Above is pollster.com aggregate without Rasmussen and Gallup. See explanation.
Above is Rasmussen and Gallup alone. "All polls included" is here.
Paul Krugman pummels Niall Ferguson (and his editors) for his misrepresentations and factual errors in a Newsweek cover piece:
I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:
The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.
Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.
Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making—he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.
"Deliberately misleading readers" = lying through his teeth.
E.J. Dionne Jr. checks out the lies being spewed in the Medicare debate and wonders why hand-wringers who say campaigning has gotten too nasty don't spend their time on something more important:
Pious sermons about tone and etiquette are a way of avoiding the hard and controversial work of establishing what’s fair, what’s not, and what lies beneath the campaign assaults.
Don't jump to conclusions about the impact of Rep. Todd Akins's remark about pregnancy and "legitimate rape," says
Ilyse Hogue:
The short-term consequences of such an incendiary remark are predictable: Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill will trumpet the remark to her own political advantage; donations will spike to her campaign; and the party committees will offer the remark as one more proof point of the GOP's war on women. But the impact of Akin's effort to redefine the terms of this debate reaches beyond this one race. In the multi-dimensional chess that shapes public opinion, the game is less about individual elections and more about a sustained effort to mainstream radical ideas. In the case of denying women control over their lives, there's evidence that the bad guys may be winning the long-game.
Kate Sheppard says Todd Akin isn't alone:
Akin didn't make this idea up. That women can't get pregnant when they're raped is a thing that some people actually believe. I stumbled across this several months ago while researching another story. It turns out to be an idea held and repeated by individuals who oppose abortion in any circumstance.
While right-wingers foam at the mouth over Vice President Joe Biden's "chains" remark,
Adele M. Stan writes, there is no equivalent challenge of Republicans who use slavery rhetoric to scare white people the way Paul Ryan, Michele Bachmann, Allen West, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, Rick Petty and Herman Cain all have done.
Zachary Bell wonders why young Americans don't strike.
The New York Times Editorial Board:
Id al-Fitr—the end of Ramadan’s monthlong fasting and sacrifice—has turned out to be an especially joyous holiday for the Islamic American community of Murfreesboro, Tenn. Hundreds of worshipers were finally able to occupy their new suburban mosque this month, prevailing in their constitutional right after a two-year assault of bigotry, persistent court challenges, arson and a bomb threat at the construction site. [...]
Their victory in opening the new mosque was happily paralleled by one in the voting booth in this month’s Congressional primaries. Lou Ann Zelenik, a Republican primary candidate who campaigned fiercely against the mosque and “the Islamization of our society,” was defeated by a wide margin. Representative Diane Black, who prevailed on the Republican line, cynically raised questions about the mosque approval process, but at least acknowledged that freedom to worship is protected by the Constitution.
Roger Bybee says Paul Ryan has been "cruelly oblivious to the suffering in his district." And the media, h adds, have "done an abysmal job linking the widespread misery in his district with Ryan’s policies and votes..."
Mike Rosen:
The so-called "news" segment of the liberal media is so all-in for Obama in this election cycle that they've abandoned any pretense of objectivity and balance. As they see it, when the stakes are this high, the end justifies the means.
So their definition of a gaffe is almost anything Romney says that they disagree with.
Jonathan Heawood:
Twitter and other social-networking platforms have given people the impression that fighting for human rights is easy: all you have to do is hit "retweet", and the world will immediately become a better place. Two things are missing from this equation: money and a movement.