Welcome to the Tuesday edition of your semi-daily open thread. I had a bit of excitement this morning – my power went out. Luckily it came back on an hour later. It’s always great when your power goes out on the hottest day of the year.
Sharron Angle is perhaps my favorite wingnut candidate this year. She is following the Rand Paul guidelines for nutty candidates – don’t talk. She’s taken it even farther, though. She’s now suing Harry Reid’s campaign to keep him from publishing the materials that was on her own campaign website.
There was no real mystery here — in the wake of Angle winning the nomination, it was time to scrub the site, removing content that made the GOP Senate hopeful look nutty. The campaign team did exactly that, taking three weeks to meticulously remove all references to Angle’s stated plans to scrap Social Security, abolish the Department of Education, crack down on immigration, expand offshore oil drilling, etc. Sam Stein and Elyse Siegel noted that a review of the old and new Angle campaign sites shows “dramatic, fundamental shifts in her policy platform.”
Not surprisingly, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) campaign believes the public might find Angle’s stated, published agenda educational, so it re-published the Republican candidate’s original issue positions online for voters to see.
In response, Angle’s lawyers threatened a lawsuit, demanding that Reid’s campaign not show voters what Angle has said she believes.
Sharron Angle has resorted to an unusual maneuver to counter Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s attacks on her past quotes and positions, the Reid campaign has announced: A cease-and-desist letter, demanding that Reid no longer republish Angle’s previous campaign website.
As Angle’s lawyers argued in their cease-and-desist letter, Reid’s campaign team was misusing copyrighted materials by re-publishing Angle’s own website.
Angle and Paul are striving to be the first candidates in history to avoid press coverage. Good luck with that winning formula!
Until last year, the Idle Hour Country Club in Lexington, Kentucky, had no African American members. Now lifetime member and 6th Congressional District Republican nominee Andy Barr is finding himself in the awkward position of explaining his connection to what was until very recently an all-white club — in the middle of a hotly contested election campaign against incumbent Rep. Ben Chandler (D).
Politico‘s Alex Isenstadt reports the Republican’s campaign has confirmed that Barr — a top-tier NRCC “Young Gun” — and his family are “active in the club.” As the Lexington Herald-Leader reported last year when former Kentucky college star and NBA player Sam Bowie was accepted as the club’s first black member, Idle Hour has “remained a symbol of exclusivity and old divisions based on race and class in Lexington” even as the state has become more accepting of diversity in the workplace and private life.
Oops. This may be a bigger problem than just the country club membership. Andy Barr also has a “Rand Paul” problem.
Beyond the clearly negative implication that Barr was an active member of a discriminatory country club, the flap also sheds a new and potentially damaging light on Barr’s refusal to discuss Kentucky GOP Senate nominee Rand Paul’s views on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Back in May, a progressive blogger in Kentucky caught up with Barr and asked him to weigh in on Paul’s controversial statements that the Act may have gone too far when it required private businesses to cater to minorities. (It should be noted that in the same interview, Paul mentioned his disdain for remnants of segregation, highlighting in particular the fact that all-white country clubs still existed.)
I’m feeling sorry for my home state. It hasn’t reached South Carolina levels of politics yet, however.