Daily Kos’s David Nir reports on a dozen new MoveOn polls that show significant vulnerability of Republican incumbents in House races. His caveat: “…the problem for Democrats is that, for the most part, these seats are held by strong Republican campaigners who have done a good job of convincing voters of their moderation and who tend to raise money in bunches. That creates a vicious cycle whereby would-be Democratic candidates shy away from challenging these incumbents, thus making them look all the more invincible when the next election rolls around.”
At The Guardian, Bob Garfield’s “False equivalence: how ‘balance’ makes the media dangerously dumb: We’ve seen it in climate change reporting; we see it in shutdown coverage. Journalists should be unbiased, yes, but not brainless” observes: “As an institution, the American media seem to have decided that no superstition, stupidity, error in fact or Big Lie is too superstitious, stupid, wrong or evil to be disqualified from “balancing” an opposing … wadddyacallit? … fact. Because, otherwise, the truth might be cited as evidence of liberal bias…what is so difficult about calling bullshit on a lie?”
Media Matters staff has an excellent round-up of recent false equivalence “reporting” by talking heads on TV.
Kyle Trygstad’s Roll Call post “The Cheap Seats: Senate Majority Determined in Inexpensive States” reports that major ad battles are taking shape in states where ads are cheaper: “Cheap markets allow campaigns, national party committees and outside groups to afford significant ad buys earlier and stay on the air longer. But they also open up avenues for smaller independent groups whose less-robust war chests wouldn’t go nearly as far if they were forced to spend in major markets such as Chicago, Philadelphia or Washington, D.C…Democratic media consultant Philip de Vellis, whose firm Putnam Partners produced Heitkamp’s ads, says cheap markets and more ads allow campaigns to deliver a message over a series of spots — not cram everything into one “kitchen sink” attack ad.”
Dems have a “solid shot” at picking up the House seat being vacated by retiring FL Republican Bill Young, according to Hotline on Call’s Sarah Mimms.
Steve Benen’s “The electoral consequences of the shutdown” at MaddowBlog spotlights another GOP House seat ready for Democratic picking, NE-2, now held by Rep. Lee Terry. In his post, Benen also puts the shutdown drama in prudent political perspective: “Everything you’ve heard of late about 2014 is true. Polls show Republican support collapsing, but the midterm elections are still a year away, and it’s too early to make firm predictions…But this story out of Omaha offers an important reminder about the consequences of the Republican Party’s ongoing disaster — they haven’t ensured electoral setbacks next year, but they’ve certainly laid the groundwork for defeat.”
Looking towards 2014 elections, Democratic policy-makers would do well to check out “Working Longer: Older Americans’ Attitudes on Work and Retirement,” a recent poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll doesn’t include data on political party preferences of the respondents, but it does shed light on which policies this high-turnout constituency favors.
Democrats should read Joseph Stiglitz’s New York Times Opinionator column, “Inequality is a Choice” and then get focused on distilling some of his lucid observations into message points, including: “In America, nearly one in four children lives in poverty; in Spain and Greece, about one in six; in Australia, Britain and Canada, more than one in 10. None of this is inevitable. Some countries have made the choice to create more equitable economies: South Korea, where a half-century ago just one in 10 people attained a college degree, today has one of the world’s highest university completion rates.”
Richard Parker (not the tiger, the Harvard proff) has an amusing ain’t-gonna-happen-idea which lays bare the hypocrisy in tea party lunacy: “Suspend Obamacare and cut the budget–just as House Republicans have demanded–but here’s the compromise: do all the cutting in just the 80 or so congressional districts of the most ardent Tea Party members.”

From VoteVets.org: A “powerful new ad running in several key districts.” The caption for the video says “The voices of veterans and military family members are the key to ending the Republican-led government shutdown.” The ad should resonate with seniors, as well as veterans and their families.

Several days ago I noted that the Washington Post’s leading conservative windbag in residence, “Big Charlie the K” Krauthammer, was actually channeling a classic old vaudeville routine in his arguments against Obama and the Dems. In that previous case, his indignant argument was actually a variant of the old joke about the man who kills his mother and father and then asks the judge for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.
Well, guess what? Big Charlie is back at it again today and this time his comedy routine is drawn from a famous moment in the 1969 movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” In that film two comically inept train robbers, played with self-mocking, “twinkle in the eye” charm by Paul Newman and Robert Redford, execute a series of increasingly large train robberies, fueled with a cheerfully goofy self-confidence that — gosh darn it all – a couple of amiable rogues like them really aren’t doing anything all that wrong.
Their robberies eventually attract a massive troop of highly professional, relentless trackers and lawmen who pursue them through the entire middle third of the movie. At one point Redford comments on the extraordinary investment that the railroad company must be making to track them down and Newman, with comic exasperation exclaims “Hell, if the railroad would just give me all the money they are spending to stop me from robbing them, I’d stop robbing them.” By this point in the film, when our sympathies have been entirely enlisted on side of the charismatic outlaws, this suggestion actually seems to have a wacky comic logic.
Krauthammer’s variation on this classic joke is the argument that if nasty old Obama would just give the GOP all the concessions they are trying to extort by shutting down the government, well by gosh, they wouldn’t shut down the government. So, the shutdown is really all Obama’s fault because he’s so damn “intransigent.”
Here’s Charlie putting on a silly looking cowboy hat and doing a Butch Cassidy imitation:

…there has been remarkable media reticence about the president’s intransigence. He has refused to negotiate anything unless the Republicans fully fund the government and raise the debt ceiling — unconditionally.

It’s outrageous. Obama actually expects the GOP to allow the government to operate normally – to run the country and pay the nation’s debts – without giving the GOP a laundry list of its demands in return. In his own mind, Krauthammer is turning to Robert Redford and saying “you know, Sundance, if they would just give us the concessions we are trying to extort by shutting down the government, we’d stop shutting down the government.”
Well, sorry, Charlie boy, but while a classic Hollywood star like Paul Newman can take a punch line like that and make it sound charming and funny, when you do it, it comes off more like a bad imitation of Tony Soprano.

If you thought recent opinion polls were bad news for Republicans, dig this excerpt about the latest NBC/WSJ poll conducted October 7-9, from Ariel Edwards-Levy’s HuffPo post, “Poll: Republicans ‘Badly Damaged’ By Shutdown Battle“:

Americans blamed Republicans over President Barack Obama for the shutdown by a margin of 22 percentage points, with 53 percent saying the GOP deserved more blame, and 31 percent saying Obama did. Approval ratings for the Republican Party and the tea party were at 24 percent and 21 percent respectively — both record lows as measured by NBC/WSJ.

There’s no avoiding the conclusion that 22 percent is a pretty astounding blame gap. It does appear that the public is beginning to get it that the shutdown, the hardship it is already causing all across America and the threat of another retirement investments debacle is overwhelmingly due to Republican extremism and obstruction. There’s more:

Voters were 8 points more likely to say they’d prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress over a Republican-controlled Congress, a 5-point shift toward the Democrats since last month. Support for the new health care law, the touchstone of the government shutdown, rose a net 8 points from September, while the belief that government should do more to solve problems was up 8 points from June.

“That is an ideological boomerang,” said GOP Pollster Bill McInturff, “if there is a break, there is a break against the Republican position.” In addition, 70 percent of the respondents agreed that Republicans are “putting their own political agenda ahead of what is good for the country,” while about half said the same for the President. Further, reports Edwards-Levy:

WSJ/NBC pollsters said the survey showed some of the most dramatic shifts they had seen in decades in public attitudes toward the well-being of the country, the direction of the economy and wider political sentiment, according to the Journal.

The poll also revealed a 6 point increase in the percentage of respondents who rated their feelings toward Speaker John Boehner as “very negative” since the last time the poll asked the question in January. You have to wonder if that has anything to do with Boehner’s petulant interview on ABC’s ‘This Week’ last Sunday.

It’s not clear how this crazy day of fiscal strategery is going to end, given John Boehner’s new short-term debt limit increase bid, and now an emerging Senate GOP proposal to provide a longer term debt increase and a reopening of government in exchange for sacrifice of the medical device tax. But it’s important to understand the fundamentals of what Republicans as a party are trying to accomplish. Here’s my take from today’s Washington Monthly Political Animal:

What’s ultimately going on here is that congressional Republicans (and their “conservative base”) are determined to do something big on “entitlements,” despite their loss of the White House and the Senate in 2012. Yes, they are strategically divided between conventional conservatives pursuing Paul Ryan’s well-trod path of indirectly undermining the entitlement status of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid though stealth and gimmicks, and Tea Folk determined to make a frontal assault on Obamacare as the “tipping point” after which America lurches into socialist slavery. But it’s all part of the same big policy goal of stopping any extension of the New Deal/Great Society legacy and then reversing it.
But the Republican obsession with their version of what is so imprecisely referred to as “entitlement reform” is exceeded by another obsession of theological dimensions: opposition to high-end tax increases. Their nemesis, Barack Obama, has refused to give them “entitlement reform” (even a pale version of it) without high-end tax increases. So they are stymied unless fearful liberals are correct that Obama will, with enough pressure, cave and give GOPers what they want without what they refuse to accept as a price. This whole hostage-taking exercise is a test of whether they can generate enough pressure to make Obama surrender his iron equation of “entitlement reforms” and tax hikes.

But despite continued progressive fears of an Obama “cave,” the hostage-taking hasn’t changed the fundamental equation:

Right now the big question is whether Obama will agree to budget negotiations if they are linked explicitly or implicitly to a threat to keep the government shut down or to default on the debt. So what if he “caves?” Does that get Republicans “entitlement reform” without a tax increase? No, not unless Obama caves again during the actual negotiations. And remember this: any “grand bargain” would have to be approved by Congress, which is composed of Democrats who will fight the kind of “entitlement reform” Republicans want to the last ditch and Republicans who will do the same to kill any tax increase. (BTW, this kind of “grand bargain” is certain to be unpopular with the public as well).

So forget about what DC pundits and the No Labels folk are saying: we are no closer to a a “grand bargain” than we were before all this nonsense started.

That doesn’t mean that Republicans may not be able to secure some spending reductions (in fact, they already have thanks to the Democratic acceptance of sequestration-levels on spending) in exchange for allowing the country to function. But their “grand” strategy has failed.

From E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s Washington Post column, “Obama can’t cave, even a little, in the face of GOP extremism“:

Now it is said by people who see themselves as realists that, because he is dealing with irrational foes, Obama has to be the “adult in the room.” The definition of “adult” in this case is that he must cave a little because the other side is so bonkers that it just might upend the economy.
Giving in is exactly what Obama cannot do. The president offered Boehner a face-saving way out on Tuesday, suggesting that he’d be happy to engage in broad budget talks if the government reopened and there was at least a short-term increase in the debt limit. To go any further would be to prove to the far right that its extra-constitutional extremism will pay dividends every time.
What’s required from the outside forces who want this mess to go away is unrelenting pressure on Boehner and the supposedly more reasonable Republicans who say they want to open the government and pay our debts. Up to now these Republicans have been the enablers of the tea party faction. They’re the ones who must become the “adults in the room,” because they’re the ones who allowed all this to happen.

Now that the juveniles have had their ineffectual tantrum in the ‘time out’ room, those who have learned the lesson can come out and join the grown ups who are trying to move America forward.

Harold Meyerson has a creative alternative for those 21 or so House Republicans who want to support a ‘clean CR,’ but fear being primaried by the tea party — declare themselves Independents. As Meyerson explains in his Washington Post column, “…To vote his beliefs and duck that challenge, all a center-right Republican has to do is declare himself an independent…This is hardly a course to be taken lightly. It entails the loss of congressional seniority and would cause rifts with friends and allies…There is no guarantee of reelection…But others have taken this course and survived — most recently, former senator Joseph Lieberman, who…reconfigured himself an independent and won reelection. Many of the House members tagged as supporters of a clean resolution, such as New York’s Peter King and Pennsylvania’s Charlie Dent, come from districts in the Northeast that aren’t as rabidly right as some in the Sunbelt. Others, such as Virginia’s Scott Rigell and Frank Wolf, come from districts with large numbers of federal employees, who almost surely are not entranced by the tea party’s anti-government jihad.”
At Facing South, Sue Sturgis reports that Art Pope, NC’s jr. Koch brother, is feeling some grass roots heat: “As Pope attempts to distance himself from controversial big-money politics, North Carolina activists continue to shine a spotlight on his outsized influence and what it has wrought.”
In a USA Today op-ed, Will Marshall presents an interesting idea: To seize the high ground, “…Democrats will need to abandon their ritual business-bashing, embrace the productive forces in U.S. society and honor companies that are investing in America’s future…The nation’s job drought is really an investment drought…Many companies are investing at home, and they deserve recognition. For the second year, the Progressive Policy Institute has ranked the top 25 companies making the biggest bets on America’s economic future. All told, these Investment Heroes spent nearly $150 billion last year on new plants, buildings and equipment.” Short of laws that protect jobs in the U.S., it’s an idea worth exploring, although the inclusion of Walmart among the “heros” is an eyebrow-raiser.
In his Politico post, “Poll: Terry McAuliffe increases his lead over Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia governor election,” Tal Kopan notes, “Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe has widened his lead over his Republican challenger Ken Cuccinelli in a new poll that puts him up 8 points…The Democrat led the Virginia attorney general 47 percent to 39 percent in a Quinnipiac poll of likely voters out Thursday. In September, Quinnipiac found McAuliffe leading 44 percent to 41 percent.”
Turns out the latest Gallup poll I noted in Tuesday’s ‘notes’ post did have some data on approval ratings of the two parties, omitted though it was in Frank Newport’s report. According to Linda Feldmann’s Monitor summation, “The Republican Party is viewed favorably by only 28 percent of the American public, a 10-percentage-point drop in just the past month, according to the latest Gallup poll…It’s the lowest favorability number ever recorded for either party by Gallup, which began asking the question in 1992.” Democrats’ favorability also dropped in the last month, down four percentage points from 47 percent to 43 percent.”
John Dickerson’s “Are Moderate Republicans the Shutdown’s Biggest Hypocrites?” at Slate.com has a cautionary observation for Dems: “Right now, these members of the Clean Caucus have the best of all worlds. They can proclaim that they want to do the reasonable thing–which pleases their moderate voters–but never cast the vote that provokes the wrath of the party’s most active and punitive wing. This is how Boehner reads their maneuvers, and they can thank him for allowing them to have it both ways.”
But, as Steve Peoples explains at Salon.com, DCCC Chairman Rep. Steve Israel points out that the shutdown gives Dems a potent edge in the uopcomming 2014 midterm elections, with 68 competitive districts in play: “The longer the Republicans continue this reckless and irresponsibility … the weaker they become going into the 2014 cycle.”
If this doesn’t make Boehner sweat,nothing will: “Their frustration has grown so intense in recent days that several trade association officials warned in interviews on Wednesday that they were considering helping wage primary campaigns against Republican lawmakers who had worked to engineer the political standoff in Washington,” report Eric Lipton, Nicholas Confessore and Nelson D. Schwartz, in the New York Times.
At Daily Kos, the blogger ‘War on Error’ flags a series of revealing inter-active charts depicting the relationships between the Koch brothers’ and other wingnut foundations and PACs, lending great credence to Hillary Clinton’s warning about the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Most disappointing revelation in the charts may be that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports ALEC. Open source software, anyone?

The following post is by Erica Seifert of Democracy Corps:
Today we are releasing data from the latest survey by Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund — and the numbers aren’t good for the GOP.
Our poll shows that the congressional vote is moving against the Republicans. In July, our survey showed Republicans with a marginal 1 percent lead among likely voters. Today’s poll shows Democrats up by 3 points among that group. Among likely 2014 voters, 46 percent say they would prefer Democrats to control Congress, while just 42 percent would prefer Republican rule.
The trends beneath these numbers are important. Voters are not punishing both parties equally for the current mess in Washington. Republicans in Congress are now at one of the lowest points we have ever recorded, with 51 percent viewing them negatively — a 5 point increase since March. Voters remain disdainful of how they are handling their job in charge of Congress, with over two-thirds (69 percent) saying they disapprove; almost half (48 percent) strongly disapprove, a 6 point increase since July.
And on the big issue of the day — health care reform — 49 percent say the Democrats have a better approach, compared to just 35 percent who say Republicans do. When asked whether the GOP’s position on the government shutdown makes voters more or less likely to vote for their Republican incumbent, voters in Republican districts say”less likely” by a 6 percent margin.
This does not bode well for Republicans in 2014, given voters’ strong disapproval of the Republican Party’s current course. As this intransigence appears to have no end in sight, we should expect Republicans to pay next November.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Some Washington “wise men” and other pundits keep talking about the current shutdown and debt ceiling standoff, as if there are two intractable sides that are equally culpable for “gridlock.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of the American people, and the majority of both houses of Congress oppose the Tea Party’s shutdown of the government — and threatened refusal to pay America’s bills.
Poll after poll have shown that most Americans want the government to go back to work and believe that America should honor its debts. They don’t believe these tactics should be used for any reason — certainly not as a means to prevent implementation of the health care law. Just yesterday a new poll by Public Policy Polling (PPP) — one of the most accurate polling firms in the last election cycle — found that overwhelming majorities opposed the shutdown in 24 swing Congressional Districts currently held by Republicans.
PPP also found that the Republicans were in grave jeopardy of loosing control of these districts — and the House as a whole — because of their shutdown.
And, contrary to Speaker Boehner’s assertion on Sunday’s interview with George Stephanopoulos, there is clearly a majority of Members in the House to pass a “clean” continuing resolution that would put the federal government back to work — and instruct the Treasury to pay America’s bills. One hundred and ninety-five Democrats have signed a letter indicating they would support such a measure — in fact it would probably receive 200 Democratic votes. And at least twenty-two Republicans have publicly stated they would do so as well. That adds up to an unbeatable 217 House votes (there are currently three vacancies making 217 the magic number for a majority). Assuming, of course, the Republicans still believe in the science of mathematics.
But if Boehner disagrees, there is a sure way for him to find out — call a vote.
Boehner refuses to call that vote, because he knows he would lose. The bill would pass, the hostage-taking by his Tea Party faction would be over, and the Tea Party extremists would hold him responsible.
Boehner’s refusal to call a vote on the floor of the House is all that is keeping the government closed. It is also the only thing that threatens the first default by the U.S. government in American history — an act that could have a catastrophic effect on the financial system and the world economy.

Read more…