“Clearly, some observers fear ordinary Americans more than they do terrorists; they fret more over how dangerously unintelligent and hateful Yanks will respond to bombings than they do over the bombings themselves. But where is this Islamophobic mob? Where are these marauding Muslim-haters undergoing a post-Boston freakout? They are a figment of liberal observers’ imaginations.”
Finally catching up on work Andrew Breitbart and Lee Stranahan were doing three years ago, The New York Times finally discovered that there was massive fraud in the Pigford “black farmer settlement, namely hundred of millions of dollars going to people who had never farmed in their life for “discrimination” by the Department of Agriculture.
Walter Russell Mead on the Wreck of the Euro. “Meanwhile everything in Europe gets worse. As we’ve said before, with the exception of communism itself, the euro has been the biggest economic catastrophe to befall the continent (and the world) since the 1930s. Politicians in Europe thought they were living in a post-historical period in which mistakes didn’t really matter all that much. They were horribly wrong, and the wreck of the euro is blighting lives and embittering spirits on a truly staggering scale.” Quibble: $500,000 won’t just buy you “a pretty nice house;” in most of the country, it will buy you mansion.
Denmark rethinks welfare. “Denmark’s long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions of the country people without jobs now outnumber those with them.”
“If Maureen Dowd’s evisceration manqué of President Obama’s gun control strategy in the New York Times is any indication, Ms. Dowd is in the wrong line of work. She doesn’t understand American politics. She doesn’t know how votes are gained and lost, she doesn’t know what presidents do or understand what powers they have, and above all she doesn’t understand how politicians think.” On the plus side, Dowd did say that Obama “still has not learned how to govern.”
Max Baucus to retire. “Mr. Baucus is the sixth Democrat since the start of the year to opt not to run for re-election in 2014, following Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey.”
Funny what 4+ years of Obama has done for Bush43’s image. “Among registered voters, his approval rating today is equal to President Obama’s, at 47 percent.”
“Kerry possesses neither principle nor expertise, and so the odds of him saying something both daft and morally bankrupt are always high.”
Larry Kudlow: “Mitt Romney politely cleaned Barack Obama’s clock tonight. A lethargic and at times tired looking President Obama was out-hustled, out-facted, out-energized, and out-informed by Former Governor Mitt Romney.”
And Jim Treacher has still more. “I’m glad the Greatest President Ever spent so much time stressing the importance of education, because he just got schooled.”
The Washington Postcalled Romney “well prepared and aggressive.”
Florida New York Times/Quinnipiac 2012 sample: 36% Democrat, 27% Republican, 33% Independent.
Each party’s share only shifts a few percentage points, but the overall split goes from D+3 to D+9.
One again, the New York Times thinks Republicans are too stupid to figure out the con. If they’re going to be that absurdly biased, why not just cut out the middleman and poll Obama for America staffers directly?
Remember: The business model of The New York Times is to envelop liberals in a soft, warm, comforting cocoon of reassurance that their ideas and leaders are popular. You saw this in 2010, when it dangerously blinded them to the coming Republican wave until too late. The same patterns is repeating itself this year.
Remember how how incredibly tight the 1980 election was? How Ronald Reagan managed to edge Jimmy Carter at the last minute despite losing Texas and New York?
Probably not, mainly because that didn’t happen. But as Jeffrey Lord’s story makes clear, that was the narrative the New York Times was pushing most of the fall, and they had “polls” to back it up.
In the pantheon of lies, damn lies, and statistics, polls aren’t even as valid as statistics. At this point, polls by the usual MSM suspects (NYT, PPP, CBS, MS/NBC, Time, Newsweek, NPR, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, just to name a few) aren’t designed to gauge the race, they’re designed to encourage Democrats and discourage Republicans. They are, as Lord notes and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee admitted to Ed Rollins, offering up “in kind contributions” to the Democrats.
So let’s take a brief look at the many ways in which the MSM is distorting polls for the benefit of Obama and the Democrats.
Dick Morris (who knows a thing or two about polling) thinks the idea that an Obama victory is in the offing is bunk. “All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.” He also notes that even the skewed polls show Obama at less than 50%, and “the undecided vote always goes against the incumbent.”
By one analysis, pollsters are oversampling Democrats by an average of 6.1%.
Jay Cost notes that “polls that do a poor job of differentiating enthusiastic non-voters from enthusiastic voters are going to overestimate Obama’s margin.”
Every week you see the media going to bat for Obama, and every week we see more evidence of lack of enthusiasm on the part of Democrats compared to 2008. 2010 did happen, no matter how much the media would like to pretend it didn’t. The Tea Party hasn’t gone away, nor suddenly decided that they like Obama’s free-spending ways after all. The fundamentals of our ailing economy and staggering unemployment haven’t gone away either. And remember: Republicans now outnumber Democrats in party identification.
There’s a lot better chance that this election’s results will look like 1980 than that they will look like 2008.
Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.
As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.
I had a maid service come clean my house in advance of a family event I’m hosting this weekend. It’s amazing the difference between “Bachelor Clean” and “Clean Clean.” It’s almost as big as the difference between “Obama Smart” and “Actually Smart”…
Rick Perry tears into “Big Government Conservatism.”
Comptroller Susan Combs denies a wind farm subsidy. Personally I’d end all “green subsidies.” Let the market pick energy winners and losers, not government.
If we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things.
After blowing over half a billion dollars in taxpayer funds, Obama’s green energy crony capitalism favorites are asking the bankruptcy judge to let them pay bonuses to remaining employees. And that’s on top of the hefty bonuses they paid executives right before declaring bankruptcy. Your tax dollars at work…
Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.
[snip]
The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency’s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests.
[snip]
Another former agency official, who asked not to be identified speaking publicly about delicate operations, said, “My rule was that if we are going to launder money, we better show results. Otherwise, the D.E.A. could wind up being the largest money launderer in the business, and that money results in violence and deaths.”
Those are precisely the kinds of concerns members of Congress have raised about a gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious
I suppose it’s progress of a sort when even The New York Times realizes something went horribly wrong in Fast and Furious. And even if the money laundering program was working, what chance does it have now that the cover has been blown?
Does anyone actually believe the Obama Administration has an effective, coherent plan to take down the cartels?
What next? Will we find out that U.S. agents actually carried out cartel assassinations?
Also this:
The former officials said that federal law enforcement agencies had to seek Justice Department approval to launder amounts greater than $10 million in any single operation. But they said that the cap was treated more as a guideline than a rule, and that it had been waived on many occasions to attract the interest of high-value targets.
If Fast and Furious is any guide, those “hundreds of thousands of dollars” will turn out to be tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.
The New York Timesdiscovers Ted Cruz. It’s generally a solid piece, though I do want to quibble with one part, even though it’s an opposition citation: “Mr. Dewhurst’s aides say that unlike Mr. Rubio, Mr. Cruz has been unable to translate the national attention into big increases in fund-raising and polls. While Mr. Cruz has raised $2.8 million to Mr. Dewhurst’s $2.64 million, Mr. Dewhurst has been in the race only since July.” Two points: 1.) Cruz is actually ahead of where Marco Rubio was in at this stage of the 2009-2010 election cycle, and 2.) Cruz’s National Review cover appearance (the most important part of that national attention) was just hitting newsstands at the very end of the Q3 fundraising period, so I wouldn’t expect to see any real fundraising bump until the Q4 numbers are released in January.
The Texas Tribune talks about David Dewhurst’s Ivory Tower strategy, which he seems to have gone back to. Dewhurst had this to say in his defense: “I’m not conservative enough, some say. They don’t know me. When they get to know me, they’ll know I am.” With all due respect, Lt. Governor, you’ve been in your current office since January of 2003, and many complaints come from conservatives in Texas. The problem is not lack of familiarity.
He also continues to garner hit pieces from the keyboard of The Dallas Morning News‘s Robert T. Garrett, who wonders at length why Cruz actually wants to be a conservative and dares to call out the Republican Senate leadership, rather than being one of those get-along-to-go-along Republicans DSM and other MSM outlets favor. Garrett asks several myopic questions, one of which I’ll actually answer for him: “Won’t opponents David Dewhurst and Tom Leppert say he’s undermining his effectiveness for Texas?” No, because whatever their other flaws, Leppert and Dewhurst both realize they’re trying to win the approval of Republican voters, not Dallas Morning News reporters. These days, approval from those two groups bear an obviously inverse relationship…
The Southern Political Report offers up a hefty does of Consensus Opinion on the race. If I had more time, I’d like to dissect the “People With Hispanic Surnames Can’t Win Statewide Republican Races” myth, which is based on precisely one data point: Victor Carrillo’s loss to David Porter in the 2010 Railroad Commissioner race. Even that same year, Eva Guzman beat Rose Vela for Supreme Court place 9. Moreover, it ignores the fact that Carrillo himself beat out the very-anglo-named Robert Butler in 2004. Carrillo lost in 2010 because he ran a very lackluster campaign and because Porter’s answers to the League of Woman Voters survey seemed more conservative, especially given the politically correct nods Carrillo gave to environmentalism and alternative energy in his answers, which was the deciding factor for me personally. However, I do get the impression that one factor did unfairly impact Carrillo’s campaign: the unpopularity of Rick Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor proposal, which, even though the improperly named Railroad Commission had jack all to do with, probably did marginally hurt his candidacy because he was the incumbent.
Cruz has another low-budget animation aimed at Dewhurst. I don’t think it’s as effective as the Chupacabra spot, but I think these cheap Internet animations are very cost effective for building awareness.
No Ricardo Sanchez news this week, but he’s probably still recovering from his house fire, so I’ll give him some slack this time around.
Mickey Kaus: “Why do these Democrats tell pollsters that immigrants are a burden because they ‘take our jobs’? Maybe because they do. Just a thought.”
The New York Times gets the Texas Senate Race, well, not quite right. “So far, only Republicans have declared in the Senate race.” False. Political neophyte Sean Hubbard has declared for the Democratic nomination, and has been filing his campaign financing reports with the FEC. “At least seven Republicans are vying for the seat being vacated by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.” Technically true but incomplete; there are five declared major candidates (Ted Cruz, Tom Leppert, Michael Williams, Roger Williams, and Elizabeth Ames Jones), three declared longshot candidates (Glenn Addison, Andrew Castanuela, and Lela Pettinger), one withdrawn candidate who filed her wind-down report with the FEC (Florence Shapiro) and one undeclared potential frontrunner (David Dewhurst). Saying “At least seven” makes me wonder exactly who you’re counting…
The Race to Replace KBH on Senate candidate Twitter antagonists. “Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite them/And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum…”
More on Leppert’s SEIU support from the horse-mouth, SEIU Texas political coordinator Shannon Perez in the lefty Dallas Observer:
“The Republican primary voters of the state of Texas need to know the truth about Tom Leppert.
When he first ran for Mayor, as a moderate and a supporter of working men and women, he was pro-SEIU, pro-public employees organizing, pro-collective bargaining.
So committed to these ideals was Tom, that he vigorously pursued SEIU’s endorsement.
So committed to these ideals was Tom, that he came to our union organizing launch in the Water Department — encouraging folks to join SEIU. So committed to these ideals was Tom, he frequently threw on an SEIU T-shirt and came to our union hall…Tom even signed an SEIU membership card!
Tom, Tom, Tom, it makes it hard to take your Second-Coming-of-Ronald-Reagan rhetoric seriously when stuff like this keeps tumbling out of your closet. Is it too late for you to switch to the Democratic Primary? You’ve already got a huge lead over Sean Hubbard…