Talking Points Memo

Josh Marshall has discovered a distaste for Sarah Palin's alleged "unapologetic appeal to resentment and victimology."   This must be a recent development.  He seemed to think John Edwards' "Two Americas" victimology was a great political tactic ("Yes, he explains it all exactly right, in a way that would cut right into the president’s deepest political vulnerabilities").   What's more, Marshall has decided recently that any references to Obama's less savory associations are "smears", which also appears to be a well-timed epiphany. 

A more cynical fellow would just assume that Marshall finds a way to rationalize whatever he already wanted to believe.  Hey, cognitive bias happens to all of us.  But the smart analysts - those who maintain some level of credibility - generally manage to avoid such overt displays of it.

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo and the TPM sites are valuable, often producing high-quality reporting and analysis.   But there's a line between good ideological/partsan reporting...and, say, WorldNetDaily, BuzzFlash or BartCop. 

Talking Points Memo is one of the most important sources of news and framing in American politics today. I simply don't feel like I know what is going on in American politics if I don't read it. You also learn how the left is thinking.

Over the last several years, TPM has been engaged in a highly successful attack on the Bush Administration attempts to enforce election laws that limit the universe of voters to registered voters. I am perfectly willing to believe that the Bush administration exceeded its authority in places, but you get the sense that TPM's goal was only secondarily to expose lawbreaking on the part of the Bush adminsitration.

They are engaged in a very smart attempt to delegitimize our election laws that protect the integrity of the ballot. You can see this in an absolutely astonishing post below. It seems that they have no interest in the law even being followed. Nearly every sentence contains a framing that acts to legitmize the crimes of voter and registration fraud. The piece is itself titled "Nevada GOP cracking down on urban voters". Normally TPM has credible journalism. Sometimes they go off the intellectual rails so far to push their agenda that it is hard to figure out what they are any more.

Read on for details.

From the states. -Patrick

Colorado is the site of one of the nation's most hotly contested U.S. Senate races. Republican Bob Schaffer, a strong conservative, faces a Democratic Congressman familiarly known to Coloradans as "Boulder liberal Mark Udall."

Two months ago a Denver Post reporter - apparently seeking some sort of investigative journalism award - penned a series of three front-page stories about Schaffer. The stories, based on sketchy sources, sought to implicate a trip Schaffer made as Congressman to the Marianas Islands with Jack Abramoff, forced labor, and sex slavery.