Mitt Romney starts his 2012 run as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. But, in reinventing himself yet again, the “authenticity” issue that troubled many of us in 2008 looms again.

Massachusetts becomes the latest state to join in the National Popular Vote initiative.

In yesterday’s much ballyhooed Super Duper Tuesday Primaries, we got the results most of us were expecting based on an analysis of the polls and the trendlines. Arlen Specter’s bid to save his career, which was going to end in the Republican primaries, by switching parties ended instead in the Democratic primaries, losing 47 to [...]

This is ultimately a non-starter (I think), but still worthy of comment: The Terrorist Expatriation Act, co-sponsored by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, would allow the State Department to revoke the citizenship of people who provide support to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or who attack the [...]

Pennsylvania is Reapportionment’s version of the Biggest Loser. If projections hold, Pennsylvania will lose Congressional seats for the ninth straight Census. Smart Politics: Several projections have been conducted by experts during the last few years – with Texas and Arizona universally considered to be the big winners of multiple seats, with the remaining gains coming [...]

Were a presidential election being held today, President Barack Obama would be former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin 55 to 42, a new CNN poll shows. President Barack Obama’s job approval may have slid — 51 percent in a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey, 46 today in the Gallup daily track, 45 yesterday. But given a [...]

Scott Brown was elected to be the final vote against ObamaCare but he never got the chance.  Now, some of his erstwhile supporters are having second thoughts. Republican folk hero Sen. Scott Brown is being taunted by triumphant Democrats – and slammed by irked conservatives – after the historic health-care bill he was elected to [...]

While not at all pleased by the outcome of the year-long sausage making extravaganza that gave us a health care reform bill that virtually no one likes, I’m much closer in agreement Steven Taylor than with Megan McArdle over what it all means for the system. Do we, as Megan suggested at the apex of [...]

It was widely reported yesterday that Amy Bishop, the UAH professor who murdered three faculty members after being denied tenure, had killed before.  Boston’s WCVBTV5 reports, The biology professor accused of gunning down five colleagues and a staff member at the University of Alabama at Huntsville on Friday was released from police custody 23 years [...]

Neil Newhouse, who served served as the pollster for the Brown for Senate campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (and was indirectly my source* last night) has written a public memo to National Democratic Leaders with the subject line WHAT MASSACHUSETTS MEANS FOR YOU.  While it’s mostly tongue-in-cheek, he makes some salient points.   Among [...]

There was talk over the last few days, from Nancy Pelosi and others, that the Democrats might use parliamentary tricks and outright chicanery to ram a healthcare bill through even if Scott Brown won in Massachusetts and take the party coalition down to 59.   Thankfully, cooler heads seem to have prevailed and that looks quite [...]

I have it on reliable authority that Scott Brown will beat Martha Coakley by a comfortable margin when the counting’s done tonight. I intentionally echoed an infamous newspaper headline (“Dewey Defeats Truman”) in my post title because, as my source tells me, if Coakley wins, “then polling as we know it is dead.”

The special election to fill the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by the passing of Teddy Kennedy is ongoing, with most expecting a win by Republican Scott Brown.  Andrew Sullivan sees this as the death knell of American politics. I can see no alternative scenario but a huge – staggeringly huge – victory for the FNC/RNC [...]

538‘s Andrew Gelman points me to University of Chicago political scientist Boris Shor‘s analysis of the Massachussets Senate race between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown to fill out the remainder of the late Ted Kennedy’s term.  Specifically, he poses an interesting question: Brown is attracting very positive national and state Republican and conservative attention. On [...]

Via E.D. Kain I learn that Scott Brown has taken the lead in the Massachusetts special election in a recent poll: The poll shows Brown, a state senator from Wrentham, besting Coakley, the state’s attorney general, by 50 percent to 46 percent, the first major survey to show Brown in the lead. Unenrolled long-shot Joseph [...]

A rather bizarre column by Jeff Jacoby is drawing some blogospheric attention. YOU’RE A sensible, principled conservative. You want America to be a land of boundless opportunity and freedom, where people are treated as individuals and judged on their merits. You reject the divisive identity politics of the left – what matters most about any [...]

Senator Edward M. Kennedy died last night, aged 77, succumbing to brain cancer. Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies (John Broder, NYT) Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew triumph and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as [...]

This map resulting from a Gallup poll on party identification is making the rounds: The lede from Jeffrey Jone’s write-up: An analysis of Gallup Poll Daily tracking data from the first six months of 2009 finds Massachusetts to be the most Democratic state in the nation, along with the District of Columbia. Utah and Wyoming [...]

Justin Barrett, a 36-year-old soon-to-be-former Boston cop and Massachussetts Army National Guard captain, is making the headlines with a letter he circulated describing, a bit too enthusiastically, his views on a Boston Globe column on the Henry Louis Gates incident. Alan Colmes has the background: His palpable anger appears to be directed at Globe columnist [...]

The only non-Michael Jackson story atop Yahoo News‘ page is “Rhode Island closer to changing state name over slavery.” Not having previously heard Rhode Island was considering a name change — let alone over slavery — I was intrigued. After reading the story, much less so: The country’s smallest state has the longest official name: [...]

New Hampshire has become the 6th state where gays can marry and the 2nd to make this change through the legislative process. Traditionally conservative New Hampshire today became the sixth state in the nation — and the fifth state in New England — where same-sex couples will be allowed to marry. “Today we’re standing up [...]