Mitt Romney damaged himself considerably with his infamous 47% speech, suggesting that this number of people in the US were shiftless layabouts who just wanted to mooch off the hard work of the rest and were the ones who would vote for Obama no matter what. [Read more…]
I wrote recently about Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio hedging an answer to the question on the age of the Earth. [Read more…]
The magazine OC Weekly has come under fire from Mormons for a cartoon on the cover of its election-day issue that shows Mitt Romney as the Angel Moroni, a sacred figure in their religion. [Read more…]
In the run-up to the elections, I contrasted the predictions of the poll-aggregators (who base their conclusions on the results of opinion polls) and those of political scientists, who argue that voter preferences are more accurately predicted by the so-called ‘fundamentals’ of the economy like the GDP, the increase of disposable income, unemployment levels, etc., all of which can be measured objectively. We know that the poll-aggregators were very successful in predicting the outcome. So how did the fundamentals models fare? [Read more…]
The current flare-up in the Middle East has for the moment shifted Iran to the background. But you can be sure that once the immediate violence ends and we return to the stalemate of Israel enforcing a cruel blockade and siege of the people in Gaza that has caused such hardship, proponents of a military attack on Iran will be back, relentlessly beating the drums for yet another war. [Read more…]
[Correction: For some reason I replaced the actual name Morris with Brown in places. I have made the correction.]
Phillip Morris is a local columnist for the Plain Dealer who usually writes fairly boring boilerplate local interest stories. I usually read just the first paragraph before moving on. But a couple of days ago my attention was grabbed by the headline to his column that said ‘Rachel Maddow and the gay tax’. [Read more…]
This is the question that the religious right is grappling with in the aftermath of an election in which the antichrist won. So what will religious conservatives do now? [Read more…]
One of the benefits of being a modern pundit is that there is no price to be paid whatsoever for being totally wrong. Let me be clear that there is nothing bad about being wrong. After all, when you are predicting any outcome that is not certain, there is always the possibility, however carefully you do your analysis, of the actual outcome being one that is not the most likely, one that lies in the tail of the probability distribution. [Read more…]