RINO US Senator Olympia "Snowjob" Snowe To Retire

 

 

Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe to retire in blow to GOP

Posted by Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blakeat 05:09 PM ET, 02/28/2012

 

Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe will not seek reelection in 2012, she announced Tuesday.

 

In announcing her plans, Snowe, 65, emphasized that she is in good health and was prepared for the campaign ahead. But she said she was swayed by the increasing polarization in Washington.
“Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term,” Snowe said in a statement. “So at this stage of my tenure in public service, I have concluded that I am not prepared to commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate, which is what a fourth term would entail.”
Snowe’s retirement represents a major setback for the GOP’s efforts to regain a majority in the Senate. As a moderate Republican, she may be the party’s only hope to hold a seat in the strongly blue state.
Republicans did get some traction in the state in 2010, including electing Republican Paul LePage as governor.
But in a more neutral political environment, and in a federal race, Democrats will be heavy favorites to steal this seat from Republicans — their best pickup opportunity in the country, for sure.
Snowe’s announcement took Republican leaders completely by surprise; she informed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn (Texas) of her decision today, according to a person familiar with the decision.
The person noted that Snowe had given no indication that she was doing anything but planning to run an aggressive reelection bid; she had hired Justin Brasell, a renowned Republican operative, to manage her campaign.
One Republican said Snowe had sent an invitation for a fundraiser as late as Monday.
Among the names mentioned as possible replacements on the ballot for the GOP: 2002 gubernatorial candidates Peter Cianchette, 2010 gubernatorial candidate Steve Abbott, state Treasurer Bruce Poliquin, state Attorney General Bill Schneider, state Senate President Kevin Raye and Jock McKernan, Snowe’s husband and the state’s former governor. Businessman Scott D’Amboise was already challenging Snowe in a primary.
On the Democratic side, Reps. Chellie Pingree (D) and Mike Michaud (D) could run, as well as former congressman Tom Allen (D), who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in 2008.
The filing deadline is fast approaching: March 15.
Snowe is known for her independent streak, often voting with Collins against many of her Republican colleagues. According to the just-released National Journal 2011 vote rankings, only Collins voted with Democrats more than Snowe last year.
The most moderate Democrat in the Senate — Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) — is also retiring.

Commentary

Good News this dirt bag RINO is going going and gone Hey Sen.Snowe dont let the door hit you in the ass

Rasmussen Poll Man On Obama

Opinion

Obama's biggest loser

By Scott Rasmussen

As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama declared his support for green-energy development. "For the sake of our economy, our security and the future of our planet," he said, "we must end the age of oil in our time."
As president, Obama called for putting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015. He backed that call with more than $5 billion in taxpayer subsidies to jump-start the electric car industry. The president also put in place a program that gave $7,500 to anyone who would actually buy an electric car.
Despite that support, sales were minimal in 2011, so his new budget proposes hiking that subsidy to $10,000 a car.
Voters are skeptical. Just 29 percent favor the $10,000 subsidies, while 58 percent are opposed. When people are told that the goal of putting a million electric cars on the road could cost taxpayers $10 billion in subsidies, the opposition reaches 65 percent. Voters are looking to reduce federal spending, not increase it.
But there's an important detail suggesting the president's plan could be an even bigger loser in the court of public opinion. The CEO of General Motors said recently that the average income of those buying Chevy's electric Volt is approximately $170,000 a year. That puts electric car buyers in the same league as BMW buyers or those who drive a Mercedes-Benz. It may not be the top 1 percent, but it qualifies in the top 7 percent of all American earners. That's a more elite group than those who buy Cadillac or Lexus cars.
Such trickle-down environmentalism is hardly appealing to voters. Seventy-three percent believe those who earn $150,000 or more should pay the full cost of the car themselves. Only 13 percent believe a government subsidy is appropriate.
While agreeing with the president on the importance of reducing our dependence on foreign oil, voters don't see providing subsidies to wealthy electric car buyers as the way to reach that goal. Instead, 75 percent say that the United States should be doing more to develop its own gas and oil resources. Most (57 percent) think the best way to do that is through free-market competition. Only 27 percent believe government subsidies and regulations represent a better approach.
The president views taxpayer subsidies for electric cars as an investment in "clean energy technology -- an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet and create countless new jobs for our people." But Americans are justifiably skeptical of political investments.
Only 11 percent believe that government officials are better than private investors at seeing the potential benefits of new technologies. Seventy-one percent think investors do a better job. If private investors don't see the value and pass on an investment, 64 percent of people surveyed think it's likely any government investment will be a waste of money.
One reason for this is that investors are most interested in producing things that consumers will buy. Political investments are more about headlines. When it comes to buying electric cars, the headlines may be about going green, but the reality is most Americans say they'll be motivated to go electric for a far more mundane reason: When the price of gas gets too high, they'll switch.


Scott Rasmussen is founder and president of Rasmussen Reports.

Commentary

You can see Rasmussen's Obama Approval rating at realclearpolitics.com

Dowd Just Dead Wrong As Usual



Maureen "the Ditz" Dowd

Maureen Dowd / The last-gasp party

The GOP lets the future slip away while it rolls back the clock

 

 

WASHINGTON -- It's finally sinking in.
Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.
"Republicans being against sex is not good," the GOP strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. "Sex is popular."
He said his party is "coming to grips with a weaker field than we'd all want" and going through the five stages of grief. "We're at No. 4," he said. (Depression.) "We've still got one to go." (Acceptance.)
The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates -- be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes -- and try to destroy them with it. President Barack Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals. The right's image of Mr. Obama, though, is more a figment of its imagination than the left's image of W. was.
Newt Gingrich, a war wimp in Vietnam who supported W.'s trumped-up invasion of Iraq, had the gall to tell a crowd at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., that defeating Mr. Obama -- "the most dangerous president in modern American history" -- was "a duty of national security" because "he is incapable of defending the United States" and because he "wants to unilaterally weaken the United States." Who killed Osama again?
How can the warm, nurturing Catholic Church of my youth now be represented in the public arena by uncharitable nasties like Mr. Gingrich and Rick Santorum?
"It makes the party look like it isn't a modern party," Rudy Giuliani told CNN's Erin Burnett, fretting about the candidates' Cotton Mather attitude about women and gays. "It doesn't understand the modern world that we live in."
After a speech in Dallas on Thursday, Jeb Bush also recoiled: "I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I'm wondering, I don't think I've changed, but it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective."
Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently called Mr. Santorum "rigid and homophobic." Arlen Specter, who quit the Republicans to become a Democrat three years ago before Pennsylvania voters sent him home from the Senate, told MSNBC: "Where you have Sen. Santorum's views, so far to the right, with his attitude on women in the workplace and gays and the bestiality comments and birth control, I do not think it is realistic for Rick Santorum to represent America." That from the man who accused Anita Hill of perjury.
Republicans have a growing panic at the thought of going down the drain with a loser, missing their chance at capturing the Senate and giving back all those House seats won in 2010. More and more, they openly yearn for a fresh candidate, including Jeb Bush, who does, after all, have experience at shoplifting presidential victories at the last minute.
Their jitters increased exponentially as they watched Mitt belly-flop in his hometown on Friday, giving a dreadful rehash of his economic ideas in a virtually empty Ford Field in Detroit, babbling again about the "right height" of Michigan trees and blurting out that Ann "drives a couple of Cadillacs."
Mr. Romney's Richie Rich slips underscore what Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist, told the Ripon Forum: "If we are only the party of Wall Street and country clubbers, we will quickly become irrelevant."
Mr. Santorum, whose name aptly comes from the same Latin root as sanctimonious, went on Glenn Beck's Web-based show with his family and offered this lunacy: "I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college," because colleges are "indoctrination mills" that "harm" the country. He evidently wants home university schooling, which will cut down on keggers.
His wife, Karen, suggested that her husband's success is "God's will" and that he wants "to make the culture a better culture, more pleasing to God."
The barking-mad Republicans of Virginia are helping to make the party look foolish and creepy. A video went viral on Friday in which Delegate Dave Albo comically regaled his fellow lawmakers on the floor of the Statehouse with his own Old Dominion version of "Lysistrata": He suggested that he was denied sex with his wife because of a Republican-sponsored bill that would have made ultrasounds, often with a vaginal probe, mandatory for women seeking abortions. With music, red wine and a big-screen TV, he made a move on his wife, Rita, while she was watching a news report about the bill. "And she looks at me and goes, 'I've got to go to bed,'" Mr. Albo said as his colleagues guffawed.
The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They're trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.

Commentary

Please give me a break Ms.Ditz you and the left are the ones in a frenzy and fixation not the right/tea party you people are the ones in the leaders of the lamestream media e.g. New York Times and left wing socialist Democrat Party you all are ruining the country

Howie Carr Goes Off On Massachusetts Gov.Deval Patrick and Lt.Gov Tim Murrary

Crash dummy and dumber

By Howie Carr Boston Herald Columnist

Here’s the question I’d like to see Gov. Deval Patrick asked this morning on network TV:
“Gov. Patrick, what exactly are you and your pint-sized lieutenant governor trying to cover up by refusing to release his cellphone records from the morning he wrecked a state car at 5:20 a.m. while driving 108 mph, after which your scandal-ridden state police began a massive cover-up as your minion gave a series of preposterous explanations, each one more unbelievable than the last?”
But the interviewer will be George Stephanopoulos, a notorious Democrat rumpswab. So Deval will get a pass in his tryout as an anti-Mitt Romney “pit bull,” an odd miscasting considering that the dog breed the governor more closely resembles is a Chihuahua, or maybe a toy poodle.
But once Deval returns to Boston, it’ll be back to business as usual — stonewalling all legitimate inquiries about what really happened that November morning. Deval said the other day that releasing Crash’s cellphone records would set a “terrible precedent.”
That’s exactly what Richard Nixon said in 1973 about releasing the White House tapes during Watergate. So, how’d that work out for him?
Then Deval said, “I think asking him to prove a negative is wildly unfair and unreas-onable.”
Well, no, it’s not. Because it would only take a few seconds to call up the cellphone records in question on the Internet and prove once and for all that Murray is finally telling the truth, that he was not calling or texting anyone in the moments before the Crown Vic achieved liftoff.
It would be one thing if the little fella had been leveling with the public all along, but he hasn’t. Remember when he said he was going the speed limit? First he claimed he lost control on some black ice — no, he fell asleep. He was out getting a Herald — no, he was conducting a storm inspection.
If there was nothing to hide, why did the state police immediately try to broom the whole accident without even checking the black box? Why did Murray demand to take a Breath-alyzer — or so he claims?
Consider what would have happened if Mitt Romney’s lieutenant governor, Muffy Healey, had gotten herself into this kind of jam. Forget seconds, Mitt would have given her up in nanoseconds.
Why is Deval engineering this entire cover-up? Is there something so toxic in those phone records that Deval is as much at risk as the Pillsbury Doughboy? Politically, Murray is a dead man walking, but Deval has a future, or at least he’d like to think he does.
For once, the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast may be interesting this year.

Commentary

The Great Howie Carr great as always

Michelle Malkin In Pittsburgh Tribune Review

Opinion

Preachers of junk science

By Michelle Malkin

Pushing back against Democrats' attempts to frame him as a religious menace, Rick Santorum forcefully turned the tables on the White House: "When it comes to the management of the Earth, they are the anti-science ones."
Scrutiny of the anti-science brigade couldn't come at a better time. It's not just big-ticket scandals like the stimulus-subsidized Solyndra bankruptcy or the Keystone XL pipeline debacle bedeviling America. In every corner of the Obama administration, the radical green machinery is hard at work -- destroying jobs, shredding truth and sacrificing our economic well-being at the altar of environmentalism.
Take President Obama's director of the National Park Service, please. While serving as the Pacific West regional director of the NPS, Jon Jarvis was accused of at least 21 instances of scientific misconduct by Dr. Corey Goodman, a high-ranking member of the National Academy of Sciences. Extensive information about Jarvis' alleged role in cooking data about a California oyster farm's impact on harbor seals at Point Reyes was withheld during the 2009 nomination process.
And given Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's role in manipulating science while building his case for the White House offshore drilling moratorium -- actions for which several federal judges spanked Salazar in the past two years -- it's no wonder he's looking the other way. Two years ago, Salazar and former Obama eco-czar Carol Browner falsely rewrote the White House drilling-ban report to wholly manipulate the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.
Then there's the war over Delta smelt. The endangered fish and its environmental protectors continue to jeopardize the water supply of more than 25 million Californians. Federal restrictions have cut off some 81 billion gallons of water to farmers and consumers in Central and Southern California. Previous courts have ruled that the federal biological opinions used to justify the water cutoff were invalid and illegal.
Last September, the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of California admonished two federal scientists for acting in "bad faith." The judge's blistering rebuke of the Obama administration scientists concluded that their slanted testimony about the Delta smelt was "an attempt to mislead and to deceive the court into accepting what is not only not the best science, it's not science."
In Siskiyou County, Ore., officials and residents have announced that they intend to sue Salazar and Team Obama over the potential removal of dams on the Klamath River.
Salazar is expected to make a decision by the end of March on environmentalists' demands that four private hydroelectric dams be demolished to protect salmon habitats and "create" demolition and habitat-restoration jobs. Opponents say Salazar already has predetermined the outcome. Green activists blithely ignore the massive taxpayer costs (an estimated half-billion dollars) and downplay the environmental destruction that the dam removals would impose.
People of faith aren't what's bedeviling America. Blame the high priests of eco-destruction in Washington who have imposed a green theocracy on us all.


Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2009).

Commentary

Michelle Malkin laying it out as it should be

David Brooks Supposed NYT Right Wing Columnist On Rick Santorum

David Brooks: Santorum "Thinks Theologically" And "Dwells On The Negative"

“He’s always been a little didactic on the stump,” Brooks said. “But he believes that. He believes — he thinks theologically. There are some odd things about Santorum. A., he thinks theologically. And very few Americans, even regular churchgoing [people] … think theologically," David Brooks said on Friday night’s broadcast of the “PBS NewsHour." (via Jeff Poor/Daily Caller)

“The second thing — and this always interests me about it — most of us when something bad happens, we sort of skirt by it and want to think about some positive thing,” Brooks said. “Santorum, through the whole course of his career, has always looked at the tragedy in the face and dwelt upon it. And that is sort of an unusual personality trope, but I think it is a personality trope. It was most serious and most tragic for the death of his son Gabriel. But, also, in the campaigns, he dwells on the criticism, dwells on the negative, sometimes even in international affairs, dwelling on the threats.”

Commentary

NYT Blowhard David Brooks self righteous RINO big time

We Need To Drill Period NYT End Of Story

Opinion/Editorial

 

 The New York Times and their little cronies just cannot get it or wan tto get it it seems.We as a nation need to get off our addiction to foreign oil.The only way to achieve it is to drill for our own oil/gas.
 This mornings NYT second lead OPED entitled "Getting Arctic Drilling Right" is more of the same whining and complaining as to why we can't drill and the alleged effects to the environment.
 It begins "Oil drilling off the North Slope of Alaska now seems virtually a sure thing. This month, the Interior Department gave tentative approval to Shell’s plans for responding to a potential spill in the Chukchi Sea, an important step toward approval of the company’s plan to drill six wells in the Chukchi’s frigid and forbidding waters. The company still needs a permit, and before the administration grants one it must be absolutely sure that Shell can meet the safety conditions stipulated in the approval.

The costs of a mistake could be very high. Many environmentalists have argued against any drilling in Arctic waters, given their value to wildlife — and given weather conditions that would make cleaning up a spill especially difficult. We believe this particular project is worth the effort, but only if done right. Estimates of recoverable reserves in the Chukchi and nearby Beaufort Seas range as high as 30 billion barrels of oil, about four years’ worth of consumption in the United States.

Shell must meet two main conditions. The first is to complete and test a well-capping system that can quickly contain a blowout in a harsh and unfamiliar environment. Among the most searing memories left by the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was the complete helplessness of industry and government officials as a runaway well spilled nearly 5 million barrels, or 206 million gallons, before it was finally capped.The other condition is that Shell, along with the Coast Guard and other agencies, conduct extensive spill response drills — in the open ocean, not “tabletop” exercises — to test the booms, skimmers, support vessels and all the other moving parts necessary to collect whatever oil escapes before a blowout is plugged."

 So now all of a sudden the NYT are experts now in drilling for oil as they think they are in everything else.Keep defending the environMENTALISTS NYT they are your religious left wingers.Oh and by the way I thought Alaska was warming oh ok change of story now to fit your leftist agenda.

 It appears that the NYT is still suffering from what the rest of the far socialist communist left is BBDS (Blaming Bush Derrangement Syndrome) "President George W. Bush recklessly proposed opening just about all of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas to drilling. The Obama administration canceled that plan in favor of what it says will be a more modest and scientifically rigorous proposal, due in midsummer. Environmentalists are urging the government to put particularly sensitive areas off-limits entirely, and we agree. The most important thing right now is to get off to a credible start by making the Shell project as mistake-proof as possible."

 Yeah right recklessly and the blame game continues to reveal its ugly head.But the Obama administration will listen to the real so called experts the enviornMENTALISTS along with the NYT.Yeah environMENTALISTS that believe in global warming no wait cliamte change or whatever they call it today a made up BS agenda and a religion of the left