Politics

It's amazing how Romney and his establishment abused Ron Paul supporters, and by doing so created the kind of angry protest he was ostensibly trying to avoid. I don't think he was trying to avoid it at all. I think he wanted this confrontation as a show of power. The rumor mill suggests Paul delegates will walk out during Romney's speech. More on the thuggery.

"Properly elected Ron Paul delegates were stripped from us. And when a motion was made to amend the Credential Committee's report, it was ignored. Morton Blackwell, a longtime conservative activist and RNC Rules Committee expert, found himself indefinitely detained — along with the rest of the Virginia delegation. The RNC bus driver responsible for transporting delegates somehow 'got lost' for well over an hour until a critical Rules Committee meeting adjourned.  [The new rules adopted by that committee] are designed to make the Republican Party a top-down organization and strip power away from state parties and grassroots activists of every stripe. All efforts to vote down these onerous rules were ignored . . . "

This is the same Chicago-style politics conservatives criticize when used by Obama and his cronies.

Peggy Noonan reports it's a quiet convention. In other words, Romney still doesn't energize anybody.

The Republican party has been such a miserable failure at the national level since Gingrich managed to put a check on Clinton that one of its propagandists wants us to look to the states to understand the party as if all the disasters they brought about at the federal level don't matter.