This afternoon’s Rush Limbaugh Show, hosted by Mark Belling, featured a semi-restrained rant by the host against Mike Huckabee. I listened to one segment of the show, as time allowed. According to Belling, other than the two issues of gay marriage and abortion, reading the words of Mike Huckabee is virtually indistinguishable from reading the words of John Edwards.

Belling needed only to include Mike’s pro-Second Amendment stance, and he would have scored the Howard Dean Trifecta:

I am tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God and gays.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m picking on Belling. Rudy Guiliani said much the same thing with his statement on social issues a few months back:

“Our party has to get beyond issues like that.”

Jeffery Lord in the American Spectator tried a similar tack in a blistering piece today, assailing Huckabee for “attacking Reaganomics.”

So while it does not surprise that there are class warrior Democrats attacking the idea of economic opportunity as “greed” and promising all manner of ways to pit one group against another, it is startling indeed to hear the following from a Republican presidential front runner — former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

Lord makes no specific references to Huckabee’s policy positions, but instead relies on statements by The Club for Growth as the arbiter of true conservatism. Any serious observer of the Republican Primary season understands that the The Club for Growth has been anything but an honest broker with regards to Huckabee specifically, and generally, any Republican who fails to meet the small-tent definition of conservatism they espouse.

The idea troubles that the nominee of the conservative party could be someone who fails to understand that his apparent scorn for “Wall Street” could resonate negatively with the almost 50 percent of the American population who are now shareholders — because of Ronald Reagan. Does Huckabee really believe that all these millions of people are therefore “greedy”? That economic growth as exemplified by Reaganomics is nothing more than a show-stopping parade of excess by out of control Middle Americans? If in fact in his heart- of-hearts he has some sort of contempt for the Reagan agenda — and the Reagan economic accomplishments that restored America to its place as the shining city on a hill — Governor Huckabee will soon find himself doing his best to balance on a stool that is missing a leg.

Do Mr. Lord, Mr. Belling, and others actually believe that the Club for Growth represents the 50 percent of Americans who own a small piece of Wall Street in their 401(k)’s?

Please.

The Club for Growth represents The Club for Growth. Their crusade for ideological purity is largely responsible for the loss of the Senate in 2006. If the Club for Growth is such a serious and respected group policy wonks, as Lord suggests, then why haven’t they successfully answered the leftist mantra of “Tax Cuts for the Rich?” Answer that and you take the whole “Greed” issue off the table.

There is only one reason that the left trots out that line: It works.

If the smartest guys in the room at The Club for Growth can’t answer that, then maybe they’re not so smart after all. And, maybe their personal crusade against Mike Huckabee has cost them in credibility in ways that they cannot yet fathom. And maybe, just maybe the middle class, gun-toting, Bible believing, wife-loving, foot soldiers of the Reagan coalition just don’t believe the Club for Growth anymore, and couldn’t care less about what the American Spectator says, and are just as likely to tell NRO and WSJ to go jump in the lake as not.

Try this experiment: Go back just a couple of years and find any Mitt Romney speech concerning the social issues, right to life, defense of marriage, and the right to keep and bear arms. Any of them, it doesn’t matter. Now, close you eyes as you listen and you just might think you’re listening to ….. John Kerry.

Get it?

cross posted at Nuke’s

Politico has an interesting piece on Fred Thompson’s campaign. Staggering, broke, and about to drop out of the race?

When I got a generic fundraising e-mail “from” Fred Thompson campaign manager Bill Lacy last night offering “a quick update” on the effort to get “on the air statewide in Iowa,” I didn’t take it literally.

I should have.

Fred has gone dark in Iowa.

With not enough cash to buy ads, he’s doing all the free media he can on his bus tour. But it’s a remarkable indicator of just how topsy-turvy the GOP race has been that the man once viewed as the party’s savior cannot even afford to buy TV time in the final days before Iowa.

I ran across this a few days ago and posted it as an update on the previous thread.

Rather than be accused of burying the lead, I wanted to take the opportunity to ask our readers this question:

“Is it legal for dead people to make political contributions?”

I don’t think the deceased is too worried about facing any legal consequences, but what about the person or persons who engineered the donations? And what about the organization that accepted the contributions?

In this case, the deceased donor is/was Arkansas gazillionaire Jackson (Jack) Stephens. The recipient of his graveyard largesse is The Club for Growth.

Jackson (Steve) Stephens, Jr., is also a big time contributor to the Club for Growth, and serves on the Board.

Jackson Stephens passed away on June 23, 2005. According to Campaign Money.com, Mr. Stephens apparently made some 20 contributions totaling roughly $200,000 to The Club for Growth, after he died.

The spreadsheet shows separate contributions for Jackson Stephens and Jackson Stephens, Jr., so it doesn’t appear to be just a clerical error.

Frankly, it may all be perfectly legit, some sort of estate planning gimmick, I don’t know.

I’m just wondering, how can this happen?

Can the Republican nomination be bought?

The Club for Growth apparently thinks so, as their spending on the anti-Huckabee crusade has grown to over $550,000 in the last three weeks alone.

The Associated Press is reporting that Houston homebuilder Bob Perry of Swiftboat fame, is joining with fellow scalawag ¹ Jackson “Steve” Stephens, Jr. to bankroll the Club for Growth’s last ditch effort to stop Mike Huckabee. Mr. Perry is actively supporting Mitt Romney for the 2008 nomination, having donated the maximum allowable to Romney’s campaign.

Perry, who has been described as “the man who pulls the strings,” but “never gets his hands dirty,” is largely “unknown outside campaign-finance databases and a small group of political leaders. Many politicians who have received Perry’s money say they never have met him.” ² Perry was the nation’s biggest donor in the 2006 elections, giving more than $16 million to state and federal candidates and campaign groups.

Bob Perry’s political donations figure prominently in a recent lawsuit against Gov. Rick Perry’s (no relation) 2006 re-election campaign and the Republican Governor’s Association today claiming they illegally hid $1 million in donations from the Houston homebuilder. ³

You can view a copy of the lawsuit here.

It does makes one wonder if being running afoul of campaign finance laws is an unwritten requirement for membership in the Club for Growth, whose own settlement with the FEC made headlines just three months ago:

The agreement [with the Federal Election Commission] asks the court to enter a consent judgment requiring Club for Growth to pay a civil penalty of $350,000 for failing to register with the FEC as a political committee and report its contributions and expenditures. ⁴

In the 2006 election cycle, Perry, who was the “#1 individual donor to 527 committees, donated as much as the #2, #3 and #4 on the list. That is $9,750,000 in total.”⁵

Update: I ran across this⁶ a few days ago, and it made me wonder.

Jackson (Jack) Stephens, Steve’s father, who passed away on June 23, 2005, apparently made some 20 contributions totaling roughly $200,000 to The Club for Growth, after he died.

How can that happen?

_____________________

¹ To most Southerners, scalawags were an unprincipled group of traitorous opportunists who abandoned their countrymen and ingratiated themselves with the hated Eastern Elite for their own material gain.

² Seattle Times

³ Texas Politics

⁴ USA Today

⁵ Sourcewatch

⁶ Campaign Money

originally posted at Nuke’s

Listening to their current stump speeches, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton seem like polar opposites. The Democratic lightening rod and the former New England governor appear to offer voters a contrasting vision of leadership: government activism versus free market solutions to the challenges of 21st century America.Their rhetoric, however, is a different story. In fact, many of their statements are downright interchangeable.

Criticisms of each candidate range from opportunism to pandering, hypocrisy to flip-flopping. Certainly, the two candidates offer starkly different leadership styles, policy differences, and philosophies of governance. But, just listening to their words, it’s sometimes difficult to tell who said what to whom.

We’ve pulled the following quotes from the excellent resource website, “On The Issues.” See if you can identify the speaker as Mitt Romney, or Hillary Clinton.

1) “I am adamantly against illegal immigrants. People have got to stop employing illegal immigrants. you see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work & construction work & domestic work.”

2) “We have to have our citizens insured, and we’re not going to do that by tax exemptions, because the people that don’t have insurance aren’t paying taxes.”

3) “I hate the idea of in any way making it more difficult for kids, even those who are illegal aliens, to afford college.”

4) “We need to stand firm on behalf of sensible gun control legislation.”

5) “I also support an assault weapon ban.”

6) “The American people are tired of liars and people who pretend to be something they’re not.”

7) “I have never met anyone who is pro-abortion. Being pro-choice is not being pro-abortion.”

8] “We ought to be providing domestic partnership benefits for people who are in homosexual and lesbian relationships.”

_________________________________________

The answers:

(1) Hillary, (2) Mitt, (3) Mitt, (4) Hillary, (5) Mitt, (6) Hillary, (7) Hillary, (8) Hillary

So, how did you do? If you got all 8 correctly, you win this pdf of Hillary Clinton’s 1969 Wellesley thesis, “There Is Only The Fight,” (suitable for downloading).

Enjoy!

P.S. — I started to say something about the commonality of Hillary seeing Dr. MLK in Chicago, 1962, and Mitt “seeing” his father march with Dr. MLK, but I decided that might be piling on a bit. Heh™.

Source: bloggers4huckabee.wordpress.com

original post by Nuke

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