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Time for Virginia to Drill, Baby, Drill
Tweet Share on Facebook August 31, 2009 Comment (9)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The ongoing economic crisis has states scrambling for new sources of revenue to fill the holes in their annual budgets. Spending cuts, while popular in the abstract, are almost always unpopular among the constituents and interests groups whose spending it is that is being cut. Many state legislators are equally unwilling to propose tax increases, especially in recessionary times.
Nevertheless, state governments must have the money to run, leaving governors and legislators the responsibility to find creative ways to pay for things. Enter William Howell, speaker of Virginia's House of Delegates, who is asking the Obama administration to open an area miles off Virginia's coastline to oil and natural gas exploration by 2011.
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Poll: Democrats' Hard Left Agenda Is Driving Away Independents
Tweet Share on Facebook August 31, 2009 Comment (27)More than half the U.S. electorate would, given the chance, fire every sitting member of Congress and start all over again, a new survey from pollster Scott Rasmussen finds.
In a stinging rebuke to the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., 57 percent of the 1,000 likely voters queried by Rasmussen said their dissatisfaction with the way the current Congress is performing would push them to hit the reset button.
The new numbers, Rasmussen says, reflect a partisan shift since last fall. Therefore it is not surprising to find that Republicans have grown less satisfied with Congress. The number of Democrats who endorsed the current Congress has nearly doubled over the same period, rising from 25 percent in October of 2008 to 43 percent in August of 2009. But even with the 18 percent increase in support among Democrats, only a quarter of the total number of people surveyed (25 percent) said they would vote to keep the entire Congress.
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Obama Administration Sued Over Healthcare Enemies List
Tweet Share on Facebook August 27, 2009 Comment (19)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
A doctors' group and an organization that advocates for the interest of the inner-city poor have joined forced to sue the Obama administration, charging that its abortive effort to collect criticisms made by those opposed to President Obama's plan to change the U.S. health care system infringed on their First Amendment rights.
In a complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education said the White House had attempted to "unlawfully" collect information on protected political speech when it asked Obamacare supporters to report any negative comments about the proposal to a U.S. government email address, flag@whitehouse.gov.
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Romney for Senate? Succeeding Kennedy Could Help in 2012
Tweet Share on Facebook August 26, 2009 Comment (51)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Though it may be hard to see at first, the passing of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts may have a profound impact on 2012's race for the GOP presidential nomination.
Back when Sen. John F. Kerry was his party's presidential nominee, the Massachusetts Legislature—which is overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats—changed the law to require that a special election be held after a vacancy occurs in one of its U.S. Senate seats rather than allow Republican Gov. Mitt Romney to make an appointment if Kerry had won.
The law is still that way today. (As he lay dying, Kennedy asked the state's political leaders, now that a Democrat was the commonwealth's chief executive, to revert to the previous method of picking a replacement.) And that means voters in Massachusetts will go to the polls, unless the law is changed soon, sometime in the next few months to pick a replacement for Kennedy.
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Democrats’ Scandals May be Nearing Critical Mass
Tweet Share on Facebook August 25, 2009 Comment (18)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Feeding the perception that corrupt public officials were running rampant in the halls of Congress was an important part of the Democrats' plan to retake control of the federal government in 2006 and 2008. The Jack Abramoff scandal, the resignation of Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, and the embarrassing but apparently not criminal conduct of former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., all helped to convince voters that the GOP had grown fat and happy during its years in the majority and needed to be replaced.
It's a powerful argument but it also cuts both ways, something the Democrats are now going to have to deal with going into the next election.
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The Obama National Security Team's Civil War
Tweet Share on Facebook August 25, 2009 Comment (9)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
If the pre-election polls told us anything negative about Barack Obama, it was that the electorate harbored concerns about his experience in foreign policy and national security. After only four years in the U.S. Senate, Obama could not match—or even come close to—the public's perception of John McCain on these issues.
McCain, the voters said, possessed a level of experience commensurate with what they viewed as the demands of the job, far and away superior to his opponent's.
Obama's team dealt with this in two ways. First, it downplayed the importance of foreign policy and national security by playing up domestic and economic issues. In 2008's version of "It's the economy, stupid," Obama talked about healthcare and global warming and the economic crisis, when he talked about anything specific, that is. Mostly, he—or more correctly, his surrogates—just attacked the Republicans for attacking him for being inexperienced.
Second, and this was how Delaware Sen. Joe Biden got to be vice president instead of Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, Obama surrounded himself with people knowledgeable about foreign policy and national security to whom he could point whenever an issue arose.
Coming into office, he beefed up his team even further with heavyweights like New York Sen. Hillary Clinton at the State Department and former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones, whom he picked to be his national security adviser. He tapped former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta to run the CIA and he asked former CIA director Robert Gates, whom George W. Bush had made U.S. secretary of defense, to stay on at the Pentagon.
So far, so good. But now that the president is out of town on vacation, well...
When the cat's away...
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'Colorado Model' Got Democrats in the Door, But Their Stay Might Be Brief
Tweet Share on Facebook August 24, 2009 Comment (4)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
As the liberals are finding everywhere they turn, governing is hard.
Case in point, the Rocky Mountains, where a group of multimillionaires backed a top-to-bottom effort called the "Colorado model," a well-funded effort to turn a red state blue. This included the funding of candidates for governor, for statewide office, and the legislature, but also the creation of think tanks, political advocacy efforts, and other astroturf operations with one goal in mind: sweep as many Republicans as possible out of office and replace them with Democrats.
The donors, people like Tim Gill, Rutt Bridges, Jared Polis, and Pat Stryker, must have been thrilled with the results. Because of their support, Colorado now has a Democratic governor, the Democrats are the majority party in both chambers in the state legislature, the Democratic Party has picked up one U.S. Senate seat and two U.S. House seats from the GOP, and the state went for Barack Obama over John McCain by 9 points in 2008.
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Polls Show It's Time for Democrats to Drop Healthcare Reform
Tweet Share on Facebook August 21, 2009 Comment (128)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The Democrats have been trying to pass nationalized healthcare ever since Harry S Truman. With Barack Obama, who campaigned on the issue, they won their first presidential mandate since Lyndon Johnson, a sizable majority in the House and a filibusterproof majority in the Senate. And, six months into a period in which they can do anything they want, they still can't seem to get healthcare done.
In the meantime, they are losing the support of the country for change.
The latest ABC News-Washington Post poll of 1,001 U.S. adults found that 50 percent of the country now disapproves of the job President Obama is doing on healthcare, up 6 points from 44 percent who felt that way in July. And a minority, 49 percent, think he will be able to "make significant improvements" in the U.S. healthcare system.
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Obama Doesn't Get How to Be President
Tweet Share on Facebook August 21, 2009 Comment (13)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Ronald Reagan was said to have been a fan of Back to the Future, the mid-'80s blockbuster about a time-traveling teen who inadvertently interferes with his parents getting together and has to set things right, as well as figure out a way to get back to his own time, before he disappears from existence. His affection for the film was probably due in no small part to the fact that it poked gentle fun at Reagan's film career (a movie marquee seen in the film advertises Reagan starring alongside Barbara Stanwick in Cattle Queen of Montana) and the seeming improbability (in 1955) of his jump into politics.
Anyway, shortly after leaving the White House, Reagan was asked—or so the story goes—to appear in a cameo in the trilogy's final film, set for the most part in the year 1885, as the mayor of the mythical town in which all three films are set. All told, he would have been on screen for less than a minute, but it would have been one more of the series' many clever allusions to the idea that history does, in fact, repeat itself, a lot. And the audience would have loved it.
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Crist's Conundrum: Who to Pick to Replace Retiring Florida Sen. Martinez
Tweet Share on Facebook August 20, 2009 Comment (1)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Charlie Crist has a problem.
Now the governor of Florida, Crist decided to forego a bid for a second term in favor of a campaign to win the U.S. Senate seat of fellow Republican Mel Martinez, who decided not to run for re-election after serving just one six-year term.
Crist is a more moderate Republican than many of his fellow Florida partisans, which led former state House Speaker Marco Rubio to throw his hat in the ring and enter the upcoming GOP Senate primary. Rubio is decidedly more conservative than Crist, with an intense and active following even though the latest polls show him behind Crist by almost 30 points, 55 percent to 26 percent.
Rubio supporters say the gap reflects his lack of statewide name identification, but he still has a tough row to hoe. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, whose job it is to win seats for the GOP in Congress's upper chamber, has already endorsed Crist, likely believing that his current popularity as governor would translate into an easy win for a party that can ill afford to lose any more U.S. Senate seats.
But Martinez has thrown everyone a curve, announcing he not only was retiring from the Senate but would be leaving a year early, meaning Crist would have to choose a temporary senator to fill the vacancy in the seat he himself would be campaigning to win over the coming year.
