By any measure, the 2010 mid-term electorate that zigged bright red was a different mix of voters than the 2008 presidential electorate that zagged deep blue. About 3 million Wisconsites voted in 2008, and roughly 800,000 fewer voted this year.

In Wisconsin, some key differences according to exit polls included:

Conservatives made up 31% of 2008 voters but 37% of 2010 voters.

People under 30 were 22% of 2008 voters but 15% of 2010 voters.

Urban voters (people living in cities of 50,000 or more) made up 21% of the 2008 vote but only 17% of the 2010 vote.

Suburbanites made up 48% of the 2008 vote but 52% of the 2010 vote.

So the Wisconsin mid-term electorate in 2010 was relatively older, more conservative, and less urban than the '08 electorate.

And most tellingly, the voters of 2008 broke for Obama here 56% to 42%. But those Obama voters made up only 48% of the 2010 electorate, a fall-off of eight percentage points. . . .

The original sin of Obama's presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

[snip]

But one cannot defend the actions of Team Obama on taking office. Law, policy and politics all pointed in one direction: turn the systemically dangerous banks over to Sheila Bair and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Insure the depositors, replace the management, fire the lobbyists, audit the books, prosecute the frauds, and restructure and downsize the institutions. The financial system would have been cleaned up. And the big bankers would have been beaten as a political force.

Team Obama did none of these things. Instead they announced "stress tests," plainly designed so as to obscure the banks' true condition. They pressured the Federal Accounting Standards Board to permit the banks to ignore the market value of their toxic assets. Management stayed in place. They prosecuted no one. The Fed cut the cost of funds to zero. The President justified all this by repeating, many times, that the goal of policy was "to get credit flowing again."

The banks threw a party. Reported profits soared, as did bonuses. With free funds, the banks could make money with no risk, by lending back to the Treasury. They could boom the stock market. They could make a mint on proprietary trading. Their losses on mortgages were concealed -- until the fact came out that they'd so neglected basic mortgage paperwork, as to be unable to foreclose in many cases, without the help of forged documents and perjured affidavits.

{snip}

To counter calls for more action, Team Obama produced sunny forecasts. Their program was right-sized, because anyway unemployment would peak at 8 percent in 2009. So Larry Summers said. In making that forecast, the Obama White House took responsibility for the entire excess of joblessness above eight percent. They made it impossible to blame the ongoing disaster on George W. Bush. If this wasn't rank incompetence, it was sabotage.

This is why, in a crisis, you need new people. You must be able to attack past administrations, and override old decisions, without directly crossing those who made them.

President Obama didn't see this. Or perhaps, he didn't want to see it. His presidential campaign was, after all, from the beginning financed from Wall Street. He chose his team, knowing exactly who they were. And this tells us what we need to know, about who he really is.

Okay, so, Obama chose these guys; is this a reflection of what Obama believes, or is this just Obama thinking these are the smartest guys in the room so, naturally, they would have to come up with all the right answers?

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- A Yemeni judge on Saturday ordered the "forcible arrest" of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who is believed to play an important role in the regional branch of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Awlaki, who is thought to be hiding among fellow tribesmen in Yemen's remote Shabwa Province, failed to appear Tuesday at a trial where he was accused of killing a foreigner. It is rare for a Yemeni judge to order the arrest of a defendant so soon after his failure to appear.

Yemen has been under increased American pressure to act decisively against Al Qaeda....

...On Tuesday, Mr. Awlaki was charged in absentia as a co-defendant at the trial of another man, Hisham Assem, who is accused of killing a Frenchman at an oil compound in September. Mr. Assem has denied those charges. Prosecutors have said Mr. Assem was in contact with Mr. Awlaki.

NYT

The Log Cabin Republicans, which is fighting Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the court system, today asked the Supreme Court to block an appeals court's decision to allow the military to enforce the policy.TPM

Polk County prosecutors have requested that a Grinnell grandmother and a Des Moines man be sentenced to a permanent ban from the Federal Building in Des Moines for their persistent anti-war protests.

Civil rights advocates are sounding alarms, saying the request, if granted, smacks of a blatant First Amendment violation, which guarantees free speech and the right to petition government.

"It's highly unusual and it's certainly something that deserves tremendous scrutiny to whether or not it's appropriate," said Ben Stone, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa. "It seems difficult to comprehend the justification for this."

Christine Gaunt, 54, has for the past eight months frequently staged "die-ins" where she outlines her body in chalk dust and pretends to be dead in the Des Moines offices of Senators Charles Grassley and Tom Harkin.

In many cases federal protection service officials gently scooped her limp body into a wheelchair and escorted her from the building, often times giving her a $100 citation, she said.

But, in August, she and Des Moines resident Elton Davis were arrested on trespassing charges after months of their non-violent protests.

Arrests of anti-war protesters at the Federal Building are common.  What's unusual is that Polk County prosecutors on Thursday asked Iowa District Judge Odell McGhee to sentence the duo to a permanent Federal Building ban.

McGhee chose to continue the sentencing hearing to Nov. 12.

[Youth and AAs] are always the favorite culprits in this blog for whatever bad happens in our politics. Do you remember how many people lashed out at AAs in this blog when Proposition 8 passed in California in 2008?
There is a sickening double standard in the posts of many commenters that exposes their sense of entitlement. If white working class voters do not vote for Democrats, it is because PBO and Democrats did not earn their votes. However, if AAs and young voters do not come out in numbers that enable their favored politician to come out on top, AAs and young voters need to be scolded. . . .