Todd's Mischief Blog

What was, just one week ago, a fairly tame US Senate primary in Nebraska with a young and popular conservative Attorney General holding a comfortable lead has now become a neck-and-neck race for the finish as the candidates try to “out-conservative” one another. Last Wednesday, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made a late endorsement in the Nebraska GOP Senate primary for Deb Fischer, previously in a distant third place. Now today Breitbart.com is running the story--billed as EXCLUSIVE--that calls Jon Bruning “establishment” in the lead. Alaska might rhyme with Nebraska, but that doesn’t make Sarah Palin an expert on our politics. And Brietbart.com is so intimately familiar with the Cornhusker State that in a March story about the lawsuit against ObamaCare, they made Bruning the AG of South Dakota! As Maxwell Smart would say, “missed it by that much.” What Palin and Breitbart are doing is putting an underline beneath the old adage, all politics are local--or at least they should be....

Also: Say hello to the “Sev-Con” There’s a NYTimes article out over the weekend that is all the buzz today. The pull-quote du jour is by former Mitt Romney strategist Mike Murphy, who told National Review in 2005 that Romney "is a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly." The preferred pick-apart is that this proves Romney will say and do anything to get elected. And, I admit, it certainly sounds damning. If nothing less, it was a poor choice of words. But this is old news. At the time Murphy issued a statement saying he had been misquoted. I’d say the facts support Murphy’s side of the story. The Times article tries to make more ado about Romney’s pro-life journey than there is. In 1994, when he ran against Ted Kennedy, he did not shy away from his personal opposition to abortion but positioned himself by saying “my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign.” He lost that race. In 2001, Romney e...