Signs of the Times

I've got two people that are new in the news that I want to go ahead and talk about for just a moment. They're names that you may have heard if you keep up with some political stuff on a daily basis. If not, they might be new to you. The first is Sharon Angle, the now GOP Senate candidate who is running against Senator and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. She has a pretty cooky resume that we'll get into in a second. The second person is Alvin Greene, the Democratic Senate candidate who is running against GOP Senator Jim DeMint. He has his own special story as well.

First up we have the esteemed Mrs. Angle. She has routinely supported and espoused what could be generously called crazy ideas. She's of the mind that flouride is an international commie plot, we should pull out of the UN, and that privatizing Social Security is the best plan ever. Since she won her primary her website has been gussied up so that it looks better and some of the craziness has been removed. Cached images are available however. Check out motherjones.com Watching as the more mainstream (I use that word loosely) of the GOP try and put a shine on Mrs. Angle's website and try to play down her statements by putting her in front of cameras on Fox and Friends and letting her interviews go to Rush Limbaugh.

On the other side of the aisle, we have Alvin Greene. He is a veteran and former service member in both the Army and Air Force who is now unemployed and living with his elderly father. There has been a lot of discussion about where Mr. Greene got the $10,400 filing fee for the primary. Personally, I believe that a filing fee that is so high is pretty un-American. Both parties have huge filing fees as standard although the GOP's is higher still than that of the Democrats. I share some of the general public skepticism that has been explained by several different people including fivethirtyeight.com in the previous link as well as Countdown and Rachel Maddow. At the same time, I want to show some caution. I'm afraid that we're all way to willing to assume that Mr. Greene has done something against the rules because he is a southern black man and, by the display of poor speaking skills on his Countdown interview from the other evening. It's true that the situation is fishy, but I feel like the truth will come out and the question really is how shocked people are once the investigation comes to its conclusion.