politicalowl

Just something to think about before you get your knickers in a knot about headlines in the Murdoch tabloids. Newspapers are getting less and less influential. News and information about the contentious 2016 presidential election is permeating the American public, according to a new survey of 3,760 U.S. adults by Pew Research Center. About nine-in-ten U.S. adults (91%) learned about the election in the past week from at least one of 11 types of sources asked about, ranging from television to digital to radio to print. This high level of learning about the 2016 presidential candidates and campaigns is consistent with recent research that has shown strong interest in this election , even more so than at the same point in the previous two presidential elections. 1 Americans are divided, though, in the type of sources they find most helpful for that news and information. When asked if they got news and information about the election from 11 different source types, and then asked whi...

Is Donald Trump causing a Republican civil war?   - Donald Trump's persistent lead in opinion polls is creating a growing divide within the ranks of the Republican Party that threatens to turn into civil war. In just the past few days conservatives seem to be splitting into two camps - those who view Mr Trump as an existential threat to their ideological movement and others who seek to shape his views and harness the wave of support he has generated into greater political power. Top Republicans say Donald Trump’s real problem is that he’s too moderate  - It's like something out of a Marvel movie. Rich Lowry, the editor of the conservative National Review, assembles a squadron of writers from all over the world of conservatism -- religious figures, radio personalities, President Reagan's former aides. True, they might have had their differences in the past, but this time, they have all come together in one final effort to stop a powerful villain from destroying li...

A good read this morning from Bradford DeLong - one of my favourite bloggers NAIL 'EM UP!!!! : "Methinks it is time to go reread Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men again..." Just a sample from quite a long piece that's worth spending time on. First an extract from Molly Ball: How Sarah Palin Created Donald Trump : To find a home in the then-nascent organs of the GOP fever swamps, which, as McKay Coppins has noted, Trump savvily courted for years before launching the current campaign.... Palin’s people are Trump’s people. Now, as Trump and Cruz battle for the nomination, the right is split between its policy commitments and its attitudinal id. Palin has made her choice—and now she may finally get her chance to be Vice President... Then DeLong descibes a dinner with a very old, very good friend—one not born and raised in the United States, and not a political junkie . He asked me what he should think of American politics in view of the rise and d...

Queensland Nickel donated nearly $290k to PUP fortnight before sackings  - Just two weeks before sacking 237 workers, Queensland Nickel made a donation of nearly $290,000 to the Palmer United Party (PUP), documents show. There will be chaos: Big Oil’s collapse and the birth of a new world order: Barrel prices have completely cratered. With alternative energies on the rise, geopolitics may never be the same - The current rout in oil prices ... threatens a profound shift in the geopolitical fortunes of the major energy-producing countries. Many of them, including Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela, are already experiencing economic and political turmoil as a result. (Think of this, for instance, as a boon for the terrorist group Boko Haram as Nigeria shudders under the weight of those falling prices.) The longer such price levels persist, the more devastating the consequences are likely to be. For once, the entire political world found itself siding with Do...

What's a campaign rally without a bit of song and dance? The Donald did it recently with three young girls —dubbed the "Freedom Kids"— singing lyrics straight out of his recent speeches.

I am normally a favourite backer when it comes to elections. My experience suggests that the market on elections tends not to get the favoured party in short enough quickly enough. So what am I doing on the US Congressional elections? Breaking my habits of a life time and going for the outsider in the Senate race. The reason for my modest risk taking on the Democrats surviving as the majority party in the Senate comes from a couple of recent articles by Sam Wang on The Princeton Election Consortium website. Midterm National Senate Polling Error Is Five Times Larger Than In Presidential Years  and  Races I’ll be Watching on Election Night   outline what Wang calls “the mid-term polling curse” whereby historically, in any given year, midterm polls have been off in the same direction by a median of 2 or 3 percentage points. Depending on the year, either Democrats or Republicans end up outperforming polls. In current poll medians, six races are within less...

“I’m Joni Ernst. I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm. So when I get to Washington, I’ll know how to cut pork.” It is certainly an ad you are likely to remember. NPR features some o ther memorable moments  from this year’s Congressional campaigns.

Politicians Get Personal With Memorable Early Campaign Ads  - "Ready or not, here come the 2014 campaign ads. As you'd expect, there are lots of attack ads about Democrats who backed Obamacare, and Republicans who are backed by the Koch brothers. But it's not all punch and counterpunch. Some notable biographical ads stand out." How A Public Corruption Scandal Became A Fight Over Free Speech  - "The current conservative Supreme Court majority has a well-earned reputation for protecting the First Amendment right to free speech, whether in the form of campaign spending or protests at military funerals. But in one area — the first amendment rights of public employees — the conservative majority has been far less protective of the right to speak out. Now the court is revisiting the issue, and the result could have far-reaching consequences for public corruption investigations." The rich are dominating campaigns. Here’s why that’s about to get worse. Everybo...

Thursday, 2nd February, 2006 Measuring political spin is the latest tool for followers of politics. Professor David Skillicorn of Canada's Queens University used a new computer algorithm to study speeches during the country's recent election campaign. Prof Skillicorn found that defeated Prime Minister Paul Martin, of the Liberal Party, spun the subject matter of his speeches dramatically more than Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, and the New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton. According to a report on the New Scientists website, "spin", in this case, is defined as “text or speech where the apparent meaning is not the true belief of the person saying or writing it”. Prof Skillington and his team analysed the usage patterns of 88 deception-linked words within the text of recent campaign speeches from the political leaders. They then determined the frequency of these patterns in each speech, and averaged that number over all of that candidate’s speeches....