Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 53

Some big questions | Michael Tomasky

Commenter ravcasleygera (are you new? welcome) asked me on the last thread:

Just out of interest, Michael: do you ever actually think, 'I give up?' Have their been moments in this spectacularly depressing period since about six months into the Obama presidency where you have just thought: 'American democracy is broken beyond repair?', or, 'the slow dismantling of the state is unavoidable?'

I'm not being facetious, I just genuinely wonder. People seemed so convinced the 2006-8 results meant...

I give up | Michael Tomasky

Here's the single most depressing poll result in history, from CNN/ORC, flagged by Mark Halperin:

The Republican Party
Too extreme 36%
Generally mainstream 58%
Mixed/Neither (vol.) 4%
No opinion 3%

The Democratic Party
Too extreme 42%
Generally mainstream 53%
Mixed/Neither (vol.) 3%
No opinion 2%

The Tea Party Movement
Too extreme 43%
Generally mainstream 41%
Mixed/Neither (vol.) 6%
No opinion 10%

Conducted Sept. 21-23, error margin 3 points.

So here we have a party that is attempting to dismantle the legal a...

D'Souza and media soul-searching: a suggestion | Michael Tomasky

I am moved to dash off this rare Saturday post by this article I read in today's NYT, about media soul-searching in the wake of Dinesh D'Souza's looney-tunes essay from Forbes about Obama's supposed Kenyan-based hatred of America:

...after a meeting last week with the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, the magazine, which initially defended the article, agreed to a post-publication fact-checking process to see if an apology or a correction was warranted, according to Bill Burton, a White...

They gave each other a pledge, impossible, unthinkable | Michael Tomasky

The Pledge for America the Republicans released yesterday hardly merits comment, certainly does not from a substantive point of view. A document that purports to balance the budget by 2020 without cutting the military (20% of the budget), Social Security (20%), Medicare and other health expenditures (20%) or the servicing of the debt (10%) just isn't remotely serious. If you're not looking at 70% of the spending, where are you looking?

Krugman notes this morning that he sees only one...

Morning after tax debate reflections | Michael Tomasky

Maybe killing the vote was the Democrats' most logical choice, as some of you and some other folks I spoke with have suggested. But still, it's depressing. It's depressing a) that a significant number of Democrats sincerely think it's good policy to add $700 billion to the deficit for a tax cut to benefit the upper 2% (these are chiefly people who scream deficit!deficit!deficit! when any spending is contemplated in behalf of the public good); and it's depressing that b) a significant number o...

Friday quiz: a little romance | Michael Tomasky

Okay, we've done modernism, so let's start dabbling over time in some other historical –isms. Today we'll take a look at Romanticism. It's interesting to me that just as I started to type that word, the screen saver on my desktop, which I can see around the edges of this Word document, suddenly shifted from one image to another, producing two vertical shafts of light resembling the intense rays of sunshine that one often sees in Romantic landscape painting. Make of it what you will.

As I...

The auto companies: on being unsure what country I live in | Michael Tomasky

Gallup came out with a poll recently showing that of the five major congressional items of the last two years - healthcare, finreg, bank bailouts, auto bailouts, stimulus - only one, finreg, enjoys majority support.

I understand HCR, stimulus and the bank bailout. I mean, I think they were good things, but I understand that Obama and the Democrats just got beat like drums on the spin over these things.

But I really totally do not understand the numbers (43-56) on the auto bailout. It worked...

Tax cut vote on ice in Senate | Michael Tomasky

Someone remind me why I spend any amount of time in life, let alone the amount of time I do, hoping that these people win elections:

A senior Senate Democratic aide told TPM today there won't be a vote on extending the Bush tax cuts in the upper chamber before the November election, a blow to party leaders and President Obama who believed this would have been a winning issue.

It's also a signal that the House won't take action -- though nothing has been decided for certain, since leaders there...

Bill Clinton's advice and the importance of words | Michael Tomasky

John Harris has a big interview with Bill Clinton up today in which the El Perro Grande dispenses his advice to Obama and the Democrats:

Bill Clinton says Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats have not been "vigorous enough" in pushing back against Republican distortions, warning that to prevent a midterm debacle, his party must urgently rally around a national message designed to halt the flight of independent voters into the arms of the GOP...

...His advice for Obama, Clinton said, is to...

Democratic midgets | Michael Tomasky

This just makes me want to go move to Labrador and write romance novels. From Greg Sargent:

A number of "moderate" House Dems have privately given Nancy Pelosi and other Dem leaders an earful in recent days, urging them not to hold a vote on whether to extend just the middle class tax cuts and not the high end ones, because it will leave them vulnerable to Republican ads, sources involved in the discussions tell me.

Okay, you say. Well duh. But remember, they would be raising taxes only on...