Republicans Love 'Breeder' Shows, Democrats Love Mad Men, Says New TV Study | Movieline

Politics and TV habits:

As it turns out, popular shows are watched by Republicans! The Amazing Race, Modern Family, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and The Big Bang Theory, among other Nielsen thoroughbreds, have a larger number of Republican fans than Democrat ones. The reason for this? Basically that Republicans like rooting for a winner. (No wonder so many Yankees fans are also Republicans.)

On the flipside, “critically acclaimed” series like Mad Men, Dexter, 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights and Parks & Recreation are watched by Democrats. So, the losers. Of course the fact that Democrats might consider themselves “too cool for school” is only half the issue, according to John Fetto, senior marketing manager for Experian Simmons.

“The big shows with mass appeal tend to have above-average scores from Democrats and Republicans but with higher concentrations of Republicans. Looking at the Democrats side, I don’t mean to make light of it, but they seem to like shows about damaged people. Those are the kind of shows Republicans just stay away from.”

I would have been happier with the shorter version: Republicans watch shows that are stupid; Democrats watch shows that are smart.

Game On - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

This cannot be said often enough:

I can't for the life of me see how the Democrats retain the House under these economic conditions, but that cannot and does not mean that what Obama has done in his first year and a half is a failure. On the contrary. On almost all the substantive stuff, he has in my view done the right and responsible and sane thing within the almost impossible constraints he was presented with. And given the legacy he inherited, what he has done is simply not enough to perform an economic or political or cultural miracle. That's the brutal truth and we have to face it. And if Americans thought they were voting for a savior, rather than a pragmatic president, they were deluding themselves.

Racial and ethnic exploitation of economic insecurity - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald puts your world in a nutshell:

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party -- controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country's vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse -- now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party's failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner -- continuing America's endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living -- renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.

It may create a lot of noise, but ultimately I don't think it's "working." Political discourse has become the equivalent of Comic-con. Marketers come loaded for bear and the fan boys go crazy for the latest sci-fi/comic book blockbuster, but when exposed to the larger marketplace, fan-friendly junk like Scott Pilgrim can't live up to the hype.

The Long Game And The Breitbart Implosion - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan continues to keep the faith regarding President Obama:

He avoided a second Great Depression. The bank bailout, however noxious, worked. GM may soon be returning a profit to the government. Health insurance reform will stick and, with careful oversight, could begin to curtail runaway healthcare costs. Financial re-regulation just passed. Two new Supreme Court Justices are in place after failed attempts at culture war demagoguery. Crime - amazingly - has not jumped with the recession. America is no longer despised abroad the way it was; torture has been ended; relations with Russia have improved immensely; Iran's regime is more diplomatically and economically isolated than in its entire history; even the Greater Israel chorus has been challenged. Moreover, if the House goes Republican this fall, it renders a second Obama term as likely as Clinton's became (how many Independents would want to hand over the government to Palin and the current GOP in Congress?).

Red State Elitism

Matthew Yglesias argues that our current culture war (brought to us by our friends, the Republicans) is not about rich and poor, elite and working class, but about two forms of upper middle class snobbery. It's about two competing brands of aspirational consumerism. Rich vs. rich.

Our current crop of candidates offers up some pretty good examples of this. The McCain family is really stinkin’ rich (inheriting multi-million dollar fortunes and owning a dozen houses) but the other three couples on national tickets are well-off on a much more banal scale. The Palin family, the Obama family, and the Biden family all have incomes running into the six figures which is much more than your average American family has. But the Palins choose to spend their money in very different ways. They’re raising five kids, getting into competitive snowmobiling, going on moose hunting expeditions, etc. This isn’t stuff that your typical coastal elites care to do with their time and money, but none of it’s cheap, either. Rather, these are the leisure pursuits of Red America’s economic elite while prosperous people in Blue America are instead raising fewer children in smaller houses that are much more expensive per square foot and spending money on cheese plates rather than moooseburgers.

In other words, the notion that the Palins are some how more in touch with America than the Obamas is nothing more than marketing. It's the myth the Republicans are selling. Like Cowboy Bush and the Crawford ranch, it's all about using imagery to buy the votes of the poor and the working class through the dream of prosperity.

Lest we forget, conservatives are the elites and the good old boys and the special interests that they only pretend to disparage.

Josh Marshall on the Democrats

It's my sense that many people have been sitting on the fence, waiting to see what would motivate voters in Iowa and New Hampshire: would we get the passionate candidate or the money candidate? Would we get the idealist or the electable compromise?

Obama is benefiting from Iowa and comes out as the new face of America. Clinton is struggling as the divisive, old school, boomercrat and Edwards is the populist without a people.

Josh Marshall reads things much more pragmatically:

In general, I think Obama's the winner tonight. I think Hillary made her case well. I think Edwards had the best debate. But the debate can only be understood in the context of the moment. Right now, Obama's on fire. The first post-Iowa polls show him picking up a big post-caucus bump. He needed to come off well. Not make any mistakes. And not let Hillary open up any strong line of attack against him. And I think he did each one of those things. Which means he gave some reassurance to those who might be hesitating to get on the bandwagon and didn't do or allow anything to happen which significantly change the trend of the moment, which is moving heavily in his favor.