According to FiredUp! Missouri:

The Missouri Baptist Convention’s Pathway editor Don Hinkle has [sic] appears to have thrown his support behind Jim Talent in a prospective GOP Senate primary, calling him “an intellectual powerhouse…regarded favorably by many Tea Partiers.”

Let’s see … an intellectual powerhouse regarded favorably by Tea Partiers? The juxtaposition of concepts may make my brain implode. Although, to be fair, I don’t doubt that Talent might be liked by the Teaple.  

Senator Claire McCaskill (D) via Twitter today:

@clairecmc Just ran into Jim Talent at Lambert. Nice friendly conversation. Asked him if it was gonna be a rematch. He said he “was working through it”  about 4 hours ago  via ÜberTwitter

He’s got to know that he’ll have access to an unlimited amount of money. Then again, he’s got a record to run on.

Now that the midterms are a couple of weeks behind us, it is time to take stock of where we stand and what the makeup of the new Congress means for the next two years, especially in Missouri, a state that is rapidly losing it’s moderate, bellweather status and turning an ever-deepening shade of red as the differences between the cities and the rural areas grow more stark and more divided in their political views.

It is against that backdrop that the woman who will be Missouri’s Senior Senator in the 112th Congress, freshman Claire McCaskill, launches her campaign to retain her Senate seat, a seat that has a special significance in this state because it happens to be the same one that Harry S Truman occupied before he was selected to be FDR’s Vice President.

Missourians are proud of Harry Truman and the job he did in the Senate, especially his work on the Truman Committee, a position from which he delighted in knocking greedy, corpulent, war-profiteering snouts out of the public trough while he threatened the heads of big businesses with serious jail time if they failed to meet the terms of their contracts. Claire has done a worthy job of filling the seat, and she has established a solid record to run on that the more practical and pragmatic, less ideologically driven people in the rural areas can bring themselves to vote for. If she reprises the same sort of campaign she ran in 2006, she ought to be able to stitch together the same constituency that got her elected to the Senate in the first place.

That is because she has created her own brand of independence from the Democratic Party, with only three other Democratic Senators having lower party loyalty scores. That record could help to immunize her against charges that she is a “big-government, tax-and-spend liberal.” Her record is one of going after waste and fraud and she is just about the only Senator in Washington doing so. She has been tireless in going after the fraud that military contractors have been perpetrating since 2001.

She was also way ahead of the curve on refusing earmarks. I happen to disagree with her on earmarks, but that doesn’t change the fact that the issue can be a winner in the outstate areas.

Yet in spite of the fact that on a multitude of issues she is where the so-called tea partiers say they want their candidates to be – earmarks, going after waste, fraud and abuse, no to Cap and Trade – they make no bones about saying they “want her running scared.” But of course, everyone knows that the so-called “tea partiers” are not really independent voters. They are just conservative republicans who are embarrassed to admit that they are the same conservative republicans who supported the previous administration and their wild and reckless ways, and are now trying to pretend otherwise because they are – or should be – embarrassed.

How tough her bid for reelection will be will depend a lot on the republican field and how bloody and bruising the primary gets and who comes out of it the last man or woman standing. If she faces Jim Talent in a rematch of the 2006 battle she won to unseat him, she should win fairly easily because he was such a lazy, do-nothing Senator when he held the seat, and the contrast that can be drawn between the two known quantities will be stark.

While Claire McCaskill has used her chairmanship of an Armed Services subcommittee to relentlessly go after military contractors who have defrauded the taxpayers and failed to deliver the goods and services they were contractually obligated to provide, Jim Talent failed to attend 65 of the 95 Senate Armed Services Committee meetings that were held during the time he held his seat on the committee.

That salient fact matters to a lot of outstate voters, because they all either have someone in their family who is currently serving or who has served recently. If you have a son, daughter, niece, nephew or friend who ever takes a shower in Halliburton-constructed living quarters, you tend to care that troops who were safely inside the wire where they should have been able to relax and unwind have been electrocuted in the shower, and they appreciate the fact that they have the only Senator in all of Washington who is trying to do something about it.

I have long lamented the loss of Democratic Party infrastructure in the outstate areas, especially the northern tier. Claire McCaskill won in 2006 because she didn’t just concentrate on the urban areas and Columbia. She went to every county and she shook hands and she asked people to vote for her. She is a skilled politican as well as an effective legislator, and while there are a lot of people who are one or the other, Claire McCaskill is one of the few who is both. As their Senator, she has been back for town halls and kitchen table chats and kept the voters informed as to what she is doing for them in D.C., and she realizes that while the population in the northern tier of the state isn’t dense, the people aren’t either, and she is smart enough to go get the votes that are there to be picked up by any Democrat who will bother to ask for them.

For the comment on a post at The Turner Report about possible republican candidates challenging Senator Claire McCaskill (D) in 2012:

The United States Senate needs talent; just not Jim Talent.

Last night Rachel Maddow nailed the key to Claire McCaskill’s 2006 victory over Jim Talent: the minimum wage. The GOP’s business constituency hates it, everyone else loves it.  It  didn’t hurt that a minimum wage initiative was on the Missouri ballot then either:

To their credit, the DSCC does get that this is a potent issue. I just saw an ad last night that they produced for Carnahan that hits Roy Blunt for his past opposition to the minimum wage – a past record that he is eager, by the way, to keep quiet:

I take the ad as indicating that Robin Carnahan gets it too, although she certainly isn’t running hard with it.

Another issue that strikes me as having all the positive mojo of the minimum wage is wiping out the BushCo tax giveaways for the wealthy – but wait – Carnahan already blew that. To be fair, she’s not alone in this lack of judgment, since the entire Democratic Congress crapped out on ending the tax breaks for the wealthy when they had a chance to use a vote on the issue to make a statement before the midterms. Remember operant conditioning? The GOP has been far too successful in training the Democrats to fold their tails between their legs and run whenever they hear the dreaded “T” word.

The real import of what Maddow is saying, though, lies in what both these issues have in common. They represent a core Democratic principle: fairness. When Democratic politicians fail to stand up for this principle, they deny their intrinsic identity, what it means to be a Democrat – and you can be sure that a self-hating Democrat isn’t likely to inspire much love from voters.

It’s 9/11, so above the fold on today’s Post-Dispatch was this headline: “Talent keeps focus on terror”, and I was prepared to scoff. Certainly it was sickening that day eight years ago to watch people leap to their deaths and to endlessly watch video of the planes plowing into the World Trade Center. But then, within a year, Jim Talent was backing President Cheney’s Bush’s invasion of Iraq, where who knows how many tens of thousands of innocent people have died, including, so far, more than 4,000 American military personnel. All this in an attack not just on the wrong enemy but an attack that recruited for al Qaida, cost us trillions in treasure that could have covered our health care problems, and didn’t even produce for us the additional oil Cheney was gleefully rubbing his hands over when he manipulated CIA data.

That’s the kind of scoffing I was prepared to do. But oops. The article wasn’t about the attack and its aftermath. Perhaps Talent, and more than likely the P-D, realize that the U.S. response to 9/11 has been such a disaster that we’d best not revisit that. No, Jim Talent is currently working to prevent an attack with a biological weapon such as a virus, bacteria, or disease causing toxin. Think, for example, of “a pickup truck blowing anthrax around the perimeter of Fourth of July celebrations in St. Louis.”

I’m not scoffing at the need to prepare for such an attack. Talent has been working with former Democratic senator Bob Graham (FL) to promote legislation aimed at doing that. The bill is sponsored by Joe Lieberman (Turncoat, Conn.), but even Lieberman can have the occasional worthwhile idea. Nothing perspicacious, mind you, just the obvious.

If we were to move beyond the obvious, we would notice that the best way to stop terrorists is to remove their causus belli. And Greg Palast, in Armed Madhouse, gives us guidance on doing that by laying out the motives for bin Laden’s jihad, starting with a quotation from bL himself:

The presence of the U.S.A. Crusader military forces on land, sea and air in the states of the Islamic Gulf is the greatest danger threatening the largest oil reserve in the world.

Threatening Islamic oil reserves. Osama even launches a sophisticated tirade against the suppression of oil production by U.S. operators in the Gulf. The wealthy engineer knows the petroleum biz, that’s for sure.

If you want to know what motivates Osama, follow his path. Long before Al-Qaida destroyed the World Trade Center, Osama, after removing, with U.S. help, the Soviets from Afghanistan, set up operations in Sudan, where oil men expected to find the next big gusher. Osama’s next target was not The Great Satan America but The Little Satan: Iran. In Osama’s view, Iranians are “Shia dogs and lackeys”, who hold, infuriatingly, OPEC’s third largest oil reserves. Osama was especially affronted by Iran’s rising influence in Afghanistan at the time, thereby blocking his ability to link up with fundamentalist militants in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan who were fundamentally coveting control of the Caspian nations’ oil wealth. Osama expressed his displeasure with Iran’s incursion on his turf by ordering the slaughter of the entire Iranian diplomatic mission to Afghanistan. After eliminating his Shia Iranian competitors in Afghanistan, Osama financed the Wahabi-influenced Taliban. Notably, Osama had no objection to the Taliban signing pipeline deals with U.S. oil firms.

In other words, if you follow Osama’s movements and read what the man says, you realize he has been less coy than Bush about this true program: Get the oil. The steps are: First, remove the Soviets from the Caspian oil fields and pipeline routes; second, remove the man he called an evil “socialist,” Saddam Hussein, from the second largest OPEC reserve: third, keep the Shia “dogs” who control the third largest reserve from expanding their influence outside Persia; fourth, remove U.S. troops from the Land of the Holy Places (and largest oil reserve), Saudi Arabia; then fifth and last, overthrow the House of Saud and re-create a new Caliphate stretching from Sudan to Kazakhstan, every province an oil state, a Petroleum Kingdom of God, presumably under His blessed servant and contractor Osama.

(pp. 12-13)

Laying aside the temptation to stay in the Middle East just to spite the greedy little bugger, we’d do better to build enough windmills and solar panels to blanket Missouri in a pile a hundred feet high. Yesterday.

But I’ll lay you any odds you’d like that Jim Talent opposes the ACES energy legislation. So  much for fighting terrorism.  

Via Randy Turner, Jim Talent has stated his distinct lack of interest in running for Senate in 2010.

I have decided to withdraw my name from consideration for the Senate in 2010, for several reasons. First, there are other qualified Republicans who are seriously investigating the race, and it is vital to prevent the kind of dissension that hurt my Party’s ticket so greatly in 2008. In addition, I have family and public obligations which this unexpected race would disrupt. Chief among the latter is my work as Vice Chairman of the Commission on WMD Proliferation and Terrorism, which is working to prevent a nuclear or biological attack on the United States.

I am still very interested in serving the people of Missouri in elective office, but the considerations I have recited in this statement are more important than my personal goals.”

My political priority in 2010 will be electing a strong and qualified Republican to replace my friend Kit Bond in the United States Senate.