Investigators have yet to point to a motive in Wade Page’s deadly rampage at a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin last Sunday. He killed six people before turning his gun on himself after being confronted by police.
We do know that he had a long history in the white power music scene and was recently patched into a skinhead group called the Hammerskins, who have been carrying out hate crimes across the country for nearly a quarter-century.
But we now also know that through his connection with the Hammerskins, he recently crossed paths with another white supremacist group, American Front. Fourteen of their members were recently indicted for plotting acts of domestic terrorism in Florida.
Nick Martin has our must read piece on a nexus of American terror.
Fox just released a new presidential poll showing President Obama leading Mitt Romney by 9 points. That’s the second poll today and the third in the last two days. The other two (from CNN and Ipsos/Reuters) both had Romney down by 7.
Worth noting that beside PPP, which releases a weekly poll, this is the first big batch of stand alone national presidential polls since mid-July. And a lot has happened since then: the big Obama push on offshore accounts, the foreign trip, the rock-em-sock-em robots with Harry Reid. Benjy Sarlin has a good run down here of the last five weeks of hits Romney’s taken on various fronts.
Updated trend chart after the jump … Read More
New CNN poll has Obama up over Romney by 7 points — 52-45. Yesterday’s Ipsos poll had the same spread.
What’s remarkable to me about Romney’s flip flop problem is that he and the right fostered it together, with absolutely no help from Democrats.
This is a little bit meta, so bear with me. I’m not talking about Romney’s actual substantive history of holding wildly inconsistent policy views. I’m talking about the perennial campaign ritual of candidates defining themselves and being defined by their opponents. Read More
Is Romneycare Mitt’s Iraq War? From TPM Reader WB …
I was volunteering for Kerry when he made the comment about how he would have authorized the use of force in Iraq even knowing what we knew then. I still vividly remember the anguished conversations I had with fellow Kerry volunteers on the bus ride from RI to NH about the comments.
Is Romney flip-floppery just impossible to square with the GOP brand? TPM Reader CL says yes …
I think JR is right that the essence of the attack on Kerry was that he was inconsistent, flip-flopper, whatever. But I disagree that this is unimportant in the current election.
Ann Coulter says Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul must be fired for touting Romneycare.