National

Former Georgetown Mayor Brian Pettyjohn, a Republican, has filed as a write-in candidate for the 19th Senate seat. Far Right radical religious conservative teabagger Eric Bodenweiser won the Republican primary against the incumbent Republican Senator Joe Booth. The Democratic nominee is Jane Hovington. Today was the deadline for write in candidacies to be filed.

We have some new state polls out of Iowa, Ohio, Arizona and North Carolina, as well as some interesting national polls. But the race basically remains as it has for weeks since the conventions: Obama is winning.

Democrats have facetiously said that Republicans think that the rich don't have enough money and the poor have too much. But the more I think I about modern Republicanism, the more I think that the statement it is literally true. Republicans believe that the poor are too well off. The modern Republican Party honestly yearns for a cleansing fire of misery and pain to sweep the land. They believe that the nation's problems are largely due to the fact that the poor are living in relative comfort as a result of the overall affluence of our society. America is the victim of its own success and has become a weak and lazy country slouching toward calamity. ...

Or...Romney sunk the ticket by PICKING Ryan. This is premature campaign autopsy-ing of a very hair splitting sort. The bottom line: Ryan's policies are prefect for losing a national election.

Hey, Republicans. We have been where you are now. The year was 2004, and we liberals could not believe that President Bush was leading John Kerry, a candidate that most of us liberals did not like but had embraced in what turned out to be a vain effort to defeat President Bush. We sought out any argument that proved that the polls were false. Those arguments were that the pollsters were sampling too many Republicans. Sound familiar? And how did that election turn out? The polls were right, much to our chagrin. The polls are right now. President Obama is winning and winning convincingly. Indeed, according to Nate Silver, there is now more of a chance that Barack Obama will win by a landslide than Mitt Romney will win at all. There is one basic fact that Republicans now and we liberals in 2004 ignore when we discounted polls: polling companies want to be right because that's their business model. If they are accurate, they get more business from media organizations and candidates. Remember, media organizations and candidates and party organizations and other organizations hire and pay polling companies and institutes to perform the polls and get accurate results. If they are skewing polls for reasons other than being accurate, then they would lose money. You should understand this Republicans. It's free market capitalism. Now, there are some polling organizations whose business model is not to be accurate but to drive narratives in the media. Rasmussen is one such example. They get paid not to be right, but to be favorable to one side. So Republicans, as always, you are so very good at projection. The thing you decry is the thing you rely on.