Friday Open Thread

Welcome to your Friday open thread. Did you realize that the year is now halfway over? I think most people can’t wait until it ends but I’m always amazed at how fast time passes.

Despite expectations that the Supreme Court decisions will open a torrent of money for political campaigns, it’s not happening yet.

Still, the slumping tally was notable in the camp of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the GOP frontrunner in polls and fundraising. Romney aides said he will report raising only about $20 million, less than the up to $50 million anticipated by supporters a few months ago –and well below the $44 million he reported by this point in 2007 in his first presidential bid.

…

While diminished compared with 2008, Romney’s start was already impressive to Corrado, even if some of it represented a sleight of hand. The former Massachusetts governor’s campaign told reporters in May that he had raised $10 million in a one-day phone-a-thon in Las Vegas. But the amount actually represented pledges gathered earlier and tallied that day, not just funds actually taken in by the campaign. Still, it showed that Romney continues to have access to a loyal and substantial group of donors, Corrado said.

Romney has at least 4x the total of the other candidate:

Though the campaigns are not required to disclose their campaign filings publicly until July 15, the New York Times has preliminary reports on second quarter fundraising:

Mitt Romney “will report raising less than $20 million for the Republican primary.”

Tim Pawlenty rasied less than $5 million, “some of which may be earmarked for a future general election campaign” and not avilable for the GOP primaries.

Jon Huntsman raised about $4.1 million for the quarter “though a substantial portion came from his own fortune.”

Ron Paul raised about $4 million “and hoped to raise more by the end of the day.”

Some of the money for the general election means that some of Pawlenty’s donors have maxed out already. The full reports are made public on July 15. It will be interesting to see if Pawlenty has few small dollar donors and mainly large dollar donors.

Mark “Kind of a Dick” Halperin got in some hot water yesterday for his remarks about Obama’s speech. Halperin was suspended from MSNBC indefinitely for the remarks and Time also condemned the remarks. Alex Pareene at Salon had the ultimate takedown:

I don’t care what Halperin calls Barack Obama. But for the record, President Obama did not really act like a dick yesterday, which is unsurprising, because Mark Halperin is a horrible political analyst who is wrong about everything. (Also for the record, it takes one to know one.)

This is a great excuse for MSNBC to fire Halperin, though! I mean if they won’t fire him for being incompetent at understanding and explaining politics they now have an opportunity to fire him for being disrespectful and vulgar. (Ed Schultz was suspended over as much.)

Being a professional observer of the “horse race” is bad enough, but Halperin doesn’t even understand the horse-race element of politics. He fails at being a hack. He’s too dumb to correctly parrot conventional wisdom. He is pretty sure Sarah Palin and Donald Trump are 2012 front-runners. He thought “suspending his campaign” to fix the economy and not knowing how many houses he has were both huge messaging victories for John McCain. He wrote a book about how to win in 2008 that predicted everything Hillary did, but in his world it all worked. He thought Bush’s political comeback would come any day now throughout the entirety of the years 2006-2008. He can’t interpret polls or see through the spin of GOP consultants who are much smarter than he. If I were revising the Hack list I’d put him above No. 1.

THIS x 1000.