Last Call For Team Cooch

Just how bad are things for the GOP in Virginia ahead of next Tuesday's gubernatorial election?  As Greg Sargent points out, it's somewhere between "horrific" and "Have Jeeves bring around the car, we're making a run for Switzerland."

With Democrat Terry McAuliffe taking a double digit lead in the Virginia gubernatorial contest, leading observers are increasingly looking at Virginia as an indicator of national political trends.

New Washington Post/SRBI polling in Virginia, which puts McAuliffe up 51-39, also demonstrates very clearly the dangers these trends pose to Republicans.

The crack Post polling team has produced a chart based on this poll that shows the GOP brand has collapsed among the very constituencies Republicans must improve their standing among in order to remain competitive in the future, both in Virginia and at the national level:

 


 Not a single one of those groups has an unfavorable opinion less than 69%, and it's 65% overall in a supposedly purple state.  You can put VA firmly in blue territory in 2016, I'm thinking.

Lindsey's Done Hucked Up

Monday:

Looks like Sen. Graham must have gotten a really dismal post-shutdown internal primary poll going into his 2014 race, because he's suddenly gone all Rand Paul on things.

Indeed, Huckleberry Graham went on to say this weekend that he'll block every single Obama appointment until he gets ANSWERS ON BENGHAZI.

Today:

His re-election campaign looming, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has seen his approval rating steadily decline in 2013, according to poll findings released Wednesday.

The survey from Winthrop University found 37 percent of South Carolina voters approve of the job Graham is doing, compared with about 48 percent who said they disapprove. Winthrop showed Graham with an approval rating of 48 percent in February, and 44 percent in April.

Perhaps even more disconcerting for Graham, who is staring at a GOP primary in 2014, is his steep drop among Republican voters in South Carolina. The latest survey from Winthrop showed 45 percent of Republican voters approving of Graham, compared with 40 percent who disapprove.

Those mediocre numbers represent a massive decline since February, when nearly 72 percent of GOP voters said they approved of Graham. In Winthrop's April survey, about 57 percent of Palmetto State Republicans approved of Graham.

Called it, 100%.  Like clockwork.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

If The Atlantic's resident "reasonable conservative" Conor Friedersdorf had actually been paying attention to the emo left, he'd have figured out that this actually logical statement:

Hillary Clinton is poised to be the candidate of continuity. Like Bush and Obama, she would govern as an executive-power extremist, is implicated in the civil-liberties transgressions of recent years, and would almost certainly seek to expand rather than rein in post-9/11 powers given to the national-security state.

...has nothing to do with Clinton's policies or logic or continuity and everything to do with the fact the emo left loves her because she's not Obama.

StupidiNews!

• European Parliament officials will meet with the White House today over NSA monitoring of heads of state, with new revelations that some European countries were cooperating with the US.
• Israel will continue building new settlement homes in East Jerusalem as Palestinian officials deny any deal to increase Israeli building in occupied areas exists.
• The mother of slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin testified Tuesday before a Senate panel on so-called "stand your ground" laws, urging lawmakers to amend the legislation.
• Retail giant Wal-Mart is scrambling to embrace solar panels on its stores, the company now generates more solar power than 38 US states.
• With assurances to Sen. Ted Cruz that tougher political ad disclosure rules are "not a priority", new FCC chairman Tom Wheeler was approved unanimously by the Senate.

Last Call For The Rise Of The Emoprogs

Jerome Armstrong, one of the founders of old school netroots blog MyDD, argues that progressive blogs have failed:  failed to get the kind of control the tea party has over the GOP, failed to get a much more progressive America, and most importantly, failed to stop the rise of Obama, who Armstrong sees as the mortal foe to progressives.

I didn’t see Lieberman’s 2006 win in quite as pinnacle a light at the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have been, had we followed it up more often, and won.

Yet I certainly peg the crux of lost movement with the rise of Obama’s campaign. It was an awful place to be in with Clinton vs. Obama, in the 2008 primary. My basic impulse (after Edwards –who had the populist message– imploded) was, like many bloggers (not the masses), to go with Clinton because she at least showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement, unlike Obama. He didn’t need the netroots for his message and candidate-movement, he had places like Politico to push out of, and was basically an identity-politics cult for many new to politics that flooded the blogs.

Armstrong goes on for some length in this general vein, viewing Obama as nothing more than a Wall Street puppet and arguing that Clinton, while not much better, would have at least elevated Armstrong and his ilk to the level of courtiers.

BooMan has an important piece setting Armstrong straight on where the Netroots went wrong.

I just find it bizarre to be lectured by a man who first came to my attention as Mark Warner's agent to the blogosphere. I like Mark Warner and think he is a good man and a decent senator. But I would never confuse him with a progressive. And then Jerome jumped on the Clinton bandwagon, which may have seemed like a solid career move, but it wasn't where most progressives were going. And then he bailed out to work on Gary Johnson's libertarian campaign for president, which was definitely a move out of the DLC camp, but a move that traded agreement on some issues like the Drug War and surveillance for disagreement about just about everything else in the progressive playbook.

I have never thought of Jerome as a progressive, and insofar as he immersed himself in the progressive backlash against Obama's presidency, which was led by Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, I think he excommunicated himself from about 90% of progressives in this country.

It's telling that he still resents Barack Obama for not coming to him with his hat in his hand. 

And that's the real reason behind the emoprog rancor towards Obama:  he doesn't need them, because he plays a different game than the Clintons do.  Armstrong especially was in it for the money and the prestige, not for the advancement of progressive political goals.  Could we have done better than Obama, given our choices were Hillary and John Edwards?  I'm going to argue that at the time, no.  Clinton certainly knew how to play the game and gave rise to many of the attacks the right still uses against Obama today.  And Edwards?  We dodged a hail of bullets by not nominating him, his personal foibles would have given us President McCain and Vice President Moose Lady for sure.

But it's the fact that these same people refuse to give Obama credit for the progressive acts he does, or worse, take credit for "forcing" him into those acts.  They still believe they run the game, and they will never admit they don't. If they do, the game ends.

And I'm sick and tired of playing games with these fools.  I for one am glad the President ignores them.  They've earned that.

Rand Paul's War On Science

Sen. Rand Paul, hero of glibertarians everywhere, sure doesn't seem to mind massive new federal regulations when it comes to declaring science the enemy of humanity.

Tea party hero Rand Paul warned scientific advancements could lead to eugenics during a Monday visit at Liberty University, looking to boost the political fortunes of fellow Republican Ken Cuccinelli’s bid for governor.


During a visit to the Christian school founded by Jerry Falwell, Paul looked to energize conservative supporters by warning that genetic tests could identify those who are predisposed to be short, overweight or less intelligent so that they could be eliminated. With one week remaining before Election Day, Cuccinelli is hoping the joint appearance with the U.S. senator from Kentucky will encourage the far-right flank of his party to abandon third-party libertarian spoiler Robert Sarvis.

“In your lifetime, much of your potential - or lack thereof - can be known simply by swabbing the inside of your cheek,” Paul said to a packed sporting arena on Liberty’s campus. “Are we prepared to select out the imperfect among us?”

The GOP war on science has been going on for some time now, but Rand Paul is jumping on it as his new toy.  "You can't trust those scientists on global climate change or environmental issues or technology or anything, they're trying to kill you and your family!"

His dangerous neo-luddite nonsense is par for the course for the Republican party, and specifically the section of the tea party that rejects science as evil because it contradicts the teachings of a Christian God.  It's not like that particular battle is new in the history of humanity, but to see a sizable chunk of America continue to reject evolution for example in 2013 is depressing.

Of course the real reason for the GOP war on science is the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientists consider themselves liberal.  Keep that in mind when you ask why the Tea party is targeting them.

No More Shutdowns?

Once again, Mitch The Turtle is writing checks his shell can't cash.

Mitch McConnell isn’t going to have another government shutdown on his watch. 

The Kentucky Republican stood up over the weekend and said he wanted to address the “elephant in the room” at a fundraising retreat in Sea Island, Ga. Speaking before roughly 300 K Streeters and big donors, McConnell said Republicans will not come close to defaulting on the nation’s debts or shutting down the government early next year when stop-gap government funding and the debt ceiling are slated to be voted on again. 

His remarks echoed similar comments he made following the shutdown that it was “not conservative policy” and that he always believed “this strategy could not and would not work.” 

“He’s in fighting mode,” said one attendee of McConnell. “He didn’t get into specifics about what they are doing and how they are going to do it, but McConnell and (Texas Sen. John) Cornyn were particularly forceful.” 

The attendee said McConnell “said everything that needed to be said” to help tamp down growing concern among bundlers and donors over how the GOP continues to be paralyzed by anti-establishment members like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). Neither lawmaker attended the event.

Considering McConnell and the GOP leadership did everything they could to encourage and then agree to the shutdown in the first place, why would anyone believe Mitch now?  If you believed it wasn't going to work, then why did you allow it to happen, Mitch?  If you actually had any clout over Ted Cruz or the Tea Party in the House, why didn't you use it to stop the shutdown earlier this month?

The answer is that this is a promise you can't keep, and Kentucky voters like me know it.

StupidINews!

• Los Angeles County police officials are searching for the identity of a woman whose remains were found in two separate water treatment plants over the weekend.
• A Brazilian judge has stopped work on the country's major Amazon river dam project over environmental reasons.
• With nearly six months since Democratic Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina was nominated at head of HUD, President Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid are pushing for confirmation.
• A federal judge has blocked some provisions in Texas's HB2 anti-abortion law, Texas AG and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott is vowing to take the matter to the Supreme Court.
• Google is offering beta testers of its Google Glass product an upgrade in November to fit prescription lenses and frames.

Last Call For Huckleberry Hounding

Looks like Sen. Graham must have gotten a really dismal post-shutdown internal primary poll going into his 2014 race, because he's suddenly gone all Rand Paul on things.

Amid the sense of gridlock that has become the norm in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is now threatening to block every single nomination from the Obama administration until he gets what he wants on Benghazi — again.

On Sunday evening, CBS’ 60 Minutes aired a new report on the attack in Benghazi, Libya that took place last year, examining the nature of the attack, which analysts are now calling pre-planned. This differs greatly from the early days and weeks after the attack, when members of the administration were still attempting to find out what went wrong and what led to the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

And sensing the opportunity to earn points with the lunatics he'll need to win his primary, Graham is now throwing a complete tantrum.

"So I am calling for a joint select committee. But for God’s sake, let the House have a select committee where you get three or four committees together to look at this situation as one unit rather than stove piping. And where are the survivors? 14 months later, Steve, the survivors, the people who survived the attack in Benghazi, have not been made available to the U.S. congress for oversight purposes. I’m going to block every appointment in the United States Senate until the survivors are being made available to the Congress. I’m tired of hearing from people on TV and reading about stuff in books."

So apparently until we have even more Benghazi hearings on top of the Benghazi hearings we've already had over the last year, Republicans will simply stop the government from working.   Let us know how that works out for you guys.  The best part?

Graham’s threat comes just as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prepares a new wave of Obama administration nominees to be brought before the Senate. Even before the threat to hold all of these nominees was issued, Senate Democrats have been mulling the so-called “nuclear option” of allowing for votes to proceed with a majority 51 votes, ending the threat of the filibuster on certain types of votes.

Ironically enough, Graham recently chastised his colleagues for blocking an up or down vote on the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calling it the “wrong” thing to do.

Yeah, that was before Graham became one of the top targets of the tea party.

Marco Rubio, Los Lucha-Dorkus

GOP Sen. Marco Rubio has ripped off his mask and -- surprise! --  he's against his own immigration plan now!

The most prominent conservative supporter of sweeping immigration reform is calling on Congress to dial back the effort and instead focus on making incremental changes, delivering a significant blow to the prospects of reform.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) now opposes a bicameral conference committee to reach a final resolution to the Senate-passed bill, his spokesman said, which anxious pro-reform advocates believe is the only feasible way to salvage the comprehensive overhaul.

"The point is that at this time, the only approach that has a realistic chance of success is to focus on those aspects of reform on which there is consensus through a series of individual bills," Alex Conant, a top spokesman for Rubio, told TPM in an email. "Otherwise, this latest effort to make progress on immigration will meet the same fate as previous efforts: failure."

Rubio is desperately trying to throw everybody under the bus that he can find, so that he can say "Well, I fought the good fight in the ring for immigration reform, but we're going to have to take what we can get, or get nothing at all."

"[E]arlier this year, Senator Rubio put aside his personal preference for a piecemeal approach and reached across the aisle to craft a bipartisan solution in the Senate. And unlike many of the proponents of reform in the Democratic party, he did so despite strong opposition within his own party and at a significant and well documented political price," Conant said. "But sufficient support for that approach simply does not exist at this time. And in fact it has only eroded further as evidenced by the fact that virtually every House Republican working on a bipartisan comprehensive bill has since abandoned that effort."

The ambitious Florida senator saw his standing diminish among conservative voters after he supported the Senate bill. Opposing conference on the Senate bill leaves little, if any, room to pass reform through a divided Congress as the broad coalitions that hold together the Senate legislation would splinter if any major components are excluded. House Republicans have resisted President Barack Obama's repeated calls for reviving the stalled effort, and lack an internal consensus on how to proceed on an incremental basis.

So Rubio's plan is to blame everyone in Washington who isn't named Marco Rubio when immigration reform crashes and burns yet again.  He's playing the part of the weary warrior who has to regroup in order to fight the good fight another day, only what he's really doing is selling out Latino voters just in time to make a 2016 run.

Funny how that works.

This Week In Village Idiocy

Florida Blue Cross/Blue Shield CEO Patrick Gehaghty sets the record straight on the "300,000 Floridians lost their BC/BS health insurance under Obamacare!" idiocy.

We’re not cutting people,” Geraghty said. “We’re actually transitioning people. What we’ve been doing is informing folks that their plan doesn’t meet the test of the essential health benefits; therefore, they have a choice of many options that we make available through the exchange. And, in fact, with subsidy, many people will be getting better plans at a lesser cost. This really is a transition. In fact, the 300,000 figure is the entire year. So it’s really 40,000 people for January 1, and we’re walking them through that transition.”

Surprise. 300,000 people, the vast majority who are going to get better coverage at a lower premium.  How horrible, as Nicole Belle explains over at Crooks & Liars.

Now, it's absolutely true that there will be a fraction of people who find that their costs have gone up, the specific number and amount is still up for debate. And if they don't qualify for subsidies, that will mean a higher out-of-pocket cost, at least in the short term. However, short-term partisan gains notwithstanding, the program will factor in long-term the inclusion of healthy, young people on the exchanges, which will help mitigate the ailing people who rushed for the initial coverage. Specifically, the re-insurance tax is being levied for the first three years is intended to help smooth that transition to allow for the long-term sustainability of the program.

But why would NBC News be interested in actually informing their viewers of the realities of the program when they can have their newscasters "sell" a misleading partisan argument instead?

Considering Republicans are lying about Social Security and Medicare "being broke" decades after they became American staples in order to force austerity cuts, is anyone surprised they are lying about the Affordable Care Act?

StupidiNews!

• Rock superstar Lou Reed, former front man of the Velvet Underground, has passed at 71 after a liver transplant in May.
• San Francisco locals believe a massive floating structure made of barges and cargo containers off the coast of Treasure Island may in fact be Google's newest data center.
• Obama administration officials say the healthcare.gov website will be repaired by the end of November for "the vast majority of users".
• China's proposed land reforms to allow outside investors to buy rural land is drawing both praise and skepticism from international investors.
• A new study shows that for the most part, US broadband internet speeds are far slower and way more expensive than the rest of the world's largest international cities.

Wild, Not So Wonderful West Virginia Voters

WaPo's Karen Tumulty argues that a toxic combination of corporate greed, crippling poverty, green energy and anti-Obama racism has turned blue West Virginia into the reddest of states.

Leaders in both parties say that what has happened to politics in West Virginia begins with what has happened to coal — an industry that employs about 32,000 in the state, fewer than half the number of jobs it provided in 1976. 

Although there always have been booms and busts, people “are convinced that President Obama wants to destroy the coal industry, and that’s what’s driving our politics,” said Raamie Barker, a top adviser to Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. 

In purely economic terms, coal and the industries it feeds no longer dominate. Nor do the labor unions that gave the Democrats so much of their political muscle. In 1997, Weirton Steel was West Virginia’s largest private employer; every year since then, Wal-Mart has held that spot — as it does nationally. 

But coal has a grip on the state’s psyche and identity that cannot be quantified by economic statistics. Mining brought generations of strivers to the mountains, where they took on dirty, deadly work. By the 1970s, those were high-paying jobs; even today, with overtime, a miner can make six figures.

“You can’t hardly talk to anybody who doesn’t say, ‘My great-grandfather was a coal miner,’ ” said West Virginia Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette. “It’s not uncommon for anybody, anywhere to look back at a time when things were different and long for those days.” 

Kevin Richardson’s father has been a coal miner for 42 years — one tough and determined enough to have gone back into the ground after a double knee replacement. The younger Richardson, who lives in Glen Daniel, is a Wal-Mart manager. 

“Driving from my house, it used to be you would pass four coal mines. Now you pass one,” he said of his daily commute to the store. Richardson also has noticed that customers lately buy only essentials: “We feel the crunch of it. It’s cutting into everybody’s pay.”

Yes, the King Coal giants broke the unions and Wal-marted the state's economy to death.  But this is also a state that's 94% white.  Nobody in West Virginia ever accused Bush of trying to destroy West Virginia, even when his economic plan doubled the state's unemployment and under Obama, West Virginia is now doing better than the national average and has seen unemployment drop to around 6%.



But Obama is the bad guy in this picture.  Gosh, what's different about him compared to the other 43 Presidents?  Poppy Bush sure tanked the state's economy with unemployment reaching nearly 12% due to the recession he caused, Bush Junior tanked the state's economy again with the near depression he caused at the end of his term, but everyone is convinced Obama is trying to destroy the state, and by God they're going to vote for the people who exploited the hell out of them, destroyed their unions, and left them one of the poorest states in the nation.

Watch what happens when Hillary Clinton shows up here on her road to 2016.  Suddenly Democrats will be awesome again.

Daze Of Future Past

California Republican Jeff Denham has seen the future, and it's a future where he's no longer in Congress if he opposes immigration reform.

A Republican congressman from a heavily Hispanic district is breaking ranks from his party to join Democrats in an eleventh-hour push for a broad immigration overhaul before the end of the year. 

Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) plans to sign on as the lone GOP member with 185 Democrats to co-sponsor a plan that would give millions of unauthorized immigrants the chance to attain citizenship. 

A handful of House Republicans have expressed support for citizenship legislation similar to the bipartisan bill that passed the Senate over the summer. But Denham is taking the additional — and politically provocative — step of locking arms with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other Democrats trying to neutralize opposition from House conservatives and shake up a polarized immigration debate. 

“I’m the first Republican,” he said in an interview. “I expect more to come on board.”
With fewer than 20 working days left in the year and Congress focused largely on high-stakes budget negotiations, some House Republicans have argued in recent days that they won’t have time to debate immigration this year. Asked in a Bloomberg TV interview over the weekend if a broad immigration overhaul stood a chance of passing in the coming weeks, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said flatly, “No.” 

Denham’s announcement comes as Democrats and immigrant advocates are trying to force House Speaker John A. Boehner’s (R-Ohio) hand on the issue. Key to their strategy is a new compromise bill designed to lure away enough centrist GOP members that the speaker would feel compelled to allow a vote of the full chamber — just as he did to end the government shutdown and avoid a financial default. 

If Boehner were to refuse to allow an immigration vote, Democrats say, they could blame him and Republicans for blocking a “bipartisan” bill on the campaign trail next year .

It's going to be bad enough for the GOP with the shutdown, but the shutdown plus killing immigration yet again will finish off enough purple district Republicans that the Dems take back the House, and they're not going down with Ted Cruz and company.  So by all means, GOP "purists", primary people like Denham with rabid, racist, anti-immigrant lunatics and we'll happily turn those purple districts blue for you.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Ezra Klein pegs the "lack of self-awareness" meter:

This chart is the best reason to stop freaking out about Obamacare! http://t.co/ehG7AXeTAZ
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 25, 2013

Now if only he would stop freaking out about Obamacare, because Jon Cohn's chart there really is solid evidence that more people (many, many more people) will sign up for insurance at healthcare.gov as we get closer to the deadline.

Sadly, Ezra just can't help himself.

Sorry liberals, Obamacare's problems go much deeper than the web site: http://t.co/Rm83LDVFKB
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 25, 2013

Le sigh, le moan.