I don’t know what to say about this, except to point you to the story at CNN.
As you know, Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio has had one of his “cold case posses” looking into Barack Obama’s birth certificate (Arpaio says that he will release the results of the investigation March 1). That in and of itself is bizarre enough given that Barack Obama wasn’t born in Arizona.
Now it appears that Arpaio has briefed presidential candidate Rick Santorum about his investigation “as a matter of fairness in case he wouldn’t want me to support him." Only Arpaio isn’t saying that he will throw his support behind Santorum, and further Arpaio is not going to say who he is endorsing until after the March 1 press conference which is after the Republican Presidential Primary. And if Arpaio is providing a service to the people of Arizona, why is he telling Santorum instead of his fellow Arizonans?
"I really started this on the theory that maybe I could clear this mess up," Arpaio told reporters. "Wouldn’t it be nice for me to do that?"
Since when has anyone accused “America’s toughest sheriff” of being “nice?”
From the CNN newstory:
“A federal Department of Justice investigation into Arpaio’s office made public in December described “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos at MCSO that reaches the highest levels of the agency.”
“He dismissed the allegations as a politically-driven ‘witch hunt.'”
Somewhere in Arizona another irony meter explodes.
“as a matter of fairness in case he wouldn’t want me to support him.”
curious, what does that even mean? wierd statement!
Almost sounds like Arpaio is prepping to go full blown Birfoon on this one, probably as a distraction from his problems with the feds. He wanted to find out if Santorum would have a problem with a Birfoon endorsing him.
“Wouldn’t it be nice for me to do that?”
LOL! Playing his empty hand for all he can get!
Santorum should be running as fast as he can.
In other awesome election news, Gingrich came to Tulsa and promised a room full of oilmen that if elected, we’ll have $2/gallon gas. Talk about not knowing your audience. If he could actually deliver on that promise, I believe the oilmen would happily help send Gingrich to his new moon base!
I always prefer to go for the simplest, most obvious explanation: Arpaio is nuts.
Or alternatively he could be going full anti-birther and wanted to know how he could spin it so it wouldn’t sound like he was supporting Obama
Does this mean that Arpaio informed Santorum of the investigation’s outcome or does it mean he just told him that his office or “cold case posse” or whatever was doing this investigation?
Oh, and the “mess” has been cleared up already, several times.
Michele Bachman made the same promise back in August of ’11.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/18/news/economy/bachmann_gas_prices/index.htm
I love how Newt, who is supposed to be all clever and “Free Marketty” and everything seems to have a major problem with the capitalist system and the actual free market and wants to apply downright communist price fixing for commodities
What next, rationing and a black market in goods…?
more like rationing market goods for blacks.
“I don’t know what to say about this, except to point you to the story at CNN.”
Then you go on to say quite a bit about it.
Seriously, is this site a satire of anti-birthers?!
Newt also claimed that you can’t fit a gun rack inside a Chevy Volt. It took someone five minutes to find a Chevy Volt with a fully-loaded gun rack in it.
Says the guy with the racially charged stereotype website. Go back to Stormfront.
In general the site is not intended to be satire.
In this particular case, what I wrote enforced my original sentence that was meant to convey my confusion over exactly what Arpaio was trying to communicate and how it didn’t make sense.
Yeah, it is definitely a weirdly phrased statement. As Doc C. also points out in the commentary there, it is even more odd that Arpaio is going to “hold off his endorsement” until AFTER his March 1st press conference.
After all, AZ votes on Feb 28th. The whole value of an endorsement is the hopes that it will boost a candidate’s chances in an upcoming election. It is not just wimpy, but fairly worthless to endorse “after the fact”.
…Then again, if you have a controversial character chasing crazy conspiracies, you don’t want your candidate to become tarred and damaged by the association. If Arpaio retains enough situational awareness to realize that his flirtations with Birtherism is an election killer, then maybe he’s intentionally holding off endorsement until after AZ votes, so he doesn’t harm his preferred candidate’s chances.
What a crazy clown car election cycle this has been! And quite full of endless unpredictability and constantly shifting fortunes.
Tonight is MUST SEE TV for me – the CNN GOP Presidential Debates in AZ from 8:00pm-10:00pm EST could be quite interesting. As this is the LAST debate still on the schedule, this might be the LAST time for folks to see all four of the remaining GOP candidates answering questions on stage together. (The planned March 1st debate was cancelled, as Romney, Santorum and Paul all declined to participate.)
With all the crazy turns and shifts to social issues over the past few weeks, the line of questioning could turn out to be quite different from any of the debates we have seen so far. With the debate taking place in AZ, will mentions of Arpaio’s meeting with Santorum come up? Will this lead to questions about Birther Trump’s campaigning efforts and robo-calls for Romney in MI? Will “Angry Newt” return to the stage, realizing that is his best chance to get back into this race? Will Ron Paul focus all his attacks on Santorum, as his latest loopy ad campaign indicates? The dynamics for this debate seem to be quite different than before and Santorum will likely be the main focus for the first time.
Although some of the prior debates failed to live up to their hype, I would be surprised if this one doesn’t live up to it. With a total shift in the nature of the GOP issue conversation and with so many upcoming states on the line, this truly could be the last public chance for each of these candidates to truly make a powerful impact and change or reinforce the direction and dynamic of this race. With MI & AZ less than a week away and WA and Super-Tuesday just around the corner, none of these candidates can afford to “play it safe” tonight, if they truly wish to remain in contention.
He’s gonna use good ol’
mainstream capitalist gumminent handouts and pork barrel drilling contractssubsidies of course.8 days and we get Sheriff Joe’s report. Birferstan is so excited. They have had so many failed OMG moments that this one is exciting. I strongly suggest you selling your frogs quickly beoree the price drops on Mar 1st. In reality nothing Sheriff Joe releases will effect Obama’s campaign.
Four brief paragraphs is quite a bit?
Well, having now had the chance to watch the CNN debate in full, I wanted to give a little bit of analysis & perspective. In an ideal sense, a Presidential debate should be a forum to inform and provide details and contrasts between each other’s positions, so that an electorate can make an informed decision.
From that standpoint, I’m going to differ from the pundits and the issues of optics and say that this debate actually did better from the detail aspect than any of the previous debates. Ron Paul always is honest about his perspective and trying to explain it. I was actually surprisingly impressed with how honest Rick Santorum was with trying to explain the practical realities of how Congress actually works and explain why he made the decisions he did.
Of course, there is always the inherent danger of rambling when one has to get into the weeds and explain the real complexities of how government actually works in a practical sense and this type of audience, raised on sound byte and spin, is just going to glaze over and be reflexively angry any time they aren’t just fed red meat and told only what they want to hear.
Which brings to the dilemma of the second part of what these debates really are – something which is often is utter contrast to a desire to inform: They serve as entertainment and spectacle. The audience wants clear winners and losers and knock out punches. The TV pundits want soundbytes and stumbles that can be run as headlines for the next news cycle. So on that level, yeah, this debate did not deliver at all.
All four of the candidates had moments of both solid and weak answers. There was a deal of combativeness between all the contestants and quite a bit of defensiveness in giving answers. While I personally found that some of the best “real” answers were given in the details of defensive answers, I realize that this is not what the media or the audience was looking for. Although some small blows were landed, there were no knockout punches and none of the four candidates really stood out in rising above the others.
From a punditry standpoint, the general perception coming out of it so far seems to be along the lines of Michelle Cottle at The Daily Beast summarized:
Aarrgh! I messed up the quote formatting above. Sorry for the confusion. Only the 1st two indented paragraphs above are from Ms. Cottle. Disclaimer: the remainder, which reads as follows, is my opinion and analysis; not hers:
Obviously, I’ve taken an overall kinder assessment than that, but I can understand why this will likely become the consensus takeaway from the event. I do agree that this debate was able to touch upon a wider array of issues than many of the previous ones. So I’m glad to see that happen and hope that even the GOP electorate gained something of value from that.
That being said, overall I don’t think there were any “game changers” as hoped for. For any candidate, that should be the goal of a debate – to make a “game changer” moment in favor of your candidacy and / or deliver a knock-out punch to your opponents. That didn’t happen at all, so I don’t see this debate shifting the existing dynamics, like a number of the previous debates were instrumental in doing. Nobody brought their “A” game tonight. But nobody was a critical failure either.
From an optics POV, Romney clearly had a very vocal audience there in AZ that was cheerleading everything he said and booing nearly every criticism that came his way. So, that clearly gives Romney the edge for the night and with no other standout criteria, I’d say that gives him the win by default.
How that translates to the polling or elections next week is left to be seen. If anything, I think it is a strong indicator that Romney should expect a solid win in AZ and anything other than that would be a major upset.
MI however, is in flux. Romney needs it to win. Santorum has a serious chance to be competitive there.
The good news for Romney is he’s facing two big states where he’s expected to win. The bad news for Romney is that due to expectations, winning both of those states is helpful, but doesn’t really move the needle as much in his favor as his campaign desperately wants. In order to do that, he’s got to prove that he can actually win states in which he’s not in “favored” territory for him. Super-Tuesday will be his chance to try to prove he can do that. However, a loss in MI to Santorum, which is a real possibility, would be extremely damaging to his campaign. Further, a loss in AZ would be absolutely devastating…and even a win by less than a five-point margin there might be damaging. I consider either outcome in AZ to be highly unlikely based on where AZ is right now and how the debate went and I expect Romney to pull off an easy double-digit victory in AZ. However, Romney should have run away with the similar state of CO… so I realize that Santorum should not be counted out from delivering unexpected victories.
For Santorum, any win next week would be a huge victory for him and truly would open the door to whether he or Romney should be viewed as the frontrunner. The slate of Super-Tuesday states have a lot of areas that seem to be polling favorable for Santorum at the moment and he should still be considered a solid contender for many of them, even if he doesn’t win any of the contests between now and then.
For Newt, he didn’t deliver the type of “game changer” performance he needed in order to put himself seriously back into this race. GA on Super-Tuesday is his hoped-for firewall… but he needs some sort of breakthrough between now and then or else this race is about to completely slip away from him.
For Paul, his campaign’s best chances really are to play up the ME debacle and to focus on his base of support in WA. If he truly wants to be in this, he’s got to deliver a win… and the odds of that happening are quickly evaporating. WA is his best chance before Super-Tuesday…but the odds of him pulling that off are quite long indeed. If he somehow managed that, it truly would be an unexpected development and could open up a few of the Super-Tuesday states to his campaign as well. Without that, he’s nearing the end of being taken as a credible contender as well; regardless of his back-end delegate accumulation strategy.
Haskins and WND will be streaming Sherriff Joe’s Marc 1 report. That will be interesting as it won’t be what they expect. Sheriff Joe is wierd but not stupid, as Trump experienced most voters ain’t on the birfer side.
Santorum was not the only Presidential candidate to get a briefing from the sheriff.
http://www.thepostemail.com/2011/12/10/presidential-candidate-meeting-with-sheriff-joe-arpaio-yielded-devastating-information/
John Dummett says he knows exactly what the sheriff is going tosay and it will be devastating. And then he goes on to kinda threateny to the sheriff if he doesn’t come clean on March 1st.
He also claims to be a computer expert.
“He’s sold out for a consideration. What kind of a name is Arpaio anyway? He’s afraid of mass riting in pink uniforms. His barber’s second cousin’s schoolteacher in third grade was an Iranian immigrant.”
Sorry, just went for a spin in the Tardis there…I’m back now.
“rioting” lol.
There is one point of last night’s debate that I feel deserves some more commentary and demonstrated where a simple question could have been become a theme soundbyte win, but instead, turned into an utter failure for most of the candidates.
Towards the end of the debate, a key point in which viewers / voters can be left with a final, lasting impression, each of the candidates were asked to define themself with just ONE word. They were even given a full commercial break to come up with something good. So how did they do?
PAUL – “Consistent”.
I’ll score Paul as a win here. That was a good choice for him and a fairly accurate description that can be used for him. Then again, that doesn’t seem to be a big enough issue to the GOP voting populace, so it isn’t enough to move him beyond his existing base of support.
SANTORUM – “Courageous”.
Meh. While I can see Santorum viewing himself as such, as he is someone who sticks to his guns and defends his positions, it was still not the right word he needed to deliver to the audience. The obvious word he should have used was “CONSERVATIVE”. That is the argument he’s really been making and needed to drop as the differentiator last night. So I consider his answer to be a missed opportunity.
ROMNEY – “Resolute”.
This one totally goes in the WTF??? category. I consider it to be the greatest FAIL choice of all four. For someone who is such a blatent and constant “say anything windsock”, resolute is the polar opposite of what he is. By making such an absurd backwards choice, he only highlights the utter hypocricy and disingenousness of his entire campaign.
GINGRICH – “Cheerful”.
Another WTF moment… but more in a farcical *dud* fashion than anything else. For one, “Cheerful” has nothing to do with what the GOP electorate is looking for in a candidate and certainly not where Newt’s supporters find appeal in him. No, his base is built in support of “Angry Newt” and those looking for a viscious attack dog to not just sling endless red meat, but to more importantly, openly spew venom towards Obama. With such a fluff and silly choice as “cheerful”, Gingrich just bombed his chance to get back into this race.
In summary, such a simple yet strategically important word choice exercise only served to demonstrate why this crop of candidates is such an utter disaster and has no business playing in the “big leagues”.
Speaking of Santorum:
Santorum Makes Campaign Swing Through Seventeenth Century
Blasts Contraception, Electricity, Soap
Read on:
http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/02/24/santorum-makes-campaign-swing-through-seventeenth-century/