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• Nobody knows who Nancy Pelosi is... except voters

  Yglesias pointing to new poll today,
  The political press has a structural tendency to overstate the political importance of basically everything that happens. And one of the ways in which they do this is with a tendency to vastly overstate the extent to which people are paying any [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2009, 8:46pm EST
  

• SCOTUS takes a pass on Redskins challenge

  Interesting read on the Native American challenge to the trademarked nickname of Washington D.C.'s NFL franchise over at SCOTUSblog. You'll never guess which Justice, in their time on the Circuit Court bench, found that failure to timely challenge assert one's rights was not available as an affirmative defense in' [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2009, 8:36pm EST
  

• For Sully

  This seemed appropriate seeing as how Andrew Sullivan has turned into an all Palin blog the last 24 hours or so...
  
  [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2009, 12:58pm EST
  

• 12 years ago today...

  
  I was a freshman in college and made my first trip to Colorado. [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 9:44pm EST
  

• Who wants to start the campaign committee?

  John Cole,
  Seriously, when is this Palin bullshit going to stop? You know who else isn’t prepared to be President? Pauly Shore. How come there are no polls about him?
  
  I'd donate some money to see that. Because really, after Sarah Palin who can't seriously run for president?
  [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 9:17pm EST
  

• Don't argue with a Professor

  Seth brings the smarts today,
  
  I've seen no small amount of hand-wringing from Democrats worried about the impact of the current double-digit unemployment on next year's midterm elections. By most estimates, even if there is robust economic growth for the next year, unemployment will still be quite high [...]
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  Posted: November 13, 2009, 12:13pm EST
  

• Presidents don't make decisions in a vacuum

  Sully makes a good point as we await Obama's decision on Afghanistan,
  One other intuition: Obama has recently clearly been pondering the dreadful responsibility of sending soldiers to war. From the decision to witness the return of coffins at Dover to the un-scheduled solitary trip to Arlington and this' [...]
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  Posted: November 12, 2009, 1:47pm EST
  

• Employer speech in union elections

  Today's Wall Street Journal has an article about pro-labor legislation at the state level. They mention an Oregon law which bans employers from holding "captive audience" meetings. That is meetings where employees are forced to sit and listen to various lies and propoganda about the union and which employers use' [...]
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  Posted: November 12, 2009, 10:47am EST
  

• Dave Schultheis thinks your stupid...

  Words fail,
  

  State Sen. David Schultheis said he didn't intend for a Twitter post accusing President Barack Obama of "flying the U.S. plane right into the ground" and ending with "let's roll" as a threat or a reference to United Flight 93, which crashed during the 2001 terrorist [...]

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  Posted: November 12, 2009, 10:21am EST
  

• Like Kevin Bacon

  Apparently I have a LinkedIn connection to Robert Farley from Lawyers, Guns & Money.
  
  I wonder who it is? [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 3:07pm EST
  

• Speaking of bigots...

  Tancredo wanna-be Dave Schultheis' latest nuttery gets picked up by TPM.' [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 12:36pm EST
  

• Tanc

  He can't possibly be this stupid, can he?
  
  Bill Ritter should be popping champagne.' [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 11:20am EST
  

• Markey's vote

  Seth writes about Betsey Markey's "Nay" vote on the House healthcare bill,
  It does not do enough to cut health care costs? She wanted the bill to be more invasive into the private insurance market? I find this a tad disingenuous. I seriously doubt that a bill with a' [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 11:03am EST
  

• State Board of Health should brush up on the Administrative Procedures Act

  Administrative Law may be the most boring class in law school but that doesn't mean that it's not an important subject area. Just ask the Colorado Board of Health.
  [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 5:34pm EST
  

• Use it

  Ezra Klein,
  The point of a congressional majority is to use it, not to keep it.
  The same can be said for any elected office or political body. Getting office holders to think like that is, of course, the challenge. [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 5:11pm EST
  

• Suggested reading

  On the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall I'll go ahead and recommend a book that I just finished reading a bit ago, "The Rise and Fall of Communism" by Oxford Professor Archie Brown.
  
  It's definitely very academic in style but it dives deeply into [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 10:15am EST
  

• About those "nay" votes

  What Seth said. [...]
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  Posted: November 08, 2009, 4:49pm EST
  

• Local 7 elections

  I guess there are some rumors that I was in someway advising or coordinating with the candidates opposing Ernest Duran Jr. in the recent UFCW's Local 7 presidential elections.
  
  For the record, I don't even know the name of the woman who defeated Duran. I don't know anyone who' [...]
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  Posted: November 07, 2009, 4:47pm EST
  

• The slippery slope of torture

  Andrew Sullivan notices how quickly we've gone from the ticking WMD scenario to advocating torture of suspects in the Ft. Hood shooting.
  
  A bunch of authoritarian thugs have spent the better part of this decade arguing for the government's right to torture anyone, even American citizens, under the [...]
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  Posted: November 07, 2009, 12:45pm EST
  

• What's the next move on Ritter's K-12 cuts?

  Have the liberal education groups agreed not to file suit challenging the K-12 cuts?
  
  And even though conservatives hate Amendment 23 and at least one Republican JBC member was modestly supportive of the cuts* will some right-wing group file suit anyway, just to be a fly in the ointment?
  [...]
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  Posted: November 07, 2009, 12:37pm EST
  

• DeGette to blow up health care reform?

  Woah.
  
  I criticize my Congresswoman a lot for not being more of a leader on progressive issues. This strikes me as completely out of character for her but if it is true good for Dianna DeGette. I doubt the entire reform package will be jeopardized by DeGette but [...]
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  Posted: November 07, 2009, 12:21pm EST
  

• Abortion and the public option

  Atrios writes,
  I do not know why some people think women shouldn't have access to appropriate medical care. Something is wrong with them.
  It's actually worse than that. The amendment, which appears set to pass, will mean that some women won't have access to appropriate medical care. Namely' [...]
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  Posted: November 07, 2009, 10:01am EST
  

• WPA, CCC and public sector unions

  Yglesias stumbles onto an interesting intellectual exercise. Could we have a CCC or WPA in 21st Century America where nearly 37% of all public employees are union members and a much larger percentage of public employees are part of a collective bargaining unit?
  
  My off the cuff answer [...]
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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 10:48am EST
  

• I know better.. Peggy Noonan content ahead

  Perusing the sports blog The Big Lead this morning I came upon a link that read,
  really strong, potentially polarizing piece about the lack of leadership in our country at every level …
  Normally I don't click political links on sports blogs. I read TBL for snarky sports coverage' [...]
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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 8:11am EST
  

• flu induced insomnia ramblings

  And right on cue Brian Williams shows up in the middle of a perfectly good episode of "30 Rock" tonight.
  The Denver Post ed board informs us that "Voters aren't in mood for taxes." They make this proclamation despite the fact that a majority of the tax issues' [...]
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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 3:06am EST
  

• flu makes me grouchy....

  Is Brian Williams the smarmiest network news anchor ever?
  
  I rag on Charlie Gibson because he's a lightweight as a "journalist" but he's at least sober, somber and competent when he anchors the evening news. [...]
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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 5:54pm EST
  

• More on the "doing jack shit" political strategy

  Kevin Drum,
  ...if there's any broad lesson to be taken from Tuesday's election (about which I remain agnostic for the moment), it's this: independent voters are getting a little weary of endless political battles with no results. The problem is not that Congress is trying to tackle too' [...]
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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 1:22pm EST
  

• Maybe if we don't do anything the voters will just forget we're even here!

  Atrios today,
  Democratic members of Congress have an irrational fear of the imagined "attack ad" which makes them frightened of actually supporting legislation for fear Republicans will make it sound bad. Who knows, maybe in normal times that fear is rational. But if unemployment is this high a [...]
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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 11:50am EST
  

• Denver and DougCo school board elections set the stage for an interesting comparison

  Looking through the election results on Tuesday it is interesting to compare and contrast the school board elections in Denver and Douglas County. In Douglas a slate of four free-market reformers were elected in a district that, while generally viewed favorably, has stagnated in its CSAP gains in [...]
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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 10:15am EST
  

• Quote of the day...

  SadlyNo! commenting on the purge of Newt Gingrich by teabaggers,
  
  It’d be like hippies booting Wavy Gravy out of Woodstock for being insufficiently gr000oo0vy. [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 6:24pm EST
  

• My Halloween

  
  Well it was as epic as I had hoped and then some. Here is how Rolling Stone described it,
  
  Under pristine conditions at the Empire Polo Field and in front of a devoted Phish crowd of 40,000 fans, the Vermont foursome rollicked [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 4:53pm EST
  

• Ditching the JJ dinners...

  Yglesias touches on something that I've long advocated - renaming the Jefferson-Jackson Democratic Party dinners,
  
  Wouldn’t it make sense to change the name of these annual dinners on a permanent basis? The policies of Andrew Jackson’s administration—opposition to central banking, Indian removal, slavery, etc.—have very little to' [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 3:30pm EST
  

• The flu season has landed at Case Del Balboni

  Flew home from a great vacation in Southern California on Monday evening and have been in bed ever since. Ugh. [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 1:11pm EST
  

• War presidentinin

  Obama went to Dover last night to welcome home the caskets of some of our deceased soldiers from Afghanistan. It was the first time that a president had done so since the War in Afghanistan began in 2001.
  
  No confirmation to the rumor that Bush refused to go [...]
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  Posted: October 29, 2009, 10:06am EDT
  

• Going down, party time... my friends are gonna be there too

  12 hours until we take off for sunny and warm Palm Springs and a Halloween that I bet we won't soon forget.
  
  
  
  Saturday night will feature one of these albums played in it's entirety... here's hoping that it's "Exile"
  
  David Bowie |' [...]
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  Posted: October 27, 2009, 8:02pm EDT
  

• No sympathy from me

  What Atrios said. Harry Reid, Barack Obama and a plethora of other Senate Democrats worked their asses off to defeat Ned Lamont and return Joe Lieberman to the Senate in 2006.
  
  We tried to tell them but they didn't listen and now the monster they helped create is' [...]
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  Posted: October 27, 2009, 12:59pm EDT
  

• Nobody could have predicted...

  ...that Joe Lieberman would be a travesty in the Senate.
  
  I guess doing Joe that favor in 2006 hasn't worked out quite the way that Obama planned.' [...]
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  Posted: October 27, 2009, 12:53pm EDT
  

• Bankshot

  Sully thinks the politics of the opt-out may work to squeeze Republicans,
  

  I'm surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. But imagine for a moment that the opt-out public option passes and becomes law (I give it a 65 percent chance at this point). Then what happens? Well, there [...]

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  Posted: October 27, 2009, 10:48am EDT
  

• Color me cynical

  
  I'm not getting too excited about the public option yet, like I said last night nothing has passed yet. I also don't know how I feel about so much credit being explicitly heaped on "progressives" for our part in pushing the Senate towards this. [...]
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  Posted: October 27, 2009, 7:07am EDT
  

• One of those mornings...

  It's getting hard to get up when it's cold and dark outside...
  
  
  
  I can't describe the feeling when
  
  I'm in my bed asleep and then
  I wake up with a vision blurred
  And all my efforts are deterred
  To reconstruct this image lost
  
  There're certain' [...]
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  Posted: October 27, 2009, 7:02am EDT
  

• Ummmm

  Nothing has passed yet and no one has signed anything into law.
  
  Been away from the blogs for today and came home to see a load of posts about Harry Reid and the public option. I think opt out sucks but it's less sucky than a trigger, an opt-in [...]
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  Posted: October 26, 2009, 9:38pm EDT
  

• House introduces Paris Hilton Protection Act

  I wonder where Jared Polis stands on this? [...]
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  Posted: October 25, 2009, 1:27pm EDT
  

• Contracts are for important people, everyone else can suck it

  Atrios points us towards an excellent post which notes the rank hypocrisy of banksters and the media regarding Wall St. bonuses. Namely that none seemed to care much about contractual obligations when it was middle-class blue collar workers who were having their collectively bargained contracts ripped up.[...]
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  Posted: October 23, 2009, 9:41am EDT
  

• Unemployment in Colorado good news for workers and good news for Ritter

  Unemployment in Colorado is at 7% now, below the national average, and has been falling for the last few months. That's obviously good news for job seekers and it's also good news for Governor Ritter. The incumbents re-election chances are inversely correlated to the unemployment numbers, if unemployment goes [...]
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  Posted: October 23, 2009, 9:06am EDT
  

• Thought crimes

  I wonder if those who are outraged at hate crimes laws realize that most every criminal law contemplates the accused's mental state as a key element? You don't have a crime without an act and a requisite mental state. This is a concept in our law that is 400 years' [...]
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  Posted: October 23, 2009, 7:56am EDT
  

• Another gliberal panacea

  Ezra Klein approvingly links to a Mark Muro article at TNR which advocates for empowering metropolitan organizations,
  

  Yglesias is particularly good here when he notices that the effectiveness of American federalism suffers because while states remain predominant “we don’t really live our lives `at the state level,’” and [...]

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  Posted: October 22, 2009, 5:58pm EDT
  

• Baghdad Bob says that Windows 7 is working fine

  Nobody could have predicted,
  
  12:48pm
  Never had a problem with Vista, but am about to upgrade to Windows 72:59pm
  Did precisely what I was asked, uninstalled my antivirus, uninstalled itunes, and uninstalled my ati drivers, followed all the instructions, and now my desktop PC is in an [...]
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  Posted: October 22, 2009, 3:29pm EDT
  

• Quick hits...

  My complaints about NPR yesterday are being echoed around the liberal blogosphere today. Steve Benen, DougJ and Dave Noonan all weigh in.
  One of Josh Marshall's readers has a take similar to mine on the White House's attacks on right-wing media. [...]
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  Posted: October 22, 2009, 12:30pm EDT
  

• I thought the market was the supreme being?

  Free market fetishist Ross Kaminsky is upset that two private companies have decided that it's in their business' best interest to stop carrying a specific product.
  
  To Kaminsky this is not a sign of business functioning in a rational manner (ie. pissing off large numbers of your shoppers' [...]
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  Posted: October 21, 2009, 1:16pm EDT
  

• Self-hating liberals on NPR today

  I listen to NPR while working at my desk quite a bit. Today though I finally had to switch it off as the discussion on "Talk of The Nation" of the Obama administrations confrontations with Fox News and whether or not it is "Nixonian" made me want to scream.
  
  [...]
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  Posted: October 21, 2009, 12:25pm EDT