The missed opportunities for Republicans in 2010

By Maggie Palin

Having now allowed some time for reflection of this years’ primary season, I’ve come to a few conclusions about this year’s primary wins.

I’m looking at November with rose-colored glasses. I’m excited about our opportunities in many key seats, such as the U.S. Senate seat in my home state of Pennsylvania. I truly hope we take back the House, and if we don’t win the Senate, come within a few seats of doing so. But as a pragmatist, I do believe that we had some opportunities to pick up seats in swing and/or Democratic-leaning states that we will not win because of the caliber of candidate we nominated in the primaries.

Take Sharron Angle in Nevada for example. Angle is running against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is widely unpopular both nationally and in his home state. Reid is so unpopular that he cannot even protect his own son, Rory, from certain electoral defeat to the state’s chief executive office. This is most evident in the fact that Rory campaigns on a first-name basis only to separate himself from his father!

Yet we nominated a Tea Party activist who has no verbal control and rotates through campaign teams as quickly as some people change their dirty sheets.  As a State Senator, Angle voted in favor of domestic abusers and Scientologists, and has even said publically that she uses her Fox News appearances as fundraisers. The political environment is very favorable for Republicans in Nevada this election cycle, and I’m not saying that any of the other candidates were that much better, but if Harry Reid is re-elected in November, it is because we nominated Angle in the primary last June.

Recent polling results clearly show that this race has the potential to be a lost opportunity for us: Pollster.com’s overall average for the race has Reid up one percent in the polls, while a late August poll conducted by Mason-Dixon on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal found that two-thirds (68%) of voters—including 71% of Republicans—would have preferred that another candidate had been nominated instead of Angle.

More recently, Christine O’Donnell’s win in the Delaware Senate primary against Representative Mike Castle is another example of a prime target we lost as a result of the nominee we chose. Video footage of O’Donnell discusses her dalliances into Wicca and witchcraft as a teen, and the comments that she has made about many social issues as the founder of the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT) would make many Republicans roll their eyes back into their sockets.

While she may not rank as high on the “crazy” scale as Sharron Angle, the fact that she was nominated in a liberal Northeastern state where the Democrats outnumber Republicans in voter registration 3 to 2 is just as painful. Her Democratic opponent—New Castle County Executive Christopher Coons—is so liberal that he is affectionately known by Senator Reid as “my pet.” With the seat open for the first time in decades as a result of Joe Biden’s ascendency into the Vice President’s mansion, this would have been a prime pickup for Republicans and instead we are merely giving Reid his “pet” in November according to several recent polls.

Don’t get me wrong—I want to take back Washington just as much as any other Republican out there. And admittedly I’m a fiscal conservative—I am rather liberal when it comes to most social issues. But I am disappointed in my party at the fact that they chose candidates who do not help the Republican cause, and hope that it won’t stop us from retaking at least one of the chambers in November.

Ahmadinjad lies because we let him

By Tal-Anna Szlenski

I can’t help but despair when reading through this article on “Ahmadinejad, master of spin“. In shedding light on Ahmedinejad’s media approach, it showcases how seasoned journalists fail to address his inane manifestations and lies as being just that.

From Jon Leyne’s BBC piece it is derived that journalists expect to corner the Iranian president and with the right prompt trigger some sort of confession accounting for wrongdoings.

In the article we read that

in an interview on Sunday with Christiane Amanpour on the ABC News programme This Week, he dismissed as “propaganda” the stoning sentence defence lawyers say was imposed on Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.

When asked his own opinion on the issue of stoning in general, he simply avoided the question.

Then, he flatly denied the claim that the number of executions in Iran had dramatically increased since he took office, something attested both by human rights organisations and by international news agencies who keep a running tally of executions announced in the Iranian media.

At Columbia University in New York, he stated boldly that there was complete freedom in Iranian universities. Several students who went out to protest against him on his return to Tehran were promptly arrested.

So why is it that our journalists are so concerned with exposing his ‘spin techniques’ rather than calling a spade for a spade and in this case, a lie for a lie? Why is it that it seems that journalists are willfully seeking to be proved wrong by Ahmadinejad? And why is it that this man is weighed against values, principles and morals which he has no intentions of adhering to?

The Beginning of the End of the 2010 American Midterm Elections

By Maggie Palin

There are several things that you can count on every time Labor Day comes and goes. Our minds tell us it’s the end of summer (even if it really does not become fall until the Autumnal equinox), kids fill up their backpacks with brand-new school supplies for their first day of school, workplace water cooler debate reverts to talk of fantasy football leagues and BCS standings, and white pants get buried in the back of the closet until next summer. And unless you live in one of the handful of states that have meaningful elections in the off-years, the Labor Day of an even term year—such as this year—brings with it one more important milestone: the official kick-off to the general election campaign. Yes it is that time of year again, when our roads and sidewalks become littered with yard signs and leaflets, when our phone lines bombarded with phone calls from survey research firms, and our TV and radio waves become filled with political advertisements.

Campaigns aren’t the only ones telling us who to vote for in November, however. While the media has been writing and rewriting the political debate for months now the voting electorate is finally reading and digesting the message.

So what did the voters learn from the mainstream media today?

• The Washington Post: “Another reason for a big GOP blowout at Midterms”
• The New York Times: “State Gains Would Give Redistricting Edge to GOP”
• The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Democrats mobilize to thwart GOP ‘tsunami’”
• Politico: “Latest polls predict a blow-out loss for Democrats in November”
• MSNBC.com: “Poll: GOP advantage ahead of midterms”

All of these headlines have one major theme in common—that the GOP will win big in November. While I am cautiously optimistic myself that the GOP will take back many, if not all, of the seats it has lost in Washington over the past two cycles, the fact that the news is essentially calling the race on the first day that the average American pays attention does worry me.

The media has been known to distort the truth in the past for commercial gain. Many Americans also consider the mainstream media to be politically biased to one political ideology or another. Regardless, having the mainstream media handicap the race at this juncture is harmful to the democratic process. If swing and undecided voters believe the race is over and the GOP has won in a landslide, they may feel that their vote is not necessarily and skip the ballot box on November 2nd. Long-term Democratic voters who have not engaged in the process thus far may become energized at the thought of losing Congress and tighten up the race. The best-case scenario for Republicans is that the Republican base continues to become mobilized and turns out in heavy numbers on Election Day. In short, having the media call the race this early in the game does nothing but hamper the political process rather than keep the American public engaged.

Whether the predictions from today’s papers are right we will not know for approximately eight more weeks. But as the unelected fourth estate of government, the media should go back to just reporting the facts, and not shaping the message. That job belongs to the American people—and the representatives they elect to Washington.