The Commentariat -- October 6

The Party of Racists. Andrea Nill of Think Progress: Republicans Sharron Angle & David Vitter use the same photo of menacing-looking young Hispanic men in their scary video ads. In Angle's ad she seems to be attacking Harry Reid for his support of the DREAM bill which would offer a path to citizenship for young people who served in the military or went to college (the ad copy is so misleading, tho it's hard to tell what she's talking about). Igor Volsky of Think Progress posts the ad pictures ...

     ... then writes that beneficiaries of the DREAM legislation would look more like this:

     ... "Angle's 'Willie Horton' Ad. Adam Serwer, writing in the Washington Post, elaborates.

Sarasota Herald-Tribune: "The process of banks hiring people to break into homes, even when occupied, is just the latest oddity of the messy foreclosure crisis in Florida.... It is illegal for any bank representative to enter a property if they have not yet retaken it at a foreclosure sale, especially if there is any sign the home is occupied, foreclosure experts say." In one instance, renters returned from an outing to find the locks changed & their valuables stolen by bank reps.

More Domestic Dirt. Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle: Jill Armstrong, who worked as a nanny for Meg Whitman & her husband while undocumented immigrant Nicandra Diaz Santillan was employed as the Whitmans' maid, says she believes Diaz Santillan's story. Although Armstrong quit working for Whitman after two months, she says she had trouble collecting the salary she had earned. ...

... Meanwhile, Seema Mehta & Carla Hall of the Los Angeles Times report that Diaz Santillan is "filing a claim with the state seeking unpaid wages and attorney Gloria Allred [is] denying claims that her involvement has been funded by Whitman's political enemies.... Diaz Santillan ... said she chose to come forward to shed light on the plight of undocumented workers who live in the 'shadows.'"

Matt Bai of the New York Times: when pollsters conduct focus groups of self-identified "independent" voters in a small town in New Jersey they discovered that the "underlying perception, that politicians in Washington conduct themselves just as childishly and with the same lack of accountability as the kids throwing chicken casserole in the lunchroom, may well be the principal emotion behind the electorate’s propensity to vote out whoever holds power."

David Leonhardt of the New York Times: "should the litmus test for American health care really be better than nothing?" Mini-med plans, like the ones McDonald's is threatening to cancel, demonstrate that "the real problem [with U.S. health care plans] was the status quo."

"The incumbent president -- I won't call his name * -- said, 'In the next week or two, I'm going to the most dangerous place on Earth: the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea.' I said, 'Rosalynn, that's where we were building homes last week.' -- Jimmy Carter

* George W. Bush, our bravest President ever

Susan Page of USA Today: ": Independent analysts predict that the number of women in Congress — currently 56 Democrats and 17 Republicans in the House, and 13 Democrats and four Republicans in the Senate — will decline for the first time in three decades."

Dana Milbank offers a quasi- (okay, very quasi-)statistical evidence that today's conservatives' standards for political purity have moved far rightward. "Comparing the [American Conservative Union] ratings of [Lisa] Murkowski [of Alaska] and [Bob] Bennett [of Utah] with those of other Republicans in the House and Senate going back to 1971 (the first year in the ACU online ratings archive), I discovered that if conservatives were to employ the purity standards they applied to Murkowski and Bennett, they would have rejected many, if not most, of the leading Republican lawmakers of the past 40 years.

Bob Woodward says an Obama-Clinton ticket in 2012 is "on the table":

     ... BUT. Anne Kornblut of the Washington Post: "The White House, not surprisingly, flat-out denies it. 'There's absolutely nothing to it,' senior adviser David Axelrod said Tuesday night." AND ...

Tom Friedman: California's Proposition 23, an effort to kill the state's clean energy legislation, is being financed -- surprise! -- by big oil on the fake premise that the clean energy law is a job killer.

Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post: "Faced with deep budget deficits and overextended pension plans, state and local leaders are increasingly looking to trim the lucrative retirement benefits that have long been associated with government employment. Public employees are facing a backlash that has intensified with the nation's economic woes, union leaders say, because of their good job security, generous health-care and pension benefits, and right to retire long before most private-sector workers."

Toljaso. Glenn Greenwald reminds readers that Tom Daschle's revelation (which he partially retracted later) that the Obama Administration took the public option off the table in early July 2009 won't be news to them. ...

... David Dayan of Firedoglake has another good post on the same subject. ...

... Here's Igor Volsky's post on the Daschle's book, interview & walk-back.

An endorsement from Sarah Palin has strings ropes chains attached. Gawker has one of the many takes on an e-mail exchange between Todd Palin, Alaska Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller & others. Mudflats (Jeanne Devon) originally published the e-mails.