Obama’s weekly address is about Ft. Hood

Add comment November 7th, 2009

WorldNutDaily tries to tie Ft. Hood shooter to Obama

7 comments November 6th, 2009

THIS KIND OF THING was inevitable, I suppose.

Jobless rate, poll numbers spell doom for Reagan, er, I mean Obama

13 comments November 6th, 2009

 Follow me on this:

 Unemployment figures released today are said in some quarters to portend a one-term presidency for Barack Obama.

 Another harbinger of tough-sledding for the president looms in the likelihood that his approval rating in the Gallup poll will soon slip below 50 percent. (It’s at 52 percent as this is written.)

 But before we write Obama’s political obituary, let’s put these numbers in historical perspective.

 First of all, we have the fact that the current rate of joblessness is the highest since 1983. If I recall correctly, that was the third year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. And in the following year, he was elected to a second term.

 Nor should we read too much into Obama’s approval rating falling below 50 percent (if, in fact, that happens). History shows that two out of the three presidents who won re-election in the past three decades (Reagan and Bill Clinton) both saw their Gallup approval numbers slip below 50 percent during their first year in office.

 Mind you, I’m not saying that Obama won’t face tough challenges in a re-election bid in 2012. Indeed, he might not make it. But let’s not forget how grim the situation looked for Reagan before he won a second term.

Tuesday’s elections were disastrous, cataclysmic blows to Obama’s prestige

11 comments November 5th, 2009

 Gail Collins tells us the TERRIBLE TRUTH.

 An excerpt:

 We have a dramatic saga story line brewing here…and I hope Obama has gotten the message. Really, he had better shape up and completely transform the way Washington works before the next election. Otherwise, another governor’s head could roll.

 UPDATE: Ruy Teixeira also has a GOOD TAKE on the elections:

 To hear Republicans tell it, Tuesday’s elections, in which their candidates captured the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, were a repudiation of President Obama and indicated a voter shift toward their party. They should calm themselves down. The results don’t show this and, in fact, suggest some rather daunting challenges for the Republicans.

 UPDATE II: El Rushbo BLAMES Newtie for wingnut loss in NY-23.

 UPDATE III: The incomparable Nate Silver offers a WORTHY PERSPECTIVE:

[I]n New Jersey, there’s literally almost no evidence that the Democrats’ agenda had anything to do with Jon Corzine’s defeat. Voters who cited a national issue were more likely to vote for Corzine, and voters who cited a local one, the Republican Chris Christie.

In Virginia, the evidence is certainly a little stronger, insofar as the national agenda may have affected the lopsided turnout (the electorate which turned out Tuesday had voted for John McCain by 8 points, a near-reversal of the actual results). Even there, however, the quarter of the electorate that cited health care as their main issue went for the Democrat Deeds 51-49. And in NY-23, which was supposed to have been the ultimate smackdown of the Democrats’ agenda, the Republican Conservative candidate unexpectedly lost.

 UPDATE IV: Dick Armey throws NY-23 wingnut UNDER THE BUS.

GOP wins guv races in Va. and Jersey, but anti-RINO gambit in NY-23 flops

12 comments November 4th, 2009

 For 24 years now, the party that holds the White House has lost the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, and such was the case in Tuesday’s voting as Republican candidates carried both states.

 But in the 23rd Congressional District of New York, a far-right-winger who had chased a moderate Republican from the race, lost to a Democrat.

 This was a contest in which a passel of prominent ultra-conservatives — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Dick Armey, et al — had skin in the game. This was going to be the first great test-case in a nascent campaign by the teabagger crowd  to rid the GOP of its so-called RINOs. And it failed — in a district that hadn’t elected a Democrat to Congress in more than 100 years.

 Republicans would like to think the voting in Virginia and New Jersey was a referendum on Barack Obama, but exit polls show that the president wasn’t a factor (see HERE). In fact, voters in both states said they generally approve of Obama’s performance in office (see HERE).

 Nor will the loss of governorships in Virginia and New Jersey directly affect Obama’s legislative agenda. Governors don’t vote in Congress. But the win in NY-23 gives House Democrats one more member than they had before this election.

 UPDATE: Ruth Marcus WARNS AGAINST over-analyzing the results in Virginia and New Jersey. Read it all. It’s worth your while.

 UPDATE II: Writing before all the votes were counted, E.J. Dionne CORRECTLY NOTED that Democrats need to do a better job of mobilizing young voters than they did this time in Virginia and Jersey.

 UPDATE III: The FUNNIEST STORY from yesterday’s political doings was the one about right-wingers jumping to conclusions over a flat tire on the vehicle of a poll-watcher in NY-23.

Exit polls say Obama not a factor in Virginia, New Jersey elections

36 comments November 3rd, 2009

 According to exit polls in today’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the vast majority of voters were not registering sentiments about President Obama.

 And those voters who did cite the president as a factor were fairly evenly divided between those who support him and those who don’t.

As CBS REPORTED:

Those who said Mr. Obama was a factor in New Jersey divided as to whether their vote was a vote for the president (19 percent) or against him (20 percent). In Virginia, slightly fewer voters said their vote was for Mr. Obama (18 percent) than against him (24 percent).

Barack Obama’s five most annoying talents

2 comments November 3rd, 2009

 Lisa Wright over at Apoliticus.com EMUMERATES the talents of President Obama she finds most nettlesome.

 One of them involves his stated “affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.”

Is flu-vaccine delay Obama’s Katrina?

11 comments November 2nd, 2009

 Some people are likening the delay in production of H1N1 vaccine on President Obama’s watch to the problems dealing with Hurricane Katrina on George W. Bush’s watch.

 But even some conservatives are coming to Obama’s defense in this matter. Check HERE and HERE.

Dramatic political difference between white men and everybody else

12 comments November 2nd, 2009

(Maps from OpenLeft.com)

Here’s how a Pentagon appointment by Obama triggered a bloodbath among Republicans

9 comments November 1st, 2009

 Frank Rich NAILS IT.

 A few excerpts:

 Barack Obama’s most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national GOP civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond…

 The more rightists who win GOP primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.