Max Baucus votes against cap-and-trade. Will Harry Reid force his caucus to vote on a bill that doesn’t have 60 votes? Well, he’s done it before.
Robert Gibbs may have done in Charlie Crist in the GOP primary in talking about the stimulus bill: “I think he was very supportive of the legislation and supportive of the benefits that it would have and has had for the state of Florida.” Think that will appear in Marco Rubio’s ads? Yup.
A matter of priorities: “Israel said Thursday that the arms seized in its largest-ever haul would have given Hezbollah firepower to bombard the country for a month and urged the world to focus on the threat from the Lebanese militants’ chief backer, Iran, rather than assailing Israel. … ‘It is a war crime that the U.N. Security Council should have a special meeting over,’ [Bibi Netanyahu] told reporters in Tel Aviv. ‘A major component of this shipment were rockets whose only goal was to hit civilians and kill as many civilians as possible — women, children, old people,’ Netanyahu said.”
You can bet this will be a campaign issue: “The Democratic-controlled Senate on Thursday turned back a GOP-led effort to bar Sept. 11 terrorists from being prosecuted in civilian federal courts.” To be clear: not a single Republican voted to allow funds to bring Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. for trial. The vote was 54-45, with four Democrats and co-sponsor Sen. Joe Lieberman voting with all Republicans to bar use of funds.
Shocking, I know, but Nancy Pelosi isn’t keeping her promise to leave the monstrous health-care bill online for 72 hours before the vote.
And here’s a reason: another poll shows that voters oppose PelosiCare by a 49 to 39 percent margin. In October the same polls showed that voters favored the Democrats’ plan by a 42 to 40 percent margin.
Charles Krauthammer says the myth of the 2008 realignment is now exploded: “The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African American president. November ’08 was one shot, one time, never to be replicated. Nor was November ’09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm — and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.”
Kim Strassel surveys the wreckage from Tuesday and the newly at-risk Virginia Democrats. So what’s Nancy Pelosi’s answer? “The White House and the congressional leadership saw this coming, and it is why Speaker Nancy Pelosi is force-marching her health bill to a vote tomorrow. She’s not about to give her members time to absorb the ugly results, or to be further rattled by next week’s Veteran’s Day break, when they go home for a repeat of the August furies. If not now, she knows, maybe never.”
