The most hilarious, devastating, and insightful smackdown of the nightmare that was “The Phantom Menace,” part one:
The rest can be found here. Happy holidays!
101 thoughts on “Weekly Open Thread: What Races Are You Interested In?”
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The poll on Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District that Public Policy Polling released this week illuminated something I had thought for a while. This is that Tarryl Clark, even though she is a state legislator with a good profile, does not have much of a chance of unseating Michelle Bachmann. Any Democrat will have a hard time running in a district with the partisan makeup that the Sixth has, especially in a Republican favoring year that 2010 most likely will be.
Good luck to all of us in the Upper Midwest!
Another week another update on the upcomming special state senate election in Minnesota.
The race is starting to take shape with Republican and DFL endorsing conventions taking place Monday and the filing deadline next Tuesday. So far their are 6 Republicans, 1 Democrat and 1 Independence Party member who have declared.
http://www.wasecacountynews.co…
The only DFL candidate to declare so far is Jason Engbrecht, a Faribault resident and physics professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield. Engbrecht serves on the Faribault School Board. I don’t know Mr Engbrecht but he sounds like an interesting candidate. Here is his campaign website.
http://www.jason4senate.org/in…
Maybe it is my bias but I am really unimpressed with the Republican field. They all seem to be garden variety teabaggers to me. Of course this is a republican leaning district and in a low turnout 3 way contest anything can happen.
Amazing, then I watched the First Contact Review. Still Amazing.
So politics, I got this book for Christmas, it may be the most interesting book I have ever received: “The Politics of Zoos.”
http://www.amazon.com/Politics…
The politics of professional animal captivity and management including congressional overhauls to American zoo standards, I am in fascination overload at this book.
And here’s 2 of my favorite Christmas songs that I’ll leave you with:
I got a couple of puzzles, a Sudoku book, an iPhone, and a Wii!
And here’s another video, a blast from the past!
With an eye toward electoral college majorities, decennial deck-shuffling, and keeping Democrats in charge in the Congress (but with that same eye averted at this point from issues that may come to change priorities), following are Members of Congress whose districts cry out for attention:
Jason Altmire from Pennsylvania’s 4th, John Boccieri from Ohio’s 16th, Allen Boyd from Florida’s 2nd, Bruce Braley from Iowa’s 1st, Vern Buchanan from Florida’s 13th, Christopher Carney from Pennsylvania’s 10th, Kathy Dahlkemper from Pennsylvania’s 3rd, Charlie Dent from Pennsylvania’s 15th, Mario Diaz-Balart from Florida’s 25th, Leonard L. Boswell from Iowa’s 3rd, Steve Driehaus from Ohio’s 1st, Jim Gerlach from Pennsylvania’s 6th, Gabrielle Giffords from Arizona’s 8th, Alan Grayson from Florida’s 8th, Paul E. Kanjorski from Pennsylvania’s 11th, Mary Jo Kilroy from Ohio’s 15th, Ann Kirkpatrick from Arizona’s 1st, Ron Klein from Florida’s 22nd, Suzanne M. Kosmas from Florida’s 24th, Tom Latham from Iowa’s 4th, Harry E. Mitchell from Arizona’s 5th, John P. Murtha from Pennsylvania’s 12th, Adam Putnam from Florida’s 12th, Tom Rooney from Florida’s 16th, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen from Florida’s 18th, Jean Schmidt from Ohio’s 2nd, Joe Sestak from Pennsylvania’s 7th, Zach Space from Ohio’s 18th, Lee Terry from Nebraska’s 2nd, Pat Tiberi from Ohio’s 12th, Dina Titus from Nevada’s 3rd, Bill Young from Florida’s 10th.
beginning on December 22. Blah blah blah Nancy Pelosi blah blah blah government takeover of health care blah blah blah pork-laden stimulus blah blah blah liberal agenda.
Why would they waste money on calls three days before Christmas when everyone’s attention was on a big winter storm and holiday plans?
Anyone know how many districts were getting similar robocalls?
Apparently, Ed Case is more progressive than Colleen Hanabusa, despite being a Blue Dog in Congress, who would have voted for the Iraq war. http://www.swingstateproject.c…
So last November in my hometown of Tucson, my parents’ Democratic City Councilwoman Nina Trasoff lost reelection to Republican Steve Kozachik. Here’s the weird thing that I somehow hadn’t noticed before; while Councilmembers represent individual Wards (in Kozachik’s case, that would be Ward 6, which contains Midtown Tucson and stretches to the University of Arizona), they are elected at large. So while Ward 6, which is one of the more liberal parts of Tucson, voted to retain Trasoff with 59% of the vote, Kozachik became its Councilman anyway because he racked up margins in other Wards that had high turnout. So now, while Kozachik knows perfectly well who actually wanted him on the council, he’s still somehow supposed to represent the interests of a Ward that didn’t want him. Is Kozachik going to improve on Trasoff’s (admittedly poor) constituent services? What motivation does he have when his only realistic chance for reelection wrests with trying to rack up his votes on the Eastside?
My question is, are there any other communities that have this bizarre system of elections? I really can’t imagine a worse way to go about City Council races-either actually having Wards chose their own Councilmembers or just electing them at-large without the pretense that they represent Wards would be much better.
I saw all 70 minutes As disappointing as Phantom Menace was, the bad acting needed to be mentioned more. Although maybe that had a lot to do with the plot, screenplay, etc. Natalie Portman, for example, has been much better in other movies.
But, its an extreeemely small sample not taken by a real pollster (157 people sampled)
of those, 25 actually answered
12 were for Brown
13 for Coakley
the rest did not answer or refused to respond
http://ow.ly/Q15q
Let’s not let this devolve into an argument about what is best for the country on passing HCR because my entire post will be politically motivated not public policy motivated.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINIO…
This is what got me thinking that progressives will either kill the entire thing all together or drag it out for an extremely long period of time, which is the area I want to talk about.
My last semester of college in my American Political Behavior class, we read a book of John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theise-Morse’s research called Stealth Democracy, outlining essentially how Americans want our government to work.
What they found was we as Americans do not want to personally be in charge of policy decisions, we want to elect experts and better qualified people to make these decisions for us, and that is the extent that we want to participate for the most part in public policy. The death knell to public opinion with pending legislation is dragging it out, making us hear about it for months on end, and making us think that the people we have elected are worthless and just cant get something done. It’s just like the phrase about legislating being like making sausage, it is an ugly process. We dont want to hear about some piece legislation that has been worked on for like 6 months, we elected people to get things passed so do it already!
Remember where the polling was on HCR and all of our electoral fortunes during the summer? Everything was quite positive, until the protests occured and people just got sick of the whole thing, those protests turned the whole thing into a toxic piece of crap to many. And IIRC, it seemed like everyone’s name who came up as being heavily involved in the process negotiating the HCR deal all saw their poll numbers drop, with Baucus being the name I seem to be recalling. Maybe Reid wouldnt be in such bad electoral shape if his name wasnt constantly associated with a piece of legislation no one wants to hear about anymore. I dont want to hear about it anymore, it’s just getting to be too and the past 6 months haved caused me to be spent.
It’s what motivates the throw the bums out mentality. If they cant do what we put them into office to do, legislate and get shit done, then throw them all out and elect people who will get something done, or the inverse and wont get anything passed.
If we want to do well in 2010, we just need to get this thing passed because having a YEAR of constant media attention and scrutiny is not going do it. Regardless of your personal opinions, if we want to do well in 2010, we need to change the message from cost control in HCR to health coverage, call it a victory, get us some good press and wrap this thing up. If we have to lose several progressive votes with us being able to pick-up several Blue Dog votes so be it, but it’s time to get something passed and stop this freefall in public opinion.
Again, I see about a million opportunties to turn this into a knock out drag out fight about policy (expanding coverage has to go hand-in-hand with cost control, etc.). Let’s not and say we did ;).
Two updates.
Dayton goes public with having constantly battled mild depression and having slipped back into drinking while having been a recovered alcoholic during the end of his term as a Senator. I have absolutely no idea why he would choose to go public with this information. He says personal disclosure of this magnitude is part of the entrance fee to the MN gubernatorial but I think that’s kind of absurd, we dont expect to know every single one of his flaws, especially such deeply personal ones.
Here is what I think, he’s either trying to get some sympathy attention because he is not viewed as a likely contender for the DFL endorsement or he is worried that someone like Coleman would use this against him in the general (Im leaning the later as an optimist). I cant imagine he’d think that other DFL contenders would attack him for this, that would be the best way for said contender to ruin all chances of winning the DFL endorsement or primary because we dont play dirty, not publicly anyway. (There was apparently some dirty politics going on to get Franken the endorsement on the first vote, but I never got any examples and it was all very hush hush.)
Second, I just got an email from the John Marty campaign and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is endorsing Marty. JNP ran against Franken and was the only one left standing by the time the convention rolled around. JNP was one of my college profs and is the de facto leader of the peace activist crew who are a powerful constituency in DFL politics and probably one of the most active further left groups in the country.
I could seriously start my own blog and have it entirely focused on the MN-Gov race. Hmmmmm…..
Is it just me or have challengers in large part changed the game when running against an incumbent? It seems like there are many more intraparty challenges (if my count is correct, there are currently 88 of these). Granted there are quite a few situations where the incumbent has yet to declare (32) and challengers may just be making sure that the party has a candidate running. But I would think if that were the rationale, they’d be in an exploratory phase, not full out declaring. My breakdown shows 36 Democrats and 52 Republicans facing primaries within their party. Of these, there are 13 Democratic incumbents and 19 Republican incumbents who have yet to declare. Texas alone has 12 Republicans facing primaries.
Another thing that seems to be the case is that there appears to be more forum shopping than previously. I’m aware of at least 4 situations where that has occurred, New Jersey (Batenman), New York (Ball), Florida (Constantine), and Pennsylvania (Welch). Does this somehow indicate a desire to cull out the weakest incumbents, and run against them, no matter where within the state they are representative?
All in all, it appears that the motives are just to get elected, regardless of incumbents’ records. Putting that together with the ever increasing importance of self-funding and doctrinaire thinking, I think, really doesn’t bode well for our representative government.
Keeping it classy:
According to WTVM:
http://www.oregonlive.com/poli…
Not like voting by mail is difficult here in Oregon…