Monday Open Thread [12.5.11]

Filed in National by on December 5, 2011

Herman Cain is going to endorse Newton Leroy Gingrich. Whatever campaign operation Cain has assembled in Iowa and South Carolina will now go to Gingrich, apparently.

In the first national poll taken since Cain left the race, Gingrich has surged into a double digit lead over Romney, with 37% to Mitt Romney’s 23%. The rest of the field is in single digits. It really is a two man race now.

The Wall Street Journal reports that as much as Donald Trump “relishes his role as Republican kingmaker, he won’t close the door on his own independent presidential bid once the next season of his reality TV show, The Celebrity Apprentice, wraps up on NBC next spring — a prospect that could spell doom for the eventual GOP nominee.” Said Trump: “I absolutely have another bite. If the economy continues to be bad and if the Republicans choose the wrong person, I would do it.”

God help us.

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  1. John Manifold says:
    December 5, 2011 at 12:48 pm

    Diploma mill pays Jack Varsalona three times national average:

    http://chronicle.com/article/On-Campuses-the-Income-Gap/129980/

  2. puck says:
    December 5, 2011 at 1:05 pm

    I love the thumbnail pic of Trump standing next to a giant Tesla coil.

  3. puck says:
    December 5, 2011 at 2:19 pm

    Here is the bullshit that makes “tax cuts über alles” sound so tasty and nutritious.

    Obama 12/17/2010 on the benefits of extending the Bush tax cuts:

    “In fact, not only will middle class Americans avoid a tax increase, but tens of millions of Americans will start the new year off right by opening their first paycheck to see that it’s larger than the one they get right now,” he said.

    So what do you think happened the following year – can anybody connect the dots?

    CNN 12/02/2011:

    “Inflation is pretty low but it’s higher than wage growth. So in real terms, people are losing income,” said Brett Hammond, senior economist with TIAA-CREF in New York.

    Right. The tax cuts provide the 1% with an incentive to depress wages. As if they needed any more incentive.

    More outcome:

    Compounding the problem, the recession exacerbated a nationwide trend that was already underway: a shift toward jobs with lower pay and fewer hours. The jobs gained in Iowa since the recession officially ended in 2009 pay more than $5,000 less, on average, than those lost during the downturn, according to a recent report by the Iowa Policy Project, a union-backed group. Iowa is one of only three states in which wages for low-, median-, and high-wage workers were all lower last year, after adjusting for inflation, than they were a decade earlier.

    There’s the results of your “centrist” policies, somewhere in the center of the space between Mike Castle and Paul Ryan.

    They are breaking us down, forcing us to make permanent downgrades in our standard of living so that more of the pie can go to the 1%:

    Colette Noble said she’d be “thrilled” to get a job that paid 60 or 70 percent of what she was making before.

  4. MJ says:
    December 5, 2011 at 2:29 pm

    Dems might be able to pick up two GOP seats in Colorado thanks to a state Supreme Court ruling – http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_19473229

  5. cassandra m says:
    December 5, 2011 at 2:32 pm

    Donald Trump is still working the birther thing.

  6. cassandra m says:
    December 5, 2011 at 2:40 pm

    For folks on Twitter, take a look at #PencilChat. It’s been an interesting and sometimes hilarious allegorical take on technology in education (but often turned into commentary or expressed frustration on other aspects on the current state of education):

    Insert “computer” or “internet” for “pencil” in Spencer’s tweets—”I’m okay with letting you use pencils, but we’re going to limit the sites where you can go with them,” and “Jesus was a good teacher and he didn’t use a pencil, so I don’t have to use one, either”—and you’ll get a good sense of all-too-common attitudes about technology in public education.

    Here is a log of some of the best of the #Pencilchat tweets.

  7. Jason330 says:
    December 5, 2011 at 5:08 pm

    Day by day coffin nails are driven into the lid of Mitt Romney’s Presidential aspirations. First it was the endorsement by Tim Pawlenty, now he has the dubious distinction of being endorsed by Dan Quayle.

  8. walt says:
    December 6, 2011 at 12:33 pm

    Is that Chump Trump running his chops again? What a shameless shill. Anything to get up the ratings on his TV show. He’ll never run for anything, and couldn’t get elected dog catcher.

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