House cleaning.

Still not troubling to Harry Reid: A Senate leader using an unnamed source on someone’s private IRS documents to scurrilously suggest a public figure had paid no taxes for 20 years in order to slime a candidate of the opposition during an election year on the Senate floor. But at least now we know he [...]

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...Wut.

That al Qaeda training video MSNBC via BuzzFeed tried to peddle yesterday, as some sort of “See, even al Qaeda thinks our background-check system needs work!”-attack on gun-rights defenders? A liberal advocacy group has already put together a TV ad that seizes on the vid to try and attack… Mitch McConnell? Oh, honestly. Allahpundit already [...]

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"It's probably possible for a political group to be worse at accomplishing its core mission than Progress Kentucky is, but it's difficult to imagine how."

On one hand, Progress Kentucky has succeeded in ways most political-action committees rarely do.  In only four or five months of existence, they have driven the national news cycle not once but twice.  Unfortunately for Progress KY and Democrats in the state, they’ve been the scandal both times.  Their operatives turned out to be behind the [...]

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Standards.

Via the Washington Free Beacon, I’m trying to understand why David Corn, Mother Jones, and their source thought this audio would end up hurting McConnell more than the tactics involved hurt the left. They’re accusing him, essentially, of … campaigning. (“Basic blocking and tackling,” as WaPo puts it.) Rest assured, Democrats in D.C. and Kentucky [...]

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Dirty deeds done for dynasties?

What happened to the Senatorial aspirations of Hollywood celebrity Ashley Judd? Some believed that she got chased out of the race after Republicans in Kentucky and the NRSC began launching attacks on her past statements, making her reluctant to spend the time and money. Others think that Kentucky Democrats changed their minds on a celebrity [...]

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Don't bet on it.

Just remember when you read this post that I’m the resident optimist at Hot Air.  I’m the blue-sky, sunny-side-of-the-street, glass-half-full contributor to this site. And even I’m having trouble buying this: Sitting at his desk a stone’s throw from the Senate chamber, McConnell turned to the aide and, with characteristic directness, said: “This decision is [...]

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Splits.

Many people expected to see a Tea Party challenge to Mitch McConnell in next year’s Kentucky primary, and it could still happen.  However, that challenge will not include any support from the Tea Party’s 2010 candidate for US Senate, Rand Paul.  Late yesterday, Paul threw his support behind the highest-ranking member of the GOP establishment [...]

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Damn.

I said on Friday that she’s low risk and high reward, which is true — if all you’re looking at it is beating Mitch McConnell. That’s unlikely to happen even with a strong nominee so why not roll the dice on a celebrity? The caveat, though, is that Judd’s enough of a loose cannon that [...]

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What could go wrong?

Should we be worried about this? I read this story, about Kentucky Democrats quaking at the idea of having a rich Hollywood uber-liberal at the top of the ticket in bluegrass country, and I thought “Hell no.” Then my eeyorism kicked in and I remembered Mitch McConnell isn’t especially popular and that, in politics, you [...]

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"Delightfully radical."

Is the Ashley Judd for Senate juggernaut really under way?  It seems so; even the Washington Post is handicapping her divorce as a potential signal that she wants to challenge Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: This week’s announcement that Ashley Judd and husband Dario Franchitti called it quits after 11 years of marriage had one surprising effect: Proof, claimed [...]

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No decision yet on filibuster.

Certainly support for Chuck Hagel isn’t intensifying, not after the weak defense offered for the Defense nominee over the weekend.  Republicans had mostly decided to oppose Chuck Hagel’s confirmation even before Thursday’s confirmation hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee, so “opposition” isn’t exactly news.  But will Republicans filibuster Hagel?  Mitch McConnell isn’t quite ready [...]

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Fairness.

As Ed pointed out this morning, the White House’s more recent attitude on the pathetic state of the American economy has run somewhere along the lines of, “Maybe if we just don’t talk about it, people will forget that it actually exists” — but the report of the 4th quarter economic contraction at least roused [...]

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Filibuster still in place.

Get ready for plenty of liberal howling over this outcome, because Harry Reid made the mistake of overpromising and underdelivering.  Reid’s vow to use the nuclear option to get rid of the filibuster turned into only a limitation on how many filibusters the minority can stage on one issue.  The filibuster otherwise lives — even [...]

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Five candidates.

Hugh Hewitt asks a question today that my editor at The Fiscal Times asked me earlier this week, although in slightly different contexts.  Normally after a national-election loss, the banner-carrier would remain as the nominal head of the opposition — even in the US non-parliamentary system.  The media certainly went to John McCain after 2008′s [...]

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Backseat Boehner?

The fiscal-cliff cycle of brinksmanship burnished the negotiating reputations of few people in Washington, but two figures did eventually gain credibility — Vice President Joe Biden, who elbowed Harry Reid out of the way, and Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who took up the reins when John Boehner’s Plan B strategy collapsed.  Look for that [...]

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"We didn't have this problem because we weren't taxing enough."

We are now officially in “extraordinary measures”-territory, i.e. we’ve hit our $16.4 trillion debt ceiling but the Treasury Department is using roundabout methods to service the debt until approximately the end of February, and the fiscal cliff fight was only the first of a multi-stage showdown. The debt-ceiling tussle is on par to get even [...]

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Surprise.

I’m a little under the weather today — a drag when you have family visiting from out of town — so we’re a little late getting a thread started on the Biden-McConnell fiscal-cliff deal.  The Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of the package, which deals with tax rates but pushes spending decisions out another two [...]

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The great leap Forward.

I think this is the moment when Harvey Keitel started running after the blue 1966 Thunderbird convertible at the Grand Canyon, isn’t it? Senate leaders are racing against the clock to reach a “fiscal cliff” deal the House and Senate can approve on New Year’s Eve. Leaders in the upper chamber narrowed their differences Sunday [...]

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Weird, right?

On the Senate floor on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell offered to give Democrats a chance to go on the record and demonstrate just how serious they are about averting the fiscal cliff by proposing a vote on the package that President Obama proposed last week. Take it away, McConnell: If the President’s proposal [...]

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Divine secrets of tooth-fairy thinking.

Well, why not?  George Miller did it in California in 1964.  Al Franken did it in Minnesota four years ago … we’re pretty sure, anyway.  Ashley Judd may become the next Hollywood star to try to gain a seat in the star-studded US Senate, according to Politico, perhaps as early as 2014: The Hollywood movie [...]

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The Senate Minority Leader weighs in!

As President Obama and the Democrats are wont to remind us, it is merely Republicans’ desire to prevent him from obtaining a second presidential term that motivates them to consistently thwart his august economic and political agenda — because, of course, the problem certainly couldn’t be that they perhaps take umbrage with any of the [...]

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Plus, worst wholesale numbers in three years.

Last week, Barack Obama tried changing the subject from a bad jobs report and a sinking economy by shifting back to his class-warfare strategy.  Insisting that the American people supported higher taxes on people earning more than $250,000 a year, he challenged Republicans in the House to pass a one-year extension on the other income-tax [...]

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Repeal?

Hostility toward the Supreme Court has risen sharply since Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. upheld the Obama health care law. People are apparently angry that the court didn’t rid them of a law they detest. But that’s silly. If Americans want to replace this thing, they should do it themselves… Republicans say they trust the [...]

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Abandonment?

If Barack Obama wants to go into electoral battle on the promise to hike taxes, he may find the ranks behind him thinning significantly.  The Hill reports that seven key Democrats in the Senate will block attempts to raise the income-tax rates for the highest-earning Americans without a comprehensive tax reform plan, which means that [...]

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Hey, who's up for amending the First Amendment -- twice?

Later today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will speak to the American Enterprise Institute on a subject that is beginning to rise to the top ranks of media discourse in this presidential election cycle — campaign finance reform.  Thanks to the proliferation of super-PACs, massive amounts of money will come into the election from both [...]

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