Republicans apparently have had enough of the man who first brought the Muslims to Minnesota

Some endorsements for president are all about the money: Scott Walker to support Ted Cruz?

Scott Walker's spendthrift ways campaigning for president infamously put him more than $1 million in debt, according to The Wall Street Journal, here:

Mr. Walker’s FEC report shows he spent $6.4 million between the mid-July launch and the end of September. But those figures don’t include $200,000 in Mr. Walker’s reported outstanding bills or debts the campaign pushed past Oct. 1 – a number that raises the Walker debt to more than $1 million more than his cash on hand, according to the people familiar with Mr. Walker’s campaign finances. ...

When Tim Pawlenty ended his presidential campaign in August 2011, his campaign was $435,000 in the red. Mr. Pawlenty endorsed rival Mitt Romney, whose family and top campaign supporters and aides helped the former Minnesota governor retire his campaign debts by the next April.

Candidates who lose races can owe debt for years. Newt Gingrich still owes $4.6 million from his 2012 campaign. Al Sharpton owes $925,713 from his 2004 White House run.

Hillary Clinton infamously took until the end of 2012 to pay off $12 million she owed from her failed 2008 run for president. The $13.2 million she borrowed from herself she had to eat.

Ex-Bush Establishment Republicans swarm to Marco Rubio like flies to a rotting corpse

Lavishly reported here about the candidate who so far is nothing but a loser:

Throughout Monday, a string of ex-Bush backers from across the country gravitated to the Florida senator, including former Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). In South Florida, Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Curbelo and former congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart — all of whom had backed Bush — also announced their support.

Rubio also picked up supporters who previously stood in the sidelines of the race, like former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).

On the donor side, in addition to Kilberg, former ambassador Francis Rooney, who gave more than $2 million to a pro-Bush super PAC through his holding company, is now with Rubio. So is financial industry executive Muneer Satter, who also made a big investment on behalf of Bush.

New York attorney Phil Rosen, a major Republican fundraiser, said he has spent the last two days on the phone with former Bush donors now eager to join the Rubio effort.

“They have a lot of disappointment about Jeb, but they are ready to put full steam ahead for Marco,” said Rosen, who said he has gotten commitments from 15 top Bush bundlers. ...

Rubio’s backers concede that a loss in his home state to Trump would likely be a fatal blow.

So, it was Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty who first brought the Muslim Somalis, and incredible discord, to the state

Good thing the Bush partisan bombed in his run for the presidency.

From the story here:

The first wave of refugees came to St. Cloud at the beckoning of Gov. Tim Pawlenty, bound for the meatpacking factories peppering the Mississippi riverbank. Their willingness to do arduous work for little pay led to friction with the unions. ... The city nicknamed "White Cloud" became 10 percent Somali. And that seemed to be the threshold where the welcome signs came down.

Pawlenty famously bailed as national co-chair of the Mitt Romney campaign in September of 2012 after one year of service to accept a lobbying position with the Financial Services Roundtable, which hands out the dough to Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike. Romney reportedly paid off $400,000 of Pawlenty's presidential campaign debts.

 

New link here.

 

 

If The Republicans Were Smart, They'd Follow The Rahm Emanuel Strategy

Rahm's strategy was to make the big tent Democrat party open to so-called fiscal and social conservatives in competitive states. It was a feint to the right.

They were liars, mostly. Some were dupes. And their public face was the "Blue Dogs" who helped the Democrats take over the House in 2006. It bled votes from the Republicans and brought them into the party, while their elected representatives dutifully voted for almost everything the Democrat left under Pelosi and Reid and Obama put forward after 2008, although not without occasional difficulty, especially in the case of ObamaCare.

That's why this analysis from one "Ben Shapiro" here is totally wrong (a troll?) and rather sad to see this late in the game because it misses the Emanuel strategy entirely:

John Kerry was a flip-flopper, a wishy-washy liberal who made liberals squeamish. So they responded by moving to the left, bringing in Nancy Pelosi to run the House and the anti-Kerry, Howard Dean, to run the Democratic National Committee. The result was a Democratic victory in 2006 in the House, and the victory of the most far-left candidate in American history, Barack Obama, in 2008.

The Emanuel strategy recognized what polls tell us even today, nearly a decade on: the American people are not Democrat or Republican predominantly, but conservative in their self-understanding, however ill-defined that may be. Liberalism as a category still comes in last, as Politico reports here:

Conservatives continue to make up the largest segment of political views in the country, outnumbering liberals nearly two-to-one, according to a new poll Thursday.

The Gallup survey found that 40 percent of Americans consider themselves conservative; 35 percent consider themselves moderate; and 21 percent see themselves as liberal. The figures did not change from 2010.

These simple facts explain why Newt Gingrich is doing so well on chewing gum and chicken wire against one of the richest Republicans to run for office in decades.

Republicans, if they want to win, should embrace this. People like Tim Pawlenty, Bill Bennett, and Ann Coulter should get with the program and stop supporting an unelectable guy whom Republicans rightly discarded in 2008 for JOHN S. McCAIN, of all people.

Gingrich's chief appeal is his ability to go mano a mano with the media, which are an unpaid arm of the Obama campaign, C-student shills who deserve a real education for once.

Gingrich will give it to them.

We might not get real conservatism, but no one can say with a straight face that we'll get that from Mitt Romney. We're trying to fill the Bully Pulpit here. It's the most important lectureship without tenure in the history of mankind. Newt never got tenure in academe, and I can't think of a better person to fill this chair at this time than Newt.

Feint right, Republicans. You've done it before, you can do it again.

We know you don't mean it. 

Up Until February 2010, Sarah Palin Was A TARP Republican

Many have pointed out Gov. Sarah Palin's hypocrisy on the bailouts, especially after her book Going Rogue appeared in late 2009, which codified her support of the extraordinary measures of 2008. I documented her statements supporting the bailouts, here and here.

With a speech in February 2010, however, she made news not just because she chose to give the speech in a Tea Party venue instead of at CPAC, but because she basically flip-flopped on the issue of the bailouts just months after her book had appeared.

Someone had straightened her out in the interim.

I'm actually not surprised by this shape shifting behavior, but it disqualifies her in my mind as much as the same sort of flip-flopping disqualifies a Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty, or even a Rick Perry. Turning currents seem to sweep people one way and then another regardless of gender these days.

The trouble, however, is that Bush was for TARP, Paul Ryan was for TARP, Nancy Pelosi was for TARP, John Boehner was for TARP, Sen. Reid was for TARP, Sen. McConnell was for TARP, Sen. Obama was for TARP, Sen. McCain was for TARP, and so was Sarah.

They're all responsible for interfering deeply and dangerously with the free exercise of the markets at a critical time when we most needed our leaders to trust in the ability of capitalism to prove its superiority to socialism, to fascism and to communism. And they all blinked.

It was a horrible failure of nerve. Many acted out of fear. And many acted out of fear of the money they would lose.

The latest speech in Iowa yesterday is a diatribe against the bailouts, against crony capitalism, and against the entrenched interests in Washington, DC. You can read the full transcript here and make of it what you will.

It doesn't mention the banks or TARP per se, just "big finance" and Wall Street. That the public/private nexus of banking is at the heart of the mortgage debacle is nowhere in evidence, which inspires zero confidence that Sarah Palin knows anything about the correct way forward. 

As a solution to our many problems the speech expresses a naivete about human nature which would be breathtaking if it came from an actual statesman, say, a Margaret Thatcher. In point of fact, Sarah Palin is as sanguine about the prospects of cleaning house as Barack Obama is about perfecting our union. Just get a new team in there and make them accountable, that'll fix it.

As if there are human beings in our world who are not corruptible. 

If we really wanted a resurrection of the spirit of the founding era, it would begin with a deep suspicion of human nature and a construction of policies and institutions meant to check it as a matter of first importance. Republican enthusiasm to overturn Glass Steagall was an expression of the opposite. As a Christian Sarah Palin should know better.

As it is, the notion that good and evil dwell mixed up together in each of us might as well be an item of organic chemistry, Latin grammar or Greek philosophy. It is incomprehensible to the current generation who seem to retain boundless faith in the essential goodness of human nature, or at least of the human nature of their particular tribe.

Whether Republican or Democrat, however, this makes them all creatures of the left, including Sarah Palin.

To which I say, No, thanks.

The response from the right would be that human nature is essentially evil (David Mamet), and thus requires either theocracy or monarchy, or from the center that human nature is mixed and requires a mixed polity such as the founders bequeathed to us in the form of the constitution. The latter is classical liberalism, a kind of half-way house, and true moderation! Think gray-heads marching in the streets, but without the litter.

This is the Tea Party, a form of reactionary conservatism trying to recover a classical liberalism which looks ever smaller in the rear view mirror with every passing day. The brave new world lies dead ahead if they do not succeed.

And I do mean dead.

That Didn't Take Long: Pawlenty Quits After Poor Showing Against Bachmann in Iowa

"'I'm announcing on your show that I'm ending my campaign for president,' the former governor said on This Week."

More here and here.

Tim Pawlenty Draws Blood: How Bachmann is Obama All Over Again

And it's about time, too:

Speaking to reporters after a town-hall event [in Iowa] on a sweltering afternoon, Pawlenty did not hold back when asked whether the Minnesota congresswoman could win a general election if she were to become the Republican presidential nominee.

"I don't think the country is going to do that again," Pawlenty said in his characteristically subdued tone before twisting the knife. "They learned the lesson of big speeches and no experience with Barack Obama, and it didn't work."


More here.

Is Tim Pawlenty "The Unnatural"?

There's a certain metaphysical quality to the guy. And we're not talking Platonic philosophy.

The New Republic tries to explain, here.

Tim Pawlenty Wasn't Much of Spending Cutter in Minnesota From 2003

Captain Capitalism has the story here:

Pawlenty, Huntsman and Daniels are Not Real Conservatives: They're Bushies

And owe fealty to the family which turned its back on the Reagan revolution:

Huntsman is the second 2012 GOP White House hopeful to meet with the former president. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty visited with Bush at the former president's office in Houston, Texas a few weeks ago.

The meetings raise eyebrows, as many senior political advisers from both Bush administrations still don't have a candidate to support in the battle for the GOP nomination, especially with Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniel's announcement Sunday that he would not make a bid for the White House.

(source)

Pawlenty Badly Flubs An Equally Badly Asked Question He Shouldn't Have Taken As Is

But his answer wasn't just a casual misstatement of the facts. It shows he wasn't thinking about what he was saying at the time, nor about the question:

Yeah, well I think the situation now in Iran is such that Secretary Gates is negotiating with whether the United States military will be there beyond the end of this year.

And they're looking to the Iranians to see if they invite the Americans to stay, invite us to stay. And if they do invite us to stay at some very reduced level I think the United States will be wise, until we make sure that they get to the next level of stability, to accept that invitation.

So if Iran makes that invitation by the end of the year, leaving a residual force, a greatly reduced force, but a residual force that would be there for a temporary amount of time. Until they could establish much better air security, until they can develop their intelligence —

Pretty embarrassing this early in the campaign.

The video is here.

Nutty Romney and Gingrich Support Ethanol Subsidies

Story here.

Pawlenty is against them.

Do Americans not realize that $5 billion of their tax money propped up that industry in 2010?

It's a waste. And 42 percent of corn production now goes to it, when it should be going to food, which is why you are paying so much more at the grocery store, especially for meat.

To the Left, Enforcing the Law is Right Wing Extremism

As in this from Conor Williams for The Washington Post:

Yet [the ex-governor's] views are hardly moderate at all: [Tim] Pawlenty has advocated fining or jailing business owners who employ undocumented immigrants. He's even suggested amending the Constitution to repeal birthright citizenship.

This approach to immigration policy could be disastrous for a region already suffering from economic hardship. The Midwest needs more immigrants - not fewer.

What the Midwest needs is fewer coastal pricks telling fly-over country what's what, and a vigorous emigration policy for liberals, from wherever they hail, including the Michigan governor's residence.