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The coming blame Obama backlash
As predicted, Clive Crook is blaming Obama for his political problems (rather than his staff as in the meme from a few weeks ago) without mentioning the fact that any president would struggle in the current economic and political context. Expect more of this if health care doesn’t pass and/or as the Democrats’ midterm polling
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Twitter roundup
From my Twitter feed: -Bob Somerby thrashes the dishonest paraphrases of Rachel Maddow -Alan Abramowitz predicts Democrats will lose 37 seats in the House, citing the standard midterm backlash and the number of seats Democrats have to defend as the main factors -Bernie Sanders attempts to win over climate skeptics with friendly comparison to Nazi
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More context on the use of reconciliation
Updating my previous posts on past uses of reconciliation, a New York Times article this morning by Jackie Calmes has what appears to be the most complete breakdown of the two parties’ use of reconciliation (updating Joshua Tucker’s previous estimate). Though there’s no shortage of hypocrisy on this issue, the punchline is that most previous
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Gaffney again Muslim-baits Obama
Via TPM, conservative apparatchik Frank Gaffney is promoting bizarre suggestions that President Obama’s missile defense policies are actually an attempt to submit the United States to Sharia law: Now, thanks to an astute observation by Christopher Logan of the Logans Warning blog, we have another possible explanation for behavior that — in the face of
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Reviewing the uses of reconciliation 1980-2008
Given the increasing likelihood that Congressional Democrats will try to use reconciliation to pass health care reform, it seems worthwhile to repost this table from a an April TNR article by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein showing that “[m]any of the reconciliation bills made major changes in policy”: Budget Reconciliation Bills Signed Into Law, 1980-2008
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Twitter roundup
Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!): –More evidence for the social construction of the “Al Gore sighed too much” narrative after the first debate in 2000 -Time to revise my priors downward on Democrats losing control of the House — the current state of the generic ballot is
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Lincoln Chafee falls for third party fantasy
Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent, commemorated the impending retirement of fellow Senate legacy admission Evan Bayh with an op-ed reviving the fantasy of a centrist third party: So I can certainly understand Senator Bayh’s remarkable decision to leave, but I also suspect that he’s not willing to give up on Washington. When he suggested recently that
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Hyping the gerrymandering/polarization link
Retiring Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh, retired Virgina Republican Tom Davis, and the center-right newsweekly The Economist (via Yglesias) have all recently cited gerrymandering of House districts as a major cause of partisanship and dysfunction in Washington. It’s DC conventional wisdom at this point. In reality, however, the evidence for the claim is weak. As I’ve
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Twitter roundup
Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!): –Prison sexual abuse is one of the great scandals of our time -Mitt Romney praises Dick Cheney’s “indefatigable defense of truth” in CPAC speech — no comment necessary -George Will writes that Sarah Palin is “not going to be president” and won’t
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The Drudge-hyped CNN “shock poll”
Matt Drudge is currently blaring this headline about a new CNN poll (PDF): CNN SHOCK POLL: MAJORITY SAY OBAMA DOESN’T DESERVE 2ND TERM Actually, the poll isn’t especially shocking. As The Hill points out, “52 percent of Americans said President Barack Obama doesn’t deserve reelection in 2012” — a number that is almost identical to