After spending five years watching a diffident political compromiser campaign for and occupy the White House, Democrats were still shocked that Wednesday's debate didn't reveal Barack Obama: Political Nut-Cutter.
Reaching for seemingly any reasonable explanation for Obama's stunning listlessness at yesterday's presidential debate, former Vice President Al Gore offered up a "controversial" suggestion: It's the altitude, stupid.
Threatening to cut PBS' funding — and therefore Jim Lehrer's job — wasn't the only way ole Massachusetts Mitt was impolite to Jim Lehrer at last night's debate. And the Democratic National Committee (eager to distract you from the President's lackluster performance last night) is already capitalizing.
So amid the barrage of very, very substantive numbers and equations we heard last night was this: Mitt Romney wants to cut marginal tax rates by 20% across the board. Most people agree that this action, taken on its own, would reduce federal receipts by $4.8 trillion over ten years. But! Romney says he will make up for that lost revenue by eliminating loopholes to the tune of $4.8 trillion over the next decade, so there won't really be a tax cut. Which raises the question: Why the fuck are you cutting taxes, then?
Many in the left-leaning media were extremely unhappy with Obama's performance during last night's presidential debate, but none made it clearer than MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who wailed like a Truth Siren at the president's feckless, listless first round.
To nonpartisan senses, neither candidate came off looking particularly presidential during last night's first-of-three presidential debates.
The first debate of the 2012 general election season—the one that will fundamentally alter the direction of this race even though both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are terrible debaters who will lose to each other—is upon us. So settle in to your couch, open a beer, review your debate drinking game rules, and let Max Read and I "liveblog"—that's a dead technology from the days before Twitter—the action for you. Let the zingers fly! (No seriously you can watch the ball game and just check in here; we'll keep you updated.)
The presidential debate will be on all the networks tonight. This explains the sense of dejection you felt on waking this morning and realizing, in some vulnerable corner of your heart, that Detective Olivia Benson won't be getting too close to a case. I'm sorry it had to be this way.
Today, The New Yorker released a series of never-before-seen photographs of Barack Obama and his friends — including journalist Margot Mifflin — as students at Occidental College. The photos show a passionate, intelligent young man, a participant in activist and artistic communities who surrounded himself with other politically and aesthetically committed young people.
When I was a young boy my father's best friend, Art, lived in Alabama, and every now and again my family and I would travel from Arizona to spend a week visiting him at his lake house. On one of those trips, on the way back from an errand to buy ice, my dad and I pulled over for a quick bite at a roadside shack advertising catfish fritters. At that point, most of my life had been spent in Saudi Arabia and Arizona, where I could count the number of black children in my elementary school on one hand, and without using my thumb. Alabama was different. Black people were everywhere, though not in Art's neighborhood, and on that day, on the back patio of that fish shack, I recognized code-switching for the very first time.
Way back in 2007, conservative bloggers went wild over then-presidential candidate Barack Obama's so-called "quiet riots" speech at Hampton Unversity, a historically black college in Virginia. For all the right-wing consternation over Obama's address, which included a shout-out to controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the future president's words were mostly benign, the kind of pro-black, inspirational speech black politicians give to large audiences of black people as a matter of course. Yes, the speech did contain a few uses of the term "quiet riot," but they were in reference to the daily indignities under which many blacks in America suffer, not calls to arms.
Remember Creed? The band that plays second fiddle to Nickelback in music acts people love to hate? Well, the group's lead singer Scott Stapp made a highly anticipated appearance on Fox & Friends this morning to reveal his choice for America's next president, and — surprise — it's not Obama.
Maybe the most exciting story of the last few years is the increasingly prominent voice of a traditionally powerless and voiceless group: the super-rich. No longer content to stand by the wayside as the president begs them to contribute a slightly higher percentage of their massive incomes while they enjoy record-breaking profits, the super-rich have finally stood up to the middle-class and, with the typically astute metaphorical skill of the Wall Street billionaire, compared themselves to violently oppressed and abused people. And piñatas.
First off—there is no such thing as "the media." The people and entities who shape our political coverage represent a fractured, disaggregated, chaotic mass of divergent agendas and interests. While they often display pack behavior, they do not operate as a coordinated monolith. But that doesn't mean they're being fair to Mitt Romney. They're not.
