The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People! » Gingrich Grassroots Journalists, Bloggers and Experts capture and report news from around the world. Become a citizen journalist with Toonari Post today! Sat, 15 Mar 2014 19:17:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 The Battle for Money in the 2012 Election Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:00:55 +0000 The battle for money has started, and Republicans and Democrats are already working on their fundraising. In the last two months the Republican Party has collected more money than the Democrat Party, but November is still far away, so things could change during these new few months.

Fundraising is crucial to win an election and President Obama knows it; in the 2008 election, according to the Federal Election Commission, he raised $ 778,642,962. Meanwhile, his opponent John McCain raised $383,913,834.And the result is well known: Barack Obama became President of the United States.

The 2012 electoral campaign is telling  us a complete different story than the 2008 campaign. The Republican Party is raising considerable amounts of money. In June they broke their record, when they announced raising $106 million for Mitt Romney’s campaign and the Republican National Committee. Barack Obama’s campaign has just announced that they raised $71 million in June.

The Democratic Party has indeed faced difficulties in financing the Obama campaign. In May, Mitt Romney raised nearly $77 million, compared to Obama’s $60 million for the same month. It is a complicated scenario for the Democratic Party and if things continue there is a strong possibility the Republicans will end up raising close to one billion dollars for their presidential campaign.

The Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, recently said in an announcement: “If we don’t take this seriously now, we risk finding ourselves at a point where there is too much ground to make up.”

In a recent video, Jim Messina tried to encourage  people to donate. In the video he assured viewers that 1.3 million people have already donated and explained that during the last quarter they had more than 200,000 new donors. Another statistic he gave is that 98% of all donations were $250 or less and that the average donation was about $55. He also expressed that money is needed in order to build the kind of grass roots campaign that they will need in November.

The aim of this video is to prove the support the Democrats have nationwide and to demonstrate that their money comes from the people, who give little money but at the end it sums a lot, and that is were the Democrat Party strength comes from. Messina criticized the way the Republican Party is raising money and said that “last week, the Republican Party filed a court brief, asking the corporations be allowed to contribute directly to campaigns” to prove that, rather than the people, the Republican Party donors are the big corporations.

The Democratic Convention is near and they are looking for funds to host it, with their goal being $37 million. In the 2008 Convention they raised $61 million, but this time around they are having problems raising enough. This is unlike the Republicans, who do not seem to have any trouble  in raising their $55 million goal for their Convention in Tampa.

Image Courtesy of  Gage Skidmore

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Santorum’s Anti-Science Agenda Should Concern Republicans Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:08 +0000 In 1988 the scientific community established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a forum for sharing their concerns about documented – and disturbing – changes in global weather patterns. By 1997 the evidence of climate change was so convincing that 191 nations signed the Kyoto Protocols, aimed at slowing the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Fast forward to 2012. NASA has produced clear evidence that atmospheric CO2 levels are higher than they’ve been in 400,000 years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency in charge of the National Weather Service, states that there is no longer any doubt that human activity is changing the chemical characteristics of the Earth’s atmosphere. The national science academies of the world’s leading economies, including the U.S., Germany, Russia, and China, have declared that climate change is real and urged their governments to take immediate, aggressive action.

And then there’s Rick Santorum.

Along the campaign trail in Colorado, Ohio, and Michigan Santorum has declared climate change to be a hoax cooked up by the Obama administration to scare people about oil exploration. Spending less money on oil exploration means more money for the federal government, Santorum said, which means more government control over peoples’ lives.

He doesn’t explain how the government would make money by allowing less oil exploration, or how any of that would equate to more control over peoples’ lives. Nor is it important that concerns about global warming began long before Obama entered politics, or that America’s most prestigious scientific institutions are urging immediate action to reduce carbon emissions. Somehow it’s all connected, and in the alternative reality of Tea Party politics, the more elaborate and mysterious the conspiracy, the more plausible it becomes.

Romney and Gingrich have also questioned climate change, but it’s clear they are just pandering to conservative audiences. Both have acknowledged the problem during their political careers and will likely do so again when the primaries are over. And neither man has accused the country’s scientific establishment of being involved in a vast conspiracy to deprive the American people of their freedom.

Not Rick Santorum. His strident rejection of any scientific evidence that conflicts with his religious or social views has helped make him the new champion of the far right, which is why he is surging in the polls. But if he wins the nomination based on his anti-science agenda, he’ll be in no position to back down during the presidential campaign.

Intellectual curiosity is not a quality that American voters prize in their leaders, as the election of George Bush clearly demonstrated. But they do expect them to respect and support America’s scientific establishment, not label them as political enemies. Questioning the severity and timing of climate change is one thing; but where’s Santorum’s evidence that it’s a hoax?

Right now, Santorum is preaching to the Tea Party choir, and they’re cheering him on. But in a presidential campaign, the national media won’t be so kind. Republicans should be deeply concerned.


Image Courtesy of

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