Welcome to the Monday edition of your open thread. Are you all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed today? I know I am! Share your thoughts below.
Crazy lady Sharron Angle is not only crazy, she’s dishonest. She ran an race-baiting ad about scary Latinos and immigration. She stood in front of Latino group and told them she was talking about Canada’s border:
Upon closer inspection, the entire message isn’t just racially divisive, it’s also intended to deceive voters. But for Angle, the extremist candidate in Nevada, we’ve got it all wrong. At least, that’s what she told a group of Hispanic high school students the other day.
U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle defended a series of campaign advertisements that use images of sullen, dark-skinned men and a map of Mexico to blast the immigration record of her Democratic opponent, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid. […]
“I think that you’re misinterpreting those commercials,” said Angle, a tea party favorite who has rallied for stricter border enforcement.
Angle told the students she was “not sure that those are Latinos in that commercial” and appeared to suggest that the ad seeks to draw attention to the danger of potential terrorists entering the country from Canada.
Unfortunately the ad has been removed from YouTube so you can’t judge for yourself. Just in case you thought the ad was perhaps vague about what it was saying, Benen adds this:
Angle’s race-baiting ads, some of the ugliest since Jesse Helms, have all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. She shows viewers images of Mexicans and a map of Mexico over on-screen text about “illegal aliens.”
The only thing saving Angle is she’s running against the hapless Harry Reid.
Balloon Juice has interesting post about the outside spending in the 2010 election. The DNC is outraising the RNC by a large amount but outside groups are spending on behalf of Republicans by a 7:1 margin. DougJ speculates that this is the beginning of a new reality:
Some of this may be a result of the demise of the RNC. National committees tend to raise a lot more money when they control the White House and having Michael Steele at the top of the RNC can’t help. Karl Rove’s Crossroads group in particular may be a magnet for money that would normally have gone to the RNC; it’s possible that when they put Haley Barbour back in charge of the RNC, this will all change.
But it’s also possible that this represents a sea change, that the Republican party committees are on their way to marginalization. These things are complicated, but Citizens United, the outsourcing of Republican messaging to Fox and talk radio, and the rise of an alternatively branded conservative pseudoparty (I’m talking about teatards here) may mean that in the future the Republican party will not be a political party in the usual sense, that instead of being controlled by party operatives acting as filters (or pass throughs) for special interest influence, it will be run directly by corporations and conservative media, with no middle man at all.
So, do you think this is the future?