So the lies go on: yesterday the Romney/Ryan campaign put out a set of talking points commemorating the sixteenth anniversary of Bill Clinton’s signing of the 1996 welfare reform legislation by continuing to ignore Clinton’s own rebuke of their race-baiting, mendacious ads on the subject and repeating the lies all over again.

But Team Mitt stepped in at least one cow pie in the latest broadside: linking to a 2006 Clinton op-ed ruminating on the lessons of the original debate over welfare reform. Here are some excerpts that I don’t think the Romney campaign really wants anyone to read or think about:

Most Democrats and Republicans wanted to pass welfare legislation shifting the emphasis from dependence to empowerment. Because I had already given 45 states waivers to institute their own reform plans, we had a good idea of what would work. Still, there were philosophical gaps to bridge. The Republicans wanted to require able-bodied people to work, but were opposed to continuing the federal guarantees of food and medical care to their children and to spending enough on education, training, transportation and child care to enable people to go to work in lower-wage jobs without hurting their children…..

The success of welfare reform was bolstered by other anti-poverty initiatives, including the doubling of the earned-income tax credit in 1993 for lower-income workers; the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, which included $3 billion to move long-term welfare recipients and low-income, noncustodial fathers into jobs; the Access to Jobs initiative, which helped communities create innovative transportation services to enable former welfare recipients and other low-income workers to get to their new jobs; and the welfare-to-work tax credit, which provided tax incentives to encourage businesses to hire long-term welfare recipients.

I also signed into law the toughest child-support enforcement in history, doubling collections; an increase in the minimum wage in 1997; a doubling of federal financing for child care, helping parents look after 1.5 million children in 1998; and a near doubling of financing for Head Start programs.

The recent welfare reform amendments, largely Republican-only initiatives, cut back on states’ ability to devise their own programs. They also disallowed hours spent pursuing an education from counting against required weekly work hours. I doubt they will have the positive impact of the original legislation.

We should address the inadequacies of the latest welfare reauthorization in a bipartisan manner, by giving states the flexibility to consider higher education as a category of “work,” and by doing more to help people get the education they need and the jobs they deserve. And perhaps even more than additional welfare reform, we need to raise the minimum wage, create more good jobs through a commitment to a clean energy future and enact tax and other policies to support families in work and child-rearing.

As you probably know, it’s by expressing an openness to state flexibility in achieving job placement goals by considering some kinds of education and training a suitable “work” activity that has supposedly exposed the Obama administration to the charge of “gutting” welfare reform, if not to the 100% dishonest assertion that it is eliminating all work requirement and just mailing checks out unconditionally.

But beyond the testimony, past and present, of Bill Clinton that the Obama administration is closely hewing to the original design of welfare reform—despite Obama’s own original misgivings about the legislation—there’s all these other make-work-pay provisions that Clinton and most other welfare reform advocates in both parties considered essential: a robust EITC and minimum wage; food assistance; medical assistance; child care; Head Start; job training; and yes, education assistance. The Ryan Budget proposes scaling back the EITC and radically reducing both food assistance and the availability of health insurance for the working poor, not to mention the drastic non-defense discretionary budget cuts it demands that are almost certain to devastate every other “work support” offered by federal or state governments.

The supreme irony of the Romney/Ryan assault on Obama is that it’s the accusers who are guilty of proposing to “gut” work-based welfare reform, which is not and never was just a matter of imposing work requirements and time-limits and expecting all those lazy women-with-kids to get off their duffs and accept those plentiful, well-paying jobs. While no one expects the GOP campaign to admit they’d unravel nearly every policy that made the 1996 law work as well as it did, they should at least have the decency to stop accusing Obama of “gutting” an initiative whose spirit and letter they reject root and branch.

Expect to hear a lot about this (from WaPo’s Aaron Blake) over the next couple of days:

Grandma isn’t scared of Paul Ryan.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows 41 percent of Americans view the new GOP vice presidential nominee favorably, while 37 percent rate him unfavorably — slightly improved from last week’s polling.

Among seniors, though, the numbers are even better for Ryan: 50 percent favorable and 35 percent unfavorable. Fully one-third of seniors say they have a strongly favorable view of the Wisconsin congressman, while one-quarter have a strongly unfavorable view.

Ryan’s Medicare plan, of course, isn’t designed to affect current seniors; it would turn the entitlement into a voucher program for future beneficiaries, starting in 2023. But that doesn’t mean Democrats haven’t tried to use it for leverage with elderly voters — a reliable and important voting group in the 2012 election — and one that generally favors the GOP.

Well, maybe. Ryan’s only been on the ticket for eleven days, and I’m sure the impression some seniors have of him is that he’s a nice-looking young man who campaigns with his proud mama. And some may have bought the well-advertised idea that he and his boss Mitt are fighting to save Medicare from that nasty Obama who wants to cut it to help those people.

But the more important reservation I’d have about the numbers in that poll is simply this: seniors have become a strongly Republican demographic group. Lest we forget, they voted for John McCain by an estimated eight-point margin (53/45) even as Obama was winning the presidency by seven points. That’s a pretty big pro-Republican gap. So even if the current approval rates for Ryan more-or-less stick, they are not out of line with what you would expect in a close presidential race.

Now it would probably be a good idea generally for Democrats to go a little lighter on the Medicare stuff and a lot heavier on the other nasty things the Ryan Budget would do to the tax code, to the budget deficit, to all sorts of non-defense discretionary spending categories affecting economic growth (from education to transportation), and most of all to the neediest of Americans. With respect to seniors, it’s odd that Democrats aren’t (so far) making a much bigger deal out of Ryan’s devastating treatment of Medicaid, which pays for long-term care for six million seniors. They should also probably get around to mentioning now and then that it was Paul Ryan who nagged George W. Bush into proposing a partial privatization of Social Security back in 2005, before Republicans were admitting there was any sort of “debt crisis.”

Presumably all of this will come out in due time. But anyone who was expecting seniors to turn against the GOP massively hasn’t been paying attention to recent trends, and ultimately, it’s not who “wins” this or any other demographic category: it’s all about the margins.

The last time I noticed anything written by National Review’s Kevin Williamson, it was a long, long and very unsuccessful effort to argue that the Republican Party was and always had been—particularly in the 1960s—the Party of Civil Rights.

When I read the first page of Williamson’s latest essay for National Review Online (“Like a Boss”), full of ludicrous evolutionary biology lessons about how Mitt Romney’s wealth and status and ability to beget sons ought to make him an overwhelming favorite among women, I thought the whole thing was tongue-in-cheek, and was prepared to ignore it. But then I noticed the piece went on for three pages—brevity is not Williamson’s strong suit—and finally realized he was serious in arguing that the key to victory for Mitt involves swaggering about the landscape and appealing to the inbred instincts of the American Herd for a Real Leader, or maybe even a Chief:

When things went wrong, people put Romney in charge of them — at Bain, at the Olympics, at a hundred companies he helped turn around or restructure. Bain is a financial firm, but Romney wasn’t some Wall Street bank-monkey with a pitch book. He was the guy who fired you. He was a boss, like his dad, and like his sons probably will be. Barack Obama was never in charge of anything of any significance until the delicate geniuses who make up the electorate of this fine republic handed him the keys to the Treasury and the nuclear football because we were tired of Frenchmen sneering at us when we went on vacation….

Elections are not about public policy. They aren’t even about the economy. Elections are tribal, and tribes are — Occupy types, cover your delicate ears — ruthlessly hierarchical. Somebody has to be the top dog….

Hillary Rodham Clinton told us that it takes a village, and Mitt Romney showed us how to populate a village with thriving offspring. Newsweek, which as of this writing is still in business, recently ran a cover photo of Romney with the headline: “The Wimp Factor: Is He Just Too Insecure to Be President?” Look at his fat stacks. Look at that mess of sons and grandchildren. Look at a picture of Ann Romney on her wedding day and that cocky smirk on his face. What exactly has Mitt Romney got to be insecure about? That he’s not as prodigious a patriarch as Ramses II or as rich as Lakshmi Mittal? I bet he sleeps at night and never worries about that. He has done everything right in life, and he should own it.

Lord a-mercy. This is the sort of thing I’ve always feared some conservatives really believe even as they prattle on about the Austrian School or Subsidiarism or The Debt Crisis: pure primitive power, procreative and financial, celebrated as “success”—you know, the kind you build on your own without any of that pansy-ass cooperation. I hope Williamson’s plea to Mitt Romney to get in touch with his inner ubermensch gets at least as much attention as his revisionist history of civil rights.

August is finally winding down, which means politics will soon get deadly serious. But only intermittently for a while yet. Here are some midday delectations:

* Kristol quotes Lincoln’s advice to prohibitionists to urge conservatives to stop attacking Todd Akin publicly and instead importune him away from the cameras to get the hell out of Senate race. Amusing on multiple levels.

* Paul Ryan confirms Romney’s position on abortion exceptions governs the ticket, but can’t bring himself to publicly endorse a rape exception. Silence speaks louder….

* And speaking of Ryan: Dowd calls him “the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs.” I’d call that an insult to the Middle Ages.

* No primetime broadcast network coverage of first night of GOP hoedown in Tampa, which means no coverage of Ann Romney’s first-of-several “keynote address.”

* U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan pass 2,000 mark.

And in non-political news:

* My favorite college football blogger, Senator Blutarsky, posts 100 things he’s looking forward to in fast-approaching 2012 season.

We’re a bit ahead of schedule in the drive to 12 posts, so I’ll be back after some quick Real Life chores.

Now that it turns out our Missouri friend Blue Girl was (at least temporarily) wrong in predicting GOP Senate nominee Todd Akin would be forced off the ballot yesterday, she is full of joy at the development:

Akin’s decision to stay in and brazen it out, at least for now, is just about the best news I’ve had lately, and to put that in the proper perspective, I had major surgery and a benign pathology report last month. I don’t think I have ever been so overjoyed in my life - weddings and births in the immediate family and the day of Jesse Helmes’ funeral excepted. Good for Akin. I didn’t believe that I had lived a good enough life for the fates to smile on me so, but there it is. I don’t know if it was me or Claire McCaskill, but one of us has been living right, and in case it’s me I’m not changing a thing. Akin staying in - whether he stays in until November or gets out in September - is the best news Claire McCaskill (or the state’s political bloggers) could have dared to hope for. We’re all throwin’ pinches of salt over our left shoulders for luck, and then pinching ourselves to see if we’re dreaming.

We’re all familiar with the phenomenon of predicting one thing while hoping for another (a sure way to avoid total disappointment), but in Blue Girl’s case, the payoff for Akin’s persistence is immediate and tangible:

His decision to stay in widens the chasm between the business and religious wings of the Missouri Republican Party. It also means the state party is due for either a reckoning or a split, and there’s no getting around it any longer.

Akin won the primary, but he wasn’t the establishment choice. He horrifies the establishment because he really believes the nutty things he says, so losing the establishment support is a badge of honor to his die-hard, wingnut, base of support.

Losing the money, on the other hand, might could matter. Already the ten-point lead he had over Claire McCaskill last week has narrowed to one point. Part of it was his horrifying and pig-ignorant comment about rape and pregnancy, but part of it is the sudden cessation of vile, heinous attack ads that Karl Rove’s dark-money outfit has buried her under for the last year-and-a-half.

Whether he stays in all the way to election day or asks a court to remove him from the ballot by the drop-dead date of September 25th remains to be seen, but I suspect that he’s “in for a penny, in for a pound” and he is not only going to go down with his freak-flag flying, he is going to take some other state-wide candidates with him. If he stays in all the way to election day and if Democrats hold the Senate, the Democratic candidate wins the open Secretary of State contest and the Democratic challenger unseats the Lt. Governor, Todd Akin will be a bigger goat than all the 2010 wingnuts who wanted to be Senators - Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck and Joe Miller combined.

I might add that if Akin wins, he will likely be a bigger pain in the butt to his Republican colleagues than a quieter and more beholden nominee with virtually identical voting inclinations in Congress, which describes anyone likely to be chosen by the state GOP to replace him if he folds. So all in all, there’s little to dislike in this strange development in the Show-Me State.

This item by Mark Landler from the New York Times’ coverage of the presidential campaign shows that the president is determined to reopen earlier criticisms of Mitt Romney and the GOP for its indifference to the plight of Americans needing help with financing higher education:

President Obama, adding another verse to his litany of differences with Mitt Romney, promoted his record on education here Tuesday and assailed his Republican challenger for advising financially strapped young people who want to go to college to “shop around and borrow more money from your parents.”

Mr. Obama, who portrayed himself as the fortunate product of affordable education, said Mr. Romney’s educational policies were conspicuously lacking in the student loans, grants, work-study programs and emphasis on lower tuition rates that put higher education within reach of millions of middle-class Americans.

If Obama really wants to make this a major campaign theme, bashing Republican indifference isn’t enough. Although his record on the subject is quite progressive (particularly his shutdown of bank involvement in federally-backed student loans), he should embrace reforms in the student loan system needed to deal with longstanding abuses that are a major threat to past, present and future cohorts of Americans seeking a better education. In a sneak preview feature (“Getting Rid of the College Loan Repo Man”) from the Washington Monthly’s upcoming September/October issue, Stephen Burd of the New America Foundation exposes the causes and effects of a nightmarish system of student loan payment collections that fails to distinguish between people who won’t and people who simply can’t pay, and also enmeshes millions in a complex and poorly administered set of regulations.

read more »

I do not wish bad, much less catastrophic, weather on anyone. But you do have to admit there’s something positively Old Testament about the prospect of a hurricane threatening a Republican Convention stuffed with self-righteous climate-change deniers, per AP:

National Hurricane Center computer models had predicted Isaac would become a hurricane over the next few days, meaning maximum winds must be at least 74 mph. Some models had the storm striking Florida, including the Tampa Bay area, after moving across Cuba or the Bahamas as early as Sunday morning.

Here’s a video of Republican delegates preparing for the possibility of a weather disaster. [A joke! A joke! It’s Porter Wagoner performing “Big Wind” at the Grand Ole Opry some time in the early 1960s, but check out the audience and the interviews at the end and you’ll see what I mean.]

At the risk of offending progressive Missourians, it does seem there is something at least mildly appropriate about the antichoice movement’s new Maximum Celebrity, Todd Akin, being from the Show-Me State. As Sarah Kliff reminds us at WaPo today, the state has long been a hotbed of legal and political challenges to abortion rights:

Missouri is the only state that has sent multiple challenges to Roe v. Wade all the way to the Supreme Court - and saw one succeed in affirming state rights to restrict abortion access. Its legislature defunded Planned Parenthood in the early 1990s, years before other states took up a similar cause.

And through the 2000s, Missouri has continued to pass some of the most aggressive abortion restrictions in the country. NARAL Pro-Choice America gives the Show-Me-State an “F” on abortion access.

“I don’t think it’s correct to say Missouri itself is radically more pro-life than other states,” says Cynthia Gornley whose book, Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars, focused on Missouri’s abortion battles. “What they did have were unbelievably good pro-life organizers and pro-choice people who were quick to take the bait….”

The state also pioneered, alongside Nebraska and Virginia, a “partial-birth abortion ban.” That law, which outlawed a specific abortion procedure used in late-term cases, passed in Missouri in 1999. Congress took it national in 2003 with the Federal Partial-Birth Abortion Act, which outlawed the procedure in all 50 states….

Antiabortion legislation has not let up in recent years. Missouri tightened its late-term abortion ban last year to only allow exceptions for cases where the health of the mother is at risk. The legislature followed up this year with a bill barring employers from covering abortion in health insurance plans.

Maybe this legacy is a testament, as Cynthia Gornley says, to the superior organization of antichoicers. But I suspect they had a lot of raw material to work with. Like Louisiana, another antichoice hotbed, the state has an unusual dual concentration of Catholics (and in Missouri’s case, German Catholics, who have historically been more conservative than their Irish or Italian brethren) and Southern Baptists. There’s also the influence of the fundamentalist Missouri Synod Lutherans (who are actually more numerous in Nebraska, but still have a sizable presence in their home state). So there has been plenty of local clerical and lay support for The Cause, and that in turn has undoubtedly been a factor in the slight realignment of Missouri in a Republican direction in recent years.

As should be obvious by now, however, Todd Akin is testing the outer limits of what a Christian Right pol can say, think and do in a politically marginal state without offending even those voters who lean in his party’s direction. And that, along with the unwelcome attention being paid to the party-wide radicalism of the GOP on reproductive rights issues these days, is why the entire state and national Republican Party along with most of the conservative movement is frantically and so far unsuccessfully trying to kick the man to the curb.

Given what we know about the cynicism of the Romney campaign, it’s entirely possible its strategy for dealing with attacks on the Ryan Budget’s effect on Medicare will be to raise constant counter-attacks that don’t survive a moment’s serious scrutiny, but succeed each other quickly until Election Day arrives and the clock runs out.

The Big Bertha rolled out about the time Paul Ryan was selected as Mitt’s running-mate, based on one of the Big Lies of the 2010 campaign, was that Obama and congressional Democrats had “raided” $716 billion in Medicare funds to pay for its socialist efforts to give undeserving poor and sick people health insurance. When it was pointed out that the same “cuts” (actually negotiated reductions in provider reimbursements plus a paring back of the “bonus” subsidies for private Medicare Advantage plans) were included in Paul Ryan’s own budget plan, Romney quickly said he’d restore the money if elected.

Now that promise is drawing scrutiny, as noted by the New York Times’ Jackie Calmes:

While Republicans have raised legitimate questions about the long-term feasibility of the reimbursement cuts, analysts say, to restore them in the short term would immediately add hundreds of dollars a year to out-of-pocket Medicare expenses for beneficiaries. That would violate Mr. Romney’s vow that neither current beneficiaries nor Americans within 10 years of eligibility would be affected by his proposal to shift Medicare to a voucherlike system in which recipients are given a lump sum to buy coverage from competing insurers.

For those reasons, Henry J. Aaron, an economist and a longtime health policy analyst at the Brookings Institution and the Institute of Medicine, called Mr. Romney’s vow to repeal the savings “both puzzling and bogus at the same time.”

Marilyn Moon, vice president and director of the health program at the American Institutes for Research, calculated that restoring the $716 billion in Medicare savings would increase premiums and co-payments for beneficiaries by $342 a year on average over the next decade; in 2022, the average increase would be $577.

Worse yet, the only thing worse than the suggestion that Obama wants to “raid” Medicare to help “those people” is the idea that Romney wants to boost out-of-pocket expenses for seniors to provide a windfall to providers, a specter congressional Democrats are already raising:

“The bottom line,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, which Mr. Ryan leads, “is that Romney is proposing to take more money from seniors in higher premiums and co-pays and hand it over to private insurance companies and other providers in the Medicare system.”

I don’t know exactly how the Romney campaign will get itself out of this latest box on Medicare, but I’m sure it will come up with something confusing enough to take time to rebut, and then turn its attention back to the evil plans of the incumbent to bring back the unconditional dole and in general let those people run riot at your expense, middle-class America!

Got that? Vote Romney and there’s more money for you! Vote Obama, and it’s less money for you, more money for those people!

Add in some selectively broadcast messages about stern father Mitt Romney not wanting dirty girls to have sex and get away with it, and that’s the heart of the GOP message this year, sad to say.

Appearances can be deceiving. Even though the apparent winners in two GOP low turnout congressional runoffs in Georgia were the “establishment” candidates fighting perceived Tea Party Insurgents, the dynamics of the contests suggested as usual that there’s no percentage in moderation in today’s GOP.

In northeast Georgia’s 9th congressional district, a new and heavily Republican district, former radio talk show host Martha Zoller seemed to have the big-time right-wing mojo going into the runoff, with endorsements from the Susan B. Anthony List, the Tea Party Patriots, Sean Hannity, Erick Erickson, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, along with the coveted Mama Grizzly designation from you-know-who. But she lost narrowly to “establishment” Republican state legislator Doug Collins, who ran ads with clips from Zoller’s old shows raising suspicions that she had at one point been soft on abortion, homosexuality, and Loco Weed, and that seems to have made the difference.

In Eastern Georgia’s 12th congressional district, another state legislator, Lee Anderson, seems to have edged out contractor Rick Allen for the right to take on perpetually embattled Blue Dog Democrat John Barrow, though a recount could occur. National groups and personalities were not as prominent in this contest as in the 9th district, but Anderson, like Collins, voted for the dreaded Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (TSPLOST) to be placed on the July 31 ballot in Georgia, and had to run a barrage of factually questionable (and racially suggestive) ads alleging that Allen had contributed to Democrats in the past to win government contracts.

Barrow supporters might be cheered by an Anderson win given the Republican’s rather notable difficulties in articulating his views (pointed to by Erick Erickson in endorsing Allen), viz. this fine peroration on “fair” versus “flat” taxes at a public forum in May:

Sounds like a voice Georgia’s horribly underrepresented conservatives need in Washington.

A small anthem for theocrats everywhere in honor of Todd Akin: The Kinks’ “Shepherds of the Nation” from Preservation Act II.

Little did I know nine days ago when I was driving through northern Missouri seeing all those Todd Akin signs that I was seeing the name of the Next New National Political Sensation! It’s been a very weird week so far. Here’s what I’ve got left over:

* New Pew survey shows large and gradually increasing public misgivings about Ryan’s approach to Medicare.

* WaPo’s Greg Sargent notes from earlier polling that Ryan is also very vulnerable on his approach to education policy.

* Bad news for EPA’s authority to regulate power plant emissions in 2-1 decision by DC Court of Appeals panel.

* At College Guide, Georgetown professor Erik Voeten mulls (and asks reader feedback about) possible ban on classroom laptops and tablets.

* At Ten Miles Square, Jonathan Zasloff notes some of the many uncomfortable questions Todd Akin has inadvertently raised about conservative ideology.

And in non-political news:

* Georgia Health Sciences University lab tech found drunk, with pants down, and surrounded by monkeys. Helluva party.

Speaking of Georgia: there are runoff elections in my home state today, including two good, vicious GOP congressional contests. I’ll have results tomorrow.

Selah.

So the big question in Politicsland this afternoon is how and why Todd Akin was able to convince himself to defy the entire GOP establishment of his state, the GOP presidential nominee, the major national campaign funders, and nearly the entire Right-Wing commentariat, and stay on the ballot in Missouri. Is he crazy? Is he bluffing?

I can’t answer those questions, but I can see how Akin might be strongly tempted in this direction. Very few if any of the people calling for him to step down supported his very recent primary candidacy; most either backed someone else or hoped he’d lose as the weakest of the potential Republican candidates. He represents a very self-conscious hard-core Christian Right segment of the GOP “base” in his state that undoubtedly feels underrepresented, undervalued, and perhaps even dissed. His candidacy is now indelibly connected with a debate over an issue—legalized abortion, and more generally, the need to rebuild America as a “Christian Nation”—about which he feels very passionately; it may very well be what made him run for office in the first place.

And thanks to the scorn and mockery he has now attracted, this relatively obscure congressman whom I’d bet half the pundits discussing his fate today had barely heard of before his primary win, is a National Superstar, the very embodiment of the Christian Right’s all-too-often abandoned determination to stand up to GOP pols who forever pay them lip service but rarely deliver the goods.

Is he worried about money? Maybe not. Recent political history is littered with relatively minor pols (Michele Bachmann and Allen West on the Right; Alan Grayson on the Left) who have built vast national small-donor fundraising networks on the heels of national notoriety and perceived victimization.

Is he worried about losing? Well, practically the first words out of his mouth before announcing he’d stay in the race on Mike Huckabee’s radio show today were to boast of a snap poll from PPP showing him still ahead of Claire McCaskill.

His family is reportedly running his campaign, so he didn’t have to worry about his staff quitting in disgust or fear of professional consequences. It’s too late for him to reassume his House seat. What does he have to lose, other than the opportunistic support of people who don’t know or like him and would probably have taken credit for his victory had he won without this latest incident?

And if he does win, he will enter the Senate next year not as some random wingnut dude from Missouri who was swept into office on a conservative wave in Missouri, but as Todd Akin, celebrity and Avenging Hero, who owes nothing to anyone other than his God, his family, and his loyal base.

Makes sense, when you look at it from his very unusual point of view.

It is apparently important for the psychology of conservatives right now to convince themselves and everyone else that Paul Ryan’s selection as Veep has created a surge in the GOP’s direction. Never mind that we are in a silly season of polling where “bounces,” if they exist, will almost certainly subside. The Cause must be moving steadily towards victory!

This occurred to me when noting on an aggregator site that I use this item from a Fox News affiliate in Detroit:

Foster McCollum White Baydoun (FMW)B, a national public opinion polling and voter analytics consulting firm based in Michigan and representing the combined resources of Foster McCollum White & Associates (Troy, Michigan) and Baydoun Consulting (Dearborn, Michigan) conducted a telephone-automated polling random survey of Michigan registered and most likely November 2012 general election voters to determine their voting preferences.

In what will be a significant blow to Democratic campaign efforts, native son Mitt Romney has climbed into the lead in Michigan’s Presidential contest. The naming of Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan has delivered a targeted affect on the Michigan and Midwest campaign dynamics.

Now it just so happens that I had a few minutes earlier read a post from Nate Silver that discussed a particularly crazy poll out of Florida:

I very much doubt that Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan will win Florida by 15 percentage points, as the Foster McCollum White Baydoun poll currently says. The survey is a huge outlier relative to the consensus of polls in Florida, which have been a bit variable but have pointed toward a race that is roughly tied….

The poll was weighted to a demographic estimate that predicts that just 2 percent of Florida voters will be 30 or younger. It’s a decent bet that turnout will be down some among younger voters this year, but that isn’t a realistic estimate. In 2008, according to exit polls, 15 percent of voters in Florida were between 18 and 30.

The poll also assumed that 10 percent of voters will be between the ages of 31 and 50. In 2008, the actual percentage was 36 percent, according to the exit survey.

The poll projected Latinos to be 7 percent of the turnout in Florida, against 14 percent in 2008. And it has African-American turnout at 10 percent, down from 13 percent.

If the turnout numbers look something like that in November, then Mr. Obama will lose Florida badly. He’ll also lose almost every other state; his electoral map might look a lot like Walter Mondale’s.

Nate went on to say that he was assigning the firm a “house effect” (i.e., a structural bias, perhaps unintentional) of 11 points in favor of the GOP, based on the Florida poll and an earlier poll of Michigan.

But you wouldn’t know any of this if you just happened to tune in to your local Fox News outlet and heard about this shocking new poll. Which is all the more reason to approach individual surveys—whether you like what you hear or don’t—with great caution.