Okay, I’ve got quick thought experiment for you. I’m about to show you a picture. Don’t go below and click yet. I need to prep you first.
When you look at the picture, don’t look at the caption. And just give the picture a quick, momentary glance and give me your first impression of who’s in the picture without giving it too much thought.
Ready? Okay, click this link.
Can we talk more about how House GOP budget chief Paul Ryan wants to phase out Medicare in addition to Social Security? Thank you.
Here at TPM we’re really interested to figure out just what Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-For the Moment) is up to. Normally, a write-in campaign is a desperate move doomed to failure. But a lot of weird stuff has happened this year. So I’m not ruling anything out. Of most interest to me is that Murkowski’s lines of attack on Tea Partier Joe Miller are garden-variety Democratic attacks — he’ll get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Department of Ed., etc.
I wanted to pick up thread from last week about just what the Dems are thinking on whether or not to push this tax cut vote. TPM Reader NB thinks it’s a matter of character rather than strategic clarity. But I think we’re talking about two sides to the same coin. First, NB …
You say you see a “lack of strategic clarity” in Dem failure to grasp the potential advantage of forcing a vote on the tax question, but I think there is a character issue involved, linked with a fundamental misunderstanding of how attack politics work. As a communications consultant who works with a lot of advocates, we coined the term “beaten dog syndrome” to describe a generation’s worth of Democratic electeds and operatives who have so internalized GOP attacks that the mere suggestion that they are coming cause these people to involuntarily cower. It’s just ingrained, and it’s pathetic.
That’s the ruling by the official arbiter of these things, the National Bureau of Economic Research. After reviewing all of the revised and updated data, the NEBR concludes that the recession lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, making it the longest recession in the period since World War II. The NEBR cautions:
In determining that a trough occurred in June 2009, the committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity. Rather, the committee determined only that the recession ended and a recovery began in that month.
For its own analytical purposes, the NEBR would treat any economic downturn subsequent to June 2009 as a separate and unique event from the Great Recession.
I don’t agree with TPM Reader JB, but wanted to share JB‘s take with all our readers:
I am writing about the post titled “Inspires Confidence” on the TPM Editors Blog.
White House strenuously denies NYT report that it is considering getting aggressive about winning the midterm elections.
If Linda McMahon (R-WWE) can close the gap against Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D), Dems should just run for the hills.
It’s a sign of something, though what I’m not entirely sure, that of all the endearingly nutty things that have come out about Christine O’Donnell over the last week, the one that seems to be causing her some genuine grief on the right is the news that she “dabbled into witchcraft” before making her hard right turn into evangelical Christianity and the sexual purity movement. There’s even some chatter that the witchcraft revelations may have been the trigger to her decision to cancel on the weekend shows, though there doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence for this or way to distinguish this possibility from all the other reasons she had to back out of the appearances.
Michelle Malkin counters attacks from the right by noting that O’Donnell’s admission of dabbling in witchcraft was part of her explanation for her opposition to Halloween, making her into a sort of Whitaker Chambers of the Occult. “She responds by explaining that she opposes witchcraft because she has had first-hand experience with what they do. So, she tried it. She rejected it. And she learned from it.”
Far from being a political liability, O’Donnell’s own experience of witchcraft makes her anti-Halloween advocacy more urgent, informed and compelling.
An interesting speculation from TPM Reader MH, building on Christina’s article on Jim Demint …
Re Jim DeMint vs the GOP establishment: what DeMint is doing now may be pointing the way to our congress’s future– 18th-century British-style factionalism, something you’re familiar with academically.
Look at the relatively new elements coming into play: the rise of PACs, 529s, and other conduits that have no necessary connection to a major-party structure, together with the unshackling of really big-time money thanks to our supreme court, and the perfecting and spread of astroturf organizing practices. This can tremendously empower the kind of factional or regional differences that have always existed within the parties– it potentially brings in rafts of new money and makes it available to individual empire-builders like DeMint, who can use it to cultivate their own circles of adherents, clients, connections, or whatever you want to call them.