Worth a thousand words
I normally use visuals only sparingly, but there are cases where they can be quite revealing.
First up, this graph has been posted on several sites already, but it's remarkably telling. It shows US job losses for each month from December 2007 through January 2010 -- Bush's last year and Obama's first year, basically:
(Source here.) It's not difficult to see why this has become known as the "bikini graph". Jobs, of course, have historically done better under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones.
Next, a chart illustrating views of people in foreign countries on the US political leadership in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009:
(Source here, with breakdowns by region.) Anti-Americanism is a phenomenon with rather complex roots, and whichever country is dominant in the international system is bound to attract some irreducible minimum of resentment no matter what it does, but the change in administrations has clearly ameliorated the problem to a startling degree.
Finally, one of the most-debated questions in politics right now is whether Obama and Congressional Democrats should keep trying to pass health-care reform. The popular will seems clear:
(Source here.) Two-thirds of the population want to see this get done. Even 42% of Republicans do. For legislators worried about re-election, pushing on will clearly gain more votes than it will lose -- in fact, it will probably lose very few, since the 55% of Republicans and 39% of independents who favor giving up is probably composed mostly of people who would not vote for a Democrat anyway.
First up, this graph has been posted on several sites already, but it's remarkably telling. It shows US job losses for each month from December 2007 through January 2010 -- Bush's last year and Obama's first year, basically:
(Source here.) It's not difficult to see why this has become known as the "bikini graph". Jobs, of course, have historically done better under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones.
Next, a chart illustrating views of people in foreign countries on the US political leadership in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009:
(Source here, with breakdowns by region.) Anti-Americanism is a phenomenon with rather complex roots, and whichever country is dominant in the international system is bound to attract some irreducible minimum of resentment no matter what it does, but the change in administrations has clearly ameliorated the problem to a startling degree.
Finally, one of the most-debated questions in politics right now is whether Obama and Congressional Democrats should keep trying to pass health-care reform. The popular will seems clear:
(Source here.) Two-thirds of the population want to see this get done. Even 42% of Republicans do. For legislators worried about re-election, pushing on will clearly gain more votes than it will lose -- in fact, it will probably lose very few, since the 55% of Republicans and 39% of independents who favor giving up is probably composed mostly of people who would not vote for a Democrat anyway.
posted by Infidel753 at 4:19 AM
2 Comments:
The thing I don't get is, if the Republicans and the Blue Dogs got behind health care, once the reality of actually having health care for everyone sunk in, the public would love the heck out of it. The only people that would hate it would be the insurance company executives.
It's amazing how ordinary people who would get so much benefit out of having health care can be convinced to grab their misspelled signs and go marching around screeching against it. This is why it's bad to be easily led, the crap they're believing from their corporate-bought representatives is so highly illogical, yet they lap it up like it was, I dunno, religion or something. Gah.
The only people that would hate it would be the insurance company executives.
.....and the problem begins to come into focus, specifically in the form of whose signatures are on those Congressmen's bribe checks -- I mean, "campaign contributions".
Of course once HCR was enacted it would eventually become a beloved sacred cow like Social Security. The naysayers' only hope is to stop it from ever being enacted.
As for teabagger gullibility, don't forget all the surveys that show ranges like 10%-30% of the population believe in ghosts, bigfoot, reincarnation, faith healing, etc. -- the National Enquirer demographic. I think what we're looking at here is basically the same bunch of people in a different context.
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