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Yes, Of Course Donald Trump Is Fueled by the Politics of Resentment

Mother Jones

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Josh Marshall:

Far be it from me to beat up on insular, east coast elites. But the insular, cross-partisan east coast media elite hasn’t grasped how the politics of resentment are fueling Donald Trump’s campaign or why gang ups from Fox News just don’t matter.

I don’t want to beat up on Josh, but seriously: is there anyone who doesn’t already get this? Maybe I’m just reading the wrong people, but among the folks I read this is the conventional wisdom by miles. Trump is basically a more experienced and media-savvy version of Sarah Palin. His appeal is anchored in simple answers, an insistence that politicians are all corrupt idiots, a disdain for political correctness, and an affirmation that ordinary folks are getting screwed.

But this doesn’t mean that gang-ups from Fox News don’t matter. It all depends on how personal the attacks get. If Trump starts to lose the support of the prime-time blowhards with a personal following—Bill, Greta, Sean, etc.—then it becomes a question of who the tea partiers trust more: Donald Trump or Bill O’Reilly? Donald Trump or Sean Hannity? This is a battle Trump can lose, and that’s why it’s in his best interest to cool it on the Fox News front. But it can also do damage to the personal following of the Fox prime-time crew, so it’s in their best interest to cool it too. In other words, let’s call a truce:

And there you have it. The support of Fox News really does matter, and Trump knows it. Likewise, support of Trump matters, and Roger Ailes knows it. Why? Because they’re just different versions of the same thing: media impresarios that feed on the conservative culture of resentment and grievance. Of course they matter to each other.

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Yes, Of Course Donald Trump Is Fueled by the Politics of Resentment

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Fox News Has Apparently Had Enough of Sarah Palin

Mother Jones

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Fox News just dropped Sarah Palin. Mike Allen reports:

Fox News will not renew its contract with Sarah Palin, whose bombastic appearances have been a cable staple since the former Alaska governor’s failed run on John McCain’s ticket in 2007 sic. When asked for comment, a Fox News spokesperson confirmed the network had amicably parted ways with the governor on June 1.

Palin, 51, is expected to make occasional guest appearances on Fox and Fox Business, and will appear on other networks and cables. She has a show on the Sportsman Channel, does a lot of speeches, and will announce a new publishing project soon.

Now she’ll presumably have more time to pick imaginary fights with Liz Warren on her web series.

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Fox News Has Apparently Had Enough of Sarah Palin

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Attention GOP Presidential Candidates: Winter Does Not Disprove Global Warming

Mother Jones

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Snow is falling across the Northeast, and millions of people are preparing for a massive blizzard. Due to the extreme winter conditions, my colleague at Climate Desk has issued the following advisory:

It may seem obvious to you that the existence of extreme winter weather doesn’t negate the scientific fact that humans are warming the planet. But that’s probably because you aren’t a climate change denier who’s contemplating a run for the GOP presidential nomination.

Last year, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) weighed in on the issue. “It is really freezing in DC,” Cruz said during a speech on energy policy, according to TPM. “I have to admit I was surprised. Al Gore told us this wouldn’t happen!” Cruz said the same thing a month earlier, according to Slate: “It’s cold!…Al Gore told me this wouldn’t happen.”

And here’s former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on his Fox News show, after a major blizzard back in December 2009:

Which brings us to a couple of Republicans who are probably not going to run for president but who have nevertheless generated headlines recently by suggesting they might. Here’s Donald Trump, during a cold snap last year:

And here’s a 2012 Facebook post from former Gov. Sarah Palin, citing extremely cold winter temperatures in her home state of Alaska:

If you’re a regular Climate Desk reader, you already know why all this is wrong. You understand the difference between individual weather events and long-term climate trends. You probably even know that according to the National Climate Assessment, winter precipitation is expected to increase in the northeastern United States as a result of climate change. But if you’re a Republican who wants to be president, please pay close attention to the following video:

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Attention GOP Presidential Candidates: Winter Does Not Disprove Global Warming

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Chris Christie Needs to Rehearse His Lines Better

Mother Jones

Paul Waldman comments on Chris Christie’s latest outburst against a heckler:

My favorite part is how Christie keeps calling him “buddy” (reminded me of this). Now try to imagine what would happen if Barack Obama shouted “Sit down and shut up!” at a citizen. Or almost any other prominent politician, for that matter; commentators would immediately start questioning his mental health. But even though it’s been a while, shouting at people was how Chris Christie became a national figure talked about as a potential presidential candidate in the first place….If you standup at a town meeting and ask him an impertinent question about something like the state budget, he’ll shout you down (to the cheers of his supporters).

Here are a few ways to explain this pattern of behavior:

  1. This is a calculated way of showing that he’s a Tough Guy, which Christie knows Republicans love
  2. This is just who Christie is, and if nobody was around he’d still be picking fights with people
  3. Both 1 and 2

I lean toward number 3. It isn’t just play-acting, because Christie obviously gets sincerely pissed off when he’s challenged by people he thinks are beneath him. At the same time, he’s a smart enough politician to know that the cameras are on, and there’s some benefit to reinforcing the persona he has created.

I admit that this is mostly just curiosity on my part, since Christie’s act long ago got nearly as stale as Sarah Palin’s. But take a look at the video. Unlike Waldman, I vote for No. 1. To me, Christie appears entirely under control. I don’t doubt that there’s some real annoyance there (even a Vulcan would get annoyed at your average heckler), but overall Christie’s response gives the impression of being practically scripted. There are even a couple of instances where Christie seems like he forgot his lines and hurriedly tosses them in before heckler guy goes away and ruins his chance to get off his best zingers.

So vote in comments. Is it real anger, or has it just become a well-rehearsed schtick by now? In this case, at least, I vote for schtick.

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Chris Christie Needs to Rehearse His Lines Better

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Sarah Palin Picks Imaginary Fight With Elizabeth Warren, Loses

Mother Jones

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Last month at Netroots Nation, Sen. Elizabeth Warren gave a speech outlining what she considers 11 tenets of modern American liberalism. (“We believe in science, and that means that we have a responsibility to protect this Earth…We believe that no one should work full-time and still live in poverty, and that means raising the minimum wage.”) You can watch it in full here.

On August 7, Alaska governor-turned reality star Sarah Palin went on her eponymous television channel to offer a conservative rebuttal.

The thing to keep in mind is that she had three weeks to write these responses. This is not live. This is not a real debate. There is no moderator. Katie Couric and the lamestream media have no hand in this. This is a Sarah Palin joint.

As Robyn Pennacchia points out at Death & Taxes, the real highlight is Palin’s word salad in response to Warren’s statement that “we believe that fast-food workers deserve a livable wage, and that means that when they take to the picket line, we are proud to fight alongside them.”

‘We believe?’ Wait, I thought fast food joints, hurh. Don’t you guys think that they’re like of the Devil or somethin’ I was. Liberals, you want to send those evil employees who would dare work at a fast food joint then ya just don’t believe in, thought you wanted to, I dunno, send them to Purgatory or somethin’ so they all go VEGAN and, uh, wages and picket lines I dunno they’re not often discussed in Purgatory, are they? I dunno why are you even worried about fast food wages because dha.

You really should watch the whole thing.

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Sarah Palin Picks Imaginary Fight With Elizabeth Warren, Loses

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Finally, Someone With the Guts to Call for Obama’s Impeachment

Mother Jones

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I see that Sarah Palin is apparently starved for attention again. Here’s her latest:

President Obama’s rewarding of lawlessness, including his own, is the foundational problem here. It’s not going to get better, and in fact irreparable harm can be done in this lame-duck term as he continues to make up his own laws as he goes along, and, mark my words, will next meddle in the U.S. Court System with appointments that will forever change the basic interpretation of our Constitution’s role in protecting our rights.

It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.

The many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.

Quite right. Minors are swarming our borders because American exceptionalism is at risk thanks to Obama’s failure to help the Ukrainians which means our enemies no longer fear us and the dollar is being debased. Or was it because he failed to arm the Syrian rebels? I forget. Something to do with Putin, though. And the Fed. Plus, um, recess appointments and one-year extensions to TyrannyCare mandates. And Benghazi.

Whatever. Impeach Obama! I sure hope every Republican in the country is asked to weigh in on this.

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Finally, Someone With the Guts to Call for Obama’s Impeachment

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Is New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez the Next Sarah Palin?

Mother Jones

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Illustration: Dale Stephanos

As she likes to tell anybody who’ll listen, Susana Martinez, the governor of New Mexico, didn’t start out a Republican. She and her husband, Chuck, like most everyone else in Las Cruces, had always been Democrats. But she’d long dreamed of running for office, and when word got out that she had her eyes on the district attorney’s seat, two local Republican activists asked her to lunch. At the meeting, the story goes, her suitors didn’t talk about party affiliation or ideology. They zeroed in on issues—taxes, welfare, gun rights, the death penalty. Afterward, Martinez got into the car, turned to her husband, and said, “I’ll be damned, we’re Republicans.”

It’s a tidy little anecdote, and Martinez has put it to good use. During her prime-time speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention, the biggest stage of her 18-year political career, the I’ll be damned punch line brought the crowd to its feet, getting more cheers than anything said by the party’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.

It’s not hard to see why the story is appealing: It suggests that Republican ideas can win over voters, perhaps especially voters who look like Martinez. If only those voters saw through pesky Democratic talking points like the “War on Women” and recognized what the Republican Party actually stands for, the logic goes, they would embrace the party. Just like Susana Martinez and her husband did.

These are trying times for Republicans in search of inspiration. Sure, it looks like they have a shot to take back the Senate. But if the escalating civil war between the establishment and the “wacko bird” tea party wing doesn’t tear the GOP in two, changing demographics threaten to push it toward extinction. Every four years, the party turns in poor showings with young people and cedes more ground among unmarried women and Latinos—the fastest-growing parts of the country’s population. In the 1988 presidential election, minorities made up just 15 percent of voters; by 2012, that number had risen to 28 percent, and they supported Obama by a 62-point margin. “Devastatingly,” the party’s 2012 post-mortem concluded, “we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us.”

No wonder, then, that many see Martinez, who turns 55 in July, as the party’s future. Fox News host Greta Van Susteren touts her “great resume”: America’s first Latina governor. Former district attorney of a border county. Guardian of her mentally disabled sister. Tax cutter, gun owner, daughter of a sheriff’s deputy. The Koch brothers invited her to speak at one of their secretive donor enclaves. Karl Rove singled her out in Time‘s list of last year’s 100 most influential people as a “reform-minded conservative Republican.” The Washington Post put her at the top of a list of likely 2016 vice presidential candidates; Romney has boosted her as a presidential contender. “She plugs every hole we’ve got as a party, and she’s got a record to match,” says Ford O’Connell, an adviser to the 2008 McCain campaign.

In the media, Martinez is often compared to Sarah Palin—”Susana Barracuda” read the title of a recent profile—a sassy small-town politician with national aspirations, an anti-Washington message, and an everywoman appeal (she loves Taco Bell, shops at Ross Dress for Less, and watches Dancing With the Stars). Her dead certain, with-me-or-against-me governing style draws comparisons to another Southwestern governor who made the leap from the statehouse to the White House, George W. Bush.

But perhaps the best comparison is to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Both are former prosecutors and Republican governors in blue states. They serve side by side on the money-raising juggernaut known as the Republican Governors Association (RGA), and they campaigned together during Christie’s 2013 reelection campaign; “Is This Your 2016 Republican Ticket?” was a typical headline.

Martinez’s 2010 campaign slogan was “Bold Change,” an appeal straight out of the Obama playbook. Jason Reed/Reuters

Their public personas, however, differ in an important way. Christie has made Jersey brashness central to his presentation; Martinez, on the other hand, “doesn’t posture, doesn’t engage in harsh rhetoric,” as one of her fundraisers put it. Since her election in 2010, she and her team have meticulously cultivated the image of a well-liked, bipartisan, warm-hearted governor by avoiding tough interviews and putting her in photo ops greeting veterans, reading to kids, or cutting ribbons. “This administration is very disciplined,” says New Mexico pollster Brian Sanderoff.

Despite numerous requests, the governor and her aides declined to comment for this piece. But previously unreleased audio recordings, text messages, and emails obtained by Mother Jones reveal a side of Martinez the public has rarely, if ever, seen. In private, Martinez can be nasty, juvenile, and vindictive. She appears ignorant about basic policy issues and has surrounded herself with a clique of advisers who are prone to a foxhole mentality.

Martinez doesn’t look like any of the governors who came before her, and members of her inner circle sometimes feel that she has been subject to unfair attacks. Jay McCleskey, her closest aide, once sent a text message complaining about an opponent’s negative mailing: “They’re trying to keep the brown girl down!!!”

Still, interviews with former Martinez aides, state lawmakers, Democratic and Republican officials, fundraisers, and donors show a governor whose prosecutorial style and vindictiveness have estranged her from leaders in her own party and from the Democratic lawmakers she must work with to get anything done. Martinez and her staff, they say, have isolated themselves in her fourth-floor office inside the modest state capitol known as the Roundhouse. As one major Republican donor in New Mexico puts it, “They’ve got this Sherman’s march to the sea mentality, burning everything in sight until they get to the finish.”

Martinez grew up among fighters. Her father, Jake, boxed in the Marines, served as a deputy sheriff in El Paso, and later started his own private security company. Her mother was a telephone operator and bookkeeper. Susie, the youngest of three, worked for her dad as a teenager, patrolling the parking lot and guarding the register at church bingo nights. The .357 Smith and Wesson Magnum she packed was, she once said, “bigger than the hip bone I was carrying it on.”

The Martinezes were Democrats, and Jake was active in El Paso politics (though his daughter proudly notes that he voted for Reagan). He and Susie volunteered on campaigns, stuffing envelopes and walking precincts. When a teacher at Riverside High School asked about Susie’s career dreams, she mentioned one day running for mayor. “Well, why not president?” her teacher replied.

The politicians Martinez saw on the nightly news all seemed to be lawyers, she once told an interviewer, so after getting her degree in criminal justice from the University of Texas-El Paso, she enrolled at the University of Oklahoma’s law school, where she became president of her second-year class. In 1986, fresh out of school, she went to work for Doug Driggers, the Democratic district attorney for Doña Ana County in southern New Mexico. He hired her as the only female prosecutor in his office, and Martinez quickly carved out a reputation for handling tough cases involving sexual and child abuse. She was an aggressive prosecutor with an unwavering sense of right and wrong, Driggers recalls, a woman who saw the world in black and white and often won. In one case, she told the same interviewer, a father who had drowned his two-year-old in front of his four-year-old brother testified that he’d only held the boy down for a minute. Martinez kept the court in silence for one long, agonizing minute to make her point. “She could sing to the jury,” says Michael Lilley, a criminal defense attorney in Las Cruces.

When voters tossed Driggers out in 1992, his replacement, a local defense attorney named Greg Valdez, fired Martinez after she was asked to testify against him in an internal grievance case. She sued for wrongful termination—in the process, she says, she learned that Valdez had put a note in her personnel file complaining Martinez was a poor dresser—and settled out of court for about $120,000. In 1996, she ran against him on the Republican ticket. Local pols remember her as a skilled campaigner with a knack for pressing the flesh, and she won by 18 points.

As district attorney, Martinez displayed the kind of hard-driving tactics that would come to define her. She was known for demanding harsh penalties, and didn’t hesitate to lock up defendants awaiting trial. (In 2012, the county said that Martinez’s office was partially responsible for an incident in which a mentally ill man named Stephen Slevin was left in solitary confinement for nearly two years without trial, and later agreed to pay a $15.5 million settlement.)

In 2002, the kind of case that makes celebrities out of DAs landed on Martinez’s desk. Five-month-old Brianna Lopez had been raped, bitten, dropped, and abused to death by members of her family in one of the worst child abuse cases in state history. “Baby Brianna” dominated the headlines for months, and Martinez ultimately secured convictions sentencing Lopez’s father to prison for 57 years, her uncle for 51, and her mother for 27. Believing that the existing statute wasn’t strong enough, Martinez lobbied the state Legislature for three years until it passed a law permitting life sentences for child abuse resulting in death.

People who worked with Martinez or squared off against her in the courtroom praise her conviction and commitment, especially on behalf of the most vulnerable. “But if you ran afoul,” says Darren Kugler, a state judge who once worked as a prosecutor under Martinez, “you were pushed off into purgatory or oblivion or Siberia. If you cross a certain line, you’re beyond redemption.”

It wasn’t long before the zealous, popular prosecutor caught the state party’s eye. In 2001, McCleskey, the New Mexico GOP’s executive director and a canny Republican operative with a record of scorched-earth wins, gathered a group of Republicans to talk about improving the party’s Latino outreach. But when Martinez stood up to speak, she blasted Gov. Gary Johnson’s push to relax penalties for minor drug infractions. “The way we attract Hispanics is we don’t talk about legalizing heroin and cocaine,” McCleskey recalls her saying.

McCleskey was smitten. He kept in touch with Martinez, nagging her every election cycle about running for higher office. Martinez didn’t bite, even as the Baby Brianna case and standout speeches at campaign rallies for Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 elevated her statewide profile. Then, on July 14, 2009, she celebrated her 50th birthday and decided to run for governor. Almost from the start, national Republicans backed her, quietly providing her with support her primary opponents could only have dreamed about, sending her policy briefings and polling data and giving her access to advisers to major party figures like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Still, Martinez struggled to stand out. Her fundraising was mediocre, and she lacked the wealth to self-finance like her main rival, a former Marine colonel and state party chairman named Allen Weh. Weh believed the job was his, according to an email McCleskey sent to campaign staffers, and at one point suggested Martinez was better suited for lieutenant governor. “What a narcissistic grandiose ‘tool’!” she replied.

But things began to turn around as major party figures from outside the state put their weight behind Martinez. In May 2010, Texas megadonor Bob Perry and his wife, Doylene, cut the first of several checks that would eventually total $450,000, making them her biggest individual donors by far. And then, on a Sunday morning just two weeks before the primary, Sarah Palin rolled into Albuquerque at the behest of the RGA. As “Start Me Up” pumped out of the hotel ballroom speakers, Palin walked onstage with Martinez and declared to a crowd of 1,300 screaming fans, “You have a winner right here.” The endorsement got more press than anything Martinez had said or done in the race to that point. “This event was a grand slam,” McCleskey wrote to the campaign that night. “Let’s get some rest tonight and then fix bayonets at sunrise.”

Martinez easily won the Republican primary in June, and then money began pouring in. Over the summer and fall, according to a copy of the 2010 campaign calendar obtained by Mother Jones, her usual diet of small-town meet and greets made way for fundraisers in Austin, Los Angeles, New York City, and DC. She flew on private jets and met executives at Fortune 500 companies (Intel, UnitedHealth Group, ExxonMobil) and powerful corporate lobbyists.

In the general election, Martinez ran as the clean-government advocate who would do away with everything New Mexicans disliked about her predecessor. Once hugely popular, Bill Richardson had been dogged by grand jury investigations, corruption allegations, rumors of sexual misconduct, and growing disenchantment over his perennial presidential aspirations. Martinez’s campaign slogan (“Bold Change”) was straight out of the Obama playbook, and it was all the more cutting given that her Democratic opponent, Diane Denish, had spent eight years as Richardson’s lieutenant governor.

On policy, Martinez drew on borrowed ideas (her education plan largely came from Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education) and flashy initiatives such as repealing a law allowing undocumented immigrants to get state driver’s licenses.

Internal campaign records and interviews with former aides suggest that she didn’t dig too deeply into the details of her own proposals: “Aren’t we the ONLY state in the US that provides a NM drivers license to illegal aliens?” she asked in a November 24, 2009, email. (At the time, seven other states had similar policies.)

In another email, in August 2009, she asked an aide, “What is podash? Or ashpod? WIPP?” Potash mining is a multibillion-dollar business in New Mexico, and WIPP refers to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the nuclear waste storage site for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has been a topic of statewide controversy for decades.

AUDIO: Listen to Martinez’s team bash the commission.

During an October 2010 campaign conference call, Martinez said she’d met a woman who worked for the state’s Commission on the Status of Women, a panel created in 1973 to improve health, pay equity, and safety for women.

“What the hell is that?” she asked.

“I don’t know what the fuck they do,” replied her deputy campaign manager, Matt Kennicott.

“What the hell does a commission on women’s cabinet do all day long?” Martinez asked.

“I think deputy campaign operations director Matt Stackpole wants to be the director of that so he can study more women,” Kennicott said.

“Well, we have to do what we have to do,” McCleskey chimed in, as Martinez burst out laughing. (As governor, she would line-item veto the commission’s entire budget.)

AUDIO: Hear Martinez call her opponent “that little bitch.”

Listening to recordings of Martinez talking with her aides is like watching an episode of HBO’s Veep, with over-the-top backroom banter full of pique, self-regard, and vindictiveness. As Martinez and her campaign staff rewatched a recent televised debate, Martinez referred to Denish, her opponent, as “that little bitch.” After Denish noted that the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce had given her an award, McCleskey snapped, “That’s why we’re not meeting with those fuckers.”

AUDIO: A Martinez aide says a Democratic politician “sounds like a retard.”

In a September 2009 email mentioning one of Martinez’s 2010 primary opponents, a former state representative named Janice Arnold-Jones, McCleskey wrote: “I FUCKING HATE THAT BITCH!” And in yet another debate prep meeting, Kennicott mocked the language skills of Ben Luján, a former state House speaker and a political icon to New Mexico Latinos: “Somebody told me he’s absolutely eloquent in Spanish, but his English? He sounds like a retard.”

Martinez’s crew saw enemies everywhere. A former staffer recalls the campaign on multiple occasions sending the license plate numbers of cars believed to be used by opposition trackers to an investigator in Martinez’s DA office who had access to law enforcement databases. In one instance, a campaign aide took a photo of a license plate on a car with an anti-Martinez bumper sticker and emailed it to the investigator. “Cool I will see who it belongs to!!” the investigator replied.

AUDIO: Martinez slams teacher salaries.

PLUS: Martinez’s team talks about how they might avoid accusations she deceived voters.

The campaign emails and audio recordings also show how Martinez and her team strategized to maintain her straight-shooting image while avoiding actually being up-front with the public. Throughout the campaign, Martinez praised teachers and insisted she’d “hold harmless” funding for public education. In private, Martinez implied teachers earned too much: “During the campaign, we can’t say it, I guess, because it’s education, but…they already don’t work, you know, two and a half months out of the year.” She and McCleskey acknowledged that cuts to education could well be necessary, so her aides plotted about how to respond if they were ever called out for it once elected: “Put up a YouTube video that no one will ever see where you talk about making everyone feel the pain,” McCleskey suggested. “And when you win, we say, ‘See, we said this shit the whole time. What are you guys talking about?'”

“It’s on YouTube,” Kennicott said. “C’mon, bitches.”

On January 1, 2011, a subzero wind gusted through the 400-year-old Santa Fe Plaza, a setting befitting the inaugural speech of the country’s first Latina governor and the descendant of a Mexican revolutionary. Ringed with shops and offices built in the Pueblo and Spanish styles, the plaza marks the end of several pioneer-era trails and lies near some of the West’s oldest buildings, relics of Spain’s once formidable North American holdings. Icicles dangled from the snow-covered roof of the bandstand where Martinez was to deliver her speech before a crowd of bundled-up supporters. She pledged to fight corruption and cronyism, to “shine a light into the dark corners of state government.” To the lawmakers in attendance, Democrats and Republicans alike, she said, “Let us be brave together.”

Like many in the Roundhouse, Bill O’Neill began the new year eager to work with the new governor. O’Neill, a Democrat, had just won a 163-vote squeaker to take a state House seat representing a GOP-leaning swing district in northeastern Albuquerque, where many lawns bore both O’Neill and Martinez signs. When Martinez said she’d work with legislators from both parties to get New Mexico back on track, he believed her.

The good will didn’t last long. One of the Legislature’s first acts was an attempt to make good on Martinez’s pledge to revoke driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. Within hours of the bill being voted down in committee, O’Neill and another legislator who opposed it found their districts hammered with hard-hitting robocalls, and the governor’s campaign committee flooded statewide radio with ads blasting her opponents for “protecting a bad law.”

Martinez immediately began purging state government of any trace of Bill Richardson. She sold the state plane (Richardson’s “personal air taxi,” she called it), fired his chefs and reassigned his security officers, and was even rumored to have ordered his name removed from the lead car of the Albuquerque-to-Santa Fe commuter train he’d helped create. She showed little interest in tradition, canceling a customary dinner with the state’s bishops on multiple occasions. Allen Sanchez, the executive director of the New Mexico Conference of Catholic Bishops, says he was told McCleskey advised her not to attend.

Before long, McCleskey was known as the shadow governor. Even though he never took a job in her administration nor played a formal role on Martinez’s transition team, she told a former aide that “Jay is going to be calling all the shots from behind the scenes.” Martinez has surrounded herself with McCleskey friends and clients—her chief of staff is Keith Gardner, a former state representative and client of McCleskey, and Gardner’s deputy, Scott Darnell, worked with McCleskey on the Bush 2004 campaign. McCleskey even kept a desk in “a hidden, closet-like antechamber” in the governor’s office suite, according to National Journal. The running joke inside the four-story Roundhouse is that there’s a secret fifth floor where McCleskey goes to work pulling the strings.

Political consultant Jay McCleskey is so close to Martinez that he’s been called “the shadow governor.”Pat Vasquez-Cunningham/Albuquerque Journal/ZUMA

McCleskey occupies a peculiar, if enviable, position: shaping the administration’s message on the inside, and getting rich off Martinez’s success on the outside. Since Martinez became governor, campaign finance records show that nearly $1.1 million has flowed from her political committees into McCleskey’s consulting firm, McCleskey Media Strategies; Public Opinion Strategies, where his wife, Nicole, works; and McCleskey-affiliated entities called CD Productions and M3 Placement.

McCleskey’s influence on Martinez’s administration has roiled state government. In her resignation letter, deputy tourism secretary Toni Balzano cites allegations that McCleskey called her “a Democrat Terrorist Al Qaeda member, a Richardson girlfriend, a spy poised to take down the administration.” And Martinez’s first appointee to run the influential department of finance and administration, Richard May, found himself cut out of budget meetings; he served just eight months before being pushed from his post after clashing with his deputy, an ally of McCleskey and Gardner.

Prominent Republicans around the state have blamed McCleskey for devising a political strategy that’s left the Martinez administration estranged from its natural allies. In a 2012 state Senate election, the governor endorsed a primary challenge to a Stetson-wearing rancher named Pat Woods, whom Martinez and McCleskey didn’t like; they bankrolled their candidate, Angie Spears, with money from SusanaPAC. In an unprecedented move, Martinez herself traveled to Woods’ district to campaign for his opponent. The plan backfired: Woods made the campaign about McCleskey, a “slick…Albuquerque political consultant” meddling with local politics, and won easily.

The Woods-Spears race infuriated members of the New Mexico GOP. State Rep. Anna Crook, a Republican whose district overlaps with Woods’, wrote in the local newspaper that the “nastiness, misinformation, innuendo, slanderous mailings, robocalls, and, in some cases, flat-out lies have created a toxic political environment the likes of which I have never seen before.” Without naming them, Crook pointed the finger at Martinez and McCleskey: “Even worse, it appears this kind of politics is being driven by outsiders—people who do not live here, don’t work here, and don’t raise their children here.”

As the state GOP prepared to elect a new chairman in December 2012, Martinez informed Republican activists that if they didn’t support her preferred candidate, John Rockwell, she wouldn’t raise money for the party. He lost, and Martinez sent a letter that, according to two party operatives who have read it, threatened to sue the New Mexico GOP if it used her name or image to solicit money. While she has headlined events for Republicans in Florida, Ohio, and Texas, she has not since attended a single fundraiser for her own state party. Martinez’s office hired away much of the state GOP’s staff after Rockwell’s loss, a move that some Republicans saw as an effort to gut the party.

Janice Arnold-Jones, the former state representative who lost to Martinez in the 2010 primary, knows Martinez’s vindictiveness firsthand. In 2012, Arnold-Jones was the party nominee in a tough but winnable race to represent an Albuquerque-based congressional district. But Martinez not only didn’t campaign for her—according to Arnold-Jones, the governor told donors not to give to her campaign. Arnold-Jones says that late one night, a month after she’d lost, Martinez called her out of the blue to explain, in a meandering ramble, that she’d withheld her support because Arnold-Jones’ campaign had hired staffers that Martinez felt were her enemies. “How sad is that?” Arnold-Jones told me.

On the eve of the 2012 elections, Harvey Yates, a former state GOP chair and éminence grise of local Republican politics, gave Martinez a 10-page letter critiquing her tenure and advising her to cut ties with McCleskey. The letter described Martinez’s administration, in the words of a National Journal reporter who talked to Yates, as “tone-deaf, exclusionary, and unnecessarily ruthless.” Yates blamed Martinez for relying too much on her top aide: “Not many voters remember voting for Jay McCleskey for governor,” he wrote.

What had Yates especially concerned was the growing evidence of business as usual from a governor who’d campaigned as a good-government reformer. In late 2011, the state awarded a 25-year lease worth an estimated $1 billion to a company largely owned by a pair of major Martinez backers, the Downs at Albuquerque, to operate a racetrack and casino at the state fairgrounds. To hear critics tell it, the bidding was rigged: Martinez met with the donors privately during the campaign and again during the selection process. The governor-appointed bid committee was stacked with McCleskey allies, and leaked files show the Downs’ attorney emailing with administration staffers to secure votes on the fairgrounds commission. Andrea Goff, a former Martinez fundraiser, has said McCleskey pressured her to get her father-in-law, who served on the commission, to switch his vote. “Everything about the whole process was controlled by the governor’s office,” Charlotte Rode, a Martinez appointee to the commission, told me.

Martinez has had some key legislative accomplishments: In 2011, the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a bill to grade New Mexico’s public schools on an A-to-F scale, a pillar of Martinez’s education reform plan. She signed a tax reform bill lowering the rate for corporations to 5.9 percent from 7.6 percent and increasing tax incentives for TV shows that shoot in New Mexico. She also signed off on an expansion of Medicaid and the creation of a state-run health insurance exchange. Martinez says both decisions illustrate her bipartisan bona fides. Her critics counter that Martinez had no choice: New Mexico is the sixth-poorest state in the nation, with the third-highest rate of uninsured citizens, and expanding health coverage was wildly popular.

One day in early 2013, Allen Sanchez, the Catholic bishops official, sat next to Martinez at the bishops’ annual legislative breakfast. The archbishop read a letter from a teenage boy thanking him for backing driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. Without them, the boy wrote, his parents couldn’t have driven him to St. Jude’s in Tennessee for cancer treatment. The boy, Cesar Quesada, had since passed away. Martinez, Sanchez says, turned to him and said, “Give me a break. He’s going to read a bleeding-heart letter? What the hell am I doing here?”

Like any smart state pol with national aspirations, Martinez deflects any mention of running for higher office. She says she’s “focused on New Mexico,” and stresses that as the guardian of her mentally disabled sister, Leticia, it would be a challenge for her to leave the state. Yet all signs point to a bigger stage for Martinez. She was elected to the Republican Governors Association’s executive committee and attends plenty of out-of-state fundraisers and speaking gigs. She’s also agreed to co-chair the “2014 Future Majority Project,” a party initiative to elect 150 women and 75 “diverse candidates.”

Despite the growing discontent among New Mexico party leaders, Martinez enjoys approval ratings in the high 50s and low 60s—among the highest of any Republican governor. Her advisers seem keenly aware of how those numbers could help her achieve higher office, and appear determined to maintain them. Martinez’s aides have closely guarded her travel schedule and her media appearances, protecting her from tough and unflattering questions. Unlike such popular Republican governors as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Ohio’s John Kasich, Martinez has for more than three years largely avoided the Sunday talk shows; the lone national news figure to get substantial time with her is Fox’s Van Susteren. As she runs for reelection this fall with a full war chest and no strong contender among the Democrats challenging her, Martinez is well positioned to shape the debate and control her own image.

Yet Democrats and Republicans alike wonder if she has what it takes to succeed at the national level. A major postelection interview with Latina magazine became a punch line after Martinez asked her interviewer to “remind me” what the DREAM Act was. Like Richardson, she could end up with a bit of legal baggage: The FBI has interviewed witnesses about the Downs deal, and a case involving a former aide intercepting emails between members of the governor’s inner circle could go on trial this summer, with the embarrassing prospect of Martinez having to take the stand.

The question on everyone’s mind is this: Can Susana Martinez overcome all these shortfalls should 2016 come calling? There’s still time for her to harness the charisma and keen strategic instincts that won over both juries and voters, and to curb her worst impulses and rid herself of the advisers who have indulged them. Can Martinez follow the path of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, two governors who rose from provincial acclaim to national stature—or will her ascent end more like Palin’s?

Source:  

Is New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez the Next Sarah Palin?

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The Lawyer Behind the Supreme Court’s Latest Campaign Finance Decision Has a New Cause: Sarah Palin for Senate

Mother Jones

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When the Supreme Court recently demolished yet another chunk of the nation’s campaign finance laws, Dan Backer arguably cheered louder than anyone. It was Backer, a Washington, DC-area attorney active in conservative politics, who had convinced an Alabama businessman named Shaun McCutcheon to challenge the government’s limit on the number of candidates, party committees, and political action committees an individual can contribute to in a single election cycle. (The basic limits on how much money that donor can give to each candidate, party, or PAC remain intact.) Backer, who represented McCutcheon, responded to the news of the Supreme Court’s decision by tweeting (in apparent reference to William Wallace in Braveheart): “FREEEEDOMMMMM!!!!”

Backer’s victory is shining some light on another high-profile cause of his: Convincing Sarah Palin to run for US Senate.

In an email headlined “Palin for Senate” recently blasted out by a PAC called the Tea Party Leadership Fund, Backer writes, “Sarah’s the proven leader we need.” He goes on, “She has a better grasp on world politics, and she knows what it means to cherish and protect our American freedoms far better than THE MAN WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BE LEADING THE FREE WORLD.” Backer slams incumbent Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) for spending “too much time in Washington, DC, begging the Obama administration for favors rather than representing the good people of Alaska.” Palin supporters need to act quick, Backer warns: The window for her to get into the race “has almost closed.” And so Backer asks recipients to sign a petition and gather enough signatures to “to push Sarah Palin over the top in a critical run for Alaska’s Senate seat in 2014.”

In an interview, Backer said almost 100,000 people had signed the Palin for Senate petition. If Palin did enter the race,he said the Tea Party Leadership PAC would bolster her candidacy with direct mail and radio ads. “Nobody’s going to be a greater agent for change than Sarah Palin from Alaska,” Backer told me. “She will bring something to the race and she will disrupt the Senate. And disruption is good.”

Read the email:

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Backer’s plea isn’t entirely out of left field. Palin has made noises about running for Senate in Alaska. Last summer, she said on Sean Hannity’s radio show that she was considering a run. “I’ve considered it because people have requested me considering it,” she said. “But I’m still waiting to see what the lineup will be and hoping that…there will be some new blood, new energy, not just kind of picking from the same old politicians in the state.” But this email comes when it’s getting late for a possible Palin campaign. (The filing deadline is six weeks away.) Right now, the much-watched Alaska Senate race pits Begich against Republican Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell. Most polling shows Begich in the lead, but the seat is considered a toss-up Senate race that could determine which party ends up controlling the upper chamber.

Backer’s email asks for more than just a signature; it includes a plea to donate $5 or more to the Tea Party Leadership Fund PAC. (Backer is the PAC’s treasurer.) A cynical political observer might wonder if this “Palin for Senate” effort could be more of a fundraising ploy than a realistic attempt to get Palin into the race. Campaign records show that the Tea Party Leadership Fund has so far raked in $3.8 million in the 2013-14 election cycle, and most of that money—almost $9 of every $10—has gone to fundraising, legal fees (to Backer’s own firm), consulting, and other related expenses.

But Backer says the Tea Party Leadership PAC has spent so much non-electoral money because it was building its donor lists during 2013, an off year. This year, he says, the PAC plans to be a counterweight to the outside money from corporations and trade associations backing establishment Republican candidates. “We knew this was going to be a tough cycle and a tough year,” he said. “You need resources you can put on the ground when you need them.”

Source: 

The Lawyer Behind the Supreme Court’s Latest Campaign Finance Decision Has a New Cause: Sarah Palin for Senate

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It’s About Time to Start Giving CPAC the Media Coverage it Deserves

Mother Jones

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CPAC, that great annual gathering of conservative red meat and can-you-top-this condemnation of President Obama, came to an end Saturday (with a petulant, syntax-challenged stemwinder from Sarah Palin, natch). In passing, Lexington mentions something that’s long puzzled me:

It is traditional for journalists to be a bit sniffy about CPAC straw polls, and with reason….CPAC attracts a very specific slice of the conservative movement, and its straw polls have a woeful record of predicting actual presidential nominees. Half the voters in this year’s effort were aged between 18 and 25, and two-thirds were male. Many seemed keen on Mr Paul’s brand of libertarianism, with its government-shrinking, pot-legalising, tax-cutting, privacy-obsessed, pull-up-the-drawbridge isolationism.

….Yet those who dismiss CPAC as a youth club for Ayn Rand (and Star Wars) fans risk overlooking the importance of the speeches here. Though the speakers pander to the crowd, they know that their words are whizzing around blogs, Twitter, talk radio and cable news TV. As a result, the senators and governors with presidential ambitions often give voice to what they believe their voters want to hear.

My puzzlement has always been just the opposite: the national political press mostly doesn’t dismiss CPAC as an inconsequential libertarian love-fest. They love covering CPAC. But why? Every year, CPAC demonstrates its own irrelevance by overwhelmingly supporting Rand Paul or Ron Paul or some other eccentric conservative type in its final-day straw poll. It’s solid proof that the attendees at CPAC represent a small and only slightly influential wing of the conservative movement.

And yet, the mere fact that CPAC reliably delivers the crazy seems to guarantee them plenty of coverage. I confess that I don’t really get it. The average CPAC attendee wants to legalize drugs, cut the military, and rein in the NSA. The conservative movement writ large supports exactly the opposite: it wants to put the stoners in jail, give Vladimir Putin what for, and send the NSA a thank you card for protecting us from terrorists.

So why all the media love for CPAC? What’s the deal?

Source:

It’s About Time to Start Giving CPAC the Media Coverage it Deserves

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The Hillary Papers: Yet Another Conservative Bombshell That Strikes Out

Mother Jones

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Jonah Goldberg watched the NBC Nightly News last night and was unhappy that they didn’t devote more time to Obama’s delay of the employer mandate. There’s a reason for that, of course: it’s not really very important and most people don’t care about it. Sure, all of us partisan junkies care about it, but that’s about it. To everyone else it’s a minor administrative rule change.

But he was also unhappy with another segment:

The highlight of the night was Andrea Mitchell’s “report” on the Washington Free Beacon’s big take-out on the “Hillary Papers.” Her discomfort was palpable. She assured viewers that the “inflammatory excerpts” weren’t necessarily in context (Mitchell the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for NBC who spent much of the last year covering Sarah Palin is a great stickler for context and eschews anything inflammatory). Hillary Clinton, the front runner for her party’s presidential nomination was treated like the victim. Thank goodness she didn’t joke about putting traffic cones up on the George Washington bridge!

By chance, I happened to see that segment. What struck me was less Andrea Mitchell’s “discomfort” than the fact that this supposed bombshell seemed like a total nothingburger. When it was over, I sort of shrugged and wondered what the point was. Here’s a bit of the transcript from Mitchell’s report about the Diane Blair papers:

Tonight, the once-private papers of the woman Hillary Clinton has previously described as her closest friend are getting a lot of attention….Thanksgiving, 1996, Blair quotes Clinton saying “I’m a proud woman. I’m not stupid. I know I should do more to suck up to the press. I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos. I know I should pretend not to have any opinions, but I am just not going to. I’m used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms.”

….September 9, 1998, Bill Clinton had finally admitted his relationship with Lewinsky. Blair writes of Hillary, “she is not trying to excuse him; it was a huge personal lapse.” But she says to his credit, he tried to break it off, tried to pull away.” Blair did not survive to provide context for her diary. Now Republicans say her notes are fair game.

Um, OK. Is that supposed to be damaging? The entire Beacon story is here, and I guess there are some outtakes that can be spun as unflattering toward Hillary, but that’s about it. It’s a bit of tittle tattle about who Hillary was annoyed with at various points in time, and not much more. And even that depends for its power on just how accurately Blair represented Hillary’s views.

Maybe I’m demonstrating a lack of imagination here, but I’m having a hard time seeing this as especially damaging or bombshellish. For the most part, it strikes me as confirming that Hillary was pretty much who we thought she was: tough-minded, goal-oriented, sometimes defensive, and not always sure how to handle the tsunami of invective that beset the Clinton presidency. If you’re a Hillary hater, it will be yet more evidence that she’s Satan incarnate, but for the rest of us, I’m not sure what’s really new here.

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The Hillary Papers: Yet Another Conservative Bombshell That Strikes Out

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