For months, Breitbart News has noted that Senate Democrats face a difficult political terrain going into the 2014 midterm elections. Democrats are defending 21 seats against the GOP’s 14. While the GOP is favored in all of its races, Mitt Romney won seven states the Democrats are defending. The GOP needs a net gain of six seats to take control of the chamber. Recent retirements, coupled with the Senate’s lurch to the left, have opened up more paths for the GOP to take control.
Likely GOP Pick-ups: South Dakota, West Virginia
Long-time Senators Jay Rockefeller and Tim Johnson have announced their retirement from the two deeply-red states. These two Senators were uniquely able to win states that have been trending Republican for years. Mitt Romney won both by more than double digits. Popular former Governor Mike Rounds is already running in South Dakota. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, scion of a political dynasty, is running in West Virginia. Some organizations are looking for more conservative alternatives, but these two remain the presumptive favorites to win the nomination and the general.
U.S. Senator Tim Johnson’s announcement that he’ll retire after the 2014 election just made the Democrats’ job of holding their Senate majority a lot tougher.
Johnson, 66, the Senate banking committee chairman, is the second Democrat from a state won by Republican nominee Mitt Romney last year to say he won’t seek re-election in 2014. The announcement today means his party must defend two open seats and support five other Democratic incumbents running for re- election in Republican-leaning states.
U.S. Senator Tim Johnson, a Democrat from South Dakota, announced his plan to retire at the end of his term. Photographer: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg
“I will be 68 years old at the end of this term, and it is time for me to say goodbye,” Johnson said at a news conference in his home state of South Dakota.
In all, 21 Senate Democrats are running for re-election next year, compared with 14 Republicans. Only one Republican incumbent — three-term Senator Susan Collins of Maine — is seeking re-election in a state Romney lost. And, so far, Republicans must defend just two open seats, in Georgia and Nebraska, both of which Romney carried.
“The battle for the Senate will come down to Democrats’ ability to hold seats in Republican-leaning states,” said Nathan Gonzales, deputy editor of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report, based in Washington. “A lot depends on how popular the president is” next year “because if people are dissatisfied, their option is to vote against the president’s party.”
Shock: Claire McCaskill, Who Just Won an Election Four Months Ago and Who Now Doesn’t Stand Again for Re-Election for 6 Years, Suddenly Remembers She’s Pro-Gay Marriage. Well as far as I am concerned you can marry anything you want it still isn’t a marriage. And loving your horse doesn’t change anything in …
Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday said Dr. Ben Carson has the entire Democratic Party “scared to death” for several reasons.
“He is able to articulate and explain conservatism in a way that is persuasive, without raising his voice at all,” Limbaugh said. It sounds like your dad talking to you, not your dad, your best buddy talking to you.”
Should Carson ever decide to run for office, like his supporters want him to, the left would have a very hard time demonizing him, Limbaugh explained.
“Partially because of his race, but not just because he’s African-American,” he added. “You can say he’s all these horrible things, then you hear him, see him and listen to him and it doesn’t click.”
“He saves children with his hands. He saves their little brains.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein emerged from a closed-door meeting with Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday — but her ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines didn’t.
Mr. Reid turned down her attempt to bring her ban on 157 different weapons and ammunition clips aboard the Democratic Party’s comprehensive gun bill, Politico reported.
“My understanding is it will not be [part of the base bill],” said Mrs. Feinstein, California Democrat. “I would like to [see it moved], but the leader has decided not to do it. … You will have to ask him [why].”
Her bill instead will have to go forth separately or as an amendment — and that means it’s probably not going anywhere.
You wonder did Gov Cumo’s drop from 74% approve to 27% approve, seal the fate.
The case struck down the Illinois system of no carry without a permit, and permits on a “may issue” basis. The governor says he wants to appeal, the AG doesn’t want to. Like a family squabble, with the court awaiting the outcome.
Economist and author of “At The Brink”, John Lott Jr., joined ‘Wilkow!‘ Monday to discuss crime in the states with the strictest gun laws, the threats such laws pose to citizens employed by gun manufacturers, and the economic impact along with other negative side effects these gun laws are having at home.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Assault Weapons ban ‘Just the Beginning’.
“We’re not going to be able to win that — not now,” she said. “But background checks I think are going to, you know, address any kind of weapon.”
Mattera, again, pushed handguns as a point of conversation, noting that a full-throttle ban could never be secured, considering the Second Amendment’s current wording.
“I don’t know. I don’t know that we can’t,” Schakowsky said, going on to note that some municipalities in her district have banned handguns, seemingly driving home the point that there is support among select cohorts for more restrictive measures in this arena. ”I don’t think it’s precluded.”
I am confused, didn’t the District Court just order Illinois to issue their subjects concealed weapons?
Illinois Democratic Congresswoman Janice Schakowsky wants to make one thing very clear … the attempt to ban so-called ‘assault weapons’ is only the beginning of the planned attack on the Second Amendment.
Schakowsky made these comments to a reporter at the One Billion Rising Women’s Rights Rally in February.
Referring to the Sandy Hook tragedy as “a moment of opportunity,” Schakowsky went on to say that “everything [is] on the table … There’s no question about it. We’re on a roll now, and I think we’ve got to … push as hard as we can and as far as we can.”
When pressed on exactly what that meant, Schakowsky noted that her choice for the next ban would be handguns, followed by allowing individual communities to deny Second Amendment rights to those who live or travel within their boundaries.
Days before the March 1 deadline, Senate Republicans are circulating a draft bill that would cancel $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts and instead turn over authority to President Barack Obama to achieve the same level of savings under a plan to be filed by March 8.
The five- page document, which has the tacit support of Senate GOP leaders, represents a remarkable shift for the party. Having railed against Senate Democrats for not passing a budget, Republicans are now proposing that Congress surrender an important piece of its Constitutional “power of the purse” for the last seven months of this fiscal year.
As proposed, lawmakers would retain the power to overturn the president’s spending plan by March 22, but only under a resolution of disapproval that would demand two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate to prevail over an Obama veto.
The proposal would require — like the sequester — that no more than $42.6 billion of the cuts come at the expense of defense programs. But the elaborate, almost Rube Goldberg construct is already provoking sharp criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike and reflects a political scramble to escape the fallout from the sequester.
Who needs the democrat lite party. Like in pre-civil war America the WHIGS and the Democrats joined up and passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The Kansas–Nebraska Act divided the nation and pointed it toward civil war. Basically it changed the balance between free and slave states.
You never know what my former stupid party will do next.
Posted by tarpon 
