Okay, I’m not buying this.
As you may have heard, last night had a big surprise in the Democratic Senate primary in South Carolina. Probably no Democrat would have much of a chance against Sen. Jim DeMint (R) this year. But the main candidate was Vic Rawl, a judge who’s also served four terms in the state legislature. He’d raised $186,000. Against him was Alvin Greene, a rather unorthodox candidate. And Greene won. (The best theory people have come up with is that no one in the state had really heard of either guy and Greene’s name came first on the ballot; and that gave him an advantage.)
Greene’s unemployed, recently out of the Army and living with his parents, and has an outstanding felony arrest from last year for showing obscene photos to a college student. Read More
AT&T suffers worst security breach. 114,000 iPad owners exposed.
There was a lot of talk last night that GOP bigwigs would pressure runner-up Gresham Barrett to drop out and let South Carolina’s Nikki Haley have the nomination for governor. But he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. He just released his first ad: He’s a good “Christian Family Man Who Won’t Embarrass Us.”
Carly Fiorina forgets she’s on an open mic and spends some time making fun of Barbara Boxer’s hair, ragging on Sean Hannity and waxing nostalgic about cheeseburgers. According to Fiorina, Boxer’s hair is “soooo yesterday.”
ABC News has an interview up with Alvin Greene, the mystery Senate candidate from South Carolina. And well, it’s just weird. I can’t say that it really gives me any clearer sense of what the hell is going on here than I had before I watched it.
But there is one point I thought I’d mention. In the video the interviewer is walking around the house with Greene. And Greene is showing him different memorabilia and pictures of himself as a kid. And the interviewer presses Greene, who says he’s a veteran, about whether he can show him any pictures of himself in uniform.
Greene sort of dodges the question and hems and haws. And it’s pretty clear that the implication of the editing is that maybe the whole military service part of Greene’s bio is made up. At this point, there’s not much I won’t believe with this story. But here’s the thing, as long as you’re keeping score at home: our Justin Elliott spent the afternoon trying to figure out what the hell was going on with this guy. And one thing Justin was able to confirm is that Greene did serve in the Air Force for three years.
See the interview after the jump. Read More
From Foreign Policy …
Western journalists who couldn’t reach — or didn’t bother reaching? — people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets posted with tag #iranelection. Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.
According to all available reports, South Carolina’s Alvin Greene didn’t campaign at all. But now he tells a local TV station that in fact and his team campaigned across the state of South Carolina. Read More
Dems launch new ad campaign daring Republicans to make the 2010 election a referendum on repealing Health Care Reform. See the ad.
It seems like some yet-to-be-revealed outside group may have dropped some independent expenditure money in favor of mystery South Carolina senate candidate Alvin Greene in the last day or two of the campaign. (ed.note: It’s looking like the mystery independent expenditure may be a false alarm. We’re continuing to dig.)
Meanwhile Rep. Clyburn (D-SC) thinks Greene is a “plant” and wants a federal investigation.