Since this is possibly the most depressing August in the history of summer, I feel compelled to point out a brighter side of the news.
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In Arizona on Tuesday, Republican voters totally rejected the Congressional candidacy of State Senator Pamela Gorman ("conservative Christian and a pretty fair shot"), whose TV ad showed her firing a machine gun at an undisclosed target. Only about 5,000 people in the district thought sending Pamela Gorman to Washington would be a good plan. And it was 110 degrees that day, so a number of those might have been hallucinating.
The winner of this primary was Ben Quayle, son of Dan and Marilyn, whose campaign was flagging until his parents each sent out e-mail blasts urging people to vote for their son. That put him over the top with a whopping 14,266 votes.
Quayle may have been the beneficiary of a notable trend in this week's elections: victories by people whose mothers helped them campaign. Rick Scott, the rich-guy gubernatorial candidate in Florida, won a surprise upset after he sent his mother to represent him in the final debate. Clearly, the voters were thinking that being forced to listen to another debate would be bad, that mothers were good, and therefore Scott deserved to be the Republican nominee for governor.
We do not pay much attention to races for governor in any state other than our own. But it's going to be hard to resist watching to see if Florida wants to put its fate in the hands of a guy who looks like Lex Luthor and once ran a company that admitted defrauding the government of $1.7 billion. It's right up there with the machine-gun woman.
The big trend among Republicans is voting out the incumbent, even if said incumbent is a Republican. In their primaries, the Democrats tend to go for the status quo. This makes sense, since the Republicans are looking for a way to show they're angry, angry, angry while the Democrats are too terrified of the Republicans to do anything but hunker down.
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