The New Hampshire Republican Party has quit "with regret" as a co-sponsor of tomorrow night's nationally televised GOP forum on FOX News.
That, from the Union Leader. The reason being Fox's exclusion of radical libertarian Ron Paul from the debate. As TPM notes,
Bear in mind that Fox News is excluding Paul from the debate, despite the absence of any objective criteria that would shut out Paul and still include some of the other people they're inviting. For example, Paul got 10% of the vote in Iowa, while invited candidate Rudy Giuliani took only 4% and is at about the same place as Paul in New Hampshire polls.
The NH GOP is doing whatever it can to disassociate itself from the national GOP, Bush, and from the scandals relating to the the phone-jamming electoral fraud schemes in 2002. In 2006, Voters rejected both of NH's incumbent Republican members of Congress and Democratic Governor John Lynch sailed into victory.
NH is trending very Democratic and the NH GOP knows that the only route for saving Republican Senator John Sununu in 2008 would be to embrace the grassroots appeal of Ron Paul. Attracting ideological libertarians and the many independent voters in the state is probably the only way to overcome the immensely popular Democratic candidate, Jeanne Shaheen, a former Governor well ahead in the polls over Sununu.
Remember that Sununu, knowing that a well planned media spectacle could change popular opinion about his ties to the Bush administration, was the first Republican in Congress to call for the resignation of Gozales. Shrewd politicians are just as capable of orchestrating this stunt with the Fox News debate though the local party office.