(CNN) - Guess who's getting slimed now in the increasingly nasty Senate race in Delaware: Republican stalwarts Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes.

The charge: both men, editors of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, are trying to undermine Delaware Republican Senate candidate and tea party darling Christine O'Donnell, or so her campaign manager says.

"Call Bill Kristol and ask him why he's crossing swords with Governor Palin's endorsement. And Google Fred Barnes and see about him taking money from Republican leadership," a frustrated O'Donnell campaign manager Matt Moran told CNN.

O'Donnell just won the endorsement of Sarah Palin.

The Weekly Standard folks sound unfazed. In a reply to an e-mail from CNN, Bill Kristol offers this: "I know Sarah Palin. I respect Sarah Palin. And with all due respect- Christine O'Donnell is no Sarah Palin."

Governor's race isn't going to get interesting until the general, the Republican always wins my etch-a-sketch drawn 6th Congressional district owned by one Roscoe Bartlett, Mikulski has no credible challenger (although there is someone running by the name of "Billy Bob Jaworski" - never voted for a "Billy Bob" before), and I might as well flip a coin for County executive.

Bleah.

Four out of Five Americans Know Earth Revolves Around Sun

(that means one is five to not.)

"'Galileo Was Wrong' is an inaugural conference to discuss the 'detailed and comprehensive treatment of the scientific evidence supporting Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe.' The geocentrists argue that 'Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the [Catholic] Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.' I, like many of you, am scratching my head wondering how people still think this way. Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons."

So much for "Minnesota nice"!  Beware of large, healthy-looking blondes bearing dishes to pass, just trying to distract you with ludefisk -- that would do it for me, yecch -- while they pervert the polling process.

It will be interesting to see if this becomes a bit of a referendum by the left on HCR.  Lynch was the only MA state rep to vote against it.  I'm sure that stance will win him some votes as well as lose them.

Of course, he voted yes on the Stupak amendment, so it's more of an economic argument than anything else.

In general Lynch is sort of a conserva-dem, at least by MA standards.  But then again, the 9th district is not exactly the liberal Mecca of MA either.

This evening, in the state of Delaware somebody will win the GOP primary, and declare something like, "And now, I ask for all Republicans to unite behind my candidacy."  At that moment, across the state, across the blogosphere, and across the country you will hear supporters of the other candidate wholeheartedly and loudly respond, "[your favorite expletive here]!"

It's hard to begrudge them. If you're a Christine O'Donnell supporter, you will have just seen a woman who stands for you and your values absolutely trashed, six ways to Sunday by an opposing campaign, a state party, and a lot of voices who you once thought of as reliable allies. And for who? A fossil who voted the right way barely half the time?

If you're a Mike Castle supporter, you will have just seen a man who's spent his career serving Delaware - with nary a peep of serious objection from the state's GOP grassroots - rejected for daring to deviate from conservative orthodoxy and the chances of a GOP majority in the Senate seem to go up in flames. You've watched the opposition misrepresent his record. And for who? A freelance publicist who has never held office before?

My Man Mitch

He is a fiscal conservative business type governor who has an outstanding fiscal record and is socially conservative but does not use it as a political tool.   In fact he goes out of his way to say social issues are secondary to budget issues for an executive.

But I would disagree that Castle is a useless RINO, or really that he is a RINO, a "Republican in Name Only," at all.  He's a moderate, northeastern Republican.  There's a difference.

Look, for instance, at the DW-Nominate metric of congressional ideology developed by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal.  It's a complicated system to produce a straightforward result: 1.0 is roughly a perfect conservative, -1.0 is roughly a perfect liberal, and 0.0 is a moderate.

Castle has scored a 0.202 in the 111th Congress.  That puts him to the right of every Democrat, including Walt Minnick, whom the Tea Party Expressed tried to endorse.  It also puts Castle roughly in line with Jim Gerlach of PA-6 and Dave Reichert of WA-8.  The GOP has spent oodles of money in the last few cycles to protect these two, and I do not seem to recall much of a hue and cry that all that cash was going to waste to protect some useless RINOs, and rightly so.  They're not RINOs, they're moderates.

That ship has sailed for her