What will be November's results in Delaware?

[Brittain33]

They're sending her a symbolic check for $42k.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/cornyn-nrsc-sending-42k-to-odonnell.php?ref=fpa

[Brittain33]

actually, most parents share the same concerns when their kids go off to college.  so I live this piece as a positive, even in DE.

They may share their concerns, but they also think that grownups who obsess about these issues and related ones (as Christine does) can be creepy and perhaps not who they're looking for in office. Her terminology here is definitely closer to "creepy" than "concerned parent," to boot.

[Brittain33]

Obsess about these issues?  She was working for a think-tank that was RESPONSIBLE for thinking about "these issues".

I'm sure any rational parent of a college-aged daughter shared O'Donnell's organization's concerns - at the time she made those statements and even today.

Including telling other people's kids not to masturbate? Is that what people want from a U.S. Senator? Really?

[Brittain33]

actually, most parents share the same concerns when their kids go off to college.  so I live this piece as a positive, even in DE.

They may share their concerns, but they also think that grownups who obsess about these issues and related ones (as Christine does) can be creepy and perhaps not who they're looking for in office. Her terminology here is definitely closer to "creepy" than "concerned parent," to boot.

with her looks, she aint creepy when talking about sex

You're missing the point.

as I already stated - her views on sex aren't creepy to parents

Note what I wrote--I didn't say they were.

[Brittain33]

Ned Lamont also won a Senate primary on this basis, too. It didn't lead to a liberal takeover of Congress.

[Brittain33]

Ned Lamont also won a Senate primary on this basis, too. It didn't lead to a liberal takeover of Congress.

Um, actually it did, if you assume Dem=Liberal at the national, congressional level.  Granted, if the GOP repeated the Dems 2006 performance, they would fall short of a majority in both houses.

Jim Webb, Bob Casey, and Jon Tester are the antithesis of liberal purists. There's a reason they're senators today and Ned Lamont isn't. Pretty much the only liberal you could say ran that way and won that year was Sherrod Brown, but he had the advantage of very long service in government. Ned Lamont is really the only person who fits the Tea Party profile--dilettante, ideologically pure, running against a compromiser and dealbreaker, drawing support from true believers. 

[Brittain33]

The issue in question was stopping universities from having co-ed dorm rooms, not masturbation. 

And I'm talking about all the issues she's chosen for her dossier over the years. You don't get the luxury of excluding some from consideration and discussion. What's more, as I said above, opposition to co-ed dorm rooms is not creepy. The way she talked about it--"menage a trois rooms, orgy rooms"--is creepy. Combined with her past obsession about masturbation.

Politics being what it is, no one gets to cherry pick one thing the candidate said out of context and imagine a scenario where it's not a problem for her when, in context, it adds up to a creepy and weird persona.

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Yes, and I'm sure that if a politician raved about birth control being dangerous and a sin, she'd be unelectable in a northeastern state, precisely because the majority of Catholics and evangelicals (if applicable) don't take that ban seriously and don't identify with people who crusade against it. I'm sure she'll clean up on the orthodox Catholic vote among women over 70 who go to mass daily and agree with her. She needs more than that to win. In the meantime, she loses everyone who's ever watched an episode of Sex and the City or South Park, even if they're Catholic.

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We'll see, I guess. Good luck making the race about Coons being weird. I saw him on Chris Matthews, he's perfectly anodyne.

[Brittain33]

Do we seriously think Coons is going to make a play on O'Donnell's position on masturbation and sex?

No, the candidate himself does not have to bring it up.

[Brittain33]

When have I assumed that?  The only thing I said is that Catholic church doctrine teaches that masturbation is a sin.  My point isn't that Catholics (or conservative Protestants or Jews or some Muslims whose religion teaches them the same) follow their church doctrine - just that it is what is taught as a matter of faith.  Painting someone as out of the mainstream for following the doctrine of a mainstream church is bizarre to me.  It's not like O'Donnell, working for a conservative think tank, just made up the position she argued for on masturbation whole cloth.

I have a question for churchgoing posters, or people who grew up going to church, Catholic or Protestant. Do clergymen make an issue of this? Do they tell parishioners not to do this because it's wrong and explain why it's wrong? Is it discussed in Sunday school?

There's no way in hell this ever would have been discussed in Hebrew School, but Judaism doesn't have the same view of sexuality as Roman Catholicism.

[Brittain33]

A women's position on masturbation is the issue, not her questionable ethics.

For the umpteenth time, it's not her view, it's her making a career out of promoting that view. And it's not evil so much as not particularly compatible with becoming a U.S. Senator. 

Also, we seem to be talking about this because Republicans have conceded the ethical issues but some have been making a stand, defending her on this.