Political Commentary, Space

The Democratizing Effect Of Social Networking

18 Comments

So I tweeted thusly a few minutes ago:

Rand_Simberg Rand Simberg
Wouldn’t know it by her committee actions. @spacelawyer “I’m a lawyer and I do want to go to space.” – @RepDonnaEdwards

And lo, a few minutes later, she or whoever actually runs her Twitter account replied:

repdonnaedwards Rep Donna F Edwards
@Rand_Simberg pls don’t misunderstand tough questions & vigorous oversight. My goal: build a strong, competitive, innovative space program.
Jun 06, 11:39 AM via Twitter for BlackBerry®

FWIW. I’m tempted to tweet back that SLS will never get her (or likely anyone) into space. Props for responding, though.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Bradley Effect

24 Comments

I’ve been thinking for quite a while that this might be the case:

the Bradley Effect has resurfaced dramatically in a different manner in the Wisconsin recall vote. The polls — and, yes, the exit polls as well – were showing Scott Walker in a narrow victory. But he won beyond anyone’s prediction.

Apparently, the silent majority of Wisconsin voters didn’t want to admit to nosy pollsters and anyone else that might be listening that they were opposed to runaway unions, runaway spending, or the Democratic administration. They just wanted to cast their votes. And they did.

This Bradley Effect, then, is not like the Bradley Effect of yore. It’s about race to some degree, but I suspect there are much larger components of being fed up with elites of all sorts, interest groups, media groups, union groups, all sorts of groups telling the average citizen what he should and shouldn’t think, openly or covertly threatening to ostracize him or her for not going along with the pervasive liberal status quo. This was a cry of “Ya, basta!”

So if I were a member of the Democratic Party this morning, if I were David Axelrod and his team of so-called wise men, I would be wondering – what if all the polls are wrong? What if this is true across the entire country?

If Axelrod and his team of so-called wise men aren’t making a mess in their underoos this morning, they’re completely out of touch with reality. I think that this also explains the disparity between the president’s approval rating and his “likeability.” People are now willing to say, after over three years of non-stop policy disaster, that they don’t approve of his policies, but they still fear being thought racist if they say they find the egomaniacal condescending incompetent insufferable.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Francis Porretto makes a good point in comments over there — it may not be the Bradley Effect so much as a “thug effect,” in which people are afraid to tell exit pollsters what they really think, given what’s been happening in Wisconsin for a year and a half.

History, Political Commentary

Sixty-Eight Years

4 Comments

…since the troops hit the beach at Normandy. It wasn’t as bold a military gamble as killing bin Laden (just ask Joe Biden), but still. Let’s hope we have a different president to commemorate the seventieth anniversary.

[Update a while later]

Here’s Reagan’s commemoration twenty-eight years ago, on the fortieth anniversary:

[Update later morning]

Well, it was inevitable, and it didn’t take long — Hitler has found out about it.

It’s hard to believe that was almost thirty years ago. I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I remember almost forty years ago, on the thirtieth anniversary, and my mother remarking that it was hard to believe that it had been thirty years (she had been a WAC in Egypt at the time). She’s been gone over twenty years now.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!