The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.
With the likelyhood that John McCain will bail on tomorrow’s debate, I have to ask the question of whether watching Barack Obama make hay of the situation is worth it.
Do I drunkblog an Obama-only gabfest Friday night?
Up to 1 answer(s) was/were allowed
Total Voters: 8
Loading ...This poll will close at 3:30 pm tomorrow because if I don’t drunkblog it, I want to be at the Brewers’ game tomorrow.
All parents of multiple children have to deal with sibling relationships from time to time. When I was growing up, because I was the oldest, sibling relationship management for my Dad usually amounted to,
“You’re older and should know better so leave your sister alone!”
While you could technically use that solution with twins (Thing 1 is 10 minutes older than Thing 2) it really only works when you have a sibling who is/should be more physically, mentally or emotionally developed.
When working with our twins, Mrs. Shoe and I use a different sibling management technique. When Thing 1 and Thing 2 get into one of their bickering contests and we get to a point where an end doesn’t seem imminent, Mrs. Shoe or I will intercede with,
“Listen, you have a choice. You can solve this issue yourselves or I can step in. If I step in, I will guarantee you that neither of you will be happy with the solution.”
That is the threat that John McCain brought to Washington today!
As I surmised yesterday, McCain was in fact, asked to come and help with the bail out bill. According to an interview with Bob Schieffer, McCain was invited by Paulson to help wrangle a solution because Republicans were balking at the Democrat’s proposal.
As an aside, but to make sure the nattering nabobs didn’t miss this; McCain went to Washington NOT as a POLTICAL STUNT but because he believed it was important for him to be there and that he could make a difference!
What’s this got to do with sibling relational management? Well first, after McCain essentially said,
“Don’t make me come in there!”
The first thing that happened was that Harry Reid denied that McCain needed to be involved! Then, about noon today, Chris Dodd dashed out and announced that they had an agreement in principle! Wow! that’s amazing when just yesterday morning only 4 Senate Republicans were willing to vote for the bill!
So what happened? It seems there’s only two choices. Either the Republicans caved or Democrats backed off of some of their more egregious demands. We’ll know which, more likely how much of both, happened later. My guess is that neither would have happened had John McCain not announced that he was suspending his campaign to work on the issue.
With McCain’s reputation for find bipartisan solutions coupled with the intense scrutiny that the negotiations were going to get because McCain had suspended his campaign to join, there was a message sent to both the Democrats and the Republicans. The message was:
“Listen, you have a choice. You can solve this issue yourselves or I can step in. If I step in, I will guarantee you that neither of you will be happy with the solution.”
Sometimes you need an adult to manage childlike petulance.
I just caught this on JSOnline’s DayWatch from Don Walker…
Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Eric Gagne bought 5,000 tickets to tonight’s game against the Pittsburgh Pirates and plans to give them away.
“Tonight we’ll be playing one of the most important games in franchise history, and I can think of no better way to thank the fans than giving families an opportunity to pack Miller Park,” Gagne said in a statement released by the team. “No matter what happens over these next four games, I want everyone to know that I think the world of Brewers fans. Three million times they have walked through the gates this year and none of us on the field takes their support for granted. We’re going to have some fun out here, and I know that the atmosphere will be electric.”
Beginning at 3:30 p.m., fans can go to Brewers.com to request up to four tickets. Click on the “Gagne Giveaway” graphic to go to the ticket request page and enter Gagne as the password when prompted.
Fans requesting the complimentary tickets will be subject to a one-time $2 fee for printing their ticket order at home, or a $4 per order fee for picking at Miller Park will call.
Tickets are first come, first served.
Hooray Gagne!
There’s plenty of trips the next couple weeks:
– I’ve got some Brewer supporting to do since the Crew is 5-1 in games I’ve been at. I’ll be at tonight’s, Saturday’s and Sunday’s games (I’ve got a debate drunkblog to run tomorrow).
– The September version of Blog ‘n Grog will be at the House of Guiness, 354 W. Main St. in Waukesha, at 8 pm.
– As noted earlier, I’ll help kick off Drinking Right-DC on Tuesday, October 7 over at Mr. Days Sports Rock Cafe, 3100 Clarendon Blvd. in Arlington, VA, at 6 pm (that would be Eastern).
– Finally, Drinking Right-Wisconsin happens at its usual 2nd Tuesday, October 14, at Papa’s Social Club, 7718 W Burleigh in Milwaukee, at 7 pm (back to Central).
Jim Geraghty has been wondering how John McCain could be gaining among independents and still be losing to Barack Obama overall in various national polls. The popular conventional wisdom is that the current crop of polls are oversampling Democrats. Because he specifically asked for the oddly-missing party-identity numbers from the most-recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, which has Obama up 46%-44% among registered voters now compared to him up 45%-43% among registered voters in August (conducted before either running mate was made known), despite a swing from a 46%-35% Obama lead among “independents” in August to a 49%-34% McCain lead among “independents” in September, I’ll focus on that. I will ignore the “likely voter” component, where Obama leads 49%-45%, for now partly because I need to compare apples to apples (the August poll did not include “likely voters”), and partly because there is not a partisan breakdown among “likely voters”.
Before I get to the party identification explanation, I must note that Obama’s support among Democrats jumped from 78% to 87%. While some of this came from “McCain-ocrats” (McCain’s support among Democrats dipped from 9% to 5%), most of the gain came from the undecideds, as that dropped from 11% to 5%. In any case, I guess the PUMAs are coming home to roost.
Similarily, McCain has also strengthened his support among Republicans, albeit slightly. That went from 90% to 91%, and appears to have come at the expense of Bob Barr. More-pointedly, the percentage of “Obama-cans” remained unchanged at 6%.
Now, to the math. In order to do a comparison between the August and September polls, one has to know the party-identity internals from the August poll. Fortunately, those numbers are part of the August release, and were 34% Democratic, 29% Republican, 29% Independent, 4% Other Party, and an unmentioned 4% “refused to answer”. Since the remainder of the internals grouped the Independents, Other Party’ers, and “refused to answer”‘s together under the “independent” label, that becomes 37%.
I must point out that the 5-point advantage the Democrats had in the August poll is greater than the biggest of recent election-day splits (4 points in favor of the Democrats in 1996 and 2000, which actually beat the 3-point advantage they had in their historic 2006 election).
This is borne out, within rounding errors, by putting the results of a given early-in-the-poll question with three (or more) distinct answers into equation form (specifically, 3 equations) and solving for the three variables of the Democratic, Republican, and “independent” portions of support for each answer.
Since there are several questions in the September poll that meet those requirements, one can average the rounding errors out. I specifically solved the equations for questions 2, 9 (and the composite “ticket splitter” table), 13, and 15, and came up with an average of 34% Democrats, 43% “independents” and 23% Republicans in the September poll.
While there isn’t a massive increase in the percentage of Democrats included, there are a couple of things of note:
– The split between Democrats and Republicans (+11 D) matches the inflated numbers in other recent polls.
– The 21% decrease in the percentage of Republicans belies the conventional conservative wisdom that the selection of Sarah Palin energized the Republican base, at least on a statistical level. I can cite piece of circumstantial evidence (an incredible number of conservative bloggers jumping on the Straight Talk Express) after piece of circumstantial evidence (60,000 for Palin in Florida) after piece of circumstantial evidence (McCain/Palin outdrawing Obama in Green Bay) why this decrease is a bunch of macaca, but regular readers of this place already know why the decrease is a bunch of macaca.
For grins, let’s apply the August partisan split to the September poll, and the September poll to the August split. Had the August partisan split been applied to the September poll, McCain would be up 46%-44%. Had the September partisan split been applied to August, Obama would have been up 48%-39%.
I’ll briefly discuss the other oddity from the Times poll; the 4-point Obama lead among “likely” voters. There is one question that is somewhat relevant; number 3, or the “are you sure?” question. Again, there is not a specific breakdown of “likely” voters, but neither the partisan split among registered voters (91% of Democrats are sure of their choice, 88% of Republicans are sure of theirs) nor the split between the tickets (85% of Obama/Biden supporters are sure, 84% of McCain/Palin supporters are sure) fully-explains why Obama has that increased difference among “likely” voters.
After 7+ seasons, Matt Millen has finally been fired as General Manager of the Detroit Lions!
During his tenure, the Lions were probably the most inept team in professional football. Their record was 53 games below 500 and they had lost at least 9 games in each of the seasons.
This season the Lions started the season 0-3, they’ve given up 113 points and have lost the three games by an average of 18 points.
If someone like Matt Millen, the butt of a innumerable jokes about ineptitude, can be fired what hope is there for your average Weatherman?
First, a video to set the scene:
This article in the Washington Post outlines McCain’s timeline and discussions that led him to decide to suspend his campaign and head to Washington to aid in the negotiation of the bailout plan.
The money quote of the article:
“We got a good sense last night, even more so this morning,” one top aide said. “Got in a position where Democrats were warily circling McCain — not going to commit to a deal unless McCain does. It was just a time for leadership. So he just stepped up.”
The aides said the concern mounted Wednesday morning, as McCain met with a panel of economic advisers and made phone calls with the Congressional leadership, including Sens. Hillary Clinton and Mitch McConnell, and Reps. Roy Blunt and John Boehner.
Yesterday, Harry Reid was reported as demanding that McCain must support the debated bill or he would not allow it to pass. Today, Harry reversed himself and said:
I understand that the candidates are putting together a joint statement at Senator Obama’s suggestion. But it would not be helpful at this time to have them come back during these negotiations and risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation’s economy. If that changes, we will call upon them. We need leadership; not a campaign photo op.
Why is this important?
A few reasons:
First, Harry Reid is about to look like a really big fool. In his wildest imagination he didn’t believe McCain would actually get involved with this process. Reid thought he could use McCain to whip the Republicans into supporting a Democrat designed bill without McCain being anywhere near it. McCain called Reid’s bluff.
Second, McCain talked to Hillary Clinton about the ongoing debate. My bet is that McCain called Clinton. On the other hand, Obama has once again done nothing that was bipartisan except attempt to write a joint statement with McCain. That joint statement, by Obama’s own admission, was requested by Tom Coburn, it wasn’t Barack’s idea!
Finally, it’s apparent that the Republicans were ready to tube this endeavor. I believe McCain has come to the conclusion that something needs to be done. It may not be the plan as written but if “nothing” would have sufficed, he would not have left the campaign. McCain obviously believes something needs to be done and that he can help bring the Dems and the Republicans together to accomplish it.
I stand by my earlier post that calls McCain’s move an “OK Corral” moment. By the end of this weekend I believe one of the two candidates will be firmly etched in the public mind as the person best able to deal with economic issues.
I’m also increasingly optimistic that the person who will come out on top is McCain.
In his press conference explaining why he wouldn’t be suspending his campaign, Barack Obama said:
Given the fierce competition of this election and the enormous stakes involved, that, the fact that both parties agree that we need to focus on this problem on Capital hill and this is an issue that should transcend the typical day to day politics, I think that’s an important statement and one that I’m glad to be a party to.
Fancy word that “transcend.” Interesting that while John McCain takes action to transcend the day to day politics, Obama only talks about it
Later Obama said he told Congressional Democrat leadership:
If you need me, call me.
Who did Harry Reid call for to get bipartisan buy in for the bill? Nope, it wasn’t “The Transcendent One” himself, it was John McCain. Even Harry knows what a real leader looks like!
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