IMPALIN’ — Stop Sarah Palin for President in 2012

div class=”dkimg-c”iframe width=”450″ height=”240″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/dp01nOGuU6g” frameborder=”0″ defang_allowfullscreen=”"/iframe div class=”dkimg-cap”Romney’s campaign is knocking Perry for having ‘liberal’ viewsbr / nbsp;/div /div a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/29/1021333/-Perry-is-a-liberal,-and-Romney-cant-gaintraction?via=blog_612492″Markos, yesterday:/a blockquotePerry is now the liberal in the race. And if that makes you laugh incredulously, see Rush Limbaugh, taking a dig at Perry (and Romney) while discussing Herman Cain’s straw poll victory in Florida./blockquote pa href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp01nOGuU6gamp;feature=youtu.be”Headline on Romney web video, last night:/a/p blockquoteExposed: Rick Perry and his liberal immigration views/blockquote pRomney’s aggressive attacks may be hurting Perry, but as Markos pointed out, Romney isn’t gaining ground. Romney’s leading the a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/29/1021253/-Fox-poll:-Romney-in-first-as-Perry-stumbles,-Cain-and-Gingrich-surge,-Obama-leads-them-all?via=blog_589703″most recent/a Fox poll, but not because his support has grown — he’s leading because Perry has stumbled. It’s Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich who have picked up ground, and Chris Christie has become the talk of the GOP town./p pThat leaves the GOP establishment in a bit of a pickle: it’s clear they don’t want Rick Perry to get the nomination, but they’ve got to be afraid that Romney can’t close the deal. That doesn’t mean they aren’t doing their best to boost Romney — check out these clips from Wednesday and Thursday in which Fox anchors Shepard Smith and Megyn Kelly work with Carl Cameron to redeclare Romney as the frontrunner:/p div class=”dkimg-c”object width=”448″ height=”284″param name=”movie” value=”http://www.dailykostv.com/flv/player.swf” / param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” / param name=”flashvars” value=”config=http://www.dailykostv.com/w/002894/vxml.php?448″ / embed src=”http://www.dailykostv.com/flv/player.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”448″ height=”284″ flashvars=”config=http://www.dailykostv.com/w/002894/vxml.php?448″ //object/div (You can also check out a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/14/1016962/-Fox-shills-for-Romney-by-splicing-video-to-put-words-in-Perrys-mouth”this clip/a and a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/13/1016428/-Fox:-Romney-won-the-debate”this clip/a for more examples of Perry’s Fox problem.) pStill, not even Fox can point to any actual enthusiasm emfor/em Romney from Republican primary voters. The best they can do is compare him to a tortoise, and hope that the latest distraction of the day — whether it’s Herman Cain or Chris Christie or Donald Trump or Sarah Palin — is enough to keep the GOP primary field unsettled as Romney methodically makes his way to the finish line, hoping to be the last option standing./p pIn short, the Romney strategy is to let everybody else lose first. That’s not exactly inspiring, but with both Fox and the GOP establishment on his side (unless Chris Christie enters the race), it’s plausible — and given his weaknesses, it’s probably his best shot./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/93Ez1nMGuSog1UGJaFJtGhcvKv0/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/93Ez1nMGuSog1UGJaFJtGhcvKv0/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/93Ez1nMGuSog1UGJaFJtGhcvKv0/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/93Ez1nMGuSog1UGJaFJtGhcvKv0/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=dNGlmzVxDws:WuMq0R97WRg:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/dNGlmzVxDws” height=”1″ width=”1″/

See the original post here: 
Romney says Perry is too liberal

div class=”dkimg-c”img src=”http://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/191280/christieobamasuv_kevinlamarque_reuters.jpg” alt=”Chris Christie” height=”307″ width=”550″ / div class=”dkimg-cap”Chris Christie is very decisive, in that he spends a lot of timebr / deciding and redeciding his mind (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)br / nbsp;/div /div It’s the morning, and I just woke up a few minutes ago, so you know what that means, right? pYep! Yet a href=”http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/09/chris_christie_seriously_consi.html”another story/a about how Chris Christie might or might not be finally getting off the pot:/p blockquoteGov. Chris Christie is seriously rethinking his months of denials and may launch a campaign for the White House after all, a source close to the governor said tonight. pIn the last week, Christie has been swayed away from his earlier refusals to run by an aggressive draft effort from a cadre of Republicans and donors unhappy with the GOP field, said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity/p /blockquote pAccording to my sources, it’s a 50-50 scenario: either he does, or he doesn’t. Of course, those are the same people who told me you have a 50-50 shot of hitting a inside straight on the river. (Turns out, you have less than a 10% chance of getting that magic card, but I digress.)/p pAnyway, I did notice something that I think is actually interesting about all this Chris Christie speculation, and it was a href=”http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2011/09/28/callers_weigh_in_on_christie”Rush Limbaugh’s take/a on why Christie would run:/p blockquoteRUSH: My gut tells me that he’s not going to run. Same thing with Sarah Palin, by the way. pCALLER: Okay./p pRUSH: I don’t think either of them are going to run this cycle./p pCALLER: I think he would sharpen Mitt Romney./p pRUSH: Um… (sigh) If he ran, it would be to take out Perry and Bachmann and Cain and Santorum. That would be the purpose. Thanks for the call./p /blockquote pI know you’ll be shocked by this, but I actually agree with Limbaugh here. If Christie did run, it would be because the GOP establishment decided that he was their last, best hope of taking out Perry, Bachmann, and Cain. But now that Romney has enjoyed a bit of a comeback, I suspect the GOP establishment doesn’t think Christie is their last best hope: they believe Romney is./p pSo why all the Christie chatter? Well, part of it is obviously that it gives the media something to talk about. Part of it is probably that some Republicans are smart enough to realize what a flawed candidate Mitt Romney is, and honestly would like Christie to be the establishment’s standard-bearer. And another big part of it is that all the talk about Christie is denying oxygen to Cain and Perry while taking the heat off Mitt Romney./p pOf course, I could be completely wrong about all this. The odds are 50-50, after all./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tfS_R2fl3SnSclJJLICa7mO1_So/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tfS_R2fl3SnSclJJLICa7mO1_So/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tfS_R2fl3SnSclJJLICa7mO1_So/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tfS_R2fl3SnSclJJLICa7mO1_So/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=KNodsRFeJQo:fYASG54wMrk:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/KNodsRFeJQo” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the original here:
Another breaking report! Chris Christie is STILL weighing 2012 run

pBy Sarah McFarlane/p pLONDON (Reuters) - To get an idea how emerging markets are reshaping global consumption patterns, look no further than the cocoa bean./p pHundreds of millions of new consumers in Asia and elsewhere are boosting demand for chocolate cakes, biscuits, drinks and ice cream. This is increasing demand for cocoa, but it is also changing the cocoa market./p bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/30/insight-asia-reshapes-co_n_988396.htmlRead More…/abr pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/893F4uFpZbU5wX_t9OJ6qxYI8sM/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/893F4uFpZbU5wX_t9OJ6qxYI8sM/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/893F4uFpZbU5wX_t9OJ6qxYI8sM/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/893F4uFpZbU5wX_t9OJ6qxYI8sM/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=D1up3knr5z4:Ea1GC2GsInE:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=D1up3knr5z4:Ea1GC2GsInE:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=D1up3knr5z4:Ea1GC2GsInE:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=D1up3knr5z4:Ea1GC2GsInE:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=D1up3knr5z4:Ea1GC2GsInE:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/D1up3knr5z4″ height=”1″ width=”1″/

Continued here: 
Insight: Asia reshapes cocoa market

div class=”dkimg-c”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/3/GOP_Tea_Party_Debate.jpg” alt=”GOP tea party debate” height=”230″ width=”550″ / div class=”dkimg-cap”No thanks. Next!/div /div As a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/29/1021214/-Wheres-the-love-for-Romney”noted/a earlier today, strongRick Perry/strong may be fading, but that’s not strongMitt Romney/strong’s gain. In fact, Romney has been stuck in the high teens to mid-20s a href=”http://pollingreport.com/wh12rep.htm”the entire year/a. pThe last two Fox News poll (and yes, unlike the network, their polling is legit):/p div class=”dkimg-c”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/3/poll_results_9-29.png” alt=”Poll results chart” height=”244″ width=”404″ //div Perry is now the liberal in the race. And if that makes you laugh incredulously, see a href=”http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2011/09/27/why_shouldn_t_obama_be_in_trouble”Rush Limbaugh/a, taking a dig at Perry (and Romney) while discussing Herman Cain’s straw poll victory in Florida: blockquoteHerman Cain won the straw poll in Florida. Why do you think he won the straw poll in Florida? You want to know why Herman Cain won the straw poll in Florida? ‘Cause you can’t find one example of Herman Cain, at any point in this campaign, not being a conservative [..] pI know where this country is. I know what the people of this country want and they don’t want John McCain, Jr. They don’t want another moderate Republican to work with the other side. They don’t want somebody who wants to cut it both ways on illegal immigration or on health care. They want a conservative./p /blockquote pAnd a href=”http://www.glennbeck.com/2011/09/23/perry-doubles-down-on-immigration-you-dont-have-a-heart/”Glenn Beck/a and his sidekick Pat:/p blockquote“There’s nobody on this stage who has spent more time working on border security than I have. For a decade I’ve been the governor of a state with a 1200-mile border with Mexico. We put $400　million of our taxpayer money into securing that border. We’ve got our Texas Ranger recon teams there now. I supported Arizona’s immigration law by joining in that lawsuit to defend it. Every day I have Texans on that border that are doing their job, but if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state from no other reason than they’ve been brought there, by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said. p“That is a progressive talking point, that you don’t have a heart, you don’t like children. Shut up. Don’t give me that,” Pat said./p p“It’s the old Rick Perry,” Glenn suggested./p /blockquote pThe “old Rick Perry”? That would be the one who was a Democrat. So yeah, he’s now a liberal./p pSo what does this Fox News poll tell us? It tells us that GOP primary voters are now flirting with strongHerman Cain/strong—the conservative version of “some of my best friends are black”! It makes them feel good about themselves, without actually having to vote for him come election day./p pIt tells us that strongNewt Gingrich/strong is getting some traction. Can you believe it? Newt! It’ll be interesting to see if his boomlet is confirmed by other polling./p pIt tells us that strongMichele Bachmann/strong is doing her best to make me look like a fool for a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/27/988434/-Why-Michele-Bachmann-will-be-the-GOP-nominee”predicting/a she’ll be the nominee. Am I recanting? Not yet. Maybe I’m just stubborn, but I still don’t see a viable ballot box alternative for the teabagger set./p pstrongRick Santorum/strong certainly hopes he’s there to pick up the pieces after the inevitable demise of Cain’s boomlet. Michele Bachmann will try to win her defectors back. strongSarah Palin/strong will be tempted to fill that void. You know she’s chaffing at her sudden irrelevance. Getting in the race would bring back the spotlight./p pBut in all of this, look at poor Romney. He’s still in those low 20s—the sum total of Wall Street Republicans and conservatives who can read the polls and want the most electable candidate in 2012. No matter what other candidates do, Mittens treads water, forgotten by the other 75 percent or so Republicans looking for the purest conservative./p pAnd that’s why the GOP establishment continues their search for savior—that mythical creature who is acceptable to Wall Street, is acceptable to the teabaggers, iand/i is electable in a matchup against Obama. Is it strongChris Christie/strong? Is it strongMitch Daniels/strong? Is it strongzombie Ronald Reagan/strong? (Certainly not the latter. Reagan would be unceremoniously booted from the modern day GOP without hesitation.)/p pThe GOP establishment would be thrilled with Romney as the nominee. They just know he can’t survive the GOP’s primary electorate. And the alternative (Perry, Bachmann, Cain, Santorum, etc) is just as scary to them as it is to us./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2SCgk-O57u6Sm33-urW2irSdT0Y/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2SCgk-O57u6Sm33-urW2irSdT0Y/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2SCgk-O57u6Sm33-urW2irSdT0Y/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2SCgk-O57u6Sm33-urW2irSdT0Y/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=eUYrVd7jigQ:yuLJuBxGu94:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/eUYrVd7jigQ” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read more: 
Perry is a liberal, and Romney can’t gain traction

div id=”uimg_right”img src=”http://www.dailykos.com/i/user/59419/Penn_Flag_275.png” / div id=”uimg_caption”Pennsylvania is tight, but still leans to Obama/div /div pPennsylvania is a state that has (justifiably) received a lot of attention in recent weeks, as it relates to the 2012 presidential election. This is something of a given, considering how the state’s trove of electoral votes has shown every sign of being a toss-up between the president and whomever emerges as his Republican foe./p pA new Quinnipiac poll, released earlier in the week, indeed suggests that President Obama would be narrowly favored to win statewide, if the election were held today./p pa href=”http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1327.xml?ReleaseID=1653″Quinnipiac/a. 9/21-26. Registered voters. MoE 2.7% (8/2 results)/p blockquotebBarack Obama (D):/b 45 (42)br / bMitt Romney (R):/b 43 (44) pbBarack Obama (D):/b 46 (45)br / bRick Perry (R):/b 40 (39)/p pbBarack Obama (D):/b 45 (45)br / bRick Santorum (R):/b 42 (43)br //p /blockquote pAdding to the recent attention bestowed upon the Keystone State was the news two weeks ago that the Pennsylvania GOP legislative leadership was a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/14/1016816/-PA-Republicans-propose-changing-electoral-college-rules?via=search”flirting with a scheme/a to change the way electoral votes were awarded in the state, going from the winner-take-all approach utilized in 48 states and the District of Columbia to a district-by-district approach that would siphon a number of electoral votes away from the Democrats, assuming they won statewide./p pThe narrow margins here underscore why, for the Pennsylvania GOP, the electoral college gambit was always a calculated risk. While Democrats have carried the state in every presidential election since 1992, the president’s polling numbers here have been pretty shaky throughout the 2012 cycle. His present job approval numbers in the state stand at just 43/54, which is just a point off his all-time low. A move designed to strip a handful of electoral votes away from the Democrats could, with a shift of just a handful of voters, actually deny the GOP a handful of electoral votes./p pWhat’s more, the bill itself is not a popular proposal. While support or disapproval generally falls along party lines, opponents to the bill outnumber supporters by a 52-40 margin. A strong majority, rightly, see it as an effort by legislative Republicans to aid their presidential nominee, rather than reflective of the will of the people. So, aside from the practical considerations, the GOP would have to expend a good amount of political capital, especially since a growing number of their GOP brethren are on the record opposing the move./p pMeanwhile, in other Pennsylvania campaign data, the GOP presidential primary is still wildly undefined. The leading candidate, Mitt Romney, is still in the teens (18 percent), narrowly ahead of Rick Perry (16 percent) and semi-homeboy Rick Santorum (12 percent). Both Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, in double digits in August, have seen their support recede as Perry’s has grown./p pDownballot, as Republicans still search for a first-tier opponent to freshman Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, the Q poll indicates that he might be a pretty tough target. His job approval continues to be above average (46/30, a bit better than GOP Senate mate Pat Toomey’s 43/32), and he leads a generic Republican challenger by a pretty solid 50-31 margin./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/WFCYtTsraJxcezHXSuEf9UUdCoU/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/WFCYtTsraJxcezHXSuEf9UUdCoU/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/WFCYtTsraJxcezHXSuEf9UUdCoU/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/WFCYtTsraJxcezHXSuEf9UUdCoU/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=U4B89hMOaCg:2jA-JzmJpJM:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/U4B89hMOaCg” height=”1″ width=”1″/

View original here:
PA-Pres: Obama keeps slight edge in key battleground, voters uneasy about electoral college shift

div id=”uimg_right”img src=”http://www.dailykos.com/i/admin/Brown__Sherrod__OH_Sen_D.jpg” / div id=”uimg_caption”OH-Sen: Brown leads by 13 points/div /div pAs President Obama’s national numbers continue to linger near their low ebb (currently residing in the low 40s both according to a href=”http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/Gallup-Daily-Obama-Job-Approval.aspx”Gallup/a and our own a href=”http://dailykos.com/weeklypolling/2011/9/22″tracking poll/a), Democrats can take some solace in two continuing themes in recent polling:/p ul liBarack Obama still holds nominal leads over his likeliest GOP rivals./li liDemocrats downballot appear to be more than holding their own, in most cases./li /ul pThe latest bit of evidence to buttress those two themes emanates this week out of the state of Ohio, where Quinnipiac’s latest numbers out of the Buckeye State show the president reeling from underwater approval numbers, but still remaining out in front of the two Republicans who are currently leading the GOP field:/p pa href=”http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1322.xml?ReleaseID=1652″Quinnipiac/a. 9/20-25. Registered voters. MoE 2.7% (7/21 results):/p blockquotebBarack Obama (D):/b 44 (45)br / bMitt Romney (R):/b 42 (41) pbBarack Obama (D):/b 44 (47)br / bRick Perry (R):/b 41 (35)br //p /blockquote pThe president has a job approval spread of 42/53, the lowest of his term to date in Ohio, according to Quinnipiac. But in a sign that the electorate is not sold on the alternative, consider the following: Obama is at a dismal 39/58 spread with Independent voters. Yet he is tied with Romney among indies, and actually holds a three-point lead among indies when paired with Perry./p pIf there is a troubling stat under the hood for Obama and the Democrats, it might be the re-emergence of an enthusiasm gap in Ohio, to the detriment of the blue team. 51 percent of Republicans declare themselves “more enthusiastic” about the 2012 elections than normal, compared to just 24 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats./p pIf Obama’s numbers are tenuous in Ohio, progressive Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown is looking considerably stronger. Sporting the best approval ratings of his career (52/31), Brown continues to hold strong leads over either Republican stacked against him:/p blockquotebSherrod Brown (D)/b 49 (49)br / bJosh Mandel (R)/b 36 (34) pbSherrod Brown (D)/b 53 (50)br / bKevin Coughlin (R)/b 32 (32)br //p /blockquote pNeither Mandel nor Coughlin appear to be making much headway against the Democratic incumbent. The GOP primary also appears to be frozen in place: Mandel’s 33-12 lead over Coughlin (the bulk of the primary electorate is undecided) is nearly identical to the previous Q poll in July./p pOn the presidential front, Mitt Romney maintains a modest lead over Rick Perry. When comparing to the previous poll, note that Perry’s ascendancy had not really begun by late July, so this was pre-boomlet:/p blockquotebMitt Romney:/b 24 (16)br / bRick Perry:/b 20 (8)br / bSarah Palin:/b 9 (15)br / bHerman Cain:/b 7 (6)br / bRon Paul:/b 6 (5)br / bNewt Gingrich:/b 4 (4)br / bRick Santorum:/b 4 (2)br / bMichele Bachmann:/b 3 (11)br / bJon Huntsman:/b 1 (1)br //blockquote pObviously, the biggest shift since the summer on the GOP side, here as it is elsewhere, is Michele Bachmann’s balloon being burst. She drops from a clear third place to a distant eighth place, looking up at the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. For her part, Sarah Palin has to be hoping for the (very real) prospect of a Rick Perry collapse, as that might make her relevant again. Her drop from July is nearly as steep as Bachmann’s./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/lw6B80gPIXrthOjjIzZ3a9HLTkM/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/lw6B80gPIXrthOjjIzZ3a9HLTkM/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/lw6B80gPIXrthOjjIzZ3a9HLTkM/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/lw6B80gPIXrthOjjIzZ3a9HLTkM/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=6hOz8HTT2wU:PQA5mID59Vg:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/6hOz8HTT2wU” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the original here:
OH-Pres/OH-Sen: Obama leads narrowly, Brown’s Senate lead still in double digits

div class=”dkimg-r”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/191280/romneypalin_reutersimages.jpg” alt=”Romney Palin” height=”201″ width=”275″ / div class=”dkimg-cap”Sarah and Mitt (Reuters photos)br / nbsp;/div /div strongBiggest loser #1:/strong Sarah Palin, because nobody cares that a href=”http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/sarah-palin-is-a-campaign-too-shackle-y/”she still hasn’t decided/a: blockquote“Is a title worth it?” she asked, rhetorically. “Does a title shackle a person? Are they someone like me who’s maverick? I do go rogue and I call it like I see it and I don’t mind stirring it up in order to get people to think and debate aggressively.” p“Is a title and a campaign too shackle-y?,” she continued. “Does that prohibit me from being out there, out of a box, not allowing handlers to shape me and to force my message to be what donors or what contributors or what pundits want it to be? Does a title take away my freedom to call it like I see it and to affect positive change that we need in this country? That’s the biggest contemplation piece in my process.”/p /blockquote pWell, I’m glad she’s at least got a “contemplation piece” in her process of deciding whether she wants the “title” of president./p pstrongBiggest loser #2:/strong Mitt Romney, because nobody cares that a href=”http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110928/ap_on_el_ge/us_republicans2012_romney”he’s still actually running/a:/p blockquoteMitt Romney is brushing aside fresh speculation about whether New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will jump into the Republican presidential sweepstakes, saying “I can’t decide what other folks do.” pThe former Massachusetts governor tells MSNBC in an interview he believes the talk of a Christie entry is all part of the glaring media spotlight on politics. He says, “You’ve got to find some excitement. You’ve got to have some intrigue.”/p /blockquote pAll this Christie speculation has got to be embarrassing for Romney. He should be flying high after Rick Perry’s rough September, but instead of soaring, his campaign has been overshadowed by all the talk of Christie’s entrance. It’s become a pattern for Romney, who has been in the campaign for four years, but has trailed potential 2012ers ranging from Sarah Palin to Mike Huckabee to Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to Donald Trump — and now, possibly, Chris Christie too./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XrbmS9A1_7OOjEaClFhHlYx8w0I/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XrbmS9A1_7OOjEaClFhHlYx8w0I/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XrbmS9A1_7OOjEaClFhHlYx8w0I/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/XrbmS9A1_7OOjEaClFhHlYx8w0I/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=cGE_aJzFaOc:Au4XFKRIVRw:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/cGE_aJzFaOc” height=”1″ width=”1″/

The rest is here: 
Who’s the biggest loser of the Chris Christie 2012 tease?

div class=”dkimg-r”img src=”http://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/1054/MitchDaniels.jpg” alt=”Mitch Daniels” height=”296″ width=”200″ / div class=”dkimg-cap”Mitch Daniels: Still not running/div /div In a still-developing story, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has stated that he a href=”http://washingtonscene.thehill.com/in-the-know/36-news/12071-daniels-not-reconsidering-presidential-run-”still has no intention of running for president/a. blockquoteAt a downtown D.C. lunch and book signing Tuesday for his new tome, Keeping the Republic: Saving America by Trusting Americans, Daniels was asked whether or not he’s given any reconsideration to a 2012 presidential campaign. Daniels said while he’s not interested in running, he is open to supporting a candidate who offers a change in direction and who’s willing to take a gamble./blockquote pThis is a reiteration of a previous statement of his non-candidacy, and is a serious blow in the effort to recruit a Republican “savior” candidate who does not appear obviously insane or sociopathic at first glance./p pDaniels joins New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in still not being a candidate for president. There is considerable tension between the two camps: Christie supporters feel the obvious sociopathic tendencies of their non-candidate strongly appeal to the Republican party base, while Daniels supporters are confident that only a less sociopathic non-candidate can effectively woo Republican business interests./p pBoth sides may be able to take lessons from the recent entry of previous non-candidate Rick Perry into the race. Like Daniels and Christie, Perry was also a prominent Republican governor who was begged by party stalwarts to enter the race: Perry, however, has seen his popularity plummet since rescinding his non-candidate status./p p”The problem for non-candidates is that if they transition to becoming candidates, people get to hear them talk,” said one political analyst who wished to remain anonymous because I just made him up right now. “In Rick Perry’s case that proved disastrous.”/p pOn the other hand, the successful non-candidacy of Sarah Palin proves that there is still a market for people who hint through that they might run for president while doing jack-shit about it. Non-candidacies can often be stepping stones to lucrative cable television shows, nationwide bus tours, or slightly more interesting blurbs on the back of book covers./p pDaniels’ statement is notable for the apparent dare to other non-candidates. “He sounds like he’s goading other non-candidates into running, just so he can support them from the sidelines,” said the same imaginary analyst. “That’s a bold move, and he may actually sucker somebody into doing it, if he keeps the pressure up.”/p pMany observers note that Daniels has been keenly positioning himself as not running for president for some time, which could represent a decisive edge against non-candidate Christie. “Chris Christie is such a self-important dumbass that he might actually run,” said the author of this post. “But I have a lot of confidence that Daniels will continue to milk his non-candidacy through at least the end of his book tour, and probably beyond.”br //p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Y-RGRFyfLVA3tn75XZRp50QfShg/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Y-RGRFyfLVA3tn75XZRp50QfShg/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Y-RGRFyfLVA3tn75XZRp50QfShg/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Y-RGRFyfLVA3tn75XZRp50QfShg/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=bLmk1Z4Zr-U:DS1DgTbT9QU:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/bLmk1Z4Zr-U” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read more:
In bold move, Mitch Daniels also still not running for president

div id=”uimg_right”img src=”http://images.dailykos.com/i/user/6685/acalegalchallenge.jpg” alt=”ACA legal challenge” //div The Obama administration has decided to a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-administration-clears-the-way-for-a-faster-supreme-court-decision-on-health-care-law/2011/09/26/gIQAzSg3zK_story.html”forgo an appeal/a to the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta of last month’s lower court decision that the Affordable Care Act’s mandate is unconstitutional. The decision by the administration means that the case will reach the Supreme Court next year rather than in 2013. pGiven that conventional wisdom said it would be much better for President Obama to inot/i have a Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the signature piece of legislation of his first term during his reelection campaign, why would they choose to speed it up? It’s not entirely clear, but Sarah Kliff has some a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/three-reasons-the-white-house-is-taking-health-reform-straight-to-the-supreme-court/2011/09/27/gIQAFwng1K_blog.html”well-informed speculation/a. Her three reasons:/p blockquotebThe Obama administration will definitely handle the case/b. Delaying a ruling until 2013 came with a big risk: a Republican administration could be in power, and arguing the case. pbThe review might not have been granted—or gone against the administration./b Even if the United States had asked the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to hear the case, the court didn’t have to accept. The 11th Circuit leans conservative, with a majority of Republican-appointed judges. Asking that court to review its health reform ruling could have bolstered the case against health reform, giving the Supreme Court more case law against the Affordable Care Act to draw from in its final decision./p pbThe move shows confidence./b Asking for review of the 11th Circuit decision would have been widely interpreted as foot-dragging, the administration attempting to slow a case that’s almost inevitably headed to the Supreme Court. For the White House to proactively pursue a faster timeline makes the administration look more confident that it will prevail in court./p /blockquote pI’m not sure that the third reason is all that convincing, that the administration would be trying to play some psychological jujitsu with the Supreme Court, but it’s possible. From a pure politics perspective, Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog might have a href=”http://electionlawblog.org/?p=23578″nailed it/a./p blockquoteIf the Court strikes down the law, Obama makes more of an issue of a Court out of control (think FDR) during the 2012 campaign (something I suggested in a href=”http://www.slate.com/id/2250579/”this Slate piece/a). If the Court upholds the law, this takes some of the wind out of the argument likely to come from the Republican presidential nominee that the health care law is unconstitutional. No lose before the election. Sometimes, a href=”http://www.slate.com/id/2228257/”you can win by losing/a before the Roberts Court./blockquote pWhatever the reasoning behind the administration’s decision, it means that the Affordable Care Act is going to loom very large in the 2012 election. That will be particularly interesting if Romney is the Republican nominee./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9w3BKpRBtjvaebKH9XUAVLQCO18/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9w3BKpRBtjvaebKH9XUAVLQCO18/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9w3BKpRBtjvaebKH9XUAVLQCO18/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9w3BKpRBtjvaebKH9XUAVLQCO18/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=L6yThFSaCcs:uUGpO01m2CY:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/L6yThFSaCcs” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Go here to read the rest:
Obama administration puts Affordable Care Act on SCOTUS fast track

div id=”uimg_right”img src=”http://www.dailykos.com/i/admin/Virginia_Welcome_Sign_275.jpg” / div id=”uimg_caption”Are VA voters less welcoming of Dems than before?/div /div pDuring a point in time when the president’s numbers have been flagging elsewhere, it had seemed as if a key cog in the Obama ‘08 coalition had held steady. Virginia, which had gone Democratic for the first time in over four decades, was still giving narrow polling leads for Obama over the myriad of GOP opponents he might face in 2012, a key state given its 13 electoral votes./p pIf a new poll out on Monday from Roanoke College is to be believed, however, the president’s fortunes in the Commonwealth might be flagging somewhat./p pa href=”http://roanoke.edu/Documents/rcpoll/RC20Sept.%202011.pdf”Roanoke College/a. 9/6-17. Likely voters. MoE 4.0% (no trendlines):/p blockquotebBarack Obama (D):/b 33br / bGeneric Republican:/b 41 pbBarack Obama (D):/b 37br / bMitt Romney (R):/b 45/p pbBarack Obama (D):/b 40br / bRick Perry (R):/b 42/p pbBarack Obama (D):/b 46br / bMichele Bachmann (R):/b 35/p pbBarack Obama (D):/b 43br / bRon Paul (R):/b 33/p pbBarack Obama (D):/b 50br / bSarah Palin (R):/b 31br //p /blockquote pIn past cycles, Roanoke has not been terribly prolific, only offering a few polls per cycle. Their numbers, however, have not had a discernible lean in the past. While a tad pessimistic, the partisan and ideological breakdown of their sample here was not way out of whack. For example, the partisan sample here was R 32/D 29, which is not as rosy as a href=”http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=VAP00p1″2008/a (when it was D+6) but not as quite as pessimistic as a href=”http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/PDFs/VA_09_exits.pdf”2009/a (which was R+4)./p pThe president’s job approval in Virginia has taken a bit of a beating, now coming to a rest at an anemic 39/54 split./p pIn the highly anticipated clash of the titans for the open Senate seat, the Roanoke poll found that if the president’s current political woes are having a drag effect downballot, it is a pretty muted one. As with virtually every Virginia poll taken this cycle, the margin between former GOP Sen. George Allen and former Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine is still a coin flip (trendlines here from a Senate-only poll in April). Indeed, if we are doing an apples-to-apples with this particular polling outfit, Tim Kaine is in a markedly better position now than he was in the Spring:/p blockquotebGeorge Allen (R):/b 42 (45)br / bTim Kaine (D):/b 39 (32)br //blockquote pKaine dominates among moderates and liberals, but Allen destroys Kaine among conservatives, which make up nearly 40% of the electorate, according to the poll./p pIn the final analysis, the key to Virginia for Kaine and Obama both is to change the makeup of the electorate. Democrats made 39% of the 2008 electorate, according to exit polls. They made up just 29% of the electorate, according to the Roanoke poll. If they can turn out their base, both Obama and Kaine look like much better bets for election, given their relative strength among moderate voters./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/K4KhgLybxNsFjjsYPvyFNFWK2iw/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/K4KhgLybxNsFjjsYPvyFNFWK2iw/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/K4KhgLybxNsFjjsYPvyFNFWK2iw/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/K4KhgLybxNsFjjsYPvyFNFWK2iw/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=02dnhpeN3U0:xox8zDHOVQ4:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/02dnhpeN3U0″ height=”1″ width=”1″/

More:
VA-Pres/VA-Sen: Dems now at narrow disadvantage, according to Roanoke poll

pa href=”http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/sarah-palin-threatens-to-sue-rogue-book-publisher/” target=”_hplink”ABC News reports/a that Sarah Palin is considering suing Random House, the book publisher that released emThe Rogue/em, a highly critical book about her life by writer Joe McGinniss./ppa href=”http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/sarah-palin-threatens-to-sue-rogue-book-publisher/” target=”_hplink”According to ABC/a, Palin family attorney John Tiemessen a href=”http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/page/sarah-palin-sue-author-publisher-rogue-14611032″ target=”_hplink”wrote a letter/a to Maya Mavjee, the publisher of the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House) in which he spelled out the family’s legal grievances against McGinnniss. /ppTiemessen also makes reference to an email in which McGinnis describes Random House lawyers expressing concern that his reporting amounted to little more than “tawdry gossip.”/pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/sarah-palin-lawsuit-the-rogue-book-publisher_n_982253.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin-2012/”More on Sarah Palin 2012/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/T_VJYnWqKqokVH6yrNRdBFA4nuw/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/T_VJYnWqKqokVH6yrNRdBFA4nuw/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/T_VJYnWqKqokVH6yrNRdBFA4nuw/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/T_VJYnWqKqokVH6yrNRdBFA4nuw/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=bSZB0xru-QA:isi6S8EQJEU:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=bSZB0xru-QA:isi6S8EQJEU:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=bSZB0xru-QA:isi6S8EQJEU:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=bSZB0xru-QA:isi6S8EQJEU:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=bSZB0xru-QA:isi6S8EQJEU:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/bSZB0xru-QA” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the original post: 
Sarah Palin Lawsuit? Ex-Governor Threatens To Sue Book Publisher, ABC Reports

pa href=”http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/26/cnn-poll-perry-still-at-top-but-romney-stronger-vs-obama/”ORC for CNN./a 9/23-25. Republicans. MoE not avail. (a href=”http://ahttp://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2011/images/09/11/rel15a.pdf”9/9-11 results/a):/p blockquotestrongRick Perry:/strong 28 (30)br / strongMitt Romney:/strong 21 (18)br / strongNewt Gingrich:/strong 10 (5)br / strongHerman Cain:/strong 7 (5)br / strongSarah Palin:/strong 7 (15)br / strongRon Paul:/strong 7 (12)br / strongMichele Bachmann:/strong 4 (4)br / strongRick Santorum:/strong 3 (2)br / strongJon Huntsman:/strong 1 (2)/blockquote pAnd what do things look like if we take Palin out of the mix? Well, it’s a two-man race between Perry and Romney — other than those two, only Gingrich breaks into double-digits, at 11%. Here’s the trend:/p div class=”dkimg-c”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/191280/perryromneysep2325trend.png” alt=”CNN” height=”300″ width=”472″ //div The one bit of good news for Romney was that he does slightly better against President Obama than does Rick Perry. Romney trails Obama by a one-point margin, 49, while Perry trails by five, 51. pIt’s worth keeping in mind that this is just one poll. After the pounding that Perry has taken (and delivered to himself) over the past couple of weeks, it’s hard to imagine that Romney could still be trailing. And PPP a href=”http://twitter.com/#!/ppppolls/status/118352325940224000″says/a that its Florida polling reflects a post-debate shift away from Perry and towards Romney, so CNN’s poll isn’t the last word. But if Romney isn’t solidly beating Perry by now, it’s one hell of a statement about the weakness of his campaign./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X9FeyJktCxbJZaKPOW4HD3Ze52s/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X9FeyJktCxbJZaKPOW4HD3Ze52s/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X9FeyJktCxbJZaKPOW4HD3Ze52s/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X9FeyJktCxbJZaKPOW4HD3Ze52s/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=e619dCOgeFY:E7hdEAHv_Xw:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/e619dCOgeFY” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Continued here: 
CNN poll: Perry still leads GOP field

div class=”dkimg-r”img src=”http://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/191280/RTR2RP7P.jpg” alt=”Cain and Romney” height=”202″ width=”275″ / div class=”dkimg-cap”It’d be a blood libel to suggest thatbr / these guys scare Sarah Palinbr / (Scott Audette/Reuters)br / nbsp;/div /div 5. It pays to be a job creator: Mitt Romney thinks it’s a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-attacks-perry-on-immigration-comment/2011/09/23/gIQAV1nYqK_story.html”worse/a to give the children of undocumented immigrants access to education than it is to be the guy who a href=”http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/11/giuliani-team-s.php”hired/a undocumented immigrants. p4. The HPV vaccine is dangerous … to people who talk about it without having a clue: Michele Bachmann a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/24/1019916/-Herman-Cain-blows-out-Rick-Perry-in-surprise-Florida-straw-poll-victory?via=blog_589703″finished last/a, behind even Jon Huntsman./p p3. Silver beats bronze: For Rick Perry, finishing in second place was a disaster. For Mitt Romney, finishing in third place was golden — because Perry finished in second./p p2. With Bachmann and Perry on the outs, there’s still time for Sarah Palin to get in./p p1. Republican activists hate brown people so much they a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/24/1019916/-Herman-Cain-blows-out-Rick-Perry-in-surprise-Florida-straw-poll-victory?via=blog_589703″voted for/a a black guy./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/hxSXHJ4DXZFsMoceadsd7N0TdMw/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/hxSXHJ4DXZFsMoceadsd7N0TdMw/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/hxSXHJ4DXZFsMoceadsd7N0TdMw/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/hxSXHJ4DXZFsMoceadsd7N0TdMw/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=lSU8bLI8-GU:HjtOcBX3Jgw:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/lSU8bLI8-GU” height=”1″ width=”1″/

See the rest here:
The top five things we learned from this weekend’s Florida straw poll

pimg src=”http://images.dailykos.com/i/user/426/APR_926.jpg” //p psmallVisual source: a href=”http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/”Newseum/a/small/p pa href=”http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/?eventId=84328″Someone’s fading/a:/p div class=”dkimg-c”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/426/Intrade926.png” alt=”" height=”148″ width=”530″ //div a href=”http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/64352.html”Politico/a: blockquote“Perry’s showing in the [FL] straw poll was disastrous. He was here, he worked the crowd, and it just proves that the debate performance really undermined his support,” said Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, who was at the straw poll in Orlando this weekend. “Perry’s gotta retool, reorganize and retrench very quickly.” pSaid one prominent conservative activist: “They’ve really got to go into damage control mode and right this ship, and they’ve got a relatively brief amount of time to do it. And if they don’t, I think he’s done.”/p /blockquote Rick who? The not-ready-for-prime-time stumblebum from Texas? pLuckily for him, a href=”"conservatives still hate Romney/a./p blockquoteWhat’s more, Perry continues to have the advantage of a flawed rival. A number of Florida delegates who said they had new reservations about Perry also indicated that they were wary of Romney. And by the time the Presidency 5 results were announced, Perry had already moved on to the next contest against Romney: a GOP conference in Michigan where Republicans will cast ballots in another straw poll Sunday./blockquote In fact, one of Obama’s biggest strengths is the weakness of the Republican field. pa href=”http://www.mlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/09/why_rick_perry_faces_uphill_ba.html”Ed Golder/a, pre-straw poll:/p blockquoteIs Perry their guy? pI asked that question everywhere this weekend as Michigan Republicans gathered for the Republican Leadership Conference, the biennial event that this year featured Perry and Romney as marquee speakers./p pAnswers varied. Most of the uncommitted seemed willing to give Perry a hearing. But it’s clear the Texan has an uphill battle to overcome Romney’s considerable organization and support./p /blockquote a href=”http://www.thestatecolumn.com/articles/mitt-romney-wins-michigan-straw-poll-marco-rubio-is-vp-choice/”And in fact/a: blockquoteIn Michigan, the state where Mitt Romney was born and raised and where his father, George, served as governor, the former Massachusetts governor won the Michigan Straw Poll 2011. Romney claimed an easy victory over Texas Governor Rick Perry./blockquote a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/rick-perry-as-sarah-palin/2011/09/23/gIQALzKwqK_blog.html”Aaron Blake/a: blockquoteBut Perry is now going to have to grapple with the very Palin-esque idea that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about on issues of foreign policy. And in fact, the issue had already been raised quite a bit even before Thursday’s debate./blockquote a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/republican-have-three-credible-candidates/2011/03/29/gIQA5enDuK_blog.html”Jennifer Rubin/a on why Romney v Christie v Santorum and why not Perry: blockquoteAfter Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s meltdown in last week’s debate, conservatives were stunned and shaken.a href=”http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/frontrunner-stumbles_594141.html”Stephen Hayes/a reported on disillusioned conservatives whose support Perry lost by “misstatements of fact, missed opportunities and general incoherence.” His collapse continued with a loss to Hermann Cain by a huge margin of 37 to 15.43% percent in the Florida straw poll on Saturday.br //blockquote What Rubin can’t admit to herself is that a href=”http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/09/25/Poll-No-confidence-in-GOP-front-runners/UPI-34811316974269/”they all suck/a: blockquoteTexas Governor Rick Perry’s debate performance could be indicative of an overall weak group of GOP front-runners in the 2012 race, analysts said Sunday.br //blockquote a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republican-debate-audiences-provoke-controversy/2011/09/23/gIQAJX6RtK_story.html?hpid=z2″WaPo/a on obnoxious GOP debate audiences: blockquoteThe audience’s outspokenness has in many ways served a positive purpose by illustrating the energy of the base, GOP strategists say. But it has also conveyed a somewhat unsavory image to less ideological people at home watching on television. p“You have very partisan people come to these events, and in some ways it is just human nature,” said Ed Rollins, former campaign manager for Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), one of the Republican hopefuls for president. But some of the more controversial moments “to the mainstream audience [are] not very appealing.”/p /blockquote pa href=”http://enikrising.blogspot.com/2011/09/trends-that-are-not-actually-occurring.html#.Tn9YRYOJkVU.twitter”Enik Rising/a on perception v reality:/p blockquoteSo, just to review, Obama has received more than seven times as many donations at this point in the 2012 cycle than he did by this point in the 2008 cycle. What’s more, the share of his donations coming from small (under $250) contributions is now greater than it was four years ago./blockquote pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/F9A54EouzexSjzJJdF2YLgzdXJ8/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/F9A54EouzexSjzJJdF2YLgzdXJ8/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/F9A54EouzexSjzJJdF2YLgzdXJ8/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/F9A54EouzexSjzJJdF2YLgzdXJ8/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=5-u2dgOnLTI:DWgM5KbtgGA:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/5-u2dgOnLTI” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Original post:
Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: the Rick Perry damage control edition

pORLANDO — Gov. Rick Scott’s announcement that a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/24/herman-cainflorida-straw-poll-results-2011_n_979096.html” target=”_hplink”Herman Cain won the Florida straw poll/a was preceded by two surprising opening acts; Sarah Palin and former President George W. Bush./ppWhen Palin first took the stage inside the Orange County Convention Center, there was an audible gasp among the crowd of delegates. /ppBut it was not Sarah Palin. Instead, a href=”http://www.sarahpalinimpersonator.com/index.php” target=”_hplink”Patsy Gilbert/a impersonated the former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate, even launching into a rap./pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/25/sarah-palin-impersonator-cpac-florida_n_979309.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin/”More on Sarah Palin/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tLOevthq4h5VvCIzlHsU-OMWlZo/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tLOevthq4h5VvCIzlHsU-OMWlZo/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tLOevthq4h5VvCIzlHsU-OMWlZo/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tLOevthq4h5VvCIzlHsU-OMWlZo/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=XwrjBbLJ9Gk:SmOyOMTeprs:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=XwrjBbLJ9Gk:SmOyOMTeprs:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=XwrjBbLJ9Gk:SmOyOMTeprs:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=XwrjBbLJ9Gk:SmOyOMTeprs:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=XwrjBbLJ9Gk:SmOyOMTeprs:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/XwrjBbLJ9Gk” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Excerpt from:
Sarah Palin Impersonator, Fake George W. Bush Crash Conservative Gathering (VIDEO)

div class=”dkimg-r”img src=”http://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/191280/RTR2RP7P.jpg” alt=”Cain and Romney” height=”202″ width=”275″ / div class=”dkimg-cap”The two happiest men in the Republican Partybr / (Scott Audette/Reuters)br / nbsp;/div /div With a href=”http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/09/24/herman_cain_wins_florida_straw_poll.html”this result/a, is Rick Perry’s campaign pretty much over? blockquoteORLANDO, Fla. — Herman Cain won the Presidency 5 Florida Straw poll with 996 votes, blowing past Rick Perry and Ron Paul, both of whom had organized to win here. p”It shows you something,” said Gov. Rick Scott. “The road to the White House is right through Florida. It pays to be here.”/p pOf course, Perry had shown up — he was here from Thursday night to Saturday morning, working over delegates personally. By failing so convincingly, Perry’s ensured that the weekend’s “trouble for frontrunner narrative” will be plated in gold and frozen in amber.br //p /blockquote pa href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/24/herman-cainflorida-straw-poll-results-2011_n_979096.html”The final tally:/a/p blockquotestrongHerman Cain:/strong 37.11%br / strongRick Perry:/strong 15.43%br / strongMitt Romney:/strong 14.00%br / strongRick Santorum:/strong 10.88%br / strongRon Paul:/strong 10.39%br / strongNewt Gingrich:/strong 8.43%br / strongJon Huntsman:/strong 2.26%br / strongMichele Bachmann:/strong 1.51%/blockquote pI’d say that Republicans couldn’t be crazy enough to nominate Herman Cain … but then again, they also nominated Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Ken Buck, and, yes, Sarah Palin./p pspan class=”update”b3:23 PM PT/b (Kaili Joy Gray):/span Sa-rah! Sa-rah! Sa-rah!/p br / pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vh6bAaF8uzxYujZrvfbSBT9xFHY/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vh6bAaF8uzxYujZrvfbSBT9xFHY/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vh6bAaF8uzxYujZrvfbSBT9xFHY/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vh6bAaF8uzxYujZrvfbSBT9xFHY/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=WzcfE_FBf0g:zJO5OD9T_iw:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/WzcfE_FBf0g” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read more from the original source:
Herman Cain blows out Rick Perry in surprise Florida straw poll victory

div id=”uimg_right”img src=”http://www.dailykos.com/i/user/59419/Penn_Flag_275.png” / div id=”uimg_caption”Pennsylvania: Leaning Dem? A GOP poll says “yes”/div /div pUp is down, and down is up in the world of horserace politics this week. A Republican pollster says President Obama is up double digits in Pennsylvania, even after other pollsters (including our partners at PPP) had the state considerably closer. And after his best national polling week in months, USA Today/Gallup tosses a pitcher of cold water on the president, saying he would be trailing Mitt Romney if the election were held today. Marist/McClatchy takes it one step further, putting Sarah Palin within striking distance of the president./p pMost of the data in this numbers-heavy week, however, falls in the realm of “as expected.” There are no huge surprises in the statewide presidential numbers, though there was one huge “whoa” moment in the downballot polling. Meanwhile, on the GOP front, Rick Perry still paces the GOP field, but there are more signs that this has become a two-man race, and that Mittens might have staunched the bleeding./p pAll this (and more!) in this “Fall is upon us” edition of the weekend digest./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TKk-lpVCQyy53y1WIXOgure58QQ/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TKk-lpVCQyy53y1WIXOgure58QQ/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TKk-lpVCQyy53y1WIXOgure58QQ/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/TKk-lpVCQyy53y1WIXOgure58QQ/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=cxoLmItfy4s:QmePFXP0w00:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/cxoLmItfy4s” height=”1″ width=”1″/

More: 
Daily Kos Elections Weekend Digest

div class=”dkimg-r”img src=”http://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/151025/Rick_Perry_public_domain_275.jpg” alt=”" height=”435″ width=”275″ //div Rick Perry has a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/13/1016409/-Palin-slams-Perry-for-crony-capitalism,-praises-Bachmann-on-vaccine-issue?detail=hide”taken a lot of heat/a for signing an executive order in 2007 requiring HPV vaccination for all girls in Texas. Michele Bachmann accused him of doing so because he was lobbied by Merck, the drug company that produced the vaccine. pBut at this week’s debate, Perry had a a href=”http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/23/politics/truth-squad-hpv-perry/index.html”pretty good answer/a to that accusation. In fact, it was probably his finest moment during an otherwise very unimpressive performance:/p blockquote”I got lobbied on this issue. I got lobbied by a 31-year-old young lady who had Stage 4 cervical cancer. I spent a lot of time with her. She came by my office, talked to me about the program.”/blockquote pPerry isn’t exactly aknown for his compassion/a, but that’s a pretty compelling reason to mandate vaccination. And it sure sounds a lot better than a href=”http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/rick-perrys-price-revealed”some of the other suggested reasons/a he might have been moved to support mandatory vaccination:/p blockquoteOver the past five years, it turns out that Merck [the company that manufacturers the vaccine] gave over $350,000 to the Republican Governors Association, a period in which Perry was heavily involved with the group, and the RGA in turn gave $4 million to Rick Perry. pAnd wait some more! Merck’s lobbyist on the vaccine issue was Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff. Toomey recently co-founded a super PAC that plans to raise over $50 million for Perry’s campaign./p /blockquote pAnd that’s on top of the $30,000 Merck has donated directly to Perry in the past. But Perry insisted that all that money—well, the $5,000 he was willing to admit he’d received, anyway—wasn’t the reason he signed an executive order mandating the vaccine. No, it was because he was lobbied by one young woman suffering with cancer. Just one problem—it’s not true:/p blockquotebPerry on Feb. 2, 2007, signed the order/b directing the state Health and Human Services commissioner to mandate human papillomavirus vaccination for all girls before admission to the sixth grade. Perry at the time released a statement saying that the vaccine “provides us with an incredible opportunity to effectively target and prevent cervical cancer,” which HPV can cause. pbPerry met Burcham after Feb. 2, 2007/b, campaign spokesman Mark Miner told CNN Friday, but he was not sure of the precise date. Miner said Perry never claimed to have met Burcham before he signed the order./p /blockquote pSo Perry is claiming that he signed this order in an act of compassion because he was lobbied by someone he didn’t meet until after he signed the order. And he was emso/em moved by her story of suffering, after he actually did meet her, that when the legislature nbsp;passed a bill to repeal his order, he didn’t veto the bill. He let his order go down in defeat. That’s how moved he was./p pWe don’t know why Rick Perry really signed that order. But we do know one thing: it wasn’t because he was lobbied by a “31-year-old young lady who had Stage 4 cervical cancer.”br //p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/DZ-dgIbTugI5-6MrtEyGFLB1RhQ/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/DZ-dgIbTugI5-6MrtEyGFLB1RhQ/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/DZ-dgIbTugI5-6MrtEyGFLB1RhQ/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/DZ-dgIbTugI5-6MrtEyGFLB1RhQ/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=Gjzh56X6Lto:fSTvUZvM778:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/Gjzh56X6Lto” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the original post: 
Rick Perry lied about why he supported HPV vaccine

Go to Barnes Noble. Read pages 137-142. Put the book back on the shelf. After readingem The Rogue/em, Joe McGinniss’ new book on the life and meteoric rise of Sarah Palin, that’s my advice.bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-craig-mitchell/joe-mcginniss-the-rogue_b_977070.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin-book/”More on Sarah Palin Book/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h05_nkz99Y5QVN_IpMlkLuPuGuY/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h05_nkz99Y5QVN_IpMlkLuPuGuY/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h05_nkz99Y5QVN_IpMlkLuPuGuY/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h05_nkz99Y5QVN_IpMlkLuPuGuY/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=TaD8-wZzsT8:M8lLHYJJn84:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=TaD8-wZzsT8:M8lLHYJJn84:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=TaD8-wZzsT8:M8lLHYJJn84:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=TaD8-wZzsT8:M8lLHYJJn84:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=TaD8-wZzsT8:M8lLHYJJn84:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/TaD8-wZzsT8″ height=”1″ width=”1″/

Excerpt from:
Donald Craig Mitchell: My Verdict on Joe McGinniss’ The Rogue

pSarah Palin is not running for president, and as such, I’ve been trying to give more space to those who have taken on the burdensome task of mounting a presidential campaign. But it hasn’t escaped my attention that from time to time, she pops up, suggests that there’s still time to get into the race, and then vanishes back behind her social media wall, leaving people to speculate on what she might do. Well, earlier this week, she did that again, but at this point, she’s running out of time to keep up this act./ppThis all begins with one of Palin’s periodic appearances on Sean Hannity’s eponymous prime-time Fox News show, a href=”http://gop12.thehill.com/2011/09/palin-suggests-shell-make-2012-decision.html”during which she floated the idea that she may yet jump in the race/a. (She also suggested that someone on the Democratic side might jump in as well. For the record, this is highly unlikely.)/pblockquoteThere is still time, Sean, and I think on both sides of the aisle you’re going to see people coming and going from this race,” she said. “In the Republican race, in this primary, I think people are still going to be coming and going because there is still time. And I’m still one of those still considering the time factor.”bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/22/sarah-palin-president-2012_n_976328.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/2012/”More on 2012/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/UGQdhrbqK-CigMUidOJXdMutzJ8/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/UGQdhrbqK-CigMUidOJXdMutzJ8/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/UGQdhrbqK-CigMUidOJXdMutzJ8/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/UGQdhrbqK-CigMUidOJXdMutzJ8/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=100tAzmmZYM:r1hi1wbOk74:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=100tAzmmZYM:r1hi1wbOk74:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=100tAzmmZYM:r1hi1wbOk74:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=100tAzmmZYM:r1hi1wbOk74:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=100tAzmmZYM:r1hi1wbOk74:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/100tAzmmZYM” height=”1″ width=”1″/

See the original post:
Sarah Palin Is Running Out Of Time To Get Into The 2012 Race

pAccording to a href=”http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/afternoon-fix-poll-shows-palin-in-striking-distance-of-obama/2011/09/21/gIQA0xBqlK_blog.html” target=”_hplink”a new poll/a, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin trails President Barack Obama by just five points in the 2012 election race./ppThough Palin has not officially announced her candidacy, the a href=”http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/misc/usapolls/US110913/2012/Complete2021,20USA20Poll20and%20Tables.pdf” target=”_hplink”McClatchy-Marist poll/a shows that 44 percent of Americans would vote for her as president, just behind 49 percent who favor Obama./ppThe same poll, however, also shows 72 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents opposing a run by Palin./pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/22/sarah-palin-barack-obama-2012-poll_n_975708.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/barack-obama-2012/”More on Barack Obama 2012/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/F7thvav0Zh1FlYZ5GI1uS3sErSA/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/F7thvav0Zh1FlYZ5GI1uS3sErSA/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/F7thvav0Zh1FlYZ5GI1uS3sErSA/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/F7thvav0Zh1FlYZ5GI1uS3sErSA/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=I24YIhO2BFk:qeEJncDFxTk:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=I24YIhO2BFk:qeEJncDFxTk:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=I24YIhO2BFk:qeEJncDFxTk:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=I24YIhO2BFk:qeEJncDFxTk:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=I24YIhO2BFk:qeEJncDFxTk:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/I24YIhO2BFk” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the rest here: 
Sarah Palin Trails Barack Obama In 2012 Poll By Just Five Points

div class=”dkimg-c”a href=”http://campaigns.dailykos.com/signup_page/electionsdigest”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/73/Elections-MorningDigest.jpg” alt=”Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest banner” height=”100″ width=”550″ //a div class=”dkimg-cap”Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. a href=”http://campaigns.dailykos.com/signup_page/electionsdigest”Sign up here/a./div /div bLeading Off/b: p• a href=”http://www.toledoblade.com/State/2011/09/21/Ohio-Senate-OKs-redistricting-plan.html”OH Redistricting/a: As expected, the state Senate followed the House in passing the new Republican-drawn congressional map yesterday — and once again, pathetically, two Democrats voted in support of the GOP plan (both of whom were, as with the House aisle-crossers, African American). More importantly, though, Republicans included a provision designed a href=”http://www.cantonrep.com/stark/x834502027/Ohio-Senate-approves-state-redistricting-plan”to thwart any attempts/a to over-ride the bill at the ballot box:/p blockquoteThe bill included a new appropriations provision inserted by the Senate Government Oversight and Reform Committee that essentially prevents Democrats from collecting petition signatures to temporarily block the bill and place it on the November 2012 ballot. pUnder the Ohio Constitution, bills with appropriation provisions aren’t subject to a referendum. Because of the change, the bill has to return to the Ohio House for a concurrence vote./p /blockquote pThe Toledo Blade a href=”http://www.toledoblade.com/Politics/2011/09/20/Senate-Republicans-seeking-to-avoid-referendum-to-add-appropriation-to-redistricting-bill.html”has more/a, but it’s not perfectly clear-cut:/p blockquoteAs a general rule, appropriation bills, such as the state budget, take effective immediately and are not subject to a petition effort to put the law directly to voters. That, however, has become less clear. The Ohio Supreme Court last year derailed then Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland’s plan to install slot machines at racetracks by inserting the language into the budget, ruling that that language could be separately subjected to referendum. p”That’s a question for lawyers and legal authority, but I think the law is clear, if the appropriation is relevant to the issue at hand, the appropriation generally makes those portions effective immediately,” said Sen. Keith Fabor (R., Celina), the committee’s chairman and a lawyer./p /blockquote pStill, if Fabor’s view is right, then the GOP was clever, because they a href=”http://www.toledoblade.com/State/2011/09/21/Ohio-Senate-OKs-redistricting-plan.html”added $2.75 million/a “to help county boards of elections to implement the new maps.” That certainly sounds “relevant to the issue at hand,” though only a judge can say so for sure./p pFinally, it may be moot at this point, but a href=”http://www.toledoblade.com/Politics/2011/09/17/Dems-may-seek-repeat-of-1915-vote-over-map.html”another interesting article/a from the Blade notes that Democrats successfully blocked a redistricting map at the ballot box… back in 1915. Indeed, the case even went all the way up the US Supreme Court, which a href=”http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=usamp;vol=241amp;invol=565″upheld the validity/a of the referendum. We may not get the chance to try that again, though./p pbSenate/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63983.html”CA-Sen/a: That’s one way to bounce back from having your campaign coffers raided by a corrupt treasurer: Sen. Dianne Feinstein says she’ll put $5 million of her (very considerable) personal wealth into her own race, an amount that equals what she reported to the FEC as having on hand on June 30. Amazingly, Politico also reports that Feinstein is still unable to access her campaign accounts in the three weeks since the Kinde Durkee story broke, which suggests that she had a shoddy or non-existent system of redundancies in place to protect against this sort of thing. It also means Feinstein doesn’t even know how much has been stolen./p pMeanwhile, Fox News (sorry, sorry) spoke with Michael Reagan, who says a href=”http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/09/21/michael-reagan-no-go-to-challenge-feinstein-in-california/”he isn’t running/a against Feinstein and claims never to have spoken with the San Francisco Chronicle, which a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/19/1018111/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Morning-Digest:-9-19?detail=hide”originally reported/a he was thinking about the race. Reagan, by the way, is indeed the name you know: He’s a conservative talk radio host and the son of the former president. Michael was in fact adopted by Ronald and his first wife, Jane Wyman, and apparently a href=”http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-04-17/features/8803090826_1_michael-reagan-four-reagan-children-maureen”didn’t have a great relationship/a with pops./p p• a href=”http://www.norwichbulletin.com/carousel/x2046632922/McMahon-launches-2nd-Senate-bid”CT-Sen/a: Huh? Didn’t Rob Simmons specifically say that he and Chris Shays have a non-aggression pact? According to Shira Toeplitz’s Aug. 26 piece, a href=”http://www.rollcall.com/news/mcmahons_2010_foe_tells_her_hes_in_shays_corner-208325-1.html”they sure did/a, with both ex-Reps. telling that only one of them would go up against Linda McMahon in the GOP primary. With Shays moving ahead with a bid, it certainly seemed pretty clear whose turn it was to get steamrolled, but now comes this from Simmons:/p blockquote“I’m not ruling anything out. Things can change very quickly and drastically. Politics is a calling. I’m always looking for new opportunities to serve.”/blockquote pChris Shays certainly won’t be too happy to hear this… but I sure am. A Simmons entry would turn a likely McMahon primary victory into something close to a sure thing, and despite her infinite millions, I have to believe Chris Murphy would rather face her than someone with a more moderate profile like Shays or Simmons./p p• a href=”http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/09/missouri-republicans-favor-steelman-perry-someone-other-than-kinder.html”MO-Sen, MO-Gov, MO-Pres/a: PPP has some Republican primary numbers for the state of Missouri, and the most interesting are from the Senate race. There, former Treasurer Sarah Steelman has taken an unexpected 40-29 lead over Rep. Todd Akin, who was up 29-28 four months ago. However, last time, Tom Jensen included teabagger Ed Martin (who has dropped out) and businessman John Brunner (who hasn’t), so it looks like their support has gone to Steelman. Akin getting stuck at 29 is certainly bad for him, especially since he’s supposed to be the frontrunner. As for the other two races, Missouri Republicans really don’t like Peter Kinder and love them some Rick Perry./p p• a href=”http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/firstreading/entries/2011/09/21/_some_interesting_scenarios_to.html”TX-Sen, TX-Gov/a: Back in July, a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/14/994410/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Morning-Digest:-7-14?detail=hide”we linked a story/a that explained what would happen if Gov. Rick Perry got elected president iand/i Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst got elected to the Senate at the same time. The answer was… complicated. But now the Austin American-Statesman’s Jason Embry has added an even stranger wrinkle: What would happen if both Perry and Dewhurst won, but Dewhurst decided he’d rather spurn the Senate and ascend to the governor’s mansion as Perry’s automatic replacement? Read the link to explore this late-night sports radio call-in show-style hypothetical. (Incidentally, Dewhurst insists he would never do this.)/p pbGubernatorial/b:/p p• a href=”http://mycn2.com/politics/david-williams-new-ad-says-he-isn-t-playing-too-nice-in-order-to-fight-for-ky-jobs”KY-Gov/a: This David Williams ad featuring “two dudes at a diner” just seems utterly forced and phony. These fake attempts at authenticity so seldom seem to work. If you want to watch a truly authentic ad, check out a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/16/632905/-Wow?detail=hide”this spot/a Tom Udall ran back in 2008./p p• a href=”http://www.journal-news.net/page/content.detail/id/567943/Early-voting-begins-today.html”WV-Gov/a: Early voting has begun in the West Virginia special gubernatorial election between acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) and businessman Bill Maloney (R). The early voting period continues until Oct. 1. For obscure reasons, election day is Oct. 4 (rather than in November)./p pbHouse/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.ebcitizen.com/2011/09/corbett-will-not-mount-challenge-to.html”CA-15/a: The East Bay Citizen reports (via an anonymous source) that Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett will not challenge Rep. Pete Stark in the Democratic primary, even though she a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/20/1018441/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Morning-Digest:-9-20?detail=hide”recently filed FEC paperwork/a to create a campaign committee. The same piece also suggests that Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi might mount a bid. Meanwhile, at least one Democrat is in fact a href=”http://www.pleasantonweekly.com/news/show_story.php?id=7801″getting in/a against Stark: Eric Swalwell, an Alameda County deputy district attorney and Dublin City Councilman, just joined the race./p p• a href=”http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/house-races/182887-nrcc-hits-barrow-in-new-republican-leaning-district”GA-12/a: Even though they’ve drawn Dem Rep. John Barrow into an almost unwinnable district, I guess the NRCC isn’t taking any chances. They’re up with a $21K ad buy criticizing Barrow for voting for the stimulus — and to show that you can never win when you play their game, they’re also attacking him for refusing to vote for a repeal of healthcare reform (lolbluedogs). So this looks like part of their ongoing “get the guy to retire” strategy (they’re also airing ads trying to goad California Rep. Jim Costa into hanging up his spurs, too)./p p• a href=”http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2011/09/hotline-sort-an-2.php”IL-12/a: Jason Plummer, the 2010 Republican Lt. Gov. nominee, is reportedly considering a challenge to Dem Rep. Jerry Costello. The NRCC a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/08/983165/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Morning-Digest:-6-8?detail=hide”previously spent/a $20K on an ad attacking Costello of “bankrupting Medicare.” Note that even during last year’s red hurricane, Costello won 60-37./p p• a href=”http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/clout/chi-us-rep-walsh-to-run-against-fellow-republican-hultgren-20110921,0,6504204.story” name=”walsh14″ id=”walsh14″IL-14/a: Already-disgraced GOP freshman Joe Walsh has made it official: To no one’s surprise, he announced he’ll run against fellow Republican incumbent Randy Hultgren in the redrawn 14th district. Amusingly, he said of himself and Hultgren: “We’ve both had a very different initial tenure in Washington.” That’s one way of putting it. (One article claimed that Walsh was a href=”http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Walsh-Running-Against-Hultgren-130273958.html”breaking some sort of agreement/a between Republicans, who supposedly pledged not to campaign until their court challenge to the new map is resolved. But the piece doesn’t even cite a source for that claim, and plenty of GOPers have been gearing up in their new districts for months. What’s more, see the IL-16 item just below.)/p p• a href=”http://www.morrisdailyherald.com/articles/2011/09/21/54946549/index.xml”IL-16/a: I’m a little reluctant to link to this story in the Morris Daily Herald, because I know at least one important detail is wrong, but let me try to sort everything out. First off, GOP freshman Adam Kinzinger says he’s seeking re-election “in the district that represents Grundy County.” I have no idea why he’s making Grundy the focus of his efforts, since Kinzinger is from Manteno, in neighboring Kankakee County, except for the fact that Manteno has now been placed in the absolutely unwinnable 2nd CD (Jesse Jackson, Jr.’s new home). So I guess Kinzinger is viewing Grundy as his new base, though he’s gamely holding out false hope that the new Democratic-drawn congressional map will get thrown out in court in favor of a GOP pipe dream that would put him in a made-up district they number the 11th./p pWhat the article idefinitely/i gets wrong is its claim that veteran Republican Don Manzullo is filing to run in the new 11th CD. That made no sense on its face, since the redrawn 11th is not only very blue, but it’s also very far away from Manzullo’s home in Leaf River. Because that seemed so implausible, I called Manzullo’s press secretary, Rich Carter, who said that the story was an “error.” Carter confirmed that Manzullo is circulating petitions to run in the current 16th. (It would also be the 16th under the GOP’s alternate-universe plan.) This means, then, that Kinzinger would face off against Manzullo in the Republican primary — something he in fact a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/29/980256/-IL-11:-Ex-Rep-Bill-Foster-rides-again?detail=hide”said he’d do right after the new Democratic map became public back in May. Kinzinger/a a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/02/981315/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Morning-Digest:-6-2?detail=hide”swiftly retracted/a that story, though, and said he hadn’t made up his mind. I guess now he has./p pOne final related note: Winnebago County Board member Frank Gambino, who had a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/29/1000190/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Morning-Digest:-7-29?detail=hide”previously indicated/a he was gearing up for a run in this district, is instead a href=”http://www.wrex.com/story/15495041/frank-gambino-launches-campaign-for-illinois-senate”going to campaign for state Senate/a. I suppose Gambino imagined he might have had a thin chance against Manzullo alone in the GOP primary, but perhaps he got wind of this Kinzinger decision and realized it would be hopeless going up against two incumbents./p p• a href=”http://www.chron.com/news/article/APNewsBreak-Mich-Dem-switches-to-GOP-House-race-2181009.php”MI-05/a: Good luck winning the Republican nomination, jerkface: Former state Rep. Jim Slezak, who served a single term in the legislature as a Democrat before failing in a state Senate primary bid last year, is switching to the Republican Party in order to run for the 5th CD seat left open by Rep. Dale Kildee’s retirement./p p• a href=”http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20110921/NEWS02/709219923″NY-23/a: Even though he said he’d seek a rematch against Dem Rep. Bill Owens a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/01/981016/-Daily-Kos-Morning-Digest:-6-1?detail=hide”back in May/a, businessman Matt Doheny only just now filed FEC paperwork to make the race official. Yes, pre-announcements are my least-favorite thing in politics./p p• a href=”http://www.politicspa.com/sestak-back-on-the-radar-sonar/28002/”PA-07/a: Dem ex-Rep. Joe Sestak, in the news because of his opposition to the Pennsylvania GOP’s electoral college plan, is also saying he isn’t ruling out another run for elective office — which is exactly what he said a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/22/948262/-DK-Elections-Daily-Digest:-2-22?detail=hide”in February/a when he was last asked. Back then, though, the speculation was that he might run for governor in 2014. Now, PoliticsPA is suggesting a return to his old seat in the 7th CD could be in the cards, and adds that local politicos and potential candidates are all playing wait-and-see. I wonder if Sestak himself is waiting on Rep. Pat Meehan to decide on his own plans, since Meehan lately has been a target of (desperate) Republican recruitment efforts for the Senate race./p pbOther Races/b:/p p• a href=”http://articles.philly.com/2011-09-20/news/30180521_1_federal-judges-residency-requirement-olympian-carl-lewis”NJ-St. Sen./a: Wow. This could be a really stunning setback for Carl Lewis, after he already appeared to make it over the finish line. A federal appellate panel, which previously ruled he could appear on the ballot, has now made the extremely unusual move of vacating its previous decision. I don’t know why the judges didn’t seem to be aware of this previously, but apparently at least one is unhappy about the fact that Lewis voted in California in 2008 and 2009. It doesn’t look good for Lewis./p p• bSpecial Elections/b: Johnny with the roundup of Tuesday night’s festivities:/p blockquote• bGeorgia HD-42/b: Going to a runoff on October 18 between two of the five Republicans who ran; Robert Lamutt and John Carson clinched the top two spots. p• bMassachusetts House, Bristol-12/b: Keiko Orrall picked up this seat for the Republicans, defeating Democrat Roger Brunelle 55-45./p p• bNew Hampshire House, Hillsborough-3/b: Peter Leishman picked up this seat for the Democrats in a 60-40 victory over Republican David Simpson./p /blockquote pbGrab Bag/b:/p p• a href=”http://bangordailynews.com/2011/09/21/politics/secretary-of-state-finds-no-student-voter-fraud-but-maintains-system-is-vulnerable/”Voter Suppression/a: Man these people are a fucking joke. At taxpayer expense, Maine’s Republican Secretary of State investigated “voter fraud” for two months, found none, and then concludes that the system is “fragile and vulnerable.” Keep trying!/p p• a href=”http://electionlawblog.org/?p=23367″VRA/a: Rick Hasen reports that Judge John Bates of the DC District just upheld the constitutionality of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — the part of the law which requires certain jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to “preclear” any changes to voting procedures with the Department of Justice. Hasen notes that Bates is a George W. Bush appointee and thinks that Bates wrote a very strong decision which could help sway Anthony Kennedy when this case (or one like it) eventually gets to the Supreme Court./p pbRedistricting Roundup/b:/p p• a href=”http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2011/09/21/changes-to-king-co-council-districts-take-a-look/”WA redistricting/a: If you’re a Daily Kos Elections regular, you probably start to get itchy and hallucinate when enough time goes by without getting a new map to look at. Well, if you’re in need of a cartography fix, here’s something to tide you over: the newly redistricted map for the nine seats on the King County Council (a pretty significant municipality, at 1.9 million residents). (David Jarman)/p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9TVYGh13pfeECYFYyRzLsqQIBvU/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9TVYGh13pfeECYFYyRzLsqQIBvU/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9TVYGh13pfeECYFYyRzLsqQIBvU/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/9TVYGh13pfeECYFYyRzLsqQIBvU/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=IP5hAY8N0Zw:CkfYgVGK2mI:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/IP5hAY8N0Zw” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the original here: 
Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: 9/22

pMUSCAT, Oman mdash; Two Americans released from an Iranian prison were spending their first full day of freedom Thursday in seclusion with their families, after more than two years in custody accused as spies./ppJosh Fattal and Shane Bauer arrived Wednesday in Oman under a $1 million bail-for-freedom deal and were embraced by relatives. Also on hand was Sarah Shourd, who was freed by Iran last year./pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/22/josh-fattal-and-shane-bauer_n_975396.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/iran/”More on Iran/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_W0DCYbMadXPXYMpoNSujm0xgA0/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_W0DCYbMadXPXYMpoNSujm0xgA0/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_W0DCYbMadXPXYMpoNSujm0xgA0/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_W0DCYbMadXPXYMpoNSujm0xgA0/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=zkBNngR8nig:ozPPv0LTc_Q:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=zkBNngR8nig:ozPPv0LTc_Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=zkBNngR8nig:ozPPv0LTc_Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=zkBNngR8nig:ozPPv0LTc_Q:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=zkBNngR8nig:ozPPv0LTc_Q:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/zkBNngR8nig” height=”1″ width=”1″/

View original post here: 
Josh Fattal And Shane Bauer, Americans Freed From Iran, In Seclusion With Families In Oman

pa href=”http://www.reuters.com” target=”_hplink”img src=”http://i.huffpost.com/gen/211216/REUTERS-LOGO.jpg”/a/pp(Sarah N. Lynch) - Underwriters or sponsors of asset-backed securities would be banned for one year from taking positions to profit from investors’ losses under a plan released by U.S. securities regulators on Monday./ppThe proposal by the Securities and Exchange Commission would get at the very heart of issues raised by U.S. Senate investigators in a report earlier this year that accused Goldman Sachs of positioning itself to profit from clients’ losses on complex securities that it packaged and sold./pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/19/sec-plan-would-ban-underwriters-taking-profits-investors_n_969687.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/securities-and-exchange-commission/”More on Securities And Exchange Commission/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_wbqQKl_jLxdsTz28oVqU_Q58Oo/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_wbqQKl_jLxdsTz28oVqU_Q58Oo/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_wbqQKl_jLxdsTz28oVqU_Q58Oo/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_wbqQKl_jLxdsTz28oVqU_Q58Oo/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=e1i-ZgF_lec:8eIugt6QAG4:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=e1i-ZgF_lec:8eIugt6QAG4:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=e1i-ZgF_lec:8eIugt6QAG4:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=e1i-ZgF_lec:8eIugt6QAG4:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=e1i-ZgF_lec:8eIugt6QAG4:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/e1i-ZgF_lec” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read more here:
SEC’s Proposed Rule To Stop Banks From Profiting At Investors’ Expense

pBy Sarah N. Lynch/p pWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The internal watchdog at the Securities and Exchange Commission has concluded that the accusations of investigative misconduct against the enforcement division by Dallas Mavericks basketball team owner Mark Cuban have no merit, according to a person familiar with the matter./p pThe SEC sued Cuban in 2008 for insider trading, alleging that he had sold his 6.3 percent stake in Mamma.com in June 2004 after learning confidentially that the Montreal-based search engine company was planning a stock offering. The SEC said Cuban’s sale allowed him to avoid more than $750,000 of losses./p bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/17/sports-magnate-charges-ag_n_967662.htmlRead More…/abr pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/NWmW_nixdl4gY_imJp4kd1Xihzg/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/NWmW_nixdl4gY_imJp4kd1Xihzg/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/NWmW_nixdl4gY_imJp4kd1Xihzg/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/NWmW_nixdl4gY_imJp4kd1Xihzg/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=dLyr4lOvg7Q:bLA66epwoqw:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=dLyr4lOvg7Q:bLA66epwoqw:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=dLyr4lOvg7Q:bLA66epwoqw:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=dLyr4lOvg7Q:bLA66epwoqw:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=dLyr4lOvg7Q:bLA66epwoqw:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/dLyr4lOvg7Q” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Here is the original post: 
Sports magnate charges against SEC unfounded: source

pJoe McGinniss’s new book, iThe Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin/i a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Rogue-Searching-Real-Sarah-Palin/dp/0307718921/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8qid=1316195941sr=8-1″ target=”_hplink”touts itself/a as “a startling and penetrating examination of the illusion and reality of Palin,” but the book’s a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/joe-mcginniss-sarah-palin-rogue-book_n_964091.html” target=”_hplink”claims/a about Palin’s supposed fling with college basketball star Glen Rice, and her alleged cocaine use (reportedly snorted from the top of an empty oil drum) — suggest a decidedly low-brow approach./ppTeam Palin has a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/16/sarah-palin-joe-mcginniss-book-rogue-allegations_n_965812.html” target=”_hplink”pushed back/a against McGinniss’s account, characterizing it as the product of an obsessive personal vendetta. (Watch McGinniss and Todd Palin discuss the book in the video below.)/pp”This is a man who has been relentlessly stalking my family to the point of moving in right next door to us to harass us and spy on us to satisfy his creepy obsession with my wife,” Todd Palin wrote of McGinniss. “His book is full of disgusting lies, innuendo and smears. Even emThe New York Times/em called this book ‘dated, petty,’ and that it ‘chases caustic, unsubstantiated gossip.’”/pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/17/sarah-palin-joe-mcginniss-book-rogue_n_966618.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin/”More on Sarah Palin/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ilOvFlyjWN9bOIA9mYPHpV3rKzE/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ilOvFlyjWN9bOIA9mYPHpV3rKzE/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ilOvFlyjWN9bOIA9mYPHpV3rKzE/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ilOvFlyjWN9bOIA9mYPHpV3rKzE/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=iEssBTOw49g:ly8UtnGOpOI:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=iEssBTOw49g:ly8UtnGOpOI:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=iEssBTOw49g:ly8UtnGOpOI:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=iEssBTOw49g:ly8UtnGOpOI:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=iEssBTOw49g:ly8UtnGOpOI:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/iEssBTOw49g” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Originally posted here:
Sarah Palin Book: Joe McGinniss’s ‘The Rogue,’ The Unofficial Index (PHOTOS)

pJoe McGinniss, the man who a href=”http://swampland.time.com/2010/05/26/sarah-palin80E29Cstalker80%9D/” target=”_hplink”famously moved in next door/a to Sarah and Todd Palin in Wasilla, Alaska, is set to release a scathing (and apparentlya href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/books/joe-mcginnisss-the-rogue-on-sarah-palin-review.html” target=”_hplink” thinly sourced/a) biography of the former First Lady of Alaska later this month–and he’s adding a few more rumors of infidelity to the mill./ppAccording to the ema href=”http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/world-exclusive-sarah-palin-book-secrets-revealed-joe-mcginnis-rogue” target=”_hplink”National Enquirer/a/em, McGinniss’s book alleges that Sarah had an affair with her husband’s former business partner, Brad Hanson, a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/joe-mcginniss-sarah-palin-rogue-book_n_964091.html” target=”_hplink”in the 1990’s/a (the emEnquirer/em was first to break that story three years ago)./ppThe book also a href=”http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/world-exclusive-sarah-palin-book-secrets-revealed-joe-mcginnis-rogue” target=”_hplink”reportedly accuses Palin/a of a tryst with NBA player Glen Rice less than a year before her marriage to Todd. Although ema href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/books/joe-mcginnisss-the-rogue-on-sarah-palin-review.html” target=”_hplink”The New York Times/a/em review of McGinniss’s book doesn’t mention the encounter, reviewer Janet Maslin pulls this choice quote from emThe Rogue/em: “A friend says, ‘Sarah and her sisters had a fetish for black guys for a while.’” /pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/16/sarah-palin-divorced-chea_n_965338.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin/”More on Sarah Palin/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/p7JCARxe5fA8Obe52Vs2bO-zjTk/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/p7JCARxe5fA8Obe52Vs2bO-zjTk/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/p7JCARxe5fA8Obe52Vs2bO-zjTk/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/p7JCARxe5fA8Obe52Vs2bO-zjTk/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=LkPZKl7GeQQ:pnet1i7ehTA:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=LkPZKl7GeQQ:pnet1i7ehTA:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=LkPZKl7GeQQ:pnet1i7ehTA:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=LkPZKl7GeQQ:pnet1i7ehTA:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=LkPZKl7GeQQ:pnet1i7ehTA:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/LkPZKl7GeQQ” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Continued here: 
Joe McGinniss’ ‘The Rogue’ Alleges Sarah Palin Affair: Here Are 5 Other Rumors

pSince Christina Hendricks wore a dress cut lower than the corporate tax rate at the Monday premiere of “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” bloggers and news sites have been enjoying every opportunity to run as many photos as possible of the busty star (a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/13/christina-hendricks-i-dont-know-how-she-does-it-premiere_n_960128.html” target=”_hplink”guilty as charged/a). /ppThe correctly-priced free Metro NY newspaper, however, took the joke far beyond tasteful, pulling her co-star, Sarah Jessica Parker, into the mix./ppRunning a photo of the cast, the genius editor added the following caption (a href=”http://www.bestweekever.tv/2011-09-16/sarah-jessica-parker-christina-hendricks/” target=”_hplink”via BWE/a):/pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/16/metro-ny-compares-sarah-jessica-parker-christina-hendricks_n_966680.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-jessica-parker/”More on Sarah Jessica Parker/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N7ZdkXcCTJoTTPkJUrWejaug3OU/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N7ZdkXcCTJoTTPkJUrWejaug3OU/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N7ZdkXcCTJoTTPkJUrWejaug3OU/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N7ZdkXcCTJoTTPkJUrWejaug3OU/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=p1y46BwYZy8:CvKK9Zn2T2M:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=p1y46BwYZy8:CvKK9Zn2T2M:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=p1y46BwYZy8:CvKK9Zn2T2M:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=p1y46BwYZy8:CvKK9Zn2T2M:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=p1y46BwYZy8:CvKK9Zn2T2M:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/p1y46BwYZy8″ height=”1″ width=”1″/

See the rest here:
Metro NY Compares Sarah Jessica Parker’s Nose To Christina Hendricks’ Chest (PHOTO)

pBy Christopher Doering and Sarah N. Lynch/p pWASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. securities and futures regulators will see large budget increases to help them implement sweeping new financial regulations under a bill approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday./p pThe plan, which will now go to the full Senate for a vote, would give the Securities and Exchange Commission a fiscal 2012 budget of $1.407 billion, an increase of roughly 19 percent from its current fiscal 2011 budget of $1.185 billion./p bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/senate-panel-keeps-budget_n_965299.htmlRead More…/abr pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h5kpwiMzS40_uVMJeqyT8-jgBck/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h5kpwiMzS40_uVMJeqyT8-jgBck/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h5kpwiMzS40_uVMJeqyT8-jgBck/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h5kpwiMzS40_uVMJeqyT8-jgBck/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=ouSQHE7knTk:-TLmoizkG1Q:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=ouSQHE7knTk:-TLmoizkG1Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=ouSQHE7knTk:-TLmoizkG1Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=ouSQHE7knTk:-TLmoizkG1Q:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=ouSQHE7knTk:-TLmoizkG1Q:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/ouSQHE7knTk” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Original post: 
Senate panel keeps budget boosts for SEC, CFTC

div class=”dkimg-r”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/73/peter-kinder-party-animal.jpg” alt=”" height=”369″ width=”275″ / div class=”dkimg-cap”Peter Kinder amp; Tammy Chapman/div /div a href=”http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_MO_0914513.pdf”Public Policy Polling/a (PDF). 9/9-12. MoE ±3.9%. Missouri voters (a href=”http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/05/nixon-still-strong-for-re-election-to-mo-gov.html#more”4/28-5/1 results/a): blockquotebJay Nixon (D-inc)/b: 50 (48)br / bPeter Kinder (R)/b: 31 (34)br / bUndecided/b: 18 (13) pbJay Nixon (D-inc)/b: 39 (–)br / bJohn Danforth (R)/b: 45 (–)br / bUndecided/b: 17 (–)/p pbJay Nixon (D-inc)/b: 47 (–)br / bJim Talent (R)/b: 38 (–)br / bUndecided/b: 14 (–)/p pbJay Nixon (D-inc)/b: 50 (48)br / bMatt Blunt (R)/b: 37 (38)br / bUndecided/b: 13 (13)/p pbJay Nixon (D-inc)/b: 45 (–)br / bBill Randles (R)/b: 24 (–)br / bUndecided/b: 30 (–)/p /blockquote pFirst the good news. Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, who in the last two months has gone from merely being “that guy that’s kinda weird and gaffe-prone” to “that guy who was a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/09/1005021/-MO-Gov:-Former-stripper-says-Kinder-was-one-of-her-best-customers,-but-wouldnt-leave-her-alone?via=search”obsessed with that stripper/a,” is losing further ground in the polls. Incumbent Dem Gov. Jay Nixon was leading Kinder by 14 in May; now Nixon leads by 19 (and sports a pretty solid 51/30 approval, including 57/26 among independents, while Kinder is at 20/33 favorables). My main worry at this point is that the results here may be too good for us… not that they’re unrealistic, but because the GOP might at this point finally be readying its very-long-hook to yank Kinder off the stage for good and find someone else while there’s still a year to go. (Even before his little stripper problem, there was already a lot of behind-the-scenes grumbling about his underwhelmingness, and that’s just intensified now.)/p pNone of the other potential GOP saviors seems poised to save the race, though. The one person, out of PPP’s laundry list of top-tier but unemployed Republicans in the state, who beats Nixon is long-ago former Sen. John Danforth, one of those guys like Dick Lugar who’s well-thought-of by just about everyone. Danforth, however, just took his name out of contention last week. Lesser options like ex-Sen. Jim Talent and ex-Gov. Matt Blunt both trail by a significant margin. Finally, there’s Some Dude Bill Randles, who trails Nixon by about the same margin at Kinder (21), which, considering that Randles is utterly unknown at 6/19 favorables, should indicate just how low Kinder’s stock is right now. Could we be looking at a Nixon/Randles race in a year, though? Well, at this point in 2009, would anyone have expected Dan Maes to be carrying the Republicans’ banner in Colorado?/p pa href=”http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_MO_09131118.pdf”Senate/a number (a href=”http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/05/mccaskill-still-fifty-fifty-for-re-election.html”May/a numbers):/p blockquotebClaire McCaskill (D-inc)/b: 43 (45)br / bSarah Steelman (R)/b: 42 (42)br / bUndecided/b: 16 (14) pbClaire McCaskill (D-inc)/b: 45 (46)br / bTodd Akin (R)/b: 43 (45)br / bUndecided/b: 12 (8)/p pbClaire McCaskill (D-inc)/b: 46 (47)br / bJohn Brunner (R)/b: 37 (41)br / bUndecided/b: 17 (12)/p /blockquote pNow for some middlin’ news, in the Senate race… Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill is posting tiny leads against her likeliest Republican rivals. On the one hand, that’s good, because as Barack Obama’s approvals have eroded over the summer, it doesn’t seem to have rubbed off much on this race, where (like Virginia) the margins have been paper-thin all along and will probably continue to do so for the next year absent a major unexpected event./p pOn the other hand, it’s not good, because McCaskill is polling at or below 45 (Is 45 the new 50? In terms of relative electoral safety, that is. Discuss.), and she’s running at 43/47 approval. The ratio of undecideds leans heavily in the Republican direction (for example, in the McCaskill/Steelman matchup, 7% of Democrats are undecided while 19% of Republicans are), meaning the undecideds are likely to break away from her, which she can’t afford when the margins are that close. Chances are she’d lose if the election were literally today. One other interesting observation: despite the general presumption that Rep. Todd Akin is the Republican frontrunner here, this poll doesn’t find him looking that imposing. It actually gives a small electability edge to ex-state Treasurer Sarah Steelman, though only by an inconsequential 1 point./p pa href=”http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_MO_09151023.pdf”Presidential/a numbers (a href=”http://publicpolicypolling.typepad.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_MO_0513.pdf”May numbers)/a/p blockquotebBarack Obama (D-inc)/b: 43 (43)br / bMitt Romney (R)/b: 47 (45)br / bUndecided/b: 10 (12) pbBarack Obama (D-inc)/b: 45 (–)br / bRick Perry (R)/b: 47 (–)br / bUndecided/b: 8 (–)/p pbBarack Obama (D-inc)/b: 47 (45)br / bNewt Gingrich (R)/b: 45 (44)br / bUndecided/b: 8 (10)/p pbBarack Obama (D-inc)/b: 47 (–)br / bMichele Bachmann (R)/b: 43 (–)br / bUndecided/b: 10 (–)/p /blockquote pNow for some bad news, in the presidential race… Barack Obama trails the two likeliest Republican nominees. Maybe it’s not that bad, though, considering that Missouri is a state he lost in 2008, more of a Lean R state than a bellwether anymore at the presidential level. So for 2012, winning Missouri would be unlikely icing on the cake of a landslide rather than an urgent part of the path to 270, and lagging only a few points behind where he lost it (by less than a point) to John McCain is predictable, if not a little better than would be expected right now, given his 43/53 approvals (including 37% among whites). Obama has a 41% approval among indies, but that’s much better than any of his opposition (Mitt Romney fares best with 28% favorables), so that’s what’s keeping him competitive in this light-red state./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3bK3bofRlwAieGWL6LRcgIapjxs/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3bK3bofRlwAieGWL6LRcgIapjxs/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3bK3bofRlwAieGWL6LRcgIapjxs/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3bK3bofRlwAieGWL6LRcgIapjxs/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=iA0JiapSHaY:8RQgUYjd1sU:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/iA0JiapSHaY” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the original here: 
MO-Gov, MO-Sen, MO-Pres: Huge Nixon lead, tiny McCaskill lead, small Obama deficit

pJoe McGinniss’s new book, iThe Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin/i, hits bookstores next week, but its a href=”http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/15/new-sarah-palin-book-leaks-from-joe-mcginniss-the-rogue.html” target=”_hplink”controversial claims /aabout the former Alaska governor are already making waves./ppIn the book, McGinniss writes that Palin had a href=”http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/world-exclusive-sarah-palin-book-secrets-revealed-joe-mcginnis-rogue” target=”_hplink”a one-night stand/a in 1987 with future NBA basketball player Glen Rice nine months before she married her husband Todd. He quotes a friend who said Palin “had a fetish for black guys for a while.”/pp”She was a gorgeous woman. Super nice. I was blown away by her,” Rice tells McGinniss in the book, NBC reports. “Afterward, she was a big crush that I had.”/pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/joe-mcginniss-sarah-palin-rogue-book_n_964091.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin/”More on Sarah Palin/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X_DqnPNeLXZVRpk3BU44gk1jwvQ/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X_DqnPNeLXZVRpk3BU44gk1jwvQ/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X_DqnPNeLXZVRpk3BU44gk1jwvQ/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X_DqnPNeLXZVRpk3BU44gk1jwvQ/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=9Nh74XzAcJ8:d7agwEuWD5g:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=9Nh74XzAcJ8:d7agwEuWD5g:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=9Nh74XzAcJ8:d7agwEuWD5g:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=9Nh74XzAcJ8:d7agwEuWD5g:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=9Nh74XzAcJ8:d7agwEuWD5g:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/9Nh74XzAcJ8″ height=”1″ width=”1″/

See the rest here:
Joe McGinniss Sarah Palin Book ‘The Rogue’ Makes Controversial Claims About Former Alaska Governor

pBack when President Obama got elected, Wyclef Jean promised to sit in the freezing cold January morning to watch him get sworn into office. “I’m like an Obama groupie from the very beginning,” he a href=”http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1602985/obama-groupie-wyclef-jean-kicks-off-inaugural-weekend.jhtml” target=”_hplink”told MTV/a, adding, “I know it’s gonna be dirt cold. … On camera, it’s going to look like I have one coat on, but I’mma have 17 sweaters under that, ’cause there’s nobody takin’ my seat!”/ppBut while he was clearly enthused about Obama’s win, he was, apparently, just a little bit upset that losing VP candidate Sarah Palin wasn’t also heading to Washington, DC. As he told audiences at Fashion Week on Wednesday, the former Fugees star is quite a fan of the former half-term governor of Alaska./pp”I have to tell you this: I am a huge fan of Sarah Palin,” he told the audience (a href=”http://www.wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/wyclef-jean-talks-sarah-palin-5165185″ target=”_hplink”via WWD/a). “Cause she’s rad. She’s shrewd. She’s cool. Because at the end of the day, I’m for the people, because this is the United States of America… this is what America’s really about. Anyone should have the right to say, ‘Look I can do the job and this is what qualifies me to do the job.’…. Now my wife probably will debate and disagree with me.”/pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/wyclef-jean-sarah-palin-fan_n_964125.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin/”More on Sarah Palin/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4mcbHmSUjQkibEmkqcRHLtX_m0Q/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4mcbHmSUjQkibEmkqcRHLtX_m0Q/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4mcbHmSUjQkibEmkqcRHLtX_m0Q/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4mcbHmSUjQkibEmkqcRHLtX_m0Q/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=68CIF0YW7mg:-DHaSGULjSU:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=68CIF0YW7mg:-DHaSGULjSU:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=68CIF0YW7mg:-DHaSGULjSU:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=68CIF0YW7mg:-DHaSGULjSU:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=68CIF0YW7mg:-DHaSGULjSU:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/68CIF0YW7mg” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Excerpt from: 
Wyclef Jean: Sarah Palin Fan

pSarah Michelle Gellar still knows how to die in style./ppIn her new CW series, “a href=”http://www.cwtv.com/shows/ringer” target=”_hplink”Ringer/a,” Gellar plays Bridget, a haunted young woman with a history of addiction. She also plays her own twin, Siobhan, a NYC socialite, with secrets. Set in a tense, stylish version of Manhattan, the show has the look of another CW favorite, “Gossip Girl,” if Gossip Girl had more guns and less shoes./ppThe show kicks off when Bridget runs away from her life to see Siobhan for the first time in five years… and then Siobhan appears to off herself by jumping in the ocean while Bridget’s asleep on the boat. Naturally, there’s nothing to do but for Bridget to assume Siobhan’s identity./pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/ringer-sarah-michelle-gellar_n_963144.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/video/”More on Video/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X3sbz4KZzM0GOCnti3BVdbI84-E/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X3sbz4KZzM0GOCnti3BVdbI84-E/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X3sbz4KZzM0GOCnti3BVdbI84-E/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/X3sbz4KZzM0GOCnti3BVdbI84-E/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=ZiQKcOAXYQs:6v7Cm0bX_p0:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=ZiQKcOAXYQs:6v7Cm0bX_p0:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=ZiQKcOAXYQs:6v7Cm0bX_p0:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=ZiQKcOAXYQs:6v7Cm0bX_p0:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=ZiQKcOAXYQs:6v7Cm0bX_p0:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/ZiQKcOAXYQs” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the original here: 
‘Ringer’ Review: Sarah Michelle Gellar Returns In New Show

div class=”dkimg-c”a href=”http://elections.dailykos.com/”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/73/Elections-MorningDigest.jpg” alt=”Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest banner” height=”100″ width=”550″ //a/div iTo receive the Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest via email each weekday, a href=”http://campaigns.dailykos.com/signup_page/electionsdigest”sign up here/a./i pbLeading Off/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/13/1016607/-Ohio-redistricting,-Washington-redistricting:-Wheres-Dennis?detail=hide”OH Redistricting, WA Redistricting/a: New congressional maps were released in two states yesterday: Ohio (where the GOP unleashed a breathtaking gerrymander) and Washington (where each of the state’s four independent redistricting commissioners put out their iown/i separate proposals). In a bit of kismet, the fortunes of one man are tied to redistricting in both places: Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has long been flirting with the impossibly weird idea of seeking re-election in Washington. With that in mind, David Jarman combined an analysis of both sets of plans into one mega-post. Click the link for the complete run-down, and also see our Ohio bullets below for more./p pbSenate/b:/p p• a href=”http://azstarnet.com/news/local/article_2c88acea-7981-50a3-af61-cb950d61c7b8.html” name=”carmonacold” id=”carmonacold”AZ-Sen/a: Former US Surgeon General Richard Carmona, who a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/18/1008137/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Morning-Digest:-8-18?detail=hide”last month said/a he was thinking about running for Senate as a Democrat, sounds like he’s getting cold feet. From the horse’s mouth: “Quite frankly, I’m just not sure it’s the right opportunity yet.” Meanwhile, the first linked article, without citing any sources, adds that former state Dem Party chair Don Bivens, who has also been looking at the race, “is expected to announce his decision in the next few weeks.”/p p• a href=”http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-campaign-fraud-20110913,0,6252366.story” name=”difi” id=”difi”CA-Sen/a: Holy crap. Sen. Dianne Feinstein says her coffers may also have been “wiped out” by Kinde Durkee, the treasurer for a huge array of Democratic campaigns who was recently arrested on charges that she stole from her clients. Feinstein isn’t sure of the extent of the damage just yet — she had over $5 million on hand — but she joins a growing list of officeholders who have been hit, including Reps. Loretta Sanchez and Susan Davis./p p• a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/13/elizabeth-warren-senate-massachusetts_n_960510.html”MA-Sen/a: According to a statement released yesterday, Elizabeth Warren will officially announce her campaign for the Democratic Senate nomination today./p p• a href=”http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/09/voters-divided-on-mccaskill.html”MO-Sen/a: PPP is out with a new survey in Missouri, and they find Dem Sen. Claire McCaskill leading Todd Akin 45-43, Sarah Steelman 43-42, and John Brunner 46-37. These numbers, while far from great, are pretty much a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/03/972710/-MO-Sen:-McCaskill-holding-steady?detail=hide”unchanged from May/a, which is actually a good sign for McCaskill given how crappy the summer has been for Democrats./p p• a href=”http://www.politico.com/morningscore/0911/morningscore413.html”MO-Sen/a: Karl Rove’s American Crossroads is spending $75K on ads trying to revive what already seems like an old issue: Sen. Claire McCaskill’s proper reimbursements for official travel on a private plane (which she decided to return anyway), and her unpaid taxes on that same plane (which she paid off). Part of the reason these incidents didn’t get as much play as they might have is because a href=”http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56457.html”it turned out/a that Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate in all but name, had engaged in genuinely abusive mis-spending of taxpayer dollars on personal travel of his own. You bring up one issue, you bring up the other. But with Kinder seemingly doomed, I guess Crossroads just doesn’t care about tying this anvil around his neck, and they seem to think they can hurt McCaskill with it./p pbGubernatorial/b:/p p• a href=”http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2011/09/13/mckenna-raises-517k-in-august-continues-to-spend-big/”WA-Gov/a: Republican AG Rob McKenna’s fundraising has been neck-and-neck with Dem Rep. Jay Inslee’s — he, too, took in around $500K in the month of August and has about $1.5 mil on hand. But McKenna’s burn rate has been much higher: He’s already spent $620K to just $294K for Inslee. Gotta wonder why he’s running through cash like this fourteen months before election day and long before any ads go up on the air./p pbHouse/b:/p p• a href=”http://azstarnet.com/news/local/crime/article_cb891b36-6a81-5a85-984b-4065c21fb012.html” name=”giffordsinterview” id=”giffordsinterview”AZ-08/a: Rep. Gabby Giffords will sit down for her first interview since being shot early this year with ABC’s Diane Sawyer on Nov. 14. Apparently “it’s still not decided whether she will sit for an interview in front of the camera.”/p p• a href=”http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/sanbernardinocounty/ci_18880529″ name=”baca35″ id=”baca35″CA-35/a: Rep. Joe Baca, who currently occupies the old 43rd CD, just announced that he’d seek re-election in the new Fontana-centric 35th. That sets him up on a collision course for the Democratic nomination with state Sen. Gloria Negrete McCleod, and also possibly with Assemblywoman Norma Torres, who formed an exploratory committee a href=”http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_18837957″last month/a. The first linked article says that Baca had been considering a run in the new San Bernardino-based 31st, but most of Baca’s current district is in the new 35th, which is also a much bluer seat./p p• a href=”http://twitter.com/#!/FixAaron/status/113637772924960768″OH-03/a: Aaron Blake reports that Dem ex-Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, who represented the old 15th for a single term, is interested in making a comeback in the proposed new 3rd CD. This district, according to the new GOP map (see redistricting item below) is a Columbus-centric Democratic vote sink that would have no incumbent, so I suspect Kilroy would not be alone in seeking this seat./p p• a href=”http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2011/09/dennis_kucinich_sees_new_distr.html” name=”kucinich09″ id=”kucinich09″OH-09 (?)/a: And here’s a statement from Dennis Kucinich himself, who is, amazingly enough, painting the new map as a bit of good fortune. However, he actually does inot/i say he’ll run in the new 9th CD (the most obvious choice), or in fact in Ohio at all:/p blockquote”It is an amazing turn of events that the legislature decided not to dismantle the district I represent. I have been praying that I could continue to serve my Cleveland-area constituency and it looks like I have a chance. That is all I could have hoped for.”/blockquote pbOther Races/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/09/federal_judge_puts_carl_lewis.html”NJ-St. Sen./a: Great news for Carl Lewis! The Third Circuit Court of Appeals just overturned the district court and found that the Democrat (and former Olympic champion) can indeed appear on the ballot this fall. Republicans are vowing to appeal, but their options are poor: They can either ask the entire Third Circuit to hear the case (known as ien banc/i review), or they can go to the Supreme Court. However, neither court is obligated to hear the case, and both decline the vast majority of requests to do so./p pbGrab Bag/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11256/1174283-454.stm” name=”paec” id=”paec”Pennsylvania/a: Man, I do not like the sound of this. Republicans in Pennsylvania are trying to pass legislation that would change the state’s winner-take-all system for electoral votes and divvy them up by congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska do. Obviously it would be a much bigger deal if PA does it, though. And this isn’t some backbencher filing a random bill. It’s being pushed by Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi and has the support of Gov. Tom Corbett./p pbRedistricting Roundup/b:/p p• a href=”http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/redistricting/180989-idaho-must-scrap-redistricting-commission-start-over”ID Redistricting/a: How did they miss this one? Just days after the state Supreme Court refused to hear a case brought by a deadlocked redistricting commission, Secretary of State Ben Ysursa says that the entire commission needs to be reconstituted from scratch. Why? Because of a 2009 law which, somewhat insanely, prevents people from serving on a commission more than once. So now Ysursa is insisting that Democrats and Republicans provide him with new names by today… but then what? Do they start from scratch? Try to pick up where the previous commissioners left off? Sounds like a serious mess, and it seems like further delays are inevitable./p p• a href=”http://txredistricting.org/post/9960571295/so-what-next-in-the-d-c-case”TX Redistricting/a: Michael Li reminds us that that iother/i big Texas redistricting case is about to heat up. One case (currently at trial) is underway in San Antonio, but the parties will soon be filing important papers in the preclearance suit that the state of Texas brought in Washington, DC. While there are a lot of intervenors, the chief defendant is the Department of Justice (as per the Voting Rights Act), which promises a substantive (rather than pro forma) answer to Texas’s complaint on Sept. 19./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/IMy5sKnTZxwKCjEPIZruYlftrRQ/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/IMy5sKnTZxwKCjEPIZruYlftrRQ/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/IMy5sKnTZxwKCjEPIZruYlftrRQ/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/IMy5sKnTZxwKCjEPIZruYlftrRQ/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=nCOKPxNaDPs:_R3dnYIwnfI:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/nCOKPxNaDPs” height=”1″ width=”1″/

See more here: 
Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: 9/14

pWho knew Buffy was such a cute kid? That’s none other than Sarah Michelle Gellar at age four and appearing in a 1981 Burger King commercial that later caused some controversy, according to a href=”http://www.snakkle.com/galleries/from-slayer-to-ringer-snakkle-looks-back-at-sarah-michelle-gellar80%99s-career/sarah-michelle-gellar-burger-king-gc/” target=”_hplink”Snakkle.com/a. a href=”http://www.snakkle.com/galleries/from-slayer-to-ringer-snakkle-looks-back-at-sarah-michelle-gellar80%99s-career/sarah-michelle-gellar-burger-king-gc/” target=”_hplink”Click through to the website/a to see more photos of Sarah Michelle Gellar through the years, from precious child actress to star of the a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/13/sarah-michelle-gellar-talks-motherhood-new-show-ringer-on-jimmy-fallon_n_959873.html” target=”_hplink”new, much-anticipated CW series “Ringer.”/a/ppstrongPHOTO:/strongbr /img src=”http://i.huffpost.com/gen/350593/SARAH.jpg”/pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/13/guess-who-sarah-michelle-_n_960368.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/fast-food/”More on Fast Food/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N0Bl5ixOFWTRX5vEN3d2_JmQtWU/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N0Bl5ixOFWTRX5vEN3d2_JmQtWU/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N0Bl5ixOFWTRX5vEN3d2_JmQtWU/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/N0Bl5ixOFWTRX5vEN3d2_JmQtWU/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=WD-1cPBSMaw:MU5TS22kGRo:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=WD-1cPBSMaw:MU5TS22kGRo:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=WD-1cPBSMaw:MU5TS22kGRo:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=WD-1cPBSMaw:MU5TS22kGRo:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=WD-1cPBSMaw:MU5TS22kGRo:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/WD-1cPBSMaw” height=”1″ width=”1″/

See the rest here:
GUESS WHO? Sarah Michelle Gellar

div class=”dkimg-c”img src=”http://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/191280/foxdeclaresromneywinner.jpg” alt=”Romney won” height=”180″ width=”550″ //div Mitt Romney won yesterday’s tea party debate—or at least that’s what Fox wants its audience to believe. div class=”dkimg-c”object width=”550″ height=”341″param name=”movie” value=”http://www.dailykostv.com/flv/player.swf” / param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” / param name=”flashvars” value=”config=http://www.dailykostv.com/w/002889/vxml.php?550″ / embed src=”http://www.dailykostv.com/flv/player.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”550″ height=”341″ flashvars=”config=http://www.dailykostv.com/w/002889/vxml.php?550″ //object/div If you watched Fox’s clip of Romney and Perry debating each other on Social Security, I wouldn’t blame you for agreeing with Fox, but if you watched the debate itself, you’d have seen an entirely different exchange, one in which both Romney and Perry took basically the same position, but differed only on the type of language that ought to be used to describe it. Michele Bachmann did land some serious punches over Perry’s decision to require HPV vaccines for Texas schoolgirls, but that hardly amounts to a Romney victory. pIn addition to the cleverly edited clips, Fox based its claim of Romney victory on reports from other media outlets. If you’re asking yourself: “Since when did Fox listen to what other media outlets have to say?” then you’re asking a good question. The answer, I think, is that Fox listens to other media outlets when Fox likes what those outlets are saying./p pAnd it’s becoming clear that one thing that Fox really would like to see is for Mitt Romney to win the nomination. Karl Rove has been on the warpath for a few weeks, and now a href=”http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/09/12/huckabee-lays-out-caution-on-perry/”Mike Huckabee/a and a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/13/1016409/-Palin-slams-Perry-for-crony-capitalism,-praises-Bachmann-on-vaccine-issue?via=blog_589703″Sarah Palin/a (along with her sidekick Greta van Susteren) are jumping on board, as is the Fox amp; Friends gang./p pSo why is it that Fox is trying to rally its troops behind Mitt Romney? a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/us/politics/13repubs.html?_r=1amp;hp=amp;pagewanted=all”According to The emNew York Times/em:/a/p blockquoteThe rising presidential candidacy of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is stirring excitement for many Republican voters but is creating unease in some quarters of the party’s establishment, particularly over his views of Social Security, which are at the root of an intensifying competition with Mitt Romney./blockquote pI have a hard time believing Republican elites are actually worried about the substance of Rick Perry’s position on Social Security. After all, these are the same people who tried to privatize Social Security in 2005, so they don’t care about emwhat/em he might do to the program. But even if they don’t care about the substance, they still might be worried that Rick Perry’s rhetoric on Social Security makes him vulnerable to Democratic attack. But whether it’s that or it’s something else, it’s clear that they are worried about Rick Perry and his rise to the top of the 2012 field./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qAaK_NOVUshnsYzLEZiSk-wANPU/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qAaK_NOVUshnsYzLEZiSk-wANPU/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qAaK_NOVUshnsYzLEZiSk-wANPU/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/qAaK_NOVUshnsYzLEZiSk-wANPU/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=QIKhfbY3slE:zMdnHHvQAqI:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/QIKhfbY3slE” height=”1″ width=”1″/

See the original post here: 
Fox: Romney won the debate

pRick Perry took an absolute beating last night over his decision to require Merck’s HPV vaccine for Texas schoolgirls, not just during the debate from Michele Bachmann, but also afterwards from Fox’s Sarah Palin and Greta van Susteren./p pPalin was particularly harsh, invoking her experience as a half-term governor (she decided not to require the HPV vaccine) to make the case that Perry’s decision was “evidence of some crony capitalism” at work./p div class=”dkimg-c”object width=”550″ height=”341″param name=”movie” value=”http://www.dailykostv.com/flv/player.swf” / param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” / param name=”flashvars” value=”config=http://www.dailykostv.com/w/002888/vxml.php?550″ / embed src=”http://www.dailykostv.com/flv/player.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”550″ height=”341″ flashvars=”config=http://www.dailykostv.com/w/002888/vxml.php?550″ //object/div blockquoteGRETA VAN SUSTEREN: There was the whole question about the vaccine in Texas and Governor Perry signing an executive order so that 11 and 12-year-olds would have this vaccine. You could opt out, but you were automatically in. And there was some context — or some discussion about they preferred that you — you know, you opt in, rather than you opt out. I’ll tell you what stunned me in the discussion is that she said — and I’m going to get more information from her later when she’s on — she said that the reason that Governor Perry said it, or she suggested it strongly, was because of a campaign contribution, that someone in his office or a prior employee went to work for the drug manufacturer. And I thought — I mean, that’s the same sort of thing that really makes Americans mad, the cronyism or the suggestion that things — you know, that it isn’t a level playing field out there. And I’m going to ask her about because that’s a serious charge to level against Governor Perry. But that — I was — I was very surprised by that. pSARAH PALIN: Well, someone? That someone, as Michele Bachmann pointed out, was Governor Perry’s former chief of staff, who then went to work for a drug company who made the drug that would be required of the Texan government to mandate that, that our young daughters would have to be inoculated against potential disease from the company that his former chief of staff was lobbying for. That’s crony capitalism. […] Fighting the crony capitalism is a tough thing to do within your own party. You have to go up against the big guns. And they will try to destroy you. […] Michele Bachmann tried to make that point tonight. And watch, she’s going to get — potentially, she’s going to get crucified by some in the party who say, Don’t, you know, don’t’ violate Reagan’s 11th Commandment and don’t call somebody out in your own party on something like that. Well, no, we have to call one another out on things that have led to the crony capitalism. […] I was governor of Alaska at the time that that issue came down, and I told our health and human services department Alaska was not going to mandate immunizations for our teenage daughters. And there had to have been something to that whole issue because it just didn’t sound like Governor Perry. Governor Perry was, you know, the proverbial anti-government type of maverick there in Texas, and yet on this issue, he decided that he was going to know better than a parent was going to know in terms of what the health care or health benefit would be for their teenage daughters. So I knew there was something to it. […] I knew even at that time something was up with that issue, and now we’re finding that, yes, something was up with that issue. And it was a — it was kind of an illustration or a big of evidence of some crony capitalism./p /blockquote pBeyond the particulars of this issue, the thing that struck me about both van Susteren and Palin is that their criticism of Perry went straight to the core of his character. It’s not that they wouldn’t support him if he won the nomination, but it’s pretty clear that along with much of the rest of the folks at Fox, they do not want to see Perry as the GOP nominee./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/K78FXWtZI–Fqv_4m0lm676rpfA/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/K78FXWtZI–Fqv_4m0lm676rpfA/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/K78FXWtZI–Fqv_4m0lm676rpfA/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/K78FXWtZI–Fqv_4m0lm676rpfA/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=ecEOYIf_cCw:EX4nd15m5HI:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/ecEOYIf_cCw” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the original here: 
Palin slams Perry for ‘crony capitalism,’ praises Bachmann on vaccine issue

“What will Sarah do?” has been a question on the minds of many in the run-up to the Republican primary season next year.bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/palin-president-2012-_b_959177.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin-2012/”More on Sarah Palin 2012/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vUJSMdDsoFCp3hM9cjSCXMQ7Pcw/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vUJSMdDsoFCp3hM9cjSCXMQ7Pcw/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vUJSMdDsoFCp3hM9cjSCXMQ7Pcw/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vUJSMdDsoFCp3hM9cjSCXMQ7Pcw/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/fxsx78uRLsY” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Go here to read the rest: 
Chris Weigant: Will Palin Go Rogue?

“What will Sarah do?” has been a question on the minds of many in the run-up to the Republican primary season next year.bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/palin-president-2012-_b_959177.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin-2012/”More on Sarah Palin 2012/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vUJSMdDsoFCp3hM9cjSCXMQ7Pcw/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vUJSMdDsoFCp3hM9cjSCXMQ7Pcw/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vUJSMdDsoFCp3hM9cjSCXMQ7Pcw/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/vUJSMdDsoFCp3hM9cjSCXMQ7Pcw/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=fxsx78uRLsY:0DGfOZpA998:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/fxsx78uRLsY” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Excerpt from:
Chris Weigant: Will Palin Go Rogue?

pA few days ago, Chilean-born fashion designer Maria Cornejo had the best meal of her life: homemade gnocchi, made by her husband, photographer Mark Borthwick, and served with fresh basil pesto and lasagna with bacon and vegetables. They ate by candlelight in the garden of their Brooklyn brownstone. And she was wearing (we had to ask) the Long Sarah Dress in Tribal linen from her spring/summer collection.br //pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/maria-cornejo-bon-appetit_n_958629.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/designers/”More on Designers/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/uW2KUCPbaHuN-a6Fd1b-CB-8No0/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/uW2KUCPbaHuN-a6Fd1b-CB-8No0/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/uW2KUCPbaHuN-a6Fd1b-CB-8No0/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/uW2KUCPbaHuN-a6Fd1b-CB-8No0/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=G2zP0GJkcjY:xq7W-CxTfa4:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=G2zP0GJkcjY:xq7W-CxTfa4:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=G2zP0GJkcjY:xq7W-CxTfa4:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=G2zP0GJkcjY:xq7W-CxTfa4:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=G2zP0GJkcjY:xq7W-CxTfa4:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/G2zP0GJkcjY” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Here is the original post:
Maria Cornejo Eats As Well As She Dresses

pCNN / ORCbr /9/9-11/11; 446 Republicans, 4.5% margin of errorbr /Mode: Live telephone interviewsbr /bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/us-2012-primary-30-perry-_n_958243.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/pollster/”More on Pollster/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/QzuQkZfRCaDvbecBxLP4YILkaus/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/QzuQkZfRCaDvbecBxLP4YILkaus/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/QzuQkZfRCaDvbecBxLP4YILkaus/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/QzuQkZfRCaDvbecBxLP4YILkaus/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=0xSrBrd44y0:QW1iBtE9NRg:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=0xSrBrd44y0:QW1iBtE9NRg:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=0xSrBrd44y0:QW1iBtE9NRg:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=0xSrBrd44y0:QW1iBtE9NRg:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=0xSrBrd44y0:QW1iBtE9NRg:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/0xSrBrd44y0″ height=”1″ width=”1″/

Go here to read the rest:
US-2012 Primary: 30% Perry, 18% Romney, 15% Palin, 12% Paul (CNN 9/9-11)

pa href=”http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2011/images/09/11/rel15a.pdf”ORC for CNN/a (PDF). 9/9-11. Republicans. MoE ±4.5% (8/24-25):/p blockquotestrongRick Perry:/strong 32 (32)br / strongMitt Romney:/strong 21 (18)br / strongRon Paul:/strong 13 (6)br / strongMichele Bachmann:/strong 7 (12)br / strongNewt Gingrich:/strong 7 (7)br / strongHerman Cain:/strong 6 (3)br / strongJon Huntsman:/strong 2 (1)br / strongRick Santorum:/strong 2 (1)br / strongSomeone else (vol.):/strong 2 (4)br / strongNone/ No one (vol.):/strong 4 (6)br / strongNo opinion:/strong 3 (4)/blockquote pI guess Mitt Romney is discovering Rick Perry didn’t a href=”http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0911/Romney_adviser_Perry_has_lost.html?showall”lose the campaign/a after all when he said Social Security was a “monstrous lie” and a “Ponzi scheme.” In fact, if anybody’s losing, it’s Mitt. Check out the trend lines between Romney and Perry:/p div class=”dkimg-c”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/191280/romneyperry_0912cnnpoll.png” alt=”CNN Poll” height=”374″ width=”550″ //div So after Romney landed the “knockout” blow during last week’s debate … nothing. And it’s not too complicated to understand why it hasn’t hurt Perry: while he may be out of step with most Americans when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, emwhen it comes to Republicans/em, Rick Perry is a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/08/1014586/-Its-Romney,-not-Perry,-who-is-outside-the-GOP-mainstream-on-Social-Security”right in the mainstream/a. Mitt Romney isn’t, and his attacks on Perry will seem increasingly desperate to Republican primary voters. pRomney’s trying to make the case that the problem with Perry’s Social Security stance is that it makes him unelectable, but even that isn’t working: 42% say sRomney/sPerry is the most electable Republican candidate, compared with 26% for Romney./p pIt’ll be interesting to see how Romney handles the issue in tonight’s debate on CNN. Perhaps he’ll be the one on the defensive. The debate begins at 8 PM ET and we’ll be blogging it live right here on Daily Kos./p pA few other things to note: This is a national poll, yet there is no national primary. So it doesn’t take the primary calendar into account. A candidate like Bachmann is betting it all on Iowa; if she were to win Iowa, she’d probably jump back into contention./p pCNN also tested a hypothetical slate including Sarah Palin. Romney and Perry stayed at about the same level, but Palin moved into third with 15 percent, bumping Bachmann down to 4 percent. Palin probably isn’t running, but if she were to run, she’d reconfigure the race for third place./p pFinally, take a look at Jon Huntsman’s numbers. On the up side, he doubled his support. And the down side, he went from 1 percent to 2 percent. He has never in any poll demonstrated anything approaching a meaningful base of support, and he doesn’t have a credible path to winning any of the early states, yet he gets more coverage than just about any other candidate in the bottom tier. It makes zero sense./p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OBx_gyGr34KNxCXEFUTUoGGnyJo/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OBx_gyGr34KNxCXEFUTUoGGnyJo/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OBx_gyGr34KNxCXEFUTUoGGnyJo/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OBx_gyGr34KNxCXEFUTUoGGnyJo/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=HYbhQVQBfhw:Ml_q9WJLV6o:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/HYbhQVQBfhw” height=”1″ width=”1″/

The rest is here: 
CNN poll: Mitt Romney’s Social Security attacks bounce off Rick Perry

Campaigns are dynamic. But elections can be predictable. The Republican candidate will be either Perry or Romney. I do not see a way for Sarah Palin to enter this race anymore.bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-helfenbein/advice-for-the-candidates_4_b_956925.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/republicans/”More on Republicans/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fZjDS3uq7OXWeIjWWPh5tFcwefo/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fZjDS3uq7OXWeIjWWPh5tFcwefo/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fZjDS3uq7OXWeIjWWPh5tFcwefo/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fZjDS3uq7OXWeIjWWPh5tFcwefo/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=LTXqVbvRRZ4:kiUGxKdpHsM:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=LTXqVbvRRZ4:kiUGxKdpHsM:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=LTXqVbvRRZ4:kiUGxKdpHsM:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=LTXqVbvRRZ4:kiUGxKdpHsM:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=LTXqVbvRRZ4:kiUGxKdpHsM:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/LTXqVbvRRZ4″ height=”1″ width=”1″/

Here is the original: 
David Helfenbein: Advice for the Candidates: Some Trouble for President Obama?

pSarah Palin a href=”http://video.foxnews.com/v/1151607584001/palins-take-on-perry-at-gop-debate” target=”_hplink”weighed in/a on a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/07/rick-perry-karl-rove-social-security-ponzi-scheme_n_953160.html” target=”_hplink”harsh language/a Texas Governor Rick Perry used in defining a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/09/rick-perry-social-security_n_955030.html?ref=mostpopular” target=”_hplink”his position/a on Social Security during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/07/gop-debate-live-updates_n_952405.html” target=”_hplink”debate/a in California./ppHuffPost’s Sam Stein and Ryan Grim relay a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/07/rick-perry-karl-rove-social-security-ponzi-scheme_n_953160.html” target=”_hplink”what Perry had to say/a about the entitlement program at the forum:/pblockquotePerry declined the a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/07/gop-debate-live-updates_n_952405.html” target=”_hplink”opportunity/a to back down from his book’s claim that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme at the GOP primary debate Wednesday night, going so far as to criticize his former adviser and current agitator Karl Rove for calling his language provocative.bra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/10/sarah-palin-rick-perry_n_956811.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/sarah-palin/”More on Sarah Palin/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nl0D068QossZtAVbMkrDyqEWYuE/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nl0D068QossZtAVbMkrDyqEWYuE/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nl0D068QossZtAVbMkrDyqEWYuE/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/nl0D068QossZtAVbMkrDyqEWYuE/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=UoZkh_3OW_M:EGF0EKohrnU:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=UoZkh_3OW_M:EGF0EKohrnU:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=UoZkh_3OW_M:EGF0EKohrnU:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=UoZkh_3OW_M:EGF0EKohrnU:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=UoZkh_3OW_M:EGF0EKohrnU:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/UoZkh_3OW_M” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Here is the original: 
Sarah Palin Reacts To Rick Perry’s Harsh Remarks On Social Security (VIDEO)

div class=”dkimg-c”a href=”http://elections.dailykos.com/”img src=”http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/73/Elections-MorningDigest.jpg” alt=”Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest banner” height=”100″ width=”550″ //a/div iTo receive the Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest via email each weekday, a href=”http://campaigns.dailykos.com/signup_page/electionsdigest”sign up here/a./i pbSenate/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.politico.com/blogs/davidcatanese/0911/Shays_unsure_how_to_overcome_McMahon_money.html”CT-Sen/a: Chris Shays sounds like he has zero fire in the belly. Just listen to the Republican ex-Rep. mope and moan about negative campaigning and Linda McMahon’s money. Shays keeps saying he won’t formally announce until October, but at this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a change of heart some time before then./p p• a href=”http://bluemassgroup.com/2011/09/scott-brown-still-playing-the-victim-on-crazykhazei”MA-Sen/a: Somehow, Scott Brown has decided ihe’s/i the victim of the whole a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/24/1010145/-Top-Scott-Brown-adviser-caught-tweeting-from-anti-Khazei-parodyaccount?detail=hide”"CrazyKhazei” business/a. Click the first link to see what I mean. Really pathetic./p p• a href=”http://politicmo.com/2011/09/06/senate-candidates-split-on-medicare-constitutionality”MO-Sen/a: Not what I would have expected in a Republican primary, but here we are: Sarah Steelman is now calling out Todd Akin for saying he thinks Medicare is unconstitutional. Steelman, who you might have thought would be interested in trying to out-teabag Akin, is actually quite convinced it is — and wants to know why Akin never did anything to eliminate Medicare in all his years in Congress if he’s so convinced of the program’s constitutional infirmity. I’m not quite sure what Steelman’s hopes are here, but you know, Medicare is a lot more popular than movement conservatives wish it was./p p• a href=”http://uppitywis.org/blogarticle/emilys-list-endorses-tammy-baldwin” name=”emilybaldwin” id=”emilybaldwin”WI-Sen/a: No surprise: EMILY’s List just endorsed Dem Rep. Tammy Baldwin’s brand-new Senate campaign. You know, the public comments from Ron Kind and Steve Kagen, both of whom faced bruising re-election campaigns just last year, haven’t sounded particularly enthusiastic. Do you think it’s possible that Baldwin might be the only major Democratic name to get in?/p p• a href=”http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2011/09/unless-something-unforeseen-ha.html”TX-Sen/a: State Sen. Dan Patrick, who had been considering an entry into the GOP primary, says he will not run “unless something unforeseen happens in the current field of candidates.”/p pbGubernatorial/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/content/senator-nan-rich-considering-run-governor-0″FL-Gov/a: Nan Rich, the Democrats’ minority leader in the state Senate, says she’s considering a run against Gov. Rick Scott, who isn’t up for re-election until 2014. Rich is term-limited and cannot seek re-election next year./p p• a href=”http://politicmo.com/2011/09/07/rove-to-stump-for-kinder”MO-Gov/a: On the face of it, well, you’re apt to make a face. But I consider it good news that Karl Rove is in Missouri tonight to do a fundraiser for the extremely embattled Peter Kinder. To me, it says that damaged Kinder intends to stay in the race, which at this point is exactly what we want. (Haley Barbour is visiting later this month, so, even better.)/p p• a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/07/1014242/-MT-Gov:-Steve-Bullock-formally-enters-the-race?detail=hide”MT-Gov/a: In case you missed it, Dem AG Steve Bullock formally entered the race for governor yesterday. His welcome video is at the link./p p• a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/07/1014283/-WV-Gov:-Maloney-trails-Tomblin-by-just-six-in-new-poll?detail=hide”WV-Gov/a: PPP is out with their new West Virginia poll, and they show acting Dem Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin up just six points, with the election only a month away. Click the link for our full post at Daily Kos Elections./p pbHouse/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2011/09/07/chad-causey-wont-run-again-in-2012″ name=”causey” id=”causey”AR-01/a: Chad Causey, last year’s Democratic nominee in the 1st CD open seat race, says he won’t seek a rematch against GOP freshman Rick Crawford. Causey, a former chief of staff to ex-Rep. Marion Berry (the guy who held this seat before Crawford), ran a creditable race but got killed in 2010’s red tide. He’s only 35, though, and adds that he plans to run for office again in the future./p p• a href=”http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2011/09/dan-lungren-wont-challenge-tom.html”CA-07, CA-04/a: Rep. Dan Lungren will not challenge fellow Republican Tom McClintock in the new 4th CD and will instead run in the 7th District “unless something changes.” Lungren is going to be in for a serious fight. He already faces 2010 opponent Ami Bera, a strong fundraiser who is seeking a rematch, and Assemblywoman Alyson Huber has also filed paperwork here for what she’s calling an exploratory committee. (Huber initially filed for CA-03 but later a href=”http://query.nictusa.com/pdf/864/11030653864/11030653864.pdf”re-filed/a (PDF) for CA-07.)/p p• a href=”http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2011/09/candidates-jockey-for-advantage-in-redistricting-spawn-scramble-for-new-seats.html”CA-37, CA-43/a: It looks like Rep. Karen Bass will seek re-election in the new 37th CD, which also happens to be home to fellow Democrat Maxine Waters. Waters, however, will run in the new 43rd./p p• a href=”http://twitter.com/#!/KyleTrygstad/status/111508011498995712″CA-39/a: This seems like pretty big news: NRCC chair Pete Sessions is headlining an event for Rep. Ed Royce, which of course ordinarily would be beneath our notice. But Royce is facing off in a GOP-on-GOP primary against fellow Republican Gary Miller, who both got drawn into the same district. It would surprise me if the NRCC plans to take sides in any redistricting fights (after all, they have far greater concerns on their hands), and perhaps Sessions plans to pretend like this is just a gesture in his individual capacity. But all we have right now is a tweet from Kyle Trygstad, who also reminds me that Royce is an NRCC vice-chair. I’ll be curious to learn more./p p• a href=”http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2011/09/07/your-morning-jolt-martha-zoller-signs-up-for-9th-district-race”GA-09/a: That clears up any lingering ambiguity: Right-wing radio host Martha Zoller officially launched her campaign for Georgia’s new 9th CD today, joining state Rep. Doug Collins in the GOP field. (There was some conflict in prior news reports as to whether she’d actually uttered the magic words “I’m running.”)/p p• a href=”http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62834.html” name=”garypeters” id=”garypeters”MI-14/a: Now ithis/i is really interesting. Politico’s Dan Hirschhorn is reporting that Dem Rep. Gary Peters, squeezed out of his current seat in redistricting, will run in the redrawn 13th. (Peters’ office isn’t confirming anything.) It’s a very complex situation since, as you’ll know if you’ve been following this story, MI-14 only kinda-sorta has an incumbent. Freshman Dem Hansen Clarke currently represents the 13th CD but is swapping seats with John Conyers, since many of Clarke’s current constituents have been moved to the new 14th and vice-versa — but definitely not all of them./p pWhat’s more, Clarke hasn’t exactly had much time to establish himself. That’s led to Southfield Mayor Brenda Lawrence all but declaring a primary challenge to Clarke, which seems to be giving Peters an opening. Both Clarke and Lawrence are black and could split the vote in what is still a heavily African-American district. A former state rep. quoted by Hirschhorn also adds that much of Peters’ old state Senate district overlaps with the new 14th. Assuming Peters follows through, this could wind up being one of the most interesting redistricting-related primaries in the nation./p p• a href=”http://www.startribune.com/politics/blogs/128874968.html”MN-08/a: Democratic state Rep. Carly Melin says she’s “keeping an open mind” about a possible challenge to GOP freshman Chip Cravaack, which is rather interesting, since she a href=”http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/17/945868/-DK-Elections-Daily-Digest:-2-17?detail=hide”just won her state house seat/a in a special election in February (and she’s also only 26 years old). For a complete list of who’s in and who’s out in this race, check out the a href=”http://www.opencongress.org/wiki/MN-08″Race Tracker Wiki/a./p p• a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzo6cLO3HC4″NV-02/a: Republican Mark Amodei’s closing ad, if you care to watch it. Mostly anodyne crap, but he does wear a purple shirt for part of it./p p• a href=”http://www.thebrooklynpolitics.com/post/9916745664/nyt-reviews-yesterdays-candidate-forum” name=”turnerloophole” id=”turnerloophole”NY-09/a: God bless Bob Turner, magnificent moron. From Tuesday’s candidate forum:/p blockquoteAnd Mr. Turner found himself befuddled when he and Mr. Weprin were asked to name one corporate tax loophole they would like to close. After pondering the matter, Mr. Turner smiled widely and pleaded no contest. b“As a Republican, I never met a loophole I didn’t like,”/b he said. “I really don’t know.”/blockquote pColin Campbell a href=”http://www.thebrooklynpolitics.com/post/9919831427/an-early-birthday-gift-for-david-weprin-11-48-am”scored some video/a of Bob Turner’s insta-gaffe. And yes, the Weprin campaign was on the ball with this one — they started contacting reporters immediately and has blasted out at least a couple of press releases. Turner’s on the defensive, and you know it because he was forced to issue a responsive statement, which is at the link just above. Not a particularly effective one, if you ask me./p pMeanwhile, Weprin is a href=”http://twitter.com/#!/HotlineJess/status/111491803739459585″ name=”weprinbuy” id=”weprinbuy”going on the airwaves/a for the final weekend of the campaign. The Hotline’s Jessica Taylor (via a href=”http://twitter.com/#!/HotlineJess/status/111483415953551360″a GOP source/a) says that Weprin will spend at least $259K: $157K on broadcast and $102K on cable. Note, though, that these figures come from groups trying to track their opponent’s spending, which is always an imperfect art, so the actual total could be higher. No word on whether Bob Turner plans to do the same, but I’d be surprised, since his fundraising has been weak. You can watch Weprin’s ad a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGm_6aCSP3s”here/a or below:/p div class=”dkimg-c”iframe width=”550″ height=”339″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/iGm_6aCSP3s” frameborder=”0″ defang_allowfullscreen=”"/iframe/div a href=”http://twitter.com/#!/BKpolitics/status/111525542662111232″As Colin says/a, seems like it was produced by Peter Bjorn and John! (a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIRE6iw-ws4amp;ob=av3n”Click here/a to see what he means.) pFinally, racist homophobe Dov Hikind, who embarrassingly for us is actually a Democrat in the state Assembly, a href=”http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/house-races/179841-jewish-dem-crosses-lines-to-back-republican-in-ny-special”just endorsed Turner/a. While Hikind does have some influence (he’s got a radio show), Turner stepped all over any shot at getting this message out yesterday with his blunder at the candidate forum./p p• a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/nyregion/new-york-republicans-in-congress-balk-at-a-call-to-tie-storm-aid-to-budget-cuts.html”NY-19/a: Watch Nan try to backpedal! Republican Rep. Nan Hayworth a href=”http://thinkprogress.org/green/2011/09/01/310372/hayworth-irene-budget-cuts/”then/a:/p blockquoteOnly days after a record-setting storm destroyed her district, Rep. Nan Hayworth and her House colleagues threatened to withhold disaster money if lawmakers don’t cut additional spending from the federal budget. “We’re facing a natural disaster in the middle of an economic disaster,” Hayworth said Wednesday. “Certainly, the challenges we face with the national budget have not changed.” pbHayworth, R-Mount Kisco, said she would only vote to replenish the federal disaster fund if new spending was offset by budget cuts./b She said those cuts should come from “non-defense discretionary spending.” Hayworth likened her position to a family skipping vacation if it was overwhelmed by bills. “We have to control spending,” she said. “There’s no question about it.”/p /blockquote pNan Hayworth now:/p blockquoteNan Hayworth, a Republican freshman representing areas north of New York City who won her seat with strong Tea Party support, also sees no connection between disaster aid and spending cuts, according to her spokesman, Nathaniel Sillin. p“They are two separate issues,” he said./p pMs. Hayworth issued a statement last week intended to assure her constituents that she did not support the effort to make disaster aid contingent on spending cuts./p p“My priority in the coming weeks will be to see that the Hudson Valley has all the federal resources necessary to recover from Hurricane Irene,” she said. “I simply won’t let politics get in the way of doing the right thing for our families and communities that have been affected by the disaster.”/p /blockquote pThink her constituents are going to forget this?/p p• a href=”http://twitter.com/#!/greggiroux/status/111471322126749696″UT-0?/a: Greg Giroux tweets that former NFL defensive lineman (and BYU football star) Jason Buck plans to run for Congress as a Republican, but Buck’s paperwork doesn’t specify a particular district (as yet)./p p• a href=”http://www.wispolitics.com/index.iml?Article=246684″ name=”pocanroys” id=”pocanroys”WI-02/a: As expected, state Reps. Mark Pocan iand/i Kelda Roys both just announced yesterday they’d join the Democratic field seeking Rep. Tammy Baldwin’s now-open seat. I guess they preferred to step on each others’ launches rather than give the other a cycle of local coverage all to themselves? Or maybe it’s just one of those coincidences that sometimes just happens. Anyhow, as we’ve been saying, look for state Sen. Jon Erpenbach to also possibly join the field, and perhaps others as well./p pbOther Races/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/09/decision_to_remove_carl_lewis.html”NJ St. Sen./a: Another legal setback for Carl Lewis, and this one looks pretty bad. The Democrat and former Olympian has been waging a months-long battle to stay on the ballot for the state Senate, since Republicans think he violates the state’s residency requirements. Lewis got dinged repeatedly in the state courts but had been hoping for a more favorable ruling from a federal court. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, and Lewis’s claim that NJ’s residency laws are unconstitutional was rejected. It sounds like Lewis will appeal, though./p pbGrab Bag/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/09/nc-opposes-marriage-amendment.html”North Carolina/a: This is unexpected — and welcome. By a 55-30 margin in PPP’s latest poll, North Carolina voters are opposed to a proposed state constitutional amendment that would forbid any legal recognition of same-sex couples: marriage, civil unions, the works. It’s not that citizens are especially pro-gay marriage, but the over-inclusive nature of the amendment looks like it’s proving to be too much since 54% of the state supports some kind of legal status for same-sex relationships (25% marriage, 29% civil unions)./p pbRedistricting Roundup/b:/p p• a href=”http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Idaho_redistricting_committee_misses_deadline_for_map,_will_head_to_court”ID Redistricting/a: This is good news… and not for John McCain, for once. Idaho’s redistricting commission failed to reach any kind of agreement on legislative and congressional districts by yesterday’s deadline, so the matter will head straight to the state supreme court. There’s a good chance the court will order the commission back to work, but it might also decide to face the inevitable and start drawing the maps itself. This isn’t exactly a huge win, since Idaho interestingly requires an equal number of Democrats and Republicans to serve on the commission, and a minimum of four votes are needed to pass any maps, so it’s not like we could have gotten railroaded. But it’s hard to imagine a court doing worse for us than any plan which could have secured a single Republican vote./p p• a href=”http://www.politicspa.com/redistricting-watch-pittsburgh80%99s-north-hills-may-not-end-up-in-the-4th-district/27501/”PA Redistricting/a: If you’re willing to go on blind quotes from House Republican sources, it sounds like the contours of the new districts in western Pennsylvania are starting to take shape. This is where the expected lost Democratic seat is likely to come from, and it sounds like Jason Altmire is drawing the better hand: although his house (in Pittsburgh’s affluent North Hills suburbs) is getting drawn into GOPer Tim Murphy’s district, Altmire may be coming out ahead here, losing the mostly-Republican North Hills while gaining the friendlier parts of Westmoreland County to Pittsburgh’s east. That would come at the expense of newbie Dem Rep. Mark Critz, who’d be the odd man out. Observers don’t expect anything definite until October or November, though. (David Jarman)br //p pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HHnESZ-ToJJjE3n7_Cjj-ZYZAbk/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HHnESZ-ToJJjE3n7_Cjj-ZYZAbk/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HHnESZ-ToJJjE3n7_Cjj-ZYZAbk/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HHnESZ-ToJJjE3n7_Cjj-ZYZAbk/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.dailykos.com/~ff/dailykos/index?a=i9fE9tS9WTQ:akEbTpCuVwg:H0mrP-F8Qgo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/dailykos/index?d=H0mrP-F8Qgo” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/dailykos/index/~4/i9fE9tS9WTQ” height=”1″ width=”1″/

Read the rest here: 
Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: 9/8

pThe most striking part of the first full-blown debate in the Republican primary was the total rejection of science. /ppIn a surreal scene near the night’s end, Gov. Rick Perry likened the people denying global warming science to a href=”http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/rick-perry-galileo-and-global-warming/” target=”_hplink”Galileo/a. To observe that he has that history exactly backwards — it was the Church that accused Galileo of heresy in 1633 for scientific theories which were on the right track — is merely to observe that Perry’s substantive errors come with their own stylistic snafus. Perhaps that is fitting. More consequential, however, was the answer that Perry failed to provide. /ppThe original question asked him to name a single scientist that supported his views. None of his opponents seized on the gaffe, since apart from the exception-of-the-night, Gov. Huntsman, every other candidate was aiming for the same conservative turf on which Perry stood. And unlike Gov. Palin’s famous inability to name her sources, the media is likely to put Perry’s problems aside, in order to focus on the “fireworks” that finally broke out between top tier candidates. /pbra href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-melber/gop-debate-from-birthers_b_953281.htmlRead More…/abr a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/gop/”More on GOP/a pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/hJpc6qGGuusPkUJ5JTN80YdIKDU/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/hJpc6qGGuusPkUJ5JTN80YdIKDU/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/ a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/hJpc6qGGuusPkUJ5JTN80YdIKDU/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/hJpc6qGGuusPkUJ5JTN80YdIKDU/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/pdiv class=”feedflare” a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=g-lAW1qGDD4:9gmKPP4q8tI:yIl2AUoC8zA”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=g-lAW1qGDD4:9gmKPP4q8tI:F7zBnMyn0Lo”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=g-lAW1qGDD4:9gmKPP4q8tI:F7zBnMyn0Lo” border=”0″/img/a a href=”http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?a=g-lAW1qGDD4:9gmKPP4q8tI:V_sGLiPBpWU”img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/huffingtonpost/raw_feed?i=g-lAW1qGDD4:9gmKPP4q8tI:V_sGLiPBpWU” border=”0″/img/a /divimg src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/huffingtonpost/raw_feed/~4/g-lAW1qGDD4″ height=”1″ width=”1″/

More:
Ari Melber: GOP Debate: From Birthers to Earthers

Kentucky: Not likely to be a coin flip in 2012 Before getting to the raw numbers out of the Bluegrass State, a caveat in the “cool your jets” vein. This PPP poll is not based on an anticipated 2012 electorate, but rather based on a sample of voters likely to turn out in two months for the gubernatorial election. As election junkies know, the GOP nominee in that race (David Williams) is an underfunded train wreck of a candidate. As a result, he is getting blown out by Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear . Republicans are, rightfully, a bit pessimistic about their chances in November. As a result, turnout among Republicans is expected to be week. The likely voter sample here voted 48-44 for John McCain in 2008. McCain, of course, easily carried the state (57-41). With that bit of information in mind, let’s explore the presidential numbers: Public Policy Polling (PDF) . 8/25-8/28. Likely 2011 voters. MoE +/- 4.0%. (No Trendlines) Mitt Romney (R): 48 Barack Obama (D): 40 Rick Perry (R): 49 Barack Obama (D): 42 Michele Bachmann (R): 46 Barack Obama (D): 43 Barack Obama (D): 47 Newt Gingrich (R): 44 Barack Obama (D): 48 Sarah Palin (R): 44 Even in the worst-case scenario, Obama halved his 2008 margin of defeat. And, against the weakest prospects in the GOP field, Obama actually reclaimed a modest lead. This is a marked difference from other summer polling this year, virtually all of which has shown Obama running behind his 2008 margins when paired against the more viable GOP contenders. This is, as mentioned earlier, entirely a function of the suppressed GOP electorate this Fall. The 2008 exit polls out of the Bluegrass State split 47-38 Democratic. The sample here split 55-36 Democratic. Clearly, a lot of Republicans are staying home this year. Just as clearly, they are liable to head back to the polls in 2012, a fact not lost on PPP’s own Tom Jensen, who noted that: In the end, Obama won’t win Kentucky–not even close.  Republican voters don’t seem too jazzed up by David Williams, so Democrats might have a good year this fall.  But conservatives will be back out in force next year, and Kentucky won’t be near the top of any candidate’s travel itinerary. Even in this decidedly amenable sample of voters, Obama still suffers from pretty miserable job approval in Kentucky (39-56). One expects that, in spite of the better-than-expected numbers, Kentucky will not make it onto any target lists unless Williams implodes to such an awesome extent that he does lasting damage to the GOP brand name here.

See original here: 
KY-Pres: Obama closer to GOP field than in 2008, but …

After a closely watched migration from CBS to ABC last June, Katie Couric makes her ABC News debut with a wide-ranging interview with actress Sarah Jessica Parker to air Tuesday on Nightline. Read More… More on Katie Couric

Go here to read the rest: 
Katie Couric’s First ABC Interview: Sarah Jessica Parker

The source of the USA Today’s preposterous advice? A book titled “Math for Grownups.” I kid you not.   According to USA Today : That raise actually might not be as good as it looks. The extra money is nice, but it could very well bump you into the next tax bracket, possibly leaving you with less money than you had before the raise. Dean Baker , Jon Chait and Matthew Yglesias marvel at the sheer stupidity of those two sentences; the whole point of marginal tax brackets is to make sure that even as you pay a higher percentage of your income in taxes, your net income continues to grow. USA Today has now posted a clarification, but instead of admitting that they were wrong, they’ve dug in their heels, posting several pages from their original source , a book written by Laura Laing which they say offers a more “complete explanation” of the concept they were trying to convey. According to the book, appropriately titled Math for Grownups , a raise is “not always” a good thing: Getting a raise is always a good thing, right? Well, not always. If that extra cash in your paycheck bumps you into the next tax bracket, you could be giving more in taxes to Uncle Sam than you’d like. Okay, so “giving more in taxes to Uncle Sam than you’d like” is a meaningless statement, but getting a raise is “not always” a good thing? That’s absurd! Of course it’s a good thing, at least if money is your bottom-line. Otherwise Sarah Palin would never have quit her job as governor. But Laing argues that instead of seeking a raise, you should make a counteroffer. Based on this logic, you’d think she’d advise you to ask for a ten percent pay cut, but she’s not quite that crazy. Instead, she suggests “asking for another week of vacation” or a requesting a “VIP parking space.” Of course, if the parking spot actually has real cash value, then it’s a benefit—and must be reported to the IRS. Which means it’ll get taxed as if it were income. So if you follow her advice, you might end up with higher taxes even though you didn’t get a raise. But at least you’d have a VIP parking spot. And you’d have the pride of being the mathematical adult in the room.

View original here: 
According to USA Today’s logic, you should ask your boss for a pay cut

James P. Hoffa ( Teamsters ) As we all know, a lot of the language around elections and campaigns relies on a measure of metaphor. Mostly it’s pretty standard stuff, like “horserace” or “targeted districts”; only every now and then someone goes a step too far with crosshairs and talk of “reloading.” So it’s pretty rich that Fox News, the televised home of Sarah “crosshairs” Palin, is trying to make an issue of lines from Teamsters’ President James Hoffa’s Labor Day speech. Hoffa said : HOFFA: Everybody here’s got to vote. If we go back and keep the eye on the prize, let’s take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong! Thank you very much! What’s controversial about that? Well, if you start it at “let’s take these son of a bitches out,” as Fox News did, removing the context that the sons of bitches otherwise known as congressional Republicans should be taken out by voting , it sounds slightly less at the center-mainstream of polite electoral discussion. (Though probably not outside the box for Fox programming meetings.) Media Matters details how Fox used the full clip at some moments, with Ed Henry specifying the electoral context, but at other times used the edited version to draw a picture of a “union thug” making physical threats. TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro followed up with Hoffa: “How is that different than Mitch McConnell saying he wants to take out Barack Obama?” Hoffa said. The answer, of course, is that the statement isn’t different. The outrage machine dedicated to hyping it is.

Original post: 
Fox News uses edited footage to accuse Teamsters president of call to violence

Another day, another opportunity for Sarah Palin to pretend she is running for president. Despite claims by anonymous sources that Sarah Palin’s speech in Iowa on Saturday at yet another teabagger rally would be ” important and news-making ,” the half-term governor did not make any announcement regarding her future plans, other than to continue to speak utter nonsense whenever a) someone is willing to pay her to do so, or b) she is likely to face a crowd of mouth-breathing idiots who actually think she should run for president because , according to one such mouth-breather who drove 387 miles on Saturday just to see her speak, “If she wins, it will change the dynamic in the country. Women of all kinds will support her.” And lest you think this poor fool needs to take a look at three years of polls that say otherwise, pffft. Sarah had an answer to that: Polls — they’re for strippers and cross-country skiers. But at the end of her nonsensical hate speech, the promised decision of whether to continue to pretend she’s relevant or to actually put her money where her mouth is so the voters can definitely tell her that she isn’t relevant did not come. And yet today, she was back on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, serving up some more of her asshattery, but apparently without all the cameras rolling. Fortunately, there is Twitter to tell us what we missed (or didn’t miss): There was, of course, the obligatory bashing of the lamestream media for paying too much not enough attention to Sarah racists in silly costumes: The fawning fans who have no grasp of any kind of reality whatsoever: The part of the speech where she talks about how pointless speeches are: The hilariously unintentional irony, with a side of gobbledygook, about how quitting is for dead fish who float upstream and don’t run toward danger or something: And of course, delusions of grandeur: Having listened to Palin’s toxic tantrum on Saturday, and then having read the real-time summary of her toxic spew today on Twitter, the most important lesson here is that Sarah has not made any decisions about whether to run for president Sarah is still an idiot eye bleeding is not as painful as ear bleeding.

See the original post here: 
Palin continues pretend presidential campaign in New Hampshire

(AP/The Huffington Post) MANCHESTER, N.H. — Sarah Palin says the Tea Party needs to play a larger role in the 2012 presidential race. Speaking to Tea Party activists Monday afternoon, the former Alaska governor wants conservatives to put aside internal squabbles and unite against President Obama. Palin’s visit — her second to the Granite State in three months — stoked supporters’ hopes she will enter the presidential race. But she says she still hasn’t made up her mind. Read More… More on Sarah Palin

Read the original post: 
Sarah Palin Rails Against Obama, Issues Warning To Tea Party In New Hampshire Speech

For this Labor Day weekend update on the War on Workers, let’s revisit a video we saw from Change to Win earlier in the summer: Bob Herbert writes: Three to four trillion dollars worth of improvements will be needed over the next decade just to bring the infrastructure into a reasonable state of repair. Meanwhile, we’ve got legions of unemployed construction workers, manufacturing workers, engineers and others who are ready and eager to step into the breach, to take on jobs ranging from infrastructure maintenance and repair to infrastructure design and new construction. It shouldn’t require a genius to put together those two gigantic pieces of America’s economic puzzle – infrastructure and unemployment. And Sarah Jaffe counts down the five worst so-called job creation ideas from the GOP . Check in on Monday for lots more perspective on where working people stand now and why it’s important to celebrate and fight for labor, organized and not. Assorted A strike at the Congress Plaza hotel has passed the 3,000 days mark. How can we improve teacher preparation? The foreign students who walked off the job at Hershey are working to draw attention to the J-1 visa program under which they were in the United States: The Summer Work Travel program was originally fashioned during the cold war to promote America to foreign students. Now it annually accounts for 130,000 college students, in low-wage jobs, while another 200,000 J-1 visas are issued to workers in year-long trainee and intern programs. Unlike other guestworker programs, J-1 employers don’t have to advertise jobs locally to show that Americans don’t want them, and there is no limit on the number of J-1 visas issued. The H2A agricultural guestworker program brings 40,000 workers while H2B, the non-agricultural program, is capped at 65,000. After Michigan public workers got a 3 percent raise for 2010-2011, the legislature passed a bill forcing them to pay … 3 percent of their salaries into their retirement healthcare fund. Now, an appeals court has overturned that requirement. The IBEW is putting pressure on NV Energy for some extremely good reasons : America’s leading consumer research firm once gave NV Energy the highest ranking for customer service in the West. But after years the eliminating service line crews and the closure of all but one customer service office in the state - NV Energy ranks dead last. Executives have pushed these cuts while reporting over $225 million in profit and paying CEO Michael Yackira nearly $5.3 million. And now, NV Energy is breaking its promise to retirees by slashing their health care when they need it most. The Shame on NV Energy campaign has a very active Facebook page filled with pissed-off customers. Public Citizen : Over the past 20 years, at least 523 workers have died and more than 43,000 have suffered heat-related injuries serious enough to result in at least one day away from work. However, because many worker injuries and deaths go unreported and many serious injuries are not counted in company data, even these numbers are probably a vast underestimate of the true scale of the problem, the groups said. “The epidemic of worker injury and death due to extreme heat exposure is only projected to worsen with global warming, as we see more frequent days of extreme heat,” said Dr. Sammy Almashat, researcher with Public Citizen’s Health Research Group. “Yet OSHA has repeatedly refused to act on recommendations from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and its own advisory committee to enact a heat standard that would protect workers from these entirely preventable health effects. As a result, tens of thousands of workers have suffered serious injury or death while OSHA essentially relies on employers to police themselves.” Speaking of workers who are vulnerable to heat-related illness and death, the United Farmworkers are continuing their march to Sacramento while California Gov. Jerry Brown proposes inadequate changes to existing legislation, arguing that the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act, a bill that’s been passed repeatedly by the state legislature, hasn’t had an adequate debate. In another heat-related story, nearly 300 workers at factories making H&M clothes passed out over a period of two days. H&M says it’s investigating. Click here to find a Labor Day event near you. And let your friends know who you ♥ this Labor day.

View original post here:
This week in the War on Workers

WASHINGTON — The Republican race for the White House is about to accelerate dramatically, with a series of debates and events testing whether Rick Perry has staying power and Mitt Romney can keep focusing on the president instead of his GOP rivals. September also may settle the field for good, with Sarah Palin perhaps deciding at last whether to run. Read More… More on Rick Perry 2012

More:
Rick Perry: As GOP Race Ramps Up, Can He Stay Atop The Field?

URBANDALE, Iowa (Reuters) - Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said on Friday there was room for more candidates in the presidential race, but stopped short of announcing whether she would launch her own bid for the White House. Palin, the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee in 2008, has said she expects to make a decision this month about whether to seek the party’s nomination to run against President Barack Obama in next year’s election. Speaking in a suburb of Des Moines, Iowa, on Friday, Palin declined to say if an announcement could come Saturday, when she is due to address a Tea Party rally in Indianola, Iowa. Read More…

Read the original post:
Palin sees room for more White House candidates

SC: Obama can play with majority of GOP field The general election numbers out of South Carolina, published on Thursday by our polling pals at PPP, are the prime example of two trends that have defined this summer’s understanding of the 2012 presidential campaign. Specifically, these two points: 1) Barack Obama’s numbers, at present, are pretty awful for a president seeking reelection; and 2) the GOP’s field of contenders and pretenders, by and large, are in a shockingly bad position to do anything about it. In South Carolina, a traditionally red state, that means that Barack Obama would be, hard as it might be to believe, even money against three of the five leading GOP contenders. Public Policy Polling . 8/25-8/28. South Carolina voters. MoE +/- 4.0%. ( 6/10 results): Mitt Romney (R): 53 (50) Barack Obama (D): 38 (41) Rick Perry (R): 49 (–) Barack Obama (D): 41 (–) Newt Gingrich (R): 45 (44) Barack Obama (D): 44 (46) Barack Obama (D): 45 (48) Sarah Palin (R): 45 (43) Barack Obama (D): 44 (–) Michele Bachmann (R): 44 (–) Despite a summer that has seen the president take a noticeable hit in his job approvals, he still fights to a draw against the usual GOP doormats (Gingrich and Palin). More telling, perhaps: Obama fights to a draw with Michele Bachmann, who has had her worst polling week in the cycle. Of course, this smattering of “good news” becomes irrelevant if Romney or Perry emerge as the GOP nominee. Both of these men hold leads that either reach or exceed the margin enjoyed by John McCain here in 2008. As is the case elsewhere, PPP provides additional ammunition for Mitt Romney to make an “electability” argument with GOP primary voters. While Perry isn’t much of a danger to lose to Obama in South Carolina, the fact that his lead is half of what Romney’s is underscores the considerably greater tolerance that indie voters have for Romney than they do for the more vocally partisan Perry. As with other southern states, the most interesting dichotomy to examine in South Carolina is the chasm between white and African-American voters as it relates to the president’s job approval. African-American voters offer up a lofty 86 percent job approval rating for the president. Among white residents of the Palmetto State, Obama’s job approval craters to just 25 percent. As a result, Obama does no better than 30 percent against any of the GOP hopefuls. As a practical matter, that performance with white voters renders it nearly impossible to envision a path to victory here, barring a putrid turnout here among white voters. In addition, most of the undecided voters here are white voters, which would make it reasonable to conclude that the margins for the GOP here are probably low-balling it slightly. Not that Democrats were counting on flipping South Carolina and adding it to the Obama coalition, but the numbers here indicate the improbability of just such a scenario. That it is as close as it is underscores, yet again, how politically toxic several of the GOP’s first tier have become.

Read more from the original source: 
SC-Pres: Only Perry and Romney keep this red state solidly in GOP column

Still to be negotiated: whether Palin can enter the debate by driving her bus through a ring of fire. I think CNN may be trying to kill us. They have announced who has been invited to their September 12th debate, and it includes, rather inexplicably, two “candidates” who aren’t currently even running for the office : In a statement, CNN announces its line-up for the September 12 Tea Party Express co-sponsored debate in Tampa: Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Gov. Mitt Romney, Rep. Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Jon Huntsman. The network adds that Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin were invited: “Giuliani declined the debate invitation, while a Palin representative has yet to respond to it.” You’ve got to be kidding me, right? We’re still pretending Rick Santorum is somehow worthy of inclusion over, say, Gary Johnson or Buddy Roemer, but somehow CNN is still so hard up for slots that they’re inviting two Republicans who aren’t even running ? Are we all that hard up for Sarah Palin news, that CNN is desperate to generate some whether she’s running or not? Luckily, Rudy Giuliani declined the invitation. The debate is September 12th, which is of course the day after the 9/11 anniversary, and Giuliani probably figures he will not have recovered from his day-long screaming orgasm.

See the rest here: 
CNN extends debate invitations to Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani, even though they’re not candidates

The importance of this new study is that it has identified another potential contributor to low birth weight in a population of infants already at risk: those born to low-income populations with poor access to good nutrition and prenatal care. Read More… More on Personal Health

The rest is here:
Sarah Janssen: New Study Links Flame Retardants to Lower Birth Weight