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NFL Football Is Hurt by the Recession. Good
Tweet Share on Facebook December 9, 2008 Comment (38)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Finally, a silver lining to the economic slump: The NFL is hurting financially:
NEW YORK (AP)—The recession has hit the NFL. The league said Tuesday it is cutting more than 10 percent of its headquarters staff in response to the downturn in the nation's economy.
Commissioner Roger Goodell announced the cuts in a memo to league employees. The NFL is eliminating about 150 of its staff of 1,100 in New York, NFL Films in New Jersey and television and Internet production facilities in Los Angeles.
I cannot stand most (not all) professional sports. But the more a sport glorifies overt machismo and intellectual nullity, the more I dislike it. I recognize I'm in the stone-cold minority on this one, as football is among America's favorite sports. Fans need to recognize there are many of us out there who find the hero worship of macho, meat-headed, tobacco-spitting men while young women dance around them in short skirts, well, offensive. So, cut, NFL, and cut again, please.
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A Key to Obama’s Victory: Increasing Turnout in Previously Noncontested States
Tweet Share on Facebook December 9, 2008 Comment (2)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It takes a while for our states to tally up the total number of votes cast in the presidential election, so only now is it possible to say something reasonably close to definitive about turnout in the 2008 general election. Overall turnout, as currently reported, seems to be 130.7 million, about 7 percent more than the 122.3 million of 2004. That's a much smaller percentage increase in turnout than between the 2000 and 2004 elections, which was 23 percent. Turnout increase in 2004-08, at 6.9 percent, was higher than population increase 2003-07 (as estimated by the Census Bureau and which I take as a reasonable proxy for the population increase from which increased numbers of voters could be drawn) of 3.9 percent, but not by much.
One of the things that have struck me as I have been crunching numbers from the 2008 election returns is how variable turnout increases/decreases were. In states that were seriously contested in 2008 but not 2004, turnout tended to be way up (example: Indiana, plus-12 percent, in a state with 2.6 percent population increase), but in states that were seriously contested both years, turnout was not up and, in one significant case, was down (example: next-door Ohio, minus-3 percent, in a state with a 0.3 percent population increase).
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The Barack Obama Administration Should Hire More Women
Tweet Share on Facebook December 9, 2008 Comment (7)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Linda Hirshman makes several excellent points in her op-ed today in the New York Times. As the incoming Obama administration prepares to create millions of government jobs, officials should make sure women are hired in numbers proportional to their numbers in the workforce.
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Mitch Daniels for President in 2012
Tweet Share on Facebook December 9, 2008 Comment (75)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I don't ordinarily publicize political flacks' press releases. But the following release, from backers of recently re-elected Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, strikes me as worthy of some note. Sure, it's self-promoting, but from what I know, it's also pretty factual. And, without saying so, it makes a case for Mitch Daniels as a possible presidential candidate. Daniels's experience is not confined to Indiana state government; he was George W. Bush's first director of the Office of Management and Budget, which gave him a fine overview of the federal budget and government operations, and served as an aide to Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar in the 1980s. Of course, Daniels's critics, opponents, and other observers are welcome to add their comments; this is just one side of the story:
Despite the anti-GOP hurricane force headwinds this election cycle, Governor Mitch Daniels not only won, he won big, 58%-40%. Hoosier voters sent a clear message they view Mitch Daniels as a change agent and reformer who gets results.
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Environmental Groups vs. Public Works Projects
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2008 Comment (7)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Will the enviros allow big public works projects to go forward? Hugh Hewitt, who has been defending landowners in environmental lawsuits, says no. Environmental restriction groups exist precisely to stop economic development, for whatever reasons they can think of. That's why their direct mail and big contributors give them money; that's what keeps their (often six-figure) salaries coming in; that's what they believe in. Advocates of major public works spending like to look back on the projects of New Dealers like Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, and Fiorello LaGuardia. All well and good. But Hopkins, Ickes, and LaGuardia were unusually gifted at getting things done; there's no assurance that their present-day counterparts will be so hugely competent. And Hopkins, Ickes, and LaGuardia didn't have to face an array of environmental restriction groups adept at using legal processes to prevent them from building the things they wanted to build. LaGuardia Airport and the Pentagon were each built in less than a year. The enviro groups won't let anything get permitted that fast in our time.
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A Get-Rich Plan for 2009: Serve Up the Schmaltz
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2008 CommentBy John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
As I am busy at work on another project, I now offer a guaranteed get-rich plan for 2009 to all my grumpy, fretful, financially hard-pressed fellow Americans.
Schmaltz.
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Caroline Kennedy Would Be a Good Senator, Jeb Bush Wouldn't
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2008 Comment (20)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Caroline Kennedy has not exhibited any of the partisan hackery so widely promoted by the extreme right Bush brothers. Yes, she shares with the Bush brothers that she is a "legacy" who became famous via the accomplishments of her family rather than earning political rank on her own.
But I'll trade the quiet, nonpartisan style of Caroline Kennedy for the nasty partisanship of the Bush clan any day.
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Anh ‘Joseph’ Cao Shows Republicans Need Out-of-the-Box Candidates in 2010
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2008 Comment (2)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Perhaps the most astonishing result in this year's many elections was the victory in Saturday's Louisiana runoff of Republican Anh "Joseph" Cao in the Second Congressional District of Louisiana. Results here; background on Cao here; more analysis here. Obviously, there were special circumstances operating here that enabled a Republican to win in a 64 percent black congressional district: Incumbent William Jefferson is under indictment; the election was postponed, because of Hurricane Gustav, to December 7 when Barack Obama was not on the ballot, so turnout was very low; Cao, a Vietnamese immigrant, had an interesting story to tell. Nevertheless, it underlines for me a lesson for Republicans for the 2010 elections: The way to make major gains is to run out-of-the-box candidates in districts where by standard metrics your party has little or no chance to win. It may not work, but nothing else will.
- Read more by Michael Barone.
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Jeb Bush in the Senate? Why That’s a Bad Idea
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2008 Comment (11)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Two members of high-profile political dynasties have made known their interest in gaining entree to that most exclusive of clubs: the U.S. Senate. One of the two is thoughtful, has a keen intellect, and has been a quiet but effective advocate for her hometown and home state. The other has blunderbussed his way onto the national stage by injecting religious morality into government policy, championing rampant development in a fragile environment, and profiteering from his political contacts. Let's see, which one would serve the American people best as a member of the U.S. Senate?
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Did the Polls Converge in the Last Week of the Campaign or Are Pollsters More Careful?
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2008 CommentBy Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
That's the interesting question raised by polling expert David Moore in Mark Blumenthal's pollster.com blog. Moore's finding: The polls on average were pretty steady throughout October. But there was wide variation between polls during any given week. Then, in November, the average results stayed the same, but there was much less variation between polls. Blumenthal advances one theory as to why not: He argues that pollsters take special care to weight the results correctly on their last poll before the election, because they know they will be judged on how close it comes to the actual election results. That's certainly plausible. But I do not dismiss, as much as Blumenthal does, an alternative theory, which is that opinion congealed during the last week. As the AP-Yahoo series of 10 polls in the 12 months before the election show, there was a lot of movement back and forth between candidates that wasn't registered in the overall standings very much because movements to and fro tended to cancel each other out. Maybe that movement stopped in the last week.
