She Thinks We're Stupid Hicks

In today's W-S Journal, Madam Foxx's campaign manager Todd Poole publishes a letter (page 23 in the Karl Rove Playbook) that sets up the election between the Madam and Roger Sharpe as a series of "choices" that no right-thinking citizen in the NC-5 could fumble.

One of those "choices":

We have a choice between confirming judges to the federal bench who strictly interpret the Constitution and our laws or the liberals who support activist judges who will legislate their liberal policies from the bench.

Surely Madam Foxx knows, even if her campaign manager doesn't, that members of the U.S. House do NOT vote on judges.

Apparently, they're counting on our ignorance. As usual.

The Odor of Wet Fur

Foxx refuses to tape debate unless reporters are barred

Today's W-S Journal

The Low Road

We opened our morning papers to headlines trumpeting Karl Rove's "genius." Whatever afflicts Rove, though, appears not to be catching.

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.
N.C. House Dist. 93 incumbent, Republican Gene Wilson, has mailed out an over-size postcard screaming "It's Time For a Change!" Wilson is a 16-year incumbent. And we couldn't agree more. Whatever, you do, Sleepy Gene, don't stop campaigning. We needed the belly laugh.

Messaging: Don't Think of an Elephant.
Since local Hardee's franchise-holder and convicted tax evader Jim Hastings took charge of the local Republican message, he's put up six radio spots that scream "librul librul librul" and "beware of OUTSIDERS!"

Where was Jim Hastings born? (dunno, but not in Watauga County)

Where was Virginia Foxx born? (New Yawk City)

Where was David Blust born? (Ohio)

We could go on. Of course, it's not about outsiders and it's not about "libruls." It's about stirring up the prejudices of rural people, the prime audience for local radio. Or, rather, it's about TRYING to stir up the prejudices of rural people ... in a year when the usual Republican base is turning deaf ears to the people they generally listen to.

The Hastings' message plan is to distract people with fear of outsiders -- gays, vegetarians, college students, llama-breeders. His party has led us down a rat-hole and into hopeless foreign entanglements, but he wants his rural listeners to fear their neighbors.

Of course, that's classic Karl Rove. And we fully expect their negative, divisive feces to coat every available surface during this last week before the election. We look especially for Madam Foxx to begin unloading a nasty dumptruck-load on Roger Sharpe, now that an independent poll shows her with less than 50% support and Sharpe within six points of overtaking her. (More on that poll later.)

They can't do ANYTHING honestly. Locally in Watauga County, the GOP was going to run against the new high school and even wrote their platform to incorporate that idea. But their own candidates wouldn't toe that line consistently. Then they decided to blow Boone's steep-slope development regs up into a big commie-pinko-socialist plot and discovered that the people in the county aren't, after all, as dumb as doorknobs, and that message has failed miserably. Now they're down to the scraps of tired old formulas that worked pretty well when Jesse Helms roamed the earth ... "librul outsiders are poisoning your vital bodily fluids!"

How pathetic. We agree with Gene Wilson.

Phony Baloney

Missed this (after all) small news yesterday: Madam Foxx has agreed to debate Roger Sharpe (wow! She must be worried!) but it will only be broadcast at 10:30 p.m. next Sunday (two days before the election, natch!) on WMYV-TV, Channel 48 ... which no one in Watauga County gets. Wonder if anyone in Alexander, Alleghany, Ashe, Davie, Iredell, Stokes, Surry, Wilkes, or Yadkin county gets that channel?

Oh, we've figgered this out. Now she can brag that she had balls enough to actually face her challenger in a debate ... without running the risk that any of us peons might actually see her mean little knotted-up soul in action.

Domino Theory

Buried in an article in today's W-S Journal is this analysis by Duke University political scientist Mike Munger:

"In any election, there is a moment, perhaps a trivial one, that focuses things in voters' minds. It can either make them choose a candidate, or make them lose enthusiasm for a candidate or party and stay home .... The question in North Carolina is this: Is the Mark Foley affair going to be that moment?"

If so, Munger said, [Robin] Hayes could lose, [Charlie] Taylor's 16-year House career will likely come to an end, and even [Madam Virginia] Foxx could be in danger.

Munger also reminds us that Hayes, Taylor and Foxx were the only GOP representatives to win with less than 60 percent of the vote in 2004.

Ole Virginia Had a Farm (Emphasis on Had)

A new bipartisan poll conducted for the Center for Rural Strategies shows the formerly solid Republican rural voter growing decidedly "pekkid."

Five hundred likely rural voters were surveyed in 41 heavily contested congressional districts and six states with close Senate races. Most of the House districts surveyed have Republican incumbents. Fifty-two per cent of the respondents indicate they'll vote for Democratic congressional candidates; 39 percent say they'll support Republicans.

No wonder Madam Foxx is feeling some constricture in the throat.

The Foxx campaign is polling rural Republicans in Watauga County (at least) with the following set of questions:

1. Are you planning to vote for V. Foxx?
2. Do you approve or disapprove of George Bush's presidency?
3. Do you feel the country is moving in the right or wrong direction?
4. Do you plan to vote in this election? Plan not to vote? Or are you unsure?

That polling, to be sure, isn't so much designed to get honest opinion as it is designed to identify the remaining 39 percent of rural Republicans who would still vote for Foxx. Those people will likely be dragged to the polls whether they want to go or not.

Foxx Hunt, Cont.

We're hearing from Republican friends that they're receiving live phone calls urging them to get out to vote early for Madam Foxx. Apparently, the Foxx campaign is seeing the same numbers we're seeing from early voting ... which don't look so good for the Madam (just based on the number of Republicans showing up to vote early vs. the number of Democrats).

She might have been tempted to use robo-calling, since there's no way a handful of College Republicans being paid minimum wage can ever make all the calls she needs. But she can't use robo-calling without once again revealing the utter hypocrisy of her politics. Why? She came out early in 2005 signing on to legislation to greatly limit the use of robo-calling. (But if anyone gets a robo-call from her, we hope you'll let us know!)

The Winston-Salem Journal is not the only 5th Dist. newspaper to go after her. She's "cashing in" like Boss Hogg, according to the Statesville Record & Landmark. She's "Representative Clueless" to the Elkin Tribune. Foxx is "a sycophant," according to the Tribune editorialist. Also "tone deaf." She's spent two years "throwing good votes after bad policy" in her slavish attempt to rubberstamp whatever El Presidente wanted and to suck up to more powerful lawmakers by spreading her money around like barnyard manure.

Yep, that's the Foxx we know. Proud, we are, that others are also seeing through her.

For example, her supposed support for the armed forces. If you've got the stomach for it, scroll through all her accumulated press releases and see how many are pious protestations about support for the military ... like this one and this one and this one.

Empty, easy symbolic gestures, most of them. The Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) sees her ACTUAL performance on behalf of military men and women and grades her as barely passing ... a big ole fat "D."

Wouldn't it be something to get her outta that House after two insufferable years? And actually get some representation.

Foxx Hunt

The W-S Journal has published another editorial blasting Madam Virginia Foxx for "misrepresentation," which according to our lexicon means lying.

Also fleecing her supporters.

And general mendaciousness.

You can see the heart-breaking TV ad Michael J. Fox did for Senate candidate Claire McCaskill here, along with the unbelieveable comment about it from Rush Limbaugh yesterday.

My wife came grumbling into the house yesterday afternoon. "You won't believe what I just heard Rush Limbaugh say on the radio," she announced. "That Michael J. Fox must have been acting, or else he was off his meds."

What do we get when Rush Limbaugh is off his meds? Illegal doctor-shopping.

What a despicable (alleged) human being.