Midday open thread
by kos
Mon May 19, 2008 at 01:13:34 PM PDT
- Thanks to everyone for their kind words regarding my grandmother. She did get to meet her 20th (!) great-grandchild, even though my poor Eli burst out in tears as my grandmother reached for her. She wasn't in good shape, and she continuously pleaded to us to let her go. Well, except for one wrenching moment when I mentioned that I would be back with the full family during Christmas, and I gamely told her she'd get to see my other child. For the only time during that trip, she looked up hopefully, and said, "if I get better."
She was taken off life support yesterday.
- Bob Barr, who we hope takes a chunk of Republican support as the Libertarian candidate for president, has some problems with his PAC.
In the last five years the fund has given $125,200 — about three cents of every dollar raised — to federal candidates and other campaign committees, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found in a review of reports filed with the Federal Election Commission. Another $81,875 went to state and local campaigns [...]
Most of the fund's spending — $3.3 million, or about 78 percent of all gifts from donors — paid for raising more money, including mailing lists, postage and telemarketing.
"It costs money to raise money," Barr said.
In the letter, Barr told potential donors the fund played a "tremendous role" in ousting Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) in 2004 and provided "critical funding" in 2006 for freshman Rep. Michele Bachman (R-Minn.). But records show the fund made modest donations in those races: $1,000 to John Thune, Daschle's opponent, and $1,500 to Bachman.
The letter states he also raised tens of thousands of dollars in 2002 for Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). The organization, however, donated nothing to Chambliss that year; a fund official wrote in an e-mail that Barr, not the fund, helped raise about $20,000 for that race.
- Obama has a 16-point lead in Gallup's daily tracking poll.
- Toobin on McCain's Supreme Court:
Successful politicians know how to attract attention, and how to avoid it, so it’s worth noting that John McCain chose to give his speech about the future of the judiciary on May 6th, a day when the political world was preoccupied with the Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. It is significant, too, that Senator McCain spoke mainly in generalities, rather than about such specific issues as abortion, affirmative action, and the death penalty. But even if he hoped to sneak the speech past a distracted public, and have its coded references deciphered only by the activists who were its primary target, its message should not be lost on anyone. McCain plans to continue, and perhaps even accelerate, George W. Bush’s conservative counter-revolution at the Supreme Court.
- MS-01: Did you hear that Childers victory last week was a good thing for Republicans? A bunch of wingers tried to make lemonade from lemons, and looked idiotic doing so.
One wonders why, if Childers' election was such good news for their cause, these analysts didn't come out for him in the first place.
- Hillary staffers looking to work for Obama:
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former campaign manager and confidante, Patti Solis Doyle, and Sen. Barack Obama’s top adviser have informally discussed the former Clintonite’s going to work for the Obama campaign in the general election.
Solis Doyle’s possible hiring is a major breach not just in Clinton’s campaign but in the political universe known as “Hillaryland,” a term Solis Doyle reportedly coined after joining the Clintons in 1991 as the first lady's personal scheduler. She was forced out of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in February amid internal criticism about her spending practices and preparation for upcoming contests.
“I’ve talked to Patti throughout. I know that she wants to be helpful in a general election campaign, and we appreciate that,” Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod told Politico, declining directly to answer the question of whether he and Solis Doyle had discussed her working for the campaign.
I'd love to see Clinton's group of Latino staffers and experts transition over to the Obama team. That crew was pretty darn good.
- Good point.
Matthew Yglesias is skeptical about the influence of anti-McCain web videos.
I kind of wonder on some level what the point of producing tons of McCain-bashing web videos is, since it seems like a foregone conclusion that pretty much the entire cohort of people inclined to watch web videos isn't going to vote for McCain in the first place [...]A small part of that "cohort" of people inclined to watch web videos is comprised of reporters and media professionals. Working them is more important to the success of a campaign than convincing a die-hard Republican McCain is a bad idea. If online viral video of SNL skits can affect campaign coverage (and trust me, not THAT many people watch SNL on TV) then so can stuff like this.
- Obama promises to target media monopolies if elected president. Watch the media conglomerates work to further subvert Obama.
- Harkin:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s family background as the son and grandson of admirals has given him a worldview shaped by the military, “and he has a hard time thinking beyond that,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., said Friday.
“I think he’s trapped in that,” Harkin said in a conference call with Iowa reporters. “Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous.”
Predictably, the wingers are getting the vapors. Get the smelling salts! John Cole:
Is there a bigger bunch of pansies than right wing bloggers? They can spend years hammering the opposition, lying about them and calling them traitors, and someone makes a fairly harmless remark and they just go insane. Well, more insane.
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