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My Election Predictions: a Big Obama Win
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2008 Comment (37)Talk about hubris. Way back in June, I decided to take a chance on what sportswriters typically do and predict the season's champion before the games begin.
On the RobertEmmet blog in the first week of June I wrote: Bottom line: President Obama. Big. With 382 electoral votes.
So here, Morgan and Rob, is what I forecast way back then. You can add it to the Thomas Jefferson St. election picks.
On the bright side, I gave Bambi almost all the industrial Midwest, two of the important, contested Rocky Mountain States, and Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida.
I also—big mea culpa here—predicted that he would carry Texas.
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Barack Obama's Irish Heritage
Tweet Share on Facebook October 30, 2008 Comment (31)OK, this is terribly self-indulgent, even for someone named Aloysius.
And admittedly tenuous, even for a people known for stretching ancestral relationships to extremes.
But it turns out that Barack Obama...is Irish.
Saints be praised! Who knew?
On his mother's side, don't you know. (Thanks to the lovely Irish-American writer Caledonia Kearns for the tip.)
Now, everybody, sing along! From the ol' Blarney Stone to the green hills of Tara... There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama....
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The Facts About Barack Obama's and John McCain's Tax Plans—No Socialism Here
Tweet Share on Facebook October 29, 2008 Comment (164)I've caught a little grief from folks who aren't pleased with the way I explained the differences between the McCain and Obama tax plans yesterday.
Some of it is ideological, from partisans wearing their Limbaugh-Hannity blinders, who simply refuse to recognize that, under Obama's plan, the mythical Joe the Plumber, married with two kids, and earning $200,000 a year WOULD GET A $6,474 TAX CUT!
Which just happens to be the identical tax cut that McCain is offering to that same upper-middle-class family.
Now, where I come from, families earning $200,000 a year are still making a lot of money. They may be annoyed at the country club assessment, or stretched by the cost of prep school tuition, or upset with the price of gasoline and auto insurance for the cars they have given their teenage children, but they are far from hurting. Yet Obama still wants to cut their taxes—significantly.
That, my friends, is not socialism.
Other critics, more reasonably, have asked why I used broad tax categories—the middle 20 percent, the richest 1 percent—in yesterday's post, since most folks don't know where they fit, percentagewise, in the universe of taxpayers.
Fair enough.
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Barack Obama Is No Socialist
Tweet Share on Facebook October 28, 2008 Comment (105)We've been hearing some pretty hysterical things said by Barack Obama's critics about Obamanomics.
Socialist. Destroyer of wealth. Enemy of small business.
So, here's a primer on how Obama, if elected, will be "spreading the wealth around" in the next four years—and why he's far from a socialist radical.
And even, to a struggling but hopeful entrepreneur like myself (call me Jack the Writer), not cause for alarm.
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Barack Obama's Race Is a Lingering Factor for Some Ohio Voters, According to Focus Group
Tweet Share on Facebook October 27, 2008 Comment (11)Maybe Peter Hart is one of those Democrats who, like Chicago Cubs fans, have gotten to within a few games...outs...strikes of victory so often, only to have it cruelly denied, that they take a gloomy disposition into any favorable circumstance.
Or maybe the 2008 election ain't over 'til it's over.
Is there a Steve Bartman out there getting ready to lunge for a foul ball and deprive the Democrats of their triumph?
On a rainy and gloomy October day in Washington, the über-pollster Hart has conveyed an appropriately glum report for his fellow Democrats from a focus group he conducted in Ohio yesterday.
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The Polls May Be Screwy But Barack Obama's Lead Is Real Because He's Strong Among White Voters
Tweet Share on Facebook October 24, 2008 Comment (65)OK, Rob. About those screwy polls. For those among us who are polling junkies, the fellows at fivethirtyeight.com have put together a couple of primers on the science of public opinion.
Here is an explanation of the many tracking polls, which explains how the various polling organizations get their samples and other tricks of the trade.
And this post goes over some of the same territory but with a persuasive analysis that the polls showing Barack Obama with a sizable lead are real.
Here's my favorite factoid, which is based on the reality that, despite the growing multicultural nature of American society, white folks still elect our presidents.
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Sarah Palin's $150,000 Real Life Reality Makeover
Tweet Share on Facebook October 23, 2008 Comment (26)Did anyone hold it against Carrie and the gals when they bought all those ridiculously expensive Manolo Blahnik shoes?
Did we not root our hearts out for Miss Vivian when she returned from that shopping trip on Rodeo Drive, put on that amazing red dress, and found happiness in the arms of Richard Gere, her very own Prince Charming?
Didn't Andrew Lloyd Webber make a gazillion bucks with Evita?
Friends, I really don't think that Sarah Palin is going to pay too much a price for her $150,000 wardrobe. Not as our newest celebrity Cinderella.
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Sarah Palin's Un-Real America
Tweet Share on Facebook October 22, 2008 Comment (30)On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, my dad, an Army captain, was in uniform and at Sunday mass. It was a fine, quiet morning on the island of Oahu.
At first, when the floor began to tremble and the explosions rumbled over the island from the bombs going off at Pearl Harbor, he and most of the congregation thought it was Navy target practice. Then they madly scrambled for their guns.
Dad fought with the armies of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, through New Guinea and the Philippines. He wore his country's uniform proudly for six years and didn't make it home, for good, until 1945. When he died, a few years ago, the American flag was draped upon his casket.
He is not here to do it, so allow me to refute the suggestion made by the McCain campaign and its surrogates that the Farrells, and Americans like us, are "anti-American" or not from the "real America" or "Communists" because we don't come from the mythical small town of Palinville, where good Christian families, who do the work and fight our country's wars, vote only for white Republicans.
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Sarah Palin's Nutty Creationism
Tweet Share on Facebook October 21, 2008 Comment (29)Famed curmudgeon Christopher Hitchens confesses that, in his never-ending quest as a contrarian, he misjudged Sarah Palin when "rather feebly" giving her the benefit of a doubt last summer.
Writing for Slate, the repentant Hitchens is now urging his media brethren to boycott coverage of Palin in the final days of the 2008 campaign until she agrees to hold a full-scale press conference.
It is a provocative, albeit fantastical, suggestion. The political press corps couldn't organize a well-run baby shower, much less a boycott of a national political figure.
Still, I particularly like his dissection of Palin's stance on the wisdom of teaching creationism alongside evolution in the schools.
I've touched on the Fred-Flintstone-was-alive-at-the-same-time-as-dino issue before. Here is the Hitchens take:
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Race in the Obama-McCain Presidential Race—Being a Racist Is Officially a Luxury
Tweet Share on Facebook October 20, 2008 Comment (6)Here is a delightful and telling, if politically incorrect, tale from the political number crunchers at fivethirtyeight.com.
They say it's a true story from their on-the-ground surveys.
So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"
Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."
The analysts at fivethirtyeight note that Washington County is a bellwether for Pennsylvania, and that John Kerry eked out a 552-vote victory from more than 96,000 votes cast in 2004.
But the Obama campaign "is on the ground and making inroads due to unusually strong organizing leadership," the website says, and has registered over 4,000 new voters here, part of a push that has given Democrats a 1.2 million edge in registered voters in the state.
The fivethirtyeight verdict: "In this economy, racism is officially a luxury."
