“But don’t you tell Alaskans that we can’t do tough things” she said. “You don’t think we can fill in an oval and learn to spell Lisa Murkowski? We can figure this out. Our state’s future is on the line, and we’re going to listen to what Alaskans have to say.” — Lisa Murkowski.

It is not tough to fill in an oval and spell “Murkowski”.  It is tough in an aggregate sense, though.

Murkowski is running for re-election as a write-in candidate: It’s an uphill climb, not only against GOP nominee Joe Miller and Democrat Scott McAdams — but against out-of-state “extremists” who she claims “hijacked” the Republican Party.

I can’t find the damned speech in transcript form.  I am forced to look her up on youtube.  “Things have happened.  Events have transpired.  And there has been an outpouring of support.  When I sat down at a restaurant, and I will quit my job — I think he just said he would go part-time… to the diners… to what I have received on the emails.”
Start here.
“Mr Miller and his Extremist Positions dismantle what Senator Stevens and so many others have built over the years in Washington and I can tell you unequivocally that is not in Alaska’s best interest,  it is simply not.”

We have a theme picking uphere.  I am Alaska.  Me.
“We are such a diverse state.  You have got to have a Senator who will fight for all of our causes.  Whether you are a Republican, or whether you a Democrat, or whether you are a Libertarian, or whether you are an Independent, or none of the above.  You’ve got to be fighting for all of Alaska’s interests.  I need to be fighting for Natives and those who Build the State and for Moms who stay at home and for the Military and for Policemen and our educators and our [err] Coal miners and our Energy People!  That’s who we represent.  We don’t represent people who just look like us.  That’s not what Alaska is about!”

Coal miners and Energy People and Moms who stay at home… all look different from “Us”.  (“Us” being, of course, daughters of professional politicians.) Interesting that you can jump from “Natives” over to various professions.
The crux of a matter comes here:

” Together we can do what they say cannot be done.  Alaska is not fair game for Outside extremists. We are smarter than that. We are sharper than that and we will not be had.”

So, Murkowski dons the Mantle of the Late Ted Stevens.  I can’t find her specific reference to California Interest, the “Tea Party Express”.  First search and I get the irony meter checked up.  (Though, the one I’m interested in looking up is what everyone had to say about Joseph Lieberman after he lost to Ned Lamont.)

And, yes, as everyone who watched a fair amount of Bill Maher knows… there is a great deal of this.  And we’ll end up seeing a dribble of it pretty quickly.  Gawkingly.

The item that popped up to the top over the weekend on this was some ramblings from Michelle Malkin about the thing being “pulled out of context”, suggesting that we’re not dabbling on the part where she suggested she “didn’t like it”.

“I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven,” […]

All very good and well.  It gets kind of neat here, though.

 “I hung around people who were doing these things. I’m not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do.  One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that.”
The problem now becomes not so much the problem of whether she dabbled in Witchcraft or Satanism (two very different things — unless you don’t want them to be two different things — in which case, um, good luck with your local Wiccan and Satanist communities), but how it is she couldn’t notice the disturbing signs?  What does the little blood there, and “stuff like that” add up to?  (I think she means her date was wearing a pendant with this on it). 
“We went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”

Okay.  Here’s something.  Her Lesbian Sister tried that witch thing, and continues with that witch thing.  Or, in reality, that sort of general paganism I tend to see self described pagans practice.
On her Facebook page, Jennie notes that she “live [sic] in west hollywood ca with my girlfriend and my dogs. just try to keep it simple and live!” She notes she is self-employed as a “spiritual psychologist, actor, meditation teacher.” She describes her political stance as “conservative liberal.” As for religious views, she says she is “into spirituality, not one religion, study all religions, take what i like, leave the rest.”

We await to see if she ever had a date where she had a movie and Satanic Altar date.
But really:  Just so long as she remained celebate, it’s all good.

The thing about these things.  You know Christine O’Donnell’s opponent, Chris Coons?  He looks like an interesting guy.  Not that we necessarily want “interesting” people elected.  We can go with a lot of Grey personalities.  The man O’Donnell pushed aside, Mike Castle, strikes me as Mr. Grey.
Chris Coons is, of course, Mr. Grey when compared with O’Donnell.

The thing about O’Donnell… and this sort of “hm” sort of “meh” Politically Incorrect segment…

…
“How many of you didn’t hang out with questionable folks in high school?” she asked fellow Republicans at a GOP picnic in southern Delaware on Sunday.

I once heard a student say something about that in describing her love of Emily Dickenson.  “We all go through a phase in high school where we dress all in black, get really depressed, and write lots of really bad poetry.”  In her case, I’d say it’s a reasonably common experience, but the follow up answer is … “Speak for Yourself”. 

At a certain point, we go back to some of the old Christian Right revelations about the Evil Scrouge of Satanism rushing forward in American Youth, the Moral Panic coming out of Heavy Metal music in the 1980s, and things start to make sense.  One of the weird effects I’ve had in hearing out or reading Born Again Christian Fundamentalists and their story of redemption runs along the lines of Christine O’Donnell’s experiences at the Satanic Altar.   Apparently she had a more experimental and ribald adolsence than I did. 
How many of us haven’t had any experience with the Occult beyond playing with an Ouija Board?  (one attached to your anatomy or otherwise.)  I don’t know if Christine O’Donnell fell into a particular youth sub-culture or if her subsequent worldview full of Satanic Forces has influenced how she perceives her “dabbling” into witch-craft.

We do have the old “Alvin Greene” problem.  A few months ago, a survey showed that the most covered Senate candidate in the news media was… Alvin Greene, the indigent Democratic victory in South Carolina.  You travel over to the “Colorful” candidates.  I am, of course, part of the problem.
As before, I point to Roxanne Conlin.  Interesting candidate.  In another election cycle, she would have a shot — she appears to be at the end of the Republican Senatorial Campaign website on who registers well enough to bother tackling. 

Here again, maybe the Republican equivalent in terms of Republicans with the same fortune… here’s the Republican Senate candidate in Maryland.  And he has an ad.  Really.

That’s a bad ad.

Another bad political advertisement:

Carnival Barkers.

While whipping up his audience, Bauer saw no need to confine himself strictly to the truth. “When the president says that Islam has played a major role in America from our very founding, it’s just not the truth,” Bauer complained, referring to Obama’s remarks at the White House dinner marking the Ramadan holiday last month. “There was virtually no Islamic presence in America until just a few decades ago.” In fact, Obama’s description of Islam’s history in the United States was far more modest — he said only that it has “always been a part of America,” which is undoubtedly true if only because many slaves imported from Africa were Muslim.
But Bauer wasn’t merely trying to smear Obama or warp history in distorting the president’s words. The underlying message of his speech, echoed by keynote speakes who followed him, was that violent confrontation between the Muslim world and the West is inevitable because of the fundamental tenets of Islam.

And…

DeMint added, “[T]he urgency for me here is the Democrat Party [sic] — and I know this sounds partisan but — are [sic] completely dysfunctional. They’re the left of Europe.”

That last one, from Jim DeMint is kind of surreal.  But I was hunting about for what I thought were comments from John Boehner, but may have been from less sedate Newt Gingrich, on the threat of “Secular Humanists”, but guaging google searches may have been “Secular Socialists”, so as we can see, things have kind of gotten a little wobbly.

Vote for the Green Party candidate.

Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House, Currently Carnival Barker.

“But I am totally opposed to any effort to impose Sharia on the United States, and we should have a federal law that says under no circumstance, in any jurisdiction in the United States, will Sharia be used in any court to apply to any judgment made about American law.”

I would like to know what former Speaker Hastert and former Speaker Foley have to say about… something… anything.  Give those two a platform.  Not so much because they’ll say anything of revelatory focus, but because they had the same position as a guy we keep hearing from.

I’m always pondering the various evolutions and revolutions, and continuities of the political parties.  Item the first.

Nixon, after becoming Ike’s vice president, said Republicans “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America” in the White House, left over from Truman. Civil rights leaders were accused of being part of a Soviet plot. The Civil Rights Act was believed to be intended to “enslave” whites. A prominent right-wing radio host insisted that JFK was building a political prison in Alaska to detain critics of the administration.  (ahem). When FDR proposed Social Security, the conservatives of the era not only screamed about “socialism,” but told the public Roosevelt would force Americans to wear dog tags.
In 1961, Ronald Reagan was absolutely convinced that Medicare would lead federal officials to dictate where physicians could practice medicine, and open the door to government control over where Americans were allowed to live. In fact, Reagan warned that if Medicare became law, there was a real possibility that the federal government would control where Americans go and what they do for a living.  (ahem.)

But since reading Glenn’s fine piece the other day, I’ve been thinking about why today seems different — or more to the point, worse. […]
I’d add just one related note. In previous generations, the American Right still had to contend with some accurate information. That’s no longer the case — a Republican activist can listen to talk radio during the day, listen to Fox News after work, read right-wing blogs with breakfast, and hang out with Tea Partiers over the weekend.

Next item, Crooks and Liars has this:  Barry Goldwater and Jacob Jarvitts in earlier battles of the Political Party.

So how long has this fractured in-fighting been going on within the Republican Party? Some say since it was formed. Others point to around 1933 as a starting point.
After the defeat of Richard Nixon in the 1960 elections, what can be best be described as a power-grab or attempted hijacking of the party by the hardline conservative wing started to take place. As the 1962 mid-term elections were getting under way, the schism within the party was taking on public proportions, as is evidenced by this exchange on ABC’s Issues and Answers from June 13, 1961, between Barry Goldwater, representing the right wing of the Republican Party and Jacob Javits, who represented that all-but-extinct liberal wing of the Republican Party. A heated and testy exchange from the get-go, it got pretty hot when the talk came around to the economy.

That is where things get a little interesting, and it is always instructive to wind back– looking more or less in backward chronology, the various political fissures, geographical and ideological, of the two political parties, and where individual politicians found themselves at different times.  I gather Orrin Hatch, once Conservative Hero, now possible Tea Party victim, may have passed by this “Constitution Day” essay to the National Review to keep his bonafides working — funny, though.

Recently, I read a professional conservative writer write up political disputes in the Republican Party — through the old one described as Goldwater versus Rockefellar — as originating back in Taft versus Roosevelt — an interesting dispute, Roosevelt a bit of an accidental president and whose party kept the hands in Taft even as he was a sure loser.   This is wrong — look at the geography, your supposed Conservatives along the Eastern coasts — think Prescott Bush — at odds with the “Progressive Wing” — your Follettes.  The map and geographical bases more or less flipped as the Republican Party dealt with fighting the Roosevelt Administration, and this week the “Moderate Wing” in Delaware were put to a beating against a force more powerful elsewhere in the country.
Then again, Ohio remained blue-blood Conservative of a different type than that embraced by the Goldwaterites — as seen by, well, Robert Taft.

What the Fu@# is going on?

Explain the phone call to me.  “Yes.  We’re a polling firm and we’d like to ask a few questions to find out American attitudes about Religion.  Do you have a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Would you be in favor of, or opposed, to a Religious Revival lead by Glenn Beck?”
“—— er ———-???”

Who polls such a question?
Incidentally, the percentage in support of such a thing is 17 percent.  The pollsters failed to dig deeper to find out what part of that segment favored a Glenn Beck lead Revival to follow him into the light personally, as opposed to Glenn Beck leading various people away from their purview so they don’t have to deal with them anymore.

So.  A “Values Voters” Conference.  Which somehow gets suckered into the political cachet of a “Tea Party”.  Somewhere along the lines that claim about it all being about “fiscal sanity”, your Rick Santielli rant inspiration, falls apart.  Sure, we have this gilded Al Smith — Raskob “Liberty League” component shown with Rand Paul celebrating at an exclusive country club.  But then Joe Miller won off the coat-tails of an anti-abortion ballot initiative.  And then…

Mike Huckabee presents a Health Care policy Jesus would profit from.

The last minute addition to the of the “Tea Party” “Values Voters” conference?  Christine O’Donnell.  The catch-all line in her speech, distilling her philsophy of what is wrong with America.:
“They’ll let your teenage daughter buy an abortion, but they won’t let her buy a sugary soda in her school’s vending machine.”
Really?  Christine O’Donnell is taking a stand in favor of Soda Machines in our public schools?  I suppose there’s something in there in deferring costs away from the tax payer dollars and to a bidding war between Pepsi and Coke for each school district.

I grow weary of this crap.  Christine O’Donnell is electorally Alan Keyes Illinois 2008.  She’s even running against a Kenyan Marxist.  Could this get any more absurd?
Of course, if Christine O’Donnell is Alan Keyes… Rand Paul is Tom Coburn.

What is kind of interesting is to read the Weekly Standard versus the American Conservative on O’Donnell.  Interesting, as Weekly Standard is generally more receptive (actually the biggest pushers) of Sarah Palin, and is more horrrified by O’Donnell.
Read Pat Buchanan and ask yourself:
Are not these the same people who assisted George W. Bush in stampeding the nation into an unnecessary war that got 4,400 Americans killed to strip Saddam Hussein of weapons he did not have?
I guess it shouldn’t all stop at that water’s edge, but did O’Donnell speak out much about foreign military adventures?

Joe Miller?  We await to see how another unusual election plays out.  Lisa Murkowski, as evidenced yesterday by an obscure blogger spotting the salvage operation of her campaign signs, is running again.  She threw down the Guantlet.  “ENOUGH!”  And now comes a write-in bid.  I do not know the ramnifications.  Nate Silver thinks she has a good chance.  Various right wing blogs are gloating that this puts the nail in the coffin for Miller’s victory.  That may be wishful thinking of a type that may be true, but if it were false they’d be saying that anyway.  Note the National Review statement before the announcement that it’d cost a seat.
The electoral map of Joe Miller’s victory over Lisa Murkowski is apparently about the same on the Alaska electoral map as the 2008 Senate victory of Jeff Begich over Ted Stevens.  This works this way all the time — don’t be surprised if you map out the same effect for Hillary Clinton versus Barack Obama as against John McCain versus Barack Obama.
I suppose the hope for McAdams is that he would collect Murkowski anti-Miller voters that are too lazy to write in her name in, and that those voters who are motivated to write in Murkowski would not have voted for him anyways.

Alaska’s situation is similar to Florida’s.  There, we see the current Republican surging ahead of the former Republican, the Democrat popularly supposed to never had any chance.  It’s an interesting dynamic, as Election Day will come and a bunch of Democratic voters will have to suck it up and make a leap of faith in voting.

On to Fox News, everybody!

Meh on Jon Stewart.

Mr. Stewart told his audience the show had secured the National Mall in Washington on Oct. 30 for what he called “The Rally to Restore Sanity.”
He later labeled it a “Million Moderate March.” The purpose, he said, is to counter what he called a minority of 15 percent or 20 percent of the country who have dominated the national political discussion with extreme rhetoric. He tarred both parties with that charge, mentioning both the attacks on the right against President Obama for being everything from a socialist to un-American and on the left against former President Bush for being a war criminal.

This is always a trap.  If you are Jon Stewart, you want to be reasonable, and satirically throw jabs at “both sides”.  In Stewart’s case, he ended up with egg on his face in having to backtrack on Breitbart’s “ACORN” video, after excoriating the media for not following up on it.

See too:

“One of the leading television commentators on one of our liberal cable channels said I was the best Republican president the country ever produced, which would come [as] quite a surprise to the Republicans, half of whom still think I’m a closet communist,” he said, according to Politico.

“What she meant by that was I didn’t necessarily follow their ‘conventional wisdom,'” he said. “I said, ‘What do you mean?!'”

In March, Maddow said, “What we ended up with is what we ended with, in my opinion, is the two terms of the Clinton administration, which is that Bill Clinton was probably the best Republican president the country ever had, if you look at the policies that he passed.”

Maddow’s is a common complaint, and in a way moderately favorable.  Also presented in a reasonable tone, short of the less “Progressive” but more blow-harded man who precedes her.  (Or the more inside-the-beltway figure that precedes him.)

Lanny Davis:

“We [Democrats] have our Tea Party side, and Rachel Maddow is typical…she’s sanctimonious and intolerant of anyone who disagrees with her. So, if it’s Bill Clinton, she calls him a Republican because he doesn’t meet Rachel Maddow’s test. So, the worst element of our party are people who call themselves liberal who are actually illiberal because they are intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them…”

That “Closet Communist” contingent is breaking apart, as Clinton now serves for foil to comparison against the Secret Kenyan Marxist Obama.

Hm.  The video that Jon Stewart has dancing about features… Lady Gaga shouting to Obama “ARE YOU LISTENING?”.  Interesting choice.
So it’s a gun-wielder versus dramatic “Dress all in Pink, pretend to sneak into publically held” meeting.
Dick Cheney shouting obscenities.  We could swarm into the realm of

I like that tiff better than Jimmy Carter versus the Ghost of Ted Kennedy.

Former President Jimmy Carter says Americans could have had comprehensive health care coverage decades ago if Sen. Edward M. Kennedy hadn’t blocked a plan Carter had proposed.

Carter revisited the old spat in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” to be aired Sunday. Portions of the interview, prompted by the publication of his White House diary, were posted on the program’s website Thursday.

“The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed,” Carter said in the interview. “It was his fault. Ted Kennedy killed the bill.”

Carter cast his Democratic rival as spiteful. “He did not want to see me have a major success in that realm of life,” Carter said.

What’s great about these comments is that the comments in various blogs — starting with this Huffington Post item — brings about a repeat of the passions behind the Carter — Kennedy 1980 primary fight!
Who to side with?  Well, Carter strives to re-furnish his image, a lifetime project Bush is starting to undertake.  The thing Carter needed to know for a successful presidency was how to butter up key Congressional egos.

Clinton again:

Bill Clinton contends that the Republican Party has shifted so far to the right this election cycle that George W. Bush would be considered a liberal by 2010’s standard.

“A lot of their candidates today, they make him look like a liberal,” the former president said of his conservative successor during a Democratic fundraiser in Minnesota, the Associated Press reported.

You know, Rachel Maddow has a theory about that sort of political shifting.

Kesha Rogers is number 8 on a Norwegian list of kooky American candidates.  Looking down the list without the translation, I see some familiar faces — and a reason to suppose it’s not just a round-up of 2010 Candidates — a categorization which would be more interesting.  Still, I suppose what we have here is a sign that Kesha Rogers is now the International face of the Larouche Movement.
Rachel Brown had her chance.  But the Barney Frank campaign pulverized the Rachel Brown Campaign.  It put the Brown campaign in a shredder, then burned it into ashes, then spit it off through a worm-hole into an alternate universe where the Laws of Physics allow for matter to be destroyed.

Either that or… something called “The Vault” kept her from winning?  The Vault is hidden inside the Inner-Alpha Group.

Last minute campaigning:

Brown’s plan for the day was to drive around the district in a sound car, playing music and talking to voters. The sound car was crafted from a scuffed-up green Jeep 4×4 a New Hampshire LaRouchie had offered for the occasion. The A-frame mounted on top featured a poster with a picture of her that encouraged the residents of the 4th District to “DESTROY THE BRITISH EMPIRE, IMPEACH BARACK OBAMA!” A smaller, slightly lower-key sign on a rear window had a less urgent demand: “RESTORE GLASS-STEAGALL.” As we set out with Scott Mooney, another LaRouchie, in the driver’s seat, Brown explained that she wasn’t worried about her chances in a district that had shown itself to be overwhelmingly Frank-friendly for decades. “There’s something about Americans which is that we may let things get bad, but we tend to resist fascism,” she said. “We tend to not allow fascism at the last moment. So, people are smelling that.”

Ah, yes.  Optimism.  But… she didn’t confront the awesome power of the “Vault”.

It is this optimistic vision of the future, which Brown presented in the debate, and throughout her campaign, which left Bailout Barney stammering in a rumpled heap, and has put the Inter-Alpha Group’s predatory looters on notice, that they have run out of time. While it is not clear, at the moment, that enough Massachusetts’ citizens will come forward and cast their votes for Brown, to give her a victory on September 14, it is clear, that the days of Barney’s bullying are over, and that his demise, and that of the failed presidency of Barack Obama, are now at the top of the agenda of the American people.

Hm.  Well, it is now clear that not enough Massachusetts citizens “came forward”.  Apparently something was holding them back.  The AP called it at 9:22.  Then again,

The Boston Vault intervened to make sure Rachel Brown’s vote was suppressed. It’s not Barney’s doing, this is over Barney’s head. He is now officially used up. His usefulness is finished, Rachel Brown and her campaign has really destroyed his political career.

Got that, Sean Bielat supporters?  A vote for Sean Bielet is a vote for Lyndon Larouche!

Rachel Brown is now a figure of national influence. It’s not a question of a head-to-head fight with Barney Frank. Barney is just a tool of the Vault, and it’s they who have to be destroyed. This is the fight for Glass-Steagall. They are weak. They can still pull dirty little tricks like vote fraud, but they can’t rig the financial system to keep it together. This thing is falling down around their heads, and we’re the only ones left standing.

Yeah, but as we saw from Norway, Kesha Rogers is a figure of INTERNATIONAL INFLUENCE. I need some caffeine.

But, according to the source, it was the major Boston bankers, the scions of the so-called Vault, who squeezed their own employees to turn out to vote for Barney or face possible job losses. The source did not in the least dismiss the possibility of outright fraud — which the Vault crowd certainly has the capacity to pull off, even as they face imminent bankruptcy. More to follow.

For what it’s worth, the Brown supporters are not voting for Frank — though I don’t know how this really alters “The Nate Report”‘s calculus.  They’re out mobilizing to fight “The Vault”.

Hm.  Maybe  Middleton, NJ can help me out with “The Vault”.

“Does this have anything to do with the Buildabears?”
“The Bilderbergs,” Tommy corrected, “And yes it does.” He handed me a leaflet.

Hold on a minute.  I have a hunch that somewhere, the editors at DC or Marvel hatched something called the “Vault”.  Quick google search and….  Has Lyndon Larouche been reading from that old stash of comic books again?  So, apparently, these guys have defeated Rachel Brown?

Officially, Rachel Brown was given 21.5% of the vote, a tally that did not match with the momentum and widespread support that she received, particularly following the Sept. 7 debate with Bail-out Barney.

Silly me.  I forget.  It’s truly an International Movement — the Fourth International, indeed… and it is all interconnecting.  Look how the Rachel Brown smackdown of Barney Frank is reverberating abroad, talking Lake Baikal!

Now, I should just mention that we had on Saturday, we had the first of our planned NAWAPA conferences in Cologne, which Iwould say was really a major success, not so much from the standpoint of the number of people who attended — it was between40 and 50 people, which could have been obviously a lot more.  But I thought it was a real success, because — and I think this is important for future such organizing — because it was both the power of where we stand in terms of the fight, you know theRachel Brown/Barney Frank debate, the Glass-Steagall issue, the window of opportunity of the next several weeks.  And then, afterI presented that, I showed the German version of the NAWAPAvideo, and then I ended it with an update on the whole strategic situation with the Eurasian Land-Bridge and the Transaqua project for Africa and similar things.

All that matters is that debate!

Rachel Brown and her campaign did exactly the right thing, she forced them out in the open, and made them play all their cards, as you saw with the debate. Now is the time to keep up the intensity, and realize how much has been accomplished with what has been done.

Rye Post office on Purdy Street in New York!

Boise, Idaho

A group representative said Obama is killing people and the economy by lowering funding for Medicare and Medicaid.
Sternberg was angry that the group was recruiting in front of the 9/11 memorial.
“It’s a vessel to attract attention,” he said.

Wait.  Hold on!  This is informative!
If there had been some group like the LaRouche movement in Germany at that time, with the courage to denounce Hitler despite his popularity, many lives could have been saved.
I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Back to my Middleton, NJ link.

“What else do you guys do besides this?” I asked. “We do this full time,” Jim said, “We’re like missionaries.” […]

“Yeah, you’re gonna hop in, but who knows if you’ll make it? You just run anyway and hope that you do.” Who knows? You predicting the marketplace meltdown is who should know! This runs up against the question of, “What do religious folks who believe the Rapture’s coming on Tuesday night do Wednesday morning?” Well, they probably say they messed up and that it’s coming the Wednesday after next. And when that day comes and go, they do it all over again. Just like the Marxist does every time the revolution doesn’t come, like the Kucinich supporter does every time the votes don’t add up in their favor; they just hop in that boat and hope the lava doesn’t hop in a boat of its own.

I can think of things worse than whatever Kucinich supporters do every time votes don’t add up in their favor.  Kucinich supporters know their guy lost.

Christine O’Donnell was the Republican nominee for Senate in 2008.  Nobody noticed, because she wasn’t going to win.  Skip forward to 2010, and she is receiving a lot of attention, even though her General election result will be about the same.  You do have to admire the “Tea Party” Movement for one thing: they had a clear Primary Election Choice — pick one and there will be a Republican Senator in Delaware, pick the other and there will be a Democratic Senator in Delaware.   In this respect, it was a clearer choice than any other state where the Tea Party candidate upended the Republican Establishment pick.  They chose the latter.

I remember Christine O’Donnell from her many appearances on “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher.  The one appearance I remember — and I don’t really know why — had her on the same show as Marilyn Manson.  You remember that guy?  She insisted on calling him by his real name.  It seemed to be the crux of her battle — I guess it’d gain some psychological advantage for her.

By the way — Karl Rove?  Liberal!

They said only Mike Castle could beat this guy.  Mike Castle couldn’t even beat a woman with all this character rectitude, all this baggage that has been labeled on her and dumped on her.  I suppose that’s the price one pays for a Republican voter roll shrunken.

All these problems that she has, paying off loans and so forth? Who the hell doesn’t?  Who the hell hasn’t had a run-in with the IRS?  So she’s had a run-in with the IRS.  That’s a resume enhancement to a lot of people!
Put a “D” behind her name, or find yourself a “RINO”, and I doubt this argument would be made. 

Anyway… we’re all making fun of her “Saviors Alliance for Truth” comments against Masturbation, and the like.  Somehow that quotation from an MTV appearance gets cut off before the real punchline:
“The reason that you don’t tell them that Masturbation is not the answer to AIDS and the other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is that, again, it is not addressing the issue…
You’re going to be pleasing each other.  And if he already knows what pleases him and he can please himself, than why am I in the picture?”
Don’t know.

Anyway… skip over to the New York Republican Gubernatorial winner, and we see an interesting split in the “Tea Party”:

An online news outlet in New York state has obtained dozens of emails, many of them racist and sexually graphic, which it reports were sent by Carl Paladino, the Tea-Party-backed Republican candidate for governor of New York, to a long list of political and business associates. One email shows a video of an African tribal dance, entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal,” while another depicts hardcore bestiality.

Paladino’s campaign manager, Michael Caputo, would not comment on specific emails, but acknowledged to TPMmuckraker that Paladino had sent emails that were “off-color” and “politically incorrect,” saying that few such emails represented the candidate’s own opinion. Caputo accused Democrats of wanting to change the subject from substantive issues to “having sex with horses.”

From one extreme to the other.  Though, Carl Paladiano represents something else: the equivalency of O’Donnell’s 2008 Senate run — nobody was going to beat Andre Cuomo anyway, so what?

Hm.

Signs in the crowd reflected the antigovernment ethos of the movement, calling for spending cuts and an end to the “Marxist income tax,” and quoting the libertarian icon Ayn Rand. “Redistribute my work ethic,” read one sign. Others called for a Fair Tax — a national sales tax to replace the income tax — and a repeal of the health care bill passed in March. “Down our throats on March 21st,” one sign said, “up yours on Nov. 2nd.”

But others reflected anger about illegal immigration — “Uncle Sam wants you to speak English,” read one — and the planned Islamic cultural center near ground zero, which many Tea Party supporters have rallied against. “Obama Creates Jobs at Ground Zero,” read one sign, over a picture of a mosque.

I was skitting about the talk radio landscape, tuning into the Republican Conservative debate over the Delaware Senate Primary being held today.  This is the one that is going to decide whether Mike Castle will be pushed aside for a long time perenial candidate, and one time Abstinence Activist.

Suddenly, this guy is a “Liberal”.

The Conservative Activists have “discovered” that this man, Mike Castle, sided with Kucinich to Impeach Bush.  A gold mine of comedy, that claim.
It could be worse.

It does not much help that prominent liberal activists are itching to claim some of these candidates, oddly justifying the warped position where your Mark Levines are drawing “right” and “left”.  From wikipedia.:

Castle’s terms marked the full establishment of what Delaware political commentator Celia Cohen has called “the Age of Incumbency.” Following du Pont’s very successful and popular terms as Governor, Delaware politics seemed to have reached a consensus, with leaders of both parties being regularly re-elected, while working closely and quietly together on a conservative fiscal low tax, pro business, and clean government agenda. Prior to du Pont only four men had served eight years as Governor and one of those had two non-consecutive terms. From 1977 until the present there have been four governors, two from each party, each emulating Castle in essentially carrying out the program initiated by Pierre S. du Pont, IV.

Things harrow back toward:
Castle’s cosponsored the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. The bill proposed expanding the number of stem cell lines that are eligible for federally funded research, expecting that this funding would generate more research and ultimately greater progress in addressing many kinds of diseases.
Still pushing it.  Right now, in fact.

In 2006, the Senate candidate who found himself squeezed in the middle, narrowly won a primary battle before losing in the general, was Lincoln Chafee.  Now an Independent favor for governor of Rhode Island.  Funny, though — the vote that is most memorable from his record was the lone Republican vote against the Iraq War.

I recall hearing — at the time the Tea Party trumped over to a third party challenge in the NY 23 Special Election — that the significant thing about the whole movement was a focus on “Fiscal” matters — the deficit and taxes.  Probably taxes over the deficit, as we seem to be learning.  Prudence, that!  No social or cultural issues are shifting into the main.

Mostly I’m just reminded of the Republican Senators who came in in the year 2004: Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn.  Are there just more of them this time out?

Well, hope is there in the voice of moderation.

I’m having a bit of trouble finding this particular “google ad sense” ad which flicked right past me, but which I found a little odd.  It was for Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for Senate in Nevada.  I assume it comports with the “Stop Socialism” blurb I see about, pointing to the NRCC.  Maybe it’s not giving me Angle because the google ad sense has sensed I’m not in Nevada?

UPDATE — here’s Sharron Angle — standing in front of Silhouette Guy and a lot of — wheat?

But here’s a question — why would the question that this ad asks stimulate your thoughts?

After you vote, buy this merchandise, why don’t you?

Sheesh.

On the left side, we see the generic political stance of a politician’s face imaged over a landscape of a valley and a mountain.  All smiles.  On the right, we have the classic “Face Off” image — and another chance to “Vote” on something.

I assume you may vote for or against Smiling Tall Guy imaged in front of Mountain Landscape, just not on the Internet.

And for all this talk of tea parties…

Actually, that one is the only one worth buying of the lot.

……………..

Small Update:

Ad from the website of a “Conspiracy Porn”ographer.  Is “Get Help” not appropriate?