Jamelle Bouie

To jump off of Tim’s post, a new Mason-Dixon poll shows Marco Rubio leading with 45 points to Charlie Crist’s 28 and Kendrick Meek’s 24: As his opponents argue over who should abandon their bid for U.S. Senate, Republican Marco Rubio is cruising toward the finish line, according to a new poll by Mason-Dixon Polling […]

Riddle me this blogosphere, why does anyone take David Brooks seriously as a political prognosticator when he writes transparently wrong things like this: The current sour mood is not just caused by high unemployment. It emerges from the fear that America’s best days are behind it. The public’s real anxiety is about values, not economics: […]

Tea Party candidates plan to buck the party leaders once they get to Washington: Insurgent Republican candidates hoping to win election to the United States Senate have made one thing clear: They are not coming to Washington to make friends. […] But, while these potential new members of the Senate defeated establishment-favored GOP contenders in […]

There was nothing really remarkable about President Obama‘s appearance on The Daily Show last night — it was mostly boilerplate — but it’s worth noting how much he called out the filibuster as a critical problem in passing progressive legislation: “I will tell you that a couple of things have in our politics are going […]

This, I think, is the key paragraph in Robert Draper‘s profile of Robert Gibbs: Panic-stricken Democrats, fearful of losing both the House and the Senate in this month’s elections, can console themselves with a perspective check. “Every president has a communications problem,” says former Clinton senior adviser Joel Johnson, who points out that at this […]

Radley Balko wants a little less democracy in the criminal justice system: But there is one change that could at least stop the bleeding: less democracy. As New York Times reporter Adam Liptak pointed out in a 2008 article, America’s soaring incarceration rate may be largely due to the fact that we have one of […]

This should have been obvious to everyone paying attention: More than half the members of the Blue Dog Coalition—the organization of moderate to conservative Democrats in the House—are in peril in next week’s election, a stark indicator of how the balloting could produce a Congress even more polarized than the current one. […] Of 54 […]

The Department of Education wants educators and administrators to take bullying a little more seriously: In a 10-page letter to be sent on Tuesday to thousands of school districts and colleges, the Department of Education urges the nation’s educators to ensure that they are complying with their responsibilities to prevent harassment, as laid out in […]

Frank T. Caprio, the Democratic nominee for governor in Rhode Island, hasn’t received President Obama‘s support, and doesn’t really want it anyway: “He could take his endorsement and really shove it, as far as I’m concerned,” said Frank T. Caprio, who is locked in a three-way race that includes former senator Lincoln Chafee, who is […]

Another way to describe Rand Paul supporters: As the candidates arrived, a group of Paul supporters pulled a female MoveOn member to the ground and held her there as another Paul supporter stomped on the back of her head and neck. According to the Louisville Courier Journal, “Lauren Valle of MoveOn.org approached Paul and tried […]