Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 48
October 19, 2010
More fun with Joe Miller | Michael Tomasky
Alaska' Joe Miller demonstrated to my satisfaction in yesterday's post that he has, shall we say, made a study of certain aspects of German history.
But now it turns out that at the same forum at which he had his security goons make a citizen's arrest of a journalist who asked questions Miller had "ruled" out-of-bounds, he was asked about illegal immigration and this happened:
Alaska Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller was asked about illegal immigration at his town hall yesterday, and he said that the country's first priority should be to secure the border...
...Anchorage blogger Steve Aufrecht reports that during the town hall, he cited his time serving at the Fulda Gap, one point on the former border between East and West Germany during the Cold War.
During that time, he said, "East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow" from one side of the border to the other. "Now, obviously, other things there were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, obviously to secure our border. If East Germany could, we could."
You can hear a clip at the above link. The clip cuts off right when he finishes speaking, which is unfortunate, because I'd really love to have heard whether these sturdy Americans on hand really liked the idea of the United States following the lead of East Germany.
Besides, Miller has a small matter backwards. People were trying to get out of East Germany. They're trying to get into America. Generally speaking it's easier to keep people in than keep them out. If millions of people had been clamoring to get into East Germany, I'd guess they'd have had pretty much the same problems we've been having.
Unless Miller thinks that US border guards, like East German guards of old, should have the authority to shoot on sight. It would be nice if someone asked him this question, but then again Miller can just rule it out of bounds, and the journalists who might be impertinent enough to do so will risk citizen's arrest.
One of the truly frustrating things about politics in the US these days is the way candidates can waltz right up to the water's edge of totalitarian madness but never quite get nailed down on it. There's an art to it. Make the extremist dog-whistle implication in venue A, then laugh it off in venue B, or just avoid the uncomfortable follow-ups altogether.
This last strategy is becoming more and more common. Miller, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and others generally appear only on friendly media: conservative radio shows, and Fox when they are asked. This is new this election: an alternative media system, quite obviously and unabashedly in existence to elect Republicans, that ensures that these candidates don't have to answer unfriendly questions. Miller has taken it farther than anyone else, but many candidates are doing something like it, and it's going to work.
And please spare us your whining about the liberal media. Most of these states are hardly hothouses of liberalism, but places with local newspapers and television stations that are just trying to report the news in the old-fashioned manner.
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October 18, 2010
Conway v. Paul | Michael Tomasky
Well, that Kentucky Senate debate was certainly uplifting eh? TPM edited it down to a digestible 2:44 for your viewing pleasure, here.
I doubt Democrat Jack Conway, trailing Rand Paul by about five or six points, did himself much good here, and I suspects we'll see polls (or certainly a Rasmussen poll if nothing else) confirming this in a few days (or in Rasmussen's case, hours).
The thing about getting into someone's college-era hijinx is that most of us were up to college-era hijinx that we'd rather the broader world not know about. I certainly got up to my share.
On the other hand, in my case (and I would venture in most people's cases) those hijinxes emphatically did not include leading a woman to a stream, tying her up and making her pray to Aqua Buddha. There will be, one supposes, some people for whom that crosses a line. Maybe those people are core evangelical Christian voters, so I'd guess that Conway's game here was that: to dampen enthusiasm for Paul among this cohort, thus decreasing their turnout by 2% or something. Remember how Karl Rove used to say that the late-October 2000 revelation about Dubya's drunk driving arrest, which made no difference whatsoever to me and people like me and if anything made us 1% more sympathetic to the guy inasmuch as it showed him as something other than robotically pious, decreased Bush's support among evangelicals by as much as 4%.
A Politico article today on this year's negative ads quotes one expert as saying that things have in fact gotten worse this year:
I've been in this business for 38 years, and every cycle there are hysterical observations that the spots this cycle are the most negative, the dirtiest, the lowest ever," said Garry South, a Los Angeles-based Democratic media consultant. "It's generally never true. But there's a critical distinction" between contrasts and demonization, he said.
This is, after all, the first election in which a candidate has felt compelled to declare that she is "not a witch."
South suggests there is a point at which the way-over-the-top attacks become counterproductive.
"There does come a point where voters start saying to themselves, 'Could anybody who's not in jail be that bad?'" he said. "Voters are predisposed to believe the worst about politicians, but at some point, common sense kicks in, and they say, 'Nobody could be that bad and be walking around the streets.'"
Candidates from both parties are doing this sort of thing, as Conway's attacks on Paul attest. But overall GOP spending on these kinds of ads is many times that of Democratic spending. A potentially important step is being taken this year, then; there aren't many more lines of taste and decorum left to be crossed. It's taking a lot of the fun out of politics. Yes, politics was once fun. Dirty, corrupt, et cetera, but also fun in its way. Now the hatred is at defcon 4 every day. Depressing really.
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The empathy deficit | Michael Tomasky
Sad piece in the Boston Globe over the weekend about findings in a recent study that college students of today care far less about the feelings and predicaments of others than college students did 30 years ago. Key grafs:
...Konrath and her coauthors, hoping to get to the bottom of this debate, set out to measure how empathy had changed over time. If narcissism was truly on the rise, they postulated, then empathy had to be in decline. They began to analyze the results of 72 different surveys, given to almost 14,000 college students, beginning in 1979, charting how the students answered the same questions over time.
Initially, they found little shift. "It's looking sort of flat, or no real pattern, up until 2000," Konrath said. "And then there's this sudden, sharp drop."
Starting around a decade ago, scores in two key areas of empathy begin to tumble downward. According to the analysis, perspective-taking, often known as cognitive empathy — that is, the ability to think about how someone else might feel — is declining. But even more troubling, Konrath noted, is the drop-off the researchers have charted in empathic concern, often known as emotional empathy. This is the ability to exhibit an emotional response to someone's else's distress.
Perhaps more than any other characteristic, one's capacity for empathic concern dictates how much one cares about others. Those who score high in empathic concern, according to past research, are more likely to return incorrect change to a cashier, let someone else ahead of them in line, carry a stranger's belongings, give money to a homeless person, volunteer, donate to a charity, look after a friend's pet or plant, or even live on a vegetarian diet. And what's alarming, Konrath said, is that empathic concern has fallen more than any other aspect of empathy. Between 1979 and 2009, according to the new research, empathic concern dropped 48 percent.
The article goes on to speculate on some possible reasons, which include technology and nonstop cable news. Oddly, the article steers entirely clear of questions of our political culture.
The college students of the 2000s were the first crop raised entirely in the modern era of conservative dominance: they were born from the Reagan ascendancy onward. So they've grown up hearing lots of authority figures say that poor people made their own problems, etc etc etc.
You want to tell me that's a mere coincidence, the sharp drop-off in empathic concern among exactly the cohort that grew up wholly in conservative America? I can't wait to see the excuses on this comment thread, eh? Bogus study, thin, no proof, yada yada yada. To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle, said Orwell. To which Tomasky adds, especially if you're ideologically committed to not seeing it.
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Maybe if the guy had worked for Volkischer Beobachter | Michael Tomasky
You may have read last week that Joe Miller, the Alaska Senate candidate of the Republican Party, said he would no longer answer personal questions:
"We've drawn a line in the sand," he said. "You can ask me about background, you can ask me about personal issues, I'm not going to answer them. I'm not. This is about the issues. ... This is about moving this state forward, and that's our commitment."
At the time, Miller, who once worked for a state government unit near Fairbanks, was being pestered about charges that he had used computers belonging to the state for improper purposes. There were also questions about federal farm subsidies he'd received in Kansas in the 1990s. He opposes the welfare state in all its manifestations, you see, so this revelation was a bit inconvenient for him.
Solution? Refuse to answer questions about any of these things. And not only that: made it sound brave, noble, selfless...it's all about moving the state forward, after all.
If it had ended there, it would just be the usual tea-party looniness. But now comes word that a journalist who tried to ask Miller some of these kinds of questions at a public forum was "arrested" by Miller's security team:
Republican US Senate candidate Joe Miller's security team detained online newsmagazine Alaska Dispatch editor and co-owner Tony Hopfinger at a town hall meeting Sunday, after Hopfinger approached Miller with questions about his Fairbanks North Star Borough employment.
After inviting the public on his website and Facebook pages, about one hundred people showed up to Miller's meeting at Central Middle School. Immediately after the meeting ended, Miller left without taking any media questions...
...As Miller left Sunday, Hopfinger says he approached the candidate.
"Joe was walking out in the hallway and I wanted to ask him about some issues with his former employment at the North Star Borough," Hopfinger says. "I had a flip cam and asked questions."...
..."Miller started walking back the direction he came from," Hopfinger says. "At that point suddenly, I was surrounded by more security guys, supporters putting their chest into me. My defensive space was violated. I was ready to walk out. I was grabbed, thrown down to the end of the hallway, handcuffed, thrown against wall and 'under arrest.' They wouldn't identify who they were."
Miller's security team works for DropZone Security. The company's owner William Fulton says Hopfinger was given several warnings to leave because he became aggressive.
So let's review:
1. Say that the First Amendment doesn't apply to you.
2. Hire a private security team (this joker needs a private security team? Sitting senators of many years don't travel with security teams).
3. Have them arrest a journalist who breaks your rules and thinks the First Amendment should apply to you.
This is plainly, technically and provably fascist. Hopfinger was released by the actual police, so no, it's not as if Miller can run the state as Miller sees fit, and no, that day will never come, so no, Alaska is not Germany 1934, and I'm not saying that. I'm talking about this behavior.
Serves me right for saying last week that I thought Sharron Angle was the most extreme of this year's crop of candidates. These people are full of surprises.
Speaking of which, check out this list of the extreme positions taken by Miller, Angle and all of this year's new stars. Pretty remarkable when you see it all there in once place.
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October 15, 2010
Senator Angle? | Michael Tomasky
Last night, while all sane, decent and God-fearing Americans were watching West Virginia trounce South Florida to improve to 5-1, some other less American Americans were evidently watching Harry Reid and Sharron Angle debate.
According to T.A. Frank of The New Republic, she throttled him. Frank:
I'm not suggesting that Sharron Angle, having been granted the opportunity to look reasonable, looked reasonable. On the contrary, she was very much herself—smiling maniacally in her crimson suit and hurling out bizarre fictions. But she looked reasonable enough. Lies about policy don't really hurt you in a debate, especially when they're voiced with conviction. What hurts you is looking evasive and squishy. Sharron Angle provided the lies. Harry Reid provided the squish.
This may, emphasis on may, be one of those instances in which the Reid people can win the post-debate-debate and show what a bunch of cockamamie lies Angle put out (Frank documents them). But why would a seasoned pol be so bad in the first place against arguably the most extreme candidate running this year (and I include Rand Paul)?
The first thing you tell a senator who is debating in his first tight race in years is this: don't do Senate-speak. Don't talk bills and all that jargon. Answer questions squarely. Talk like a regular person.
The bubbles these people let themselves get into. Have you read the Peter Baker Obama profile in the Times mag everyone is talking about? It'll be out in Sunday's paper, but it's already on the interwebs.
It has some reasonably insightful self-criticism from Obama, to wit:
As we talked in the Oval Office, Obama acknowledged that the succession of so many costly initiatives, necessary as they may have been, wore on the public. "That accumulation of numbers on the TV screen night in and night out in those first six months I think deeply and legitimately troubled people," he told me. "They started feeling like: Gosh, here we are tightening our belts, we're cutting out restaurants, we're cutting out our gym membership, in some cases we're not buying new clothes for the kids. And here we've got these folks in Washington who just seem to be printing money and spending it like nobody's business."And it reinforced the narrative that the Republicans wanted to promote anyway, which was Obama is not a different kind of Democrat — he's the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat."
Right. Well, why couldn't he have seen that at the time, and done something about it? "That's life in the bubble" is the excuse typically bruited, but I don't buy it. Yes, these people are subject to scrutiny like no one else in the world, and infuriating lies are repeated about them day after day. But it's not as if it was hard to see that this White House was losing spin war after spin war. They did nothing about it. And last night, Reid seems not to have given any meaningful thought to how he was going to come across.
The political incompetence of these Democrats has gotten to me. I'm going away for a nature weekend. Well, nature...and...golf. They're the same thing basically, aren't they? Enjoy.
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Beginning of the end for HCR? | Michael Tomasky
The ruling by Florida federal judge Roger Vinson, a Reagan appointee, upholding portions of a lawsuit against the healthcare reform bill and allowing it to proceed could spell the beginning of the end, if you ask me. From TPM:
This measure -- the individual mandate -- has been the main focal point of the law's opponents for months. Years ago, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the idea of requiring people to purchase health insurance "unprecedented." Citing that CBO conclusion, Vinson wrote that "to say that something is 'novel' and 'unprecedented' does not necessarily mean that it is 'unconstitutional' and 'improper.' There may be a first time for anything. But, at this stage of the case, the plaintiffs have most definitely stated a plausible claim with respect to this cause of action."
Key to the plaintiff's argument is that the health care law does not regulate activity affecting interstate commerce. Instead it seeks to regulate economic inactivity -- i.e. by issuing a penalty on people who decide not to buy health insurance.
"He's bought into the idea that this is regulation of inactivity and that the Constitution requires that there be activity to be regulated," Jost says. "That's my reading of the case."
But doesn't the state, or don't states, regulate various kinds of inactivity? Sure. The inaction of not buying auto insurance, for obvious and fairly parallel starters. The inaction of not filing a tax return. The inaction of not buckling your seat belt. For that matter, the inaction of not contacting authorities when you have knowledge of the commission of a crime, although I suppose that's different. But there are loads of areas where inaction is subject to penalty. Actually, whether the mandate to buy insurance is a "penalty" or a "tax" was one issue here, with Vinson clearly considering it the former.
Whatever. Vinson's ruling stands in contrast to a recent ruling by a judge in Michigan who tossed another lawsuit challenging the reform. That judge was a Clinton appointee. All this is really about politics and ideology, not the law. Ezra writes:
The Clinton appointee sees a constitutional tax, the Reagan appointee may or may not see something constitutional, but he definitely does not see a tax. But as has been true since the day these suits were filed, the question is not the bill's abstract constitutionality. If Democrats had appointed five Supreme Court justices whether than four, there would be no question. It is whether the five Republican appointees on the Court are interested in chipping away at it, or whether they'd prefer to avoid that confrontation with the administration and the Democrats.
Who can really doubt that the Supreme Court will rule 5-4 with Vinson and plaintiffs? I know that different justices have been in different places on commerce-clause related issues, but I doubt very much that anyone in the five-member conservative majority, with I suppose the imaginable exception of Kennedy, will let himself be seen as the conservative who upheld Obamacare. So as I said, I think this could well be the beginning of the end of healthcare reform. I have no idea of the timetable.
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The next trend to sweep the south | Michael Tomasky
Two days ago the Georgia board of regents passed a resolution barring students who came to the US illegally from studying at most of the state's public universities and colleges.
The issue flared up last spring, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, linked to above:
Debate over illegal immigration and higher education resurfaced last spring after Jessica Colotl, an illegal immigrant attending Kennesaw State University, was arrested on campus for a traffic violation. College officials disclosed they had charged her in-state tuition. State rules require illegal immigrants pay the more expensive out-of-state rates.
Giving illegal immigrants an education at in-state rates is against federal law. But naturally, just addressing that wasn't enough. So at that point, after Colotl's arrest, research was undertaken to see just how seats that could be hosting the fannies of good homegrown Georgia boys and girls were being given over to night crossers. Result, according to NPR: out of 310,000 students enrolled in all the state's colleges, about 500 are classified as undocumented.
The Georgia ban right now is partial, limited to the better schools. The expectation is that it will be extended to all state schools and technical colleges. There's a governor's race right now, and both the Republican and the Democrat support the new policy.
In this effort, Georgia follows two other states. Can you guess? I did, while I was listening to the radio last night. South Carolina and Alabama. Surprise surprise.
See, you just have to take a stand against these things. First it's traffic violations. That's how they start. But you never know what these people can get up to.
Honestly. This is morality, or "morality," without sense. Without compassion, too, which goes without saying, but without sense. Lots of these people probably came over with their parents when they were little. Some, possibly many, likely had little or no choice in the matter. But here they are.
If kicking them out of college meant they were going back to their country of origin, that would be one thing. The policy would still be heartless, but at least it would make a kind of sense. But of course, in all likelihood, they're staying here, because their lives are better here whether they're business majors or construction workers or gardeners or whatever.
Given that, it makes no sense to prevent them from bettering themselves. And then one day building toward citizenship, as Democrats and a small number of Republicans would prefer in re immigration legislation.
So that's the choice. If the liberals had their way, these folks would get college educations and become taxpaying citizens in 15 years. Under the conservative diktat, they'll be college dropouts and will always be illegal, not fulfilling their own potential or contributing the maximum they could to society. But it's more important that they be punished, see? Look for this policy notion to sweep the south. I'm sure they're madder'n'a'hornet down in Texas that they didn't do it first.
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Friday quiz: those special places | Michael Tomasky
Ever been to Machu Picchu? Angkor Wat? Walked the stairs of the Colosseum, climbed the Acropolis up to the Parthenon, emerged from the Nassau Street subway station and turned a corner to behold, for the first time, the Brooklyn Bridge?
I bet lots of you have done lots of these things. I've done the last three of the above five, and they all remain indelible moments. In nearly 20 years of living in New York, I grew quite bored by the sight of the Brooklyn Bridge, and probably frequently was pissed off at the inhospitable traffic situation on it. But boy, I will never forget the first time I laid eyes on it, during a visit before I lived there.
One has a physical response to these magnificent structures, no? Your chest empties out slightly; your skin tingles; you feel a kind of warmth around your eyes, as if your brain has just fired itself up to a new level of activity, and the blood is scampering up there to feed it the necessary fuel. It's the biology of awe, and it's quite a feeling.
Our subject today, then, is the great landmarks of humankind. This is kind of architecture, but it's also engineering, and it's also art in a way, right? And therefore if it's all three of those things, it's something more. These totems represent our greatest love and aspiration. Some are old, and the more remarkable for that. Some are new. All are breathtaking upon first sight.
It seems to me for reasons I can't quite articulate that this topic in particular could devolve into a trivia quiz rather than a knowledge quiz, which as you know is against our rules. So I've made these questions on the hard side, digging into details about the origins and features of these landmarks that will require you to think it through, make mental connections to other facts about history and so on. At least I think I have. You be the judge.
In any case I also thought that this subject should make for a really lively comment thread, as you tell the rest of us what you've visited, how it impressed you, what most moved you, etc. So here we go.
1. Scaffolding was placed around this landmark to protect it from airplanes' bombs at three points in history: during World War II, and during wars in 1965 and 1971.
a. Baalbek ruins, Lebanon
b. The Taj Mahal
c. Tomb of Khai Dinh, Vietnam
2. The name for this ancient landmark comes from the Greek verb for "strangle":
a. The Great Sphinx
b. The Parthenon
c. Topkapi Palace, Turkey
3. The Great Wall of China was built over many centuries. Which century witnessed what is generally considered the peak period of the building of the wall?
a. 15th century
b. 5th century
c. 2nd century BCE
4. To whom is Angkor Wat dedicated?
a. Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of beauty and light
b. The mother of the man who built it, Khmer ruler Suryavarman II
c. Vishnu, the preserver and protector of creation
5. The northern stairway of this 11th-century structure was designed to catch the interplay between the sun's light and the edges of the stepped terraces at sunset on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes:
a. The Great Pyramid of Giza
b. The Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu
c. The Great Temple at Chichen Itza
6. Battle reenactments at this landmark included sea battles, during which it was filled with water and ships brought in:
a. The amphitheatre at Pompeii
b. The Colosseum
c. The Diocletian arena in Alexandria, Egypt
7. During the French Revolution, this landmark was designated to be destroyed, but the mason hired to oversee the destruction saved it by pointing out that razing it would create a pile of rubble that would take many years to remove.
a. Notre Dame de Paris
b. Versailles
c. Chartres Cathedral
8. The saint who gave his name to this landmark was, in life, an apprentice shoemaker who went on to pull what today would be regarded as p.r. stunts, all in behalf of his city's poor: he shoplifted for them, and went around naked and weighed down in chains, and berated his nation's ruler for his violent treatment of poor innocents; the ruler, chastened after this person's death, served as a pallbearer at his funeral.
a. St. Basil of Moscow
b. St. Vincente of Cadiz
c. St. Mark of Venice
9. Atop this European landmark is perched the Quadriga of Victory, a sculpture of a chariot drawn by four horses abreast; it was stolen by an invader and returned shortly after the invader's fall from grace.
a. The Forum in Rome
b. King Sigismund's Column, Warsaw
c. The Brandenburg Gate
10. Big Ben is not in fact the clock at Westminster Palace, but what, technically?
a. The spire above the clock
b. The largest of the five bells inside that strike the time
c. The nickname of Benjamin Skimpole, the original clockmaster
11. During the War of 1812, the British burned which landmark Washington, D.C. building basically to the ground?
a. The Supreme Court building
b. The White House
c. The US Capitol
12. The design work on the exterior of this landmark was one of the first to involve the use of computers in structural analysis:
a. The Gaudi Cathedral
b. Guggenheim Bilbao
c. The Sydney Opera House
Fun, eh? Answers below the fold.
Answers:
1-b; 2-a; 3-a; 4-c; 5-c; 6-b; 7-c; 8-a; 9-c; 10-b; 11-b; 12-c.
Notes:
1. Tough, maybe; good fake answers, but India and Pakistan had wars in 1965 and 1971.
2. Because the Sphinx was said to strangle those who could not answer her riddle.
3. Maybe you guessed that the materials to make it as strong as it is didn't exist in those earlier centuries.
4. A tough one, but Vishnu is the big guy.
5. Giza came way before the 11th century, and Machu Picchu somewhat after it.
6. Probably the easiest question of the day, I think. I totally made up c.
7. A story you might have heard.
8. The violent ruler was supposed to be the clue here (Ivan the Terrible).
9. I like this one. The invader was, sure enough, Bonaparte.
10. Big Ben is the bell that strikes the hour. Americans, did you get this?
11. The Supreme Court building didn't exist yet. They burned the Capitol, but not to the ground, and besides the Capitol dome didn't exist yet. So, the White House. You awful people you.
12. Logical deduction I'd think.
So tell us how you did, and tell us about the great landmarks you've seen and the ones you want to see and all the rest. Of the ones I've not visited, probably Machu Picchu is number one on my list, although of course one wants to see them all.
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Video | Tomasky Talk: US midterms 2010: New Hampshire
Michael Tomasky analyses the House and Senate races in a traditionally Republican state that swung to the left over the last two elections, but could be turning red again
Michael TomaskyOctober 14, 2010
More on money | Michael Tomasky
Sorry about the delay today, technical snafus now resolved.
NPR had a very thorough report this morning, which you can read the script of here and which continues this evening on All Things Considered, looking at the effects of undisclosed money on some races in Pennsylvania.
Local stations in Pittsburgh, an area featuring two close House races and a tough Senate race, are running up to 14 ads per hour in total, many of them from groups that have to disclose almost nothing about themselves in this post-Citizens United era. Unsurprisingly, one side is doing more of this, actually a lot more since the other side is doing zero:
The ads in Pittsburgh attacked candidates of both parties, but the ones attacking Republicans were all from Democratic candidates or party committees, groups that have to disclose their donors. Not one ad from the supposedly nonpolitical groups attacked a Republican. All of those ads are aimed at Democrats.
In other words, yes, Democrats run attack ads, but placed by candidates and committees that operate under the old disclosure rules. Only conservative attack ads are operating under the new rules for "nonpolitical" groups.
Many of you are going to write in saying ah Tomasky, more liberal whining, voters don't care. You're right about the second part. Most voters don't care. But I care, and you ought to as well, unless you think it's a good idea that a few mega-rich corporate titans can give a few million bucks to group that has to disclose almost nothing and run ads attacking candidate X that say nothing about their real agenda for the country.
Howard Fineman tries out a they-shall-reap-what-they-sow argument at HuffPo, about how this shadowy independent spending (running 9-1 in the GOP's direction, according to one estimate he cites) might make itself felt in intra-GOP presidential primary politics:
No one expects Karl Rove, the hub of the wheel of independent GOP spending, to choose sides in the GOP primary early on -- let alone lead an independent campaign for or against a presidential contender.
But many of the donors -- and others -- may well feel differently. Conservative cash supporting Tea Party candidates will see no reason to rest once the congressional campaign has ended -- and the more established contenders may hope that friends will defend them.
"I could see a Mormon-Harvard-Bain Capital coalition getting out there to defend Mitt Romney even before he is attacked," said Tracey. It's a potential gold mine for an enterprising "independent" consultant. (I wouldn't be surprised if some guy with a Power Point isn't on his way to Boston even as I write.)
Maybe. But right now, they're all rowing the boat in the same direction. This is an election cycle in which it is expected that up to $5 billion with a b might be spent. Sure, trial lawyers and unions are putting in their share. But the bulk of it is corporate, and much of it was unleased directly by the Supreme Court. We may never know exactly how much was spent, and we'll certainly never know the sources for many, many millions. I can see varying degrees of being worked up about this, but I really can't see anybody thinking this is all right.
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