Since projection has become the rule rather than the exception with Republicans, we should wonder whether Chambliss has ever committed crimes against children.

Saxby "Chickenhawk" Chambliss has to be one of the most loathsome Republicans in congress. And considering some of the other Republican characters there, that's saying a lot.

The "Chickenhawk" moniker comes from Chambliss' willingness to send others to fight while he stayed home where it was safe. He received student deferments and then claimed he had "bad knees".

I have no information as to whether Chambliss has or hasn't committed crimes against children.

I don't think it's an accident that "Chambliss" and "classless" sound quite similar.

That odious coward took as many deferments as Dick Cheney for a "football injury" that cleared right the hell up the minute the draft was stopped. Now he is officially considered one of the top golfers in the Senate, so that recovery from his (non-existent) football injury sure was long-lasting, wasn't it?

What? You expect Saxby Chambliss to run on his record of legislative accomplishments? That of the Republicans? Low blows, lies and cheap shots; that's today's Republican party.

Is Obama going to Georgia to stump and GOTV? Thank goodness Clinton and Gore are down there, but we need gigawatt star power to win this one.

Seems to me there is a really nasty ad in there, sort of like:

During the Vietnam War Saxby Chambliss got eight deferrments for a football knee

Max Cleland went and served

After the war Max came home without any legs

Saxby ran dirty ads accusing Max of being allied with America's enemies

Saxby became one of the best golf players in the Senate.

Now Saxby is accusing Jim Martin of not protecting our kids.

Jim Martin's kid was abducted. Jim has a record of being tough on crime.

History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce

Senator Saxby Chambliss has been in Congress for 14 years including 6 in the Senate, and the FEC reports he has raised $12,041,398 for the 2008 Senate race starting on the day he was sworn in in 2003. Mr. Chambliss has consistently opposed regulation of commercial banks and the real estate industry. Those industries put $362,163 (real estate) and $211,248 (banks) towards his re-election- including $10,000 from Fannie Mae, $9,000 from the American Bankers Ass'n, (and $1,000 from my mortgage company, Washington Mutual, which recently collapsed).

In the health insurance arena, Mr. Chambliss opposed any regulations that would prohibit insurance companies from refusing to insure persons with pre-existing illnesses or HMO's from refusing to pay for life-saving medical procedures. He opposed any effort to remove the burden of providing employees' health insurance from America's struggling businesses (GM, Ford, and Chrysler all pay billions in health related costs while their foreign competitors pay nothing). He supported a Medicare prescription drug benefit that prohibited the government from negotiating discount prices and kept seniors from ordering cheaper drugs from Canada. He has been rewarded with $261,861 from the insurance industry, $282,160 from medical providers, and $46,600 from various pharmaceutical companies such as Abbott Laboratories ($5,000), AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals ($5,000) and Johnson & Johnson ($4,500).

Mr. Chambliss, who has served on the Armed Services Committee, failed to ensure that our troops had life saving armored vests and up-armored vehicles when he voted for War in October of 2002 (I had to spend $6,000 out of my pocket for vests for my son and other members of his unit during his second Iraq deployment in 2006) , but he made sure that the largest defense contractor in the world (Lockheed-Martin) continued to get tens of billions of dollars in funding for advanced fighter jets that have no usefulness in the War on Terror. That company supported him with fund raisers in 2007 and 2008, led by its Maryland based CEO, and the company's top executives from Texas to California gave him $36,500 in the span of a few days.

I agree that Obama needs to do a visit in Georgia for Martin to activate the Democratic vote. Without Obama's star power, the turnout will be low.

It comes down to a simple question: are Georgia's voters going to select their next Senator based on the number of lies he tells to gain power? If so, what makes them think he'll stop telling lies once elected?

I too hope Obama goes to Georgia. Chambliss is despicable.

Speaking from the heart of Middle Georgia, Chambliss is in the driver's seat in the runoff. However, he will be the last of GOP the Kool-Aid drinkers in the Senate from Georgia. It will take a while, but except for the Northern Atlanta 'burbs, the GOP will decline into utter decrepitude as the consequences of the flight from reality of 1980-2008 become too obvious to ignore. And as the water runs out and the price of gasoline creeps back up into the $4 range even the GOPers surrounding Atlanta will have second thoughts. Most of them can read, after all. As for the Congressional Districts represented by dim bulbs such as Jack Kingston and Lynn Westmoreland, well, there is no hope for some people.

But this is the classic Karl Rove tactic--maybe the one he'll be remembered for: attack the opponent at his strongest point. It doesn't matter that there's no substance to it--doesn't matter that it's all lies. It will baffle people in the middle who know something; for the enemies it will be seen as a takdown of the enemy's strongest point; and for the low information voters it just may change their minds.
Of course, you need a broken media to do it. This tactic didn't work for Liddy Dole,for example. But it worked against Cleland. It worked against Kerry. It might work in Georgia.

My thoughts are pretty much in line with what Eli suggested, although his were more developed and probably classier than mine. I think Martin should make an ad that demonstrates what a complete scumbag Chambliss is, going so far as to explicity state that Chambliss is a scumbag for these reasons, and finishing with "Does Georgia really deserve a scumbag like Saxby Chambliss?"

During the Vietnam War Saxby Chambliss got eight deferrments for a football knee

Max Cleland went and served

So did Jim Martin. BTW, there's a really dishonest ad being run here by some PAC accusing Martin of every "liberal" smear you can imagine: radical abortion agenda, giving social security and citizenship to illegal aliens,"crushing" new taxes, etc.

FWIW, the DSCC ran a really dishonest ad about taxes against Chambliss also. Goes both ways.

I'm with KLG though,. It's probably Chambliss' election to lose.

If the GOP really wants to regain some popularity with the mainstream of America's electorate, they'll need to stop finding the worst imaginable scumbags and running them for office. It doesn't seem that the Wall Street Repugs have the ethical constraints and the Theocratic/populist/racist Repugs don't have the brains or enough real faith to make such a leap. At this rate, it looks like they'll be a regional party representing all that is wrong with this country for at least a generation.

I've seen several comparisons between the Dole and Chambliss campaigns, and a common hope that Chambliss' extreme ads will backfire the same way Dole's did . . . but that is missing the point. Dole's "Godless" ad did not backfire by itself. Rather, it backfired because 1.) Kay Hagan ACTUALLY FOUGHT BACK, and 2.) She fought back with an amazing ad of her own, that turned a defense into an offense. Had the Democratic candidate been someone whose political instincts were less sharp than Hagan's, Dole just might have been re-elected. It was the FIGHTING BACK that won the election for us. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any such political savvy from Jim Martin. I certainly hope he wins, but, if I were a betting woman, I wouldn't put any money on it!

Don't forget about Zell. Saxby has the Empire State of the South's Personal Liebermann to steer center-left &/or centrist voters, who could well, should well, go to Martin, to Chambliss instead. & to the possible success of that endorsement: the voters in Georgia still think of Zell as the Third Way governor who gave them the Hope Scholarship, not as the spittle-flecked loon from Hardball who challenged the host to a duel. So, I expect a win by a convincing margin, maybe even 60-40.

Nobody's mentioned how Chambliss was losing in the polls by the same amount he ended up "winning" by. Counted on Diebold machines, of course.