Senator Tom Harkin

One Democratic Senators views on the Bush Tax cuts. Here, what I found most interesting was the word "Hostage". This is a serious word, and it was used in the form of politics. This is terminology that shreds any dream bubble one may have of a bi-partisan movement, effort or perspective within Washington. This not only sounds bells of a reacquiring problem that the current Administration, and Obama specifically, has dealt with these past two years. Additionally, there are also signals of stress, and  even the possible inability of the Democratic caucus to hold the line. The first bell is the "sales" of the Democratic accomplishments that are historic in nature. The second bell rings loud with the politics of the Republican party out maneuvering the Democrats in the recent lame duck session: people-press.org/reports/graphs/681.gif
This brings me to my point on the hostile atmosphere between party's right now, that is spilling over to a public that doesn't know or care where to aim their arrows. The public and political rhetoric of the country is changing, emphasized by the TEA Party movement. The national deficit is looming among a unstable global economy. The recession and the methods to fix it seem intangible. The domestic unemployment, and more notably the unemployment of persons with a Bachelors degree or higher has increased with the latest figures. This all alongside a "war of choice" as Tom Harkin puts it, playing on a chess board where foreign players are becoming more aggressive. These figures give no hope, no optimism, these are facts of the day. In times like these, many of which are more frequent throughout time than one would desire, a common goal, a similar and positive rhetoric, a sacrifice among political agendas on both sides is essential for stabilization. This is not the time for political "Hostage" or backyard playschool tricks. This is a time that not only a Nation needs to have a omniscient purpose (and agreement on engaging it), but the worlds Nations as well. The U.S.A., as the still top but not prospicient power with it's (and China's) current direction, needs to pave the way for a more euphoric and prosperous future. Here is one side of the "Washington Coin" that I think explains the attitude of the politicians as well as the people in their frustration to get along on issues and solutions.My thoughts are that in a totally political world, where as Sen. Harkin explains (& where he too is a Political machine and should not be believed or praised without question), when one side on the issue threatens the life of another, separate issue over the progress of one being discussed, progress is dead. I don't believe there is a specific individual or group to blame. Although, it is a crisis, there does need to be some plays under pressure right now. There is so much fighting between teams that the game, and the fans are being hurt. Sometimes, I believe, that people don't believe in history to tell an unbiased story, but history is not Political. And the sustainability of our Politics today, is history tomorrow. My predicted tomorrow holds themes of no change, recurring mistakes, and continuous political stagnation. With this model, at best, were in the same boat, and were praying on it to hold up to treacherous seas, as the visibility of the horizon seems further and further away. How long will it take for us to stop all frantically scooping out the water, before at least one of us starts mending the holes in the boat???

The Hand Faster Than the Eye?

Nowadays, the same as yesterday, the perception of technology, and magic tricks, forces masses of people to question what they see, or, to blindly believe what they see. This has always been. The difference now is in part that the masses are bigger, and the scientists, as well as the magicians who mask them with smoke, are working faster, harder, and smarter than ever before. We don't have many forms of honestly reliable mass media. This creates a confused public where no one has enough spare time in the day, or the month rather, to validate the information, or even the source of the "knowledge" that every individual is bombarded with on a casual day. The solution is this, listen closely, someone has to find a solution for it! A very political solution indeed. I can't be here to offer cure all treatments to these complicated issues, but I do have the resources of point out some of the bleeding. This is all that I have for today's comment on a survey that someone found, which I then found, and I'm hope your glad that you found it here. I encourage you to fallow the links, especially the first which is a short article on the matter of sampling error for the fallowing graph that was used in the Wall Street Journal, "California's Distructive Green Jobs Lobby" where in it reads, "Co-sponsoring a disgraceful bill introduced in September to force utilities to expand their use of "renewable energy" to 15% by 2021 are Republican Sens. Sam Brownback and Susan Collins. Republican politicians are apparently lower in climate skepticism than readers of Scientific American, which recently discovered to its horror that some 80% of its subscribers, mostly American scientists, reject man-made global warming catastrophe fears. as evidence against climate change." Here are more facts. Graph

This from "How One Online Global Warming Poll Could Influence US Policy" at The Freedomist. It explains what sources the samples came from, and why the data is skewed as a result. I have also Included is the The Finnish Environment 644 which is a document found in the IPCC's database that states that "In its Third Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
concluded that the global average surface air temperature has increased by 0.6 ±
0.2 °C during the 20th century, which is likely to be the largest rise of any century
during the past 1000 years (IPCC, 2001a). Moreover, it presented convincing new
evidence that most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is attributable
to increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations." On p.7 the first paragraph of the Introduction.
Apparently, the hand, and the mouth, are faster than the eye.

To the Issues

I thought that I would  make it easier for my loyal fallowing this time with a copied chart from Gallup, unfortunately, it's not in a nice graph. Just in case http://sas-origin.onstreammedia.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/ztybao6qoegc_-aam95srw.gif Here a sample of America's feelings on the issues is shown, enjoy.

Here we see some startling trends. On a lot of issues, America is divided in nearly half. Lovely how we all get along. No shock there, what is surprising is the that there is a consensus on some issues. On this list, polygamy and affairs are the only things less accepted as morally right than cloning humans. For cloning humans, that is a very open minded 9%. May I also add, good for you 7% of guys who grove to polygamy. Maybe they feel it's okay if the the wives are all clones.

Dedicated & Unsyndicated Blogger,

UNOWHO

From the White House

These are figures for Net Job Gain/Loss per Month.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/graphs/job-growth-numbers

This bar graph shows that the first positive growth for unemployment, was in November of '09, since the start of the graph at January of '08. What is also nice about the graph is that it shows the different administrations by color. I find this data interesting shadowing the Mid-Term election results, where many Political Scientists say that there was a referendum against the Obama administration. This graph must add to the Democratic party, and especially their campaign communities chagrin.

Okay, we'll keep it simple.

Here, from Pew, are preemptive results to the election.

http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/1787-1.png

Here we can see that, while there is a skew in the results, taking the average of these polls would lead one to assume that there will be a victory for the Republicans. However, I may add that there are so many toss-ups between both houses, that this surely will be an interesting election. Who knows whether or not voters have even made up their minds yet.

Wisconsin's 2 cents

Here is the job approval rating that Wisconsinites have for our President.

http://huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/23/jobapproval-presobama_n_725956.html?xml=http://pollster.com/flashcharts/content/xml/WIObamaJobPres.xml&choices=Disapprove,Approve&phone=&ivr=&internet=&mail=&smoothing=&from_date=&to_date=&min_pct=&max_pct=&grid=&points=&trends=&lines=

How does this bode for republicans here, political science would tell us not well.The switch in favor happened between February and March of this year.The trend is continuing to decline with respect to Obama's favor, so nothing different is expected to change among the overall feeling for Democrats by mid-term time. I think the five point spread; Approve: 44.9% Disprove: 50.9 %, where it is now, is significant for Wisconsin Republicans on the ballot.

Does this matter?

Well now, this might mean something. Wright Track/Wrong Track
Wrong track is on top
Wright track is on bottom

In June of '09 the ballots meet at 45.8 believing the Country was on the Wright track, as well as the same percentage thinking the Country was on the Wrong track. Now, 63.5 disagree with the Country's direction while a huge 30.8 disagree. That accounts for a -32.7 spread. It's easy to interpret what this means for the mid-term elections. However, in attempting to interpret the trend, people seem to have been increasingly optimistic after the Presidential Election and throughout the stimulus taking place, until the economy/unemployment rate became stagnant, when the majority became increasing dissatisfied. Very interestingly, from late March to mid May, there was an actual a decrease in dissatisfaction, by three points! This is a time span immediately fallowing the Health-Care Reform Bill being signed into law. I could guess that post-midterm trends would follow this graph until the economic growth pulls out of recession. But, I like this graph.

!@$%?

I was curious to see what kind of influence specific party's would have when going to the poles this November. These are the margins that I found.

http://huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/30/party-id_n_725948.html?xml=http://pollster.com/flashcharts/content/xml/USPartyID.xml&choices=independent,Democrat,Republican&phone=&ivr=&internet=&mail=&smoothing=&from_date=&to_date=&min_pct=&max_pct=&grid=&points=&trends=&lines=

This not surprisingly, surprised me, and I did not appreciate how crucial the Independent Vote was, or at least how important it appears to be by this chart from pollster.com. It will also be interesting to witness the next shift in majority.

Close your eyes people.

http://sas-origin.onstreammedia.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/dmaocdd1se2puc8cb-ekta.gif

Well, nobody said that it was going to be easy, and apparently, nobody thinks that it is. The reason I think this is important is because it affect the idea of the 'American Dream'. From this I gather that even employed people are less happy with there job; this whether due to lower wage, longer hours, less job security,  need of a better job to supplement lost household income, a combination of these things, or some left unsaid, showing that the recession has had a profound impact on all Americans way of life. Maybe this is digging too deep, but if recovery means going back to where we were as a nation before the recession, things may not be back to normal even longer after nationwide employment grows.

2010 Wisconsin Senate Race

I found this @ http://www.rasmussenreports.com/
This may mean a few things. One, the Russ has a pretty strong fallowing, probably because of his time in office and name recognition. Two, Ron has been steadily growing in popularity, possibly because of the independent voters finally switching to him, and the undecided members also may be choosing Ron. This may show that Russ is not attracting new voters while Ron is.

	Ron Johnson (R)	Russ Feingold (D)	Some Other Candidate	Not Sure
September 15, 2010	51%	44%	1%	4%
August 24, 2010	47%	46%	1%	5%
August 10, 2010	47%	46%	2%	5%
July 27, 2010	48%	46%	2%	5%
July 13, 2010	47%	46%	2%	6%
June 21, 2010	45%	46%	3%	6%
May 25, 2010	44%	46%	3%	6%

*NOTE: Results from surveys conducted prior to September 15 do not include leaners.

Candidate for the WI Senate Race	Very Favorable	Somewhat Favorable	Somewhat Unfavorable	Very Unfavorable	Not sure
Feingold	32%	19%	18%	28%	3%
Johnson	29%	32%	14%	19%	5%

This is also interesting, because people for Feingold find him 52% Favorable, and 46% Unfavorable.
The people for Johnson find him 61% Favorable and only 33% Unfavorable.
This is something that I think shows that Johnson has a stronger base with less chance of swing voters.

Uh Oh for Obama

This could be very serious for Obama, and the Democrats in general.

http://sas-origin.onstreammedia.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/er24smwlmk2sckuqwsjo4g.gif

 http://sas-origin.onstreammedia.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/ovc2gafzhu2l2600zv_-qw.gif



This would mean that Obama would have to fight more friction in getting his legislation passed, and therefore would lead to the possibility increasing of him becoming a one term president. This is because these groups are the Presidents bread and butter. Leading those groups to assumably vote Democrat.

Economy/Food Supply

These are very nice charts of Brazil's change in agriculture in response to the reemerging concerns of a world food crisis due to population, renewable water, and land resources, also known as "agro-pessimism". These show hope.

http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/images-magazine/2010/35/bb/201035bbc172.gif




Found at Economist.com & check out the first link, it's another chart that's very cool, same site as the second, but would not paste!

First Assignment

The site http://bostonreview.net/BR34.5/ndf_election.php lists many factors that can be used to predict the outcome of an election, specifically the 2008 presidential election. Although you can test and represent certain factors based on data including only those subjects, conclusive data is not shown. What is shown is specific to Obama's victory is, young voter's swung Democrat 2 to 1 when under 30years old. Obama won dramatically against Kerry in the minority vote. While Obama did not win the majority from any white's, he was 3% higher in the white vote, 7% higher in the black vote ( with 2 million more black votes in 2008 than 2006 ), 12% higher Asian vote, and 13% higher in the  Latino vote than Kerry. However, determining factors did not seem to include racism from working class whites. Also, for 2008, Democrats gained 5% in both congressional and presidential votes. Factors that seem prevalent in all elections are these: stability of the economy (which was not noticeable with the fall of the Lehman Brothers, or the bailout of AIG, for whatever reason) but historically it is true that the party who is in house with a failing economy is blamed for the failure, therefore there is a switch in momentum for the opposing party; as well as party affiliation, where 90% of Americans are either Republican or Democratic. It is true that even these factors may not be written in stone nor is it proven whether there is a significance in policy's or agenda's per candidate. Contrary, it is shown that lack of proposals can hurt a campaign. But of course, the Iraq policy, the health debate, and as always, speaking ability were contributing factors. As a problem however, it is very difficult to presume where a certain candidate, or election for that matter went wrong, or right, or even how much of the campaign had any significance at all, which has constantly changing variables. Predictability however is apparently very good based off the median scores from pre-election analysis.