Of course Mike does. It's all about Mike, remember?

Dangerous for Obama.  How can anyone top a Bloomberg/Paul type of "change" ticket?  Even if Obama went with a centrist GOP like Hagel or Snowe, it still would pale to a ticket with a Jewish New Yorker worth billions and a libertarian conspiracy theorist from Texas who used to publish material proclaiming there to be Jewish New Yorker billionaire global domination plots.  

Bloomberg is irrelevant to that ticket; it will get votes from the Ron Paul people.   The putative Mike Bloomberg constituency is moderate, vaguely liberal, technocratic, non-ideological, competency-oriented yuppies ... in other words, people who realize that it makes no sense to cast their vote for anyone other than Obama or McCain.  Paulites, on the other hand, would gladly cast a vote for Ron on American Idol, if it were only possible.

Assuming that Paulanians would otherwise swing more for McCain (a pretty big assumption, granted), this will probably help Obama.

Does this Independent Green Party of Virginia have the right to create a ticket without the consent of either party? The link states that it did just that and hat strikes me as totally insane. Somehow, I think Bloomberg might not be ready to abolish the gold standard.

Both of these guys should ask for their names to be removed from the ballot. Are they going to campaign? Together? This is beyond ridiculous.

Bloomberg's a liberal. Paul's the darling of the anti-BusHitler!!! anti-RIAA anti-MSFT software-should-be-free crowd.

To the extent it has any impact at all, Paul-Bloomberg hurts the liberal candidate.

Nah, I don't buy it, tep.  First of all, only a fraction of Ron Paul's support comes from the ... let's call them the slashdot crowd.  In California or Oregon, maybe there are enough of those guys to counterbalance his much bigger constituency: hard-core libertarians, especially gun activists and keep-the-guvment-off-my-property folks, who would otherwise probably go for McCain.  In VA, most IT workers suckle from the sweet, sweet teet of the Federal government in some form or other; they're not free software absolutists.   But there are tons of Virginians who hate restrictions on their guns.

They call themselves "Greens," but what has Mike Bloomberg ever done for the environment? And Ron Paul is outspokenly against government conservation in nearly all forms. It makes as much sense for the Greens to nominate Ron Paul for anything as it would for the ADL to endorse Pat Buchanan.

Which is why I suspect that this is actually an astroturf movement designed explicitly to help McCain. Obama's margin in Virginia, if he wins it, will come from exurban Republicans who are temporarily disillusioned with the GOP. Give them an apparently serious "not the Republican" choice other than Obama, and a fair number of them will choose Bloomberg. And by "fair number," I mean a few thousand, or a few tens of thousands, but remember, several of Virginia's recent statewide elections have been decided by a few hundred votes.

Why would the NRA types vote for a ticket that has Mayor Bloomberg on it?

Because they will be entranced by the magical words "Ron Paul," the same way a hyperactive 8 year old will plow through a pile of Brussels sprouts if there's candy buried beneath them.  Name recognition, dude: it'll be the "some guy/Ron Paul" ticket.

OK, Mike Bloomberg and Ron Paul are nominated incognito by a bunch of "happy hillbillies" in Virginia?  This is so far off the wierdness scale I can't even see it anymore.  It has to be some sort of conspiracy theory, doesn't it?  How long before it comes out that these dopes are bankrolled by the same folks that underwrote the Swift Boaters?

Hmmm... my 6 year-old would throw out the brussels sprouts, not plow through 'em.

tep, there's not a lot of trust for McCain's stand on guns among the guys I shoot with in Northern Virginia.

Also, it's worth nothing that any gun owner in Virginia who is angry about gun restrictions is, quite simply, crazy, and it's a mistake to expect rational voting from a crazy person. The only meaningful gun restriction in Virginia is the one-a-month purchase limit. People with concealed-carry permits are exempted from the one-a-month limit, and concealed-carry permits are easy to get in Virginia. Fill out a form, sign a check for fifty bucks, get fingerprinted at your county police headquarters, and you can buy all the guns you want every day of the week. (Or you can be a sane person and wait 30 days to buy that second gun. The reputable gun shops here will hold guns for you while you wait out the one-a-month limit on, say, a matched pair of Vaqueros with consecutive serial numbers.)

The only way guns could be less restricted in Virginia is if the commonwealth were to start handing out firearms for free.

Plus, when you're casting a protest vote, the fact that the third-party candidate you're voting for won't actually become president is a feature, not a bug.

Well, your six year old probably has a modicum of common sense, which would preclude her from ever being a Ron Paul voter.

The ways of the Paulistas are a mystery to more than myself.

This will do nothing to hurt Obama in Virginia, my home state.  If Obama wins in the Old Dominion, it'll be on the back of two groups: educated, out-of-state professionals in the DC 'burbs who are savvy enough to recognize a bullshit spoiler when they see one and blacks--21% of the state's population--who aren't voting for anybody other than Barack Hussein Obama.

Rhubs, I vaguely recall a stat from the eighties suggesting that some huge percentage of guns used in crimes in New York City (50%? 70%?) had been purchased in Virginia.  For this reason the ATF nicknamed I-95 The Iron Highway.

"Obama's margin in Virginia, if he wins it, will come from exurban Republicans who are temporarily disillusioned with the GOP."

I disagree.  Obama's margin in Virginia, if he wins it, will from blacks in Tidewater, Richmond, Petersburg, and the rural south side of the James who haven't voted for the past twenty years, if ever, but come out to the polls this time around.