Dick Morris tells Republicans that after they take over Congress they should replay the government shutdown Republicans did with Bill Clinton in 1995.
TPM Reader MG asks his question …
Admittedly, “taking the pulse of America” on any issue is often an over-simplistic, Newsweek-y proposition, but …
The GOP has its largest lead ever on Gallup’s generic congressional survey question: 51-41.
Maybe this government shutdown stuff isn’t just talk.
For a piece we’re planning on running tomorrow we’re looking into the coalescing plans on the right of the GOP to attempt to defund the Health Care Reform bill if the Republicans take back the House in November, which certainly has to be seen at this point as a more likely than not proposition. What caught my attention is that they seem to have a group now interested in whipping the issue pre-election.
Now, that’s a dicey matter. And it’s clear that the leadership types in the GOP want to harvest all the anti-HCR juice they can, win elections with it and then agree to pass a repeal law that will either die in the Senate or die on Obama’s desk. But if they can whip the defunding stuff effectively, that might be trickier.
And there’s another point too. Obama’s veto pen can do a lot of stuff. He can veto a defunding bill too. The key though is that he’s got a government to run and he needs a budget. All of which suggests that this ends up pointing in the direction of a government shutdown type standoff. So crazy as it may seem, Dick Morris (broken clock twice a day and so forth) may be on to something.
With renewed peace talks about to begin between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, one of the country’s top Mizrahi rabbis and the spiritual leader of the Shas political party (an ultra-orthodox party of Jews descended from immigrants from Arab countries), took the opportunity to declare Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas “evil” and pray that God would strike down Abbas and the Palestinian people.
The statement was so outrageous even Abe Foxman denounced it.
The Iraqi-born Yosef, who is 89 years old, didn’t used to be so hawkish, let alone insane. So some of it may be age. Last year he got people in an uproar by suggesting those murdered in the Holocaust were reincarnated sinners from earlier generations. But it also reflects the transition of the Mizrahi Jews toward most intense territorial maximalism over recent decades.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) finds himself in the ironic position of defending the new health care law from a blatant political ploy undertaken by his home state’s Republican governor. Gov. Dave Heineman (R) is trying to put the state teachers unions over a barrel by demanding they basically choose between health care reform and teacher salaries.
The anti-immigrant Minutemen branch out into the Islamophobia racket.
I love the smell of a contested election in the morning. The latest on the long, slow counting of ballots in the Alaska Senate GOP primary.
Focus on the Family, the high-profile Christian right advocacy group, says that anti-bullying campaigns are becoming a front for giving special right to gays.