Not Surprising: 76 year old Republican senator runs a campaign commercial about Twitter to try to make himself sound happening, cool and not hopelessly stuck in the last century.
Surprising: He kind of succeeds.
Sen. McConnell just went on the Senate floor and announced he’s introducing a bill to keep all the original Bush tax cuts in place. In other words, cuts that everybody gets up to $250k and the ones that only about 1% of the population gets over $250k.
But here’s the key. Maybe not for much longer. But for the moment, Democrats are in the majority. That means that they can bring their bill to a vote. McConnell can’t. In other words, it’s in the power of the Democrats to shape the legislative debate to their advantage.
This is why, as noted earlier, what happens in the next 24-48 hours is going to have a huge impact going forward over the next seven weeks.
This morning the Associated Press reported that Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had a pledge from his whole caucus to filibuster any tax cut bill restricted to incomes under $250,000 per annum. But now McConnell’s spokesman says that’s not so. No pledge.
Late Update: In other news, Joe Lieberman is apparently preparing to go on TV and make to his bayat pledge to McConnell that he will support a filibuster or anything else that’s needed to make sure the upper income tax cuts get extended too.
Down in Amarillo, skateboard dude sneaks up behind whacko preacher and snags away his Koran just before he was going to burn it in the city park.
Said 23 year old Jacob Isom: “I snuck up behind him and took his Koran, he said something about burning the Koran, I said ‘Dude you have no Koran,’ and ran off.”
Political campaigns often include inflection points where key decisions on each side, taken over a short period of time, can have a vast effect on the outcome of the election. This looks like one of those moments. Despite being in the House leadership for over a decade, John Boehner’s performance yesterday on Face the Nation showed he’s still out of his league as a party leader on the big stage. Boehner gave the president and the Democrats a big opening by conceding that he’d vote for an extension of only those tax cuts on incomes under $250,000 a year.
But the first response from the Senate Democratic leadership we’ve heard is that, in their view, Boehner’s concession is not particularly relevant since the real fight is in the Senate, and turns on whether the Democrats can overcome a Republican filibuster. And that suggests that the top Senate leadership is locked in the sort of parliamentary myopia that renders them basically incapable of dealing with this in the context of the November elections. Read More
These things have become fairly routine in the post-9/11 world and the vast majority of the time turn out to be nothing. But Brian Beutler reports that police have closed off and evacuated a portion of the House side of the Capitol after finding a suspicious yellow powder.
Uberconservative Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell (R-DE) is touting her support from … “Hillary Democrats.”
The New Republic‘s Martin Peretz apologies for writing that Muslims don’t deserve the protections of the First Amendment, but stands by his claim that Muslims don’t value human life.
Late Update: Peretz also disingenuously suggested that the New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof agreed with him that Muslim’s consider life cheap. Kristoff responds: “I disagree with his suggestion that I concur that Muslim life is cheap.”
I’m really not sure the casual political observer completely understands how central the enthusiasm gap is to the dreadful poll numbers for Democrats. It’s not that the country has undergone a sea change politically since 2008. It’s that when pollsters screen for who is likely to vote come November the pool they wind up with is markedly more conservative than it was two years ago. It’s also far more conservative than a comparable sample of registered votes would be. Read More