Call It A Comeback
If OPEC can’t significantly affect the price of oil when it can increase supply by 1.5 million barrels a day, how is ANWR supposed to do that when estimates put the maximum barrels a day at 876,000 in 2025?
Just curious.
Does the father figure head back to Florida because of this? Or does he stay safely in Greene County? My guess is heads back to Florida.
A. They’ll all be buried in Illinois
Austin Mayor points out a rather strange ID in the Post-Dispatch, Keyes’ picture is labeled as Obama when you let your cursor rest on the picture
They also mispell Keyes name in the caption. Welcome to my daily paper. If you wonder why I don’t criticize the Trib too much, it’s the comparison that makes it look so, so good.
If by deceiving you mean, clearly stating his consistent position for the entire race, I suppose that is deception, but I think we can all agree that isn’t a typical definition of deceiving. Alan is just nutty on this one–well on all of them, but complaining that Obama is against gay marriage, but for civil unions is sort of silly given Obama’s been clear on the issue.
And, Obama is actually in that middle third of voters who tend to be against gay marriage, but for some sort of institution like marriage for gay couples. I disagree, being in the slightly under a third of people who think that marriage should be available to gays and lesbians, but I can’t be too critical of a guy who is about average on the issue.
The Defense of Marriage Act is a direct assault on federalism from Keyes perspective so it’s a bit bizarre that he is so vocal about supporting it. DOMA denies federal benefits to gay and lesbian couples regardless of state law. If you argue state powers should be respected, arguing for DOMA is logically inconsistent.
Zorn accosted by evangelists on the way to work this morning. The whole rant by the woman sounds like a former school board member in the City of Saint Louis who put a curse on me for calling her mentally ill.
Someone in his comments suggests he started a physical confrontation. Huh?
Anyway, raving loons on mass transit or in a Senate race aren’t exactly the way to judge most people of conscience.
I think bad polls might degrade people’s confidence in social science, but I doubt it has much effect on how people vote.
Zorn points out one potential problem:
The problem with polls, such as it is, is the way public often interprets and then acts upon results.
A candidate who polls poorly in the early stages of a race, particularly a primary, often then has a very hard time raising campaign money ? who wants to throw his hard-earned down the rat hole of a loser’s coffers? ? which in turn makes it hard for him or her to show well in the polls or the Only Poll That Matters on Election Day.
It’s not clear to me that people act on the polls. I’m probably guilty of saying that a poll might deter turnout in such cases as the Keyes craziness, but even I’m not sure that is accurate. Even if there wasn’t a polling telling us that Keyes was screwed, isn’t the stench of death around the Keyes campaign and everything it touches pretty obvious? Even without showing a 45 point gap would anyone think differently?
I had a friend just run against a very connected incumbent for the 3rd District in Missouri. The polling for Jeff was horrible and even not that great on the last week from what I hear. Jeff lost by just over 1 percent of the vote–1700 votes. He ran a truly insurgent campaign and came so close to winning, but didn’t even though every conventional measure said he coudln’t do it. And he raised a lot of money despite having no poll standing and all of the establishment lined up against him. Polling hurt on some fundraising, but not much. Russ Carnahan’s connections hurt far more than any polling and that is something that can’t really be fixed.
Michael points out the same problem with Keyes position on polling, but takes a shot at McCain-Feingold for outlawing issue ads and wonders why I don’t address that….
First, issue ads aren’t illegal in the most basic sense. What are illegal are issue ads run by organizations that are incorporated and mention a federal candidate on TV or radio (print is not included in the regulations) within 30/60 days of the election. That doesn’t make it illegal to run such ads, it requires that if you want to run such ads, you have to form a Political Action Committee or run it as a unincorporated non-profit that can demonstrate the cash is raised from individuals.
Political Action Committees are formed with the express intent to electioneer and may make as many ads as they wish as long as they do not coordinate with a federal candidate’s campaign. The coordination is one limitation, the only other limitation is that of how much one can donate to a PAC which is limited per election cycle. That is considered by some to be a limitation on free speech by some, others, including the Supreme Court argue it is only a limitation on a monetary transaction. In fact, individuals who wish to buy media time or otherwise support candidates can do so alone so one can spend as much money as they wish on electioneering, but when they band together there are donation limits.
Much of the confusion on the matter is shown when people blast the MoveOn ads as somehow being the work of 527s that don’t report donations and have no limits. That isn’t true–MoveOn Pac runs the commercials and that is also why they mention the President specifically and say to vote against him. I believe Sierra Club also has a PAC as well as a 527.
So you can run issue ads as an individuals or you can have them run as a PAC with donation limits to the PAC.
I don’t see the donation limits in this context as a serious challenge to free speech. A long history of banning corporate and union money from being used directly for electioneering has existed in this country and while the corporate bodies can’t donate money in such a way, the individual members of such organizations may and do contribute to electioneering. Individually, it’s a wide open world as long as you don’t coordinate.
McCain-Feingold’s biggest improvement in the system (if it wasn’t eviscerated) would have been to force full disclosure of electioneering dollars for mass media. Those dollars are directly tied to the idea of influence over office seekers and the limits are far more modest than most people think.
Second, regulating the broadcast media is far different from regulating campaigns. We do regulate the public airwaves quite a bit already, but we stay away from content and even require less than we used to. In the case of 527 expenditures naming federal candidates close to an election, we aren’t regulating what they can say at all, we are regulating how they raise the money and how they disclose that.
Third, I’m not buying that polling matters as much as many claim it does. In fact, I think most people are quite good at tuning them out. While I’ll discuss that more later, I think the basic issue with polling is that people tend to dismiss anything they don’t understand as being wrong because they want it to be and in fact, much of the political psychology literature indicates people discount information that doesn’t support what they already believe and seek out information that confirms their positions.
We should all recognize that tendency since most of us (and me included) are guilty of such.
and where to send donations are available at the Capitol Fax (nicely redesigned and easier to read)
His column deals with Statehouse security as well.
Via Rising Hegemon
That’s Stephen Douglas for those playing at home. Strangely, Keyes has been trying to pretend to be Abe the whole campaign.
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