Category: Hot Air

Downgrading America

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by Smitty

Big Government links The Hill with a poll saying over 2/3 of voters say America is in decline.
Meanwhile, HotAir brings the new RNC ad going after BHO for his bus tour in NC and VA:
Got news for BHO about the Commonwealth: the impending VA election will likely be as savory to him as Momar Qaddafi’s last breakfast was to the recently departed.

Amidst all the doom and gloom about decline, let us draw an important distinction. America, itself, and by that I mean the founding Enlightenment ideals of the country, are the permanent political priapism. The country is substantially fine. We just have to get back to the substance. The only thing saggy in these parts is the nanny state tit of the Progressivism, which has so completely run out of other peoples’ money that it can’t mooch more money to buy bigger bustiers that can contain it all.

The GOP keeps threatening to show consciousness of the Tea Party disdain for the Ruling Class nonsense of the last century. And then we get a Mitt Romney as the anointed front-runner. I can safely predict, in the case of a Romney nomination and election, an Andy Warhol honeymoon for the man. Roughly 15 minutes after the oath of office, the Tea Party would be scrolling over Romney like repetitive speeches on BHO’s teleprompter. This American downgrade/decline is unacceptable.

Update: more at The Commune

Herman Cain Surges Ahead in New Poll; Mitt Romney, Allahpundit Hardest Hit

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Being the guy who has been talking up Herman Cain since Nov. 13, 2010, pretty much guarantees nobody will give you credit when the impossible actually happens:

Fueled by Tea Party supporters, conservatives and high-interest GOP primary voters, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain now leads the race for the Republican presidential nomination, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. . . .
Cain checks in as the first choice of 27 percent of Republican voters in the poll, followed by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 23 percent and Perry at 16 percent. . . .
In the previous survey, conducted in late August, Perry led the field at 38 percent, Romney stood at 23 percent, while Cain was at only 5 percent.

In the span of six weeks, Cain has gained 22 points and Perry has lost 22 points. And so the guy I started boosting 11 months ago is trouncing the guy whom I dubbed “The Phantom Menace” three months ago. But no linky-love for the Blogger Whom Allah Hateth. Instead, we get this kind of contingency/hypothetical doomsaying:

Even if Cain pulls the upset in South Carolina — which isn’t impossible given its social conservatism and Cain’s southern roots — how does he compete with Romney in a state as expensive as Florida and in the dozens of primaries that’ll follow that? . . .
Via Greg Hengler, here’s a “3 a.m. phone call” compare-and-contrast between Cain and Gingrich on the subject of how they’d handle the Iranian terror plot. This sort of thing — plus the fact that his 9-9-9 plan has alienated tax warriors like Grover Norquist — could knock Cain back enough by the time Iowa arrives to restore Perry to frontrunner status in the all-important “Not Romney” competition. Problem is, I have no confidence that Perry’s answer to this question would be any better than Cain’s. And, giving how Perry tends to avoid interviews, he probably doesn’t have any confidence either. Exit question: Second look at Gingrich?

Resisting the temptation to blame raaaaacism for all these doubts about Cain — whose emergence as front-runner none of the “smart” pundits ever imagined possible — I’ll instead attribute it to their unwillingness to speak the Four Dreaded Words: “Stacy McCain Was Right.”

Meanwhile, if Allah wants to raise doubts about any GOP candidate’s “electability,” let him watch this video from Ryan Gill at Tea Party Brew:

And as for “second look at Gingrich,” my answer can be summarized in two words: Dede Scozzafava.

 





Has This Blog Mentioned That Allahpundit Is The Greatest Within The Last Ten Minutes?

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by Smitty

This
blog would
like to take
a moment
to thank
ALLAHPUNDIT
at HotAir for
what may go
down in ‘net
history as the
cheapest linkage
stunt in evar.
Thanks, Your
Anonymity:
you’re the best.

Those curious as to the basis for this post are invited to click the ALLAHPUNDIT link above. Because throwing web traffic is a neighborly act for a blog, if perhaps a tad redundant when it’s the wee mouse blog feeding the 800lb gorilla blog. It’s not precisely the same as citing a reference in an academic paper; the only grader here is public opinion, after all. Nevertheless, we must cheer the coolness of ALLAHPUNDIT: he da man.

(h/t AmericanGlob, an example of a mensch.)

Again, Zappa

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by Smitty

Via Hot Air, there is the Debbie Wasserman-Shultz at Real Clear Politics, desperately hoping to perform a modern miracle on the economy through repetition.

“Well, we’re going to focus on what we know is the number one priorities on Americans ease minds right now, that is creating jobs and continuing to get this economy turned around.

Once again, one is compelled to reach for the Zappa. Listening to this NSFW clip (couple of f-bombs and a sphincter reference) one is struck by the sharply prophetic portrait Zappa paints of Wasserman-Shultz. Did her image appear on his windshield while driving at night, or was that just a juicy insect?

More of the great DWS at American Glob.

See? B.S.!

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Ed Morrissey does an excellent evisceration of a blatantly deceptive CBS News poll:

Have Democrats leaped to an eleven-point registration advantage in the last five weeks?  In early June, a CBS News poll showed a D/R/I sample of 30/30/40, which undersampled both parties slightly in favor of independents, even weighting it to slightly favor Republicans. In their latest poll today on the debt ceiling debate, CBS offers one of its most egregious poll samples in recent memory to pursue the “public blames the GOP” meme . . .

Read the whole thing. I will add only two points that I’ve made before about how polling data is often misinterpreted:

  1. “Random adults” don’t matter in politics. Any poll on a political topic that surveys mere “adults” — as opposed to registered voters or, preferably, well-screened likely voters — is utterly worthless. People who don’t vote, don’t matter. Any poll that doesn’t make some attempt to screen out non-voters tells you nothing useful about the political landscape. And also, non-voters are more liberal than average.
  2. Early polling is always deceptive. Public opinion of political issues in July of an off-year is a poor measure of where voter sentiment will be 16 months from now on Election Day 2012.

In the most recent election eight months ago, Republicans won a historic landslide and there is no reason to believe now, in mid-July, that Americans have suddenly shifted toward the Democrats. What CBS News did with that poll is as big a lie as RatherGate, and they should be ashamed of themselves for promoting dishonest propaganda while pretending to report the news.

Of Course, There Will Be No QE3

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by Smitty

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air seems to think that there will be another round of quantitative easing, but then explains why it won’t happen:

The “era of easy money” will have to come to an end at some point. As QE2 demonstrated, Fed monetary policy at the extreme of “easiness” has almost no impact any longer on investment or growth. It serves only as a backstop against deflation. Because the cost of money is now as close to zero as possible, the Fed can no longer provide short-term boosts through temporary reduction of interest rates. That makes them all but powerless, especially with an administration that has pursued anti-growth strategies for the last two-plus years in regulatory expansion and signaling of higher taxes.
If the Fed starts to pull cash out of the economy, interests rates will rise, which will make investment even more costly. It won’t bring us back to the stagflation of the Carter years, when inflation and interest rates skyrocketed, but the stagnation and unemployment will start to calcify in the absence of a reversal of economic policy from Washington.

By the time inflating the currency can no longer be avoided, there will be a new term. It will still be theft, you understand, but it will probably not be called ‘Quantitative Easing’. The problem is not the money supply; rather, giving vast power to a small number of un-elected officials. All we have to do is have those un-elected officials break out a new term, say, ‘Measured Flexibility’, and it’s all good.
Even less likely than QE3: political candidates with the courage to reform this over-centralized system. In my perfect world, the 49 states other than North Dakota would form their own banks, take responsibility for the housing and education loans connected to citizens residing in them, and the century of federal over-reach marked by the Federal Reserve would begin to wind down.
But no, we’ll just continue to stumble from verbal magic wand to magic wand, frantically expending charges like we’re in some lousy game of Economic Dungeons & Dragons. Or maybe World of Economic Warcraft.
What a pile of hooey.

It’s Kinda Hard to ‘Work the Refs’ When the Refs Are Playing for the Other Team

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One of my habits is re-reading good books. Any book worth reading is worth re-reading, and there are some books that I have read multiple times, including William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores.

Another habit, picked up during my college days: I always prefer to read while lying down. When I was in college, I’d take my textbooks to bed with me, fall asleep reading them, wake up and read some more until I fell asleep again. I’d sometimes spend most of the weekend like that, reading and napping all day, only leaving my dorm room to go eat lunch, until it was time to go out and party at night.

All of which is preamble to saying that I was re-reading Ann Coulter’s Slander last night when I went to bed. It had been a while since I first read it — it was published in 2002 — and I had almost forgotten how good it is. People who only know Coulter as a TV personality, trading snark with Hannity and O’Reilly on Fox News, ought to take time to read some of her books. She is a much better writer than most of her critics give her credit for, and probably even better than most of her fans realize.

Coulter’s writing is often aphoristic: She writes brilliant little sentences that hit the nail square on the head. At her best, she strikes those hammer blows in succession — bam! bam! bam! — and keeps it up for page after page. Such is the case with the seventh chapter of Slander, “The Joy of Arguing With Liberals: You’re Stupid!” Continue reading It’s Kinda Hard to ‘Work the Refs’ When the Refs Are Playing for the Other Team →