You may have heard that Swiss voters on Sunday voted 57.5% to ban the construction of any new minarets in the country. The grand total of four existing Swiss minarets may remain; there just can’t be any more. A short line of text will incorporate the ban in the Swiss constitution.
Now it seems that the Swiss may be really warming to the idea of religious intolerance. Christophe Darbellay, the president of the Christian Democratic People’s Party of Switzerland (a mainstream party which is part of the country’s current coalition government) on Thursday told a TV interviewer that there should also be a ban on separate Muslim and Jewish cemeteries.
As with the aforementioned minaret ban, Darbellay doesn’t think the current cemeteries should be dug up. He just thinks there shouldn’t be any more in the future.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) says he’ll filibuster health care reform if his anti-abortion amendment isn’t in the bill, and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) says Nelson’s amendment doesn’t have the votes for approval. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
It adds no little extra measure of drama to the on-going health care debate in the senate that there’s a very real chance that Harry Reid is going into his final year in the senate. Reid’s wily and a political survivor. So he can’t be counted out. But these poll numbers are really bad.
The former campaign manager for ex-Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT), who lost his 2008 re-election in a tight race, has been arrested and charged with embezzling a quarter of a million dollars from the campaign.
So much change over the last decade in popular attitudes toward homosexuality. But you’ve still got cases like this where the Republican House campaign committee goes in for really sleazy anti-gay innuendo against a Tennessee Democrat. Definitely give this a look.
New indications that the Senate ethics committee might be taking a real hard look at Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) and the arrangements he made post-employment for the staffer whose wife he was bopping.
The Daily Show investigates Switzerland’s anti-Islam ban on minarets. Watch.
Swiss government minister decides calling for a ban on Muslim and Jewish cemeteries maybe wasn’t such a hot idea.
It’s been fun watching Arlen Specter race toward the left to avoid getting outflanked by Joe Sestak in next year’s primary, but on health care reform, at least, Specter has had much less ground to cover because he was pretty far to the left of his party even before his party-switch. Still, it was pretty rich to see Specter giving Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins a very public lesson on the public option during a joint press conference today.
In today’s TPM Photo Feature we bring you Dick Cheney’s greatest moments of shooting his mouth off since they made him turn over the keys to the vice presidency.
