"It’s still not clear exactly what did this.”

The FBI briefed the Senate yesterday and today on the progress in the Boston Marathon bombing case, but more questions than answers may have arisen from it.  The Boston Globe quotes multiple sources from within the briefing that the FBI didn’t just get one warning from Russia about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, they got warned repeatedly — [...]

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Be sure to let the FBI know.

He did? We certainly suspect this might be the case, given Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s unusual six-month sojourn to Dagestan and Chechnya, but, er … no one has actually established that as fact. At least judging by media reports, the current case theory postulates that Tsarnaev self-radicalized, and apparently approached bombmaking with the same auto-didactic enthusiasm.  And yet, Secretary [...]

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But he was on the ... welfare list?

First, everyone wondered how Tamerlan Tsarnaev could have left the country without triggering an alarm after a Russian warning to the FBI in 2011 about his radicalization.  Yesterday, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said that Tsarnaev’s travel did set off warning bells, at least when he left.  Last night, though, CNN reported that Tsarnaev had never been on [...]

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Honeymoon over?

A few days ago, I noted that a Reason/Rupe poll had Barack Obama’s approval rating underwater at 47/49, even with a sample that gave Democrats an 11-point edge over Republicans.  At the time, I called it an outlier, as Obama had been enjoying relatively strong approval ratings since the election, but Sean Trende warned me [...]

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Hmmmm.

Interesting. But dubious. Thirty percent of those polled think that most illegal immigrants, with some exceptions, should be deported, while 23 percent believe all illegal immigrants should be deported. Only 5 percent believe all illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the United States legally, and 31 percent want most illegal immigrants to stay… [...]

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Surge.

Like Ed said this morning, you’ll have to wait a few more days for public reaction to be fully priced in. But that doesn’t mean we can’t end a very good week on a hopeful note. President Barack Obama’s lead over challenger Mitt Romney has narrowed to just two percentage points since the Republican’s strong [...]

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"We're not seeing a sort of glimmer, at this point, of a bump."

Not sure how useful this is but I subjected you to an eeyorish “no bounce yet” post about Romney during the convention so I owe you a tentative high-five. Mitt ended up with the most modest possible bump after the GOP shindig ended; maybe this new poll is a sign that O won’t fare any [...]

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Seriously?

For those readers who wonder why I haven’t written about the weekly initial jobless claims, it’s because they haven’t produced any significant news over the last few weeks.  The changes have all been within a range that can best be described as statistical noise.  When dealing with numbers between 360K-380K, a shift of anything under [...]

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Secret no more.

Go figure that, fresh off a Mitt Romney foreign policy tour designed to draw a contrast with O over “strength,” we get a fresh new leak about what The One is doing to kick terrorist and/or dictator ass. This one’s almost as tasty as the “kill list” leak. President Barack Obama has signed a secret [...]

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Complete with leftist media bias!

In last couple of months, two studies have been released showing climate change is expected to have a devastating impact on the East Coast and West Coast of the United States. As reported by Just Facts President Jim Agresti: One study…was published in the journal Nature Climate Change and shows a “recent acceleration” of sea-level [...]

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Obama up 6 ... when only 26% of registered voters are Republican.

At least Reuters/Ipsos was more successful than the WaPo/ABC poll yesterday.  The latter had a D+9 sample but could only muster a tie between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, whereas the former takes a D+5 sample (D+4 when counting leaners) and transforms it into a six-point lead for Obama: President Barack Obama expanded his lead [...]

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Data.

Tomorrow’s the big speech where he plans to ask for more time to turn things around because there have been all sorts of headwinds and Hopenchange takes time and that damned George W. Bush did everything wrong and yadda yadda yadda. Think indies will go for it after this month’s terrible jobs report? New from [...]

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Winning?

I know, I know: “An online poll?!” C’mon, humor me. It’s Friday evening and the news pickins are slim. Besides, I feel a regrettable twinge of vindication in this result. Bloomberg is indeed a loathsome nanny-state tool and I’d never support a ban on big portions, but as I said once before, I do think [...]

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Gap.

There are lots of polls I don’t worry about but I do worry about this one. Likability won’t decide the election but when you like someone you’re apt to give them the benefit of a doubt they don’t always deserve. I’ve always thought, for instance, that that’s a contributing factor in why huge swaths of [...]

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Reuters-Ipsos puts Obama up 4 ... in D+9 sample.

So much for that eight-point lead in the secretly-weighted CNN poll, eh?  CBS gives us a sneak peek at their first general-election poll of the season, in partnership with the New York Times, and finds a dead heat in the mid-40s: Mitt Romney has closed the gap with President Obama among registered voters, a CBS [...]

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Fish, barrel, some assembly required.

Sometimes it’s tough to suss out bias in polling, I grant you.  This is not one of those times.  Reuters leads with a story about Barack Obama’s approval rating jumping back up to 50%: For the first time since early July, more Americans approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing than disapprove, according [...]

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Sorry.

Good news for O, with even a sizable minority of Republicans — 37 percent — backing him. Is this good news too? While the spasm of violence that erupted following the incident on a NATO base in Afghanistan does not appear to have significantly altered Americans’ perspective on the war, 66 percent of those polled [...]

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Lowest level in more than three years.

The US got some good news, albeit qualified, on the job front today from the Department of Labor.  The level of initial jobless claims last week fell to 366,000, the lowest level since a normal recession turned into something historically ugly: In the week ending December 10, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 366,000, [...]

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