It is rather depressing, though perhaps unavoidable, that modern election campaigns spend almost all their money and energy trying to persuade that tiny group known as the ‘undecided voter’ in the so-called swing states. [Read more…]
I have mentioned before that many political scientists eschew opinion polls and look more closely at election predictions made on the basis of what are called the ‘fundamentals’, that depend upon objective measures (GDP, disposable income, etc.). Of course, which model you choose can affect the results that you get. [Read more…]
Reader Norm sent me a link to this news article that reported on a new study that said that life expectancy had dropped dramatically for white people who did not have much formal education. [Read more…]
Stephen. M. Walt, reflecting on the secret video showing Mitt Romney saying that would ‘kick the can down the road’ when it comes to dealing with the Israel-Palestine issue, says something that has been puzzling me too. [Read more…]
One of Barack Obama’s personality strengths is that he does not seem to get flustered and put off stride by events and attacks. He seems to respond calmly and in measured ways to events and people have wondered how he manages it. [Read more…]
So Mitt Romney has released his 2011 tax returns and a ‘summary statement’ about his taxes from 20 previous years. It was interesting that he released them on Friday afternoon, the ‘Friday news dump’ time, which is the traditional period for releasing news that you don’t want people to pay much attention to. I think this practice arose from the times when people got much of their news from the broadcast TV networks and few people watched them on weekends when they were often pre-empted by sports events. [Read more…]
It falls to Fox News to try and clean up the repeated messes made by the Mitt Romney campaign. The Daily Show had an excellent three-part series on the extreme effort required by them to mitigate the damage done by the recent release of the video. [Read more…]
I was curious about the fact that there seems to have been no subsequent news about the effort to blackmail Mitt Romney about his past tax returns. [Read more…]
With all the attention focused on Mitt Romney’s verbal stumbles on the campaign, less attention has been paid to his running mate Paul Ryan’s activities. He too has had his share of awkward incidents. But while Paul Krugman has rightly been excoriating Ryan’s budget, calling him ‘an unserious man’ and his budget a ‘con game’, other commentators have focused more on Ryan’s odd penchant for embellishing his physical prowess to unrealistic levels. [Read more…]
(This clip appeared on September 18, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)