I’m going to write more about this later this morning. But initial indications are that at least the Senate leadership totally misses the significance of what Rep. Boehner (R-OH) said yesterday on tax cuts. (They appear to be lost in a myopic focus on parliamentary tactics). And most likely the same applies to the folks in the House. So this is going to be a case where we’ll have to watch to see whether the White House recognizes its opportunity and runs with it. It’s shaping up to be one of those inflection points in the campaign where decisions on each side in the next 48 hours or so could have an outsized impact on the result in November.
More later.
I mentioned a few weeks ago reading Lawrence Wright’s masterful Looming Tower, his history of the backstory of the 9/11 attacks. So I wanted to strongly recommend to you his short and sweet summation of the Park51 controversy. Being immersed in the history of Islamic radicalism, having spoken to many of the formative players in its evolution in the research for his book, he writes with great authority when he makes the essential point that few things could better aide al Qaeda’s propaganda war than a hate-filled and vilifying campaign to block the building of an innocuous Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan. Read More
One of the less fortunate signs from yesterday’s 9/12 Tea Party Rally in DC.
Click for full size image and the rest of our slide show.
Some words of wisdom from Steve Clemons about the current Islamophobia:
One of my late mentors, Hans Baerwald, taught me that the only way to get a real rather than shallow sense of a political system’s norms and operating behavior was to watch it under stress.
With commentary like that we have seen from John Bolton, Martin Peretz, Richard Cheney, Liz Cheney, Glenn Beck, and saw in the political maneuvering of Cheney Chief of Staff, David Addington, we unleashed an America that defiles key aspects of its own DNA and that is less-trustable by the rest of the world today.
Read Clemons here.
Delaware is not normally where you go for exciting politics. It’s a small state, totally dominated for most of the last three or four decades by three or four guys who keep getting reelected, except when they trade one of the state’s four major offices and get elected again. Mike Castle’s been getting elected for about thirty years. He was Governor. Then the state’s sole Representative since 1993. And now he’s trading up to be Senator. That’s just how things work in Delaware.
Until about a month ago.
Now it looks like he’s about to get rocked by totally wild-eyed Tea Partier Christine O’Donnell. She’s the one who says it’s not enough to be abstinent. You have to eliminate sexual desire entirely. Which suggests she’s what you’d call an aspirational politician rather than a realist. Read More
Just two days before the election, the new Public Policy Polling survey of the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Delaware gives the uberconservative anti-masturbation Christine O’Donnell a 3-point lead over Rep. Mike Castle. There’s been very little polling of this race. The only other poll, two weeks ago, showed Castle up by 6 points.
Rep. Boehner just released the following statement, apparently trying to walk back his comments from his Face the Nation appearance earlier today.
Full text after the jump … Read More
Did Boehner blink? I think so.
Today on Face the Nation, House GOP Leader John Boehner told Bob Schieffer that while he’d prefer to extend all the Bush tax cuts, he’d be willing to vote for a bill that extended them only for voters making less than $250,000 per year.
Here’s the exact exchange …
Bob Schieffer: “I want to make sure I heard what you said correctly: you’re saying that you are willing to vote for those middle class tax cuts, even though the bill will not include … extending the tax cuts for the upper bracket American.”
Rep. Boehner: “Bob, we don’t know what the bill’s going to say, alright? If the only option I have is to vote for those at 250 and below, of course I’m going to do that. But I’m going to do everything I can to fight to make sure that we extend the current tax rates for all Americans.”
Tariq Ramadan of all people says the organizers of Park51 should choose another spot to build on.