Like Miller, she had already previously pledged that, if she lost the election, she would respect the will of the voters:

Miller said Sunday he expects Murkowski will stick to her promise, made at a mid-August chamber of commerce forum on the Kenai Peninsula, to follow the will of Republican primary voters and bow out following the loss.

“We both said that. We expect she’d keep her word, we think she will,” Miller told the News-Miner by phone.

So this announcement by the Alaska Libertarian Party on August 30 seemed to be not just premature, but also redundant:

The Alaska Libertarian Party said today that it would not name Sen. Lisa Murkowski their Senate nominee if she loses her Republican primary bid to Tea Party-backed challenger Joe Miller, the Anchorage Daily News reports.

Last week’s primary is still too close to call; Miller currently leads by nearly 1,700 votes, but more than 23,000 ballots remain to be counted, according to the Associated Press.

The Libertarian Party’s decision leaves Murkowski with one less way to proceed with her re-election bid, if she were to lose the Republican primary. The Libertarian Party is the only third party in the Senate race, meaning Murkowski could still run as a write-in candidate but is now left with no chance at a third-party bid.

After all, “Neither Murkowski nor her campaign staffers ever approached the Libertarian Party about joining their ticket, the Daily News reports…”

But Murkowski has apparently decided not to go gentle into that good night after all:

Now, in an interview with the Associated Press, she “says she’s not a quitter and ’still in this game.’” She’s been swamped with calls and e-mails from supporters, reports the AP’s Becky Bohrer, “asking her not to leave the race. She says she’s been humbled, and is listening — and weighing her options.”

The second surprise is that the Alaska Libertarian Party nomination remains an open possibility after all:

Apparently one of the options is the Libertarian nomination. She met with David Haase, the Libertarian nominee, earlier today, but no resolution has been reached. The AP report quotes her as saying “she had an interesting discussion” with Haase “but made clear she’s not interested in changing her ‘political stripes.’”

Haase would have to withdraw by Sept. 15 for Murkowski, or anyone else, to replace him on the ballot.

The Alaska Libertarian Party chairman has confirmed that discussions are ongoing:

The state party’s leadership earlier voted to not take on Murkowski, but Alaska Libertarian Party Chairman Scott Kohlhaas told the Anchorage Daily News recently that discussions have occurred since then.

Stay tuned, I guess. The end-game approacheth.

We’ve been breaking everything on our national poll this week down by whether respondents have ever smoked Marijuana before and here’s one I wasn’t expecting: Sarah Palin is the top choice for the 2012 GOP nomination among Republicans who have.

Granted it’s a sample size of just 83 and her lead is within the margin of error but it’s still kind of amusing.

Among Republicans who say they’ve smoked Marijuana:

Palin 25
Gingrich 22
Huckabee 17
Romney 17
Paul 8

Among Republicans who say they have not smoked Marijuana:

Huckabee 24
Romney 23
Gingrich 21
Palin 21
Paul 3

A new national poll released Sunday indicates that eight in 10 Americans say that the economy is in poor shape, and the number that says conditions are very poor is on the upswing after steady declines through the spring.

And according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, more people blame the Republicans over the Democrats for the country’s economic problems.
[...]
Forty-four percent of people questioned describe economic conditions as very poor, up seven points from July.

The poll indicates that roughly half the country says that conditions have not improved in the past two years. The other half says that the economy has gotten better, but many of them expect things will get worse in the near future.
[...]
According to the survey, more Americans hold the Republicans responsible than the Democrats, with 44 percent blaming the GOP and 35 percent picking the Democrats.

“And when George W. Bush’s name is added to the mix, the number who blame the Republicans rises to 53 percent, with just a third saying that Barack Obama and his party are at fault. That indicates why the Democrats are likely to mention Bush’s name every chance they get between now and election day,” (CNN Polling Director Keating Holland) said.

And then there’s this Washington Post-ABC News poll last night:

On the economy, 43 percent of voters side with Republicans when it comes to dealing with financial problems, while 39 percent favor Democrats. (Fifteen percent say they trust neither party more.) Although not a significant lead for Republicans, this marks the first time they have had any numerical edge on the economy dating to 2002. In recent years, Democrats have typically held double-digit advantages on the issue.

It’s not just a case of different polls coming up with different results. A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released this morning found essentially the same results as the Washington Post-ABC News poll:

Republicans have a slight edge over Democrats on the economy, according to a new national poll.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday indicates that 46 percent of Americans say that Republicans in Congress would do a better job dealing with the economy, with 43 percent saying that Congressional Democrats would do a better job on the top issue on the minds of Americans. The GOP’s three point advantage is within the poll’s sampling error.

The Republicans’ 3-point edge is a big shift from last year, when the Democrats held a 52 to 39 percent advantage. The GOP leads 51 percent to 32 percent on the economy among Independents, and they have a 9-point advantage on the issue among voters 65 and older.

According to the poll, Republicans have a slight 3-point edge over the Democrats on taxes and a 6-point advantage on tacking the federal budget deficit.

So a few days ago, Americans were pondering the shape of the economy and what got us into this whole damn mess, and what they came up with was something along the lines of:
These guys put us into a car, and drove us into a ditch, and then just walked away, refusing to lift one damn finger to help us get out of the ditch. These same guys want to persuade us to get back into the same car with them, so that the same drivers, in the same impaired state, can drive us down the same damn road again. Meanwhile, the car is still in the ditch.

And now, just a few days later, they want to ask these same guys to go get their tow-truck, and pull us out of the ditch? So that we can get back in the car with them? (Because, hey, who needs to pass Go, who needs to collect $200? “Go to ditch! Go DIRECTLY to ditch!” is just fine.)

And the people going: “One more time, baby! Come on, let’s go, you can do it!” are not standing on the sidelines, either. Those voices are coming from inside the car.

No wonder the rest of the world just doesn’t understand American politics.

Today, someone at ThinkProgress finally decided that they should probably wish her a fond farewell (and that Friday afternoon on a holiday weekend was the perfect time to do it). So they wrote up a nice little fare-thee-well post, perfectly impersonal, and not even signed by anyone. She only worked there for 6 years (which is almost the entire time ThinkProgress has been in existence).

I wonder why she left.

Nevada’s Angle believes unemployment benefits doesn’t help anyone; Alaska’s Joe Miller believes unemployment benefits are unconstitutional; Kentucky’s Rand Paul thinks it’s time to cut the jobless off before we’re worse than Europe; and a wide variety of Republican lawmakers have said the aid to the unemployed is encouraging laziness.

It’s ironic, in a way. Unemployment will very likely cost Democrats their congressional majority, but it’s Republicans who seem to actively, personally dislike those who’ve lost their jobs.

It’s actually worse than that.

It’s Republicans who are responsible for the deep recession that created all this unemployment in the first place. It’s Republicans who have strenuously resisted every effort to revive the economy, every effort to stimulate job growth. What Benen calls their active, personal dislike of the unemployed just adds insult to the considerable injury they have already caused.

(1)
Regular readers know what a numbers nerd I can be. ThinkProgress has brought together some numbers generated by The Institute for Policy Studies:

According to IPS, American CEOs make 263 times the average compensation for American workers, up from the 30 to 1 ratio in the 1970s. For comparison, the average compensation of a Japanese CEO is less than one-sixth that of their American counterpart and 16 times more than the average Japanese worker.

That disparity between the U.S. ratio of 263-to-1 and the Japanese ratio of 16-to-1 is obscene enough. Especially to American workers who “are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s.”

But slice-and-dice the numbers and there’s another disquieting fact. For every dollar that American workers make, American CEOs take home $263. Japanese CEOs take home less than one-sixth of that. One-sixth of $263 is $43.83; let’s round that down to $43. The average Japanese worker makes one-sixteenth of that, which is $2.69.

In other words, the average Japanese worker makes more than two-and-a-half times what the average American worker makes.

And it’s not only American workers who are getting screwed by runaway CEO compensation:

In fact, a study released late last year by researchers Raghavendra Rau and Huseyin Gulen of Purdue University and Michael J. Cooper of the University of Utah that surveyed the performance of 1,500 companies between 1994 and 2006 found that “lavish CEO compensation may in fact undermine shareholder wealth.” The researchers concluded that “the 10 percent of companies with the most highly paid CEOs earned unusually low returns in both the near- and long-term.”

Fancy that! If your board members approve a compensation contract for you which amounts to letting you rob your company blind, your stockholders also end up getting screwed. (Of course, you, in turn, get to sit on their boards, and/or other boards, and help to keep on spreading what could and should have been stockholder wealth to top executives. And nobody ever has to waste a single dollar out of the tens of millions they receive each year buying a back-scratcher.)

(2)
The results of that research study probably deserve some annotation. The findings are not saying that when the market learns company X will pay its CEO an exorbitant salary, its stock price takes a hit. Those “unusually low returns in both the near- and long-term” represent what happens to the stock price after the market has digested the initial news. In other words, if you pick a company with a very highly paid CEO and look at its performance after the compensation contract is already in place, then, on average its stock under-performs each year for several years. Clearly, the one thing the exorbitant salaries are not doing is motivating CEOs to do a better job for stockholders.

The interesting thing is that there are essentially two competing explanations for supersized CEO compensation. The standard rationale advanced by supporters is that it creates stockholder wealth by motivating CEOs. The argument made by opponents is the expropriation-by-mutual-backscratching argument that can be labeled the “21st Century Robber Baron Hypothesis”.

One of these explanations doesn’t appear to be true.

 
*** Update, Friday, September 3, 3 p.m. ***

Two alert readers pointed out to me that the average American worker makes about $35,000 (as a ballpark number). My math implies that the average Japanese worker makes about $95,000. That, they said, seems awfully high.

(That didn’t exactly come as news to me. It had struck me too. The difference was, they were troubled by it. I should have been too, but wasn’t.)

Duly alerted, I went back to check the two studies I had cited, and it turns out the two readers are absolutely right. The average Japanese worker doesn’t make anywhere near $95,000.

First, let me correct one error in my post. I wrote:

ThinkProgress has brought together some numbers generated by The Institute for Policy Studies:
According to IPS, American CEOs make 263 times the average compensation for American workers, up from the 30 to 1 ratio in the 1970s. For comparison, the average compensation of a Japanese CEO is less than one-sixth that of their American counterpart and 16 times more than the average Japanese worker.

Actually, the second analysis is by Bloomberg Businessweek, not The Institute for Policy Studies (original article here).

And the math error is actually in the Bloomberg Businessweek analysis. They say:

Companies listed on Japan’s stock exchanges paid their chief executives an average of $580,000 in salary and other compensation last fiscal year, PWC estimates, about 16 times more than the typical Japanese worker. Average CEO pay at the 3,000 largest U.S. companies is $3.5 million, including stock options and bonuses, according to the Corporate Library, a research group.

That is what yielded “the average compensation of a Japanese CEO is less than one-sixth that of their American counterpart” result cited by ThinkProgress and used by me in my computsations.

However, their number for average CEO pay in the U.S. seems to be totally off the mark. According to the AFL-CIO’s Executive PayWatch page:

A chief executive officer of a Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 index company was paid, on average, $9.25 million in total compensation in 2009.

This means that the average American CEO makes roughly 16 times what the average Japanese CEO makes.

Reworking the math:
For every dollar that American workers make, American CEOs take home $263. Japanese CEOs take home one-sixteenth of that, which is $16.44. The average Japanese worker makes one-sixteenth of that, which is $1.03. No huge disparity, after all.

By way of verification, Bloomberg Businessweek implies that the average Japanese worker makes $36,250 (one-sixteenth of $580,000). According to the AFL-CIO, the average American worker makes $32,049. In other words, after correcting Bloomberg Businessweek’s error in the Japanese CEO-worker compensation ratio, everything is in the right ballpark.

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that these statements apply equally to the first two years of the Obama administration.

If it hurts the economy to finance these huge war expenditures by borrowing, then why has Obama made exactly zero efforts to do anything about it? I don’t see how it’s a defense to say “But Bush started it!” Maybe, but Obama cheerfully continued it. As if there was no choice but to do so. And, of course, the whole point of that quote from his speech is that there was always a choice. There was a choice for Bush. And there was a choice for Obama. And Obama made the same choice as Bush. Even though he’s been criticizing Bush’s choice for the last three years.

I really think that Obama should have proposed a “Bush’s Wars” tax increase early in 2009. Perhaps a temporary increase, to be phased out as the wars wound down.

Clearly, the wars needed to be paid for. And there was no reason for Obama to take the political heat for this necessity. But it really shouldn’t have been too difficult — even for the hapless Democrats — to hang this fairly and squarely around Bush’s neck.

I’m not saying the Republicans — together with the elements of the Democratic Party who have proven time and again that they are easily intimidated by Republican rhetoric — would have actually allowed the tax increase to go through. But doesn’t Obama’s consistent rhetoric on the irresponsibility of funding these two wars by borrowing require that he should at least have tried?

And wouldn’t he have won politically even by losing?

President Obama’s Oval Office address was impressive and perplexing. Politically, I liked the clever pivot to the domestic economy, but he left me utterly confused about the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are we to continue to spend trillions supposedly building “democracy” in those nations or not? He still has not defined what success means. If we’re just getting the hell out of those countries, then say say so and do so. But as always, Obama seems to be trying to split the difference between the irreconcilable. That is perhaps his greatest strength — or weakness.

It might be a strength if he had actually managed to get anywhere trying to do this. (Not just a strength, actually, but a miracle.) But, of course, he hasn’t. Because that’s what the word “irreconcilable” means, after all.

It is currently the consensus of their headline writers and editors that the word attuned means “holding strong opinions”. (Perhaps some dictionaries will attune them to the real meaning of words, which would be a step up from just having strong opinions about them.)

This was the headline: “AP-GfK Poll: Most attuned voters tilt toward GOP“.

And this is what it’s attached to:

Americans with the strongest opinions about the country’s most divisive issues are largely unhappy with how President Barack Obama is handling them, an ominous sign for Democrats hoping to retain control of Congress in the fall elections.
[...]
In another danger sign for Democrats, most Americans extremely concerned about 10 of the issues say they will vote for the Republican candidate in their local House race. Only those highly interested in the environment lean toward the Democrats.

What is hilarious is that the people whom the headline describes as “most attuned” are described in the story as “highly opinionated”.

Nobody was saying afterward that the rally itself had caused much of a stir.

This, incidentally, was the modest prediction made by the rally’s low-key (and entirely sane) architect-in-chief:

What’s going to happen there will raise the hair on your arms. What’s going to happen there you will never, ever forget and I promise you, then next day when you read about it – if the press covers it – you will say “oh my gosh, I wish I would have been there.” This will go into the history book.

This is Divine Providence. This is the Lord’s hand at work. This is a miracle.

(It is obviously a miracle that so many people take such an obvious lunatic so seriously, but let’s return to the main theme.)

Attendance was certainly much less than the organizers and promoters had claimed to expect.

When they applied to the National Park Service for a permit, the organizers said 300,000 people were expected to attend.

Many people are going around saying that Beck had predicted an attendance of 100,000 at his rally, but this is what he said in the previously quoted radio interview:

You can feel the presence of the Lord. I mean, the Spirit is so strong. When you two hundred, three hundred, five hundred thousand people on the Mall in that space right there between Washington and Lincoln with the Reflecting Poll – a spiritual space in our nation – the Spirit of the Lord is going to be unleashed like I think you’ve never felt it before

The CEO of FreedomWorks, a key supporter, also said on ABC News that he expected up to half a million people to attend:

During an appearance on ABC News’s “Top Line,” Freedomworks (sic) CEO Matt Kibbe weighed in on the Glenn Beck “Restoring Honor” rally slated for Saturday.

“As far as I can tell, there’s going to be hundreds of thousands of people tomorrow,” Kibbe said. … Kibbe went on to predict that there would be 400,000 to 500,000 people in attendance — as many as, if not more than, the number of people estimated to have attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream Speech.”

Tea Party activists were also enthusiastic in their probable-attendance hype:

Some “tea party” activists say the event, at which former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is also scheduled to speak, will have a greater impact than last September’s “9/12″ march along Pennsylvania Avenue.
[...]
Conservative activists, meanwhile, promise that the rally will show their unity and voice, as last year’s 9/12 event did. Jamie Radtke, founder of the Federation of Virginia Tea Party Patriots, predicted an event as much as twice as large as last year’s, based on the number of buses that local tea party organizers have chartered (note: The Fire Department estimate of attendance at last year’s rally was 60,000 to 70,000. Unhinged conservative bloggers claimed attendance of 2,000,000. It’s probably a safe bet that Jamie Radtke doesn’t believe the Fire Department estimate and was trying to predict attendance much greater than 140,000.). The Richmond Tea Party alone is sending 15 buses – up from seven last year, she said.

Marcus Kindley, an organizer for Americans for Prosperity in Greensboro, N.C., predicted a similar showing from his region. “There’s a buildup of energy out here of people frustrated because they don’t think Washington’s listening,” Kindley said. “At 9/12, it was a wonderful coming together of people who felt like their voices weren’t being heard. And I think the reason so many more are coming this year is because our voices still aren’t being heard.”

Beck, the third-highest-rated radio personality, has promoted the event relentlessly to his enormous audience. FreedomWorks, the tea party group that staged 9/12, is lending its organizational muscle and grass-roots network.

The only objective estimate of the attendance at Saturday’s rally puts the actual attendance at 78,000 to 96,000:

An estimated 87,000 people attended a rally organized by talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck Saturday in Washington, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News.

The company AirPhotosLive.com based the attendance on aerial pictures it took over the rally, which stretched from in front of the Lincoln Memorial along the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument. Beck and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spoke at the rally.
[...]
AirPhotosLive.com gave its estimate a margin of error of 9,000, meaning between 78,000 and 96,000 people attended the rally. The photos used to make the estimate were taken at noon Saturday, which is when the company estimated was the rally’s high point.

There doesn’t seem to have been any noticeable increase in America’s honor. I have yet to meet anyone who has said: “Oh my gosh, I wish I would have been there.” And if the Spirit of the Lord was unleashed, nobody seems to have felt it yet.

But perhaps we need to give it a few more days?