With Haley Barbour’s surprising exit from the GOP presidential nomination race, reports are now that Mitch Daniels is 60%-70% likely to run. The race will likely boil down to be between him and Mitt Romney. I suspect Barbour will throw his considerable support behind Daniels.
Jalopnik had an article about the 2012 Beetle redesign right next to an article about a new version of the Porsche 911. I’m not sure if they were trying to give credentials to the Beetle it didn’t deserve or make fun of the Porsche 911.
Paul Ryan’s comment isn’t mere political rhetoric. In order to tackle debt, the solutions are going to be spending cuts, not tax increases. When President Obama revealed his economic plan, it relied heavily on increased revenue from increasing to top marginal tax brackets. However, historically, the percentage of government revenue to GDP has remained largely constant regardless of what the top tax bracket has been:
While it might feel good to tax the rich more, unless dramatic tax changes take place, the result will be negligible. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal noted, “Even if [everyone earning over $100k] were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.”
On Tuesday, Wisconsin held an election for one of the justices on the state Supreme Court. It’s normally a minor off-year election, with something like 10% of the electorate turning out and the incumbent usually winning in a landslide. However, because of the fight over the legislation reforming public unions, it turned into a vastly more important race. Democrats were extremely energized over what they felt was an unjust and direct assault on unions (one of their most important constituency), and possibly the beginnings of a national movement, as similar legislation was being introduced in other states.
With the Republican wave of 2010, Republicans captured all the branches of government in Wisconsin. They held majorities in both houses of the legislature, the governorship and held a 4-3 majority on the Supreme Court. Given the anger over the legislation going through the government, and given their lack of ability to prevent it, the Supreme Court election this year became exceptionally important to the Democrats, and money poured into the race. They wouldn’t be able to block the union reform bill (as the new justice wouldn’t be seated until after a ruling was made), but they would be able to call it a rebuke (as this was the first election following the passage of the bill) and would be able to block future legislation. The base was as energized as it ever was – the Democrats felt they were fighting for their very existence in the state.
Wisconsin is a historically very-Democratic state. It hasn’t voted for a Republican President since the Reagan blowout of Mondale in 1984, when all but one state in the Union voted for Reagan. It had two Democratic Senators since 1993, until the surprise unseating of the quintessential liberal, Russ Feingold, in 2010.
Given the Democratic nature of the state, given the energized base, given the desperate nature of the situation to Democrats, and given the amount of money poured into the campaign, the fact that the Republicans, in an off-year election for a normally ignored race, managed to match Democratic turnout, things do not bode well for Democrats in 2012 (and especially Herb Kohl, the other Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, who is up for election that year). The fact that Republicans appear to have won the race (a few thousand votes separate the two candidates out of 1.5 million) will put a dampener on the enthusiasm the Democrats have built up, and possibly hamper their efforts to recall legislators in the state. The 2012 elections look to be a tough one for Democrats, especially if they need to fight just to retain a state like Wisconsin. It’s like Republicans fighting to retain Alabama.
