Presidential
tqa | January 19, 2009
I was just looking at some poll numbers. In particular, I was just looking at Soon-to-be-Former-President George W. Bush's final job approval numbers. According to CBS, the final breakdown is:
Approve: 22%
Disapprove: 73%
Don't Know: 5%
"Don't Know"????
The man has been President for EIGHT friggin' years. EIGHT years. How the bloody hell do you not know if you approve of the job he's been doing by now? Were those people all in a coma the entire time? Good grief.
tqa | October 29, 2008
I just watched the Obama "infomercial", and I was blown away. Never mind the production values that Chris Matthews is nattering on about. The real story is about the message: this campaign is about us. It's about what we need, and what we can do to get it.
The entire half hour was - well, it's hard to call it a positive ad. It was a hard look at the problems that we're facing, and need to address. This was not a "daybreak in America" kind of talk. But it wasn't negative, either. McCain was not belittled, he was ignored.
As I was writing that last paragraph, MSNBC went to the first…
tqa | October 28, 2008
In today's Atlanta Journal Constitution, Army spouse Elisabeth Kadlec writes:
When we married our spouses, I am sure that none of us were signing up to be single parents. But in essence that is what we become. Many people I know, like my husband, have already been deployed more than three times, and will go again. Most of these deployments are to Iraq or Afghanistan. It always amazes me when people ask me if my husband has to go back. I even laugh at this question!
I think it shows that the public has no idea how many troops make up the armed forces and how many are deployed at a time.…
tqa | October 20, 2008
I've got to admit that when I heard that Colin Powell was planning on endorsing a candidate for president yesterday, I was unimpressed. I figured that whichever candidate he chose would be on the receiving end of a lukewarm endorsement that would be easy to dismiss and would fade from the news rapidly. I didn't expect to see such a painfully honest assessment of the problems with the way the Republicans are campaigning, but I was even more surprised and impressed by Powell's simple, clear, and eloquent dismissal of the "he's a Muslim" argument:
I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain…
tqa | October 15, 2008
A little spat that John McCain is having with YouTube has gotten a bit of press lately. Basically, he's not happy because YouTube has been taking his videos down whenever they get a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice from a copyright holder. Apparently, this has happened to McCain fairly often, possibly because his campaign has gotten into the habit of using other people's material without their permission.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an internet service provider (like YouTube) is only immune from copyright infringement suits if they promptly take down…
tqa | August 28, 2008
The Democratic nominee for President is giving one hell of a kick ass speech at the moment. I really hope this is the Obama we see for the rest of the campaign.
tqa | June 8, 2008
Senator John McCain, it appears, is not a fan of William Jennings Bryan. In a recent interview with USA Today, the Republican Party's nominee for President compared the three-time Democratic nominee for president from the turn of the last century to the Party's current nominee:
"I believe that people are interested very much in substance," McCain said. "If it was simply style, William Jennings Bryan would have been president." (Bryan, a noted orator, lost three presidential elections as the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900 and 1908.)
It would be easy for me to dismiss McCain's dislike of…
tqa | April 22, 2008
Senator Hillary Clinton has apparently decided to join John McCain in calling for a "gas tax" holiday for the summer. Their plan would suspend the 18.4 cent per gallon tax on gas (and the 24.4 cent tax on diesel fuel) from Memorial Day to Labor Day, giving consumers a temporary break from the high cost of fuel. If, that is, the companies that sell the fuel don't decide to raise their prices and erase the relief.
In a Presidential campaign season that's been marked by more than its fair share of stupid ideas, this one's still a standout. Nothing says "responsible leadership" (or, for that…
tqa | February 13, 2008
There were three more Presidential primaries yesterday - Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC. Turnout in all three of them was high yesterday, at least on the Democratic side. The numbers for all three areas are good, but I'm most excited by the Maryland numbers.
In 2004, Democratic candidates received a combined total of 481,476 votes in the Maryland presidential primary. As of right now, Barack Obama has 457,053 votes. That's the figure with 96% of precincts reporting. It doesn't include the absentee ballots, and it doesn't include the provisional ballots that were cast during the…
tqa | February 6, 2008
Is the party. Again.
In every single state that had a primary on Super Tuesday, Democratic turnout was up from 2004. The details are below the fold, and they're pretty cool to look at.
(Update 1: I've started to look at the Republican numbers. There are some things I'm seeing that they're probably not going to like. Details can be found at the bottom of the post.)
I got the 2000 and 2004 data from Dave Leip's Atlas of US Presidential Elections. The 2008 data comes from CNN's election page. Raw numbers of votes weren't available for the states that had caucuses yesterday, so I…
tqa | February 5, 2008
It looks like there's definitely going to be a little bit of good political news for everyone tonight - a statement released by leading theocon James Dobson:
"I am deeply disappointed the Republican Party seems poised to select a nominee who did not support a Constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage, voted for embryonic stem-cell research to kill nascent human beings, opposed tax cuts that ended the marriage penalty, has little regard for freedom of speech, organized the Gang of 14 to preserve filibusters in judicial hearings, and has a legendary temper and often…
tqa | February 5, 2008
It's Super Tuesday, but the primaries aren't the only political action in town. My kids came up with an election of their own. They created, and are both running for, the position of "President of the House." Both of them have been putting up posters, and each of them has independently discovered a common political strategy. My daughter managed, in just a couple of hours, to master the fine art of the meaningless slogan ("Vote for me and do what is right"). My son has mastered the tactic of slapping his posters directly on top of his opponent's. They're ten and eight respectively. I think…
tqa | January 18, 2008
It's been a couple of days since I posted on the New Hampshire recount. At the time, I fully expected that I wouldn't do another post on the topic, but a couple of things that have happened since then changed my mind. First, Scibling Chris Chatham included me in a list of people who he thinks should get off their "soapboxes", stop "hurting America", and focus on the statistical anomaly he's identified. Second, and far more importantly, preliminary recount results are in from a number of precincts.
First, let's look at this "Diebold Effect" thing again. When I took my first look at the…
tqa | January 16, 2008
In the week since the New Hampshire voting, a number of people have become increasingly concerned about some of the things that they've seen in the results. Two things, in particular, have gotten a lot of attention. The first is the difference between the pre-election polling, which had Obama ahead by a considerable margin, and the final result, which was a clear victory for Clinton. The second is a difference in outcome when hand-counted precincts are compared to precincts where the ballots were counted using machines. Obama came out ahead in the hand-count areas, while Clinton came out…
tqa | January 9, 2008
As the dust settles in New Hampshire, people are starting to talk about the winners and losers, and what it all means in the grand scheme of the election. Some are looking for excuses reasons why Obama didn't actually pull off a win when every poll conducted in the known universe last week said he would. Others are discussing the critically important question of whether the whole "tears" thing helped or hurt Clinton, and whether the emotions were real or fake. Then there's the pressing question of whether Fred Thompson's arrival in South Carolina was a calculated political decision, or if it…
tqa | January 7, 2008
Today's Wall Street Journal has a page A1 article (and accompanying blog post) about John Edward's decision to invoke the Nataline Sarkisyan case in his campaign-trail discussions of health care. Sarkisyan, you may remember, was the 17-year-old California girl who died a few weeks ago, shortly after her family's insurance company turned down her doctors' request that they cover a liver transplant for her. The tone of the article is somewhat negative toward Edwards' decision, and not all of their criticism is entirely unfair.
Edwards, they claim, "has been bashing big health insurers in…
tqa | October 3, 2007
There are times when I wish I was a right-wing hack. If I was, I could let the title of this post stand just as it is, and attack the President for his lack of support for military families. It is true, after all. He did just veto such an act. In fact, he did it twice! Our President, a man who uses the military as a backdrop for a photo op at least once a month, just vetoed both "The Support for Injured Servicemembers Act" and "The Military Family Job Protection Act."
If I was one of the many cogs in the Right-Wing Noise Machine, I would be able to take those facts - those incontrovertibly…
tqa | September 17, 2007
In "The Republican War on Science" Chris Mooney referred to the Newt Gingrich-led Congress' decision to eliminate the Office of Technology Assessment as "a stunning act of self-lobotomy." If anything, he was lowballing the effects. For those of you who aren't familiar with this agency (and don't feel bad if you're not; it's been dead for 12 years), the OTA was a nonpartisan Congressional agency. It's job was to provide Congress with an objective analysis of the complex scientific and technical issues relevant to various issues that were relevant to measures under consideration.
Ostensibly…