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Kansas Republican: VAT Tax Would Cripple U.S. Recovery
Tweet Share on Facebook May 28, 2010 Comment (12)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Kansas Republican Rep. Todd Tiahrt is demonstrating the kind of leadership that is sorely needed in Washington right now.
Fearing that a commission chartered by President Barack Obama and chaired by former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson will recommend the introduction of a value added tax to pay down the debt all of Obama’s new spending has accrued, Tiahrt has authored a resolution asking Congress to go on record against the VAT.
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Sestak Job Offer Likely Benign, But Questions Remain for White House
Tweet Share on Facebook May 28, 2010 Comment (21)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
About that job that was offered to Rep. Joe Sestak as an inducement to not challenge Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary? Turns out it was all a misunderstanding, or something close to it. [See who supports Sestak.]
On Friday the White House counsel’s office revealed that, working through former President Bill Clinton, Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel had reached out and made a vague offer of an appointment to some kind of unpaid position on a presidential advisory board in exchange for Sestak agreeing not to take on Specter, whom he eventually beat.
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Sestak Bribe Allegations Could Sink His Candidacy
Tweet Share on Facebook May 26, 2010 Comment (22)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Joe Sestak, the former U.S. Navy admiral and member of Congress who bested party-switching Arlen Specter in last week’s Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary, may have torpedoed his candidacy with his own big mouth.
Some months ago, as he was beginning his Senate campaign, Sestak let it slip that someone in the White House might have offered him a job in exchange for dropping out of the primary against Specter, whose bid for a sixth term had the backing of President Barack Obama. And then tried to avoid talking about it ever again. The problem, as Sestak no doubt now realizes, is that to offer a specific position or reward in exchange for a specific act is, as many people read the law, illegal.
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What the Media Can Learn From Karl Rove About Covering Politics
Tweet Share on Facebook May 25, 2010 Comment (6)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
To be frank, the journalists who cover U.S. elections are, by and large, not really up to the job. There are a select few, like former U.S. News columnist Michael Barone, the much-missed Tim Russert, and others who, as former practitioners of some aspect of the “dark arts” themselves, understand the subtexts and subtleties of campaigns and their strategies and can explain them in ways that are neither mind-numbing nor unbalanced.
They are too few in number. Many of the rest--but by no means all--of the stamped out, blow dried network types who report on poll numbers like they were sports’ scores and who are obsessed, to borrow a word from Sarah Palin, with playing “Gotcha” so obviously radiate contempt for the candidates they are assigned to cover or are so clearly in love with them that they fail to even approach objectivity.
For them, especially, it would useful, even instructive, to read Karl Rove’s memoir of his life in politics. Most books of this type are little more than an “I was there as history unfolded” collections of great moments and significant accomplishments. Rove’s Courage and Consequence is decidedly not that kind of book. Instead it is something more on the order of, well, a training manual for anyone who is interested in running campaigns or, of equal importance, covering them.
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D.C. School Reform? Public Schools' Absurd New Condom Policy
Tweet Share on Facebook May 24, 2010 Comment (11)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Officials in the District of Columbia, which has some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation, are concerned that their program for the distribution of free condoms in those schools is failing. According to the Washington Post, “High school students and college-age adults have been complaining to District officials that the free condoms the city has been offering are not of good enough quality and are too small.”
If that alone was not bad enough, students are also complaining that it is embarrassing to have to ask school nurses and other health professionals for them.
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Newt Gingrich Hits Back at Secular-Socialist Critics
Tweet Share on Facebook May 21, 2010 Comment (38)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is pushing back against those who say his criticisms of President Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress in his new book, To Save America, cross the line.
"I have asserted that the secular-socialist machine is a mortal threat to the future of America as we have known it, just as totalitarian regimes were mortal threats to the survival of America in the past,” Gingrich says in a statement explaining what he is trying to do, discounting claims that he equates the people currently in power in Washington with some of history’s darkest regimes.
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Polls Turn Against Public Employee Unions
Tweet Share on Facebook May 20, 2010 Comment (10)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The idea that public employees have gold-plated benefits packages is, in a flagging economy, potentially toxic, prompting some public officials to address the issue head on.
In one prominent example, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie kicked off a firestorm of protest when he proposed that the state’s teachers begin making contributions to their pension plans. So far Christie, who is refusing to back down despite threats from teachers’ union officials, seems to be winning the argument because, with national unemployment near 10 percent and federal and state deficits at record levels, folks who are tightening their belts at home are put off by what they view as the selfishness of public employees who refuse to give even an inch.
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Why Democrats Are Celebrating Too Quickly
Tweet Share on Facebook May 20, 2010 Comment (4)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Given that even the smallest bit of good news comes as something of a welcome relief to Democrats these days, party solons are being somewhat triumphal about Tuesday’s election results.
As my bloleague Robert Schlesinger explained yesterday, the Democrats appear to have dodged a number of bullets managing, for example, to hold on to a congressional seat in western Pennsylvania that some polls showed they were in danger of losing. And they pulled off a big win in the Keystone State’s Senate primary by denying the nomination to veteran senator--and recent party switcher--Arlen Specter (who seemed almost certain to lose to former U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey in the fall election) in favor of U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, a former two-star admiral in the U.S. Navy. The newly anointed Democratic nominee can, at least in theory, can campaign more comfortably in the center than either Specter or Toomey.
It is also intriguing that, in Kentucky, almost twice as many Democrats turned out than Republicans to vote in the state’s two competitive U.S. Senate primaries, each of which was won by the candidate who more clearly represented the anti-establishment wing of two parties.
That said, Tuesday’s election returns don’t necessarily match up against the national polling data, which continues to show the Republicans competitive with the Democrats this year for the first time since President George W. Bush won re-election in 2004.
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Elena Kagan's Supreme Court Nomination is Stalling
Tweet Share on Facebook May 18, 2010 Comment (17)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
By now the White House must realize that its selection of U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be the next associate justice of the United States Supreme Court could be going better. Kagan, the former dean of the prestigious Harvard Law School, has spent the past week introducing herself to members of the U.S. Senate, but has yet to see the American people embrace her nomination--which may be an early indication that her hopes for confirmation may be headed to the rocks.
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The Tea Party's Test for Elena Kagan and the Supreme Court
Tweet Share on Facebook May 17, 2010 Comment (11)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Since its inception the Tea Party movement has been met with considerable criticism from those who are opposed to its goals.
Flowing freely from the pens of some of the nation’s most prominent columnists are charges that it is too narrowly focused, that it lacks depth, that it is unrepresentative of the mainstream, or that it represents the darker side of the American character. One of them, writer and former Crossfire co-host Michael Kinsley has penned an essay in which he complains that Tea Party activists are, in contrast to the altruism of the anti-war demonstrators of the 1960s, “mostly self-interested.”
