Month: June 2012
Obama Maintains Approval Rating in May
47%
President Obama’s job approval rating average in May, unchanged from April, and exactly the same as George W. Bush’s and Gerald Ford’s ratings in May of their re-election years. Bush ended up winning by three percentage points in 2004, while Ford lost by two points in 1976. Obama’s average is well below the May re-election-year averages of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, both of whom won, but above the May averages of George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, who lost, according to Gallup.
McConnell Equates Obama with Nixon
It’s really quite Nixonian. I think you’d have to go back to Richard Nixon to find the last time you had group of people both through the campaign and through the power of the fed government really trying to harass and silence critics, and I think they need to be called on it.
— Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), in a Fox News interview, accusing the Obama administration of using the IRS, the SEC and other agencies to go after campaign contributors to Mitt Romney.
Santorum Nixes Notion of Serving in a Romney Administration
Yeah, it is pretty much a flat no.
— Rick Santorum, in a CNN interview, on serving in a Romney administration.
How to Wake Up an Electorate Dominated by the Rightwing Culture of Scarcity
Try to ignore the ad agency’s patting of itself on the back in this video — although they kind of deserve to. They explain the very different approach they used to reframe the issue in a space usually dominated by no-tax drivel. Bravo!
Tucker Carlson Operative Heckles President at White House News Conference
An employee of Tucker Carlson, the Swanson frozen foods heir and failed TV pundit who now runs The Daily Caller, a Republican propaganda “news” site, put the GOP’s disrespect for the office of the presidency on display once again when he heckled Pres. Obama during a news conference at the White House yesterday.
The operative, Neil Munro, was at the news conference because the White House Correspondents Association, the gatekeeper organization that decides which media outlets are allowed to attend White House news events, plays along with the ruse that the Daily Caller, Fox News and the rest are news organizations not propaganda mills.
The purpose of the news conference was to announce Pres. Obama’s plan to end the deportation of children of undocumented immigrants who have been raised in the United States.
“Excuse me, sir. It’s not time for questions, sir,” the president said in response to Munro’s first interruption. But Munro continued, demanding to know if the president would take questions. “Not while I’m speaking.” When the heckler continued shouting at the president, Obama responded, “I didn’t ask for an argument. I’m answering your question.”
More on this story at these links:
Most Congressional Staff Say Media Bias Affects Decision Making
95%
Of congressional staff members believe that political bias in the media influences or shapes decision-making in Congress, according to a survey from George Washington University. Seventy-five percent of Republican Hill staff believes there is “a lot” of bias compared to 53 percent of Democratic staff. Forty-one percent of Democratic staff says there is “some” bias compared with 24 percent of Republicans.
The Centrality of the Gaffe
Why does the presidential race appear, at least on the basis of campaign coverage, to be nothing but a succession of gaffes? A week or two will go by without news, and then either President Obama or Mitt Romney will say something damaging, and that comment will define the contours of the debate until the next verbal own goal. … The centrality of the gaffe is an outgrowth of horse race coverage. Political reporters have little interest in informing the public about the policies advocated by the two candidates. Their job is to tell us every day who is winning. And since very little changes in the horse race from day to day, the main device they have to drive the narrative is the gaffe. The gaffe is a candidate saying something unplanned and unwelcome. As campaign reporters define their job, the gaffe is the primary form of ‘news.’
— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine.
Anti-Gay Hate Group Leader Who Gives Marching Orders to Romney Objects to New Yorker Article That Reveals His Obsession with Rigid Masculinity
According to Right-Wing Watch, Fischer is very unhappy with the New Yorker piece at least in part because it exposes his obsession with, um, rigid masculinity. This obsession may have started when he learned that his father had been a conscientious objector during World War II. Fischer’s lifelong shame about his father’s weakness appears to have been compounded when his mother left his father for a bus driver — when Bryan was at the tender age of 20. (Even so, when Fischer, who turned 18 in 1969, had the opportunity to go war himself, he opted not to volunteer and did not serve in Vietnam.)
As a student at Stanford, Fischer joined an evangelical church in Palo Alto. He told a friend that he was attracted to the church because of its “manliness.” “It was the first time I’d been around a real muscular Christianity,” Fischer said to a friend then. “It had a kind of strength and virility to it that would appeal to men.”
