Tough future for Snowe as a Republican

It looks like Olympia Snowe could have a pretty hard time getting nominated for another term in the Senate as a Republican.

There are now more folks in her party who disapprove than approve of Snowe's job performance. 46% of GOP voters think she's doing a bad job to 40% who give her good marks.

Snowe is still pretty popular with the liberal/moderate wing of her party, earning a 64% approval rating from them. But even in Maine 68% of Republicans are conservatives and they give her just a 29% approval rating with a 56% majority disapproving of her.

White House communications director Anita Dunn will step down from her post at the end of the month and Dan Pfeiffer, her deputy, will take over, according to sources familiar with the move.

Dunn, a longtime Democratic media consultant, took over the job on an interim basis earlier this year when Ellen Moran abruptly left the post to take a job at the Commerce Department. Dunn will remain as a consultant to the White House on the communications and strategic ends.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/white-house/dunn-leaving-white-house-pfeif.html

November 10, 1775

Birth of the U.S. Marine Corps

During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress passes a resolution stating that "two Battalions of Marines be raised" for service as landing forces for the recently formed Continental Navy. The resolution, drafted by future U.S. president John Adams and adopted in Philadelphia, created the Continental Marines and is now observed as the birth date of the United States Marine Corps.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=7077

1993 - The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Brady Bill, which called for a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases.

November 10, 2001

Bush addresses the United Nations regarding terrorism

On this day in 2001, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush addresses the United Nations to ask for the international community’s help in combating terrorism around the world. He also pledged to take the fight against terrorism to any place where terrorists were harbored.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=52002

Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s national security adviser dismissed reports that the administration has reached a decision to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.

Obama hasn’t received final options that he has requested, neither has he reviewed those alternatives with his national security team, said National Security Adviser James Jones, responding to reports by the Associated Press and CBS News. The AP reported Obama would add “tens of thousands more forces,” while CBS said he plans to send four combat brigades plus thousands more support troops.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aZ71FJxCOJf4&pos=8

Koreas Exchange Fire in Naval Clash

South Korean warship shoots at North Korean navy ship as it passes disputed western sea border; North fires back    

November 9, 1906

Roosevelt travels to Panama

On the first foreign trip by a U.S. president, President Theodore Roosevelt departs the United States for Panama aboard the battleship Louisiana.

The visit came three years after Roosevelt gave tacit U.S. military support to the Panamanian revolt against Colombian rule. Panamanian independence allowed American engineers to begin work on the Panama Canal project--an effort to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with a U.S.-administered canal across the Isthmus of Panama.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=5508

November 9, 1970

Supreme Court refuses to rule on legality of Vietnam War

Remembering the Wall    [Hans A. von Spakovsky]

Not too long after the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, my wife and I visited Berlin. Crossing into what had been East Germany was like going through a time tunnel. It looked like it was still the 1940s. Through its physical environment, East Germany highlighted the difference between Western freedom and Communism. This difference was even more evident in Berlin. What struck me was the complete absence of color in what had been the Eastern Zone, which said quite a lot about the quality of life under communism.

West Berlin was full of bright colors, from shop windows and pennants flying on buildings, to the clothes worn by Berliners on the street. All of the buildings in East Berlin were gray and dirty. Some were still unoccupied and had bullet holes; they had never been repaired or renovated after the end of World War II. West Berlin was full of bright, sparkling vistas and shops filled with consumer goods of all kinds. East Berlin was dark and dingy. The few shops were empty of the everyday necessities and luxuries that give us the quality of life we enjoy. All of the differences between the liberty and prosperity of the free West and the prison conditions and poverty that characterized life behind the Iron Curtain were easy to see.

Even driving to West Berlin in our rental car was quite an experience. We were surrounded by Trabants — East Germany’s version of the Volkswagen, and one of the worst cars ever made (it sounded like a sewing machine). At that time, there were still only three highways leading into what had been East Germany. Close to the former border, a huge traffic jam on the autobahn brought the traffic to a stop. We got off the highway hoping that a secondary road would be a way around, but we ran into a major problem — the road ended when it got to the old border. All of the roads ended, except for those three major highways, because of the barbed wire and minefields that had divided Germany for more than 40 years.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmJjODZjMzBlODk3YWYzNDQ4ZWQ4NzAyMDBkYzAxYmY=

Club for Growth Wields Its Club in Florida Senate Race, Backing Rubio

Susan Davis reports on politics.

The potential for an ugly Florida Senate Republican primary just got a little bit uglier today after the antitax Club for Growth endorsed former House Speaker Marco Rubio in his bid against party favorite, incumbent Gov. Charlie Crist.

The move, while not unexpected, raises the stakes in the August 2010 primary that had seemed at first like Crist’s to lose. The governor remains the favored in recent polling, but Rubio has been able to narrow the gap in both polling and fund-raising in recent weeks.

The Club for Growth’s backing will provide both grassroots support and money for Rubio, who sits further to the right of Crist and has more support from the GOP’s conservative flank.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/11/09/club-forgrowth-wields-its-club-in-florida-senate-race-backing-rubio/

Several of my colleagues have weighed in today on the fall of the Berlin wall 20 years ago. I covered that event for The Post, and I have a graffiti-stained chunk of the wall to prove it. But to me the most interesting news today is not the anniversary gala in Berlin, but a smaller, more complicated yet still thrilling breakthrough in Baghdad: the passage by the Iraqi parliament of a law allowing national elections to go forward in January.

Sure, Iraq has had democratic elections before -- three of them since 2005. But the deal setting up this one, arrived at after months of haggling and several blown deadlines, broke some new ground. It mandates that the voting for the national parliament be done, as in this year’s local elections, according to an “open list.” That means voters will get to choose among individual candidates rather than selecting one party. The result should be less influence for sectarian coalitions that appeal to Iraqis to vote Shiite or Sunni or Kurd. An all-Shiite coalition took advantage of a “closed list” system in 2006 to gain a majority in parliament. Repeating that outcome has been a focus of Iranian diplomacy in Iraq this year.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/11/iraq_takes_a_big_step_toward_g.html

Obama's Afghan Plan: About 40K More Troops

CBS Exclusive: Sources Say Force Will Grow to 100,000 - Nearly Filling Gen. McChrystal's Request; Long-Term Stay Planned

(CBS)  Tonight, after months of conferences with top advisors, President Obama has settled on a new strategy for Afghanistan. CBS News correspondent David Martin reports that the president will send a lot more troops and plans to keep a large force there, long term.

The president still has more meetings scheduled on Afghanistan, but informed sources tell CBS News he intends to give Gen. Stanley McChrystal most, if not all, the additional troops he is asking for.

...

The first combat troops would not arrive until early next year and it would be the end of 2010 before they were all there. That makes this Afghanistan surge very different from the Iraq surge, in which 30,000 troops descended on Baghdad and the surrounding area in just five months.

Fred Kagan, the man who helped create the surge strategy in Iraq says this:

Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute says a slow motion surge will produce slow motion results.

"If they're going to be sort of trickled in very slowly over the course of a year than it's unlikely to have a very decisive impact in the course of 2010," he said.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/09/world/main5592551.shtml?tag=cbsContent;cbsCarousel

Iran Said to Ignore Effort to Salvage Nuclear Deal

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, attempting to salvage a faltering nuclear deal with Iran, has told Iran’s leaders in back-channel messages that it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for temporary safekeeping, according to administration officials and diplomats involved in the exchanges.

But the overtures, made through the International Atomic Energy Agency over the past two weeks, have all been ignored, the officials said. Instead, they said, the Iranians have revived an old counterproposal: that international arms inspectors take custody of much of Iran’s fuel, but keep it on Kish, a Persian Gulf resort island that is part of Iran.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/world/middleeast/09iran.html?_r=2

Here is Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill) who asks the question if ObamaCare is so good, then why penalize the people who don't want it:

In Baltimore, the 300 block of East 23 1/2 Street is getting patched up in time for winter. One economic stimulus program is paying to insulate 11 rental rowhouses, another is paying for furnaces and a third is covering the cost for reflective roofs to be installed by prison inmates in a job-training program.

The block is part of one of the biggest initiatives ever undertaken by the federal government, a nationwide push to improve the energy efficiency of buildings. But as the national unemployment rate crosses into the double digits and Republicans question the stimulus program's impact, the work on East 23 1/2 -- even with all of its activity -- has so far not produced a single job.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110603919.html?nav=rss_business

Two Profiles in Class    [Rory Cooper]

This past weekend, Americans were treated to two completely different profiles in class. First there was former president George W. Bush. On Friday night, George and Laura Bush traveled by car to Fort Hood to meet with the devastated families of last week’s tragedy. They specifically asked the base commander not to alert the press, and spent hours simply doing what they could to comfort the grief-stricken families.

The story was eventually uncovered, as these moments tend to be, but clearly President Bush did not see this as a personal opportunity, nor did he want to upstage the current president. The former president saw his interactions with wounded soldiers and their families as private moments.

Twenty-four hours later, President Obama was not at Fort Hood, but rather on Capitol Hill lobbying a private meeting of Democrats, who must not have known his position on health care. Obama told the lawmakers, according to Democratic congressman Earl Blumenauer in the New York Times: “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit [Democratic voters] and it will encourage the extremists.”

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTA4N2ExZDkyZmYyNTY3NThkNWY3YzczYTE3NDg1NWU=