My complaints about Webb are perhaps the subject of another discussion, but they’re not budgetary in nature. My general belief is that when the Democrats are in the majority, then I’m interested in trying to move the party leftward. That may very well mean losing a few seats, but when we’re in the majority is when we have seats to spare.

Point to “Newt & Co” all you want, we’ve seen what happens when Republicans control both the oval office and the capitol. I’m actually a little worried about having the Democrats control both houses of congress and the office of the president, but the Republican party is sick and needs a chance to reform itself, and Barack Obama will make an excellent president.

I don’t know that I’ll be voting Webb next time around, though.

Nice try.

And today as Baby Bush winds down his “administration” we find our financial markets socialized, our national debt doubled (and possibly tripled), 600,000 people unemployed since January and on record with a budget deficit that just went from $500 billion/yr. to “unknowable”.

Yeah, good thing we had the Republicans in charge.

Hey so, maybe we can be generous and say that all of this whitewashing, conclusion-drawing-by-stereotype is 99% bullshit? Or would I Publius like for us to spend the rest of our lives calling him and his political bretheren Communists?

Finally, as economist Greg Mankiw points out in his blog, reacting to a similar calculation by Alan Blinder (both of them former chairs of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers), correlation is not causation. Maybe economic statistics are better when the president is a Democrat for reasons having nothing to do with the president’s skill in handling the economy. My own feeling about that is that as long as the pattern continues, who cares why? Correlation will do just fine.

That is all.

Waldo, if you weren’t speaking literally, what’s the point of the blog entry? The only logical reasons that you’d want to “get this message out” is that you either 1) believe there’s a correlation, or 2) think enough Americans are stupid enough to believe there might be.

The problem with this particular message is that Americans aren’t stupid. When is the last time Democrats lowered ANYONE’S taxes?

Do you have data showing that Republicans are more likely to lower a given person’s taxes?

By the way, are you seriously suggesting that there is a direct correlation between the White House and the stock market?

Yeah, I’ve seen this around, and while I do think it speaks somewhat to the incompetence of the Bush administration, I don’t really credit Clinton with driving up the stock market, and I can’t say that the thrust in the stock market helped a middle class that was shrinking at the time.

Besides, I’m not sure that we want to highlight the economic boom during Clinton’s years because much of that was growth in the finance sector that’s currently looking pretty damn shaky, specifically the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which tore down the walls between investment banks, commercial banks, and insurance companies (which was passed with a veto-proof majority from a Republican legislature, but sadly, I’m not sure that’s relevant in a discussion about messaging).

The problem with this particular message is that Americans aren’t stupid. When is the last time Democrats lowered ANYONE’S taxes? By the way, are you seriously suggesting that there is a direct correlation between the White House and the stock market?

Are you seriously suggesting that there is no legislative body in the nation that is headed by Democrats that has lowered taxes recently? I’ll do you the courtesy of assuming that you’re not speaking literally as I imagine you’ll do the same for me.