Good morning, boys and girls!
As Mitt cruises along taking a victory lap, the Freeperati are losing what little shit they had left. Let's jump right in:
First up - Destruction Of Tea Party - Complete!
The GOP: The party of bailouts & cronyism. Destruction of Tea Party complete.
Posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 12:34:33 AM by Minus_The_Bear
The GOP has chosen. The destruction of the TEA Party is almost complete.
"Almost"?
The Weekly Standard, National Review, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, & all the establishment Republicans have driven the TEA Party out of the picture.
Now we are told that taking Federal bailouts = capitalism & that anybody who disagrees should just shut up. Why did they TEA Party start in the first place?
Because some blubbering hysterical wealthy stock trader whined about attempts by President Obama to keep millions more homes from going into flreclosure?
Without ethics capitalism is doomed to corruption.
I expect every Romney voter would support Solyndra or GE... because "it's just capitalism"1 posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 12:34:37 AM by Minus_The_Bear
To: Minus_The_BearI think you have it backward. The Republican Party’s destruction will be complete. They are about to join the Whigs on the ash heap of history.
To: Minus_The_BearYou are 100% right!
We are screwed. The Tea Party did not take over the Republican Party....they destroyed us. Now we will have every RINO candidate shoved down our throats. The Dems and the Rebubs are one and the same. They took away every real Conservative from us. Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman, and now they will destroy Newt and Santorum! I do not know if America will ever be free again, or have truw free elections. We have no real choices, because they are made for us. ALL of the media are now paid operatives for the elites. All hope is gone......To: upsdriverThe closest thing to a TEA Party candidate in this race is Ron Paul and he’s labeled as a kook.
13 posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 12:51:14 AM by BigSkyFreeper (You have entered an invalid birthday)
To: Minus_The_BearI thought the objective is beating Klownie the Kenyan? Quit your whining.
I read the same post back on the night when Dumbo won the election and the best posts was when Freepers who owned business wanted to fire every Obama voter in their company. That’s the Freeper I want to read about
...not this sob story.
14 posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 12:51:14 AM by max americana (Obama is a POS)..To: Minus_The_BearThe Tea Party has been co-opted by the GOP. The economy is no longer an issue for those who have co-opted the Tea Party. They talk of everything else other than the economy - national security, abortion, religion and winnability. These issues induce fear into the sheep and they are willing to forget the economy and fall in line behind the GOP establishment. The candidates in the primaries are establishment candidates who are seasoned politicians.
To: max americanaSadly firing folks in this economy is not populist.
To: Minus_The_BearI always listen to Rush. Today I wanted to crawl through the line and strangle him. He doesn’t get the fact we know that there are times where capitalism exceeds it’s limit and becomes socialism for the few.
To: TwoSwords“I always listen to Rush. Today I wanted to crawl through the line and strangle him. He doesn’t get the fact we know that there are times where capitalism exceeds it’s limit and becomes socialism for the few.”
He really was an imbecile on stilts today, and perhaps a whore - don’t know his real motivation so not sure on the latter.
Today Rush, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan came out against Gingrich. Early for the Ides of March, but there it is.
To: allmostRush doesn’t think any of these venture capitalist purchases and sell-offs are incorrect?
Too many of these decisions were made to make the VC the most money and then to lay pensions on the taxpayer.
They were all done within the law. I don’t require my fellow worker to have a law degree.
When Rush can make me angry at his analysis then I truly fear for my country. I despise his defense of the legalese of these actions. That’s all they are, legalese. And he was bitching the other day about congressional insider trading. What an short-sighted idiot.
To: mylifeI’ve never found hardly any fault w Rush but today I wanted to cry. To give groups who can buy out companies and then violate agreements is wrong.
To: TwoSwordsI didn’t listen to the show, if he was backing raiders it probably would have pissed me off as well. He is an entertainment venue however. Always has been. Corporate interests are part and parcel. He is not the ‘little guy’. He is the ‘elite’.
Rush Limbaugh - Elite RINO whore!!!
I can’t remember the last show of his I listened to. Not bashing him, just not taking the predictable slant you describe as a shock. He’s always better than network news from what I’ve heard in the past.
..To: Minus_The_BearHere's the bad news. Romney won two states. The good news. Most states haven't voted yet.What are WE going to do about it, besides complain on message boards.
83 posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 1:54:31 AM by Darren McCarty (Anybody but Romney or Obama)..To: dixiechick2000I totally dis-agree w Rush’s analysis. And believe me, I’ve listened to him for 20 yrs, and rarely disagreed w his analysis.
That's because you're an idiot.
He said this is personal between Gingrich and Romney after Iowa. BS. Rush is scared. Rush is selling out. Never thought I’d say that but that is what I believe.
Rush is like family and he’s not himself.
Rush is like the crazy cousin who used to content himself with shooting at passing cars, but has now started shooting up the house.
Not good for us. People may think I’m crazy but I’ve never seen Rush so wrong. Something is up.
..To: JediJonesDrudge is in the tank, also? If they want their careers to survive, they fold. Patriotism is replaced by cya.
112 posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 3:07:07 AM by presently no screen name
Nikki Haley’s Rough Start (Her approval ratings have slumped since being sworn in as SC governor)
National Review ^ | 01/12/2012 | John Fund
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 6:45:23 AM by SeekAndFind
The race for the Republican presidential nomination has pivoted towards South Carolina’s January 21 primary. Because the state’s primary voters have selected the eventual GOP nominee in every contested White House race since 1980, every campaign is putting out a maximum effort. One of the aces that Mitt Romney believes he holds in the Palmetto State is the endorsement of Nikki Haley, the new 39-year-old governor who rocketed to political stardom last year by challenging the good-ol’-boy political network in the state. Fueled by endorsements from both Sarah Palin and Romney, Haley was able to marshal tea-party support to crush a sitting attorney general, a sitting congressman, and the state’s lieutenant governor, winning the GOP nomination and then the general election.
It was classic political Cinderella theater, with the story of the state’s first governor from a minority group (Haley is Indian-American) taking place on the 150th anniversary of its secession from the union and providing a powerful symbol of just how far the South has progressed. But one year after she was sworn in, enough of the luster has worn off that former governor Mark Sanford, her immediate predecessor and political mentor, is discouraged. “I wonder if she’ll be more of a liability to Romney than she is an asset,” he told me. “She’s taken her eye off the ball and lost focus.”
His comments are echoed by several tea-party leaders I spoke with, who say her efforts at cutting government have been half-hearted at best. “She is increasingly falling back in line with legislative leaders bent on preserving the old system,” says Brit Adams, a leader of the Upstate Coalition, a collection of tea-party groups in the Greenville area. “She talked about school choice and zero-based budgeting in the campaign, and now those things have dropped away,” says Talbert Black, the founder of Palmetto Liberty, a local political action committee.
Haley certainly has seen her approval ratings slump since being sworn in, although just how much is a point of dispute. According to a December Winthrop University poll, the governor’s approval rating is 35 percent, with only a little more than half of Republicans giving her a thumbs-up. Since every statewide official in South Carolina is a Republican, the GOP controls the legislature, and Republicans have a seven-to-one advantage in the congressional delegation, the Winthrop survey rang alarm bells everywhere.
The governor punched back. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, she dismissed this “local poll” because it also showed that President Obama would today win South Carolina, which would be a bizarre result since he lost the state by 9 percentage points in 2008.
But the poll in question didn’t test President Obama’s general-election prospects in South Carolina, only his statewide approval rating. This came in at 45 percent — higher than Haley’s. The governor’s office was forced to admit she had misspoken.
“She sure didn’t have a problem with this ‘local poll’ when we correctly predicted her gubernatorial victory in 2010,” Scott Huffmon, the director of the Winthrop poll, commented, noting that his survey predicted Haley’s defeat of Democrat Vincent Sheheen in the general election. Nonetheless, Team Haley has a point when arguing that the survey is somewhat suspect. “I have consistently found a durable ten-point Republican-party affiliation edge in South Carolina elections,” says Haley strategist Jon Lerner. “The Winthrop poll surveyed 3.6 percent more Democrats than Republicans, so there was an inaccurate partisan weighing.”
That appears correct, but fixing it would still leave the governor with an approval rating only in the 40s, which is what recent private polls I was shown all pegged her at. A Public Policy Polling survey in September had her at 41 percent approval.
That level isn’t what an incumbent governor would hope for after a year in office. Even Governor Sanford, who crippled his own administration in 2009 when he admitted to leaving the state to meet his Argentine lover, ended his two terms in office a year ago with an approval rating near 50 percent.
“Everyone knows she has a weak governorship in which the major budget decisions are made by a five-member control board, on which she is only one vote,” says Ashley Landess, president of the free-market South Carolina Policy Council. “That said, she hasn’t taken on the power structure like her allies hoped, but rather accommodated herself to it.”
(snip)
Drummond calls most of those issues “low-lying fruit” that were so popular it’s no surprise the legislature passed them. And as for transparency, he says there’s a clear distinction between rhetoric and reality in the Haley administration. Columnist Isaac Bailey of the Myrtle Beach Sun News concludes that “she’s done just about everything to make it impossible for the public to know what she is doing and why, even going out of her way to hide or delete emails or using personal accounts to dodge open document requirements.”
Indeed, some Republican activists are furious at her sudden decision to ask the state’s environmental board to reverse itself and approve a permit to allow a dredging project that will benefit the port of Savannah, Ga., a competitor of Charleston’s port. Some Republicans ran an ad during a recent football game between the University of South Carolina and Clemson accusing her of making a backroom deal. When the Republican legislature held hearings on the issue, Haley staffers initially refused to testify and cooperated only after subpoenas were issued.
Rob Godfrey, the governor’s communications director, says such criticism shouldn’t surprise anyone because “when you run for office as a champion of transparency, you always set yourself up for critics saying you are not transparent enough. But the reality is that no governor in South Carolina history has been as transparent as Governor Haley. She goes further than is required by law.”
Many of Haley’s original supporters say they understand she entered office without executive experience, and they expected some rocky moments. But they say hiring a very young staff known more for its loyalty than its competence has compounded her problems. Mark Sanford has an edge of sadness in his voice when discussing her first year with me: “She’s on the cover of national magazines, her book will be out in April — I think it can be confusing, and all this has led her to punt on some of the really big issues she ran on.”
Nikki Haley remains a political superstar in national Republican circles, and her charm and fighting spirit are undeniable. But it’s increasingly clear that many of the people who elected her are worried that because of either national distractions or an unwillingness to fully confront the power structure she ran against, she is becoming what last year she said she loathed — just another politician.
— Mr. Fund, a columnist, is the author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, which was recently published in a new edition
1 posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 6:45:32 AM by SeekAndFind..To: SeekAndFindNikki Haley’s Rough Start (Her approval ratings have slumped since being sworn in as SC governor)I stopped caring when she endorsed Romney...To: TimaeusYep, Sarah needs to take away her “Mama Grizzley” title since Nikki turned out to be a toothless teddy bear.
10 posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 8:34:59 AM by McGavin999 ("If you'll have my back when I go to Washington, I'll have yours" Rick Perry 2012)..To: SeekAndFindRomney PAC for Nikki...$36,000.00
13 posted on Thursday, January 12, 2012 9:16:25 AM by RetSignman (I take responsibility for what I post not for what you understand.)
John Bolton to endorse Mitt Romney
CNN ^ | Wednesday January 11, 2012
Posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 9:53:41 PM by Bigtigermike
(CNN) – John Bolton, the former U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, is set to endorse presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a source close to Romney’s presidential campaign said Wednesday.
Bolton served in the administrations of former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush before former President George W. Bush appointed him the U.N. role.
*********************************
The Fix is in! First it was Nikki Haley, then Pam Boni in FL, now some TEA Party leaders musing about supporting Romney, now Bolton!Sigh!
1 posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 9:53:53 PM by Bigtigermike..To: BigtigermikeThe H.W. side of Bolton reappears..
Dumb move. Just another RINO showing his true colors.
3 posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 9:58:07 PM by CainConservative (Newt/Santorum 2012 with Cain, Huck, Petraeus, Parker, Watts, Duncan, & Bachmann in Newt's Cabinet)..To: Impy; fieldmarshaldj; AuH2ORepublican; EternalVigilance; GOPsterinMAWTF IS GOING ON???!!!
4 posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 9:58:48 PM by Clintonfatigued (Illegal aliens collect welfare checks that Americans won't collect)
To: CainConservativeChaos Redux. Operation Chaos,
I say, Republican Establishment style.
So Bolton was always a Democrat posing as a Republican, waiting for just this moment to strike?
Devious bastard, isn't he?
Very funny timing, as the Establishment goes wobbly at our rebellion. We now know what “Cram Down” means, but we don’t have to swallow this time. We have a choice to see this through and remain in rebellion.
“REBELLION IS BREWING!” Jim Robinson, on many occasions
To: BigtigermikeIs there any mention of what the sales price was?
To: Clintonfatigued; AllLike I wrote ~2.5 hours ago:
“I just don’t know what to do anymore...”
16 posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 10:04:43 PM by GOPsterinMA (And who doesn't have baggage?)
To: BigtigermikeWell, Mr. Ambassador, you’ve just gone way down from that pedestal I had you on. This now goes on your record, sir.
.
To: CainConservativeWow! It took 3 posts until the RINO label showed up. So if Bolton is a RINO then who isn’t?
Bachmann predicts surprise amid ominous Iowa signs
AP via SFGate ^ | 1/3/12 | BRIAN BAKST, Associated Press
Posted on Tuesday, January 03, 2012 2:49:49 PM by SmithL
URBANDALE, Iowa (AP) -- Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, fighting low expectations in the Iowa caucuses, is dismissing predictions that a poor showing could effectively doom her campaign.
"We think people are going to be very surprised with what the vote is tonight. We're confident," Bachmann said after addressing an assembly of suburban high school students Tuesday morning. "We're moving on. We're moving forward because this election is far from over. This is the opening chapter. Tonight is the first vote. We've got a long road to go.
..To: SmithLI still believe in Santa, but I never did believe in the Easter bunny.
I suspect that Bachmann believes in the Easter bunny and that she also thinks it’s a tax lawyer.
It might take Paul’s straight jacket just to get her off the stage. LOL
She makes me think of every mans ex-wife.
Quite the little lady, is she not? It's always Halloween at our house.
One of the first blog-based books, the anthology Special Plans examines Feith's role in misleading America into war. Buy from 
The asylum inmates are strangely agitated. Next week they'll be wondering which limb to gnaw off to get out of the trap.
Thanks for sharing the photo of your Bête noire.
Posted by: Snarki, child of Loki | January 16, 2012 at 07:21
Wow. Just...wow.
I worked in a biology lab in undergrad and was present for an "unofficial" experiment trying to determine if copperheads get drunk, and what is the most effective liquor to make them so.
This Freeperati Obsession is starting to look veeeeery familiar.
Posted by: left rev., ferret envy | January 16, 2012 at 07:52
These people take "No true Scotsman" to heart, don't they?
If it seems that you're the only Republican left, and everyone else in the world is a RINO, then perhaps it's time to revisit your definitions.
What am I saying... FULL FREEP AHEAD!!!!
Posted by: Razor Eddie | January 16, 2012 at 08:02
See also:
Cognitive dissonance
Equivocation
Euphemism
Loaded language
Moving the goalposts
Persuasive definition
Reification (fallacy)
Posted by: Razor Eddie | January 16, 2012 at 08:07
Again, thank you for dipping into this rancid stew so we don't have to.
Posted by: David Terrenoire | January 16, 2012 at 10:22
Funny that these guys can't figure out that Rush Limbaugh broadcasts via Inland Empire, which is distributed by Clear Channel, which is owned by... Bain Capital Management.
That "free market" thingy is so darned complicated!
Posted by: montag | January 16, 2012 at 10:53
I’ve never found hardly any fault w Rush but today I wanted to cry. To give groups who can buy out companies and then violate agreements is wrong.
Anne Bancroft: WATER, Helen. W-A-T-E-R. Water.
Patty Duke: WAAAAAH? TAH?
Anne Bancroft: Yes, Helen, YES. WATER!
Posted by: Kevin | January 16, 2012 at 10:56
Rush a RINO? Say it ain't so!
Posted by: mazareth | January 16, 2012 at 15:18
Thanks again, Tommy. I was killing time at a Starbucks reading FR today and you should look into the MLK threads. Not only was MLK black, but he was a commie. Oh, and he had hookers in the room when he was shot (seriously, they were asserting that). But mainly it was like a bunch of middle schoolers where one made a racist remark, and that was like a tacit signal that everyone else can get into the act, too.
Oh and there was a fascinating thread about white college kids using food stamps while in college even though their families were not poor. The whole undertone was that such an act is ok to massage the system. As long as you aren't brown. As long as you aren't brown.
Finally, there is a thread where people were requesting a comment ranking system. The consensus was that it could be done for an additional $15,000 to $20,000! Seriously.
Posted by: MarcD | January 16, 2012 at 17:22
Pretty, pretty kitty. Thanks TommyT!
Posted by: Dee Loralei | January 16, 2012 at 17:35
Sorry I won’t be able to contribute to this week’s expedition. The iso-suit is in for re-duct-taping, but I did watch through the fish eye.
--Kibitzer
Posted by: Kibirtzer 2006 | January 16, 2012 at 20:25
The saddest thing about watching the GOP implode so spectacularly is knowing there aren't very many competent Democrats, Liberals, and Progressives to make them really hurt on election day.
Posted by: Cousin Pat from Georgia | January 16, 2012 at 20:48
Thank you all - First Draft commenters are the bestest!
I read every one, and love the level of wit and snarkitude displayed by all of you.
Precious Kitty walks with her tail held forward over her body like a little skunk, and the thick body and short legs complete the comparison. I'm forever threatening to get some animal-safe white spray paint and give her the Pepe Le Pew treatment...
Tommy
Posted by: Tommy T | January 17, 2012 at 03:10