http://loftylantern.com telepathic, mimetic, and legendary Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:50:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en include wonderful essays by Dharini Bhaskar and Sean Nelson http://loftylantern.com/2008/12/30/new-pieces-on-the-south-wing/ The writers of this site are abandoning it to the wolves, moving to different and hopefully better pastures at TheSouthWing.com. If this was simply a blog, where we attempted to describe what interested us using only our own briefest efforts, then The South Wing will include that, as well as ... http://loftylantern.com/2008/11/02/a-happy-funeral/ There are two categories of polls that often get confused; there are regular polls, and then there are tracking polls. A regular poll asks a thousand voters, say, a question over a period of three or so days, and then puts out the numbers. A tracking poll asks 333 people ... http://loftylantern.com/2008/10/28/tracking-poll-tracking/ National polls are now regularly giving Barack Obama upwards of 50% of the vote, making him the heavy favorite to win the election. Unusually, however, a relatively significant amount of voters are still undecided. At this point in 2004, for example, less than 4% of Americans had not made up ... http://loftylantern.com/2008/10/24/is-the-election-narrowing/ People sometimes ask me - what is the difference between you and Sarah Palin? I'll tell you. I'd never underpay Amy Strozzi like that. http://loftylantern.com/2008/10/24/difference/ Remember everybody talking about how Jews are going Republican? Implying issues of racism and such? Well, not so much. Gallup just came out with a poll showing Jews are backing Obama by a 74-22 margin. For reference, in 2000 Jews broke for Gore by a 79-19 margin, and in 2004 went ... http://loftylantern.com/2008/10/23/jews-trick-everybody-again/ It isn't easy to find bad news for the Democrats. The Senate map looks astonishingly strong for them, with a remarkable event having to occur to keep them from gaining at least 5 seats, and about a 50-50 shot of them gaining 9 seats. Congressional elections are shifting towards them ... http://loftylantern.com/2008/10/20/southern-congressional-map/ The California Teachers Union and SEIU have now invested a combined 1.5 million dollars against Proposition 8, a proposed anti-gay marriage amendment to the California constitution. Granted that the California Teachers' Union isn't exactly the Teamsters and Andy Stern isn't quite John Lewis, but this is still a fascinating development. http://loftylantern.com/2008/10/16/unions-for-gay-rights/ Obama should have hit McCain on his advocacy of Nuclear energy; his talk about reprocessing was strange, shallow, and alarming.  Sure, Nuclear Reprocessing exists, but it doesn't succeed in eliminating nuclear waste. What the process does is to seperate the waste into different components.  Some such as plutonium are used for ... http://loftylantern.com/2008/10/15/mccain-and-nuclear-reprocessing/ Shortly after Taliban-linked operatives attacked a meeting of Pakistani tribal leaders, the tribes have reacted http://loftylantern.com/2008/10/11/the-taliban-can-be-hit-too/