Word: gop
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...ballot measures such as Proposition 13 (property taxes), Proposition 187 (illegal immigration) and Proposition 8 (gay marriage). Conservative Anglos, a minority of the state's population as a whole, are vocal and continue to exert power beyond their census numbers because they vote in relatively higher percentages, and because GOP votes are required to pass a budget or enact new taxes under the state's unusual two- thirds majority requirements...
...Wednesday and Thursday cajoling her members on the phone, in meetings, on the House floor during votes, even following a member into the Speaker's lobby - the domain of the press - to make her case in full view of a pack of reporters. She also met with seven GOP moderates on Wednesday, extending a rare hand across the aisle. Even former Vice President Al Gore was recruited to work the phones from Tennessee. Obama made the case himself for the bill on Thursday, telling reporters, "This is going to be a close vote because of misinformation out there that there...
...Sanford, in fact, has always been more effective as a conservative icon than as a conservative governor, a figure popular with the Republican Party's red-meat base but in chronic conflict with South Carolina's GOP-controlled legislature. When TIME ranked him in 2005 as one of the nation's worst state chief executives, it was because his fiscal hard-liner theatrics (carrying piglets under each arm to the door of the state legislature to protest pork-barrel spending) rarely yielded real results. In too many instances, his conservative principles thwarted the economic development of a poor Southern state...
...latest showcase involved President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package. Sanford led a group of GOP governors, including Alaska's Sarah Palin and Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, assailing it as fiscal suicide. Sanford even likened it to the hyper-inflationary policies of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and he spent the past spring fighting to reject a quarter of South Carolina's $2.8 billion share of the funds unless he could use it to reduce the state's debt...
...Whatever happens, Sanford's bizarre tango - coming less than a week after another GOP presidential hopeful, Nevada Senator John Ensign, admitted having an extramarital affair with a staffer - is yet another scandalous blow to his party's family-values image. Democrats, as former President Clinton and more recently former North Carolina Senator John Edwards proved, are hardly immune to these disasters. But Sanford, a conservative Christian, has long portrayed himself as a model family man devoted to his wife of 20 years and their four sons. While he asked for his state's forgiveness, his hypocrisy and that of many...