Hilary Hylton, our reporter in Austin, passes along the following: Famous/infamous (depending on your point of view) Travis County DA Ronnie Earle, now retired, has filed papers with the Texas Ethics Commission as the first step to running for as a yet-to-be-announced statewide office. Supporters have been urging him to run for the Democratic gubernatorial [...]
Walter Shapiro, over at Politics Daily, clearly summarizes the political situation President Obama inhabits, now that the vertiginous economic collapse seems to have slowed, and the long period of economic agony has begun, with continued job losses projected for many months to come. The president still needs to buy himself time with a lot of [...]
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which has been struggling in the absence of ailing Chairman Ted Kennedy, has put out a full version of a health reform bill that solves many of the problems of its earlier versions and trial balloons. This amounts to enormous progress, largely creditable to Connecticut Senator Chris [...]
A statement just released from his would-have-been publisher: Sentinel has agreed to release Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina from his contract to write a book about fiscal conservatism, which was to be called WITHIN OUR MEANS and was scheduled for publication in March 2010. This is a mutual decision. We wish Governor Sanford the [...]
I have been a bit exhausted by most of this post-post-postmortem of the McCain campaign, relitigating old divisions that only really matter now on the off-off-off chance that Sarah Palin is the Republican standard bearer in three years. But I do find these old emails, published by CBS News, rather riveting. The whole thing starts [...]
In the Washington Post today, screw-loose wingnut extraordinaire John Bolton has a column in which he advocates an Israeli strike against Iran. This would be shocking, except that… On June 26, Bolton had an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he advocated bombing Iran. And, well, er… On June 12, he had an [...]
Justin updates his ugly chart with today’s bad news.
If you thought the whole Dana Milbank/Nico Pitney battle was fun last week, just imagine the raw material that CNN host/Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz now has to work with this Sunday. As Mike Allen reports in Politico, “For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, non-confrontational access [...]
I have a new story about the White House effort to keep the Stimulus popular and on track in the next newsstand issue of TIME (with a value-added eye-popping picture and charts that you can’t get online, so subscribe, $1.99 for six weeks). It starts like this: Fueled by Coke Zero and a double-chocolate protein [...]
(Via Gawker, which notes that Andy Cobb, the guy playing Sanford, even sort of looks like him.)
