According to the “thermometer” poll released yesterday by Quinnipiac, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, two of the leading GOP presidential contenders for 2008, are at or near the top of the list of the most popular political figures in the country. I’d argue that at least some, if not most, of this base of support […]
This probably won’t come as a big surprise to any of you, but it’s nevertheless helpful to have empirical data on the subject. (via Tom Tomorrow) A collective “I told you so” will ripple through the world of [tag]Bush[/tag]-bashers once news of Christopher Lohse’s study gets out. Lohse, a social work master’s student at Southern […]
One could very easily do a post every day highlighting the incoherent insanity on Rush Limbaugh’s daily radio show, but some days are clearly worse than others. Yesterday’s tirade on the Middle East, for example, was truly special. On the November 27 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, in response to claims made by […]
In the year-long debate over the president’s warrantless domestic surveillance program, the strangest controversy arose in June. Several dozen Democratic lawmakers contacted the Department of Justice, arguing that political appointees had given the White House questionable legal advice about the program. Dems asked the DOJ’s inspector general to review whether the legal advice was sound. […]
Today’s edition of quick hits. * Bush will reportedly let Donald Rumsfeld stay on as Defense secretary through Dec. 29 — so that he can break the record for the longest-serving Pentagon chief of all time. That’s a good reason, right? It’s not as if he were incompetently overseeing the most disastrous war in a […]
Part of me got my hopes up, just a little, a couple of weeks ago about the Iraq Study Group. I thought that maybe, just maybe, the White House was looking for a face-saving way to get out of Iraq, and that James Baker was going to come riding in to rescue him. “It’s not […]
Josh Marshall raised a good question over the weekend: “Is it just me or has George W. Bush checked out of the stumbling national crisis we know as ‘Iraq’?” [S]ince the election he seems to have disappeared from the conversation entirely. Like he’s just checked out. It’s not his thing anymore. […] Back when he […]
Plenty of polls can tell us who has a high approval rating, and plenty more can show which political figures can beat other political figures in hypothetical election match-ups, but I’ve always found Quinnipiac’s “National Thermometer” poll a bit more useful. The poll, released quarterly, measures what the public feels generally towards various leaders. The […]
The Republican Party, which used to dominate the region’s politics, has now officially lost New England. The transformation evolved fairly slowly, but this year, it became complete — of the 22 U.S. House seats spanning New England’s six states, Dems lead the GOP, 21 to 1. There are a variety of explanations for this, but […]
I noted over the weekend that the Los Angeles Times broke new media ground with regards to covering the war in Iraq: the paper decided to stop playing semantics games and call the conflict a “[tag]civil war[/tag].” Today, NBC did the same thing. From this morning’s MSNBC broadcast: “The news from Iraq is becoming grimmer […]