In a slick new commercial, Russ Fiengold claims that his independent stances haven’t made him friends in Washington:

From HotAir titles this “Fun: Liberal Democratic hero suddenly a man with no known political affiliation”, pointing out the following distortion in the ad:

The scene of him eating alone is cute and shrewd as a way of distancing himself from the Democratic cancer, but is it really true that he’s lost friends for opposing automatic pay raises for Congress? That seems to me like one of the cheapest and easiest gestures on ethics a politican could make. And the numbers bear me out: Apparently, the Senate passed Feingold’s bill unanimously without a roll call vote and then the House rubber-stamped it, 402-15. Who’s not sitting with Russ in the cafeteria because he dared to propose such a populist no-brainer?

Neil Cavuto introduced a segment on Fox News with a colorfully choiced clip to introduce his interview with Alaska Republican Senate Nominee Joe Miller. Viewers might have thought they were watching a commercial, but it was actually a cold-open to the Fox News show Your World with Neil Cavuto. Watch:

HotAir on the possibility of Castle starting a write-in campaign:

Castle’s team won’t confirm that they’re polling, but why wouldn’t they do it? Surely his name recognition’s high enough in the state that they’d want to know if he has a shot to win. Here’s the irony: If you think O’Donnell’s numbers against Coons are already so grim that she stands no real chance of winning — and most O’D supporters do not think that — then it’s a no-brainer that you should want Castle in the race. Worst-case scenario is that he and O’Donnell split Republicans and Coons manages to hold onto enough Democrats to squeak to victory, but then a Coons victory is how things look at the moment anyway. Bad-case scenario is that Castle manages to pull enough Dems from Coons and Republicans from O’Donnell to win the seat himself, in which case the GOP is a step closer to a Senate majority. Best-case scenario, obviously, is that Castle and Coons split the Dems and O’Donnell squeaks through on the strength of conservative supporter. If, however, you think O’D can still beat Coons head-to-head — and especially if you’re a DeMint-ian “true conservative” who regards centrist Republicans as even worse for conservatism than Democratic victories — then you should probably want Castle to stay out. “Anyone but the RINO,” no?

Another grand irony here? Castle’s hard feelings towards O’Donnell and the base may be so hard that if he polls this and the numbers show that he’ll hurt Coons more than he’ll hurt her, maybe he’ll decide not to run just to spite her. RINO revenge?

bad news for Republicans.

Assuming Meek wins his primary and is in the race, Crist leads Rubio with 41 percent of the vote to Rubio’s 30 percent, with 12 percent going to Meek, according to the poll of 590 likely voters surveyed from July 24 to July 28. The poll has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Assuming Greene wins the Democratic primary, however, changes things.

In that case, Crist gets 37 percent to Rubio’s 29 percent, and Greene gets 16 percent, poll results show.

The Florida Poll was conducted by New York Times-owned Florida newspapers, including The Ledger, and the University of South Florida Polytechnic in Lakeland.

As Kendrick Meek consistently comes in third in the three-man race in polling, key Democratic strategists have begun to give up on Meek:

Top Democratic strategists are abandoning their party’s frontrunner in the Florida Senate race in favor of Independent Charlie Crist, who bolted the Republican party over the state party’s rightward lurch toward the Tea Party.

SKDKnickerbocker, a leading Democratic political strategy and communications firm, has agreed to work on Crist’s up-hill campaign as an independent for the U.S. Senate.

Ed Morrisey from HotAir explains why this analysis is exactly wrong:

First, the party didn’t “lurch to the right.” Crist lurched towards Barack Obama when the President was popular, backing Obama’s profligate spending agenda. Second, the party continued to back Crist, with the NRSC issuing its endorsement of Crist as soon as he entered the race and keeping their support in place until the moment Crist abandoned the GOP. Crist lost the voters, which is an entirely different thing than the party.

Sarah Palin has endorsed Carly Fiorina for Califonria senate, which has made some conservatives angry that she looked over primary candidate Chuck Devore whom they regard as more conserbvative. However as one commenter puts it: “Would you all prefer Sarah endorse Devore and watch him lose by 20 pts?”.

Someone with the username IheartSarah on the Conservatives4Palin blog had the following reaction:

This is my feeling about the whole thing. The primary is a month away and Devore is only polling at 13%. If he were within striking distance to actually pull off the upset, then Sarah would have either stayed out of it or endorsed him. However, he is not within striking distance. But Carly is within striking distance of Campbell, who, from everything I am hearing and reading is a really poor choice. Sarah’s endorsement could put Carly over the top to beat Campbell and she would have a much better chance at beating Boxer, nobody can argue with that. If Sarah had stayed out of it, Campbell had a pretty good chance of winning and he is definitely not acceptable. So, I believe she had to get involved.

I also trust Sarah’s instincts. From what I have seen, she is carefully weighing each endorsement she is making and does not take the responsibility she has lightly. She may not endorse the person I would like for her to endorse, but that is okay. I know she knows what she is doing. She has my full support in 2012, no matter who she endorses in 2010. She has the bigger picture in mind, whereas I might be looking at the smaller picture. This is a fight for our country, but the same way that Progressives have taken almost 100 years to reach the point they are at now, we are not going to be able to win back the soul of our country in one or two elections, we have to be willing to be in this for the long haul. While I believe these next two election cycles are very important in putting a stop to Progressives, I do not believe they are enough to turn the country around, it will be a much longer battle because it is not only a battle for the heart of soul of America but for the minds of its citizens. We have just begun this fight and I believe Sarah is looking at the battles that are winnable for now and the future.

RedState.com bashes Cary Fiorina saying:

When Carly Fiorina speaks on the campaign trail here in California, running to be the Republican nominee to unseat Barbara Boxer, she tries to prohibit recording of her speeches. However somebody snuck in an audio recorder to an event yesterday, and these clips seem to show why she would do that. The real, private Carly seems to be a bit different from the public, ‘conservative’ Carly.

Radical feminist and supporter of Jesse Jackson. That’s a two-fer of reasons to doubt her so-called conservative credentials and instead support Chuck DeVore for Senate.

The evidence for this alleged Jackson love and radical feminism however, is…rather lame.

Senate candidate Carly Fiorina discusses the ongoing debate over health care reform.

If he did, Romney would then have a platform to actually introduce legislation modeled on the proposals he put forward as a presidential candidate in 2008 and planned to put forward in 2012. No guesswork. No empty rhetoric. Real ideas, on the Senate floor, that could be evaluated, debated, and perhaps even voted on.

It would be an intriguing thing if, after waiting a day or two out of respect for the late senator, Romney were to downshift and announce he will be a candidate in the upcoming election to fill Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat.

Such an announcement would likely be embraced immediately by the Republicans, who would like almost nothing more than to deny Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada his new, hard-won, 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority. As a self-funding candidate who has already been elected once statewide, Romney has nearly 100 percent name ID. And, in an environment where President Obama seems to be dragging the Democrats down, he would be a serious threat to the Democratic hegemony in Massachusetts’s congressional delegation. Meaning Romney likely would win.

The Hot Air blog responds:

Would he? Obama’s still near 60 percent approval in Massachusetts. Given the creepy dynasticism of the Kennedy cult, you can expect them to lend their weight to a campaign for the seat to stay Democratic (“Do it for Teddy!”). Romney’s not the same pol who won the governor’s race in 2002, either: Remember, his conversion to the pro-life cause came while he was in office so he’ll be demagogued inside the state as a cynical sell-out to the hard right today. And there’s more to lose in doing this than there is to gain. If he wins, he ends up stuck in the minority with the rest of the GOP with no way to pass legislation unless he compromises with the Democrats — not something a guy who’s already suspected of RINOism is wont to do. If he loses, it proves he’s a paper tiger who can’t even carry the moderate states to which he’s supposed to appeal as a potential Republican nominee.

Running and winning would lend him some extra gravitas and name recognition, which he’ll desperately need in a primary against Palin and media darling Huckabee. But even so … seems like a longshot with the potential for catastrophe. Let’s vote on it.

Ed Morrisey writes in Town Hall Magazine:

The Franken team had a clear mission. Since they were behind in votes, they needed to either find new Franken votes or discredit Coleman votes in order to close the gap. Learning from the Gregoire campaign, they trained their volunteers to understand the limits of Minnesota law and to aggressively challenge ballots.

Coleman’s team, on the other hand, had a much more delicate mission, as they explained to their volunteers. Each of the precinct workers interviewed for this story had the same description of the instructions given by the campaign: Do not get overly aggressive in challenging ballots. They did not want to be seen as the campaign that “disenfranchised” Minnesota voters, as successful ballot challenges do by removing ballots from the count.

One Coleman volunteer explained the instruction as an explicit message from Team Coleman that “we don’t expect to be in the business of suppressing Franken votes, and we’re not trying to find new Coleman votes. … Don’t go out of your way to make what we think will be frivolous challenges.”

This instruction came specifically about overvotes, where a voter filled in two or more bubbles on the same race, which would have led the counting machines to reject the ballot for that race. Franken’s team latched onto the overvotes and tried to argue on as many as possible that the intent of the voter was to support Franken. Coleman’s team knew from the beginning that Franken’s volunteers would use that strategy, another Coleman recount worker said, but that “we should not engage them like that.”

But according to Minnesota law, as the state discovered during the process, the question of voter intent on overvotes is a legitimate area of challenge in a recount. In this case, it appears that both campaigns understood the parameters of action, but Coleman’s team simply didn’t want to avail itself of the entire range of action allowed by Minnesota statutes. They trained their recount volunteers to engage only on the most obvious cases and to refrain especially from giving the appearance that the Republicans wanted to invalidate ballots on a massive scale.

Predictably, this led to many missed opportunities for Coleman challenges. Because of the training received, the GOP volunteers assumed that many of the Franken team’s challenges in the precincts were invalid and would be tossed out by the Canvassing Board, the bipartisan panel that ruled on each challenged ballot. They were shocked to see the types of challenges later upheld by the panel, and they lamented the passive manner of the Coleman team’s recount effort, especially in the opening days. One volunteer estimated that he could have produced between 10-20 ballot challenges himself that the Canvassing Board would have upheld, based on their later rulings.

Franken’s team didn’t rest on its organizational edge during the recount, either. They gathered information from all the precinct recounts, even using tally sheets to note trends on questionable ballots, and apparently analyzed them overnight. Coleman volunteers recall seeing coordinated efforts to focus on new issues almost every day from their counterparts during the process.

Ed Morrisey adds on the Hot Air blog:

None of the people involved, most of them GOP partisans, believed that Franken “stole” the recount or did anything illegal. All of them insisted that the difference came down to two different approaches.  Team Coleman wanted a collegial, Minnesota-style approach, while Franken’s team saw this as an adversarial process that pushed both teams to use every legal advantage available for each client.  Put more simply, Coleman got outboxed, and badly, especially in the early days of the recount.

That’s a lesson Republicans need to learn.  Gone are the days when Congressional and especially Senate recounts will get conducted as a collegial effort between two candidates who want to act as referees as well as litigants.  Both sides had better be prepared for a process that looks a lot more like a lawsuit — or maybe a divorce — than anything else.  That includes preparation for a recount in races that look close months before the election.  Franken did all of these things, which is the reason he’s sitting in the Senate now.