Check out CNN’s coverage by Campbell Brown and Erica Hill on the House Judiciary’s hearing on the Bush administration’s wrong-doing. I’m guessing that the Constitution isn’t important to them. I hope they never need those rights that they are laughing at.
It looks like Senator John McCain has been wearing a $550 pair of Salvatore Ferragamo ‘Pregiato’ Moccasin shoes (see the detailed picture below). Now, this wouldn’t be a big deal since this campaign is about ideas and the direction of the country, EXCEPT that the media made a big deal about haircuts earlier. So, I’m guessing if a $400 haircut is a big deal, then we should hear about several days worth of coverage on how how McCain can’t relate to middle America because of his $550 pair of shoes. TCR has more.
Cassini has been photographing Saturn and it’s moons for some time now. It appears that scientists have evidence of liquid on the surface of Titan. The liquid is ethane. It’s not drinkable, but the discovery is interesting nonetheless.
In spite of Senator Barack Obama’s flawless trip overseas and Senator John McCain’s campaign doing everything that it could to make him look stupid, McCain is still getting wide coverage. McCain in a golf cart with former president George H. W. Bush is not really news worthy. McCain canceling a trip to an off-shore oil platform wasn’t really big news. McCain in a grocery store in middle America (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) is not news. Yet, McCain, the darling of the media, started complaining about his news coverage.
I would hope that McCain would stop whining and go and make some news. If he goes overseas and speaks to hundreds of thousands of folks, that’s news and the networks will cover him.
Of course, reality is different than the picture that the McCain camp is painting. Despite complaints, McCain is getting plenty of good press.
From the Huffington Post:
The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.
You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.
During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.
Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.
A new Television advertisementby supporters of Senator John McCain flashes images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, suggesting that Senator Barack Obama is a celebrity.
But that’s not really the story.
The story here is about linking a black man to blond white women. This is just what Tennessee Republicans did with black U.S. Senate nominee Harold Ford in 2006.
The people who make these ads know what they are doing.
McCain has already said Obama would lose a war in order to win an election. McCain will say and do anything.
Senator McCain voted against the Martin Luther King holiday. He now says he is sorry.
The McCain campaign could only find two blonde white women to put in that ad?
Now what?
One of the great things about Jazz is that there are standards which everyone is expected to play at one time or another. Moanin’ is one of those tunes. This is played by the great Art Blakey and a very young Freddie Hubbard. (Sorry about the terrible ending.)
I have talked about the media’s love for Senator John McCain on a number of occasions. Paul Waldman and I discussed McCain and the press on my radio show last week. In addition, Media Matters put out this nice video.
Gallup has been doing polling since forever. (Okay, I know it hasn’t really been forever. It’s only been 70 years, but you get my point.) Gallup release the results of two polls yesterday. One was their daily tracking poll which I try not to look at because it has little or no meaning. We don’t elect our president as a nation, instead we elect by states. Therefore a tracking poll of each state would be of better value.
I took a look even though a national tracking poll is a popularity contest (or a horse race) which may have no reflection on how states will vote. Anyway, in the Daily Tracking poll Senator Barack Obama was up by eight points. In a separate Gallup poll, Obama was ahead among registered voters but behind Senator John McCain in the subgroup of likely registered voters by four points.
I listened to Countdown last night. Keith Olbermann and Richard Wolfe tried to make some sense of these numbers but they mangled it pretty badly. So, I went to one of my best sources for polling results, the blog 538. (See below the video for an excellent explanation.)
From 538:
Kudos to Gallup for disclosing the process and perils of its likely voter model, but as Alan Abramowitz has noted at Pollster.com, something about the new USA Today/Gallup poll showing John McCain 4 points ahead among likely voters — but 3 points behind among registered voters — doesn’t quite sit right:
How do you get from a 47-44 Obama lead among RVs to a 49-45 McCain lead among LVs?
A few quick calculations shows how. You have 900 RVs and 791 LVs, so that means that among your 109 UVs (that’s unlikely voters according to Gallup) Obama leads McCain by a whopping 61% to 7%.
Putting it another way, according to Gallup 16% of registered Obama supporters are unlikely to vote compared with only 2% of registered McCain supporters.
Whatever one thinks about likely voter models in general, the mathematics of this particular implementation defy credulity. Although, we should probably wait for USA Today to release its crosstabs so we can make sure there wasn’t a typographical error of some kind in the write-up.
Also, this is a good time to mention Robert Erikson’s critique of the extra volatility introduced by Gallup’s likely voter model in past election cycles.
The Onion has been around for years and the paper has a very loyal following. I read it and their web site infrequently although I always find it enjoyable.
This is a very funny bit on President Bush touring the devastation of his presidency– America.
Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency
Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska (Republican) has been indicted for receiving goods and services illegally. There have been several reporters on this story for over two years. I posted a couple of items on him last year:here and here.
From the Washington Post:
Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens (R) was charged with seven counts of making false statements on his financial disclosure forms in an indictment unsealed in federal court in the District this afternoon.
The indictment accuses Stevens, former chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, of concealing payments of more than $250,000 in goods and services he allegedly received from an oil company. The items include home improvements, autos and household items.
The Alaska oil firm, Veco, and its one-time leader Bill Allen, asked for help in return. Allen and another former Veco official pleaded guilty in May 2007 in connection with their role in the bribery of Alaskan public officials. Prosecutors said that in some but not all instances Stevens or his aides allegedly provided the help requested by Allen and Veco. (more… )
The 2008 political campaign has been going on forever, yet it still has many months to go. Following the campaign can be a big waste of time. So-called “horse race” coverage is often stale within hours of dissemination. Can you imagine anything less relevant than an assessment from July 2004 about the John Kerry-George Bush race?
( Above is some real horse race coverage. The great Native Dancer on the cover of Time in 1954.)
I find that cable TV coverage is the biggest waste. It goes on and on. Yet rarely does it discuss anything other than the presidential race. The “analysts” say nothing that any regular follower of politics does not already grasp.
As for issues, 90 percent of the public knows full well how they will vote. And candidates gear positions to the political needs of the moment. I know a great deal of where they stand from simple party lines.
That said, I do keep up with events.
I get three newspapers each day at home. My local Houston Chronicle, The New York Times, and USA Today. [Read more →]
Microsoft has tried and failed. Yahoo! is a shadow of its former self. Ask and the other search engines are bringing up the rear. So, can Anna Patterson, a former Google employee, make Google cry “Uncle”? Patterson may have built a better mouse trap but it is still going to be hard to unseat Google. After all, you don’t just search the web, you Google it!
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From CNN:
Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.
She believes her latest invention is even more valuable - only this time it’s not for sale.
Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.
The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.
Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier - searched for better ways to search. (more… )
Talking Points Memo has put together a great montage of Senator John McCain’s interviews over the last several months. It shows how McCain has been all over the place on the subject of Iraq. His most extreme position was that it was okay for us to stay in Iraq for 100 years. Just a couple of days ago, he was okay with a time table for leaving.
Once again, Tom Brokaw leads with a negative question for Senator Barack Obama: Why haven’t you been to Afghanistan, if you really think that it is the central front on the war on terrorism, before now? (That’s not quite as bad as “Have you stopped beating your wife?”– but close.) Again, Obama does a very good job getting out of this negative frame. He explains that he hasn’t been down at the corner barbershop playing dominoes. He states what he has been doing.
I would urge Obama to step back from phrases like “We must win in Afghanistan.” This type of phrase echoes of discourse on Iraq. All sorts of questions arise. What does “winning” mean? Will defeating the Taliban lead to a formal surrender with Mullah Omar (who is still on the loose) handing over his sword or AK-47 to our General on the ground?
Instead, Obama needs to talk about our goals. Afghanistan needs to develop a viable economy which exports something other than heroin. Farmers must have a reason to plant something other than poppy. We need to help the Afghans build roads, schools, and a real economy. I have no idea how to deal with the local tribal leaders who are used to having an enormous amount of power over their own regions, but these leaders must be made to work within the framework of their constitution.
Obama shows a national audience that he has command of foreign policy. His plan isn’t wimpy. Instead, it is aggressive and thoughtful.
If Obama made a mistake during this discussion it might have been with the phrase, “We know where they are.” However, he did qualify it by saying that military commanders have told him that they are… I don’t know. We’ll see if Senator John McCain and his gang will make something out of this.
The brilliance of Senator Barack Obama should be coming obvious to everyone who want to see it. Those that don’t, will never see it. One of truly crafty things that Obama does on “Meet the Press” is turn a negative question into a positive one. Answering a negative question puts you on the defensive, making a person look weak.
Tom Brokaw poses such a negative question when he asks Barack Obama to comment on something that David Brooks said. The wind up to the question was very long. Obama addresses it by mentioning that there were plenty of positive reviews of his speech (including mine). This was great. He is turning the negative into a positive. Then, he points out that conservative columnists are not usually in his corner. Finally, he shows that David Brooks was wrong. In addition, he point out harsh realities in the world and criticized Europe, asking them to step up.
Obama did a masterful job of turning a negative into a positive. It’s verbal Jujitsu. If you weren’t paying attention, you might have simply missed it.
I was looking for something a little different. Well, I found it. The Muppet’s Animal versus the great jazz drummer Buddy Rich.
Errington C. Thompson, MD, is a surgeon, scholar, fulltime sports fan and part-time political activist. He is active in a number of community projects and initiatives. Through medicine, he strives to improve the physical health of all he treats...
