Happy Birthday to Dominic West, 43. Looking forward to Series Two of The Hour (and if you've seen it, please don't tell me anything about it). Meanwhile, this is the second birthday within a week of someone who was in The Phantom Menace! That has to mean something, no?
The good stuff:
1. Erik Voeten runs down the arguments for and against the EU deserving a Peace Prize.
2. 5 Myths about polling, from Jon Cohen.
3. No, various things said to be worse than Watergate are not actually worse than Watergate. Andrew Rudalevige explains.
4. I'm a little late on this one, but you should look at it anyway: E.J. Graff thinks about whether women are better or worse off than they were four years ago.
5. And Joe Posnanski on Yanks/Orioles and Jeter.
Some stuff fun to read. Paul Ryan's visit to a soup kitchen suggests it's time for him to be like Sarah Palin, go rouge on his campaign handlers.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's got me wondering. Because the Ryan even, above, was an obvious gaffe; you don't go to such a place and 'pretend' for the cameras; reinforces the 'out of touch with the poor' meme.
But what's with the quiet on campaign handlers? Sarah Palin had 'em. And she didn't do what they told her to do, it was the news.
So are we not hearing about Ryan's because he does what they tell him to do, or because he's a man, and it's just more interesting when a woman doesn't do what she's told?
I think Sam Wang deserves consideration for a catch of the day. He posted this morning that, "Andrew Sullivan is staring so hard into what he thinks is an abyss that he has not noticed actual conditions." http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/15/the-passing-storm/#more-7552
ReplyDeleteHe goes on to point out that Sullivan's big analysis piece entitled " How Obama Gave the Campaign Back to Romney" published last night has already been debunked by this morning's polls. It's a great example of one of the things I find incredibly frustrating about a lot of political writing, namely when people make big sweeping predictions, are proven to be wrong and then they pretend like it never happened. Like how Bush went from being a genius to an idiot in a lot of columnists and pundits minds almost instantaneously sometime during the summer of 2006 and people like Joe Klein started acting like they had always been critical of Bush, even when they weren't.
@LWDL: "Are you forgetting my performance four years ago?....23 months before the election, I'm prepared to call it: Al Gore will be the president of the United States, defeating the Republican nominee, Ling-Ling the panda, after the surprise felling of George W. Bush by monkey pox."
Delete(It's a great bit by Samantha Bee on the Daily Show on pollsters back from 2007...http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-23-2007/presidential-polls)