Electoral College Elector: Why I Will Not Cast My Vote for Trump

I have addressed the founders' purpose in writing the Electoral College into the United States Constitution - to protect the nation from a demagogue who would undermine the constitutional order. Yes, Alexander Hamilton had his issues not withstanding the hit musical Hamilton.  But he and other members of the authors of the Constitution tried to guard against all contingencies, including efforts by foreign rulers to bribe America's political leaders.  The so-called Emoluments Clause had this specific purpose and with every passing day Trump has revealed his intention to ignore the Emoluments clause and to enrich himself and his family members as much as possible.  On December 19, 2016, the Electoral College electors will cast their votes to finalize the 2016 election results.  One Texas elector has an op-ed piece in the New York Times explaining why he will not cast his vote for Donald Trump.  Here are op-ed highlights:

DALLAS — I am a Republican presidential elector, one of the 538 people asked to choose officially the president of the United States. Since the election, people have asked me to change my vote based on policy disagreements with Donald J. Trump. In some cases, they cite the popular vote difference. I do not think presidents-elect should be disqualified for policy disagreements. I do not think they should be disqualified because they won the Electoral College instead of the popular vote. However, now I am asked to cast a vote on Dec. 19 for someone who shows daily he is not qualified for the office.

Fifteen years ago, as a firefighter, I was part of the response to the Sept. 11 attacks against our nation. That attack and this year’s election may seem unrelated, but for me the relationship becomes clearer every day.

George W. Bush is an imperfect man, but he led us through the tragic days following the attacks. His leadership showed that America was a great nation. That was also the last time I remember the nation united. I watch Mr. Trump fail to unite America and drive a wedge between us.

Mr. Trump goes out of his way to attack the cast of “Saturday Night Live” for bias. He tweets day and night, but waited two days to offer sympathy to the Ohio State community after an attack there. He does not encourage civil discourse, but chooses to stoke fear and create outrage.

This is unacceptable. For me, America is that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan envisioned. It has problems. It has challenges. These can be met and overcome just as our nation overcame Sept. 11.

The United States was set up as a republic. Alexander Hamilton provided a blueprint for states’ votes. Federalist 68 argued that an Electoral College should determine if candidates are qualified, not engaged in demagogy, and independent from foreign influence. Mr. Trump shows us again and again that he does not meet these standards. Given his own public statements, it isn’t clear how the Electoral College can ignore these issues, and so it should reject him.

I owe a debt to my children to leave them a nation they can trust.

Mr. Trump lacks the foreign policy experience and demeanor needed to be commander in chief. During the campaign more than 50 Republican former national security officials and foreign policy experts co-signed a letter opposing him. In their words, “he would be a dangerous president.” During the campaign Mr. Trump even said Russia should hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. This encouragement of an illegal act has troubled many members of Congress and troubles me.

Hamilton also reminded us that a president cannot be a demagogue. Mr. Trump urged violence against protesters at his rallies during the campaign. He speaks of retribution against his critics. He has surrounded himself with advisers such as Stephen K. Bannon, who claims to be a Leninist and lauds villains and their thirst for power, including Darth Vader. “Rogue One,” the latest “Star Wars” installment, arrives later this month. I am not taking my children to see it to celebrate evil, but to show them that light can overcome it.

Finally, Mr. Trump does not understand that the Constitution expressly forbids a president to receive payments or gifts from foreign governments. We have reports that Mr. Trump’s organization has business dealings in Argentina, Bahrain, Taiwan and elsewhere. Mr. Trump could be impeached in his first year given his dismissive responses to financial conflicts of interest. He has played fast and loose with the law for years. He may have violated the Cuban embargo, and there are reports of improprieties involving his foundation and actions he took against minority tenants in New York. Mr. Trump still seems to think that pattern of behavior can continue.

The election of the next president is not yet a done deal. Electors of conscience can still do the right thing for the good of the country. Presidential electors have the legal right and a constitutional duty to vote their conscience. I believe electors should unify behind a Republican alternative, an honorable and qualified man or woman such as Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. I pray my fellow electors will do their job and join with me in discovering who that person should be.

Fifteen years ago, I swore an oath to defend my country and Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. On Dec. 19, I will do it again.

Trump's GOP Enablers Need to Be Held Accountable

As noted in several posts that have compared 2016 America with 1933 Germany, both Hitler and Trump have rose in power and respectability thanks to self-serving politicians who foolishly thought that they could control the demagogue that they believed would increase their own power and/or wealth.  The Germany enablers proved to be terribly wrong and Germany and the world paid a terrible price.  Here in America, there is still time to stop Trump and his racist and fascist agenda.  A column in the New York Times by a long time GOP apologist calls on Trump's enablers to take a stand and put the nation ahead of partisan ship and self-aggrandizement.  Would that this columnist and others would have condemned the GOP over the last 20 years for the hate, racism, homophobia and general misogyny that were used with great calculation to win elections.  Here are column excerpts:

Up through the convention there were all sorts of Republican officeholders who weren’t really for Trump, but they weren’t really against him. They sort of endorsed him implicitly, while trying to change the subject.

They had all sorts of squirrelly formulations about why it was O.K. to ride the Trump train: He can be tamed or surrounded and improved. Sure, he’s got some real weaknesses, but he’s more or less a normal candidate who is at least better than Hillary.

Over the past few days, Trump has destroyed this middle ground. He’s exposed the wet noodle Republicans as suckers, or worse. Trump has shown that he is not a normal candidate. He is a political rampage charging ever more wildly out of control. And no, he cannot be changed.

He cannot be contained because he is psychologically off the chain. With each passing week he displays the classic symptoms of medium-grade mania in more disturbing forms: inflated self-esteem, sleeplessness, impulsivity, aggression and a compulsion to offer advice on subjects he knows nothing about.

Trump insults Paul Ryan, undermines NATO and raises the specter of nuclear war. Advisers can’t control Trump’s brain because Trump can’t control it himself.

He also cannot be contained because he lacks the inner equipment that makes decent behavior possible. So many of our daily social interactions depend on a basic capacity for empathy. But Trump displays an absence of this quality.

Republicans are not going to be able to help the 70-year-old man-child grow up over the next few months. Nor are they going to be able to get him to withdraw from the race. A guy who can raise $82 million mostly in small donations has a passionate niche following.

But they can at least get out of the enabling business. First, they can acknowledge that they are being sucked down a nihilistic whirlpool. Second, they can acknowledge the long-term damage being done to the country and to themselves.

Amid the chaos, all sorts of ugliness is surfacing. See the video of the horrific things shouted at Trump rallies compiled by Times reporters. Moreover, Trump is permanently tainting the names of conservatism and the Republican Party and the many good men and women who have built and served it.

Events are going to force Republicans off the fence. For the past many months Republican leaders have been condemning Trump’s acts while sticking with Trump the man. Trump is making that position ridiculous and shameful. You either stand with a man whose very essence is an insult to basic decency, or you don’t.

Those who don’t will have to start building a Republican Party in Exile. They will have to tell the country what they honestly think of Donald Trump. They will have to build a parallel campaign structure that will survive if Trump implodes, a structure of congressional and local candidates.

There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable. If you’re not in revolt, you’re in cahoots. When this period and your name are mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids will look away in shame.

Sadly, I am not holding my breath to see what Brooks calls for to happen.  The GOP sold its soul long ago to Christofascist, racists, and white supremacists.  

Poll: Hillary Clinton Tops Jeb Bush in Florida

As prior posts have note, some in the GOP - especially Wall Street figures - are hoping that Jeb Bush will throw his hat into the 2016 GOP presidential contest and "rescue" the GOP.  This thinking, of course, ignores the toxicity of Chimperator George W. Bush's legacy outside of select Kool-Aid drinking GOP circles. Now, a new poll shows that while Jeb Bush beats other GOP competitors, Hillary Clinton trumps them all.  Here are excerots from Politico:

Jeb Bush has a strong lead in Florida among potential 2016 Republican presidential contenders — but Hillary Clinton’s got them all beat, a new poll Thursday found.

According to the Quinnipiac University poll, 27 percent would back Bush for the White House, earning him a sizable lead over the rest of the GOP field.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul came in second with 14 percent, beating out Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who came in third at 11 percent. No other candidates received more than 6 percent support.

The poll comes amid rising speculation that Bush, the governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, might run for the GOP nomination in 2016.

The poll showed Hillary Clinton doing well in Florida, as well. She topped all potential GOP challengers in a head-to-head race. In a potential faceoff between her and Bush, she received 49 percent support compared to 41 percent support for the former governor.

Seanate Passes Immigration Reform - Will House GOP Racists Kill It?

Yesterday, the U. S. Senate passed a sweeping immigration reform bill with 14 Republicans voting for passage.  Now, the issue goes to the House of Representatives where it faces an uncertain future given the extremism and anti-immigrant mindset of the members of the House GOP.  Obviously, if the reform is killed by Republicans in the House, Hispanics will have a greatly increased motivation to get themselves to the polls in 2016 and vote the bigots and racists out of office.  Huffington Post looks at the bill that cleared the Senate:

The Senate passed a politically fraught immigration reform bill on Thursday that would give a path to citizenship to some of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., bringing them out of the shadows and preventing continued record deportations that have separated hundreds of thousands of families.   The bill passed 68 to 32, picking up all Democrats and 14 Republicans.

Undocumented immigrants and advocates in the crowd, many of them young so-called Dreamers, broke out into applause and chants of "yes we can!" after Vice President Joe Biden, who came to the Senate to preside over the proceedings, read the results. Senators in the bipartisan "gang of eight" that drafted the bill -- Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) -- patted each other on the back.

The path to citizenship is long -- likely 13 years or more -- and arduous, but advocates are thrilled that it would exist at all, given opposition from many Republicans and the failure of bills to carve out such a path in the past. Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, would be able to earn green cards in five years, as would some agricultural workers.

The bill adds huge increases in border security, bolstered by an amendment from Corker and Hoeven that helped bring on board unsure Democrats and Republicans. The amendment would prevent green card status for undocumented immigrants until the government deploys 20,000 additional border agents, mandates E-Verify to prevent businesses from hiring unauthorized workers, completes a 700-mile border fence and adds to entry-exit systems to track whether foreign nationals overstay their visas.

Although those border security measures and other pieces of the bill come at a cost, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the legislation would shrink the deficit by nearly than $900 billion, minus expenses from the Corker-Hoeven amendment.

The bill has vehement opponents in Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), along with 27 others who voted in opposition to the bill. They argue that the bill is "amnesty" . . . .

The opponents have expressed hope that the bill will die in the House, which is a possibility, given Republican opposition there. Lee said earlier Thursday on the Senate floor that the legislation is doomed to fail anyway, resigned that it would pass in the upper chamber.

"If this bill passes today, it will be all but relegated to the ash heap of history, as the House appears willing to tackle immigration reform the right way," Lee said ahead of the vote. "The sponsors of this bill had the best of intentions, but in my opinion, intentions aren’t enough."

A column in The Daily Beast suggests what will come now in the House: race baiting and the demonizing of immigrants and minorities in general, things that today's overtly racist GOP does best.   Here are column excerpts:

The situation is this. The immigration reform bill passed the Senate yesterday. It will now go to the House. A few weeks ago, as I read things, there were occasional and tepid signals that the House would not take up the Senate bill. Now, by contrast, those signals are frequent and full-throated. For example, yesterday, Peter Roskam, a deputy GOP whip in the House, said this: “It is a pipe dream to think that [the Senate] bill is going to go to the floor and be voted on. The House is going to move through in a more deliberative process.”

“Deliberative process” probably means, in this case, killing the legislation. House conservatives, National Journal reports, are increasingly bullish on the idea that they may be able to persuade John Boehner to drop the whole thing.

Phyllis Schlafly and talk-radio opponents of the bill like Laura Ingraham have been saying for a while now that the party doesn’t need Latino votes, it just needs to build up the white vote. 

And now, they have the social science to prove it, or the “social science” to “prove” it. Sean Trende, the conservative movement’s heavily-asterisked answer to Nate Silver (that is to say, Silver got everything right, and Trende got everything wrong), came out with an analysis this week headlined, “Does GOP Have to Pass Immigration Reform?,” showing that by golly no, it doesn’t.

Somehow or another, under Trende’s “racial polarization scenario,” it’ll be 2044 before the Democrats again capture 270 electoral votes. Thus is the heat of Schlafly’s rhetoric cooled and given fresh substance via the dispassionate tools of statistics.

These Republicans and the people they represent—that is, the sliver of people they care about representing—don’t want any outreach. They almost certainly won’t let a path to citizenship get through the House. And they’ll attack minorities in other ways, too.

And here’s the worst part of this story. If the House Republicans kill immigration reform, and Republican parties across the South double down to keep blacks from voting, then they really will need to jack up the white vote—and especially the old white vote—in a huge way to be competitive in 2016 and beyond. Well, they’re not going to do that by mailing out Lawrence Welk CDs. They’re going to run heavily divisive and racialized campaigns, worse than we’ve ever seen out of Nixon or anyone. Their only hope of victory will be to make a prophet of Trende—that is, reduce the Democrats’ share of the white vote to something in the mid- to low-30 percent range. That probably can’t happen, but there’s only one way it might. Run the most racially inflamed campaign imaginable.

That’s the near-term future we’re staring at. We can take satisfaction in the fact that it’s bad for them, but unfortunately, it’s not so good for the country.

Delusional Jeb Bush Claims There is No Negative Bush Baggage for 2016 Run

The saying used to be that of the Bush brothers, Jeb Bush was the smart brother and George W. was - well we all fond out what the Chimperator was and "smart" wasn't one of the descriptions that appropriately attached to him.  Cretin, religious nut case on a crusade, war criminal, etc., etc., yes, but never ever smart.  Now, Jeb Bush is proving that perhaps he is just as stupid as his brother after all.  How?  He is claiming that should he run for president in 2016, he will not be hobbled by any negative baggage from his brother's disastrous regime.  Never mind that current a number of presidential historians are ranking George W. Bush as one of the worse presidents in the history of the country.  And never mind that the Chimperator knowingly took America to war in Iraq on false pretenses and  outright lies.  Raw Story looks at Jeb Bush's incredible denail of reality.  Here are highlights:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) is insisting that his famous family name will not hurt him at all if he decides to run for president in 2016.

Fox News host Chris Wallace pointed out to Bush on Sunday that his brother, George W. Bush, had been “somewhat unpopular” when he left office in 2009.

“Do you think there is any Bush baggage?” Wallace wondered. “Do you think that would be a problem?”

“No,” the former Florida governor replied. “I don’t think there’s any Bush baggage at all. I love my brother, I’m proud of his accomplishments, I love my dad, I am proud to be a Bush.”

“And if I run for president, it’s not because of something in my DNA that compels me to do it. It would be that it’s the right thing to do for my family, that the conditions are right and that I have something to offer.”

According to a 2009 CBS News/New York Times poll, former president George W. Bush left office with an approval rating of 22 percent, the lowest approval since the Gallup began asking the question 70 years earlier.

Given Jeb Bush's apparent total detachment from objective reality, he is obviously the perfect candidate for a party out of touch with reality and a majority of the American electorate.

Why the GOP War on Democracy Must be Stopped

This blog has looked at the Republican effort to subvert the Electoral College in several posts, but  many readers still underestimate the danger this effort poses.  If successful, thanks to previously gerrymandered districts, majority rule would simply no longer matter.  A future president could win the White House even though his/her opponent won millions of more votes.  Democracy in effect would be dead in America.  What makes the situation even more frightening is that the party pushing for this disingenuously crafted de facto revolution is the party of racism, greed, religious extremism and open bigotry against millions of Americans.  It is the most serious threat to democracy as I have known it in my lifetime.  America now has wealthy disparities worthy of a banana republic of old.  If the GOP succeeds our system of government will also reflect the rigged elections of the former banana republics.  One can only hope that American wake up to the threat and begin their assault on the GOP immediately, beginning in states like Virginia which have elections this year.  The bastards MUST be voted out of office.  They are literally a threat to democracy.  A piece in Daily Kos quantifies the threat we are now facing.  Here are highlights:

Republicans can't win national elections anymore, having lost the popular vote in five of the last six, and with demographics shifts moving solidly against them, rather than try to better represent the will of the American electorate, they're instead going to try to break the system so that the will of the American electorate no longer matters. And it would be perfectly legal, because we choose our presidents through the Electoral College, and there are very few rules about how the electors are allocated. Make no mistake: This is a war on the very concept of democracy and republic. This is a war on the very nature of our system of governance. If it succeeds, it will tear this country apart.

Last week, while much of the country was focused on President Obama's second inauguration, or was distracted by a three-day weekend, a quiet coup by Virginia state Senate Republicans disappeared a Democratic state Senate seat. Virginia's upper house is evenly split, but with Sen. Henry L. Marsh III in Washington for the presidential inauguration, the Republicans used his absence and a party line vote to approve a new redistricting plan that eliminates a Democratic Senate seat, thus giving themselves a likely more permanent majority, beginning in 2015. But that was only the beginning of what they want to do. Virginia's Republicans have an even more cynical plan for 2016:

A Republican-backed bill that would end Virginia's winner-takes-all method of apportioning its 13 electoral votes in presidential elections cleared its first legislative hurdle Wednesday.

How would the new system work?

The bill would apportion electors by congressional district to the candidate who wins each of the state's 11 districts. The candidate who carries a majority of the districts would also win the two electors not tied to congressional districts.

And what would it have meant, last November?

Last fall, President Barack Obama carried Virginia for the second election in a row, making him the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win Virginia in back-to-back presidential elections. For his victories, he received all 13 of the state's electoral votes.Under (the Republican sponsor's) revision, Obama would have received only four Virginia electoral votes last year while Republican Mitt Romney would have received nine.

President Obama won Virginia by 149,298 votes, or 3.88 percent, yet under this new Republican plan he would have won less than half of Virginia's electoral votes. Whatever you want to call it, that is not democracy, it is not the will of the people, and it is antithetical to every precept by which representative government is supposed to work.
Think about what it would do to this country, and what it would tell the rest of the world. President Obama won the national popular vote by close to 5 million votes, but if the Republican plan had been in effect Mitt Romney might now be president. No matter your political allegiance, if you believe in such basic concepts as democracy and representative government and will of the people and fair elections, such a plan should leave you not just angry but infuriated and aghast. Unless this effort is buried, it should be the issue and the the story, because nothing even approaches it in importance. Every political issue is by it trumped, because it would trump every issue, and in countless cases countermand what the people of this nation want done on the issues.

Unless this effort is buried, all elected Democrats must understand and act on the reality that Republicans with this effort are proving they are neither responsible nor responsive, and that their every pretense of patriotism and honor is nothing but a lie. The danger of this effort cannot be overstated. And if it is allowed to happen, it is a certainty that if on election night 2016 a Republican has by these rigged rules stolen the presidency despite losing the popular vote by millions, the traditional media will shrug it off, just as they shrugged off the later proved stolen election of 2000. But this would be so blatant that even the traditional media's best efforts wouldn't be able to obfuscate it. It would tear the country apart, as every person of principle and conscience awakened to the reality that the dreams and ideals of democracy and republic were dead. But it would be too late. It would be legal, even though the rule of law itself no longer would have any basis in popular consensus.

The time to speak out is now. This can only succeed if done quietly, in the shadows. Already, Florida Republican leaders are backing away from the idea, and the more Americans hear about it, the more they will be outraged by it. Regardless of partisan affiliations, you can be sure that the vast majority of Americans still has a basic sense of fairness, and a respect for the ideals by which this country is supposed to work. The time for Democratic leaders to speak out is now. The time for Republican leaders to be forced to take public stands for or against representative government is now. All Americans of conscience and integrity must stand up and be heard, or anything good and just about the American system of government will fall and be silenced.

Hillary Clinton Strikes Back at Amnesia Burdened GOP Senators

Apparently worried that Hillary Clinton may run for president in 2016 and whip the GOP's ass, in a hearing before Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican senators went out of their way to try to bloody Hillary Clinton.  In the process, however, these disingenuous GOP senators displayed shocking levels of amnesia in terms of GOP lies and dropped balls under the watch of Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  For those who need to be reminded of GOP misdeeds, let us not forget (i) Bush/Cheney's failure to stop the 9-11 attacks even though intelligence reports existed that warned of the attacks and (ii) the deliberate lies that Bush/Cheney used to drag America into the fiasco known as the Iraq War, a war that took over 4,000 American lives and help create the nations burgeoning budget deficit.  And if the security of American embassies and consulates is really an issue as GOP senators pretended, lets not forget the $300+ million cut from the State Department budget by the GOP controlled House of Representatives.  The Daily Beast looks at Hillary's counter attack on lame and disingenuous GOP senators.  Here are some highlights:

Throughout the hearing Wednesday, Clinton was often poised, marshaling the complex facts of the government assessment and investigation of the incident with flair. In her opening statement, she got a little choked up, recalling the events that killed Ambassador Stevens. 

In a back and forth with Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, Clinton’s voice rose slightly when asked why the American people were not told what the diplomatic security officers knew at the time of the attack—that it wasn’t a spontaneous protest tied to an anti-Islam film.

Clinton responded, “With all due respect, the fact is, we had four dead Americans. Was it because there was a protest or was it because there were guys who went out for a walk one night who decided they would kill some Americans?” she asked. “What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and to do everything we can to make sure it never happens again.”

In her testimony, Clinton made the point that her top priority in those first days after the attacks was to figure out how to keep U.S. diplomats safe. She said the State Department didn’t want to interfere with the FBI investigation or question diplomatic-security officers who were witnesses to a crime scene. She explained that on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 she was dealing with protests at U.S. embassies throughout the Muslim world.

But she was adamant that there was no cover-up. The closest Clinton came to voicing contrition for the public statements about Benghazi after the attack was when she faulted the administration for not explaining how unclear the picture was on the evening of the attack. “I understand trying to figure out what was going on and why were we told this, that, and the other,” she told Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona. “I can only assure you, as the information came to light, we tried to share it, but that took some time.”

Clinton also responded to questions about last week’s hostage crisis in Algeria, including reports suggesting that some of the Benghazi attackers may have participated. Clinton said she could not confirm those reports. “It’s coming from the Algerian government related to some of the terrorists who they took alive. We don’t have anything to confirm it yet,” she said.

What the GOP senators sought to do today goes hand in hand with the repeated lie that Barack Obama is a big spender when in fact, the most explosive increases in spending over the last 15 years occurred under Bush/Cheney, not the Obama administration.  Like their Christofascist masters, the GOP senators seem incapable of telling the truth.

  

More GOP Insanity: Santorum Planning 2016 Presidential Run

If nothing Republican Party is consistent: consistently insane and out of touch with both voters and objective reality.  Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum is already gearing up for another presidential run in 2016.  The irony, of course, is that in many ways Santorum personifies what is wrong with today's GOP and its growing alienation of younger voters, women and non-whites.  Yet there remain Kool-Aid drinkers who continue to support Santorum rather that strap him in a straight jacket and take him away to the mental ward.   The New Civil Rights Movement looks at Santorum's unhinged efforts to prepare for 2016 - a move that will only help Democrats and those in support of the LGBT civil rights movement.  Here are highlights: 

Rick Santorum is already planning and organizing his campaign for the Republican 2016 presidential election season. Santorum, who lost badly this year, ran on a platform of religious anti-gay and anti-immigrant hate — exactly the positions that some in the GOP are now just starting to realize hurt Mitt Romney‘s chances, however small they were, of winning the White House.

Santorum is a questionable candidate among younger voters, women, the LGBT community, the African American community, the Hispanic community, and other minorities, and his abrasive and condescending demeanor doesn’t help either. By 2016, America will be so over the Rick Santorums they’ll have to find another country to try to rule.

“A leading evangelical leader who is close to Santorum and asked not to be identified, told The Christian Post on Wednesday that Santorum is ‘organizing and making all the necessary preparations’ for another run in the 2016 Republican primary,” the Christian Post reports: “Rick’s getting ready organized and is not going to be behind the eight-ball when it comes to fundraising and building a grassroots organization,” the anonymous source said. “I think you’ll see and hear a lot from Rick in the next 12 months.” 

Last week, Santorum told CNN’s Piers Morgan that “Romney, in my opinion, didn’t do was go out and vigorously defend the beliefs that he said he espoused and didn’t go on the offense.”

“And when you’re playing defense, which is what I believe the campaign was doing and Republicans were doing generally throughout the course of this campaign you’re not going to win.”

“He didn’t make it about those two fundamentally different visions for America,” he said of Obama’s re-election campaign, “and I don’t think we did a very good job either as Republicans pointing out those fundamental differences and what type of freedom we’re talking about.”

What not a single Republican seems to understand is that Hispanics don’t have a problem with the GOP’s not having “a strong message for those folks.” The GOP has had a very strong message for the Hispanic and Latino communities: “self-deport, you illegals.”  Santorum 2016!

Democrats must be thrilled that Santorum will be out actively underscoring the extremism and racism of today's GOP.