It doesn’t take long these days before a player having a career year starts hearing accusations of steroid usage. First of all, baseball is a game largely determined by luck. Second of all, unless your name is Madoff, any endeavor with small sample sizes will show some natural variance in your performance.
But we really need [...]
I don’t remember James Inhofe or Rush Limbaugh being so concerned that Roberts or Alito would let their whiteness or maleness unduly influence their judicial opinions. I think that assuming the “white” point of view is the default or “normal” position is much more prevalent in our society than we care to admit. Many pundits [...]
Obama’s budget marks a return to accounting sanity. The Bush administration’s accounting of their budgeting process made liberal use of sleight of hand to obscure the true cost of their proposals. The Bush tax cuts were set to sunset in 2010, which allowed their accountants to limit their projected revenue impact, even though they always [...]
This is a bit less interesting. Since Democrats tend to do very well in the biggest cities, large Democratic margins tend to correlate directly with large populations. New York City suffers here as it is split up into five counties. The top Obama margins are: Los Angeles, Cook (Chicago + suburbs), Philadelphia, Wayne (Detroit), [...]
Here are the 10 counties John McCain won by the widest margins. Food for thought. Democrats have a lot of work to do in the Texas suburbs if they want to be competitive statewide.
County
State
McCain Margin
Notable Features
Maricopa
AZ
132,821
Phoenix
Utah
[...]
I was planning on writing an omnibus mega-post on the Obama budget, but instead I think I’ll parcel it out over several posts. There’s a lot of ground to cover and I don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Through the transition and stimulus fight, the one concern I had about [...]
Calling something a “teachable moment” in a debate is incredibly condescending.
For the short term: Net transit and intercity rail funding survive the conference committee largely intact.
For the long term: Both Obama and Reid went to bat for transit funding. Elections have consequences.
Let’s be blunt: Congressional Republicans have every political incentive to hinder President Obama, no matter what their actual opinions of his policy moves are. Politics ultimately boils down to: the incumbents stay in until they screw up or we get bored with them. So, I fully expect to see lots of knee-jerk reactions and obstruction [...]
12:24pm <harveyj> Obama hasn’t had to say certain things in this address, especially re: civil liberties, nonbelievers, and reaching out to the Muslim world, yet he did anyway. That means a lot.
12:22pm <harveyj> Thank you for referencing Katrina, even if obliquely.
12:17pm <harveyj> “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
12:12pm <harveyj> [...]