The longtime NPR commentator gets the boot after comments he made on The O’Reilly Factor Monday night about Muslims.

Bill Clinton is the Democrats’ ace in the hole, especially in parts of the country where President Obama’s own lack of popularity is a drag on Dem candidates:

I quasi-defended Christine O’Donnell the other day for her apparent Establishment Clause debate blunder. (If “she didn’t mean this stupid thing, she meant that stupid thing” counts as a defense.) Now O’Donnell is coming to her own defense:

After that debate my team and I we were literally high fiving each other thinking that we had exposed he doesn’t know the First Amendment, and then when we read the reports that said the opposite we were all like “what?”

You got him, Christine.

Jon Stewart to Larry King: I pick on CNN because “you’re terrible.” Watch.

Just last week over lunch with one of our reporters, I wondered aloud where Bob Perry was putting his campaign contributions this election cycle. We started looking into it, with the idea that if the Houston builder was flying under the radar this time around — unlike in 2004 when he funded Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or 2006 when he funded the Economic Freedom Foundation — it might be indicative of the changed environment legally and politically that allows so much anonymous money to be pumped into the elections this year.

As it turns out, Perry’s giving is above the radar. It shows up in FEC filings filed yesterday by the group Karl Rove helped found, American Crossroads. Perry’s contribution: a cool $7 million.

Put this in the category of things I would never have noticed on my own. TPM Reader KC checks in:

Not to be such a nitpicky female, but how did Christine O’Donnell’s hair go from a professional, skimming the shoulders cut in the “I am not a witch ad” to the middle of her back in the debate? Three possible options: 1) they edited it in post-production on the ad, 2) she’s currently wearing hair extensions, 3) or she actually is a witch.

Does KC have a point? Judge for yourself: Read More

In his day Bill Clinton got demonized by the DC thumbsuckers about his aggressive, sometimes brassknuckle campaign tactics. And Mike Kinsley had the most apt take on the phenomenon: The rules of the game are that Republicans pioneer the hardball tactics and Democrats must wait until the following political cycle to use them for themselves. In other words, political rectitude is Republicans being able to do anything they want and Democrats having to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules. Or use the hardball tactics after 2 or 4 years has made them soft and ineffective. But Clinton decided to use the hardball tactics first. And that was wrong.

Needless to say, Kinsley had a way of saying this more wittily and clearly in one sentence. But that was the idea.

Let me try to understand this. Rand Paul is still out complaining about the Jack Conway ad. But why doesn’t he get asked this question: He’s a bible-believing Christian. Yet before he got into the final couple months of this campaign, he was very open about being a devotee of Ayn Rand. Rand of course, in addition to being a hard-right extremist in political terms, was a confirmed atheist who was not only openly contemptuous of organized religion and Christianity but a convinced critic of the element of Christianity that most agnostics and atheists actually find redeeming: namely, altruism.

This is only one element of what a fraud Paul is. But this is reality. It’s very hard to see how you can be an (Ayn) Randian Christian.

Should Rand Paul’s private views on religion be his own business? Maybe. But why should his lying about them be off-limits? Read More

In response to the Christine O’Donnell hair question, raised earlier (in jest), comes this striking analysis of her image strategy, from TPM Reader HF:

Here’s what I think.

The bangs in the ad released October 4 look pretty freshly cut, probably to give her a plainer, more girlish look and possibly specifically for making this ad. Her hair is parted just off-center and straight back to the crown. (Usually she parts it farther off to the right with a zig zag and does a bit of a 60’s, Jackie Kennedy type bang.) The hair on the right is probably longer, which is why much of it is tucked back behind her ear for the ad. Most of her hair is probably pulled back out of the way, as the goal here is to make her hair look as thin, straight and unattractive as possible. It looks like her hair has been flattened with a straightening iron and an oily product to make it very smooth and straight. It falls from a bit of a natural cowlick, so it looks like it was combed and air-dried rather than blown out. All in search of the “I just got out of English class and what’s all this about witchcraft?” look.

Read More

There are a number of races that look like they’re becoming newly competitive, mainly but not solely ones where Dems had seemed like they were out of it. But the one that seems most clearly to be the real thing is the PA Senate race with Sestak against Toomey.

You can see the movement on the trend chart above. But we’re getting close enough to election day that you really need to look at the most recent numbers. We’ve now got three polls in the last week. One from Quinnipiac, one from PPP and two days of a tracking poll from Muhlenberg. You can see the specific numbers here. And they all show basically a dead even race.