Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Nancy Cartwright, 56.

With some good stuff:

1. John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi, "The decline of union membership and what it means for politics."

2. Andrew Sprung on Tafts, McCarthys, and Cruzes. The current Taft's claim of "adult" status for Republicans is pretty iffy over the 20th century period he's talking about -- and I wouldn't have suggested it for someone writing about the party of (to put it more crudely in this context than I would in others) the part of Anglo men.

3. I found this Philip Bump post on tech and ACA helpful.

4. Rick Hasen on Posner and voter ID.

5. Yes, tax deductions and exemptions really do benefit those who benefit from them at the expense of the nation and, therefore, other taxpayers -- as Dean Baker points out in the case of Ted Cruz's health insurance.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Carrie Fisher, 57.

Plenty of good stuff for the new week:

1. Seth Masket on top-two.

2. John Sides on primary reform.

3. Robert Costa interviews Ted Cruz.

4. Nice Adam Serwer item about what a mess DHS is.

5. Danny Vinik pushes back against my case for blaming mainstream conservatives for the shutdown; he says the Tea Partiers were at fault.

6. Amanda Hess on privacy and young people.

7. Off my normal track, but: a good series about specialization in high school sports, from Tom FitzGerald. My experience has been that not only is this true and a real shame, but that it's not restricted to sports; at least in Texas, it seems to be common to all extracurriculars.

8. And I don't like Eddie Vedder and I'm partial to APBA, but still, this one.

Why We Have Campaigns

Alex Roarty called Ted Cruz the 2016 Republican "frontrunner" today:

The Republican establishment despises Ted Cruz. And that’s great news for the senator from Texas: It’s the most prominent sign that he’s the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.

He also gets one good quote from Iowa conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats: “I really believe if the Iowa caucuses were held today, I don’t even think it’d be close. Ted Cruz would walk away with it.”

But here's the thing: it's not just a quirk of timing that the Iowa caucuses aren't being held today. What it means is that we're only at the beginning of a very long campaign.

And campaigns matter. Even general election campaigns matter; what they mainly do is remind people which party they belong to, and inform them that the nominee of that party is a perfectly acceptable representative of that party. That's a big party of why if you ask before the campaign you'll find all sorts of people ready to jump to a third party candidate, or in some circumstances even cross over to vote for the other party's candidate, but by November most people are back where they "belong."

In primary elections, the information environment is more complicated, because there are fewer obvious cues. Tail Gunner Ted is taking advantage of one of those cues right now -- he's been the most visible, recently, of the radical Republicans, so those who basically look for the representative of that strain of the party are moving to him.

Whether that lasts, however, is another story, as Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain could tell you.

What's going to happen is that Iowa voters will learn more about the various candidates. Recently they've had more exposure to Cruz; later, all the fully-funded candidates will get their own messages out. And, meanwhile, the press coverage will increase, both in the neutral press and the GOP-aligned media. And here's the thing: to the extent that GOP opinion leaders either hate Ted Cruz or, now, think that Ted Cruz is a loser, that's going to show up on the coverage that Cruz gets. Sure, not in all the coverage; there were, I'm sure, plenty of conservative blogs that were with Bachmann or Cain (or the Newtster for that matter) to the bitter end). But clearly enough to get the proper cues to a sufficient number of primary and caucus goers that they figured out: hey, that's not our candidate.

To the extent that those future negative cues are already baked in -- and I'm fairly confident that's the case for Ted Cruz -- no, he's not the frontrunner. Not at all.

Elsewhere: Boehner, Cruz, more

Over at the Post this week...I think I'll pull a quote from today's PP post:

We can’t know for sure, at least on the evidence we have right now, whether Boehner was following the wishes of the majority of his conference on October 1 or on October 16. But what evidence we have strongly suggests he was. There’s plenty of blame to go around for the shutdown and debt-limit fiasco, but any account which focuses mainly on Boehner is probably letting both the moderates and the mainstream conservatives — in other words, most House Republicans — off far too easy.

 Also:

More on extortion for the sake of extortion

Why this is bad for Ted Cruz's nomination hopes

And looking ahead to January

Ted Cruz? Winnowed, Probably

I've been on the side of those who thought that Ted Cruz was a viable candidate for the Republican nomination in 2016. Not a likely winner, but very plausible.

I'm pretty sure that's done now.

I was willing to defend Cruz's chances despite his quickly-gained reputation within the Senate for excessively sharp elbows. I thought that Hill reputation was a relatively minor factor in overall party view of a contender.

But what's happened to him now goes well beyond Hill reputation. Moreover, the type of bad reputation has changed, and that should matter, too. Three things:

1. It's one thing to have a reputation as a loudmouth; it's quite another to have a reputation as a loser. That's what the shutdown fight has done to Cruz. Among true believers he'll be the one who was a leader in a fight that surely would have won if the squishes hadn't sold them out. But for most party actors, including many sympathetic to Tea Partyism, he's going to be the guy who ran up the wrong hill.

2. I can't remember if Grover Norquist had already publicly feuded with Ted Cruz before the shutdown fight, but he's certainly doing it now. That's not good. The more broadly Republican party actors dislike Cruz, and the more intensely they dislike him, the harder it would be for him to get the nomination. We saw the way this worked with Newt Gingrich in 2012: every time Newt stumbled, there were plenty of Republican opinion leaders ready to kick him while he was down. That's where Cruz is heading now.

3. Yeah, I think that the polling probably matters at this point. He's still fairly unknown, but I can't think of anyone who had established a 2-1 against ration on the favorable/unfavorable question eventually getting anywhere close to a major party nomination. Sure, it could still change, and I suppose one could argue that all it means is that the MSNBC audience has learned to dislike him...but then why hasn't the Fox audience learned to love him?

Add up all three of those, and at this point I think he's probably off the list of serious contenders. He still has the basics of a viable candidate (conventional credentials, if only just barely, and he's within the mainstream of his party on public policy positions). But I think it's extremely likely that he's in the process of being winnowed out.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jane Krakowski, 45.

Some good stuff, too:

1. Heather Roff-Perkins on robots.

2. Dave Wiltse on Ted Cruz and the invisible primary.

3. And Steve Greene on being friendly with students.

Perverse Incentive Watch

Okay, it's mostly funny that Ted Cruz showed up at a meeting of Senate conservatives with a poll he himself commissioned that "shows" why his shutdown strategy is a brilliant success, especially since his poll showed that more people blame Republicans for the shutdown.

But if we want to stop giggling (Alex Seitz-Wald: I only trust polls commissioned by Louie Gohmert.) for a minute at the possibility that his colleagues might actually believe anything they saw in that poll...

The detail I'd note about it is that Cruz -- presumably his campaign committee -- paid for the poll. Which means that his pollster is profiting from the shutdown. And I'm sure this isn't an isolated instance. We also know that people have been running ads on this fight since August; that means in most cases money to people who make the ads (the exception would be in-house media people), and perhaps to people who place the ads; it also means revenue to whoever ran the ads.

Then there's how Cruz got the money to commission the poll: I'm sure his fauxlibuster was great for generating campaign contributions. Indeed: I'm sure that everyone involved, at least everyone who is getting increased visibility, is cleaning up. That's both politicians and organizations.

I haven't looked up any numbers (other than Plain Blog traffic, which is at more or less twice the normal pace), but I'm pretty confident that ratings are way up at Fox News (and MSNBC) and the rest of the political mass media.

All of which is to recognize that for most of politics-as-an-industry, the shutdown/debt limit fight is excellent business. At least, if you don't count government employees and those dependent on the government functioning properly as part of politics-as-an-industry.

Is all of that a significant cause of the shutdown and possible debt limit disaster? I don't know! But I do know that there's a direct financial incentive for a lot of people to generate high-visibility partisan fights. And people often react to direct financial incentives.

It certainly isn't the whole story. It may well be a part of it.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Lena Heady, 40.

Good stuff:

1. What it sounds like when your colleagues in the Senate really, really, hate you. This is beyond brutal. From Manu Raju.

2. Elizabeth Rigby on how Republicans have made Medicaid more complex, even before the ACA expansion.

3. A couple I missed: Seth Masket on sore loser laws as party protection.

4. And Richard Skinner on parties and policy.

Elsewhere: Boehner, Cruz, more

Today's TAP column was about how John Boehner is far more secure in his job than people seem to think.

Over the weekend at Salon, I argued that Ted Cruz didn't get closer to the White House this week; it's one thing to annoy other Senators, but it's another to lead your party off a cliff in a very visible way.

And at PP today, I pointed out again that if 25 or so sane Republicans refuse to vote for the Cruzified CR, the fight would likely be over.

Later this afternoon, there was some reporting that exactly that might happen -- in fact, that the latest CR (which has the Vitter Amendment and a delay of the individual mandate) might lose Republican votes on both sides of the GOP. If it does go down, then there's only one House majority on the CR, and it's going to be pretty hard at that point for Boehner to resist putting a clean CR on the floor and letting it pass. On the other hand, if it passes...then Republicans are threatening at least one more round tonight (all-night ping pong!). So we'll see.

I'm remembering that the House was in, for some reason, during the epic 16 inning Mets/Astros Game 6. Maybe we'll get a great game in the AL 2WC playoff tonight to keep us entertained during the ping pong. Anyway, I see the House is in; guess we'll learn more soon.

Catch of the Day

An excellent one from Philip Klein, who argues that conservatives are now overcompensating for being too easy on Bush-era Republicans by being unrealistically harsh towards Obama-era Republicans:

Republicans can prevent the passage of gun control, as they have. But when it comes to the current debate, many conservatives have been arguing that if Republicans cannot get Obama to wipe out or seriously undermine the signature legislative accomplishment of his presidency, the only reason is that Republicans lack sufficient courage. And that's a completely absurd expectation.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. Note, of course, that what we're seeing here is exactly parallel to the magical thinking about the presidency that many liberals have fallen for throughout Obama's presidency. That's not to say (and Klein certainly doesn't say) that all the criticisms of either Republican Congressional leaders or the president are wrong; it's just that pretty much all of the criticisms based on the premise that if only they (he) had the guts and the dedication...if only they they really wanted whatever it is...then they could get it.*

What Klein doesn't add, but could, is that this belief in magic makes conservatives easy marks for demagogues who promise that Republicans could have everything if they just fight hard enough. Thus Ted Cruz, who really (as Ross Douthat has been pointing out lately) had nothing substantive to offer conservatives, winds up the conservative hero while those who have been working on real policy proposals lose the spotlight, at least for now.

Nice catch!




*Which is interesting: it suggests that the problem isn't so much about the presidency per se as it is about a general reluctance to accept, and perhaps a failure to understand, Madisonian democracy.

Elsewhere

I slipped away for a bit this morning (Simchat Torah!); I'll have more later, but for now here's the elsewhere stuff:

Filibustering something that gets a 100-0 vote (true whether or not Cruz's speech counts as a "filibuster" is the signature Senate Republican move.

No, the media isn’t out to get poor Ted Cruz

More on Cruz and the post-policy mainstream Republicans

Way back on Tuesday, I said we probably still won't get a shutdown. We'll see...

And of course, nobody cares about the deficit

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, 47.

Some good stuff:

1. Ah, I think I'm (happily) obligated to link to anything that starts the way this one starts.

2. Greg Koger, who knows a thing or two about it, says that the Cruz speech was not a filibuster -- but there was a filibuster, which was " the refusal of senators to allow a a vote on whether or not it is a good idea to discuss the continuing resolution, which was the question before the Senate on Tuesday and Wednesday." As I've said, I agree...but given that it was Cruz who was delaying that vote, and Cruz giving the speech, I'm not going to be a stickler about not calling the speech a filibuster. Even though it wasn't.

3. Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy on Barack Obama's slow approval decline.

4. I like Kevin Drum's question for House Republicans.

5. Sarah Kliff, Sandhya Somashekhar, Lena H. Sun and Karen Tumulty do some street-level ACA reporting.

More Notes on the Cruz Speech

First, on "fillibuster." As Josh Huder pointed out on twitter, there certainly is a filibuster involved here. That's correct, but the filibuster is, essentially, the objection to the motion to proceed, which forces a cloture vote and sets the clock for the cloture vote. That's the filibuster. By all accounts, the filibuster will be defeated at that point. Cruz's speech is occupying a (very large!) portion of the time within that filibuster; if he wasn't speaking, either someone else would be or the Senate would be in recess. So there is a filibuster -- which Cruz and Mike Lee are responsible for -- but this speech itself isn't delaying or obstructing anything.

Given all that, I'm pretty much fine with calling it a filibuster or not. On twitter, I went with "fauxlibuster" (was I first on that? I went with it right at the start, but I might have seen someone else use it).

Second: while it's fair to talk about the speech in the context of GOP WH 2016 (Chuck Todd called it "the world's longest presidential stump speech"), that overlooks the specific point of this specific tactic for him right now. As far as I can see, this is all about his slip last week in which he admitted, after the House vote, that defunding would lose in the Senate and that therefore the key to the strategy would be the House sticking to its position after that -- which was interpreted by frustrated House Republicans as defeatism. More than anything, this speech is his response to that -- even if it is entirely useless from a parliamentary point of view, it's going to be impossible for Republicans to complain that Cruz didn't fight hard.

Third: On the other hand -- it sure will be interesting to see whether Republicans yield back postcloture time, or otherwise fail to use their maximum available delays later in the week. Not that it really matters; this isn't the kind of fight in which adding a few days of delay actually makes any real difference. But it will be interesting, nevertheless.

Next: it's worth emphasizing, as some others have, that this stunt is in fact very different from recent similar stunts by Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul. In both of those cases, the point of the extended speech was to raise the visibility of an issue. That's certainly not the case with health care reform! Neither the issue in general, nor Cruz's views on the issue, have been marginalized in the press. And as Ezra Klein pointed out this morning, Cruz hasn't exactly been focused on the evils of Obamacare; he's spent more time, really, on bashing "Washington" (and to a large extent Republican Senators) for supposedly not listening to the will of the people.

All in all, as silly politician stunts go, this is one of the least useful and impressive. It's far more focused on Ted Cruz, personally. There's no other particular point to it. I am, in general, in favor of silly politician stunts (and I suppose this one can very much be justified on representation grounds; Ted Cruz promised the voters who put him there that he would be a blowhard, and look!). But it's a lot easier to mock this one than to get up much enthusiasm for it.

The Ted Cruz Speech

(This is a recycled item; I'm basically reprinting a post on a similar Bernie Sanders stunt a while back; pretty much only the names and the topic are changed)

Ted Cruz, as anyone who has flipped past C-SPAN2 today has no doubt noticed, has embarked on a marathon speech (mostly alone, sometimes with others) against Obamacare.  He's into Hour 11, I think, as I write this.  Technically, I don't think it can really be called a filibuster, because he's not delaying any action, but this is what lots of people have claimed they want to see.  So?

Gosh, I hate to say "told you so", but:

Republicans wouldn't fill the time reading recipes or from the phone book  They have large staffs, and an nation full of professional and amateur conservative wordsmiths.  They would have plenty of material to use.

And:

In the old days, Senators engaged in a filibuster would read recipes or otherwise stray off topic. No need for that now! Not only do Senators have large staffs who could produce content, but there's a whole big internet available. If I were advising the GOP in that situation, I'd tell them to let conservative bloggers know that they can have their big chance for immortality: post something good, and a Republican Senator will read it on the floor of the Senate....Excellent way to rev up the conservative blogosphere, no? Meanwhile, by forcing Republicans to perform a "real" filibuster, Democrats would transform a 24 hour network that millions of Americans get in their homes into a 24 hour Republican propaganda outlet. How is that possibly good for the Democrats? 

Both written in response to liberals who thought Republicans would somehow be humiliated by having to hold the floor with "live" filibusters.

Now, do any conservatives think that Cruz is humiliating their side of the argument?  I very much doubt it, even those who believe that his shutdown/defund strategy is a terrible one.  He is, of course, not reading recipes or reading from the phone book.  He's been staying on topic, more or less, attacking the ACA and making the case that, his view, listening to constituents means following his plan.  Indeed, as I'm listening now, he's reading from a series of statements from state conservative think tanks -- just as I predicted! Well, sort of.  The real question is: does anyone doubt that a dozen Senators could keep this going, with more or less the same quality of  rhetoric, indefinitely?

(And it's worth noting: Cruz isn't actually filibustering, and he wants to talk; that's the whole point.  If a group wanted to keep a filibuster going but needed a break, they could do a quorum call that would allow them to rest until the majority could produce enough Senators on the Senate floor.  Under current rules and practices, it's easy to keep a filibuster going).

Whatever one thinks of majoritarian democracy, and whatever one thinks of various proposals for filibuster reform or elimination in the future, I hope everyone gets that under current rules, there is absolutely no advantage to the majority to force a minority larger than one or two Senators to engage in a "live" filibuster. There is simply no point in doing it.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Megan Ward, 44. I'm sure people who didn't go to Wesleyan can enjoy PCU; just not sure I get why they would.

The good stuff:

Here's good news: Thomas is being phased out.

Good news for racing? Hey, that is good news. Lydia DePillis on higher yearling sales prices as a sign of economic recovery. Yes, I know that most (okay, almost all) of you don't care.

Emma Roller on Ted Cruz, college debater. Double-extra warning: we know how memory works, or doesn't work. We know how partisanship works. It's highly likely that liberals remembering Ted Cruz from years ago would be either highly selective, or even fairly inaccurate, in their memories -- with their memories matching their current view of Cruz as a jerk. Might he have actually been a jerk? It's certainly possible. Is he a jerk now? I have no idea, and neither do any of you who don't hang out with him regularly. "Work jerk" isn't the same as personal jerk, no matter how much our rational minds resist that idea.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Ted Cruz: helping himself get the Republican presidential nomination with what's happened on the shutdown, or hurting his chances?

Elsewhere: The CR, Ted Cruz, more

Let's see...haven't done this for a while, so there are a few.

Today at Plum Line I got into the question of whether Democrats have already surrendered on the budget by accepting a sequestration level CR (the answer? No, probably not, but I'm not impressed with their strategy).

And I got on Ted Cruz's case for his "new paradigm" of grassroots activism.

What else?

Cruz's rhetoric is self-defeating.

The Republicans could use a Pope -- or maybe Gowron.

Five reasons we might get a budget calamity.

Summers and the proper use of trial balloons.

If John Boehner Really Had Chutzpah...

...what he'd do today is convince over 100 Members of his conference who have been griping about Ted Cruz and the Crazy Caucus to stand with him while he makes the following statement:

--

Over the last several months, I was convinced by enthusiastic Tea Party conservatives that their defund Obamacare idea really had a chance to work. I admit I was against it at first. But they convinced me that I was trapped in politics-as-usual Washington thinking, and that what we had here was a one-time opportunity to turn the tables on Barack Obama and the Democrat Party. They were right. A House vote for defunding Obamacare along with the CR would set the stage for a battle in the Senate -- and with the House giving them momentum, a groundswell of opinion from small towns, from big cities, and from farms across America could finally put an end to this terrible socialist experiment. Tea Party conservatives had me smelling the phone wires and emails and spontaneous grass-roots demonstrations that would have started as soon as our plan passed the House and hit the Senate. And so we scheduled the vote.

Unfortunately, Senator Ted Cruz undermined all that by his pre-emptive surrender yesterday. What was once a promising strategy has been destroyed. There's no going back; as much as we wish it, conservatives are very sensible and pragmatic people, and there's no way they're going to rise up to support a plan when a prominent Senator who had been talking up the idea, one who had been thought to be a real conservative, has already admitted defeat.

Therefore, now that Ted Cruz has given away our chance of using the budget deadlines to end Obamacare, we're going to move ahead with a more positive plan, centered on the budget and the spending. After all, what Americans really want to know is: What about the spending? So we're going to solve his crisis that the president caused. We'll vote tomorrow to keep the government open for the year and to adjust our debt limit to account for the lower deficits that Republican policies have brought us. But that's not all: we're also going to force the Senate to vote on our new Balanced Budget Amendment, the one that answers the question: Where are the jobs? And we're going to make them vote again -- three times -- on a budget. That'll show 'em.

I've heard recently that whoever doesn't carry the fight against Obamacare is therefore basically an Obamacare supporter. I guess that makes Ted Cruz the biggest Obamacare supporter of them all. As for us, we've voted 41 times to repeal against this terrible program, and I pledge right now that we'll vote 41 more times if necessary. I'll never give up, and neither will any of us Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Thank you very much.

Cruz/McGovern

I'm very late at getting to this, but the great Steve M. took on my weekend column on Ted Cruz, and I did want to respond to part of it.

Not the part where Steve argues that I'm wrong about the possibility of a Cruz move to the center in the event he was to win the nomination. I'll stand by what I said, but there's no way to know, and he may certainly be correct. We're in the realm of speculation in choosing between "Cruz is what he is, and would only be more so after a successful nomination campaign" compared with "Cruz would be more able to move to the center than Romney/McCain types." And I'll readily concede that reputation (which is what matters here) may be sufficiently sticky that moving to the center wouldn't help even if it happens, and he might be stuck with a reputation for extremism regardless of what he does in the general election.

No, the part I want to respond to is about 1972. I said that a large part of Nixon's landslide was the fundamentals; Steve argues (with links, which I'm not redoing here):

OK, stop right there. Nixon beat McGovern because Nixon was "a popular president during good times"? As Rick Perlstein notes in Nixonland, at the beginning of 1972 Nixon had a 49% approval rating, and the Harris poll showed him beating Ed Muskie by only 1 in a three-way race with George Wallace, who was expected to run as a third-party candidate. Unemployent and inflation had increased significantly in Nixon's first term, as had the crime rate; Perlstein notes that the movies in the theaters -- Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs, The French Connection -- depicted rampant crime. Oh, and the war was still going on, and the country was still racially polarized. No, we weren't happy campers in 1972 reveling in peace and prosperity. We were just sold on the notion that Nixon was the uprightest of citizens holding the line against dirty hippies like George McGovern. That's largely why Nixon rose in the polls throughout 1972 and crushed McGovern.

I strongly disagree. It's correct about January 1972; in fact, as I've said, Watergate makes sense in the context of what looked like it might be a close election at that point. But not about November 1972. It was a very good economic year (Nixon was no Carter-like fool; he, like LBJ before him, did everything he could to goose the economy during an election year). The trips to China and the USSR early in the year were major events, and the war was winding down all year, too. That, and not the contrast with McGovern, was surely why Nixon's approval rose in the first half of 1972.

Beyond that, it's not clear that reputation for ideological extremism was McGovern's main problem that year. The Democrats really were fundamentally split; Nixon's sabotage made it worse, but the divisions were real and painful. There's nothing remotely like that on the Republican side right now; there's no significant group or faction that might walk or sit out the campaign if Cruz wins the nomination, so that nominating whoever the GOP '16 version of Muskie or Humphrey would prevent it. And then there's the campaign's troubles beyond ideology, including the chaotic convention and the disaster with the VP slot.

Again: I definitely think that reputation for ideological extremism cost McGovern and Goldwater (and Reagan). But the 1972 and 1964 elections weren't primarily about the out-party candidates,

Elsewhere: Cruz, More

My Saturday column for Salon warned liberals not to root for Ted Cruz. If you read that, you might also want to read Michael Tomasky's argument today that liberals should root for Ted Cruz. His case is pretty much what I was writing against; he basically takes it as a given that Cruz would have no chance to win, and works from there. 

The piece generated tons of comments, most of them ranging from hostile to contemptuous. Quite a few were with Tomasky's point of view -- that Cruz obviously couldn't win. A lot of them were on the order of: Cruz could never pivot back to the center! He's a loon! On the former, well, read the item. On the latter: it can't be true that Cruz is both a calculating, McCarthyite demagogue and wound never modify his rhetoric during the general election campaign. Not saying he necessarily would -- he might make the mistaken judgement that extremism sells better than moderation in November. But I strongly suspect that's not what would happen if he won.

And then there were comments...I didn't go all the way through, but it may well have been hundreds of these, plus tweets and emails -- calling me a fool because I'm overlooking Cruz's supposed lack of eligibility. Sorry; don't know who is feeding this to liberal Salon readers, but Cruz was born (in Canada) a US citizen, with (one) US citizen parent, which is all it takes (WaPo's Aaron Blake had a fine explainer on this a while back). I do wonder how much of the intense reaction on this is sincere (liberals mistakenly believing Cruz is ineligible), and how much is simply cynical payback for Obama birthers. At any rate, it surprised me.

Other elsewhere items:

Yes, Barack Obama's popularity still matters.

Stop burying Marco Rubio.

Why Obamacare will be nothing like Medicare.