The most troubling thing about the rash of attacks, threats and vandalism directed toward Democrats is the fact that the Democrats are willing to speak about it publicly.
--Josh Marshall
An FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force has conducted a series of raids on a Christian militia group called 'Hutaree'. Seven have been arrested so far and will appear in U.S. District Court in Detroit tomorrow.
More Fun Where That Came From Update: Gawker digs up the Hutaree militia's page on MySpace.
--Josh Marshall
As I've mentioned at various times, I'm an iPhone user. And before that, I was an iPod user. (I've now consolidated into a iPhone-only lifestyle.) So even though I wasn't a super early adopter, I did (and do) have one of those early all-white, physical scroll wheel, boxy archeo-Pods that probably many of you had at one point or another.
--Josh Marshall
The White House has just announced that President Obama has made fifteen recess appointments, including several for hot-button nominees. These are appointees Republicans refused to allow votes on and for which the president's supporters have been pressing for recess appointees.
Notable on the list are Craig Becker to NLRB and Chai Feldblum to EEOC.
In arguing for the appointments the press release states: "President Bush had made 15 recess appointments by this point in his presidency, but he was not facing the same level of obstruction. At this time in 2002, President Bush had only 5 nominees pending on the floor. By contrast, President Obama has 77 nominees currently pending on the floor, 58 of whom have been waiting for over two weeks and 44 of those have been waiting more than a month."
Full press release after the jump.
--Josh Marshall
Eric Cantor's latest defense: I didn't know that the police had concluded the bullet in my (sometimes) office was randomly fired until after my press conference in which I said my office had been targeted.
You know it's bad when your fallback defense is reckless disregard for the truth.
--David Kurtz
At a Texas fundraiser today, Joe Biden rhapsodized about the swimming hole of his youth and giving the American people light. Really, it makes sense in context.
--David Kurtz
With today's announcement of a new nuclear arms treaty between Moscow and Washington, we look back at Hillary Clinton's just completed trip to Russia where the final groundwork was laid for the agreement:
--David Kurtz
Still trying to emulate one of the iconic moments of a decade they mostly despise, tea partiers under the banner of the Republican-consultant-created Tea Party Express will gather in Harry Reid's hometown this weekend for what they're dubbing a "Conservative Woodstock."
--David Kurtz
Kirsten Gillibrand seemed like one of the weaker incumbent senators going into the 2010 election cycle. She was appointed to the job by the now-disgraced Gov. Paterson. She'd only served little more than a single term in Congress when she was appointed. And she had some issue positions that worked for her upstate district but didn't necessarily fit that well for running statewide in New York. But somehow over recent months numerous Republicans and Democrats have sounded out a run against her, only to decide against it -- Ford, Zuckerman, Giuliani, McCarthy, Maloney, the list goes on and on. Is she an unstoppable force in politics? Evan McMorris-Santoro has the story.
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN): "100 percent of our economy was private" before September 2008.
--David Kurtz
The Richmond Police Department confirms to us this morning that the gunfire incident Minority Whip Eric Cantor described as a direct threat to himself was in fact a "an act of random gunfire" not targeted at Cantor at all.
--David Kurtz
Sarah Palin will be down in Arizona today helping to bail out John McCain in his primary against Rep. J.D. Hayworth. That and the day's other news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
--David Kurtz
The Washington Post today has a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, the 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama who last week posted a call for people to throw bricks through the windows at Democratic offices around the country to protest their votes for Health Care Reform. Whether the people who actually did this over the last week did so in reaction to his call to arms is not clear. But he's happy to take credit and others are crediting him too.
But Vanderboegh really is a classic exemplar of scream-at-your-TV tea-partyish extremism. A radical libertarian, champion of getting big government off the people's backs, his day job? Vanderboegh lives on government disability checks down outside of Birmingham, Alabama.
--Josh Marshall
It would be as foolish to say where things are going based on the last week as it was to make predictions on the same basis two or three weeks before. But I hope the current sense of turnabout (whether temporary or lasting) shows people once and for all the importance and transformative impact of winning. Big fights and wins don't deplete political capital; they create it.
--Josh Marshall
It's truly done. The House just passed the slightly modified 'reconciliation' fix bill by a 220-207 vote.
--Josh Marshall
It wasn't quite as bad as showing up this morning with a backwards B scraped on his cheek. But even so, it doesn't look like anybody's buying Eric Cantor's nonsense. Even the AP is coming about as close as their stylebook will allow them to come to calling him on his nonsense about the bogus attack he tried to float in this morning's press conference.
From the AP report ...
"A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I've received threatening e-mails," Cantor said. He refused to release details, however, saying it would only encourage more threats, and refused to take questions.Later Thursday, however, Richmond police said in a news release that the bullet had been fired into the air around 1 a.m. Tuesday. It finished its random arc back to earth at a sharp downward trajectory, breaking a window pane on the bottom floor of the two-story brick building where Cantor's campaign leases the top floor.
--Josh Marshall
The conservative American Enterprise Institute parts ways with David Frum after seven years -- and just four days after he called the passage of health care reform the GOP's "Waterloo."
--David Kurtz
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