Clearly the economy is the first, second and third issue in this year’s election. But I don’t remember a Democrat in a presidential race ever so clearly outpolling the Republican as this time. Look at these numbers. It helps to the be the incumbent. But it’s not just that.
Not only is Mitt Romney’s record on the individual mandate out of step with the Republican Party, but there is no one on his side of the aisle that can or will come to his defense on that issue.
GOP Governor (MI-R) vetoes series of vote suppresion/vote ID laws. “Voting rights are precious and we need to work especially hard to make it possible for people to vote.”
At the time, GOP’s Pavlovian response to the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act ruling was so predictable, it almost seemed worth ignoring.
But that was Thursday — political eons ago. In hindsight it seems like it was a pretty big error. Actually, it looks like amateur hour. It shouldn’t have taken Washington’s top Republican operatives more than a few minutes to recognize that attacking the mandate as a tax would put Mitt Romney in an even more uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the Affordable Care Act than he’s already in and, implicitly, give John Roberts and the Supreme Court a pass on the legal argument.
That strikes me, again in hindsight, as an obvious lose-lose. Read More
Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) publicly questions whether his Democratic opponent Tammy Duckworth, who lost two legs in Iraq, is a true war hero.
Police seek charges against former Commerce Secretary John Bryson for last month’s hit and run incident.
I never much cared that Andy Griffith occupied a mostly earnest, irony-free zone as an entertainer.* Still loved his whole schtick. Our memorial slideshow. Read More
No getting around that Team Romney and national Republicans are not on the same page about trumpeting Obama’s individual mandate as a tax. It’s for reasons that have less to do with the politics of the moment than with Mitt’s repeated descriptions over the years of his own mandate in Massachusetts as a tax. One GOP strategist we talked to about the channel conflict uses the elegant euphemism “message dichotomy.”
The NYT on renowned climate scientist Lonnie Thompson and his cohort of researchers:
Dr. Thompson, 64, is one of the most prominent of the generation of scientists who, in the latter decades of the 20th century, essentially discovered the problem of global warming. Now those scientists are beginning to age out of the field. Many of them say they grapple with the question of how hard to keep pushing themselves. Could one more finding or one more expedition help turn the tide of public awareness?
Deeply affecting Rolling Stone piece on the recently dispossessed and now homeless American middle class that defies your expectations and stereotypes.