Visual Source: Newseum
Phil Rosenthal:
"It's like you know your kid is not doing well in school because he doesn't seem to be studying and he doesn't seem to know math, and then the teacher tells you he got an F," economist Matthew Mitchell said of Standard & Poor's historic downgrade of U.S. debt. "That's a signal, but you kind of knew it anyway."
The United States is your kid. School is the global economy. Studying is making hard choices, the teacher is Standard & Poor's and the F is S&P's AA+ credit rating (although it's more like the report-card equivalent of an A-minus), down for the first time from the top-tier AAA.
Math is math, as the staggering deficit at the heart of this situation will attest.
The tea party doesn't do math. Or science. But how can a downgrade hurt us when tea party Republicans told us the debt default consequences were overblown? 1964 calling on line 2: we want the John Birch Society back.
WaPo:
“Grover’s not realistic,” said former senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a self-described “Reagan robot” elected to Congress in 1980. Gregg retired last year after serving with Coburn and Crapo on the bipartisan fiscal commission that recommended stabilizing borrowing by trimming tax breaks and sharply cutting spending.
With the number of people on Medicare and Social Security set to double, Gregg said, “your government is inevitably going to grow. And you’re either going to have to finance that, or you’re going to end up running the country into the ditch.”
And yet, here we are.
Robert J Samuelson:
With so much financial turmoil — and Standard & Poor’s downgrade of U.S. debt — it’s important to grasp what last week’s budget deal does and doesn’t do.
Note, for starters, that it won’t create much “fiscal drag” on the economy. The spending cuts are simply too small in a $15 trillion annual economy. The deal might shave one-tenth of 1 percent off annual growth in the next decade, estimates the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers. Note also that the deal isn’t a victory for the Tea Party over liberals. Liberals got much of what they wanted while the Tea Party’s influence may wane. Taxes may rise if the Bush-Obama tax cuts expire at the end of 2012.
How conservatives see it.
Nieman Journalism Lab:
That simple shift in perspective — thinking in terms of jobs accomplished rather than products offered, and profiting from it — is key to what Vidiots [independent L.A. video store] is doing. And it’s intriguing to consider what the shift might look like when applied to journalism. News outlets are certainly getting into the community game — through social media, of course, but also through IRL events like the NYT’s TimesTalks, the Journal’s Weekend Conversations, the Texas Tribune Festival, the Register-Citizen’s newsroom cafe, and on and on — but often those happenings are presented as subsidiary products, as events that are separate from the news itself. They’re just another revenue stream — just another product sold, just another milkshake.
But: What if they were more than that? What if news outlets were to consider themselves as doing a job rather than selling a product? And what would happen to organizations’ business models if we started to think of “the news,” at its core, not as a product, but as an event?
Alan Grayson:
In 2010, my district and everywhere else in Florida, Republican turnout was in the sixties. Democratic turnout was in the forties. Republican turnout was close to what it was in 2008; Democratic turnout was barely half of what it had been. In 2010, I could have won every Democratic vote (and almost did), plus every Independent vote, and I still would have lost. When I saw those numbers, I said on MSNBC, “when Democrats don’t vote, Democrats don’t win.”
Some WI coverage, with the recalls happening Tuesday:
The Reporter (Fond du Lac):
The stage for the final recall election has been set for Tuesday in which 18th District state Sen. Randy Hopper, R-Empire, will square off against Democrat candidate Jessica King of Oshkosh while 14th District state Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, will face challenger state Rep. Fred Clark, D-Baraboo...
City clerks in both Fond du Lac and Oshkosh say requests for absentee ballots have been brisk as well as the number of residents stopping at the counter to vote via absentee ballot in advance of the election.
Fond du Lac City Clerk Sue Strands said her office has mailed out more than 900 absentee ballots and assisted over 500 walk-ins casting ballots at the counter. Strands predicts voter turnout to be heavy, with as many as 80 percent of the city's 21,670 registered voters casting ballots.
Oshkosh Northwestern:
But even as the Government Accountability Board certified recall petitions and announced election dates, the rhetoric shifted from collective bargaining rights to the rapid pace with which the Republican agenda was introduced, vetted and voted into law.
Concealed carry, voter ID, redistricting and a biennial budget that includes significant corporate tax cuts and cuts to local aid and education funding have turned what were recall campaigns focused on collective bargaining rights into a more general campaign that focuses less on the individuals being recalled and more on party politics and Gov. Scott Walker.
Ads about who paid taxes or who hit a pedestrian have increasingly been replaced by ads about who represents the interests of taxpayers, of education and of hunters and conservationists and who will support women's rights.
Nothing is more depressing than listening to disaffected voters in WI complain about the poison of partisanship when only one party (Republicans with an ideological agenda) is responsible for poisoning the well.
Postcrescent.com:
With six Republican senators fighting for their seats on Tuesday, then two Democratic senators facing recall next week, high stakes and intense national interest in the historic recalls mean spending totals will continue to rise.
Cash flowing into the recall elections from third-party interest groups has reached about $30 million, election watchdogs say, and total spending by third-party groups and candidates could top $40 million.
That total would double spending on all 116 of last fall's state legislative races combined.