Author: David Weigel

The big news from today’s Gallup Poll is President Obama’s weak 44-42 lead over a generic Republican 2012 candidate. It’s the kind of support that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had before they went on to struggle in midterms and win re-election, but it’s clearly bad for Democrats.

Still, I’m more interested — in our current moment of Palin hype — by the numbers for actual Republican candidates. The open-ended Gallup survey (that is, they didn’t prompt anyone for names) found Mitt Romney the most-mentioned possible 2012 candidate at 14 percent, with Palin at 11 percent. But in the last month, we’ve seen polls paid for by conservative (Newsmax) and liberal (Daily Kos) organizations that found Palin doing not a whole lot better in the GOP field. The January Newsmax/Zogby poll found Palin at 22.2 percent to Romney’s 19.4 percent. A Research 2000/Daily Kos poll found Palin at 16 percent to Romney’s 11 percent.

We’ve got more frequent polling now than at any point in American political history, but we have a few data points to compare this to, vis-a-vis past presidential races. (Thanks to TWI’s Rachel Hartman for digging this up.)

A July 2002 ABC News/Washington Post poll of Democrats found that former Vice President Al Gore was the clear frontrunner, but asked who’d be in front if Gore passed on the race. The top vote-getter: 2000 veep nominee Joe Lieberman with 21 percent, Tom Daschle with 14 percent, Dick Gephardt with 13 percent and eventual nominee John Kerry with 10 percent.

Similarly, there weren’t many trial heats in early 2006 — and all found Hillary Clinton with a commanding lead — but a USA Today/Gallup poll taken four years ago today found 2004 veep nominee bunched up with Gore and Kerry for second place, at 12 percent. A December 2005 poll that excluded Gore had Edwards and Kerry at 14 percent.

Now, in both of those cases, the parties had clear frontrunners. That July 2002 poll had Gore at 46 percent. Those December 2005 and February 2006 polls had Clinton at 43 percent and 39 percent, respectively.

Is Palin a top 2012 prospect if she runs? Sure, and it’s not clear whether an announcement would push her numbers up or not. But she’s clearly closer to the place that eventual losers Joe Lieberman and John Edwards were — boosted by name recognition — than to the frontrunner status of candidates like Clinton or Gore. Yes, neither of them won the nomination, but it’s still amazing that Palin, with roughly a third or a half the support among her own base that Clinton and Gore had, is uniquely treated as their standard-bearer.

Credit Glenn Beck for consistency. He booked Debra Medina, the out-of-nowhere Tea Party/Ron Paul candidate for governor of Texas and asked her to rebut rumors that she believed the federal government might have been involved in the 9/11 attacks. The result: a choke worthy of Martha Coakley.

BECK: Do you believe the government was in any way involved with the bringing down of the World Trade Centers on 9/11.

MEDINA: I don’t have all of the evidence, there, Glenn. So I don’t… I am not in a place — I have not been out publicly questioning that. I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard. There’s some very good arguments. And I think the American people have not see all of the evidence there. So I have not taken a position on that.

BECK: I think the American people might think that’s a yes.

The right is basically throwing Medina under the bus for this.

An interesting admission in Benjy Sarlin’s interview with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the GOP’s brainy ranking member on the House Budget Committee who’s been targeted by Democrats for his entitlement-cutting proposals.

Ryan said his vote for the bailout was influenced by Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, a popular book among conservatives that argues that Nazism and other fascist movements were actually left wing in origin, and his belief that a second Depression would threaten capitalism—and rescue Obama’s presidency.

“I’m a limited-government, free-enterprise guy, but TARP… represented a moment where we had no good options and we were about to fall into a deflationary spiral,” he said. “I believe Obama would not only have won, but would have been able to sweep through a huge statist agenda very quickly because there would have been no support for the free-market system.”

I’ve had other Republican members of Congress with impeccable fiscal conservative credentials explain their votes in similar terms — I’m thinking Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) — but the citing of Goldberg is a first.

Former John Edwards speechwriter Wendy Button’s mini-memoir of the “mess” is worth reading, especially her account of how he replaced her words — “I lied” — with the anodyne and empty “these words will never be enough.” But after reading it, I wondered where I’d heard of Button before. And then I remembered the rambling, so-sad piece she wrote for the Daily Beast the week before the 2008 election announcing her support for the McCain-Palin ticket, and the follow-up piece she wrote about how mean people were to her. The first article looks, in retrospect, even sillier.

I can no longer justify what this party has done and can’t dismiss the treatment of women and working people as just part of the new kind of politics. It’s wrong and someone has to say that. And also say that the Democratic Party’s talking points—that Senator John McCain is just four more years of the same and that he’s President Bush—are now just hooker lines that fit a very effective and perhaps wave-winning political argument…doesn’t mean they’re true. After all, he is the only one who’s worked in a bipartisan way on big challenges.

Hard to make the case now that a few jabs at Sarah Palin can match — let’s leave Edwards aside — the conservative attack against the “lightweight” Sonia Sotomayor, or “Big Sis” Janet Napolitano, or Nancy Pelosi. And amusing to picture the “bipartisan” John McCain after his year of trench warfare against Obama policies and nominees. Fooled by John Edwards once; fooled by everyone else the rest of the time.

The nine-term Republican from South Florida, who had his first electoral scare in years back during the 2008 election, is retiring. Josh Kraushaar has a good preview/rundown, pointing out that the Obama-Biden ticket scored 49 percent of the vote in the district — it was one of the areas where Obama’s surge among Florida Hispanics caught the McCain-Palin campaign off-guard. As Reid Wilson points out, it’s one of the very few open Republican seats that Democrats could target. One simple reason: Obama’s popularity among Hispanic voters has remained stratospherically high even as white independents have edged away. And this district is almost three-quarters Hispanic.

Also worth noting: Democrats have not been buffeted as badly as some expected since the implosion of Martha Coakley and election of Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.). By my count they’ve watched one Democrat retire in a swing seat (Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas) and one retire in a safe seat (Rep. Diane Watson of California) and lost a big recruitment hope in Delaware (Attorney General Beau Biden). Republicans have responded with strong recruitment, but it’s far from the Democratic run-for-the-exits that some early punditry suggested.

There are rumors that Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) may run for his brother’s open street, a strange possibility with an uncertain political effect — the presidential race was only one point closer in Mario’s FL-24.

Sarah Palin must be the most-polled political figure who doesn’t even hold office, but as long as we’re going to get relentless coverage of her it’s good to get data like this.

Palin’s more popular in her own party — 69 percent of Republicans see her favorably. But far fewer, 37 percent, do so “strongly.” (By contrast, in an ABC/Post poll last month, 70 percent of Democrats had a strongly favorable opinion of Barack Obama.) More problematic for Palin is that even in her own party 52 percent think she’s not qualified for the presidency — up by 16 points from an ABC/Post poll in November, shortly before the publication of her memoir, in which she criticizes the strategy of the 2008 Republican presidential campaign.

Full results here. Palin’s been the beneficiary of some magical thinking from pundits and reporters, as evidenced very well in David Broder’s silly column that shares space with this poll today. It was always obvious that by bailing out of the only powerful job she’d held, Palin was attempting to become a celebrity pol — the kind of candidate that conservatives accused Barack Obama of being, when they groused about the media not examining him enough and spending too much time promoting his “narrative” of unity and change. The problem is that Palin, who has been unpopular for all but one month of her time on the national scene (from joining the GOP ticket to the Couric interviews,) has used her post-gubernatorial career to whine and score-settle and not — as the defenders said she had to — talk about policy in any serious way. Instead she’s filibustered about “common-sense” politics, a silly dodge that’s as old as politics itself.

Anyway, here’s what Bill Kristol wrote in The Washington Post when Palin resigned.

She has fervent supporters, which would presumably help her in primaries and caucuses. Among the general public, she has a not-great but not-unmanageable 45-44 favorability rating.

That was in a June Pew poll. Seven months later, she’s got a 37-55 favorability rating. And here’s Matt Continetti writing when Palin’s book hit the shelves.

Independents are a different story. These are the folks who decide presidential elections, and they are divided on Ms. Palin. In last month’s Gallup poll, Ms. Palin had a 48% unfavorable and 41% favorable rating among independents. Not good, but not insurmountable. Flip those percentages, and they could be serving moose burgers in the White House in 2013.

Today:

Six percent of Democrats now consider her qualified for the presidency, a drop from 22 percent in November; the percentage of independents who think she is qualified fell to 29 percent from 37 percent.

But if she finds a way to move up 21 points, they could be serving moose burgers in the White House!

A lot of people are gobsmacked by this David Broder column on Sarah Palin’s “pitch-perfect populism,” which praises Palin for some pretty unimpressive blather about her hatred of elites. Count me among the gobsmacked. The conclusion just throws me.

When [Chris] Wallace asked her about resigning the governorship with 17 months left in her term and whether she let her opponents drive her from office, she said, “Hell, no.”

Those who want to stop her will need more ammunition than deriding her habit of writing on her hand. The lady is good.

Wait, that’s it? What about the ammunition of her quitting the governorship with 17 months to go — something that would give her the skimpiest public service resume of any candidate since Wendell Wilkie — and giving a weak non-answer as to why? Obviously, Palin was driven from office by her opponents. She said as much!

Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations – such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters’ questions… Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow.”

Translation: Political opponents were mean to her, so she decided to quit. If Broder thinks that can be dismissed with a “hell, no,” his political radar is badly damaged. And I’m not even getting into the farce of a columnist obsessed with bi-partisanship who is finding virtue — perhaps heroism — in a candidate who seems to physically recoil at the though of the other political party.

At around 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 4, Rich Weathers got a call. The Edgewood, Ky., businessman had been a Republican voter and donor for years, so he wasn’t surprised to get a call asking his opinions of Senate candidates Rand Paul and Trey Grayson.

“I would say it seemed like a normal GOP survey call, except I noticed that this was a real live person interviewing me,” said Weathers.

Weathers was asked whether he was following the election and whether he planned to vote; he said yes. Once he said he supported Paul, however, “the call began to deteriorate.” He was informed that Paul opposed “our going into Iraq,” that he’s “for legalization of marijuana,” and that he “supported Roe v. Wade.” That last item isn’t even remotely true.

“I said, wait, this isn’t a survey,” said Weathers. “You have an agenda.”

Weathers asked who the pollster was calling for, and she told him Voter Consumer Research in Houston. VCR, based in Texas and D.C., has polled for former President George W. Bush, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and the three main Republican committees. But as of last night it was unclear who actually funded this poll. It has not billed the NRSC or any campaign in Kentucky, according to FEC data.

“I was hoping for a reasonable GOP survey,” said Weathers, “and got the most blatant push poll I’ve ever seen.”

The Tuesday night meet-and-greet with former Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.) was supposed to draw a bigger crowd. More than 10 people who’d RSVP’d for the event at Reason magazine’s Washington, D.C. offices had begged off, on account of the fresh snow that had started to build on the drifts piled high for nearly a week. That gave the few dozen attendees time to shake off the snow and sample the Whole Foods catering and open bar as they chatted with the affable Johnson. It also gave Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason.com, an opening for a joke.

“Just so you know, Gary is already having an effect,” said Gillespie, bringing a microphone to members of the crowd who were asking questions. “The federal government has announced it’s closing tomorrow. So if you stay here all week, we might balance the budget.”

Johnson, dressed in a blue business suit and standing behind a logo-less podium, chuckled at the gallows humor. The crowd of libertarian activists and a few journalists laughed along. Johnson’s fans included staffers at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the libertarian think tank that’s planning lawsuits against NASA over global warming science, and the Marijuana Policy Project, whose 15th anniversary gala Johnson had spoken at last month. His short presentation and Q&A, a variation of a presentation he’s giving all over the country, rolled out the new three-point economic plan of his Our America organization: deep spending cuts (including cuts to entitlement programs), a flat tax, and less federal regulation of business and immigration.

But what could Johnson do that Tea Party groups and D.C. conservatives weren’t doing already?

“Obviously, he’s going to run for president in a couple years,” said Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economics professor who’s helping out Our America and who came to D.C. to participate in the Q&A. “So that’s one thing that differentiates this from some of the groups that are just putting out statements.”

Since launching Our America late last year, Johnson has been admirably blunt about his intentions. He won’t announce anything yet, but he’s seen what it takes to mount a libertarian-leaning Republican presidential bid, and he’s laying the groundwork to do so. He’s “showing up to speak to whoever asks me,” he says, which means he’s spending much of the most snowy week in 111 years of Washington, D.C.’s history doing media interviews and talking to libertarian groups. In two weeks, he’ll be back to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. And on paper, Johnson is a more spotlight-ready libertarian hero than Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), famous more for his personal lobbying for marijuana legalization (it’s one of Our America’s agenda items) than for a return to the gold standard.

“Right now, we’re where we’d thought I’d be a year from now,” said Johnson in the Q&A. “On the one hand, that’s bad, because it tells you what a state this country is in. Things are worse than we’d thought they’d be. But you’ve also got an energy out there and a desire for something new.”

The effect of the sped-up schedule was on display Tuesday night. Johnson knocked some questions out of the park, arguing that he’d helped change the way voters in New Mexico thought about marijuana after he controversially came out for legalizing and taxing the drug. “When I announced that, my approval rating fell from 58 percent to 28 percent,” he said. “I went all over the state explaining my position. When I left office, my approval rating was 58 percent.” But he responded more generally to other questions, letting Miron flesh out some of his answers. When Reason senior editor Katherine Mangu-Ward asked what Johnson thought of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisc.) alternative budget, a flashpoint for debate among D.C.’s liberals and conservatives, the governor threw up his hands.

“Actually,” said Johnson. “I’m not familiar with it at all.”

“Do you think that it’ll pass, then?” joked Gillespie.

In other answers, Johnson revealed economic policy stances in line with the most conservative elements of the Republican Party, but social stances more popular with the left. He told reporters that he supported the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and supported “gay unions,” but not gay marriage. He’s pro-choice “up to the point of viability.” On a day that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and other conservatives joked that the heavy snow was disproving global warming, Johnson only cricitized environmentalists for being heavy-handed.

“For argument’s sake,” said Johnson, “global warming is happening, it’s man-caused. That given, I think the effects of it are grossly exaggerated and I think the amount of money we’re looking to spend on it is grossly, grossly misguided.”

Our America is a 501(c)3 non-profit group, not a PAC like the ones chaired by Mitt Romney or Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.), and not a 527 like Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions, even though it shares office space with Johnson’s political strategist’s firm. So far, it’s a vehicle for Johnson to tour the country and put his ideas in one place, rather than a way to build his national standing by giving money to Republican candidates. That didn’t prevent him from taking a swipe at the people he might debate if he entered the 2012 race.

“Without exception,” Johnson told TWI, “the current presidential candidates — if you took the 10 or so likely candidates — if you put a piece of cardboard up over their likenesses, if you disguised their voices, you wouldn’t know which is which.”

He poured some cold water on the idea that the GOP had proven itself ready to run the country again, knocking the party for opposing Medicare cuts as a tactic in the debate over health care reform. “It would be a mistake to take Scott Brown’s election for a mandate for Republicans,” he told TWI. “I think people are so angry at everyone in office that they’re willing to vote anyone out.” And he criticized Republicans for supporting the continued wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (”I don’t think any of them could explain why we’re there”) and not coming out against torture.

Nonetheless, he ruled out a third-party bid. “I’m a Republican and I’m going to stay a Republican,” he told TWI.

Johnson also criticized Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.), his successor back home, on the grounds that he’d added more than 4500 jobs to the state payroll after Johnson cut 1000.

“I’d argue that there’s no area of government that’s improved because of these 4500 stones he threw into the machine,” said Johnson. “And that’s just the ‘E.’ I can go A to Z if you. He bought himself a jet — that’s the ‘J.’ He bought himself a train from Albuquerque to Santa Fe — that’s the ‘T.’”

That sort of political point-scoring was a factor missing from Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential bid, a long-shot effort that most libertarians supported — many with reservations — despite being frustrated by the candidate’s lack of commitment to a grueling campaign schedule. Paul had blanched at skipping work in Congress, leading him to schedule fewer campaign events. That’s a problem that the independently wealthy Johnson — he sold his construction company 11 years ago — doesn’t have. His job, he explained, is “getting out there.”

“I talked to the staff of Ron Paul’s New Hampshire operation,” said Ronald Nielson, the president and CEO of NSON Opinion Research, who worked on Johnson’s 1994 bid for governor and has returned to help him work on Our America. “He didn’t really go there. You know, he’d go once in a while, but it wasn’t a really organized effort. They told me that they’d organize events, and he’d cancel. They’d organize trips, and he’d cancel. They’d organize four events and he’d show up for one of them. I don’t know what that was about, but that’s not what we’re doing.”

As the Reason event wound down, Johnson’s listeners moved closer to the open bar and assessed his performance. He needed some polish on economic issues. He needed to transfer the passion he had on ending the war on drugs to other topics. How, they wondered, would he compete with other Republicans? Talking with TWI, Johnson suggested that he was on his way.

“The support that I’ve found surprising is sitting down with what would be described as right-wing Christian Republicans and finding support,” said Johnson. “That’s been a surprise.”

Kerry Picket reports that Marvel Comics is partially apologizing for a storyline that portrays Captain America investigating white supremacists and observing a Tea Party protest for research. The source of the controversy: a photo I took for TWI at the first Tea Party protest on February 27, 2009.

In preparation for the infiltration, Marvel Comics depicts the two super heroes out of costume and observing from a rooftop a street filled with what can only be described as a Tea Party protest. The scene shows crowds of people in city streets carrying signs that say, “stop the socialists,” “tea bag libs before they tea bag you,” and “no to new taxes.” Naturally, the people in these crowds are depicted as being filled with nothing but white folks.

“According to to Mr. Quesada,” writes Picket, “the book was ready to go to printer, but the panel in question had a group of protesters handling signs with no words on them, so the editor asked the letterer to ‘fudge in’ some quick believable slogans at the last minute. The letterer referred to this sign as a sample to work from.”

That sign was photographed by me, here.

After Andrew Breitbart criticized World Net Daily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah for using his speaking slot at the National Tea Party Convention to raise questions about President Obama’s citizenship, I chatted with Farah about why and how he wanted the media to cover his pet issue.

“I really want to know the answer to this question,” said Farah, “and the people in that room really wanted to know the answer to this question. And I’m not going to let some Republican board of political correctness or some media board of political correctness decide that I can’t ask the question.”

As we talked, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News joined the conversation and followed up on Farah’s claim that the “birther” controversy had been bad for WND.

“The birth certificate theory is really popular on the internet,” said Bunch.

“Well, it’s popular because of us,” said Farah. “We essentially created it, didn’t we? That wasn’t a decision made because there was a constituency out there waiting for this, [or] it was a way to make money. Those people had to be found.”

Farah suggested that WND had kept a brush fire going, evidenced by legislation in several states (not of it has yet passed) that demands proof of citizenship from presidential candidates. “[Obama]’s going to have to produce it if he wants to run for re-election,” said Farah.

He added that the proof-of-citizenship bill introduced in Congress by Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) won’t do the trick, because it allows facsimiles — like Obama’s certificate of live birth, available online — to prove citizenship. “The Posey bill is flawed,” said Farah.

Still, Farah was more optimistic than pessimistic about the resilience of the “birther” subculture, pointing out that Obama had criticized those who “question my citizenship” at his National Prayer Breakfast speech.

“He’s even talking about it now!” said Farah.

The Republican National Committee’s e-cards for Valentine’s Day — a cute gimmick that the parties have been doing more of — includes a reminder that, no matter the fate of James O’Keefe, the ACORN scandal was a watershed event for Republicans.

Bob Collins gets the scoop on a mysterious billboard in suburban Minnesota that portrays George W. Bush winking conspiratorially with the slogan “Miss Me Yet?”

Mary Teske, the general manager of Schubert & Hoey Outdoor Advertising reports, “The Bush Miss Me Yet? billboard was paid for by a group of small business owners who feel like Washington is against them. They wish to remain anonymous. They thought it was a fun way of getting out their message.”

Amusingly, Collins reports that people from outside the state are trying to claim credit for the sign.

Jason Pye passes on a video of Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), a candidate for governor of Georgia, being questioned by minor birther figure Carl Swensson (of “citizen grand jury” fame), and explaining the current status of his request for President Obama to release his birth certificate.

Video and transcript after the jump:

I think that it is a communication that deserves, at least, his response, first of all, I think — which we have not received. But in essence what I told him is this. When I am asked a congressman, from constituents, hard questions, I don’t shy away from hard questions. I try to answer those questions. If I don’t have the information to answer the questions, I have to go to the people who do have the answer. In this case I think the president is the one who can clear this up. What I’m asking him to do is tell me where I can ask my constituents to go to see authentic documentation that he says will satisfy their curiousity.

I know that some folks are trying to label this as politically incorrect. I want to tell you something. Political incorrectness is paralyzing our society. These kinds of things deserve straightforward responses. And I think this ought to be put to rest I’m not questioning his legitimacy to serve as president. I would think he’d like to clear that up in as unequivocal a fashion as possible. And that’s simply all I’m asking.

Deal’s take is reminiscent (if it’s fair to compare the two conspiracy theories) of the logic behind the 9/11 Truth Statement that brought down former Green Jobs “Czar” Van Jones. It’s not that he himself doubts Obama’s citizenship — it’s that Questions Are Being Asked.

Marc Ambinder has a read on which politicos are close to, or advising, Sarah Palin.

Pam Pryor, a former RNC senior adviser, leads Palin’s political action committee and is orchestrating her outreach to social conservatives. Randy Scheunenmann remains her policy maestro, with informal assistance from his Orion Strategies colleague Michael Goldfarb, the former Weekly Standard writer and McCain campaign rapid responder. (Goldfarb did not return an e-mail seeking comment about his future in Palin’s world.) Fred Malek is perhaps the single Washington establishment figure that Palin turns to.

Add this to what we learned in 2009, that Becki Donatelli runs SarahPAC and that lawyer-around-town John Coale does whatever else needs to be done, and we’re left with a pretty small-time operation. No offense to any of the players, but compare this to Mitt Romney’s team — which just helped bring Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat over to the GOP — or Mike Huckabee’s industrious HuckPAC, or Tim Pawlenty’s aggressive, never-a-foot-wrong media and web operation, and it looks like an afterthought operation. The result: things like Palin leaning on a Pat Buchanan column to make a hawkish (!) case against Obama’s foreign policy.

The death of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) is a blow to Democratic efforts to pass the Senate version of health care reform in the House — they’re now down one vote from a swing district Democrat willing to make the tough choice.

But what might turn out to be an insurmountable problem is the intransigence of two liberals in the House conference, Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio.). Both say they won’t vote for anything less than a single payer system. Kucinich, in this e-mail sent to his list, asks for help scoring an endorsement from Firedoglake — the liberal website has been polling Democratic districts and its data suggests voters don’t want a mandate-based bill — based on his pledge to vote with the GOP against the bill.

E-mail below the jump:

I Need Your Help in Winning This Poll at firedoglake.com

Dear Friends,

Popular progressive blog, Firedoglake (FDL), has launched a new poll to identify three ‘Fire Dogs’ in Congress. Firedoglake will provide the winner with get out the vote tools, voter lists, in district voter registration and fundraising support. This support will help us in our re-election campaign.

We are currently 2nd in the poll out of all the Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives. I need your help in getting us into 1st place. Please log onto http://action.firedoglake.com/page/content/fdlpacvote and click the link on the right-hand side of the page to vote for FDL Fire Dogs. Then please enter your contact information and select me as your first choice. After selecting all three choices, then click ‘Submit Form’

Firedoglake is evaluating candidates on three criteria:
1) Pledged to vote against any war funding that does not have troop withdrawal provisions
2) Voted against June 2009 war supplemental
3) Pledged to vote against any health care bill that does not have a public option

I’ve been a leader in the effort against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and led the efforts against funding for the wars. This week I will introduce legislation in Congress on the question of withdrawal from Afghanistan. Together with Representative John Conyers, I’ve led the effort on single-payer, passed an amendment in committee to protect the rights of states to pursue single-payer and voted in committee for the bill that had a public option. I will continue to oppose any healthcare bill that does not have a robust public option. I will never give up on the dream of Medicare for All! Your continued support makes it possible for me to take strong progressive positions.

I need your help in winning this poll. Please log now onto http://www.firedoglake.com to help us get to 1st place!

Thank you for your support!

Here’s an extra anecdote from my National Tea Party Convention notebook. As I reported (and tweeted) on Saturday night, many people arrived at the Sarah Palin-headlined banquet — which they could attend for $549 as convention ticket-holders or for $349 if they only wanted to attend the banquet — with copies of “Going Rogue” and black pens. But Palin never made herself available for autographs. She walked onstage, gave her speech, shook a few hands close to the stage, (to get there, you had to get through a VIP rope line) did her Q&A, and left. Minutes later, convention organizer Judson Phillips made an announcement.

“The governor is leaving the building,” he said. “She has a tight schedule.”

I ran into Pat Almont, a retiree from Memphis, who attended the convention with one of the $349 banquet tickets. She’d run to the back of the room clutching a copy of “Going Rogue,” but Almont couldn’t get it signed.

“I just missed her!” Almont said. “They said she’d just left.”

I asked Almont and her friend, Jean Britt (another banquet attendee) whether they were disappointed that Palin wouldn’t sign the book.

“Oh, yeah, she would,” Britt said. “If you just ran into her in the hall, she’d sign it. She’s very down-to-earth. I’d love to see her as president.”

Two reporters who filed a ton of great, context-building coverage of the National Tea Party Convention were Jillian Bandes of Townhall.com and Lydia DePillis of The New Republic. Archives of their coverage are worth digging into, including DePillis’ observation about how the extremely limited number of African-American speakers and attendees worked hard to absolve the movement of the “racist” charge.

An interesting revelation from an online reader chat with The Washington Post’s “Washington Sketch” columnist.

My policy in each presidential race is to vote for the best candidate who is not on the ballot… so I voted for McCain in 2000, when Bush and Gore were on the ballot. I voted for Chuck Hagel in 2004, when Bush and Kerry were on the ballot. And I voted for Mike Bloomberg in 2008.

That’s really a pretty representative list of candidates who became darlings of the D.C. media establishment. (For the record, I voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 presidential primary and the Obama-Biden ticket in the general election.)

Last week, white nationalist writer Jared Taylor found himself at the center of a controversy when One People’s Project and Max Blumenthal reported on his 2006 appearance at an event attended by James O’Keefe. I’ve already written about this pretty extensively, but here’s more context — audio of the 2006 speeches from Taylor and National Review’s John Derbyshire, as well as the back-and-forth that followed.