At Post Partisan, I got involved in a thing between Charles Krauthammer and Greg Sargent (who had a nice post) and argued mainly that the liberal talking point about how the Ryan budget would hit particular programs is a little silly, given that the long-term Ryan budget would shut down almost all of the federal government.
And at Greg's place, I noted that Barack Obama's Gallup approval numbers have now just about caught up to where George W. Bush was at this point in 2004. He hasn't quite yet matched or bettered a Bush number since September 2009/September 2001, but Obama is at 50% in today's Gallup reading, and need only have a day at or above 49% tomorrow (and even a bit lower, down the line) to do it. Of course, the specific comparison is just for fun, but the basic point is that he's now more or less where he would need to be to have a very close race for re-election. Still a long time to go.
I said earlier that I'd have a part two to the Swift Boat post, but I suspect that's not going to happen until Monday. If all goes well tomorrow, I'll try to tweet out my Derby pick before the race.
Friday, May 4, 2012
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Poor greg trapped in Krauthammer world. I do have to say I enjoy your rebuttal pieces especially the rubin take down earlier this week. Going off of your points about individual pieces of economic data being over hyped (like today's job report) i found an interesting thing via twitter at the BLS http://bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm its a chart of all the jobs numbers with all the revisions (2012 is at the very bottom). It is a great example of the importance of trends as opposed to single events. For example, last month's job numbers were revised above Nate Silver's 150k "re-election magic number" and remember that terrible month of August when no jobs were created? Well actually it turns out that after the revisions the economy added 104K jobs that month showing a very different economic picture.
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