Posts Tagged ‘scott brown’

Will Scott Brown become the Fishbait Miller of the Senate?

Posted: November 8, 2010 by datechguy in politics
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When heading toward re-election pols tend to take the feelings of the voters back home a lot more seriously.

In Maine for example Republicans swept statewide elections pretty solidly. It should have an interesting effect on Maine two liberal republicans and the day of their next race comes closer.

In Massachusetts the clean sweep of offices for democrats will likely not be lost on Scott Brown when election day 2012 comes around. The same turnout machine that pushed Patrick et/al will still exist, and may even be aided by national money.

But the dynamic in the Senate has changed dramatically as George Will puts it:

When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had 40 or 41 senators in his caucus, he usually had 40 or 41 votes when he felt he urgently needed them. Beginning in January, with at least 46 senators, he will always have 41 votes when he really wants them.

There are going to be times when Scott Brown is going to want to demonstrate his “independence” from the GOP caucus. With 6 votes to give McConnell will be able to do without Brown, or Collins or Snowe and still stop anything he needs to.

The question is this. Will he gain more sympathy at home opposing the GOP or not. Or to put it another way. We know the machine will be against him no matter what he does, so will he make more points with the electorate with the electorate going left or going right?

Of course he could just do the right thing and do what he thinks is right…

On Tuesday evening we are going to find out who is right on O’Donnell

Posted: October 28, 2010 by datechguy in elections, opinion/news, politics, tea parties
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Tuesday at the debate I was talking Big Red Wave with an aide to a republican candidate for statewide office, although he was feeling highly confident on his local race when I said to him that the wave would be even bigger.

I started mentioning the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen in district after district he was unimpressed.

When I brought up Christine O’Donnell and Chris Coon’s sudden Volte Face he immediately dismissed me as ignorant and my opinion unworthy.

Well if all he sees are polls like this that’s one thing, but then there is stuff like this:

Yesterday, a poll went around showing Christine O’Donnell just five points behind Commie Coons in Delaware’s Senate race. This SORT OF explains the weird amount of time the White House has been spending in a slam dunk blue state.

But, Democrats are ferociously attacking CoD as hard as they attacked Scott Brown in Massachusetts. If she is so far behind, what is the point in beating up on this woman?

This is anecdotal, but I think I know why they are doing this…just like with Hottie McAwesome there are internals showing O’Donnell ahead.

Today I talked to a friend from Team Hillary who is a big Dem fundraiser. He told me that for the last week or so the DNC has been at DEFCON 1 leaning HARD on the rainmakers because they are terrified of a CoD win in Delaware.

and this:

We have seen reliable polling that shows O’Donnell is within single digits, and Coons can’t break 50%. What is more, these polls rely on a turn-out model that is relatively conservative and, contrary to what pundits think, a much higher than normal turn-out could mean the polls are off by as much as 5-6 or more points. In the primary, most polls showed O’Donnell down by a few or tied, however she won by 6 points, a figure higher than most of the pre-vote polls and outside of their margin of error.

Why is this happening, and why might the pundits, once again, have egg on their face on election day?

Voters in Delaware are learning from reliable internet sources, despite a near blackout by the elite political press, more and more about Coons and his record.

One is right and one is wrong, but I can’t forget the Globe polls that showed Martha Coakley up 15 points:

Coakley’s lead grows to 17 points – 53 percent to 36 percent – when undecideds leaning toward a candidate are included in the tally. The results indicate that Brown has a steep hill to climb to pull off an upset in the Jan. 19 election. Indeed, the poll indicated that nearly two-thirds of Brown’s supporters believe Coakley will win.

and of course my favorite of all newspaper quotes:

The Mainstream media knows all

Somebody is right here and somebody is wrong here, by this time next week we will find out.

Update: Of course liberals always use these tactics when up 15 pts don’t they?

As you might guess I don’t agree with Jane Hamsher much…

Posted: September 1, 2010 by datechguy in elections, media, politics, tea parties
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…but when it comes to the health care bill she is one of the few people on the left looking at the political consequences with open eyes:

The DCCC was very good at getting not-so-savvy poll analysts to try and discredit the SurveyUSA polling. (Those same pollsters, ironically, didn’t see anything weird in the Research 2000 polls they were quoting authoritatively at the time, which many now find suspect — though Jerome Armstrong spotted it). Somehow Democratic members of Congress engaged in magical thinking and believed Rahm’s BS about the popularity of the health care bill increasing if it passed.

Rather than focus on jobs creation in a country with climbing unemployment rates, Obama spent the better part of a year focused on passing a health care bill that looks like it will play no small part in the Democratic Party’s upcoming electoral woes.

Well, we warned you.

I’ll go one step farther. The Election of Scott Brown was the real breaking of the dam and the thing that made the Brown Election was the chance to stop the Healthcare bill. Forgetting everything else, the morale factor that the Election of Brown had for the tea parties and the GOP can’t be overestimated. Without the Brown victory you don’t have Miller in Alaska you don’t have the GOP establishment defeats in Utah & NC.

Brown’s election Made the Tea Party and the election climate that we have this fall, and the Healthcare Bill made Brown.

Democrats did this to themselves, Hamsher & Co tried to warn them.

I should point out that legal insurrection dissents:

I’m not buying that spin. It is true that Hamsher had some of the most devastating critiques of Obamacare. But when I wrote my Open Letter in January 2010 to Hamsher asking her to join us in defeating Obamacare, there was no response, either directly or indirectly, in words or in action. Instead, Hamsher and others were focused on improving (e.g. public option) not defeating the legislation, an ultimately futiile quest which required a level of subservience to the Democratic leadership in the hope they would come through for you. They didn’t.

Fair point.

memeorandum thread here

On MSNBC Tina Brown and Mika argue for “Diversity of Thought” on Wall Street

Posted: July 28, 2010 by datechguy in employment, internet/free speech, media, opinion/news
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The Gods of Irony head’s are now exploding.

Update: This comes from a discussion of hiring quotas that were included in the bank bill. Brown and Mika both came down on “White Men” and maintained that if there were more women in charge in Wall Street than the bank meltdown wouldn’t have happened. After all we know that women are not greedy and could never run a company into the ground or lie or steal or cheat.

Are we actually hearing people saying this in the year 2010? I was waiting for them to call for Wall Street to be run by a “Wise Latina”.

The details:

Four members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have signed a letter complaining that Section 324 of the conference report titled the “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” “includes a section on race and gender that even those who pride themselves on keeping up with national affairs may have failed to notice.” This provision, which can be found on page 172 of the conference report, may lead to unconstitutional racial and gender preferences being forced on financial institutions covered by the new law.

There’s more:

The Commissioners further argue that these new bureaucrats will be empowered to shall “’develop standards’ for ‘assessing the diversity policies and practices of entities regulated by the agency’ and ‘develop and implement standards and procedures to ensure, to the maximum extent possible, the fair inclusion and utilization of minorities, women, and minority-owned and women-owned businesses in all businesses and activities of the agency.” According to the letter, this new mandate will cover “financial institutions, investment banking firms, mortgage banking firms, asset management firms, brokers, dealers, financial services entities, underwriters, accountants, investment consultants and providers of legal services.” If these institutions are doing business with the government, newly minted bureaucrats will be allowed to study the racial and gender composition of these covered entities work forces to search for companies with not enough minorities and women in a decision making capacity.

If I’m Scott Brown, and the senators from Maine, I’m feeling pretty foolish right now, and you should be.

Update 2: Newsbusters wasted no time jumping on this. They miss the irony part.

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