Kaus beats expectations, but not Quintana; Taitz tops 25%
Twitter: With 98.2% of precincts in, Boxes slips past 80% mark. @BrianQuintana 14.2% (250,313 votes), @kausmickey 5.3% (93,173). http://bit.ly/aIulWV
Category Archives: News
Will Mickey Kaus get 5% of the vote? How about 3%? Okay, 1%?
Say what you will about blogging pioneer / curmudgeonly Democratic gadfly / U.S. Senate candidate Mickey Kaus, but he sure knows how to set expectations low. Here’s his take, in Calbuzz, on his chances in today’s primary against Barbara Boxer: My friend Jill Stewart of L.A. Weekly bet a friend dinner that I wouldn’t top 5%. But I don’t want… Read more »
Best vanity plate ever?
"Smug liberal?" HAHAHA.
Cassava crop virus threatens millions, could be Irish potato famine writ large
Happy Monday Tuesday! In need of something new to worry about? Start off the new week, and month, right — with a new source of PANIC!!!!!!!!!: [A new plant-blighting virus, called] brown streak, is now ravaging cassava crops in a great swath around Lake Victoria, threatening millions of East Africans who grow the tuber as their staple food. Although it… Read more »
“America is at something closer to an event-horizon than a cross-roads”
[Kudos to Terry Corcoran for coming up with an alternative title for this blog post: Brendan’s Grand Unified Theory of PANIC!!!!!! Hahaha. Brilliant. -ed.] I had an interesting conversation with Melissa Clouthier (and, chiming in at one point, Doug Mataconis) on Twitter today. It started with me criticizing Melissa for, in my view, propagating patently unfair criticisms about President Obama,… Read more »
Rand Paul is apparently not the only one who thinks the Civil Rights Act was a bad idea
Over 72% of the people who voted in a Fox News online poll think private businesses should be allowed to discriminate however they wish. To say this is appalling is an understatement.
Charts, graphs and bubbles
From the “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but look at this pretty chart” files… Those are stock prices — specifically, the Dow and the S&P 500 — over the last 20 years. Visually, it starts to look a bit like we had 7 or 8 years of genuine growth, followed by Bubble #1 (the tech bubble), then Bubble… Read more »
The deficit, solved
Ross Douthat has solved America’s deficit problem: Good news, America: Using the online budget simulator created by the good people at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, I’ve successfully reduced our deficit to a relatively stable 60 percent of G.D.P. by the year 2018. All it took was means-testing Social Security and raising the retirement age to 68, keeping… Read more »
I still think Dick Blumenthal will surivive
Will my snap prediction that “Richard Blumenthal will survive misstatement-gate, and will be sworn in as Connecticut’s junior senator on January 3, 2011” go down in the pantheon of Great Brendan Loy Political Prognostications, alongisde Rudy Giuliani will win the 2008 GOP nomination and Hillary Clinton “will not win a single primary”? Twenty-four hours later, survey says… “The latest Rasmussen… Read more »
“Ha ha! I can see his arse!”
Dear Lord, I love British people: We live in serious times. … [And] this seriousness is being compounded by an intensifying national determination to behave terribly seriously about it. … This aversion to levity certainly infused the [U.K.] election campaign. But there was a funny bit and most of us missed it. When Gordon Brown got in his car and… Read more »