California GOP $500K in debt, can't afford offices, decides Karl Rove is the answer, Calif. clubhouse GOP man's 'first move' was to get Rove to speak at convention

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3/1/13, "California Republican Party Convention: GOP attempts to recover from disaster," Bay Area News Group, Steve Harmon, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

"Having sunk to its lowest depths in its 159-year history, the California Republican Party's first order of business at this weekend's convention will be to lick its wounds. The state party is still reeling from humiliating defeats in November that gave Democrats two-thirds majorities in the Assembly and state Senate. 

It's $500,000 in debt and doesn't even have offices for its staff, which has dwindled to a handful of employees who work from home. The GOP's only gubernatorial prospect for 2014 is a conservative assemblyman who was once a border vigilante. And Republican voter registration in the state is at an all-time low of 29.3 percent.

Into all that gloom rides Jim Brulte, a former Republican leader in the Assembly and state Senate, as the presumptive new party chairman....

"Nothing focuses a party like a shellacking, and we got shellacked," Brulte said in an interview with this newspaper as he prepared for the weekend festivities, which begin Friday with the arrival of 1,000 GOP delegates, family and friends at the Hyatt Regency and Sacramento Convention Center....

Brulte's first move was to secure Karl Rove, the Republican uber-strategist, as the lunchtime speaker at the convention Saturday, a not-so-subtle message to conservative activists that he's seeking a pragmatic way out of the GOP's political morass.

It was controversial pick. Rove didn't endear himself to conservatives when he recently formed a new political group that he said would drum extremist candidates out of GOP primaries -- including those from the tea party -- as a way to appeal to the center.

Rove was himself at the center of GOP failures in the fall: His American Crossroads super PAC spent $300 million on mostly losing candidates.

In a nod to party activists, GOP officials hastily added conservative blogger Ben Shapiro as the convention's keynote speaker Saturday night, while moving Rove to the Saturday afternoon slot. But the strain between the activists and pragmatists remains."...

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Ed. note: When Obama was re-elected, Democrats in the media thanked Storm Sandy for putting him over the top. They said nothing about the GOP being bad with Hispanics as the GOP keeps saying. The reason the GOP lost is because the GOP establishment wanted Obama to win:

"Obama re-election helped GOP House Speaker Boehner": NPR
 
12/8/12, "Once Boxed-In, Boehner May Finally Be Master Of The House," NPR, Frank James

"In a paradoxical way, Obama's re-election victory coupled with congressional Democrats adding to their numbers may have helped Boehner. Some of those wins came at the expense of the Tea Party, the conservative movement whose affiliated House members have been very willing to stand up to Boehner."...

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GOP rushed to effectively nullify all elections except Obama's, Boehner tells GOP House members to remember the GOP lost badly and they need to remember they have no power and keep quiet (even though in the House they're in the majority). Boehner gave NY Times the inside story:

11/10/12, “Boehner Tells House G.O.P. to Fall in Line,” NY Times, by Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer

“On a conference call with House Republicans a day after the party’s electoral battering last week, Speaker John A. Boehner dished out some bitter medicine, and for the first time in the 112th Congress, most members took their dose.
 
Their party lost, badly, Mr. Boehner said, and while Republicans would still control the House and would continue to staunchly oppose tax rate increases as Congress grapples with the impending fiscal battle, they had to avoid the nasty showdowns that marked so much of the last two years."...  

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"Establishment GOP care more about controlling the party than winning elections:" AEI member

7/13/12, "George Shultz Endorses Carbon Tax – You Were Surprised?" GlobalWarming.org, Marlo Lewis

"This pattern is becoming boringly familiar....

There has always been a wing of the GOP — the “establishment,” “Country Club,” or “Rockefeller” Republicans — who care more about controlling the party than about advancing liberty or even about winning elections. AEI’s Ken Green (a colleague of Hassett’s) hits the nail on the head. In a story on Shultz’s endorsement of carbon taxes, Green told Climatewire: (subscrip):

“There seems to be an eruption of conservatives — very moderate-seeming conservatives, non-tea party, old country club-style conservatives — who are suddenly enamored of carbon tax,” said Kenneth Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“I think this is mostly vanity and egotism on the part of these people who are coming forward, to try and reassert the Republican establishment over the tea party revolution,” he added. 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we have more of these guys weigh in.”(begin parag. 11)...
 
As noted here, earlier this week, former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) launched a new institute with Rockefeller Family Fund backing [oil money] to promote carbon taxes as a ‘Republican idea.’...  

In 2010, Shultz, partnering with Tom Steyer, a Democrat, “led the successful campaign to defeat Proposition 23, a California ballot initiative to suspend the state’s ambitious law to curb greenhouse gases.”"...

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11/7/12, "Chris Matthews on Obama's Win: 'I’m So Glad We Had That Storm Last Week' ," NewsBusters, Sheppard

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2/20/13, "As Country Club Republicans Link Up With The Democratic Ruling Class, Millions Of Voters Are Orphaned," Angelo Codevilla, Forbes, via Mark Levin show

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Also from Angelo Codevilla about today's political class:

10/20/11, "The lost decade," about 2001-2011, and 
 7/16/10, "America's Ruling Class-and the perils of Revolution," by Angelo Codevilla, from American Spectator.

To view on one page, "America's Ruling Class-and the perils of Revolution."

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Excerpt from "The Lost Decade:"

10/20/11, "The lost decade," Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont Institute 

"At home, the American people are less free, less prosperous, more bitterly divided, and much less hopeful in 2011 than in 2001 because a decade of the War on Terror brought a government ever bigger and more burdensome, as well as “security” measures that impede the innocent rather than focusing on wrongdoers. Our ruling class justified its ever-larger role in America’s domestic life by redefining war as a never-ending struggle against unspecified enemies for abstract objectives, and by asserting expertise far above that of ordinary Americans....It failed to ask the classic headwaters question: what is the problem?...

That would have pointed to the Middle East’s regimes, and to our ruling class’ relationship with them, as the problem’s ultimate source. The rulers of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority had run (and continue to run) educational and media systems that demonize America. Under all of them, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Wahhabi sect spread that message in religious terms to Muslims in the West as well as at home. 

That message indicts America, among other things, for being weak.

And indeed, ever since the 1970s U.S. policy had responded to acts of war and terrorism from the Muslim world by absolving the regimes for their subjects’ actions"...


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Ed. note: Ben Shapiro had been named to replace Karl Rove as keynote Saturday night speaker, bumping Rove to Saturday lunch. It was big news when it was announced, but it now appears to have been meaningless. What remains of the Calif. GOP worships Rove, and we're to take that as a "not so subtle message." The message is the Calif. GOP wants Democrats to stay in power. Articles I found about the Calif. convention like those below made no mention of Ben Shapiro, just went on about Rove. Rove guarantees Democrat victories, flipped both the House and Senate from Republican to Democrat while a Republican sat in the White House and elected Obama twice. At minimum, with the help of Fox News and the Bush crowd, he destroyed the Republican Party and the lives of millions of people:


3/2/13, “Rove: GOP needs candidates who reflect diversity,” AP, Laura Olson, via Fresno Bee

3/2/13, “Calif. GOP seeks answers for turning party around,“ AP, Juliet Williams, via beaumont enterprise.com

"The roster of speakers for the weekend reads like a list of establishment Republicans."..

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 2/15/13, “UPDATE: Exciting New Voices Coming to 2013 Spring Convention,” cagop.org

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2/16/13, "Breitbart's Ben Shapiro Replaces Karl Rove as CA GOP Convention Keynote," Breitbart News, Tony Lee 



 
 

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