The idea is "to counter Harry Reid's nation-wide effort to tear-down Republican Senate candidates with dirty campaign tactics," the site says. "Our resources will be used to counter the Reid-machine attacks, and work to defeat Senate Democrats at the polls by explaining their records to the voters."
Sharron Angle's going with the obvious in her new fundraiser for Congress. Nevada will hold some sort of special election to fill Dean Heller's old congressional seat now that he's moving into the Senate seat John Ensign's resigning. The law's not clear on how that special election should happen. Democrats want an all-comers election; Republicans say the law calls for the parties to pick a candidate. And the candidate Republicans want is named Anyone Other Than Sharron Angle.
From Ms. Angle's letter: "The Democrats want this seat. The left wing of the Republican Party wants it more. Instead of an open process - already they are behind closed doors, choosing one of their own to be the preferred candidate in the race. This is exactly why I am running and why I need your help - to put an end to special interest politics!"
With Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada) resigning today, Nevada's Republican governor will appoint Congressman Dean Heller to serve the remainder of his term and then run next year as the incumbent, Las Vegas Sun reporter Jon Ralston told us last night. "It's a fait accompli," he said.
Mr. Ensign decided he'd rather not sit through ethics hearings on his affair with one staffer who was married to another, or on Mr. Ensign's parents giving $96,000 to their family. Rather than serve out his term, as he'd earlier announced he would do, Mr. Ensign can hand off the seat now for Mr. Heller, who was running for it anyway.
That leaves Mr. Heller's seat to be filled by special election. How that happens isn't clear under Nevada election law, Mr. Ralston told us, but one possibility is a quick, no-primary, all-comers election for the congressional seat. In that case, keep your eye on Sharron Angle, who was already ready to go. "[I]n a free-for-all, she still does have a base of people who would die for Sharron Angle," he tells us.
The other possibility, he explained, is that the law calls for the parties to pick candidates for the special election. In that case, Ms. Angle would be at a real disadvantage. The "Second Amendment remedies" candidate won the Senate primary last year in a Tea Party upset and faced off against Senator Harry Reid. Nevada's Republican establishment tried reinventing her as a mainstream pol, but in the end, she booted the party's chance of capturing Mr. Reid's seat. If Nevada GOP leaders get to choose who runs now, they'll likely look somewhere else. "That's not even a contest," a Republican insider tells the Hill. "They won't pick Angle."
As a Senate candidate in 2010, Sharron Angle made the highlight reels by running away from reporters. And then she lost. Today at a press conference in Reno, Ms. Angle reportedly took questions for more than hour about her bid for Nevada's second congressional district, and then said she'd talk to journalists by themselves.
Nevada reporter Elizabeth Crum tweeted the pic above, of Ms. Angle at the podium. Your challenge is to figure out what the number signifies. The answer's here and here. I'll drop a little more from Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston in the comments.
Two things -- first, does anyone else have those mushroom kitchen container things in their house, or in a relative's house?
And second, after Ms. Angle's failed 2010 Senate bid, she founded a new PAC, the Patriot Caucus. That group hasn't got much to say yet about her new run. In January, the Twitter account asked us all to stay tuned -- "big plans to be announced soon."
On February 14, a new post called Congressman Heller's no vote on the Patriot Act "very telling" -- and linked to a story that concludes the vote "could come back to haunt" him in a Republican primary.
The link goes to an endorsement from Ms. Angle's PAC: "Dean Heller is both a true conservative and a proven leader with solid campaign management experience. He's been a warrior for our cause in Congress, and it's time for him to go to the Senate to step up the fight against a radical left in America."
Sharron Angle is jumping into the race for queen of the Tea Party, with her new Patriot Caucus PAC. In a press release on ThePatriotCaucus.org, the Nevada Republican bounces back from her loss in the Senate race with a promise to launch, among other groovy things, "an online action hub" for the 2012 election.
The first go at that action hub may already be in action. ThePatriotCaucus.net leads off with a bunch of pharmaceutical spam and a racist video.
" 'If you see something, say something' -- welcome to Obama's America," says Ron Futrell for the Liberty Alliance. "Big Brother here, or in this case Big Sis, beaming out at all of us through TV screens in Wal-Mart of all places, telling us to spy for them."
"What if I see someone, can I report that?" Futrell says. "Things don't cause terrorism, people do. What if I see someone, for example, let's just say a male of Middle-Eastern descent acting suspicious while chanting 'Allah akbar,' or something? What if I see that? That's what they saw at Fort Hood, was it not? Ask the 13 families who lost loved ones in that terrorist attack at Fort Hood if they would've liked a warning when they heard Nidal Hasan commit his terrorist act there. But you see, that would be profiling, wouldn't it?"
A single Tea Party activist owns all three of the websites Angle appears either to be using or to be prepping. Eric Odom, who claims to have started the first Tea Party group and worked to get Angle elected, bought .org, .net, and .com sites for The Patriot Caucus back in November 2009. Odom's Twitter bio lists Liberty.com as his website -- it's the same one that appears in the video on what looks like Angle's new action hub. Now Odom's the head of 1773 Media, which stands to be the ones and zeroes for the next Tea Party wave.
After watching Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell raise a little over five percent of her itemized donations from people who could actually vote for her -- that is, from people in Delaware -- we wanted to see how the rest of the Tea Party Senate slate fared.
It turns out that there's not much correlation between where a Tea Party pol got the money and what happened on Election Day. The final, final reports aren't in yet, but the FEC documents so far show that most of them raised a ton of money out of state. Check out the expanded view of all nine.
(Special thanks to our in-house astrophysicist, Summer Ash, for the data-wrangling.)
In Nevada, Sharron Angle is making one final, final, final pitch to voters. This one comes with a caution:
One last thing: the unions are here on the ground in force today. We told you last week Reid was trying to steal the election and he is. His people are making calls and they are working at the polls.
Harry Reid will have his henchmen on the street today doing anything they can to swing this election his way, trust me.
The first thing I think we need to do is to make sure that Afghanistan is not a safe haven for terrorists. And when I say safe haven, I'm not talking about that there isn't a possibility of a terrorist in Afghanistan. I'm saying that when you look at other countries similarly situated -- Somalia, Yemen, other countries -- that Afghanistan is at least as safe as those countries.
The two wars that we're in right now is exactly what we're in.
Tom Tancredo, Colorado Tea Party Republican for governor:
"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong, fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent, or you will find an attack."
The Republican Governors Association has been going after Democrat Tom Barrett, the Milwaukee mayor who's running for governor of Wisconsin.
A viewer sent the ad above, noting that the disgruntled workers who show up at 00:09 are the same disgruntled workers who show up at 00:25 in an ad by Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle. In the Angle spot, we're meant to see them as Nevada taxpayers. Heaven only knows what they're also doing in Wisconsin.
The campaign for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) posted this video and is passing it around -- and you can see why.
"The two wars that we're in right now is exactly what we're in," Republican Sharron Angle tells reporter Nathan Baca, one our guests in Las Vegas this week. It's about the most substantive answer Angle gives as she runs away from him in the airport.
"I'll answer those questions when I'm the senator," Angle says.
This week we talked to the owner of gun shop in Las Vegas who supports Tea Party Republican Sharron Angle for Senate. He's big on Second Amendment rights, and Sharron Angle really loves that particular corner of the Constitution.
Afterward, someone wrote on our blog something like, yeah, right, of course. White gun shop owner practically equals Sharron Angle supporter. Right?
Not necessarily. While we were in Las Vegas, I had a moment to myself by the side of the road with the tape from our Jon Ralston interview. While waiting for Bill Wolff to pick me up, I wandered into an army surplus store on the corner. And yes, I was expecting the same thing you might, that I'd find a supporter for Sharron Angle -- someone into her "us vs. them" immigration ads and at least tolerant of her Second Amendment remedies. You know they love her in the army surplus store, right?
Conventional wisdom, meet Prosper Mintz, owner of Mad Man Army Surplus, lover of the Second Amendment, voter for Harry Reid. "I'm going to vote for Reid because I believe Angle's racist against Latin people," Mintz told me. One vote's not much of a consequence for racist campaigning, and yet.
