Gop

Having put us through one torturous, mind-binding fiasco, here's hoping that the Republican Party has learned how to keep the tail from wagging the dog. Al Funk, Timonium

There is a saying that "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. " That seems to sum up the Republican approach to all issues. The latest example is the GOP-controlled House, which just passed a budget bill that bans the use of military facilities for gay marriages. Gay discrimination in the military has ended. Gay marriage is legal is many states. Yet the Republicans have used a religious approach to everything and now have applied it the budget. There is medical condition in which fluid builds up in the wrist, causing swelling that looks like a small knot on the skin.

We Democrats welcome the Republican voters and their candidates back into the fire. It has been lonely being the only active party, solving problems. Now remember, you don't have the luxury of "no," and you are getting a second chance to take back "your" country. There will be no more opportunities for the Republican voters or their party if your representatives drop the ball. The pressure is off us Democrats. Now we can sit back and ask you and your party why things are not going well.

If money is the mother's milk of politics, then America's big corporations are Big Mama, and Big Baby is the Republican Party suckling at the enormous bosom of business. Democrats, meanwhile, are abandoned brats scrounging for nourishment wherever they can find it. During the long decades the Democrats held a solid majority in Congress, campaign donations from the corporate world were spread around between incumbents in both parties -- not evenly, but at least the D's got their share.

Your editorial "O'Malley bucks Republican tide" (Nov. 3) correctly points out that Republicans should have done better locally this election to ride the national wave. But it misses a bright spot. Republican John Leopold has provided just the blueprint you said is lacking in the state. He won his election decisively to a second term as Anne Arundel County executive, and he did it with a simple game plan: govern effectively. Couple that with another simple formula: Practice fiscal discipline and do the work necessary to personally connect with voters instead of relying on attack ads and surrogates.

As an ardent supporter of former Republican Sen. Charles McC. Mathias Jr., it saddens me to observe what has happened to his Grand Old Party. It has made a grand terrible bargain with the devil. The equation is easy to see. They don't want to raise taxes on people earning over $1 million a year, which they say is critically important for the average American. To achieve this goal, they say, we must accept some things we may not like from a vocal minority of the party: Limiting women's access to contraception; limiting women's ability to make decisions regarding their health; and limiting men and women's right to marry whomever they wish.

They may not be the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but the 2012 GOP presidential primary debates still let the public see the ideas and ethics of those who would rule us. Maybe television is a good thing after all. William Akers, Windsor

Perhaps the best comment on all the Republicans who have been criticizing everything the Democrats have been trying to do since even before the election of Barack Obama is a phrase from that fine representative of the Grand Old Party, Spiro Agnew. Those critics are the contemporary version of Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism." Sidney Krome, Reisterstown

The old definition of the Yiddish word, "chutzpah," is the son who murders his parents and at his trial pleads for mercy because he is an orphan. The modern definition of chutzpah is for the Republicans, who held America hostage over extending the debt limit, to blame President Obama for the downgrading of Standard and Poor's credit rating of America from AAA to AA+. Leon Reinstein, Baltimore

The GOP presidential primary revolts me. It is so full of scummy negativism. Each night the networks news programs thrust clips of Newt Gingrich throwing a jab at Mitt Romney, or vice versa, into our living rooms. Neither has any appreciable platform for what they would do as our next president. Most issues are simply swept under the carpet. Why? Because it's so much easier just to denigrate one's opponent. Both Messrs. Romney and Gingrich have the money to invest in small armies of people whose sole responsibilities are to dig up personal dirt on the other.

Republican lawmakers opened Monday's special session with a roar of protest, denouncing Gov. Martin O'Malley as a liar and vowing to fight the majority Democrats' plans to raise income taxes and shift part of the cost of teacher pensions to the counties. Several dozen GOP senators and delegates held a news conference on the first floor of the State House and directed much of their fire at the occupant of the office on the floor above. House Minority Leader Anthony J. O'Donnell, a Calvert County Republican, told of hearing on the radio on the way  to Annapolis that lawmakers were coming into session to cut an additional $600 million in spending -- an interpretation he said had come from the governor's office.

Campaign 2012 is now joined. The darts heretofore traded between the Obama and Romney camps now have extra-sharp tips. And it's going to stay this way through to Nov. 2. Most pundits predict a "razor close" and "particularly ugly" campaign. I concur. So, which storyline is a political junkie to follow in light of the 24/7 coverage given to this race for the ages? Which subplot is most instructive with regard to the ultimate outcome? A few thoughts for your consideration: •Youth.

The Republican sleight-of-hand machine is back in business ("Obama targets divisive issues," April 29). Instead of talking about the economy (for which they have no solution) or energy (no solution there, either) or global warming (GOP: "What's that"?), they want to talk about same-sex marriage, Planned Parenthood and any other "social issues" they can find to distract people's attention from the real problems facing this country. Repeated lies, negative advertising - these are the tried-and-true methods that Republicans (privately)

There's a tendency among some to shorthand the ongoing federal budget debate as between Republicans who want to reduce government spending and Democrats who don't. This isn't really the case, as recent actions in the House have demonstrated. On Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee took a close look at President Barack Obama's proposed $525.4 billion defense spending plan and decided that simply wasn't enough. The GOP-controlled committee voted to authorize nearly $4 billion more than what the Pentagon had requested for 2013.

The hit men of the tea party can carve another notch in their collective gun belts this week with the ouster of Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar, a 35-year veteran of the U.S. Senate. Whatever mojo the conservative firebrands had in the 2010 GOP primaries, when they ousted party moderates right and left, is apparently still working for them. Longtime incumbents are not easily toppled, but Mr. Lugar's vulnerabilities were well-documented prior to Tuesday's Indiana primary: The six-term senator is 80 years old, has lived in Northern Virginia for decades (despite using a 1970s-era address for voting purposes)

The economic and political tumult in Europe has continued this week with anti-incumbent votes in France and Greece as well as signs of disaffection in Italy, Great Britain and Germany. The electorate is angry, and the election results have raised renewed concerns about whether Europe's most debt-burdened countries will stick with their quest toward fiscal discipline. On this side of the Atlantic, it's tempting to view the uproar in purely parochial terms - out of concern that the U.S. economy will continue to be encumbered by the eurozone crisis.

There's several things wrong with Jack Kinstlinger's letter "GOP digs its political grave" (Readers respond, Dec. 22). I'm sure it's convenient for Mr. Kinstlinger to assume that a bill that is now wildly unpopular will one day be wildly popular. That's within his rights. Rewriting history, however, is not. In fact, the 1935 Social Security bill was supported by the vast majority of Republicans in both the House and the Senate, which is a far cry from the unanimous Republican opposition to the current bill.

With President Barack Obama's victory in the passage of "Obamacare," I've heard a number of Republicans say, "The Democrats have won the battle but lost the war." Really? Prior to that, as Mr. Obama lost his footing on the utopian pedestal he was idealistically elevated upon, I heard other Republicans say, "He's a one-term president like Jimmy Carter." These have indeed been tough days and weeks for the Obama White House. That said, myopic comments like those can only be music to the ears of battle-tested Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod.

The last thing you'd think Maryland's Republican party needs would be a nasty internecine fight, but that's what it got at its annual convention over the weekend. Rather than unity in the effort to overcome a massive voter registration disadvantage, chronic fundraising problems and a frequent lack of competitive candidates for state-wide offices, the party became focused on a divisive race for an obscure position: national committeewoman. In the end, Audrey Scott, a GOP stalwart who has held a variety of elected and appointed posts, including a stint as state Republican chairwoman, was defeated by a heretofore little known, 37-year-old Baltimore woman, Nicolee Ambrose.

SOLOMONS — A conservative activist running an insurgent candidacy against the Maryland Republican establishment seized the post of national committeewoman at the state GOP convention Saturday, beating longtime party stalwart Audrey E. Scott. The victory by Nicolee Ambrose of Baltimore represents a generational changing of the guard for Maryland Republicans. Her win came after a bitterly fought internal struggle that played out in blogs and on Facebook. The race pitted Scott, a 76-year-old pillar of Maryland Republican politics for decades, against a 37-year-old activist with experience in national presidential campaigns.