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–Charlie Crist is expected to announce he’s running as a no party affiliation candidate at an event in St. Petersburg this afternoon. There’s a lot of good analysis out there on what it means for the race; more on this later.
–Marc Ambinder reports Crist reached out to the White House and they wouldn’t take the call.
–Nate Silver talks with Tim Kaine about the Dems’ 2010 message.
–Ambinder asks whom they’re messaging to, and warns Democrats they may be missing the mark on an older, whiter midterm electorate.
–Over at the Post, Karen looks at the Republican effort to win the trophy trifecta: Obama, Biden and Reid’s Senate seats. The very fact that they’re in play says a lot about the cycle.
—Dan Balz parses the polls and sees two points of light for Democrats amid the gloom: more trust to handle the country’s problems and independents rewarming to the president.
–I’d say their problem is the economy. Even with recovery, high unemployment is likely to continue and there’s widespread perception the stimulus was flop. A new Pew survey finds the politically odious TARP is seen as more effective (granted, to a very different end.)
–Obama plans to fill the three vacancies at the Fed with San Francisco Federal Reserve president Janet Yellen, Maryland Financial Regulation Commissioner Sarah Raskin and MIT professor (also former Peter Orszag co-author) Peter Diamond.
–Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez are crafting an immigration bill with border security benchmarks up front.
–Obama doesn’t see it happening this year.
–The controversial Arizona immigration law may be tested by referendum, which would delay implementation until 2012.
–Mike Bloomberg calls the legislation “national suicide.”
–Bob McDonnell says it has “shades of some other regimes that weren’t necessarily helpful to democracy.”
–And the Consumers Union went through with that whole “bankers eating people” thing:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbMw_0yYdPY]
What did I miss?