[ Posted Thursday, July 14th, 2011 – 16:46 UTC ]
Today, I'd like to excerpt some of those articles, as "footnotes" to yesterday's column. While copyright laws prevent me from just pasting whole articles in here, I am allowed fair usage excerpts, which is what you'll find below. The promise of the internet was supposed to be easy access to this sort of thing, but in recent years many media sites have locked off their archives behind paywalls, making it impossible to freely access this historical material.
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[ Posted Wednesday, July 6th, 2011 – 13:21 UTC ]
As many were predicting, President Obama's bounce in approval polls due to the death of Osama Bin Laden did not last very long. While Obama started the month still strongly riding the wave of public approval from the Bin Laden raid, this had mostly dissipated by the second week in June, and Obama's poll numbers flattened out after that. The plateau he hit at this point is slightly higher than he had before the "OBL bump," but that's about the only consolation for Obama fans in the June numbers.
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[ Posted Monday, July 4th, 2011 – 12:20 UTC ]
Which is why, this Independence Day, I will personally be lifting my glass in a toast to a French admiral, and the French sailors who served under him. Because without Admiral Compte de Grasse's efforts, we might not even have an Independence Day to be celebrating. The Battle of the Chesapeake deserves to be remembered. This military triumph deserves a bit of celebration. By all Americans. So, I hope you'll join me in honoring the good French admiral this Sunday. Lift a glass and give grateful thanks to his bravery and his heroic efforts on behalf of our own revolution -- whose successful end he made possible:
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 28th, 2011 – 17:03 UTC ]
Some poll numbers are starting to come in on President Obama's announced withdrawal plans for American troops in Afghanistan. Overall, the polling shows public support is about as high as could be expected, given the fact that the opposition to Obama's plan is split between "pull more out faster" and "pull the troops out slower."
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[ Posted Friday, June 24th, 2011 – 16:13 UTC ]
Well, it's certainly been an eventful couple of weeks, hasn't it?
We're back on our regular weekly schedule here after returning home from our second trip this month (this one to Netroots Nation), after which I can firmly conclude that flying, these days, sucks. Big time. Sigh.
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[ Posted Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 – 12:54 UTC ]
Later today, President Obama is going to address the nation on the subject of the Afghanistan war. Specifically, he's going to make good on a promise made a year-and-a-half ago: to begin the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan next month. The big question everyone's been speculating about in the run-up to this announcement has been how big a reduction the president will announce.
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[ Posted Monday, June 13th, 2011 – 16:32 UTC ]
The Republican presidential field for the 2012 presidential election will be on full display this evening, as CNN airs the second nationally-televised candidate debate, this one from the early-voting state of New Hampshire. Since the first debate was a little light on heavyweight candidates, this is the first chance a lot of Republican primary voters will have to assess the biggest names in the race.
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[ Posted Thursday, May 26th, 2011 – 23:04 UTC ]
This month was the best month President Barack Obama has ever had in the polls, when measured as change over the previous month. If you count it one way (measured by absolute values) Obama's best month was technically the second month into his term -- when he was still enjoying his "honeymoon" period, and had 63.4 percent support from the public. But in terms of actually changing public opinion, May was indeed the best month Obama's had, by far.
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 24th, 2011 – 17:42 UTC ]
Barack Hussein Obama is not exactly the first name that springs to mind when the average person thinks of American politicians with Irish roots, to say the least. But Obama does indeed have Irish ancestry, and he certainly played this up in his recent visit to the Emerald Isle. Today, we are going to print the full text of Obama's address to an ecstatic Dublin crowd.
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[ Posted Friday, May 20th, 2011 – 16:46 UTC ]
A word here about timing is necessary, I think. While the blog post is quite obviously meant as a semi-joke, wouldn't this have been more fun in, say, mid-October -- a few weeks before Hallowe'en? Instead of this week, with the "End of Days" prophesied for midafternoon this Saturday? I'm just saying....
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