THE BEST SPEECHES

1. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky.

Yarmuth took his surprising win -- as an incumbent Dem from a GOP-friendly Kentucky district, he was widely considered a goner -- as an opportunity to deliver one of the most passionate and generous speeches of the evening. In a campaign that saw many House Democrats sell out Nancy Pelosi (with her blessing!) in an attempt to appeal to right-leaning voters, Yarmuth was happy to stand by the speaker (granted, it was after the polls closed):

"I almost wish there were another podium here tonight, because I feel like Nancy Pelosi has been in this campaign the whole time. And Nancy ought to take a victory lap with me. And maybe President Obama as well. The disservice and disrespect that has been leveled on them has been so outrageous and so unjustified that it makes me really fear for this country. When you have two people who work every day to make life better for every American and they put up with the nonsense … [I]t’s not only unjustified, it’s un-American."

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Fiorina's campaign said the former Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive has been successfully treated for the infection at a Los Angeles-area hospital.

"This morning, her doctors gave her the good news that she will be released from the hospital today and can resume her busy campaign schedule tomorrow," Fiorina's chief of staff, Deborah Bowker, said in a statement. "Carly is grateful for the outpouring of well wishes and prayers from so many Californians."

The first-time candidate, who is 56, was diagnosed with breast cancer in February 2009 before she formally announced her run against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. She completed chemotherapy and radiation treatments a year ago and had reconstructive surgery in July after having a double mastectomy.

Recent polls show the race between Boxer and Fiorina tightening with just six days left before the election.

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Deborah Bowker, the campaign's chief of staff, says in a statement issued Tuesday that Fiorina was admitted to a hospital and is being treated with antibiotics. The campaign will not say when or where she was admitted.

Fiorina, who is 56, fought breast cancer before her run against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. The former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO has maintained a busy campaign schedule in the final weeks of the race.

Bowker says Fiorina has canceled Tuesday campaign events in Riverside and Coachella. She says she expects Fiorina to return to the campaign trail soon.

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Somebody’s been spending some time researching Google images and the bleak 1930s iconography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

Carly Fiorina’s new attack on Barbara Boxer goes for the depression jugular, with a stark series of graphic, high-contrast black-and-white shots that paint a eschatological picture of California. One photograph, depicting the liquidation of a retail store, could have been lifted from a Walker Evans retrospective at the San Francisco MOMA

Check out that opening scene. Grim-faced farmers standing on a barren field, a Grapes of Wrathian image if ever there was one. During this, the equally ominous announcer intones:

“After 28 long years of Washington partisanship, this is Barbara Boxer’s California. Trillions in reckless wasteful spending. Destroying small business. Killing jobs. Crushing hopes.”

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This year's real conditions for Democrats are certainly threatening, but there are indications that the impending repudiation will not be as devastating as suggested by the current narrative. Whatever ultimately happens in the House, where a Republican takeover appears likely if not inevitable, the Senate will probably remain under Democratic control -- despite enormous spending by "independent" groups such as the Club for Growth, the voice of Wall Street conservatives; American Crossroads, the Karl Rove outfit; and the Chamber of Commerce.

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"They talk about me like a dog," he said. (According to the transcript provided by the White House, "applause" followed that remark, which I suppose we should take to mean that the audience was pleased that powerful interests were being mean to the president, but still seems a little odd.)

The nastiness is not confined to the much-remarked outbursts of overblown rhetoric from Wall Streeters. According to a new analysis of campaign finance contributions conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2010 the financial industry  sharply increased the flow of funds headed to Republicans, and decreased it to Democrats.

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"He brings our style of civility and independence to Washington and works to develop solutions," is the soothing, even quaint message on the 71-year-old lawmaker's campaign website, which shows him in a suit and tie, working alone at his desk. Experience "is hugely important," he said in an interview.

After two terms as governor and nine as the state's lone congressman, Castle appears better positioned than other veterans who faced a tea party-backed challenge this year. If he prevails over Christine O'Donnell on Sept. 14 -- he and GOP officials have launched a fierce counterattack -- he would join more than a half-dozen other veteran Republican officeholders on the ballot in Senate races.

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But if you have read the piece, and might somehow still be wondering whether these guys are as bad as they sound, here's another data point, fresh from the keyboard of Todd Woody, in Grist. Through one of their many subsidiaries, Flint Hills Resources, a Kansas petrochemical company, the Kochs just donated $1 million to Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative designed to sabotage the state's global warming law, AB 32.

The Koch donation came a day after Tesoro, a Texas oil company that has been bankrolling the pro-Prop 23 campaign, put $1 million into the campaign coffers.

According to the [No on 23] campaign, 97 percent of the $8.2 million raised by the Yes forces has been given by oil-related interests and 89 percent of that money has come from out of state. Three companies, Koch Industries, Tesoro, and Valero -- another Texas-based oil company -- have provided 80 percent of those funds.

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Also, if you're called on it, because your campaign's Twitter account posts pictures of people with identical signs on the same day on opposite ends of the state, as Carly Fiorina's campaign did, you should come up with a better excuse than "Office Max and Staples carry the same paper and markers."

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"Man, what a terrible choice in Iowa, Sarah," Meghan Swella wrote on Palin's Facebook wall after the former Alaska governor announced her support for Terry Branstad in last week's gubernatorial primary.

"I guess you got co-oped by the milk toast moderates. I thought you were better than that," she scolded.

In choosing Branstad, Palin skipped over businessman Bob Vander Plaats, a tea party favorite, in favor of a former governor with a strong chance of returning to office -- and wielding political power when the Iowa presidential caucuses roll around.

"She's playing her cards, and trying to set herself up" for making a push, should she run, said Dante Scala, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire who is watching to see who, or whether, Palin endorses in his state.

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But I have to say, it's disappointing the focus has been on Fiorina's diss of Boxer's hair. The real political story was insulting her female GOP "colleague" Meg Whitman for going on right-winger Sean Hannity's show the day after Whitman's primary win in the governor's race. It highlighted the Whitman/Fiorina feud -- we can't have TWO female Republican Silicon Valley CEOs running for top state offices in California; they must scratch one another's eyes out! And if it's up to Fiorina, she might.

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I also explained why I don't think Meg Whitman is likely to be governor, or Carly Fiorina will defeat Barbara Boxer to become California's first female GOP senator. I got one fact wrong that I'd like to correct: On "Hardball" I said Whitman was antiabortion, but in fact, her website says she is pro-choice. I apologize for my confusion. Whitman ran such fierce ads criticizing her GOP primary opponent Steve Poizner for supporting abortion rights, I assumed she did not. In fact, she tried to have it both ways, trashing Poizner for supporting fewer restrictions on abortion than she does, while quietly reassuring California's pro-choice majority that she shares their views. Reasonable people may disagree about the ethics of her strategy, but if she says she's pro-choice, I'm going to accept that, and welcome it.

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Fiorina was caught on an open mic and camera feed Wednesday, mocking Boxer's hair. A friend of Fiorina's, it seems, had seen Boxer on TV earlier in the morning. And she "said what everyone says," Fiorina blurted. "God, what is that hair? So yesterday!"

That's about four minutes into the video. Boxer shouldn't feel too bad, though, because Fiorina spent the vast majority of the time the camera was rolling bashing her fellow Republican, Meg Whitman, for going on Sean Hannity's Fox News Channel show on the first day of the general election campaign for governor.

Watch here:

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The culture had evolved by then. Getting rich was always a motivation for people in the tech industry, but so was innovation and competition that could be fierce yet fair.

Whitman, at least, knew how to run a company. She was a strong leader at eBay, a company that innovated in many areas as it became by far the largest service of its kind.

Like some other big tech companies of the era, however, eBay also resorted to over-the-top tactics to stifle competition. In 2000, it persuaded a federal judge in California that Bidder's Edge, a company that offered price comparisons across multiple auction sites, was "trespassing" on its servers -- a ruling that threatened "the very foundations of the Web," according to some of America's top cyber-law experts. (An appeal was dropped in a settlement, and a California Supreme Court decision in a different case appeared to contradict the district judge's ruling.)

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11:27 p.m.: The fun now shifts to Nevada and California. Although California looks academic already; with four percent of the vote in, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman have both opened enormous leads -- more than 100,000 votes -- in their respective GOP primaries. The Nevada GOP Senate primary is the real barn-burner. With 15 percent of the vote in, Sharron Angle is three points ahead of Sue Lowden, who (at least early on) is faring better than most expected. Danny Tarkanian, who had overtaken Lowden for second in some pre-primary polls, is a distant third, with about 20 percent.

11:07 p.m.: As you've probably seen by now, Blanche Lincoln has been declared the winner. (Keith Olbermann actually made the announcement by interrupting a guest who was trying to say that there were still lots of votes outstanding and that Halter still had a chance.) Lincoln will clearly be the underdog in November against Republican John Boozman. But who knows now? No one thought she'd survive tonight.

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With closely watched elections in California, Nevada, Arkansas and South Carolina (and less well-known contests in eight other states), here's a guide -- in chronological order -- of what to watch for as the returns come in.

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Unlike the May 18 contests that told us something about the national environment -- anti-incumbency (Specter’s loss), the backlash at the establishment (Paul’s victory over Grayson), and the reminder that good candidates and campaigns can win in a tough political environment (PA-12) -- Tuesday’s primaries don’t really offer broad themes.

That is a shame, isn't it, that there are no "broad themes" that Chuck Todd can create out of separate, disparate elections that have not happened yet. Except he then goes on to elaborate on various "storylines we're watching." There is an important Political Analyst difference between a Storyline and a Theme!

I'm pretty sure that a few weeks from now, Todd will definitely have figured out the Themes that currently elude him. Let's help:

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But apparently to win the Republican nomination for Senate in California these days, even a woman whose brain-power might have been a campaign asset has to pretend she doesn't know the difference between long-term global climate trends and the daily, local weather.

An unintentionally revealing new ad by former Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief who is favored to win next Tuesday's GOP primary, quotes Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer saying in 2007, "One of the very important national security issues we face, frankly, is climate change."

Carly then leaps in with this: "Terrorism kills, and Barbara Boxer is worried about the weather. I'm Carly Fiorina. I ran Hewlett-Packard. I chaired the external advisory board for the CIA. We've had enough of her politics. I'll work to keep you safe."

Fiorina's first sentence -- willfully pretending that being concerned about the threat of global warming is the same as being worried about whether it's going to rain today -- should disqualify anyone for higher office, especially in California.

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Now, there's no way that Republicans aren't going to have a good November in absolute terms. But a sign here and a sign there are starting to suggest that it might not be the stellar midterm that the minority party has been dreaming of and getting ready for. The president can point to some successes, with healthcare, financial reform and signs of economic recovery, for one thing. For another, it looks like we can count on Republicans to figure out a way to screw it up for themselves.

The latest example of Republicans finding an opportunity to miss an opportunity comes in Illinois. The Senate seat once held by Barack Obama is a major prize, and Republicans badly want to win. Everything seemed to line up just right. Democrats nominated a damaged candidate in state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, and scandal was hanging over the incumbent party anyway thanks to the collapse of the Rod Blagojevich administration. Republicans, meanwhile, got their dream nominee: Rep. Mark Kirk, from the Chicago suburbs, is the rare true suburban centrist Republican to survive the collapse of his wing of the party. He's staved off a couple of tough Democratic challenges, managing to become one of only seven Republicans to represent a district carried by John Kerry in 2004. In a state where moderate Republicans have thrived, but conservatives have been trounced repeatedly by mediocre Democratic hacks like Blagojevich, Kirk seemed to be just the ticket.

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