CNN/ORC Poll: Republicans too extreme | POLITICO

Not a very surprising result from the recent CNN/ORC poll:

"Fifty-three percent of Americans said the GOP is too extreme, according to a CNN/ORC poll. That’s up 17 percentage points from two years ago, when Republicans were coming off a midterm walloping where they took control of the House. A matching 53 percent said Republicans should compromise more. However, Americans don’t want the GOP to lose control of the lower chamber, according to the poll."

The GOP's media cocoon - Jonathan Martin | POLITICO.com

POLITICO's Jonathan Martin writes an excellent analysis piece on the Right's media bubble (something I will admit I've taken great pleasure in reading about the last few days.) While others have written about this particular phenomenon:

"Facebook and Twitter feeds along with email in-boxes have taken the place of the old newspaper front page, except that the consumer is now entirely in charge of what he or she sees each day and can largely shut out dissenting voices. It’s the great irony of the Internet era: People have more access than ever to an array of viewpoints, but also the technological ability to screen out anything that doesn’t reinforce their views."

... Martin also talks about the emerging split between conservatives over 50 and those 49 and under:

"Some younger conservatives worry that the effects of cocoonism are just as evident after the race as before — and not only in the disbelief that Obama won. The knee-jerk reaction by some on the right to Romney’s poor performance with Hispanics has been to simply say that all will be well with the party if they pass an immigration bill and elevate Cuban-American Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

But to many next-generation Republicans, this smacks of tokenism and is more than a tad patronizing.

“They just want to put a sombrero on the Republican elephant,” said one Latino GOP operative, who didn’t want to be identified discussing such a sensitive topic.

Similarly, [45-year-old GOP strategist Bruce] Haynes fretted that “the mistake Republicans are going to make is thinking this is a demographic and political problem and not a social and cultural problem. You can’t fix this with Orca (the Romney campaign’s ill-fated GOTV software) or iPad apps or to some extent even running Hispanic candidates.”

To young Republican strategists and writers, a fundamental shift of how the party communicates is required. That doesn’t mean delegitimizing hugely popular and powerful outlets on the right, but rather transcending them.

“Communicating to the country’s changing demographics and outside of the Fox News echo chamber is a strategic imperative,” said GOP operative Phil Musser, 40.

“The rise of conservative media has been one of the best things to ever happen to the conservative movement. It has helped us reach new voters, has helped with voter persuasion and even motivation,” said GOP strategist Todd Harris, 41. “But with all the positives, there is this fact: If all you did was watch and read the conservative media, you were probably pretty shocked at what happened Tuesday. There’s a huge and ever-growing segment of the vote that Republicans just aren’t talking to and in some cases didn’t even know existed.”"

All-in-all this is a great read worth checking out regardless of whether you're on the left or the right.

Whose Lie Is It Anyway?

Whose lies were more outrageous than the others? Go to FactCheck.org's recap and PolitiFact's recap of the MSNBC/Politico Republican Debate to find out.

"First, we must dispose two myths."

Great opinion piece by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in Politico. Regarding what the country can do about job creation, Stiglitz states two myths that have been perpetuated by the right:

"First, we must dispose two myths. One is that reducing the deficit will restore the economy. You don’t create jobs and growth by firing workers and cutting spending. The reason that firms with access to capital are not investing and hiring is that there is insufficient demand for their products. Weakening demand — what austerity means — only discourages investment and hiring.

As Paul Krugman emphasizes, there is no “confidence fairy” that magically inspires investors once they see the deficit go down. We’ve tried that experiment — over and over. Using the austerity formula, then-President Herbert Hoover converted the stock market crash into the Great Depression. I saw firsthand how the International Monetary Fund’s imposed austerity on East Asian countries converted downturns into recessions and recessions into depressions.

I don’t understand why, with such strong evidence, any country would impose this on itself. Even the IMF now recognizes you need fiscal support.

The second myth is that the stimulus didn’t work. The purported evidence for this belief is simple: Unemployment peaked at 10 percent — and is still more than 9 percent. (More accurate measures put the number far higher.) The administration had announced, however, that with the stimulus, it would reach only 8 percent.

The administration did make one big error, which I pointed out in my book “Freefall” — it vastly underestimated the severity of the crisis it inherited.

Without the stimulus, however, unemployment would have peaked at more than 12 percent. There is no doubt that the stimulus could have been better designed. But it did bring unemployment down significantly from what it otherwise would have been. The stimulus worked. It was just not big enough, and it didn’t last long enough: The administration underestimated the crisis’s durability as well as its depth."

He also states four major events that have taken place in the last ten years:

"First, tax cuts beyond the country’s ability to afford. Second, two costly wars and soaring military expenditures — contributing roughly $2.5 trillion to our debt. Third, Medicare Part D — and the provision restricting government, the largest drug buyer, from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years. Fourth, the recession."

All-in-all it's a very sensible piece that clearly lays out what went wrong, what can't fix it, what can fix it, and how the issue is not about economics but rather about the politics in this country.

Death Panels and Tax Cuts: Not quite the same as Death and Taxes

Following up on the theme from yesterday's post on Matt Miller's column, Charles R. Morris authors an op-ed piece in Politico about how the US tax burden is really a red herring and the real issue isn't the quantity of taxes collected but the quality of the government spending them. He also calls out the people that think everything can be saved by cutting spending without raising a penny in taxes:

"But even a casual look at the country’s needs suggests that increased revenues have to be part of the solution. Cutting-edge U.S. research, mostly funded by the government, created the Internet and much of the scientific matrix supporting the semiconductor and biotech industries. But now research funds are under severe budget pressures. Roads, bridges and airports are in disgraceful condition after decades of scrimping on maintenance.

If we magically eliminated all waste in health care, the expanding technologies of “standard care” would still have far outrun middle-class paychecks. We have a terrible record in perinatal care, thereby incurring immense longer-term social and medical costs. Only in America do middle-class kids finish college with mountains of debt. And sad to say, it seems that economic mobility in America is now lower than in most European countries."

That's kinda the point Joe

From Joe Scarborough's weekly column in Politico:

"White House watchers believe the president will not touch Social Security until he is safely ensconced in his second term."

This is seemingly passing comment in the column is unfortunately the problem for as long as politics has existed in the human community. When unpopular decisions need to be made, political leaders don't make them because it reduces their chances of getting re-elected. It's not necessarily a sign of cowardice. That political leader believes he or she is doing the right thing for his or her town, city, state, and country and can only continue doing so while in office and not out of it.

That's part of the reason presidents don't attempt any real reform until their second term, such as Reagan's 1986 Tax Hike. Obama addressing Social Security now would be akin to George H.W. Bush breaking his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. Presidents make controversial decisions in their second term because they don't have a re-election to worry about. As a two-term president, your place in history will be determined by how much you accomplish, not just if you're a two-termer. Unfortunately the fickle voting public will never re-elect you to a second term if you do something unpopular in your first term no matter how beneficial it is to the greater good.

Why is that a problem? Because the loss is usually due to the unpopular decision and, more often than not, the challenger will have run on a platform to get rid of whatever good yet unpopular thing the incumbent did, setting the whole country back.

So isn't the issue equally divided between the politicians in charge as well as the naivete of the voting public?

President {insert name here} wants to destroy the Constitution!

Interesting op-ed by Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’S “Morning Joe” in Politico last Monday. This is remarkably, and sadly, a very accurate passage:

“For eight grim years, Democrats worked to delegitimize Bush. Opinion leaders on the left relentlessly bashed the 43rd president on national TV and online, accusing him of being a fascist and war criminal who worked in tandem with Vice President Dick Cheney to destroy the Constitution.

Eight years before Bush entered the White House, Republicans (like myself) glared at Bill Clinton as he was being sworn in as president, immediately declaring him unfit for office. Soon after he was sworn in, extremists began claiming that the 42nd president was a Marxist and fascist who sought to destroy the Constitution.

The ugliness that followed set a dangerous precedent that fed into the shrillness of the Bush era. And as the Age of Bush mercifully came to a close, a cacophony of enraged right-wing voices welcomed Obama to the White House by accusing him of being a Marxist, a fascist, a Nazi and a racist who hated America and was — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — trying to destroy the Constitution.”

Update on the Indian-Americans Running in 2010

If you read my blog post from July 7th, I mentioned a handful of Indian-Americans running for major elected offices across the United States. Just to give you an update, all but one of the candidates that I named in my post have either won their party's primary election or is running uncontested in an upcoming primary election. The only exception is Reshma Saujani, who is facing the nine-term incumbant Carolyn Maloney in the Democratic primary on September 14th for New York's 14th Congressional District.

Also, Politico recently ran an article about the Indian American Leadership Initiative. It wasn't a very long or detailed article about the IALI but I'm sure the publicity from a major Washington publication can't hurt!

News and Political Highlights of the Week

Since I haven't had a chance to blog in the past few days, here are some key highlights of the week (except Shirley Sherrod, who should just be left alone by everyone that threw her under the bus this week):

- President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Bill, enacting one of the largest regulatory reforms of the financial sector since the Great Depression. This post on New York Times' Dealbook blog has a great breakdown of the Dodd-Frank Act. If you want an interactive explanation, this interactive at the Washington Post is fun, easy to understand, and the pictures are too cute to ignore. (My favorites are the Derivatives panic people and the Regulators raising their hands to be picked.) Also on financial reform, Zach Carter writes in The Huffington Post about "Wall Street Reform: Five Key Fights After the Bill Is Signed"

- Elana Kagan passed the Senate Judiciary vote this week, with only one Republican, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, voting for her confirmation. The Hill has the text of Sen. Graham's statement. What's more telling though are the hateful comments from the readers at the bottom of the page. If you want an idea of how extreme our politics have gotten, read Graham's gracious statement and the venomous replies to them from readers.

- Some fantastic opinion pieces worth reading this week:
In Politico this week, Robert Borosage had an excellent opinion piece about the lack of leaders in DC, from the perspective of leadership as a personality trait rather than a formal position of authority. Here is an especially poignant excerpt:
"This country must build a new economic foundation — revive cutting-edge manufacturing, modernize infrastructure, revitalize education and training, invest in research and development, find ways to shackle speculation and drive private investment into longer-term horizons and empower workers to gain a fair share of the productivity they help generate."

Anne Applebaum of The Washington Post wrote about how people's words and actions can be in direct conflict with each other in a column titled, "A government of the people's every wish?"

Hopefully I can blog during the week. Otherwise, I'll check in next weekend! Have a great week!!!

Alaska Republican Congressman: Time to get moving on high-speed rail

Alaksa's House Representative, Don Young, wrote this great piece in Politico recently about the need for the United States to build a new high-speed rail infrastructure. What's interesting is Congressman Young is a Republican, so this isn't what the political right would typically call a left-wing tax-and-spend/government works scheme. The Congressman clearly lays out the needs in terms of reducing energy usage (specifically fossil fuels) and improving transportation capabilities by easing congestion on roads and airlines. Please read it and tell me what you think.Thanks!

Great Article in Politico

Roger Simon of Politico writes a great column about the auto industry and the "horror" that a failing company might fail because of its own lousy business decisions over the years. The best line in this piece:

"Detroit will turn the corner when you go to the rental car desk and the person behind the counter offers you a Toyota or a Buick and you pick the Buick."