The sludge flow from out-of-state, secretive political groups is unrelenting. All hours. All mediums. A football game-break brings three attacks in a row, calling a senator a liar, a vandal and a glutton for debt. A weather update is interrupted by a trio of hits from the other side, making the challenger out to be the worst thing for women since Neanderthal man took up a club as an accessory to romance. [...]

“The First Amendment protects more than just the individual on a soapbox or the lonely pamphleteer,” wrote Justice Roberts.

Come to Colorado, your honor. You will see that those iconic individuals don’t have a prayer in the post-Citizens-United world, let alone some broadcast time for the soapbox.

Indeed, Egan reports that last Friday, 1,200 television ads aired in Las Vegas alone for the Senate race taking place in the state. And according to the Wesleyan Media Project, spending by outside interest groups in the midterm Senate races has shot up 91 percent from the same period in 2008, while spending by political parties has fallen 61 percent. Most of the spending surge has come from conservative groups, but many outside observers are beginning to predict that liberals will feel they have no choice but to employ similar methods the next time around, meaning the midterm elections will prove a mere dress rehearsal for the flood of independent spending in 2012.

The ads, which will also run in Las Vegas and Denver, are meant to capitalize on anger by Latinos at a rash of harsh anti-immigration statements by Republican politicians. In addition to Arizona’s recent efforts to curb illegal immigration through its contested SB 1070 immigration law, Republican politicians have released a spate of ads attacking their opponents for immigration policy using images of Latinos, leading to charges of racism.

While Latinos largely identify as Democrats, recent nationwide polls indicate registered Latino voters have lower enthusiasm for this election than voters overall. Other progressive organizations have also rallied behind immigration causes to try to mobilize Latino voters. Immigrants rights groups purchased Spanish-language ads in a number of states tying the Republican Party to anti-immigrant fear-mongering.

The demographers estimate the poverty rate will increase year-on-year from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent. That means one in seven Americans, some 45 million people, lived in poverty last year, the “highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959.” The rate is already above the previous high of 13 percent, which came during the energy crisis in 1980. From The AP’s report:

Among the 18-64 working-age population, the demographers expect a rise beyond 12.4 percent, up from 11.7 percent. That would make it the highest since at least 1965, when another Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the war on poverty that expanded the federal government’s role in social welfare programs from education to health care.

Demographers also are confident the report will show:

• Child poverty increased from 19 percent to more than 20 percent.
• Blacks and Latinos were disproportionately hit, based on their higher rates of unemployment.
• Metropolitan areas that posted the largest gains in poverty included Modesto, Calif.; Detroit; Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla.; Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

To classify as impoverished last year, a family of four needed income of less than $22,025 — $17,163 for a family of three, $14,051 for a family of two and $10,991 for individuals.

This spring, the Obama administration decided to update how the government defines poverty, to give a clearer picture of how many families and individuals are really in need. In March, the Census Bureau started developing a new poverty measure, to go alongside the standard rubric. (The government plans to use the supplemental measure starting next year, with 2010 data.)

The current poverty yardstick, in place since the 1960s, gauges poverty by a family’s cash income. The new measure will take into account cost-of-living differentials, as it is much more expensive to live in, say, New York than Omaha. It also weighs the cost of utilities, child care and health care, and the amount of federal and state assistance — such as SNAP benefits (formerly, food stamps) — a person or family receives.

Even by the old yardstick, the data the Census Bureau will release this week should look grim, with more than 40 million individuals living in families with income below the poverty line.

Rebecca Blank, undersecretary for economic affairs in the Commerce Department, expanded on the rise in poverty in the recession in congressional testimony (PDF) last year. She noted that poverty did not fall during the economic expansion of the 2000s, as economists would have expected — more evidence of the 2000s as a “lost decade” for most working Americans.

“[T]he poverty rate always rises steeply during recessions, but falls during expansions,” she said. “[P]overty fell by 1.5 percentage points during the expansion of the 1980s and by almost 3 percentage points during the expansion of the 1990s. In the recession of 2001, poverty went up as anticipated, but never really came down. Rather than falling, poverty rose by eight-tenths of a percentage point during the expansion of the 2000s, so that a higher share of the population was poor in 2007 than in 2001.”

That means poverty increases during the great recession came on top of an elevated base.

Having suffered a series of disappointments this year on energy and climate change, Democrats and environmentalists are a bit disillusioned with Reid and the rest of the Senate, to put it mildly. It remains unclear if the conference can provide a smidgen of hope. According to the agenda, much of the conference is going to focus on creating jobs and the state of clean energy in Nevada, where Reid is facing reelection. The conference will also focus on financing new renewable energy projects.

Speakers at the conference include: Reid, Center for American Progress President John Podesta, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue and senior Department of Energy adviser Matt Rogers.

The location for the event is up in the air, but Phillips and other organizers threw around Las Vegas or San Diego as the most likely locations, in part because of the lack of conservative events in the west.

Yesterday, speaking about jobs in New Hampshire, President Obama pointed out the obvious: In lean economies, people tend to spend their money on the things they need, rather than unnecessary luxuries.

“When times are tough, you tighten your belts,” Obama said. “You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices.”

Not really a provocative thought — unless, of course, you’re a politician representing Nevada. Indeed, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) shot out a series of statements (here, here and here) demanding an apology from the president.

Obama slams Las Vegas again. I am calling on the President to apologize for his remark.

Las Vegas is suffering through one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and we cannot afford

for the President to bring us down any further.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) soon followed suit, issuing a statement telling Obama to “lay off Las Vegas and stop making it the poster child for where people shouldn’t be spending their money.”

They seem offended that Vegas — which, to its lucrative advantage, has built its reputation and business model around the singular concept of excess — has become symbolic of that very idea.

Obama responded in a letter to Reid, telling the majority leader that he “wasn’t saying anything negative about Las Vegas.”

I was making the simple point that families use vacation dollars, not college tuition money, to have fun.

He’ll have a chance to prove it. Later this month, Obama will be in Vegas to stump for Reid, who’s facing a tough reelection in November.

The notorious Amity Shlaes, the Bloomberg scribe  who drives liberals around the bend with her thinly sourced argument that the New Deal was a failure, has come out boldly in favor of at least one form government stimulus spending. In a jaunty column today, “Sin City on the Potomac Wounds Nevada’s Bordellos,” Shlaes faults President Obama for driving business from that engine of American economic recovery, the capital of casino gambling.

No, its not parody. Shlaes, who can be fairly classified as a libertarian neocon, is having fun tweaking the pieties of the liberal left and Christian right in the service of Las Vegas business interests who are complaining to Politico and any one else who will listen that Obama’s let’s-get-to-work exhortations prompted TARP-subsidized Goldman Sachs to cancel a scheduled convention in Sin City. As a quipster, Shlaes is amusing. As an economist, her ideas are half-baked, as this contorted passage reveals.

Government pork tends to produce junk gross domestic product, because even really smart government doesn’t allocate capital optimally. To dismiss what GDP Nevada generates as junkier than what Washington might generate is misguided, since Nevadans most of the time probably know better what investments make sense.

Her complaint that the president effectively discouraged the recipients of TARP money from scheduling Nevada getaways implies that taxpayer money spent in Sin City is as productive as money spent anywhere else, so why be a stick in the mud? Shlaes isn’t exactly contending that spending taxpayer money in Nevada whorehouse is as worthy a way as any to drive economic recovery (though her headline implies as much), but she is saying you’d have to be liberal to think its smarter to spend taxpayer money on solar power than on gambling junkets. At least she’s right about that.