President Bush has been routinely criticized for his lack of curiosity, but his visit to India this week has magnified just how little the president cares about foreign countries and their culture. Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey noted that when Clinton visited India in 2000, he spent a week touring the country, “famously visiting […]
Dean Baker noted yesterday that the Bush administration plans to eliminate the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), but is running into some resistance. More than 400 researchers, including 2 Nobel Laureates signed a letter opposing the elimination of the SIPP. The SIPP is the only major longitudinal survey that tracks the […]
I don’t mean to sound picky, but after nearly four years, I kind of hoped the Department of Homeland Security would be further along than this. Among other woes at Homeland Security, the inspector general’s office says it can’t widely distribute electronic announcements of new watchdog reports. A spokeswoman explains the department lacks capacity to […]
Last week, none of the major polling outfits produced national data. Since Tuesday, we’ve had five. Here’s a recap of what we’ve learned about public opinion this week, with the most recent polls first. * Gallup — Bush’s job-approval rating is 38%, the second lowest of his presidency in a Gallup poll. The proportion who […]
You know, maybe Al Gore is on to something. The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year in a trend that scientists link to global warming, according to a new paper that provides the first evidence that the sheet’s total mass is shrinking significantly. The new findings, […]
Dan Froomkin raised a good point today about the White House response to the new Katrina video. Apparently as a rejoinder to the new video, the White House yesterday suddenly sent around a transcript that it previously said didn’t exist, from a conference call on the following day. It includes a second-hand account of Bush’s […]
The midterm elections are still eight months away, but if you want to know what’s coming up, look no further than Progress for America’s ad campaign, being tested in Minnesota right now. In an early sign of the imagery that may flood the nation’s television screens as congressional elections approach this fall, a conservative political […]
In recent years, the idea of pay-by-channel cable television has caught on with a broad audience, but conservatives have been particularly keen on the idea. By selecting only those channels they want to pay for, conservative families could stop subsidizing networks they find morally offensive, and save some money on their cable bill in the […]
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * A new Field Poll in California shows that only 37% of California’s likely voters are inclined to re-elect Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in November, though his Dem rivals are not well known statewide. […]
A new Quinnipiac poll is out this morning, offering a pretty thorough take on how Americans perceive the president’s warrantless-search program, among other things. At this point, the clear majority of Americans are right where the Democrats are. By a 76 – 19 percent margin, American voters say the government should continue monitoring phone calls […]