It turns out that after Sharron Angle was a Republican and before she joined a small extremist right-wing party in Nevada she was actually a Democrat for about four years. She left in June 1984 which sort of suggests she probably didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan the second time around, though she claims that she did.
After Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle made a mad dash for the exits in the Capitol today to avoid reporters, we asked Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, how long until Angle is ready to face the press: “I don’t know, I mean I just think it’s going to take a few weeks,” Cornyn admitted.
Obama’s first Oval Office address, on the Gulf oil spill disaster, begins at 8 p.m. ET. We’ll be here, so join us and watch it live here.
The government’s new estimate of the amount of oil being spilled into the Gulf every day is dramatically up since the estimate released on Friday. Now the estimate is 35k to 60k barrels a day, a 50 percent increase on the high end of the range.
The GOP’s chances of taking control of the Senate in this year’s elections were never great, but just a few weeks ago they still had a chance. A slim chance, but a real chance. But the party’s nomination of weak candidates in key races has even Republicans conceding that they blew that opportunity.
It turns out the guy who tried to use fake ID to get into MacDill Air Force Base with a number weapons and lots of ammo was himself an AWOL serviceman. The military press person is saying it doesn’t appear to be a case of attempted terrorism. But it’s hard to figure where an AWOL soldier trying to drive his car into another military base with a lot of weapons isn’t up to no good.
Greg Sargent dug up a recent radio interview in which Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle suggested that if Congress keeps up its current policy agenda the people may need to resort to violent struggle against the United States Government. To quote her specifically …
If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.
With everything else going on this week, I wonder if the biggest thing isn’t the fact that congressional Democrats greeted the president’s call for new stimulus spending by telling him, in so many words, to go jump in a lake. Not that their response was surprising or that they had much choice, mind you. Going into a tough election, with Republicans dead set against doing anything, politically it doesn’t seem remotely realistic. But it’s of a piece with the move in international economics circles to say that the time for anti-recessionary spending is over and it’s time for retrenchment.
It all looks a lot like President Roosevelt’s decision to go with the belt-tighteners which tipped the US back into a severe economic downturn in 1937.
As many of you know, Krugman’s been banging this drum for some time.