A world without nuance is probably much easy[ier] to cover, but it is not our world.
-- Roger Pielke Jr., to Andrew Freedman
Unless you're one of the Fighting 21%, there's a myriad of ways that statement applies. In this case, it comes at the end of a post by Freedman, in which he contemplates one of the most difficult aspects for reporters on his beat: how much or how little do you attribute a given extreme weather event to the overall problem of climate change?
This isn't a thumbsucker or a woe-is-me piece. It's worth a read. To maybe give you some sense of where Freedman is coming from, I came across his blog via John Cole,* who listed Freedman as one of George Will's WaPo colleagues who has taken Will to task for global warming denialism.
* John's piece is about Republican lying in general, and as is true for anything on Balloon Juice, it bears a look. It's not really related to the main point of this post, though.
1 comment:
Of those fighting 21... it's a bit higher. But more important it's not like Dems are 50%, they're at a robust 36.7% to the Republicans 26.4%. And both are trending downwards, with both parties having lost about 3% of their support since the election.Further, Obama's personal popularity is buoying the party's numbers and obscuring the fact that people are not really... liking... what the Democrats who aren't named Obama are doing. For intsance, in Red States like New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire Republicans are resurgent and could topple prominent Dem incumbents.Also if you look at Obama's job approval numbers with all polls included like on RealClearPolitics.com it looks like he's holding his ground. Separate out the polls into just ones that are amongst you know, people who can vote, and people who are likely to vote, and the numbers for Obama appear to be trending down.
This is 3 months and change into the new Administration. It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the mid-term, especially if the Dems can't get a hold of spending, which it appears as if it turns out people actually care about.
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