Primary Thoughts

A few quick hits from last night's primaries around the nation:

In the big news, Indiana Senator Dick Luger lost in the republican primary to a much more conservative candidate.

The 80-year-old pillar of Washington's foreign policy establishment lost his Indiana GOP primary battle to a younger, hungrier and more politically attuned conservative challenger, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock.

Luger is 80 years old and has been in the senate for the last 36 years. Now he's out on his pompous, arrogant, self-entitled, wrinkled ass.

The venerable senator's finished. Chalk up another win for the tea party.

The list of conservative complaints against Lugar has grown over the last several years, a period coinciding with an aggressive campaign to rid the GOP of officeholders who fail to march in lockstep with the party's ideological activists. Lugar voted for Obama Supreme Court nominees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, advocated a hike in the gas tax, backed immigration reform, opposed an earmark spending ban and supported the financial and auto industry bailouts.

Lugar was once called Obama's favorite Republican senator...

The kiss of death.

It's also worth noting that the NRA mounted a significant campaign for Mourdock, with thousands of radio and TV ads, almost half a million phone calls, and 700,000 pieces of mail. I don't know exactly how much impact that had, but it damn sure didn't hurt.

The Tea Party. The NRA. The people are speaking.

Now Mourdock is probably going to Washington. And Lugar, a hero of the Washington establishment, is headed home...

"hero of the Washington establishment" my ass. One down, a whole bunch to go.

In other primary news:

ABO (Anyone But Obama) Gaining Momentum

... a man in prison in Texas got 4 out of 10 votes in West Virginia's Democratic presidential primary.

The inmate, Keith Judd, is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas for making threats at the University of New Mexico in 1999. Obama received 59 percent of the vote to Judd's 41 percent.

Keith Judd, Texas convict and almost the West Virginia democrat nominee for president.

Granted, obama's ongoing efforts to kill the coal industry makes him pretty unpopular in coal mining states like West Virginia, but still ... 40% of democrats picking a jailed felon from another state over their party's sitting president!?! Damn ... just Day-um.

Other results from Tuesday's primaries include 21 percent of North Carolina democrat voters picking "no preference" over obama.

Couple that with results from democrat primaries held in March in other states:

• Oklamoma: anti-abortion protester Randall Terry got 18 percent of the primary vote.

• Louisiana: a lawyer from Tennessee, John Wolfe, pulled nearly 18,000 votes.

• Alabama: 18 percent of Democratic voters chose "uncommitted" in the primary rather than vote for Obama.

So in four of those five states, 1 voter out of every 5 is in favor of someone other than obama as their party's nominee. In the fifth state, a whopping 40% would rather have a Texas convict as president in place of the incumbent.

It's early yet, and there's a long way to go, but I'm starting to feel just a wee bit optimistic.

Yes we can!