THE DAILY BLADE: Strong Tea
People either like or dislike strong tea, whereas a weak brew is meh. So too, in politics.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted September 14-15, 2010 finds that the largest percentage say their opinion of a candidate would be influenced if (s)he were tagged as a Tea Partier (70 percent), whereas the smallest percentage say the same for a candidate described as a moderate (42 percent):
If a candidate is described as a “Tea Party member,” 32% see that label as a positive, while 38% hold the opposite view. That’s a net rating of negative six, making it less positive on balance than calling someone a conservative, moderate or progressive.
However, the Tea Party’s negatives are very heavily concentrated among partisan Democrats. Seventy percent (70%) of those in the president’s party say calling someone a member of the Tea Party would be a negative description.
Partisan Republicans like the Tea Party label but not as much as the conservative label. Just 54% of the GOP says calling someone a Tea Party member is a good thing.
Among unaffiliated voters, 35% consider the Tea Party label positive, while 34% say it’s a negative for them. That split decision means the Tea Party label is less popular among unaffiliateds than the term conservative. However, among unaffiliated voters, the Tea Party label is more positive than either progressive or liberal.
According to Rasmussen, one-in-four voters (26 percent) consider themselves Tea Partiers or have close friends or family members who are in sync with those protesting big government and high taxes.
The Stiletto Scoops Dana Milbank (Again)
Feminists and lacto-Nazis insist that breasts are not ornamental orbs, but utile udders that give sustenance to a mewling and puking baby in some mysterious way - no double-blind longitudinal clinical trials have ever been done - that formula cannot. Yet when former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) referred to tits (AKA teats) exactly that way – comparing Social Security to "a milk cow with 310 million tits" – NOW and the Older Women's League demanded that Simpson resign from the bipartisan deficit commission or that President Barack Hussein Obama remove him. The Stiletto is confused.
- Update to “Breasts Are Not Udders” (fifth item), The Stiletto Blog, August 30, 2010
Simpson was merely paraphrasing the satirist H.L. Mencken, who once said FDR regarded the government as "a milk cow with 125 million teats." Tit is a variation of teat, from the Middle English tete, from the Old English titt, from the Middle High German zitze. It's vulgar when referring to a woman's anatomy, but Simpson was talking about a cow.
- “America Has A Cow Over Alan Simpson's Candor On Deficits,” The Washington Post’s often droll but not always original (last item) Dana Milbank, September 5, 2010
In Memoriam
Edwin Newman, January 25, 1919 – August 13, 2010
Comments