Inside politics

JERSEY GAME

“In what could become the highest profile game of political musical chairs in the state, Democratic sources claim they are considering replacing U.S. Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg with outgoing Gov. Jon Corzine,” according to the Hudson Reporter, a New Jersey newspaper.

“It would work like this: Corzine would resign prior to January, when Republican Christopher Christie takes over as governor. A Corzine resignation would allow state Senate President Richard Codey to serve as acting governor. Then, Lautenberg would retire from the U.S. Senate, leaving Codey to name Corzine to fill the seat until a special election,” the newspaper said at www.hudsonreporter.com.

“This is similar to a move made when Corzine resigned the Senate to become governor, when he named then-Rep. Bob Menendez to fill his own seat.

“The move would prevent Christie from being able to name a replacement for the aging Lautenberg and would give Corzine a leg up as a Senate incumbent in the special election next November.”

SPEAKING OF GOVERNORS

Savvy Republican Governors Association Chairman Haley Barbour of Mississippi thinks the “tea party” anti-tax activists of 2009 will be Republican voters come 2010.

In a teleconference with reporters at the start of the RGA annual meeting in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday, Mr. Barbour recalled that more than 80 percent of those who voted for independent presidential candidate and budget hawk Ross Perot in 1992 voted for Republican candidates in the Republican congressional sweep of 1994.

“I don’t think there’s anything automatic in politics,” Mr. Barbour said. “Republicans just can’t take it for granted that all those [tea party] people or most of them will vote for us.”

But he recalled that the national Republican Party worked hard to woo Perot voters in the mid-1990s and predicted the party would have a similar success with tea-party voters unhappy with the Obama administration’s tax and health care policies.

With breakthrough victories in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races earlier this month, Mr. Barbour said he saw a “target-rich environment” for GOP candidates in the 37 governors’ races set for November 2010, with the RGA expecting to spend more than $25 million to back its candidates.

RECIPE FOR DISASTER

“I have long thought it would be a good idea to bring 9/11 mastermind” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed “and his accomplices to lower Manhattan,” Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens writes.

“In my concept, the men would be taken by helicopter to a height of about 1,000 feet over ground zero and pushed out the door, so that they, too, could experience what so many of their victims did in the awful, final flickering seconds of their lives,” Mr. Stephens said.

“And since al Qaeda intended the attacks as a spectacle for the benefit of its would-be recruits, I’d give al Jazeera the exclusive TV rights.

Story Continues →