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If people truly think Democrats in Congress are going to look at a poor election result this November and say “wow, it looks like we weren’t liberal enough for our base,” you don’t know the Democrats in Congress.
Choosing not to vote sends precisely the same “message” as a new tea partier who decides to vote Republican. The politicians won’t be able to tell the difference. And even if they somehow could (advanced analysis of precinct data, exit polling, etc.), the moderates who have been the problem the whole time will ignore that and feel more emboldened than ever that they were right that the Dems “overreached” during this session. And the mainstream media will be all too happy to amplify that sentiment.
Tom Emmer, the far-right Tea Partier who believes the state of Minnesota is an independent republic that doesn’t have to follow any federal laws, has moved into a statistical dead heat with former Sen. Mark Dayton.
(Click TPM Logo to see full size graph.)
Did Democrats decide that things were already going so great there was no need to push a tax cut vote?
Greg Sargent says that Schumer and Menendez, the former and current heads of the DSCC, both really wanted to hold a vote. That would be telling, if true, since those are the two guys most plugged into the political dynamics of the equation. Greg also says that Baucus, usually the bete noire of party liberals was for it too. And that’s at least not inconsistent with our reporting on the story. Read More
Whoever you are, wherever you sit on the political spectrum, you can be confident that the polls and what they say about relative levels of enthusiasm on each side confirm what you think and your own experience of the last two years.
Is Carl Paladino behind Andrew Cuomo by 6 points? Or is it 33 points? Or is 19 points?
Depends which poll of that race you look at taken between September 20th and the 22nd. And no, likelies vs. registereds doesn’t even solve the discrepancy. The 6 and 19 numbers are both polls of likelies. No one knows what’s going on here.
Stephen Colbert’s opening statement at this morning’s congressional hearing. Watch.
If you followed the saga of how the Bush-era Justice Department tried to turn the protection of voting rights for minorities into the protection of white people from minorities, then this won’t come as a huge surprise. But it’s startling nonetheless that the last guy to head the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division under Bush testified today that it was a “travesty” that the Department didn’t take a race-neutral approach to cases like the New Black Panthers case in the 2008 election. By race-neutral, he means taking just as an aggressive approach to the long history of minority disenfranchisement of majority white voters as the department historically took to protect black voters. Yes, that’s meant sarcastically.
Christopher Coates is now an assistant U.S. attorney in South Carolina, and he testified against orders from DOJ. He was the guy who brought the Black Panthers case originally and is still griped about it being dropped. Appointed by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Coates replaced John Tanner, who TPMers will remember as the guy who defended voter ID laws on the grounds that they discriminated against seniors and blacks equally because “minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do: They die first.”
Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), about her Republican opponent, who is Vietnamese American: “The Vietnamese and the Republicans are trying — with an intensity — to take this seat, this seat with which we’ve done so much for our community.” Take a look.
Trying to figure out which is more shocking.
That Wisconsin DA is accused of sending sexually suggestive text messages to four women? That one of the women was at the time part of a domestic abuse case the DA was handling? Or that he allegedly asked one of the women to an autopsy as a date?