Author: David Weigel

WorldNetDaily’s Bob Unruh has a lot of fun with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on new right-wing extremist groups, calling up some of the leaders named and shamed and finding — surprise — a lot of mockery and skepticism.

Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers, told WND such accusers try to link activists with terrorists such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, because their arguments have no substance… “We want our government to return to the constitutional republic which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution defined and instituted,” he said.

And a less controversial group jumps in:

Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America … told WND the SPLC report was little more than “fundraising, trying to scare a bunch of little old ladies to cough up money.”

“It’s a typical argument that the left resorts to,” he said, “since they really have trouble with the fact that, until Obama was elected, they had been pretty successful at concealing that liberalism really is socialism.”

Like I said in a short post about the release of the report, this stuff doesn’t really bother the right — calling out their fringe as a possible threat to national security is laughed off as hyperbole.

The song and video of “O.T.P. – One Term President” by “Wolverines” has been making the rounds — the fate of all eyebrow-raising conservative rap, I suppose. But I don’t think anyone else has pointed out the video history of rapper Molotov Mitchell, the bearded guy who rhymes “Thought I was votin’ for hope/ I was votin’ for a bum, man!” He broke into the conservative web scene with a series of videos investigating Barack Obama’s citizenship, like this one:

From there he started making videos titled “For the Record,” which appeared on WorldNetDaily.com. Here’s one of the early ones in which he urges Americans to avoid enlisting in the armed forces as long as Obama is president.

“If you want to protect your country,” says Mitchell, “start a militia.”

Republicans are having a good time today looking over the wreckage of what Democrats once hoped could be serious re-election challenges for Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee. A Tea Party candidate’s primary campaign against Sessions crashed and burned, drawing less than 17 percent of the vote.

And more embarrassing for Democrats: The winner of the primary to challenge Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas), who holds a seat the party held from 2007 to 2009, is a member of the Lyndon LaRouche cult, which has pivoted sort of brilliantly from anti-Bush conspiracy theories to anti-Obama conspiracy theories. When I was in Massachusetts, LaRouche activists worked Scott Brown events to find gullible voters who’d voted for “anti-bailout” cult candidates.

For months, liberals have watched the Texas State Board of Education debate standards for new textbooks, with Gov. Rick Perry-appointed member Don McLeroy leading the charge for standards more in line with conservative ideology. Some examples from a mid-February profile of the board:

McLeroy moved that Margaret Sanger, the birth-control pioneer, be included because she “and her followers promoted eugenics,” that language be inserted about Ronald Reagan’s “leadership in restoring national confidence” following Jimmy Carter’s presidency and that students be instructed to “describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” The injection of partisan politics into education went so far that at one point another Republican board member burst out in seemingly embarrassed exasperation, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!” Nevertheless, most of McLeroy’s proposed amendments passed by a show of hands.

Last night, McLeroy narrowly lost the Republican primary for another term on the board to challenger Thomas Ratcliff, while his ally Geraldine Miller lost her seat to another first-time candidate. No Democrats are running for these seats, which means the moderate Republicans who ousted McLeroy and Miller will take their places on the board.

Dave Itzkoff ribs Sarah Palin, in perfect New York Times style, for a strange complaint made on the program formerly known as The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien. Palin’s version of her criticism of “Family Guy,” which recently featured a Down Syndrome actress doing the voice for a Down Syndrome character whose mother was “the former governor of Alaska”:

Somebody making a joke that wasn’t so funny because it was a lame episode of the “Family Guy,” but a special-needs family asking me what I thought about the episode. I commented and then that gets out there in the blogosphere, it gets out there in the different forms of the mediums that we have today. And then it’s left there, not an opportunity for me to follow up and kind of elaborate on what I really meant and what I really thought of the thing.

Itzkoff:

The New York Times had previously sought comment from Ms. Palin about the “Family Guy” episode and Ms. Friedman’s response to her, but neither her press representative nor her political action committee replied to requests.

This is sort of what I’ve written about in the past. Plenty of reporters wrote on Palin’s Facebook post about “Family Guy,” and most made a good faith effort to ask her a follow-up question. The Times, enterprisingly, published a stinging rebuke to Palin from the actress, Andrea Fay Friedman. And even then, the paper got no response from Palin.

The much-discussed primary challenge that Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) faced from three Tea Party activists ended with a whimper last night. Paul won 80.8 percent of the vote against Tim Graney (9.7 percent), John Gay (5.3 percent), and Gerald Wall (4.2 percent).

Hours before the polls closed, here’s how Politico handicapped it:

The question is whether he’ll win the nomination outright with more than 50 percent or be forced into a runoff. If a Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll victor like Paul — who has built a career out of trying to shrink the size and scope of government — is held to a modest mid-50s winning percentage, it might serve as a flashing sign of caution for other GOP incumbents facing tea party-oriented challengers.

Well, so much for that. There was even more hype about a possible Paul embarrassment in 2008, when a pro-war city councilman challenged him and convinced some conservative bloggers that Paul was beatable. Paul crushed him by 40 points. For all of the whining about his alleged unpopularity in the district, Paul has a fantastic operation there.

Jonathan Martin has more on the inability of Tea Party candidates to live up to the hype.

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R-Ky.) blockade on extending temporarily unemployment benefits put the Tea Party movement in an unfamiliar position. Instead of nudging the Republican Party to take a stand, activists watched a politician pick an anti-government fight they didn’t even know existed.

“We’ve just been so consumed with the health care issue,” said Jennifer Hulsey, a Georgia-based leader of the American Grassroots coalition. “People are only now starting to take a stand on this.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

After a slow weekend, said Hulsey, the group only developed a position on Bunning’s blockade during a Tuesday night conference call, shortly after Bunning relented. Other conservative activists and Tea Party groups also took their time in responding — but in the end, most of them got behind Bunning. What Democrats saw as a perfect opportunity to turn American opinion against Republican obstructionism in the Senate became, with only a few exceptions, an opportunity for conservatives to endorse a slowdown of Senate business. Late Tuesday, when Bunning announced a hold on all pending nominations, activists were confident that Democrats would blink first in a conflict that the majority party could have ended on day one, had they been honest about what they were doing and willing to invoke cloture.

“Senator Jim Bunning has taken a courageous stand, to hold the Democrats — in fact, all of us — accountable for the the things we say we believe,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). Bunning, argued DeMint, was making a point about Democratic hypocrisy on “pay-as-you-go” rules, and Democrats were spinning unfair scare stories about Americans left without unemployment benefits.

“I admire the courage of the junior senator from Kentucky,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who in his role leading the National Republican Senatorial Committee is tasked with electing a Republican to replace the retiring Bunning. “It’s not fun to be accused of having no compassion for the people who are out of work.”

The conservative enthusiasm for Bunning echoed in his state, where he was once so unpopular that Republicans not-so-quietly urged him to step aside. All three of the Republicans seeking to replace Bunning endorsed his stance, starting with frontrunner Rand Paul. At a rally in Lexington, pro-Bunning activists stood with Paul and chanted “Pay Go, Pay Go.” That chant revealed how, after a fitful start, Bunning’s explanation for his blockade — he is not opposing all aid, just that which would add to the deficit — had trickled down to the conservative base.

Like the Tea Party organizers, Democrats and liberal activists didn’t anticipate Bunning’s blockade. But unlike their opposites on the right, they had been looking for a fight to demonstrate how Republicans are gumming up their legislation. And in the search for a villain, Bunning seemed to come from central casting. Never a fan of political etiquitte, Bunning responded to a criticism from freshman Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) with a crisp insult: “Tough shit.” When ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl attempted to buttonhole Bunning with questions, the senator made a rude gesture and physically prevented him from entering an elevator.

“We need this to end,” wrote Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in a column for the Huffington Post. “Debate big differences. Disagree. Use the filibuster when big matters of principle hang in the balance — and sometimes they do. But at the end of the day, Washington has to function — people are counting on it.”

Conservative activists hesitated in responding to that spin. But by Tuesday, when the stunt was reaching an end after four days, the smart take was that Democrats were intentionally letting Bunning act out in order to make a political point. Conservatives like Erick Erickson of RedState took obvious delight in being pilloried by liberal organizations like Media Matters when they spoke out for Bunning. In a series of blog posts, Erickson argued that Democrats could have stopped Bunning’s filibuster on day one, but had instead sparked an ideological argument that conservatives should be happy to have.

“Reid is doing this for a photo op,” Erickson told TWI, arguing that the majority leader was misleading voters by letting Bunning’s stand be portrayed as a filibuster. “He has the votes. It’s just one senator [who] said he will not go along with unanimous consent without knowing where the money is coming from.”

By the time Bunning abandoned his quest, that was conventional wisdom among conservatives. “Liberals think they have discovered a winning issue – conservative obstructionism,” wrote conservative activist Gary Bauer in a daily e-mail message to supporters. “Today, all three major networks tuned in to the Senate’s proceedings to broadcast live coverage of Senator Bunning blocking the $10 billion ‘emergency’ spending bill. This one appropriation is not newsworthy, but the Left thinks Bunning is making its case as to why socialized medicine must be passed using budget reconciliation rules. This is a perfect example of how the media distort what conservatives in Washington are doing and how they manipulate the news.”

According to Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, the furor over Bunning was the latest in a line of liberal campaigns to make conservatives like Rush Limbaugh the face of obstructionism, and the reason that Democrats couldn’t get bills through the Senate.

“For all the talk of Obama as some kind of messiah, I see a bunch of guys trying to score junior high school tactical wins,” said Norquist. “They keep setting up cheap shots against these straw men. If setting up a phony fight with Limbaugh didn’t work, you think a fight with Jim Bunning will? Who’s Jim Bunning? You have to explain this to voters who haven’t even heard of him.”

Not everyone in the grassroots, given some time to watch the strategy, agreed with Bunning.

“He comes across as a hardass, don’t you think?” mused Robin Stublen, a Florida Tea Party activist who’s often critical of Republican efforts to court the movement. “Some of his argument was legitimate. Some of it was grandstanding.”

That kind of criticism, however, was a distinct minority.

“Some weak-willed Republicans don’t want the GOP to be cast as the heartless Scrooges taking away ‘temporary’ unemployment benefits that have become enshrined permanently,” wrote conservative blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin. “If Republicans can’t stand up and question the permanent Nanny State and can’t point out the unintended consequences of liberal intentions without folding like card tables, what good are they?”

“I’m glad someone up there is finally asking the question, how are we going to pay for this?” said Judson Phillips, whose Tea Party Nation group sponsored the National Tea Party Convention. “In my family, when our income is down, that is the first question we ask. I don’t care how important the spending is. That question must be answered.”

From an RNC press release, here’s a hint at just who’s moping about Harold Ford’s aborted Senate bid.

U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul is holding a 3 p.m. rally in Lexington, Ky. to support Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R-Ky.) block on extending unemployment and health insurance.

“Jim Bunning is being unfairly attacked for saying we should spend money already set aside for benefits rather than borrowing more,” says Paul in a press release. “He deserves our support and he is going to get it.”

I called the campaign of Paul’s rival, Trey Grayson, and will update when I find out what, if anything, he is doing in reaction to Bunning.

Michael Zak, the historian who wrote the biographies of famous black Republicans on the GOP’s “Heroes” page, has an op-ed at Big Government comparing ACORN’s rumored restructuring and rebranding efforts to that of the Ku Klux Klan. The connection? Well, the Ku Klux Klan tried to suppress votes or engineer fraud, and ACORN has been caught registering bogus voters.

Like ACORN, the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity until Republican politicians and journalists sounded an alarm. In 1869, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK’s Grand Dragon, ordered the Klan disbanded.  Why?  The national organization was getting too much attention, so Klansmen would have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as the Red Shirts in South Carolina and the Men of Justice in Alabama. Nonetheless, most members of these spin-off groups considered themselves to be Klansmen.

The fact that the KKK suppressed and terrorized black voters while ACORN, well, doesn’t — sort of left out here.

Via Matt Vadum.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors right-wing extremist activity, finds “that an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244% jump” from 2008.

There’s a lot of commentary about how conservatives are hamstrung when talking about race, or issues that touch on race at all — immediately, they’re accused of racism. But I think that militia/right-wing extremism presents a comparable rhetorical problem for the left. Pointing out that militia activity or conspiracy-mongering is on the rise is, as we saw last year, seen a slander on Americans who criticize the government, an attempt by liberals to rule all of that out of bounds.

Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) gets his first good news in a while with a Quinnipiac poll that has him recovering a lead over Pat Toomey, the GOP candidate who nearly ousted the senator in 2004. He has a 49-42 lead and a 48 percent approval rating.

Other, ambient good news for Democrats — Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) has a robust 53-29 job approval rating and President Obama, despite slippage with independents, is hovering at 49 percent approval, just where he’s been since October 2009. I think that’s in line with national polls which argue against the narrative of some Obama freefall — the president has been bruised but narrowly popular for months.

Ben Smith has a rose-colored look at a possible Senate run in New York by Mort Zuckerman, the 72-year-old media mogul and pundit who seems interested in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-N.Y.) seat and is — like Harold Ford did, until last night — getting nothing but kudos from the state’s moneyed elite.

Zuckerman, who owns the New York Daily News and U.S.News & World Report, has been a practicing pundit for years and “has always wanted to be in the political mix,” said Howard Rubenstein, the New York PR man and a Zuckerman friend. More important, the weaknesses of his likely opponent, Gillibrand, are clear to everyone, and a statewide office has rarely seemed so ripe for the plucking.

“He’d be her ‘worst possible opponent’ among possible candidates, said Democratic political consultant Dan Gerstein.

The Daily Progress’s writeup of a Tea Party-sponsored Republican candidate forum in Virginia’s 5th district — seen as one of the best opportunities for the GOP to take back a seat lost in 2008 — is being mined for quotes by liberal bloggers, and I see why. Second-tier candidate Lawrence Verga calls Barack Obama’s election win “political correctness gone awry,” endorsing the much-whispered-about, rarely-spoken-aloud argument that Americans elected an unqualified president because he was black. But I’m just as fascinated by the comments of Robert Hurt, the establishment-backed front-runner.

Hurt said Climategate is “scientists who have given us something that is not true. It is faulty information and it has real consequences in the 5th District, in the loss of jobs and in power bills from Appalachian Power Co.”

Residents have power bills that exceed their income and businesses are closing or talking about moving overseas, he said.

“How is that possible?” Hurt asked. “It’s possible because of regulation and the idea that bureaucrats in Washington know better than anybody else.

“I would try to repeal those regulations,” Hurt said.

This isn’t rhetoric that should damage Hurt in this district — historically conservative, it voted narrow for McCain-Palin in 2008 — but it’s interesting to see how far he’ll go to please Tea Partiers. Another example, snagged by Howie Klein: Ed Martin, fighting a surprisingly strong race in a historically Democratic seat in Missouri, posts pictures of Tea Partiers holding “Obama = Communist” signs at a rally.

While working on something unrelated, I realized that none of the men and women currently being discussed as 2012 GOP challengers to President Barack Obama had served in the military. With the exception of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who was an Air Force surgeon and who most handicappers consider too old to make a new run in 2012, no one on the starting line-up has any military service. Either they got deferments during the Vietnam era or they were too young to serve.

Here’s a quick rundown, based mostly on Politics1’s excellent list. I didn’t include Dick Cheney (who did not serve) or Scott Brown (a Lieutenant Colonel in the Massachusetts National Guard), as their candidacies are pretty much the stuff of D.C. cocktail party chatter. And while Democrats tried (and failed) to make an issue out of George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service, 2012 will likely be the first year that the GOP’s nominee has no military experience whatsoever since it nominated Thomas Dewey in 1948.

Newt Gingrich: Born in 1943. During the Vietnam War he attended various schools; he received a deferment.

Mitt Romney: Born in 1947. During the Vietnam War he attended Stanford, then did missionary work in France, then got married and attended Brigham Young University. He also received a deferment.

Haley Barbour: Born in 1947. During the Vietnam War he attended the University of Mississippi, worked for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, ran the census in his state, and returned to Ole Miss for law school.

Mitch Daniels: Born in 1949. During the Vietnam War he attended Princeton and worked for then-Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar.

Gary Johnson: Born in 1953, and attended the University of New Mexico during the last years of the Vietnam War.

Mike Huckabee: Born in 1955, and was just reaching enlistment age when troops stopped heading to Vietnam.

Mike Pence: Born in 1959 and dived into radio broadcasting right after college.

Tim Pawlenty: Born in 1960.

John Thune: Born in 1961.

Sarah Palin: Born in 1964.

Bobby Jindal: Born in 1971.

I think all of this matters in two ways. In the primary, it means no GOPer has a natural base among veterans, who compose huge chunks of the electorate in the early states of South Carolina and Florida. In the general, it might complicate the effort to go after Obama on matters of national security.

His political career looked dead after his humiliating 2006 campaign for lieutenant governor of Georgia — he lost the primary by 14 points, dogged by his ties to Jack Abramoff — but David Brody has Ralph Reed mulling a run for Congress in a safe Republican seat.

Sources close to Ralph Reed tell The Brody File that the former Executive Director of the Christian Coalition is “seriously” considering running for Congress in Georgia.  According to one well-placed source, Reed has talked to key grassroots leaders and local elected officials in Gwinnett county and other parts of the district, but has not made a decision yet.

As Brody points out, Reed dived back into political activism last year with the Faith and Freedom Coalition — an organization I haven’t yet seen making a huge impact.

The liberal group sends an appeal to its list asking for a fairly small amount of aid to Bill Halter, the lieutenant governor of Arkansas who just entered the primary against Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.).

Primary challenges have been among the least appreciated, most impactful stories of this Congress. In January 2009, it was not at all clear that Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) would be solid liberal votes; it was not clear how Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) would vote at all. But all worked to stave off primary challenges from their parties’ respective bases — so far, only Gillibrand has succeeded — by moving away from the center and taking on big fights. Will Halter force Lincoln to the left? That’s an open question, but so is her unpopularity in a state with an incredibly popular Democratic governor.

Dear MoveOn member,

For the past year, a small handful of conservative Democrats in Congress has obstructed progress at every turn—but starting today, we’ve got a huge opportunity to stop one of the worst of them.

That’s because just this morning Arkansas Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter announced that he’s challenging Senator Blanche Lincoln in the Democratic primary there.

Sen. Lincoln stood with insurance companies to kill the public option, with coal companies to roll back the Clean Air Act, and with big banks to kill legislation that would have helped families stay in their homes.

If we can replace her with progressive Bill Halter, it’ll put every conservative Democrat in Washington on notice that siding with corporate interests has a heavy political price.

But Halter needs to quickly raise enough money to compete with Lincoln, who has over $5 million in the bank, much of it raised from corporate interests.

So a major coalition of progressive groups has set a goal of raising $500,000 for Bill Halter this week. That’d make headlines, but it’ll take 314 donations from New York to meet the goal—can you chip in $300?

Just how bad is Blanche Lincoln?

She promised to filibuster any health care bill that included a public option after taking more than $866,000 from insurance and HMO interests.4 She’s the #1 recipient of campaign contributions from Big Oil in the last year, and now she’s sponsoring a bill to roll back the Clean Air Act.5 And she accepted more than $1.3 million over her career from Wall Street banks and financial interests, and then voted to kill legislation that would’ve allowed struggling homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages and stay in their homes.

Here’s how MoveOn member Jennifer P. from Little Rock put it: “Lincoln never met a special interest she didn’t like. It’s hard to express just how awful she has been as a senator. I don’t know of anyone who will vote for her if she shows up on the November ballot.” That’s why MoveOn members in Arkansas voted 92% to support Halter’s campaign to replace her.

Fortunately, we’ve got a much better alternative. Bill Halter has a progressive record as lieutenant governor and he’s willing to take on big corporations when he gets to Washington.

Click here to donate to his campaign:

In announcing his candidacy today, Halter said: “Washington is broken. Bailing out Wall Street with no strings attached while leaving middle-class Arkansas taxpayers with the bill. Protecting insurance company profits instead of protecting patients and lowering health costs. Gridlock, bickering, and partisan games while unemployment is at a 25-year high. Enough is enough.”

Halter’s well-positioned to beat Lincoln, and her approval ratings are so low that he has a much better chance of keeping the seat Democratic—but only if he can quickly raise enough money to compete. And given her unpopularity, Lincoln’s likely strategy is to flood the air immediately with attack ads to keep him from building the momentum he needs to win.

So we need to get Bill Halter’s campaign off to a huge start. Can you chip in $300 towards our goal of 314 donations from New York to his campaign this week?

Thanks for all you do.

–Adam, Wes, Nita, Michael, and the rest of the team

Tom Tancredo does an interview with the Dutch paper Handelsblad — which treats him, credulously, as a “Tea Party prominent” — and drops the hammer on his co-Tea Party Convention speaker Sarah Palin.

“I really don’t have this feeling about her as being presidential,” Tancredo said. “I don’t know what it is exactly. I don’t know if the issues really are that difficult for her or not.”

He questions if she has what it takes, and whether she really wants it. “As governor of the state of Alaska, she doesn’t have all that kind of experience. She can get better. But I don’t know if she is really looking to do it.’’

It could all be a commercial thing, just a way to sell books?

“Sure. Make a lot of money and stay in the mix. I think that’s a great idea.’’

John McCain has brought over his former running mate to campaign for him in Arizona, where the Tea Party movement is challenging his seat in the Senate.

She will campaign against J.D. Hayworth, a friend of yours who is on your side in the immigration debate. What does that tell you about Palin?

“That tells me she is a Republican. I am not. I mean, I am a member of that party and that will always stay that way. But to me it’s only a mechanism, a way to get on the ballot and all that. But she is a real Republican.’’

Tancredo’s unlikely to ever re-enter electoral politics, but he remains a hero to a segment of the GOP base that overlaps with Palin’s base.

Democrats are passing around this article by election handicapper Stuart Rothenberg, which takes the hammer and tongs to Rasmussen Reports. Rothenberg focuses on a poll that finds Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) weak against a first-time candidate.

Dave Westlake probably is a nice guy, and I wish him well. But there is no way that two out of three likely Wisconsin voters know enough about him to have an opinion of him (unless Rasmussen provided other information, such as party). And that’s what the favorable/unfavorable question is intended to produce — information about the person’s name identification and image.

I asked Scott Rasmussen to respond. “I think it’s funny,” he said, “that some people like to pick at the details rather than focusing on the overall accuracy of our work.”

Rasmussen’s full answers after the jump:

We ask favs after the ballot question. So, the little known candidates get a lot of very “somewhat” fav or unfav depending upon which party they’re in.

That’s the reason we emphasize the Strong opinions in our stories.

We ask favs after the ballot question for two reasons. First, the ballot question is most important. Second, most people may not know the names of challengers even on election day. But they have an opinion along the lines of “Oh yeah, that’s who’s running against Senator so-and-so.”

I think it’s funny that some people like to pick at the details rather than focusing on the overall accuracy of our work.

It’s also interesting that people fail to note other aspects of our polling. For example, in the Rothenberg article, he claims that Daggett underperformed all the polls. Actually, we nailed the NJ race (we showed Dagget with 8 and he got 6). It was the operator-assisted polls that showed Dagget with a bigger number.

Another example is in Nevada where our latest polling shows the most favorable result for Harry Reid.

Joan Walsh points to a video I’d been wondering about — the footage shot by cameramen who were trailing Andrew Breitbart at CPAC, monitoring his conversations with journalists and liberal bloggers. The exchange captured in this blog post is in there, complete with Breitbart leaning into my notebook for emphasis.

A quick recap of my role here — I asked Hannah Giles about the charge, leveled by a lot of liberal bloggers, that she and James O’Keefe had misled people by claiming he dressed as a flamboyant pimp in the ACORN sting videos. She responded that the flamboyant costume was filmed later, for B-roll. Why Media Matters and other organizations think this dispute can discredit the ACORN tapes, I’m not sure — Giles was clearly dressed as a prostitute, and both her and O’Keefe spun wild, illegal scenarios that some ACORN employees appeared ready to help cover up. And while Breitbart was annoyed that this was becoming a debate, he was obviously happy to have the ACORN scandal bubble into the blogosphere once again.