Drive-By Muthings: September 12, 2012

* Chicago teachers continue to screw students out of their education today in the third day of their hissy fit walkout/strike. In a Democrat city. With a Democrat mayor. Where our Democrat president got his political start as a community organizer. Whose Secretary of Education used to run the Chicago school system.

All in the family.

* By the way, ReasonTV has a great new 4-minute YouTube video exposing the fact that “the machine that runs the K-12 education system isn’t designed to produce better schools. It’s designed to produce more money for unions and more donations for politicians.”

Click here to see it.

* Oh, boy, is THIS ever embarrassing!

Democrats have been in high dudgeon for the past two weeks over Mitt Romney not mentioning the military in his acceptance speech at the GOP convention in Tampa.

But get this: In their tribute video to America’s military at the Democrat convention in Charlotte, the D’s featured, not U.S. ships, but 4 ships…from the RUSSIAN fleet!

D’oh!!

* Maybe it’s just me, but all of these campaigns spending all of this money on all of these TV commercials seems to be pretty much a waste. Other than one pro-Romney ad that I actually looked for and watched, only because I helped recruit a couple of folks to be in it, I don’t think I’ve watched a single television campaign commercial since the Republican primary elections in June. For any campaign in any race.

How about the rest of you?

* Aaron Blake of The Fix reports that “New Washington Post-ABC News polling shows that, whatever price the Republican presidential nominee might have paid for his work in venture capital, the issue now cuts pretty evenly in swing states. In July, twice as many voters (32 percent) said Romney’s position at Bain was a major reason to oppose him as said it was a major reason to support him (16 percent). Those numbers are now basically a wash, with 28 percent viewing Bain as a major negative and 27 percent viewing it as a major positive.”

Bain today; gone tomorrow.

* A source who says they’ve seen recent polling results in competitive state Senate races in Nevada says three Republican candidates are trailing their Democrat opponents: Mari St. Martin and Steve Kirk in Clark County and Greg Brower in Washoe County.

St. Martin is said to be down by double-digits.

That said, bear in mind these poll results are reportedly from internal Democrat polling. Nevertheless, they should be troubling to Republicans who must win four out of the five competitive races this November to win majority control of the Senate.

And because I’m a broken record on this issue, I’ll note that none of the three Republican candidates in those competitive Senate races has signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Hmm, ya think maybe Democrats and non-partisans don’t want their taxes raised either?

* Speaking of the Tax Pledge, I had yet another GOP legislative candidate tell me yesterday that they haven’t signed the Pledge because they’ve been threatened by various lobbyists that if they sign the Pledge the lobbyist won’t give their campaign any money.

In other words, this candidate’s vote on tax hikes has been bought with the promise of campaign cash before they’ve even been elected. Any idea who they’ll listen to and how they’ll vote if they actually get to Carson City?

* One last word on the Tax Pledge. As Grover Norquist, father of the Pledge, recently explained: Pledge signers don’t vote against tax hikes because they signed the Pledge; they sign the Pledge because they are 100% committed to voting against tax hikes.

Indeed, taxpayers have every right to be suspicious of any candidate not secure enough in their beliefs on the tax issue to back up their verbal assurances with their John Hancock…just as they do when they take out a bank loan or sign for a purchase made with their Visa card.