Where the heck you been? Been missing you. ;-)

is a wonderous sight indeed.

How dare you say our brave commander in chief lide!!! Every body knows he never lied that's just a viscious kind of smear that only a liberal would say at a point in time when our VERY WAY OF LIFE IS UNDER ATTACK AND OUR BRave troops aree in harm's way at this point in time!!!

In case you forgot about it cLINTON LIED AND PEOPLE DIED THAT'S WHY WE HAD TO IMPEACH THE LIER!!!

Maybe you better watch your step "Greenwald" cause we're god fearing poeple and we aren't going to take this ANY MORE!!!

Thanks for the virtual "shake," L.W.M. Brief episode of syncope. Better, now.

It just seems to me that there is no one more likely to catch it before the election than Iran. I'd say the last thing the Republicans want is another hit on their watch. The opportunities for declaring martial law and suspending elections seem rather remote to me.

There's no way around the fact that the destructive force of this administration has been real and extreme and unprecedented. So I didn't mean to suggest that it's paranoid to see them as bogeymen - they are bogeymen. But even evil has to have the aid of other forces, and it's not hard to see that the perfect storm they've benefitted from is dissipating and I think any grand last minute stunt or desperate hail-satan pass, has more chance of failing monumentaly than in succeeding.

Regarding Brad's if we knew the whole of it: I believe we will and in the not very distant future. And it might actually be better that it doesn't come out for a few more years when, I hope, there is some new blood in our media or we have forced some change in their operating system so that all of those bombshells aren't reduced to muffled farts as were all of the staggering abuses you listed in your comment.

Brief episode of syncope.

You get those, too? Me too.

Hope you're feeling better.

What struck me about Broder's apologia is that he chose to condescend by using the word "proportionality" as his guideline for deciding what is, and what is not, worthy of his reproval.

So let's see: Bill Clinton lying about a blowjob is worthy of impeachment. A Senate report confirming the abject falsity of the President's representations leading us into a war of aggression is not. Hmmm. Lying in a deposition about personal conduct with a consenting adult = impeachable offense. Lying to facilitate the same conduct which constituted the principal grounds for the Nurenburg trials and the conviction and execution of Nazi war criminals = not so much.

I'm glad Mr. Broder has cleared that up for all of us. We need more proportionality in this country, yessir.

Sorry, I offended you. I only meant that it was a mistake on his part to be wandering around Iraq, alone, at a very dangerous time. I could have phrased it better.

On one level, I don't disagree with you. On another level, the activities of this administration, as they have come to light, exceed anything I've been able to imagine them capable of doing prior to that point. As Brad DeLong has said on occasion, This is bad, but if we knew the whole of it, it's probably a lot worse., or words to that effect. There seems to have been no upper bound (or, lower bound?) on what this administration has been willing to pull. Ie; unitary executive via signing statements and a fully corrupted DoJ, a dismissal of any intelligence which might have urged caution wrt Iraq, the stagecraft (as opposed to statecraft) wrt Katrina, torture, rendition, wiretapping, and black sites... The list of things which have left me speechless is a long one. Many have noted Bush's deer in the headlights expression as he received news of the attacks on 9/11. My current interpretation of his expression is My, God. How lucky is this? So, yes. I would assign them an evil quotient that's pretty high, even if no genius were involved.

have to be the ones to clean up the Republican Presidents' constitutional and criminal messes? Democrats didn't control Congress while all this was going on - so why castigate them NOW by condemning their failure to impeach Bush as being negligent?

Where was the media asking the tough questions BEFORE the invasion of Iraq? They are just as responsible as anyone else for the mess that is Iraq. They couldn't wait to "gin up" their own ratings and bottom line by being embedded with the troops. It was high freakin' drama back then, wasn't it?

The media are an elitist group, owing allegiance to no one political ideology or side except the almighty dollar! Screw them - and the Bush administration.

Thanks for the virtual "shake," L.W.M. Brief episode of syncope. Better, now.

Rabbits ex machina™ (Sysprog), indeed. I saw that. Makes my heart hurt.

Moore: The Frontrunner Myths

'

Today's Guest Pollster article comes from David W. Moore, a senior fellow with the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. He is a former vice president and senior editor with the Gallup Poll, where he worked for 13 years, and is the founder and former director of the UNH Survey Center. He manages the blogsite, Skeptical Pollster.com.

Eons ago, it seems, the press was touting Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton as the dominant frontrunners in their respective party presidential contests. The press was wrong in doing this, of course, but the pollsters told them that was true, and journalists believed...

[...]

... national polls of the party faithful don't predict state winners, and without an idea of who they might be, there's no way to tell who the nominee might be. By this reasoning, no matter how well Giuliani might have been faring in the national polls, that said nothing about how he might do in the state contests and in his effort to win the presidential nomination. So, on what grounds was he the frontrunner?

It turns out, apparently, that all along ABC was using the national numbers of what Langer calls the "made-up primary" not just "for context," but in fact to predict the winner of the actual nomination process. That's the only way in which Giuliani could be called a frontrunner.

Of course, ABC was not alone. Every major media polling organization reported results, at one time or another, based on that "made-up national primary." And in the summer and fall of 2007, they all reported that Giuliani was the dominant frontrunner - while ignoring that he trailed in all of the early state contests.

Similarly, Hillary Clinton was hardly the "solid" favorite as virtually every major news organization claimed. It's true the polls showed her leading in the several primary states after Iowa, but in this latter state she was never dominant. She trailed John Edwards for the first seven months of 2007, until she moved into a modest lead in the late summer and fall. But there were many undecided voters, and if she lost in Iowa, who could predict how she might fare elsewhere? Howard Dean's experience four years earlier, when his leading status in New Hampshire evaporated in the two-day period following his loss in the Iowa Caucuses, should have been a cautionary note for pollsters.

The reality was that in the summer and fall of 2007, there was no Republican frontrunner, and the Democratic frontrunner had only a tenuous lead. That so many pundits and politicians and members of the general public still think otherwise, because that's what the pollsters told us, should be the biggest embarrassment of the polling industry since Dewey beat Truman in 1948.

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/moore_the_frontrunner_myths.php

Moore's analysis and critique of Recount here:

http://skepticalpollster.com/?p=25#more-25