Category: Da Tech Guy

Cheryl Voted for Obama in 2008, But …

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. . . this time in New Hampshire? Not so much:

Governor Romney challenged each member of the crowd to speak to one Obama voter to convince them to change their minds this time around.
The visuals were excellent and it seemed hard work of the volunteers paid off. My interviews after the event suggested an energized crowd, but the most significant moment was an interview with a newly retired schoolteacher named Cheryl from Nashua New Hampshire.
Cheryl was an Obama voter, a former teacher who had never gone to a Romney event before. She left as a Romney voter. I asked her per, Gov Romney’s challenge, what she would say to a fellow 2008 Obama voter to persuade them to change their vote her answer was telling:
“All they have to do is listen carefully, there is so much negativity and there is no message in negativity.”
Her dissatisfaction, more than any successfully staged event is the greatest danger to the election prospects of this administration.

Read the rest of Da Tech Guy’s column at the Examiner.

DaTechGuy Was With Mitt In Bow, NH

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by Smitty

Da Tech Guy brings you Fedora on the ground reporting from NH. The Romney event was solemn, beginning with the invocation:Lord rest the victims, strengthen the survivors, and point toward justice for the perpetrator.
Mitt sounds truly Presidential here:

In Florida, President Obama:

“Even as we learn how this happened and who’s responsible, we may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings like this,” Obama said. “Such violence, such evil is senseless. It’s beyond reason. But while we will never know fully what causes somebody to take the life of another, we do know what makes life worth living.”
“I know many of you came here today for a campaign event,” Obama continued at the event in Fort Myers. “I was looking forward to having a fun conversation with you about some really important matters we face as a country, and the differences between myself and my opponent in this election. But this morning, we woke up to news of a tragedy that reminds us of all the ways that we are united as one American family.”

Thanks, Pete: even on a tough day like this one, you’re a champ.

Update: Da Tech Guy’s full post here.

Axis Of Fedora Puts Another Two Under The Brim

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by Smitty

Yesterday at the Barack Obama Elizabeth Warren channeling (quotation is from Roanoke, but I doubt they reloaded the teleprompter) the Axis of Fedora enrolled a couple of new members, joining the ranks of SWAC Girl and Fishersville Mike. Welcome aboard, Marooned in Marin

and some guy named Aaron Worthing.

The Axis of Fedora respects the individual privacy policies of members. Not everyone is comfortable with their face and name being bandied about on the ‘net. Now get your doggone blog on, guys!

Update: Daily Pundit points out some of the ambiguities of the English language.

Zilla On Da Tech Guy’s Show

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by Smitty

As fortune would have it, I’m off to a retirement ceremony for my boss last year in Afghanistan, so I shan’t call in and harass. Nevertheless, the details are here, and you will be energized by taking in Pete’s show, which I can attest comes in just fine over the internet.

Also on the radio tomorrow is Valley of the Shadow. Check him out on the left coast!

I Keep Saying: “People Don’t Scale”

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by Smitty

Da Tech Guy catches up on Brett Kimberlin and Wisconsin, and makes the following observation:

With Wisconsin looking horrible and the National election starting to show signs of the cracks that have been obvious for a year the party has to go all in to keep 2012 from being a rout that shatters them on both a national and a state level.
The problem You can’t go “all in ” without the activists, and with the party as far left as it now is the activists are the people doing the very things that make the democrats unelectable.

You might be tempted to think that by having a representative government, we aggregate our individual wisdom and, as a society, make decisions that are orders of magnitude wiser than we would as individuals.

The behavior of the Left, and our government as a whole, seems to put that idea to rest. Instead, we’ve arrived at a place where even passing a budget, much less balancing the legislative joke that the budget had become, is “like, way too hahrd, dude”.

I submit that government idiocy is like a sine wave. We’re (hopefully) bottoming out now. If we learn anything from all this, a good lesson may be that secular organizations, political parties, and governments are simply not the places to go looking for human redemption. At best, these entities can minimize and stabilize the corruption present in every human heart. Hopefully, the current crop of Lefties represent the worst.

Let’s hear it for the Constitution and enumerated powers, shall we?

Update: Ace offers “People Don’t Scale, EU edition”.

Distraction Tactic Backfires: Romney Gains in Polls After Obama Gay Shift

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Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign strategy could be summarized in four words: “It’s Obama’s Economy, Stupid.”

Romney and his aides have made clear that they regard every other issue as a distraction from what polls — as well as common sense — indicate as the main concern of American voters: Jobs, the economy and the explosion of deficit spending under the Obama administration.

So when the news cycle last week was dominated by President Obama’s announcement of his support for same-sex marriage, this was viewed by Republicans as yet another attempt to distract voters from the economy — and thus, strategically, as another “win” for Team Obama.

Yet the first polls reflecting public reaction to the president’s endorsement of gay marriage show the move has, at least so far, backfired on the White House. A CBS/New York Times poll taken Friday through Sunday shows Romney leading Obama 46% to 43%, whereas a CBS/NYT poll taken April 13-17 showed the race a tie at 46%. This result verifies polling by Rasmussen Reports showing Romney moving ahead. Obama has clearly lost support since a month ago, and the New York Times article indicates voters are starting to see through the president’s motives:

Most Americans suspect that President Obama was motivated by politics, not policy, when he declared his support for same-sex marriage, according to a new poll released on Monday, suggesting that the unplanned way it was announced shaped public attitudes.

(Via Memeorandum.) Examining details of the latest poll, Allahpundit at Hot Air suggests “that some people who would otherwise support [Obama’s] shift on gay marriage have been turned off because he’s been so transparently cynical and opportunistic about it.”

There is also the possibility that the gay shift may undermine support for Obama among some socially conservative black voters. Yesterday we reported that Obama’s gay position was condemned by Texas pastor Dwight McKissic, who supported Obama in 2008. And Peter Ingemi’s suggestion that the “historic” Newsweek cover — “The First Gay President” — could unintentionally yield an anti-Obama undercurrent is not as far-fetched as it may seem, Ed Driscoll says.

UPDATE: “We’re Not as Stupid as Barack Obama Thinks,” says The American Spectator‘s Ross Kaminsky, but Democrats may be that stupid:

Despite the issue not working so far, Democrats are doubling down, with 17 Senate Democrats (actually 16 Democrats plus socialist Bernie Sanders) asking the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to stop refusing green cards to foreign gay “spouses” of Americans.

Hispanic voters are going to love that one, huh?

 


 

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Two Cheers for Katy Conrad!

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John Hindraker thought it was “insane” for Katy Conrad of CBS News to contact Koch Industries, inquiring about the claim by MSNBC and other liberals that the Koch brothers were paying for George Zimmerman’s legal defense in the Trayvon Martin case.

Pete Da Tech Guy comes to Katy Conrad’s defense, saying that at least she checked it out and didn’t run the story, and I agree.

Katy Conrad did her job. If Ed Schultz is going to permit Karen Finney and Van Jones to lie about the Koch brothers on MSNBC, other news organizations are obligated to check out the facts, which Conrad did, to her credit. While Koch Industries lawyer Mark Holden asked that CBS “not mention Koch in any way in your broadcast,” perhaps it would have been even better if CBS had re-focused its story on how MSNBC abets left-wing liars engaging in politically motivated slander against Koch.

Related: NPR employed a “reporter” who formerly worked for the liberal activist group Common Cause, and the reporter, Peter Overby, helped abet the left-wing demonization campaign against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Among the left-wingers pushing that demonization campaign is — surprise! — Van Jones.

Common Cause has also been part of the anti-Koch campaign.

It’s almost as if there were a vast conspiracy at work here . . .

‘They Just Want the Money’

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Walter Russell Mead finds amusement in New York Times employees — members of the Writers Guild union — whining about a proposal to substitute 401(k)s for their current bloated pension plan:

Nobody in the video talks about the changes in the news business that threatens to drive the Times into a deep dive. Nobody talks about the prospect of future significant staff cuts if costs can’t be contained. None of them discuss the incongruity between their own naive sense of entitlement and what is going on in the cities, companies and countries they cover.
They just want the money.
Some writers allude to the prospect of leaving the paper if the pension change goes through, but a quick check of the newspaper business suggests they don’t have all that many options. Certainly with the exception of a handful of superstars the New York Times would have less trouble replacing its current staff than the current staff would have in replacing their jobs. And if those new jobs are in journalism, good luck finding a company with a generous defined benefit pension plan.

Indeed. Perhaps the NYT’s grumbling newsroom proletariat should read about working conditions for young bloggers at the Washington Post.

The days of easy money and “banker’s hours” in the news business are definitely over, and the Writers Guild mentality is part of the problem, not part of the solution. I’m reminded of a line from Ghostbusters, after they’ve lost their university research gigs:

Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities. We didn’t have to produce anything. You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.

Too many people in the upper echelons of the news industry never had a reason to think about the bottom line. The first newspaper I ever worked for — a tiny weekly in Austell, Georgia — went out of business five months after I started there. There was no warning; I went out to cover a high-school football game on Friday night and on Saturday morning got a phone call telling me to come pick up my final paycheck.

My next job was selling menswear in a department store.

That experience in 1986 was an early and unpleasant introduction to the economic reality of the news business, a valuable lesson that might have something to do with whatever success I’ve subsequently had. Many citizen-journalists have a much better understanding of economic reality than do the members of the Writers Guild.

Da Tech Guy has some interesting suggestions about the intersection of Old School journalism and New Media. He knows what a hard dollar it can be — please don’t forget to hit his tip jar.