In my post on the Cuban missile crisis, I spoke about how the myths that were perpetuated in dealing with that crisis, of America being successful because it was rigid and unyielding and forced the other side to back down, has cast a long shadow over how to deal with future crises. [Read more…]
Among other things, he points out that when it comes to foreign policy, there is only one country that matters, and that is Israel. [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…]
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…]
I am not generally a fan of insult humor of the kind made famous by Don Rickles, which consists of rude put downs of the other person. I tend to prefer the more subtle forms. [Read more…]