News Roundup, 5/9/08: Strike Two for Cornyn

For those of you who thought our original reporting on just how close the Texas Senate race may be might have been some sort of fluke: Believe it.

The Research 2000 poll was commissioned by Daily Kos, and the crosstabs over there show some interesting details. Among those are Cornyn's high unfavorables and low level of "no opinion," which Josh mentions, as well as Bush's 37% approval rating and how the percentage voting for either Democrat against John McCain is practically identical no matter who is picked.

That last point jibes well with what some prominent Texans were saying yesterday about party unity. The Dallas Morning News story on the subject features a veritable Who's Who of longtime Texas Democrats.

In other state news, Governor Rick Perry is eyeing tax rebates for Texas residents, in the same train as the current federal economic stimulus plan, as one of the options for spending a $15 billion state budget surplus next year. Which I'm sure would sound like a much better idea if it wasn't for the fact that we don't have a $15 billion surplus, at least by the accounts of the state comptroller's office which has for a while now been saying it will be around 30 percent less. I suppose you could say the Republican economic slogan across all levels of government lately has at least been consistent: "Spending Money We Don't Have."

The Michigan Democratic Party signed off yesterday on the plan floated previously by Senator Carl Levin and other prominent Michigan Democrats to apportion their delegates so they can be seated in the national convention. The state will be asking the national party's Rules and Bylaws committee to approve a 69-59 delegate split in favor of Clinton, effectively halfway between a 50-50 split of 64 candidates each and the 73-55 split that originally would've gone in Clinton's favor.

John Boehner's stirring up GOP congressmen by starting an advisory board for the National Republican Campaign Committee to help deal with any "problems" that may arise in targeted areas — a move which was apparently intended to help party unity, but has met with a good deal of skepticism by his Republican colleagues. Guess if the rest of the cycle's been any indication, they're going to be keeping pretty busy. I wonder if Vito Fossella's New York district is on that list of "problems." He's had a pretty rough past few weeks.

Oh, and by the way, you don't have to feel guilty about getting your news from The Daily Show. You really don't. Jon Stewart's show is political satire, and to get political satire you have to know and understand the context for the satire in the first place. (Which I'm sure doesn't have anything to do with why more liberals watch the show than conservatives...) The assertion has been made before and has some common sense behind it, but now it has numbers to back it up as well.

In international news, a few countries ran into each other yesterday at a popular meeting spot for multinational Middle Eastern conflicts. Syrian Hezbollah fighters took control of western Beirut yesterday in an effort to oust the majority Sunni government, prompting tempers to flare and accusations to fly between Iran and Israel.

And Russia's new president, Dmitry Medvedev, apparently wanted to make one of his first acts as chief diplomat the removal of two military attaches from the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Nobody's talking yet as to why the action was so quickly requested, though it may have something to do with our expulsion of a Russian military attache two weeks ago.

Josh has an audio interview up with Isabel Zermeño, convention director for this year's Democratic convention, and Grace interviews McLennan County Party chair John Cullar. Enjoy, and thanks for reading.