Welcome to the Thursday edition of your open thread. What’s on your mind today?
Newly-crowned California Senate nominee Carly Fiorina cares about the issues. Issues like Barbara Boxer’s hair:
Fiorina, who won a 3-way primary last night, was preparing for an interview with CNN affiliate KXTV this morning and chatting with her aides. In a several-minute chat with the camera rolling that CNN posted online, Fiorina mocks Boxer’s hairdo. Laughing, Fiorina tells her staff that someone had seen Boxer on television and “said what everyone says, ‘God what is that hair?’ So yesterday!” But she also questioned a decision by fellow Republican Meg Whitman to appear on Hannity so soon after winning the GOP nomination for governor.
“I find it really surprising that on the first day of the general Meg Whitman is going on Sean Hannity,” Fiorina said, while reading her BlackBerry. “I think it’s bizarre … I think it’s a very bad choice actually. You know how he is.”
Fiorina alluded to Whitman avoiding the press during the primary, saying, “Why after saying no to all these people would you go on Sean Hannity?” Later she added, “Sean Hannity is not an easy interview.”
She also thinks fawning Sean Hannity is not an easy interview? He doesn’t ask trick questions like “What do you read?”
Money is shaking up the Florida governor’s race. Florida AG Bill McCollum was the presumed Republican nominee until former health insurance CEO, crook and astroturfer Rick Scott jumped into the race. He’s leading now!
The new Quinnipiac poll in Florida shows that former healthcare executive Rick Scott’s right-wing campaign for governor is having a serious impact — he now leads the establishment GOP candidate state Attorney General Bill McCollum, in the Republican primary.
The numbers: Scott 44%, McCollum 31%. The survey of likely GOP primary voters has a ±3.4% margin of error. At the same time, 59% of primary votes who expressed a choice also said that their minds could potentially change, with that number spread evenly across both candidates’ supporters.
The McCollum team is hoping that Scott’s checkered past will stop his well-financed campaign dead in its tracks. While he was CEO of Columbia HCA, the company was forced to pay $1.7 billion in government fines after it was accused of overcharging Medicare. For his part, Scott is willing to talk about the scandal, telling the Times in an interview that “I learned hard lessons, and I’ve taken that lesson and it’s helped me become a better business person and a better leader.”
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Scott, meanwhile, has a connection to the party insurgency that would be the envy of many Republicans. As the fight for a public option heated up in the health care reform debate, Scott spent $5 million on the Conservatives for Patient Rights campaign, which ran ads and funded efforts to get protesters to Congressional town hall meetings across the country. On his website, Scott touts the experience, claiming “CPR successfully led the charge to stop the government-run public option plan.”
The Republicans will beat up on each other and the presumed Democratic candidate Alex Sink will be the beneficiary. She’ll either have an opponent who spent $120,000 of state money on disgraced anti-gay activist George “rentboy” Rekers or she’ll go after the millionaire crook.