Chris Christie, the Republican nominee in this year's race for governor of New Jersey, apparently has determined not to make property taxes a central issue of the campaign against Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine and instead to focus on corruption. And this is proving to be a costly decision.

"That decision could be the one that ends up sinking [Christie's] campaign," says Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth University's polling institute.

I say "apparently" in describing Christie's strategy because, while it is beyond dispute that his campaign has failed to make property taxes a central issue of its platform so far, it is not necessarily true that the campaign has no plans to make tax reform the focal point of the fall campaign.

It is at least possible that the Christie campaign has made a decision to hunker down through the hot summer months, when only a relatively small segment of New Jersey voters are paying attention, and instead save its ammunition for a concentrated burst in the final weeks of the campaign.

Who will run the Republican Party's rebuilding in New York during the crucial 2010 election cycle, when the governorship, two U.S. Senate seats, and control of the legislature (and the redistricting that goes with it) is up for grabs?

New York's GOP chairman, Joseph M. Mondello, yesterday announced that he would leave his state party position and instead focus exclusively on a post he first won in 1983 and which he has held to this day -- chairman of the Nassau County Republican Party.

Views of Mondello's success or failure as GOP state chairman vary, depending on whom one asks. Establishment Republicans (the attitudinal, if not linear, descendants of the Dewey/Rockefeller wing of the party) seem to think he did a mediocre-to-poor job, while more conservative Republicans (the attitudinal, if not linear, descendants of the Buckley wing of the party) clearly think less of his two-year tenure.

Fans of Friday Night Fights may be in for a treat on a Tuesday night -- if they happen to be residents of the Virginia's 8th congressional district.

Tomorrow evening at 7:00 PM in the auditorium of the South Lakes High School at 11400 South Lakes Drive in Reston, Virginia, Rep. James Moran will hold a town hall meeting to discuss "current efforts in Congress to reform our nation's health care system."

Joining Moran will be a special guest, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

That's right -- the two most short-fused and hot-tempered men in the national Democratic Party are going to be together in the same room, fielding questions from constituents on the most volatile subject matter since Dan Rostenkowski, at a Chicago venue called The Copernicus Center, 20 years ago "learned that the earth does not revolve around the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee."

Is this what awaits the nation after the debut of "Dancing with the Stars," starring the never-before-known-to-be-a-hoofer Tom DeLay, AKA "The Hammer?"

Praise the Lord, and pass the smelling salts.

Lawrence O'Donnell is a jerk.

And I don't mean the Navin Johnson character created by Steve Martin, I mean a real jerk, the kind of guy who, in the words of Denis Leary's fabled (but close enough to obscene that it's not appropriate for family listening) song, "has fun at someone else's expense."

Wednesday evening, subbing for Chris Matthews as host of MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews," O'Donnell interviewed Katy Abram, the woman who stood up to Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Specter) at his recent health care town hall meeting.

"Katy Abram, I know you're not a regular at this stuff, and you don't do it every day, so, take it easy, we're just going to go through some simple questions about this."

That was how O'Donnell introduced Mrs. Abram to his audience, his voice like silk, as smooth as the guy Sade sang about 25 years ago.

Will someone please pass this message to the people running the Republican Governors Association: "Please, sirs, stop running the inane negative spots attacking Jon Corzine, and instead start running positive spots building up Chris Christie?! Or, at the very least, if you insist on running attack spots, could you at least run attack spots that might actually have a chance of working?"

I've written before about the strategic imperative facing Republicans who want to win this year's contest for New Jersey governor: To do so, they first must win the war over GOP nominee Chris Christie's image.

Virtually every likely voter in the state knows and has an opinion about Corzine, the incumbent Democrat -- according to the latest survey from the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, for example, only 6 percent of the survey sample said they hadn't heard enough about Corzine to form an opinion.

I'm a conservative, so that title could work for any number of pieces I might want to write.

In this instance, I'm referring to an exchange on last night's edition of MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews," which begins at about 9:27 into this clip featuring Matthews interviewing Rep. Bob Inglis and Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips:

Matthews: The conservatives talk reasonably when Democrats get in power, and say, "Well, we have an alternative that's more free market, it's less onerous, it's less, you know, big shot, big government stuff, and I accept all that. But when you guys are in power, you don't do anything on health care. And that's what happens, and that's why, for, God, almost a century of foot dragging on this. The Democrats get in power, whether it's Truman, whether it's Bill Clinton, or it's Hillary Clinton, or it's Barack Obama, they try something, it fails, because you guys are good at playing negative politics. You're really good at destroying Democrats' plans, chances to reform. But when you get in power, when you have George W. Bush in there, with both houses of Congress, or you've got Reagan in there, with complete ideological control, you don't do anything on health care."

Really?

Well, the new survey from the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute is out, and the race for New Jersey governor is tightening: GOP challenger Chris Christie clings to a 6-point, 46 percent to 40 percent lead over incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine, with independent candidate Chris Daggett drawing 7 percent of the vote.

That's a significant movement from the July 14 survey, which showed Christie leading Corzine by 47 percent to 38 percent, with Daggett at 8 percent.

"Significant movement" when it's just a 3 point difference? Yes, it's significant, when 3 points is the difference between a 9-point lead and a 6-point lead. In that difference, the 3 points represents a 33 percent cut -- so Corzine's team can say, "We've cut Christie's lead by a third."

Plus, in a poll where the margin of error is plus or minus 2.9 percent, that 6-point lead begins to look even smaller -- because it might just be a 3-point lead, and there's still 12 weeks to go.

Why in the world would a powerful former committee chairman and current ranking Republican of a committee as powerful as Energy and Commerce want to throw away his House clout, only to become the most junior member of the United States Senate, ranking behind even Roland W. Burris and Al Franken?

That's the question that has Capitol Hill veterans scratching their heads as they read about Texas Republican Joe L Barton's possible interest in making a play for the U.S. Senate seat soon to be vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison, who has signalled plans to resign the seat to focus on her contest with Texas Gov. Rick Perry for the 2010 Texas GOP nomination for governor.

CQ Politics' Greg Giroux has one idea -- under Texas's quirky law on special elections for U.S. Senate seats, Barton could make the run without having to give up his House seat.

"If at first you don't succeed ... wait two decades for a new Congress, and then try again."

If that credo isn't matted, framed, and hanging on the office wall of Rep. John P. Murtha, it should be.

On July 22, Murtha's Defense Appropriations Subcommittee reported out a $636 billion appropriations bill that included funding for new airplanes in which the Air Force could ferry Members of Congress around the world.

Dear Flag@whitehouse.gov,

In re: your Tuesday request that I forward to you any information I might have on "fishy" emails or "casual conversations" that might come to my attention regarding President Obama's health care reform proposals, please be aware that on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 5, 2009, at 1:08 PM, I received an email from "President Barack Obama" -- the actual email address was "info@BarackObama.com" -- that made a couple of spurious (some might say "fishy") claims.

First, of course, I need to point out that the individual who sent this email may or may not actually be President Barack Obama.

After watching coverage last night of Bill Clinton's meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, and reading more coverage this morning of his trip to recover two American journalists who had been held prisoner by the megalomaniac's regime, I'm sure I'm in good company when I say I'm concerned about the potential fallout from the whole exercise.

I am speaking, of course, about what the future holds for Jesse Jackson -- because I cannot think of anyone who is less happy with Bill Clinton today than is Jesse Jackson.

First, Clinton beat Jackson to the punch in the presidential sweepstakes, twice winning where Jackson twice had fallen short, and earning for himself the title "America's First Black President."

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs suggested Tuesday morning that angry protesters showing up at the town hall meetings held by members of Congess are in fact some kind of manufactured opposition, presumably being driven not by their opposition to the Democrats’ plans for health care overhaul, but instead by their service to some corporate master.

“I hope people will take a jaundiced eye to what is clearly the Astroturf nature of grass-roots lobbying,” Gibbs said in this morning’s gaggle. “The Brooks Brothers brigade … appear to have rented a similar bus and are appearing together at town hall meetings throughout the country.”

House and Senate Democratic leaders are sending members home for the August break equipped with information on health care overhaul efforts to share with constituents. The talking-points cards list faults of the current system, benefits of the proposed plan and the plan’s effect on specific districts. Members have been encouraged to hold town hall meetings to discuss the issue.

How long will it be before Gibbs is linking his “Manufactured Opposition Theory” to the story of Jack Bonner and forged letters of opposition to the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate change bill?

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Check out New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine's latest television spot.

Is it just me, or does this leave you with the impression that the incumbent has caved to pressure from powerful Democratic Party bosses, and announced his decision to let Barack Obama run at the top of the ticket with Corzine as lieutenant governor?

This ad is notable for four things:

1) It's Corzine's first positive ad of the campaign season.

What started with a trickle on the morning of July 31 — one article in a small, local newspaper — had by that afternoon swelled into a raging torrent, with major play in left- wing blogs like the HuffingtonPost, DailyKos, and TPMMuckraker, then coverage in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Politico.

That same afternoon, a House committee chairman was promising a show trial — scratch that, “investigation” — tailor-made for the fall ratings sweep period, and nearly-naked left-wingers were protesting outside the Washington, D.C., offices of one of the nation’s premier corporate grass-roots lobbyists.

This deluge now threatens not just the continued existence of one boutique lobbying firm, but the ability of members of a political minority to exercise their First Amendment rights to petition their government.

Last week, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported that Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello — a freshman elected in a 2008 upset of longtime Virginia conservative Democrat-turned-more conservative Republican Virgil H. Goode Jr. — was on the receiving end of six letters urging opposition to the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate bill.

Some years ago, a lawyer whose client's story was so explosive that everybody in the media wanted to get a piece of him decided to do five Sunday morning talk shows, all on the same day.

Thus was born Doing a "Full Ginsburg."

A few years later, in a Senate race in New Jersey, a candidate quit the race just 35 days before the election -- long after the statutory deadline -- and got the state's Supreme Court to let him get away with it.

Thus was born Pulling a "Torricelli."