Tag: Mike Huckabee

As Saturday's South Carolina primary voting draws close, presidential candidate Mitt Romney is being savaged on the right for his shifting stance on abortion, just as he was savaged months ago on the left for his shifting stance on abortion.

When it comes to politics, there is no denying the pull of momentum. And while it is clear that for this eighth edition of our Power Rankings U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann owns it, there is also no denying that social and religious conservatives in the state still have choices to make.

GOP 2012 presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney has decided to pass on the Iowa straw poll this summer, a warm-up event for the election-year Iowa caucuses, which increasingly have become a sort of warm-up event for the real primary campaigns. Romney's decision is making headlines as a risky move but the fact is non-incumbent winners of the GOP Iowa caucus don't win the GOP national nomination in any kind of consistent way. And the record of caucus winners is even less a predictor for success in the general election. As Romney knows and as the New York Times suggested Saturday, Iowa is now way too Christian right and Midwest parochial to serve as a barometer for Republican America.

The first GOP presidential primary debate is behind us. Fox News hosted the event in South Carolina last night. It featured five second-tier candidates and the news is that former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty didn't lose and that Herman Cain, the Georgia political figure, motivational speaker and former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, may have won. Rightwing RedState blog founder Erick Erickson celebrated Cain as the new Mike Huckabee!

Republicans won an historic number of Congressional seats in the midterm election just six months ago. Tonight Fox News is hosting the first 2012 GOP presidential primary election debate and it will feature something like the weakest early lineup of candidates in modern memory. Serious Republican strategists will be watching either in denial or in panic through fingers stretched across their eyes.

Last week, a Rasmussen poll showed that Donald Trump was riding the birther conspiracy theory wave in becoming the Republican Party’s unlikely frontrunner for the 2012 presidential nomination. But a new survey seems to indicate that the 19-percent support Trump has among likely Republican primary voters is just about the full extent of the reality star’s backing among the general population.

Conservative celebrity Sarah Palin and right-wing blogger Erick Erickson are just two of the high profile far-right leaders disparaging Speaker of the House John Boehner for the budget deal he hammered out with President Obama and Democratic Senate leaders last week. Colorado "liberty movement" talk radio hosts are unhappy. Colorado Tea Party freshmen Congressmen Scott Tipton and Cory Gardner as well as Colorado Springs conservative Doug Lamborn broke with the Speaker and voted against the budget. But Boehner can't go back on the deal and he won't likely win over the Tiptons and Palins and Ericksons with a lecture on the delayed gratification of budget cutting and the difference between outlays and spending. On the contrary, it would just make him seem more establishment. So instead, Boehner followed the lead of GOP presidential hopefuls and took a provocative and distracting stand against gay rights.

Next month, anti-abortion rights advocates will gather for two hours of prayer, lunch and spring wear -– all made possible by Dillard’s.

In interviews with ABC news and the New York Times former Alaska governor Sarah Palin said she is planning to run for president of the United States in 2012. The interviews with two of the main "lamestream media" outlets in the country, as she refers to them, will come out this week and are certain in Palin style to make a splash. They will overshadow the grassroots work former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, one of Palin's likely rivals for the Republican nomination, will be doing in Iowa, the traditional first battleground in the presidential election cycle.

ST. LOUIS — Kitty Werthmann has made a career out of warning Americans that fascism is on its way. The 84-year-old native Austrian survived the Third Reich and, in her dotage as a leader of the South Dakota branch of the Eagle Forum, has recorded tapes and videos explaining just how Hitler took power. She made her case during George W. Bush’s presidency, but the audience was small–fringe conservative activists, radio hosts like Alex Jones. Then came President Obama. On Saturday, at the “How to Take Back America” conference here, Werthmann found herself speaking to an packed room of conservative activists about the parallels between the rise of Obama and the rise of Hitler.