News Roundup for 5/24/11

I'm just saying you should think about it, Russ

-Headline of the day-
"Poll: Come Back, Russ Feingold!"

Well that didn't take long. Just seven months after losing to rightwing halfwit Ron Johnson, Russ Feingold is now the favorite to win the seat held by the retiring Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl. According to the report, "In hypothetical contests Feingold leads Tommy Thompson 52-42, Mark Neumann 53-41, JB Van Hollen 53-38, and Jeff Fitzgerald 54-39. He wins independents by at least 9 points in all of the match ups and takes more than 90% of the Democratic vote while keeping the Republican candidates in the 80s within their own parties."

If you don't know who all those people are, don't worry. Suffice it to say that they're all jerks. Tommy Thompson is probably the one to watch, having been the longest-serving governor of the state. After that though, he kind of went south and led what might very well be the most disastrous presidential campaign of 2008. And that's why you never heard of him -- he was out almost as soon as he got in. The others have enough pro-Walker, anti-labor baggage to be sure targets in attack ads.

Here you go Russ. Just pick right up where you left off. (Weigel)


-Conservatives are just awful-
Top Palin aide Rebecca Mansour -- who looks remarkably like Danny DeVito as "The Penguin" -- loves her some of that twitter. And it's there that we begin to find out what conservatives are really like.

See, Mansour has been having a "Twitter correspondence with a web denizen whom she didn't know, but had come to trust online," according to Politico's Ben Smith. And said web denizen was looking to cash in.

"Does Politico pay for exclusives? Cause I'm looking to sell. I have 122 direct messages from Sarah Palin staffer Rebecca Mansour," the web denizen emailed Smith. Smith told him he'd buy lunch or something, but that was as far as journalistic ethics would allow him to go.

"Sorry, Ben, but it's going to take more than a happy meal and a hand shake to get me to betray someone's confidence. Only freshly printed 100 dollar bills help me get over feelings of guilt," he wrote back, "Would it violate some fake journalistic ethics and standards to get me in contact someone who does pay? I know that the thought of blogging about this is making your panties wet. The topics range from Chuck Hagel to Ricky Hollywood and everything else in between. It's a fucking blogger's gold mine."

Yeah, this guy's just a wonderful person.

Anyway, Smith wrote back that it was no deal, so web denizen took his tweets to Tucker Carlson, who totally denies paying for the dirt that Smith refused to pay for. Still, it all wound up at Carlson's Daily Caller, because he offered a better lunch or something.

So we go from jerk #1 to jerk #2 -- i.e., Mansour herself. Rebecca hates everybody. Redstate's Erick Erick is "a total douchebag" (this confirms my suspicions, by the way). Mitt Romney supporters are "wacky as hell." She was "was thinking more along the lines" of mailing journalist Joe McGinnis "a dead fish." Even Bristol Palin gets hit with comparisons to Billy Carter and Margaret Thatcher's "screw up son Mark."

Then, when confronted with the tweets, she tried to deny them. That proved to be impossible, so she begged that they not be printed. "Can I just appeal to you to leave the Bristol stuff alone?"

Finally, she sent out a statement saying it was all "personal private conversations between myself and someone who I thought was a friend."

Wow. With the way you talk about people behind their backs, you really think you have friends? (Politico, Daily Caller)


-Bonus HotD-
"Study: Whites say they face more racism than blacks."

Oh for fuck's sake... (Raw Story)