worth memorializing. If you're angling for a spot as campaign manager for one of the 2012 or 2016 campaigns, here are the top ten things you'll learn from 2008 (so far). 10. Politics Abhors a Vacuum....

Two Smart Guys on How To Campaign in Virginia Two of the more interesting assessments of Republican campaigns in Virginia I've read come from Patrick Ruffini (who admits he's more of a national politics guy)... Instead of applying blunt force on the immigration issue in a diverse community, you zero in on the illegal immigration-related quality of life concerns that 90% of the electorate can identify with, like the scourge of MS-13 gang violence in the region. Were I running in Northern Virginia, I wouldn’t mention the words “illegal immigration.” I would talk exclusively about MS-13, and about working with...

"They can either go quietly or they can go loudly, but either way, they will go." -- Governor-elect Bobby Jindal (R), on Louisiana's corrupt establishment I don't care who your candidate for President is. Tonight, Bobby Jindal is our leader. Jindal's 54% first-round victory is an historic mandate for change against the most corrupt political culture in America. For decades, Louisiana has lived in the shadow of the easy populism of Huey Long, its politicians feasting on revenues from the state's natural resources. If you want to get a taste of a sense of entitlement and venality normally seen in...

I haven’t had much to say about the overall state of the Republican race lately. I’ll cop to a little laziness here. This thing is just so darned hard to read. Anyone who argues that this isn’t jump ball between some permutation of Giuliani/Romney/Thompson is probably lying to you. If there is anything this campaign has proven, it’s that this race is a marathon not a sprint, and making sweeping predictions based on short-term momentum shifts means you’ll be eating crow the next week. As if we could forget: McCain is the frontrunner! Romney is at 3%! Rudy is doomed...