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The Texas Blue
Advancing Progressive Ideas

News Roundup, 3/18/08: Economic Echoes

The economy is hurting, and from the look of it Americans know about it.

A CNN/Opinion Research survey came back with a staggering 74 percent of Americans believing that the economy is in recession.

The poll indicated that 9 out of 10 Democrats and 54 percent of Republicans felt that we were in a recession. 53 percent felt that it would last longer than a year, and nearly twice as many thought the economy was the most important issue in America right now as they did the Iraq conflict.

Of course, whether it is or isn't is not something that's up to popular vote. But it's also just as obvious that as consumer confidence goes, so does the American economy.

And often, as the American economy goes, so does the global market. "When America sneezes, the world catches a cold," it has been said, and though many have said that this is no longer true, it would seem that yesterday's global financial turmoil proved there is still some life left in the quote.

Japan's Nikkei 225 Stock Average and Europe's Stoxx 600 saw record drops, international financial institutions like the Swiss UBS AG and Japan's Mitsubushi UFJ took a big hit, and the value of the dollar has dropped to record lows as well, pushing up demand for gold and prompting a senior currency strategist at the Tokyo branch of Deutsche Bank AG Koji Fukaya to say that "the dollar is facing a credibility crisis."

There's probably an easy joke in there somewhere about what you get when a president is elected who previously made a career out of running businesses into the ground, but as the realities of the situation keep coming to light, that seems less and less funny.

Locally, some clarity has come back to the Texas caucus process as the Texas Democratic Party has put out a press release saying that there are no plans to delay the convention process as was requested by the Clinton campaign last week. The request was so that caucus results could be verified for accuracy, but the state party noted that there was already a verification process in place in the rules, through the delegate credentials process which allow candidates to challenge the validity of delegates.

And Tom Craddick's chances for returning to the speaker's chair in the Texas House seem to be growing slimmer and slimmer. The current "strategy" in that camp, apparently, is to narrow the field down to two people on the first ballot, one of which ostensibly would be Craddick, so that he could win over a sole challenger on the second.

Kelly Fero summed up the problem with that theory pretty succinctly:

"Craddick as consensus candidate? Yeah, that'll play well," Democratic consultant Kelly Fero said. "It's another tone-deaf reading of the House and the voters who put them there."

It would, indeed, seem likely that moderate Republicans and Democrats would be far more likely to coalesce around an anti-Craddick vote than the alternative.

The Internet blog world saw some news yesterday, as a diarist on Daily Kos, the largest liberal political blog on the Internet, called for a Daily Kos writer's strike to protest the widely seen anti-Clinton bias on the site, which the writer called "abusive."

And ThinkProgress launched what they are calling a "public policy rapid response room" as a sister blog to their site, which they're calling The Wonk Room. The site says its "ultimate goal... is to create a mandate for progressive action in each of [the site's] four core policy areas:" health care, economic mobility, national security, and climate change.

The Michigan and Florida revotes seem to be hitting some rocky patches. In Michigan, the Obama campaign's hesitation to agree to a revote is causing problems for legislators in the state who don't want to expend the time and effort on a state bill that may be for naught.

And Florida's looking even more dire, as the Florida Democratic Party has now stated that it will not hold a second primary, having been unable to find a way to do so that was "anywhere close to being viable" in the state, said state party chairwoman Karen Thurman.

Finally, if you're wondering how the campaigns and the media can stand the stress of this crazy primary season, it really isn't as easy as they try to make it look.

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