The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is expected to name Republican voter-suppression guru Hans Von Spakovsky to the State Advisory Committee for Virginia, a volunteer board that advises the commission. Zack Roth reports.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) lashed out at reporters on Capitol Hill who were asking him questions about his role in the Ensign affair:
You’ve got two families that are back together and you guys are going to help tear them apart. What do you think their kids think about what you’re writing right now? You’re helping tear two families apart that are back together. You need to quit. It’s all manipulation.
There’s a lot of salacious back and forth today about the Ensign scandal. But beneath the tabloid headlines there’s a critical question that needs to be asked:
Which is more emasculating? Getting paid a hundred grand by the guy who screwed your wife? Or being a fifty-something United States senator and still needing mom and dad to cut the check to pay off your mistress and her husband?
Thoughts?
On the 10th anniversary of a student uprising, anti-government demonstrators took to the streets again in Tehran today where they were met by riot police. Pictures.
Through all the legislative ins and outs on health care over recent weeks, one pattern keeps standing out to us. Each time the ‘public option’ looks like it’s getting marginalized on the leftward side of the policy equation, it’s Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), through a mix of his rep for ‘centrism’ and perceived political canniness, who pushes it back to the center of the debate as something that will be in the final bill, with some pointed public comment.
At a presser this morning in Italy, Obama said of the world economic crisis: “full recovery is still a ways off.” That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Read the House Blue Dogs’ letter to Speaker Pelosi and Steny Hoyer which prompted the delay in publicly rolling out of the draft health care reform bill.