Several readers (yes, really, several) have been kind enough to ask if I’m going to do my regular downballot recommendations on judges and other local issues.
Usually I do them at the last minute, but given that absentee ballots are turning up in people’s homes, I am already hard at work on them, and hope to post them very soon, maybe tomorrow. Bear with me, it is a long ballot.
I’m glad people find them of use!
If Walk and Talk the Vote is not the best political commercial of the year, it’s certainly the best political commercial for judicial office I’ve ever seen.
Thank you to PW for pointing it out to me.
A new — unofficial — website promises all the details on Mitt Romney’s 5 trillion dollar tax plan. I have to admit that at first glance they do seem to have captured the basic idea rather well.
Further study may be required to grasp all the fine points, though.
Thanks to DF for the pointer!
1.8 million views on YouTube so far for Mitt Romney debates himself:
Indeed, the scariest thing about the guy is his seeming willingness to say anything, everything, to get elected. It’s far beyond the ordinary politician’s pander level. It’s well beyond Nixonian or Rovian. On the national stage, it is in a class by itself.
It also seems to be reasonably effective.
If you’re here because of the Running in Place, Before the Treadmill Ever Arrived, by David Segal in the New York Times’s Haggler Column, welcome.
To read my treadmill posts in order, just start with the first one, Why I Do Not Have A Treadmill (Sears Can’t Deliver). There’s a link to the next one at the end of each post.
In the days since the treadmill was actually delivered, I got my new receipt for warranty purposes, and I’ve had calls from four different live human non-robotic folks in the Sears delivery/fulfillment/mess-containment hierarchy asking if everything is OK. The last was the most interesting: it was from “Donna” in Sears HQ, who is apparently in charge of straightening out the delivery mess that someone in Sears has figured out they have (she made it sound as if this job predated my experiences). Donna started out by asking me who I had dealt with in a way that suggested something messy would roll downhill; I said most of the people I had dealt with had actually been very nice, they just seemed trapped in an evil system. According to Donna there is a way to stop the robocalls, and she seemed peeved that no one had trained front-line staff in how to do that. And she offered me a $100 gift certificate; perhaps I will have to set foot in Sears to use it, we’ll see.
Donna and I had a long chat, during which I think I learned that the call center operations are going to be repatriated from the Philippines, something I’ve read many other firms are also doing. And Steps Will Be Taken about delivery problems. On the one hand, it seems good that Sears is working on its delivery/fulfillment problems. On the other hand, there was one aspect of the conversation that I found very odd. I asked Donna — purportedly the person in charge of sorting this stuff out — if she’d had a look at the I Hate Sears website. If I were in charge of fixing something, the first thing I’d want to know is what the symptoms were. Donna said she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do that because of the term “hate”. Donna, if you are reading this, you really should go over there and see what all the commentators are complaining about.
Meanwhile, however, here is the full list of my treadmill-related posts:
PS. While you’re here, look around. I also write about a politics, law, technology, and other things.
Via Talking Points Memo, here’s a highlight from the talk:
If that doesn’t work, here’s a direct link.
As TPM notes, as a rally-the-troops kind of a speech President Obama’s Miami speech was a big success — the President had energy, he got himself going, and he got the crowd going.
And it did a good job of taking the fight to the other guy, unlike a certain recent debate performance.
But as a description of what Obama would actually do in the next four years the speech — like the whole campaign — was a little weak: end the war in Afghanistan, stay the course on the recovery, hire some teachers, make education more affordable (somehow), make a deal with Republicans to cut $1 trillion or more from the budget (queuecue the Catfood Commission).
The key for the Obama campaign has been and remains to demonize Romney, a process that very largely consists of just telling the truth about him. But that’s why the debate hurt so: for the mythical low-information undecided voter, who was just tuning and was relentlessly ignorant of everything Romney has been saying and doing for past two years, it’s all too possible Romney looked good, or at least neither dangerous nor demonic.
Update: While I’m swiping video from TPM, I really ought to include this — an analysis of Romney’s debate performance. It really deserves to work:
Just one thing: This video isn’t by Team Obama at all! It is by something called CannonfireVideo.
Update2: This following video, on the other hand, is by the ‘Obama Truth Team’:
Jotwell Blenderlaw