Rep. Boehner just released the following statement, apparently trying to walk back his comments from his Face the Nation appearance earlier today.

Full text after the jump … Read More

Just two days before the election, the new Public Policy Polling survey of the GOP primary for U.S. Senate in Delaware gives the uberconservative anti-masturbation Christine O’Donnell a 3-point lead over Rep. Mike Castle. There’s been very little polling of this race. The only other poll, two weeks ago, showed Castle up by 6 points.

Delaware is not normally where you go for exciting politics. It’s a small state, totally dominated for most of the last three or four decades by three or four guys who keep getting reelected, except when they trade one of the state’s four major offices and get elected again. Mike Castle’s been getting elected for about thirty years. He was Governor. Then the state’s sole Representative since 1993. And now he’s trading up to be Senator. That’s just how things work in Delaware.

Until about a month ago.

Now it looks like he’s about to get rocked by totally wild-eyed Tea Partier Christine O’Donnell. She’s the one who says it’s not enough to be abstinent. You have to eliminate sexual desire entirely. Which suggests she’s what you’d call an aspirational politician rather than a realist. Read More

Some words of wisdom from Steve Clemons about the current Islamophobia:

One of my late mentors, Hans Baerwald, taught me that the only way to get a real rather than shallow sense of a political system’s norms and operating behavior was to watch it under stress.

With commentary like that we have seen from John Bolton, Martin Peretz, Richard Cheney, Liz Cheney, Glenn Beck, and saw in the political maneuvering of Cheney Chief of Staff, David Addington, we unleashed an America that defiles key aspects of its own DNA and that is less-trustable by the rest of the world today.

Read Clemons here.

One of the less fortunate signs from yesterday’s 9/12 Tea Party Rally in DC.

Click for full size image and the rest of our slide show.

I mentioned a few weeks ago reading Lawrence Wright’s masterful Looming Tower, his history of the backstory of the 9/11 attacks. So I wanted to strongly recommend to you his short and sweet summation of the Park51 controversy. Being immersed in the history of Islamic radicalism, having spoken to many of the formative players in its evolution in the research for his book, he writes with great authority when he makes the essential point that few things could better aide al Qaeda’s propaganda war than a hate-filled and vilifying campaign to block the building of an innocuous Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan. Read More

I’m going to write more about this later this morning. But initial indications are that at least the Senate leadership totally misses the significance of what Rep. Boehner (R-OH) said yesterday on tax cuts. (They appear to be lost in a myopic focus on parliamentary tactics). And most likely the same applies to the folks in the House. So this is going to be a case where we’ll have to watch to see whether the White House recognizes its opportunity and runs with it. It’s shaping up to be one of those inflection points in the campaign where decisions on each side in the next 48 hours or so could have an outsized impact on the result in November.

More later.

I’m really not sure the casual political observer completely understands how central the enthusiasm gap is to the dreadful poll numbers for Democrats. It’s not that the country has undergone a sea change politically since 2008. It’s that when pollsters screen for who is likely to vote come November the pool they wind up with is markedly more conservative than it was two years ago. It’s also far more conservative than a comparable sample of registered votes would be. Read More

The New Republic‘s Martin Peretz apologies for writing that Muslims don’t deserve the protections of the First Amendment, but stands by his claim that Muslims don’t value human life.

Late Update: Peretz also disingenuously suggested that the New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof agreed with him that Muslim’s consider life cheap. Kristoff responds: “I disagree with his suggestion that I concur that Muslim life is cheap.”