Happy Birthday to Joe Biden, 70. The Practically Perfect Veep.
Some good stuff:
1. Lessons from 2012 from The Gamble, the campaign book by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck.
2. Jonathan Chait on the fiscal cliff.
3. Rod Dreher on Marco Rubio, Genesis, liberals and conservatives. I think he's right in principle about (many) liberals, but to be fair: there are plenty of Republican politicians who do, in fact, seem to be actually anti-science, whether or not particular strains of Christian belief are inherently anti-science.
4. "The Rich People Who Don't Know How Tax Rates Work," from Dave Weigel; see also Kevin Drum's "Handy Tax Table for Innumerate Rich People."
5. And Paul Krugman on Paul Ryan.
State legislative supermajorities -- the other big story of the 2012 elections, even less noticed initially than the liberal shift in the Senate:
ReplyDeletehttp://news.yahoo.com/powerful-supermajorities-elected-statehouses-194730460.html
This is off-topic, David, but reading your Washington Post article on how gerrymanders weren't responsible for the Democrats' not winning the House (because even under the preceding apportionment Democrats would have done only slightly better), I liked the comment of one person, "And the previous districts weren't gerrymandered?" I think that's right to the point. Maybe the Democrats wouldn't have done much better under the 2001 apportionments of Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan, but these were GOP gerrymanders just as much as their successors were! (True, the gerrymanders didn't work in 2006 and 2008 in Pennsylvania or in 2008 in Ohio and Michigan--but this just shows that gerrymanders aren't sufficient in a "wave" election. 2012 was a good year for Democrats but not a true "wave" election.)
ReplyDeleteOops, I meant "This is off-topic, Jonathan."
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the other day, Joe Biden has never lost a general election! Nine times he has been on the ballot in November and nine times he has won.
ReplyDeleteCompare that to Mitt's OBP