Uncategorized

Eileen Smith of Texas Monthly’s In the Pink blog tells us that things are getting pretty hot in the 2010 GOP primary race for Governor, where incumbent Rick Perry is trying to convince voters that Kay Bailey Hutchison (whose 2008 American Conservative Union voting record topped 89%) is just too darn liberal for the state and the party. …

I am supposed to advise you that there is electricity in the Washington swamp air, a ringing tension, a sharp static, a fibrous charge that will explode at any moment. I should compare this moment to Manila, circa 1975, when Muhammed Ali was cavorting about with a rubber gorilla, taunting Joe Frazier into furious focus before the big …

So after we’ve been reading all these stories about record sales of firearms and ammo, and how gun owners are stocking up because they think Barack Obama is going to take away their weapons, the NYT tells us:

WASHINGTON — Advocates of gun rights are poised to win a Congressional victory that eluded them under a Republican

…

The Senate Democrats’ apparent decision not to fund the $80 million closing of Guantanamo links them, inextricably, to the cheap politics being played by Senate Republicans, especially the most neolithic member of that august body, Senator Jim Inhofe, who has submitted a bill that would prohibit any of the Guantanamo detainees from …

Not really, at least yet, if you look at the new Gallup data. But at least the Grand Old Party now has an argument. Michael Steele, the embattled RNC chairman, is laying down a new gauntlet at his chairman’s luncheon today. The speech does not include any reference to Dick Cheney, George Bush or Rush Limbaugh. And it is a lot more …

The former President–in a development first broken by Laura Rozen–has accepted an appointment to become a United Nations special envoy to Haiti.

Clinton notes that Haiti is a country that he first fell in love with when he and Hillary traveled there 35 years ago. From his account of that visit in his memoir, it would seem that it …

A new poll by Democracy Corps gives Barack Obama strong approval on national security issues, traditionally a weakness for Democrats. Yes, the poll was done by the Democrat Stan Greenberg,but it seems well within the range of other polling–indeed, Obama’s overall approval rating, 58%, is lower than many other polls. Furthermore, the …

The New York Times is fueling the buzz, but our colleague Bobby Ghosh emails that the Homeland Security Secretary herself was coy at a breakfast this morning with journalists. Bobby reports: “Asked how it felt to be on the shortlist, Napolitano smiled–impishly–and quipped: ‘Man, these are really good eggs.’ ”

The joke in Kabul used to be that Hamid was the only one of the Karzai brothers who wasn’t smart enough to run a restaurant, so he was chosen to run the country. But it turns out–to almost everyone’s surprise–that Karzai is a pretty cagey political player: he has almost completely neutralized his potential opposition in the upcoming …

Maybe the CIA wasn’t lying then, and Nancy Pelosi isn’t now. This has been my own theory of the case in this contretemps. But I’ve never been in one of these top-secret briefings. Former Congressman Martin Frost has, and gives us a little flavor of how they work:

I was not in the room when Pelosi was briefed. However, as

…

Priceless.

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.c-spanarchives.org/flash/cspanPlayer.swf” fvars=” pid=286423-1 ; clipStart=6520 ; clipStop=6663 ; autoplay=0 ” width=”365″ height=”340″ /]

(And thanks to our friends at the C-SPAN Video Library.)

In my breakdown of Obama’s speech at Notre Dame, I wrote that his comments supporting a new conscience clause for health care workers–“Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, …

I thought this piece, by Jeff Goldberg in yesterday’s NY Times, was a very good assessment of Benjamin Netanyahu’s state of mind. But when the two meet today, I don’t think Barack Obama will be buying. Several Administration sources have told me that:

1. Obama isn’t going to take his eye off the two-state solution, especially the need …