Now Former RINO, BOTUS Stroking Charlie Crist, Opts out of Republican Party

Per Fox New, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, is pulling out of the Republican Party to run for Senate as an Independent. Marco Rubio will now face two opponents in November because the grandiose Gov - like nearly all narcissistic personality types - is so completely tone deaf that he doesn't care that the GOP is being pulled back to its core principles. His ambitions come first.

UPDATE BELOW

Crist to Run as Independent in FL Sen Race

Posted By Kimberly Schwandt On April 28, 2010 @ 1:00 PM In Uncategorized |

Republican Florida Governor Charlie Crist has decided he will run as an independent in the race to fill the Florida U.S. Senate seat, Crist allies tell Fox News. The official announcement is scheduled for Thursday at 5pm ET in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The Senate campaign has been rough and tumble for Crist, he was once the front-runner -- but in recent months began trailing his GOP opponent, Tea Party favorite and former Florida State Speaker Marco Rubio. Rubio has been able to turn a 30-point deficit in the polls into a 30 point lead over Crist.

Crist has said that under no circumstance would he drop out of the race, saying he will do what is best for the voters of Florida. The governor says Republicans in Washington want him to stay in the Republican party but voters in Florida have told him they want him to run as an independent.

His campaign and the governor's office have not officially confirmed anything, however this move by Crist has made internal communications difficult because some staff are unlikely to continue to work with Crist as an independent candidate.

The governor is expected to use much of Thursday for courtesy calls to supporters, allies and some Republican officials nationwide. Close advisers expect him to say tomorrow that he looks forward to caucusing with Republicans but that is not a certainty, there are still some issues being worked out and discussed.

Rubio has also been gaining momentum recently by clinching endorsements from big name Republicans including former Vice President Dick Cheney, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former 2008 presidential candidate and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

"Washington is broken and Congress is already overflowing with politicians who need pollsters to tell them what to think. It certainly doesn't need another one. Now more than ever America needs leaders with the strength of conviction. That is why I am proud to endorse Marco Rubio," Cheney said in a statement last week.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who initially supported Crist, indicated Sunday that if Crist switched to run as an independent, he would no longer support him.

"I would be troubled if the governor decided to run as an independent. I think that would be a serious problem. And he would certainly not have my support and not have the support of any other Republicans that I know," McConnell said on Fox News Sunday.

The governor has been open about his consideration of switching parties, but GOP officials were pushing him to drop out rather than split votes among the Republican party -- and give Democratic nominee U.S. Kendrick Meek an advantage.

On the main page of Crist's campaign website ^[1], there are no visible signs of Republican affiliation. His bio still calls him a "common-sense conservative."

The Republican Party of Florida has taken down Crist's name from most of its official website ^[2]. He is named in the elected officials section, but has been pulled off in other areas, according to a party official.

Crist had until Friday at noon to pick his party.

Fox News' Carl Cameron and Serafin Gomez contributed to this report.

UPDATE: Well Charlie, seems like hugging BOTUS wasn't quite worth the effort after all huh? Marc Ambinder on his blog column at The Atlantic reports that Rahm Emanuel has just tossed Charlie Crist under the Hope & Change Bus.

The Night Beat: Sorry Charlie

Apr 28 2010, 9:00 PM ET | Comment

What matters tomorrow...tonight. Subscribe to @marcambinder

....

2. Here first: Charlie Crist, soon to be independent Senate candidate from Florida, tried to reach White House chief of staff Emanuel through intermediates. WH refuses to take the call. Dems plan big talent/money blitz for Kendrick Meek. BTW: Obama's approval rating in FL is in high 40s, per internal Dem polling.

SPLC Nut Job's Fund-Raising Screed attacks Libertarians

Mark Potok - director of publications and information for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) - has written a fear mongering fund-raising opinion piece (very inaccurately portrayed as an Intelligence Report) to his outfit's donor base.

Basically, Potok's schlock conflates "Tea Party" participants and other peaceful liberty loving activists with far-right militia groups, OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh and similar murderous idiots on the extreme right.

Below I've pasted in Potok's latest piece for you to assess his demonization efforts for yourselves.

Eric Dondero over at Libertarian Republican has a related piece at his site.

Stacy McCain also discusses Potok's lunacy at his blog here

Intelligence Report, Spring 2010, Issue Number: 137

Rage on the Right

The Year in Hate and Extremism

By Mark Potok

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called "Patriot" groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight.

The anger seething across the American political landscape — over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as "socialist" or even "fascist" — goes beyond the radical right. The "tea parties" and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.

“We are in the midst of one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States history,” Chip Berlet, a veteran analyst of the American radical right, wrote earlier this year. "We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage."

Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Just a quarter think the government can be trusted. And the anti-tax tea party movement is viewed in much more positive terms than either the Democratic or Republican parties, the poll found.

The signs of growing radicalization are everywhere. Armed men have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the "tree of liberty" needs to be "watered" with "the blood of tyrants." The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and Oath Keepers, a Patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps. Politicians pandering to the antigovernment right in 37 states have introduced "Tenth Amendment Resolutions," based on the constitutional provision keeping all powers not explicitly given to the federal government with the states. And, at the "A Well Regulated Militia" website, a recent discussion of how to build "clandestine safe houses" to stay clear of the federal government included a conversation about how mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph were supposedly betrayed at such houses.

Doing the Numbers
The number of hate groups in America has been going up for years, rising 54% between 2000 and 2008 and driven largely by an angry backlash against non-white immigration and, starting in the last year of that period, the economic meltdown and the climb to power of an African American president.

According to the latest annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), these groups rose again slightly in 2009 — from 926 in 2008 to 932 last year — despite the demise of a key neo-Nazi group. The American National Socialist Workers Party, which had 35 chapters in 28 states, imploded shortly after the October 2008 arrest of founder Bill White for making threats against his enemies.

At the same time, the number of what the SPLC designates as "nativist extremist" groups — organizations that go beyond mere advocacy of restrictive immigration policy to actually confront or harass suspected immigrants — jumped from 173 groups in 2008 to 309 last year. Virtually all of these vigilante groups have appeared since the spring of 2005.

But the most dramatic story by far has been with the antigovernment Patriots.

The militias and the larger Patriot movement first came to Americans’ attention in the mid-1990s, when they appeared as an angry reaction to what was seen as a tyrannical government bent on crushing all dissent. Sparked most dramatically by the death of 76 Branch Davidians during a 1993 law enforcement siege in Waco, Texas, those who joined the militias also railed against the Democratic Clinton Administration and initiatives like gun control and environmental regulation. Although the Patriot movement included people formerly associated with racially based hate groups, it was above all animated by a view of the federal government as the primary enemy, along with a fondness for antigovernment conspiracy theories. By early this decade, the groups had largely disappeared from public view.

But last year, as noted in the SPLC’s August report, "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias," a dramatic resurgence in the Patriot movement and its paramilitary wing, the militias, began. Now, the latest SPLC count finds that an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244% jump.

That is cause for grave concern. Individuals associated with the Patriot movement during its 1990s heyday produced an enormous amount of violence, most dramatically the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead.

Already there are signs of similar violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, right-wing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation’s first black president. One man from Brockton, Mass. — who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites — is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama’s inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with antigovernment, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases.

As the movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream. While in the 1990s, the movement got good reviews from a few lawmakers and talk-radio hosts, some of its central ideas today are being plugged by people with far larger audiences like FOX News’ Glenn Beck and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn). Beck, for instance, re-popularized a key Patriot conspiracy theory — the charge that FEMA is secretly running concentration camps — before finally “debunking” it.

Last year also experienced levels of cross-pollination between different sectors of the radical right not seen in years. Nativist activists increasingly adopted the ideas of the Patriots; racist rants against Obama and others coursed through the Patriot movement; and conspiracy theories involving the government appeared in all kinds of right-wing venues. A good example is the upcoming Second Amendment March in Washington, D.C. The website promoting the march is topped by a picture of a colonial militiaman, and key supporters include Larry Pratt, a long-time militia enthusiast with connections to white supremacists, and Richard Mack, a conspiracy-mongering former sheriff associated with the Patriot group Oath Keepers.

What may be most noteworthy about the march, however, is its date — April 19. That is the date of the first shots fired at Lexington in the Revolutionary War. And it is also the anniversary of the fiery end of the government siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

FACEBOOK OBAMATRONS CENSOR BECKY CHANDLER LINK TO OUTSIDE BLOG

Becky Chandler, a very sassy and sexy lesbian roman catholic libertarian recovering lawyer who's blogspot blog Just a Girl in Short Shorts... was shut down by angry progressives who came to hate her dissing of 'da ONE, has been censored yet again, this time by the Obamabots of FaceBook for a link she put up on her page there earlier today.

Becky Chandler Pessimistic Conservative sees glimmer of hope in all the liberty talk sweeping the nation http://bit.ly/93F4gb

14 hours ago via Twitter · Comment ·

Clicking the Hyperlink inside FaceBook takes you to this page...

Had the Plouffian Pasdaranis trolling around FaceBook not been born the sniveling little whiny twerps they are, Becky's link would have taken you to this page at AZCentral.com where Robert Robb a columnist for the Arizona Republic posted this opinion piece.

A ray of hope for a fatalistic conservative

I confess to being a fatalistic conservative.

Ever since I read Bill Buckley's "The Jeweler's Eye" at the age of 16 and was convinced, my sense has been that the long-term trend of American politics was in the wrong direction. Political fortunes ebb and flow, but over time liberalism inevitably gained ground.

Liberal gains were permanent; conservative gains ephemeral. The central domestic policy success of the Reagan presidency was the reduction in the top individual income tax rate

to 28 percent. In less than a decade, it was back up to nearly 40 percent under Bill Clinton. Under George W. Bush, it was reduced to 35 percent, amidst accusations that he was giving away the store to the rich. After Barack Obama allows the Bush cuts at the top to expire at the end of this year, it will back over 40 percent.

At the state level, the record is slightly more encouraging. Under Gov. Fife Symington there was a very creative and constructive burst of conservative governance. Those reforms – school choice, welfare reform, truth-in-sentencing, individual income tax rate reductions – have endured.

In general, however, conservatives seem better at dissent than at governance. George W. Bush's experiment in big-government conservatism was a colossal failure. Arizona has probably the most conservative governor and Legislature in its history. Yet the biggest idea they are pushing is the liberal industrial policy fallacy -- that general economic growth can be stimulated through subsidies to politically favored industries.

Watching Gov. Jan Brewer fete, at her State of the State address, a solar equipment manufacturer for bringing around 200 jobs to a state with 2.8 million workers was both amusing and disheartening.

The biggest source of my pessimism, however, has been voter sentiment. Conservatives like to reassure themselves that the American electorate is, at root, center right. With respect to social issues, that's certainly the case. With respect to economic issues, American voters are center right compared to electorates in Western Europe.

But on the fundamental dividing line between liberals and conservatives – should government be bigger or smaller – the American electorate is more accurately described as center left. Voters occasionally want the increase in government

to be slowed down. But they haven't yet shown any support for actually reducing it. Even Reagan couldn't get that done.

The question is whether voter attitudes are changing, making true conservative reforms that actually reduce the size of government feasible. A recent extensive survey by the Pew Research Center indicates that it's possible.

The headlines from the Pew report have been about distrust in the federal government reaching an all-time high. That, however, is an emotional sentiment that can come and go.

On the fundamental question of whether the federal government should be bigger with more services or smaller with fewer services, there has been a dramatic shift since just 2008, when voter sentiment was evenly divided. Today, it's in favor of smaller government by a 50 percent to 39 percent margin.

Just a year ago, voters thought more government control over the economy was a good idea by a 54 percent to 37 percent margin. Today, voters think it's a bad idea, 51 percent to 40 percent.

I think voters got sticker shock from the bailouts, stimulus packages, the Fed printing press and a trillion dollar health care entitlement. There's broad recognition that the country can't afford the government it has, much less a bigger one.

This has lead to a voter backlash against Obama and the Democrats, who are perceived as pushing for even bigger government, that positions Republicans well for the next election.

But do voters want Republicans just to slow Democrats down, or to right-size government into something affordable? And will Republican candidates

actually have the moxie to run on proposals to do that?

There's not yet enough to give a fatalistic conservative actual optimism. But there's enough to melt his cynicism at least a bit.

(column for 4.21.10)

Rasmussen Reports: Ron Paul in virtual Dead Heat with BOTUS in 2012

Rasmussen Reports has just released a 2012 Election Poll result that in a face-to-face match-up Barack Obama would take 42% of the vote and Ron Paul 41%

Pit maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul against President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up, and the race is – virtually dead even.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

Not particularly surprising is that the Political Class - unctuous scum that they are - favor BOTUS at a rate of 95% while ordinary voters - meaning most of us - prefer Paul by 58%.

Read the whole poll here at Rasmussen Reports Election 2012: Barack Obama 42%, Ron Paul 41%

See more on this story over at Left Coast Rebel