By RP Staff, on Thu May 26, 2011 at 2:00 PM ET As we previewed a few hours ago, the RP, contributing RP Lisa Borders, and a bipartisan group of national leaders, committed to promoting civility and bipartisan solutions to the nation’s toughest problems, have launched No Labels Radio.
No Labels is a new grassroots movement of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are united in the belief that we do not have to give up our labels, merely put them aside to do what’s best for America. No Labels Radio will offer a weekly dose of news and interviews with the policymakers who are working to find bipartisan answers to the otherwise intractable problems our country faces.
TUNE INTO THE LIVE BROADCAST BY CLICKING HERE.
By RP Staff, on Thu May 26, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET The RP is definitely not just sitting around in his post-politics second act. If it weren’t enough for him to be practicing law, advising a clean energy firm, hosting The Recovering Politician, and, most recently, blogging for The Huffington Post, the RP now has a new gig as a radio talk show host.
Starting today at 2 PM EDT, and then reappearing every Thursday at the same time, the RP — along with contributing RP Lisa Borders and others — is serving as a co-host for No Labels Radio.
No Labels is a new grassroots movement of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are united in the belief that we do not have to give up our labels, merely put them aside to do what’s best for America. No Labels Radio will offer a weekly dose of news and interviews with the policymakers who are working to find bipartisan answers to the otherwise intractable problems our country faces.
If you are interested in the organization, click here to learn about how you can help promote civility and reduce the hyper-partisan influences on public policy.
And regardless of your political preferences, please join the RP on No Labels Radio at 2:00 PM EDT today and every subsequent Thursday.
Check out a preview here:
By Stephanie Doctrow, RP Staff, on Tue May 24, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET A few weeks after the surprising news of Osama Bin Laden’s death, data from multiple polls reveals that Americans’ primary source of news coverage was television. [Poynter Institute]
Newsweek discusses how American media outlets have coped with a particularly difficult May news cycle in the face of major budget cuts. [Newsweek]
Donald Trump’s fake presidential bid, by the numbers: [Good Magazine]
Twitter is in more trouble. British soccer star Ryan Giggs is suing the social media site for revealing his affair with a British model, despite an injunction that prevented the information from being printed in traditional media. [Wired]
A small group of Christians said The Rapture would happen on May 21, 2011. Here’s how the media and American culture built the “end of the world” up into a cultural phenomenon: [Associated Press]
By Artur Davis, on Thu May 19, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET  By my count, six Republicans of differing degrees of stature have passed on running for President. Some of the hesitation is rooted in jitters about entering the national stage prematurely (Pence, Thune, maybe Christie, if he is chemically capable of jitters); some of it is based on a cold assessment that Barack Obama plus a billion dollar war-chest is too high a barrier in the fall, and that playing kingpin in the primaries is an appealing enough way to spend the winter and spring of 2012.
As for the remainders–Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Jon Huntsman seem the most serious and the most plausible, with Mitch Daniels and Sarah Palin still keeping their own counsel. I offer four questions to keep in mind for the growing peanut gallery observing this race:
(1) Can Romney win a nomination when his signature accomplishment is anathema to his party? In the early part of the last decade, when a centrist record seemed essential to winning general elections, Romney’s stewardship of healthcare reform in Massachusetts seemed ideal pre-positioning for an eventual presidential run. Today, “Romneycare” is why a candidate who just raised 10 million dollars in a day, and who leads in the polls, is still so vulnerable. Roughly 80% of Republicans not only oppose the national legislation that copies major portions of Romney’s work, they loathe it and desperately desire its repeal. Romney’s efforts to explain away the comparison are so far a babble and greater scrutiny of his plan will only make matters worse.
Romney’s hope is that electability, the fact that he alone polls within hailing distance of Obama, will outweigh his albatross. His problem is that in primaries, electability is a vessel for blank slates, not candidates with a freight train of positions. Nor is Bill Clinton ‘s “centrist campaign” in 92 much of a model. Clinton’s defense of the death penalty and his then vague promises to revamp welfare were hardly signature issues that year; in contrast, the fate of Obama’s healthcare law will be front and center, especially in the GOP electorate. The hard reality for Romney: Gerald Ford is the last candidate who won a nomination with his party opposed to major chunks of his record and that did not end well.
(2)  Is there a “silent majority” in the Republican Party? Jon Huntsman and to a degree, Mitch Daniels, think there is and that it is very different from the cultural conservative base that the term was coined to describe. The reason that Huntsman conceives that a social moderate who served in the Obama Administration can win, and the reason that Daniels call for a “truce” on abortion and gay rights, is that in their estimation there is a sleeping center in the Republican Party that distrusts the “culture wars”. There is limited circumstantial evidence for the premise: national polls for the better part of a decade have shown unexpected Republican sympathies for abortion rights and gay rights. But primaries and early caucuses contain more than their share of evangelical leaning conservatives who remain embracing of a traditional moral agenda.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Handicapping the Republican Primary
By Stephanie Doctrow, RP Staff, on Tue May 17, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET Read this before you watch the next episode of 60 Minutes. Steve Kroft discusses why he broke major journalism rules when interviewing President Obama about Osama bin Laden’s death. [Poynter Institute]
Just how effective is it to look at President Obama compared to his predecessors? [NY Times]
Another crazy use for Twitter: assembling a government? The five parties in Northern Ireland’s government took turns Friday picking the government departments they want to lead and announced their decisions via social media. [Associated Press]
Yes, Disney just trademarked “Seal Team 6.” Expect to see an action movie soon? [Time]
In case you missed it: Saturday Night Live makes fun of Wolf Blitzer and President Obama at the same time. [Hulu]
By Paul Hodes, on Fri May 13, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET  I first ran for office as an ordinary citizen from New Hampshire in 2004. My hope when I ran was to help change the course of the nation and to effectively represent the people of my state with independence, integrity and imagination. I was fortunate to meet those goals before joining the ranks of The Recovering Politician.
I was part of a historic new majority in the House of Representatives and was chosen by my peers as President of the Freshman Class of 2006. I served on the Oversight and Government reform committee and the Financial Services committee during a period of unprecedented activity.
 As a freshman congressman from the first in the nation primary state, I was courted by Presidential candidates. I believed that the wave of change that swept me into office was not finished and that business as usual in Washington needed some shaking up. Against all odds, I decided to support a long-shot candidate for whom change was a theme, Barack Obama. I had the honor of serving as a national co-chair for the President’s first campaign.
The wave elections of 2006 and 2008 were countered by the tsunami of 2010 when I decided not to run for my congressional seat; instead I ran, unsuccessfully, for the United States Senate. Politics has a lot to do with timing and luck. You can’t surf a tsunami. As a musician I should know a bit about timing. Suffice it to say, I had quite a while to confront the idea of political afterlife while I ran for the Senate, a tremendous experience nonetheless.
Read the rest of…
Paul Hodes: On the Way to Recovery & Renewal
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu May 12, 2011 at 2:15 PM ET The political blogosphere is abuzz with the news of family strife within a bi-partisan family dynasty: the separation of former California Governator Arnold Schwartzenegger and Kennedy scion Maria Shriver.
The mainstream news and political media want to know why, and they’re making their best guesses: Read here and here and here and here.
My response?
It’s None of Your Freaking Business!
Yes, he’s an international movie star who served two terms as Governor of our nation’s most populous state. Sure, she was a national news broadcaster, and a member of the most influential and popular modern American political dynasty. Of course, a long time ago, they both voluntarily submitted themselves to public scrutiny.
But as I argued a few weeks ago concerning three-year-old Trigg Palin, I believe that every one of us — even the richest, most powerful, and most famous — have a discrete zone of privacy which the responsible press should not disturb. And as long as their separation did not involve actions that were criminal or a violation of the public trust while Arnold was in office, the mainstream media should leave them and their family alone.
Of course, I am a passionate First Amendment advocate, and I certainly don’t believe in laws to restrict such reporting. But I believe that the Fourth Estate bears a special responsibility to the public to draw ethical lines every so often and not cross them. This is one of those occasions.
Let’s leave this story where it belongs: to trashy mags like TMZ and OK and The Hollywood Gossip.
The rest of us should leave Ah-nuld and Maria alone.
What say you, RP nation?
By Jeff Smith, on Wed May 11, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET Last week I wrote about congressional redistricting, and the messy inter- and intra-party hostility it engenders – and is currently sparking in my home state of Missouri.
Congressman Russ Carnahan And as hypothesized, more hostility developed in Missouri following the Legislature’s override of Governor Nixon’s veto of the map. Because Missouri lost a seat during the apportionment process, the new map divides up Congressman Russ Carnahan’s district among four other districts, and Rep. Carnahan has been lashing out – first a few weeks ago at his fellow Missouri Democrat Rep. Lacy Clay, and then a few days ago at another Missouri Dem, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, for going along with the decimation of his district. Of course, he is more privately seething at the four Democratic members of the state House who defected and voted for the override.
Does anyone really think Rep. Carnahan would be working to kill the map if the Republican Legislature had proposed to divide Rep. Clay’s district four ways and force him to run in an overwhelmingly white district? If you do, you’ve probably never seen Jane Elliot’s famed Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes experiment – and you don’t know much about human nature. Instincts for self-preservation are strong, power intoxicating, and race often wielded as a tool to gain and maintain it.
***
Now, surely Rep. Carnahan is angry at the Republicans for drawing these maps, but that anger is mild: he had to have expected it from them. Carnahan’s more visceral fury has been directed at his co-partisans.
Read the rest of…
Jeff Smith: Dirty Tricks: On Race, Redistricting, and Stalking Horses
By Stephanie Doctrow, RP Staff, on Tue May 10, 2011 at 12:45 PM ET How did the royal family keep Kate Middleton’s wedding dress a secret from those pesky reporters? [Time]
In 2005, reporter Chris Hondros‘ haunting photos of Iraqi children who lost their parents in the war changed the way the world felt about civilian casualties. This week he returned to Iraq to show the children the photos that changed the war. [Poynter Institute]
The New Yorker chronicles the life and death of reality TV (to those who argue that reality TV is still great, have you watched Jersey Shore?). [New Yorker]
Blogging changes the way we communicate, from life to death. Read the story of one blogger’s postmortem farewell. [CNN]
By RP Staff, on Mon May 9, 2011 at 11:30 AM ET We are proud to announce that our own contributing RP, Jeff Smith, has been asked to join “The Arena,” Politico’s daily debate with policymakers and opinion shapers.
Jeff’s first piece was in response to the group’s discussion of the state of the economy:
Using the absolute number of jobs created as a gauge of employment trends can be deceiving for a couple simple reasons.
1) The economy needs to add somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. So the first couple hundred thousand jobs added generally won’t reduce unemployment because of a growing denominator…
Click here to read the rest.
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