Red to Blue

Bardel, Recchia, Grimm-- there's only one sane choice for NY-11I'm over the whole concept of even voting for the lesser of two evils any longer. The lesser of two evils is, by definition, still evil, even if not as base as the greater of two evils.

Top DCCC recruits who vanished without a trace: Suzanne Patrick, Joe Bock, Jennifer Garrison... so much wasted moneyWith Wall Street banksters flooding GOP campaign coffers with immense amounts of money for last minute TV blitzes in key races, a new NBC/WSJ poll shows a Republican advantage in the midterms.

We’ve been talking a lot about the very predictable catastrophic impact the Steve Israel Effect has been having on Democratic campaigns from coast to coast.

All cycle we’ve been talking about The Steve Israel Effect— even before we named it.

Red to Blue looks like such a stinker for Steve Israel this cycle that he's started slipping in candidates in blue districts so his batting average won't look as atrocious on the morning of November 5th as anyone looking at his inept recruiting will surmise. A good red-to-blue program would have strong, progressive candidates running against Republicans in blue-leaning districts. Instead, Israel's personal agenda had him out-right protecting Republicans in many of these districts.

Texans Mac Thornberry (Amarillo), Mike Conaway (Midland/Odessa) and Kevin Brady (the north Houston 'burbs of Montgomery County) don't have to worry about Democrats; their districts barely have any. In 2012, Thornberry didn't have a Democratic opponent while Conaway beat his with 79% and Brady beat his with 77%. These are red hellholes that national Democrats don't even think about. All three have PVIs hovering around R+30.

There were a lot of Democrats who won tough primaries last Tuesday, but there was only one that caused an orgy of twitter ecstasy from the DCCC: Petey Pie, Steve Israel's flawed New Dem who would like to get into Congress so he can help the Republicans cut Social Security benefits for retirees while increasing his perceived value as a lobbyist, when he goes back to his original profession.

I'm still in the beginning on the awesome new book by Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance. I just read a few pages every night before going to bed and then meditate on it as a lesson of the day.

Over the weekend, Marilou Johanek took apart the Ohio Republicans' elaborate excuses for strangling voters' access to the polls and concluded that it's just plain old voter suppression.

DCCC will never win back the House until they get Republicans like this out of Democratic seats-- but that means recruiting candidates and fighting to win-- which Steve Israel refuses to doNow that the DCCC has officially launched its Red-to-Blue program, what happened to Steve Israel's vaunted Jumpstart program and the candidates he tapped, many despite primary races back home? The program itself has been "disappeared" from the DCCC website.