Massachusetts

This is a surprising result from Public Policy Polling, the occasionally partisan group which nonetheless called the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races accurately. Mitt Romney’s favorable rating among Republican voters has fallen to 48 percent–a plurality, but a weak one. And the trend lines are even more interesting. Since April, when PPP started asking [...]

An Amherst Special Town Meeting approved a resolution last night welcoming one or two cleared Guantanamo Bay detainees to Amherst, Mass. — once Congress agrees to lift the latest bans on their transfer. The town of 30,000 residents says it’s the first municipality in the nation to officially welcome the detainees.
I reported earlier that Amherst [...]

The political wrangling over where Guantanamo Bay detainees are going to go is only getting more complicated — and stranger — as the president’s deadline for closing the U.S. detention facility by late January draws closer.
On Tuesday, the Senate voted 79 to 19 to allow the Guantanamo detainees to come to the United States — [...]

TPM has been all over the bizarre John Perry “military coup against Obama” column at Newsmax.com–an incredibly popular conservative site, as I discovered in my story on WorldNetDaily. The liberal BlueMassGroup blog has an interesting wrinkle. Scott Brown, the credible GOP candidate for the open Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat, has been running ads on Newsmax.com. [...]

Gov. Deval Patrick (D-Mass.) has named Paul Kirk, former Democratic National Committee chairman and aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), to fill Kennedy’s vacant seat until a special election is held in January to fill the seat permanently. The pick comes one day after the Massachusetts legislature changed the law to allow Patrick to name [...]

The Massachusetts State Senate has approved a bill that would alter the state’s Senate succession law to allow Gov. Deval Patrick (D-Mass.) to appoint an interim replacement for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). The vote was 24-16, with 11 Democrats voting with the five GOP members against the bill. Scott Brown, one of the [...]

Joe Kennedy II, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy who became a six-term congressman from Massachusetts, has passed on a run for his uncle’s Senate seat, even after a poll portrayed him as the clear favorite. But Joe Kennedy, a Libertarian Party activist, has thrown his hat in the ring. His reasons for running:
My [...]

This Suffolk University poll brings a little reality back to the question of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) open Senate seat. Three main findings:
1) After weeks of silly speculation about the chances of Red Sox hero Curt Schilling, an independent who backed George W. Bush and John McCain for president, it seems that Schilling [...]

I didn’t pay too much attention yesterday to the conservatives who tweeted or blogged untoward things about the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. It would have been bizarre if they hadn’t; he was, for decades, one of the most hated men on the left. And liberals didn’t pretend to have warm feelings about Jesse Helms when [...]

Unless Massachusetts passes a quick amendment to its constitution, the successor to the late Ted Kennedy will be chosen in a special election held, at the soonest, 145 days from now. John Gizzi has the most optimistic Republican spin on the race, keying off of the Democratic primary that will pit most of the House [...]