I got an inkling that something was amiss when our assistant editor suggested I add mention of Where The Wild Things Are to this post. So I informally polled the 20somethings on our team and sure enough Maurice Sendak was not a top-of-the-brain name for them. Some hadn’t heard of him, for others it rang a bell but wasn’t immediately clear who he was. This despite the 2009 motion picture treatment of Where The Wild Things Are (which raises another point: In The Night Kitchen doesn’t get its due).
Were children of the ’80s not saturated with Sendak the way we were in the ’70s? Is my sample size too small? For what it’s worth, Shel Silverstein was more familiar to this cohort. So maybe there is hope? Read More
A big Washington Post story last week reported that the economic dislocation of the last four years had significantly reduced Hispanic and African American voter registration numbers nationwide. Under economic distress, uprooting and relocating, a lot of minority voters simply hadn’t managed to re-register. That makes intuitive sense, and it’s the kind of subterranean socioeconomic or demographic shift that can have big impacts on election outcomes.
But the story of those registration numbers is actually a bit more complicated than that. The raw Census data the Post relied on isn’t the best proxy for voter registration, an expert in the field tells TPM. Another tell that there may be more to this story: rather than using the Post piece to exhort its legions of field operatives and volunteers, the Obama campaign is dismissing it.
Brian Beutler has our story.
Checking in from the coop, TPM Reader SB reflects on Obama’s gut check moment …
This whole framing of the difference between Romney and Obama on the auto bailout really highlights their personalities. At the time of the bailout, I think general sentiment was, “Screw the US automakers. They made terrible decisions and should pay the price.” At least for me and my group of progressive friends. Honestly, I was angry at the US automakers.
Besmirching the dead isn’t my style, even when the decedent in question was a heavily armed neo-Nazi white supremacist who stands accused of murdering four people, including a toddler, before turning his gun on himself.
But I don’t think it’s unfair to J.T. Ready to point out that the FBI says it’s looking into a number of unsolved shootings of immigrants in the Arizona desert during the time Ready was leading a band of border guard vigilantes.
Was he involved? No evidence has emerged yet that he was, but authorities are investigating that possibility. For now though, Ready has been cleared in one of those killings, a double homicide last month.
The Obamas reading Where The Wild Things Are last month on the White House lawn.
It ain’t that often that a potent political attack happens to be true both in the deep sense of substance and in the often more important sense of word play. President Obama took a big gamble continuing and upping the massive auto industry bailout that began fitfully under President Bush. The fact that Mitt Romney wrote a oped at the deadline with the jarring headline “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” is probably enough to skewer him in the court of 30-second ads and speech gotcha lines. Read More
Romney tells Cleveland TV station: “I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.” Watch.
Big question for November: will big drop offs in black and Hispanic voter registration doom Obama?
Maybe not as much as the numbers suggest.
Santorum releases 11 pm email endorsing Mitt Romney.
(Bonus title with biblical allusion.)
Something very weird just happened on the Israeli political scene. Or perhaps it’s better to say, something even weirder than usual.
Israel was in the midst of preparing for new elections in September, ones called by Prime Minister Netanyahu from a position of relative strength and ones that showed every sign of returning him to the Prime Minister’s office, quite possibly with a more stable majority. Read More