(Scott Meyer via GoComics.com — enlargement available at the link)
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From the Washington Post, some good news concerning our illogical hobby of politics-watching:
On the eve of the first presidential debate, President Obama leads or is at parity with Mitt Romney on virtually every major issue and attribute in what remains a competitive general election, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll….
Nationally, the race is unmoved from early September, with 49 percent of likely voters saying they would vote for Obama if the election were held today and 47 percent saying they would vote for Romney. Among all registered voters, Obama is up by a slim five percentage points, nearly identical to his margin in a poll two weeks ago.
But 52 percent of likely voters across swing states side with Obama and 41 percent with Romney in the new national poll, paralleling Obama’s advantages in recent Washington Post polls in Florida, Ohio and Virginia…
Obama continues to hold double-digit advantages when it comes to being the more friendly and likable of the two, and also as the candidate more voters trust on social issues, women’s issues and terrorism. He maintains a big lead when it comes to empathizing with people facing economic problems. And he has a 10-point edge when it comes to handling “an unexpected major crisis,” the first time the question has been asked this year…
If you need a warm-up for Wednesday’s debate, I plan to live-blog the second Elizabeth Warren / Scott Brown debate at 7pm EDT tonight… unless or until moderator “Dancin’ Dave” Gregory causes me to throw the monitor out the window.
What else is on the agenda for the official start of the week?
raven
God, 9pm start for the debates!
arguingwithsignposts
LOL.
PeakVT
@raven: That’s still early on the West Coast. I don’t know about you, but I certainly wouldn’t want to watch Romney lie, lie, lie while trying to eat dinner.
danielx
At this point I imagine many Republicans are feeling the same way I felt in 2004…desperation and wondering how can anybody vote for this clueless yahoo, i.e., the incumbent. Or perhaps they’re wondering that about their own candidate in 2012.
Must…stop…wallowing…in…schadenfreude.
raven
@PeakVT: Well screw that, 10pm is my beddy-bye time. It’s bad enough that the World Series and MNF football is delayed so all those commies on the West Coast can watch!
Baud
I’m happy Gregory is the moderator. When he chuckles, I’ll know that Romney has launched one of his zingers.
raven
@Baud: I don’t see Gregory listed, do I?
Baud
@raven:
No, he’s not. Did he moderate the Warren-Brown debate? I was confused.
Too bad. Jim Lehrer doesn’t chuckle.
arguingwithsignposts
@Baud: He will be moderating tonight’s Warren/Brown debate. Why? Good question, unless he lives in Mass., he has fuck-all reason for being there.
raven
It’s maul Mika monday!
raven
@arguingwithsignposts: Reading fail. Thanks for proofing!
Baud
@arguingwithsignposts:
Thanks. Rachel Maddow lives in Mass. Wonder why she’s not moderating? Hmmm.
Warren should come out dressed as a Cherokee Indian holding a tomahawk, and talk about how she’ll scalp the Wall Street bankers who putting the squeeze on Massachusetts middle class families. Time to throw the attack back in Brown’s face.
Baud
@raven:
Balloon Juice before coffee – not for the faint at heart.
raven
Anne Laurie has a post at the end of the last thread that I don’t understand. I keep trying to ask what a KATO riff is and it keeps going into mod.
raven
@Baud: We’re on our way!
aimai
Can someone go over and give two tight slaps to the little creep who was blogging in at Atlantic Monthly this weekend, Simon something or other. He was just awful. He was Ezra awful without actually knowing anything interesting. The commenters took him to task and then just gave up in disgust but he was really disgracefully out of touch with everything he was writing about and pontificated like a teenager about shit that is so obvious that your jaw just dropped. One of his throwaway lines after explaining that Warren was “in trouble” because of the Brown attacks was “Brown is no bigot, of course.” Which he actually meant.
aimai
arguingwithsignposts
@raven: I believe cat0 is a banned nym. FPers can use it, but other people can’t, like Real1ty ch3x, etc.
arguingwithsignposts
@aimai:
Ah, I see they invested in a McMegan starter kit.
raven
@arguingwithsignposts: What, because of the Pink Panther?
arguingwithsignposts
@raven: I think there was a troll here once went by the nym cat0 – might have even been old r3ality ch3x. When you use one of those nyms in a comment, the comment just vanishes – doesn’t even go to moderation.
aimai
@arguingwithsignposts:
Yes, I assume it looks like one of those Shitakke Logs with teeny tiny pundits grown from spores.
aimai
arguingwithsignposts
@aimai: haha! That would be a great photoshop image. Where’s driftglass when we need him?
raven
@arguingwithsignposts: Ah, I get it now. Sheesh, I ain’t too swuft.
raven
@arguingwithsignposts: Well I figured it out I guess. This is some obscure shit.
TS
@Baud:
And it would be worth a major donation to Warren to see the reaction of Brown and Gregory.
Punchy
So this is the thread about Mass. debating? I got wait until tonite for this?
/stashes towel
cmm
I have a friend at work who is very pro-flat tax, the version where there is no more income tax at all, just a sales tax on everything. He believes it woul be more “faair”. I know that it is regressive because taking the same percentage from all means taking a larger percentage of income from the people lowest on the scale, but I can’t get him to see that. Can anyone point me to a resource abut this that may help me make the point more effectively?
PeakVT
Does anyone live in Maine? Is the left going to split the vote again and let a Republican sneak into the Senate?
@cmm: Have you pointed out to him that the marginal utility of income declines (meaning that the first dollar someone earns is more useful than the last dollar)? It may seem self-evident, but perhaps he’s just that clueless.
Elizabelle
Early October surprise:
Josh Marshall to start charging for Talking Points Memo — TPM Prime.
$50/year, or $4.15+ monthly.
Understand TPM has salaries and expenses.
But not sure I’d spring for it, unless they’re doing something awesome like the US Attorneys’ attempted purge.
What do you guys think? (And maybe you discussed this yesterday …)
ETA: Ah, the coffee kicks in and have read earlier Marshall post. Not a paywall, more a scheme to get well-heeled, passionate TPM readers to pony up with funding.
Josh: “Just so we’re crystal clear: this is not a paywall and never will be. Everything you see here on TPM today will continue to be here free to everyone. That won’t ever change.”
link: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/09/introducing_tpmprime.php?ref=fpblg
MikeJ
WaPo says the presidential race is tight as a tick’s ass, except in the swing states where it’s an Obama blowout. 2 points nationally, O up 11 in Ohio, similar in Florida and Virginia.
I can live with that.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@cmm: It’s simple math; any decent middle school textbook (pre-Jeb!) should suffice. If your friend doesn’t grasp it then, it’s because he doesn’t want to.
amk
@Elizabelle:
Way to drive
upaway the traffic.amk
@MikeJ: Don’t these nice weaselly words from wapo scare ya?
arguingwithsignposts
@Elizabelle: Meh, all the kool kids are doing “prime” things these days, so I guess Marshall had to jump on the bandwagon. Doesn’t look like it will be much added value among anyone other than people who want to join something and have money to burn.
Elizabelle
@amk:
Edited my comment. I misinformed; Josh Marshall says it’s not a paywall and “never will be.” It’s a funding gambit.
Otherwise: agree with you about driving away traffic.
arguingwithsignposts
@Elizabelle: To add to my previous comment, I have never found anything that “deep” about Talking Points Memo that wasn’t available everywhere else on the web. But if he can get people to spring for it, more power to him.
These “prime” things have been around the tech blogs for quite a while. I also suspect he’ll start doing events soon.
MikeJ
@amk: I think they just want it to look interesting and get page views. The safe states are safe. Ohio isn’t really even a swing state any more (even though I do expect it to tighten up and not give us a 10 point win.)
We know one third of the country is insane, and one third barely pay attention. It’s not too surprising that some people think the nice looking white guy couldn’t possibly mean all those things he says.
danielx
@amk:
Consider the source. It’s impolite in Villager circles to suggest even the possibility that Obama is going to run over Romney like a lawn mower. After all, this would violate the narrative that Republicans are generally more to be trusted with governing than Democrats.
They’re Very Serious People!
cmm
Ok I watched a video about it and the (anti flat tax) guy explains how it advantages someone with more money who *doesnt* spend it all and can afford to save…so they get to receive interest or dividends on the money they are not using for consumption but the person with the low income who is spending every dime on living expenses doesn’t get that. There is also the problem that it depends on consumption (if it goes as a national sales tax vs a flat income tax rate for all) which is an unsustainable model as resources get scarcer. But if we all consume less by buying second hand, growing own food, cutting back, the govt. Functions less and less too. Which in my friend’s outlook is a feature not a bug, I suppose.
I don’t understand the thing about marginal utility. I was an english major, never had any business or econ classes (something I kind of regret now, as I contemplate going back to school for accounting). PeakVT…could you explain it. In simple terms? I am not stupid but my brain seems to seize up when contemplating financial stuff.
cmm
This is the video I watched:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhMWJlN3-Vo&feature=youtube_gdata_player
amk
@danielx: I severely wonder what ‘virtually every major issue’ means anymore? Seriously.
PeakVT
@cmm: It just means as you earn more, each additional dollar is less important. For instance, if you earn $2500 a year (in the US) just about every dollar is going to go to food. So, every dollar is extremely useful. If you earn $25,000, enough food isn’t a problem, but paying for housing, utilities, a crappy car, insurance, etc. will eat up all the 25,000, leaving you with nothing to save. In this case, not every dollar is life-and-death critical, but every dollar is used up maintaining an almost normal American lifestyle. If you earn $250,000, well, food will never be a problem, your going to have a decent house and new, reliable cars, and you’ll probably be able to save quite a bit even if you indulge in a vacation or two every year. So, in this case, the last dollar – the 250,000th dollar – really won’t make any difference to your life. In other words, it’s usefulness, or utility, is low.
That is why we have a progressive income tax system, with higher marginal rates for people with higher income. All these proposals for “fair” taxes are in fact quite unfair in the real world. They are only seem fair to libertarian idiots who are unable to handle the complexity of reality.
amk
allen, the diarrhea mouth, bastshit crazy nutjob, west lags by 9 points.
Anya
@amk: Yeah, I wondered about that. The article does not support the parity with Mittenz part. It’s hard for the Village to admit the President is in the lead. I think they’re in the bargaining stage of grief. Winguts are in the denial stage.
1badbaba3
@amk: But Coulter said their Blacks were better than our Blacks.
Fraud in/at the polls!
jeremy
I don’t believe the national numbers. If Obama is outperforming and doing great in all of the swing states then the popular vote lead is more like 5-8 point spread in the President’s favor. Even Fox has the president leading nationally by 5 or 6 points.
Washington Post can’t show the president beating Romney too bad because it defeats the horse race narrative. The MSM did the same thing in 2008 when Obama won in a landslide.
Kay
@amk:
FWIW, I do think it’s still competitive. Obama’s big advantage in Ohio is that he’s up (big, for Ohio, 5 points is big for Ohio) when early voting starts, and the string of good news has Democrats really energized. I don’t think he’ll win Ohio by 9 or 10 points, unless Romney really collapses, and that would be discernable nationally. In a way it doesn’t matter. That campaign doesn’t change on the ground in response to polls. They’ll do every single thing they planned to do back in March, regardless of whether he’s up 10 or 5 or behind.
jibeaux
@cmm: In basic terms, the lower income you are, the higher a percentage of your spending you will need to do on basics like food, housing, transportation. If you make $10 an hour, your take home pay is likely to be $1200 a month or so, and you’re likely to spend every penny of it, and not on luxuries either. The more money you have, the more you have the luxury of deciding whether to spend it or not. So sales taxes are regressive because the poor spend close to 100% of their earnings, and there’s not much they can do to change that other than earn more money.
I hadn’t thought of the point that it encourages secondary markets, though. I wonder if anyone has studied the VAT in Europe and whether it led to an increased use of bartering, craiglist, garage sales, home gardens, etc.
Punchy
So blue-state Brown accuses white woman of being insufficiently red….
Rainbow politics, bitchez!
amk
@Kay: Oh, I agree that this team’s long-range ground game plans and stratergy is great. It’s just that the bw, even at this stage where the ineptitude of mittbot’s team has been proven umpteenth time, is still playing the friggin’ close-race game that is pissing me off.
Lojasmo
@amk:
Romney leads in the question about the ability to reduce the debt…or deficit, can’t remember. Asinine, that.
MikeJ
@amk: But but but he’s losing white people in Mississippi 80-20! It must be a close race!
MikeJ
Ladbrokes update. I checked a few days ago and it had shortened to 1/6. Now at 1/7. Bet £7 on Obama to win and you can make £1. Two will get ya nine on Romney.
It looks like people who have actual money on the race have decided.
Schlemizel
Start the second week of my new “permanent” job (not contract, not consulting no intermittent periods of ‘between jobs’ – real job with vacation and benefits!!)
But let me tell you about last week. My boss walks up to me on Thursday and say “I guess I’m going to work from home so I wont be in tomorrow” making the air quote sign when he says WFH! OK, so I already knew the guy has no work ethic but thats a whole new level.
Then he calls into a phone conf on the huge project he assigned to me – 20 minutes late. When we get to the end he says to the project manager “I know we have missed a lot of dates for our deliverables and are behind, can you give Schlemizel a list of those so he can start getting us caught up?”
Maybe I made a mistake taking this job???
Ash Can
@amk: See?! They skew the polls! They even admit it!! THEY SKEW THE — oh, wait…
/tighty-righty
Kay
@amk:
I don’t worry about “complacency” so that’s not it. I don’t buy the whole “theory of complacency”. I think people are happier when they’re winning, or when they perceive they are winning. What I worry about is buying the 10 point point lead and then considering a reversion to 5 a set-back. Set-backs are discouraging to people, generally, IMO.
Joey Maloney
Warren should come out dressed as a Cherokee Indian holding a tomahawk, and split Brown’s skull down the middle with it.
Dennis SGMM
The horse race narrative is another example of just how lazy the media has become. They would get plenty of eyeballs if they wrote articles about a candidate with a near-lock on the election and how that came to be. That would, however, require that they commit journalism and that’s just not going to happen. In this election WaPo and others would have to admit that the Republicans nominated lunatics and phonies. That would lead to their losing access to the lunatics and phonies – or so they assert in rare moments of candor. Easier to pretend that the ideas of both parties are equally valid, just different, and that the candidates are in a close race. That way the intrepid journos can keep getting those free cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.
Raven
@Schlemizel: Maybe you should do your job and not worry about him or her?
Anya
Watching Morning Joe (self hate) and they’re going hard core with both sides do it. And Joe is lying about stuff “every cent the Federal Government takes goes to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. The rest we borrow from China”. Also, too, Ronald Reagan.
debit
@Raven: I think Schlemizel is worried about him/herself. I’ve worked for people like that, and you end up eating a lot of shit because they dump everything on you and don’t give you the time or support you need to be successful, and then act like your failure was due to your own lack of planning and work ethic. I’d say Schlemizel it right to be concerned.
ETA: And just to be clear, I’m talking about putting in 13 hour work days while the boss fucked off and went home at 5:00.
Ash Can
@Schlemizel: Dude, it sounds like your boss is handing you his job on a silver platter. Unless your boss is his boss’s favorite son or nephew, or spouse, or lover, or he owns the whole outfit himself, if you keep chugging away and do good work you will easily outshine him in no time, in everyone’s eyes including higher management’s. And even if your boss for whatever reason is not fireable, your co-workers and the company’s clients will figure out the score, and you’ll have contacts and references galore for your next job. It may be kind of a tough slog taking on the extra work load you’re faced with, but this could really be a golden opportunity for you.
Ash Can
@Joey Maloney: What, are you an undercover GOP operative here? Give the decaf a try. Geez.
Raven
@debit: Well, I’ve work from home and I get shit from co-workers who don’t AND friends. Fuck em.
wiscomom
This is fun. Unskewed Polls daily tracker has Obama leading Romney 51 to 47.
debit
@Raven: I have no problem with working from home. I actually think it tends to lead to more work because your desk is always there. It’s the attitude of the boss that worries me, not his work locale.
Linda Featheringill
@cmm:
Flat tax on sales. Essentially VAT.
I remember a state somewhere that instituted a sales tax but exempted some things because of an unfair burden on poor people. Groceries, for instance, weren’t taxed. I think children’s clothes were also in that category. Anyway, the thinking was that if the essentials were tax free, the rest of one’s purchases were fair game.
PurpleGirl
@cmm: It’s not taking a larger percentage from those with less, it’s taking a larger PROPORTION from those with less. (At least that’s how I’ve always seen it.)
Frankensteinbeck
@MikeJ:
This. Obama is winning all the swing states. He’s winning almost every demographic. Everyone likes him more on every issue. No one likes Romney, not even his own party. The close national polls break down to Romney having an unbelievably huge (as I recall, 40 points?) lead with whites in Southern states. This election is a measuring stick for exactly how strong racism remains in America.
rikyrah
wonder if Brown is going to be a sneering fuck to Warren again tonight.
Linda Featheringill
@jeremy:
In 2008, Wapo may have had some doubt about whether the country to actually elect a black man president. I had my doubts, too, and I voted for the guy.
They have no such excuse this time.
1badbaba3
@Joey Maloney: If only. When he gets desperate he’ll get one of those ‘staffers’ to hit him in the head and blame it on her and her tribe. “Circle the wagons! The savages are attacking! Manifest Destiny!”
Gretchen
@aimai: Simon was at Washington Monthly, and yes he was clueless . I was especially annoyed at the kid referring to “”Liz” Warren.
debit
@1badbaba3: Maybe he’ll show up with a backwards E on his face.
maya
Both sides of Davey Gregory’s ass cheeks do it.
Schlemizel
@debit:
BINGO! Add to that the guy is something of a control freak who does not want other people making decisions so anything I want to do has to go through his approval, which he just can’t find the time to give.
@Ash Can:
No, although they just promoted him a couple levels, he is universally disrespected. Problem is the ‘home office’ is 1000 miles away and the politics are such that there is a good chance they will take the work away from us because of that guy.
I’m quite well aware that I have a great opportunity to be successful and it won’t be hard to look good in comparison. The last guy to do that got crushed because it made the boss look bad so the gap to be successful & employed is rather narrow I’m afraid.
OGLiberal
Even the liberal Rasmussen has Obama up 3 nationally and by 6 in the swing states. He’s switched to his “includes leaners” model which in recent days hasn’t hurt Obama.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
Ugh, Dave Gregory as moderator? Seriously?
Looks like a magnum of pinot grigio will be required. And here it is, only Monday.
Ruckus
“Dancin’ Dave” Gregory causes me to throw the monitor out the window.
Wouldn’t a less costly and dare I say more productive solution be to throw dancin dave out the window?
Ash Can
@Schlemizel: Then it sounds like upper management has its collective head up its ass, which is the real problem, and one you’re not likely to solve all by yourself. If I were you I’d do a good job anyway, and be really, really nice to the other people who work there and — especially — to the clients you come in contact with. Also, is it possible to get in touch with that last guy on the QT? Maybe find out what he’s doing now, and pick his brain. Do everything you can to make as many people as possible like and appreciate you, and the least you’ll end up with is a bunch of good contacts and references, which is nothing to sneeze at in a tight job market.
Ash Can
@Schlemizel: And PS: In the meantime, take your paychecks and save up like mad with them. Build as much of a savings cushion as you can; it’ll take some of the edge off the urgency of job-hunting if it comes to that, and you’ll feel less rushed into decisions.