×
- What's the Matter With Arizona Roundup: Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano suggest the new immigration law could be challenged by the federal government; J.D. Hayworth wants more draconian and broadly applied birther legislation; an Arizona sheriff points out the obvious, may refuse to enforce immigration law; everybody hates John McCain; and according to leading right-wing cranks, Raul Grijalva is a traitor, possibly subhuman.
- The headline-generating find in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll is that "members of Congress face the most anti-incumbent electorate since 1994, with less than a third of all voters saying they are inclined to support their representatives in November." Patrick Ruffini doesn't cite the poll, but I'm sure he would see it as validation of his hunch that Republicans will pick up 70 House seats in the fall. This is absurd for a number of reasons, but the basic conceit here is that "independents" are some new wellspring of Republican support. Similarly, Nick Gillespie is ecstatic that 56 percent want smaller government and fewer services and reiterates his belief that some libertarian third party will magically emerge from the ether to capitalize on all this discontent. Again, for the record, the importance of independents is serially exaggerated, and the public has consistently demonstrated that it doesn't understand the federal budget in any detail.
- As I've mentioned before, I don't doubt that time will eventually enable people to forget how terrible the presidency of George W. Bush was, and I think the name-association problem facing Jeb Bush has a similar half-life. Yet this comment from Republican consultant Alex Castellanos that the Bush brand "could be rehabilitated for Jeb just as it was for Hillary Clinton after her husband's presidency" cannot go unchallenged. As I recall, Bill Clinton left office with a positive approval rating. The last year of his presidency, not after, his wife won election to the U.S. Senate. By comparison, Bush's approval rating was in the low 30s at best by the end of his second term, and voters still blame him for the economy. But in conservative fantasy land, both Clintons are loathed by the electorate because, well, just because.
- Remainders: The White House Press Corps needs to get over their overwrought sense of self-importance; don't be fooled by the Wall Street banker's overwrought sense of economic importance; yes, ending anonymous Senate holds is an excellent idea; nobody could have predicted that the crack journalists employed by Andrew Breibart would get a story about HHS totally wrong; the RNC decides that it has not been despicable enough with their fake census, blames the Democrats; the California GOP decides to emulate its national counterpart; Bill Frist demonstrates that Republicans who are out of office are often less cynical than those who are in; I assume Rush Limbaugh has worked up some new material in the past four years with which to bash those who suffer from disabilities; and I have to concede that this proves that conservatives aren't exhausted of ideas.
--Mori Dinauer
