With the support of Sen. Chris Dodd, D.-Conn., the federal government has awarded $54 million to Connecticut's politically well-connected Mohegan Indian tribe, which operates one of the highest grossing casinos in the U.S.

The tribe runs the sprawling Mohegan Sun casino, halfway between New York City and Boston, which earned more than $1.3 billion in gross revenues in 2009. Each tribe member receives a cut of the profits, a number a tribal official said was "less than $30,000" per capita per year. The stimulus money is a loan from a U.S. Department of Agriculture rural development program that is meant to help communities of less than 20,000 people that have been "unable to obtain other credit at reasonable rates and terms and are unable to finance the proposed project from their own resources."
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Uh, No!

But, what do you expect from Obama spreading the wealth around – to his friends.

Days after North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge (D-Lillington) was seen in a video confrontation with a man with a camera on a Washington street, a new poll seems to indicate the incident has damaged him with voters.

The conservative leaning Civitas Institute released a flash poll Thursday that shows Etheridge slightly trailing Republican challenger Renee Ellmers.

Civitas said the poll of 400 registered voters in the 2nd Congressional District shows Ellmers leads Etheridge 39 percent to 38 percent. Twelve percent said they would vote for Libertarian Tom Rose and 11 percent said they were undecided.

The margin of error was plus or minus 5 percent – putting the candidates in a statistical dead heat

Keith Olbermann announced Wednesday night that he will cease blogging for the liberal Daily Kos over a comment directed at the MSNBC host’s coverage.

Olbermann and some of his MSNBC colleagues surprised their left-leaning fans on Tuesday with eviscerating critiques of President Barack Obama’s Oval Office address on the oil spill spewing off the Gulf Coast.

“It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days,” Olbermann said of the president’s remarks, echoing similarly negative comments from fellow MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow.

One commenter on the Daily Kos, where Olbermann has frequently blogged over the years, speculated that the pattern of hosts generally sympathetic to the president bashing the administration was too consistent to be a coincidence.
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Keith Olbermann is a moron

With less than five months left until Election Day, many political commentators are asking whether this year’s midterm elections could be a reprise of 1994 when Republicans picked up 8 seats in the Senate and 54 seats in the House of Representatives to take control of both chambers for the first time in 40 years. There is almost universal agreement that Republicans are poised to make major gains in both the House and the Senate. And while the GOP’s chances of gaining the 10 seats needed to take control of the upper chamber appear to be remote, the 39 seats required to take back the House of Representatives may be within reach.
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Even if the GOP does not achieve complete control, the Dems hold on policy will be over. Will it be better for Obama that Republicans win complete control?

The answer is yes.

Then, he can blame the GOP going into the 2012 elections.

"It's no surprise that [Republican Carly] Fiorina is attacking me," Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., wrote in a recent fundraising pitch, "because she's so out of touch with California voters. … She supports allowing people on the no-fly terrorist watch list to buy guns."

This is a line I've seen and heard repeatedly in the last month, and one that I expect to hear from many Democratic candidates this fall. At issue in the debate, and in recently proposed legislation: Should the government restrict the gun rights of people whose names appear on a secret list kept by the government?
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Abridgement of second amendment rights without due process is antithetical to the Bill of Rights itself.

Californians need to acknowledge the full consequences of the state’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and accept the reality “that the net result of green policies may be negative for the economy,” says a report released today by the California Lutheran University Center for Economic Research and Forecasting.

The report, co-authored by the center’s director, economist Bill Watkins, was commissioned by the California Manufacturers and Technology Association. It becomes the latest in a series of conflicting reports and analyses on the potential economic impacts of AB32, California’s landmark climate-change law, and will add fuel to the debate over a November ballot proposition that seeks to suspend the law’s implementation.

The report, which Watkins called “a review of the evidence,” argues that there will be no net economic benefit from any green jobs created as a result of the legislation.
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Not a shocker but very obvious….

Sen. Barbara Boxer said last week that climate change — not any of that other stuff — will stand as the "leading cause of conflict" over the next two decades. The comment was apparently based on reports and studies over the past few years that have linked climate change to other security issues, but her colleagues — as well as her Senate campaign opponent — described the prediction as a big stretch.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., Boxer's Republican counterpart on the environment committee she chairs and arguably the most outspoken global warming skeptic in Congress, decried the warning on Tuesday as a bogus ploy to win support for a sweeping energy regulation bill.
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If Boxer persists she will lose big in November.

Our new Louisiana poll has a lot of data points to show how unhappy voters in the state are with Barack Obama's handling of the oil spill but one perhaps sums it up better than anything else- a majority of voters there think George W. Bush did a better job with Katrina than Obama's done dealing with the spill.

50% of voters in the state, even including 31% of Democrats, give Bush higher marks on that question compared to 35% who pick Obama.

Overall only 32% of Louisianans approve of how Obama has handled the spill to 62% who disapprove. 34% of those polled say they approved of how Bush dealt with Katrina to 58% who disapproved.

Editor’s Note: About a month ago, we received a list of names of people connected to the UltimateBet super-user cheating scandal. Much of that information can now be found on 2+2 here.

Since then, we received substantial and substantive information that helped validate some of the data that appears in those documents, while disproving other data. We conducted a wide-range of interviews with well-informed sources connected to the investigation, high-level and connected industry figures, and high-stakes poker players that had varying degrees of knowledge (ranging from ”intimate” to “was directly cheated by Russ Hamilton”) about the scandal.
Eventually, a consistent story formed about who built the super-user cheating software, who else might have known about the cheating scam, and who exactly were the super-users.

Some of this information has, in some shape or form, been discussed through great investigative work by the likes of Nat Arem, Haley Hintze, and others
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Read it all

Tom Campbell still would have lost his Republican primary for U.S. Senate even if he didn't support gay marriage, according to a survey of GOP voters. But he probably wouldn’t have been trounced as badly as he was.

That’s the conclusion of a poll commissioned by the National Organization for Marriage, a group opposing same-sex marriage that ran an ad campaign targeting Campbell on the issue.

Even though most voters didn’t know Campbell’s position, there was a significant minority who did. The poll showed that the latter turned against Campbell in large numbers.

The post-election poll of 300 GOP primary voters found that those who voted for Campbell’s opponents were more aware of his gay-marriage stand. Of the voters who supported Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, R-Irvine, or former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, three in 10 said Campbell’s opposition to Proposition 8 was a factor in their decision.
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Why, of course it did.

I think we’ll know very soon if this CrossTarget poll of the California Senate race is an outlier, or whether Carly Fiorina has gotten enough of a bump from her primary win to make this a neck-and-neck race with Barbara Boxer.

Boxer 46.5%

Fiorina 47.0%

Undecided 6.5%

Rasmussen had Boxer by 5, but the incumbent’s lead has been pretty marginal in most recent polls: 6, 3, 9, 4, 7, 1.

And if Barbara Boxer really is in trouble… well, the Democrats had better run and hide in the rest of the country.
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The Dems can run but they cannot hide