In one of the few announced primary races on the Democratic side, Rep. Allen Boyd, a Florida Blue Dog who voted against the House health care bill, is already trailing state Senate Minority Leader Al Lawson in a two-way race.

Lawson leads Boyd 35-31 in the poll, conducted by The Research Network, with the rest undecided. Allen Boyd’s re-elect number is just 39%, and his job approval number is 44.5%. While Boyd has generally good favorability numbers, Lawson’s numbers are sky-high, with a 47.5% favorability and just 12.4% unfavorable. By contrast, Boyd is up to 38% unfavorable. The poll screened for likely voters, and has a fairly large margin of error of ± 4.6%.

If you’re a Democrat, you vote for health care reform, period. If you vote no, the Democratic party will abandon you and the GOP will blow you up anyway.

Look, blue dog Democrats are expected to vote stupidly on things like guns, abortion, and gay rights. I expect that. But on health care reform? If you’re not going to vote for that, don’t bother being a Democrat.

We should support the primary opponents of the following Democrats, and in the case of Artur Davis, not support his run for governor of Alabama. It would be great for Alabama to have a Democratic governor who is black, but it isn’t worth it if that Governor is going to be a lackey for the health insurance industry and the forces of the status quo.

The 39 Democrats who shouldn’t bother to be Democrats:

Adler
Altmire
Baird
Barrow
Boccieri
Boren
Boucher
Boyd
Bright
Chandler
Childers
Artur Davis
Lincoln Davis
Chet Edwards
Gordon
Griffith
Herseth-sandlin
Holden

Kissell
Kosmas
Kratovil
Kucinich
Betsy Markey
Marshall
Massa
Matheson
McIntyre
McMahon
Melancon
Minnick
Scott Murphy
Nye
Peterson
Ross
Shuler
Skelton
Tanner
Taylor
Teague

Alan Grayson’s campaign has already raised over the $400,000 they planned to raise today and are now within reach of $500,000… It pays to be tough in D.C.

“I choose to fight. Stand and fight, stand and fight!”
– John McCain

Conservatives had it easy for several decades. The Democratic left of the ’70s and ’80s was in full retreat, convinced by the Reagan revolution that they had no serious place in the American political spectrum. Occasionally there were flashpoints, like Ted Kennedy being so mean to Robert Bork, or for other Democrats not rolling over for the nomination of Clarence Thomas — who retreated into identity politics when his sexual harassment was revealed.

But those were exceptions. Cons set the parameters of the discussion, they said the worst they could about the left and the left was mute, foolishly assuming that the mainstream media might do their jobs and debunk the lies that pass for discourse on the right. Of course that didn’t happen.

We had a moment of false hope when Clinton ran for president, as the war room was conceived of to fight back versus the smear machine – but at best it neutralized elements of it. The right was still able to impeach Clinton and the mainstream press just kept on carrying the water.

Then came the Bush presidency, 9/11, and the Iraq War. At that moment, the Democratic party essentially ceased to exist for all intents and purposes. They went along with the entire Bush program with nary a protest. It wasn’t until the blogosphere came along and began to fill the coffers of pols who refused to back down like Howard Dean did the left regain it’s capacity to fight – the same spirit that fought against racism and sexism in some of the seminal battles of the American story.

Now we’ve got a Democratic administration who has simply pushed back against the day-in-day-out smears of Fox News, as well as a congressman who is telling the basic truths of the GOP’s non-plan for health care reform. For this, the mainstream press rushes to Fox’s defense, while the Republican noise machine expresses OUTRAGE that a Democrat would do to them what they’ve done for the last 20+ years.

Oooooh, scary.

Here’s hoping this fighting spirit becomes the natural position of the left. No more cowering, go toe to toe. Don’t turn off what offends you, but refute it and yell it from the highest mountain. When they punch you in the gut, you rhetorically beat them in the face until they can’t stand anymore.

I chose to fight.

All but two of the 72 Democratic lawmakers who cautioned last Friday against open-Internet rules have received campaign donations this year from Internet service providers, the companies most likely to be impacted by new regulations.

For their most recent election campaigns, the House members received a total of more than $405,000 from the nation’s largest carriers, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and the trade associations representing them, according to a Post analysis of data on Opensecrets.org. AT&T gave the most: about $180,000 to 52 of the 72 Democratic lawmakers. The company has historically been the biggest donor to Congressional campaigns of any company.

Net Neutrality is how we keep the Internet as great as its been so far.

And the President speaks in front of crowds that look like America.

Maryland is the nation’s third-bluest state, behind Massachusetts and Hawaii, according to the survey, which tracks how residents identify their own political leanings.

By Gallup’s analysis, 58 percent of Marylanders identify themselves as Democrats or leaning Democratic; 31 percent are Republican or leaning Republican.

Lets get those numbers up to 60, Maryland. Slackers.

Even funnier is the way this map shows you where the population centers in Maryland are. The redder, the less inhabited. I live in Montgomery County, the second bluest county.

The measure Abercrombie will introduce commemorates the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood. But here’s the rub, his spokesman tells me: It describes Hawaii as Barack Obama’s birthplace.

‘In the language of the resolution, there is a statement that Hawaii is the birthplace of the 44th President of the United States,’ Abercrombie spokesman Dave Helfert confirms.

That confronts House GOPers with a choice: They can vote for the measure, and endorse the idea that Obama was born in Hawaii, which could earn the wrath of birthers. Or they can vote against commemorating the 50th state’s joining of our blessed Union. Or GOPers can skip the vote, but that could look nutty.

UPDATE: Looks like Michelle Bachmann blocked the resolution. I guess she wants the “real” birth certificate too?

For the first time since the GOP won control of Florida’s government in the mid 1990s, the Democratic Party and its leading candidate for governor together raised more money than their Republican counterparts at the start of a gubernatorial election season.

Alex Sink, the state’s Democratic Chief Financial Officer, raised almost $1.3 million to Attorney General Bill McCollum’s $1.04 million, since April 1. The Democratic Party raised nearly $2 million, while the Republican Party of Florida raised almost $1.2 million.

It’ll be even better if somehow Marc Rubio knocks off Charlie Crist in the senate primary for the GOP because while Rubio plays well with the base, Crist is the sort of increasingly rare moderateish Republican that can actually win an election outside of the traditional south (and make no mistake, especially in Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward counties, Florida is not the traditional south).

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

I sure hope so.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday ordered Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill.

…

According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.

Those sixty seats you have are nice and comfy, it would be a shame if someone were to take them away for you simply because you decided it would be nice to get an invite to a wingnut coffee party.

Americans overwhelmingly support substantial changes to the health care system and are strongly behind one of the most contentious proposals Congress is considering, a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The poll found that most Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes so everyone could have health insurance and that they said the government could do a better job of holding down health-care costs than the private sector.

There is no impediment to health care reform other than the courage of Democratic members of congress. They have the votes and a President ready and waiting to sign the bill. Most importantly they have a public out there that wants this reform. The only wind in their faces is wind from insurance companies flapping around their millions of dollars in the breeze.

There are no reasons, no excuses for making this happen.

Keep it up guys.

McCain won the South in November, but Obama swept the rest of the country by an even bigger margin. The same pattern holds now for House and Senate seats. Republicans may continue to win governorships in Democratic-leaning states, but in congressional and presidential elections the geographic divides are sizable.

Brownstein reeled off a list of statistics that all arrived at the same place: The South now accounts for a greater share of Republican strength than at virtually any time since the party’s founding. That base is too narrow, as even Republicans know.

Demographically, the forces at work have chipped away at what was once a GOP-leaning majority in the country. The most important is minorities’ rising share of the vote. Whites accounted for 76 percent of the overall electorate last November, down from 85 percent in 1988.

In the last election, there were more than 2 million additional African American voters, about 2 million more Hispanic voters and about a million more Asian American voters. All are groups in which Obama increased the Democratic share of the vote over 2004. Frey estimated that minority voters in nine states made the difference in Obama’s victory margin.

Considering the conservative-wide freakout over Obama’s election and the racially tinged attacks on Judge Sotomayor, the Republicans haven’t learned a thing from the last 10 years. There is always the possibility of Democratic complacency on these issues, and we saw some of that in 2004 when Kerry neglected the black vote until the very end, but somehow I think the current leader of the Democratic party will not make a similar lapse. Call it a hunch based on what he sees in front of the mirror every day.

The Republican party could again become a majority party, but the path for them would have to include being more inclusive to single women, blacks, hispanics, and gays. The issue of course is that strategy is equally likely to turn off large parts of their elderly white male base, as well as the xenophobic white males who are the elected officials on the Republican side.