Teabaggers and Other Detritus

The Tea Baggers will soon announce a 7-figure anonymous donation for a Get Out The Vote campaign. I guess the donors' name sounds like Coke. And they are going to need it. Buried in a morning poll was this little tidbit. 21% of Americans say they will vote because of (favorably) the Tea Baggers. 40% say they will definitely vote to counter the teabaggers.

Quinnipiac conducted a poll in March on the Tea Party Movement. 13% of Americans consider themselves part of this "movement". 80% say they are emphatically not. Of the teabaggers, 74% are Republicans or independents leaning that way; 16% are Democrats or independents leaning that way. 77% vote for McCain. Only 15% voted for Barack Obama.

Of the following teabagger candidates for the Senate, I can only spot two--Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey--, who have ever held public office.

Rand Paul--Kentucky
Joe Miller--Alaska
Sharron Angle--Nevada
Christine O'Donnell-Delaware
Ken Buck--Colorado
Mike Lee--Utah.

We have good news for Hate Fans-- forget Islamophobia, let's get a real anti-semite to run. Jim Russell, the Republican running for New York's 18th District is a true-blue anti-semite, a white supremacist and a believer in eugenics. He's running against Nita Lowey. Russell is complaining that there is an active campaign to Judaize Christianity and he's campaigning to stop that. maybe he should openly attack Rev. John Hagee and his phony brand of Hebraic Christianity. I'm sure Russell has the winning formula for New York state.

www.electoral-vote.com ran an interesting piece on why Rasmussen can be excluded from polling summaries. The piece mirrors my concerns that started at the beginning of Obama's term when Rasmussen's approval ratings for Obama were radically at odds with almost every other pollster. Then Rasmussen started running hundreds of polls trying to create an electoral environment all his own. A Republican and now a Fox News employee, the Rasmussen polls are weighted for a sample of 38% Republican. Weighting of polling data is commonplace and in fact necessary but 38% for Republicans, when only a year and a half ago party identification was around 25%, seems a bit off. The short piece is worth a read. However, I would suggest that Rasmussen has to tighten his game for the period leading to the elections to retain any credibility left.

Governor Moonbeam has emerged from the dead. PPP polls have Brown by five over Whitman 47-42. However, in late July, he was with a six pt. lead 46 to 40. Fox News has the race tied at 45-45. Interestingly, Meg Whitman's negatives have jumped to 48.5%, near a fatal level in electoral politics.

A Greenberg Quinlan poll of swing states shows that voters approve of getting rid of the tax breaks for the wealthy at 53-62%. This seems to be a successful theme for Democrats to accent. However, Joe Lieberman wants to create a caucus of 12 to support the tax breaks for the wealthy.

Mitch McConnell is mad at Lisa Murkowski for running a write-in campaign for Senate in Alaska. For trivial buffs, only one person ever won a Senate seat by a write-in vote--Senator Thurmond of South Carolina. He may deprive her of a seat on the Energy Subcommittee.

The filibuster against the Defense Appropriations succeeded with a vote of 56-43. In other words, 57 senators wanted to vote on the bill. Welcome to the wacky world of filibusters. While credit for this neanderthal move goes to the Republicans, Virginia's own Webb acted as the closet redneck he is. Harry Reid promises another vote after the elections.

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which fights same sex marriage through state referenda and were a major sponsor of Prop 8 in California, received tons of money from Mormons for the California fight. But now that it adopted a policy of refusing to disclose its donors, it has become the beneficiary of $1.4 million in donations from the Knights of Ciolumbus. Apparently, the Knights of Columbus contribution funded NOM's efforts in Maine, where same-sex marriage was barely defeated.

New on our Book Shelf is C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy by Jeff Sharlet, the author of The Family. If you are a regular viewer of the Rachel Maddow Show, C Street will be familiar as the rest stop for Family Values guys like Senator Ensign, Coburn and Rep. Stupak. Also,who can forget the Love Guv Sanford from South Carolina?