2014 congressional races

Ron Leach is a Iraq/Afghan War veteran and the Democratic Party candidate for Kentucky's 2nd congressional district, a stretch of central Kentucky from the suburbs southwest of Lexington through Elizabethtown, south to Bowling Green and Glasgow and west to Owensboro. The PVI is R+16 and Obama only took 35% against Romney. In 2012, the Republican incumbent, Brett Guthrie, won all 21 counties that make up the district, beating his Democratic opponent, David Williams, 64-32%. There wasn't a single county in which Williams did well.

Lame and lamerThis morning Alex Isenstadt's column in Politico, Homestretch made the case that the Republicans are blowing their chance to make the mammoth gains in the House many predicted they could.

The DCCC usually makes mediocre ads-- or worse. They hire over-paid, overly-cautious consultants who only care about one thing: the next job they can get. The video above, however… that's a decent ad. And the DCCC started running it today-- part of a $950,000 investment in anti-Grimm broadcast ads on Staten Island and the parts of south Brooklyn that are part of NY-11 (Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights, Bath Beach, Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend, right up to the border of Midwood).

I would call this Horsey cartoon from yesterday's L.A. Times pretty risqué. It uses an image of a cocaine snorting Miss McConnell to portray and mock his addiction to extreme right-wing Koch brothers cash. David Horsey is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Times and he can get away with stuff like this.

“No way any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday… a week after Jim Foley was beheaded"- Peter KingRoland and I have been traveling all over the world for decades. He'd eat grasshoppers, snakes, monkeys and, in Beijing, dog. So when I wondered if I knew anyone who watched the video of Jim Foley's beheading, I asked Roland. "Are you kidding," he declared in disgust. "I'd never watch the savage garbage." OK, so I don't know any friends or family who did.

Yesterday Digby covered how Florida Democrats-- except Debbie Wasserman Schultz-- hope to use a medical marijuana initiative to turn out voters. In Colorado young people (the 18-29 cohort) made up 14% of Colorado voters, already high because of Obama-enthusiasm.

Monday morning, Tennessee state Senator Jim Tracy conceded the August 7 Republican primary that had left Scott DesJarlais ahead by by 38 votes; Tracy won't be asking for a recount. So DesJarlais, a doctor whose reputation has been harmed because of a series of scandals involving women patients who he drugged up and had sexual affairs with-- even forcing one to have an abortion (which as a far right Republican zombie he loudly opposes… at least for other women. So the Republicans couldn't quite knock off the wounded and bleeding DesJarlais. Will a Democrat take him to pieces?

Incapable of learning from past mistakes; doomed to endlessly repeat themJessica Wehrman's analysis of Ohio's congressional election for the Columbus Dispatch this morning, could have been in almost any newspaper anywhere in America.

The 26th Amendment to the Constitution is a simple one: "The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age." After being ratified by the 38th state legislature, North Carolina's, on July 1, 1971, it became part of the Constitution 4 days later on July 5. It has passed the Senate on March 10, 1971, 94-0, and the House March 23, 401-19.

Georgia Blue Dog John Barrow has one of the most reactionary voting records of any Democrat in Congress-- to the point where he defines the term "DINO," Democrat in Name Only. For 2013-14, ProgressivePunch has scored him a dismal 27.73, just fractionally worse from Utah Blue Dog, Jim Matheson who decided to retire rather than face certain defeat in November.