Mori Dinauer

Liberal pundit/blogger disillusionment roundup: Paul Krugman‘s on the cusp of giving up on Barack Obama; Kevin Drum is disgusted and embarrassed by the Democrats; Sandy Levinson is dismayed that Obama still wants to reach across the aisle; Robert Farley doesn’t understand why Democrats don’t have, at a minimum; an instinct for self-preservation; and Jon Chait‘s […]

The dust had barely settled in Massachusetts before the cowards of the U.S. Senate announced their legislative plan for 2010: do absolutely nothing. Evan Bayh is worried that the Democratic party has moved too far to the left. Jim Webb wants the health care debate to be suspended until Scott Brown can dictate its outcome. […]

Today’s spectator sport, in the absence of any actual news to report on, seems to be divining the “meaning” of the Massachusetts special election. Well, I’ll tell you. It means Democrats retain 60 seats in the U.S. Senate or Republicans gain one seat. If the latter scenario, then House Democrats will either pass the Senate […]

Massachusetts Senate race roundup: Interim Senator Paul Kirk‘s expiration date is to be disputed; I’m not convinced that the election is a “referendum” on health-care reform; Scott Brown has dabbled in birtherism; temp workers and out-of-staters are assisting the Republican’s campaign; and will the libertarian candidate in the race be a spoiler? “The frustration on […]

If conservatives axiomatically believe that the conservative movement represents the interests of the American public, then the converse must also be true: that the public rejects liberal policy. You can see this on full display as Jon Chait introduces his Wehner Fallacy award for outstanding achievement in the field of propagandist punditry, the first being […]

One assumes Senate candidate Scott Brown is willing to lie about his knowledge of and participation in the tea party movement because he correctly concludes that such an association would not go over well in the Bay State. Yet what’s more interesting is that the tea partiers are willing to finance elements of Brown’s campaign […]

In the absence of knowing who the general campaign candidates will be and what public opinion polling will look like 10 months from now, there’s very little to go on in terms of predicting how the midterm elections will turn out. In fact, this is why I feel fundraising and voter registration numbers offer the […]

The big moment in last night’s debate between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown for the Massachusetts special election was when Brown proclaimed that the open Senate seat is “not the Kennedy seat and it’s not the Democrat’s seat — it’s the people’s seat.” Well, sure. But it’s worth looking at what the implications are for […]

The biggest revelation in Game Change is not that Harry Reid used an archaic term to describe the electoral chances of a black presidential candidate. It’s that books like Game Change expose how pathetic elite political discourse in this country has become. The Reid story continues to dominate the news despite it revealing little about […]

In today’s segment of the Michael Steele/RNC train wreck, we learn that Steele a) “didn’t seek this job. I didn’t ask for it,” instead merely following God’s calling, b) wrote a book on Republican strategy that no one in the Republican party knew about, and c) could face a challenge (again) from Katon “no colored […]