A new Boston Globe poll finds Rep. Edward Markey (D) holds a solid lead over rival Gabriel Gomez (R), 54% to 41%, as the two enter the final week of the special U.S. Senate campaign.
When you include voters who said they haven’t yet made up their minds but are leaning toward a candidate, the race tightens slightly, with 54% favoring Markey and 43% favoring Gomez.
The New York Times notes the iciness between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) “has been replaced by a powerful force in politics: expedience.”
“Mr. McConnell, 71, the embodiment of Washington establishment, and Mr. Paul, 50, a grass-roots insurgent who harbors a brightly burning presidential ambition for 2016, have formed an odd-couple, scratch-my-back alliance that stretches from Washington to Louisville. Some weeks, it can even seem that the balance of power has shifted between Kentucky’s junior and senior senators.”
Andrew Sullivan: “Well, we don’t yet quite know what’s in the works – but once you start arming one side of a civil war, you become part of that civil war; the other side may target you; and as this sectarian conflict deepens across the region, the US will be seen as a Sunni power fighting Shiites. I cannot think of a worse policy position for this country – to take stand on the sectarian fault-line of the Muslim world and back one side over another. You think the other side won’t notice? You think Americans wouldn’t be targeted for this kind of meddling? Let Putin get bogged down in this hell, if he remains so 19th Century he feels he must. But we should have zero interest in that ancient religious dispute; zero.”
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David Hawkings flags a new Gallup survey which found that only 10% of those surveyed “described themselves as having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress, ranking it last on a list of 16 societal institutions for the fourth consecutive year. No institution has scored lower since Gallup started asking in 1973.”
“Underscoring the crisis of confidence, Congress was the only institution this year in which a majority expressed very little or no faith at all. The number was 52 percent; television news was the institution with the next most-pronounced lack of confidence, at 39 percent.”
North Korea “proposed high-level talks with the United States, saying that it was ready to discuss easing tensions and eventually denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula,” the New York Times reports.
“The North’s proposal indicated that it was shifting to dialogue after months of bellicose language, including threats to launch nuclear strikes at the United States and South Korea, that have raised tensions to the highest in years. North Korea had also proposed dialogue with South Korea this month, though their initial agreement to hold high-level dialogue in Seoul collapsed last week over a difference over the level of their chief delegates.”
New York Times: “Driver’s license photographs and biographic information of most Americans would be accessible through an expanded Department of Homeland Security nationwide computer network if the immigration legislation pending before the Senate becomes law.”
“The proposed expansion is part of an effort to crack down on illegal immigration by requiring all employers to confirm the identity and legal status of any new workers… But the proposal already faces objections from some civil liberties lawyers and certain members of Congress, who worry about the potential for another sprawling data network that could ultimately be the equivalent of a national ID system.”
“Until we have a commander in chief who knows what he is doing… let Allah sort it out!”
— Sarah Palin, quoted by The Hill, saying the United States should not intervene in Syria.
New York Post: “New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft revealed the real story behind a 2005 meeting with Vladimir Putin, during which the Russian president pocketed his Super Bowl ring, worth more than $25,000. Kraft, at the time, claimed the diamond-encrusted bauble was a gift, but he now admits Putin stole it, and the White House intervened when he demanded it back.”
“Republican lawmakers say they anticipate a flood of questions in the coming months from constituents on the implementation of ObamaCare, which will pose a dilemma for the GOP,” The Hill reports.
Some Republicans indicated “they will not assist constituents in navigating the law and obtaining benefits. Others said they would tell people to call the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).”
A new Stockton College poll in New Jersey finds Gov. Chris Christie (R) crushing challenger Barbara Buono (D) in his race for re-election, 64% to 24%.
Former Vice President Al Gore told The Guardian that the National Security Agency’s secret telephone data collection program violates the Constitution.
Said Gore: “I quite understand the viewpoint that many have expressed that they are fine with it and they just want to be safe but that is not really the American way. Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that those who would give up essential liberty to try to gain some temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
“One after another, they talked about the business they had built. But not a single — not a single — factory worker went out there. Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage.”
— Rick Santorum (R), quoted by Politico, explaining why Mitt Romney’s attempt to exploit President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark didn’t resonate at the GOP convention.
“A recent briefing by senior intelligence officials on surveillance programs failed to attract even half of the Senate, showing the lack of enthusiasm in Congress for learning about classified security programs,” The Hill reports.
“Many senators elected to leave Washington early Thursday afternoon instead of attending a briefing with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and other officials.”
Moderate cleric Hassan Rohani “took a solid lead over conservative rivals on Saturday in preliminary vote counting in Iran’s presidential election in what could be the makings of a surprise victory over favored hardliners,” Reuters reports.
“The outcome is unlikely to transform relations between Iran and the outside world, the Islamic Republic’s disputed policy on developing nuclear power or its support of Syria’s president in the civil war there – all sensitive security matters that are the domain of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”
“The emergency manager who was sent to reverse the fortunes of this financially troubled city asked some of its creditors on Friday to accept pennies on the dollar as he laid out his plan for tackling Detroit’s staggering debt, kick-starting negotiations that could determine whether the city is headed to bankruptcy court,” the New York Times reports.
“The proposal includes an offer that amounts to less than 10 cents on the dollar on some of the city’s unfinanced debt obligations like unsecured bonds and a portion of unfunded pension liabilities, which together total more than $11 billion.”
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that he and Mitt Romney lost the election last year in part because they were arguing against the “empty promises” of the not-yet-implemented Obamacare law, Politico reports.
Said Ryan: “This was the challenge that Mitt Romney and I had in this last election… we had to argue against the promise and the rhetoric of President Obama. The great soaring rhetoric, all of the empty promises. Remember in his first two years, he passed his big program, but he didn’t implement his program. Now, in his second term, we’re seeing it implemented — and it’s pretty darn ugly.”
A judge ruled that two defendants in military sexual assault cases cannot be punitively discharged, if found guilty, because of “unlawful command influence” derived from comments made by President Obama, Stars and Stripes reports.
“The judge’s pretrial ruling means that if either defendant is found guilty, whether by a jury or a military judge, they cannot receive a bad conduct discharge or a dishonorable discharge.”
Wall Street Journal: “The Obama administration tied its dramatic shift in favor of arming Syria’s rebels to findings that chemical weapons had been used in the civil war–but the decision, according to people familiar with it, was the product of two months of increasingly unsettling assessments about the war that convinced the president to do something he had previously argued would be a mistake.”
“It was more than a week ago, according to American officials, that U.S. intelligence agencies reached their conclusion that 100 to 150 Syrians have been killed by chemical weapons. Thursday’s public about-face in American policy toward Syria’s two-year civil war was driven by other factors as well… These included growing U.S. concerns about large-scale battlefield deployment of militants from the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah–an appearance that alarmed Israel and caught the Americans by surprise–and President Bashar al-Assad’s battlefield gains.”
Micah Cohen: “The shift in administration policy on Syria seems reflective of public opinion. Polls have consistently shown Americans are deeply wary of the United States becoming involved in the fighting in Syria. But they also show that public support for intervention increases sharply under circumstances where it is confirmed that the Assad regime used chemical weapons.”
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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