Romney ‘Still Deciding What His Position On Immigration Is’

Huff Post

Elise Foley  Posted: 05/08/2012 1:06 pm Updated: 05/08/2012 3:17 pm

A Latino-vote outreach program on Tuesday plans to stress to voters that the president has failed on immigration reform and deported a record number of people, said the Republican National Committee’s top Hispanic outreach coordinator.

But so far, it doesn’t have a message on what Republicans would do on the issue themselves, and specifically the plans of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney. In fact, coordinator Bettina Inclan told reporters, Romney didn’t have his immigration policy mapped out and the RNC would not yet be able to talk about it to Latino voters.

The RNC quickly tried to take back the statement, telling reporters who tweeted it that Inclan’s words were misunderstood — or that she was misquoted. Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the RNC, said message coordination between the RNC and the Romney campaign is still in its early stages because challenger Rick Santorum only dropped out of the race two weeks ago.

Still, the statement by Inclan seemed to indicate the RNC’s lack of message on immigration, despite an increased effort to turn out Latino voters. Below is the full quote from Inclan, that Kukowski would later say was misconstrued:

I think that as a candidate, to my understanding that he’s still deciding what his position on immigration is, so I can’t talk about what his proposal is going to be because I don’t know what Romney exactly — he’s talked about different issues, and what we saw in the Republican primary is that there’s a diverse opinion on how to deal with immigration. I can’t talk about something that I don’t know what his position is.

A few minutes later, after apparently reading tweets from reporters on the phone and in the room, Kukowski said they were misreporting the statement.

“I want to clear something up. As far as what Governor Romney’s positions are on immigration, that is for him and his campaign to talk about, and they will tell you what their policies are,” she said. “In this room right now, and what we do at the RNC from a Hispanic outreach perspective, is on-the-ground community outreach in the Hispanic community.”

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Sexual Freedom Group: After A Night At A Bondage Nightclub- ‘The RNC Is Hypocritical’

Sexual Freedom Group Charges RNC With Hypocrisy

Huff Post- Sam Stein

First Posted: 03-30-10 09:57 AM   |   Updated: 03-30-10 10:36 AM

One of the leading organizations advocating for sexual openness and freedom is charging the Republican National Committee with hypocrisy in the wake of revelations that a RNC staffer spent nearly $2,000 on a night at a bondage-themed nightclub.

Jeffrey Montgomery, a founding member and spokesperson for the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, who has lobbied extensively to promote the idea that sexual freedom is a human right, charged the RNC and its chairman, Michael Steele with duplicity for posturing as moral purists at the same time that they were indulging their esoteric, voyeuristic impulses.

“I think, from our standpoint, the issue isn’t that he was at this club and spent all that money. If one can afford that, it is not such a big deal. It sounds like a fun club. The problem, of course, is that the RNC is hypocritical,” Montgomery said. “I really doubt we would be talking about this issue if he got reimbursed for a weekend poker tournament or a Final Four basketball game… but because he happened to go to a sex club or whatever the definition is, once again the RNC finds itself in this hypocritical position of having one of their own leaders involved in a thing they would otherwise be worked up about. That’s the problem here.”

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Steele: We Were Getting High On Power ‘Drinking That Potomac River Water’

Steele: Americans don’t trust the GOP because we were ‘getting high’ ‘drinking that Potomac River water.’

Think Progress-  By Amanda Terkel at 12:54 pm

Yesterday, RNC Chairman Michael Steele spoke to his party faithful in LaCrosse, WI. Steele tried to claim that moderates were welcome to his “big table” party, but said that in order to join him for dinner, they had to first silence their own opinions and agree with him and other far-right Republicans:

“All you moderates out there, y’all come. I mean, that’s the message,” Steele said at a news conference. “The message of this party is this is a big table for everyone to have a seat. I have a place setting with your name on the front.

“Understand that when you come into someone’s house, you’re not looking to change it. You come in because that’s the place you want to be.“

Steele also talked about why the GOP had fallen out of favor with the American public. It’s not that the country is “less conservative,” he said. “It’s that our credibility with them is shot. It’s that we left them along the side of the road on our way to drinking that Potomac River water, getting high on power and influence and forgetting how we got where we are.”

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RNC Chair Steele: ‘No Reason, None, To Trust Our Words Or Our Actions At This Point’ (VIDEO)

RNC Chair Steele on his own party: ‘No reason, none, to trust our words or our actions at this point.’»

Think Progress- By Matt Corley at 6:22 pm

On Glenn Beck’s Fox News show this evening, Beck told RNC Chairman Michael Steele that conservatives are “pissed” at Republicans because they don’t “expect socialism” from them. “Why should we even think twice of pulling a lever again?” asked Beck. Steele responded that he was right and that voters have “no reason” to trust the GOP “at this point”:

STEELE: Yeah, no, Glenn. I’m not gonna, look, I’m not going to soft pedal this with you. I’m not going to try to blow smoke either. The reality of it is, you are absolutely right. You have absolutely no reason, none, to trust our word or our actions at this point. So, yeah, it’s going to be an uphill climb.

Watch it:

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GOP Rebrands It’s ‘Sh*t Sandwich’?? (VIDEO)

Daily Show ‘helps’ GOP rebrand its ‘sh*t sandwich’

Raw Story- David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Friday January 16, 2009

As Democrats prepare to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama, the Republicans are left with not much to do but slink off and lick their electoral wounds. Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, however, suggests that they “could use the opportunity to make themselves stronger.”

Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee noted that under George Bush, the Republican Party has been tied to “a strategy that in only eight years has produced two wars, a $10 trillion deficit, and one drowned American city.”

Despite these failures, Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway insists, “The policies of the Republican Party are less the issue than the image.”

“Republicans need for people to even stop and notice the product and not say ‘Ick’ and keep walking,” Conway told Bee. “The packaging on the Republican Party currently screams to the average consumer, ‘Don’t touch this. Stand back.'”

“It’s like the Republican Party is a shit sandwich,” Bee commented. “How do you get Americans to eat the sandwich?”

“You … say it has no calories,” Conway replied.

Bee then sought professional help in “rebranding” the Republican Party — and arrived at the theme of “sex up grandpa.”

However, when Bee’s new GOP icon “Reagraham Lincool” — a doddering old man in a jogging suit and a stovepipe hat — was introduced to a focus group of voters, their reactions ranged somewhere between unimpressed and totally bewildered.

“With a little rebranding,” Bee concluded cheerfully, “Republicans will be back on top in no time!”

This video is from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, broadcast Jan. 15, 2009.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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Michael Connell: Was His Plane Crash An Accident?

The Intriguing Death Of Top GOP Consultant Michael Connell

Huffington Post- Thomas B.  Edsall

December 25, 2008 10:01 PM

At 3:31 PM Friday, December 19, Michael L. Connell, a top Internet consultant for the Republican National Committee and for the Bush and McCain presidential campaigns, left Washington from the small airport in College Park, Md. Alone at the helm of a single engine Piper Saratoga, Connell’s flight plan anticipated arrival at his hometown Akron-Canton Airport in a little over two hours, at 5:43 PM.

Instead, about three miles short of the Akron-Canton Airport, Connell’s plane crashed to the ground in an upscale section of Lake Township, killing Connell instantly. “I was standing in the kitchen and I looked out the window and all I saw was fire,” Taylor Fano told The Akron Beacon Journal. “It took out the flagpole and the cement blocks surrounding the flagpole . . . . It skidded across the driveway and right in-between a line of pine trees and a small fence around an in-ground pool.”

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the accident and has not yet filed a report, but there was no immediate evidence of wrong-doing or sabotage.

Nonetheless, Connell’s death provoked a groundswell of commentary among conspiracy theorists on the web, including Larisa Alexandrovna, Raw Story, Velvet Revolution, ePluribus Media, and TheZoo.

The most common unsubstantiated allegation on these sites is that Connell was about to provide crucial information in the case of alleged vote fraud in the 2004 Ohio presidential contest, and that that information would implicate Karl Rove and others in the Bush administration. Just last month, Connell was deposed in the ongoing case, King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell. According to accounts of the November 3rd deposition, Connell denied any knowledge of attempts to fraudulently manipulate 2004 Ohio vote counts.

MORE HERE

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