Month: October 2010
Poll: 62% of Californians Don’t Like GOP – Dem Brown Up By 8 in Gov Race, Sen. Boxer up by 5
Most striking, only 55 percent of registered Republicans have a favorable impression of the GOP; 39 percent look on it unfavorably. By contrast, 75 percent of Democrats are favorably impressed with their party.
A new poll from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California finds that Democrat Jerry Brown leads Republican Meg Whitman by eight points — 44 percent to 36 percent — and Sen. Barbara Boxer leads her GOP opponent by five points 43 percent to 38 percent.
The survey also found that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a 29 percent job approval.
Why are California Republicans trailing in a year when the GOP and its tea party base are said to be ascendant in the rest of the country? Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton suggests it is because they are Republicans:
What Is This Election Really About? Not the Deficit, the Stimulus or Big Govt – Watch Maddow Bust the Media Myths about the 2010 Mid-Terms
MADDOW: It‘s not the deficit. It‘s not big government. It‘s not the stimulus.
It‘s not Obamacare. It‘s not populism. It‘s not that all of these people are outsiders.
It‘s none of these things. These things are all provably not what‘s going on. They‘re not bolstered by the facts no matter how many times you hear from the Beltway media. This is not what‘s happening.
But the media dressing these guys up like there is some coherent narrative, like there is some cogent argument here, that conveniently obscures what‘s really going here, which is that we are on the precipice of elevating the federal office, the most extreme and in some cases strange set of conservative candidates in a lifetime…
There are extremist candidates who from time to time survive the churn of electoral politics and actually make it into the mainstream. There‘s always a few. But there has never been this many.
None of this makes any sense. We‘re just about to elect a whole bunch of extremists … unless thing change in the next two week.
Complete Transcript:
Florida Gov. Candidate Rick Scott Doesn’t Know What You Mean
In this footage from depositions that then-CEO tea Rick Scott gave when Columbia/HCA was under investigation for Medicare/Medicaid fraud in 1995, Scott makes Bill Clinton — who famously told investigators into his sex life that his answer depended on what your definition of “is” is — look like an over-sharer. Although Columbia went on to receive the nation’s biggest fine ($1.7 billion) for its guilt, and Scott was forced to resign to avoid criminal prosecution, investigators got farcically little cooperation from the man who now wants to run Florida “like a business.”
AllFacebook Offers a New Way to Parse the Midterms
For the political wonks out there (meaning my two blog colleagues), AllFacebook offers a new take on the upcoming elections. They use a page statistics tool to detect trends in races based on fans with the AllFacebook Election 2010 Tracker. I don’t know if this makes any sense or has any correlation to the elections, but it has some interesting information.
For instance, there are more than twice as many Republican fans as Democratic fans. And I heard this somewhere but had forgotten that old mean bastard John McCain has more Facebook fans than anybody in Congress. Check it out and let me know if you think there’s any validity to it as a predictor.
Tea Party Thuggery: ‘When Fascism Comes to America, It Will Be Wrapped in the Flag, Carrying a Cross’
Left: Private security thugs arrest a reporter after a Joe Miller town-hall event in Alaska – Right: News segment on leather-clad veterans physically intimidating a Democratic operative at an Allen West event in Florida.
“When fascism comes to America,” Sinclair Lewis supposedly predicted in 1935, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Note that the quote sets up the arrival of fascism as certain — “when,” not “if,” it comes. Watch the two videos above — both taken within the last week or so — and you may wonder if that day has finally arrived.
When Dittoheads Think Alike
dittoismnoun. When everyone is thinking the same thought without a healthy tendency to break the uniformity of thought.
