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Chocola: Rove Only Cares About GOP ‘Brand’

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photo credit: silas216Club for Growth President Chris Chocola says Republican strategist Karl Rove is more concerned about the packaging of GOP candidates than their political philosophy, a position he believes dismisses how voters feel about a candidate’s “core beliefs.”

“What Karl Rove and some of the establishment groups care about is only the brand,” Chocola told CBS’ “Face to Face” Thursday. “They only care if someone’s a Republican or not. They don’t really care what their core beliefs are.”

Chocola, whose own limited government group just targeted nine GOP congressmen for defeat because their voting records aren’t conservative enough, was referring to Rove’s Conservative Victory Project, which plans to target conservative Republican candidates whose views may be too extreme to get them elected.

Chocola says there’s a difference between how Club for Growth measures candidates and how Rove does it.

Read more from this story HERE.

J.C. Watts: GOP ‘In Denial’ About Its Image Problems With Minorities

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHoteyFormer Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) says the Republican Party is “in denial” about its image problems with minority voters — and he argues the “burden of proof” is on the GOP to show it is sincere about repairing relationships with communities tilting toward Democrats.

“We are in denial — because the fact is that many people associate the Republican Party as the party of the rich,” Watts told The Hill on Wednesday.

Watts, who left Congress in 2003, recently launched INSIGHT America, a nonprofit group designed to boost diversity within the GOP. It’s one of several GOP efforts at minority outreach launched in the wake of the 2012 election, in which President Obama won large majorities of the black, Hispanic and Asian American vote.

“Right now, there is not a strong relationship between minority communities and the Republican Party,” said Watts, who was in Washington on Wednesday to give a speech to the Heritage Foundation.

“The burden of proof is on us and it starts with relationships … We lost eight out of 10 demographics in the last election, so we have to be getting back to basics,” he added.

Read more from this story HERE.

Abdication: Senate GOP Ponders Shifting Power To Obama

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Photo Credit: John Shinkle Days before the March 1 deadline, Senate Republicans are circulating a draft bill that would cancel $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts and instead turn over authority to President Barack Obama to achieve the same level of savings under a plan to be filed by March 8.

Congress would retain the power to overturn the president’s spending plan by March 22, but only under a resolution of disapproval that would demand two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate to prevail over an Obama veto.

The proposal would require — like the sequester — that no more than $42.6 billion of the cuts come at the expense of defense programs. But the elaborate, almost Rube Goldberg construct is already provoking sharp criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike and reflects a political scramble to escape the fallout from the sequester.

Indeed, a rival Republican proposal to instead come up with alternative cuts and not cede power to the president was already circulating Tuesday night, a 31 page draft bill crafted by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.)

The sweep of the first GOP option, which has leadership support, is striking. If Congress were to follow this course, significant power would be shifted to the president, an unusual maneuver that even Obama himself and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) have scoffed at. But the plan is being advanced by some conservative Republicans who don’t want the White House to continue using the sequester as a public relations hammer.

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Tea Partyers Fight For Soul of GOP

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Photo Credit: APThough years in the brewing, the internal fight over the direction of the Republican Party has exploded onto front pages and political talk shows this month after strategist Karl Rove announced the formation of a new political action committee designed to promote more electable candidates.

Fed up with what they see as a sellout of their small-government agenda and tired of Election Day disappointments, tea partyers and many conservatives are firing back.

The outcome of the battle will define the party and how it tackles everything from foreign policy to national security and immigration on Capitol Hill, where GOP leaders and tea partyers have been butting heads over taxes and spending.

“This is a fight,” Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, one of the largest branches of the grass-roots movement.

“It is a fight between the people across the country who think they know how to live their lives best and pick their own representatives, against the establishment that thinks it can decide what is best for us through laws, regulations, political consultants and a political class who thinks they should deem who are the most winnable candidates in any given election.”

Mr. Rove, who was former President George W. Bush’s chief strategist through his two presidential wins, is the father of the new Conservative Victory Project, which is designed to provide a counterbalance for influential groups such as the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks that have bucked the GOP establishment on occasion.

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Newt Blasts ‘Repugnant’ Rove Super PAC, GOP Consulting Class

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Photo Credit: BreitbartOn Wednesday, Former House Speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich blistered Republican consultant Karl Rove, saying Rove’s new super PAC that was created to wage war against conservatives and Tea Party candidates in GOP primaries should be “repugnant” to every conservative and Republican.

Gingrich, in his weekly newsletter, writes of Rove, “no one person is smart enough nor do they have the moral right to buy nominations across the country” and that a “bunch of billionaires financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states” is “the opposite of the Republican tradition of freedom and grassroots small town conservatism.”

“That is the system of Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine,” Gingrich writes.

Gingrich points out that, while Rove likes to point to Christine O’Donnell’s 2010 loss in the Delaware Senate race as a reason for creating his super PAC, Rove-backed candidates in 2012 lost “winnable senate races in Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida.”

“So in seven of the nine losing races, the Rove model has no candidate-based explanation for failure,” Gingrich writes. “Handing millions to Washington based consultants to destroy the candidates they dislike and nominate the candidates they do like is an invitation to cronyism, favoritism and corruption.”

Gingrich writes that it is “appalling how little some Republican consultants have learned from the 2012 defeat” and “even more disturbing how arrogant their plans for the future are.”

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Hispanicked GOP Elite: They’ll Respect Us In the Morning

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Photo Credit: Gary CameronDon’t anyone tell Marco Rubio, John McCain or Jeff Flake that nearly 80 percent of Hindus voted for Obama, or who knows what they’ll come up with.

I understand the interest of business lobbies in getting cheap, unskilled labor through amnesty, but why do Republican officeholders want to create up to 20 million more Democratic voters, especially if it involves flouting the law? Are the campaign donations from the soulless rich more important than actual voters?

Without citing any evidence, the Rubio Republicans simply assert that granting 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens amnesty will make Hispanics warm to the GOP. Yes, that’s worked like a charm since Reagan signed an amnesty bill in 1986!

True, Romney lost the Hispanic vote, but so did John McCain, the original Rubio. (McCain lost Hispanics by 67 percent compared to 71 percent who voted against Romney.)

President George H.W. Bush created “diversity visas,” massively increased legal immigration and eliminated the English requirement on the naturalization test. In the 1992 election, he won 25 percent of the Hispanic vote — less than what Romney got.

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In Defense of Christine O’Donnell

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreAmericans love to watch public figures eviscerated publicly. Progressives love to bash conservatives. And the media will go out of their way to cripple conservative candidates (even if it means missing wildly and making an ass out of themselves, i.e., Wolf Blitzer and Marco Rubio’s water bottle). But progressives, the media and the American public will eventually cease their assault, if for no other reason than the story gets old and the appetite for schadenfreude eventually wanes.

For over two years now, center-right political professionals — from Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove down to local GOP pols — have trashed Christine O’Donnell without relent. They’ve made her name synonymous with embarrassing failure. The declamations are tossed off casually by TV’s alleged conservatives, usually as a cautionary tale. Among the right’s talking heads, Christine O’Donnell is invoked as a two-word epithet utilized to dismiss unfit and extreme Republican candidates, most often Tea Party upstarts. I object. Partly to correct the historical record, partly to defend Christine, partly to stymie a lingering and erroneous bit of conventional wisdom on the right, but mostly to tell Karl Rove that he can go sit on a volcano, I offer a sadly rare defense of Christine O’Donnell.

First of all, if you like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and the scores of other conservatives who won competitive races in the 2010 tea party wave, you should thank your lucky stars for Christine O’Donnell. Whatever you think of the candidate herself, she took an unseemly barrage of media arrows that would have otherwise landed on other candidates. With every old clip Bill Maher released of Christine’s antics on “Politically Incorrect,” the legacy media spent hours ridiculing her. Across the networks, on October day after October day, liberal media elites relished, reveled in and replayed every O’Donnell gaffe and misstep. It was probably good for their ratings. And they may have thought that they were damaging the Republican brand. What they were actually doing was wasting hour upon hour of airtime ridiculing one candidate while ignoring political races across the country. Christine O’Donnell’s media flogging was a national shield for conservatives in close races. Witting or not, her sacrifice deserves recognition, if not gratitude.

In reality, moderates like Mike Castle are guarantors of conservative defeat. Political debate always ends in compromise. If Castle is “moderate,” then why should anyone entertain proposals from the far right? In every debate, the question is not whether conservatives win, but how much we lose. If America wants to vote itself socialist, that’s fine, but, at the moment, we’re not giving it a choice. With either party, we’re just taking baby steps toward statism and ruin.

And that’s my final point, and the only one that really matters: A Republican loss is not necessarily a loss for conservatism, nor is a win a win. And anyone who wanted to elect Mike Castle is not fighting for the conservative cause.

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A Bill of Goods : Napolitano Says US Borders Have ‘Never Been Stronger’

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Photo Credit: The National GuardHomeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano insisted Wednesday that U.S. borders have “never been stronger” during a Senate hearing on immigration reform.

Facing calls from the GOP to crack down on the flow of illegal border crossers, Napolitano said Congress should pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul that strengthens security while also addressing the factors that entice people into the country.

“I often hear the argument that before reform can move forward, we must first secure our borders,” Napolitano said at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s first hearing on immigration reform.

“But too often, the ‘border security first’ refrain simply serves as an excuse for failing to address the underlying problems. It also ignores the significant progress and efforts that we have undertaken over the past four years. Our borders have, in fact, never been stronger.”

Republican Sens. Jeff Sessions (Ala.) and John Cornyn (Texas) objected, saying that while border security has improved in recent years, the Obama administration has not done enough.

Read more from this story HERE.

Karl Rove And The Definition Of Insanity

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With their attacks on tea party conservatives, Karl Rove and his cohorts have fired the first salvo in the Great GOP War of 2013. The strangest aspect of this is that even as Rove denounces conservatism in favor of his unique brand of watered-down compromise, he appears to be looking to capitalize on conservatism itself.

While he may call his latest super PAC the “Conservative Victory Project,” Rove most decidedly does not wish for conservative victory. The aim of his group is to push moderate candidates while posturing as the savior of the embattled Republican Party. This is what disgraced Republicans do all the time — turn away from the base in an effort to win praise from the liberal mainstream media.

What’s that old phrase? “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” If that is true, the GOP’s moderate shot-callers must be a few bricks shy of a full load.

We have tried it their way for two long, frustrating decades — and with limited success. Moderate, supposedly “electable” candidates are often anything but. Just ask President John McCain. Or Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican moderate Rove and others pushed to unseat Governor Rick Perry in 2010. (Perry won handily, and Hutchison was embarrassed into retirement.)

Let’s take a look at the most recent example of Rove and his fellow faux-conservatives’ handiwork: America was force-fed Mitt Romney, a good man who was, nonetheless, far from what Americans on the right actually wanted. Romney had many good qualities, but his soft stances on issues that would have made him appealing to conservatives cost him the election. Conservatives just couldn’t get excited about the prospect of a Romney administration. Sure, almost every registered Republican preferred Romney over Obama, but their lukewarm enthusiasm for the Massachusetts moderate did not translate into a GOP victory. Liberals voted Democrat, moderate Republicans voted Republican and some conservatives swallowed the bitter pill and voted Republican while others voted independent or not at all.

Read more from this story HERE.

The GOP, Fox Political Purge (+video)

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Photo Credit: Mike LichtRepublicans and Fox News are moving to purge the controversial political creatures they created.
Both were damaged badly in 2012 by loud, partisan voices that stoked the base — but that scared the hell out of many voters.

Now, the GOP, with its dismal image, and Fox News, with its depressed ratings in January, are scrambling to dim those voices. To wit:

Fox ousted contributors Sarah Palin and Dick Morris, two of the most obnoxiously partisan figures on the network’s air.
Karl Rove, himself sidelined by Fox after the election, has helped start a new super PAC, the Conservative Victory Fund, designed to keep controversial conservatives like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) from winning Senate primaries.

Senate GOP leaders created what amounts to a buddy system with their caucus’s most popular tea party members, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, to get their help in taming anti-establishment conservatives.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has been running around the country warning anyone who will listen that Republicans must quit being the “stupid party” that nominates nutty candidates.

Read more from this story HERE.