It’s Cory Booker’s race to lose | The Fix - Washington Post

"With Republicans unable to land a top-tier candidate, the real action is in the Democratic primary, and two new polls show Booker with a huge early lead.

According to a new Rutgers-Eagleton poll, Booker leads Rep. Frank Pallone 55 percent to 9 percent, with Rep. Rush Holt bringing up the rear at 8 percent.

And a new Quinnipiac University poll shows very much the same picture, with Booker at 53 percent, Holt at 10 percent and Pallone at 9 percent."

Read more at The Washington Post's The Fix blog.

Blue Jersey:: Upendra Chivukula Running for Congress in CD7

From Blue Jersey:

"[Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula] is Deputy Speaker in the Assembly, where he has served in the Assembly in the district stretching across Middlesex and Somerset for 10 years. He is an electrical engineer by education, and was council member then mayor of Franklin Twp. (Somerset) before his election to the Assembly.

Chivukula is first Indian-American elected to the New Jersey General Assembly in its history, and only the 4th Indian-American in the United States to be elected to state office."

David Frum: Why our government is broken - CNN.com

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum pens an excellent column on how politics has changed from the 1950's to the 1980's to today:

"Under the old rules, there were certain things that political parties did not do -- even though theoretically they could. If one party controlled the Senate and another party controlled the presidency, the Senate party did not reject all the president's nominees. The party that controlled the House did not refuse to schedule votes on the president's budgets. Individual senators did not use secret holds to sway national policy. The filibuster was reserved for rare circumstances -- not as a routine 60-vote requirement on every Senate vote.

It's incredible to look back now on how the Reagan tax cut passed the Democratic House in 1981. The Democratic House leaderships could have refused to schedule votes on Reagan's tax plans. Instead, they not only allowed the tax plan to proceed -- but they allowed 48 of 243 Democrats to break ranks on the key procedural vote without negative consequences to their careers in the Democratic party. (Rep. Dan Glickman of Kansas, for example, who voted for the tax cuts would rise to become Secretary of Agriculture under President Clinton.)

Hard to imagine Speaker John Boehner allowing his Republicans to get away with similar behavior on a measure proposed by President Obama."

Although I personally think he conveniently avoids the issue of how usage of the filibuster has became so prominent (Republican senators after the 2006 Democratic takeover of both Houses of Congress), the column is an excellent read on how our politics got to where it is today.