I remember an extremely jarring moment during one of President Obama’s press conferences about extending the Bush tax cuts, when Obama said he must give in to hostage-taking tactics. Via Huffington Post: “I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. Then people will question the wisdom of that [...]

Two of the ads did significantly better than the average, one came in right about there, and one was not performing so we stopped serving it before it actually got any clicks. That’s the great thing about online advertising — you really get a chance to see what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your buy before you’ve sunk a lot of money into the ads.

Theses are the results:

Some people are worried about the potential Constitutional crisis if President Obama uses the 14th Amendment to declare the debt ceiling voting unconstitutional. The reality though is that we are already in the midst of a full blown Constitutional crisis that is will likely only get worse in the coming years. Whether or not you [...]

Not surprisingly, the Republicans are going to call Obama’s bluff by pushing for a short term debt ceiling extension. From Bloomberg: House Speaker John Boehner plans to press ahead with a shorter-term increase in the U.S. debt limit than President Barack Obama has requested, he told lawmakers today, defying a veto threat and signaling continued [...]

To maintain his role as head of the Republican caucus Speaker John Boehner can’t cut just any old deal with the Democrats, at least not now that so much rides on this particular fight. Even if Boehner and most of the Republican leadership want to cut a deal, and that isn’t a given, the only [...]

Paul Krugman quotes Elizabeth Drew who says that Obama is “a weak negotiator—a ‘pushover.’” But it’s not the whole story. I wrote about his negotiating style and the impact it could have on the looming debt ceiling fight in December of last year, shortly after the extension of the Bush tax cuts. And I figure if Tbogg can rerun the lawnmower post….

Jane wrote yesterday about the launch of our Google Ads campaign to alert people in key election states that Social Security and Medicare are on the chopping block. She mentioned that we would also be running Facebook ads. I just wanted to pop in and give a quick update and let everyone know that the Facebook ads have now been approved, and are up and running.

It’s been two and a half years since we first said Obama was trying to cut Social Security. Denial is no longer possible. Barack Obama, 7/22/2011, 6:06pm ET:

“We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.”

Still waiting for the “epic shitstorm.”

I’m reading President Obama op-ed in USA Today about the deficit. If I’m not mistaken, it contains the strange message that he wants the middle class to pay a significant portion of the cleanup costs for a mess they didn’t create. That’s why people in both parties have suggested that the best way to take [...]

We created the following online ads that will be targeted at senior citizens in Florida and other key 2012 presidential election states. The Google system takes 24 hours to report which ads get better click-through rates. We’ll let you know which ones perform the best tomorrow, so test your predictive skills by placing your bets in the comments.