Former Congressman Alan Grayson, who is running again for a House seat in 2012, criticized the Democratic leadership in a discussion in Los Angeles this weekend, saying that they don’t understand the basic concept that voters need something to vote for. Grayson, speaking at the offices of the progressive filmmaking organization Brave New Films in [...]

Brian Beutler reports on the House GOP’s next trick. Their plan is to find the two worst parts of the President’s jobs bill and deficit plan, and combine them for a package that sounds almost comically silly, but that gives them the talking point that the President supported the component parts: The piece of the [...]

The 1% at the Wharton Business School showed how their side in the class war operates by chanting “get a job” at protesters of the Occupy Philadelphia movement during the protests over Eric Cantor’s cancelled speech on Friday. It was a revealing moment. The response to the Occupy Wall Street protests has been generally muted [...]

Last night, the Manhattan Community Board 1 held a Quality of Life Committee hearing about the Occupy Wall Street encampment, hearing the complaints of neighbors about incessant drumming and general inconvenience to the community. The hearing ended with a resolution asking Occupy Wall Street to “limit the use of drums, trumpets, tambourines, bugles, and air [...]

Looks like I gave Doug Schoen way too much credit in criticizing him about his poll of Occupy Wall Street. His MO was to marginalize the protest movement in familiar terms, as a “radical” left-wing group supporting some amalgam of godless communism and hippie free love-ism for America. All of the actual policies that his [...]

The new new thing in journalism is a little thing called fact-checking. I know, it’s very novel. What happens is that claims are actually tested and subjected to a rigorous analysis. We’re still one step away from the test happening BEFORE the alleged facts get into stories; usually the “fact check” article is separate from [...]

This was a good day for this poll to come out. A new Gallup survey finds that Americans believe government has overreached. The irony of that coming out today, when the US completed the executive assassination without trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, even though the survey results have nothing to do with that kind of executive [...]

Ron Suskind’s book looks like it will be the talk of the entire week. The dispute with Anita Dunn over a truncated quote is sucking up a lot of oxygen. I haven’t read the book, but I think the context does indicate that the President stepped in when the old boy’s network was getting to [...]

OK, we’ve covered the policy of the jobs speech pretty well. What about the politics? Because that’s what the speech really was – a political argument in the face of a struggling economy, an intransigent opposition and an unclear re-election campaign. I think the consensus is that the President gave a strong speech, deficit mania [...]

Dave Weigel has a really nice piece about the Democrats’ cunning plan to trap Republicans into cutting payroll taxes. As Dave says, it wasn’t so long ago that lifting the payroll tax cap was a standard part of any Democrats’ stump speech. In fact, people like Jim Clyburn still mention it today, and Bernie Sanders [...]

Fareed Zakaria went there. Typical of a furriner, without a true appreciation for the finest system of government ever devised! After the S&P downgrade of the United States, no country with a presidential system has a triple-A rating from all three major ratings agencies. Only countries with parliamentary systems have that honor (with the possible [...]