. . . and those Democrats had a fiercely contested primary, with one man dumping millions in the race while his opponent earned the endorsement of the incumbent Democratic President and a campaign visit from the immediate past Democratic president.

With 1,053,447 votes against two nuisance candidates, Marco Rubio bested the combined vote total of Kendrick Meek (513,648) and Jeff Greene (280,326) or 793,974. And even if we add in the Democratic nuisance candidates for a total of 897,015 and exclude the Republican, Rubio still wins.

In a two-candidate race, Rubio wins with 54%.

(H/t for the idea:  Jim Geraghty.)

Charlie Crist could not be reached for comment, but we could expect him to take the 192,539 votes won by the Republican nuisance candidate and how many of defeated Democrat Jeff Greene?

Perhaps the most amusing thing about watching CNN while doing cardio is that I can show just how better informed I am than their supposedly even-handed reporters. I’m sweating on the stairmaster while they’re ensconced in studios with paid staff to help them complete their research. And still I have more facts at my disposal than they do.

Bemoaning the fate of her new favorite, right-wing laughingstock J.D. Hayworth, Jessica Yellin said that had this race been held six months earlier, the results would have been different. Would they have?

I recalled that there was a time when the race seemed close between the four-term Senator and the former Congressman, but that there never had been a time when Hayworth had been in the lead, I returned home to find this chart by typing one website (pollster.com) and two “mouse” clicks:

(Pollster.com.)

Of course this chart undermines Miss Yellin’s spin that J.D. Hayworth would have won had John McCain not dumped millions into the race.  To be sure, his money may have prevented Hayworth from securing a more sizable share of the anti-McCain vote and certainly prevented conservatives from rallying ’round him.

UPDATE:  Jim Geraghty reports that CNN has called the race for John McCain.

In a few short hours, Arizona Republican voters will do voters in Arizona’s Fifth Congressional District did four years ago, end the career of one of the biggest buffoons in American politics:  J.D. Hayworth.  This man comes straight from liberal central casting of what a conservative is like.  He may have the right (in our opinion) views on certain issues, but he expresses them in ways which invite ridicule.

And he just looks stupid, like the football player who took a few too many hits which impaired his cognitive abilities.

He’s like Foghorn Leghorn, but without the cunning.

That said, the folks at CNN were bending over backwards to portray in a favorable light the man who is attempting to deprive John McCain of the Republican nomination for the Arizona Senate seat.  Ol’ Jessica Yellin lamented how the Republican incumbent had described the former Congressman as a “huckster”, hinting a nasty campaign by the 2008 GOP standard bearer.  She didn’t mention how the once and future talk show host recorded infomercials where he advised people how they could get “free money” from the government.

Nor did she note how he was a champion of pork-barrel politics.  Now, I know there are many reasons for conservatives to be upset with John McCain, but, in this of all years, to have a former politician with a record to the four-term incumbent’s left on spending issues try to run as the conservative choice is really rich.  I mean, on earmarks at least, McCain has held true to conservative principles, in both rhetoric — and practice.

Well, Hayworth did get the Republican incumbent to spend $20 million to hold the seat.  Interesting.  No wonder Yellin was flacking for the right-wing buffoon.  That’s $20 million that could have helped Republicans defeat entrenched Democratic incumbents.

NB:  Tweaked the post to correct a typo and improve the flow.

‘CBS Evening News’ Ties All-Time Low

Well, I’ve been proven right.  Just shy of four years ago, I wrote:

I expect Ms. Couric to enjoy the same success with the CBS Evening News as Geena Davis [did] with Commander in Chief. All the hype about the show will give her great initial ratings which will gradually decline as the buzz wears off.

Couric’s “newscast” drew 1.62 million fewer viewers than did its counterpart on second-place ABC.  And over 2.5 million fewer than first-place NBC.

I guess making nice with Joe Biden just doesn’t help you earn the respect of the American people.

Whoever thinks that he alone is wise,
his eloquence, his mind, above the rest,
come the unfolding, shows his emptiness.
A man, though wise, should never be ashamed
of learning more, and must unbend his mind.

Antigone, trans. by Elizabeth Wyckoff.

Please, Mr. President, unbend your mind; your policies aren’t working.

Normal folk have intrinsically known this for about a year…. now the “experts” are catching on.

Positive gross domestic product readings and other mildly hopeful signs are masking an ugly truth: The US economy is in a 1930s-style Depression, Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg said Tuesday.

Writing in his daily briefing to investors, Rosenberg said the Great Depression also had its high points, with a series of positive GDP reports and sharp stock market gains.

But then as now, those signs of recovery were unsustainable and only provided a false sense of stability, said Rosenberg.

Rosenberg calls current economic conditions “a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession,” and notes that any good news both during the initial 1929-33 recession and the one that began in 2008 triggered “euphoric response.”

“Such is human nature and nobody can be blamed for trying to be optimistic; however, in the money management business, we have a fiduciary responsibility to be as realistic as possible about the outlook for the economy and the market at all times,” he said.

The 1929-33 recession saw six quarterly bounces in GDP with an average gain of 8 percent, sending the stock market to a 50 percent rally in early 1930 as investors thought the worst had passed.

I hate to say “I told you so”…. but “I told you so”.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Simple, yet effective country song about the state of our nation and how fed up most Americans are. (h/t – GP reader Spartann)

Unfortunately, standing up against the Obama Administration carries a heavy price. 

Bryan Glover, an assistant coach at Grassland Middle School near Nashville, co-wrote the country music song, “When You’re Holding a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail.”

It was co-written by a parent who has a child on the team. Glover, 26, said he emailed a copy of the song to friends, family members and player’s parents through his personal email account.

And that’s when all the trouble started for the self-described independent conservative.

“The coach called me and said parents were upset – that I was being politically incorrect and the song had racial overtones,” Glover told FOX News Radio. “An hour and a half later I was told I was being terminated.”

“I was informed that I was being let go because of the song,” he said, denying claims there were any racial overtones in the song.

Racial overtones?  Good lord.  Hasn’t the “race card” expired already for overuse?

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

If Patrick Guerriero had truly been concerned about the integrity of the organization he headed in 2004, the Log Cabin Republicans, he would have resigned his position as president immediately after George W. Bush was re-elected to a second term in the White House in 2004.  Instead, he lingered for nearly two years.  Since he was so closely tied to Log Cabin’s non-endorsement of Bush in that election, his resignation would have cleared the decks and allowed the organization’s board to tap someone who did not have such bad blood with the then-Republican Administration in Washington.

With that in mind, when I first read that Clarke Cooper was elected head of Log Cabin in May, it struck me that the organization’s head had long-standing ties to the Bush family, even having served eight years, W’s entire tenure, in that good man’s Administration.  It was as if his appointment was a tacit acknowledgment that the organization had erred in 2004.

I met Clarke Cooper last night at a meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of Log Cabin — at which gathering congressional candidate Mattie Fein was also present (more on that anon) — and was reasonably impressed.  Time will only tell if he can show a greater commitment to building the GOP than did the first two executive directors of the organization.  In his speech he pretty much said all the right things; he was willing to listen to some of the criticisms I had leveled against the organization when I approached him after his talk.  While in the manner of his distingished predecessor, Patrick Sammon, he was open to criticism, he did seem a tad defensive at times.

I was impressed that he said log Cabin need to “resynchronize” with the GOP.  He even called the organization a GOP auxiliary.  Thanks to his Bush connections, he was able to secure meetings at the RNC.  He indicated that in 2010, that process of resynchronization should be relatively easy, given that all conservatives are “on the same page” with a focus on jobs and the economy, standing up to the big-spending policies of the incumbent Administration. (more…)

The left-of-center magazine, the New Republic, has called his gay marriage position a “disgrace.”