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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.
Finally, I leave you with a secret, just in case you ever find yourself attending a Netroots Nation convention: if you want to guess which state will host Netroots Nation next year, look for a senator attending who is not from the state you're currently in.
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.
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.
Having just gotten back from a trip abroad where the news was dominated by the story of a politician facing severe consequences (and the end of his political career) for his sexual misconduct, I opened up the pages of the American news to find... well, pretty much the same thing.
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.
Sometimes special elections are harbingers of things to come. And sometimes they are not. The tricky part is that nobody can tell the difference until long afterwards. Which certainly doesn't stop rampant speculation in the meantime. Last night, a Democrat pulled off a surprising upset in New York's 26th congressional district, in an election that was forced due to the resignation of a House member who got caught trolling the internet (with shirtless pictures, no less) for extramarital fun and games. What this signifies for the 2012 election is anyone's guess, at this point.
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.
With all this frantic jumping in and out of the race, I thought it was time to take another look at the Republican field to see how it is shaping up. At this point, there are only a few holdouts left on the sidelines, as most of the bigwigs (and some decidedly "smallwigs") have made their intentions known.
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....