Month: November 2009

Anyone planning to read the Sarah Palin book should bookmark these sites. Both the A.P. and Media Matters have printed lists of the inaccuracies and falsehoods in Going Rogue: An American Life. Media Matters is maintaining theirs as an ongoing work in progress, since drilling down through Sarah’s muddled speech and thought is, in the words of the former defense secretary, a long, hard slog.

In addition to the well-publicized and seemingly false slams at the John McCain team, Palin can’t keep the facts straight concerning her travel (and the bills involved), cap and trade legislation, whether Obama wanted to kill fetuses that survived botched abortions, her support of hunting wolves by shooting them from helicopters and small planes, the disconnect between Palin’s opinion of stimulus funds and Alaska’s dependence on federal subsidies, and so much more.

Of course, most people who read the book will accept Sarah’s version of the events without question, no matter how much evidence is provided to the contrary.

State Attorney General Beau Biden, the vice president’s son, has pulled ahead in the 2010 Delaware U.S. Senate campaign. U.S. Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.), whose votes have taken a partisan turn, is going down in flames. A new poll shows Biden leading Castle by 5 points, after trailing him by 21 points last April. What’s changed?

According to the pollster, the shift “may be a result of negative publicity [Castle] received in the state after casting a ‘no’ vote for President Obama’s health care reform bill in the U.S. Congress.” Castle, who has thrived as a moderate Republican in an increasingly Democratic state, has been casting more partisan votes — against the stimulus package, for the Stupak amendment — that have been well-reported in Delaware.

Respondents were asked if the vote were held today, whether they would choose Biden, the Democrat, or Castle, the Republican. Forty-five percent took Biden compared to 40 percent who selected Castle. Another six percent wanted someone else, and 8 percent were undecided. In April, 2009, 34 percent picked Biden while 55 percent said Castle.

David Corn, Mother Jones Washington reporter, brought reality back to Republican arguments about Afghanistan on ABC’s This Week. After conservatives George Will and David Brooks went over their thoughts on Obama’s distaste with the task of figuring out how to go forward in the country, saying he’s not showing the proper enthusiasm for war, Corn bottom-lined it.

Brooks: Listen, I think it’s worth doing. I think it would be a moral atrocity if we left and the Taliban took over parts of the country. I think it would fundamentally destabilize Pakistan if that happened. Nonetheless, when I look at the White House, I think what I see and what you hear in the president’s voice when you hear about the meetings are a couple of things. Tremendous ambivalence about this. You also hear, “Maybe we can’t afford it,” as if this is something I’m competing with.

I don’t think you should go to war if this is one of your priorities that maybe you don’t think you can afford. I don’t think you should go to war with a minimalist mentality. I don’t think you should go to war if you are just looking to get out. We went through the Donald Rumsfeld regime — that was trying to do war on the cheap. I [don’t] think you go to war if the president believes there’s no reason to do it. And if he doesn’t believe that, I think probably we shouldn’t do it.

Corn: But Obama’s not “going to war,” he has this war, that’s the problem. For six, seven, eight years, the Bush-Cheney administration addressed none of these issues, including the Karzai government’s ineptitude. And so now he’s stuck with no good choices, and you can’t start it over again. He’s inherited this.

Thank you, David Corn! After he spoke up, PBS’s Gwen Ifill took up the point, and described a cartoon that showed Obama selecting from four flip charts. One said, “Bad,” one, “Worse,” one “Horrible,” and one, “Disaster.”

Republicans have already forgotten that it wasn’t Obama’s policies that wrecked the economy. Now they are trying to blame him for Afghanistan. Like Corn, we have to keep reminding them that it’s just not that way.

The Onion has nailed it before but this time, they used a Hitachi 16-gauge, selective trigger, leather-grip nail gun. You need to read the whole thing but here’s how it starts.

ESCONDIDO, CA—Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.

Kyle Mortensen would gladly give his life to protect what he says is the Constitution’s very clear stance against birth control.

“Our very way of life is under siege,” said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. “It’s time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are.”

According to Mortensen—an otherwise mild-mannered husband, father, and small-business owner—the most serious threat to his fanciful version of the 222-year-old Constitution is the attempt by far-left “traitors” to strip it of its religious foundation.

“Right there in the preamble, the authors make their priorities clear: ‘one nation under God,'” said Mortensen, attributing to the Constitution a line from the Pledge of Allegiance, which itself did not include any reference to a deity until 1954. “Well, there’s a reason they put that right at the top.”

Read the rest at The Onion.

Ken Rudin is reporting a bizarre situation in the recent New York 23rd Congressional District race. It began as a three-way race between Republican Dede Scozzafava, Democrat Bill Owens, and Conservative Doug Hoffman, for whom Sarah Palin and Fred Thompson campaigned. Scozzafava dropped out after taking a drumming from fellow Republicans over her reasonable stands on choice and same-sex marriage. Then Owens won. Maybe.

On election night, NY 23 went for Owens over Hoffman by just 5,335 votes…With 93 percent of the vote counted, Hoffman conceded, and Owens was quickly sworn in, on Friday — just in time to cast a what-turned-out-to-be-a-much-needed-vote for the Democrats’ health-care bill on Saturday night.

Now we learn that the vote count in NY 23 is not over. And not only that, the state has yet to certify the election.

The Syracuse Post-Standard’s Mark Weiner reports that a recanvassing of the votes in the 11-county district shows Owens’ lead down to 3,026 votes — 66,698 to 63,672.

And that’s not all. There are still absentee ballots to be counted. John Conklin, the communications director for the New York State Board of Elections says that 10,200 were distributed prior to the election, which includes military and overseas ballots.

Conklin sent a letter to the House Clerk last week, stating that there was no certified winner. But because Owens still had a lead and Hoffman was not challenging the results, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went ahead and had Owens sworn in.

Rudin explains that Hoffman was ahead in the three-way race, and likely only lost because Scozzafava pulled out.

Rob Ryan, the Hoffman campaign spokesman, “said the absentee ballots are likely to favor Hoffman because most were likely mailed before” Scozzafava suspended her campaign:

“For Doug to win, we needed a three-way race,” Ryan said, adding that the campaign’s internal polls showed Hoffman would win with all three candidates.

“Given the majority of these ballots are from a three-way race, we think the ballots are going to break Doug’s way,” Ryan said.

Since Owens was officially sworn in by the time he voted for health care reform, that result will stand, even if Hoffman ends up taking the seat.

Well, it’s official. Carly Fiorina announced last week that she is entering the Senate race in California against Democrat Barbara Boxer.

And — proving that Tea Baggers learned nothing from the debacle they created in last week’s special election in New York, when they drove a liberal Republican out of the race and thus handed the seat to a Democrat for the first time in over 140 years — Fiorina now has a Tea Bagger opponent in the primary election next June.

It gets better. Assemblyman Chuck DeVore is not just a run-of-the-mill Tea Bagger — he is a real whack job with ties to the Birther movement.

Even if Fiorina defeats DeVore in the primary, her chances of beating Boxer next year are, at the risk of understatement, a long shot. That said, she’s a shoo-in compared with DeVore’s chances against Boxer, which range from nil and nada to zippo and zilch.

Fiorina’s chief problem is her record. She’s known nationally and in California mainly for two things:

• She was the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Hewlett-Packard, where she was a vocal advocate of shipping American jobs overseas. She was forced out in 2005 after she merged HP with computer giant Compaq mainly because HP’s stock had dropped over 50 percent during her four-year tenure. After her departure, it was discovered that in an effort to stop board-room leaks she had eavesdropped on board members. In April 2009, Portfolio magazine listed her as one of the 20 worst CEOs of all time.
• After briefly being considered for John McCain’s running mate last year, her performance as a surrogate was so gaffe-ridden that the campaign sidelined her. (Wanna bet they wished they could have handled the actual VP pick the same way?)

The foolishness of DeVore’s gambit is compounded by the fact that it’s not just prospectively a repeat of the NY23 debacle last week, it’s eerily similar to the primary race for California governor in 2002, when right-winger Bill Simon, whose single claim to fame was the fact that his father had been Pres. Nixon’s Treasury Secretary three decades earlie, defeated liberal Republican Richard Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles. In the general, Simon lost to the unpopular incumbent, Gray Davis, by 5 percentage points.

The minefield for Fiorina is that registered Republicans 30 percent or so of the California electorate. As is true just about everywhere, that the 30 percent is comprised mostly of right wingers who are likely to agree with DeVore’s Tea Bagger extremism than Fiorini’s Guiliani-esque positions on social issues.

And then there’s the fact that Boxer is not unpopular. Last time out, in 2004, she collected the third highest number of raw votes of any candidate in the country next to the presidential candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Boxer remains popular among the state’s liberal base and not particularly unpopular among left-leaning and centrist independents, and so will probably do as well or better in November 2010 as she did six years ago.