PW Makes A Daring Prediction About Newt’s Press Conference Tonight

Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker and current presidential hopeful, is having a press conference tonight after the Nevada primary results are in.

Many think Newt will announce that he’s pulling out and conceding the nomination. I don’t think so.

I think it’s going to be Newt’s announcing that he’s going to be hiring a guy that Mitt Romney just spurned because Mitt’s ego is getting too big for its britches:

A GOP operative who won plaudits for bolstering Mitt Romney’s recent debate performances is not being retained by the front-runner’s campaign, an apparent victim of internal tensions over staff receiving too much credit for the candidate’s comeback, POLITICO has learned.

Brett O’Donnell, a former top aide to Michele Bachmann, has been paid for his work assisting Romney in the crucial Florida debates but was not offered a formal role with the campaign as he expected, according to Republican sources familiar with the situation.

I think that Romney dumped the guy both because of Romney’s ego, and also because of Romney’s arrogance. He needs 1144 delegates to win the nomination, and he’s got less than a tenth of that even with winning Nevada tonight, yet he’s already acting as if the nomination is his — so he’s preparing to pivot away from the Birchers and Tea Partiers and towards a message he thinks will be more suited to the general election. If he’s already pivoting away from the Tea Partiers, he won’t need an expert in Tea Party talk like O’Donnell, or so I imagine him to be thinking.

I have no inside information, just a weird wild guess that this is what I would do if I were Newt.

We’ll see in a few hours just how wrong — or right — I am.

UPDATE: Well, he didn’t mention O’Donnell by name, but he didn’t concede either. So it’s half-right, or half-wrong, depending on how you score these things.

Howard Dean would not allow pro-cancer Cliff Stearns to run unopposed

In all the celebration over the Susan G. Komen Foundation flinching in the face of public disapproval, the real perpetrator behind this is going about the attack on Planned Parenthood and breast cancer screening almost unnoticed.

His name is Cliff Stearns. He represents, to that district’s shame, Florida 6.

And he is running unopposed.

My DK diary here.

How to turn them around?

Occupy Oakland has a strong, non-violent faction, for example:

A Call To Oakland’s Non-Violent Movement: We Must Lead By Example

Posted on 03 February 2012 by NeilF

Those who would condemn the actions of activist’s violent responses to police brutality must show by example what a powerful non-violent response would look like. We must be there, on the front line, willing to sit down and refuse to move when tear gas, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades are going off all around us and injuring us. That is when the courage of our conviction to non-violence is tested and proven. That is when we prove the power of non-violence to oppose injustice.

Until we, the advocates of a non-violent response, can show the power of our convictions through our actions, we have no room to condemn violent protesters, especially when we do so while not also condemning the violent actions of the police in the same breath. We have no moral ground to stand on in this regard. We must build a moral high ground through the sacrifices of struggle. It is not automatically afforded to us without proving our commitment to non-violent resistance when it is tested the most.

Non-violence can be an incredibly powerful response to violence by institutions because it can clearly show who the violent side is and which side is fighting a moral struggle, rather than a military one.

But then I read this:

FTP March against Police Brutality
January 10, 2012 at 5:01 pm.

Posted by desiluna

Categories:
When: Back to Calendar » February 4, 2012 @ 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Repeats:Weekly on Saturday – forever
Where: Oscar Grant Plaza

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you identify as peaceful and are likely to interfere with the actions of your fellow protestors in any way (including telling them to stop performing a particular action, grappling, assaulting or holding them for arrest), you may not want to attend this march. It is a militant action. It attracts anti-capitalists, anti-fascists and other comrades of a revolutionary bent. It is not a march intended for people who are not fully comfortable with diversity of tactics.

It is very well known that the police often employ people to commit crimes (or to encourage others to do so) in order to discredit protest movements. But agents provocateurs are only a few, perhaps half a dozen in a crowd. They don’t have any power to damage a movement unless many adherents of the movement give them that power.

Knowing this, why would anyone help them?

What will it take to turn them around?

Susan G. Komen’s “Apolitical” Planned Parenthood Diss Crafted By GOP Operative Ari Fleischer

Know how the Susan G. Komen people have been saying that politics had nothing to do with their defunding Planned Parenthood? This just blows that excuse to smithereens:

Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush and prominent right-wing pundit, secretly helped guide Komen Foundation’s disastrous strategy regarding Planned Parenthood. Fleischer personally interviewed candidates for the postion of “Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations” at Komen last December. According to a source with first-hand knowedge, Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood.

Oh, and furthermore: “Fleischer’s high-level involvement with Komen further complicates its image as an apolitical cancer charity. Fleischer is a prominent partisan commentator and a longtime critic of Planned Parenthood.”

Hear that sound? That’s the sound of the last shreds of SGK’s credibility being torn apart.