Free Republic

Mitt Romney was the inevitable nominee — until he wasn't. In order to sustain a lead, a candidate's message must resonate with the heart and the mind. Mr. Romney's cakewalk to the nomination has been stymied by the inability to get anyone excited about his campaign. He has supporters but not believers. Rick Santorum's message resonates with voters' hearts and minds (this week at least), because he is a true believer. He believes in his message, and his message is consistent with core Republican values. What gave Mr. Santorum the edge in Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri can give him...

This is the first I’ve heard of this, but if true, it’s troubling because it’s one more reason that experience in business really doesn’t translate to governance. Right Across the Atlantic is reporting that Romney went on a trip while governing Massachusetts, paid by Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, that ultimately looked like a sort of crony capitalism deal, but Romney side-stepped it by going on vacation so that his Lt. Governor would sign the bill, relieving him of any ethics investigation worries. In fact, the whole manner of the episode is troubling, and you should check out the article in...

Whenever I write that Newt was, in fact, a lobbyist, I get lots of responses reading "who cares!?" or something to the same effect. The reason it matters, though, is not because being a lobbyist is inherently bad. The problem is twofold: 1) Newt says he didn't lobby. He did. That means Newt is not telling the truth. A candidate serially telling untruths is a reason to not like that candidate. 2) Newt didn't simply lobby for businesses. He lobbied for businesses that were trying to profit at the expense of everyone else by increasing the size of government. This...

The White House press shop will soon have a new edition: Jennifer Palmieri, who will be the deputy communications director. Palmieri is a veteran of the Clinton White House, where she worked for eight years, including a stint as the deputy press secretary. She also worked in the press shop for the Democratic National Committee before going on to work as the national communications director for Democrat John Edwards' presidential bid during the 2004 election cycle. She later served as the communications director of Democrat John Kerry's presidential campaign. Since 2005, though, she's worked for the Center for American Progress,...

Gallup finds that 82 percent of Tea Party affiliated voters deem Newt Gingrich an acceptable Republican presidential nominee in 2012. They don't seem to realize that if he wins the nod their movement is doomed, regardless of how the general election goes. The Tea Party cannot support Gingrich without betraying its core principles. But the movement also cannot disclaim him once he is the Republican nominee. Tea Partiers with a better instinct for self-preservation would see that none of the Mitt Romney alternatives still running would be as corrosive to their cause as the former Speaker of the House. Why?...

With the Republican field’s first major test just weeks away, the failed presidential bid of Herman Cain is throwing his support behind the current frontrunner. Sources told Fox 5 Atlanta that Herman Cain will endorse the presidential bid of Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Several sexual harassment allegations and a claim of a long-term affair left the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO’s White House bid all but destroyed.

ew GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich, anticipating an attack from fellow contender Mitt Romney, has instructed his campaign staff and advisers not to respond in kind to the former Massachusetts governor, RCP has learned. According to Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond, “In response to the dynamics over the last 24 hours about the attacks coming our way, his instructions to us were to not say anything bad about Mitt Romney.” Hammond explained that the campaign has received inquiries about how it will respond to attacks on Gingrich, given the searing Web ad Ron Paul’s operation has released and a reading...

Newt Gingrich specifically urged the Florida Legislature to consider projects initiated by clients of his Center for Health Transformation, an audio recording of the 2006 meeting shows. The audio raises more questions about Gingrich's claims to have never engaged in lobbying. The 2006 health "summit" was noted in a New York Times story tonight. The Buzz tracked down the audio, which was archived on the Florida House website. "We urge you look to look at a Travelocity model of buying drugs with real-time information, building with what you've already done with My Florida Rx," Gingrich told a packed audience in...

Again and again Newt Gingrich says he never lobbied. Bit by bit, more evidence surfaces that he did in fact lobby. Blog posts today by Ben Smith at Politico and Jen Rubin at the Washington Post help waterproof the case that Gingrich isn't speaking truthfully about his lobbying. Here are some of the facts of the case: I reported that Gingrich was paid by players in the drug industry to help pass the Medicare drug bill, and he visited Capitol Hill to convince lawmakers to vote for the bill. The New York Times reports that Gingrich actively worked to pass...

When Newt Gingrich says he never lobbied, he's not telling the truth. When he was a paid consultant for the drug-industry's lobby group, Gingrich worked hard to persuade Republican congressmen to vote for the Medicare drug subsidy that the industry favored. To deny Gingrich was a lobbyist requires an Obama-like word parsing over who is and who isn't a lobbyist. Gingrich stated last week on Fox News, "I do no lobbying of any kind. I never have. A very important point to make. I have never done lobbying of any kind." But the facts contradict that claim. First of all,...

Newt Gingrich has taken the lead in PPP's national polling. He's at 28% to 25% for Herman Cain and 18% for Mitt Romney. The rest of the Republican field is increasingly looking like a bunch of also rans: Rick Perry is at 6%, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul at 5%, Jon Huntsman at 3%, and Gary Johnson and Rick Santorum each at 1%.

Newt Gingrich's campaign is pushing back against criticism that the former Speaker consulted with embattled mortgage lender Freddie Mac, insisting that Gingrich did not lobby on behalf of the government corporation. Gingrich was pressed on the ties during Wednesday evening's Republican debate — the Speaker was paid $300,000 in 2006 — but insisted that he only met with Freddie in his capacity as a historian, not as a lobbyist. "I have never done any lobbying," Gingrich said. "Every contract was written during the period when I was out of the office, specifically said I would do no lobbying, and I...

FReepers / Cain Supporters, Question for you. Like I said last week, I figured out the identity of the NJ Accuser (she hasn't come forward yet). I have said before and will continue to refrain from revealing her identity on a public forum until she decides to come forward or another media link outs her. However, since it was easy for me to find her, I thought about emailing her and letting her know that both Politico/Google Search has compromised her anonymity and show her how I was able to identify her without being a journalist, hacker, investigator, etc. I...

On October 29th, when I sat on a panel during the first ever Grizzly Fest Summit, I spoke about being “disillusioned” with the state of politics and Washington DC prior to learning about Governor Palin in 2007. Disgraced former high-power DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff had a lot to do with that because as the Washington Post described back in 2006 (emphasis): Former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff was sentenced to five years and 10 months in prison on March 29, after pleading guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials in a deal that requires him to cooperate...

Do Obama's big donors break his no-lobbyist pledge? CBS News President Obama's re-election campaign is pushing back against a New York Times report that suggests Mr. Obama may not be meeting his own standards when it comes to keeping corporate lobbyists out of his campaign.

President Barack Obama’s new senior campaign adviser is a longtime Wall Street lobbyist, and has the potential to damage the president’s aspirations to appeal to the protesters currently “occupying” New York City’s Zuccotti Park. Obama’s new adviser, Broderick Johnson, has an extensive history of lobbying for big banks and corporations, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2007, he lobbied for JP Morgan Chase and in 2008 Johnson lobbied for Bank of America and Fannie Mae. From 2008 through 2010, he lobbied for Comcast and in 2011 he lobbied for Microsoft. Johnson is currently a partner at D.C.-based communications...

Cain, Now Running as Outsider, Came to Washington as Lobbyist SHERYL GAY STOLBERG October 22, 2011 WASHINGTON — Herman Cain, the Republican presidential candidate with the sharp wit and easy-to-remember tax plan, is a cancer survivor, radio host and former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza. On the campaign trail, he talks up his business experience, casting himself as a “problem solver” and Washington outsider. But the role that helped propel Mr. Cain into politics was that of an ultimate Washington insider: industry lobbyist. From 1996, when he left the pizza company, until 1999, Mr. Cain ran the National Restaurant Association,...

The collapse of Solyndra looks inevitable in retrospect — and for auditors who reviewed their loan application that the Obama White House expedited and to the employees who worked there, it looked inevitable before it happened, too. This has many wondering just what business model Solyndra used to keep the company going as long as it did. The New York Times figures out that Solyndra’s execs used a tested-and-true business method called Lobby For Dollars — and that they kept using this model even as the company disintegrated: According to records filed with the Clerk of the House and a...

When congressional leaders earlier this month named six lawmakers from each party to a debt reduction “supercommittee,” investing unprecedented power in a tiny cadre to slash funding, they set off a wild scramble among special interest groups to gain access and protect their interests. Yet many groups with the most at stake didn’t have to change their plans. Some members of the supercommittee received more campaign contributions in July from political action committees controlled by corporations, unions and other lawmakers than anyone else in Congress, disclosures filed this weekend show. Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan Republican who chairs the tax-writing House...

Rep. Xavier Becerra — or, to be more precise, lobbyists working on his behalf — wasted no time Thursday capitalizing on the California congressman’s appointment to the congressional super committee. A little over two hours after Becerra was named to the powerful panel, Investment Company Institute’s Jim Hart sent out an email encouraging attendance for the trade group’s upcoming $1,500 per person fundraiser based on Becerra’s new found status as one of the elite 12. “We will host an event for Congressman Xavier Becerra, not only Vice Chairman of the Democratic Caucus but also who has just been named to...

Lobbyists are trained at an early age in Michigan. Elementary school children win over the hearts of politicians from both parties when it comes to official state designations for such things as reptiles, mammals, fruit and more. It happened recently when Michigan Senator Rebekah Warren, D-Ann Arbor, introduced a resolution to name the cherry as the official state fruit. The inspiration was a fourth-grade class from Ann Arbor’s Bach Elementary School. They put together a PowerPoint presentation about cherries that Warren saw and then asked the senator if she would submit a bill designating the cherry as a state fruit....

Republican Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker on Friday defended her decision to leave the agency for a lobbying job with cable provider Comcast and pushed back against critics who questioned her impartiality. Baker, who voted to allow Comcast to merge with NBC Universal last January, attracted considerable criticism this week when she said she was going to work for the newly merged company. Baker denied that she was compromised by any discussion with Comcast. “Not once in my entire tenure as a Commissioner had anyone at Comcast or NBC/Universal approached me about potential employment,” she said in a statement....

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales chided fellow Republicans on immigration, urging them to work toward comprehensive immigration reform. Gonzales, the first Hispanic attorney general of the U.S., said it was a "failure" by both parties to have not achieved immigration reform yet, and warned against a proposal favored by some Republicans to amend the U.S. Constitution to deny birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. "My recommendation not just to the Republican Party but also the Democratic Party is that this country, our federal leaders need to pass comprehensive immigration reform," Gonzales said Sunday on Univision's "Al Punto" program....

A Cambridge consulting firm’s controversial bid to bolster the image of Moammar Khadafy and Libya should have been registered with the US government as a lobbying effort, an internal company investigation found. Company officials with Monitor Group, which enlisted prominent professors from Harvard University in the effort from 2006 to 2008, said the inquiry also concluded that public relations work for foreign governments is not part of its core mission and should be avoided. “We are putting in place new systems to make sure we do not repeat a mistake we fully acknowledge we made here,’’ said Eamonn Kelly, a...

Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions. Yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker's administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state. How did Deschane score his plum assignment with the Walker team? It's all in the family. His father is Jerry Deschane, executive vice president and...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Senate will soon issue findings of a probe of the US mortgage meltdown that fueled the global financial crisis, with Goldman Sachs likely to face fresh embarrassment over its role, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose high-profile inquiry commission subpoenaed Goldman's and other executives last year, is due to release its report on the subprime implosion of 2007 and 2008. The paper, citing people familiar with the matter, said the report was expected to release emails from securities firms that developed or sold subprime mortgages and financial vehicles including...

<p>Several sources familiar with the ongoing investigation tell WTOP fire and police investigators believe the radiator in Turton's 2008 BMW X5 was punctured when it rolled into a workbench. The halogen headlights, which emit a bluish light and illuminate the road better than conventional headlights, stayed on after the radiator was punctured.</p>

Ashley Turton, a former aide to Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and the wife of White House staff member Dan Turton, was found dead this morning in her burned-out car in the garage of her home in Southeast Washington, D.C. Turton, a mother of 3-year-old twins and a 1-year-old, worked as a lobbyist for Progress Energy. The Metro police and fire department received a call at 4:49 a.m. from a neighbor about a fire in a garage at the intersection of Eighth Street and A Street in Southeast Washington, near Capitol Hill. The D.C. Fire Department arrived at Turton's row house...

Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I couldn't help thinking about an issue I hope our party will better address. I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party's line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities. National Journal reported last month that 19 of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers declared that the science of climate change is either inconclusive or flat-out wrong.

Rapiscan is one of the two companies that makes the nudie-scanners at airports for the TSA. Rapiscan CEO Deepak Chopra (who has the same name as the more famous Deepak Chopra, M.D.) recently was tapped by Obama to accompany the administration on Obama’s trip to India. Also, Chopra is an Obama donor. Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2010/11/nudie-scan-ceo-obama-ally#ixzz15xjJ7JKX

Now that election 2010 is over, let’s go back over to OpenSecrets and look at which evil corporations stole our democracy and bought Congress for the Republicans — the RepubliCorp! First suspect: the military-industrial complex! •Defense Contractors: 55% Democrat, 44% Republican ($18 million) Oh, really? Well, then, it must have been Wall Street! That’s it: Wall Street bought Congress for the GOP! •Securities & Investment: 53% Democrat, 46% Republican ($8.2 million) Oh. Well, even if Wall Street as a whole preferred Democrats, it must have been the real bad guys, those risky Hedge funds and exotic investors… •Hedge Funds: 53%...

From CNN: Sen. John McCain is widely ahead of his two primary challengers, according to a new poll.A Behavior Research Center survey released Thursday indicates that 64 percent of likely Arizona Republican primary voters support McCain, with19 percent backing former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, five percent supporting Jim Deakin, a Tea Party activist, and 12 percent undecided. The primary is scheduled for August 24. Why such a gap? "The simple reality is that McCain took his (Hayworth's) border and SB 1070 issue away from him, and then nailed him on ethics issues pertaining to being a lobbyist and so on," said...

Remember how President Obama promised Lobbyists wouldn’t be running his administration? With more than 1,000 lobbyists coming through the front door of the White House for meetings inside, Laura Ingraham reports on Fox News today that many meetings with lobbyists are simply taking place across the street at the local Caribou Coffee shop! Ingraham says in order to make it look like...

I sometimes worry that there might be some naive entrepreneur out there who takes at face value this talk on “green energy” being the next boom — a businessman who doesn’t understand that the only way to make money from wind, solar, biofuels, and the like is through government favors. In case such a misguided soul exists, lobbying firm Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schrek have launched a public-service campaign to set them right: Well, I guess it’s not technically a PSA, but it is good for this K Street lobbying firm to remind the business world that the green-energy game is...

John Podesta of the Center for American Progress is nearly scripting the White House’s BP response, according to Jonathan Weisman at the Wall Street Journal in a blog post picked up by Drudge. But Weisman leaves out a key detail: Podesta’s brother is a BP lobbyist. Tony and John Podesta cofounded the Podesta Group, a K Street lobbying firm. Now BP is a client, and Tony is one of the lobbyists on the account, according to the firm’s latest lobbying filings.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A Washington hedge fund lobbying group has given names and contact information about its members to Congressional investigators, the Wall Street journal reported in its online edition on Monday. The Managed Funds Association turned over the information about more than 2,600 members on May 13 under threat of subpoena from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the Journal said, citing a letter the hedge-fund lobbying group sent to members.

Washington -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi laid down the law this year: To prevent the appearance of Congress doing unethical favors for big campaign contributors, she told Democrats they could no longer steer federal money directly to corporations. The only "earmarks" members could seek in spending bills would be for nonprofits... But not everyone is obeying Pelosi’s tough talk... U.S. Reps. Dan Maffei and Michael Arcuri have found a way to work around the new orders: Simply pass the federal money to not-for-profit organizations and let them forward it to corporations.... Maffei and Arcuri accepted campaign contributions from the same...

Complete and utter hypocrite: President Obama has been happy to beat up on Wall Street "fat cats," but tonight he'll be even happier to take their money. The President is slated to headline a superswank, $50,000-per-couple fund-raiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at Manhattan's gilded St. Regis hotel on Fifth Ave. The high-dollar affair will feature fine French food, a bevy of Wall Street titans and 23 Congress members - including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). [snip] The man's hypocrisy knows no bounds. I firmly believe in capitalism and disagree with Obama's vilification of Wall Street. The government and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Democratic Party's 2010 congressional election campaign is looking to an elite group of lobbyists for bundled political contributions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to a study released on Monday. The study by the non-partisan watchdog Center for Public Integrity found that four of the five biggest bundlers of campaign contributions among lobbyists were Democrats who raised a combined $1 million for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee alone. Other beneficiaries were the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and New York Senator Charles Schumer, the study showed. Bundlers,...

I am in an argument with someone & wondering if anyone knows who the major lobbyists were for and against HRC. Thanks in advance

Ladies and gentlemen of the Legislature, kindly get a grip. Sen. John Coghill and some of his legislative colleagues want to raise the limit of what lobbyists can spend on lawmakers' meals without reporting it. He wants to raise the limit from $15 to $50. Why? Well, it seems that good meals cost more than $15 in Juneau and other parts of the state. And if a lawmaker should go to lunch with a lobbyist and order something that costs $17.50, that lobbyist has to report the meal and who it was for.

A record $3.47 billion was spent on federal lobbyists in 2009, according to a new study by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Ergo, fair now to say that Wall Street and K Street had a bull year, while Main Street suffered in recession. The lobbyist boon times were tied to the legislative debates of the day: health care reform, financial reform and energy policy.

Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman, is resigning as president of the drug industry trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America amid internal disputes over its pact with the White House to trade political support for favorable terms in the proposed health care overhaul. As the industry’s top lobbyist, Mr. Tauzin brokered the deal with the White House and Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate finance committee, last summer to limit the drug industry’s total costs under the proposed health care overhaul to $80 billion over 10 years.

Another mismatch between Obama's rhetoric and reality!Remember this? We face a deficit of trust -– deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years. To close that credibility gap we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly... That's why we've excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs, or seats on federal boards and commissions. --Barack Hussein Obama State of the Union address If Obama really "excluded" lobbyists then why are there so many working in his Administration? Timothy Carney at the...

With big changes to the nation’s food safety system looming in 2010, the FDA made a strange move earlier this week when it appointed former Monsanto lobbyist Michael Taylor to lead the agency’s fight against contaminated peanut butter and lethal lettuce. Taylor was named to the new post of deputy commissioner for food. Taylor, who has circled three times between government and industry, isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to see issuing orders in the Obama FDA. The last time he was at the FDA, the agency created several policies on genetically modified foods that no one would ever...

Some lobbyists are getting worried in Massachusetts with Martha Coakley getting beat by Scott Brown so what do they do? They do a fundraiser: With Democrat Martha Coakley in trouble in the Massachusetts special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat, Democrats could lose vote No. 60 for President Obama’s health-care bill. In response, an army of lobbyists for drug companies, health insurance companies, and hospitals has teamed up to throw a high-dollar Capitol Hill fundraiser for Coakley next Tuesday night. Of the 22 names on the host committee–meaning they raised $10,000 or more for Coakley–17 are federally registered lobbyists, 15...

<p>In its new "A Fistful of Dollars" report, the International Monetary Fund concludes that the riskiest mortgage lenders were also the most active lobbyists in Washington.</p> <p>IMF researchers found that during 2000 to 2007, lenders lobbying more intensively on mortgage-related legislation — such as consumer protection laws and securitization — made more hazardous mortgage loans than those who lobbied less.</p>

While much of K Street has seen a dip during the recession, Tony Podesta has managed to buck the trend. His firm, the Podesta Group, has earned more in lobbying fees in nine months than it did in all of 2008, has nearly doubled its staff and is expanding its office space by one floor. It helps that Podesta is arguably the most recognizable Democratic name on the Washington lobbying scene. Podesta is modest about his success. In an interview with The Hill, he called lobbying “a people business” and credited his success to his staff, listing off a bipartisan...

Top aides to President Barack Obama have met early and often with lobbyists, Democratic political strategists and other interests with a stake in the administration's national health care overhaul, White House visitor records obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press show. The AP in early August asked the White House to produce records identifying communications that top Obama aides -- including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, senior advisers David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and Pete Rouse, and 18 others -- had with outside interests on health care. The AP in late September narrowed its request to White House visitor records for those...

President Obama has always made a pretty big deal about not working with “lobbyists”. Registered lobbyists can’t get stimulus money, can’t be White House advisors and are not allowed access to meetings and summits. So how does one get around that? It’s simple; you just don’t register as a lobbyist. That’s what Andy Stern did and it may come back to bite him.