Wonkette

Robot phone calls are driving people nuts throughout the northeast. The prank calls claim to be from one candidate (the Democrat) while they’re actually from the other (the Republican). MORE »

The Colorado Republican Party wants you to know that Dem congressional candidate Ed Perlmutter is a convicted sex offender who’s moving into your neighborhood. This is the campaign season that made satire irrelevant, isn’t it? MORE »

Missouri Senator Jim Talent was raised by wolves Jews, according to an anonymous and very poorly sourced email we recently received and didn’t bother to check in to: MORE »

We’re proud to have played some small and completely inept role in this, the first and quite possibly most entertaining of October’s surprises. While the news continues breaking (Foley has checked himself into rehab — the Kennedy kind, not the Focus on the Family cure-me-of-the-gay kind), it may be entertaining to step back a bit and examine just how this story happened.

After the jump: When and why Foley was outed, who knew his Page problems and when, why the story was sat on for a year, and just how much Foley’s current and former friends in the House are shitting themselves.

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Providence Journal photo by Gretchen Ertl MORE »

Chaos in Rhode Island! More electoral fraud from the smallest, but most brutal of all states! Hotline reports the Chafee campaign’s desperate plea: MORE »

Why the hell is Joe Lieberman’s campaign site hosted by these people (site down — probably not because of dirty deeds, by the way) under the cheapest plan available? And why do Lieberman’s FEC filings say he’s paying $1500 to a different company for web hosting? No, we seriously want to know. These aren’t rhetorical questions.

We have to assume that Lieberman paid the guys named above (click to enlarge slightly) to find hosting, and “2 Dog Media” went with the cheapest option available, using the rest of their paycheck to buy Ecstasy or whatever Internet people ingest. With Friends of Joe Lieberman like this, etc. MORE »

The New Republic’s Franklin Foer reports from this summer’s skullduggery-laden College Republican Convention, which elected a South Dakota kid named Paul Gourley, a self-professed “hick” as its new chair. The College Republicans are the great proving ground for made political operatives in the GOP–past presidents include Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Jack Abramoff. Foer says his favorite dirty trick involves a plainly forged fax that created a slate of dubiously legitimate Missouri delegates. But for our money, it’s hard to beat this one, courtesy of the aw-shucks “hick” Gourley: MORE »

The NYT Magazine yesterday laid out a fascinating scenario for the future of the Democratic party, based on the revolutionary new idea of “talking points.” Apparently, staying concisely on a message arrived at through carefully conducted focus groups may help one win a political battle. The test case for this, the article points out, was the Republicans’ attempt to eliminate the filibuster. As you may recall, the Democrats fought back successfully, all the way to a draw. (A draw being a success for Democrats.) The story’s author, Matt Bai, lays out how they worked this magic:

In an unusual show of discipline, Democrats in the Senate and House carried laminated, pocket-size message cards — ”DEMOCRATS FIGHTING FOR DEMOCRACY, AGAINST ABUSE OF POWER,” blared the headline at the top — with the talking points on one side and some helpful factoids about Bush’s nominees on the other.

Basically, by reducing their arguments to note cards, Democrats managed not to lose to the Republicans. Winning will take reducing their arguments to pointing and grunting. Or just give Kerry a lobotomy. MORE »