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A day after losing another special election in a GOP stronghold, House Republicans pointed fingers at each other and at President Bush, saying that their “brand” has become an “albatross” and warning that their party faces “deep and serious problems” heading into the November elections.

What they didn’t say: how they might fix the crisis they now face.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) called Tuesday night’s special election loss in Mississippi a “wake-up call” for Republicans, but that’s what he said about the Republicans’ special election loss in Louisiana last week, too. Boehner said Republicans “have to do a better job” if they’re going to avoid an electoral bloodbath in November, but he also said he had “no preconceived ideas” about what that meant.

In a conference call with reporters Wednesday afternoon, Cole, who has been criticized for trying to “nationalize” local House races by tying Democratic candidates to Sen. Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said that his party’s problems went “beyond campaign tactics.”

“A large segment of the American public doesn’t have confidence in the Republican Party to deal with the issues in front of us,” Cole said. “What we have to do is look in the mirror a bit and ask how we lost our way.”

After a closed-door session with members in the basement of the Capitol, Davis stomped his foot on the concrete beneath him and declared: “This is the floor — and we’re underneath it.”

In a scathing 20-page memo to his colleagues, Davis said that Republicans face their worst political environment since Watergate, one that is “far more toxic than the fall of 2006, when we lost 30 seats (and our majority).” He called special election losses in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi “canaries in the coal mine, warning of far greater losses in the fall, if steps are not taken to remedy the current climate.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10371.html

• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is working to raise $40 million to help its Capitol Hill allies; the labor unions are vowing to spend $400 million this cycle.

• In 2006, candidates who captured open House seats spent an average of about $1 million for an easy win (more than 60 percent) and about $2.5 million for a relatively close one, according to the Campaign Finance Institute. House Republicans have $7 million in the bank to help defend 30 open seats this cycle, and not a single one can be considered easy after Tuesday’s Mississippi upset.

• Fundraising-challenged Senate Republicans have long relied on the Republican National Committee to bail out their candidates. This year, Arizona Sen. John McCain has already laid claim to all of the central committee’s cash to boost his financially strapped presidential campaign. There will be no help in the wings.

“This may prove to be one of the worst cycles for Republicans in modern history,” said Anthony Corrado, a nonpartisan campaign finance expert. “The landscape is against them, voter opinion is against them, and they don’t have major reasons for the party faithful to give, particularly given the prospects of Democratic gains in both the House and Senate.”

Of the top five best-financed independent groups, or 527s, that will run ads or conduct voter turnout operations in November, only one is run by Republicans. Of the total giving to those groups, 41 percent of the money comes from labor unions, 36 percent from individuals and just 2 percent from corporations.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10369.html

For the past 18 months, ever since the 2006 elections, congressional Republicans have been like a hospital patient trying to convince visitors that he is not really all that sick: a bit under the weather; actually feel better than I sound; should be up and about any day; thanks for asking.

Suddenly — belatedly — all pretense is gone.

The Republican defeat in Tuesday’s special election in Mississippi, in a deeply conservative district where, in an average year, Democrats cannot even compete, was a clear sign that the GOP has the political equivalent of cancer that has spread throughout the body. Many House GOP operatives are privately predicting that the party could easily lose up to 20 seats this fall.

Combined with the 30 seats that the GOP lost in 2006, that would leave the party facing a 70-vote deficit against Democrats in the House — a state of powerlessness reminiscent of Republicans’ long wilderness years in the 1960s and ’70s.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10366.html

Libertarian voters played a big role in swinging control of Congress to the Democrats in 2006. Could Mr. Obama hold them against Arizona Sen. John McCain? While base voters still voted along party lines in 2006, Republicans lost big among independents. According to an analysis that David Kirby and I did, libertarians may be the largest bloc of such independent-minded swing voters. Particularly in states with high concentrations of libertarians such as Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, and New Hampshire, disaffected libertarians likely cost Republicans House and Senate seats.

David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, is the author of The Politics of Freedom and co-author of "The Libertarian Vote."
More by David Boaz

Recent polls suggest that 10 to 20 percent of Americans hold "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" or libertarian views. Indeed, libertarians are a bigger share of the electorate than the much-discussed "soccer moms," and they are increasingly a swing vote.

Libertarian voters have often given 70 percent or more of their votes to Republican candidates, including George W. Bush in 2000. But after six years of war, wiretapping and welfare-state social spending, libertarians gave barely half their votes to Republican candidates in 2006. The swing was even larger in Senate races. It seems clear that a lot of the centrist, moderate, and independent voters who swung to the Democrats in 2006 were libertarian leaners.

The presidential campaign this year has been bleak for libertarian voters, with full slates of big-government liberals and big-government conservatives.

Mr. McCain is also the leading supporter of the war in Iraq, which is unpopular with independent and libertarian voters. And he has a long record of hostility to the First Amendment, from campaign finance regulation to regulating blogs to banning flag desecration.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9364

Childers immediately rejected the notion that Obama had endorsed his candidacy, a sign that even some Democrats may be worried about being too closely associated to the frontrunner in the race for the Democratic nomination.
"Sen. Obama hasn't endorsed my candidacy," Childers said after the ad began to air. "I have not been in contact with his campaign, nor has he been in contact with mine."
The NRCC later said those comments "not only [said] a lot about himself, but also about the toxicity an Obama candidacy can bring to Democratic campaigns down-ballot." CNN

Why I, A Lifelong Republican, Support Barack Obama
February 4, 2008

Partisan politics don’t appeal to me. I don’t think I am alone. Proverbs 13:12a says that “Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” and I think there are a whole bunch of us out here tired of being heartsick. We want to hope again, believe that we can be more than we are, while also stopping along the way to lend a hand to the oppressed and the overlooked. We want to dream again, listen to a president whose words send chills down the backs of our legs, whose speeches make us cry and remember who we are. In the end, our country is not simply an intellectual exercise in democracy, but rather an enterprise in which we invest our hearts, souls and minds. It’s time to fall in love with America again, and we’re looking for someone to light the spark. Obama’s the one.

http://musingmom.wordpress.com/2008/02/04/
why-i-a-lifelong-republican-support-barack-obama/

Susan Eisenhower is more than just another disappointed Republican. She is also Ike's granddaughter and a dedicated member of the party who has urged her fellow Republicans in the past to stick with the GOP. But now Eisenhower, who runs an international consulting firm, is endorsing Barack Obama. She has no plans to officially leave the Republican Party. But in Eisenhower's view, Obama is the only candidate who can build a national consensus on the issues most important to her—energy, global warming, an aging population and America's standing in the world.

"Barack Obama will really be in a singular position to attract moderate Republicans," she told NEWSWEEK. "I wanted to do what many people did for my grandfather in 1952. He was hugely aided in his quest for the presidency by Democrats for Eisenhower. There's a long and fine tradition of crossover voters."

Eisenhower is one of a small but symbolically powerful group of what Obama recently called "Obamacans"—disaffected Republicans who have drifted away from their party just as Eisenhower Democrats did and, more recently, Reagan Democrats in the 1980s. They include lifelong Republican Tricia Moseley, a former staffer for the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, the one-time segregationist from South Carolina. Now a high-school teacher, Moseley says she was attracted to Obama's positions on education and the economy.

Former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough, who anchors MSNBC's "Morning Joe," says many conservative friends—including Bush officials and evangelical Christians—sent him enthusiastic e-mails after seeing Obama's post-election speeches in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. "He doesn't attack Republicans, he doesn't attack whites and he never seems to draw these dividing lines that Bill Clinton [does]," Scarborough told NEWSWEEK.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/107476

Introducing ......the Obamicans.

The Republican party has moved so far right that old school Republicans really have no place there anymore.

Are they, dare I say, running out of gas ?

From Deirdre Walsh
CNN Congressional Producer

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Republicans in the House of Representatives blocked a $163 billion war funding bill Thursday, dealing a surprising defeat to Democrats who had expected to pass the measure.

The vote was 141-149, with 132 voting "present" -- a way of registering dissatisfaction with the bill without having to go on record as having opposed funding the troops.

House Democrats are calling the Republican move a political stunt. The funding is expected to be restored when the Senate takes up the measure next week.

with 132 voting "present"

A Democratic aide said the House Democratic leadership had decided not to contest any Republican effort to derail the bill, leaving the GOP members of Congress to explain their positions.

"They either voted to delay funding for the troops or voted against the war,the aide said.

The vote was 141-149, with 132 voting "present" -- a way of registering dissatisfaction with the bill without having to go on record as having opposed funding the troops. House Democrats are calling the Republican move a political stunt.

A measure that would give veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan full four-year scholarships, dubbed a new G.I. Bill, also passed by a vote of 266-166, short of the two-thirds needed to override the promised veto by President Bush.

The added benefits would cost $52 billion over 10 years and would be paid for by a 0.5 percent surtax on individuals making more than $500,000 a year and couples making more than $1 million.

Calling the new tax a "patriot premium," Democrats argued that it was time for wealthy Americans to share in the sacrifice that troops are making in Iraq.

Florida Republican Ginny Brown-Waite charged that the Democrats were playing politics with the troops and that the new tax would only damage the sluggish economy. But in the end, 32 Republicans voted with Democrats on the measure, passing it 256-166 -- short of a veto-proof majority, however.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/15/house.war.funding/index.html

Saudi Arabia has rejected a plea from President Bush to increase oil production, a top White House aide said today.

Rocketing fuel: Diesel fuel has been in tight supply for the last several months following a cold winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and as the popularity of diesel cars grows in Europe and the developing world.

With diesel prices outpacing gasoline, refiners in the United States have been ramping up production of diesel and sending it abroad. That has displaced some domestic gasoline production, helping push gas prices higher.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/16/markets/oil/index.htm?cnn=yes

Oil rises as Saudi Arabia nixes Bush plea

The OPEC nation rejects calls from the President to increase production as oil reaches a new record near $128 a barrel.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Oil prices surged nearly $3, reaching a record high of almost $128 a barrel Friday as Saudi Arabia rejected President Bush's call to increase production.

According to the White House, Saudia Arabia doesn't see enough demand to increase production.

President Bush met with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on Friday as part of his Middle East tour to appeal for greater production to help quell crippling fuel prices.

- Ibid