When I started writing this over at
Down With Tyranny it was just a little wrap up on how delusional Republicans are and how Democratic candidates are continuing to make headway in every part of the country. I'll get to that below the fold, but towards the end I turned it into a fundraiser; I can't help myself.
I hope you've already heard the Blue America campaign song Have You Had Enough and know a little something about our campaign to get district-targeted versions of the song on the air in October. You can read about it on our My Space page. Anyway, listen to the song, watch the videos, and see if you want to help. If you do, our ActBlue Page is open 24/7 and every cent that goes to the Blue America PAC goes towards getting the ads on the radio. And if you donate today (Tuesday)-- at least twenty bucks, you get a rare CD-- not sold in any store anywhere for any price-- of the song, done by Rickie Lee Jones and the two guys from the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher.
Now, back to the delusionalism of right wing loons. Between the Republican intra-party
civil war and the
drip, drip,
drip of more and more corruption scandals coming to light-- Jerry Lewis should be next-- the GOP is dead meat, perhaps for a very long time.
Still, today some of them are taking heart in a rally-the-troop(er)s story in The Moonie Times claiming that GOP electoral prospects are looking up. Apparently Cheney and Rove have gotten their allies at Big Oil to lower the price of gasoline in the hopes of staving off the midterm disaster most prognosticators are now prognosticating. Interestingly, Big Oil has been lowering the price of gas in states with some of the tightest races: Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan and Kentucky.
The Moonie Times echoing feeble Republican talking points about how great the economy under Bush is, just reminds voters that the Regime is either bizarrely out of touch with reality... or liars. Even fiscal conservatives, half the base of the Party of Greed and Bigotry (the greed part), are starting to acknowledge that the Bush Regime has been their worst nightmare. Richard Viguerie is urging fiscally conservative Republicans to stop donating to the party and to sit the midterms out. I mean how smart do you have to be to figure out that Bush is more a power-grabbing fascist than a traditional small-government fiscal conservative when he took the huge Clinton budget surplus and turned it into the biggest budget deficit in history?
Zogby's explanation is two fold: 1- Bush shrieking about the alleged war on terror and 2- the abysmal job being done by the DCCC's Rahm Emanuel-- or, as he puts it, "the Democrats' failure to lay out a clear plan of their own on 'how are we're going to get out of Iraq and what they would do about terrorism that's better than the Republicans.' Democrats 'are not giving their Democratic base what it needs to hear on those issues,' Mr. Zogby said. 'Republicans are severely wounded. The Democrats should be crushing them, and they are not.'"
But are GOP prospects really looking up? Rasmussen downgraded Republican senate races in Montana, Ohio and Rhode Island today, from toss-ups to lean-Democrat. Conventional wisdom inside and outside the Beltway is no longer asking if the Democrats will take back the House, but by how many seats-- and can they also take back The Senate? Most impartial observers see a 50/50 split right now. If the Dems pick up Virginia, Nevada, Arizona or get New Jersey back in line, they'll hold both houses of Congress in January. Even in states where the Republicans looked like they could win a few governorships-- important positions they often use in stealing elections, the way they did in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004-- the tide has turned noticeably grim for them.
Democrats in safely blue districts, especially in cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, might want to think about purple districts where a little push can go a long way towards ridding the country of the disgraceful-- even shameful-- rubber stamp congress that has gone along with every heinous proposal the Bush Regime has sent down the pike in their direction. Why not adopt a district like Ohio's 2nd CD, where Dr. Victoria Wulsin is on the verge of defeating Mean Jean Schmidt or Minnesota's 2nd CD, where Coleen Rowley is within striking distance of John Kline, one of the most extreme right wingers in the entire Congress, or 29 year old Robert Rodriguez, a fresh new face of progressive California, who is a lot closer to dislodging an entrenched Republican barnacle than the DCCC can possibly understand? There are at least a couple of dozen districts that would not normally be in play but that can be won in a tsunami of anger and discontent with the way the Orwellian Bush Regime has been treating this nation. It's now or... well, it's hard to imagine that there'd ever been a better time.