Politicians Tests

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U.S. Politicians Testing Results

U.S. Politician Tests Summary - Our U.S. Politicians Political IQ Tests are moderately difficult 12 to 15 question multiple-choice quizzes, each designed to simultaneously test, inform and engage the casual user on the views, political leanings and policy-making of the politician of focus. These tests feature a more than ample time limit (either 25 minutes or 30 minutes), and a question set compiled by randomly selecting from our extensive question databases.

Interesting Washington Links

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In American Politics, Commentary and Analysis

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The Army of Misinformed Martyrs: Commentary on Health Care Reform

While politics often oscillates between being a source of extreme optimism and being a source of tragic disillusionment, it seems that many people in politics are used to such vicissitudes, and are immune to the emotional effects that accompany them. Indeed, I once thought I was capable of abstracting personal feelings from the polemics of the democratic process. Unfortunately, after attending Congressman John Dingell’s August 7th town hall meeting in Michigan, I was dislodged from my emotional indifference to the natural ebb and flow of politics and thrust into a whirlwind of so-called political passion. As I stared blankly at the unruly crowd, which was screaming at the representative who was given no opportunity to answer questions that were posed by interested voters, I observed what seemed to me as a failure of the democratic process.

There’s No Such Thing As Free Emissions Reductions

The American Clean Energy and Security Act that passed in the House and is awaiting approval in the Senate would be a sweeping and revolutionary change in environmental policy unlike anything we have seen since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1963. The bill is so broad and comprehensive in its applications that it has rendered most debates about its merits incomplete and ineffective, as if the two sides pitted against each other have merely been two ships passing. To simplify, the bill attempts to implement four principle policies:

Republican Party Watch: Romney leads Pack, Palin

Last month I examined the current landscape of the Republican leadership, and now, courtesy of the latest Gallup Poll, we transition to a similar topic - the leading candidates for the GOP Presidential Candidate in 2012.

In our previous Gallup Poll, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich had a very slight edge over the rest of the field as the most influential speakers representing the Republican party, but in spite of this neither Limbaugh or Gingrich polled as a particularly serious contender for the GOP nomination in 2012: Romney 26%, Palin 21%, Huckabee 19%, Gingrich 14%.

Latest Poll: Republicans Lack Leader - I Blame McCain

Exactly who speaks for the Republican Party these days? According to the latest Gallup poll, 18% of democrats think Rush Limbaugh is the primary speaker for the Republican Party, while republicans themselves can’t come to more than a 10% consensus for any republican leader. Only a year ago the answer would have been a resounding ‘John McCain.’ But the subsequent political maneuverings of the McCain campaign not only compromised McCain as the present and future leader of the Republican Party, but also left the party without a clear direction, as reflected in this latest poll. Even during the Republican primaries there was a great deal of political division among the republican presidential candidates and the priorities of their voter constituencies - most notably between the Christian base of Mike Huckabee, the Mormon and fiscal bases of Mitt Romney, and the military and moderate republican bases of John McCain.

GM’s Collapse: A Story of Prosperity, Decline and Defeat

Michigan is sad. I hear about it everyday from the family and friends I have who still live there. “It’s a sad day for Michigan,” my mother says nearly every time she calls. “But the weather is nice today,” she concedes. Michigan is sad, as is the country, after GM’s collapse. Indeed, we should not downplay the significance of GM’s apparently ineluctable filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 1 June 2009 - more than a century after GM’s founding on 27 September 1908. It comes as an unsurprising but hard-to-swallow finale to a decades-long decline in market share and profits. Unfortunately, the predictability of GM’s demise, or a comprehensive understanding of why it occurred, does little to soften the blows endured by manufacturers, auto workers and Americans in general as a result of GM’s fall and ultimate collapse.

Just what does this mean for the U.S. economy, already saddled with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and burgeoning government debts? The negative affect of the ensuing layoffs will take time to reveal itself as the loss of industry spreads from its epicenter in Detroit, but when put in the context of the entire U.S. industry sector certain indicators suggest that the actual impact of the GM collapse may not be commensurate with its symbolic impact as a face of industry.

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Posted in A Political Economy, In American Politics | 3 Comments »