Harry Reid must really be in danger of losing his Senate seat.

Today Harry Reid sent out a press release to the national media praising Senator Baucus for his new proposal on health care reform.

There’s just one problem. And it could be fatal to Harry Reid’s re-election chances in Nevada.

While Reid was praising Baucus to the national press corp, in Nevada he sent out a press release severely critical of the Baucus plan and said it was a raw deal for Nevada.

Harry Reid wants to have it both ways. He can’t.

Wow. Just wow.

New poll in Nevada by Vitale & Associates (July 29-30, 510 LV, MoE +/-4.4%) shows incumbent Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid losing by six points to Sue Lowden, chairwoman of the Nevada Republican Party, 44-38, with 10% undecided.

Real Clear Politics has more.

You can consider this an open thread.

…that someone surveying the situation might be forgiven in thinking that it’s implicitly permitted: but no, we don’t actually want election fraud to happen. When it does - like it did in Pennsylvania - and we can catch them at it, we put the people who did it on trial.

And then, apparently, we have the ACLU wander in and pick the wrong side to defend (via No Sheeples Here).  They’ve decided that paying people to commit election fraud is constitutional:

PITTSBURGH — The community organizing and voter registration group Acorn filed a federal lawsuit here Wednesday claiming that a state statute that is being used to prosecute some of its former employees is unconstitutional.

[snip]

Acorn hopes the lawsuit will prevent criminal prosecution of its local leaders and office, which have been under investigation by Mr. Zappala’s office for eight months, said Witold Walczak, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which is representing Acorn.

See also the American Spectator, which in another article notes the real estate links between the NYT and ACORN.  Just in case anyone was wondering why the sympathetic tone.

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Admittedly, Ensign’s taken one heck of a drop, but he’s still at least more liked than disliked.

Favorable / Unfavorable
Sen. Ensign (R): 39 / 37 (May 12-14: 53 / 18)
Sen. Reid (D): 34 / 46

Job Approval/Disapproval
Reid: 43 / 55
Ensign: 48 / 45

Jim Geraghty thinks that Reid should try having an affair; I will not be cruel and write the first three things that come to mind*. I will however, note that the Presidential numbers:

Favorable / Unfavorable
Pres. Obama: 49 / 32
Job Approval/Disapproval
Obama: 47% Excellent/Good, 50% Fair/Poor

…seem a bit weak for somebody who won Nevada 55/43.

Moe Lane

*But not the fourth: “Nobody needs shoes that bad.”

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Disney, unhappy with a drop off in tourism, has come up with a novel idea to get people to go see the rat and his minion in Florida: tax them.

Jeff Birnbaum, writing in the Washington Post last year, did a stunning job capturing just what an astroturf campaign the tourism industry has created in Congress.

It is widely accepted at Disney — if not empirically proved — that one of every 15 visitors to the United States ends up at a Disney park. Leveraging the power of the federal government to bring more tourists from overseas, therefore, would wind up filling the pockets of the Mouse.

After gaining a consensus among his colleagues at Disney, and talking to people at the Travel Industry Association and the Roundtable, Gluck drafted his boss’s “Apollo speech.” It was meant to be Rasulo’s call to arms. A big lobbying push was needed for a big Ask — the term lobbyists use to describe what they are pleading for from Congress. Rasulo would not say so publicly, but he told colleagues privately that his Ask would be for at least $200 million a year in advertising funds — four times what the Commerce Department had previously been directed to spend.

So Disney and the travel industry has convinced Congress to impose a $10.00 tax . . . “fee” . . . on visitors into the United States to pay for a handout to the travel and tourism industry — in addition to already allocated American tax dollars. The Senate is going to be working on this legislation shortly. It is called the Travel Promotion Act.

To put this in perspective, we have gone from a bailout for businesses to handouts for businesses. At what point does Congress realize we cannot afford to keep up the spending spree?

Oh, and you want results? Here’s one of the ad campaigns to be subsidized by your tax dollars and foreign visitor “fees”:

So.  Back in February the President went to Elkhart, Indiana and made a speech where, as Deceiver.com helpfully reminds us, he included this part:

You can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime. There’s got to be some accountability and some responsibility, and that’s something that I intend to impose as president of the United States.

Earlier this week, the President took a trip to Las Vegas on the taxpayers’ dime.  His privilege.  He went there to raise money for the wildly unpopular Senator Harry Reid.  Likewise, his privilege. He did this even though the current Governor is quite upset at the President for helping to lose his state about 131 million in revenue so far this year - and upset from afar, because the President didn’t meet with either him or the (Democratic) mayor of Las Vegas.  Once again, the President’s privilege - hey, do you know the etymology of the word ‘privilege?’

It’s Latin: it means ‘private law.’

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(Via AoSHQ): In 1988, I was a Democrat.  I came from a long line of Democrats; we were a good union household, the old blue-collar generation pushing the new generation into white collar.  When it came to political heroes, it was FDR, Truman, JFK all the way: my parents voted for Carter, and grumbled about Reagan throughout his term.  1988 was my first election, and I went right down to the polling place and proudly voted for Dukakis/Bentsen.  In short, I was a Democratic voter in a Democratic family in a Democratic state in a Democratic region who voted for two Democrats.

And if my Democratic parents had ever caught me calling a Republican First Lady crude names, even by implication, I would have gotten whacked on the ear*.

Speaking Bluntly
Mark Hemingway

[snip]

Three pages in, after lamely trying to establish his bipartisan bona fides by talking up George H. W. Bush, Reid shares this charming anecdote about his early days in the Senate: “[Former Texas senator and vice-presidential candidate Lloyd] Bentsen went on and on effusively about what a quality man President-elect [H. W.] Bush was. Then he paused and said, ‘But watch out for his wife; she’s a b[*]tch.’ I have never had anything against Mrs. Bush, but guided by Bentsen’s crude advice, I’ve always said that our forty-third president is more his mother than his dad.”

Which I guess makes me different from Harry Reid.

Thank God.

Moe Lane

*In fact, my mom would probably still do it.  And I’d sit there and take it, too.  That’s because I was raised to respect women.

Somewhere in Nevada, a Republican has just decided to run for Senator. We do not know his or her name, but whoever it is, he or she worries Senator Harry Reid right now:

CARSON CITY — Nearly half of Nevadans have had enough of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as the powerful Democrat heads into his re-election campaign, a new Las Vegas Review-Journal poll finds.

About a third of the state’s voters would re-elect Reid if the 2010 election were held today, according to the poll, but 45 percent say they would definitely vote to replace him. Seventeen percent would consider another candidate.

The findings are echoed by another poll question about Reid’s popularity that finds the four-term incumbent to be a polarizing figure in his home state.

Half of Nevada voters had an unfavorable view of Reid, while 38 percent had a favorable view and 11 percent a neutral opinion.

More via Chris Cillizza, who is actually going to some trouble to shoot down the most likely objections to this poll. The article goes on to quote Reid’s campaign manager as saying “The only poll that really matters is on Election Day.” This common sentence in Politician translates to “we’re doomed, but we’re not going to give you the satisfaction of seeing us wince,” and is one of the reasons why there’ll probably be a serious challenger or challengers by this time next week.  Getting below 50% favorable is a sign of alarm for a politician; having a 50% unfavorable rating is a harbinger of upcoming disaster.  He can still win, but there won’t be a repeat of 2004’s easy win for him.  Put another way, the Democrats don’t want to have to fight for that particular seat, but at this point they don’t have a choice…

Crossposted at Moe Lane.

Two years ago this April 19th, Harry Reid declared the war in Iraq “lost.”

“Now I believe, myself, that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows: that this war is lost, that the surge is not accomplishing anything,” Reid, D-Nev., told reporters.

Reid was utterly wrong and has never retracted his remarks. In fact, his remarks were heralded by the Islamofascists we fight and were greeted negatively by the American soldiers and sailors who were and are winning on and off the battlefield in Iraq.

But we should remind Harry Reid of this anniversary. I would encourage each and everyone one of you to send Harry Reid an anniversary card, reminding him of the day, two years ago, he threw our military under the bus for political expedience.

His address is:

Lloyd D. George Building
333 Las Vegas Boulevard
South, Suite 8016
Las Vegas, NV 89101

Hat tip to Jed Babbin for reminding me and egging me on.

[Libertarian]: “Voluntary taxation” = You can choose whether or not to participate in the tax system.

[Liberal]: “Voluntary taxation” = You calculate and send in your taxes, instead of your employer. And, oh, yes, you don’t have to pay taxes on a house if you don’t want to own one.

Watching an example of the former explain the definition to an example of the latter - and watching the liberal completely reject the definition without even remotely understanding it - in the following video will no doubt amuse you. Or make you want to throw a brick through the screen. Or both.

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Yes, yes, I know: NAFTA’s supposed to prevent that sort of thing, but we’re having one anyway:

Ricardo Alday, spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington said pressuring politicians by hitting imports from states with key Democratic leaders with tariffs of up to 90 percent “is one the main considerations,” for the action, the Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday.

The official list of products has not been released, but a draft obtained by economist Dermot Hayes at the University of Iowa suggest the tariffs will pinpoint almonds from California, sunglasses from Illinois, bowling equipment from Nevada and books from New York — the home states of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, President Barack Obama, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And before you ask: yes, it’s because of the bill that Dina Titus (D-NV) said that she read.

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When the House passed the Obama-Reid-Pelosi debt spending plan - and the carveout for AIG bonuses - Democrats allowed a scant few hours for review of the 1,000 page bill before the vote. Some honest Members of Congress admitted they had not read the bill. Nevada’s Dina Titus however, claimed to have done so:

House Democrats voted on the ’stimulus’ bill just a few hours after they drafted the text (without input from Republicans). Did Representative Titus really go over the entire text as she claimed, or was she simply too embarrassed to acknowledge that she was voting on something she hadn’t read? In either case, she clearly felt she knew enough to vote for the bill, since the House had been talking about it ‘for a long time’ - about 3 or 4 weeks, actually.

Did Titus really know what she was voting on, or was she shirking the first and most basic part of her job? It’s time for all the Democrats who voted for this bill to answer that question.