Month: September 2010
Sept. 27, 2010 – the Hottest Day in Los Angeles History
113°
The temperature at noon today, Sept. 27, 2010, in Downtown Los Angeles, making it the hottest day recorded in the city center since records started being kept in 1877. Early autumn is usually the warmest time of year in the region.
Read a Banned Book This Week
If you need a suggestion for what book to read to celebrate National Banned Books Week, this site has them.
Banned Books Week is the only national celebration of the freedom to read. It was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than a thousand books have been challenged since 1982.
Oddly, according to a map posted at the site, most of the clusters of censorship have been along the Northeastern corridor and in the more “civilized” areas of the Midwest.
While some new books joined the Top Ten list of challenged books in 2009 (And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, which acknowledges homosexuality, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, which includes drug use, violence, and yes, homosexuality), plenty of old standards continue to irk…someone. These include the highly regarded classics To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
Of course, we actually don’t mind that one book series made the list. That would be Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. Don’t tell my 12-year-old niece, but it’s O.K. with me if you don’t read those.
New Crist Endorsement Flummoxes Florida Democrats
An endorsement from the “Fire Breathing Liberal” himself has upped the hang-wringing quotient among Florida Democrats who buy into the false premise that they must defeat Gov. Charlie Crist in the U.S. Senate race.
Former U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-South Florida) came out in support of Crist over the weekend.
“There is a special time in which elected officials have to put country before party, and this is one of those times,” the seven-term congressman told a crowd of his former constituents at Century Village west of Boca Raton. “I am here to endorse Gov. Charlie Crist because he has earned it. He has truly earned it.”
Almost every traditional shorthand measure for this election fails us
How Crist “earned it” is anyone’s guess, although he has shown signs of being a vertebrate with election-year vetoes of egregious legislation passed by Florida’s Republican-majority lawmakers. Still, Democrats expected Wexler to endorse U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, whose tagline since Crist went no party affiliation (NPA) is that he is a “lifelong Democrat.”
The often overlooked detail in the three-way race between the newly NPA Crist, the Democrat Meek, and the Tea Party Republican Marco Rubio is that all that has to happen for Rubio not to be the next U.S. Senator from Florida is for him to capture less than 33 percent of the vote. So Democrats can vote for Crist or Meek, just so long as they don’t vote for Rubio.
70 Percent of Republicans Self-Identify as Conservative
7 in 10
Share of Republicans who describe themselves as conservative politically, while 29 percent self-identify as moderate or liberal.
KY Sen: Rand Paul Loses 6 Points, Conway Gains 7
Here’s a poll result that runs counter to the media’s GOP-ascendant narrative, so you probably won’t hear about it on television. In the latest Bluegrass Poll from Kentucky, Democrat Jack Conway has pulled up within two points of Christian libertarian tea-party Republican Rand Paul:
The poll shows that Conway, the state’s attorney general, is now appealing to voters who say they are neutral on the tea party — Paul’s base of support.
And Conway is building a significant lead among women, who earlier were almost evenly split between the two candidates.
According to the poll, Paul leads Conway 49 percent to 47 percent, with 4 percent undecided. That lead is well within the poll’s 4 percentage point margin of error…
The previous Bluegrass poll, released the first week of September, showed Paul leading Conway 55 percent to 40 percent.
Another fact that gets lost in the coverage of the Conway-Paul race is that they are running to succeed Sen. Jim Bunning, whose right-wing views are so extreme that he might as well be a tea bagger. In that sense, if Conway wins the seat, it will be a double pick-up for the Dems.
Dems Building Firewall in California? Brown, Boxer Leading – U.S. House Generic Poll Gives Dems 13 Point Advantage Statewide
In the race for California governor, Democrat Jerry Brown, the state’s attorney general and former governor, has led billionaire former eBay executive Meg Whitman slightly in three out of four recent polls and the fourth was a tie. In the Senate race, Democrat Barbara Boxer has seen her lead over the Republican candidate, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, grow incrementally in three recent polls.
Results from the new Los Angeles Times/USC poll out today show that, in the race for governor, Brown is ahead by 5 points, 49 percent to 44 percent. Whitman has spent $120 million of her money on her campaign, so far, while Brown has only spent what amounts to a fraction of that.
While generic polls on House races nationwide show the parties even or Republicans a few points ahead, in California Dems lead in the generic by 13 points, with 51 percent for Democrats and 38 percent for Republicans.
The same poll found that Boxer’s lead over Fiorina appears to be expanding when compared with other recent polls. In the Times poll, Boxer is ahead by 8 points, 51 percent to 43 percent. (Boxer’s 51 percent represents the first time any of the four candidates for the two big offices has been over 50 percent in the past few weeks.)
A SurveyUSA poll [PDF] conducted on Sept. 19 for a consortium of local TV news channels statewide, including KABC in Los Angeles, found Brown with 46 percent and Whitman with 43 percent.
The same poll put Boxer at 49 percent and Fiorina at 43 percent — the same result Fiorina received in the new Times poll. (This was a reversal from the previous SurveyUSA poll, which had Fiorina in the lead 48-46.)
