Posts Tagged ‘party’
Mexican election could return longtime ruling party to power
Last Updated on Sunday, 1 July 2012 12:08 Written by admin Sunday, 1 July 2012 12:08
Lot to love here RT @McCollumAshley: .@mattbuchanan talking 5 years of the iPhone on CNN. http://t.co/HGBXGCKf
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Police: Teen beaten, stomped at party – CNN International
Last Updated on Monday, 8 November 2010 05:04 Written by admin Monday, 8 November 2010 05:04
Police: Teen beaten, stomped at party
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- They are accused of killing an 18-year-old at a house party in Atlanta early Sunday
- The attack on Bobby Maurice Tillman was reportedly unprovoked
- 57 witnesses were brought in for questioning
For more on this story, go to CNN affiliate WSB.
(CNN) — The four Georgia teens accused in the beating death of a fifth teen at a house party appeared in court on murder charges Monday morning.
Horace Damon Coleman, 19, Emanuel Benjamin Boykins, 18, Quantez Devonta Mallory, 18, and Tracen Franklin, 19, face one felony murder count each, according to Lt. Bruce Ferguson with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office.
They are accused of killing Bobby Maurice Tillman, 18, at a house party in metro Atlanta early Sunday. Officials said the party got out of control.
A judge at their initial hearing ordered no bail for the suspects until they can speak with an attorney.
All but Franklin asked for court-appointed counsel. His mother told the judge she had already hired an attorney for her son.
Before the attack, one of the teens reportedly told his friends he was going to hit the next person he saw, Ferguson said.
Sheriff Phil Miller told CNN affiliate WSB the assault on Tillman was unprovoked. He was a “little guy, 18 years old, 5-foot-6, weighed 125 pounds,” Miller said about the victim.
“And they beat him up and stomped him and killed him,” he added.
Police arrived on scene early Sunday. They were called by the mother of the girl who had hosted the party, Ferguson said. Police took 57 witnesses in for questioning.
Ed Stephens, who lives near where the party took place, watched the brutal attack from his bedroom window, WSB reported.
“I just thought he was hurt. I never thought that his life was ending,” Stephens said.
CNN’s Chuck Johnston and Tristan Smith contributed to this report.
Tags: beaten, international, party, police, stomped, teen | Posted under U.S. News | No Comments
Tea party complicated GOP Senate math – The Associated Press
Last Updated on Saturday, 6 November 2010 05:04 Written by admin Saturday, 6 November 2010 05:04
Tea party complicated GOP Senate math
WASHINGTON (AP) — Tea party-backed candidates proved both a help and a hindrance to Republicans in the midterm elections, injecting enthusiasm into campaigns around the country but losing Senate seats held by Democrats in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada that the GOP once had big hopes of capturing.
Republican leaders and strategists are muttering that the same tea party activists who elevated speaker-to-be John Boehner and Republicans to power in the House simultaneously hobbled the GOP’s outside shot of taking control of the Senate. Tea partiers largely spurned establishment candidates in the GOP primaries and helped nominate Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Ken Buck in Colorado.
All three lost on Tuesday.
“You let the voters decide,” the nominees, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said Friday. “It’s a risk. Voting is a risk.”
Republicans won Senate races in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That put them within three seats of a 50-50 split in the upper chamber. Vice President Joe Biden would have broken the tie and allowed Democrats to retain their majority.
If they could have managed an even split, however, Republicans would have pushed hard to switch some lawmakers, with the likely target Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who votes with the Democrats but strongly supported Republican John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid. Others considered Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota a possibility.
All those what-ifs fell apart, though, in three states.
In Delaware, tea party activists rallied behind Christine O’Donnell over nine-term moderate Republican Rep. Mike Castle. Party leaders tried to crush O’Donnell; the state party chairman said she could not be elected dogcatcher, much less a senator.
Their efforts proved unsuccessful, voters picked O’Donnell and Republican officials in Washington largely abandoned the race, leaving O’Donnell with no campaign infrastructure or organization. Her campaign struggled with revelations about financial troubles and old TV footage in which she spoke out against masturbation and talked about dabbling in witchcraft as a teenager.
On Friday, she blamed Washington Republicans for her loss to Democrat Chris Coons.
“In just the six weeks that we had, if we didn’t have that network, that machine, mechanism to plug into like other candidates did, we had to spend the time rebuilding that, establishing the grass-roots network to get out the vote,” she told NBC’s “Today” show. “And also defending the accusations that even my own party was putting out. So it was too heavy of a lift for one entity.”
In Nevada, voters nominated Angle as the Republican challenger to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had to overcome low approval ratings and the state’s high unemployment. They rejected state lawmaker Sue Lowden, who was considered a more polished candidate and was a state party chairwoman — too much of an establishment credential for voters looking for something new.
Angle was dogged by missteps. She told a group of Hispanic students they looked Asian, drew ridicule for avoiding reporters and suggested a “militant terrorist situation” has allowed Islamic religious law to take hold in some American cities.
“My thoughts are these, first of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas, are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don’t know how that happened in the United States,” she said. “It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.”
Dearborn has a thriving Muslim community. It was not immediately clear why Angle singled out Frankford, a former town that was annexed into Dallas around 1975.
Unlike in Delaware, national Republicans and their allies stood with Angle and waged a bruising campaign that came up short against Reid.
In Colorado, Republicans nominated tea party favorite Ken Buck over Lt. Gov. Jane Norton. Republicans hoped Norton would have an easy race against Sen. Michael Bennet, appointed to the seat Ken Salazar vacated when he stepped down to become President Barack Obama’s interior secretary.
“Did they help Ken Buck win the nomination? You bet,” said Colorado Republican Party chairman Dick Wadhams. “Were they responsible for his defeat? Absolutely not.”
Bennet, a former school superintendent, had never been elected statewide and Democrats braced for a tough campaign against Norton, a former Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration official.
Buck, a district attorney, proved an easier opponent. Although he had tea party backing, he also had expressed views that Democrats seized on to peel away enough voters, mostly women who disagreed with his comments on rape and abortion.
While Wadhams said he “can only deal with the reality of what happened,” he also noted voters gave Republicans two new House members — the first time since 1964 that Colorado ousted two Democratic incumbents in the same year — and picked up the state House. They also gave Bennet a narrow 15,000-vote victory out of almost 1.7 million ballots cast.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Tags: Associated, complicated, math, party, Press, Senate | Posted under U.S. News | No Comments
Republicans Credit Tea Party for Gains in Midterm Election – Voice of America
Last Updated on Friday, 5 November 2010 08:04 Written by admin Friday, 5 November 2010 08:04
Photo: AP
Rand Paul, a favorite of the Tea Party movement, waves to supporters after winning election as a Republican to the Senate from Kentucky
The U.S. Republican Party enjoyed a major victory in last Tuesday’s congressional midterm elections, winning back control of the House of Representatives and gaining seats in the Senate. Republicans are giving the conservative Tea Party movement a lot of credit for their success, but political analysts say the Tea Party could turn into a mixed blessing in the months ahead.
The Tea Party is not a political party but more of a grassroots conservative and libertarian movement dedicated to reducing the power and size of the central government in the lives of ordinary Americans.
The Tea Party movement does not have one leader and is made up of hundreds of small activist groups around the country, which in turn helped dozens of Republicans win congressional races on November 2nd.
Among those who benefitted from the Tea Party is the new Senator-elect from Kentucky, Rand Paul. “We’ve come to take our government back,” Paul said.
Paul and other Tea Party favorites like to cite the grassroots nature of the movement, and they in turn have vowed to carry out the Tea Party’s aim of smaller government in Washington.
In addition to Rand Paul, Tea Party activists rallied around winning Republican Senate candidates in Pennsylvania, Utah and Florida, where Republican Marco Rubio emerged victorious in a three-way race.
But in the wake of his victory, Rubio had a message for fellow Republicans in Washington. “This election is not an embrace of the Republican Party,” he said. “It is a second chance to be about principle and values.”
Former Republican Congressman Dick Armey of Texas is one of several national organizers of the Tea Party movement. Armey says Republicans will be held to their campaign promises to cut government spending and taxes and confront President Obama in the months ahead.
“The voters have said to Washington, no, we don’t take instructions from you, we don’t follow your lead. You are not in charge. You are hired hands. We are in charge and yes, we want action, but we want action on our agenda, on America’s agenda,” he said.
Not all Tea Party endorsed candidates succeeded. Republican Senate candidates lost in Nevada and Delaware and experts say that better candidates in those two races might have helped Republicans retake control of the Senate.
Republican leaders have acknowledged the role Tea Party support played in this year’s midterm elections, and at least for now they say they welcome the scrutiny of the Tea Party to make sure they deliver on their campaign promises.
“And Tea Party activists will continue to energize our party and challenge us to follow through on our commitments,” said Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
The influx of new senators with allegiances to the Tea Party movement could complicate McConnell’s job to unite Republican senators on various issues that come before the Senate.
“It is an activist group and they are going to demand that the party pay heed to their agenda,” said Bob Benenson, a senior political analyst for Congressional Quarterly and the Roll Call newspaper. “This is why we voted for you, this is why we worked so hard for you, we want what is coming to us.”
Tea Party activists overwhelmingly supported Republican candidates this year and gave the party new life after big congressional losses in 2006 and 2008.
But pollster John Zogby says the increasing influence of the Tea Party could lead to some congressional splits between Tea Party loyalists and moderate Republicans.
“Their first battle is to define the heart and soul of their party,” he said. “For Republicans, is it the establishment, inside-the-beltway [Washington] Republican Party, or is it the Tea Party? And they have got to decide that.”
Looking ahead, many analysts expect the Tea Party movement to have a big influence on the battle for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2012, with several candidates eager to appeal to a group that has already proven it can mobilize voters.
But University of Virginia expert Larry Sabato says there is a down side to excessive Tea Party influence within the Republican Party. “They are going to try to have a tremendous impact on the Republican side,” he said. “They are going to try to pick the nominee. The problem of course is that the Tea Party is well to the right. It is further to the right than the country, there is simply no question about that.”
Tea Party activists already have in mind several potential presidential contenders for 2012, and at the top of the list are former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and conservative TV talk show host Glenn Beck.
Tags: America, credit, election, gains, midterm, party, Republicans, Voice | Posted under U.S. News | No Comments