San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom held his first media interview late last week since his abrupt withdrawal from the California governor’s race, and let’s just say it didn’t go very well … at all. Watch.
I’ve mentioned in several contexts that the one lesson Dems seem to have internalized almost universally is that starting on health care but not passing a bill would be catastrophic in political terms — quite apart from the policy consequences. This new poll from PPP gives some concrete evidence that that’s the case.
Currently PPP has the Dems with a 8 point margin on the ‘generic ballot’. If they pass a bill with a public option, the margin drops to 5 points. If they pass nothing at all it falls to dead even.
I’m reading through the responses to my earlier post about the Public Option and how much the now-emasculated version of it is actually worth. Some of the responses, to put it bluntly, amount to: this bill isn’t great, or not exactly what I wanted it to be, so let’s just pull the plug on the whole effort. Others say it’s the Senate Dems’ fault since they just should have ignored or plowed through the current set of rules forcing 60 vote majorities.
What does surprise me though and what I’ve seen few good answers to is why there wasn’t more of a push from the outside on the question of ‘up or down votes.’ Read More
The Washington Times receives about $40 million in annual subsidies from its owner, Rev. Moon’s Unification Church, the paper’s former op-ed editor claims in an affidavit obtained by TPM.
While many of us had naively construed the string of phony crowd scenes and other hijinks as Fox News editorial policy, apparently it ain’t so. Fox News execs are now threatening warnings, suspensions and even firings over the string of recent video editing and fact-checking errors, all of which seem to have had the effect of inflating public support for the Beck/Palin wing of the GOP.
A decision on whether the President will attend the climate talks next month will come soon, the White House says.
Every election cycle, TPM has the niche of sniffing out each sides’ robo-call campaigns. And in the last two cycles, one of the expanding threads of the story is the effort of robo-call outfits to get around state laws prohibiting the practice in certain states. (Like, if Indiana prohibits robocalls, can Indiana law touch me if I’m placing the calls from Montana?) Now we’ve got the next stage of the story as a new GOP group tries to knock out anti-robo-call statutes in several states.
Earlier this year, the RNC got in some trouble when dissident committee members tried to push a symbolic measure calling on the Democratic party to rename itself the “Democrat Socialist Party.” Now another group is pushing for a purity test at the next RNC meeting in January to make sure all GOPers in good standing assent to catechism of key Hoffmanite principles.
With Gov. Charlie Crist’s Senate ambitions being challenged from the right flank of his own party, he tees off on supporters of his primary opponent Marco Rubio as “angry” birthers.