Damn, that must have been one hell of a break up with Susan Sarandon....
Actor Tim Robbins is making heads turn again.
Not only has the outspoken liberal managed to separate from longtime girlfriend Susan Sarandon without much fanfare, but according to the Daily Beast, Robbins has donated $5,000 to various Republicans in the House and Senate, including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.).
"Former GOP congressman J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, who lost in 2006 despite Robbins' $500 donation, was baffled and surprised. ... 'Maybe because I covered the Durham Bulls as a sports broadcaster in the late 1970s and early '80s? Maybe because I used to frequently rent Bob Roberts back in the '90s?' Hayworth wondered, mentioning two of Robbins' starring vehicles. 'All I can say is, 'Thank you!' I hope he enjoyed the Christmas card.'"
#1
The possibility is that he spouted liberal politics to avoid issues with the girlfriend. Now that they're separated, he can say what he really thinks.
Gee...Opinion, or Seedy Politicians? It is an editorial, but also has a lot of facts.
President Obama's freshman-year foreign policy was the worst in living memory. At the dawn of 2010, the United States finds itself noticeably weaker in international affairs than it was when Mr. Obama took office, and there are no signs of improvement in the year ahead.
Mr. Obama was elected with almost no national security experience, but he counted on two principle sources of leverage on the world stage: his personal charisma and the fact that he was not George W. Bush. The year began with much swagger and self-assurance, but the result was a foreign policy with the naive enthusiasm of someone who once may have taken a graduate seminar in international relations.
Mr. Obama's first-week pledge to close the detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year set the tone for 2009. It was a victory of symbolism over substance that proved to be more difficult to implement than he expected, and Mr. Obama soon found that it was easier to make lofty promises than to deliver prudent policies.
Other failures followed. Efforts to regionalize a peace process in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India foundered on the rocks of entrenched national interests. The president announced a "stronger and smarter" strategy for Afghanistan in March, and another in November that contained a deadline which is not quite a deadline, for a pullout that is not really a pullout. A lot more inconvenient facts at the link. Read it all.
The world is a tough neighborhood. Mr. Bush was not loved, but he was feared, which Machiavelli advises is a more durable position. Oderint dum mutuant?
Mr. Obama has sought only to be loved, but in the process has disappointed America's allies and encouraged our adversaries. The world has the measure of the man in the White House, and he doesn't measure up to the task at hand. Unless he shows a stronger hand, Mr. Obama will continue to increasingly follow global events rather than lead them.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/04/2010 06:17 ||
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Democrats are turning their fire on Scott Rasmussen, the prolific independent pollster whose surveys on elections, President Obama's popularity and a host of other issues are surfacing in the media with increasing frequency.
The pointed attacks reflect a hardening conventional wisdom among prominent liberal bloggers and many Democrats that Rasmussen Reports polls are, at best, the result of a flawed polling model and, at worst, designed to undermine Democratic politicians and the party's national agenda.
On progressive-oriented websites, anti-Rasmussen sentiment is an article of faith. "Rasmussen Caught With Their Thumb on the Scale," blared the Daily Kos this summer. "Rasmussen Reports, You Decide," the blog Swing State Project recently headlined in a play on the Fox News motto.
"I don't think there are Republican polling firms that get as good a result as Rasmussen does," said Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow with Media Matters, a progressive research center. "His data looks like it all comes out of the RNC [Republican National Committee]."
"Whether intended or not, Rasmussen polls have been used by conservative voices as talking points, and when that happens on one side it inevitably produces a reaction from the other," explained Mark Blumenthal, a polling analyst and the editor and publisher of Pollster.com. "Rasmussen produces a lot of data that appear to produce narratives conservatives are promoting, and that causes a reaction."
While Scott Rasmussen, the firm's president, contends that he has no ax to grind -- his bio notes that he has been "an independent pollster for more than a decade" and "has never been a campaign pollster or consultant for candidates seeking office" -- his opponents on the left insist he is the hand that feeds conservative talkers a daily trove of negative numbers that provides grist for attacks on Obama and the Democratic Party.
Nothing, however, sets off liberal teeth gnashing more than Rasmussen's daily presidential tracking polls, which throughout the year have consistently placed Obama's approval numbers around 5 percentage points lower than other polling outfits.
"He polls less favorably for Democrats, and that's why he's become a lightning rod," said Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who studies polling. "It's clear that his results are typically more Republican than the other person's results."
On Saturday, Dec. 26, for example, Rasmussen's daily tracking had Obama's approval at 44 percent, with a disapproval figure of 56 percent. A Real Clear Politics compilation of other pollsters, meanwhile, showed Obama with an average approval figure of 49.5 percent and disapproval of 45.1 percent.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/04/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Notice what happens when there are inconvenient truths:
1. Liberals assume that it MUST be ideologically driven. Because that's what they do!
2. The source of the inconvenient truths must be attacked, its credibility destroyed.
3. The very fact that an independent researcher is producing contrary results to The Cause[tm] is PROOF POSITIVE that he is doing something wrong. The idea that things just might not be as they think simply does not enter into the equation.
#2
Stalinist political purge threats and attacks against the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had the desired effect, why not exercise the same tactics against Rasmussen? Few surprises here.
#3
The liberals dont like the numbers so they shoot the messenger instead of dealing with reality. Typical idiotic Stalinist response from the left.
What has them twisted in a knot is that of all the major poll companies, Rasmussen has been the most accurate in terms of predictive polls, or so I have heard said.
It would be interesting to see how Rasmussen did in NJ and VA compared to the Dems favored pollsters (NYT/MSNBC probably).
#4
In either New Jersey or Virginia, Rasmussen got it right on the button (a 3-pt winning margin for the Republican) and their prediction in the other race was close also.
It's funny how the Democrats conveniently forget that Rasmussen's outfit was the first to recognize that Obama was pulling away from Hillary and that he actually OVER-estimated Obama's winning margin against McCain.
The Democrats are still in the Denial phase. Regret will arrive as we get closer to the 2010 elections and Acceptance is due after November.
#8
Just added Rasmussen Reports to my browser's Favorites tab.
Fox news got a lot of new viewers. Glenn Beck was named Man of the Year. Rush Limbaugh's EIB Network sold out all advertising spots. Rasmussen is definitely going to considered a premier polling source from now on.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Mr. Obama was elected with almost no national security experience, but he counted on two principle sources of leverage on the world stage: his personal charisma and the fact that he was not George W. Bush. The year began with much swagger and self-assurance, but the result was a foreign policy with the naive enthusiasm of someone who once may have taken a graduate seminar in international relations. 
