Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Everybody saw this coming.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Let me file that under fuck it.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

“They not like us!” (that’s for sure!)

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Consistently wrong since 2002

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Bark louder, little dog.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

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Election 2011 eh

Another Poll Shows Hochul Ahead

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PPP has Kathy Hochul ahead by a 6 points (MOE 2.9%) over Republican Jane Corwin in tomorrow’s special election in NY-26. Tea Partier by day Jack Davis is down to 13%.

This poll, and Saturday’s Siena survey show that Davis and Corwin are splitting conservative votes. A good part of the reason is the many self-inflicted wounds that have given Corwin a 52-34 unfavorable-favorable rating (almost the mirror opposite of Hochul). As Buffalopundit put it, “Corwin has run a campaign that is only competent at incompetence”.

Polling for special elections is tough, so it would be foolish to assume that Hochul will win this race based on a couple of polls. Even so, here’s another poll with brutal crosstabs [pdf] for Republicans. Barack Obama is more popular than John Boehner in a 90% white district where 66% of respondents identify themselves as moderate to very conservative. A small plurality of respondents think that Republicans are doing a worse job in the House than Democrats, and they’re not sure whether Obama or the Republicans in Congress are best suited to run the country (it’s at 44-45).

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Hochul Takes the Lead in NY-26

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In the three-way special election in NY-26, a new Siena poll was just released showing Democrat Kathy Hochul leading Jane Corwin, 48-32 42-38 (MOE 3.9%). Erstwhile teabagger Jack Davis is bringing up the rear with 12%. The Republican conventional wisdom on this race was that Republicans who were flirting with Davis would come home to Corwin, but it looks like the opposite is happening. Hochul has gained 11 points since the last Siena poll, and Corwin has gained 2.

Looking at the crosstabs [pdf], Corwin is down by a point in the most conservative, rural and oldest part of the district. That’s devastating for the Corwin campaign and for Republicans in 2012, because it shows that the Hochul strategy of telling the truth about Corwin’s support of the Ryan plan is taking a big bite. Hochul and her spokespeople have been visiting nursing homes in the district to press home the attack, and it’s clearly working.

The election is Tuesday, the momentum in this race is on Hochul’s side, and the Corwin campaign is a complete fail parade. Yesterday, a local newspaper excoriated Corwin for a misleading Chamber of Commerce ad that made it look like they had endorsed Corwin. And, to top that, Corwin, in league with House Republicans, was first to release the news that an amendment opposed by families of Flight 3407 had been pulled. I’ll let you follow that last link by Buffalopundit to get a full taste of how low Corwin will go, and how desperate her campaign has become.

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Secretly Minnesotan

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American Conservative magazine has a lengthy and interesting history of Michele Bachmann and the rise of evangelical Christians in the Midwest in the last 40 years. The main driver of change is the battle over abortion:

Go across the Midwest, state by state, and you find the “moderate” wing of the party has shrunk to insignificance. No Republican could get signatures on a ballot petition, let alone win a primary, as a supporter of abortion rights. That wasn’t true just over a decade ago. And the nearly forgotten Ford-Dole ticket of two famed Midwestern Republicans in 1976 wouldn’t elicit much support from GOP voters in the region today.

Bachmann’s strategy will be to unite the Tea Party/Paulists with the social conservatives, which will be a neat trick considering that Paul himself is running. But, after reading the piece, I’ll buy the premise that she’s the only big name candidate in the Republican race who social conservatives will take seriously. She’s got a long, solid history of anti-abortion advocacy, and a far more serious political background than her doppelganger Palin. And, for all the “Hoot-Smalley” idiocy, she’s also a lawyer, which means that she was at least able to stick around long enough to finish law school.

If she does announce, I hope Democrats put some money into her district to encourage her constituents to throw her out because she’s not paying attention to her district. MN-6 is a R+7 district, so it’s no cakewalk for a Democrat, but she had a fairly tight race in 2008 after her first set of stupid public commentary. It would be a hell of a public service to knock her out of Congress.

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The Fail Parade Pulls Into Buffalo

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This local newscast, posted by the always excellent BuffaloPundit, shows just what a clown show the special election in NY-26 has become. Because Tea Party candidate and self-funding millionaire Jack Davis is threatening to upset the sure thing election of Jane Corwin, Republicans parachuted in some other “Tea Party” organization to give Corwin their useless endorsement. But that weak effort is drowned out by the collapse of the Republican establishment in the face of a combined Democratic and (real) Tea Party assault.

After Republicans posted a highly-edited video purporting to show Jack Davis assaulting Corwin’s chief of staff, and after Republicans refused to post the rest of the video, wanted posters are out for Corwin’s employee, who has disappeared. The Republican claim that the batteries were dead on a second camera has been thoroughly debunked, and now Corwin and Republican operatives are falling back on “that’s all in the past” statements that satisfy nobody.

This is all sideshow bullshit, but Corwin is the one who needs to rebut the (true) charge that she supports the Ryan plan to gut Medicare. With all the fussing and fighting, that message isn’t getting out.

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Newtonian Calculus

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A word of warning to those with weak stomachs: you might want to hold off on reading this morning’s Times profile of Newt Gingrich and his third wife Callista until after your breakfast has settled. I’m guessing it was meant to be a puff-piece beat sweetener, but the yuck factor of the young plastic trophy wife coupled with that disgusting old geezer just overwhelms the whole exercise. Did you know that she’s 22 years his junior and their affair started when she was still in her 20s? Trust me, if you didn’t, those facts will be burned into your brain and roiling your stomach long after today’s newspaper is lining birdcages.

Newt and Callista run a bullshit factory built on Newt’s reputation as a Republican macher, and daddy can’t write paychecks unless there’s cash in the bank, so Newt pretty much had to run for real this year, otherwise people would just point and laugh in 2016. Unfortunately for Newt’s future cash flows, his “I’m a candidate” sideshow is already the butt of Saturday Night Live skits. I doubt that Newt will even make the official David Brooks serious candidate list this time around — the best he can hope for is a few more years on the Sunday shows.

Newt’s latest sideshow gimmick is a heartfelt conversion to Catholicism, his wife’s religion, timed appropriately to coincide with his company’s release of a DVD about Pope John Paul II. By the time 2016 rolls around, Newt will probably be shilling tales of the pain of the circumcision required for him to convert to Judaism in order to marry his fourth trophy wife, all timed to pimp the release of a special two-DVD collection honoring the life of Binny Netanyahu.

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