More down the ballot news: Democrats about to avenge Jindal's win

An unusual amount of down-the-ballot races these past two days - especially in gubernatorial contests.

• Fletcher about to be ousted

Our latest rankings of governor races listed Kentucky and Louisiana as the two most vulnerable governships. Republicans kept up their end of that by picking up LA last week, and it is now up to Democrats to return the favor in Kentucky. There has been really no suspense in this race for now. Governor Fletcher has only cracked 40% in one poll up to now.

There is only two more weeks before Election Day, and the latest SUSA poll shows there is close to no hope for the GOP here. Democrat Beshear leads 58% to 38%. This is an increase from two weeks ago, where Beshear led by "only" 16. ˜eedless to say, the saying that an incumbent under 50 is in trouble applies even more strongly when the incumbent is under 40...

• Rematch in Washington

In 2008 races now, the Washington governor race has been set to a rematch of 2004: Dino Rossi, the Republican who lost the race against Democrat Gregoire by 133 votes only after a second recount reversed his lead at the last minute, is about to confirm the conventional wisdom that he will run for again. This would ensure that Washington is extremely competitive in 2008 -- and thus get a lot of attention considering there is a very little number of competitive seats.

The only poll out of this race lately has it at a complete toss-up, with Gregoire holding to the slightest of leads. This is still a good turnaround since the early days of her administration, where Rossi regularly out polled her by double digits as Washington voters did not believe he had actually lost.

• No censure for Stark

The House continues to waste its time. Today, Republicans were trying to use the controversy over Rep. Stark's comments on the war for their benefit and tried to offer a censure vote. Democrats managed to avoid going to a censure vote by tabling Boehner's proposal 196 to 173. Stark had declared last week, “You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement." He had also included Bush in the Axis of Evil a while ago.

Democrats were weak and spineless again on this issue (Pelosi publicly condemned Stark) and refused to help Stark in an obvious GOP attempt to change the subject away from the war. But at least they were not quite as spineless than when they voted to condemn MoveOn last month.