And on the eighth day, Olympia Snowe wrung her hands over the “process” …

[ed.note: Our annual survey is now closed; our sincere appreciation to all who participated — jmm.]

Okay, we run our annual surveys here at TPM during one twenty-four hour cycle. We started today at 9:00 AM. So we’re almost 15 hours in and have about 9 hours to go.

As I explained this morning, getting a lot of readers to fill out our survey is key to helping us sell the ads that fund TPM. So if you value TPM, please take just a few minutes and fill out the survey. No data is being collected about individual people. Everything you tell us remains confidential. We’re only collecting demographic data about our readership as a whole. If you haven’t already, please take just a few minutes to fill out our survey and keep TPM alive and thriving.

We sincerely thank you.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that German and Russian authorities are investigating whether executives at Hewlett-Packard paid out millions in bribe money to secure a contract for a “a state-of-the-art computer system designed to provide secure communications for prosecutors throughout Russia.”

The precise dates of the alleged bad acts are not completely clear from the article. But two references in the piece suggest they occurred during the middle months of 2003. That of course would place it during the tenure of now-Senate candidate Carly Fiorina as the company’s CEO (1999-2005).

Though the investigation appears to be centered in Europe, it could trigger an SEC probe since foreign bribery by American companies falls under the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has a new Republican who wants to run against her on the Republican ticket: former Bear Stearns exec David Malpass. He was their chief economist from 2001 to 2008.

If history’s any guide, like about 100 other guys so far, he’ll be bowing out of the race sometime soon.

More seriously, chief economist of Bear Stearns for the seven years before it collapsed? Really?

[ed.note: Our annual survey is now closed; our sincere appreciation to all who participated — jmm.]

As I noted earlier, the primary reason we do our annual survey is to collect data that advertisers want to know about our audience. And the topics and structure of the questions are chosen with that in mind. Still, there’s a lot of information generated that’s just interesting in general. So I thought I’d share some results that caught my attention. Before I get into that, if you haven’t filled out our survey yet, please do. For an explanation of what it’s so important, see this post from earlier today.

And now on to the numbers! Read More

MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan enlists a troop of puppets to explain the case for financial reform.

Around the time Health Care Reform passed I did a post noting that, contrary to a lot of pundit commentary, reform was actually getting more popular, not less. That was true then. But contrary to my expectations, it’s not true now.

Now, I think it’s always important to point out in these cases that the movements are pretty small. What’s more, the Health Care Reform poll data set is particularly problematic since unlike the ‘congressional generic’ or presidential approval numbers, all the pollsters ask slightly different question. Indeed many pollsters actually started phrasing the question differently after Reform actually became law. All that said though, the trend looks like it’s been going south for Health Care Reform since about mid-March.

Click the TPM icon in the graph to see the full-sized graph and individual polls. Read More

Is Mitch McConnell telling me the Republicans have teamed up with the big banks to put a stop to any more big bank bailouts?

[ed.note: Our annual survey is now closed; our sincere appreciation to all who participated — jmm.]

First, thanks so everyone who’s filled out our 2010 reader survey.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, I would really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes of your time to fill out our survey. It’s quick, totally confidential. And it helps us sell the ads which keep TPM online and thriving.

If you want to hear more about why this is important and how much it helps us, please read my post from this morning. If you’re convinced and ready to give us a few minutes of your time to help TPM, please click right here. Thank you very much. We really appreciate it.

[ed.note: Our annual survey is now closed; our sincere appreciation to all who participated — jmm.]

When we do our annual surveys, readers are always able to point out blind spots we had in putting it together. To be clear, the survey is primarily aimed at compiling data of interest to advertisers. So when we put it together we’re not thinking necessarily of what we’d be interested in knowing as what we know advertisers are interested in knowing. And so we’ll often model to the questions they’re used to seeing answers to. So, whatever blind spot we were using, last year a number of readers pointed out that in the married/single/divorced question, we had no option for people who would like to be married but live in states that don’t recognize their right to marry. So this year, we added, “Domestic Partnership/Civil Union” as an option along with “Married”, “Single, Never Married”, “Divorced” and “Widowed.”

5.7% of our readers say they’re in a domestic partnership or civil union. And that percentage has held quite stable throughout the day.

Haven’t filled out our survey yet? We’d really appreciate it if you would. Just click right here. Click here to find out why filling out our survey is so important and how the information is kept totally confidential.