Interviewed on MSNBC’s Countdown last week, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Fox News pundits and commentators “were useful to the White House,” adding that they were given “talking points” to air. On his radio show today, Bill O’Reilly let loose on McClellan, calling him a “liar” and an “idiot”:
McClellan goes on NBC. Hehe, I guess he lives there now. I never got a talking point in my life from anybody. And McClellan’s lying. Okay, Scott? Got it? I’m calling you a liar. Lost all respect for you. I treated you courteously when you came on the program. No respect for you now. … He’s an idiot. He wants to sell his stupid book.
George W. Bush rode into office with a budget surplus, courtesy of his predecessor. When he leaves in January, he will not return the favor. The White House estimated the budget deficit for next year at a record $482 billion—and that doesn’t include the full cost of two wars, the potential bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the full stimulus package or the loss of tax revenue from an economy in the toilet.
New York Times:
The outlook for the budget will crimp the ability of the next president to carry out ambitious spending plans of any kind.
Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal policy group, said that a one-year record deficit would not necessarily be worrisome if not for the overall pessimistic economic atmosphere.
“I think that the fiscal year 2009 deficit could get a lot worse, if you add in war costs, there could well be a real drop-off in revenues from this year’s slowing economy and of course if there are further problems in the housing market, if the federal government does have to inject some money into Freddie and Fannie, that could get worse too,” Mr. Bixby said.
Today, in a vote of 52 to 43, conservatives successfully obstructed the Advance America’s Priorities Act, a package of approximately “40 bills that have in many cases been single-handedly stalled by one of the Senate[base ']Äôs more conservative members,[base ']Äù Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). The act — dubbed the “Tomnibus” — included provisions for a centralized database to help doctors find a cure for Lou Gehrig [base ']Äôs Disease and authorized more funds “to be added to the Department of Justice budget for the purpose of investigating and prosecuting outstanding Civil Rights era crimes.[base ']Äù
Today’s Justice Department report — which faults department aide Monica Goodling for “violating federal law” through politicized hiring practices — reveals Goodling’s bizarre and thorough way of ensuring she hired only the most tried and true conservatives. Besides asking applicants, “Why are you a Republican?” or “What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?”, Goodling also judged applicants by asking them to name public officials they admired:
Several candidates interviewed by Goodling told us they believed that her question about identifying their favorite Supreme Court Justice, President, or legislator was an attempt to determine the candidates[base ']Äô political beliefs. For example, one candidate reported that after he stated he admired Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Goodling [base ']Äúfrowned[base ']Äù and commented, [base ']Äúbut she[base ']Äôs pro-choice.[base ']Äù
The report noted that Goodling refused to hire one Assistant U.S. Attorney because she thought he was a “‘political infant’ who had not ‘proved himself’ to the Republican Party by being involved enough in political campaigns.”
In the latter instance, the metric being evaluated was one near and dear to the hearts of pollsters, the "likely voter." In the earlier poll that showed Obama ahead, Gallup merely surveyed registered voters.
Obama partisans would perhaps point out that the Illinois Democrat's entire campaign is based on drawing new voters -- or "unlikely voters" in the parlance of pollsters -- into in the political process. Many observers have taken the record-breaking turnout from the Democrats' primary season as empirical evidence of an unusual enthusiasm among rank and file voters on that side of the partisan divide.
Which makes investigating the Gallup/USA Today "likely voter" statistics all the more odd. Besides its rare finding of a McCain lead, almost all of the voters deemed "unlikely" to turn out just so happened to be Obama voters.
Emory Univeristy political scientist Alan Abramowitz broke it down for the Huffington Post. Noting that out of the 900 voter sample surveyed by Gallup/USA Today, the pollsters deemed 791 of those individuals to be "likely" ones, and it is their responses which make up the 49-45 figure that immediately got coverage on MSNBC's Hardball.
By contrast, the full 900 person sample of registered voters polled by USA Today showed Obama with a 47-44 lead. So what about those 109 likely voters? According to Abramowitz, "among your 109 unlikely voters, according to Gallup, Obama leads McCain by a whopping 61 percent to 7 percent. Putting it another way, according to Gallup 16 percent of registered Obama supporters are unlikely to vote compared with only 2 percent of registered McCain supporters."
Meanwhile, Gallup's independent tracking poll is conducted with an entirely different -- and larger -- sample of 3,000 voters.
And Abramowitz notes that this isn't the first time Gallup has courted controversy in calculating "likely" voters. "Eight years ago the Gallup organization got in hot water for using a likely voter screen several weeks before Election Day that produced wild fluctuations in candidate preference. At one point, the Gallup tracking poll went from an 8 point Gore lead to an 11 point Bush lead in three days. Of course, this was nonsense. The wild swings in the tracking poll were almost entirely caused by the likely voter screen. Those results were not to be believed. And neither are these."
Jeff Jones of the Gallup Poll pushes back on Abramowitz's critique of their joint USA Today poll by noting that the voter model "assumes a 60 percent voter turnout of national adults. The likely voter sample is weighted to match this assumption, so the weighted sample size of likely [voters] is 604."
Therefore, Jones says Obama's lead among "unlikely voters" is merely 51 percent to 21 percent.
Still, that's a huge margin. And it begs the question: How useful is it to try to estimate, 100 days out from the election, which registered voters are likely to vote -- especially when they favor one candidate so dramatically?
Sixty-six percent of Americans can name at least one judge on the popular TV show "American Idol," while only 15 percent can identify John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
