Saturday opinion.
SF Chronicle:
GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, still reeling from the political fallout of reports she had an undocumented employee for nine years, heads into a crucial debate on Spanish-language television today against Democrat Jerry Brown with questions still unanswered about what appears to be her rapidly changing immigration policy.
Kevin Drum:
According to CBO reports, the stimulus has created 3.5 million jobs and kept unemployment about 1 to 2 percent lower than it otherwise would have been, and apparently it's accomplished this efficiently and with minimal waste. It's a testament to what happens when you take good policy seriously.
Unfortunately, it's also a testament to how little most people care about good policy and competent execution. As near as I can tell, it's practically conventional wisdom these days that the stimulus package was a complete bust—and all because the Obama administration initially made a lousy projection about the future course of the recession and suggested that the stimulus package would reduce unemployment to 8 percent. If their forecast of the depth of the recession had been correct and they'd predicted, say, 11.5 percent unemployment without a stimulus package and 10 percent with it—which is what happened—elite opinion about the stimulus would probably be completely different.
So there you have it. Good policy and good execution gets you bubkes. All it takes is one wrong forecast number to wipe it all out. Welcome to the real world.
WaPo:
Progressive groups hope to draw tens of thousands of supporters to the Mall on Saturday and create a show of force that will rival the conservative tea party movement.
In terms of media coverage? Doubtful. it doesn't fit in the media story line.
TPM:
Sharron Angle is now getting on board the latest Republican bandwagon, warning that sharia -- the term for Muslim religious law, which the American right has conflated to refer to its branches within Muslim extremism -- is taking over parts of the United States.
But nutcases like this do.
Kathleen Parker:
The suicide of an 18-year-old Rutgers University student following an unimaginable invasion of his privacy has launched an overdue examination of casual -- and possibly criminal -- disregard for others' personal space.
Margie Omero:
So don't make the mistake Matt Lewis does. He argues that because men, allegedly, would rather have their wives cheat on them than lose their jobs, they care more about the economy, and so are more likely to vote. (Talk about a stretch!) As I've written before, women have consistently outnumbered men at the voting booth for decades, and they did again in 2008.
With so many close races, it's not too late for campaigns to move swing women voters. And for Democrats, it might be mission critical. A sizeable gender gap can stave off major losses. As we'll discuss in a future post, we think the gender gap seems poised to widen. So turnout may be as much--if not more--important than persuasion. Encouragingly, the EMILY's List survey showed surge women voters quickly became more enthusiastic after a short discussion about the issues.
Paul Starobin:
Such suspicions about Obama are part of a wider and swelling cluster of anxieties of a traditional nativist type, reflected in an earlier age by citizens worried about the influx of Catholic immigrants in big cities in the North. The core nativist question, a staple of the modern Radical Right, is always the same: Who is a real American?
Today's nativist agenda extends from opposition to the construction of mosques -- and not just the one proposed for a site a few blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan -- to calls for repeal of the 14th Amendment provision that automatically grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The rollback cause, agitated by the influx of illegal Hispanic immigrants from south of the border, has been embraced by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jon Kyl of Arizona.
Although the debate over Muslims and Islam is, in certain respects, quite different from the debate over Latino immigration, a tie binds the two matters: the fear, which a significant chunk of Americans feel but the evidence does not bear out, that the country is being changed for the worse by non-native elements that cannot or simply will not assimilate into traditional American culture.