Let’s imagine a Republican National Convention with no majority nominee on the first ballot. How do we think the first ballot will wind up? There are only so many candidates that are capable of getting enough delegates to stop that, so I expect the delegate count would wind up in the neighborhood of Newt Gingrich 40%, Mitt Romney 40%, Rick Perry 10%, Ron Paul 5%, and scattering votes making up the remaining 5%.
Even in the unlikely scenario that we get no majority, how do stop Mitt Romney (or Newt Gingrich) from finding the votes he needs simply by picking up delegates for whom Romney is a second choice, plus making promises to spend X number of dollars campaigning in selected states this cycle in order to win over party officials from various states? That’s a maneuver described to me by a friend as Pawlentying the vote.
Once the convention gets control, the voters lose any say. Though I think such an event is unlikely, it still troubles me that anyone would root for it.
The New Hampshire Union Leader having endorsed Newt Gingrich in the Republican Presidential primary, I thought it would be worthwhile to look at how often the paper’s endorsed candidates actually go on to win the primary.
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I’d like to put something out there about GOProud, conservatives, and the Republican party. I’m seeing some people having very strong reactions to the ACU’s decision to disallow future Conservative Political Action Conference sponsorship by GOProud. Some of these reactions are coming from people I respect in the greater Republican coalition of right-wing politics.
Make no mistake: I have no desire to kick anybody out of the GOP. I routinely cooperate with libertarians, some of whom I have sharp disagreement with on vital issues, because there are a great many issues we do agree on, and can do good things with to move the ball forward. That’s coalition politics 101, and why Ronald Reagan was a proponent of the big tent Republican Party.
But what is good for the GOP is not necessarily what’s good for CPAC. And that’s why I’m also happy to see the ACU make it stand, as reported by the Daily Caller today.
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Amazon’s not kidding one bit about punishing states that attempt to punish it. After Amazon sent a last ditch warning to Associates that all California Associates would be terminated in the event Governor Brown signed the budget with the Amazon Tax in it, the Governor went ahead and did it.
So, every Amazon Associate in California just got terminated, including countless small businesses scraping by in a lousy economy (11% unemployment in CA, thanks to Brown, Obama, and the ARRA). I was one of them. I got the notice at 9:45pm. For the email’s contents, see below the fold.
Democrats: Killing jobs since 1861.
Contrast with Republicans who are embracing new technologies like Skype, shunned by the Nancy Pelosi era House.
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Next week the FCC meets to make a decision on Net Neutrality. So there’s plenty going on as all sides press the FCC to do one thing or another. Some are lobbying more competently than others, though. Doing well are the Senate Republicans who prepare to fight and the incoming House Committee leadership who are getting loud on Net Neutrality and the runaway FCC.
Doing not so well are the forces of regulation caught this week making bad mistakes. First is the fringe neo-Marxist group Free Press. The Free Press tech brain trust made a terrible technical mistake on its website by sending anti-Comcast letters when they promised to send pro-Internet Takeover letters. Second we have radicals Media Access Project and Public Knowledge lying about Amazon’s Net Neutrality position, making the firm out to be taking a hardline pro-Internet Takeover position when in fact the firm supports a modest compromise.
If the radicals can’t even run their own lobbying efforts correctly, why should we trust them to run the entire Internet?
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The time has come for the Senate Republicans to begin thinking about what to do with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which this last cycle was run by Senator John Cornyn along with bureaucrat Rob Jesmer. Before any Republican endorses that team to go ahead and run the committee for another cycle, I urge them to consider alternatives.
The NRSC has the name and the databases to be a tremendous force for good for the party, much as the RGA was this cycle. But to do so it has to make the right decisions with those resources that it has. I submit that it could have done much better this year.
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Source for the unemployment figures: a spreadsheet taken yesterday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Republican period: January 1995-December 2006. Democrat period: January 2007-June 2010. Click for a PDF:
When the FCC announced plans to declare that ISPs are no longer information services, but are instead phone companies, the FCC claimed the authority to regulate content and prices on Internet service nationwide. And no matter how many times the neo-Marxists at Free Press (and their front group Save the Internet) claim that Net Neutrality is all about “preserving an open Internet,” the FCC’s actions are all about command and control.
Even Democrats see the problem, as 72 House members of the Democratic persuasion signed a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski urging him to slow down and let the Congress do its job, instead of taking matters into his own hands and defying the law and the courts to do so.
Update: It’d help if I link the right letter.
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