Club for Growth Is on Hunt for Republicans Who ‘Don’t Fit the Bill’

After pumping more than $1 million into an upstate New York House race to elect the Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman, the Club for Growth is on the hunt again.

Chris Chocola, president of the conservative political action committee, made it clear the PAC is looking for more GOP targets who don’t embrace the Club’s limited-government approach.

Priority No. 1 is likely to be the Senate contest in Florida, where Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, who embraced President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, is being challenged by former State House Speaker Marco Rubio.

Chocola said the Club will jump in “where there is a viable candidate and a stark contrast.”

“It’s no secret we like Rubio a lot and we have great concerns about Crist,” he said, adding that a decision will come in “no more than weeks.”

Beyond Florida, other establishment Republicans may be looking over their shoulders. Chocola, a former House Republican from Indiana, noted that he served with Rep. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) and former Rep. Rob Simmons (R., Conn.), both running for the Senate.

“They’re both good guys, but they don’t fit the bill as Club for Growth candidates,” he said.

Before his organization decides to jump in, however, he said the group has to see how those races develop, and whether a clear “Club” alternative surfaces.

“The best Kirk and Simmons can expect is that we leave them alone,” Chocola said.

As GOP Holds Up Unemployment Extension, Nearly 200,000 Lose Their Benefits

In the world outside the Senate, time is money; inside it, time is everything. Senate Republicans are taking full advantage of that reality, using every parliamentary device at their disposal to slow down an extension of unemployment insurance benefits -- even after Democrats added billions for big business to sweeten the pot.

The saga is a cast study both in the difficulty of passing even popular legislation in the Senate and the lengths to which the GOP is going to slow down the process.

The extension overwhelmingly passed the House 331-83 in late September. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made a motion to pass it by unanimous consent in early October; it was blocked by GOP objections.

After negotiations, Reid filed for cloture on Oct. 21 to break a GOP filibuster. On October 27, the Senate voted 87-13 on a motion to proceed to consider the bill, breaking the filibuster.

But under Senate rules, the GOP is still allowed 30 hours of "debate." There actually isn't much debate, but the clock is ticking while senators take to the floor to make speeches about whatever they like.

To get things moving, Democrats sweetened the pot, adding in billions in tax breaks for business -- a net operating loss carry-back provision that the GOP has long favored -- and an extension of the homebuyer tax credit. Reid introduced the goodies in a substitute amendment with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), a champion of the business tax break.

"The two were put together as a means of greasing the skids. You know how things work around here," Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) told HuffPost. "Could we have gotten UI through otherwise? Yes, we could have, but it would have taken us several days. And we don't have that kind of time. And the minority is then able to, because of the time, demand certain things."

The skids properly greased, Reid filed for cloture again on Oct. 29th. It came to a vote Monday night, Nov. 2nd, where it passed 85-2.
( Read more )

Boehner's Health Care Bill At Odds With Pre-Existing GOP Positions

The health legislation authored by House Republicans and set to be unveiled in the next few days reportedly would not prevent health insurance companies from discriminating against patients with pre-existing conditions.

That's not just a stark contrast to Democratic-produced legislation; it puts Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his co-authors at odds with many members of their own party.

Many of the most respected health care voices in the GOP have historically treated the idea of eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions as an obvious plank in any reform effort. A Democratic opposition researcher provided the Huffington Post with several examples.

Even deeply conservative figures like Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okl) insisted as recently as August that "everyone agrees" that legislation should "eliminate pre-existing conditions" as an excuse for denying coverage.

Coburn's colleague in the Senate, John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), explained in July that after listening to people in his home state, he understood that Congress needed "to take care of things like pre-existing conditions so that that doesn't stop them from getting insurance."

Another Senate Republican who was heavily involved in negotiating health care reform, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, has unequivocally declared that the government has "to prohibit insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting medical conditions and charging higher premiums to people who are sick."

Even the Republican Whip in the Senate, Jon Kyl of Arizona, has stressed the need to make sure that patients "cannot be denied care because [they] have a pre-existing condition..."

On the House side as well, many Republicans will find themselves at odds with the legislation that their leadership is about to introduce.
( Read more )

Okay I dragged out about 456 more words for my nano. Suckage, but I was ahead a day's worth so it's not the end of the world (and the night is still young!). Until then, here's this meme I've ganked from several people on my flist.



Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

I always feel bad for people caught in the middle of this lovefest.

Hi! Does anyone have the .tp download link to the 090626 FIRE + Umbrella performance?
I would also like to request for a .tp/hd download link to the performance in which CL said " Today, with all my respect for Michael Jackson." but I believe that the performance was also the 090626 one :)

NY-23: [UPDATE] Hoffman Accuses Democrats of ‘Stealing the Election’

At a short press availability in his campaign office here, NY-23 Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman said that a GOTV volunteer’s tires had been slashed, and all but blamed Democrats for the dirty trick.

“There are reports that they’re bringing in the troops and they’re bringing in ACORN,” said Hoffman. “I think the Democrats are doing anything they possibly can to steal this election away from the 23rd district.”

The campaign gave reporters the name and phone number of Jeremy Kain, the volunteer who claimed to have his tires slashed, but asked to confirm whether he was accusing the Democrats of supressing the vote, Hoffman started to backtrack: ‘We’ve called in the police and the police will be investigating.”

The campaign is pushing this story hard after a wave of morning reports that Hoffman’s grassroots supporters were misbehaving. Attacks on ACORN, and allegations that Democrats are trying to steal this election, have been striking components Hoffman’s hard-edged late-game messaging.

Update: Anton Troianovski of the Wall Street Journal followed up with the Plattsburgh police on this, and was told that the volunteer actually damaged his tire on a broken bottle. I asked Hoffman campaign manager Dan Tripp about this–he said he had no comment because the campaign had not heard this yet.

It’s not unheard of for a candidate to make an accusation like this without having all the facts, but it’s a strange sideshow in the final hours.

Click for full size.

Anyone remember what this was from (something Olympics related maybe)? ^^;