Terry McAuliffe is not popular, with 29% of voters holding a favorable opinion of him to 33% with a negative one. But we find that Ken Cuccinelli is even more unpopular, with 44% of voters rating him unfavorably to just 32% with a positive opinion. As a result we find McAuliffe leading Cuccinelli by a 5 point margin, 42/37. McAuliffe also led by 5 points on our January poll, but the share of voters who are undecided has spiked from 13% at the start of the year now up to 21%.
You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the latest high-profile target of poison-tainted letters sent though the mail, police revealed yesterday.The leader of the nation's largest city was threatened anonymously in two letters sent to Bloomberg's offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., NYPD spokesperson Paul Browne said. An undisclosed number of New York cops who responded to one of the letters now "are being examined for minor symptoms of ricin exposure," but the potentially dangerous substance never reached the mayor.
"The writer, in the letters, threatened Mayor Bloomberg, with references to the debate on gun laws," Browne said.
[I]t's the message in the closing seconds that arguably matters most: as the video ends, and viewers see the words "Intimidation. Retaliation. Secretive" on screen, we hear the president say, "We're going to punish our enemies and reward our friends."
But this is an out-of-context quote, pulled from a comment made more than two years ago in an interview with Univision radio. “If Latinos sit out the election instead of, ‘we’re going to punish our enemies and we’re going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us’ – if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder,” Obama said in that interview. McConnell’s use of the quote is the dishonest capstone to an intensely dishonest piece of political rhetoric.
With the announced departure of Michele Bachmann from the World’s Greatest Legislative Body today, we inaugurate a new semi-regular weekly feature in which we study the possible successor to la Bachmann as Queen Regent of the Crazy People. (Louie Gohmert is, of course, emperor for life). A Top Commenter from Missouri has suggested Vicky Hartzler, who represents the Fourth Congressional District of that state and, boy howdy, the Top Commenter is not kidding. Among other things, Ms. Hartzler apparently believes that the heathen Chinee are spying on us through our toasters.
And I am concerned. They are shipping all the, I’m concerned about the microchips. That they are in many, many of the things that we own. And some of those are embedded, I believe, with, with detection and, uh, capabilities or tracking capabilities.
She’d also rather the government not tolerate those “fringe religions” because the First Amendment says that Congress Shall Make No Law Unless Vicky Hartzler Thinks Your God Is Freaky.
Aside from Hillyer, consultants say the most likely and viable candidates in the race include:
-- State Sen. Tripp Pittman, a wealthy owner of a tractor company in Baldwin County, a rural area in the 1st District.
-- First-term state Sen. Bill Hightower.
-- Former state Sen. Bradley Byrne, a lawyer who lost a Republican gubernatorial primary bid in 2010.
-- Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran, who consultants say is well-respected in the community and has strong name recognition.
We can't tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.
Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, Dylan, Madeline, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, James, Grace, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica, Benjamin, Avielle, Allison, God has called them all home.
For those of us who remain, let us find the strength to carry on and make our country worthy of their memory.
In the Senate, the backlash had an effect. Some Republicans who had opposed the bill, such as Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Jeff Flake of Arizona, signaled they might be open to changing their minds. Majority Leader Harry Reid, once a dependable NRA ally, spoke about taking the rare step of bringing the bill back for another vote. Senator Joe Manchin, the bill's Democratic co-sponsor, is still actively courting support from his colleagues. "It's not going away," he told me.Why did these developments take so many elected officials and pundits by surprise? As New York Times columnist Tom Edsall has pointed out, political science research shows that politicians consistently overestimate the conservatism of their constituents. But in this case, there was something more debilitating at work. The political class often lets old assumptions blind it to shifting realities.And the absolute power of the NRA is one of the oldest and least-tested assumptions in Washington.
[F]or some time now, the NRA's power has been more a matter of entrenched wisdom than actual fact. Gun ownership is declining -- from half of households in the 1970s to a third today. A slew of senators and governors have won campaigns in red or purple states despite NRA F ratings, including Tim Kaine (Virginia), Kay Hagan (North Carolina), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Claire McCaskill (Missouri), and Bill Nelson (Florida), who has campaigned on gun control but has won majorities even in deeply conservative Panhandle counties. Senator Chris Murphy, a rookie Connecticut Democrat who has taken a lead on the issue since the Newtown massacre, points out that, of the 16 Senate races the NRA participated in last year, 13 of its candidates lost. "The NRA is just all mythology," he says. "The NRA does not win elections anymore."
And then came Newtown. We are so resigned to seeing mass shootings come and go without any attempt to fix gun laws, but after Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook, something really did change. At long last and against all expectations, a viable movement for gun regulation is emerging. It is a development that not only bodes ill for the gun lobby and its Republican patrons, but will also complicate matters for elements of the Democratic Party who have been content to accede to the status quo. The narrow defeat of the background-check bill, it turns out, was not the end of hopes for gun reform, but the beginning.
In 2008, when Begich won the seat, he did it by a mere 47.8 to 46.5 percent margin. And his opponent was the profoundly ethically challenged Ted Stevens who, if reelected, would have been "the first convicted felon elected to the U.S. Senate." (Funny, I would have thought there were others.)I think there are a lot of outside interests that would like to see Sarah Palin in some form of elected office. Most in Alaska recognize our former governor is really not involved in or engaged in the state anymore, that she’s moved to other interests. In order for you to represent the state of Alaska, you’ve got to be in the state.
"Morning Joe" is the lowest rated of the big three cable news morning shows in both total viewers and the younger demographic. Fox News' Red Eye — a show Fox airs at 3 in the morning — had more total and 25-54-year-old viewers in April 2013 than "Morning Joe" did. "Morning Joe" in April 2013 was down, from its April 2012 numbers, in total and in young viewers by a greater percentage than the rest of the network as a whole.
I'm not harping on "Morning Joe" because I think the show is representative of everything wrong with contemporary political elite thinking, though it is, but because it illustrates MSNBC's larger problem: It's a political talk show. Every other TV morning show is mostly fluff and weather. "Morning Joe," instead of entertainment news updates, has a former member of Congress wave a newspaper at Mark Halperin for a while. MSNBC's target audience may just be much less interested in listening to people talk about politics in spring 2013 than they were during an election year.
MSNBC is actually making some good decisions, lately, from the point of view of someone who'd like (talking head) cable news to be better. And anyone who says the network's failing because of liberalism should probably have to account for the fact that the channel's highest-rated show remains Rachel Maddow's. (Followed by O'Donnell, who really is the insufferable smug self-satisfied liberal caricature everyone thinks all of MSNBC is.)
But do you know who watches cable news all day? And at prime time? When there's not an election on, or a war, or some terrorism? Older conservative people. If MSNBC wants better ratings, it'll either have to train a generation to want to pay attention to political years all the time, or it'll have to produce a scripted show about zombies.
When CVFC, a conservative veterans' group in California, applied for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service, its biggest expenditure that year was several thousand dollars in radio ads backing a Republican candidate for Congress.
The Wetumpka Tea Party, from Alabama, sponsored training for a get-out-the-vote initiative dedicated to the "defeat of President Barack Obama" while the I.R.S. was weighing its application.And the head of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, whose application languished with the I.R.S. for more than two years, sent out e-mails to members about Mitt Romney campaign events and organized members to distribute Mr. Romney's presidential campaign literature.Representatives of these organizations have cried foul in recent weeks about their treatment by the I.R.S., saying they were among dozens of conservative groups unfairly targeted by the agency, harassed with inappropriate questionnaires and put off for months or years as the agency delayed decisions on their applications.But a close examination of these groups and others reveals an array of election activities that tax experts and former I.R.S. officials said would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review.
A report issued this month by the Treasury Department's inspector general, J. Russell George, found that inappropriate criteria, including groups; policy positions, were used to flag some cases and that specialists in the I.R.S. office in Cincinnati, which reviews all tax-exemption requests, sometimes asked questions that were irrelevant to the application process.And agency officials have acknowledged that specialists inappropriately used keywords like "Tea Party" and "Patriots" in searching through applications.
[S]ome former I.R.S. officials disputed several of Mr. George's conclusions, including his assertion that it was inappropriate to ask groups about their donors, or whether their leaders had plans to run for public office. While unusual, the former officials said, such questions are not prohibited if relevant to an application under consideration."The I.G. was as careless with terminology as the Cincinnati office was," said Marcus S. Owens, who headed the I.R.S.'s exempt organizations division until 2000. "Half of those questions have been found to be germane in court decisions."
If one longed to hear that the end of the "war on terror" is imminent, there are several good passages that will be quite satisfactory. If one wanted to hear that the war will continue indefinitely, perhaps even in expanded form, one could easily have found that. And if one wanted to know that the president who has spent almost five years killing people in multiple countries around the world feels personal "anguish" and moral conflict as he does it, because these issues are so very complicated, this speech will be like a gourmet meal.
