Enjoy the 4th

The Carpetbagger Report will be off tomorrow, enjoying the 4th of July weekend. I’ll resume posts for your viewing pleasure on Monday. Enjoy the holiday.

How not to play the expectations game

Every time presidential campaigns see the end of the quarter coming, and they know that all the political reporters will be focusing on who raised what, the campaigns start playing the expectations game. It goes like this: campaign staffers tell key reporters — on background — that their guy is doing well with fundraising, but […]

We’ll need a little more than anger to win in 2004

Michael Tomasky has a terrific web-exclusive article online at The American Prospect’s website that I’d really recommend reading. It’s about why liberals should be angry, but why we’ll need more than anger to beat Bush and the GOP. Though Tomasky doesn’t specify his inspiration, I’m fairly certain it was a recent article by David Brooks […]

New unemployment numbers are bad news for everyone — including Bush

Unemployment increased to a nine-year high in June, with the unemployment rate reaching 6.4%, far worse than expected. In total, 30,000 private sector jobs were lost last month, on top of 70,000 job cuts in May. Two million people were unemployed for 27 weeks or more last month, an increase of 410,000 since the start […]

More on Roy Moore’s religious crusade

Just to follow up on my post from yesterday on Roy Moore’s religious crusade in Alabama, I wanted to mention that everyone’s favorite theocrat held a press conference yesterday. I don’t think it went well. Predictably, Moore condemned the 11 Circuit Court of Appeals for its unanimous ruling against his Ten Commandments monument, describing the […]

Howard Dean and the Internet were not always so inextricably linked

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen about as many stories that mention Howard Dean’s incredible online success as any other political story in America. Probably more. The Washington Post, for example, said Dean has “clearly tapped into something” by “running an ever-expanding grass-roots campaign online.” Mother Jones said that Dean “has tapped [the […]

Common sense wins in Alabama Ten Commandments case

Alabama State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore is not your typical religious right activist. For one thing, there’s that impressive title — most far-right theocrats don’t sit atop state supreme courts. More importantly, however, Moore has intentionally set the stage for a high-profile legal fight over whether (and how) the government can endorse religion. […]

The Carpetbagger Report’s Democratic Candidate Rankings — Part III

It’s the beginning of the month and so we return, once again, to my completely subjective rankings for the Democrats running for president. I was going to do this yesterday, but I waited another day to get more fundraising info for the second quarter. As always, these rankings are my impression on where the candidates […]

Historic — and ridiculous — redistricting effort underway in Texas

Remember all the fun we had weeks ago when Democrats in the Texas state legislature left town and Republicans went berserk and misused the federal Department of Homeland Security? Of course you do; those were good times. But in our fun, it was easy to forget why Democrats fled to Ardmore, Okla., in the first […]

Military vote could be up for grabs if Dems pay attention

I remember during the Florida recount debacle of 2000, there were a couple of days immediately following Election Day when “overseas” ballots still needed to be counted. There was an assumption that the overwhelming majority of these ballots would be for Bush because most of these voters were military personnel, and, well, military folks vote […]