The U.S. Senate candidate campaign finance reports are available at the Federal Election Commission. The latest quarterly reports have been out for almost a week. The cumulative summaries, in alphabetical order:

AKIN, W TODD

From: 01/01/2011  To: 06/30/2012

Office: SENATE

Party: REPUBLICAN PARTY

Itemized Individual Contributions $1,558,133

Unitemized Individual Contributions $278,903

Party Committees Contributions $13,500

Other Committees Contributions $336,331

Candidate Contributions $0

TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS $2,186,867

Operating Expenditures $1,309,425

Ending Cash On Hand $1,405,526

[emphasis added]

It just goes to show that it is possible to raise around two million dollars if you’re a right wingnut.

BRUNNER, JOHN

From: 05/01/2011  To: 06/30/2012

Office: SENATE

Party: REPUBLICAN PARTY

Itemized Individual Contributions $505,776

Unitemized Individual Contributions $70,445

Party Committees Contributions $0

Other Committees Contributions $15,500

Candidate Contributions $4,789,406

TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS $5,381,130

Operating Expenditures $5,193,846

Ending Cash On Hand $182,914

[emphasis added]

Think of it as an individual’s economic stimulus program to prop up the broadcast industry.

MCCASKILL, CLAIRE

From: 01/01/2011  To: 06/30/2012

Office: SENATE

Party: DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Itemized Individual Contributions $6,115,089

Unitemized Individual Contributions $1,478,353

Party Committees Contributions $43,100

Other Committees Contributions $1,535,758

Candidate Contributions $15,355

TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS $9,187,664

Operating Expenditures $7,143,371

Ending Cash On Hand $3,641,413

[emphasis added]

That’s some serious money. With the billionaire funded PACs slinging all those television ads you’re gonna need a lot more, Claire.

STEELMAN, SARAH H

From: 01/01/2011  To: 06/30/2012

Office: SENATE

Party: REPUBLICAN PARTY

Itemized Individual Contributions $721,757

Unitemized Individual Contributions $244,885

Party Committees Contributions $0

Other Committees Contributions $21,100

Candidate Contributions $0

TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS $987,742

Candidate Loans $400,000

Operating Expenditures $1,004,214

Ending Cash On Hand $561,660

[emphasis added]

If karma or your personal deity has a sense of the absurd they/it will make Sarah Steelman our next U.S. Senator. Then again, the same could be said for John Brunner and Todd Akin.

In about two weeks we’ll know which one of the three right wingnut republicans makes it through to the November dance. Meanwhile, it’s anyone’s guess.

Or, if you didn’t benefit from a classical education and you watch too much television:

…Smithers, release the hounds.

Senator Claire McCaskill’s (D) campaign has released three ads, one each for three of the right wingnut republicans trying to make it past the August primary. In alphabetical order:

Claire Mccaskill (D): I’m Claire McCaskill and I approve this message.

Narrator: The most conservative congressman in Missouri as our senator? Todd Akin. A crusader against bigger government, Akin would completely eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy and privatize Social Security. Todd’s pro-family agenda would outlaw many forms of contraception. And Akin alone says President Obama is a complete menace to our civilization. Todd Akin. Missouri’s true conservative is just too conservative.

Claire McCaskill (D): I’m Claire McCaskill and I approve this message.

Narrator: John Brunner, a reliable conservative? Turns out, records show since two thousand Brunner hasn’t even bothered to vote in sixteen elections. And as a CEO, the media reports, Brunner nearly killed the family business and ran up two hundred forty-five million in debt. No wonder John Brunner can’t even say where he would cut the federal budget. Around here, being reliable means showing up to vote and conservative means you don’t spend more than you make.

Claire McCaskill: I’m Claire McCaskill and I approve this message.

Narrator: Meet Sarah Steelman, she’s just more politics as usual. More pay to play, contributions from big contributors earn Sarah Steelman’s vote for big favors at taxpayer’s expense. More inside deals, taking thousands in gifts from lobbyists in just her first five months in office. And more to hide, in direct violation of sunshine laws, hundreds of key documents from Steelman’s office have gone missing. Sarah Steelman, just more of the same.

And they all thought that Claire wasn’t going to bring a Louisville Slugger to the street fight.

Last week we noticed that GOP senatorial wannabe Sarah Steelman was attempting to ignite some enthusiasm for her candidacy by exploiting her mavricky resemblance to erstwhile rightwing star, Sarah Palin (e.g., they both love to play with guns). It must have paid off because this week she earned Palin’s endorsement. This turn of events has got the worshipful Steelman absolutely, gushingly giddy:

I am deeply honored and humbled to have earned the endorsement of Governor Palin, whose willingness to stand up and fight for what is right, regardless of the political consequences, has blazed a trail for conservatives who believe as we do, that the status quo has got to go. I am ready to join Governor Palin and lead the fight in the Senate to restore fiscal discipline and speak truth to power by putting this country back into the hands of the people!” said Steelman.

I can’t help smirking when she talks about “joining” Palin, whose selection as John McCain’s running mate arguably put the final kibosh on his inept presidential campaign, and who is now well on her way to the political dustheap she so deserves. Actually Steelman might get her wish and join Palin among the also-rans since Palin’s endorsements haven’t always delivered the keys to the kingdom in the past.

What’s even more amusing is the way that these fighters against the “status quo” always propose the most status quo GOP non-solutions to our problems: Gutting social programs in order to keep the tax rate low for corporations and the wealthy – check. Cutting public spending and in the process destroying public sector jobs along with our social and physical infrastructure – check. Privatizing successful government programs like Medicare and Social Security that serve the middle class – check. Fighting like hell to take affordable health care away from the uninsured – check.  Opposing government regulations that keep our food and water safe along with financial regulations that would have saved us from the 2008 recession had they been in place – check.

All in all, a strange way to “put the country back into the hands of the people,” but I guess it’s really a matter of which people you’re talking about – not that I expect either Sarah would have a clue.

We’ve received very slick and expensive right wingnut campaign mail pieces from republican U.S. Senate primary candidate John Brunner (r), all in anticipation of the August primary:

Oh, we get it – Todd Akin (r) is like President Obama (D) and Sarah Steelman (r) is like Senator Claire McCaskill (D). Really?

Interesting. Not [O]ne mention of John Brunner’s party affiliation [Oops, there was one there on the mail piece on the right, it just wasn’t very noticeable – the piece on the left has no mention of party affiliation]. That’s one thing you can expect from individuals with a bit business experience – they know a damaged brand when they see it and avoid it like the plague.

Previously: Signs: Party, what party? (July 14, 2012)  

Talking Points Memo on Sarah Palin’s new add, “Real Missouri“:

Steelman also appears in the ad, touting her pro-life record, while the words “conservative maverick” flash on the screen. […] After Steelman touts her social conservative credentials, she ends the ad by reminding voters that she “loves to hunt” – something Palin is well known for. “Real Missouri” ends with an image of Steelman in camouflage in the woods, a gun beside her.

TPM suggests that Steelman wants to evoke another Sarah who thinks there are “real Americans” and not-so-real Americans -just like Steelman thinks there are “real Missourians” as distinct from folks in St. Louis who don’t know that animals are good for nothing but sport shooting?

Not so, says Steelman’s campaign staff:

Steelman campaign spokesman Patrick Tuohey said any similarities to Palin the ad might evoke “certainly wasn’t anything intentional.”

Yeah right.

But, I can’t help wonderng, is this a wise direction for Steelman? Consider, for instance, another point of comparison between the two women that might not serve Steelman so well. I am alluding to the the low level of esteem accorded to both by right-wing media figures – folks nominally on their side.

Palin was – reputedly – skewered by non other than Fox News’ Chairman Roger Ailes. According to a (subsequently disputed) New York Magazine article, a source “close to Ailes” claimed that “he thinks Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid.” If true, Ailes isn’t the only one who has a less than flattering opinion of her abilities. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, for example, is on the record calling Palin, among other things, a nincompoop. Steelman, for her part, was described by conservative Missouri broadcaster Mark Reardon, as not  “the sharpest knife in the drawer“?

I hate to be mean, but somebody has to say it. Is hunting the only thing that Palin and Steelman have in common?

Richard Posner, a conservative judge appointed by Ronald Reagon, has decided that he’s less conservative “since the Republican party started becoming goofy.” After watching the primary debate this evening between the GOP contenders for Claire McCaskill’s senate seat, Rep. Todd Akin, Sarah Steelman, and John Brunner, I understand what he was getting at.

You want to know what the candidates had to say? I can boil it down for you to about three basic proposals that were essentially offered in response to all questions almost as articles of faith: Cut federal spending, stop with all the federal rules and regulations, cut taxes. This simple prescription will fix the economy, create scads of jobs, and save the middle class according to this trio. Of course, it’s also the formula – at least the lack of adequate financial regulation – that blew the economy to smithereens in the first place, but then I think we’re actually talking religion here, not economics.

Speaking of religion, they also all hate Obamacare. Akin really, really hates it (and he knows about using reconciliation to kill it). Brunner calls it ObamaClaire (get it?), because there’s nothing like a catchy slogan. Steelman’s pretty sure that Chief Justice Roberts was just interested in protecting politicians rather than upholding the Constitution when he upheld Obamacare – because we all know that Tea Party hacks have mystical constitutional knowledge not granted to highly-trained legal scholars.

As for what they’d put in place of the ACA, it all sounded a lot like the weak pablum John McCain promised to dish up if he were elected: tort reform, purchasing insurance from out-of-state insurers (in order to undermine consumer protections in states with a well-regulated insurance market, no doubt), all the old GOP standbys.  

Portable insurance policies that folks could take from job to job generated lots of enthusiasm from Steelman and Akin. No mention of who would supply those portable policies, whether folks would be expected to pony up out of their own pockets when they are no longer employed, and whether or not there’d be subsidies for low-income folks who are unemployed or whose employment doesn’t offer insurance. Todd Akin, for one, was sure that this prescription would take care of the uninsured, which is notable because a year or so ago, if I remember correctly, he seemed to think the uninsured poor should beg charities for care. If I were one of the 900,000 uninsured Missourians, I’d be very worried about now.

Who won? Who knows? Who cares? If this evening’s performance is any evidence, the three are basically interchangeable when it comes to substance. A few other takeaways:

–They’re all willing to compromise and work with Democrats as long as Democrats are willing to do just what Republicans want (Akin called it starting from the right principles).

–Todd Akin thinks that Obama is leading us from a recession into depression. And to think – most of the rest of us, including all those economists, are pretty sure we’ve been in a slow recovery for the past three years. Actually, some of us are pretty sure that it’s been the efforts of folks like Akin who are responsible for the slowing of the recovery.

–Akin doesn’t trust Romney’s “conservative” credentials. When asked if he supported the presumptive GOP candidate, Akin responded that he would have to wait to evaluate Romney’s actual performance as president. Goes to show that waffling, etch-a-sketching, and evading specifics doesn’t work with the wingers any more than it does with progressives.

–Brunner proves that practice pays off. He managed to spout a simple message – variations on the citizen politician vs. career politician theme – in a reasonably polished fashion.

–Does Sarah Steelman always seem so terrified when when she speaks in public? Or just when she’s on TV? She should get some pointers from John Brunner’s handlers.

–Finally, I can’t wait to see Claire McCaskill debate whichever of these dufuses wins the primary. As you might guess from the comments above, they all need some serious schooling and one thing about Claire – she can give it to them.

Given Claire McCaskill’s past behavior in regard to coal and the EPA, who’d have thought she’d come out on the side of the angels when the Senate voted on GOP legislation designed to block new regulations of toxic emissions from coal fired plants. Thanks to McCaskill and her like-minded colleagues, millions of Americans are less apt to die prematurely of asthma or other respiratory deiseases, cancer, and heart disease.

True, McCaskill is proposing to delay the implementation of the regulations in order to give the coal industry more time to comply. Nevertheless, in this case, her honesty about what is at stake is a world away from the nonsense coming from her GOP opposite numbers in Missouri.

Where McCaskill, right or wrong, retains some individual flexibility, her senate colleague from Missouri, Roy Blunt, is a lock-step GOP soldier. Blunt, who predictably voted to block the more stringent standards, is well-programmed when it comes to fighting “job-killing” regulations on politically friendly industries. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Blunt cited studies estimating a $10 billion cost for industries across the country to comply with the rule. He argued that it presents an undue burden on states like Missouri that rely heavily on coal to generate electricity.

Analysis (pdf) provided by the Congressional Research Service, however, suggests that industry assessments that inform Blunt’s cost numbers are inflated:

EEI, NERC, and other recent reports describe scenarios and potential impacts of EPA rules, including projected need for additional power plant capacity or potential reliability problems, that depend on a number of assumptions such as the stringency of the rules or expected tight compliance deadlines, many of which differ greatly from what EPA has actually proposed or promulgated. Also, because most of the reports try to look collectively at EPA rules, to the extent a proposed or promulgated rule differs from some of these assumptions, it can be difficult to separate out one rule’s projected impacts from the report’s overall conclusions about multiple rules

So once again, Blunt’s dire pronouncements about job losses are basically empty.

Nor does does Blunt seem to be aware of – or at least willing to mention – the report published by Earth Justice, the American Lung Association, and Clean Air Task Force, which asserts that the new regulations will give us $281 billion a year in health care savings. As far as I’m concerned, 281 of anything trumps 10 of anything, anytime – but particularly when the money saved is also associated with the prevention of as many as 35,700 premature deaths a year.

As for McCaskill’s wannabe November opponents , John Brunner is on the record that he’d repeal “job-killing” EPA regulations. Apart, however, from affirming his Republican orthodoxy, he doesn’t seem to have anything more substantive to say.

Sarah Steelman, however, never fails to delight lovers of the ridiculous. She doesn’t think that the actual, trained scientists at the EPA are up to snuff, commenting that their data is “debatable or inherently flawed.” So there you have it from Sarah Steelman, environmental scientist. The only thing sillier were the comments from Steelman’s other alter ego, the motivational psychiatrist, who remarked that

I believe that much of the environmentalists’ agenda has little to do with preserving nature and wildlife, and is actually more directed at regulating businesses and inhibiting economic growth.

Because scientists just inherently love inhibiting economic growth. Note also how the issue becomes “preserving nature and wildlife” with no mention of human life, which is what is actually at stake with the new EPA regulations? Steelman’s got that GOP talent for misdirection down pat.

The real winner, though, is Rep. Todd Akin. While Akin is most likely capable of knee-jerk opposition to just about any regulation imposed on the corporate bastions of “market freedom,” he is, when it comes to the EPA, probably more concerned right now with those pesky EPA spy drones that have been flying over Missouri agricultural operations, which, as he informed the EPA’s Lisa Jackson in a recent letter, are “deeply troubling.”  

Via Twitter, from one of the republican U.S. Senate candidates:

Sarah Steelman ‏@sarah_steelman

A big thank you to Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield for hosting tonight’s fundraiser! They are both brilliant and such great citizens! #mosen 9:54 PM – 13 Jun 12

Gosh, I know quite a few brilliant people who are great citizens. It’s just that they don’t have a really fat checkbook.

Over at the Turner Report you can read press releases (here and here) from Sarah Steelman and John Brunner, claiming the laurels from the last GOP senatorial primary debate. Todd Akin, at least as far as I can determine, seems to think that squabbling about who won after the fact is beneath his dignity. Given the arguments his rivals put forward, he may be right.

It’s hard to know what Akin could add since the debate showed him and his two rivals singing in more or less perfect harmony from the same hymnal – the one favored by today’s more extreme GOP. The debate established that they all want to, what else, eliminate Obamacare, and insure that if the Bush tax cuts are extended, they are extended for millionaires too. None of them made any bones abut their preference to privatize Social Security (along with cutting some benefits). The Democratic incumbent, Claire McCaskill, reminds us in her post- GOP debate press release that their willingness to sacrifice seniors doesn’t stop with Social Security:

Akin, Steelman, and Brunner’s insistence on privatizing Social Security tonight follows earlier debates in which all three emphatically endorsed dismantling Medicare and turning it, instead, into a private voucher program.

So no big differences where it counts. Which gets us back to the GOP candidates’ press releases noted above and raises the question about what could distinguish one from the others as a winner in the debate – or in the election itself, come to that.  

Steelman wants to set herself apart from the group by claiming that she alone has “a plan.” Her release proclaims that “she was the only candidate who provided specifics and plans of action.”

If you’re inclined to believe this, check out her Website where she lists her “Show-Me Solutions for the First 60 Days.” You won’t find much that’s new – “fight” for a balanced budget amendment, get rid of the President’s “czars” (i.e.,  administrative personal essential to run the executive branch), implement an optional flat tax, put a congressional bit and briddle on the Fed, term limits, yada, yada, yada.  As clever as Steelman obviously thinks she is, we’ve heard all these ideas ad nauseum since they comprise what amounts to Fox-inspired, GOP orthodoxy these days – Todd Akin in particular likes to drone on about the putative “czars” – and they are all still very bad ideas. Nor did I notice any specifics about how she plans to achieve these goals – apart from the rather spectacular implication that Sarah will get all this destruction done in the first 60 days after she takes office. Delusions of grandeur much?

John Brunner, on the other hand, thinks that the way to distinguish himself is to point out that he has no experience doing the job he wants to take on. He somehow thinks that it doesn’t matter that most of his policy prescription are identical to those of his rivals since he isn’t, like them, a “career politician.” There is a certain class of American, I suppose, who thinks that all politics – or at least politics in Washington D.C. – are so evil that we have to continually sacrifice political virgins to the process in order to get a few months of uncorrupted leadership, but experiments with this philosophy usually only prove that folks who vote according to this belief deserve the inept politicians they send to Washington to represent them.

For his part, although he has little to say about the debate as such, Todd Akin is trying to stand out as the most popular kid in class. He is touting the results of the recent PPP poll that showed him one point ahead of Claire McCaskill. Well and good, except that he he completely ignores the Rasmussen poll that shows Steel leading McCaskill by a much larger margin. Note that I’m not saying that I endorse the findings of the notoriously inaccurate Rasmussen polls, particularly as regards Claire McCaskill – just that it’s premature to crown oneself a front runner based on one poll out of several, especially this early in the game.  

Along U.S. Highway 50 in west central Missouri, a 4 x 8 sign, printed on both sides:

Ah, image bleed through in bright sunlight – the bane of cheap campaigns.

What, no party affiliation? The brand must not be doing very well.

Previously: Signs, signs, everywhere signs… (2012) (June 6, 2012)