As Halloween approaches, parents will take the usual precautions to prevent their children from being harmed by dangerous psychopaths who they fear will try to use the treats as vehicles for their attacks. But all that fear is based on myths. [Read more…]
I woke up this morning to see that a huge pine tree that was right next to our house in the backyard had toppled over. Fortunately it missed our house and the garage and the power line. It did knock out our telephone line so now I have no landline phone and hence no internet access at home, since I use DSL. [Read more…]
In an earlier post yesterday, I mentioned the ‘house effect’ of polls. These are the size of the effects that a given polling outfit produces in favor of one or the other party. They are not necessarily biases in the sense of the polling firm deliberately distorting the results. It is often the result of methodologies that produce different effects such as sampling only likely voters vs registered voters, cell phones vs. landlines, robocalls vs. human calls, weighting by party affiliation, etc. Simon Jackman has an article explaining it in more detail. [Read more…]
I have to say that he really nails Romney’s smarmy phoniness. [Read more…]
Hurricane Sandy is bearing down on the East Coast of the US. Apart from Virginia (which is a toss-up), all the other states in its path vote reliably Democratic.
If Sandy does wreak a large amount of damage, I wonder who will be the first crazy preacher to suggest that this is god’s punishment for the liberal leanings of the people in that region, their support for same-sex marriage, and their pro-choice views.
UPDATE: It looks like we may already have a winner!
This is a bit late but Jon Stewart makes the roughly accurate point that during the debate what we saw was Mitt Romney adopting Barack Obama’s foreign policy, while Obama has adopted Bush’s policy. [Read more…]
We are currently being inundated with polls and it is easy to become overwhelmed, with the risk of whiplash as one poll jerks you one way to be followed immediately by another in a different direction. The media will highlight any new poll, especially if it is a surprising outlier, and even more so if it supports their desired narrative of a close race, thus whipping up interest in following the news. [Read more…]
Conservative circles are buzzing at the release of a new home video that was taken by Barack Obama’s father during his actual birth. Although old and grainy, the video clearly shows a white woman giving birth to a baby, with Obama’s mother’s name (Ann Dunham) on her chart, her photo, a calendar open to the month of August 1961, and a flag of Kenya. This proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Obama was born in Kenya. [Read more…]
The Maryland Marriage Alliance, the group leading the effort against the referendum that grants equal rights to same-sex marriages in that state, has been careful to try and not appear to be religious hatemongers, arguing that they do not oppose gays or gay rights in general, but that their goal is limited to only objecting to extending marriage to cover their unions. [Read more…]