Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D) will announce his bid to replace Chris Dodd at noon today.
Dodd’s own retirement announcement is also at noon, though I presume protocol will require Blumenthal to hold off taking his podium until Dodd has stepped down from his. Still, it gives you a sense of the speed with which Blumenthal is moving to try to fill the vacuum on the Democratic side.
The NYT is reporting that Sen. Chris Dodd will not seek reelection this November.
Even though his odds seemed very long. This one is still kind of a stunner. And I must confess that while I know the stuff about Countrywide and the larger political climate, I never completely understood just how Dodd — a seemingly untouchable figure in the Connecticut political firmament for decades — sort of out of the blue became unelectable. But there it is.
Here’s the thing though. In seat counting terms, this is the mirror image of the Dorgan retirement. Dorgan’s seat was probably safe until he retired. Now it’s a probable Republican pick up. On the other hand, Dodd’s being on the ticket took a really blue state and made it a very possible Republican pick up. It’s still a bad climate for Dems. But Richard Blumenthal, who I assume will step in and get the Dem nomination, will be in a much stronger position to hold the seat. So this is the one retirement Democratic seat counters were probably hoping for.
Now we know that had a few chemicals reacted differently, we might have had three hundred or so fatalities on Flight 253 and perhaps many more dead on the ground if the plane had fallen in a particularly unfortunate location. But was this really a breakdown in the system? We’re treating it as obvious that because the Xmas bomber’s dad went into the Embassy in Nigeria and said his son was going off the extremist deep end that that should have punched Abdulmutallab to the top of the watch lists and prevented him from getting on that plane in Amsterdam. Read More
North Dakota went 53-45 for McCain in 2008. Historically, that was actually a pretty good showing there for Democrats, who didn’t even contest the state.
At a presser this afternoon, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked about one of Obama’s campaign pledges and whether CSPAN cameras would be allowed to film the House-Senate negotiations on health care reform: “There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” she pointedly noted.
Zack Roth continues his series of posts on the people Sir Allen Stanford used — PR types, lawyers and lobbyists — in his last-ditch effort to avoid the government scrutiny that would bring down his business empire.
Pete Hoekstra, the Republican congressman from Michigan who’s running for governor, left the domain address PeteHoekstra.com unregistered, and now it’s fallen into enemy hands .
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) will not run this year for another term in the Senate.
As you can see in our current feature, the Tea Party/Club for Growth wing of the GOP scored a major victory today in finally forcing the resignation of FL GOP Chairman Jim Greer, a key ally of Gov. (and senate candidate) Charlie Crist. But lest you think Greer is some utter milquetoast, he’s no real stranger to the crazy either. Greer’s the guy who started the whole Obama is indoctrinating our children ruckus back in the fall.