Good Day Wednesday
* Good news: The Obama administration has decided it will no longer defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in court. This from Barney Frank suggests that Democrats may have stumbled, through no fault of their own, onto a key truth: “People who will be angry at the President over this won’t vote for him anyway.”
* More good news: Scott Walker gets awesomely prank-called. More here.
* Maybe Jon Stewart should rethink this moronic camel gag. It’s good that the protests in Wisconsin haven’t turned violent, but it’s not as if there isn’t a history of anti-union violence in the U.S. Remember that this all began with Walker promising to bring in the National Guard—and a deputy attorney general from Indiana was fired just today for advocating the use of live ammunition against the protestors.
* This is weak even by Fox standards.
* Nate Silver pregames 2012, state by state.
* Bernie Sanders is my copilot:
What we have to understand is this is not just Wisconsin. This is part of the concerted attack on the middle class and working families of this country by the very wealthiest people in America, the Koch brothers and many others. And you’re also right in suggesting that if you look at the end game, what are you talking about?
You’re talking about the end of Social Security, privatization of Social Security, massive cuts and privatization of Medicare, major cuts in Medicaid. You’re talking about over a period of time, the end of unemployment compensation, the end of the minimum wage or lowering the minimum wage.
What these guys want is to return us to the 1920’s when working people had virtually no rights to organize or to earn a decent living. Bottom line today is the top 1% earn more income than the bottom 50%. The top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%. That gap between the very rich and everybody else is growing wider.
And what the wealthiest people in the country are doing are using their resources to make the attack against the middle class even stronger. They want the destruction of the middle class and almost all wealth in this country to go to the people on top.
* And to top it all off: creationists suffer defeat in Oklahoma. It’s like I can’t lose today.
Gerry Canavan 
“The decline of the strike: number of strikes involving 1000 or more workers” should read “number of strikes in the US involving 1000 or more workers.”
Alex
February 24, 2011 at 11:26 am
You’re telling me there’s some other place beside the U.S.? That doesn’t seem right.
gerrycanavan
February 24, 2011 at 11:28 am
HuffPo’s coverage of the Koch/Walker thing is a little stupid. They make too much of certain parts of the conversation, like when fake David Koch suggests they plant provacateurs and Walker says, “We thought about it” or when Koch offers, hypothetically, to fly him out and Walker says “That would be lovely” (I don’t think one could make claims of an ethics violation, since he wasn’t actually accepting any offers). The two important things are 1) he divulges his entire game plan for breaking the strikes (the importance of this is strategic); and 2) he talks at length to shadow billionaire David Koch (this could be a public relations issue). Everything else seems irrelevant.
Alex
February 24, 2011 at 11:57 am