Month: June 2012

Edolphus Towns endorses Charles Barron (D CAND, NY-10 PRI)… and GOP House Majority.

Meet the man likely to win the NY-10 Democratic nomination:

“I want to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.“

-That’s NYC Councilman Charles Barron, who apparently is the Democratic establishment’s choice to be the next Congressman from NY-10 (the seat currently held by retiring Edolphus Towns).  And it’s not even the most obnoxious thing that Barron’s ever said!  Heck, we haven’t even mined the Farrakhan stuff, or the Jewish stuff (which leads back to the Farrakhan stuff, of course), or the Gadhafi stuff, or… well.  What time is it?  I’m sure that he’s going to spout off something stupid today.  Anyway… this is all apparently fallout from a feud between various members of NY’s state and federal Democratic delegations, and it is going to be a glorious mess if Barron gets the nomination. Continue reading Edolphus Towns endorses Charles Barron (D CAND, NY-10 PRI)… and GOP House Majority.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed hates Bain! …Except the parts* that are helping *him*.

This Bain thing is getting weird. And by weird I mean “self-immolating for Democrats.”

  • Point: [Atlanta Mayor Kasim] Reed said on NBC’s Sunday political broadcast he was alarmed by the internal Democratic skirmish over whether or not President Barack Obama should attack his GOP rival’s business career, likening the prospect of campaigning without the volley to fighting “with one hand behind his back.” “[F]or Democrats to be having a conversation about whether this is fair game,” Reed said in yesterday’s “Meet the Press” roundtable, “is unacceptable.”
  • Counter-point: …Reed neither disclosed nor explained why, if he thought Bain Capital was so horrible, he hired two high-level employees–former Chief Operating Officer (COO) Peter Aman and current Deputy Chief Operating Officer Hans Utz–immediately after the two had been working at Bain.  Aman, a Partner at Bain & Company, took a two-year leave of absence from Bain, in order to work as COO, which is essentially a Deputy Mayor position, under Mayor Reed, from the beginning of 2010 to the end of 2011.

Continue reading Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed hates Bain! …Except the parts* that are helping *him*.

The RNC …cuts and pastes OfA’s Anna Wintour ad.

You know how people would joke that it was going to be incredibly easy for the RNC to do campaign ads this election season, because they’d write themselves?  That in fact the GOP would just have to show Obama and the Democrats being… Obama and the Democrats?  That we might not even have to do more than cut and paste?

Yeah.  As God is my witness, we were JOKING about that last part.  We didn’t think that our opponents were going to be that dumb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Huts_Ltt2CU

Continue reading The RNC …cuts and pastes OfA’s Anna Wintour ad.

#rsrh The ‘Pew Gap’ (as in, church pews).

Let me just establish-via-selected-quotes (via Patheos) the problem that the Democrats are facing with religious voters.

In 2008, the Obama campaign sought ways to cooperate with religious moderates and conservatives and make them feel more welcome among Democrats.

[snip]

According to exit polls, the effort paid off. Obama made gains over the 2004 nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, with voters who attend religious services more than once a week, 43 percent to 35 percent. Obama also won 26 percent of the evangelical vote, compared with 21 percent for Kerry.

[snip]

But from 2008 to 2010, when control of Congress was at stake, the DNC cut its faith outreach staffing from more than six people to one part-timer, according to The Washington Post.

Continue reading #rsrh The ‘Pew Gap’ (as in, church pews).

#rsrh Shorter Victor Davis Hanson: Germany looking around…

…and starting to be comfortable with the idea of saying that, when it comes to Europe, Alles nicht in Ordnung ist*.

No, I’m not entirely comfortable with that, either.  But, heck, at least they’re unlikely to actually invade Belgium this time.

Moe Lane

*I think that I got the German right: I am much like Mark Twain in spirit when it comes to that language – and much less like him when it comes to its syntax, grammar, and vocabulary.

88% of Obama’s 2008 over-$200 donors are AWOL in 2012.

This is one of the more amusing factoids that you’re going to read this morning: “According to a BuzzFeed analysis of campaign finance data, 88% of the people who gave $200 or more in 2008 — 537,806 people — have not yet given that sum this year. And this drop-off isn’t simply an artifact of timing. A full 87% of the people who gave $200 — the sum that triggers an itemized report to the Federal Elections Commission — through April of 2008, 182,078 people, had not contributed by the end of last month. It’s a factoid that is subject to some interpretation, of course. Certainly the Obama for America campaign is in full-fledged meltdown/spin mode on the subject; they’re pointing out that those people could be contributing less than $200*. Which could very well be true.

It’s also true that most of these people will end up pulling the lever for the Democrats in November, too: roughly 45% of the vote will go to Obama even if a dinosaur-killer asteroid hits the earth between now and Election Day**. So the goal here is probably not to get these folks to see the light in that regard… and, honestly, it’s not their voting habits that we want to change; it’s their contribution habits – because changing those will probably also change their phone banking/door knocking/letter writing habits. Remember, every dime that Barack Obama has to spend on paying people to canvass for him is one less dime that he can’t spend aggressively. Continue reading 88% of Obama’s 2008 over-$200 donors are AWOL in 2012.