Monday Open Thread [2.13.12]

Mitt Romney under-whelmingly won the Maine Caucuses on Saturday, but that news was overshadowed by Whitney Houston's death. Although now it seems that Ron Paul could pull a Rick Santorum and win Maine after all. Here are the polls that came out during the weekend. Santorum has stormed into the lead in one recent national poll.

Queen Takes Republican Bishop – Checkmate

While there were many lessens learned through the Komen fiasco the main one was: Stop messing with Women's Health or face the consequences. Republicans would be wise to study what happened to Komen, because their plan of going after contraception could very well destroy them in the same way it destroyed Komen. By moving contraception into the forefront of the abortion wars the GOP has not only revealed its true strategy, it has exposed its King. And everyone knows that the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board. Lose your Queen, lose the... election?

NJ Truthiness Watch — Women’s Health Care is Not Important Unless Men Say It Is

The editorial in Saturday's NJ does a couple of dumb and dangerous things in siding with the religious leaders who have been howling about the Obama Administration's ACA rule that religious institutions need to provide contraceptive coverage to their female employees as part of a preventative care package. This isn't the first time that the NJ editorial has been quick to join the war on women's health care. And as usual, the NJ editorial staff doing the writing of this thing never bothered to inform themselves of the facts of this business and pretty much just repeat what they see on cable TV.

Saturday Open Thread [2.11.12]

I'd almost forgotten it was winter, with daffodils coming up and willow trees budding already. Unfortunately for most of my friends, I am a fan of winter and look forward to a few snow days each season, so am hoping there will be a proper snostorm before it is all said and done. But here we are, cruising the internets and catching up on the stuff that happened during the week:

Eye of Newt

Newt Gingrich might have called out Mitt Romney on his "pious baloney," but poor Newt might now be classified as "desperate baloney" after being eclipsed this week by the frothy Rick Santorum in Colorado and Minnesota.

Delaware Political Weekly: February 4-10, 2012

Missed this one last week, but someone named Ben Mobley, who is running for Insurance Commissioner on the R side, failed to file his campaign finance report. Celia Cohen, who still covers Rethug politics, at least New Castle County-style, has what passes for the story here. BTW, Mobley is an 'investment advisor' at Morgan Stanley. Don't they have to know some legal thingies? Maybe it's other legal thingies... Doesn't matter. He will not be our next IC. But, if you can stomach it, here is Ben Mobley with an ever-smarmier Charlie 'Bouvier de Flandres' Copeland channeling his inner Mitt Romney. FWIW, I like Mobley a lot better in this clip than Copeland. Just look at the studied casualness of Copeland's attire.

The Delaware Liberal Tracking Poll

You may have noticed in the center column of the site, we have a poll question regarding the job performance of Governor Markell. Currently, the Governor has a 69% approval rating (27% approve, 42% strongly approve), and a 22% disapproval rating (17% disapprove, 5% strongly). And 9% of you either don't care, don't know or are "meh" when it comes to the Governor. Now, an internet poll is in no way accurate (although, real polls of the Governor's job performance have similar findings, with approval in the 60's). We are not dealing with a random sample here. And the sample size is way too small (64 people at last count). Still, I thought it would be fun to have a new tracking poll feature each day that polls the politically motivated and passionate in Delaware. Each day of the week we will poll on a different office holder or candidate.

Let’s Do This Again

Yesterday we showed the new Delaware Democratic Party logo, but there was just a small problem with it. The vendor misspelled “Democratic” by adding a third “c.” And to be fair to the staff at the Del Dems, I missed it when I first looked at it, because my attention was drawn to the Hen. Click inside to see the revised new logo, and the secondary logo that we have not seen yet, that I love even better, and see how much better these logos are than the logos of the past.