SurveyUSA has Republican Bob McDonnell with a sizable lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds in the Virginia governor’s race.
All the polls show a least a softening of Obama’s national numbers. But you may have seen right wing sites pushing the new Rasmussen index showing Obama deep into negative territory, with a dozen or so deficit in terms of approval vs. disapproval.
Look a little deeper though and you’ll see that Rasmussen is using a way of slicing the numbers he never used until quite recently, and one that no other pollster seems to use as his top-line measurement.
Eric Kleefeld phoned up Rasmussen and asked him what was up.
Remember all the talk about Hillary’s campaign debt? Her campaign committee is now in the black. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Jon Stewart is your guide on a tour of the recent right-wing craziness on the cable news nets.
How is New Orleans coping now? We take the pulse of the city, debunk some myths, and continue to write the history of what Harry Shearer calls the “greatest man-made engineering disaster in American history” as the TPMCafe Book Club features Cheryl Wagner’s Plenty Enough Suck To Go Around: A Memoir Of Floods, Fires, Parades, and Plywood, an often hilarious account of her bizarre three-year haul rebuilding her home and her life in New Orleans.
In addition to Shearer, Wagner (full disclosure: an old friend and high school classmate of mine) will be joined by Paul Tough, John McQuaid, Al Kennedy, and Charles Figley to discuss what it’s like in the city that America abandoned then forgot.
At our editorial meeting this morning, Eric Kleefeld flagged several recent polls that appear to show public opinion on health care is where I feel like it’s been all the way back to 1994 and before. That is, there’s broad public support for reform that creates universal or near-universal coverage but also enough concerns about costs, taxes and access to provide fertile ground for opponents to chip away and possibly destroy support for any real plan.
Wipe away all the spin and procedural mumbojumbo and it seems you’ll have an outline of a bill in both houses and then the month of August off where each side will battle to drive the narrative of public debate (in a generally dead news period) and try to determine how things are going to look in September. Read More
Rick Hertzberg seconds Tina Brown’s suggestion that Obama sic Bill Clinton on the Blue Dogs and get them chained up in the kennel.
You may have seen the front page story today in the Times about the top US military advisor in Baghdad who wrote a limited distribution memo circulated through US command in Iraq advocating a sped up withdrawal of US military forces. Not that it necessarily tells us anything about the quality of his Iraq analysis. But it turns out that the memo originated on a blog the colonel kept at Townhall.com where he also wrote (his only other post) a totally unhinged screed about Obamacare.