Posted on 04/21/2011 10:54:32 PM PDT by neverdem
As of this writing, the Intrade futures markets give the Democrats a 62 percent chance of holding the White House in 2012, essentially unchanged from a peak of 63 percent a month ago. Washington conventional wisdom seems to agree. Politico's Roger Simon opined a few days ago that "I don't think Barack Obama will have a hard time defeating his Republican opponent in 2012, barring a financial meltdown or a major foreign crisis." David Brooks similarly asserted recently that "Obama is very likely to be re-elected."
This is the first of a two-part series to provide a more thorough examination of the presidential campaign that is about to unfold. It concludes that the results are far from foreordained. This does not mean that the president will necessarily lose, or that he is even favored to lose. Right now I believe his chances of success are roughly 50-50, with perhaps more upside on the losing end. But none of the arguments for why he should be considered a strong favorite withstand scrutiny.
Most of the pro-Obama analysis rests on six arguments. I will look at three today, and three in Part 2.
Argument 1: We don't usually turn out our presidents.
Pundits love historical factoids. Here is a superficially...
--snip--
These early polls have little predictive power for next November. But they do offer a snapshot of today, and they aren't indicative of a dominant president. As I've noted before, this approval rating obscures a much deeper disapproval on policy matters, suggesting that his support is quite soft. We see this again in the Pew poll cited above. The president's approval rating is 47 percent, but his approval rating on the economy is 39 percent, on military action in Libya is 41 percent, and on the budget deficit is 33 percent...
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Did you read the last paragraph in the excerpt? Obama’s support is softer than a pillow. Check the links in comment# 58, if you please.
Reading various threads on this forum alone, if I had to lay $ down on a ‘12 bet, I’d go with Obama. Conservatives just can’t seem to get it together. Palin’s not electable. Trump’s a clown. Romney’s a RINO. blah blah blah.
Obama is as vulnerable as it gets, but the Dems and their cohorts in the MSM will be united behind him. Conservatives can’t even seem to agree that today is Friday. And, everyone seems to think that THEY are the very portrait of conservatism. Anyone with a slightly more liberal take a single issue is a RINO for whom they will NEVER vote.
I fear ideological purity could give us 4 more years of Brackets. And we will have absolutely no one to blame but ourselves.
Thanks neverdem.
I should have saved it then. I’ll try to save it now.
You need to go though the page, find all the relative URLs, and change them to absolute URLs by prepending to each the host name of site which hosts the page you are working with.
The problem arises when you attempt to post on FR HTML code excerpted from a page hosted somewhere else. E.g., if you go to the Google homepage, there is a link towards the bottom entitled About Google. If you inspect the source code for the page (in Firefox, select the link text and the select View Selection Source), you will see:
<a href="/intl/en/about.html">About Google</a>
That won't work if you copy and paste it as is into a post on FR. However, if you first run the following script against the Google homepage, the link will be made absolute and suitable for use on any site:
javascript: var links = document.links; for (var x = 0; x < links.length; ++x) links[x].href = links[x].href; var pix = document.images; for (var x = 0; x < pix.length; ++x) pix[x].src = pix[x].src; void 0;
What that does is, run through the links and images on the current page and change the link associated with each to absolute (if it wasn't already absolute). At first glance, assigning something to itself would appear not to do anything. However, when you retrieve the URL from a link or image object, the object provides you with the absolute version, even if it's keeping a relative URL internally. So, the end result of the above is to assign the absolute version of the URL to each link and image.
Now, the obvious question is, how do you conveniently run that code on a page you are about to excerpt? The answer is to house the code in a bookmarklet. I'd put one here, except FR filters out JavaScript. However, there is an Absolutify bookmarklet on this page. To install it, drag the Absolutify link to your Bookmarks Toolbar. Then, when on a page you want to excerpt, click your Absolutify link before using View Selection Source or similar. If you do that on the Google homepage and then select the source for the About Google link, it should now read:
<a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/about.html">About Google</a>
That link should work from any site.
Of course, there are other challenges in transferring HTML. They mainly have to with the heavy use of style sheets to define a page's appearance. The basic HTML tags work on FR, but FR filters out CSS even if you manage to copy it. So, you may have to approximate the original page's appearance by inserting some basic tags. E.g., a page might contain something like this:
<div class="sectionHeading">Early Life</div>
The identifier sectionHeading
refers to a style sheet specification somewhere that details exactly what font face, size, weight and color to use for section headings. To put that in a post on FR, you'd have to settle for an approximation of the original appearance, for instance using an H3 tag or similar.
No Matter What
By Dr. Walter Williams
Can President Obama be defeated in 2012? No. He can’t. ...
If that prediction were actually written by Dr. Williams, it might merit a second thought. However, it seems, he didn't write it!
That's my usual custom, but there are times when I find dozens of relative links in a single text.
Wasn't there a way to save the webpage to a new file, and then retrieve it after one or two other commands with all the relative links converted to absolute.
You sort of lost me with the rest of your reply, but thanks anyway. I appeciate all those key strokes.
Ws need to draft Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin who just made the rats go nuts.
The rats put everthing they had into the election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but Prosser won anyway.
Let Walker be the face of the Tea Party, and we'll keep the majority of the independents vote.
You can save the page to a disk file. I tried that in one or two cases before inventing the bookmarklet, which is what I've used since.
If you save a page as "Web Page, Complete", it will save the HTML to a file and copy the images, etc., into a folder named after the HTML file. If you look inside the saved page, you will see that the links have been made absolute. However, the image URLs now all point into the page's companion disk folder, which means the image tags are no good for posting.
An alternative is to save the page as "Web Page, HTML Only". That leaves the links and image URLs unchanged. However, then you need a way to make the relative ones absolute without doing a lot of work. A possibility might be a global change in your favorite text editor. E.g., you could have your editor change every occurrence of href="/ to href="http://www.somewhere.com/. And similarly for src="/.
However, using text editors to make global changes can lead to unexpected results. I find it easier to click the bookmarklet, then View Selection Source, then copy what I want out of the source window and modify it as needed, the relative URLs having already been fixed by the script in the bookmarklet. For difficult cases, a text editor might come in handy to clean up the HTML, but usually I just paste directly into the posting window.
Thank you again!
I respect Dr. Williams, however, I wonder what a wildcard like Marco Rubio or Alan West would do to the ticket?
If the top of the ticket is not Mr. Excitement, we could add some by tapping one of the above.
Really? Sure, he's a hopeless clown. He's worse than that. But the problem is that the Republicans have to run someone. That more than evens things out. Without a total economic collapse--and that's distinctly probable--I think he wins.
“I respect Dr. Williams, however, I wonder what a wildcard like Marco Rubio or Alan West would do to the ticket?”
Yes; I don’t necessarily agree with Williams’ article, especially after the 2010 election results. Rubio might be good. Alan West would, too, but I doubt that another black candidate would have much success after the the damage done by Hussein. It’s true that race should not be a factor, but many people don’t judge a person on a case-by-case basis, so race will always be in the mix.
In any case, the current non-Hussein slate is dismal: Trump, Huckabee, Romney, Gingrich. We pray every night that God will send us a viable candidate.
Rubio has ties to the racist organization La Raza. Besides that he is NOT ELIGIBLE TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT.
MARCO RUBIO IS NOT A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN.
Hasn’t this been categorically established as a hoax put on by MoveOn.org?
This one refers to the previous site:
http://www.patriotactionnetwork.com/profiles/blogs/what-dr-walter-williams-says
Has anyone taken the time to verify this with Dr. Williams himself. Is it real?
Mitch Daniels?
Another establishment RINO with the charisma of Bob Dole.
No way and no thanks!
Thank You for posting that link. I really was incredulous at this article/thread.
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