Showing posts with label Colin Powell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colin Powell. Show all posts

Saturday, January 26, 2013

The Council Has Spoken!! This Week’s Watcher’s Council Results

JoshuaPundit on Jan 25 2013:

The Council Has Spoken! has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.

Before we get started, let me remind you that there’s now a seat available on the Watcher’s Council up for grabs.

We’re currently looking at candidates, so if you’re interested, think you qualify or want to find out more about what’s involved in being part of the longest established blogging group of its kind, simply leave a comment with site URL and your e-mail address (which won’t be published) on any article over at Joshuapundit.

These don’t come up all that often and when they do they usually fill up quickly, so don’t snooze.

There’s a great deal of discussion going on among self-identified conservatives and Republicans about how to rebrand the party, gets its message out and change what appears to be its image

This week’s winner, Bookworm Room’s To win the future, conservatives need to give voters a positive image of a can-do America and a can-do Republican Party lays out her blueprint for that process in her usual witty and erudite style. Here’s a slice:

For the past four years, conservatives have been fighting a relentlessly rearguard, defensive action. For those same four years, conservatives have lost every rearguard, defensive action that they’ve fought. Or if they haven’t actually lost, the best that they’ve managed is a stalemate that stalls Progressivism, but doesn’t advance conservative values. Even the stunning 2010 “shellacking” proved ineffective, as shellackings really only work if you take over Congress entirely, rather than just getting half of it.

Conservative also don’t seem to be faring too well in the culture wars. To use abortion as just one example, in the 2012 election, conservatives lost the chance to take over Congress when Progressives successfully demonized two Republican Senate candidates who are pro-Life. More than that, it seems as if, contrary to past trends showing that Americans are inclined to a pro-Life view, a recent poll gave a definitive victory to American support for abortion.

Ironically, right up until the 2012 election, many conservatives (myself included) thought that these tactics would work. We believed that a jobless recovery (a stock market that benefited from Obama’s crony capitalism, even as more and more people became unemployed), creeping inflation, flabby home sales, depreciating savings, rising medical costs, and all the other signs of a sick economy, would turn voters against Obama.

We also thought that proofs of corruption (Fast and Furious), incompetency (Benghazi), and crony capitalism (Solyndra), would turn voters against Obama. They didn’t.

Sure we knew that Romney, although a good and intellectually brilliant man, was only a decent candidate, but we thought that, given all of Obama’s failures and dishonesty, Romney’s charisma deficit wouldn’t be a problem. And had Romney been a Democrat, it really wouldn’t have been a problem. He was a Republican, though, which meant that sterling character and brilliant economic chops were inadequate to fend off the extraordinarily vicious character assassination that the White House and the media launched against him.

We conservatives hadn’t counted on Americans buying such disgusting canards or ignoring ugly facts, but they did. Between the media running interference, general disinterest from voters more fascinated by Honey Boo Boo and Jersey Shores than by politics, and Americans’ probable fear of voting a black man out of the White House, conservatives got to watch Obama win

again.

In the wake of Obama’s victory, conservatives in the media and in the blogosphere have responded by amping up their previous tactics. Considering that Obama won’t be running again in 2016, spending all of our political capital and emotional energy attacking him doesn’t seem like a good use of resources. Be that as it may, conservatives are Obama is still Target No. 1. There certainly is a lot to get fired up about, most notably the way in which Obama seized upon Sandy Hook as an excuse to seize guns. Nothing will come of it, of course, since there are too many Democrats who like guns too, but Obama has successfully framed the issue to be one of life- and child-loving Democrats squaring off against gun-crazed, child-murdering Republicans.

Rather than running about like headless chickens who are still trying to peck the President to death with details, we might do better focusing on very specific weaknesses and not letting those weaknesses vanish from the public eye. To me, the most obvious are (a) the economy and (b) his handling of Benghazi.

In our non-Council category, the winner with a very different kind of article was Caroline Glick with Bye Bye London submitted by Joshuapundit. She recently participated in a debate in London about Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines and relates what happened there. Do read it.It’s an eye opener.

And forgive me if I not-so-humbly add I saw this coming some time ago, and if anything it’s even more relevant than it was 7 years ago. Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.

OK, here are this week’s full results. Only Gay Patriot was unable to vote this week, but was not subject to the mandatory 2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners
Non-Council Winners
Honorable Mentions

See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day and with short takes and weigh in…don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter…..’cause we’re cool like that!

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Monday, October 20, 2008

Colin Powell Admits that Obama's Race Is Major Factor in His Decision... Say It Isn't So, Colin... Say It Isn't So!

 Thought For The Day 10.20.08

If you're not confused, you're not paying attention. …Tom Peters

Powell Admits that Obama’s Race Is Major Factor in His Decision

(Powell Backed Black Democrat Before)

Sunday, October 19, 2008 4:08 PM
By: Kenneth R. Timmerman

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama on Sunday morning during his appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."

The media spin has been that Powell, a Republican and former John McCain supporter, has taken very the unusual step of crossing party lines to back a Democrat he thinks will serve the country best.

But a review of Powell’s own campaign contributions with the FEC shows that he has crossed party lines once before to help an African-American Democrat in a federal race.

In 1994, then-Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the state’s first African-American governor, entered the Democratic primary in a bid for the U.S. Senate.

Records show that Powell donated $1,000 to Wilder’s campaign. Wilder later withdraw from the primary as polls showed him lagging three other candidates.

On “Meet the Press” Sunday (yesterday), Powell’s explanation for his backing of Obama made clear that he thought ‘Obama’s race’ was a major factor for his support, but not the only one.

Powell also described Obama as a “transformational” candidate, but in the end, it is about race.

Though Obama has no national security or executive experience Powell asserted that he had "met the standard" to be commander-in-chief. But, Powell again insinuated Obama’s race played a critical factor for him, noting his support "because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America".

Interestingly, Powell’s endorsement came despite the fact that in 2007 he dipped into his wallet and wrote a $2,300 check to McCain.

Powell’s contribution – the maximum allowed by law – came at a time when the press had written off McCain and said his campaign was about to collapse.

“[McCain campaign manager] Rick Davis called all the Republican heavy hitters in early August 2007, and said if they didn’t raise $50,000 by the end of the month, McCain was going to close up shop ,” a Republican insider who answered the same call from Davis told Newsmax.

Davis called it the “No Surrender” campaign. After the fundraising drive succeeded – with the help of Powell, among others - McCain liked the new brand name so well that he replaced the “Straight Talk Express” logo on his campaign bus with a huge sign that read, “No Surrender.”

“Of course, the phrase ‘No Surrender,’ could be applied to the McCain campaign as well,” The New York Times wrote in September 2007. “It was practically written off over the summer when it nearly ran out of money, forcing it to reduce its staff sharply and scale back its operations in all but three states, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.”

McCain weathered the money pinch with the help of Powell, who wrote his check on Aug. 7, 2007 – at precisely the moment McCain needed it the most.

Since then, Powell has not given to any other presidential candidate and is barred from giving more to McCain because McCain has agreed to limit his campaign expenditures and accept public funding, unlike Obama, who changed his mind after signing the paperwork to accept public funding thereby again going against his word.

In addition to his contribution to McCain’s presidential bid, Powell has written 44 checks to Republican candidates – including several liberal Republicans such as Arlen Specter, William Weld and Rudy Giuliani.

25% of Afro-Americans admit that they are voting for Obama ‘just’ because of his race. Only 8% of Whites say they are not voting for Obama because of race. People would certainly be yelling if these stats were reversed!! 

“4” former Secretaries of State support John McCain for President and so did Colin Powell until it came down to an issue of race. So this is not much or an endorsement. And it says a lot more about Colin Powell than it does about John McCain. Personally I find this to be very sad… and all I can say is, “Say it isn’t so, Colin, say it isn’t so!”

“Because democracy is not a spectator sport. …It is essential that we are all informed and do our homework on ‘every’ candidate and on all the issues. 57 newspapers support Obama 18 support McCain, just another example that the main stream media of the United States is liberal and biased. So you know you aren’t getting all the facts or the true facts from them. And you can’t make an educated choice without all the facts!”

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