Steve Benen

Today’s edition of quick hits: * Apparent hate crimes in NYC: “A wave of arson attacks spread across eastern Queens on Sunday night, and the police said the firebombings were being investigated as bias crimes — with Muslims as the targets. No one was hurt in the four attacks, in which homemade firebombs were apparently […]

Byron York had an interesting report the other day on the process Mitt Romney went through before running for the Senate. He noted, for example, that the Massachusetts Republican traveled to Salt Lake City in 1993 in order to brief several leaders of his church about the policy positions he intended to take. That in […]

We talked earlier about a fascinating exchange during last night’s “60 Minutes” on CBS, when Lesley Stahl noted that Reagan raised taxes and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s press secretary threw a fit. It appears my post wasn’t well received by some on the right. To briefly recap, Stahl and Cantor were talking about the […]

As regular readers may know, I place very little stock in Rasmussen polls, but given yesterday’s discussion about whether we’re seeing the worst Congress in American history, I found this amusing. A new Rasmussen report of likely voters has Congress’ approval rating (people believing they are doing an “excellent” or “good” job) at an unimaginably […]

Campaigning in Iowa today, Mitt Romney took a relatively new tack in going after President Obama, characterizing the president as having promised to be a savior to the entire planet. “I’ve been watching some clips of President Obama, then candidate Obama, when he was going across Iowa four years ago,” Romney said. “And the promises […]

As part of an aggressive Republican “war on voting,” GOP policymakers in much of the country are putting new hurdles between Americans and their election process. The most common — and arguably most odious — are mandatory voter-ID laws, intended to block traditional Democratic constituencies (African Americans, students, the poor, the elderly) from participating in […]

Over the weekend, Rick Santorum told an Iowa audience, “Diversity creates conflict. If we celebrate diversity, we create conflict.” It seemed like an odd thing for a presidential candidate to say. The line does, however, help explain a bit about how the Republican presidential candidate thinks. (via Jamil Smith) “Having that strong foundation of the […]

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that won’t necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * As the Republican race in Iowa gets closer, the same cannot be said about New Hampshire. A Suffolk University poll released yesterday shows Mitt Romney with more than double the support […]

As Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann sees it, the key to turning around her collapsing campaign is talking up a military confrontation with Iran. The Minnesota lawmaker, who is courting conservative voters in Tuesday’s caucuses, said she would put U.S. missiles “on alert” and consider a blockade against the oil-rich nation in an effort to […]

Every year, tens of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants graduate from American high schools, but are quickly stuck — they can’t qualify for college aid, and they can’t work legally. America is the only home they’ve ever known — in most cases, they were, at a very young age, brought into the country illegally by […]