Pawlenty Drops Out of Presidential Race

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-08-14-08-48-42

Despite finishing 3rd in the Ames Straw Poll, Pawlenty has quit the race a full 15 months before the election. Where will his supporters go now? Perry? Romney?

 

ya i guess he put a ton of money and effort into iowa so anything short of a win was pretty disappointing for him. also, his fight with bachmann during the debates didn't do either of them any favors.

 

ah rick perry, the new 'conservative' front runner is a former democrat and al gore supporter. the right is really good at picking big government neo-cons and liberals to run the show. the radio talk show hosts spout out the talking points and everyone falls in line. it was like clockwork all on the same day all the radio hosts were like perry this and perry that, sickening.

 

Just wait until people start learning about the guy. He's running on "job creation" in Texas (though a majority of those jobs are minimum wage), plus he's a batshit crazy Christian. Oh, and he proposed that Texas secede from the union. Yep, that sounds like presidential material to me

 

so Perry, Romney, and Bachman huh?

who wins the nomination?
who beats Obama?

Anybody else on the horizon?

 

ron paul is the only person that could possibly beat obama. the reason is he is the only candidate that is willing to end all the wars in the middle east and cut military spending something obama wont even do. how ironic the only peace candidate is a republican?

ending the wars would get him votes from independents and maybe even some democrats which no other republican candidate can touch.

 

four more years
some of you I know don't wanna see that happen and it's gonna happen. there is not someone in the race that can beat him and if there is someone who can he/she has to emerge within the next few weeks or it's gonna be too late. I want to see it happen

Lemme explain

first if you haven't figured it oout by now I am a Black guy, I both voted for Obama because he was
black and not because he was Black I found he was the best candidate.My state is the great state of Illinois.

as the campaign approached my state I had 3 candidates
Mr. Edwards
his agenda was to build up the poor I wasn't poor but if he could build an economy that supported thoses guys and lift them up then the economy would be such that I could climb up a little more I know it's selfish but if poor was 25then the middle had to be 50+, I was just at 45 at the time I could stand to mover up

My second candidate was Bill's wife. They painted her as a superbitch, but I just knew that she would employ the same philosophy as her husband iif not the same people and pour economy would adopt the same tract

Mr McCain was another seemed to me that he did what he thought was best regardless of affiliation. I didn't always agree but at least there was some conviction

and of coourse there was Mr Obama I didn't expect miricles but everybodoy was holding his jock so I tought that if he got in with a majority in congress he'd get some shit done

by the time it got to me here in Illinois Edwards dropped out, Hillary proved faker than silicone tities, and McCain made a clumsy but obvious move toward the center.

Under the circumstanses I think he's done an ok job and would like to see him finish, just like we gave Bush a chance to finish his MiddleEast crap. I am so far prepared to vote for him again so he can finish what he started and since it would be his last term do his legacy stuff and maybe set us on the right path.

 

As a Minnesotan, I'm pleased. Pawlenty is an opportunist, which I guess is just another word for politician. He did speed up his efforts to soundly fuck up our state once he banked hard right after deciding to run for president. I'm glad that he decided to run, though, because if he hadn't, he'd likely still be governor and also be in control of both houses of the legislature and we'd currently be competing with Wisconsin in a race to the bottom.

I just hope that someone completely fucking nuts gets the nomination and that Obama doesn't take a huge enough dump for them to win. I might have a hard time not voting for Paul if he gets the nod, though. Us Minnesotans seem to tend to choose unique, unpredictable candidates over known candidates if the known candidate sucks enough.

 

from @glenn greenwald:

this is a real problem. any idiot the republicans run will be taken entirely seriously by the political class because system legitimacy depends on it. so the vacuous positions of a perry or right libertarian loopiness of ron paul (who has the advantage of at least talking about some of the problems we face, but he does it in a mad way and would be an absolute disaster as president--a kind of collective hara kiri) will become "serious" until the arent any more and the newspeak machinery will then say x or y never was serious. the press has almost (almost) abdicated its critical functions in the name of some specious notion of objectivity. you know the "objectivity" that came into being post-limbaugh that features 3 paragraphs about a 500 thousand person march against the war in iraq (remember those?) and almost the same amount of space given the 12 conservatives who show up to chant yay war!....

we have always been at war with eastasia.

 

The 2014 Senate race in MN should be interesting, with Pawlenty and Bachmann potentially battling to take on Al Franken.

 

I'm pretty sure Bachmann's support in MN is confined mostly to her district. Pawlenty might be able to credibly challenge Franken, though he left a bad taste in a lot of folks' mouths by moving hard right for hisnlast two years in office. I may be biased since I voted for him, but aside from a few instances of suckery, Franken has turned out to be a pretty good senator.