Chad’s Morning Brief: The GOP Isn’t Dead Yet, Obama Meets With MSNBC’s Sharpton and Maddow at The White House, & More

Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of December 6, 2012. Give us your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11 am.

1. The GOP Isn't Dead (link)

Do the Republicans need to move to the center or do they just need to find the right candidate with a good message? David Carney says it's all about the candidate and message.

We lost young people, we lost Hispanics, so we lost hope I guess. What tripe. One campaign loss does not call for an extreme makeover of our movement . Conservatives need to assess what went right and what went wrong in this past election. It was not that we did not have the proper app, nor was it that we did not pander to collections of potential voters or just that the ads were ineffective and in many case unintelligible, nor was it Hurricanes named Isaac or Sandy.

 

Let's start with what matters. Candidates matter. The exit polling showed that on the question of "who cares more about people like me" one candidate got 81 percent and the other got 19 percent Guess which is which and guess who won. Enough said.

 

Message matters. Obama did not win because he had a better economic plan or because people thought the country was headed in the right direction or because they thought Governor Romney was too conservative. President Obama was re-elected because he spoke to the economic concerns of voters in a meaningful way. He talked of tax cuts for the middle class, balancing the federal budget, and creating jobs and opportunity. The fact that during his four years in office he hasn't done any of these things and now less than a month after the election is asking for additional "stimulus" spending just proves how good of a politician the president is.

You can read the entire article by clicking on the link above. Carney brings up some good points I think. As I have been saying for a while now, the Republicans have done a terrible job with messaging and branding the GOP. Mitt Romney wasn't the greatest of candidates and we all knew that. 2016 has a brighter future but if Republicans can't sell the message, it won't matter who runs.

2. MSNBC Love Fest at the White House (link)

Presidents seek advice from those they trust and those that they believe have soon sound advice on key issues. So what does it say about President Obama when he summons Al Sharpton, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell to the White House to discuss fiscal policy? According to the Weekly Standard:

President Barack Obama met with several MSNBC hosts this afternoon at the White House to discuss tax rates, according to Huffington Post reporter Jennifer Bendery. The reporter wondered if an "MSNBC love fest" was going on at the White House.

Scary.

3. Recording Interrogations? (link)

Senator Rodney Ellis of Houston will introduce a bill in the upcoming Texas Legislative Session that would require police to record interrogations. According to the Texas Tribune:

Some advocates argue that such false confessions could be prevented if police interrogations were recorded. SB 87 by state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, would police require police to record the questioning of suspects in cases involving murder, kidnapping, human trafficking and some sex crimes.

 

“Recording an interrogation is the most accurate means of preserving what happened in an interrogation room and what a suspect actually said,” Ellis said in an email.

 

Texas law already requires in most cases that investigators tape the confession itself. But in the wake of a handful of exonerations involving false confessions, defense attorneys and other advocates worry that without a recording of the entire interrogation, they may never know how a false confession occurred. Nineteen other states and the District of Columbia already require such recordings.

 

While some prosecutors and police support the idea, others worry that it could be used to unfairly target law enforcement officers and that it would make it harder to convince a jury that a confession was valid in the absence of a recording. The bill includes a variety of exceptions to the rule, allowing for spontaneously-given confessions and faulty equipment, and advocates hope those will make police officers comfortable that the recording requirement would not undermine their work.

Thoughts?

Other Top Stories:

How Americans Feel About the Fiscal Cliff

Boehner Says the Rich Will Pay More Taxes

The Battle of Paying for Roads

Blame the Men, Not the Guns

5 Odd Places to Buy Gifts

These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com.