Sunday funnies.
Brown v Whitman, via LA Times:
"Let's be sympathetic and let's really empathize with the millions of people who are in the shadows and you want to keep them in the shadows and now you're trying to evade responsibility," he said. "Don't run for governor if you can't stand up on your own two feet and say, 'Hey I made a mistake, I'm sorry, let's go on from here.' You have blamed her, blamed me, blamed the left, blamed the unions but you don't take accountability."
NY Times:
Republicans carry substantial advantages as they move into the final month of the fall campaign, but the resilience of vulnerable Democrats is complicating Republican efforts to lock down enough seats to capture the House and take control of the unsettled electoral battleground.
Ari Melber:
Indeed, historians may stress how the tea party rose at exactly the same time that traditional print journalism crashed into the earth like an asteroid, instantly sinking underground and far from political relevance. Some already are.
At the panel, Harvard historian Jill Lepore, who just published a book on the role of contested historical narratives in tea party organizing, said the "disequilibrium" created by newspapers’ demise is fueling a new type of politics.
"Our political and newspaper culture were born at the same time," Lepore noted, pointing to the partisan papers founded to oppose John Adams. With the decline of print, she proposed, comes a decline in local news coverage, a demise of the local "form of community," and ultimately a distortion of "proportion" – where people have less sense of which developments are actually significant. We may even look back on this period, Lepore suggested, and realize that we spent far too much time on the tea party. Coming from someone who just wrote a book on the subject, that’s saying something.
Newsweek:
But the NEWSWEEK Poll's most revealing finding is that despite months of media coverage insisting that voters are "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore," anger is unlikely to decide this year's elections. For starters, self-described angry voters constitute only 23 percent of the electorate, and there's no reason to believe that they're more likely to cast ballots in November than their calmer peers. Why? Because the percentage of angry voters who say they will definitely vote in the midterms is statistically indistinguishable from the overall percentage of voters who say the same thing (84 percent vs. 81 percent). In fact, majorities of voters say they would not be more likely to vote for candidates who express anger at Washington incumbents (60 percent), Wall Street bankers (52 percent), the illegal-immigration problem (53 percent), the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (65 percent), or health-care reform (55 percent). Fifty-three percent of voters see Obama's unemotional approach to politics—his "coolness"—as a positive, versus only 39 percent who don't...
So if not anger, the president, or the issues, what will be the deciding factor in the 2010 midterm elections? According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, the condition of the economy, and the inability of anyone in Washington to improve it, is by far the most important force at play in this year's congressional campaigns.
It's not the tea party, it's the economy. I'd tell print journalism, but according to the previous link, they are "far from political relevance".
Thomas Friedman:
We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look Americans in the eye and say: "These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans."
Dana Milbank:
Glenn Beck, the conservative television and radio host, is an amateur historian. Very amateur.
One day, he rhetorically asked his Fox News viewers: "Why did we buy Alaska in the 1950s?" A good question -- because "we" purchased Alaska in 1867. Another day, he gave his version of European history: "We have the Age of Enlightenment, 1620 to 1871, uh, 1781. This was a time when people said, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, we can think out of the box.' This is coming out of the Dark Ages." That was thinking outside of the box, because the Dark Ages ended in about 1000 AD, six centuries earlier than Beck claimed.
NY Times:
"I don’t know what smells worse," the little guy huffs, "my diaper or this new bill."
A sign-off informs the television audience that this high-minded piece of issue advocacy was paid for by the "Coalition to Protect Seniors."
Hmmm.
