[ Posted Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 – 17:47 UTC ]
Rather than micro-examine Super Tuesday's results or predict what will happen in any of the upcoming primary contests this month (you're probably already maxed out on such analysis by now, right?), instead I'd like to take a longer view, and contemplate where the Republican Party will be headed after the 2012 election. There are three major scenarios as to how this could play out, if you'll join with me in what is admittedly some way-way-too-early speculation.
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[ Posted Monday, March 5th, 2012 – 15:44 UTC ]
President Barack Obama's job approval numbers are back "above water" (where his approval rate is higher than his disapproval number), continuing an impressive rise in the polls which began in November of last year. This is the longest run of improved public job approval Obama has managed since he got elected. Obama posted a gain of almost two full percentage points in his approval rate in February, the third-best month he's ever had in this respect (and one of the two months he posted bigger gains in was the bounce he got from Osama Bin Laden's death). He wound up the month with his approval rating a full percent better than his disapproval rating, the best numbers he's seen since last June. But this trend could be flattening out, as he ended the month of February by slipping back a bit. So in the midst of plenty of good news on the polling front for Obama, there is reason for caution as well. Call it the dark lining to a very silver cloud, if you will.
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[ Posted Friday, February 24th, 2012 – 17:51 UTC ]
"When the going gets weird," Hunter S. Thompson famously said, "the weird turn pro."
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[ Posted Friday, February 17th, 2012 – 17:21 UTC ]
President Barack Obama certainly had an impressive week, getting from Congress exactly what he demanded in the State Of The Union message -- a payroll tax holiday extension for the rest of the year... with "no drama."
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[ Posted Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 – 17:33 UTC ]
Is the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party becoming irrelevant?
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[ Posted Friday, February 10th, 2012 – 17:02 UTC ]
In other news, the Obama White House had rather a bad week... but again, we'll get to that in a moment.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 9th, 2012 – 16:59 UTC ]
Mainstream American churches have, in the past, used Biblical passages to advocate the rightness of slavery. Mainstream American churches have also refused to allow blacks to join their congregations with the same status as white worshippers. Mainstream American churches have used the Bible to justify wife-beating, and corporal punishment for children. That is all fine and good (well, it's not, really; but it's legally all fine and good) -- the Constitution does not permit government to have any sort of sway over a church's beliefs in any way (except possibly if the church were mounting armed resistance to the government and calling it religion).
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[ Posted Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 – 15:29 UTC ]
You know what I have yet to see either on television or in print? A poll of the workers affected. Maybe that's too tough a thing to ask for -- polls are time-consuming, after all, and the debate hasn't been raging all that long. But I have also yet to see in the media even a single woman interviewed who actually works for a religious hospital or university. Not a single "woman on the street" interview, not a single union representative who speaks for these women, not a single spokesperson for the women themselves. Not one. No nurses, no janitors, no administrators, no security guards... nothing.
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[ Posted Monday, February 6th, 2012 – 16:31 UTC ]
Mitt Romney's gaffe last week (reproduced in full, above) is going to wind up the "gaffe that keeps on giving" for Barack Obama and the Democrats in this election cycle. Because the more Romney's comment is examined and dissected, the worse it looks for him. This could, in fact, be the defining moment for Mitt Romney as a national political presence. That phrase is often bandied about in politics, but I use it here in the full literal sense of "defining moment" -- a point in time which absolutely cements an image in the public mind of who you are and what you stand for as a politician. The image, quite obviously, is not a good one for Romney.
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[ Posted Friday, February 3rd, 2012 – 17:10 UTC ]
Mitt Romney, frontrunner for the Republican nomination, announced he wasn't too worried about poor people. Maybe it would be fun to see Romney debate Joe Biden, just because nobody would know what to expect from either of them. Heh.
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