Great White Way

Well, this is some depressing stuff.  Pew Research's latest poll on President Obama's approval rating has some pretty...what's the word I'm looking for...divided?  Divided breakdowns.  Total, he's at 46% approve, 46% disapprove.  The crosstabs get pretty hinky, but it's the last section on white poll respondents that's a whopper:


My observations:  I'm honestly surprised that among white Republicans, the president's approval numbers are even 6%.  Also, not surprised at all to see one in 5 white Dems unhappy with President Obama.

But to see working class white folks 2 to 1 against this President is astonishing.

If you make less than $75k a year and you're white, you pretty much despise this President, and for the life of me I can't explain why.  I mean, I can postulate.  President Obama has a very positive approval rating among white college graduate women, 55-40.  But 22% among white men without a college degree?  Are you serious?

TNR's Nate Cohn seems to think this isn't quite a complete disaster for POTUS.

But these numbers also show the difficulty of winning with gains among white working class voters alone. Despite Obama’s monumental collapse among white working-class voters, his approval rating is only at minus-5 among registered voters. That might seem like a silly complaint, since the GOP would gladly take a 5-point win in a presidential election. But the GOP won’t sweep the white working-class voters who supported Obama in 2012 but now disapprove of his performance. More than half of them are self-identified Democrats—and it’s tough to imagine that most won’t return to the next Democratic nominee. And if these Democratic white working-class voters ultimately come home, then Democrats would still win, narrowly, on the strength of their resilient "new coalition" of minorities and well-educated whites.

Additional gains among white working class voters will almost certainly be part of the next winning GOP coalition. But it’s hard to win with narrow gains concentrated among a single demographic group. At some point, the GOP will reach the point of diminishing returns, where they start running into the problem of ideology and partisan loyalties. That seems to have happened (at least in this poll) in the South, where Obama hasn’t lost very much additional ground among white voters since last November’s election. And the Electoral College discourages narrow gains: The GOP needs to win back states like Virginia, Colorado, and Florida, where there are fewer white working-class voters than the national average. So it would be prudent for Republicans to broaden their appeal across the board, even if the newest polls suggest they have a particularly fruitful opportunity among downscale whites.

And while the President's approval rating is down sharply among white voters...it's up 8 points with Latino voters.

Food for thought.

Not Even Pretending Anymore

North Carolina Republicans, apparently sick of this "nonsense where Democrats are allowed to vote" and all, have decided that removing hurdles to vote just won't work, and if "those people" want to vote, well then they can just be massively inconvenienced like everybody else.  Here's what the NC voter suppression bill will do:

• Implementing a strict voter ID requirement that bars citizens who don’t have a proper photo ID from casting a ballot.
• Eliminating same-day voter registration, which allowed residents to register at the polls.
• Cutting early voting by a full week.
• Increasing the influence of money in elections by raising the maximum campaign contribution to $5,000 and increasing the limit every two years.
• Making it easier for voter suppression groups like True The Vote to challenge any voterwho they think may be ineligible by requiring that challengers simply be registered in the same county, rather than precinct, of those they challenge.
• Vastly increasing the number of “poll observers” and increasing what they’re permitted to do. In 2012, ThinkProgress caught the Romney campaign training such poll observers using highly misleading information.
• Only permitting citizens to vote in their specific precinct, rather than casting a ballot in any nearby ward or election district. This can lead to widespread confusion, particularly in urban areas where many precincts can often be housed in the same building.
• Barring young adults from pre-registering as 16- and 17-year-olds, which is permitted by current law, and repealing a state directive that high schools conduct voter registration drives in order to boost turnout among young voters.
• Prohibiting paid voter registration drives, which tend to register poor and minority citizens.
• Dismantling three state public financing programs, including the landmark program that funded judicial elections.
• Weakening disclosure requirements for outside spending groups.
• Preventing counties from extending polling hours in the event of long lines or other extraordinary circumstances and making it more difficult for them to accommodate elderly or disabled voters with satellite polling sites at nursing homes, for instance.

 It's a greatest hits collection of barely legal voter suppression, all roped into one behemoth of awfulness, and with the Voting Rights Act now defunct, there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.

If passed, HB 589 will almost certainly have a disastrous impact on voting in North Carolina. As Ari Berman notes, 56 percent of North Carolinians voted early in 2012, including a disproportionate number of minorities. In addition, more than 155,000 voters registered to vote at the polls last year. And with 10 percent of North Carolinians — 613,000 people, a third of whom are black and half of whom are registered Democrats — lacking photo ID, it doesn’t take Encyclopedia Brown to figure out which party will be helped by HB 589.

No, it doesn't.  And they're not even pretending any more that they care about anything other than reducing turnout, reducing the number of overall people who can vote, reducing the college vote, reducing the minority vote, and reducing the poor vote.

StupidiNews!

• Amid calls for him to drop out of the NYC mayoral race, Anthony Weiner is again in the spotlight as new allegations of explicit text exchanges with other women surface.
• New Hampshire becomes the latest state to approve a medical marijuana bill into law as Gov. Maggie Hassan okayed legislation on Tuesday.
• Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto faces a tough uphill battle trying to convince lawmakers to allow foreign oil companies to operate alongside Mexico's state oil giant, Pemex.
• Dell Computer stockholders will vote this afternoon on whether to accept founder Michael Dell's $24.4 billion buyout offer.
• Federal officials have charged a Texas man with running a $4.5 million Ponzi scheme involving digital currency Bitcoin.

Last Call For The Next GOP Shutdown

And so it begins:  with Obamacare going live January 1, 2014 and state insurance exchanges up on October 1, increasingly desperate Republicans are running out of time to stop Obamacare.  Their last ditch effort is now to threaten a government shutdown over funding for the program.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) declared on Monday that he and other congressional Republicans would be willing to shut down the federal government in order to block further implementation of President Barack Obama's health care reform law.

Speaking on Fox News, Lee said Republicans determined that refusing to fund Obamacare was the "last stop" before the individual mandate and the law's health insurance exchanges are set to go into effect at the beginning of next year.

“Congress of course has to pass a law to continue funding government -- lately we’ve been doing that through a funding mechanism called a continuing resolution," Lee said. "If Republicans in both houses simply refuse to vote for any continuing resolution that contains further funding for further enforcement of Obamacare, we can stop it. We can stop the individual mandate from going into effect.”

But Lee is bluffing.  There's nothing he can do and he knows it.  He's already given up the game.

Lee added that his effort, which he said was backed by "13 or 14" Senate Republicans and a host of House Republicans, wouldn't target popular Obamacare provisions that already had gone into effect, like a measure that allows children to remain on their parents' health insurance until the age of 26.

Lee's talking about at most shutting down the government over the individual mandate, a fight the GOP has already lost in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.  He's bluffing.  The wingers know it too, and they're pissed:

Congress should completely defund Obamacare by October, when the government next runs out of money. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there are times for half-measures, and there are times to get the job done. If Republican leaders intend to vote only on an individual mandate delay, then this half-measure will serve only to keep Obamacare limping along now to wreak its havoc and ruin on the economy later.

Republican leaders are understandably wary of being blamed for a government shutdown at the next showdown about running out of money (yet again).

But Congress must not do anything to prop up this faltering law. For the moment the Obama administration declared the employer mandate would be delayed until after a tough election, this debate transcended a fight over health care and became a fight about transforming our constitutional system of separate but equal branches of government.

This is now about ceding power to a runaway executive branch that the Constitution simply does not allow.

Except of course the Supreme Court indeed ruled that the Constitution does allow it. Any wonder then that the GOP plan over the month-long recess is to snow job voters at home during town hall meetings?

While Republicans have a familiar rhetoric, leadership does suggest that members seek out diverse groups during the break with “Meetups” — forums to “ensure the Member is engaging with all demographics.”

“Potential groups to organize Meetups around include women, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and millennials,” the kit explains.

As always, don’t forget to assign a staffer to live-tweet the event with photos, Vines and a consistent hashtag. The memo loves the budding Vine app, which has traditionally been used as a means for frat brothers to share their drunken misadventures in six-second bursts, not as a means for House Republicans to spread their limited-government message.

To get the conversation rolling in the right direction, the playbook suggests planting questions: “Prepare a few questions in advance in case the conversation slowly starts.”

“Invite at least 3-4 people with whom the member already has an established relationship,” the memo instructs. “This will strengthen the conversation and take it in a direction that is most beneficial to the member’s goal.”

Make sure you throw in a few minorities to look good.  Use social media.  Plant a few questions.  Forget it, Republicans.  You lost on this, there's nothing you can do other than drag your feet kicking and screaming, and the voters will cure you of that pretty quickly.  But if you're willing to shut down the government over this, go ahead.  I'm sure the Democrats would be thrilled to actually pick up seats in the sixth year of a Democratic president's time in office.

The Next SCOTUS Test

The next big case for the Supreme Court later this year could determine the future of abortion in the US.  Kate Sheppard at MoJo recaps the fight in Cline vs Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice and the coming battle over "medical abortions".

Roe v. Wade, watch out. The Supreme Court will venture into the abortion debate later this year when it considers the constitutionality of an Oklahoma law restricting the use of oral medications for abortions. The case could have major implications for the 16 states that have passed laws limiting the use of drugs that induce abortions.

Oklahoma's governor signed the state's medicine abortion law in May 2011, putting in place new restrictions on the use of RU-486 (also known as mifepristone or Mifeprex) and any other "abortion-inducing drug." The law mandates that doctors follow the exact protocols for the drugs that are described on the Food and Drug Administration-approved label. Off-label use of drugs is legal and fairly common, and in the years since the drug was first approved for use in 2000, doctors have found that RU-486 and other drugs can be effective at lower doses and can be done with fewer visits to the doctor's office than outlined on the FDA label. Doctors have also found that RU-486 is effective up to nine weeks into a pregnancy, not the seven weeks for which it was originally approved. Oklahoma's law bans doctors from using that new knowledge to help their patients.

After Oklahoma's governor signed the law, the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice and the Center for Reproductive Rights sued—and won. A trial judge struck down the law in May 2012. When Oklahoma appealed to the state Supreme Court, it lost again. The state then appealed to the US Supreme Court, which indicated in June that it would consider the case. Reproductive rights groups say Oklahoma's law—and similar ones in other states—are a transparent attempt to limit access to medication abortions. The groups argue that the new laws would make medicine-induced abortions virtually inaccessible, since the drugs are so frequently used off-label. "What this law will do is deny women the benefits of nonsurgical options for terminating a pregnancy," says Julie Rikelman, the director of litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights. "We think it's an extreme law."

Remember, states like North Carolina, Texas, and Ohio have recently passed laws that require women to jump through the same ridiculous hoops (waiting periods, mandatory ultrasounds, mandatory counseling, etc.) to use RU-486 as they would for surgical abortion procedures.  These states also require a doctor in order to prescribe it (not a nurse practitioner) and the doctor must be on-hand to give RU-486 to the woman.

Ohio's law goes further, redefining "fetus" and "pregnancy" to be from conception, meaning that technically, the same ridiculous measures a woman would have to go through in order to get RU-486 would be required for birth control like Depo Provera or an IUD.

Something to think about.  I'm sure there's already 4 votes to side with the anti-choice side as is, if not already 5.  If so, it could be end of medical abortions in the US, and in some cases, the end of birth control as we know it too.

Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Still Rising

Hey folks, a not-so-gentle reminder that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster didn't just go away because the US press stopped covering it.

A Japanese utility has said its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is likely to have leaked contaminated water into sea, acknowledging for the first time a problem long suspected by experts.

Experts have suspected a continuous leak since the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant was ravaged by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. had previously denied contaminated water reached the sea, despite spikes in radiation levels in underground and sea water samples taken at the plant. Japan's nuclear watchdog said two weeks ago a leak was highly suspected, ordering TEPCO to examine the problem.

Surprise, after 28 months, TEPCO finally coming clean on the fact that radioactive water has leaked and most likely is probably still leaking into the Pacific.  Workers and cleanup crew there face serious health risks as a result.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, the operator of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, said Friday that about 2,000 people -- 10 percent of those who were part of the emergency crew involved in the cleanup after the plant’s meltdown in 2011 -- face an increased risk of thyroid cancer due to exposure to nuclear radiation.

And that risk continues to grow as the waters off the bay continue to be contaminated.  Little coverage on that, it seems.  But the problem's still there, folks.

StupidiNews!

• House Republicans have signed off on President Obama's plans to arm the Free Syrian Army, removing the last obstacle to doing so.
• The California Democratic Party has approved a resolution telling the federal government to stop raiding the state's marijuana dispensaries.
• US sugar farmers are in turmoil as a glut of NAFTA-imported sugar from Mexico has dropped US sugar prices to near record lows.
• The US Chamber of Commerce is not happy with President Obama's new picks to the National Labor Relations Board, which could test the "nuclear option" deal in the Senate.
• Boeing has introduced its first "commercial space vehicle", the CST-100, in Houston this week.

Last Call For Six Feet Under Six Flags

Texas's apparent need to disregard any possible reason for government oversight of exploding fertilizer plants also extends to oversight of roller coasters that kill people.

“With No Safety Oversight, Six Flags Will Investigate Roller Coaster Death Itself,” says a U.S. News headline that we totally could have written. Does it surprise you to learn that this death trap of an unregulated roller coaster is in Texas? No, of course it doesn’t. Does it surprise you that there are absolutely zero elected or appointed officials charged with coordinating the legislative, bureaucratic, or legal ramifications of such a death? No, it is Texas, so this too is unsurprising.

So guess who is investigating Six Flags in Arlington?  Why, Six Flags!  Why?  There's NOBODY ELSE TO LOOK.

Six Flags initially said in a statement that it was “working with authorities” to figure out what happened. But it later had to admit that it was running the investigation itself because there are no authorities to work with.

There's no oversight investigating Texas amusement parks, because there's literally no oversight governing Texas amusement parks.


America, because freedom.

Last Call For The Confederate Luchador

Rand Paul's racist buddy Jack "Check out my Confederate flag wrestling mask" Hunter is finally out of a job.

Jack Hunter, the aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who has in the past expressed pro-Confederate views, has resigned.

Hunter said in an e-mail to the Daily Caller that he will resume his career as a pundit and that he didn’t want to be a distraction for the senator, who is considered a top potential 2016 presidential candidate.

“I’ve long been a conservative, and years ago, a much more politically incorrect (and campy) one,” Hunter wrote. “But there’s a significant difference between being politically incorrect and racist. I’ve also become far more libertarian over the years, a philosophy that encourages a more tolerant worldview, through the lens of which I now look back on some of my older comments with embarrassment.”

Paul stood by Hunter two weeks ago, saying his past comments were “absolutely stupid,” but that he didn’t think Hunter held any racist views.

“If I thought he was a white supremacist, he would be fired immediately,” Paul said.

Instant termination if you're 100% sure, but apparently if you're only relatively sure your social media campaign guy is a white supremacist, firing him takes two weeks or so.  Meanwhile, Hunter is going back to his "pundit" roots where he can be a racist shock jock and actually get paid for it.

Nice work if you can get it, I guess.

Meanwhile, this will fix Rand Paul's little racism problem, right?

Bluegrass State Priorities

What's more important here in Kentucky to our state politicians, good governance or UK basketball? Here's a hint: if it took you more than half a second to arrive at the obvious answer, you don't live here.  here's Think Progress sportswriter Travis Waldron on the state's two religions: coal and basketball.

Now, with one of those industries in sharp decline and the other enjoying its return, as head coach John Calipari says, to its “rightful position atop the mountain of college basketball,” their paths are crossing in a way that will leave many of Kentucky basketball’s biggest fans holding the short end of the stick. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) and Lexington Mayor Jim Gray (D)announced plans this week to renovate Rupp Arena, the home of UK basketball since 1976. How the state plans to pay for the estimated $300 million cost, which includes renovations to the attached convention center, is unclear. But to cover the multimillion-dollar cost of the planning and design phase, which will begin soon, Kentucky is diverting $2.5 million in revenues raised from the 4.5 percent tax levied on the sale price of all coal produced in Kentucky.

The so-called coal severance tax generates more than $200 million a year in revenues for Kentucky. Half of that revenue goes immediately into the state’s general fund. The other half is split between two separate accounts for reinvestment into coal-producing counties, with those investments aimed at funding economic development projects that aren’t related to coal, and to foster economic development partnerships between eastern Kentucky counties. In the past, it has funded the creation of industrial parks, road, water, and other infrastructure projects, and scholarship programs for students from coal country. It is meant to address a reality that is staring Kentucky in the face: coal won’t be there forever, and the counties whose mountains have produced it for more than a century need something to turn to when the coal either runs out or is no longer worth mining.

What it isn’t meant to do is build arenas in Lexington. “That’s not what this money is for,” Carrie Ray, a research associate at the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, an organziation based in Berea, Kentucky, told me. “It’s not intended to build a basketball arena that’s nowhere close to the coalfields.”

The state doesn't mind sticking Kentuckians with a $2-$5 toll each way on replacing the Brent Spence bridge to Cincy, but replacing Rupp Arena, well the state will bend over backwards to get that done ASAP.  And these are the Democrats here doing this.  Good ol' Dinosaur Steve and friends are happy to get Rupp Arena renovated.  The Brent Spence?  Not so much.

And people wonder why Kentucky is full of red state Dems.

You Mean It's About Jobs?

With useless Republicans busy trying to repeal Obamacare for the 40th plus time and yelling BENGHAZI and IRS at any reporters they can find, President Obama will be on the road this week talking to Americans about jobs and the economy.

Drawing renewed attention to the economy, President Barack Obama will return this week to an Illinois college where he once spelled out a vision for an expanded and strengthened middle class as a freshman U.S. senator, long before the Great Recession would test his presidency.

The address Wednesday at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., will be the first in a new series of economic speeches that White House aides say Obama intends to deliver over the next several weeks ahead of key budget deadlines in the fall. A new fiscal year begins in October, and the government will soon hit its borrowing limit.

The speech comes just a week before Congress is scheduled to leave for its monthlong August recess and is designed to build public pressure on lawmakers in hopes of averting the showdowns over taxes and spending that have characterized past budget debates.

In his economic pitch, Obama will talk about efforts to expand manufacturing, sign up the uninsured for health care coverage, revitalize the housing industry and broaden educational opportunities for preschoolers and college students. He will also promote the economic benefits of an immigration overhaul.

But with Congress effectively out of town after next week until Labor Day, we'll only have three weeks after that until the October 1 deadline.  Things are going to get ugly and this may actually be the year that the GOP shuts down the government.  We'll see, but at this point the GOP has made shutdown threats over defunding/repealing Obamacare, raising the debt ceiling, turning Medicare into a voucher program, turning Medicaid into block grants, and it wouldn't surprise me to see them threaten shutdown over the ridiculous national abortion anti-choice law, too.

Keep that in mind as we head forward.

StupidiNews!

• Britain's Prince William and wife Kate Middleton are in London's St. Mary's Hospital awaiting the birth of their child, who would be third in line to the throne.
• The US Marshal Service has "misplaced" nearly 2,000 encrypted two-way radios since 2011, according to a new report.
• Legendary White House press corps maven Helen Thomas passed away Saturday at the age of 92, having covered ten presidents in her nearly seven-decade career.
• The newest concern for America's aging Boomers: the legal and social ramifications of sex and consent when dementia comes into play.
• An accidental administrator password exposure put all of the Official Ubuntu Forums user information at risk over the weekend.

Last Call For Repeal-O-Rama

To Orange Julius, it's always the summer of 2010.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) vowed Sunday to hold more House votes to thwart ObamaCare, a major priority for the GOP as the law is implemented.

"You're going to see a lot more," Boehner told CBS's "Face the Nation." "You're going to see bipartisan votes coming out of the House to derail this thing.

Boehner is absolutely sure that enough House Democrats are eventually going to jump on the repeal bandwagon to give him a veto-proof margin in the House, and that will lead to 67+ votes in the Senate, and that will force President Romney to repeal Romneycare.

I really don't have the heart to tell him it's not going to happen, but apparently not only does he think Democrats in Congress are morons, he thinks voters are morons too.

But he's going to stick with his plan, dammit.  Right until it blows up in his face.

They Still Can't Stop Lying About Obamacare, Yet Again

Republicans and conservative pundits will never stop lying to you about Obamacare, America.  And for once, it's not the usual suspect (Forbes hack Avik Roy) but the Indiana GOP doing the lying.  That's right, we've gone from pundits making up statistics to state insurance officials doing it, and Washington Post health care writer Sarah Kliff catches them red-handed:

The average health insurance plan in Indiana will increase by 72 to percent next year and hit $570 under the 2010 health-care law, the state announced Friday. What does that tell us?

It certainly doesn’t tell us insurance coverage in Indiana will be cheap; that much is obvious. But it doesn’t really tell us that Indiana’s premiums are outrageous – in fact, when you dig into the documents insurers’ filed, it turns out Indiana’s rates look a lot like the rest of the country.

The $570 figure that Indiana put out Friday doesn’t, in fact, tell us much at all. It’s pretty much just a great number to make the cost of health insurance sound expensive in Indiana and a horrible one to use in thinking about how much Hoosiers will pay for coverage come January.

Cherry-picked numbers to put the worst-possible spin on Obamacare?  Surely you're joking!  Why, Republicans would never do that!  You know, except for doing it constantly for the last three years.

Indiana’s $570 figure comes from squishing together all the filings –- every plan that is bronze, platinum or anywhere in between –- and coming up with one composite. We don’t know whether a bronze plan in Indiana will be incredibly expensive, which is certainly a possibility, or if some high-priced platinum offerings are pushing up the average.

In other words, let's say Indiana wouldn't tell you what community college tuition cost in the state for 2014.  What if instead, they gave you the average cost for every college, community, two-year, four-year, public, and private, then said OMG community college costs went up A ZILLION PERCENT?

That's exactly what Indiana did with health care premiums.  Just like Avik Roy, they refuse to compare apples to apples, but instead compare apples to the average price of all fruit!  The entire point of the number is to make it look bad, and to make Indianans want to repeal Obamacare.  And it all because the GOP has nothing better to do but lie to their constituents.  This isn't some hack pundit doing this, these are state officials.

By the way, checking to see what premiums actual insurance companies are charging for silver level plans, they come out to $300-$400 a month for individual plans.  That's a far cry from $570, yes?

But you'd never know if you ask state Republicans.  They're too busy lying to you because they think Hoosiers are stupid.

Keep Calm And Pay Nate Silver Fat Stacks Of Disney Cash

FiveThirtyEight.com prognosticator extraordinaire Nate Silver is headed for the intersection of sports analysis and political analysis:  he's leaving the NY Times and taking a long-term contract with Disney to work as ESPN and ABC.  Marc Tracy at TNR explains:

In maybe the juiciest free agent signing since LeBron James bolted for Miami three years ago, it looks like Nate Silver, the political forecaster behind the FiveThirtyEight blog, is departing the New York Times after serving out his initial, three-year contract, and going to ESPN. According to (who else?) the Times, Silver will, presumably among other things, appear frequently on Keith Olbermann’s forthcoming, New York-based late-night show on ESPN2, and also do some politics work for ESPN’s corporate sibling ABC News. He had reportedly been in negotiations with the Times to sign a new contract.

Silver, who a decade ago was working at Baseball Prospectus analyzing the sport with advanced statistics, started blogging about politics at Daily Kos and then his own blog during the 2008 primaries and election. He became popular for forecasting elections, most prominently the presidential election as it plays out in the electoral college (hence “FiveThirtyEight,” for the 538 electoral votes), by averaging polls and weighting them to adjust for the ways in which they had been inaccurate in the past—a method not dissimilar from the one he used to devise a well-regarded algorithm for forecasting the future performances of baseball players. He moved his franchise to the Times in the summer of 2010. Particularly last November, he became a lightning rod for this more empirical way of following elections, as contrasted with the “narrative”-heavy approach of many pundits. He did not reply to a request for comment Saturday.

Now all of this makes a huge amount of sense:  At ESPN, Nate can rattle off sports figures and stay focused between election cycles.  It's basically the perfect job for him and his team, and frankly I don't know why ESPN didn't pay him more to begin with.

Which leads me to conclude the X factor here that made Nate take the plunge is Olbermann, also back at ESPN.  The two of them together again (Nate got his political TV punditry start as a regular guest on 2007-2008 Countdown with Olbermann) are a formidable combo.

Olbermann's reportedly not allowed to talk politics on his show.  But...with Nate Silver as a regular guest, I would have to think that he might bring up politics for Keith.  Either way, it's a compelling reason to at least tape Olbermann's show once in a while.