Tag: Politics

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

David Sirota: From Uprising to Hostile Takeover … and Back Again

Death Panels. Witchcraft. Birthers. Islamophobes. Tea partiers. Obama text messages. Palin robo-calls. TV commercial after TV commercial after TV commercial. And now, at the end of this $4 billion We-Didn’t-Start-the-Fire-worthy vaudeville known as the 2010 election, what do we have to show for it? That’s right, a new House speaker with the politics of Newt Gingrich and the skin complexion of a Syracuse mascot.

If after this soul-crushing extravaganza you find yourself shell-shocked, that’s understandable. If you are confused, that’s understandable, too, considering the contradictions.

A president who helped corporate interests gut the very proposals he was elected on-health care reform, Wall Street regulation and economic stimulus-was suddenly berated for being anti-business and for overreaching. An anti-Establishment/anti-corporate/anti-NAFTA/anti-government tea party ended up electing to the Senate a congressman’s son (Rand Paul), a pharmaceutical lobbyist (Dan Coats), a Bush trade representative (Rob Portman) and a corporate chieftain whose business was propped up by government grants (Ron Johnson). Meanwhile, a country that twice rejected Bush Republicans in favor of Democrats suddenly returned those same Republicans to power

Sen, Bernie Sanders: MSNBC’s Disgrace

It is outrageous that General Electric/MSNBC would suspend Keith Olbermann for exercising his constitutional rights to contribute to a candidate of his choice. This is a real threat to political discourse in America and will have a chilling impact on every commentator for MSNBC.

We live in a time when 90 percent of talk radio is dominated by right-wing extremists, when the Republican Party has its own cable network (Fox) and when progressive voices are few and far between.

At a time when the ownership of Fox news contributed millions of dollars to the Republican Party, when a number of Fox commentators are using the network as a launching pad for their presidential campaigns and are raising money right off the air, it is absolutely unacceptable that MSNBC suspended one of the most popular progressive commentators in the country.

Is Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz next? Is this simply a ‘personality conflict’ within MSNBC or is one of America’s major corporations cracking down on a viewpoint they may not like? Whatever the answer may be, Keith Olbermann should be reinstated immediately and allowed to present his point of view.

Johann Hari: America is now officially for sale

It’s the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while actually ripping him off

The laws and policies of the legislature of the United States of America are now effectively on e-Bay, for sale to the highest bidder. Are you a Wall Street boss who wants to party like it’s 2007? Are you a Big Coal baron who wants to burn, baby, burn? Are you an insurance company that wants to be able to kick sick people off your rolls? Meet John Boehner, the most powerful Republican and soon-to-be Speaker of the House. But – of course! – you already have.

Here’s an example of how you have worked together. In 1995, the House was going to finally repeal subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn’t seem like the most deserving recipient of tax-payers’ cash – until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: “It’s gone on here for a long time.” So get your bids in: the House is open for business.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

David Sirota: Thank You, Dick Cheney, For Giving Me the Proper Words

The facts are painfully apparent. Though hundreds — if not thousands — of people in D.C. are professionally paid to pretend these facts require debate and analysis and parsing and speculation and press releases and pithy Tweets and Sunday Show roundtables and C-SPAN symposia and to-camera cable-TV rants and lengthy thousand-page books, they don’t require any of that. The facts are simple. The facts are obvious. The facts are undeniable to anyone not paid fistfulls of sweaty money  to lie or sensationalize:

1. The Democratic Party shit on its base with its policies, as noted above.

2. This demoralized the Democratic base, which responded by not turning out to vote. As CBS News notes, “Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections (but) turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels.”

3. In cause-and-effect style, the result of all this was, as the Washington Post reports, a freshman congressional class that is primarily made up of angry, white, lunatic-conservative assholes.

So yes, all of you who are wasting all of our time pretending this isn’t the basic point-A-to-point-B story of the election — and there are a lot of you out there — please, if not for me, then for everyone else: Go fuck yourself.

Paul Krugman: The Focus Hocus-Pocus

Democrats, declared Evan Bayh in an Op-Ed article on Wednesday in The Times, “overreached by focusing on health care rather than job creation during a severe recession.” Many others have been saying the same thing: the notion that the Obama administration erred by not focusing on the economy is hardening into conventional wisdom. . . . .

Of course, there’s a subtext to the whole line that health reform was a mistake: namely, that Democrats should stop acting like Democrats and go back to being Republicans-lite. Parse what people like Mr. Bayh are saying, and it amounts to demanding that Mr. Obama spend the next two years cringing and admitting that conservatives were right.

There is an alternative: Mr. Obama can take a stand.

For one thing, he still has the ability to engineer significant relief to homeowners, one area where his administration completely dropped the ball during its first two years. Beyond that, Plan B is still available. He can propose real measures to create jobs and aid the unemployed and put Republicans on the spot for standing in the way of the help Americans need.

Would taking such a stand be politically risky? Yes, of course. But Mr. Obama’s economic policy ended up being a political disaster precisely because he tried to play it safe. It’s time for him to try something different.

(emphasis mine)

Joe Conason: Obama should push back — like Bill Clinton

It’s true that Clinton compromised after 1994 — but first he fought the Gingrich GOP to a standstill

Long before the dismal results of Tuesday’s election were complete, one especially dog-eared bit of guidance for President Obama was getting wide circulation in the mainstream: He must now emulate Bill Clinton, who “shifted to the center” after the electoral debacle of November 1994, “triangulated” his way to compromise with the Republicans, and won a second term.

Among the reasons why such advice is outdated and useless, the most obvious may be that Obama’s position today is stronger than Clinton’s after 1994. Today, unlike then, the Democrats can look forward to retaining control of the Senate. But there are two other overriding reasons why Obama shouldn’t seek to imitate Clinton by immediately seeking compromises with the Republicans.

The first is that he has tried vainly from the beginning of his presidency to engage the Republicans in negotiation over vital reforms, only to learn again and again that they aren’t really interested in anything but sabotage. The second is that compromising with the Republicans isn’t exactly what Clinton did — or not at first, anyway. Before he could do anything else, he had to push back.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Gail Collins: The Day After the Day After

O.K., you poor little Democrats. Stop sobbing. Lift up your little liberal heads and shout. There’s gonna be. …

Umm.

Harry Reid! There’s gonna be more Harry Reid! Nobody thought it could happen, but the charisma-challenged Senate majority leader won another term, decisively defeating Sharron Angle, a Tea Party favorite who had claimed that American cities were run by Sharia law and who had ingratiated herself to a roomful of Hispanic teenagers by telling them that they looked Asian to her.

Yes, the Titanic went down, but Harry Reid got a lifeboat. I know you were hoping for someone more Leonardo DiCaprio, but right now you’d better take what you can get.

Arianna Huffington: In 2009 the White House Underestimated the Economic Devastation, in 2010 Democrats Paid the Price

For all the hours of pre-election predictions and post-vote analysis, the 2010 midterms came down to a very simple truth: If unemployment were near double digits come November, Democrats would take a beating.

It is, and they have.

Exit polls found that nearly nine in ten voters believe the economy is in bad shape. The same percentage said they feel pessimistic about America’s economic future. That’s practically everyone!

And while a large majority of voters still believe that George Bush is to blame for getting us into this mess, they are clearly holding Obama accountable for not fixing it.

Amanda Marcotte: The Real Reason Sharron Angle Lost

It’s the curse of the Mama Grizzly.

Sharron Angle had all the breaks that should have allowed her to take the Senate seat in Nevada. She was running against a wildly unpopular incumbent in a state that leads the nation in unemployment. She raised and spent a record amount of money for a Senate race. She ran a race-baiting campaign in a style that almost always works for Republicans. She had the Mama Grizzly hype behind her. Despite all this, she managed to lose the race for Senate by virtue of her inability to stop saying crazy things, talking about “Second Amendment remedies,” calling the unemployed “spoiled,” and telling a group of Latino students that they look Asian to her.

Still, it all seems a little unfair. Angle, for all her hard-right views, was no worse and often better than some of her more successful male colleagues running in swing states, such as Pat Toomey and Marco Rubio. In the world of gaffes, she fell short of Rand Paul, who called for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act before backing off and who kept having to let go of volunteers and employees for doing things like celebrating lynching and stomping on the head of a MoveOn activist.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Will Obama and the Democrats now get the message? The center is too far right. We did not elect them to continue the same destructive policies of the last administration. We elected them to do the bold things they said they would do really regulate Wall St. and the banks, real health care reform and regulation, ending DADT and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan not expanding them into Pakistan and Yemen. Had they tried that and failed because of Republican obstruction maybe last night would have been far different.

TMC

Glenn Greenwald: Pundit sloth: blaming the Left

Ten minutes was the absolute maximum I could endure of any one television news outlet last night without having to switch channels in the futile search for something more bearable, but almost every time I had MNSBC on, there was Lawrence O’Donnell trying to blame “the Left” and “liberalism” for the Democrats’ political woes. Alan Grayson’s loss was proof that outspoken liberalism fails. Blanche Lincoln’s loss was the fault of the Left for mounting a serious primary challenge against her. Russ Feingold’s defeat proved that voters reject liberalism in favor of conservatism, etc. etc. It sounded as though he was reading from some script jointly prepared in 1995 by The New Republic, Lanny Davis and the DLC.

There are so many obvious reasons why this “analysis” is false: Grayson represents a highly conservative district that hadn’t been Democratic for decades before he won in 2008 and he made serious mistakes during the campaign; Lincoln was behind the GOP challenger by more than 20 points back in January, before Bill Halter even announced his candidacy; Feingold was far from a conventional liberal, having repeatedly opposed his own party on multiple issues, and he ran in a state saddled with a Democratic governor who was unpopular in the extreme. Beyond that, numerous liberals who were alleged to be in serious electoral trouble kept their seats: Barney Frank, John Dingell, Rush Holt and many others. But there’s one glaring, steadfastly ignored fact destroying O’Donnell’s attempt — which is merely the standard pundit storyline that has been baking for months and will now be served en masse — to blame The Left and declare liberalism dead. It’s this little inconvenient fact:

  Blue Dog Coalition Crushed By GOP Wave Election

Robert Reich: Why Obama Should Learn the Lesson of 1936, not 1996

Which lesson will the president learn from the midterm election — that of Clinton in 1996, or FDR in 1936? The choice will determine his strategy over the next two years. Hopefully, he’ll find 1936 more relevant. . . .

Obama’s best hope of reelection will be to re-frame the debate, making the central issue the power of big businesses and Wall Street to gain economic advantage at the expense of the rest of us. This is the Democratic playing field, and it’s more relevant today than at any time since the 1930s.

The top 1 percent of Americans, by income, is now taking home almost a quarter of all income, and accounting for almost 40 percent of all wealth. Meanwhile, large numbers of Americans are losing their homes because banks won’t let them reorganize their mortgages under bankruptcy. And corporations continue to lay off (and not rehire) even larger numbers.

With Republicans controlling more of Congress, their pending votes against extended unemployment benefits, jobs bills, and work programs will more sharply reveal whose side they’re on. Their attempt to extort extended tax cuts for the wealthy by threatening tax increases on the middle class will offer even more evidence. As will their refusal to disclose their sources of campaign funding.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: And now for the next battle

President Obama allowed Republicans to define the terms of the nation’s political argument for the past two years and permitted them to draw battle lines the way they wanted. Neither he nor his party can let that happen again.

Democrats would be foolish to turn in on themselves in a fruitless battle over whether their troubles owe to a failure to mobilize and excite their base or to win support from the political center. In fact, Democrats held onto moderate voters while losing independents. What hurt them most was this brute fact: Voters younger than 30 made up 18 percent of the electorate in 2008 but only about half that on Tuesday, according to network exit polls. This verdict was rendered by a much older and much more conservative electorate. Yes, there was an enthusiasm gap.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Ted Sorensen: A Time to Weep

Commencement speech at the New School University in New York on May 21, 2004

This is not a speech. Two weeks ago I set aside the speech I prepared. This is a cry from the heart, a lamentation for the loss of this country’s goodness and therefore its greatness.

Future historians studying the decline and fall of America will mark this as the time the tide began to turn – toward a mean-spirited mediocrity in place of a noble beacon.

For me the final blow was American guards laughing over the naked, helpless bodies of abused prisoners in Iraq. “There is a time to laugh,” the Bible tells us, “and a time to weep.” Today I weep for the country I love, the country I proudly served, the country to which my four grandparents sailed over a century ago with hopes for a new land of peace and freedom. I cannot remain silent when that country is in the deepest trouble of my lifetime.

I am not talking only about the prison abuse scandal, that stench will someday subside. Nor am I referring only to the Iraq war – that too will pass – nor to any one political leader or party. This is no time for politics as usual, in which no one responsible admits responsibility, no one genuinely apologizes, no one resigns and everyone else is blamed.

The damage done to this country by its own misconduct in the last few months and years, to its very heart and soul, is far greater and longer lasting than any damage that any terrorist could possibly inflict upon us.

The stain on our credibility, our reputation for decency and integrity, will not quickly wash away.

Robert Freeman: If You Want More Debt Vote Republican

One of the most successful deceits of the past thirty years is that Republicans are the party of “fiscal discipline.” In fact, Republicans are the party of fiscal wreckage. Simply put, Republicans love deficits and debt. They have buried the country with them. They expand them with orgiastic fervor every time they get the chance. Until we come to grips with this simple truth we will never gain control of our fiscal destiny.

In 1980 the national debt stood at $1 trillion. Over the prior 204 years, the nation paid for the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the build-out of an entire continent, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, and the better part of the Cold War. And through all that, we still only borrowed $1 trillion.

But over the next 12 years of relative peace and prosperity, Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would quadruple the national debt, to $4 trillion. They did it by dramatically lowering taxes on the wealthy and furiously expanding government spending. This isn’t even economics, it’s arithmetic: bring in less income while spending more money, and the result is debt. Mountains of it.

Glenn Greenwald: The wretched mind of the American authoritarian

Decadent governments often spawn a decadent citizenry.  A 22-year-old Nebraska resident was arrested yesterday for waterboarding his girlfriend as she was tied to a couch, because he wanted to know if she was cheating on him with another man; I wonder where he learned that?  There are less dramatic though no less nauseating examples of this dynamic.  In The Chicago Tribune today, there is an Op-Ed from Jonah Goldberg — the supreme, living embodiment of a cowardly war cheerleader — headlined:  “Why is Assange still alive?”  . . . .

There are multiple common threads here:  the cavalier call for people’s deaths, the demand for ultimate punishments without a shred of due process, the belief that the U.S. is entitled to do whatever it wants anywhere in the world without the slightest constraints, a wholesale rejection of basic Western liberties such as due process and a free press, the desire for the President to act as unconstrained monarch, and a bloodthirsty frenzy that has led all of them to cheerlead for brutal, criminal wars of aggression for a full decade without getting anywhere near the violence they cheer on, etc.  But that’s to be expected.  We lived for eight years under a President who essentially asserted all of those powers and more, and now have a one who has embraced most of them and added some new ones, including the right to order even American citizens, far from any battlefield, assassinated without a shred of due process.  Given that, it would be irrational to expect a citizenry other than the one that is being molded with this mentality.

Dressed in all black wearing little black cat ears and her orange striped sneakered feet propped up on the desk, Rachel Maddow, with a sense of ironic humor, delivered a general run down of candidates and initiatives that voters will decide on Tuesday.

I will be up and out early tomorrow, once again helping get voters to the polls and explaining the new voting system here in New York. I have the option, as ek does, to vote on The Working Families line. Yet, not all those candidates fit the ideals of Liberal/Progressive that I support. Yeah, I’m pretty left of the left.

Here are two web sites to help you find details on candidates, locations of polling places, relevant local laws and what your rights are when in case your vote is challenged.

Do-It-Yourself Local Voter Guides

and this one to help you find where your polling place is located from Working for America

Look Up Where to Vote

“I’m still hanging on to this belief that when people go in that booth — they’re going to be mad at Obama, they’re going to be mad at the Democrats, you know, things haven’t changed, people still aren’t working, they’ve been out of work for two years, their house is getting foreclosed — but when they’re in that booth and the curtain closes and they look at that Republican name, I think a lot of people are just gonna go, ‘oyyyyy,’ I remember what those eight years were like.”

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

These programs all look like the “Trick or Treat” editions. Sadly, it appears to be all tricks,

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour: This Sunday, Ms. Amanpour will look at the last ABC News/Washington Post poll before Tuesday’s election. She will be joined by Republican campaign chairman Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Democratic campaign chairman Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.

Ms. Amanpour will report on her experience at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”.

Joining her Round Table discussion is Dick Armey, former House majority leader and current chairman of Freedom Works, along with George Will, Cokie Roberts, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile and ABC News’ Senior Congressional Correspondent Jonathan Karl. They will debate the possible consequences of the Tuesday election

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Joining Mr. Scheiffer this Sunday will be Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.), Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Gov. Ed Rendell (D-Pa.).

I think we can all know what Pete King will be ranting about….TERROR!!!

The Chris Matthews Show: Mr. Matthews guest will be Norah O’Donnell, MSNBC Chief Washington Correspondent, John Heilemann, New York Magazine National Political Correspondent, Howard Fineman, Newsweek

Senior Washington Correspondent and Helene Cooper, The New York Times White House Correspondent.

The questions for discussion:

How Many Senate Seats Will Republicans Pick Up Tuesday?

Will Barack Obama Do The “Clintonian Backflip” That Republican Leaders In Congress Are Demanding?

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Democratic National Committee Chairman Former Gov. Tim Kaine (VA) and Republican Governors Association Chairman Gov. Haley Barbour (MS) will join Mr. Gregory for The final arguments for what’s at stake in this midterm election.

NBC News’ Tom Brokaw, Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin, NPR’s Michele Norris, National Journal’s Charlie Cook, and NBC News’ Chuck Todd will comprise the Round Table for a look at the political landscape.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: A special edition live from CNN’s Election center in New York. It’s the homestretch in the midterm elections and both sides are making their final push to Election Day. Republicans seem set to make great gains, but will it be enough to shift the balance of power in Congress? Joining us, the Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on the future of the Republican Party.

Then, the view from the other side of the aisle. Majority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) on the Democratic strategy headed into Tuesday’s election. What will it mean for the Democratic agenda in the next Congress?

Finally, a look at some of the hottest races and what to expect on Election Day. What are the most important issues as voters head to the polls? We’ll talk to former long term Senator and presidential candidate Bob Kerrey (D) and CNN Political Contributor Bill Bennett.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS: The American Dream: the idea that anybody can get ahead, can succeed, can enrich themselves with hard work and smarts. Is that idea dead?

For large swaths of America, it MAY be. The national unemployment rate is 9.6% but that only tells a part of the story. Millions of jobs have been lost in America. The question is: how do we bring jobs — and GOOD jobs — back?

Fareed has gathered four of the top businessmen in America to tell us what’s at the heart of the job problem — how some many have been lost — and what the solutions are — how America can re-gain what its lost:

– Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO Google

– Muhtar Kent, Chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola

– Klaus Kleinfeld, CEO of Alcoa

– Lou Gerstner, who ran three American giants — RJ Reynolds, American Express & IBM

And Fareed will present solutions of his own — both for the nation and for the American worker.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Nouriel Roubini : A presidency heading for a fiscal train wreck

What has been the fiscal performance of President Barack Obama? He inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, as well as a budget deficit that – after much needed bail-outs and a series of reckless tax cuts – was already close to $1,000bn. His stimulus package, together with a backstop of the financial system, low rates and quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, prevented another depression. Mr Obama also deserves credit that the US, alone among advanced economies, currently supports a “growth now”, rather than an “austerity now” path.

But this is but one half of the picture; we must also judge his first two years on his ability to anticipate what the economy will need tomorrow. Here the picture is much less positive. Given the likely path of fiscal policy after next Tuesday’s election – with the expiration of existing stimulus and transfer payments, and even with most of the 2001-03 tax cuts being kept – the US economy will soon experience serious fiscal drag just when it needs a further boost. Problematically, the administration’s failures leave it relying on the Fed, which is bent on further QE, likely to be announced next Wednesday. But studies show this will have little effect on US growth in 2011, so fiscal policy should be doing some of the lifting to prevent a double dip recession.

David Sirota: It’s the Stupidity, Stupid

Redistributionist-as epithets go, the moniker is so mild, so … 2008. Today, we’re hammered by screeds against Democrats’ alleged socialism and President Barack Obama’s supposed Marxism. The class war is clearly on-the paranoids and royalists of the world have united, seizing the means of propaganda production in these waning days of this year’s election campaign.

The onslaught, of course, is predictable. After all, this is an election season-which inevitably evokes Red-baiting crusades by the plutocrats. Less predictable is this crusade’s traction. As Wall Street executives make bank off bailouts, as millions of Americans see paychecks slashed and as our economic Darwinism sends more wealth up the income ladder-it’s surprising that appeals to capitalist piggery carry more electoral agency than ever.

What could cause this intensifying politics of free-market fundamentalism at the very historical moment that proves the failure of such an ideology? Two new academic studies suggest all roads lead to ignorance.

Michael Moore: A Boot to the Head …from Michael Moore

There she was, thrown to the pavement by a Republican in a checkered shirt. Another Republican thrusts his foot in between her legs and presses down with all his weight to pin her to the curb. Then a Republican leader comes over and viciously stomps on her head with his foot. You hear her glasses crunch under the pressure. Holding her head down with his foot, he applies more force so she can’t move. Her skull and brain are now suffering a concussion.

The young woman’s name is Lauren Valle, but she is really all of us. For come this Tuesday, the right wing — and the wealthy who back them — plan to take their collective boot and bring it down hard on not just the head of Barack Obama but on the heads of everyone they simply don’t like.

Rinku Sen: The Most Racist Campaign in Decades, and What It Demands of Us

If the election of 2008 was a referendum on race, the midterms are feeling like a recount. The dominant political discourse of 2008 centered on an improbable question: Could a black man overcome decades’ worth of conservative fear mongering about scary, criminal, lazy black people and win a majority of voters? Today, things have changed. Now, the question is whether invoking scary, criminal, lazy Latinos and Muslims can incite enough conservative voters to reverse the Democrats’ 2008 gains.

Across the country, candidates are competing for the title of Best Immigrant Basher and Most Opposed to Mosques. Republican candidates have vowed that, if they win, they will turn these campaign-trail memes into congressional hearings and use them to block reforms critical to all Americans in the midst of an ongoing economic crisis. Democratic candidates, for their part, have been deafeningly silent on the subject and have vowed-well, nothing. Today’s political landscape is as frightening as 2008’s was hopeful.

LOL It looks like the Tea Party backed candidates are too nuts for Conservative, Libertarian Bob Barr. Barr, former conservative congressman and 2008 libertarian presidential candidate, endorsed Sen. Russ Feingold, (D-WI) for re-election over his Tea Party backed opponent, Ron Johnson.

What I look for in Washington are folks in the Senate and the House who put the Constitution first. Not the “R” or the “D”, not partisan politics but the Constitution. And what you have in Russ, and I have worked closely with him over a number of years to try to rein in the Patriot Act, to try to rein in the government surveillance and so forth – this is a man who understands the Constitution, who supports and fights sometimes against his own party to defend the Constitution in the Congress of the United States in ways that are much more consistent and much more proactive than a lot of Republicans

Barr also attacked the Republican Senate candidate, Ken Buck, who is running against incumbent Democrat, Michael Bennett.

Who says that Republicans don’t criticize Republicans?

As David Weigel notes:

If Russ Feingold loses his Senate seat, it will hit Democrats harder than almost any other 2010 setback coming their way on Tuesday. . . .

If Feingold leaves the Senate, there is no storm-the-barricades opponent of war on terror spying, or advocate of campaign finance reform. There are Democrats who’ll go along with it, but there’s no one else who relishes casting a lone vote or has the media profile to attempt it and get the press to care about it. . . .

If you can’t vote for Russ Feingold at least send him $5 or whatever you can afford. We need him in the Senate.

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