CLUELESS NY TIMES STAFF might have to take pension downgrade...The horror.



Take a listen to the bucketheads at the NY TIMES whine about the possibility that they might have to take a reduction in pension benefits. The horror !!


Here's a bite of reality for you Mr. Media-Elite. Welcome to the new economy that the Democrats & dear leader Mr. Obama have given us...Share YOUR wealth Mr. Newspaper Elite !!. Here is what the rest of us have known for the past three years as we watched the DEMS spend us $5 TRILLION dollars further into debt.


Granted, the other side is not much better but they haven't figured out how to wreck things like Pelosi, Reed and Obama did in three years. These ingrates will get their pensions, just not a life-time of their full salary. That is reserved only for Municipal workers, State & Federal employees. The rest of us will have to get by on working in normal retirement age, add in what little social security is left and anything else we can do.


To work for a major newspaper and to act this clueless/entitled/elite is the sign of how badly the media does it's job. If they couldn't figure this crap out until now, how much other shite they write about is wrong also ?


Russel Mead lays it out in true Schadefreude...enjoy.


To quote John McClean from DIE HARD, " WELCOME TO THE PARTY PAL..."






At The NYT: Clueless Blue Deer Meets Onrushing Truck
Russell Mead - PJ Media


Schadenfreude alert: readers, and especially those who don’t much like the New York Times, should make sure they are not eating soup or holding hot liquids before viewing the video below. Uncontrollable gales of laughter stemming from excessive levels of schadenfreude may cause spilling and staining.


New York Times staffers, like suffering proles all over the world, belong to a labor union, and over the years the union has negotiated a very comfy defined benefit retirement plan. The staffers love the plan.


But economic reality is intruding. Times management, perhaps reading the coverage in its own pages about the companies and cities going bankrupt due to unsustainable union-bargained pension systems, wants to make a change. It wants to offer a defined contribution plan, instead. Workers and the company pay into a 401(k) plan, workers invest it, and when they retire, that is the amount they have towards their income.


It’s an entitled blue deer, meet onrushing truck kind of moment. The Guild is talking about a strike, and an array of Times staffers, including some famous bylines that are well known in news circles, worry aloud that the new plan could make them eat cat food and sleep in boxes on the street in old age. (Or late middle age, anyway; not one staffer talks about working past 65.)


Nobody in the video talks about the changes in the news business that threatens to drive the Times into a deep dive. Nobody talks about the prospect of future significant staff cuts if costs can’t be contained. None of them discuss the incongruity between their own naive sense of entitlement and what is going on in the cities, companies and countries they cover.


They just want the money.


Some writers allude to the prospect of leaving the paper if the pension change goes through, but a quick check of the newspaper business suggests they don’t have all that many options. Certainly with the exception of a handful of superstars the New York Times would have less trouble replacing its current staff than the current staff would have in replacing their jobs. And if those new jobs are in journalism, good luck finding a company with a generous defined benefit pension plan.


I sympathize with the Times staff about living in tougher economic conditions, but that is what people are adjusting to all over the world; I’m not sure what gives them an exemption. Newspaper reporters of all people should have seen this coming long ago, and have made savings and retirement plans on the assumption that their defined benefit plan would be going the way of the passenger pigeon and sooner rather than later.


If anything, their feelings of regret and chagrin should be tinged with at least a soupçon of relief. In the end, a defined benefit plan is only as solid as the company behind it, and given the turmoil on today’s media landscape it’s not at all clear where the Times will be or how it will be restructuring its debt 20 years from now. The good thing about a defined contribution plan is that you don’t lose the money if your ex-employer goes broke.


For readers, this is a fascinating and revealing glimpse inside the Times bubble. I am not sure which is more disconcerting; the deeply embedded sense of blue entitlement so palpably on display or the poor political judgement that led the union brass to think that releasing this video to the public would be good PR. Either way it serves as a powerful illustration of just how fundamentally out of touch many of the people working at America’s most famous newspaper have become.


I like and admire many of the people who write for the Times. Some of them I have known for years and, happily, the judgment and sensibility behind this video doesn’t characterize everyone who works there. But I suspect that most viewers around the world are going to find this video funny and revealing rather than heartfelt and convincing.

INCOMING - Obama plans 345% increase in healthcare costs for military

The battle of the budget is on and the feckless idiots in Washington have succeeded in spending our great-great-great grandkids and all the rest of us into a hole so deep they need to pipe light down to us at the bottom.

" Entitlements ' is the issue and who is entitled to what is the crux of the problem. Yes, we need to take care of the truly needy but the number of people who are officially listed as disabled has skyrocketed especially under Social Security. Many who now get a monthly check from Uncle Sam have never paid a nickel into the plan or seen the weekly deduction that is taken from those who work for a living.

Now, we get to the issue at hand, that the "Village Idiot from Chicago" has decided that after all the hard work the military has done for our country, they need to pay a higher premium for their healthcare. I understand that the cost of this program is not something that should be immune from adjustment but when they attempt to foist a 345% increase of the cost on the average military member/family, but at the same time not adjust the cost of the healthcare offered to UNION Government Civilian workers, we have a major problem.

This is par for the shiftless bastard in the White House. He has a life-long disdain for the military so he shafts them while giving preferential treatment to his Union Buddies. We need to send a message to the Idiot in Residence at the White House and send him out of there in November. While increases are needed, they should be shared across all areas and not just given to those who protect our country and serve in distant locations. Protecting Unionized Government workers who have done better than all other classes of workers is what was expected from the unethical poser in chief but now we can respond to this by voting him out of office.

OMG - Obama Must Go. Really.

Trashing Tricare - Obama to cut healthcare benefits for active duty and retired US military
BY: Bill Gertz - Washington Free Beacon - February 27, 2012 3:36 pm

The Obama administration’s proposed defense budget calls for military families and retirees to pay sharply more for their healthcare, while leaving unionized civilian defense workers’ benefits untouched. The proposal is causing a major rift within the Pentagon, according to U.S. officials. Several congressional aides suggested the move is designed to increase the enrollment in Obamacare’s state-run insurance exchanges.

The disparity in treatment between civilian and uniformed personnel is causing a backlash within the military that could undermine recruitment and retention.

The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the Pentagon’s $487 billion cut in spending. It seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget, and $12.9 billion by 2017.

Many in Congress are opposing the proposed changes, which would require the passage of new legislation before being put in place.

“We shouldn’t ask our military to pay our bills when we aren’t willing to impose a similar hardship on the rest of the population,” Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a Republican from California, said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon. “We can’t keep asking those who have given so much to give that much more.”

Administration officials told Congress that one goal of the increased fees is to force military retirees to reduce their involvement in Tricare and eventually opt out of the program in favor of alternatives established by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

“When they talked to us, they did mention the option of healthcare exchanges under Obamacare. So it’s in their mind,” said a congressional aide involved in the issue.

Military personnel from several of the armed services voiced their opposition to a means-tested tier system for Tricare, prompting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey to issue a statement Feb. 21.

Dempsey said the military is making tough choices in cutting defense spending. In addition to the $487 billion over 10 years, the Pentagon is facing automatic cuts that could push the total reductions to $1 trillion.

“I want those of you who serve and who have served to know that we’ve heard your concerns, in particular your concern about the tiered enrollment fee structure for Tricare in retirement,” Dempsey said. “You have our commitment that we will continue to review our health care system to make it as responsive, as affordable, and as equitable as possible.”

Under the new plan, the Pentagon would get the bulk of its savings by targeting under-65 and Medicare-eligible military retirees through a tiered increase in annual Tricare premiums that will be based on yearly retirement pay.

Significantly, the plan calls for increases between 30 percent to 78 percent in Tricare annual premiums for the first year. After that, the plan will impose five-year increases ranging from 94 percent to 345 percent—more than 3 times current levels.

According to congressional assessments, a retired Army colonel with a family currently paying $460 a year for health care will pay $2,048.

The new plan hits active duty personnel by increasing co-payments for pharmaceuticals and eliminating incentives for using generic drugs.

The changes are worrying some in the Pentagon who fear it will severely impact efforts to recruit and maintain a high-quality all-volunteer military force. Such benefits have been a key tool for recruiting qualified people and keeping them in uniform.

“Would you stay with a car insurance company that raised your premiums by 345 percent in five years? Probably not,” said the congressional aide. “Would anybody accept their taxes being raised 345 percent in five years? Probably not.”

A second congressional aide said the administration’s approach to the cuts shows a double standard that hurts the military.

“We all recognize that we are in a time of austerity,” this aide said. “But defense has made up to this point 50 percent of deficit reduction cuts that we agreed to, but is only 20 percent of the budget.”

The administration is asking troops to get by without the equipment and force levels needed for global missions. “And now they are going to them again and asking them to pay more for their health care when you’ve held the civilian workforce at DoD and across the federal government virtually harmless in all of these cuts. And it just doesn’t seem fair,” the second aide said.

Spokesmen for the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not respond to requests for comment on the Tricare increases.

The massive increases beginning next year appear timed to avoid upsetting military voters in a presidential election year, critics of the plan say.

Additionally, the critics said leaving civilian workers’ benefits unchanged while hitting the military reflect the administration’s effort to court labor unions, as government unions are the only segment of organized labor that has increased in recent years.

As part of the increased healthcare costs, the Pentagon also will impose an annual fee for a program called Tricare for Life, a new program that all military retirees automatically must join at age 65. Currently, to enroll in Tricare for Life, retirees pay the equivalent of a monthly Medicare premium.

Under the proposed Pentagon plan, retirees will be hit with an additional annual enrollment fee on top of the monthly premium.

Congressional aides said that despite unanimous support among the military chiefs for the current healthcare changes, some senior officials in the Pentagon are opposing the reforms, in particular the tiered system of healthcare.

“It doesn’t matter what the benefit is, whether it’s commissary, PX, or healthcare, or whatever … under the rationale that if you raise your hand and sign up to serve, you earn a base set of benefits, and it should have nothing to do with your rank when you served, and how much you’re making when you retire,” the first aide said.

Military service organizations are opposing the healthcare changes and say the Pentagon is “means-testing” benefits for service personnel as if they were a social program, and not something earned with 20 or more years of military service.

Retired Navy Capt. Kathryn M. Beasley, of the Military Officers Association of America, said the Military Coalition, 32 military service and veterans groups with an estimated 5 million members, is fighting the proposed healthcare increases, specifically the use of mean-testing for cost increases.

“We think it’s absolutely wrong,” Beasley told the Free Beacon. “This is a breach of faith” for both the active duty and retiree communities.

Congressional hearings are set for next month.

The Veterans of Foreign Wars on Feb. 23 called on all military personnel and the veterans’ community to block the healthcare increases.

“There is no military personnel issue more sacrosanct than pay and benefits,” said Richard L. DeNoyer, head of the 2 million-member VFW. “Any proposal that negatively impacts any quality of life program must be defeated, and that’s why the VFW is asking everyone to join the fight and send a united voice to Congress.”

Senior Air Force leaders are expected to be asked about the health care cost increases during a House Armed Services Committee hearing scheduled for Tuesday.

Congress must pass all the proposed changes into law, as last year’s defense authorization bill preemptively limited how much the Pentagon could increase some Tricare fees, while other fees already were limited in law.

Tricare for Life, Tricare Prime, and Tricare Standard increases must be approved, as well as some of the pharmacy fee increases, congressional aides said.

Current law limits Tricare fee increases to cost of living increases in retirement pay.

The fiscal burden of public-employee unions - a class of citizens who set themselves up as "Lords of the Manor"

We learn our mistakes and how the mistakes happened when we study history. Only in hindsight can we see that decisions that seemed to be in our best interest at the time, can have disastrous consequences late on.

We now have a class of citizens who by virtue of working for your local, state or Federal Government, have set themselves up as the "Lords of the Manor", granting themselves entitlements that last a lifetime that few if any other citizens could possibly hope to achieve. And at the same time, they will expect all others to pay for their entitlement, even to the detriment of all others needs.

Siegel writes " Instead, the decision to grant this privilege was a political decision designed to enhance the power of a pressure group whose interests, even many liberals assumed, would be at odds with those of the general public. Political decisions can be reversed."

Agreed sir. We NEED to reverse the decision to give them this ability to hold all us collectively hostage, the sooner the better. To not do so, would to put the success of our nation and it's communities at grave danger. These greedy Unions don't care about you & me,or how their demands effect the rest of the population, only their own selfish needs.



How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage -
The first to seize on the political potential of government workers was New York's Mayor Robert F. Wagner.
The Kennedy White House took notice of his success
Text By FRED SIEGEL - Wall Street Journal Opinion


The turbulent years of the 1960s and '70s are best known by the headline-grabbing civil rights and women's rights movements. But there was another "rights" movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively.

Liberals were once skeptical of public-sector unionism. In the 1930s, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia warned against it as an infringement on democratic freedoms that threatened the ability of government to represent the broad needs of the citizenry. And in a 1937 letter to the head of an organization of federal workers, FDR noted that "a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable."

Private-sector union leaders were also divided. George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO from 1955-1979 who came out of the building trades, argued that it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government." Private unionists more generally worried that rather than winning a greater share of profits, public-sector labor would be extracting taxes from a public that included their own workers. But in the late 1950s, with the failure of the labor movement's organizing campaign in the South, Meany's own executive council insisted on the necessity of winning the right to organize public employees.

The first to seize on the political potential of government workers was New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner. The mayor's father, a prominent New Deal senator, had authored the landmark 1935 Wagner Act, which imposed on private employers the legal duty to bargain collectively with the properly elected union representatives of their employees. Mayor Wagner, prodded by Jerry Wurf of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (Afscme), gave city workers the right to bargain collectively in 1958.

Running for re-election in 1961, Mayor Wagner was opposed by the old-line party bosses of all five boroughs. He turned to a new force, the public-sector unions, as his political machine. His re-election resonated at the Kennedy White House, which had won office by only the narrowest of margins in 1960.

Ten weeks after Wagner's victory, Kennedy looked to mobilize public-sector workers as a new source of Democratic Party political support. In mid-January 1962, he issued Executive Order 10988, which gave federal workers the right to organize in unions.

Two young and militant public-sector unionists, Al Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers and Wurf of Afscme, both strong supporters of the still nascent civil rights movement, seized the opportunity. Shanker saw both teachers and African-Americans as second-class citizens fighting the old-line political bosses. He'd also called a brief teachers strike in 1960. Shanker called another strike in 1962 that shifted the balance of power from principals to teachers, where it has remained down to the present.

In 1958, there had been but 15 public-employee strikes nationwide, involving a handful of workers. By 1968, after the old guard in Afscme had been deposed by the so-called young Turks led by Wurf, more than 200,000 union members, mostly in local and state government, were involved in 254 strikes.

In 1968, amid rioting, civil rights and antiwar protests, Martin Luther King Jr. backed an Afscme strike by poorly paid, mostly African-American sanitation men in Memphis, Tenn. After King's tragic assassination, the city quickly settled with the union.

In the 1970s, government-worker unions became a political venue for New Leftist, feminist and black activists hoping to carry on in the militant spirit of the 1960s. The divisions within organized labor over the Vietnam War allowed Wurf and his allies to take on the declining private unions of the AFL-CIO, whose leader Meany backed the war. Wurf made himself a key player in George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign, and public employees have had a lead role in Democratic Party politics ever since.

Public-employee unionism seemed to be moving from success to success—Afscme was gaining a thousand (mostly female) workers a week—until the summer of 1975. At that point there was a surge in strikes, and the government unions began to threaten Democratic officeholders.

On July 1, 1975, New York sanitation workers walked off the job, allowing garbage to pile up in the streets of a Gotham already in the throes of fiscal crisis. In short order, cops objecting to furloughs imposed by the city's liberal Democratic Mayor Abe Beame shut down the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, with marchers carrying signs that read "Cops Out, Crime In" and "Burn City Burn."

On that same July 1, 76,000 Pennsylvania state workers went on strike against liberal Democratic Gov. Milton Shapp's austerity measures. Afscme's leader in Pennsylvania, Gerald MacIntee, told his members "Let's go out and close down this God-damned state." And in Seattle, the fireman's union initiated a recall ballot on July 1 directed against the one-time union favorite, Mayor Wes Uhlman, who held back pay hikes in the midst of rising deficits.

Mr. Uhlman narrowly survived and he, like Beame and Shapp, calmed the situation by largely caving in to the striker's demands. But a line had been crossed: With New York's near-bankruptcy a visible marker, the peril posed by public-sector unionism became a problem for Democrats as well as Republicans.

The fiscal burden of public-employee unions briefly became visible again in the early '80s, when many warned of a looming public-pension crisis. That crisis was averted by the stock market boom that began in 1982-83 and lasted until 2007-08. It is now back with a vengeance.

Restraining the immense clout that government-employee unions have accumulated over the past half-century will be difficult, but not impossible. Civil rights for African-Americans and women was a fulfillment of the universalist American promise as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Collective bargaining by public employees was not rooted in deep-seated American tradition.

Instead, the decision to grant this privilege was a political decision designed to enhance the power of a pressure group whose interests, even many liberals assumed, would be at odds with those of the general public. Political decisions can be reversed.

Mr. Siegel is a scholar in residence at St. Francis College and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

Arrogant Teachers & FLA Legislator want to grade Parents - "They will have no choice ....they are going to be graded as well as the children"

Wacky news stories come out of Florida...it is the center of all crazy news stories.


In Florida, the arrogance of petty bureaucrats, politicians and administrators in the public sector has just hit a new watermark.....A legislator from the state of Florida wants to require Teachers to grade parents.....Who died and left her in charge??? This woman is the next "Pelosi-in-Training".

I left public education quite a while ago and the days of having a public school teacher hold sway over me ended then & there. From that day on, all education I got came out of my $$$ and I paid for the Bachelor's Degree, allowing the Professors to school me in professional business.

These arrogant, petty idiots want the ability to rule not only your child's life, but yours as well.

The failure of schools is not all on the educators but the system of tenure-for-life, no-performance ratings school systems has only insulated Educators from reality and made them arrogant. They are the epicenter of entitlement and have no regard or care for what you think. I had to chew a few of these idiots out in my time of raising children and had to remind them they work for us, not the other way around.


Schools serve our children and we as Parents will always have the final say on our children's lives. PARENTS are responsible for their children and Teachers can advise but no Teacher will ever grade parents.....that would be the height of an arrogant and out-of-control bureaucracy that is the hallmark of the failing eduction system, run by out-of-touch elite liberal idjits who haven't got a clue.

Lakeland lawmaker proposes grading parents along with students, schools
By: Matt Collins - ABC News

LAKELAND, Fla. - Students get grades and schools get grades.

Now one state lawmaker is sponsoring a bill that would require teachers to give parents in Florida a grade for how involved they are with their child's education.

Rep. Kelli Stargel (R-Lakeland) said on Wednesday that teachers and schools can only do so much.

"We hold teachers accountable, we're holding students accountable, we're holding administrators accountable," explained Stargel. "Frequently, I was hearing from teachers saying I can't educate a child who's not there."

Parents of students in kindergarten through grade 12 would be assessed, but only parents of kindergarten through third grade students would actually see a grade on their child's report card. Stargel is proposing giving parents a satisfactory, unsatisfactory or needs improvement grade.

"You need to have your child at school, you need to have them fed with some rest and you need to talk to the teacher," she said.

Jessica Podany, who was shopping with her young children a block from Stargel's Lakeland office, had mixed feelings about the idea. But she agreed giving parents a grade would get them more involved.

"They will have no choice to be involved if they are going to be graded as well as the children," Podany said.

Stargel said one of the complaints she heard from teachers during the debate over Senate Bill 6 last year was that parents, along with teachers, needed to be held accountable for a child's education. SB6 called for an end to teacher tenure and tied teacher pay to students' performances on tests. It was vetoed by then-Governor Charlie Crist.

Stargel is a mother of five. She's also chairman of one of the Florida House's education subcommittees. The lawmaker said the legislation is a start the conversation on parent accountability.

"I don't believe this bill is going to be the finished product," Stargel said. "We're going to get input from all of the people and figure out what we can do to hold the parents more accountable."

Copyright 2011 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

ENTITLEMENT MENTALITY...

It's hard to top this write-up - The sense of "entitlement" is ripe in all forms of State and Local Government (especially in small towns) - The " Don't-you-know-who-I'm-am ???" mentality is a BLIGHT on our landscape.....Ms. Coakley is about to find that out.....ouch - how the mighty have fallen....

If we could make the "cancer" of entitlement in our state go away, we could save so much money it would bring tears to your eyes.......

From the BEANTOWN GLOB

In public battles, entitlement buys nothing
By Joanna Weiss

Globe Columnist / January 16, 2010

YOU CAN’T turn on the TV right now without finding yourself in the crossfire of two epic battles: for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, and for Johnny Carson’s old desk on “The Tonight Show.’’ The stakes are different, obviously, but the same cautionary tale holds for both: Whether in politics or Hollywood contract negotiations, a sense of entitlement gets you nowhere.

Entitlement is a good chunk of the reason why Martha Coakley has watched her once-comfortable lead in the Senate race vanish. Her shock at her predicament is palpable. I can’t keep myself from giggling at one of her attack ads, so sinister in tone that it feels like self-parody. “Who is Scott Brown, really? A Republican,’’ it asks. Wait - he didn’t tell us that already?

But that’s the underlying message, apparently heartfelt: Can’t you people understand that Brown isn’t supposed to win this race? This is Massachusetts, after all, where congressional seats are supposed to be reserved for Democrats. And the primary, which Coakley won without exerting herself, did nothing to dissuade her that a candidate with Kennedyesque views and statewide name recognition owned the future.Assumptions can be hard to shake, in politics and in the equally political business of TV. And just as conventional wisdom holds that Massachusetts is ruled by the left, it says that TV is ruled by the young, the hip, the edgy. That’s why we keep getting shows like “Jersey Shore,’’ and why NBC promised “The Tonight Show’’ to Conan five years ago.

Now, Conan and his hipster fans seem shocked that the network would renege on its promise and cling to someone as square as Leno. So they’re reacting with their own, tech-savvy sense of entitlement. They’ve set up Facebook fan pages and drafted Shepard Faireyesque posters declaring, “I’m With Coco.’’ They’ve graft subtitled rants about Leno onto old German films about Hitler. It’s great stuff, but what is Leno supposed to do - disappear just because he isn’t hip? Give up the right, in a vicious and ego-driven business, to get the best time slot he can?

Or should he get credit for understanding his audience, and sensing that NBC would come around? After some boneheaded scheduling moves and clumsy negotiations, NBC realized its late-night future doesn’t rest with the young hipsters who don’t bother to watch TV at a scheduled time, or are already lost to the cult of Stewart and Colbert. Jay Leno speaks to the un-hip viewers who love “NCIS’’ and “CSI,’’ and who - for now, at least - are the power source for network TV.

You can’t win an election, either, without understanding where the power lies. That’s why, in Massachusetts, Scott Brown now has a chance. He knows that the swing voters here are the Interstate 495 independents. He knows they like candidates who reflect their frustration at the state of the world, and that they like to be asked for their support.

Now, they know who Brown is, too; ever since this race turned into a race, he’s been on the air so much that I can trace the outlines of his kitchen cabinets in my sleep. Brown’s ads are clever: They reflect a general sense of disgruntlement without bothering to get too specific. They sell the political equivalent of Leno, an everyman in a comfortable sweater who doesn’t like mean people.

It’s still amazing that Coakley hasn’t been able to tap into similar populist fervor, to connect her past work fighting Wall Street excesses to the news of record Wall Street salaries, to make a case that obstruction on health care is bad for the little guy, too. She needs her own “I’m With Coco’’ movement more than ever now. And while a rally with President Obama is one approach, she could also take a page from the O’Brien fans’ playbook, and try to turn her now-precarious situation into a source of strength.

Just as O’Brien is getting a ratings boost from gabbing about his misfortune, Coakley could get some sympathetic attention by offering an honest assessment of the race. She could apologize for thinking this was her seat to lose and admit she has to work for every vote. And then she could start working. Fast