Tag: Campaign 2010

Issa to Double Staff, Barrage White House with Subpoenas If He Becomes Oversight Chair

Jon Ponder

Issa
Issa
Outside his Camp Pendleton-adjacent district north of San Diego, which he has served since 2001, GOP Rep. Darrell Issa is considered a laughingstock in California — mostly because he broke down in sobs in front of local television cameras after Arnold Schwarzenegger bigfooted him out of the governor’s race during the 2003 recall election. (But really, who didn’t see that coming?) Which is why Californians are amazed that this buffoon is on track to becoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, the committee Dan Burton of Indiana chaired during the Clinton era, if Republicans win control of the House in November.

Cynical GOP-watchers, including yours truly, are predicting that if the GOP wins Congress in November Speaker Boehner will greenlight multiple, simultaneous investigations into the White House with the ultimate goal of impeaching Pres. Obama at any cost. There’s no surer sign of Boehner’s intent than the choice of a nutbag like Issa to chair the Oversight Committee. Anyone familiar with Issa’s record knows that he will devote whatever time and government resources it takes to find a pretext — any bogus reason — to impeach the president.

If you think this is too Chicken Little-ish or an alarmist attempt to scare the bejesus out of fans of the president who are complacent about the midterms, a new report in right-leaning Politico.com might give you pause: Issa has been boasting that he has requested a doubling of the committee’s staff in order to handle the volume of subpoenas he’ll be issuing to the White House, if he becomes chairman:

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RNC Chair Steele Insists Party Will Waste Money, Resources on California GOP Campaigns This Year

Jon Ponder

Steele
Steele
Despite the fact that the two highest profile Republican candidates running in California this year — gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman and U.S. Senate nominee Carly Fiorina — both oppose abortion in a state that is solidly pro-choice, RNC Chairman Michael Steele says the national party will pour money and resources into GOP campaigns this year:

[National] Republicans, buoyed by what they see as a potential resurgence in California, pledged on Tuesday to send significant financial, logistical and strategic resources to the state in coming weeks.

[Steele], speaking to reporters on a conference call, said Republicans in years past have treated California as a “flyover” state because of Democrats’ electoral edge, or little more than fertile grounds for fundraising.

“The days of just grabbing and going or just ignoring altogether are over,” he said, after meeting with California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring in Washington. “We’re going to be full partners on the ground.”

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NV Sen: GOP Scientologist Sharron Angle Was Member of Anti-Gay Christianist Party in the 1990s

Jon Ponder

Angle
Angle
Talking Points Memo:

For at least six years in the 1990s before [Sharron Angle] held state-level elective office, Angle was a member of the little-known Independent American Party, a right-wing party that combines elements of Ron Paul’s doctrinaire libertarianism — pro-gun, anti-tax, anti-bureaucracy, pro-states’ rights — with Christian social conservatism and fear of the “North American Union” and other forms of “global government.” The small party attracted considerable controversy in 1994 when it took out a newspaper ad titled “Consequences of Sodomy: Ruin of a Nation,” which suggested HIV could spread through the water.

Three members of the Independent American Party tell TPM that Angle, a Nye County, Nevada, school board member at the time, was an active member of the party in the 1990s. They say she only left the Independent American Party and became a Republican out of political expediency when she decided to seek a seat in the state assembly, to which she was elected in 1998.

“It was because she wanted to run for office. And it was difficult for members of our party to get elected at that time,” Janine Hansen, executive director of the Independent American Party, tells TPM. “It was a strategic move on her part.”

Poll: Democrats on Track to Lose Control of House – Get Used to It Now: ‘Speaker Boehner’

Jon Ponder

Speaker-to-Be Boehner
Speaker-to-Be Boehner
Yesterday, Buck found a slight uptick in approval of Democrats in congressional races in a new Public Policy Polling survey. According to PPI, Democrats are preferred on a generic ballot, 43-41 — an improvement from March, when Republicans were preferred 46-43.

But now a new poll of specific House battleground districts conducted by Democrat Stan Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger for NPR suggests that Republicans are well within strking distance of regaining control of the House:

For this poll, Bolger and Greenberg chose the districts where incumbents are considered the most vulnerable, and, in the case of open seats, the ones most likely to switch party control in November. Sixty are currently held by Democrats — many of whom won these seats even when voters in the same district preferred Republican John McCain for president in 2008. The other 10 districts are the flip side — held by Republicans in the House, even though their voters went for Barack Obama in 2008.

These are this year’s swing seats — the political terrain where the battle for control of the House of Representatives will be won or lost. In this battleground, voters are choosing Republicans over Democrats 49 percent to 41 percent.

Another dire indicator for Democrats is that Pres. Obama is unpopular in the battleground districts, where his disapproval rate is 54-40, according to the pollsters.

Separately, here’s yet more evidence that MSNBC’s White House correspondent Chuck Todd is fully in the bag for the GOP this year. He promoted this NPR poll showing Dems in trouble on his aptly named “Rundown” show this morning, while ignoring the PPI poll results showing improvement in Dem chances.

CA Sen: By Refusing to Apologize, Fiorina Keeps Her Catty Hair Comments in the News

Jon Ponder

Fiorina making light of her chemo-related hair loss
Fiorina making light of her chemo-related hair loss
What Californians and the rest of country have learned about GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina since she got caught trashing the hairdo of her opponent, Sen. Barbara Boxer, in front of a live camera — five days during which she has blamed others (“I was quoting a friend of mine” about the hairstyle) and adamantly refused to apologize (although she “regret[s] this whole situation”) and even tried to deflect criticism of her tacky behavior by bringing up her own treatment for cancer — is that her personality can be summed up in a single word:

Asshole.

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Pelosi: We’ll Stop Blaming Bush When the Crises We Face Stop Being His Fault

Jon Ponder

Speaker Pelosi
Speaker Pelosi
In an interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked the speaker if Democrats’ efforts to remind the public that it was the policies of George W. Bush that led to the various crises facing the country is a smart political strategy:

Asked how much longer Democrats should continue to blame Bush, Pelosi replied: “Well, it burns out when the problems go away. And here’s what the president inherited. He inherited a deficit, when this president [Bush] inherited from the Clinton administration four budgets that were either in surplus or in balance. And he turned it into a massive deficit. He … brought us to the brink of a financial crisis. He brought us to the brink of deep recession, ignoring issues that relate to climate change.”

It’s not surprising that Washington Republicans and Beltway media types like Chuck Todd don’t want Democrats to remind Americans what happened during the Bush years — they were complicit in his downfall, to one degree or another.

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Energy on the Right? Voter Turnout in the California Primary was 25%, Lowest in 96 Years

Jon Ponder

The Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket in the California primary ran mostly unopposed, so turnout on Tuesday should have been driven by the purportedly intense “energy on the right” that the national media has been promoting.

Calbuzz has done the math and figured out that Whitman spent about $90 per vote in the primary, while Jerry Brown — who barely campaigned at all — spent just 20 cents per vote.

If voter turnout is a gauge, however, the right-wing’s “energy” fizzled in California. With all but a few mail-in ballots counted, it appears that voter turnout on Tuesday was about 25 percent, which makes it the lowest turnout in almost a century. The last time only a quarter of California voters showed up at the polls was 1914.

Until now, the lowest recent turnout was in 2006, when, as a solidly Democratic state that already had a majority Democratic congressional delegation, California merely ratified the wave that swept Democrats into power on Capitol Hill. The turnout that year was 33.6 percent.

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CA Sen: Carly Fiorina Caught on Video Dishing about Sen. Boxer’s Hair: ‘Sooo Yesterday’

Jon Ponder

Hey, Carly, what’s with that dress?

See minute 04:00

FIORINA: [Lawter?] saw Barbara Boxer briefly on television this morning and said what everyone says, “God, what is that hair? (Cackles) Soo yesterday.”

Earlier, at the top of the video, she says she’s puzzled that her frenemy Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO who won the GOP gubernatorial spot on Tuesday, had scheduled an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

FIORINA: I find it surprising that on the first day of the general, Meg Whitman’s going on Sean Hannity. Did you hear that?

OFF-CAMERA VOICE: That’s weird.

FIORINA: It’s bizarre. I mean, she’s never been on Sean Hannity.

OFF-CAMERA VOICE: [Indistinct.]

FIORINA: I think it’s a very bad choice, actually. You know how he is.

This is so bad it’s like an unguarded moment “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” diary-cam. So much for the “year of the woman.”

A gaffe like this on day one of her campaign does not bode well for Fiorina, a political novice who is funding her campaign with the $21 million she received when she was fired as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 2005.
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CA Primary: eMeg, Carly Dodge Birther Bullet – Orly Taitz Loses GOP Nod for Secretary of State

Jon Ponder

Orly Taitz
Orly Taitz
The results at the top of the ticket in the California primary yesterday were a foregone conclusion going in — the Democrats, Jerry Brown, the gubernatorial nominee, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, mostly ran unopposed and the top two GOP candidates — Meg Whitman (governor) and Carly Fiorina (U.S. Senate) literally bought their wins by outspending their opponents — Whitman, the former eBay CEO, spent $80 million of her own money on the primary, and Fiorina spent $7 million of the $21 million golden parachute she received when she was fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

There was one contest in doubt, however. And with results in, the only bad news for the state’s liberal majority is that Birther queen Orly Taitz lost her bid to run as the Republican candidate against incumbent Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, in November.

Taitz received 368,210 votes, but her opponent won with over 1 million votes. (Now we know that the approximate number of certifiable nutcases in California is 368,000, or about 1 percent of the state’s population.)

Taitz’ loss is also another sign of the weakness of the tea party mob phenomenon in California — as was the loss of tea bagger Chuck DeVore in the U.S. Senate Race. DeVore received just 19 percent of the Republican vote.

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