Texas Is Turning In A More Purple Direction-- Is 2020 The Year A Democrat Will Win Statewide?

The Texas AFL-CIO is meeting in Austin's Omni Hotel this weekend, the only union hotel in the city. On the umbrella organization's agenda is endorsing 2020 election candidates. Many locals already have done so but these endorsements are for the state organization. And there was a problem right from the start. Many for the conservative building trades unions and unions in the fossil fuels industries are vehemently opposing progressive canddiates backing the Green New Deal. It's got to be incredibly frustrating for the union activists who are strongly campaigning on the Green New Deal.

As we mentioned when we first endorsed her, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez is a Latina labor organizer and the line you hear about her is that she represents the future of Texas. Reporting for In These Times on Friday, Steven Greenhouse wrote about meeting Ramirez 7 years ago when she was running the Workers Defense Project and how he found her "whip smart, a born organizer and an inspiring speaker... The WDP brought national attention to the fact that Texas construction workers have the highest on-the-job death rate in the nation, and then in Austin won Texas’ first municipal ordinance requiring rest and water breaks for construction workers. It got Apple and other companies to guarantee workers on their Austin construction projects receive raises, safety training and workers’ comp, not required in Texas. Tzintzún Ramirez proved adept at working with undocumented workers, union leaders, construction industry execs and lawmakers." You can use the Take Back Texas thermometer below to contribute to federal campaigns of Texas progressives. Take a look at who Blue America is recommending in the Lone Star State.

Greenhouse interviewed her about... well, about how a labor organizer with a progressive agenda is going to defeat Republican Party heavyweight John Cornyn. She started by expelling that she's "spent a decade and a half thinking about how to make policy solutions for real-life problems that politicians often didn’t even know existed. I learned how to build coalitions. I learned how to raise resources for campaigns. I learned how to work around the clock to win-- because the only thing I have that those in power don’t have is time, and the knowledge that you can defeat powerful people by building movements of ordinary people."

Steven: At WDP and Jolt, you developed a reputation as a fighter for Latinos. How would you assure all Texans you will fight for them?

Cristina: I don’t think that disqualifies me to be Texas’ next senator-- I think it makes me uniquely qualified. The things that Latino families want are the exact things that every other family wants: Making sure the education system is affordable and accessible. Making sure people have good, living-wage and safe jobs. Making sure families can be together. Making sure our democracy works for everyone.

Steven: What are some ways you would work to help white and African-American communities?

Cristina: We have a senator, John Cornyn, who only wants to represent the interests of one ethnic group, one income bracket and one gender: the interests of white wealthy men.

I want to be the senator for everyone. I stand up for Medicare for All because I believe it is the best way to have the highest quality healthcare and to make sure every single American can go to the doctor. I want to tackle the student debt crisis and make sure every single Texas family can send their children to college or trade school. I want to make sure that Texas becomes a leader in transitioning our economy to green energy in a way that creates millions of great jobs for Texans.

I was really proud of my work at the Workers Defense Project. I brought union and non-union workers together, immigrants and American-born together, black, brown and white together to pursue their common interests.

I understand the way Republicans use racism and xenophobia and sexism to distract us. That’s how they get away with not giving us healthcare. That’s how they get away with divestment from our education system. That’s how they get away with an economy that doesn’t work for everyone.

Steven: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has endorsed one of your 11 opponents, M.J. Hegar, presumably thinking a centrist Air Force veteran has the best chance. Why would a progressive like yourself fare better?

Cristina: There are two strategies to change Texas. One of them has been tried for 20 years and failed every single time-- which is to run a moderate Democrat to try and swing white Republican voters.

The other strategy is to embrace the state’s diversity. We are a state that is majority people of color, a state with a long populist tradition, where progressives are hungry for change. Beto O’Rourke was the most progressive statewide candidate I can remember, and he got closer than anybody. In our Senate campaign, we try to speak to everyone-- the Black Lives Matter movement, Latino and immigrant communities, the LGBTQ community.

Everybody knows that you don’t win in Texas unless you drive up voter turnout among Latino voters. No Democrat wins without us. Yet there are Democrats running who don’t want to speak to us, who don’t want to fight for us.

There are some people in Washington who think that they know Texas better than Texans. We will prove them wrong on Election Day.

Steven: Cornyn will no doubt have a huge campaign chest. How will you defeat him?

Cristina: Republicans know if they lose Texas in 2020, it’s game over for them nationally. So I think every single dirty trick will be played in this race.

Unseating the second-most powerful Republican in the Senate doesn’t come without hard work or substantial resources. It’s my intention to raise those resources from small-dollar donors across the country who understand what’s at stake in Texas. Texans have the ability to change the course of not just our state’s history, but our entire country’s history, when we flip Texas.

Steven: What do you hope to achieve in the Senate?

Cristina: A state as large as Texas can dream big because we are big. I want to position Texas to be a leader in our nation’s transition to renewable energy. We are already the largest wind energy producer. I want to make us the largest solar energy producer and create nearly two million green jobs in Texas-- good jobs-- over the next decade. I want to tackle income inequality. In Texas, we work more hours than most people in other states. Yet most Texans struggle to get by.

The other big issue is Medicare for All. In Texas, we have the highest uninsured rate in the country: one in six. Even Americans with health insurance struggle to pay their co-pays, deductibles, premiums. This past week my son was in the hospital twice, and we had a $500 co-pay.

Steven: Texas’ economy has been built in large part by fossil fuels. How do you persuade Texans that the Green New Deal is good for them?

Cristina: As Texans, we don’t run away from big problems. We take them head on. I see climate change as a big problem, but I also see it as a real opportunity, especially for Texas. John Cornyn opposes the Green New Deal because he says it’s too expensive, but he doesn’t calculate the catastrophic cost of doing nothing-- the cost for our economy and our environment, and the human cost and suffering, which is incalculable.

No state has more to gain or lose than Texas. Texas has 250,000 workers in the oil, gas and mining industries and 233,000 workers in advanced energy, which will outpace the oil and gas industry in the next few years. So it’s just basic common sense for Texas to support the Green New Deal.

Steven: I deliberately haven’t asked whether it’s hard running with a 3-year-old son-- I imagine male candidates don’t get that question.

Cristina: I don’t mind you asking, because it’s the truth. Deciding whether to run was hard. I know that, when men run, they get thanked for their sacrifice of being away, but when women like me run, we get villainized as bad mothers But I think I could be a great senator and a great mother. I’m running with my little guy, Santi. I taught him how to hand out flyers and say “Vota Mama.” He likes to do that at all the events.

When I’m going out and fighting for the policies and solutions I believe are in the best interest of Texans and Americans-- doing that with my son next to me, I know I’m fighting for his future as well.

MJ Hegar Is Taking On John Cornyn For Senate This Time, Not John Carter In TX-31

As the lady says, Texans don't give up easy. Yesterday MJ Hegar, the former Air Force helicopter pilot who ran a strong race against John Carter in 2018, is taking on bigger game in 2020-- Texas senior Senator John Cornyn. The was the seat everyone wanted Beto to run for before launching is ill-advised presidential run. First a note: it's still possible that other strong Democratic candidate will get into the race-- San Antonio congressman Joaquín Castro has been hinting he'll run and former state Rep. Mark Strama could run. But, no matter what happens, MJ will be a contender. On paper, the state of Texas is an easier target for someone like her than TX-31 was. The PVI of TX-31 is a pretty prohibitive R+10. The state's PVI-- slightly less prohibitive, is R+8. Trump beat Hillary statewide 52.23% to 43.24%. He beat her in the 31st 53.5% to 40.8%.

Last year Hegar did a lot better than Clinton did in the district. The final score was 144,680 (50.6%) for Carter and 136,362 (47.7%) for Hegar. In fact, she won the bigger of the two counties in the district, Williamson, but not by enough (D+2) to overcome the powerful red-lean of Bell County (R+15).

So what about the 31st? It's certainly a DCCC target but with Hegar running for Senate, is there an obvious candidate? In fact, Carter is 78 and doddering and may decide too not even run again. One thing we can be certain of-- if the new DCCC regional vice chair, Marc Veasey is charged with recruiting a candidate, Carter will be able to go to sleep now and wake up reelected in 2020. One Williamson County progressive, Mike Clark, still not officially in the race, told me just moments ago that he plans to run for the Democratic nomination and that he expects several others to do likewise. We'll be hearing more from him soon but I can tell you that he supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, supports Pramila Jayapal's new and improved Medicare-For-All Act and backs the Green New Deal framework resolution as way to get busy tackling the climate change crisis.

By the way, in 2018 Hegar spent $4,998,676 to Carter's $1,943,447. There wasn't any big outside spending, although Pelosi's PAC put in $138,738 and the DCCC spent $15,000. It won't be easy for anyone to outraise what Hegar accomplished, but this time the DCCC is paying attention and, at least in theory, someone probably woke up EMILY's List.

A Handful Of Congressional Republicans Are Wondering If The Nazification Of U.S. Immigration Policy Will Hurt Them At The Polls Again

Monday evening there were a slew of reports that Capitol Hill Republicans were freaking out over the Trump-ordered mayhem at the Department of Homeland Security. And, believe me, virtually no one in Congress other than Steve King (R-IA) was excited to hear that the White House's pet neo-Nazi, Steve Miller, had been unleashed with full authority to reimplement his reviled "zero tolerance" agenda. What comes after babies in cages? Babies in gas chambers? Republican senators are grumbling that Miller was never nominated, investigated or confirmed for anything and that he's running the whole show. Trump breaking the law himself by explicitly instructing border agents to just ignore the law and defy the courts, isn't helping either. "If judges give you trouble, say, 'Sorry, judge, I can’t do it. We don’t have the room.'"

The Washington Post's Seung Min Kim reported that Grassley was raging against Trump, especially when he heard that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Lee Francis Cissna was on Miller's purge list. By Tuesday morning the NY Times was blaring that "Trump’s purge of the nation’s top homeland security officials is a sign that he is preparing to unleash an even fiercer assault on immigration, including a possible return of his controversial decision last summer to separate migrant children from their parents... But the longer term effect of the eruption of Oval Office frustration is likely to be a burst of hard-line policies that stand out even in an administration that has pursued an unprecedented series of executive actions and rules changes aimed at reducing legal and illegal immigration into the United States."

Jonathan Swan at Axios had the details for Republicans already on slow burn, reporting that "Trump has directed top officials to execute the most aggressive changes in immigration policy since his inauguration… Some officials consider the moves legally and politically dubious." Executive orders are aimed at making it "more difficult for people to invoke their fear of returning to their home country in order to seek asylum in the U.S.," largely by pretending the Orwellian fascist dictatorships in the U.S. protectorates in Central America are lovely places for people to live. Trump and Miller want to "change rules to allow the government to detain migrant children for longer than the 20-day limit allowed under the so-called Flores agreement... Sources close to Nielsen tell us that Trump and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller have called for changes that are legally dubious and would therefore be operationally ineffective."

• Nielsen has found Trump's demands unreasonable, and he has privately described her as "weak on the border," even though she oversaw actions that many viewed as the most brutal in recent memory-- such as the "zero tolerance" policy that separated migrant parents from their children.
• These sources say that Trump’s desire to make it dramatically harder for people to seek asylum in the U.S. wouldn’t produce lasting changes because they would immediately lead to court challenges. 

Is this going to have any impact at the polls? In other words, will the evangelical base still loyal to Trump continue to be fine with what his regime is doing refugee and immigrant families? Team Politico reports that even some of Trump's congressional allies are starting to worry. Senators are "urging him not to fire more top officials and warning him how hard it will be to solve twin crises at the border and the federal agencies overseeing immigration policy." And they're worried that Miller has taken over. John Bresnahan wrote that after November elections in which suburban voters rejected Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda, the president is once again making it the centerpiece of the GOP’s platform.

Texas Senator Cornyn, McTurtle's top deputy told Politico he has "no idea what Miller’s agenda is in determining immigration policy because he isn’t Senate-confirmed and doesn’t correspond with the Hill."

Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the most senior GOP senator, is trying to head off even more dismissals as Trump tries to reshape DHS into a “tougher” mold.

In an interview, Grassley expressed concern that Trump may soon boot U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Lee Francis Cissna and Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, who heads the office of policy and strategy at USCIS.

“I heard that they are on the list to be fired,” Grassley said. “They are doing in an intellectual-like way what the president wants to accomplish. So no, they should not go.”

Republicans empathize with Trump’s frustrations over the border and Congress’ languid pace at changing immigration laws. They mostly backed him on his 35-day government shutdown over the border wall, buckling only as the standoff dragged into its second month.

Most of them hated his emergency declaration on the southern border, but only 25 GOP lawmakers between the two chambers ended up bucking him. And when Trump and Miller sought to tank an immigration compromise last year, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly sided with the president and left Democrats holding the bag on the legislative collapse.

But on immigration, the party is not in lockstep with Trump. So even as the president pursues more aggressive strategies on the border, the GOP might not stick with him ahead of an election cycle that has the Senate up for grabs and with Republicans eager to take back the House.

“He thinks it’s a winning issue,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican whip. “It works for him. It may not work for everybody else.”

...Centrist GOP Rep. Will Hurd, who narrowly won reelection in 2018, said the turnover in the upper ranks of DHS isn’t helpful during a critical time at the southern border, though the Texan expressed confidence in Nielsen’s successor.

“When you’re dealing with something that’s the worst we’ve seen in 12, 13 years, having to deal with that problem and having new people come in and deal with it is always tricky,” said Hurd, whose district stretches along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Moderate GOP Rep. Tom Reed of New York said he would prefer to focus on issues like infrastructure, drug pricing and health care in the 2020 election cycle, saying the issue of immigration is being kept alive “for political purposes.”

Reed also took a veiled shot at Miller: “One hard-liner is not going to dictate the outcome of this.”

But Miller’s rise in the Trump administration is merely one more indication of how the president gravitates toward the restrictionist wing of his party.

“The president is really unhappy with the results and he’s trying to find a different formula that produces a different result,” said Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 4 Senate GOP leader. “Unless you either change the court directives or the asylum law, it’s very hard to quickly come up with a solution. And the president’s frustrated by that.”

The problem for Trump is that that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Congress’ dithering on immigration in the six years since the Senate passed its “Gang of Eight” comprehensive immigration bill, which died in the House, is no surprise.

Republicans have been signaling to Trump that with the election coming up so soon, they're not going to be able to confirm any more hard core neo-Nazis he sends over the the Hill. Xenophobic extremist Kris Kobach has been widely rumored to be the top choice of fellow-fascist Stephen Miller to replace Nielsen or one of her fired-- or soon-to-be fired-- lieutenants. Yesterday, the Kansas City Star reported that Kansas' retiring senior senator, Pat Roberts, warned, dramatically, "Don’t go there. We can’t confirm him."

BETO... For U.S. Senate?

BETO by Nancy Ohanian

Chris Cillizza delivers the most superficial and stupidest way to watch the 2020 nomination race on CNN every month. Yesterday, he moved Bernie, Klobuchar and Castro up in his "power ranking," while Sherrod Brown and Kirsten Gillibrand moved down. "Sliding down to #3," mouthed the silly Cillizza-- with silly cartoon music behind him (apparently someone at CNN knows what a doofus he is)-- "is former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke. Now, O'Rourke is the buzz and momentum candidate, even hosting his own competing rally in El Paso..."

Chuck Schumer loves recruiting candidates. Unfortunately he usually picks the worst candidates. Last cycle, his biggest efforts went into 3 extremely conservative Democrats-- Phil Bredesen (TN), Jacky Rosen (NV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ). Bredesen lost with just 44.2% of the vote but the other two flipped red seats. Unfortunately they have both already earned F grades for their Senate voting records, entirely predictable, since they both had F grades for their House voting records. In fact, Sinema had the single worst voting record among Dems in the House and after just a month of votes is already voting more conservatively than Doug Jones, Joe Manchin and... Susan Collins! That said, even Schumer can accidentally pick a decent candidate once in a blue moon. And both Texas and the moon seem to be headed in a blue-tinged direction. Look at that brand new polling of Texas voters from PPP:

Beto may be too middle of the road to make the best 2020 presidential nominee, but he'd make a very good Democratic Senate nominee against McTurtle sidekick John Cornyn. There are Texas progressive activists who don't want to hear that, who already have their hearts set on Sema Hernandez, organizer of the Poor People's Campaign and the 2018 DSA primary candidate who drew 245,847 votes (23.7%) in 2018's three-way Senate primary that Beto won with 640,769 votes (61.8%), before he was half as well-known as he is now.

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project at UT put together all the arguments for Beto to take on the 69 year old Cornyn in less than 2 weeks after he came within 2.6% of beating Cruz. "O’Rourke," they wrote, "is a known commodity to the Texas electorate, and more importantly, won’t be easy to define, or redefine, compared to his less known, and less well-financed, potential competitors... The rampant speculation about a Beto for President campaign in 2020 is a fantasy borne of various combinations of Texas-centric thinking, viral Betomania, and media group think. The idea that O’Rourke is already a top-tier candidate in a very crowded and more experienced Democratic field has been, since its pre-election inception, at best far-fetched and at worst a transparent attempt at generating web traffic. Bluntly put, losing hasn’t made it any more plausible... But O’Rourke's return to the statewide arena for the 2020 campaign could hasten the arrival of something genuinely new to Texas politics: A more competitive political system in which neither party monopolizes politics and policy. A competitive Texas would also have serious implications for the presidential race, more signficant than were he to join the Democratic presidential nomination fight. The stakes are high." They polled for favorability/unfavorability between Beto and Cornyn and the results are encouraging:

• Beto- 43% favorable-- 44% unfavorable
• Cornyn- 39% favorable-- 34% unfavorable

Their most interesting claim was that "the likely composition of the Texas electorate in 2020 might actually favor Democrats, particularly one who has now demonstrated the ability to turn out low-propensity Democratic leaning voters in 2018." The larger turnout in a presidential year will favor Beto, even in Texas. "Larger Texas electorates are," they wrote, "at least, less conservative, and potentially more moderate or even more liberal than the habitually small turnout affairs that have marked Texas elections for decades. High turnout in 2020 (compared to 2016) would likely benefit a strong Democratic challenger to Cornyn... certainly compared to recent history. And Beto running for Senate would help ensure this higher turnout." It would also help Democratic candidate up and down the ticket and could help Dems flip as many-- and I know this is optimistic-- ten red seats that Dems came close to winning last year. Beto on the ticket will certainly help flip TX-23 (Hurd), TX-10 (McCaul), TX-21 (Roy) and TX-24 (Marchant) and possibly TX-31 (Carter) and TX-22 (Olson). Depending on the Democratic nominee next year, Dan Crenshaw (TX-02) needs the big turnout Beto would generate like a hole in his head.

Mike Siegel, the progressive Democrat running for the Austin-Houston corridor 10th congressional district, did a lot of campaigning with Beto last year and is eager to do it again next year. Today he told me that "Beto running for Senate might be the best of both worlds. By confining his energetic, inspirational campaigning to Texas, he maximizes statewide turnout and replaces right-wing crony Cornyn with a Democratic senator from Texas. And at the same time, he puts Texas in play for the Democratic nominee for President. Of course, he might be able to accomplish both of these ends as a presidential nominee, as well, especially if Joaquin Castro runs for Senate. Whatever he decides, I hope he makes sure we are doing what is best for Texas and the nation." [Note: that thermometer on the right is Blue America's Take Back Texas contribution tool. Please click on it to contribute to Mike's campaign.]

Beto was a basically unknown backbencher from El Paso when he started his race against Cruz. Now he's a national celebrity with an immense (and growing) database of voters, volunteers and grassroots donors. None of the other potential candidates seem nearly as well-positioned as Beto to make Cornyn's reelection campaign a serious race, which is why Schumer is trying so hard to recruit him. Some might argue it's Joaquin Castro's turn but he's already committed to being chairman of his twin brother's presidential campaign and he was just elected chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and running for Senate means not running for reelection to the House. Other names being talked up include Dallas state Rep. Rafael Anchia, Dallas County judge Clay Jenkins, former gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis and Mark Strama, a former Texas state Rep and an old friend of mine from the People for the American Way Young Elected Officials program who is now a tech executive. Only Davis, though has a statewide profile and I suspect Cornyn would breathe a sigh of relief if one of them wound up as his opponent.

Nuttier than Steve Stockman? We bring you a real Texan, Dwayne Stovall

No, it's not the canine who's challenging Texas Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary, it's his master. Dwayne apparently isn't a big fan of "Beltway turtle" Mitch McConnell.

by Ken

Howie passed along this clip, and what can I say? It's Texas, friends.

If you're two-term Sen. John Cornyn, and you've spent your political career trying to be the kind of right-wing crackpot every Lone Star redneck crackpot can be proud of, the reality is that if you're up for reelection in 2014, the thing you have to watch out for is someone from the new generation of crackpots slithering around at you from the Even Farther Right. The senator has responded by trying to run on the coattails of his junior colleague, Sen. Rafael "Ted" Cruz. And luckily for the senator, nobody terribly scary has turned up, and according to Wikipedia the field is looking something like this:

• Curt Cleaver, hotel industry consultant and candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2012
• Ken Cope, aerospace executive and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel
• John Cornyn, incumbent U.S. Senator
• Chris Mapp, businessman
• Reid Reasor, Tea Party member
• Steve Stockman, U.S. Representative
• Dwayne Stovall, bridge construction contractor
• Linda Vega, attorney and immigration activist

And would you believe that the most "serious" candidate is our old friend Steve Stockman, a man who has to be on anyone's short list for the Wackiest Member of Congress. (See Howie's February 2013 post "Texas Congressman Steve Stockman -- Domestic Terrorist?," and my post from the month before, "What's frightening, says Dana Milbank, is that the wacky Steve Stockman of the '90s 'no longer sounds like an outlier"'.")

Naturally our Steve is hoping to rally Teabagger support, seen as the new key to unseating merely "far right" Republican incumbents. Unfortunately for Steve, he's having trouble with his image as Mr. Conservative, partly because of rumblings about "ethical lapses."

Into the breach steps . . . Dwayne Stovall, who last week won the endorsement of a statewide Teabagger group called Grassroots America-We the People. Dwayne says he was waiting for a suitably "Jeffersonian" candidate to enter the race, and when it didn't happen, he had to take the plunge himself.

I'll bet ol' Tom Jefferson, wherever he is, couldn't be more proud.

#

Wondering Who The Republican Party's Next Todd Akin Will Be? There Are So Many To Choose From

Get used to seeing pictures of New Jersey teabagger Steve Lonegan yelling

Steve Stockman's deranged "John Cornyn-is-a-liberal" campaign really is something to behold. Stockman, a former vagrant strung out out on and dealing a wide varietis drugs, is making a lot of ambient noise on twitter and producing amusing infographics like these:

In December, when he announced he would be abandoning his House seat to primary Cornyn, he asserted that "Liberal John Cornyn wakes up every morning and works to make the Senate a more liberal place. That’s why I am running for the United States Senate. I have a 100% pro-gun, pro-life, conservative voting record in Congress." One top staffer for a conservative Republican in the House told me that Stockman is widely viewed as "crackpot… He's toxic… No one wants to get anywhere bear him. He's probably the least effective member of our caucus… It must have been a very frustrating year for him. None of our members pay the crazy things he's always saying any attention at all. And attention is what this poor man is craving… I don't think even the most extreme groups like Club for Growth and FreedomWorks will back him. I wouldn't be too worried if I were Big John."

But with polls showing Cornyn crushing the hyperbolic Stockman-- 50-6% according to Republican Party polling outfit Wilson Perkins Allen Research-- Cornyn's strategy is to just pretty much ignore Stockman and hope he burns himself out-- or ODs.

The NRCC wishes they could ignore some of the crackpot fringe characters the Tea Party is putting up to run in important seats aound the country. Over the weekend, The Hill's Cameron Joseph reported on the GOP's primary problem. And some of these races are not the long shots the Texas Senate primary is. He's warning of more than one potential "Todd Akin problem" for the Republicans.

After a rash of recent retirements by entrenched incumbents, Republicans are unexpectedly defending a number of seats in tossup or GOP-leaning districts. And to the national party’s chagrin, many of those controversial candidates are already running or planning to-- and if they emerge as the nominee, it could endanger the GOP’s hold on the critical seats.

Crowded, expensive primaries that produce flawed candidates are nothing new for Republicans. But the epidemic has been most problematic on the Senate side, where gaffe-prone candidates like Akin in Missouri, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware cost them winnable seats the last two cycles. Now, it’s threatening to bleed into congressional races, too.

“The House landscape is littered with land-mine candidates in certain seats and districts,” said Cook Political Report House Editor David Wasserman. “That doesn't mean the nomination of those candidates will doom Republican chances in those district, but it'd force Republicans to spend more money and effort than they'd like to and give Democrats hope in some of the districts they need to win.”

As Democrats have gleefully welcomed newfound opportunities in swing districts due to recent retirements from Reps. Jon Runyan (R-N.J.), Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.), Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Tom Latham (R-Iowa) and Rep. Bill Young’s (R-Fla.) death, they’ve salivated at some of the candidates who have already announced.

…Here are a few of the pivotal races giving Republicans heartburn:

New Jersey’s 3rd District-- Retiring Rep. Jon Runyan (R-N.J.)

The former NFL lineman’s decision to retire has opened up a seat President Obama carried in both 2008 and 2012. Former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan (R), a Tea Party-affiliated former Senate candidate, is running and starts the race with early advantages in organization and name identification.

Lonegan made a number of controversial comments during the special election last year against now-Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin endorsed him at a large rally in the state, and he embraced a number of conservative social stances.

Republicans are hopeful another strong candidate can emerge, but fear Lonegan will be hard to beat in a primary and would be all but unelectable in the general election.

“The Lonegan thing is not helpful, for sure,” said one national GOP strategist.

Meanwhile, Democrats are all too happy to welcome Lonegan back into politics, as they hope to regain the seat they lost in 2010.

“In a perfect world, he runs every year for something,” laughed one state operative.

Virginia’s 10th District-- Retiring Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.)

Controversial state Sen. Dick Black (R) announced his bid for Wolf’s slightly GOP-leaning Northern Virginia House seat earlier this week. Black, a staunch social conservative, has compared abortion clinics to Auschwitz and handed out plastic fetuses ahead of a legislative vote on abortion.

In fact, national Republicans say they might not even spend money on the district if Black is the nominee.

“He's like a ticking time bomb,” said one GOP strategist.

Many establishment Republicans are hopeful Virginia Del. Barbara Comstock (R) can unite the GOP field win the nomination, and she’s received early endorsements from both wings of the party-- conservative talk radio host Mark Levin and former presidential nominee Mitt Romney are both backing her.

But the biggest variable will be how the nomination ends up being decided. Local Republicans will meet on January 23 to decide whether to choose an open primary or a closed party convention, which are usually dominated by very conservative activists. A half-dozen other Republicans are seriously weighing bids for the seat, so no matter what type of nominating process the GOP chooses, there is a high level of uncertainty over who will emerge from the crowded field.

Iowa’s 3rd District-- Retiring Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa)

Numerous candidates are lining up to run for Latham’s seat, which Obama won twice.

A crowded field primary field could hurt the GOP, especially since candidates need to win 35 percent of the vote to clinch the nomination. If no candidate reaches that mark, a local convention of typically-conservative delegates will select the nominee. And such a scenario is Republicans heartburn.

“If there end up being five of these guys running, I'm concerned about it going to a convention,” said former Iowa Republican Party Political Director Craig Robinson.

Republicans also worry about Robert Cramer (R), who has close ties with the state’s powerful religious conservative activists and is likely to run. Cramer is a member of the Family Leader, a group of vocal socially conservative activists in the state, and his appointment to a state board was blocked by Democrats because of his views.

Pennsylvania’s 6th District-- Retiring Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.)

The suburban and exurban district outside of Philadelphia's district leans slightly Republican-- Mitt Romney won it by a narrow margin in 2012, though President Obama carried it in 2008-- and is likely to be competitive now that Gerlach is retiring.

No one yet to launch a bid for Gerlach’s seat after his announcement last Monday, but local observers say former gubernatorial and Senate candidate Sam Rohrer (R) is likely to throw his hat in the ring.

Rohrer has deep ties with both the Tea Party and religious conservatives and would be formidable in a primary, but too conservative for the swing district.

“He gives us heartburn,” said GOP strategist.

A number of more establishment Republicans are looking at running, but they could split the more centrist primary vote and give Rohrer a boost if he runs.

“This is a ripe district for an establishment-versus-Tea Party primary,” said Keegan Gibson of the Pennsylvania political website PoliticsPA.

It's a mark of how extreme the GOP has become that they're hoping a sociopath like Barbara Comstock is the solution to someone they deem as too far right! In case you've forgotten her, let me remind you of what then-Republican operative David Brock had to say about her in Blinded By The Right. Page 208-9:

One night in the winter of 1995, as the scandal over the firings of workers in the White house travel office reached a crescendo on the Hill I received a late night telephone call from one of Ted's colleagues on an investigative committee, Barbara Comstock. Around the committee, the two Barbaras [Comstock and Olsen] were known as "the Barbarellas," a reference to the 1968 movie starring Jane Fonda as a space-age vixen whose cosmic adventures take her to bizarre planets via rocket ships. Late night calls from Barbara Comstock were not unusual. She often telephoned with the latest tidbit she had dig up in the thousands of pages of administration records she pored through frantically, as if she were looking for a winning lottery ticket she had somehow mislaid. A plain woman with tousled reddish brown hair, she once dropped by my house to watch the rerun of a dreadfully dull Whitewater hearing she had sat through all day. Comstock sat on the edge of her chair shaking, screaming over and over again, "Liars!" As Comstock's leads failed to pan out and she was unable to catch anyone in a lie, the Republican aide confided that the Clinton scandals were driving her to distraction, to the unfortunate point that she was ignoring the needs of her own family. A very smart lawyer by training and the main breadwinner for her charismatic, happy-go-lucky husband and kids, Comstock remarked that maybe she couldn't get Hillary's sins off her brain "because Hillary reminds me of me. I am Hillary." In this admission a vivid illustration of a much wider "Hillary" phenomenon can be seen. Comstock knew nothing about Hillary Clinton. Comstock's "Hillary" was imaginary, a construction composed entirely of the negative points in her own life.

Comstock invited me to go along on an expedition to the Washington home of senior White House aide David Watkins, the central figure in the travel scandal Olson and Comstock were probing. A short time later, Republican lawyers Comstock, Olson, and other congressional investigators, including David Bossie, and Whitewater investigator Christopher Bartomolucci, pulled up outside my house in an SUV. Though I wasn't sure what the group hoped to accomplish-- they were visibly frustrated with their inability so far to incriminate Watkins-- I went along for the ride. Olson explained that Congressman Sonny Bono had cleared us into the private, gated community where both Bono and Watkins lived, in the northwest section of Georgetown. When we arrived at our destination, Olsen giddily leapt from the truck, trespassed onto Watkins's property, and hopped down a steep cliff that abutted his home. Barbara peered into Watkins's window where she observed him-- watching television. No crime there.

Still, better than "the ticking time-bomb," Dick Black. Jesus! And The Hill completely missed the bloody primary battle already gearing up to replace Buck McKeon as he crosses over to K Street. CA-25-- Antelope Valley, Santa Clarita Valley and Simi Valley-- are seeing the seams of the GOP split apart as McKeon's handpicked successor, carpetbagger Tony Strickland, being challenged by the single most right-wing member of the California state legislature, extremist whack job Steve Knight. Afraid to face Democrat Lee Rogers again, McKeon hopes Strickland can hold the Los Angeles area seat for the GOP, despite demographic shifts away from what Republicans need to hold districts. And Knight has built his political career on hatred against and bigotry towards Hispanic voters who have come into their own right in his own backyard.

California's 25th District-- Retiring Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA)

Steve Israel is blind to this key race but Knight's voting record would be considered ultra-conservative even for a backward district in Alabama or Mississippi. In suburban L.A., it's just bizarre and a throwback to another century. Widely considered a shill for the NRA and an automaton for the most extreme right-wing proposals that ever come up in Sacramento, Knight was one of only 11 senators who voted against increasing the minimum wage and, despite representing a district with a huge Hispanic population, he was one of only 8 senators who voted against drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. When the Governor decided to expand Medicaid in line with the Affordable Care Act, only 7 die-hard right-wingers opposed it, Knight being one of them, of course. He was also one of only 8 senators to fully back unregulated fracking in California earthquake zones. He is vehemently anti-Choice and anti-gay and voted against every piece of legislation promoting equality that has ever come before him. For example, last May he was one of only 9 senators to vote against a bipartisan bill that prohibits tax-exempt status for organizations that discriminate against the LGBT community and he was also one one of only seven sociopaths who opposed an anti-bullying bill that passed the Senate with huge bipartisan support. One legislator told me that Knight isn't a bad guy on a personal level but that he's "an inflexible ideologue… probably the single least effective member of the state legislature… Sure, Strickland is no prize but Knight makes even him look almost good!" Key word: "almost."

John Cornyn Forced To Defend Ted Cruz's Lunacy… Fails Miserably. Will Republican Senate Candidates Be Crushed In 2014?

John Cornyn must have felt ambushed when mild-mannered centrist, Bob Schieffer threw him onto the grill when he appeared on Face the Nation Sunday. Schieffer just pounded him on the Republicans' whole blackmail and terrorism approach to governance.

Schieffer:The law has been passed. Why not keep the government running and then everybody can sit down and decide what they want to do about it.

Cornyn: Well there should be a negotiation, and this government would still be up and running in full if President… if Harry Reid had allowed Democrats to vote to eliminate the Congressional carve-out which treats them favorably under Obamacare and to treat average Americans the same way the President has decided to treat business with regard to Obamacare penalties.

Schieffer: Senator, isn’t there something wrong when you say I won’t fund the government unless i can attach my personal wish list to the legislation every time we vote? I’d love to see the government find a cause, uh, cure for cancer, but I don’t think you can say I’m not going to pass and pass any funds for the rest of the government until [the National Institutes of Health] finds a cure for cancer. I mean, isn’t that just kind of the same thing here?

Big John was squirming-- and Schieffer didn't even remind him his party is costing the taxpayers $300 million a day in pure waste. Keep in mind that last January, Cornyn reassured the Houston Chronicle editorial board that Republicans would never force the U.S. into a default. This was before he understood he had become Ted Cruz's bitch. "We will raise the debt ceiling. We're not going to default on our debt. I will tell you unequivocally, we're not going to default." No doubt Cornyn wishes Cruz would disappear off the face of the earth, but he's stuck with him so long as the right-wing media has the GOP grassroots brainwashed that Cruz's vision is the way to go-- even if that vision leads directly to a kind of political and economic (and social) armageddon, something right-wing crackpots have been taught to pray for.

At least Cornyn doesn't have to be worried about losing his seat as long as he keeps himself firmed joined at the hip to Cruz. Other GOP Members of Congress worry that their seats are in jeopardy, either because they're supporting him or because they could be primaried by Koch-financed teabaggers if they don't support him.

Republican primaries in states like Georgia, Alaska and North Carolina are turning into the kind of tea party-driven fights that put winnable races for the GOP in Democrats’ column the past two elections.

And as the shutdown drags on and Republicans dig in on the debt ceiling, Republicans are only digging the hole deeper, endangering what should be their year to take back the Senate, with early warning shots that they could nominate candidates who will have a tough time winning a statewide election.

The battle is far from over, but already Republicans and Democrats alike are pointing the finger squarely at Cruz, who both sides credit with fueling the strategy of linking Obamacare to the government funding fight-- without an obvious exit strategy.

“Sen. Cruz thinks his boisterous efforts on defunding the healthcare law will help defeat the likes of Hagan, Pryor and other Democrats in swing states, but this is to his own detriment,” complained one Senate GOP aide to MSNBC.com. “Instead he has become the Senate’s new Jim DeMint, raising money off being loud, bringing division within his party, and causing influential leaders to be at great risks to under qualified candidates in their primaries.”

Democrats are gladly fanning the flames, too. Obama’s former campaign arm, Organizing for America, is up with a new ad this morning blaming “Tea Party Republicans [for] threatening an economic shutdown.”



…In Georgia, the site of maybe the most volatile GOP primary next year, it wasn’t just Rep. Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey-- seen as the most conservative and most worrisome to Republican strategists if they win-- who said they would side with Cruz. The entire field said they would have backed his controversial tactics, including Rep. Jack Kingston, former Secretary of State Karen Handel and businessman David Perdue, the cousin of the state’s former governor. That’s counter to how both the state’s GOP senators-- Saxby Chambliss, the man they’re vying to replace, and Johnny Isakson-- both voted.

Not helping matters, Republicans say-- one of the leading voices on the movement in the House, Rep. Tom Graves, hasn’t just kept a hardline on the defunding strategy may have passed on the Senate race, but GOP observers in the state say he’s also helping push the field further to the right.

The volatility of the GOP primary race there is one reason Democrats made getting a top recruit in place, and they turned to Michelle Nunn, the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn and former CEO of the volunteer organization Points of Light, where she worked closely with former President George H.W. Bush.

“Ted Cruz and Tom Graves have boxed the GOP in in D.C. and they’ve done the same thing here in Georgia with our Senate candidates. They’ve all been forced to support what’s going on and move toward the right,” said Georgia GOP strategist Joel McElhannon. “Right now it’s not helping our Senate candidates position well against [Nunn] who can adopt the national Democratic narrative that Republicans are shutting everything down.”

In North Carolina, where Republicans hope to knock off first term Democrat Kay Hagan, the whole primary field has also said they would back Cruz’s defunding strategy-- also squarely at odds with the state’s GOP Sen. Richard Burr, who called it “the dumbest idea I’d ever heard of.”

Even in Alaska, it’s making for some strange bedfellows. Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell may be the favorite of DC Republicans but he faces a primary challenge from former 2010 Senate nominee Joe Miller, who beat Lisa Murkowski in a primary but went on to lose to her as a write-in candidate, and now has a three-way primary with the entrance of former natural resources commissioner Dan Sullivan. Miller has firmly backed Cruz, but Treadwell also, to the surprise of some, pledged he would “stand and work with Cruz and Lee.”

Republicans argue it’s a gamble, though, that 13 months out from the election voters will remember the political posturing that took place during this fight, especially as both sides are uncertain how the stalemate ends. Instead, they argue it’s the president’s health care law, which remains heavily unpopular in many of the targeted states, that will be their catalyst to victory.

But the problem for Republicans-- it’s the right who’s the most energized in the primaries and could end up not just picking but also forcing candidates to take more conservative positions in these primaries.

“The enthusiasm in the party is coming from the right, and that exhibits itself in a primary,” said Harvard Institute of Politics Director Trey Grayson. A former Kentucky secretary of state, Grayson experienced that first hand in 2010-- the early favorite in the primary, he eventually lost to now-Sen. Rand Paul.

That seat stayed in Republican hands, and Grayson noted other failed GOP Senate nominees didn’t have the political skills and savvy Paul has. Even though he comes from the same ideological wing as Cruz, Paul hasn’t taken up the defunding yoke with quite as much fervor as Cruz has, taking a more pragmatic approach. And he has stuck with backing McConnell in his own primary challenge that’s drawn ire from other conservative groups.

But Grayson says the internal discord is “frustrating to watch.”

“When you lose a couple of presidential elections in a row, these are the kind of things that happen,” said Grayson. “We’re doing some soul searching.”

Still, being on the precipice of victory is a scenario Republicans have found themselves in before. With favorable math and even a wind at their backs, they didn’t capture the Senate in either 2010 or 2012. In 2010 they picked up five seats in a huge wave year, but still lost winnable races in Nevada, Delaware, and even Colorado with problematic candidates. In 2012, Democrats were defending more than double the races that Republicans were, yet the GOP squandered away winnable races in Missouri and Indiana as Democrats actually picked up three seats.

Those five missed opportunities, when added together, wouldn’t have given the GOP the majority, but could have made it a lot easier to even sway conservative Democrats to their side in the shutdown fight, or make a more successful pitch to even delay the health care individual mandate.

To pick up the upper chamber next year, Republicans face a map that runs through many red states held by Democrats and should be squarely in their column. They have the upperhand in seats with Democratic retirements-- West Virginia, South Dakota and Montana-- but still need three more. They’d like to find those in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina, all states where Democratic incumbents must defend territory where President Obama lost last year. But hoping messy primaries can give them an opening, Democrats have put GOP-held Georgia and Kentucky in play.

The seeds could also be there for at least some more primary discomfort in the Bluegrass State, making both Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election challenge more difficult both in the primary and general.

McConnell didn’t vote with the Cruz/Lee bloc to oppose cloture on the House version of the CR, and his primary opponent, Matt Bevin, has attacked him for it, aided by the Senate Conservatives Fund, who’s named McConnell a top target.

But Republicans counter that these primaries are far from settled that the president’s refusal to negotiate and his hard-line against Republicans will backfire-- and that the shutdown battle could be a distant memory by next November, again giving voters a way to register their dissatisfaction with Obamacare.

“It’s too early to know what, if any, political impact the shutdown will have on 2014, but what we do know is that Democrats have controlled Washington for the last five years and during that time it has been a dysfunctional disaster,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brad Dayspring. “The dysfunction of a shutdown or a failure to even try to negotiate hurts institutional Washington, which hurts already weak incumbents facing a difficult political environment like Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, and Mark Begich. Democrats are the status quo in Washington, which gives us an opportunity since people do not like the results-- or lack thereof-- on their watch.”

But, it’s Democrats who see the early signs of deja vu again, and hope holding the Senate, yet again, is their hat trick.

“Republicans have not missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, putting Democrats in a strong position to keep the majority next November,” said DSCC spokesman Matt Canter. “Republican recklessness and bitter partisanship is exactly what voters think is wrong with Washington.  By embracing the Cruz strategy en masse, GOP senate candidates are showing voters an inability to govern.”

Republican Anti-Immigration Filibuster Is Defeated 82-15. What's Next?

Will the immigration reform battle sink any of these ships?

Yesterday just over a dozen motley racists-- all Republicans-- voted against shutting down Jefferson Beauregard Session III's filibuster of the comprehensive immigration bill. These were the 15 bigots:

• John Barrasso (R-WY)
• John Boozman (R-AR)
• Mike Crapo (R-ID)
• Ted Cruz (R-TX)
• Mike Enzi (R-WY)
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
• Jim Inhofe (R-OK)
• Mark Kirk (R-IL)
• Mike Lee (R-UT)
• Jim Risch (R-ID)
• Pat Roberts (R-KS)
• Tim Scott (R-SC)
• Jefferson B. Sessions III (KKK-AL)
• Richard Shelby (R-AL)
• David Vitter (R-LA)

That's the good news. But it's not the end of the story... not even in the Senate. The Republicans have all kinds of tricks up their collective sleeves to water down and derail the bill. Miss McConnell was one of the Republican senators who voted to shut down the filibuster, but he warned not to interpret that as meaning he favors meaningful immigration reform. He doesn't. "As an elected leader in my party," McConnell lisped just before the vote, "it’s my view that we at least need to try to improve a situation that as far as I can tell very few people believe is working well either for our own citizens, or for those around the world who aspire to become Americans. I’ll vote to debate it and for the opportunity to amend it, but in the days ahead there will need to be major changes to this bill if it’s going to become law." John Cornyn voted "yes" as well-- and he has a poison pill in the works he hopes will derail the whole bill by requiring significantly higher thresholds of border control before the bill’s “trigger” kicks in allowing undocumented immigrants to move toward citizenship.

Marco Rubio, a GOP presidential aspirant who has been taking a bad beating from the party's Know Nothing base, helped write the bill but is now trying to be seen by the Know Nothings as being against it (while he courts Latino voters and hopes they see him in their corner; the guy's a mess). He is being given the credit for getting Mark Kirk, usually viewed as a mainstream conservative, to vote with the extremists and racists against the bill yesterday. He tried the same thing with Kelly Ayotte, who rebuffed his clownish efforts. His latest trick is to offer an amendment that requires immigrants speak English before they even get permanent residency, quite the departure from American history and traditions.

I lived overseas for almost seven years after college, and for nearly four of those years I worked at the Kosmos, an international youth and meditation center in Amsterdam. The Kosmos was a virtual Tower of Babel. People weren't just speaking Dutch, they were speaking English, German, French, Italian, 4 different Scandinavian languages, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic and Chinese. Luckily for Americans, English was the official lingua franca of the establishment, the one common language everyone used to communicating with everyone else outside of their own group. Whew!

But over the course of my stay in Amsterdam and my travels through Europe, Africa and Asia, I noticed something else about language. Americans-- and only Americans (so not Canadians or Brits)-- would get uptight when other people spoke their native language, sometimes really uptight. It was no big deal for German's to hear people speaking French or Spanish or even for Dutch people-- and it was, after all, their country-- to hear everyone speaking English. But Americans... it was scary. There was a tendency for Americans to get paranoid and be freaked out when they heard other languages. And these were the hippest Americans there were, traveling overland to India or hanging around a meditation center in Holland. There was this predilection for Americans to imagine that if they heard another language, it meant people were talking about them-- or even plotting against them!

Friends of mine in Congress have told me that many Republicans there often brag about having never traveled overseas or even owning a passport... or of even eating "foreign" food. Webster's has a simple definition of xenophobia: "fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign." It's a concept that has found a home in the right-wing psyche and the Republican party worldview. I wonder if Marco Rubio's family spoke English when they fled the right-wing dictatorship of fascist General Fulgencio Batista in 1956 and shoved to the front of the immigration line, settling in Florida. Anti-immigration wing-nut Ted Cruz is also the son of an immigrant. His father, Rafael, fought in Fidel Castro's peasant army that overthrew Batista and later escaped to the U.S. in 1957 with a hundred dollar bill sewn into is underwear. (He became a citizen in 2005.)

Lesson for the GOP (including you, Tommy Thompson): If you live by the high-priced lie, you better watch your butt

GOP slug Dan Lungren says: "What I'm trying to do is transform the system so people participating as candidates can be held responsible for what is said." Ha-ha-ha!

by Ken

My goodness, this would be hilarious if it were . . . no, let's go with hilarious. Here's the start of a report by the NYT's Jennifer Steinhauer and Jonathan Weisman, "Mauled by Ads, Incumbents Look to Declaw Outside Groups":

WASHINGTON -- An expansive onslaught of negative political advertisements in Congressional races has left many incumbents, including some Republicans long opposed to restrictions on campaign spending, concluding that legislative measures may be in order to curtail the power of the outside groups behind most of the attacks.

While Democrats have long denounced a 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the gates on unlimited spending on advertisements, some Republicans are now growing more disenchanted with the system that has allowed the barrage of ads, often by shadowy groups, and the effects it has had on what they see as a sullen and disenchanted electorate.

"Once we get back, those that do get re-elected will all be commiserating about all the negative ads," said Representative Joe Heck of Nevada, a Republican who faced ads accusing him of voting against a rape crisis center and against money to help victims of domestic violence, among other things. "And that will start the groundswell for reform."

Representative Dan Lungren, a California Republican and the chairman the House Administration Committee, which has jurisdiction over campaign finance issues, has been a target of negative advertisements. He has drafted legislation that he said would force more responsibility for the tone and messages of the campaign onto the candidates and the political parties and away from the third-party groups. The staff of Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, is also working on proposals.

The 2010 Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was expected to be an unalloyed advantage to Republicans, who have a deeper bench of rich individuals and corporations willing to finance candidates.

The decision has appeared to benefit Republicans over all this election cycle, as Republican money has poured into the presidential contest. Democrats say their third-party allies have also been outspent, by about two to one, in Senate campaigns. But the impact of Citizens United has come with complications, with some Republican incumbents in the House at a disadvantage. . . .

Oh, there's more, like Representative Lungren, in his capacity as chairman of the House Administration Committee, explaining the aim of the bill he intends to craft when (if?) he gets back to D.C.: "What I'm trying to do is transform the system so people participating as candidates can be held responsible for what is said."

And, oh yes, there's that loathsome slug Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX),

who runs the group charged with electing Republicans to the Senate [and] has said he thinks it would be worthwhile to examine the campaign finance system after the election.

"Revisiting the federal fund-raising restrictions and coordinated limits on both parties, and even smaller, common-sense steps like requiring electronic filing for federal candidates are a few good things that could be looked at next year," he said in an e-mail.

Can you believe it? In the entire history of mankind, has any group of humans ever done more to smash the concept of political accountability than the House and Senate Republicans?

Of course that was before it began to dawn on these slugs that He Who Lives by the High-Priced Lie May Also Take It Up the Butt. Oh, I don't expect much in the way of meaningful reform. As the NYT reporters note, the expectation that Citizens United would be a massive boon to the vaunted GOP lie machine (OK, they don't use those exact words) has proved generally correct. But notice how touchy the R's become when, at least in their own view, they're the victims -- bearing in mind always that there's no screeching self-styled victim like a Republican screeching self-styled villain.


MEANWHILE, WILL TOMMY THOMPSON SPEARHEAD
A GOP CLEANSING -- BY ENDING HIS CANDIDACY?

The logic seems impeccable to me. Now that we've gotten to the point where it has to be assumed that every word out of the mouth of every Republican is a lie, doesn't someone have to take a stand and draw the line somewhere? And who better than that loathsome toad former WI Gov. Tommy Thompson, now the GOP candidate to retiring Dem Sen. Herb Kohl.

I can see it now. A solemn Tommy addressed the assembled press contingent:

Thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen. I'll be brief. In the wake of the shocking debacle of my campaign's "Dangerous Path" TV ad shockingly impugning the patriotism of my opponent, I have come to the realization that I am too dishonest and corrupt to live, let alone occupy public office. Accordingly, I am ending my candidacy for the U.S. Senate and withdrawing from all forms of government service.

I am not withdrawing entirely from public life, however. I will continue to salt away all the corporate cash I can in my D.C. influence-peddling office.

If you're not caught up on the scandal of the Thompson campaign's appalling "Dangerous Path" spot, you can check out a new post by Eugene Kiely for the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org, "Smearing Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin Senate Race."

A false and vicious TV ad attacks Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin for voting against "honoring the victims of 9/11." The fact is, she voted to award three Congressional Gold Medals to honor the victims of the terrorist attacks in New York City, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

So what's the ad talking about? It cites her 2006 vote against a ceremonial resolution on the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 -- which Baldwin opposed because she said the GOP-drafted resolution "politicized" the anniversary by praising controversial legislation, such as the USA Patriot Act.

The ad, called "Dangerous Path," is yet another attempt to cast Baldwin as an extremist in Wisconsin's close Senate race. (We recently wrote about another TV ad sponsored by a pro-Israel group.) This ad -- sponsored by her Republican opponent, former Gov. Tommy Thompson -- says her "far left approach leaves this country in jeopardy."

Thompson's ad features military veterans and shows an image of the hulking ruins of the World Trade Center in New York. One of the veterans says Baldwin "had the opportunity to vote to honor the victims of 9/11 and she voted against it." Another says, "It's a slap in the face to every one of their families and anyone who has ever served in the United States military." . . .

What this is, however, according to FactCheck.org, "is a case of cherry-picking a vote to distort the facts. Baldwin did honor the victims of the terrorist attacks."

What the smear job did, in brief, was to take a vote on what the Kiely report calls "a ceremonial House resolution" in 2006, in anticipation of the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Rep. Tammy Baldwin was one of only 22 House members to vote against a proposed tribute. What the Thompson-campaign ad leaves out, however, is her reason for doing so. Kiely quotes a Capital Times report from Sept. 14, 2006:

Baldwin and other Democratic critics said the resolution drafted by Republicans praised controversial legislation like the USA Patriot Act and a border security bill.

Baldwin contended the GOP "disgracefully politicized what should have been a solemn and sincere resolution."

"Instead they converted the resolution into an endorsement of the Patriot Act, punitive immigration bills, and other highly controversial measures, which many of my constituents oppose," she said in a statement explaining her vote.

She added it was disrespectful to the Sept. 11 victims and families to be "playing election year politics" with the anniversary.

Oops!

Of course Tammy can always be counted on to support legitimate 9/11 commemorations.

I suppose the Thompson-campaign brain trust is contemplating the necessity of some sort of weasel-worded non-apology. Wouldn't it be nice, though, if instead the governor came through with the sort of announcement I've fantasized above? Isn't it time for somebody to draw the line in the bullshit?

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