Mother of man involved in shootout with police yesterday on an Oakland freeway: My son was upset with “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”
Someone on the GOP side now figuring out that making 2010 a referendum on George W. Bush may not be the strongest play Republicans can make this year? The NRCC denies that its chairman, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), was calling for a return to Bush economic policies.
The first place you’d expect Sharia law to gain a foothold would be … Tennessee. With that in mind, the Republican candidates in the primary for the TN-06 House seat are scrambling to see who can come out strongest against construction of a mosque in Murfreesboro.
Actually, whether it’s a “mosque” is at issue, too. “This isn’t a mosque,” the campaign manager for one of the candidates tells TPM. “They’re building an Islamic center to teach Sharia law. That is what we stand in opposition to. And this is one of the largest Islamic centers in the country, at 53,000 square feet on 15 acres.”
We look into Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express and his chronic case of accidental racism.
We told you last week about two GOP congressmen directly lobbying the UN missions of foreign countries — including some that criminalize homosexuality — to oppose a U.S. push to give accreditation to the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. Well, today, the group finally received its UN seal of approval.
Now this is interesting, although it’s not entirely clear to me what the implications are or will be. According to an upcoming survey from Public Policy Polling, a majority of those planning to vote for Gov. Charlie Crist for U.S. Senate in Florida think that if he wins election he should caucus with the Democrats.
My first reaction to that number was that it puts Crist in quite a bind if he wins. But that may be getting ahead of ourselves because what this finding is actually showing is more evidence that Crist has become the de facto Democratic nominee since he left the Republican Party to run as an independent. So yes, at some point down the road, Crist may have some tricky decisions to make if he wins. But the more immediate effect is on the eventual Democratic nominee — whether it be Kendrick Meek or Jeff Greene — who are clearly losing Democrats to Crist in a big way.
Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) becomes first member of the House Republican leadership to sign on for Michele Bachmann’s new Tea Party Caucus, with a Palinesque “You betcha.”
Tea party conservatives are not happy with former Majority Leader-turned-lobbyist Trent Lott who ripped the movement over the weekend, saying: “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”
That’s Lott’s way of saying these guys and gals don’t know how the game is played here in Washington and they get in the way of doing business. (If anything might give me a soft spot for tea partiers …)
But the best part of this whole tempest is watching an old TPM fave, former Rep. Chris “The Count” Chocola (R-IN), rip Lott right back. Chocola, who is now president of Club for Growth, goes straight for the kill, 
referencing Lott’s 2002 comments about Strom Thurmond that cost him his leadership post: “To paraphrase the former Leader himself, if recent Senates had had more Jim DeMints and fewer Trent Lotts making economic policy, ‘we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.'”
Oh snap.
The NAACP, with one well-timed resolution condemning Tea Party racism, sends tea partiers into paroxysm of racism.
Well, in fairness, not all tea partiers. One bunch, so distraught over the charges of racism, is planning an event in Philadelphia later this month to show off tea party diversity. They’re calling the event Uni-Tea.