National

Let's get some answers! Great video from the Obama Team, showcasing some of the pertinent questions around RMoney's decisions to invest money in other countries rather than the one he lives in:

Governor Martin O'Malley has been pretty visible recently with a few very cogent critiques of the GOP and it's policies. In talking about the GOP objection to the mandates in the ACA, he noted that “The only health care mandate they can embrace are transvaginal probes for women,” .

Bill Moyers continues to be one of the most insightful and moral champions of of genuine democracy. Here, he discusses the implications for the Supreme Court decision to not revisit their Citizens United decision.

Quoting such well known thinkers as the guy who said, "Keep it simple Stupid," this guy takes out a 1/2 page ad in the Sunday Dead Tree Edition to urge people to vote for Mitt Romney.

So as El Som says, we are coming down to it. El Som covers the recent filings this week in his Political Weekly column, the most important of which are for the newly open seats that Speaker Gilligan (the 19th) and Terry Schooley (the 23rd) are vacating. As he mentions, none of the endorsed GOP statewide candidates have filed. And as we will see below, the GOP is lagging far behind the Democrats in finding candidates for the General Assembly. The filing deadline for individual candidates is July 10. If Jeff Cragg, Sher Valenzuela, Kevin Wade, and Tom Kovach all fail to file their candidacies by then, all hope is not lost for the GOP and it doesn't mean Governor Markell et al are automatically reelected without opposition. For there is another deadline further out in the distance: September 4, 2012. That is the deadline for Certificates of Nomination from the two major parties to fill ballot lines for offices in which there is not a primary election. So for a lot of the races below, the real deadline to keep in mind is September 4. So the GOP has about 8 more weeks to scramble to fill all of those empty spaces you will see below in our charts. Still, all of those empty spaces points to a horrible recruiting failure on the part of the State GOP. Especially for a party that once, earlier this year, had designs on recapturing the Senate after many decades.

Check out these recent stump speech quotes from Obama, and count the ways Romney has screwed himself:

“The guy I’m running against tried this in Massachusetts and it’s working just fine, even though he denies it,”

President Obama maintains his small but significant lead in Gallup and in a new You Gov poll. Not much for state polling this week, due to the mid-week Fourth of July holiday screwing everything up. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, former Governor and Senate frontrunner Tommy Thompson is about to get himself Christine O'Donnelled.

... they suck so much that they don't even understand what a Venn Diagram is. Doesn't every 12 year old get taught this?

Speaking of wealthy idiots blowing money on a lost cause....

Friess committed to contributing "significant dollars" to Republican candidates here. He seemed particularly to adopt Wade, the senatorial candidate, even if he did mangle one of the best-known names in state politics as he did. "What's more important for our country going forward than Kevin Wade serves instead of Tim Carper?" he said.

Another funny bit from the folks at Second City: