Free Republic

A Recap Of the CRP Platform Committee Activity At the Convention There is much to be said about the California Republican Party’s Fall Convention held in downtown Los Angeles last weekend. Presidential candidates and a straw poll, great workshops and townhalls, tributes, speeches and more. The better part of a thousand GOP activists, donors and leaders descended on the L.A. Live! Marriott-Ritz hotel, across from the Staples Center (we were the pre-show for the Emmy Awards, I guess). This column, however, is devoted to only one aspect of the convention – the ongoing process of the quadrennial adoption of the...

Charles T. Munger Jr. isn't your run-of-the-mill Republican donor. The wealthy Stanford physicist is gaining prominence in a state Republican Party now regularly in search of money needed to win in blue California. But Munger's involvement in the state GOP goes beyond writing checks. His influence will be on display this weekend as California Republicans gather in Los Angeles for their fall convention and begin discussing a Munger-inspired platform that downplays traditional GOP positions on gun rights, abortion and same-sex marriage. The bow tie-wearing Republican has spent recent months shepherding a behind-the-scenes effort to adopt a more moderate California Republican...

A winery owner, a tech executive and venture capitalists are among the Texas governor's local backersWant to meet Rick Perry? The Republican governor from Texas will be at the Four Seasons in East Palo Alto for a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser on Friday during his first trip to the Bay Area since declaring his candidacy for president. Perry's campaign says the GOP candidate has no public appearances scheduled for the region. He has a packed schedule, with three fundraisers on Thursday (in San Diego, Orange County and Los Angeles) and three more on Friday (in Bakersfield, Fresno and East Palo Alto). But...

Boarded-up shops and a nearly empty parking lot provided the backdrop for former Masschusetts' Gov. Mitt Romney’s visit today to a struggling shopping center near the intersection of Victory and Laurel Canyon boulevards. Romney, presumed to be among the leading Republican contenders for the presidency in 2012, said President Barack Obama’s economic policies have contributed to the decline of this and many other malls across America. “Proposing raising taxes did not put people back to work. Obamacare made it less likely for employers to want to hire people. The talk about cap-and-trade and higher energy costs made it less likely...

Orange County Republicans have censured an official who sent an email that included President Obama's face superimposed on that of a chimpanzee with the words "Now you know why - No birth certificate!" County GOP Chairman Scott Baugh has called for Davenport to resign, something she has refused to do. Baugh had said the email was "dripping with racism and is in very poor taste."

As Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger prepares to decamp from Sacramento on Jan. 3, he has displayed zealous determination to complete what critics say will be among the worst deals the state has ever made: the sale of 11 premier state office complexes to a group of politically connected private investors. ...California would pocket about $1.3 billion after debt is paid off, but would then be a tenant in the same buildings. According to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, the deal would cost taxpayers $6 billion over 35 years. ....Two prominent Bay Area lawyers sued to halt the sale, and the state...

According to state records, one of the investors in California’s $2.3 billion sale of 11 state office buildings is a Newport Beach company founded and run, until 2008, by Hadi Makarechian, a contributor of more than $314,000 to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger since 2003 and nearly $175,000 to ballot measures backed by the GOP governor. Makarechian, 62, a long-time real estate developer and investor, was appointed by the GOP governor as a University of California regent in 2008. ... Makarechian was traveling and unavailable, his office said. Kern said Makarechian was still an owner and officer of the company. In his...

Karl Rove on 'Happening Now' with Jon Scott, FNC. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX-LN1GIzME

Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who recently campaigned with GOP former Gov. Pete Wilson as being "tough as nails" on illegal immigration, could alienate her crucial conservative base, some party members say, by declaring she's in lockstep on the issue with her rival: former Gov. Jerry Brown. In an opinion piece published this week in a Spanish-language publication in Southern California, Whitman wrote that there is "very little" that she disagrees with Brown on concerning the hot-button issue of illegal immigration. While both agree that undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to get amnesty or obtain driver's licenses, Brown's camp...

Arnold Schwarzenegger approval drops to record low -- tied with Gray Davis dsiders@sacbee.com Published Wednesday, Jul. 14, 2010 Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's job approval rating has fallen to a record low, matching that of former Gov. Gray Davis from 2003, the year he was recalled, according to a Field Poll released today. Registered voters held an even dimmer view of the job state lawmakers are doing. Though the Legislature's job approval rating ticked up three points from March, it remained a dismal 16 percent, according to the poll. With the state mired in yet another budget crisis, just 22 percent of...

James G. Gimpel is a professor of government at the University of Maryland, College Park. He can be reached at jgimpel@gvpt.umd.edu. This Backgrounder examines the political implications of large-scale immigration. Between 1980 and 2008, 25.2 million people were granted permanent residency (green cards) by the United States. A comparison of voting patterns in presidential elections across counties over the last three decades shows that large-scale immigration has caused a steady drop in presidential Republican vote shares throughout the country. Once politically marginal counties are now safely Democratic due to the propensity of immigrants, especially Latinos, to identify and vote Democratic....

Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO, said Tuesday that she won't debate GOP challenger Steve Poizner in front of party activists at the state Republican convention next month but will debate him before deep-pocketed party donors in Orange County. Whitman's campaign team said she will not debate Poizner, the state insurance commissioner, at the state party's convention March 12-14 in Santa Clara. Hundreds of the party's most loyal activists, as well as candidates for all statewide offices and for a U.S. Senate seat in California, will attend the three-day gathering. State GOP Chairman Ron Nehring said months...

An unfortunate tendency on the right these days is to attempt to win arguments through tendentious and shallow redefinitions of what constitutes “left” and “right.” That tendency flared up in recent days with efforts to rebut any notion that the Holocaust Museum shooter was a right-wing extremist and, instead, to rebrand him as a leftist – or “vile leftist monster,” as Rand Simberg put it in one such creative feat of ideological legerdemain at Pajamas Media. According to Simberg, there’s nothing in James von Brunn’s biography that qualifies as right-wing, “if by that you mean someone who adheres to individualism,...

Conservatives who object to moderate Republican officeholders have over the years asked themselves how far they are prepared to go to rid themselves of their intraparty rivals. In the case of California’s senator Thomas Kuchel, the answer was: very far indeed. Kuchel (pronounced “kee-kul”) was among the last of the California progressives, politicians who had been decisively influenced by the middle-class, moral reform movement of the early twentieth century and leading progressive figures including Republican governors Hiram Johnson and Earl Warren. A key progressive reform, which was still in existence when Kuchel first was elected to the California State Assembly...

Can David Frum forge a new majority? The veteran conservative pundit and former Bush speechwriter has launched NewMajority.com, a group blog intended to heal the wounds afflicting the ailing Republican Party and conservative movement. Just as I wish President Obama the best of luck in leading this country, I wish Frum the best of luck in leading the American right out of the wilderness. Frum’s “Diary” blog at National Review Online has been a must-read for the past few years and, unfortunately, a target of much unfair criticism. Frum has been smeared by the talk-radio world for allegedly being a...

...The Goldwater myth shuts down all attempts to reform and renew our conservative message for modern times. And it offers a handy justification for nominating a 2012 presidential candidate who might otherwise seem disastrously unelectable...

CRAFT is a 527 committee launched by last year by Schwarzenegger donors Larry Dodge and Paul Folino, and former Gov. Pete Wilson to recruit the "next generation" of statewide Republicans candidates. It is run by former California Republican Party Chairman Duf Sundheim. Moderate GOP pundit Tony Quinn opined at the time that CRAFT's formation "...shows the money people in the party have no faith in the California Republican party. This group would not exist if not for the fact that Republicans can't win statewide elections." Judging by CRAFT's financial disclosure, I'm not sure those involved know how to run a...

SAN FRANCISCO -- California Republican and Democratic Party leaders, always at war, finally agree on a common enemy: the open primary. A proposed constitutional amendment would go before voters in June 2010 instituting a "top-two" primary system, which would effectively eliminate party primary ballots, erase candidate party labels in primary elections and allow voters to choose the two candidates - of whatever party - who would compete in the general election. An open primary would dissolve the current political primary system, and has the potential to seriously erode party power and change the entire landscape of state politics.The measure...

Former EBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman joined the race for governor of California this morning, setting off a battle between Silicon Valley moguls for the 2010 Republican nomination. Whitman, 52, has never run for public office, but is banking that Californians will see her corporate background as just what the state needs to break its chronic cycle of fiscal disasters. ... Whitman's chief rival for the party nomination is state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, also a high-tech tycoon. Another Republican exploring a run is a former Silicon Valley congressman, Tom Campbell, now an economics professor at UC Berkeley. With vast...

A new conservative movement that takes libertarian ideas seriously could use the inertia created by the nation's new progressivism to slingshot itself into the future on a platform of reduced government, lower taxes, and limited interventionism, while also respecting climate change (adjusting the tax code to encourage green reform without any expense to taxpayers) and reforming the immigration system (opening the borders as the market demands labor without sacrificing security). The Republican Party has a chance to transform itself into something it has never been: a party of small government based on classical liberal principles. It doesn't have to be...