Montana turns blue

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Let's move Florida and Georgia and Missouri back into The Maveprick's column -- the Barr effect is yet to really show up there -- and let's hold off on Indiana for Obama for the time being.

But the Big Sky is turning blue. I give you The Votemaster (with the requisite cautionaries) ...

Happy Independence day, everyone! Flags as big as baseball fields are all the rage these days. And if you are more into auditory than visual celebrations, how about having someone read the Declaration of Independence out loud? It takes only 6 minutes.

Of course the 438,000 people who lost their jobs this year (including 62,000 announced yesterday) may not be so happy. People who own stocks may also not be so happy with the current bear market (the Dow is off 21% from its recent high). And people whose house was foreclosed may not be so happy, either. All this bad economic news is going to make the Republicans unhappy as the economy is overshadowing everything else as the key election issue and poll after poll shows that the voters prefer the Democrats on the economy. Barack Obama has a built-in advantage here because Democrats believe the government should do something. Republicans believe that leaving matters to the free market is a better approach than having government bureaucrats run the economy, even if it means short-term pain for some people. But it is a tough sell to tell an unemployed steel worker in Ohio that soon there will be a lot of jobs for multimedia specialists in California.

We have four polls today, two of them surprising. Rasmussen has Obama ahead in Montana by 5%. That seems very questionable. Let's wait for a few more before jumping to the conclusion that Montana is competitive in the presidential race (although both senators, Jon Tester and Max Baucus, are Democrats and so is Gov. Brian Schweitzer). The other surprising poll is in Georgia where McCain leads Obama by a mere 2%. Again, even with Bob Barr in the race (polling at 4%), this may not last. But if Obama can register vast numbers of blacks and young people, he could at least make Georgia competitive.

Independence Day Funnies

Bell leans toward Senate run

Italy's Tower of Pisa stands straight up by comparison. Alan Bernstein, honing the snark:

Officially, Democrat and former Houston congressman Chris Bell is considering running for the seat in the state Senate vacated by Republican Kyle Janek. Bell, the Democratic candidate for governor in 2006, even acknowledges that he is leaning toward running in the District 17 race.

But, with Bell's permission, a current lawmaker and a former lawmaker already have scheduled a July 24 fund-raising event for Bell's candidacy and that of Joe Jaworski, who is running for state Senate in an adjacent district.

State Rep. Craig Eiland of Galveston and former state Sen. Lloyd Criss are helping together the Galveston Yacht Club event (.pdf).

As leanings go, this one's pretty sharp.

Bell said today that he approved the preparations in case he runs. And, he will make his decision public by four days before the fund-raising event. Guess what he'll say!

The district runs from southwest Houston to the Beaumont area to Key West and Cuba. Well, not that far, but the strangely shaped boundaries do go from Braes Bayou to the eastern edge of the state (.pdf).

News we've been eagerly anticipating for some time now. With Joe Jaworski and Wendy Davis and Chris Bell in the Texas Senate, we go a long way toward reversing the red tide in Texas.

Extremism in the defense of liberty

" ... is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

-- Barry Goldwater, the nation's last respectable conservative (apparently)

(Thanks to Dallas Sidebar)