“She completely surprised me. I was having dinner with my boys. A couple of candidates who had endorsed us in the race, they said time to go in. I go in, I round the corner, there she is to give me a hug and surprise me. It was a nice event, and it was not at all what I expected. But it was awfully, awfully nice surprise.”
— Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R), in an interview with CNN, recounting how he was surprised by his fiancee, Maria Belen Chapur, at his primary victory party.
Coming this month: The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan.
The author imagines a Centrist Party which attempts to win a few as four or five seats in the U.S. Senate, enough to deny either traditional party a majority. At that point, he says the Centrists would be the powerbrokers in DC. giving voice to those who fall in the ideological middle.
“I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people
who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in
the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to
decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot
and there won’t be any more available.”
— Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), quoted by the Denver Post, apparently not understanding that a gun magazine can be reloaded.
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Joshua Green: “As best I can tell, only two things are guaranteed to remove a politician from office in the wake of a sex scandal. One is consorting (or attempting to consort) with someone who is underage… The other thing that can dislodge a congressman from his seat is an angry spouse… But even these ‘guarantees’ seem shakier and shakier.”
“Surviving a sex scandal is hardly new. Just ask Bill Clinton, the patron saint of surviving sex scandals. But it used to be an exception, and now it looks more like a rule.”
President Obama “plans to return 5 percent of his salary to the Treasury in solidarity with federal workers who are going to be furloughed as part of the budget cutting process known as sequester,” the New York Times reports.
“The voluntary move would be retroactive to March 1 and apply through the rest of the calendar year… The White House came up with the 5 percent figure to approximate the level of automatic spending cuts to non-defense federal agencies that took effect that day.”
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus took a break from rebranding the Republican party to accuse Democrats of supporting infanticide.
He writes on Red State: “The President, the Senate Majority Leader, the House Democratic Leader, and the Chair of the Democratic National Committee (in whose home state this hearing occurred) made funding Planned Parenthood an issue in the 2012 campaign. They should now all be held to account for that outspoken support. If the media won’t, then voters must ask the pressing questions: Do these Democrats also believe a newborn has no rights? Do they also endorse infanticide?”
Steve Benen: “This feels a bit like under-the-radar pandering — maybe Priebus wrote this for RedState, as opposed to a mainstream outlet, in the hopes that only the GOP base would see it — but the party chairman is still taking a risk.”
Highly-recommended: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth.
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) has filed a petition with
the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals asking the full
15-judge court to reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel last
month that overturned the state’s sodomy law, the Washington Blade reports.
The panel ruled last month that a section of Virginia’s
“Crimes Against Nature” statute that outlaws sodomy between consenting
adults, gay or straight, is unconstitutional.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee “is seeking to tie former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) to other House Republicans, pushing them to say whether or not they back the House nominee’s campaign to return to Congress after his fall from grace,” The Hill reports.
“Sanford’s nomination puts the GOP in a bind — the party might need to help him win the race, but it needs to avoid being tainted by his past scandal. Many Republicans have privately groused that his nomination hurts the party’s image at a time they’re trying to rebrand.”
Taxpayers could shell out at least $120,000 to figure out how indicted former Pittsburgh police Chief Nate Harper might have misappropriated about $70,000, the Pittsburgh Tribune reports.
DNAinfo has photos of the demolition that began this week on the apartment building where President Ronald Reagan lived as a child.
“The University of Chicago bought the building in 2004 as part of a decadelong effort to buy all residential property immediately north of the hospital… Preservationists had tried to save the building, but were unable to persuade city or university officials that the gas-lit apartment where Reagan lived from ages 2 to 3 was historically significant.”
A must-read e-book just out: Lesterland: The Corruption of Congress and How to End It by Lawrence Lessig.
“Two maids allege that FBI agents from Miami tried to brow-beat them into
making incriminating statements against U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez,
during questioning about alleged sex parties at the Dominican Republic
resort home of a South Florida doctor who hosted Menendez numerous
times,” the Miami Herald
reports.
Many Republicans “privately concede” former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R), who easily won a runoff last night, could hand a safe Republican House seat to Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D), Politico reports.
“Fellow GOP pols don’t like him. Neither do female voters.His campaign is largely an exercise in seeking forgiveness for his transgressions four years ago — a defensive crouch that makes it tricky to take the fight to Colbert Busch, the sister of late-night comedian Stephen Colbert.”
Charleston Post and Courier:
“The political race many had anticipated would unfold in the 1st
Congressional District — the national comedian’s sister versus the
once-disgraced governor angling for a comeback — is finally here.”
It’s worth noting that Public Policy Polling, which nailed the runoff result, found Colbert Busch leading Sanford by two points.
Republican lawmakers in North Carolina introduced a bill to allow the state “to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide,” WRAL-TV reports.
Greg Sargent: “One thing that remains striking about our politics right now is the degree to which public opinion among Republicans is increasingly isolated and drifting away from the rest of the electorate. You see this on pretty much every major issue facing the country.”
“All of which is to say that there seems to be little incentive for GOP
politicians, particularly ones who are insulated from national opinion
in safe districts with a lot of GOP base voters, to compromise with
Obama or Democrats.”
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds 57% support a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, but that number is just 35% among self-identified Republicans — “evidence of the political peril for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and other GOP politicians involved in the negotiations on a compromise immigration bill.”
Among self-described “conservative Republicans,” the numbers are even more negative, with just 30% supporting the idea.
At the same time, Democratic support is reaching new highs — moving up to 73% from 68% in February — and 84% of self-identified liberal Democrats support providing a path for undocumented workers to gain legal status.
“Well, you know, at the end of the day, Stephen Colbert’s a very popular, you know, well-regarded comedian, but at the end of the day he’s not on the ticket.”
— Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R), interviewed on Morning Joe, saying the only thing voters know about his opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D), is that she is the sister of the late-night comedian.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
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— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
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— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
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— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
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— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
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— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.