Today’s edition of quick hits.<\/p>\n
* When a very large “shredding services” truck shows up at the Vice President’s house<\/a>, I get a little nervous.<\/p>\n * Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) — you know, the guy who allegedly accosted a cocktail waitress in a Las Vegas parking lot — is now officially under a criminal investigation<\/a>. I know Nevada is generally a “red” state, but voters couldn’t still elect this guy, could they?<\/p>\n * Just in time for Halloween, a new Gallup poll reveals that a little more than 1 in 10 Americans object to Halloween “on religious grounds<\/a>.” That number, 11%, climbs to 27% among those who attend religious services weekly. Additionally, more than 1 in 4 evangelicals object to Halloween.<\/p>\n * South Dakota’s ballot measure to ban abortions doesn’t<\/a> appear to be doing very well. Good.<\/p>\n * I’ve seen goyim<\/a> give Jewish voters the hard-sell before, particularly in Florida, but I’ve never seen anyone go quite as far as Katherine Harris<\/a>.<\/p>\n * My friend Cliff Schecter has a terrific piece<\/a> on AlterNet today about Joe Lieberman’s “evolving” opinions on almost everything, including the war in Iraq. After reading it, one wonders how anyone could take Lieberman seriously anymore.<\/p>\n * Speaking of must-read pieces, Will Evans did a fantastic job<\/a> for Salon about federal judges who gave financial contributions to Bush and other Republicans who helped place them on the bench. Amazing.<\/p>\n * Republican Reps. Joy Padgett, Rick O’Donnell, and Curt Weldon are supposed to be candidates the GOP is committed to protecting this year. Today, however, the Republicans started backing away<\/a> from all three of them. * Wait, the Dem establishment thinks the netroots<\/i> aren’t ambitious enough<\/a> to find for every seat? Don’t they realize they have that backwards?<\/p>\n * John Dickerson is right; the GOP’s new push polls seem to misunderstand the whole point<\/a> of push-polling. The idea is to fool<\/i> people into thinking it’s a legitimate survey. If the script includes all kinds of absurd claims that the voter doesn’t believe, the whole project is useless.<\/p>\n * How’s that GOP outreach to African Americans coming along? Not very well<\/a>.<\/p>\n * When statewide Republican candidates start apologizing for their party affiliation<\/a> in TV ads, you know the party is having a rough cycle. Wow.<\/p>\n * You TimesSelect subscribers will definitely enjoy Tom Schaller’s piece<\/a> today on the myths of the 2004 election. It’s amazing so many professional pundits get so many facts wrong about an election that just happened two years ago.<\/p>\n * It’s scary to think that Katrina is the “forgotten disaster<\/a>,” but I’m afraid it’s clearly the case.<\/p>\n * And in case we needed any more reasons to question the efficacy of the no-fly list, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D), a five-term lawmaker from California, was denied access to a United Airlines flight last week, and a United employee told her she was on the terrorist watch list<\/a>. “I handed over my congressional ID and he started laughing and said, ‘I’m going to need an ID that has your birthday on it,'” Sanchez said in a phone interview with the Associated Press.<\/p>\n If none of these particular items are of interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today’s edition of quick hits. * When a very large “shredding services” truck shows up at the Vice President’s house, I get a little nervous. * Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) — you know, the guy who allegedly accosted a cocktail waitress in a Las Vegas parking lot — is now officially under a criminal investigation. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n* I’m kind of amazed reporters don’t care about the timing of the Saddam Hussein verdict. I’m even more amazed CNN would mock<\/a> those of us who think it’s a legitimate question.<\/p>\n