Open Mic October 19

Biden said in Las Vegas:

Ryan has writ­ten a book called ‘The Young Guns‘ with two other fel­las, mem­bers of the House, Repub­li­can lead­ers in the House … unfor­tu­nately the bul­lets are aimed at you.

http://​www​.politico​.com/​b​l​o​g​s​/​b​u​r​n​s​-​h​a​b​e​r​m​a​n​/​2​0​1​2​/​1​0​/​b​i​d​e​n​-​g​o​p​-​b​u​l​l​e​t​s​-​a​r​e​-​a​i​m​e​d​-​a​t​-​y​o​u​-​1​3​8​9​3​2​.​h​t​m​l​?​h​p​=r9

Funny joke, or over the line? If you’re going to call your­self a “young gun,” does that make it tac­itly OK for some­one else to joke about where you’re aim­ing your bullets?

@PNE

This year, I voted early (as early as pos­si­ble) here in Iowa, but I remem­ber how much I wanted to vote in per­son on elec­tion day the first time I voted, too. It makes it feel just that lit­tle bit more real.

Here in Iowa, about 1 out of 5 have already voted. Makes the almost daily tele­phone polls inter­est­ing, because none of them yet have had the “already voted” option. Ques­tions are still phrased as if every­one were persuadable.

The poll I got yes­ter­day was an in-​​person call focus­ing on the local con­gres­sional race, but the woman mak­ing the call barely spoke Eng­lish and couldn’t under­stand me when I answered the “will you definitely/​likely/​not likely/​definitely not be vot­ing” ques­tion with “Do you have an option for already voted?” She was con­fused and just repeated the ques­tion in heav­ily accented Eng­lish, so I said “You’d bet­ter mark me as def­i­nitely since I already voted.” The large num­ber of words evi­dently con­fused her, so I finally rolled my eyes and just said, “Def­i­nitely.” (At least the guy on Mon­day got the joke and answered my “already voted” remark with “Should I mark you as Def­i­nitely then?”) Just like Monday’s poll, the rest of the ques­tions were all phrased as “will you be more likely to vote for…” which I answered with who I’d already voted for. Then, there was the kicker, she asked one of those hypo­thet­i­cals, if I tell you [blah blah blah] will that change who you are likely to vote for on Nov 6? “No, because I already voted.” She insisted that I rate the like­li­hood of chang­ing my vote on the stan­dard 4-​​point scale. Just to be per­verse, I almost answered that it was very likely to change my vote, but I was good and told them I was unlikely to change my vote. Really, if you’re going to be polling about the local Iowa races, the ques­tions should take into account that a lot of peo­ple here have voted already.

That was yes­ter­day. Today, I got a poll from an Iowa RNC out­fit that was just as ill-​​prepared to deal with a voter who’d already voted. I can almost for­give the national poll­sters for not being on the ball, but if you’re an Iowa orga­ni­za­tion polling Iowa specif­i­cally, then it’s really unfor­giv­able that they aren’t pre­pared for vot­ers who’ve already voted as 20% of my fel­low Iowans already have. 

Repub­li­can Rep Walsh (Tammy Duckworth’s oppo­nent) in Illi­nois says that there is no need for a “life of the mother” excep­tion to abor­tion, because “mod­ern tech­nol­ogy and sci­ence” has made that no longer a con­cern. “You can’t point to a sin­gle instance,” he says.

http://​www​.politico​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​/​1​0​1​2​/​8​2​6​2​0​.​h​tml

My guess is that this plays just about as well with sub­ur­ban Chicago as Akin’s com­ments about forcible rape…

@GROG

The biggest dif­fer­ence is that lib­er­als largely admit they are chang­ing their mind on some­thing and often offer expla­na­tions as to why. For exam­ple Obama’s chang­ing views on homo­sex­ual mar­riage rights, or Biden’s clearly expressed views on abor­tion rights, or Kerry’s (poorly expressed) expla­na­tion that he’d changed his mind. The rea­son you’ll never hear a Repub­li­can say they voted for some­thing before they voted against it is because they’ll never admit to hav­ing held the con­trary position.

Con­ser­v­a­tives (and Mitt in par­tic­u­lar) pre­tend that what­ever they are say­ing today has always been their posi­tion and they haven’t changed a bit. Mitt has always been for pro­tect­ing a woman’s con­sti­tu­tional right to choose what to do with her own body, except when he’d be “delighted” to sign a bill ban­ning all abor­tions. I might accept that he’d just changed his mind, but he’s been tout­ing both the end all abor­tions posi­tion and the won’t take away a woman’s right to choose posi­tion off and on through­out the past few weeks depend­ing on his audi­ence. I hon­estly can’t say what Mitt’s posi­tion on abor­tion is, because as soon as I artic­u­late a posi­tion for Mitt, some­one else can point to a quote from the past week that con­tra­dicts what­ever posi­tion I pick.

That’s the difference.