First the Repubs set up a a “Dems for Candidate” office and then they maybe firebomb it or soap the windows or something, and claim Dems are attacking them.

Is this the kind of stupid dirty trick seen around the country.

It certainly sounds more old-fashioned than bashing your own web site and then blaming it on the opponents.

Since I haven’t been in tight with a campaign and felt the sting of negative campaign attacks I generally feel the best way to fight is to simply get your opponent on the record and then highlight the better differences in your opinion or to point out really egregious positions/votes/speeches of the opponent. Straight up debate stuff.

Collins seems determined to go off track on the wacky train, so we should just point that out to the public, right along with her lack of concern for the video tracker and her Conservative Bush Republican voting record.

Mainers aren’t very fond of bullshit – ’specially when it reeks of the Big City kind…

I would expect that Susie is gonna get punctured by that dry, dry Maine humor.

Maybe the Mainers will also wonder if she would help them the way she, Lieberman and Rove helped New Orleans after Katrina decimated the city.

Really, could Mainers (or anybody for that matter) depend upon Republicans (or Lieberman) to help them in an emergency?

oh yes it is…….i was a life-long methodist…….i quit going to church because ‘government issues’ were creeping into the church DURING church services……….it is appalling………there is a new minister there, and many have tried to get me to come back, but the fact that noone saw the danger in that, makes me not want to be a part of it….what bush and his neocons have done to the church makes me barf………church was the one place where it didn’t matter who you are, what party……and government used to be didn’t matter what religion you are…….outta be the same, both places, shouldn’t matter….well, not anymore……..and i think that’s dangerous for our freedoms……..all of us, to live as we choose, think as we choose…..

don’t want government in my church
don’t want church in my government

(you got your chocolate in my peanut butter, no, you got your peanut butter in my chocolate)

hackworth–sure I agree that it’s an important principle of a free govt.- but it’s not a popular one- not one a candidate will run on and win on- except perhaps in some exceptional congressional district.

Its a bad platform (or plank in a platform) b/c the Democrats surrendered that ground. It was good ground and high ground, but they didn’t protect it. Now they gotta run around splainin that they’re just as religious as Rove’s brand (and as bellicose too). It’s me-too-ism and its weak. If your selling the same thing as the other guy and the other guy’s is the original…

AnnieW @ 34

Me, too. I was left feeling that she didn’t misspeak.

My impression was that she probably took the same oath to the Constitution as every other government employee, but she is incapable of conceiving of any distinction between that and an oath to the president personally. I don’t think they made them swear personal loyalty oaths because the people who would take them seriously (and not blow the whistle) didn’t need them; they were hired for slavish loyalty above all in the first place.

My guess is that this is partially correct. The oath they took was too the constitution but I will bet that they talked among themselves as having taken an oath to Bush without making the distinction. It just seemed too ingrained in her when Leahy pushed back on her having taken an oath to the president. IIRC she had to keep correcting herself and each time it looked like an inward struggle. It did not look like she just thought of it that way but hadn’t really thought much about it.

Not all states have elected Judges, but appointed judges can buy their seat on the bench by donating to Governors’ campaigns, as it were.

Alaska has a very good system. Judges are appointed by the Governor from a list supplied to her by the Alaska Judicial Council. The Council’s work includes interviewing and most importantly, surveying attorneys, cops, the public, and soliciting comments, etc. Judges are required to stand for retention elections, at the first election after they are appointed, and these elections are not political. The judicial council will occasionally recommend against retention, which ususally results in the judge withdrawing and resigning. No campaigning by judges is allowed.