2) My district has a particularly nasty Congressional race this time out. What makes it especially annoying is that we used to be represented by Tom Davis, a moderate Republican, who retired because he felt increasingly unwelcome within the Virginia Republican party. Gerry Connolly (a Democrat) won the office two years ago. As far as I can tell, he's done okay with it. I don't particularly like the man (and, yes, I've met him since he came down to my polling place the last couple of elections) but will vote for him given what an extreme right wingnut is running against him. (Where does the Virginia republican party get these people? We have an attorney general who wasted money redesigning award medals to cover up the breast of the goddess depicted on the state seal. And Keith Fimian, the candidate in question, who wants to ban not only abortion but contraception. Not that he has a chance in hell of that, but it reflects an attitude.)
But what bothers me is the campaign literature I've gotten. The Democratic Party of Virginia has sent me at least one and often two or three flyers a day - all of them with Keith Fimian's name and a summary of some of his more repellant positions on them. For a change of pace, they sometimes send out some about his various failed business enterprises. The kicker is that none of this campaign literature has Gerry Connolly's name on it!
If you know your candidate is so poorly liked that you feel you can't mention him, perhaps you should have looked for someone else to run?
3) One of my pet language peeves surfaced again yesterday. "To flush something out" comes from a hunting term and has to do with using the dogs to get the birds to fly up so you can shoot them. That is, you are creating a stimulus that gets that something out of hiding. If what you want to do is fill in the blanks in an outline, you want to flesh thing out.
