GOP indecision on 2012 may give Rick Perry a ‘huge opening’
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on July 13th, 2011 4:35 am by HL
GOP indecision on 2012 may give Rick Perry a ‘huge opening’
As he weighs whether to jump in to the 2012 Republican presidential race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been dialing GOP establishment bigwigs across the country. In phone calls that sometimes stretch more than a half-hour, Perry asks the same questions:
Is the door open for a new candidate? And how wide is it open?
The answers: most definitely, and plenty wide.
House GOP fails to turn off new standards for light bulbs that some see as issue of freedom
WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Tuesday failed to stop the enactment of new energy-saving standards for light bulbs they portrayed as yet another example of big government interfering in people’s lives.
The GOP bill to overturn the standards set to go into effect next year fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage. The vote was 233-193.
For many Republicans, those newfangled curly fluorescent light bulbs were the last straw, pushed by an overreaching government that’s forcing people to buy health insurance, prodding them to get more fuel-efficient cars and sticking its nose into too many places.
Pawlenty, Bachmann, Romney and the Iowa marriage pledge
Last week, the Family Leader, a conservative pro-family group in Iowa, asked Republican presidential candidates to sign a pledge endorsing traditional marriage and other social issues. Michele Bachmann was the first to say she would sign it. Mitt Romney has decided not to. Tim Pawlenty hasn’t announced his decision.
That tells you something important about the battle for the Republican presidential nomination and the box in which Pawlenty now finds himself. Two months ago, he believed he was in a strong position to break out and become the principal alternative to front-runner Romney. Today he is trying to figure out how to prevent Bachmann from blocking his path.
Fed divided over more stimulus, meeting minutes show
Federal Reserve officials lack a strong consensus over what they should do next in setting the nation’s monetary policy, according to minutes of their last policy meeting, showing a mix of views as to why the U.S. economy remains weak and what, if anything, they should do about it.
At a June 21-22 meeting, some leaders of the central bank argued that if there were no progress reducing unemployment, the Fed should consider further expanding the money supply — which in practice would mean a third round of “quantitative easing,” or buying hundreds of billions of dollars in Treasury bonds.
