Welcome to your Friday open thread. It’s been a wild & crazy week in Delaware politics! Surely there’s something you’d rather talk about than Christine O’Donnell, right?
While Delaware is enduring its time in the sun with its own wingnut, New York has a really crazy wingnut running for governor. Carl Paladino won the GOP NY governor nomination (the same Carl Paladino who sent racist emailsm, porn & bestiality to an email list of local officials and business leaders) and he had this brilliant idea:
A few thousand New York household received an odoriferous gift in the mail from Carl Paladino, the Republican nominee for governor – and it doesn’t smell like roses.
Paladino’s campaign mailed out garbage-scented fliers declaring “Something Stinks in Albany” and featuring photos of seven New York Democrats whose political careers were marred by scandal.
“It’s basically a folder and then when you open it, when the oxygen hits the card the stink starts,” Paladino explained to Anderson Cooper on “AC360” Thursday night.
“The longer you keep it open the worse the stink gets. That’s our analogy of Albany,” he added.
Wow. This guy won the GOP nomination over Rick Lazio. Teabaggers aren’t kidding when they say they want to overthrow the Republican establishment. This is their answer?
Jim DeMint – at least he’s honest about what he wants.
But due to his successful efforts to help drive tea party senatorial candidates like Christine O’Donnell, Pat Toomey, and Marco Rubio to victory over establishment candidates, DeMint is emboldened. He told Bloomberg that businesses want him to produce “complete gridlock” in the Senate:
DeMint doesn’t care. “I’ve been told by businesses that if we would stop the tax increases the best thing that could happen for business after that is complete gridlock. At least gridlock is predictable,” he tells Bloomberg Businessweek, taking a quick break between TV appearances. His goal, he says, is to stop programs that violate his anti-Big Government ideology. “What happens in the Senate is the Republicans sink to the lowest common denominator,” he says. “People want an alternative to some kind of watered-down Republican philosophy.”
This is what we can expect if the Senate doesn’t reform its rules even if Democrats manage to hang on to their majority.