Supporters of the tea party candidate challenging Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) from the right parade through town carrying campaign signs — oh, and guns. Watch.
That’s the hush-hush phone number that BP set up years ago for California politicos to call to score free tickets to Arco Arena in Sacramento: NBA games, Britney Spears concerts, you name it. At least it was hush-hush. No one picks up your call since Josh Harkinson started reporting on the BP freebie ticket scheme.
Speaking of BP, why are they photoshopping pictures of their command post in Houston?
July in DC would be notorious for the lack of news and of anything much happening except that August is even worse. Today is a welcome exception. The Senate Judiciary Committee votes on the Kagan Supreme Court nomination; Carte Goodwin is sworn in as West Virginia’s new senator (he’s a mere 56 years younger than his predecessor); the Senate votes on extending unemployment benefits; and Senate Democrats and Republicans have their respective weekly lunches, which gives reporters a chance to buttonhole senators. We’ve got our reporters in the field and will bring you the latest. Get it while it lasts, before DC returns to the inexorable march toward the torpor of August.
West Virginia has cleaned up its special election law. Gov. Joe Manchin (D) signed the new law last night. It provides for a special election this year. But with a twist. Republicans secured a provision that allows candidates already on the ballot in other races to simultaneously run in the Senate special election. Someone like, oh, say, Rep. Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV).
I expected the anti-mosque folks to try to disguise their opposition under broader concerns like zoning regs, general NIMBY-ness, and other more parochial concerns. But it’s clearly OK just to be blatantly anti-Muslim, like this Southern Baptist pastor in Riverside County, California: “The Islamic foothold is not strong here, and we really don’t want to see their influence spread.” We take a look at the opposition to mosques popping up around the country.
TPM Reader MK, a New Yorker, has had enough with out-of-towners like Sarah Plain protesting the mosque near the WTC site:
I first heard about this project a month or two ago, and the thing that struck me the most about it was the overwhelming support it had from the local community board in Lower Manhattan. As you are probably familiar it is nearly impossible to have a community board agree on even the most mundane issues, so to have a community board agree 29-1 on ANY this particular issue is quite an accomplishment.
Furthermore, why is land use in New York City the business of anyone else but the citizens of New York? If so, I would really like to know Sarah Palin’s opinion of the Atlantic Yards (or Hudson Yards or the expansion of Columbia University) project, an issue that is 1,000,000x more controversial than this project. That’s all this is: a land use issue.
TPM Reader AB checks in from Murfreesboro:
I’ve appreciated your coverage of the putative “controversy” enveloping the proposed Islamic center here in Murfreesboro, and I’d like to point out a couple of details that might enhance your coverage.
One aspect lost in national media coverage is the fact that nearby Nashville is home to a substantial Kurdish community; indeed, we in the region believe it is the largest Kurdish population in the United States.
Andrew Breitbart has another notch in his belt: the forced resignation of a black USDA appointee in Georgia who Breitbart has on tape addressing a local NAACP chapter earlier this year and seeming to admit that she didn’t give a white farmer all the help she could have because he was white. Or at least that’s the story you get from Brietbart’s Big Government and from Fox. Read More