Oct 16, 2012
It's debate day, so it's a big day for pre-gaming. We were without Greg Dworkin today, but the publication of the latest Daily Kos/SEIU State of the Nation poll gave us the opportunity to highlight the differences between analyzing an unfavorable poll and "unskewing" one (i.e., cheating). Then a meandering stroll through the news, including the launch of Glenn Beck's line of jeans, the absurdity of Rep. Joe "You Lie!" Wilson (R-SC) complaining about the inappropriateness of President Obama's campaign accusing Mitt Romney of lying, and Rep. Darrell Issa's stretch in comparing the Benghazi attacks to President Bush's "mission accomplished" moment. Finally, we returned to the story of Mitt Romney's time at the head of Bain & Company's consultancy with the Russian government, and wondered why being a top advisor to the Yeltsin administration gets no mention from a campaign that admits it's lacking in foreign policy experience. Is it just that he's reluctant to accept the Cold War-era implications? Or is it that given the chance to construct a free market economy from the ground up, Romney instead opted to reconstruct a much more familiar (and personally profitable) kind of crony capitalism?