E.J. Dionne’s op-ed today takes on the conventional wisdom about taxes and debt in a way few progressive or Democrats in the media or politics dare. The news peg is the two right-wing “TABOR” measures, which would have severely restricted state spending in Washington state and Maine, both of which went down badly on Election [...]

Charlie Crist is at least acting like a man in some trouble. He has seen the teabagger army bearing down on his seat, and he has seen the head of the NRSC bck down to the mob and vow to stay out of primaries even where they’ve endorsed a candidate, like they have with Crist [...]

This is pretty big news that shows the institutional power of the tea party conservative base. In the wake of last night’s disaster in NY-23, John Cornyn, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the GOP campaign arm for Senate races, announced that his organization will not endorse or spend money in “contested primaries.” [...]

So, you might have noticed that I took an interest in the elections last night. The scoreboard was that Democrats lost the Governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia, won a nice pickup in NY-23 where they hdn’t been in office since 1871 and took a seat in CA-10 with an ideological shift toward a [...]

Pretty much all you need to know about the wing of the party Doug Hoffman and conservative activists are fully embracing today. From the indispensable Dave Weigel: “I was at the tea party, but see, I don’t, this is a bit too slow of a process for me. I’m more on violent side. I’m more [...]

Via John Amato, the teabagger activists in NY-23 are illegally intimidating local residents at the polls. I just got off the phone with former state Democratic Chairwoman June O’Neill, who informed me the police had been called to at least two polling sites in St. Lawrence County due to overzealous electioneering (O’Neill called it “voter [...]

There’s going to be a lot of talk about winners and losers in the media this week after today’s elections. Before knowing the outcome, I think it’s clear who one loser is – Florida Governor Charlie Crist. The success of the conservative movement in driving out a moderate Republican in NY-23 will embolden that same [...]

An eye-opening new report from the Democratic-aligned research organization Democracy Corps suggests that conservative Republicans, the majority of the GOP base, harbor a well-developed, consistent, peculiar worldview about President Obama and his “hidden agenda” for the country. Armed with “facts” from conservative media, these individuals, fully 2/3 of the Republican Party at this point according [...]