Cliff Schecter

It seems the Diaz Balart brothers may be about to lose their “birthright” in the Cuban community in South Florida. Democrats had also hoped to upend Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, so that poll [all three polls are below] is good news for the GOP.

Ok that makes two (Mark Warner and Jim Webb) of the “big three” (Warner, Webb and Tim Kaine) in Virginia who have decided that the VP is a no go (or they found out it wasn’t going to be–and preemptively struck).

Well, perhaps not so much. And Lee Stranahan has one of his patented hilarious videos to prove “that word does not mean what you think it means,” to paraphrase The Princess Bride.

In fact 300 of them signed a statement supporting it…although it might have been because Senator “Straight-Talk” left out the controversial parts:

The statement leaves out two big chunks of McCain’s economic argument: the gas tax holiday and his promise to balance the budget by the end of his first term — there’s literally nothing in the release that mentions the deficit or national debt.

How mavericky!

Amazing what a few years will do (you can see this in Chuck Hagel’s lack of support for McCain too, and of course Lieberman’s switch over to the GOP in everything but name). As I reported in The Real McCain, first broken by Jonathan Singer of MyDD, McCain actually approached Kerry about being on his ticket in 2004.

The Democratic National Committee puts together another in what has become a series of devastating side by sides of McCain and Bush (Moveon and others have chipped into this effort also).

In this ad, we hear the strikingly similar rhetoric coming from both Bush and McCain to try and convince us that the fundamentals of the economy are good, NAFTA has been economic Viagra, etc.

This puts into perspective what we have been covering here at The Silo, with numerous polls showing Democrats doing well in states where they have not existed in a generation:

That prospect is a window onto a remarkable political trend that has been eclipsed by the fireworks surrounding the 2008 presidential contest:

When Susan Collins ran for the senate in 1996–and won just barely with a huge assist from the Bangor Daily News in biased coverage that continues to this day–she ran on a pledge of only serving two terms, a popular stance in a reform-minded state such as Maine.

Well, of course, so much for that now that she might be able to win a third term.

So Stevens is now calling Chuck Schumer names. How John McCain-on-a-campaign-bus-with-his-wife of him! (Take a look at how uncomfortable Gov. Palin of Alaska looks next to him when he goes off on his personal-attack diatribe).

It should come as no surprise that these two guys (Sens. McCain and Stevens), while also both being older than Methuselah, have also been the leaders of the pack in the “Hottest Temper” category in a yearly

This might be a window into why that shakeup just took place at the top of Team McCain. In the past, Republicans have derided Obama’s attempts to increase the playing field beyond a dozen or so swing states. Well, with polls showing him leading in Virginia and Colorado, and within the margin of error in North Carolina and Georgia, you may have thought he had already accomplished that.