[ Posted Monday, April 6th, 2009 – 16:09 UTC ]
Following conventional wisdom, especially in Washington, is often a fool's errand. Groupthink can be wildly wrong, even if "everyone knows..." or "everyone believes..." something to be true. But every now and then, the conventional wisdom turns out to be right. Which may be the case for the punditocracy's predicted doom for cap-and-trade legislation intended to reform America's energy policy. If this proves to be the case, it will be the first major Obama priority to fail in Congress.
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[ Posted Friday, April 3rd, 2009 – 16:33 UTC ]
Because (are you sitting down), Krauthammer's big bugaboo, his big boogeyman spectre designed to send us all screaming out into the night... is "fairness." America being "fair" is such an awful, frightening, downright terrifying future for our country, that all good citizens should rise up against it. To the barricades! To fight for Unfairness For All!
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[ Posted Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 – 16:28 UTC ]
It really is a bit early to focus on President Obama's approval ratings in the polls, I know. But, rather than looking at the overall picture of how he's doing, I have been noticing something interesting which I don't believe others have picked up on -- Obama's numbers dramatically improve depending on the sample used by the pollsters. When "likely voters" (LV) are polled, the numbers they give are different from when either "registered voters" (RV) or "all adults" (A) are polled. Obama's LV approval rating is about five points lower than the RV/A numbers. The difference is more pronounced in the disapproval ratings, where LV numbers are fully ten points higher than RV/A numbers.
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[ Posted Thursday, March 5th, 2009 – 17:27 UTC ]
For all the terminology of the political world, all the divisions and divisions-within-divisions, there is no term which defies definition quite the way populism does. When we speak of conservatives or liberals or progressives or even libertarians, we pretty much all agree what the label means, and who it covers. Hyphenation and neologisms abound to adequately describe individual factions of the major groups; such as social conservatives versus fiscal conservatives, or neo-conservatives versus paleo-conservatives. But there's no disagreement with the general scope of what "conservative" means. The concept of populism doesn't have this generally-agreed-upon consensus among the public, however. Even historians define the term differently amongst themselves. And this is just within America's politics -- populism can mean even more diverse movements when talking about the rest of the world.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 – 23:07 UTC ]
The Republican Party is at a real fork in the road. It is rare, in politics, to be able to see with absolute clarity such dividing points while they are happening, I should point out. Usually these things are analyzed after the fact, when conclusions can be drawn with certainty. But the GOP is now at such a point, and it faces two choices: absolute purity, or some shade or another of pragmatism ("the road less traveled," as it were, for Republicans these days).
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