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Obama's Poll Numbers Remain Strong, But Auto Bailout Could Be a Problem
Tweet Share on Facebook March 31, 2009 Comment (7)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
President Obama got more good news in various polls today, with some troubling signs sprinkled in.
The president remains strong in the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with 66 percent approving of his job performance (down marginally from 68 percent in February); 60 percent approve of his handling of the economy, which is the same as last month.
Rasmussen's daily tracking "Approval Index" (the number of people who strongly approve less the number of people who strongly disapprove) has Obama at +11, the highest it has been since the first week of March.
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Fox Enters Realm of Self-Parody With New "Fox Nation" Opinion Site
Tweet Share on Facebook March 31, 2009 Comment (19)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Have you seen The Fox Nation, Fox News Channel's new opinion site, yet? Intrigued by this Hot Air post, I wandered over and checked it out. I wonder if it isn't a giant put-on by The Onion—Fox has officially entered the realm of self-parody.
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Obama Now Owns GM? Not Quite—and Not Quite a Bad Thing
Tweet Share on Facebook March 30, 2009 Comment (14) -
Conservatives Are Making the Wrong Argument on GM and Rick Wagoner
Tweet Share on Facebook March 30, 2009 Comment (37)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Reading through some of the conservative blog-reactions to the announcement that the administration has decapitated General Motors while giving both GM and Chrysler a firm deadline, it strikes me that they are still stuck on the last auto debate—whether to bail out the automakers at all.
Once we cleared that hurdle, the administration's actions are broadly sensible (though it's still not clear whether that's true in the particulars).
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Obama's Afghanistan Surge--A Primer
Tweet Share on Facebook March 27, 2009 Comment (11)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
President Obama announced his new Afghan strategy today, with significantly higher funding and more troops to the region.
As my colleague Anna Mulrine has reported, one of the biggest hurdles facing Obama's plans is the endemic corruption in the Afghan government:
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Barack Obama's Teleprompter and Glenn Beck's Idiotic Demagoguery
Tweet Share on Facebook March 27, 2009 Comment (164)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Broadcast nutter Glenn Beck is the latest right-winger to pick up the Obama/Teleprompter meme. He does so with typical, ahem, gusto, calling the president a "Manchurian candidate."
Give Beck credit for this: At least he has distilled this charge to its inane core.
Let's be clear, again (and again): A teleprompter is a tool without any magical properties. The main difference between using a teleprompter and having a speech typed on paper in front of you is that teleprompters are reportedly harder to use.
A president (or any politician, or for that matter, television commentator) using a teleprompter signifies ... that his remarks have been prepared ahead of time.
So where exactly is the problem?
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Obama Adviser Tyson: "The Democratic Coalition Is Badly Broken"
Tweet Share on Facebook March 26, 2009 Comment (7)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
In case you're looking for another sign that the strain of fixing the economy is taking its toll on the Democrats, I give you Laura Tyson, an economic adviser to Barack Obama during the campaign and now a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
"The Democratic coalition is badly broken already," she said. "We have Sen. [Kent] Conrad already eviscerating the budget of the president."
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Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, The Onion ... and the Decline of Mainstream Media
Tweet Share on Facebook March 26, 2009 Comment (8)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Herewith two data points helping to chart the disappearance of the line between serious journalism and entertainment.
Rasmussen reported this week that nearly one-third (32 percent) of Americans between the ages of 30 and 39 say that satirical "news" shows on television (most notably, of course, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) are taking the place of traditional news outlets. Among all Americans, almost a quarter (24 percent) agreed. Hey, I love those shows and watch them regularly. But are we really reaching a point where we can't be bother to consume straight news? We need the sugar of Jon Stewart's wit to make it go down? Really?
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Arlen Specter Stays Republican on Card Check, But Polls Show He May Be Wrong
Tweet Share on Facebook March 25, 2009 Comment (8)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
A new Quinnipiac poll shows Arlen Specter losing badly to his expected GOP primary opponent, former Rep. Pat Toomey. Specter, of course, apparently dealt a death blow to the Employee Free Choice Act (also known as the "card-check" bill) yesterday when he announced that he would vote against it.
The senior Keystone senator had had a couple of choices before taking a position on the bill, and the poll shows that he may have chosen the toughest option—meaning that we should look out for him to make a hard charge to the right.
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Harold and Kumar Trump Obama on Guantanamo Bay
Tweet Share on Facebook March 25, 2009 Comment (1)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
A colleague flagged for me this morning yet another reason to be depressed about the state of our society, and specifically what interests our citizenry. He had been looking at (the very cool) Google Insights feature that lets you see search volume over time for specific search terms.
He had been comparing "Guantanamo Bay and Gitmo" (probably something to do with Alex Kingsbury's interesting piece on Obama's Guantanamo Bay dilemma) and he noticed the top search terms related to Guantanamo Bay. They were listed along with relative search volumes (Google adjusts the data to make it comparable, so you can see how much they get searched in comparison to each other):
