Obama and Pattern Recognition

Pollster.com

Over at TPM, Eric Kleefeld reports on the Gallup Poll released just today.

The new Gallup poll shows the national Democratic race might be really tightening — Hillary's lead is down to the single digits. Here are the numbers, compared to their last poll from two days ago:

Clinton 42% (-2)
Obama 36% (+3)
Edwards 12% (-2)

Only a week ago, Hillary was up by 16 points.

We'll find out soon enough what the impact of Edwards' withdrawal will be, and also where the remaining undecideds will end up.

So the pattern is clear. But is there enough time in our "front-loaded" primary free for all?

Bush and The Road to Ruin

Rob Rogers

Bush Legacy

Click to enlarge

The Frankfurt Stock Exchange's DAX index plummeted 7.2 percent, its steepest one-day decline since Sept. 11, 2001. Fears that the United States might be in a recession sent markets from Germany to India into a tailspin.

Let's see what happens tomorrow when the US markets open. Given the Bush track record, I am not confident.

Sophistry and the Bush Administration

On January 18 Paul Krugman published a column that contains the following quote:

All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.”

Wikipedia elaborates that:

A sophism is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. It might be crafted to seem logical while actually being wrong, or it might use difficult words and complicated sentences to intimidate the audience into agreeing, or it might appeal to the audience's prejudices and emotions rather than logic, like raising doubts towards the one asserting, rather than his assertion.

Seems to me this pretty much describes the entire Bush Administration starting with the stolen election, including misleading the country into invading and occupying Iraq, the unforgivable mishandling of Katrina and now the coming recession.

Longevity and Health Care Spending - Patterns and Outliers

The Big Picture

This graph shows two very interesting things: the US rank in life expectancy relative to other countries and US per capita spending on health care.