Tag Archives: National Journal

March 23, 2013 · 9:37 AM

Pew Founder: Republican Party Estranged From America

Alan Colmes’ Liberaland

Andrew Kohut says the only other time a party was this far from the center was the Democratic Party of the late ’6o’s and early ’70′s.

The Republican Party’s ratings now stand at a 20-year low, with just 33 percent of the public holding a favorable view of the party and 58 percent judging it unfavorably, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Although the Democrats are better regarded (47 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable), the GOP’s problems are its own, not a mirror image of renewed Democratic strength…

The party’s base is increasingly dominated by a highly energized bloc of voters with extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues: the size and role of government, foreign policy, social issues, and moral concerns. They stand with the tea party on taxes and spending and with Christian conservatives on key social questions, such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage…

According to our polling, three factors stand out in the emergence of the GOP’s staunch conservative bloc: ideological resistance to President Obama’s policies, discomfort with the changing face of America and the influence of conservative media…

Race has loomed larger in voting behavior in the Obama era than at any point in the recent past. The 2010 election was the high mark of “white flight” from the Democratic Party, as National Journal’s Ron Brownstein called it — the GOP won a record 60 percent of white votes, up from 51 percent four years earlier.

Related articles

1 Comment

Filed under GOP Bubble

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 29, 2012 · 9:26 PM

Norquist: Republicans Will Impeach Obama If He Doesn’t Extend Bush Tax Cuts

This is absurd.  The GOP will stop at nothing to harass, humiliate and blackmail President Obama into conceding to their demands.

However, throwing around the word “impeachment” is mere hyperbole since they would need a majority in the Senate to succeed and although it may be by the narrowest of margins, the GOP do not have that majority and won’t have it in the near future.

Think Progress

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist has long held a tight grip on the marionette strings of the GOP. Wielding undue influence as the head of the Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist ensures that Republican lawmakers sign his anti-tax pledge and threatens them with electoral defeat  should they even think of deviating from it. Norquist has marked a successful few years, killing the deficit super committee agreement,batting down  a tax increase on millionaires, and, of course, ensuring the extension of the Bush tax cuts.

Pleased with his headway, Norquist is now mapping out how he can ensure further anti-tax victories by securing Republican majorities. In an interview with the National Journal, he mused that a GOP mandate would obviously enact an extension of the Bush tax cuts, work to maintain a repatriation holiday for corporate profits, and even pass House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan that jeopardizes Medicare. But when asked what Republicans should do if faced with a Democratic majority that won’t keep the tax cuts, Norquist had a simple answer: “impeach” Obama .

NJ: What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?

NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

Norquist certainly revels in his power , but suggesting Republicans impeach the president over tax cuts is wildly outlandish. According to the constitution , the president, vice president, or public officials can only be impeached for “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Preserving a tax cut that gives more to the top 1 percent than the average income of the 99 percent hardly qualifies. But if Norquist’s only goal is to “crush the other team ,” it seems he’ll stop at nothing to do so.

Related articles

6 Comments

Filed under GOP Hubris, GOP Radicalism

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

December 15, 2011 · 1:34 AM

Santorum: Obama ‘Doesn’t Deserve Credit’ For Killing Bin Laden

Rick Santorum - Caricature

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

If anyone had any questions as to why Rick Santorum is at the bottom of the GOP Primary polls with Huntsman (who I really like) and Bachmann, here’s the reason why:

Think Progress

Last week President Obama responded to his Republican critics who say he is the 21st century’s version of Neville Chamberlain. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 other out of 30 top al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” the President said during a news conference.

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum regularly lobs the inane “appeasement” charge at Obama. “At every single turn the president has appeased those who would do us harm,” the former Pennsylvania senator said on Sunday. So naturally, Santorum probably isn’t convinced that Obama even had anything to do with killing bin Laden and he said so last night on CNN (as he has before), calling the president’s comment last week “pathetic”:

SANTORUM: Osama bin Laden was a continuation of President Bush’s policy. It had nothing to do with a contingency or a problem that came up on his watch. He simply followed through, which we have been trying to do for 10 years.

KING: Deserves no credit for that?

SANTORUM: Any more — no, the people who deserve credit for that were the military whose mission it was to find them. And the president doesn’t deserve credit for doing — he didn’t make a decision, if you will, as to go after bin Laden. That decision had been made 10 years ago.

Santorum eventually relented after host John King noted that Obama “gave the go-ahead” to raid bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. “I do give him credit for that,” Santorum said.   Watch the clip:

President Bush himself tried to sneak this narrative by the press too but the reality is that Obama nabbed bin Laden in spite of the former president’s policies, not because of them.

The conservative claim that Bush is the one responsible for the bin Laden raid “couldn’t be further from the truth,” the National Journal’s Michael Hirsch wrote in May. “Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader…lies a profound discontinuity between administrations — a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists,” from Bush’s bombastic and overly expansive “war on terror,” to Obama’s “covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.”

“Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview after bin Laden’s death, “I brought [then-CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’”

Related articles

4 Comments

Filed under National Security

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

November 9, 2011 · 7:46 AM

Mark Block, Cain’s Chief-Of-Staff, Falsely ‘Confirms’ Accuser’s Son Works For POLITICO

This is indicative of the sloppiness and dishonesty in the Cain camp….  Herman Cain should personally come out and correct this lie as quickly as possible.

The Huffington Post

(See video here…)

Herman Cain’s campaign may want to verify facts before confirming anything on television.

Mark Block, Cain’s chief-of-staff, spoke to Sean Hannity on Fox News Tuesday, and wrongly claimed that the son of a woman who accused Cain of sexual harassment in the 1990s works at POLITICO.

“At the press conference it was brought up that Karen Kraushaar had come out as one of the women, so we’ve come to find out that her son works at POLITICO, the organization that originally put this story out,” Block said.

When Hannity asked if the information about Kraushaar’s “son” was confirmed, Block said: “We’ve confirmed that he does indeed work at POLITICO and that’s his mother, yes.”

Josh Kraushaar, the man Block appears to be talking about, denied these claims. On Tuesday, Kraushaar posted numerous messages on his Twitter page that refuted Block’s “confirmed” allegations.

Kraushaar acknowledged working at POLITICO from 2007 to 2010, but said he had been at the National Journal for over a year. His Twitter bio lists his current job title as the executive editor of the publication’s blog The Hotline. He’s also not related to Cain’s accuser.

“For a presidential spokesman to go on TV and make up blatant falsehoods doesn’t speak well for his boss, either,” Kraushaar wrote.

Kraushaar did manage to keep his sense of humor about the whole situation. “The only positive benefit about being smeared by Mark Block on Hannity is I’m getting 100 new Twitter followers a minute.”

According to CNN’s politicalticker blog, Karen Kraushaar accused Cain of sexual harassment when he led the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s. She was the second woman to come forward publicly with allegations about the GOP presidential candidate, but only did so after her identity was revealed by the iPad news site, The Daily.

Karen Kraushaar, 55, is a registered Republican who works at the Treasury Department. Through her attorney, she has described the alleged harassment as “a series of inappropriate behaviors and unwanted advances from the CEO,” NPR reported. She reportedly received a payout in 1999.

Related articles

Comments Off

Filed under Herman Cain

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

August 8, 2011 · 6:28 PM

GOP Presidential Candidates Ignore S&P’s ‘Blast At Republicans,’ Pin Downgrade Blame on Obama

The GOP’s ultimate goal is to make President Obama a one-term president.  Their strategy is simply to blame him for everything, even though the electorate and everyone in the media knows this current fiscal crisis is on them…

Think Progress

On Friday, the credit rating agency Standard & Poorsdowngraded the U.S. from AAA to AA+ in the first downgrade in U.S. history. In its release, S&P took Republicans to task for using the debt ceiling as a political football and refusing to consider new revenues as an option for reducing the country’s long-term deficit. As National Journal put it, “it’s hard to read the S&P analysis as anything other than a blast at Republicans.”

However, you wouldn’t know that from reading the statements the GOP presidential candidates released in the wake of S&P’s announcement. In their world, the downgrade was entirely due to government spending, and the way to turn things around is to balance the budget without raising any additional revenue:

MICHELE BACHMANN: “We were warned by all of the credit agencies that a failure to deal with our debt would lead to a downgrade in our credit rating, but instead he submitted a budget that had a $1.5 trillion deficit and then requested a $2.4 trillion blank check. President Obama is destroying the foundations of the U.S. economy one beam at a time. I call on the President to seek the immediate resignation of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and tosubmit a plan with a list of cuts to balance the budget this year, turn our economy around and put Americans back to work.”

MITT ROMNEY: “Standard & Poor’s rating downgrade is a deeply troubling indicator of our country’s decline under President Obama. His failed policies have led to high unemployment, skyrocketing deficits, and now, the unprecedented loss of our nation’s prized AAA credit rating.”

JON HUNTSMAN: “Out-of-control spending and a lack of leadership in Washington have resulted in President Obama presiding over the first downgrade of the United States credit rating in our history. For far too long we have let reckless government spending go unchecked and the cancerous debt afflicting our nation has spread.”

Related articles

Comments Off

Filed under GOP Myopia, S&P Downgrades

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

July 10, 2011 · 6:08 PM

McConnell: Stopping Obama’s re-election still ‘single most important’ goal

This topic should stay on the frontline of political news.  It is the reason for the turmoil in the debt crisis and other Obama set agenda including jobs bills that the republicans refuse to pass for partisan reasons.

The GOP is willing to literally tank the economy of this country so that they could win in the next general election.

Crooks & Liars

Even with the country on the brink of default, the Senate’s highest ranking Republican says his “single most important” goal is to make Barack Obama a one-term president.

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told National Journal‘s Major Garrett in October.

Fox News’ Bret Baier asked McConnell Sunday if that was still his major objective.

“Well, that is true,” McConnell replied. “That’s my single most important political goal, along with every active Republican in the country.”

“But that is in 2012,” he added. “Our biggest goal for this year is get this country straightened out and we can’t get this country straightened out if we don’t do something about spending, about deficit, about debt and get the economy moving again. So our goal is to have a robust vibrant economy to benefit all Americans.”

McConnell told Baier that a “Grand Bargain,” where Republicans agree to tax hikes in exchange for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, was likely off the table.

“I think it is. Everything they told me and the Speaker is to get a big package would require big tax increases in the middle of the economic situation that is extraordinarily difficult with 9.2% unemployment. We think it’s a terrible idea. It’s a job-killer.”

“Nobody is talk about not raising the debt ceiling,” McConnell later insisted.

Taking a break from debt limit talk, the Senate’s top Republican also said that it was time to send more terrorism suspects to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

“They are going the try a couple of foreign terrorists in Kentucky, my state, whose fingerprints were found on IED’s in Iraq. These foreign terrorists are enemy combatants. They should be taken to Guantanamo. They should be tried in military commissions.”

Related articles

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

March 3, 2011 · 3:04 PM

Obama: Gaddafi Must Go

The Daily Beast

Just when it seems the heat on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi couldn’t get any higher, President Obama has again bashed him. “You have seen with great clarity that he has lost legitimacy with his people,” Obama said during a White House press conference with Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

“So let me just be very unambiguous about this. Colonel Qaddafi needs to step down from power and leave. That is good for his country. It is good for his people. It’s the right thing to do.” Obama added: “It’s time for Gaddafi to go.” In addition, he said that humanitarian concerns have led him to approve the use of U.S. military planes to airlift Egyptians who are trapped in the country and have fled to the Tunisian border. The administration previously suspending diplomatic relations, seized Libyan assets, and backed sanctions.

 
Related Articles

Comments Off

Filed under Libya Unrest, Muammar Quaddafi

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 31, 2010 · 1:56 AM

Divided We Fail (NYT Editorial by Paul Krugman)

New York Times – Paul Krugman

Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?

Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?

No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.

Start with the politics.

In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.

After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.

Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.

Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.    Continue reading…

Comments Off

Filed under Mitch McConnell, Republican House Takeover, Republican Secret Donors, Republicans

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 26, 2010 · 4:48 AM

Mitch McConnell: I Want To Be Senate Majority Leader In Order To Make Obama A One-Term President

Official photo of United States Senator and Mi...

Image via Wikipedia

So, Mitch McConnell wants to make sure that Obama is a one-term president and he is determined to make that happen.  McConnell says:

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

My question is this: What will Congress do about the unemployment situation, the foreclosure fiasco, campaign finance and the environment?

Do they plan on concentrating solely on maintaining power for the sake of catering to their corporate base?  What about the needs of the people of this country?  Don’t we count at all?

Think Progress

From the moment Obama entered office, right-wing conservatives embraced the posture of hell-bent opposition. Recall, in Jan. 2009, hate radio host Rush Limbaugh expressed his hope that Obama fails. One month later, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proudly embraced Limbaugh at a conservative conference. The fringe rhetoric of far right activists had quickly become the de facto governing strategy of the Republican leadership, as they adopted a posture of obstructionism.

Believing that the Republican strategy of opposition has played to his political benefit, McConnell is pledging to do more of the same if Republicans win back the Senate. In an interview with the National Journal’s Major Garrett, McConnell candidly acknowledged that he feels his “single most important” job is to defeat President Obama in 2012:

MCCONNELL: We need to be honest with the public. This election is about them, not us. And we need to treat this election as the first step in retaking the government. We need to say to everyone on Election Day, “Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job.”

NATIONAL JOURNAL: What’s the job?

MCCONNELL: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

McConnell added, “Our single biggest political goal is to give our nominee for president the maximum opportunity to be successful. … We need to work smarter than we did [in 1995], and not become the foil off which [President Obama] pivots.” In 1995, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich led a shutdown of the government, which many Republicans now acknowledge was a “serious mistake, tactically and substantively.”

This morning, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was floored by McConnell’s open admission that his single most important goal is to defeat Obama. “Mitch McConnell said that?!? … He admitted that on the record?!? That is embarrassing,” he said. “Can I just say for the record – that is pathetic.” Watch it:

Related Articles

Comments Off

Filed under Mitch McConnell

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

August 25, 2010 · 4:41 PM

Major Garrett Leaving Fox News For National Journal

Huffington Post

Fox News’ Chief White House Correspondent is leaving the network — and TV entirely.

Fox News announced Wednesday that Major Garrett, who covers the Obama White House for the network, will “return to his roots in print journalism” effective September 3.

Garrett will join the National Journal as a congressional correspondent, the New York Times reports.

Wendell Goler and Mike Emanuel will share the White House beat.

“Throughout my television career, I’ve known with certainty I would someday return to my roots in print journalism,” Garrett said in the announcement. “That day has come. I will soon announce an exciting new phase of my career — one made possible in no small part by FOX News’ consistent support. It would take a lot – something near perfection – to lure me away from the best job I’ve ever had. Details to come.”

“Major Garrett is the embodiment of the new team we’re building here at National Journal,” National Journal Editor-in-Chief Ron Fournier said in a separate announcement. “He is known across Washington as one of the hardest-working journalists in the business, a fierce competitor on his beat, and a good and decent man. It is a rare combination, and one we’re incredibly lucky to be bringing into our newsroom.”

Fox News recently moved up to the front row in the White House Briefing Room, a decision that was facilitated in part by Garrett’s evenhanded reporting on the administration.

The minutes of the White House Correspondents Association meeting at which Fox News was awarded the seat indicate that Fox News’ “contributions to the television pool, the excellent team fielded to the beat and longstanding presence at the White House was discussed favorably.”

“We think Major Garrett is a legitimate reporter,” former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said in the midst of the administration’s battle against the network.

“There are reporters and then there are truly tenacious reporters who come along every so often,” Fox News Senior Vice President Michael Clemente said. “Major Garrett is a fact-finding machine, and wherever he goes he will continue to serve an audience that is thirsting for genuine reporting and balance. We wish him the best as he turns this page.”

Before joining Fox News in 2002, Garrett spent seven years at the Washington Times.

Comments Off

Filed under Fox News

Tagged as , , , , , ,