A pair of longtime Republicans — former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson and Florida Rep. John Mica — are facing strong challenges from insurgent conservatives. Their races are the marquee contests among four state primaries, including Connecticut and Minnesota.

Wisconsin and Florida are the latest battlegrounds for tea party forces and other conservative activists hoping to add to big wins this year in the Indiana and Texas GOP Senate primaries. Tea party candidates scored major gains in the 2010 congressional races, but they've had mixed success since then.

Thompson, who served as Health and Human Services secretary under President George W. Bush, is in a tough four-way race for a chance to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl. His challengers have cast themselves as closer to today's more conservative GOP than the 70-year-old Thompson.

Thompson was governor for 14 years, but the party has become more conservative since he left the post for the Bush administration in 2001.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Rep. Kendrick Meek went on national morning TV news shows to swat down reports that he had told Clinton, who was campaigning for Meek, that he would drop out to improve Crist's chances of defeating the front-runner, Republican Marco Rubio. Crist left the GOP to run as an independent after Rubio led him before the Republican primary.

Meek said it was Crist who had suggested the idea to Meek. He said Crist had also called Clinton's office "trying to persuade them to get me out of this race."

"Gov. Crist talked to me about getting out of the race. I recommended to the governor that he should consider getting out of the race," Meek said on CNN's "American Morning."

Crist's spokesman did not immediately respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Meek said he had talked with Clinton about the idea while the president was campaigning for Meek. He said Clinton privately asked him about rumors that he would quit the campaign.

Continue Reading...

The Times reported that Mike Tyson cruised around the world with Greene on his yacht, partying and doing drugs. They were forced to correct the story, though, when Tyson told them that he never did the drugs he was doing while he was specifically on Greene's boat. He would get off the boat, first.

Continue Reading...

Last week, he said that while the healthcare reform bill was flawed, he would've voted for it. His campaign immediately issued a "clarification" explaining that he would not have voted for it.

Then, yesterday, he told CNN that he backs a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, even though he is "OK" with two dudes living together, or whatever. A few hours later, the Crist campaign "clarified" that the governor just meant an amendment to the Florida constitution. That is, apparently, the "moderate" compromise on the issue.

Continue Reading...

Florida, like all our states, has its share of nuts and xenophobes, but it is a good deal more moderate than Rand Paul's Kentucky. And a GOPer, even in a three-way race for 34% of the vote, will have to win over some folks who may think that the president is a Muslim, but don't necessarily mind. But is Rubio going too far in his quest for moderate votes? Listen to him, he doesn't even seem to think that the federal government should be prevented, by any means necessary, from functioning:

Continue Reading...

Greene has spent $22.9 million of his own cash so far, but Kendrick Meek is opening up a decent lead in the polls ahead of next week's primary.

The theory is that, had former campaign manager Joe Trippi convinced Greene to spend even more, "he could have buried Meek to the point where he could not dig out." But, I dunno! I mean Greene has basically already spent "bury him" money, and he didn't bury Meek. But money doesn't stop an endless drumbeat of stories about how best man Mike Tyson might've done cocaine on your party boat, or how you're a shitty boss, or how you were involved in a scuzzy real estate deal in California.

In Connecticut, Linda McMahon is sorta showing that money can trump character issues, but Greene is a heroically bad candidate, character-wise. Lots of people enjoy professional wrestling. Mega-yacht trips to Cuba are a bit less populist.

Continue Reading...

The paper's Adam C. Smith does not really care, though, and so today he has a story on strippers and "massage therapists" boarding the boat during the wild summer of 2005. Plus one former yacht stewardess provided excerpts from her journal, describing "naked, drunken people everywhere" while the boat was in Sag Harbour in August of 2006.

Greene describes the woman as a "disgruntled" ex-employee. And he is probably right -- most of his former yacht employees seem very disgruntled, because he was a terrible boss.

But Greene does not want to talk about that! He wants to talk about the economy:

Continue Reading...

The St. Petersburg Times has a long and wonderful story about how Jeff Greene just screamed at and abused the people who maintained his "party yacht." Greene's former personal chef sued Greene for berating and humiliating him all the time. Adam Lambert, the 20th and 22nd captain of Greene's 145-foot yacht, says Greene "has total disregard for anybody else."

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

He spent $5.8 million.

(Even that meager $3,000 is baffling. What kind of person donates money to a billionaire?)

Continue Reading...

Last New Year's Eve, 55-year-old Greene was photographed hanging out in St. Barth with starlet and convicted criminal Lindsay Lohan, whose upcoming jail sentence you might've read something about recently.

What could they possibly be talking about? The people of Florida demand answers!

Also, does Greene have any famous friends who haven't been convicted of crimes?

Continue Reading...

In the race for the Republican nomination for governor, Medicare defrauder Rick Scott is on the attack against Attorney General Bill McCollum. Scott's platform is being a rich person who hates Obamacare. In case that's not enough to put him on top, he's now accusing McCollum of being objectively pro-homosexuals.

"McCollum endorsed pro-abortion and pro-homosexual rights candidate Rudy Giuliani for president in 2008 and was a Giuliani campaign leader in Florida," a Scott consultant wrote in a memo sent to reporters. I am not sure if that is a successful line of attack in Florida, but I guess this year the crazy right-wingers are the ones most energized about the primaries.

Continue Reading...

Scott, who in 1997 was ousted from the healthcare corporation he founded, is running on a platform of hating Obamacare, a lot. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, that's enough to put him on top of "establishment" Republican candidate Attorney General Bill McCollum, 44-31 percent.

Scott paid $1.7 billion in fines for his company's massive fraud.

The Democrats are about to make their own idiotic mistake, too, with billionaire real estate investor and Mike Tyson pal Jeff Greene neck-and-neck with Kendrick Meek in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.

So... billionaire criminals are the new "outsiders." Nice work, everybody. (But the primaries are not until August 24, and many voters probably just do not know how terrible these people are, yet.)

Continue Reading...

A survey by Quinnipiac University of 1,133 registered Florida voters shows Crist's independent bid slightly ahead of Republican Marco Rubio. Crist received 37 percent to Rubio's 33 percent while Democrat Kendrick Meek received 17 percent in the poll taken June 1 through 7.

Both Republican gubernatorial hopefuls -- Attorney General Bill McCollum and businessman Rick Scott -- lead Democratic front-runner Alex Sink. Scott leads Sink 42 percent to 32 percent while McCollum leads by a 42-34 margin.

The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

Continue Reading...

A survey by Quinnipiac University of 1,133 registered Florida voters shows Crist's independent bid slightly ahead of Republican Marco Rubio. Crist received 37 percent to Rubio's 33 percent while Democrat Kendrick Meek received 17 percent in the poll taken June 1 through 7.

Both Republican gubernatorial hopefuls -- Attorney General Bill McCollum and businessman Rick Scott -- lead Democratic front-runner Alex Sink. Scott leads Sink 42 percent to 32 percent while McCollum leads by a 42-34 margin.

The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

Continue Reading...

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.

Continue Reading...

Meek launched an ambitious drive to become the first Florida statewide candidate to qualify by petition. If elected, he'd be the state's first black U.S. senator (his mother, former Rep. Carrie Meek, was Florida's first black House member) and the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction.

Instead, Meek has been a bit player in the drama surrounding the meteoric rise of former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, who started running five months after Meek, and Rubio's takedown of Florida's once unsinkable governor, Charlie Crist.

Polls show Meek stuck in the teens in a three-way race and losing significant Democratic support to Crist. Some Democrats are starting to whisper -- or say outright -- that it might be time to abandon Meek and back the well-known, well-liked governor, in order to prevent the far-right Rubio from winning in November.

Continue Reading...

This year, Democrats could be positioned to engineer a different switch, this time in Florida, where the presumptive Democratic nominee, Rep. Kendrick Meek, has fallen far behind in a three-way race with Republican Marco Rubio and independent Charlie Crist. Democrats could use the same direct, high-level pressure that forced Torricelli's hand to usher out Meek in favor of Crist’s independent bid -- a move that would give Democrats their best chance of knocking off Rubio. 

To be sure, the circumstances in Florida this year aren't quite what they were in New Jersey in '02. Unlike Torricelli, Meek is not weighted down by immense baggage. And the four-term congressman has deep ties to the national party (he's one of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's favorites), not to mention a solidly liberal record pleasing to the Democratic base.

Continue Reading...

Rubio has locked up conservative Republican votes for November. But to win, he needs to expand his base to include independents, who in Florida tend not to be nearly as right wing as Rubio's new BFF, Jim DeMint (of South Carolina), or even as the state's legislature, whose minority rule is cemented by gerrymandered districts. By moving to the far right in the immigration debate, Rubio may make Ann Coulter happy, but he could harm himself with fellow Hispanics (Rubio is Cuban-American, but the fastest growing group of Florida Hispanics are Puerto Rican, and their numbers are numerous in the critical central portion of the state) as well as with suburban whites, and younger voters, who tend to hold more moderate views.

Continue Reading...