Month: October 2010

Your Liberal Media

The Headline:

Democrats Retain Edge in Campaign Spending

The Democrat’s Paragraph (emphasis added):

Even with a recent surge in fund-raising for Republican candidates, Democratic candidates have outraised their opponents over all by more than 30 percent in the 109 House races The New York Times has identified as in play. And Democratic candidates have significantly outspent their Republican counterparts over the last few months in those contests, $119 million to $79 million.

The Kicker (emphasis added):

Republican-leaning third-party groups, however, many of them financed by large, unrestricted donations that are not publicly disclosed, have swarmed into the breach, pouring more than $60 million into competitive races since July, about 80 percent more than the Democratic-leaning groups have reported spending.

See what they did there? By making a false equivalency, we can say the Democrat is wildly outspending the GOP when judged by individual candidate spending. But, of course, if you count in all the outside group spending, well, then, that uh, that tells a slightly different story. In fact, assuming these numbers are correct, the GOP is outspending The Democrat. One might even headline it:

GOP and Their Shadowy Enablers Outspend Democrats by Wide Margin

But that’s not important. Move along. Move along. Keep walking.

Come On, Myerson, $303 Ain’t Bad

Since 1980, it’s been a very different story. The economy has continued to grow handsomely, but for the bottom 90 percent of Americans, it’s been a time of stagnation and loss. Since 1980, the share of all income in America going to the bottom 90 percent has declined from 65 percent to 52 percent. In actual dollars, the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent flat-lined – going from the $30,941 of 1980 to $31,244 in 2008.

In short, the economic life and prospects for Americans since the Reagan Revolution have grown dim, while the lives of the rich – the super-rich in particular – have never been brighter. The share of income accruing to America’s wealthiest 1 percent rose from 9 percent in 1974 to a tidy 23.5 percent in 2007.

Looking at these numbers, it would be reasonable to infer that when the Tea Partyers say that they want to take the country back, they mean back to the period between 1950 and 1980, when the vast majority of Americans encountered more opportunity and security in their economic lives than they had before or since. Reasonable, but wrong. As the right sees it, America’s woes are traceable to the New Deal order that Franklin Roosevelt, working in the shadow of the even more sinister Woodrow Wilson, imposed on an unsuspecting people.

In fact, the New Deal order produced the only three decades in American history – the ‘50s, ’60s and ’70s – when economic security and opportunity were widely shared. It was the only period in the American chronicle when unions were big and powerful enough to ensure that corporate revenue actually trickled down to workers. It marked the only time in American history when, courtesy originally of the GI Bill, the number of Americans going to college surged. It was the only time when taxes on the rich were really significantly higher than taxes on the rest of us. It was the only time that the minimum wage kept pace (almost) with the cost of living. And it was the only time when most Americans felt confident enough about their economic prospects, and those of their nation, to support the taxes that built the postwar American infrastructure.

Come On, Myerson, $303 Ain’t Bad

I lied about accessing all of the computers. I then admitted about accessing the computers, but lied about what I was doing. Finally, I admitted what I did

Joe Miller, Tea Klan nominee for Senate. This certainly speaks to his bona fides for high office; it’s always a three-stage cycle: lie, lie about the details of said lie, admit the first lie (and declare it old news). The article also details the fact that he’s a tried and true ratfucker in the Rovian style:

Miller went on three of his co-workers’ computers to vote in an online poll, apparently connected with his failed effort to oust Randy Ruedrich as state Republican Party chair. Miller then cleared his colleagues’ computer caches to erase his tracks, in the process clearing out their passwords and saved websites.

But why no whisper campaign about Ruedrich’s sexuality? Amateur hour.

Six Things

All of which the Tea Klan have declared unconstitutional (bulletized for your enjoyments; click through for detail):

1) Social Security
2) Medicare
3) Minimum Wage
4) US participation in the United Nations
5) Unemployment Benefits
6) The Civil Rights Act

With the possible exception of the UN, these all poll in the ridiculously favorable range, so: Would it kill the DCCC or other national messaging group to make a 30 or 60 second commercial detailing this? Apparently it would.

Six Things

I disagree strongly with the concept of separation of church and state. It was not written into the Constitution. While we have a Constitution that is very strong in the sense that we are not gonna have a religion that’s sanctioned by the government, it doesn’t mean that we need to have a separation between government and religion. And so that, that concerns me a great deal.

Ken Buck, Tea Klan candidate for Senate from Colorado.
We’re going to have to start with phonics, and only then move up to vocabulary.

All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.

Choire Sicha, if that is his real name, discussing the process of starting (and popularizing) The Awl.

On Consensus

President Obama: [Democrats need to have an] appropriate sense of humility about what we can accomplish; [to that end, I pledge to] spend more time building consensus.”
Mitch McConnell, (R, KY): The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.