links for 2010-09-21

The San Joaquin Valley, often considered one of California's political backwaters, is shaping up to be a key battleground in the state's hotly contested U.S. Senate race.

Republican challenger Carly Fiorina has made the valley a focus of her campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. She has made 22 trips here since she announced her candidacy last November, even though the region holds only about a tenth of the state's population. By comparison, she has made 34 trips to Los Angeles County, where more than a quarter of Californians live.

The reason: With voter polls showing the two candidates neck-and-neck, the slimmest margin gained anywhere in the state could tip the scales in November. And Ms. Fiorina's strategists are counting on the San Joaquin Valley—which has a large number of conservative-leaning voters—to give her that edge in a heavily Democratic state.
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The same way Pet Wilson beat Jerry Brown in 1982 for the US Senate

A new Fox News poll in Delaware shows Chris Coons (D) leading Christine O'Donnell (R) in the U.S. Senate race among likely voters, 54% to 39%.

Interesting: If Rep. Mike Castle (R) had won the Republican nomination, he would lead Coons by the same margin, 48% to 33%.
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Tough race for the GOP

Boxer's vulnerabilities aren't so different from those of other entrenched incumbents nationwide — economic angst and growing mistrust in government have racked the electorate, and the junior Senator from California has seen her job approval fall into the low 40s over the last year. "People are looking for a reason to abandon Boxer," says Larry Gerston, a political science professor at San Jose State. Some of them are finding that reason in Fiorina, who has been relentless in her critique of Democrats' record on the economy, rattling off grim statistic after grim statistic in a recent debate. But after emerging from a competitive primary that pushed candidates to the right, the Republican hasn't reached far beyond her base. "Fiorina has not crawled to the center," Gerston says, and the TIME survey showed her trailing Boxer among younger voters, women and independents.
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With one-in-seven Americans living in poverty, with unemployment at record levels, with an unprecedented national deficit, with foreclosures up and businesses down you’d think the Obama Administration and Democratic National Committee (DNC) would be focusing on the economy…
You’d be wrong.

Instead, the Community Organizer In Chief and the radical left is focusing its energy on stalking and harassing top conservatives and tea party patriots.

On Saturday, September 18th, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart headlined an event entitled “Right Nation 2010,” held just outside of Chicago, Illinois. When Andrew Breitbart, a speaker at the event, arrived at the Sears Centre west of Chicago, he was met by an angry mob of radical protesters who were “praying” for an “end to hate” while also hurling insults and homophobic slurs toward the targets of their enmity. One of the prayer leaders at the event and the lead organizer, C.J. Hawking, is also a noted socialist from the Chicago area.
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Fresh off big primary wins in Delaware and Alaska, national "tea party" groups are redirecting the energy of the movement toward the November midterm elections, raising millions of dollars, expanding their advocacy into dozens of congressional races and building voter turnout operations nationwide.
Leaders of the Atlanta-based Tea Party Patriots said they will announce a seven-figure donation Tuesday, from a yet-unnamed person, that the organization will pour into local tea party groups and get-out-the-vote efforts in some of the most competitive congressional races.

FreedomWorks, which is headquartered in Washington and endorsed 25 House and Senate candidates during the primary season, said it will expand that list to more than 80. The Tea Party Express, based in Sacramento, is planning its largest national bus tour at the end of October to get conservatives to the polls.
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Tea Party movement has been building since February 2009 – MSM just figured it out.

A new Twitter security flaw has been widely exploited on thousands of Twitter accounts, redirecting users to third-party websites without their consent.

The bug is particularly nasty because it works on mouseover only, meaning pop-ups and third-party websites can open even if you just move your mouse over the offending link.

The flaw uses a JavaScript function called onMouseOver which creates an event when the mouse is passed over a chunk of text. We’ve seen the flaw being abused to launch simple pop-up windows, redirect users elsewhere (including porn sites), and we’ve also seen it used in combination with blocks of color, covering the true “intention” of the tweet.

For now, the best course of action is using only third-party apps such as TweetDeck to access Twitter, as the bug only seems to affect Twitter’s web interface. Also, if your Twitter account contains a message abusing the flaw, you can delete it using a third-party app.
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@Flap uses TweetDeck