From DCorps Stan Greenberg:
In our latest video, James and I discuss the challenges facing the Republican Party on the eve of critical debates over the budget and the debt ceiling. The Republican Party has a serious brand problem, and it keeps getting worse. The GOP is viewed unbelievably negatively, and even Republicans themselves agree that it is deeply divided.
Polls show the Republican brand problem manifesting itself in the Virginia gubernatorial race, and in Senate races across the country. And if Republicans damage their brand even worse by shutting down the government, we think they could trigger a revolt that might even imperil their House majority in 2014:

Democrats have improved their prospects for holding their Senate majority, with the entry of a solid candidate into the WV senate race for the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Jay Rockefeller. In their post, “Tennant Moves the Needle in West Virginia,” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley, two of the more astute election-watchers, explain:

…Secretary of State Natalie Tennant (D) will reportedly enter the contest Tuesday morning. Her entry, which has been rumored for months, gives Democrats a credible opponent for Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R, WV-2), the likely Republican nominee. We are changing the rating in this race from Likely Republican to LEANS REPUBLICAN. With a successful statewide elected official now running, Democrats have kept the race on the competitive board, but it would still be a significant surprise if Republicans fumbled away one of their best pickup opportunities in the country.
…After graduating from West Virginia University in 1991…Tennant spent many years as a TV reporter and anchor in Charleston and Clarksburg. She was comfortably elected and reelected as secretary of state in 2008 and 2012, respectively, and this will be the second time she’s run for office “from safety” in the middle of her term in office. In running an uphill Senate race, Tennant is risking a third statewide defeat: She lost the Democratic nomination for secretary of state in 2004, and in 2011 she finished third in a special Democratic primary election for governor.

Skelley and Kondik caution that the likely GOP opponent, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, is seasoned and well-connected and the state GOP is only slightly divided by tea party factions. They rate Capito the favorite to win in a state that has been trending Republican in recent years. However, Capito has a problematic track record, which raises questions about her credibility and inconsistency.
It won’t be a cakewalk against Tennant, a media-savvy Democrat who has won statewide elections on two occasions and has an intimate knowledge of state voting patterns, as a Secretary of State. Those who read up on Tennant’s salt-of-the-earth narrative won’t have much trouble envisioning an upset win.
The writers also review the GOP’s prospects for a U.S. Senate takeover, which contains a lot of dicey “ifs,” and conclude:

Democrats remain small favorites to hold the Senate, but control of the chamber is very much in play. Ultimately, Tennant’s entry in the race might not be enough to keep Capito from ascending to the Upper Chamber, but it could tie down Republican resources that might be better used in some of these other contests. That’s important in a cycle where Democrats are largely playing defense.

Tennant does not yet have an ActBlue page, but those who want to help should visit her well-designed campaign web page.

As a result of the horrific massacre in Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yard, the NRA and its political minions have suddenly eased off gloating about the Colorado vote in which a very small minority of eligible voters recalled two supporters of gun control from the state senate.
The massacre, in which a man who had a history of disturbing incidents with guns reportedly killed 12 people and wounded at least 8 others with an AR-15 assault weapon, a semi-automatic pistol and another unspecified gun, has evoked new calls for gun control. Senator Diane Feinstein’s statement on the massacre got straight to the point:

There are reports the killer was armed with an AR-15, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol when he stormed an American military installation in the nation’s capital and took at least 12 innocent lives…This is one more event to add to the litany of massacres that occur when a deranged person or grievance killer is able to obtain multiple weapons-including a military-style assault rifle-and kill many people in a short amount of time.
“When will enough be enough?
“Congress must stop shirking its responsibility and resume a thoughtful debate on gun violence in this country. We must do more to stop this endless loss of life.”

Senator Jay Rockefeller echoed the call: “We are becoming far too familiar with senseless, tragic violence. This is the seventh shooting since 2009, and these repeated incidents demand our attention.”
The NRA declined comment on Monday. Later on, they are expected to regurgitate the “a good guy with a gun is the only way to stop a bad/crazy guy with a gun” and “the real issue here is weak national security” memes. With respect to their argument that not much can be done about people with psychological derangement getting guns, however, Eugene Robinson responds in his WaPo column:

Opponents of gun control argue that, instead of infringing Second Amendment rights, we should focus on the fact that most, if not all, of these mass shooters are psychologically disturbed. But many of the officials who take this view are simultaneously trying their best to repeal Obamacare, which will provide access to mental health services to millions of Americans who are now uninsured.

Earlier this year legislation to curb gun violence, including mental health reforms and bills to provide stronger background checks and restrict high-capacity gun magazines failed in congress shortly after the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school massacre. In response, Vice President Biden announced that the Administration is taking executive action, which does not require congressional consent: As CNN’s Adam Aigner-Treworgy reports:

The first action closes a loophole that could allow individuals prohibited from purchasing certain restricted weapons to do so legally by registering them under the name of a trust or corporation. Calling this “an easy way to evade the required background checks,” Biden said this new proposed rule, issued by ATF, would require individuals attempting to register firearms under a trust or corporation to be subject to the same background checks as individual gun purchasers…”Last year alone there were 39,000 requests for transfer of these restricted firearms to trusts or to corporations,” Biden said.
The second action addresses U.S. military firearms sold or transferred to foreign allies. Currently the government must approve any re-importation of these weapons back to the United States, but the rule announced Thursday would deny nearly all such requests. The vice president said that since 2005, the government has approved the transfer of more than 250,000 of these firearms.
“We’re ending the practice of allowing countries to send back to the United States these military weapons to private entities,” Biden said. “Period. Period. The new policy’s going to help keep military-grade firearms off our streets.”

The reforms are welcome, but are small-scale in a nation that has more guns than people. Thus the Vice President emphasized that legislative reforms remain the “best way to reduce gun violence.”
“If Congress won’t act, we’ll fight for a new congress,” Biden said. “It’s that simple.” That’s the unavoidable challenge advocates of a sane firearms policy must accept to put an end to the NRA’s political bullying.

The next time some pious politician parrots cliches about the glories of ‘the free market,’ you may want to respond with some of the points former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich makes in his HuffPo post, “The Myth of the ‘Free Market’ and How to Make the Economy Work for Us“. As Reich sets the stage:

One of the most deceptive ideas continuously sounded by the Right (and its fathomless think tanks and media outlets) is that the “free market” is natural and inevitable, existing outside and beyond government…And whatever ways we might seek to reduce inequality or insecurity — to make the economy work for us — are unwarranted constraints on the market’s freedom, and will inevitably go wrong.
By this view, if some people aren’t paid enough to live on, the market has determined they aren’t worth enough. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of Americans remain unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they work two or three part-time jobs with no idea what they’ll earn next month or next week, that’s too bad; it’s just the outcome of the market.
According to this logic, government shouldn’t intrude through minimum wages, high taxes on top earners, public spending to get people back to work, regulations on business, or anything else, because the “free market” knows best.

Such is the pablum Americans are spoon-fed from childhood on. But Reich takes an interesting angle on the term:

In reality, the “free market” is a bunch of rules about (1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); (2) on what terms (equal access to the internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections? ); (3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?) (4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); (5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on.
These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them.

Reich adds that “If our democracy was working as it should, presumably our elected representatives, agency heads, and courts would be making the rules roughly according to what most of us want the rules to be.” In reality, however,

Instead, the rules are being made mainly by those with the power and resources to buy the politicians, regulatory heads, and even the courts (and the lawyers who appear before them). As income and wealth have concentrated at the top, so has political clout. And the most important clout is determining the rules of the game…Not incidentally, these are the same people who want you and most others to believe in the fiction of an immutable “free market.”

Reich’s take on ‘free market’ mythology is something all good social studies teachers should use to challenge their students, starting in jr. high/middle school. As it is, most young people are not exposed to anything that challenges free market mythology until/if they get to college, if then. Educators who are serious about teaching critical thinking should put Reich’s essay at the top of their reading lists.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. sheds light on the Colorado recall of two state senators who supported modest gun safety laws: “[Colorado state Senate President John} Morse also cautioned proponents of stricter gun laws around the country not to read too much into a low-turnout election. He stressed the impact of a court decision that effectively barred mail-in ballots in the contests. Since 70 percent of Coloradans normally vote by mail, the ruling gave the highly energized opponents of the law a leg up. The latest count showed that Morse was defeated by only 343 votes, although Giron’s margin of defeat was wider.”
You knew progressives opposed making Larry Summers the new Fed chair, but “Wall Street types and business economists” too? According to Tim Mullaney’s report on a USA TODAY survey, “56% of the 42 economists said they preferred Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen for the top job. Conservatives who favor a good sound business administration wanted the quiet, liberal academic Yellen because she’s closely identified with easy-money policies that have served Wall Street well.”
Nothing glazes the eyes over so quickly as discussions of the intricacies of budget battles, critically important though they are to the quality of life experienced by millions of Americans. At Huffpo Sam Stein’s “Democrats Torn Over Strategy For Government Shutdown Fight” explores the debate over the budget baseline and the concerns of progressives about setting the bar too low. “Our argument is that it should not be ok to accept this spending level, not even in the short run,” said Michael Linden, Managing Director for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress…”It seems to me it would be a real mistake for Democrats to help Republicans pass something that basically endorses the sequester … the continuing resolution should be agnostic on the sequester…”
From Susan Page’s USA Today report on the latest Pew Poll on Obamacare: “There has been a full-court press from Day One from the opposition to characterize and demonize the plan,” says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, who wrote about the GOP efforts in a 2012 book about Washington he co-authored, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. “The campaign against the law after it was enacted, the range of steps taken, the effort to delegitimize it — it is unprecedented. We’d probably have to go back to the nullification efforts of the Southern states in the pre-Civil War period to find anything of this intensity.”
Bloomberg’s Ford Vox, a physician at at the Shepherd Center for brain and spinal-cord injury in Atlanta, has a devastating portrait of Georgia Governor Nathan Deal’s war on Obamacare, which leaves 650,000 citizens of his state without any help getting health care coverage. Vox writes that “Deal is leading the bandwagon of largely Southern state leaders in blocking implementation of the health-care law,” even though “Georgia’s governor was for state-based health-insurance exchanges before he was against them” and “he declared that it was his “hope” that the committee would find a way for the state to so. His change of heart came in November 2012, after Real PAC started raking in large donations from the health-care industry.”
But Devin Leonard’s BloombergBusinessweek Politics & Policy post on “Obamacare’s Corporate Boosters” includes some good news for those who see Obamacare as a positive step toward separating health security from employers: “…As the House GOP continues to push the line that Obamacare is bad for America and bad for business, some of the nation’s largest employers are undermining the message. Bloomberg News reports that General Electric (GE) plans to curtail benefits for some of its retirees and move them into government-run health-care exchanges. More recently, IBM (IBM) and Time Warner (TWX) said they would steer some of their retirees into privately run health-care exchanges. How long will it be before they simply give their employees a yearly check and let them shop for coverage on government-run exchanges?”
Lauren Fox’s US News post “In Montana, Democrats Might Have Found Their Guy” addresses Dems’ prospects for holding the senate seat being vacated by retiring Max Baucus: “Several Democrats in the state confirm John Walsh, Montana’s lieutenant governor, is now the top recruit who will make his final decision in upcoming weeks. He spent time in Washington this week meeting with party leaders…Walsh, a member of the Montana National Guard, an Iraq War veteran and a bronze star recipient, breaks a lot of stereotypes…”It’s an exciting turn of events,” one Democratic operative says. “You look at John Walsh and you see a salt of the earth leader. He’s not a politician. Montanans like that.”
At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky explains why you get creeped out when Republican leaders talk about the Administration’s Syria policy: “…I’m not very interested in being lectured that Bashar al-Assad has no real intention of giving up his chemical weapons by the very same people who a decade ago were pushing this country into war–and having the deranged gall to call the rest of us unpatriotic–on the argument that there was no possible way a monster like Saddam Hussein had given up his chemical weapons. Barack Obama has been forced to spend about 70 percent of his presidential energies trying to repair crises foreign and domestic that these people created, and forced to do so against their iron opposition on all fronts; and now that he’s achieved a diplomatic breakthrough, they have the audacity to argue that he sold America out to Vladimir Putin? It’s staggering and sickening.”
What’s this, tentative expressions of, gasp, hope from a couple of Republicans that President Obama’s Syria policy will turn out well? Writing in the New York Times, Michael D. Shear quotes Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee: “It’s hard for anybody to pooh-pooh the idea that we may be on the way to a diplomatic solution.” Republican, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin says “I hope it works out. I truly do. If he succeeds with this framework, people have to give him credit.”

Steve Benen’s “Revenge is a dish best served coherent” at Maddowblog explains what the Republicans and their media minions are too warped to admit. Responding to a post at The Hill entitled “Putin gets his revenge on Obama,” Benen writes:

Let’s take stock of what happened this week: (1) the United States threatened Syria, a Russian ally, over its use of chemical weapons; (2) Syria then vowed to give up its chemical weapons; and (3) Russia has committed itself to the diplomatic process the United States wants, which is intended to guarantee the success of the Syrian disarmament plan.
So, Obama, at least for now, ended up with what he wanted, which was then followed with more of what he wanted. If this is Putin exacting revenge, I suspect the White House doesn’t mind.

Benen acknowledges that Putin’s op-ed made a splash, although the significance of it was overstated in the melodramatic headline. As Benen puts it, “I don’t imagine President Obama was reading the NYT with breakfast yesterday, telling those around him, “Putin wrote a newspaper piece? And it chides the United States? I’ve been foiled by my strategic better! Curses!”
The GOP spin machine shifted into overdrive, whining about having “to take our leadership from Mr. Putin,” as House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon put it. Benen responds:

The U.S. told Russia we intend to do something about the threat posed by Syria’s chemical weapons; Russia is now working on helping eliminate that threat. In what way does the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee sees Americans taking our leadership from Putin?

Of course no Republican spin du jour would be complete without an even more melodramatic contribution from Peggy Noonan, who wrote that Putin “twisted the knife and gloated, which was an odd and self-indulgent thing to do when he was winning.”
Benen reiterates for the reality-challenged that “the possibility that the Obama White House is actually achieving its strategic goals with these developments is apparently unimportant — Noonan and other Republicans are too overwhelmed by the belief that Putin got his revenge by writing an unpersuasive and inconsequential op-ed in a newspaper.”
Benen also notes “the right’s increasingly creepy affections for Putin.” He sees “the elements of a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts — the right decided in advance that Obama’s rival must be impressive because he’s Obama rival, so they work backwards to make their thesis look more impressive.”
Benen adds that “Tucker Carlson heralded Putin for “riding to President Obama’s rescue” while Russia “humiliates the United States.” Charles Krauthammer added that it’s Putin’s government that’s “playing chess here with a set of rank amateurs.” Now, explains Benen, “every development is then filtered through the conservative prism that says Putin is President Tough Guy Leadership. The Russian gently rebuked the U.S. in an op-ed? Then conservatives must be right about Putin’s impressiveness!”
Putin’s macho hangups notwithstanding, he didn’t get where he is by being stupid. He knows that forcing Obama into a corner where he has to strike Syria could be his downfall as well. Further, he has no reason to think that helping the Republicans, who are held hostage by tea party lunacy, would be good for Russia. He has carefully crafted what looks like a win-win scenario. In chess terms, he looked at the board and concluded that, in this case, a draw is a win. The smarter Republicans know this and they are livid.
It’s all a silly twist on Rove’s dictum that Republicans must hit Democrats where they are strongest. But it’s an increasingly tough sell, as unfolding developments make the President’s strategy look savvy. As Benen concludes, “this might be more persuasive if Obama weren’t getting exactly what he wants right now.”

Paul Krugman’s column, “Rich man’s Recovery” focuses on a new study of I.R.S. data by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, which reveals disturbing conclusions about the growing “concentration of income in America’s upper strata.” As Krugman explains:

According to their estimates, top income shares took a hit during the Great Recession, as things like capital gains and Wall Street bonuses temporarily dried up. But the rich have come roaring back, to such an extent that 95 percent of the gains from economic recovery since 2009 have gone to the famous 1 percent. In fact, more than 60 percent of the gains went to the top 0.1 percent, people with annual incomes of more than $1.9 million.
Basically, while the great majority of Americans are still living in a depressed economy, the rich have recovered just about all their losses and are powering ahead.
…These numbers should (but probably won’t) finally kill claims that rising inequality is all about the highly educated doing better than those with less training. Only a small fraction of college graduates make it into the charmed circle of the 1 percent. Meanwhile, many, even most, highly educated young people are having a very rough time. They have their degrees, often acquired at the cost of heavy debts, but many remain unemployed or underemployed, while many more find that they are employed in jobs that make no use of their expensive educations. The college graduate serving lattes at Starbucks is a cliché, but he reflects a very real situation.

Krugman adds that “the effect of that concentration is to undermine all the values that define America. Year by year, we’re diverging from our ideals. Inherited privilege is crowding out equality of opportunity; the power of money is crowding out effective democracy… Extreme inequality is still on the rise — and it’s poisoning our society.”
Krugman goes on to commend New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio for his call for a small surtax on incomes over $500K to finance universal prekindergarten education as an example of the kind of policies that can help rectify stalled upward mobility. He notes that Peter Beinhart’s Daily Beast post on “The Rise of the New New Left” cites de Blasio’s proposal as a good example of “new economic populism that will shake up our whole political system.”
Krugman is right that tax increases on the wealthy to help fund upward mobility in America are urgently needed at the federal, state and local levels. The other half of the policy mix would be the restoration of a healthy labor movement, without which any effort to rebuild the middle class is doomed. There is simply no getting around the reality that the precondition for both causes is a nationwide defeat of Republicans in 2014 — an enormous, but unavoidable challenge for Democrats.

Greg Sargent raises an important question today about the GOP and mainstream commentator criticism of Obama on Syria:

I continue to be puzzled by an enormous imbalance we’ve seen in much of the commentary — from neutral analysts and Republican lawmakers alike — about Obama’s handling of Syria. On the one hand, the basic take has been that Obama’s handling of the process has shown him to be weak and inconsistent. He changed his mind on whether to go to Congress….He changed his mind again on using military force, instead opting to pursue a diplomatic solution when the possibility presented itself…
[But] Regardless of motive, wasn’t going to Congress the right thing to do, and wasn’t that preferable to him bombing without Congress?…Many of these critics won’t say whether they think exploring the possibility of a diplomatic solution was the right thing to do given that this possibility arose. This is particularly jarring when it comes from those who also say they can’t support war.
…Ultimately what this whole dodge comes down to is that one can’t admit to thinking that going to Congress and pursuing a diplomatic solution are the right goals for Obama to pursue, without undermining one’s ability to criticize Obama for betraying abstract qualities like firmness and consistency we all know a president is “supposed” to possess…. After all, if Obama’s changes of mind have now pointed him towards goals you agree with, how was changing course a bad thing?

In order to clarify their position, it has now clearly become vital that Obama’s critics unite behind a clear joint statement of their perspective. As an attempt to assist them in this effort, I am happy to propose the following public statement for their consideration:

CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser reports that, “With the clock ticking towards two crucial deadlines, a new national poll indicates congressional Republicans would shoulder more blame than President Barack Obama for a possible government shutdown.” Steinhauser continues, “Only a third would consider President Barack Obama responsible for a shutdown, with 51% pointing a finger at the GOP – up from 40% who felt that way earlier this year,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.”
Those who believe that political ads don’t matter much should read Michael Barbaro’s New York Times article about “The commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race.”
According to Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, “An Arlington, Va.-based conservative group, whose existence until now was unknown to almost everyone in politics, raised and spent $250 million in 2012 to shape political and policy debate nationwide…The group, Freedom Partners, and its president, Marc Short, serve as an outlet for the ideas and funds of the mysterious Koch brothers, cutting checks as large as $63 million to groups promoting conservative causes…And it made grants of $236 million – meaning a totally unknown group was the largest sugar daddy for conservative groups in the last election, second in total spending only to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which together spent about $300 million.”
In his New York Times column, “That Threat Worked,” Nicholas D. Kristof credits President Obama with sound strategy in asking for support for military strikes in Syria. Kristof argues, “while it seems that neither Congress nor the public has any appetite for cruise missile strikes on Syria, it will be critical to keep the military option alive in the coming weeks or Russia and Syria will play us like a yo-yo.”
We knew the gender gap was a major factor in presidential elections. But now Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley report at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “We went back and looked at hundreds of exit polls since 2004 in presidential and Senate races and found that 87.5% of statewide Senate and presidential races featured a clear gender gap, which on account of poll error we are defining as the Democratic candidate doing at least three net percentage points better with women than with men.”
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas is running a symposium on “middle-out economics,” exploring theory and policies based on the idea: “Where conservatives say investing in the top 1 percent drives growth, we say that investing in the broad middle does it.”
Steven Greenhouse and Jonathan Martin of the New York Times shed light on labor union problems with Obamacare. The authors quote Terence M. O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union, who explained “If the Affordable Care Act is not fixed and it destroys the health and welfare funds that we have fought for and stand for, then I believe it needs to be repealed…We don’t want it to be repealed. We want it to be fixed, fixed, fixed.”
PPP’s Tom Jensen has an interesting take on the PPP polling mess, flagged by Dave Nir of Daily Kos: “We did a poll last weekend in Colorado Senate District 3 and found that voters intended to recall Angela Giron by a 12 point margin, 54/42. In a district that Barack Obama won by almost 20 points I figured there was no way that could be right and made a rare decision not to release the poll. It turns out we should have had more faith in our numbers because she was indeed recalled by 12 points…What’s interesting about our poll is that it didn’t find the gun control measures that drove the recall election to be that unpopular. Expanded background checks for gun buyers had 68/27 support among voters in the district, reflecting the overwhelming popularity for that we’ve found across the country…And voters were evenly divided on the law limiting high capacity ammunition magazines to 15 bullets, with 47% supporting and 47% opposing it. If voters were really making their recall votes based on those two laws, that doesn’t point to recalling Giron by a 12 point margin…We did find on the poll though that voters in the district had a favorable opinion of the NRA by a 53/33 margin. And I think when you see the final results what that indicates is they just did a good job of turning the election more broadly into do you support gun rights or are you opposed to them.”
From the Gallup Poll conducted September 5-8: “…The 48% who name an economic issue as most important problem is down from 63% in the first month of this year. And, as Congress reconvenes to debate issues related to the nation’s debt and deficit, anxiety related to these issues has fallen dramatically…” Despite the Syria crisis, writes Gallup’s Andrew Dugan, “Nonetheless, the economy in general remains the No. 1 U.S. problem according to Americans, followed by jobs and unemployment, dissatisfaction with government, and healthcare.”