Visual source: Newseum
JSonline:
In a Wisconsin poll taken two weeks ago, Gov. Walker’s approval rating among Republican voters was 87%.
His approval rating among Democratic voters was 9%.
Those aren’t normal numbers, even in polarized times.
Few if any governors are as popular in their own party as Walker is today.
Few if any are as unpopular in the other party.
Wisconsin is more divided on partisan lines over its governor than anywhere else in America.
WI is unique; he's the only Gov with opposite party numbers in single digits. [Oops... my bad. Gregiore does her part!] What's with those 9%? Why isn't it 0%? And how could Republicans approve of that kind of polarization?
JSonline:
The season of dirty political tricks is now officially under way.
In letters obtained by No Quarter, local Republican Party officials are encouraging their GOP colleagues to collect enough signatures to get a fake Democratic candidate on the ballot in each of two upcoming recall elections.
The spoiler Democrats, who are identified by name in the letters, would run in the Democratic primaries for the seats now held by Republican Sens. Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac and Luther Olsen of Ripon.
Both of the fake Democrats have a history of giving almost exclusively to major Republicans.
Dean Baker:
When the financial system was on the edge of melting down back in the fall of 2008, there was much talk in the punditocracy of a second Great Depression. The story was that we risked repeating the mistake at the onset of the first Great Depression: allowing a cascade of bank failures that both destroyed much of the country’s wealth and left the financial system badly crippled. Instead, however, we acted, and these days the accepted wisdom is that the TARP and other special lending facilities created by the Federal Reserve Board prevented a similar collapse that saved us from a second Great Depression. But this view badly misunderstands the nature of the first Great Depression—and may, in fact, result in the country suffering the second Great Depression that the pundits claim we have averted.
EJ Dionne:
Unfortunately for Romney, he barely got his moment in the sun because dark clouds rolled in. Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani showed up in New Hampshire on the former Massachusetts governor's magical day, underscoring why Romney is plagued by the word "putative," which almost always appears before the word "front-runner."
But Romney's travails are about more than the man himself. They speak to the condition of a party that won't let him embrace his actual record, and constantly requires him -- and all other Republicans -- to say outlandish things.
Stephen Stromberg:
On Face the Nation Sunday, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) said that a Republican can beat President Obama next year if the election is about the president’s record. Good thing Barbour decided not to run, then, because the governor also made a series of assertions about Obama’s record on energy that suggests he was confused about it, intentionally misleading, or both.
Peter Beinart:
So why do I still think Obama will win in 2012? Because if the Ronald Reagan analogy may not exactly hold, the George W. Bush analogy just might. Unemployment wasn’t particularly high when Bush sought reelection in 2004, but Americans were in a sour mood nonetheless. Throughout the summer and fall of 2004, a clear majority of Americans said the country was on the wrong track. The numbers, in fact, were only marginally better then than they are now. So how did Bush win? For one thing, people’s feelings about him outpaced their feelings about the state of the country. Despite saying the country was on the wrong track, a slight majority of Americans approved of his job performance, and he was reelected by essentially that margin.