FIRST BOX OFFICE: Anti-Obama Movie #1

By NIKKI FINKE | Friday August 24, 2012

 

FRIDAY 2 PM: The anti-Obama movie 2016 Obama’s America went into wider release around America today and is opening right now in first place at the domestic box office. That’s quite a feat since the Rocky Mountain Pictures political documentary is still playing in only 1,090 North American theaters – or about 1/3 as many theaters as big-budget actioner The Expendables 2 (3,355 theaters). But these political documentaries like faith-based films are frontloaded. The Stallone picture from Millenium/Lionsgate is still


expected to end the weekend #1 and should top the box office tonight. And, based on matinee trends, 2016 Obama’s America looks to gross $1.2M-$1.7M Friday for a $3.7M-$5.0M weekend. But right now it has grossed $700,000 today compared to $300,000 for The Expendables 2. Its new cume after this weekend could make it the #1 conservative documentary (ahead of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’s $7.7M). The success of the anti-Obama pic is based on big pre-sales leading into the Republican National Convention August 27-30, and exhibitors are reporting busloads of filmgoers arriving at theaters around the country in pre-organized trips. It also employed much of the same marketing techniques used to garner attention and support for faith-based films, understandable since the audience is overlapping. Its campaign included advertising nationally over the past two weeks on talk radio and cable news channels including Fox News Channel, A&E, History and MSNBC.

 

 

La web del Departamento de Estado se convierte en “el mundo según Obama”

Helle C. Dale

El Departamento de Estado continúa editando su página web en pro de un relato de lo que ocurre en el mundo pero girando alrededor de Barack Obama.
Como informó el analista de la Fundación Heritage Jim Roberts, el Departamento de Estado cambió hace tres meses el formato de una de sus mejores realizaciones, las Notas de Fondo país por país, por un formato supuestamente más acorde con los tiempos que corren. Las Notas de Fondo han sido usadas durante décadas por diplomáticos, investigadores, educadores y estudiantes. Estas proporcionan información en profundidad de una forma fácilmente entendible, cubriendo la historia, la economía, la demografía, la cultura, la política y muchas cuestiones más.
Con escasa o ninguna promoción (se podría decir que con escasa o ninguna advertencia), fueron sustituidas en mayo por las denominadas Hojas Informativas, centradas exclusivamente en la actual política de actuación de Estados Unidos, es decir, la política de actuación de la administración Obama.
La decisión fue tomada por la Oficina de Asuntos Públicos tras una investigación aleatoria llevada a cabo a través de state.gov, que recoge automáticamente la información sobre las visitas a la página web. Un responsable del Departamento de Estado comento a la Fundación Heritage que:

El Departamento trabaja continuamente para mantener el ritmo de nuestro mundo cada vez más digital. Como gran parte de la información de la serie de las Notas de Fondo mostraba una información disponible en otras páginas web (que no era el caso cuando las Notas de Fondo se desarrollaron por primera vez para ser impresas, hace 30 años), el Departamento actualizó el formato para centrarse en áreas en las que podría proporcionar una información única. Estas hojas informativas sobre países con un nuevo formato están más centradas en los aspectos de las relaciones de Estados Unidos con cada país en particular.

Mantener el ritmo del mundo digital es una cosa. De hecho, es un objetivo importante y loable. Sin embargo, cambiar el contenido de una página web del Estado, es otra bien distinta. Aunque el nuevo formato ciertamente describe el estado actual de las relaciones bilaterales entre Estados Unidos y el resto de países del mundo, no refleja las relaciones mantenidas en el pasado y de ninguna manera posee la profundidad de información disponible en las bien redactadas y detalladas Notas de Fondo de años anteriores, disponibles ahora sólo en forma de archivo. READ MORE

 

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Morning Jay: How to Read the Polls

Aug 24, 2012 • By JAY COST

       

In every presidential cycle, there is a debate about partisan identification in polling. Conservatives complain about too few Republicans being sampled; pollsters, journalists, and liberals respond by saying it is inappropriate to weigh polls by party identification.

What to make of all this?

The primary issue relates to the population that polls are sampling. There are several populations to choose from, and we can conceive of this as a series of concentric circles.

The idea here is that each circle represents a different population that can be sampled – but with a twist. The adult population includes all other sub-populations, the registered voter population is smaller than the adult population but includes likely and actual voters, and so on. And of course we cannot poll the actual voters until after they have voted!

Each population is worth polling, albeit for different questions. For instance, if you want a gauge of “consumer confidence,” you naturally sample the adult population. If you want a measure of how voters think about the state of the economy, a poll of adults would not be your best bet.

The reason that polls become a partisan football is that the further out on the circles you move, the more Democratic the poll usually gets. Likely voter polls usually have fewer Democrats than registered voter polls, which have fewer Democrats than adult polls.

Thus, the conservative case against “oversampling” Democrats is not that a pollster has included more Democrats than he should have in his sample, but that the population he is sampling has more Democrats than will come out to vote on Election Day.

This is how pollsters can be honest brokers, employing best practices, and still produce polls that overestimate the Democratic standing.

So what is the solution? At first blush one might conclude that the best approach is just to move inward through the circles – from registered voters to likely voters. Yet this approach does not necessarily produce a clearer picture of the ultimate electorate. We are still quite far from Election Day and a large portion of the voting public has yet to engage, meaning that those polls could still be more Democratic than the actual electorate (or even more Republican)

Absent some panacea, we have to approach the polls with prudence. Above all, we have to remember that the population we care most about – the actual voters – cannot be polled. So, all polls must be examined with caution.

We also have to keep history in mind. Over the last quarter century, party identification on Election Day has actually been quite stable in presidential elections.

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