Whatever it takes...It's all about me.

It’s me, Jeff. And I have something to say.

At Protein Wisdom Jeff Goldstein has something to say.

Anyone

Colorado GOP Convention, Colorado Springs, April 9, 2016

Citizen Pete writes,

"These are our friends and fellow grassroots activists, Tea Party members and long-time Republicans, county chairs and first-time caucus attendees, young and old, very conservative and not-as-conservative, all gathered together to move our country forward, select senate candidates for the June primary election, and to elect delegates to the GOP National Convention, who will help to select our next president.

These are the Patriotic Americans that the Donald Trump Campaign compared to Nazis, using Gestapo tactics. These are the delegates that Donald Trump totally ignored until a week before the convention. This is the crowd who would have loved to hear a Trump speech, even if a majority were supporting his opponent, Senator Ted Cruz. But Donald Trump couldn't be bothered to show up. Instead, after he lost all of the Colorado delegates to Senator Ted Cruz, the Donald directed his staff and supporters to whine, and to make false accusations about a delegate selection process he didn't bother to understand, or choose to participate in."

This week, Trump was back in New York, among the people who share his values, complaining that the whole Colorado delegate selection process was a "totally corrupt rigged system" designed by the GOP establishment to prevent him from attaining his Trump-Given Right to be nominated for president.

Well, I've got some news for you Mr. Trump, and for all of the media and pundits who bought into your bogus narrative. It's going to backfire, big time.

You see, Colorado politics and the process of selecting candidates and delegates is all about showing up, starting at your local precinct caucus (held on March 1). It's a truly grassroots process, and it's been done that way for over 100 years.

Anyone, and I mean ANYONE, who is registered Republican, can show up and be part of a local precinct caucus. A precinct is the smallest political delineation for elections and holding party meetings. In an urban area it might encompass several blocks, basically your larger neighborhood. In rural Colorado it might include all or a large portion of a county. Typically, a precinct contains a few to several hundred GOP voters.

Anyone, and I mean ANYONE, can be selected by their fellow caucus attendees to be a delegate to their county and congressional district assemblies, and yes, even to the state GOP convention. Anyone. It was estimated that about 40 percent of the over 4,000 delegates and alternates at this year's convention were new to the process. Some of them drove six or more hours to get there, and stayed in motels at their own expense.

And here is the little-known fact that all the pundits and press have failed to report:

Anyone, and I mean ANYONE, who is a registered Republican, could have filled out a form and been listed as a delegate to the National GOP Convention. Anyone. You didn't even have to attend your caucus - the form was posted online at your state or county GOP website. On that form you had to designate either that you were supporting a particular candidate or were running as un-pledged. Most listed themselves as un-pledged.

That is precisely why there were over 600 national delegate candidates listed at the state convention, and about an equal number of candidates combined at the seven congressional district assemblies. Out of that thousand or so candidates, only 13 would be selected at the state convention, and 21 at the congressional assemblies (3 each), plus an equal number of alternate delegates, to go to the national convention in Cleveland. Add the Colorado GOP Chairman, and one man and one woman delegate to the RNC, and you have the total of 37 delegates frequently mentioned in the press.

Note that, only one, let me repeat that, ONLY ONE out of that 37 is part of the GOP establishment, the Colorado GOP Chairman, Steve House. All of the others were elected in a process that began with electing delegates to the state convention and the congressional district meetings at the local precinct caucuses. Delegates were also selected to attend county assemblies where candidates for local office, and the state legislature are selected through votes.

That is grassroots, baby. No other way to describe it.

Unless you are the Donald. Then you describe it as the party establishment disenfranchising potential Trump delegates. Give me a break.

If any potential Trump voters were "disenfranchised", it was because of the failure of the Trump Team to reach out and educate their supporters about the process of electing delegates. No one told them to show up. Or maybe there just aren't that many Trump supporters in Colorado. Out of 22 people at my own caucus, not one supported Trump.

Read more here.

Distraction

Ross Kaminsky is a person who digs for facts. Here is his take at The American Spectator on Donald Trump's whining:

Fury as Colorado has no primary or caucus!” shrieked a scandalized Drudge Report on Monday morning. That would be news to the roughly 60,000 Republicans who caucused across the state on March 1, many of whom attended Saturday’s GOP State Assembly.

Matt Drudge was channeling the phony indignation of his chosen candidate as Donald Trump spent the evening on Twitter and the morning on Fox News complaining that Colorado’s delegate selection process was “a crooked deal.”

The real crooked deal, and perhaps the reason that Trump and friends are so frenzied in waving around the shiny object of faux corruption, is Donald Trump’s so-called charity: According to an analysis by the Washington Post released Sunday night, 2,900 of the 4,844 reported charitable contributions by Mr. Trump from 2009 through 2014 were free rounds of golf at his golf courses. Others were such things as “175 free hotel stays, 165 free meals and 11 gift certificates to spas.”

Higher-valued “charity” included conservation easements granted on property he owned — likely to have been conditions of receiving permits for land development. According to the Post, not a single item of charity in the “93-page document compiled by the Trump campaign” is a “cash gift from Trump himself.”

At the risk of playing into Mr. Trump’s distraction from the faux-charity bombshell, let’s return to the Centennial State:
Despite the rules of the contest having been set months ago and available for all to read and understand, and despite the votes of thousands of previously elected delegates on Saturday, Mr. Trump has the cojones to say on national television that in Colorado “there was no voting. I didn’t go out there to make a speech or anything…”

In fact, Donald Trump was invited to speak to the roughly 7,000 party faithful at the assembly but declined, having a surrogate, Stephen Miller, do so in his place, while Ted Cruz came to Colorado Springs and continued his domination of Mr. Trump in circumstances in which political organization and base-motivating have been determinative. During the event, Mr. Miller said to the assembled delegates that no state has treated the Trump campaign as fairly as Colorado has, under the leadership of State Republican Party Chairman Steve House.

Mr. Trump seems so incapable of developing tactics around relatively easy-to-understand political rules that one wonders how he has succeeded in real estate development. Perhaps the difference is that Trump can’t actually corrupt and manipulate the Republican Party the way he wishes he could (I guess the GOP doesn’t need a conservation easement) — and the way he has succeeding in corrupting and manipulating the media. (See Fox’s Steve Doocy mindlessly parroting Trump, “It’s rigged!”)

Which brings me back to the reprehensible Monday performance of the Drudge Report.

Consider the four headlines “above the fold” on Drudge’s web page just after 8 AM Eastern Time:

SHOCK: Republicans cancel presidential election in CO...
Voters burn registrations in protest...
1 MILLION REPUBLICANS SIDELINED...
PAPER: GOP made big mistake...

Let’s consider the relevance and accuracy of this “news” aggregation, taking each story in turn:

The first link is a wildly misleading rewording of a headline in the 7-month-old article it links to, which reported that the state GOP changed its rules for the caucus to remove a binding presidential straw poll and instead elect unbound delegates to the state convention.

Drudge’s second headline implies that large numbers of Colorado Republicans were so disgusted by this weekend’s proceedings that there was a mass burning of voter registration forms. Instead the video links to one bitter man burning a form that he claims is some sort of GOP registration. However, the man in the video is the same man who posted another anti-GOP video which appears to be, to put it plainly, a pack of lies. Even if this man were genuine in his anger and behavior, a single person lighting a single piece of paper on fire hardly qualifies for Drudge’s plural headline, “Voters burn registrations in protest.”

But wait, there’s more!

Republicans were not “sidelined” in Colorado any more than they are in the dozen or so other states and territories that utilize caucuses, nor are Republicans sidelined any more than Democrats are due to a state’s choice to have a caucus. It is fair to note that Colorado’s rule change away from a binding straw poll diminished caucus participation but that was a voluntary choice made by those who could have attended. Anybody registered as a Republican or a Democrat prior to January 4 was eligible to participate in this year’s Colorado caucuses for their respective parties.

And then there’s Drudge’s final headline which links to another dated Denver Post story, this one an editorial from February in which the paper’s editorial board correctly notes that Colorado’s rules this year did shift some of the delegate selection process into the hands of more active Republicans rather than ordinary caucus-goers. There are items to quibble with in the piece, but the real issue is that Messrs. Trump and Drudge are obviously complaining only because they lost.

They didn’t just lose. They got utterly walloped. Skunked. Shut out. Aced. Wiped off the state’s electoral map. But it wasn’t because the game was rigged or because Ted Cruz cheated. It was because Trump simply didn’t play.

Trump didn’t come to Colorado; Cruz did. Trump fired his local staffer just days before the assembly, giving his replacement an impossible organizational task. Trump’s staff printed delegate guides with errors (compounded by a printing error on the ballot itself, which was not the Trump campaign’s fault). The Cruz campaign created a website to aid supporters; Trump’s didn’t. And so it goes.

The complaining by Donald “Sore loser” Trump and his pet propagandist Matt Drudge about what happened in Colorado might be worth a moment of consideration if there were important differences between the results here and those from other caucuses, the majority of which Trump also lost. But there aren’t.

Was Utah’s process — in which Cruz, as in Colorado, won every single delegate — a “crooked deal”? Or Kansas’s? Or any other caucus state? The answer to each is a resounding no, yet in those cases Mr. Trump was (at least relatively) silent. So why the furor over Colorado?

Donald Trump is squawking about his Colorado loss more than any other is to distract consumers of social media and gullible Fox News couch-sitters, perhaps the biggest donors of free air time to the phone-it-in campaign of The Donald, from the devastating revelation that Donald Trump’s “millions of dollars” in charity over the last several years may not have involved opening his own wallet a single time.

Read more here.

The GOP is changing

Darryl Glenn

The editorial board of the Colorado Springs Gazette covered this weekend's state convention there. Here are some of their observations:

The convention was a showcase of diversity among candidates and a long parade of white, black, Indian, straight, gay, male and female speakers in positions of power. Nothing resembled the party's old established white male image.

Two black men and one female running for the Senate spoke with eloquence about liberating individuals to ascend culturally, professionally and economically. Republicans have seldom sounded so connected with, or concerned about, middle-class and low-income Americans.

A chunk of the show was moderated by state GOP Vice Chairman Derrick Wilburn, a black man from Colorado Springs who founded American Conservatives of Color. Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman talked about her unending efforts to represent average people of Colorado, not just powerful state officials. The president of Colorado Jewish Republicans spoke about the Torah's teaching that government social spending is not legitimate charity.

The crowd warmly welcomed a representative of Log Cabin Republicans, a gay organization. Hispanic senatorial candidate Jerry Natividad, like Hispanic Cruz, drove home a message that conservative taxing and regulatory policies would help minorities and others mired in low-wage work.

Republicans are breaking their outdated mold, as seen Friday and Saturday in Colorado Springs. Democrats should take heed. They aren't facing grandpa's old GOP this year.

Read more here.

h/t Kathy Peterson