Republicans Still Think You're A Moron

BooMan:

On Tuesday, Carte Goodwin, of the coal-rich state of West Virginia, will be seated as the 100th U.S. Senator. On the same day, the Senate will pass an extension of unemployment benefits, utilizing Goodwin to break a Republican filibuster. Now, you might think that the fact that all but one Republican in the Senate has been supporting a filibuster of this bill means that the Republicans oppose it. You'd be wrong.

On CNN's "State of the Union," the leader [Mitch McConnell] beat back comparisons of deficit spending in the George W. Bush administration. 

"They've taken the deficit as a percentage of GDP from 3.2 percent to almost 10 percent in a year and a half," McConnell said of the Obama administration.

"Somewhere in the course of spending a trillion dollars, we ought to be able to find enough to pay for a program for the unemployed," he said.

"If we can't pay for a program like extension of unemployment insurance that virtually every member of the Senate -- I think, in fact, every member of the Senate wants to extend, then what are we going to pay for? When do we start?"

Republicans think you're not paying attention to them blocking this bill not once, not twice, but 3 times.  Republicans think you're stupid enough to believe them when they say the deficit is causing all of our problems and the deficit is 100% Obama's fault.  And the best part is our "Liberal Media" refuses to call the Republicans out when the go on air and lie like fiends.

Republicans think you're stupid, you're not paying attention, and that you're too depressed to vote or even to give a damn about your country anymore.  They're counting on it.

Real Unemployment, Surreal Numbers

One of the real dangers of the Dems sitting on 9.5% unemployment and acting like it's the new normal is that nobody believes the unemployment rate is just 9.5%.  The reality of the workforce is that with the millions of underemployed who are being forced to cut hours, work contract jobs or work just part time, and the long-term unemployed who have "left the workforce" and have "stopped looking for work" the reality is much, much worse than 9.5%.  It's really more than twice that.

Raghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed.

"Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.

However, Mayur's polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who's unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department's jobless numbers.

Now this fiddling with Labor Department numbers has been going on for a long time now.  It's not just Obama, but Bush and Clinton too.  The Labor Department changed its formula back in 1994 to do more mathematical modeling and less actual counting. 

 

The Labor Department does have an estimate of all this, and it's called the U-6. (The official unemployment rate is called U-3.)  That U-6 number, the "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" still only comes out to 16.5% for June.  Now, that's bad enough, but Mayur's polls here are showing that the real U-6 is 22% or more, maybe 40% higher than it really is.

Americans instinctively know something is very, very wrong.  The more people you know, the more worried you are.  Your sister's kids can't find a summer job.  The guy across the street's been looking for a job for nine months and is taking care of the kids and doing carpool now while he prays his wife doesn't get downsized.   Your best friend dodged yet another layoff wave downtown.  Cousin Jane's been out of work since last summer when they closed the plant.  The Andersons left the neighborhood three months ago and have moved back in with her mother, their house joining the other six for sale signs on the block.  Chuck from school joined the military because nobody else was hiring, and he just hit 40.  You don't feel guilty when Paula from church tells you she was at the food bank (because you were there last week) but you do feel a twinge when she apologizes for not having you over because "the apartment they live in now is a lot smaller than the house was."

Needless to say, nobody's buying that 9.5% number anymore.  Subconsciously they know it's much, much worse.  

And they know that Republicans are telling them "Sorry we can't help you, we need to cut the deficit.  We're broke too."  And they know that the Democrats are nodding their heads sadly and saying "Gosh they're right, we have to tighten our belts too."

And they ask themselves "Why did I vote for Obama and the Democrats again, anyway?"

With Friends Like These...

Well, you know how the rest of it goes.

Netanyahu is speaking to a small group of terror victims in the West Bank settlement of Ofra two years after stepping down as prime minister in 1999. He appears laid-back. After claiming that the only way to deal with the Palestinian Authority was a large-scale attack, Netanyahu was asked by one of the participants whether or not the United States would let such an attack come to fruition.

“I know what America is,” Netanyahu replied. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in their way.” He then called former president Bill Clinton “radically pro-Palestinian,” and went on to belittle the Oslo peace accords as vulnerable to manipulation. Since the accords state that Israel would be allowed to hang on to pre-defined military zones in the West Bank, Netanyahu told his hosts that he could torpedo the accords by defining vast swaths of land as just that.

“They asked me before the election if I’d honor [the Oslo accords],” Netanyahu said. “I said I would, but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue.”

Smiling, Netanyahu then recalled how he forced former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to agree to let Israel alone determine which parts of the West Bank were to be defined as military zones. “They didn’t want to give me that letter,” Netanyahu said, “so I didn’t give them the Hebron agreement [the agreement giving Hebron back to the Palestinians]. I cut the cabinet meeting short and said, ‘I’m not signing.’ Only when the letter came, during that meeting, to me and to Arafat, did I ratify the Hebron agreement. Why is this important? Because from that moment on, I de facto put an end to the Oslo accords.”

President Obama, and anyone else concerned about Israel’s commitment to the peace process, may watch the tape online here.

Nine years later, Bibi's back in charge, and nothing has changed.   The only truly bipartisan thing our Congress can agree on is telling Obama to sit the hell down, shut the hell up, and know his place before Israel.

It's almost funny if you think about how much power Netanyahu has over us.  That's a small tail to be wagging a big dog, for sure.  But that's the way it works.  There's no chance to fix the Palestinian-Israel relationship until we fix the Israel-United States relationship.  But that's not going to happen anytime within our lifetimes

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Why pretend you have any solutions at all for voters in 2010 when you can just blame Obama?  Even the Villagers see the obvious benefits in the GOP plan now.

Behind the scenes, many are being urged to ignore the leaders and do just the opposite: avoid issues at all costs. Some of the party's most influential political consultants are quietly counseling their clients to stay on the offensive for the November midterm elections and steer clear of taking stands on substance that might give Democratic opponents material for a counterattack.

"The smart political approach would be to make the election about the Democrats," said Neil Newhouse of the powerhouse Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, which is advising more than 50 House and Senate candidates. "In terms of our individual campaigns, I don't think it does a great deal of good" to engage in a debate over the Republicans' own agenda.

Others are skeptical that any Republican policy proposals will have much of an impact. "They really still have to have a sharp contrast with the Democrats," said John McLaughlin, another leading Republican pollster whose firm counts both the House and Senate campaign committees among its clients. "They really need to drive that home before people will be willing to listen to what Republicans stand for."

It's not that Boehner (Ohio) is arguing for a cease-fire. The debate among Republicans comes down to this: The speaker-in-waiting, for all his love of political combat, thinks that voters will not trust GOP candidates if their attacks don't also provide at least some substance. The consultants argue that public anger, if properly stoked, alone can carry the party over the finish line. In their view, getting bogged down in the issues is a distraction and even a potential liability. 

The lesson the GOP spin machine has taken away from 2006 and 2008 is "specifics don't matter, stoking anger against Obama does."  That's all they've got under their thin cloak of populist Teabagger rage.  "Throw out the hated Dems!  Throw out the people taking away my country from me!  Those people and their allies are ruining my country and I'll be damned if I let people like them be in charge!"

The problem is, this inchoate rage is almost certain to work.  All the Republican consultants want to do is eliminate the jumping through hoops and contortions of twisted logic that Republican candidates and members of Congress have to go through.  If they all just agree that they hate hate hate hate President Obama then they're on the same page.

All this is...this is honesty about the Republican party in 2010.  They have no solutions.  They have no coherent plan.  They have no pretense anymore of being anything other than the last gasp of the most broken and diseased parts of 20th century culture.

They don't need any other platform other than "We Hate Obama".  And if we ignore them, they won't go away.

They'll win.

Time to fight back.  The Republicans certainly plan to.

More Useful Idiocy

Maha's analysis of Russ Feingold, Useful Idiot, is spot on.

I like Russ Feingold, but I think Mark Kleiman makes a good point about Feingold and the financial reform bill. Feingold was the only Democrat who voted with the Republicans against cloture. He did this because he didn’t think the bill was good enough, and I suspect I would agree with all of his objections.

However, Mark says, because Harry Reid had to compromise with some “moderates” so the bill could be voted on, it was watered down even more. Mark writes,

With the W.Va. seat still vacant, that meant that Reid needed Snow, Collins, and Scott Brown, as well as Ben Nelson. … The bill as passed exempts at least three major sources of consumer maltreatment in the financial market: car loans, payday loans, and check-cashing services. It omits the $19B bank tax to pay for bailouts. It has a very weak form of the “Volcker rule,” thus leaving the country exposed to future meltdowns. Those concessions were the price of those last four votes.

Mark goes on to say that Feingold suffers from “integrity narcissism,” which is a great phrase. It’s a syndrome I normally associate with Dennis Kucinich, but if the shoe fits …

And there's a lot of this integrity narcissism going around.  Feingold's a politician, after all.  But Maha brings up the much larger and much more important point that by refusing to compromise on the fact the bill wasn't good enough, the Dems had to then turn to the Republicans who made the bill worse.

And someone needs to beat Russ Feingold and in fact all the Firebaggers over the head with that salient point until they understand.  It is one thing to say "I will not support this bill because it's not good enough."  But when that intractable refusal to compromise becomes an abdication of legislative responsibility, and that loss of a vote in our hyper-partisan Senate means that Republicans can then work to strip out the provisions they don't like, your integrity doesn't mean a damn thing.

Russ Feingold made the bill worse by not voting for it, which was the complete opposite of what Feingold's stated intent was.  This is what I mean by "useful idiocy" for the GOP.  How did Feingold's opposition make the legislation more progressive in any way?  It failed miserably in that respect:  the Dems then courted Scott Brown, who had his own list of demands.  His demands were met.

“I’ve spent the past week reviewing the Wall Street reform bill. I appreciate the efforts to improve the bill, especially the removal of the $19 billion bank tax."

So again, what did Russ Feingold accomplish other than being a useful idiot?

The Mask Slips Again

And Republicans accidentally tell the truth.  Today's supplicant?  New York Republican Rep. Peter King.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) told a radio show Thursday that the GOP should focus on its strategy of being against President Barack Obama's policies, but shouldn't give too many specifics on its own policies -- or those policies could be used against them.

GOP strategy should be "a combination of being against what Obama is for, and also giving certain specifics of what we are for," King told the Bill Bennett Radio Show. "Having said that, I don’t think we have to lay out a complete agenda, from top to bottom, because then we would have the national mainstream media jumping on every point trying to make that a campaign issue."

Hey that's awesome.  Peter King isn't even pretending anymore that the Republicans even have any ideas to fix the economy, just that they hate Obama and want you to hate him too.  Why lay out any specifics to help America when you can just call Obama a socialist or blow the racism dog whistle and win votes?  Oh no, if we lay out an agenda, the media might do their job and ask us questions about it!  We can't have that, right?

What makes anyone think the Republicans will do anything differently from the last time they were in charge?

Yes, they really all do think you are that stupid.

(Minimum) Waging A War On California State Employees

Earlier this month I talked about Gov. Schwarzenegger's plan to force 200,000 state employees to take a pay cut to minimum wage until the state got a budget in place.  State Controller John Chiang refused, saying the state's antiquated computer payroll system couldn't handle the change.  Yesterday, a judge sided with Chiang.

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Patrick Marlette today denied Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's request to immediately compel State Controller John Chiang to pay state employees minimum wage.

The denial means there will be a status hearing on July 26, with a full hearing sometime in August, but Marlette's ruling is a boost for about 200,000 state workers, who were facing paychecks for $7.25 an hour for the July pay period. Chiang has said he would issue full pay unless the legal process went against him before July 22, the cutoff to send payroll to the check printer.

The battle's not over yet, there's still no budget in place in California and there's probably not going to be one for a while.  It's the fact that Republicans believe that the best thing to do to help an economy suffering from a staggering lack of demand and facing a deflationary death spiral is to do everything they can to cut wages for state employees as sort of an anti-stimulus package that bothers me the most.

Is he trying to drive these folks out of state government and into the unemployment line?  Is he trying to drive them out their homes?  Is he trying to drive them out of state, period?  Can anyone explain to me how this actually helps the economy of California in any way?  Wouldn't paying wages to California state employees so they turn around and spend it in California to buy goods and services from California taxpayers be one of the most direct consumer spending stimulus vectors the state could use to boost the economy?  Why then would you want to turn that spigot off?  Who does that kind of thing?

Oh yes, Republicans would.  Even "moderate green Republicans" like Arnold there.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Apple will be offering a free case to all iPhone 4 customers who want it to correct the "death grip" antenna problem.
• A Denver judge has struck down a law designed to punish anyone who pretends to be a war hero, saying it violates the First Amendment's free speech provision.
• West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin has appointed his former chief legal counsel Carte Goodwin to the late Sen. Robert Byrd's seat.
• Two-year Treasury note yields sank to a record low in the bond market as the economy continues to stumble.
• Mozilla has upped the bounty to $3,000 for people who find security glitches in its Firefox web browser.

Last Call

Macroeconomics 101:  Money is only an acceptable means of legal tender if everyone has confidence in it.  When people collectively stop believing money is worth anything, they start obtaining resources they know are worthwhile.  Case in point:  Greeks are starting to hoard olive oil.

In an unexpected spin-off from the Eurozone contagion hitting Mediterranean countries, Greek producers uncertain about the future of the debt-laden state are hoarding stocks of olive oil rather than selling them on the open market.

As a result, and because of growing demand for olive oil worldwide, prices have risen 20 per cent in a year, according to Britain's biggest olive oil brand, Filippo Berio. Its managing director, Walter Zanre, warned there would be further increases in the cost of the oil, widely used by Britons for frying and as a salad dressing. Greece is the world's third-largest olive oil producer, after Spain and Italy. "Greek growers consider stocks of olive oil in tanks to be a safer bet than cash in a Greek bank," Mr Zanre told The Grocer magazine.

"Greece is a source of high quality extra virgin oil and this is putting additional pressure on prices. At some point the oil will have to be sold but in the short term it could cause a spike in prices."

A spokeswoman for Filippo Berio's distributors, RH Amar, said: "The economic climate in Spain is unstable and if the growers decide they can afford to use their oil as cash in the bank, prices are likely to spike as a result."

There's a cheery thought.  Olive oil being a safer bet than Greek banks.  How quaint, you think.  And then you read that eight more U.S. banks were closed today, bringing the total number of failed banks this year to 96, and putting us on pace for another 80 or so before the end of the year.  And that's if things don't get worse, which I'm now positive they will.

Just some food for thought with your olive oil.

Bust a Cap In It, Part 2

BP well cap tests aren't going as well as we'd hoped.

Pressure readings have been less than ideal from the new cap shutting oil into BP's busted well, but the crude will remain locked in while engineers look for evidence of whether there is an undiscovered leak, the federal pointman for the disaster said Friday.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said on a conference call that pressure readings from the cap have not reached the level that would show there are no new leaks in the well.

Allen said BP's test of the cap, which started 24 hours previously by shutting three valves and stopping the flow of oil into the water, would continue for at least 6 hours. It was scheduled to last up to 48 hours.

He said the developments were "generally good news" but needed close monitoring.

Allen said there are two possible reasons being debated by scientists on the project for why the pressure hasn't risen as high as desired: The reservoir that is the source of the oil could be depleting after a three-month spill, or there could be an undiscovered leak somewhere down in the well.

"We don't know because we don't know the exact condition of the well bore," Allen said.
He said the test will go ahead for another 6-hour period before being reassessed to see if BP needs to reopen the cap and go back to piping some of the oil to ships on the surface.
If it were reopened, Allen said, "There's no doubt there would be some discharge into the environment."

In other words, unless you believe that the oil under the ocean is depleted to the point where the pressure's gone (and yet had enough pressure to spew tens of thousands of gallons of oil, 24 hours a day for 87 days) there's another leak out there somewhere in the pipeline.  Odds are very good now that by capping this wellhead, that pressure is now be transferred to the leak point or points, and it's in the process of ripping them open wider too, meaning all the oil being capped here is coming out, we just can't see it because it's under a mile of ocean somewhere.

Frankly, this means that there's a very good chance that this cap is a failure, and that the only solutions now are that relief well working or waiting until enough oil really has spilled out to lower the pressure to the point where we can plug it.  Option one may take weeks to months and several tries, option two may take much, much longer.

Either way, this isn't over.  Not by a long shot.

Well That Explains A Lot

Atrios catches this anecdote from Ryan Lizza's piece on Larry Summers, Christina Romer and the financial crisis in the New Yorker:

Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn’t require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer’s analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion. The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer’s $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was “an insurance package against catastrophic failure.” At the meeting, according to one participant, “there was no serious discussion to going above a trillion dollars.”

Wow, good thing Summers was right and drew the line at $890 billion (and then the stimulus got cut down to $787 billion by Arlen Specter and friends) and that was enough money otherwise we might have seen unemployment over eight percent or something really unimaginably bad like nine percent or something.

Oh wait.

Assholes.

[UPDATE]  The Kroog finds this interview with outgoing House Dem and Appropriations Committee Chair David Obey:

The problem for Obama, he wasn’t as lucky as Roosevelt, because when Obama took over we were still in the middle of a free fall. So his Treasury people came in and his other economic people came in and said "Hey, we need a package of $1.4 trillion." We started sending suggestions down to OMB waiting for a call back. After two and a half weeks, we started getting feedback. We put together a package that by then the target had been trimmed to $1.2 trillion. And then [White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel said to me, "Geez, do you really think we can afford to come in with a package that big, isn’t it going to scare people?" I said, "Rahm, you will need that shock value so that people understand just how serious this problem is." They wanted to hold it to less than $1 trillion. Then [Pennsylvania Senator Arlen] Specter and the two crown princesses from Maine [Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins] took it down to less than $800 billion. Spread over two and a half years, that’s a hell of a lot of money, but spread over two and a half years in an economy this large, it doesn’t have a lot of fiscal power.

So $1.4 trillion, which is what we needed,  got cut nearly in half.  The result?  Boy, we could sure use that other $700 billion or so.  Too bad it went to the banks instead.

What's In The Box? Nothing!

So what's the Republican solution to all the massive problems that we have?  What smart governance will they implement to deal with the economy, jobs, the oil geyser's effects in the Gulf, and all the other domestic problems we have right now?  John "Orange Julius" Boehner has a game plan for the American people.

"I think having a moratorium on new federal regulations is a great idea it sends a wonderful signal to the private sector that they're going to have some breathing room."

Errrmm...say what there, OJ?

"I think there's probably a way to do this with an exemption for emergency regulations that may be needed for some particular agency or another. But if the American people knew there was going to be a moratorium in effect for a year that the federal government wasn't going to issue thousands more regulations, it would give them some breathing room."

So faced with all the problems that America is facing right now, the Orange Julius Solution offered for the 2010 election is...to do nothing.  Stick your head in the sand.  Don't even try to regulate ANYTHING.  Let the free market just run around naked for a year with guns and booze and hump everybody who walks by.  For an entire year.  This is your solution.  Repeal the laws you don't like and keep the government from issuing regulations for a yeah while we're heading over the waterfall.  The best part is Obama's still there so you can blame him when this doesn't work.  Brilliant.

Abdicate responsibility through applied nihilism.  I even have the perfect campaign commercial for this.



Yes voters, you can keep the Democratic red snapper or you can go for the Republican solution in the box. What's in the box? NOTHING!  STUPID!  YOU SO STUPID!

Why, what did you think the Republican solution would be?  Vote for us, we're going to do nothing!  There's your choice in 2010.  And hey, firebag on Obama some more while you're at it, because America's pretty damn close to choosing the box over the most productive red snapper this country has seen in decades.

But Obama hasn't fixed everything yet!  Let's put the Nothing in charge again.  Won't that be better?

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Zero Hedge reminds us that every time ECRI Leading Economic Index has hit -10% or worse, we have had a recession.  Today's weekly reading?  -9.8%. Tyler Durden:

The ECRI Leading Economic Index just dropped to a fresh reading of 120.6 (flat from a previously revised 121.5 as the Columbia profs scramble to create at least a neutral inflection point): this is now a -9.8 drop, and based on empirical evidence presented previously by David Rosenberg, and also confirming all the macro economic data seen in the past two months, virtually assures that the US economy is now fully in a double dip recession scenario.

It's no longer a question of if we'll be facing the double-dip scenario, but when the Power That Be will admit we're now in a long-term depression and have been since December 2007, and that we need to take drastic action to get out.  The alarm bells at the fire station are now ringing, and the firemen are being told to conserve water because the town reservoir is low and to start praying for the next hard rain to put out the blaze.

Meanwhile, here's even worse news from Ezra Klein:

That's job growth per month on the X axis, and how many months that level of job growth would take to get us back to pre-recession levels on the Y axis. Notice that adding new jobs at a rate of 200,000 a month would take us 150 months -- or 12.5 years -- to get back to normalcy. So far, only April has seen more than 200,000 in non-census jobs growth -- and even then, just barely.

Beautiful.  Lost decade, here the hell we come.  Taking all that together, it's looking like very soon we're going to be in a situation where we're going to need ol' Helicopter Ben's printing press to try to save the economy.  The jobs aren't coming back for a long long time...if ever.

I'd say this is the new normal, but something tells me we're in for a hell of a lot worse.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Peggy Noonan asks:

On the Internet, you read the fierce posts of political and ideological writers and wonder, Why do so many young bloggers sound like hyenas laughing in the dark? Maybe it’s because there’s no old hand at the next desk to turn and say, “Son, being an enraged, profane, unmoderated, unmediated, hit-loving, trash-talking rage monkey is no way to go through life.”

I don't know.  Why do so many old crochety newspaper columnists write inane drivel that sounds like it came from your average high school civics teacher after half-a-dozen margaritas at lunch?  Maybe it's because there's nobody brutally honest at the desk to turn and say "Will you just shut the hell up already?  Complaining about bloggers is sooooooo 2004.  My god, how are you still relevant?"

Maybe fierce and ideological is better than the same old centrist Village bullshit we get every week.  Keeeeeerist.

Suck It Up And Roll It Out

Eugene Robinson has some damn good advice for the Dems in 2010:

After rising from the ashes of 2008 by uniting in opposition to anything Obama and the Democrats tried to do, Republicans are defined more by the word "no" than by anything else. They have a rallying cry but not a program. Are the populist, Tea Party types really going to accept the fat-cat economic philosophy of the GOP congressional leadership? Is "drill, baby, drill" a viable energy strategy after the BP disaster? Is Sen. Lindsey Graham the voice of the party on Afghanistan, or is Michael Steele?

That's a lot for Democrats to work with. I happen to believe that Obama and his party have established a remarkable record of achievement. Many Americans do not agree, however, and the thing for Democrats to do is not to sulk and feel mis-understood but to go out and change people's minds.

Democrats need to get over themselves. And then they need to get busy. 

And this goes back directly to the White House messaging shop.  Where is it?  Who's in charge of it?  Where are the commercials and the pressers and the "We're #1" giant foam fingers?  Yes, the Bush spin machine was a bit overbearing ("Mission Accomplished", anyone?) but they did not lack enthusiasm in playing the game.  The White house seems content to let stand the merits of their own accomplishments, which is great if you're writing a doctoral thesis for Poli Sci but not so great if you're trying to not lose the House to the likes of Michele Bachmann and Virginia Foxx.

Look at Harry Reid.  (Yes, I'm using Harry Reid as a positive example.)  He's pounded Sharron Angle on "Here's what I have done for Nevada and the country, and here is what Sharron Angle would have done if she were Senator."  As a result he's up seven points now in five weeks.  We need that on a national scale, on a massive level.

Here's what we have accomplished.  Here's what the Republicans would have done instead.  Do you want to go back to that?  Hit them on that, time and time and time and time again.  Make them believe what you did is good and is helping, because right now the only message people are hearing is that of the loudest fringe in the Republican minority calling Obama a socialist...so much so that the label is sticking with a majority of Americans.

Dems, you're losing the message war.  Go out there and fix that.