“Is that the best you can come up with?”
3 comments July 31st, 2008
Archive for July, 2008
Flash! McCain to pick Britney Spears for veep
7 comments July 31st, 2008
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who’s recently shown a great interest in the pop chanteuse, likely will choose her as his running mate.
And why not? After all, they’re both big fans of President Bush:
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t
10 comments July 31st, 2008
From a REPORT by David Kiley at BusinessWeek.com:
“What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.”
I wouldn’t be surprised. Would you?
The Match Game: No candidate has ever…
14 comments July 31st, 2008
HERE’s an interesting post from a great Web site.
The sleazemeisters have taken over
12 comments July 31st, 2008
Steve Schmidt (above), a protege of the infamous Karl Rove, is NOW IN CHARGE of the garbage-slinging detail at John McCain’s campaign. Consequently, we’ve begun to see such irrelevancies as comparisons of Barack Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
I doubt, however, that Schmidt & Co. are going to have as much success this time around as they previously did selling George W. Bush and his ill-advised war to an unsuspecting nation.
Americans aren’t that stupid. They’re not likely to buy more stuff from an outfit that already has peddled them shoddy goods under false pretenses.
UPDATE: According to THIS PIECE: “For McCain, the new and sharply negative tone toward Obama could damage the Republican’s image as a maverick who rejects the attack-dog politics of traditional Washington.”
UPDATE II: McCain’s handlers have trouble keeping him “on message,” as he sometimes WANDERS OFF into contradictory ramblings.
A day of dishonesty
6 comments July 30th, 2008
It seems that everywhere I turn today, somebody is telling lies or making excuses for them or applauding them or whatever.
A review in links:
THIS ONE is about oil spills. [UPDATE: My source on this one is in error. See Comments Nos. 2 and 3]
THIS ONE (actually, more than one) is about taxes.
THIS ONE involves a distortion of something Barack Obama said.
THIS ONE is about owning up to a lie.
THIS ONE is about a right-winger applauding something he admits is dishonest.
THIS ONE is about federal budget deficits.
THIS ONE is about the price of coal.
THIS ONE is about a whole pack of falsehoods in an e-mail from a soldier in Afghanistan, which has been roundly refuted by the U.S. Army.
I could go on, but this exercise is too damn depressing.
Political polls and the nudge factor
1 comment July 30th, 2008
About 20 years ago, before the rise of the World Wide Web, I wrote a column about what I called “the nudge factor” in public opinion polls.
My focus was on surveys concerning issues rather than political races. And my theory, though doubtless not original, was something that just somehow came to mind rather than from any hypothesis advanced by an expert on the subject.
I argued that lots of people who are surveyed on certain issues, especially those issues that have not been the subject of intense national debate, haven’t really given them much thought and therefore haven’t formulated any serious opinions.
Wouldn’t such people merely declare themselves undecided or indicate that their responses belong in the “don’t know” category? I think not. Many people don’t want to admit ignorance on any but the most arcane matters. They don’t want to look like dummies.
Consequently, as I argued in that column, pollsters tend to unintentionally nudge some people toward giving answers to questions they’ve never previously considered. In such cases, the responses break down, one way or the other, into percentages that are not necessarily representative of the public as a whole. The polls become skewed by the nudge factor.
Something akin to my theory seems to be part of a forthcoming book (above) in which David W. Moore, a former senior editor at Gallup, argues that polls often fail to differentiate between “those who express deeply held views and those who have hardly, if at all, thought about an issue.”
There’s more about the book HERE.
The point is this: If you’re widely admired, there must be something wrong with you
11 comments July 30th, 2008
Funny thing: Britney Spears, who is featured in the McCain ad above, has been pretty much in league with McCain in her admiration for President Bush, as we see here: