Visual Source: Newseum
There was a recall election last night, and there are now two more Democrats in the WI state Senate. we came up short with two others (and got skunked in the last two.) These losses were all red districts, but we gained and we will be back.
It was an extraordinary day at the site on Tuesday; thank you all for being here with us.
Nate Silver:
If you are going to read into the results, it is probably best to compare them to Mr. Walker’s performance in 2010 rather than the margins that the state senators themselves achieved that year. Ordinarily, nobody pays much attention to state senate elections. If some Republican incumbent was re-elected with 70 percent of the vote in 2010, but survives the recall with 55 percent of the vote, it would be dubious to cite that as a sign of progress for Democrats since the elections were contested under substantially different circumstances.
On the other hand, Mr. Walker carried the six districts on Tuesday’s recall ballot by an average of 13 percentage points in 2010 — better than his statewide margin of 6 percentage points. If Democrats were to split the vote across these districts about evenly, that would be a reasonably troubling sign for Mr. Walker, however many of the seats Democrats actually win.
WaPo:
The stock market staged a dramatic rebound Tuesday, recording the biggest gains after the Federal Reserve announced it would keep its ultra-low interest rate policies in place for two more years.
The surge ended a wild day of trading in which the Dow Jones industrial average dipped in and out of negative territory four times, giving back hundreds of points in early gains before finishing the session up 429 points. That represented a nearly 4 percent rise, the largest increase in two years.
The Fix:
In the end, the efforts against Walker and Kasich on labor rights could very well provide a chilling effect for other Republicans who are feeling ambitious when it comes to those rights in their own states — i.e. ‘Don’t mess with labor.’ And Democrats argue that could extend to other divisive budget-cutting issues like reforming Medicare.
But besides that, taking six state Senate races in one state and extrapolating them across the rest of the country is highly problematic.
Pundit final exam: "What did it all mean? A lot and nothing at all." Okay, you pass. Congratulations.
WSJ:
Why This Crisis Differs From the 2008 Version
Starting from the most obvious: The two crises had completely different origins.
The older one spread from the bottom up. It began among over-optimistic home buyers, rose through the Wall Street securitization machine, with more than a little help from credit-rating firms, and ended up infecting the global economy. It was the financial sector's breakdown that caused the recession.
The current predicament, by contrast, is a top-down affair. Governments around the world, unable to stimulate their economies and get their houses in order, have gradually lost the trust of the business and financial communities.
That, in turn, has caused a sharp reduction in private sector spending and investing, causing a vicious circle that leads to high unemployment and sluggish growth. Markets and banks, in this case, are victims, not perpetrators.
The second difference is perhaps the most important: Financial companies and households had feasted on cheap credit in the run-up to 2007-2008.
When the bubble burst, the resulting crash diet of deleveraging caused a massive recessionary shock.
This time around, the problem is the opposite. The economic doldrums are prompting companies and individuals to stash their cash away and steer clear of debt, resulting in anemic consumption and investment growth.
The final distinction is a direct consequence of the first two. Given its genesis, the 2008 financial catastrophe had a simple, if painful, solution: Governments had to step in to provide liquidity in droves through low interest rates, bank bailouts and injections of cash into the economy.
Greg Sargent:
This is a completely false rendering of what actually happened. In reality, the protests from Democrats were prompted by Scott Walker’s proposal to strip public employees of their bargaining rights, protests that were later sustained by the deep cuts in his budget, leading to the recall drive. Priebus doesn’t even mention the collective bargaining piece of the story, only citing the demand for pension and health concessions as the reason for the entire standoff. In the real world, of course, labor unions actually agreed to those concessions, yet Walker pressed ahead with his union-busting proposal anyway, which is what prompted the whole battle.
Various efforts to submerge this truth have been central to conservative arguments about Wisconsin throughout this battle. Prominent conservative columnists such as Charles Krauthammer have pretended that Walker’s proposals shouldn’t have surprised Democrats, and that Dems subverted the will of the people by resisting them, which is a profoundly distorted history of what actually took place.
Victoria Pynchon:
When violent riots break out in a society known for the quiet queue and adherence to still quite fixed economic and social class boundaries, something has gone awry. As a student of conflict resolution, I know that active disputes – from angry shouting to keying your neighbor’s car to throwing bricks through store windows – arise primarily in two contexts – one having to do with identity and the other having to do with “relative deprivation.”
Because London’s present troubles do not appear to be identity (race or nationality or religious) based, they are more likely than not to have their origin in power and income inequity...
The riots that erupt after the pressure has grown too large for testosterone-fueled young men in the heat of summer are not intentional protests against life’s inequities any more than the violence that follows British “football” games. They are, however, a sign of illness, of something out of whack in the society that gives rise to so many people expressing so much anger so self-destructively at the same time.
