Sam Stein reports at HuffPo on evidence of new sleazoid right-wing sting operations cropping up. Stein explains a recent scam to entrap the Economic Policy Institute:

…When EPI’s President Lawrence Mishel was targeted last week in what appeared to be a conservative media sting operation, led by infamous saboteur James O’Keefe, it was a point of pride. The 25-year-old non-profit think tank officially has enough gravitas to be vilified.
“I’m honored to be the subject of their attention,” Mishel told The Huffington Post. “When we get attacked by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I tell my people, ‘Be proud.’ I never got listed by Glenn Beck. I felt left out because I feel like I’m an important person on the left.”
While it remains uncertain whether or not EPI has become the subject of one of O’Keefe’s undercover investigations — the list of past subjects includes ACORN, CNN, National Public Radio, Occupy Wall Street, and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) — several signs suggest that he targeted the think tank.

In another recent incident, Stein reports that Policy Matters Ohio was targeted for a phony bribe to see if they would twist data in a study for payment by a hedge-fund manager, who was supposedly affiliated with the Ohio Education Association. They gave a phony email address with the domain name “ohioedassoc.org,” which has nothing to do with the Ohio Education Association. Stein adds:

So who runs ohioedassoc.org? The website, according to online records, is registered to Shane Cory, the Acting Executive Director of Project Veritas. Reached by phone, Cory noted that he owns “hundreds” of domain names. Later he confirmed that this particular one was indeed owned by Project Veritas. “From there,” he added, “I really don’t know what’s going on.”

Project Veritas was started by James O’Keefe, according to Stein. Wonder where they get the money for all those domain names.
The moral blind spot of the right-wing scamsters who earn their keep on trickery and deceit is kind of pathetic. Even more regrettable, however, is the reluctance of mainstream conservatives to denounce their actions.

By now most Dems have surely read articles belaboring the point that what Democrats are struggling with now is not the Republican Party of Lincoln, Ike, Nixon, or hell, even Reagan or Goldwater. In his HuffPo post “The Rise of the Regressive Right and the Reawakening of America,” former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and adds some clarity to the argument and finds some hope for progressives in historic trendlines:

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today’s Republican right aren’t really conservatives. Their goal isn’t to conserve what we have. It’s to take us backwards.
They’d like to return to the 1920s — before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act…In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.
Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s — the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the “rot” is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).
In truth, if they had their way we’d be back in the late nineteenth century — before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons — railroad, financial, and oil titans — ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.
Listen carefully to today’s Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don’t help the poor or unemployed or anyone who’s fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

Reich is quite right. The term “conservatives” is a misnomer for this crowd. They are more accurately “regressives,” and maybe that’s what they should be called. Reich presents a capsule description of their consolidation of wealth and how it has brutalized the political system:

In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation’s wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America’s wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker’s wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers’ wage.
This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.

As discouraging as is Reich’s description of the underlaying economic and political dynamics associated with the rise of the “Regressives,” he concludes on a hopeful note:

Yet the great arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward. Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble; sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.
Look at the Progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities, and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s.
In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform….Perhaps this is what’s beginning to happen again across America.

It is important to be optimistic, and, yes, there are grounds for hope for progressives in the lessons of history. But everything depends on progressives not entertaining a passive hope for the best, but redoubling our activist commitment to fight the regressive narrative and project a more credible vision of the future.

Ah, some new data rendering the myth of the ‘liberal media’ into a pile of rubble. As Politico’s Keach Hagey reports on a new Pew Research study of “11,500 news outlets — including news websites and transcripts of radio and television broadcasts, at both the local and national levels — as well as hundreds of thousands of blogs”:

Sarah Palin put an end to her possible presidential candidacy this month with a familiar parting critique: President Barack Obama has an unfair advantage as a candidate because he’s got “about 90 percent of the media still there in his back pocket.”
…But a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, in the past five months, the reverse has actually been true: Obama has received the most unremittingly negative press of any of the presidential candidates by a wide margin, with negative assessments outweighing positive ones by four to one.
Pew found that just 9 percent of the president’s coverage was positive, while 34 percent was negative — a stark contrast to the 32 percent positive coverage and 20 percent negative that it found Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the most covered Republican, received.
“His coverage has been substantially more negative in every one of the last 23 weeks of the last five months — even the week that Bin Laden was killed,” Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said of the president’s treatment in the media compared with that of the GOP field.

The wingnuttiest Republicans got plenty of positive coverage, as Pew reports:

The top four most favorably covered candidates, the study found, were all tea party favorites: Perry was followed by Palin, with 31 percent positive coverage and 22 percent negative; Michele Bachmann, with 31 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative; and Herman Cain, with 28 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative…Mitt Romney’s positive and negative coverage were almost in a dead heat at 26 percent and 27 percent, respectively.

Of course there is always a cautionary note with this kind of data. Some publications carry a lot more weight than others, as do some stories. Associated Press stories, for example, tend to appear in hundreds of newspapers. Hagey quotes one AP story that put a negative spin even on the killing of bin Laden:

A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the street to wildly cheer President Barack Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decadelong manhunt. The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his reelection campaign.

Hagey goes on to show that, despite negative stories in the “liberal” media, Perry and Palin have gotten pretty positive coverage, according to the Pew data (Gingrich not so good). Ron Paul has done well on the blogosphere, but not as well in the MSM, while Herman Cain’s coverage has perked up considerably. Hagen quotes Newsweek analyst Jonathan Alter:

…Over the last 2½ years, Obama never got a honeymoon, if you actually look back into the early days of his presidency. He got very positive press on the first day, and he’s been in the scrum ever since…The truth about the American media is that we have gone, over the last 15 years, from something that could accurately be called a dominant liberal media — through the period of American liberalism, from the end of World War II to the founding of Fox News in 1996 — to a dominant conservative media in this country.

Moreover, President Obama is taking plenty of heat from the left flank inside his party, so the cumulative criticism is cited by both the left and right as proof of his growing unpopularity. Yet he still does much better in opinion polls than the Republican Party and surprisingly well in head-to-head horse race polls, considering the current economic situation.
Hagen closes with an inconclusive discussion about whether it is good strategy to attack the media for bias. But what remains clear is that conservative whining about ‘liberal media bias’ won’t find any verification in the best data out there.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The shape of the 2012 Republican presidential contest has now assumed a strange, shadowy form. The original front-runner, Mitt Romney, is the front-runner again, and is rapidly consolidating elite acknowledgment as the probable nominee. But his levels of actual support among GOP voters and conservative activists seem to have barely budged. Rick Perry, the political Leviathan who threatened to put the whole contest away just a month ago, is in deep trouble, bleeding support everywhere and alienating his Tea Party base with a toxic position on immigration. And Herman Cain, with little money and even less organization, has captured much of Perry’s hard-core conservative support with upbeat, crowd-pleasing oratory, a popular tax proposal, and the sheer incongruity of his candidacy. The key question, therefore, is this: Is conservative antipathy to Mitt Romney sufficient to fuel a Perry comeback, or make Cain a serious candidate for the presidency rather than the best-seller list? And if either anti-Romney effort remains feasible, which one will movement conservatives and their leaders choose?
During the last week, it’s become apparent that the Perry crash and Cain surge aren’t just a matter of some national polling phenomenon that is irrelevant to the actual task of winning early primary and caucus states. Two new polls of likely Iowa caucus-goers show Perry losing more than half his earlier support and sinking to fourth place, even as Cain leaps into first or second place with numbers similar to those sported by Perry at the peak of his own surge. Worse yet for Perry, one of those polls shows Iowa Republicans displaying not just a sense of being underwhelmed by the Texan, but active disdain (an approval/disapproval ratio of 38/41, as compared to 51/36 for Romney and 63/17 for Cain), most likely a product of ongoing anger over his violation of the newly established conservative litmus test requiring maximum hostility to illegal immigration.
What makes these numbers hard to interpret is the importance in Iowa of the money and organization needed to get supporters to endure a long, cold, winter evening of caucusing. Perry’s got money and organization to burn; Herman Cain has neither at the moment, but as the current favorite of Tea Party supporters in Iowa and elsewhere, he does have enthusiasm, which was enough to propel Mike Huckabee past Mitt Romney in Iowa during the last cycle. The positioning of the field in Iowa will be crucially affected by whether or not Romney takes the bait and decides to go for broke there, aiming for the kind of early knockout blow John Kerry achieved among Democrats in 2004. And local endorsements could matter, too. Senator Chuck Grassley has indicated he will probably choose a candidate quite soon, as could Governor Terry Branstad, Representative Steve King, an iconic right-winger and close friend of Bachmann who also happens to be Congress’ noisiest nativist (which should make Rick Perry nervous), and social-conservative kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats of the Family Leader organization.
Looking beyond Iowa, and given the likelihood that Romney will easily win both the Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the Perry-Cain rivalry, if it persists, will have a new dimension when the campaign moves to the South. Perry was presumed to be the dominant favorite in that region the moment he announced, but it’s also where Cain has some semblance of an organization to supplement the probable support of local Tea Party groups. A new American Research Group poll of South Carolina shows the national patterns taking hold in Dixie as well, with Cain edging Romney 26 percent to 25 percent, and Perry back at 15 percent (given ARG’s uneven reputation for accuracy, that finding should be taken with a grain of salt). The Palmetto State is another early primary venue where bigfoot endorsements could matter, particularly one by Senator Jim DeMint, whose national clout could theoretically make Cain viable, give back Perry his movement-conservative street cred, or signal the acceptance of Romney by a reluctant Right.
Indeed, DeMint’s decision mirrors the choices currently facing movement conservatives in this contest. Having moved the entire party decisively in their direction since 2008, they do not, as it turns out, have an ideal vehicle for living out their dream of making 2012 a successful “re-do” of the 1964 election, which gave them a true champion determined to roll back the New Deal and short-circuit the Great Society–but not a president. There are certainly a lot of signs that conservatives are increasingly confident they can beat Barack Obama no matter who they nominate, so Romney’s supposed superior “electability” doesn’t resolve their dilemma. And for people with a long series of grievances about broken Republican promises, the supremely untrustworthy Mitt would have to be a last resort. Cain is more their kind of candidate, and his improbable nomination would be a monumental and gratifying act of defiance aimed at political and media elites. But it’s by no means obvious Cain can clear the Palin Line of showing the minimum self-discipline, seriousness, and relevant experience that even movement conservatives respect. Perry, too, for all his own experience and fundraising prowess, has richly earned as much skepticism as Cain about his staying power, and is in danger of looking as untrustworthy to serious conservatives as Mitt when it comes to the issues.
The so-called Republican Establishment has largely made its choice of Romney, but for all their money and media influence, they can no longer impose a nominee on a united conservative movement. So between now and January, it’s gut-check time for the right, and we’ll soon know whether its leaders attempt to rig the game or just throw up their hands and let the rank-and-file roll the dice.

Greg Sargent’s Plum Line flags a new National Journal poll addressing “an epic argument over the core question of whether the Federal government can act at a time of severe national crisis to bring Americans relief from serious economic suffering.”
The poll indicates that “public attitudes on this question are in serious flux — which only raises the stakes for this showdown.” Sargent continues:

…The poll finds that the percentage of those who say that “government is not the solution to our economic problems; government is the problem” has edged up to 40 percent. That bolsters the widely made claim that skepticism about government’s ability to act to create jobs is perilously high for Democrats.
At the same time, though, a total of 56 percent wants government to play an active role in the economy. The rub is that 29 percent of those are not sure whether government can be effective in this regard, even if they want to see it try, anyway. Meanwhile, 27 percent do have confidence in government’s ability to regulate the marketplace. That’s unquestionably low — but there’s a sizable bloc out there (the 29 percent) that wants to be persuaded of government’s efficacy.

Sargent also makes it clear that, although President Obama gets blamed by nearly half of respondents for a “record deficit while failing to slow job loss,” there isn’t much for the GOP to cheer about in the poll, which was conducted 9/28-10/2.

…While the 40 percent who trust Obama to solve our economic problems is low, an even more abysmal 33 percent trust Congressional Republicans….42 percent say his policies are starting to move things in the right direction, and 11 percent say we’re significantly better off because of them, for a total of 53 percent — versus only 41 percent who buy the conservative argument that he’s made things worse….Also: Very solid majorities believe the Dem argument that a combination of Bush’s economic policies, and risky loans and investments by banks and investment firms, caused the crisis.

As Sargent concludes, “Public attitudes are very much up for grabs, adding to the urgency of winning this argument.”

At Five Thirty Eight, John Sides has the second installment of “The Moneyball of Campaign Advertising” (part one here) taking a skeptical view of the value of political ads, according to available data — except when a candidate is not well-known.
Dems, know thy adversary. Democrats involved in political analysis, strategy and messaging should check out GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz’s web page. Start here and keep reading and clicking.
Is the upper south trending blue? Kyle Trygstad’s “Latest Quinnipiac Poll Continues to Show Virginia Is Top Battleground” at Roll Call Politics taps a new Quinnipiac University Polling Institute survey to offer some encouragement to both the Obama and Kaine for Senate campaigns.
GOP bullying tactics don’t work so well in the granite state, reports the AFL-CIO blog’s Nora Frederickson. The Republican speaker Bill O’Brien got five of the GOP presidential candidates to pop off in favor of overriding Democratic Governor John Lynch’s veto of the so-called “right-to-work” bill. But after hearing from workers, the override effort flunked, and Bachmann got booed.
John Cassidy’s New Yorker article “Can Obama Win? Not This Way” makes a persuasive case that Obama campaign strategists’ belief that he can win without a strong showing in the industrial states is dangerously wrong.
Curious about top corporate/PAC contributors to Democrats and Republicans? OpenSecrets.org has the percentage breakdowns for the 2012 election cycle thus far.
Need a good soundbite on GOP Senators killing the one jobs bill that has popular support? “There are 14 million people out of work, wages are falling, poverty is rising, and a second recession may be blowing in, but not a single Republican would even allow debate on a sound plan to cut middle-class taxes and increase public-works spending.” So sayeth this New York Times editorial.
But the bill is about to be resurrected — in more palatable bites. Lisa Mascaro and Christi Parsons report from the L.A. Times D.C. bureau on the strategic considerations in their article “Democrats plan next step for Obama’s jobs package“.
Time Magazine Swampland reports that the latest Time/ABT SRBI poll has some good news for Dems. Asked “Regardless of how you usually vote, overall, which party…do you trust to do a better job in dealing with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years?”, 42 percent chose Democrats and 31 percent picked Republicans, with 18 percent saying “neither.” In addition, a total of 54 percent of respondents said they had a “somewhat favorable” or “very favorable” opinion of the Wall St. protests and 68 percent said “the rich should pay more taxes,” while 73 percent favored tax hikes on millionaires.
Jamison Foser at Media Matters has a provocative post “The Symbiotic Relationship Between “Moderate” Republicans And The Tea Party,” which faults ‘moderate’ GOP Senators, who “deserve far more blame than they get for Washington gridlock and the continued failure to fix urgent problems…” He calls out Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, along with Mass. Sen. Scott Brown as particularly blame-worthy for political gridlock because they know better. Ditto, says Foser, for GOP House members in swing districts.

The following article by political strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The Occupy Wall Street movement really frightens the Right Wing. It is not frightening to the Right because of Congressman Eric Cantor’s feigned fear of “the mob” that is “occupying our cities.” It is not frightening because anyone is really worried that Glenn Beck is correct when he predicts that the protesters will “come for you, drag you into the street, and kill you.”
That’s not why they are really frightened — that’s the Right trying to frighten everyday Americans.
There are five reasons why the Right is in fact frightened by the Occupy Wall Street movement. None of them have to do with physical violence — they have to do with politics. They’re not really worried about ending up like Marie Antoinette. But they are very worried that their electoral heads may roll.
•All elections are decided by two groups of people:
•Persuadable voters who always vote, but are undecided switch hitters. This group includes lots of political independents.
•Mobilizable voters who would vote for one Party or the other, but have to be motivated to vote.
The Occupy Wall Street Movement is so frightening to the Right because it may directly affect the behavior of those two groups of voters in the upcoming election.

Read more…

This item is cross-posted from Salon.
After fierce but inconclusive battles in Wisconsin, the great labor struggle of 2011 is now centered in that ultimate swing state of Ohio. A richly funded national right-wing effort to break the economic and political power of the labor movement in its Midwestern heartland is now facing a ballot test in a Nov. 8 referendum to affirm or overturn a union-busting law, known as Senate Bill 5.
As in Wisconsin and other states, conservatives in Ohio have focused their fire on public-sector unions, which are easy to identify with unpopular levels of government spending and taxation. But just as there is little doubt the assault on public-sector unions this year is part of a broader effort to weaken collective bargaining rights and undermine labor’s political strength, efforts to repeal Senate Bill 5 will depend on the solidarity of private-sector union members who are not directly affected by the legislation, but can see the handwriting on the wall.
The heart of Senate Bill 5, as enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by GOP Gov. John Kasich, is a set of provisions limiting collective bargaining by public employees to wage and hour issues. Strikes by public employees (who constitute nearly half the state’s unionized workforce) would be banned, as they already are for police and fire department employees. Pensions and benefits, and a variety of ancillary issues affecting conditions of employment, such as class sizes for teachers, would be permanently off the table.
Of equal importance is a provision banning “fair-share” assessments from non-union members who benefit from union collective bargaining efforts, a step that would seriously damage incentives to join public-sector unions. This is perhaps the most obvious feature of Senate Bill 5 that might set a precedent for future attacks on private sector unions in Ohio and on unions in other states. Nationally, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing state right-to-work laws banning “union shops.” Some, including, so far, at least two Republican presidential candidates, are even promoting a national right-to-work law.
Proponents of SB 5 are trying mightily to claim the legislation is mainly about “runaway” pensions and benefits, and often tout a provision requiring public employees to pay at least 10 percent of the cost of pensions and 15 percent of the cost of healthcare premiums. Unfortunately for this argument, many if not most public employees already contribute to pensions and benefits at this level or more. Just as important, public employee unions in Ohio and elsewhere have traditionally sacrificed wage increases to pension and benefit needs. Indeed, in 2008 alone, Ohio public-sector unions made $250 million in wage and benefit concessions to state and local governments.
The conservative talk about disparities between public and private-sector employees is a transparent ploy to drive a wedge between the two wings of the labor movement, while distracting attention from the more egregiously anti-union provisions of the SB 5. Polling has shown the benefit and pension issues are the only provisions of SB 5 that are reasonably popular.
These efforts certainly have not worked at the level of union or political-party leadership. The drive to repeal SB 5, spearheaded by a union-funded umbrella group called We Are Ohio, has conspicuously featured private-sector union leaders. This weekend, a Columbus-area phone-bank and door-to-door canvassing effort was personally led by Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen, with strong participation from other private-sector unions ranging from the Steelworkers to the Plumbers & Pipefitters to the Food and Commercial Workers.
Mike Gillis of the Ohio AFL-CIO told me that building trades unions, who fear an effort to kill Project Labor Agreements ensuring union jobs for major public works projects, are also very active in the repeal campaign. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed Kasich’s approval ratings among voters in union households to be deeply “underwater” with 27 percent positive and 68 percent negative. And beyond the union ranks, the Ohio Democratic Party has been an unambiguous opponent of SB 5 from the beginning.
The apparent strategy of conservative anti-union activists to target public-sector employees as a less-popular “weak link” in the union ranks is based on questionable assumptions. Though there is little in the way of public polling on this subject, a February 2011 Pew survey showed public- and private-sector unions having almost identical favorable/unfavorable ratings from the public at large. The poll found 48 percent have favorable view of private-sector unions with 37 percent negative. For public section unions, the figures were 48 percent favorable, 40 percent unfavorable.

Read more…

From Greg Sargent’s The Plum Line, before yesterday’s vote on the American Jobs Act: “In an interview with me this morning, Greenberg made a strong case that moderate Senate Democrats in red states would be foolish and shortsighted if they vote against the American Jobs Act today…He argued that moderate Democrats who vote against it are actually imperiling their own reelection chances.”

“They reduce their risks for reelection by showing support for a jobs bill that’s going to be increasingly popular as voters learn more about it,” Greenberg said. “They have to be for something on the economy, and this the kind of proposal they should support. If I were advising them, I’d say you want to be backing a jobs bill with middle class tax cuts paid for by tax hikes on millionaires. Moderate voters in these states very much want to raise taxes on the wealthy to meet our obligations.”
…”Voting No would increase their risk of losing,” Greenberg said bluntly. “Democrats would look divided on their central agenda. In the end you all go down with the ship here. Why would you send Democrats back to the Senate if they are divided on the most important issue facing people? Here you can show unity and purpose, which Democrats have not had an opportunity to do during budget negotiations.”

Asked by Sargent about the President’s popularity numbers as a possible reason for Democratic defections, Greenberg responded,

“It’s a long time until the election, and the President’s standing can go up,” he said. “If the Democrats are divided and have a weak vote on the jobs bill, then moderates will only hurt themselves.”

In the first Senate vote on whether to allow “full consideration” of the $447 billion jobs bill, just two Democratic Senators, Ben Nelson (NB) and Jon Tester (MT), “who each face tough reelection bids,” voted with Republican Senators, all of whom opposed allowing a floor vote. Although they succeeded in preventing full consideration of the act, more votes on specific measures of the act are expected soon.

Kevin Drum’s “Rich People Create Jobs,” at Mother Jones provides a handy guide to five must-shred myths Dems will have to address to do their best in 2012.
Eric Lichtblau’s New York Times article “Protests Offer Help, and Risk, for Democrats” reviews the complexities of the relationship between Democrats and the Occupy Wall St. Protesters. Robert Reich has some insights on the topic as well.
Naomi Klein delivered an inspiring speech to the OWS demonstration, urging the protesters to remain nonviolent and “…this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.”
If you haven’t yet seen Alan Grayson’s KO of P.J. O’Rourke’s limp attempt to trivialize the Wall St. protests, Digby’s got the transcript and video.
In his WaPo column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. takes America’s most widely-read columnist, George F. Will, to task for setting up a “straw colossus” in his poorly-supported attack on Elizabeth Warren. “My colleague has brought out his full rhetorical arsenal to beat back a statement that he grants upfront is so obviously true that it cannot be gainsaid. Will knows danger when he sees it.”
And Warren’s fund-raising prowess is proving to be as impressive as her ability to rally progressives, as Sean Sullivan reports at Hotline on Call.
John Nichols has an update in The Nation, reporting on the drive to recall Wisconsin’s union-busting Governor Scott Walker — and his efforts to get control of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board, which oversees “the pettioning, the voter registration, the voter-identification rules, the vote counting, the recounting, everything…”
The Occupy Wall St. Protest is rapidly approaching tea party levels of news hits, owing in part to clashes with the police, and Nate Silver has the numbers and charts to prove it in his Five Thirty Eight NYT blog.
According to Mark Blumenthal, “…President Obama large-sample national tracking surveys show that the level and intensity of Obama’s overall approval rating among blacks remains largely undiminished.”