Elizabeth Flock spots a doozy:
RNCLatinos.com features as its main image a stock photo from Shutterstock, which tags the photo with keywords that clearly suggest the kids are Asian, including: "asia," "asian," "interracial," "japanese," and "thailand." We're guessing the RNC may have taken inspiration from Sharron Angle, who in 2010 told Hispanic children they looked Asian.
Jamelle Bouie questions whether the growing Latino population will doom the GOP:
The politics of Italian Americans changed with their shifting status. As the party most identified with immigrants, Democrats gained an early lead with Italian Americans; they formed a key part in Franklin Roosevelt’s victorious coalition and proved crucial to Democratic successes through the 1960s. But as Italians became fully assimilated, and Democrats championed the rights of racial minorities and women’s rights, the balance shifted. By the 1980s, Italians would join most white Americans in voting Republican.
A similar path might emerge for Latinos.
Highlights from Romney's and Obama's speeches:
Unlike me, Howard Gleckman was unimpressed by Obama's speech yesterday:
Obama today delivered what was billed as a major economic speech. But, like Romney’s health talk, it was largely devoid of serious new ideas. Instead, the president seems to be running on a recycled version of last year’s stimulus proposal and echoes of his past budgets. You know the drill–subsidies for alternative energy, education, and basic research, modest new infrastructure spending, and tax cuts on firms that hire in the U.S. These ideas are not only old, they are small….
Yglesias asks how, exactly, Obama plans to get any of his proposals through Congress:
Unfortunately, far and away the least plausible portions of the speech were the ones where Obama tried to explain how re-electing him would lead to his vision becoming law. He's quite persuasive on the point that an Obama re-election would block Romney from doing various perhaps-objectionable things. But the idea that a second term for Obama will change the fact that 41 Republican Senators can and will filibuster any Obama ideas that they don't like (i.e., basically all of them) doesn't add up.
Mataconis is on the same page. Jamelle Bouie applauds Obama for portraying Romney as Bush III:
Campaign messages aren’t as important as we like to imagine, but to the extent that they are, this is much more effective than the attack on Bain Capital. The problem with Bain, and even the Massachusetts attacks, is that they are abstract. Most people have little experience with either private equity or Massachusetts, but everyone remembers the Bush years. To (accurately) tie Romney to his predecessor is to ask a question: "Why do we think these policies would work better this time?"
Ezra Klein thinks Romney needs to distance himself from Bush:
One speech doesn’t change an election, and this one won’t, either. But the Obama campaign’s line of attack does point to a difficulty for the Romney campaign in the coming months: Where can they show a sharp break with the policies of the Bush administration? Spending cuts, perhaps, but the more specific they get on what they’ll cut, the most voter opposition they face.
Ed Kilgore doesn't see how that's possible:
I particularly like his adoption of Bill Clinton’s line that Romney’s economic policies are Bush’s policies “on steroids.” Maybe if he repeats that a few hundred times, Team Mitt will finally have to explain exactly how its policies differ from those of Bush, and admit that it’s mainly a matter of even more regressive taxes and an assault on the New Deal and Great Society legacy that Bush could only dream about.
And Will Wilkinson thought the speech was too long:
[Obama's] meandering reflections on togetherness, the glory of big infrastructure projects, green industrial policy, and a tedious list of sundry nickel-and-dime initiatives seemed to me only to underscore that if he "doesn’t believe the government is the answer to all our problems", as he claims, that's only because he believes government is the answer to most of our problems and is splitting hairs. By the time he got around to the forced big finish, Mr Obama sounded more like the guy Mr Romney wants him to be than the sensible centrist he aimed to appear. Successful triangulation sometimes means knowing when to shut up.
More of a compliment than you might think. From a survey of penises in the animal kingdom:
Spiny anteaters sport four-headed varieties that rotate between copulations. Although most birds don’t have penises, the phalluses of Argentine lake ducks are nearly eight inches long (almost as long as an ostrich’s), corkscrew-shaped, and festooned with dense, brushy spines that sharpen to hard spikes at the base. Despite a 33-inch member and a penis-to-body ratio of seven to one, Limax redii, a Swiss slug, doesn’t have the most impressive proportions in nature. That title goes to Balanus glandula, which wows the tide pool with its prodigious barnacle penis. Permanently cemented to a tidal rock, the barnacle sports a penis 40 times the size of its body.
Russian authorities are harassing opposition leaders. Julia Ioffe explains the situation:
Why is the state doing this? [Opposition activist Ilya] Yashin has said that he thinks they are ginning up a criminal case against opposition leaders like him. More likely, it is a case of an overzealous machine seeking to please its master. If one reads the tea leaves—and that’s often all one can do in Russia—it is clear that Putin has had enough of the protests.
Go out and protest for fair elections, but the elections are now over, and he won. Now it’s time to go home. But people don’t seem interested in that, and both protests, on May 6th and on June 12th, drew tens of thousands of people. (In fact, many of those I spoke to at the protest on Tuesday said that they had planned on skipping the rally but changed their minds when they heard about the searches.)
How to deal with them? Putin is no Assad, and at least so far he has shied away from a real crackdown. But he’s clearly unhappy with the situation and wants it to go away.
(Photo: One of the detained Other Russia movement activists who tried to hold an unsanctioned protest outside the central election commission looks through a guarded window of the police vehicle in central Moscow with a photo of Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reading: 'Putin, Let Corruption Take You!' plastered on the window. By Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images)
New research on service stations that cheat on auto emissions explores the connection:
The upshot is that firm misconduct appears to increase with the threat of losing customers to rivals, which has implications for both business managers and government regulators. Managers should be aware that fostering a culture of intense competition, in an honest attempt to motivate employees, may instead induce unethical behavior.
At the same time, they need to consider the possibility that their rivals are misbehaving in the name of competition—and to keep an eye on them. "The failure to do so may allow these rivals to gain advantage through illicit strategies, particularly under institutional regimes where regulatory monitoring or enforcement is weak," the paper states. For government agencies, the findings indicate the importance of monitoring firm behavior in highly competitive markets—and the importance of realizing when a policy is what creates intense market competition in the first place.
Obama's Super PAC takes its Bain attacks to New Hampshire:
Alex Burn comments:
Unlike a number of the other hits Democrats have directed at Romney's private equity record, the outsourcing issue is a well-worn political charge that voters can easily understand. It's also the kind of thing that even business-friendly elites typically don't rush to defend.
The RNC launches a golf-related microsite, fortyfore.com:
By the way, the Romney campaign's "first negative" TV spot of the general election was modeled almost entirely on this anti-McCain Obama ad from 2008. Lastly, the Obama campaign deploys Stephanie Cutter to counter some of Romney's more egregious claims about the president's record on spending and the deficit:
Previous Ad War Updates: June 13, June 12, June 11, June 8, June 6, June 5, June 4, June 1, May 31, May 30, May 29, May 24, May 23, May 22, May 21, May 18, May 17, May 16, May 15, May 14, May 10, May 9, May 8, May 7, May 3, May 2, May 1, Apr 30, Apr 27, Apr 26, Apr 25, Apr 24, Apr 23, Apr 18, Apr 17, Apr 16, Apr 13, Apr 11, Apr 10, Apr 9, Apr 5, Apr 4, Apr 3, Apr 2, Mar 30, Mar 27, Mar 26, Mar 23, Mar 22, Mar 21, Mar 20, Mar 19, Mar 16, Mar 15, Mar 14, Mar 13, Mar 12, Mar 9, Mar 8, Mar 7, Mar 6, Mar 5, Mar 2, Mar 1, Feb 29, Feb 28, Feb 27, Feb 23, Feb 22, Feb 21, Feb 17, Feb 16, Feb 15, Feb 14, Feb 13, Feb 9, Feb 8, Feb 7, Feb 6, Feb 3, Feb 2, Feb 1, Jan 30, Jan 29, Jan 27, Jan 26, Jan 25, Jan 24, Jan 22, Jan 20, Jan 19, Jan 18, Jan 17, Jan 16 and Jan 12.
Larison takes the senator to task for praising Romney's foreign policy:
While Rand is not as strictly non-interventionist as his father, no one could confuse him for a hawk in the mold of Florida's Marco Rubio. When the Kentucky senator praised Romney for his "mature" foreign policy and asserted that the Republican nominee believed war should be a last resort, he hurt his reputation with his strongest supporters and undermined the critique of Republican foreign policy that has been central to his father's message. No less important, Rand provided Romney with valuable political cover for a foreign policy that appears to be every bit as reckless as that of George W. Bush.
Today on the Dish, Andrew liveblogged Obama's Cleveland speech (with reader response here and follow-up here), implored the President to embrace immigration reform as a campaign issue, worried about Sheldon Adelson's "limitless" ability to influence the campaign, spotlighted a documentary about H.W. Bush (related stuff here), mocked Sally Quinn, then sorta defended her. We ran the numbers on the "blame Bush" tactic, favorably compared Obama's negative narrative about Romney to Romney's negative narrative about him, explained how little evidence there was that gaffes mattered, wondered when the GOP would come to its senses, broke down the reasons Obamacare wasn't a job killer, pointed out the inherent vagueness of Romney's health care plan, speculated as to why Democrats rarely vote for Mormon candidates, and put up some reader pushback against the "hypocritical left" on soda bans thesis (incidentally, the ban wouldn't work). Ad War Update here.
Andrew also reacted to the seeming coup in Egypt (views from around the Web on same here), found Bill Kristol calling for more war, and scrutinized David Cameron's ties to Rebekah Brooks. Libya prepared to vote, soldiers failed to understand Afghanistan, the African population had little room to grow, and Europocalypse loomed. Trailers received mixed reviews, a baseball catch wowed, video games felt like playing music, and Reddit solved the forever war. Internet culture mainstreamed, women powered the web, mobile was tough to monetize, and Southwest kept it simple. Ask Tina Brown Anything here, Quote for the Day here, Poseur Alert here, Yglesias Award Nominee here, Chart of the Day here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.
(Photo: By Jewel Samad/Getty Images.)
Brendan Nyhan puts Obama's "private sector is doing fine" gaffe in perspective:
Negative ads are indeed the most likely way that Republicans might try to make the quote salient in the fall. The problem, however, is that evidence for the effectiveness of negative ads is quite limited. The best experimental evidence suggests that the effects of television advertising decay quickly. Moreover, as Georgetown University political scientist Jonathan Ladd pointed out on Twitter, the relevant question is whether ads (or speeches or commentary) that exploit gaffes are more persuasive than the material Republicans would otherwise have used. How much will it matter if a Romney ad quotes the "doing fine" statement or, say, criticizes the stimulus or healthcare reform instead?
The Dish 
