Antique Map of Europe circa 1595
I used this link and here to see the total votes versus the amount spent by the Conservative Clown Posse in Iowa.
Mitt Romney: $1.11 million from campaign, PAC money from Restore Our Future $2.85 million. Total votes 30,015. Just using his campaign funds each vote cost Romney about $36.70. Adding in the PAC money Romney spent $120.00 per vote.
Rick Perry: $2.86 million from campaign, Pro-Perry PAC $1.33 million. Total votes 12,604. Total votes 12,604. using the campaign funds spent Perry paid $227.00 per vote. Counting the total with his PAC Perry spent $332.00 per vote.
Ron Paul: $1.37 million from campaign funds. Total votes 26,219. $53.00 per vote.
Rick Santorum: $1 million from campaign funds, $400k from the Super PAC – the Red, White and Blue Fund. Total votes 30,007 . $33.33 per vote with just campaign funds. $46.66 per vote counting PAC funds.
Newt Gingrich: $476,000 from campaign funds. Total votes 16,251. $28.74 per vote.
Michele Bachmann: unknown. Total votes 6,073.
This is not exactly Nate Silver depth analysis but it does look like that while Paul and Santorum got a lot of bang for the buck, the Republican presidential nomination is for sale wit Romney and friends the ones likely to buy it. Apparently Perry cannot get any value for his dollar. I can see Perry staying in for a while hoping for a VP slot or a cabinet post. The same could also apply to Santorum and Gingrich. Gingrich seems to be losing any delegate leverage he might have very quickly. None of the clown posse candidates have recovered once they had a dip in their surge.
More than ever PAC money will be a big factor in the 2012 election cycle.
This is probably not the most fascinating analysis in the world, but one has to consider that looking deep into the eyes of right-wing conservatives and right-wing libertarians is like watching bread go stale, Ron Paul, Spoiler?
This looks like an election cycle ripe for small-party or third-party candidates. The bases of both main parties include unusually large numbers of disillusioned voters. Movements like the Tea Party and the Occupy groups have already constructed networks that small-party candidates could adapt and synthesize with sections of Ron Paul’s base.
In this post-Citizens United era, in which corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals are free to spend unlimited amounts of money to support their mainstream candidates, it would be hard for such candidates to do anywhere near as well nationally in November as Paul did on Tuesday in Iowa. But they could nonetheless tip the election, most likely in favor of President Obama, by drawing off votes in swing states that might otherwise go to Romney.
Obama versus Romney looks, from this admittedly great and unpredictable distance, like it will be a close-run thing. Ralph Nader’s vote in Florida in 2000, which arguably cost Al Gore the Presidency, is a reminder that even relatively small numbers of disenfranchised-feeling but mobilized voters can decide close Presidential races—and it’s not the only one.
Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson withdrew from the Republican race to run as a right-wing libertarian. Should Paul decide to join him that would have a sizable impact on the election ( Paul is for government control of women’s bodies while Johnson is not. That might be an insurmountable difference). Though most likely in Obama’s favor. Libertarians are tolerable when they use their liberal credentials on 1st amendment issues – even though their logic is usually twisted even then. In every other way their modern home is somewhere far Right of center. Ron Paul, still loony – Even when the Texas congressman is right on an issue, it’s for the wrong reasons
In the meantime, Talking Points Memo overheard candidate Paul warning the citizens of Sioux Center, Iowa, that land use regulations could lead to dictatorship.
“I’m fearful,” he said “because some people would like us to go all the way to the U.N. and have the U.N. controlling our lands, too.”
Black helicopters, anyone? Exactly who these “some people” might be, Paul didn’t say. Of course, some people think space aliens monitor their thoughts through fillings in their teeth. Some people even believe that the U.S. government has installed chemical tracking agents in $100 bills.
Oops, actually that was Dr. Paul himself. A 1993 promotional letter for the militia-friendly “Ron Paul Newsletter,” published the last time a Democratic president provoked apocalyptic fears among Moron-Americans, helpfully explained: “The totalitarian bills were tinted pink and blue and brown, and blighted with holograms, diffraction gratings, metal and plastic threads, and chemical alarms. It was a portable inquisition, a paper ‘third degree,’ to allow the feds to keep track of American cash, and American citizens.”
Send that tainted cash straight to Ron Paul. He’d know what to do with it. Today, of course, the candidate says he neither wrote nor read any of the crackpot ravings in the Ron Paul Newsletter. Not the stuff about how Martin Luther King was a pedophile, how Israeli agents bombed the World Trade Center, about the coming American race-war, or the “federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS,” none of it.
Even “The Original Famous Ron Paul Survival Kit,” an official World War II U.S. Army ammo holder filled “with highly liquid, small-denomination silver and gold coins for hand-to-hand use,” was supposedly news to Ron Paul.
Sure it was. How could anybody doubt him?
Not to pick on Glenn Greenwald’s and a couple others defense of Paul, but it is difficult to see Paul as they do, in nice convenient pieces through rose colored glasses. Glenn is a lawyer by profession and also happens to believe by vocation in building logical arguments. If you happen to pick the right side of some issue by some slap-shot process as Paul and his followers do, that means they do not build their arguments on solid foundations. When it comes down to decisions on issues that inevitably pop up during a presidency where is Paul going to land based on what should be carefully formulated principles. His drug policy would indeed do away with the ridiculous criminalizing of marijuana, but it would also let Monsanto sell patented poppy seeds to farmers whose morphine derivative products would be marketed like candy or cars. If we had another Kosovo where 10,000 women are being murdered and raped per week is Paul going to shrug his shoulders and declare it none of our business. Maybe it should not be entirely the burden of the U.S. but perhaps another partnership with NATO. With the UN ( who Paul thinks is out to seize your land) as peace keepers.
WHY DOES FOX NEWS HATE PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS? (his caps not mine)
Fox News entertainment reporter Hollie McKay apparently thinks musicians’ intellectual property belongs to the Collective:
Do Musicians Block GOP Candidates From Using Their Songs?
When GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s team was looking for a theme song for his campaign, Kid Rock’s hit “Born Free” hit a chord. But instead of doing what countless other politicians before him had done, simply take the song and start blasting it at events, Romney first asked Rock’s permission.
…could he have taken this tack because musicians often seem to lean anti-GOP?
Most talented people, people who are gifted creatively tend to be non-wing-nuts. It just so happens that in a democratic republic such as ours that is not illegal or morally wrong. Its called freedom. Hollie McKay might have asked how is it that conservatives do not have a large base of talented people to chose their music from.
The Grand Strategy Behind Obama’s Recess Appointment
President Obama’s decision to use a recess appointment to seat Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was a no-brainer — such a no-brainer, in fact, that many of us were racking our brains to figure out why he didn’t do it sooner. It’s an important move that brings together four important battles the Obama administration is waging:
1. Nullification. Fights between Congress and the president over presidential appointments have gone on for decades. But Senate Republicans have taken the fight to a new level by using the power to deny appointments to require changes in the laws. The Dodd–Frank financial reform established the C.F.R.B., but Wall Street hates it, and Republicans openly vowed not to confirm any director unless Obama agreed to weaken the law.
This is an entirely new use of congressional power to block appointments. The normally mild-mannered James Fallows has called this “nullification,” and Republicans have begun using it to paralyze large swaths of the government. The normal presidential recourse against hardened opposition to an executive branch nominee is to make the appointment when Congress is out of session, but Republicans closed off that avenue as well, by holding pro forma sessions year-round. If it held up, this would give Congress enormous power over the president – allowing it to unilaterally halt any agency it likes in return for any demand at all. They have likewise refused to confirm any directors at all to the National Labor Relations Board, denying the agency a quorum and essentially halting the enforcement of federal labor law.
The Senate’s conservative minority has made American democracy into a joke blocking everyone and anything they do not like. If Richard Cordray’s appointment was allowed to come to a vote he would have gotten a simple majority – he may have even gotten a few conservative votes as many Republicans liked him. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who has had a amazing career as a serial lying borrow and spend conservative says this is unprecedented. If Mitch’s lips are moving, guess what,
“Unprecedented move”? There is some technical dispute about when the Congress is and is not in recess. But the only thing “unprecedented” about Obama’s use of recess appointments is how rarely he has done it. According to the Congressional Research Service, Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments in 8 years, and George Bush made 171. According to Wikipedia (only source I immediately found), Obama made 28 in his first three years — or less than half of Bush’s rate, 9+ per year versus 21+.
“Arrogantly circumvented”? At the moment, Obama is the elected president of the United States. The Consumer Financial Protection Board was approved by both houses of Congress and duly signed into law by the president. There is no doubt that Cordray would receive a majority Senate vote in favor of his appointment — if the nomination were ever allowed to come to a vote. And Obama is the one “arrogantly circumventing” Constitutional processes and the American people? Seriously, this kind of thing need to be called out for what it is: nonsense.
Some conservatives have previously argued that presidents have the right to make recess appointments even during pro forma Senate sessions. As I write this the usual shrill cries by Wingnuttia that Obama is a dictator. Conservatives love dictators so that is hardly a good argument.
President Obama needs to do this more not less. This Week on JudicialNominations.org
The president continued nominating candidates to the federal bench, putting forth Judge John Thomas Fowlkes, Jr. of the Shelby County Criminal Court as a nominee to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee and Newark litigator Kevin McNulty as a nominee to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
On the Senate’s last official day of business for the year, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that he would block 21 judicial nominees waiting for floor votes. The Senate subsequently returned eight others to the president. They are:
Caitlin Joan Halligan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
Michael Green to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York
Victoria Frances Nourse to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Louis B. Butler, Jr., to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin
V. Natasha Perdew Silas to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia
Linda T. Walker to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia
Arvo Mikkanen to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma
Steve Six to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth CircuitThe White House announced that it would not renominate Green; the seat for which the president nominated him has been vacant since March 2009.
In other news:
“McConnell Takes Every Single Judicial Nominee Hostage To Sabotage Consumer Protection Agency,” from ThinkProgress
Hostage taking has worked for conservatives. They see the results of elections as optional if they don’t win. If they do win and polls sow the American public thinks they have gone too far, they ignore them. In other words there exists in the same geographical borders the democratic republic of the United States and the land of Wingnuttia. In the land of Wingnuttia they always do what is best for conservative wacko ideologues and plutocrats, not the U.S.A.
The Year 2011 Was The Year That Anti-American Conservative Talking Points About Obama’s Foreign Policy Crumbled. The entire conservative noise machine is just one big Bill Always Wrong Krsytal. For a secert Muslim that hates America Obama sure does kill a lot of terrorists,
Earlier this month officials confirmed that al Qaeda’s chief of Pakistan operations, Abu Hafs al-Shahri, was killed in Waziristan, Pakistan.
In August, ‘Atiyah ‘Abd al-Rahman, the deputy leader of al Qaeda was killed.
In June, one of the group’s most dangerous commanders, Ilyas Kashmiri, was killed in Pakistan. In Yemen that same month, AQAP senior operatives Ammar al-Wa’ili, Abu Ali al-Harithi, and Ali Saleh Farhan were killed. In Somalia, Al-Qa’ida in East Africa (AQEA) senior leader Harun Fazul was killed.
Administration officials also herald the recent U.S./Pakistani joint arrest of Younis al-Mauritani in Quetta.
Going back to August 2009, Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan leader Baitullah Mahsud was killed in Pakistan.
In September of that month, Jemayah Islamiya operational planner Noordin Muhammad Top was killed in Indonesia, and AQEA planner Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was killed in Somalia.
Then in December 2009 in Pakistan, al Qaeda operational commanders Saleh al-Somali and ‘Abdallah Sa’id were killed.
In February 2010, in Pakistan, Taliban deputy and military commander Abdul Ghani Beradar was captured; Haqqani network commander Muhammad Haqqani was killed; and Lashkar-e Jhangvi leader Qari Zafar was killed.
In March 2010, al Qaeda operative Hussein al-Yemeni was killed in Pakistan, while senior Jemayah Islamiya operative Dulmatin — accused of being the mastermind behind the 2002 Bali bombings — was killed during a raid in Indonesia.
In April 2010, al Qaeda in Iraq leaders Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi were killed.
In May, al Qaeda’s number three commander, Sheik Saeed al-Masri was killed.
In June 2010 in Pakistan, al Qaeda commander Hamza al-Jawfi was killed. [Political Punch, 9/30/11, via ABCNews.com]
The Long Goodbye 