Two simple questions for Max Baucus

Dick Diver

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Tuesday July 28, 2009 · 1:05 PM PDT

2009/07/28 · 13:05

Here they are:

What Democrats does he expect will vote for his watered-down, worse-than-nothing "compromise" plan?

What Republicans does he expect will vote for his bill?

The answers to these questions are probably obvious, but I will still elaborate below.

Dick Diver

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Friday July 24, 2009 · 10:14 AM PDT

2009/07/24 · 10:14

The NYT has a story today headlined "For Public, Obama Didn’t Fill in Health Blanks." Reading that headline, you might think the story is about a scientific poll of the general public's reaction to President Obama's press conference.

No such luck.

Instead, the story is a misleading presentation of interview excerpts with four families, without any explanation as to how or why they were selected. From the comments of these four "families" (actually only five people are quoted in the article), along with a bunch of misstatements and phony "analysis," the Times reaches the remarkable conclusion that the "Public" (i.e., the over 300 million people who live in the U.S.) feel "Obama Didn't Fill in Health Blanks" -- that is, his press conference was a failure.

Dick Diver

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Wednesday July 22, 2009 · 8:03 AM PDT

2009/07/22 · 08:03

A few unrelated (or maybe related) facts:

According to Article 25 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted over 60 years ago (and which the U.S., as part of the General Assembly, approved):

•(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Dick Diver

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Wednesday October 15, 2008 · 11:34 AM PDT

2008/10/15 · 11:34

Today, Gallup released its tracking data, which show three different results, all of which reflect tightening from yesterday:

Today's Result (Yesterday's Result)

RV O50, M43 (O51, M42)
LVE O52, M44 (O53, M43)
LVT O49, M46 (O51, M45)

RV means within the sample of 2785 registered voters (for today's results). LVE means an "expanded" likely voter sample of 2319. LVT is a "traditional" likely voter sample of 2160.

Dick Diver

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Tuesday October 07, 2008 · 5:38 AM PDT

2008/10/07 · 05:38

Barack Obama has surged into the lead in the presidential race over the last few weeks, which is of course great news. But there are exactly four weeks to go until election day -- an eternity in a campaign. Tonight, the second presidential debate will likely be another key moment in the race and a chance for John McCain to regain momentum.

So it's worth considering for a moment who the moderator is for the debate: Tom Brokaw. And more importantly, what Brokaw's relationship is with John McCain.

A month ago, the New York Times ran a story about McCain's relationship with the press entitled "Old Friends in the Media See a New Side of McCain." The lead paragraph troubled me deeply then, and even more so today as we prepare for tonight's debate.

Dick Diver

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Wednesday October 01, 2008 · 9:17 AM PDT

2008/10/01 · 09:17

If there is one thing we can say for sure about Sarah Palin, it's that little things called facts simply do not get in her way. If you don't believe me, perhaps I can interest you in a bridge up in Ketchikan, Alaska.

I know this is not a matter of public policy or great importance, but Sarah Palin's comments about how long she has been hearing Joe Biden's speeches just really bug me. The simple fact is that she is saying something obviously untrue, that she knows is untrue. There is a word for a person who does that:

Liar.

Dick Diver

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Monday September 15, 2008 · 5:32 AM PDT

2008/09/15 · 05:32

The Gallup Daily Presidential tracking poll, which many of us follow more closely than we should, reports results based on a survey of registered voters. At some point in the future, Gallup is going to switch to likely voters for the tracking poll, but we don't know exactly when.

Just as Nate predicted over at 538, the Gallup tracking poll showed a stable, close race leading up to the conventions, then a bounce for Obama, and then a bounce for McCain that seems to be subsiding, though less quickly than Obama's. The longer-lasting effect of McCain's bounce is probably the result of his VP selection (and convention) stepping on Obama's, rather than any lasting shift in the race (despite what the pundits have rushed to conclude).

But I want to focus on the poll Gallup released last Monday, Sept. 8th, through USA Today, that used a sudden, unexplained, temporary shift to the likely voter model and caused a huge splash in the media.

Dick Diver

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Wednesday September 10, 2008 · 7:12 AM PDT

2008/09/10 · 07:12

Back in 2004, I, like many people, was very optimistic that John Kerry would unseat George W. Bush. Certainly Bush was relatively unpopular for an incumbent. Throughout much of the early summer, Kerry led in the polls; he fell behind in August and trailed most of the rest of the way, but at the very end he surged and I really thought he would win.

But through it all there was a little historical fact that nagged at me, that I ignored but should not have. What Kerry was attempting to do was almost unprecedented: to change the party in control of the White House just one election following a similar change. In the last 28 Presidential elections, a period spanning more than a century, this has only happened once: the Democrats took the White House in the 1976 election but gave it back to the Republicans just four years later.

In other words, when a party regains control of the White House it almost always holds on to it for two terms. And a corollary to that is that

Dick Diver

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Tuesday September 02, 2008 · 6:35 AM PDT

2008/09/02 · 06:35

As everyone around here knows, the last four days have seen the Sarah Palin VP pick revealed to be an act of utter cynicism and hypocrisy on the part of John McCain and the Republican party. Even before the revelations about Bristol, the AIP, the Bridge to Nowhere, most voters saw right through the Palin choice and it was not helping McCain at all. The Labor Day Massacre of damaging revelations will likely turn the Palin choice into a disaster even worse than Dan Quayle.

Republicans are no doubt privately considering whether to dump her from the ticket, but almost surely they will not. Why? Because the Christian fundamentalist base loves her.

This is a huge opening for us. Palin was a transparent attempt -- openly admitted in Republican circles -- to appeal to undecided women voters. But Palin's stand on one issue in particular is almost guaranteed to turn off any such voters (indeed any reasonably moderate voters of either gender) -- and we must make sure that this issue is pounded into the public consciousness. What is this issue?

Dick Diver

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Saturday May 24, 2008 · 12:49 PM PDT

2008/05/24 · 12:49

I lived through the George H.W. Bush presidency, and there were only two moments when I felt anything but intense dislike for the man: first, when he joined with Democrats in Congress to support a tax increase on the wealthy in 1990, and second, when he conceded the Presidential election to Bill Clinton in November 1992. He did so with grace and dignity, congratulating Clinton on his victory and pledging to bring the country together to support the new President-elect. After an extremely bitter and negative campaign (by Bush) it was a healing moment and I felt very grateful to the man.

Dick Diver

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Wednesday April 30, 2008 · 6:02 AM PDT

2008/04/30 · 06:02

I know, I'm not that naive. I understand that in the right-wing echo chamber that is America today, Rev. Wright is relevant because commentators at Fox News say he is, and therefore the mainstream media "has" to cover whether he will "hurt" Obama. But amidst all the ink spilled, the Web space taken, the air time devoted to the question of whether Wright is hurting Obama (and the resulting self-fulfilled prophecy that he has), I have seen next to nothing about why he should.

So I'd like to step back for a second and ask (naively, I know) why Rev. Wright should be harmful to Barack Obama -- at least from the perspective of an alternate reality in which logic and reason have some bearing on the case.

Dick Diver

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Tuesday April 29, 2008 · 6:33 AM PDT

2008/04/29 · 06:33

AP is flogging to death its latest pollhttp://news.yahoo.com/... showing Hillary Clinton with a 9-point lead over McCain, while Barack Obama is shown in a statistical dead heat. Never mind that this poll is likely an outlier, with Gallup showing no measurable difference between the two Democrats vs. McCainhttp://www.gallup.com/... and Rasmussen the same thing http://www.rasmussenreports.com/.... One can hardly say for sure who will run better in November simply based on a head-to-head poll in late April.

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