Republicans Win Big in Local Races
The loss of a Republican seat in NY-23 under highly unusual circumstances notwithstanding, yesterday was a good day for Republicans. After crushing defeats in successive elections, they won back the Virginia governor's office in a blowout and knocked off a billionaire incumbent governor in New Jersey despite having their vote split between two candidates. I would, however, resist the temptation ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 4, 2009 08:43
Scozzafava Endorses Democrat Owens
The special election to fill New York's 23rd Congressional District seat vacated by the appointment of Republican John McHugh as Secretary of the Army has taken yet another bizarre twist. Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava dropped out over the weekend, causing great celebration on the part of Republicans like Michelle Malkin, who termed her "radical leftist GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava" and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 2, 2009 08:20
Republicans Better Informed
A new Pew survey shows a rather steep "Partisan Knowledge Gap," with Republicans and Independents generally better informed than Democrats. Mary Katharine Ham finds this quite amusing and also notes that, "if the polling had gone the other way, the NYT would shout it from the rooftops." She provides examples of the mainstream press doing just that on previous occasions. We'd need ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 28, 2009 13:18
Libertarianism Not an Ideology
IOZ (whose identity is apparently a mystery) sums up a recent debate that's been brewing on several of the blogs I frequent: When Kerry Howley made the irrefutable and yet quixotic point that any proper concern with liberty, whether practical or, ahem, merely philosophical, must grapple with the strictures of cultural mores and social conventions, for they affect the lives and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 27, 2009 12:45
Marijuana Legalization Support at Record High
While a majority still supports criminalization, more Americans than ever think marijuana should be legal, according the latest Gallup survey. Lydia Saad (a family friend) provides the analysis: Gallup's October Crime poll finds 44% of Americans in favor of making marijuana legal and 54% opposed. U.S. public support for legalizing marijuana was fixed in the 25% range from the late ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 20, 2009 09:30
Limbaugh, Obama, and the NFL
Joseph Ashby argues that something fishy is being ignored in the matter of Rush Limbaugh's failed bid to buy the Rams. NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith served as counsel to Attorney General Eric Holder and was a member of Barack Obama’s transition team. [...] Despite the fact that Smith’s opposition was based on Limbaugh’s political commentary, the report failed to mention ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 16, 2009 12:57
McConnell: No Retalliation
Olympia Snowe and other wayward Republicans will be subject to strong persuasion but no punishment from the caucus, Senate Republican leaders tell Politico. [caption id="attachment_42848" align="alignright" width="297" caption="Mitch McConnell and his deputies in the Senate Republican leadership are responding very cautiously to Olympia Snowe's decision to become the first GOP vote for a Democratic health care reform bill. Photo: AP ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 15, 2009 07:49
Salting Snowe
Erick Erickson is angry at liberal Republican Olympia Snowe's announcement yesterday that she'd sign on to the Baucus version of health care reform in exchange for a seat at the negotiating table. Olympia Snowe has sold out the country. Having been banished to our world after Aslan chased her out of Narnia, Snowe is intent on corrupting this place too. So we ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 14, 2009 13:02
Politics of Spite
Paul Krugman continues to demonstrate that brilliance in one field doesn't necessarily translate into sound insights into others. He's upset that some Republicans took pleasure in President Obama's embarrassment in not landing the Olympics for his adopted Chicago and their cynicism in positioning themselves as the defenders of Medicare in order to fight his health care reform proposals. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 5, 2009 15:24
Biden: Republican House Takeback ‘End of the Road’
Vice President Joe Biden told a partisan crowd that, if the Republicans win the House back in 2010, it would be "the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do." Karen Travers for ABC: Biden said Republicans are pinning their political strategy on flipping these seats. “If they take them back, this the end of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 22, 2009 07:57
Obama to Paterson: Quit
President Obama has reportedly asked New York Governor David Paterson to drop his bid to win election in his own right, fearing that he would hurt Democrats down ballot. [caption id="attachment_42135" align="alignright" width="400" caption="President Obama shook Gov. David A. Paterson's hand in December 2008 at an event with the National Governors Association in Philadelphia. Jim Wilson/The New York Times "][/caption] The decision ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 20, 2009 07:46
Post Trying to Macaca McDonnell
Republican Bob McDonnell enjoys a rather sizable lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds in his race for Virginia's governorship. But the Washington Post, which went after George Allen with amazing fervor in his 2006 race against longshot Jim Webb, is doing what it can to fix that. First, it ran a series of articles about a master's thesis McDonnell ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 9, 2009 11:21
Republican Party Needs More Votes if it is to Win
Bruce Bartlett explains why he's not a Republican anymore using a time-honored refrain: He didn't leave his party; his party left him. While he now considers himself an "independent," he's more than non-partisan; he's "anti-Republican." Why? I still consider myself to be a Reaganite. But I don’t see any others anywhere in the GOP these days, which is why I consider ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 31, 2009 11:58
Romney For Senate
US News blogger Peter Roff speculates that Mitt Romney will run for the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. Such an announcement would likely be embraced immediately by the Republicans, who would like almost nothing more than to deny Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada his new, hard-won, 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority. As a self-funding candidate who has already been elected once ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 27, 2009 09:29
Mary Jo Kopechne
In my early morning Teddy Kennedy Dead at 77 media roundup post, I observed, "That the Chappaquiddick scandal didn’t make the first several paragraphs — or even first page — of several of these obits is quite remarkable. It would be like writing an obit for Richard Nixon that didn’t mention Watergate or one for Michael Jackson that glossed over ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 26, 2009 14:31
