May 16th, 2012
Is this the Golden Age of New Jersey politics?
After the chronic embarrassments of Governors James McGreevey and Jon Corzine, beyond the scores of mayors indicted for corruption, the Garden State is suddenly fielding a bipartisan team with national appeal.
They’re the ultimate political odd couple, a stereotypical comedy duo in a thin guy/fat guy, black guy/white guy sort of way. And now they’ve co-starred in their first online comedy feature, filmed for the benefit of the New Jersey Press Association Legislative Correspondents Club dinner, which quickly went viral. Read More…
May 7th, 2012
It’s RINO hunting season, and Dick Lugar has a big target on his back.
The six-term Indiana senator was once Richard Nixon’s favorite Republican Mayor—but Tricky Dick looks like a hippie compared to the Tea Party crowd, and Lugar has several sins alleged against him that could lead his party to purge him on Tuesday.
First, he’s on speaking terms with some Democrats. Second, he once co-sponsored nuclear non-proliferation legislation with Barack Obama. Third, as the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he definitely knows who the president of Uz-becki-becki-stan is. Read More…
March 27th, 2012
This is it, showdown at the Supreme Court corral—or Three Days That Could End America, as one conservative website put it.
At the heart of the apocalyptic rhetoric is the individual mandate—that not long ago was considered a conservative idea.
“Nobody was saying that it was creeping socialism or unconstitutional at the time. A lot of conservatives were for it,” former GOP senator Bob Bennett told me yesterday, looking back to the 1993 fight against “Hillarycare.” Read More…
March 3rd, 2012
The Vital Center is under siege on Capital Hill. “Congress is now more polarized than at any time since the late 19th century,” attests the data-driven blog Vote View.
It has gotten so bad that Sen. Olympia Snowe is throwing in the towel on her three-term career in disgust: “I do find it frustrating,” she said, “that an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies has become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions.”
What’s worse, she doesn’t think it’s going to get better any time soon: “I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term.”
Read More…
February 24th, 2012
Quick: Name a young Hispanic Republican swing-state governor with a record of reducing the size of government and cutting spending while passing education reforms like ending teacher tenure and establishing merit pay, all with a Democratic legislature.
Stumped? Here’s another hint: he’s a former state attorney general and federal judge who left a lifetime appointment to the bench to successfully challenge a scandal-prone Republican incumbent.
Read More…
