Category: Uncategorized

“Last Wednesday night, Obama and his campaign finally ‘paid the price’ for believing in falsehoods that had no actual basis in reality.”
— Susannah Fleetwood, “Thoughts on the Recent Presidential Debate, and the Real Reason Why Obama Lost to Romney”

Jimmie Bise Jr. sometimes does what he calls “Clearing the Browser Tabs” at Sundries Shack and, speaking of Jimmie, the podcasting phenom and Twitter savant got hired by Liberty News Network to unload his “boundless supply of pith.” His  new theme song:

Attempting to satisfy the market’s nearly infinite demand for pith, Steven Crowder is in a sign war with his liberal neighbor.

Reasons to support Mitt Romney’s plan to abolish annoying yellow puppets: Don’t Liberals Know Big Bird Is a Birther?

When in doubt, blame John Kerry.

Ann Coulter is more Cherokee than Elizabeth Warren. The high cheekbones gave her away. Ann’s new theme song:

Speaking of new theme songs . . . Continue reading Randomly: Movin’ On Up, Sign Wars,
Half-Breeds and Diamonds to Sand →

#tcot OHIO: Registration data shows Obama has BIG TROUBLE in the Buckeye State pjmedia.com/blog/ohio-poll… hat-tip @beccajlower

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 7, 2012

Ed Driscoll’s favorite Insta-phrase “preference cascade” (describing the sudden shifting of opinion) could be the best understanding of what we might — I emphasize, might — be beginning to see in the aftermath of Wednesday’s debate:

A new poll shows a slight change in the presidential race immediately following Wednesday night’s debate in Denver, with a 4-point lead for President Obama the day before the debate becoming a 1-point deficit the day after his uninspiring peformance.
On Tuesday, the Washington, D.C.-based Clarus Research Group surveyed 590 likely voters and found Obama leading Mitt Romney, 49 percent to 45 percent. On Thursday, Clarus found, in an identical number of interviews, that Romney had inched ahead by 1 point, 47 percent to 46 percent.

Caution is necessary for several reasons:

1. Polls are a lagging indicator;
2. Any one poll may be an anomalous outlier; and
3. Presidential elections are fought on a state-by-state basis, and the ultimate key is not what any national poll shows, but rather how the battle shapes up in the dozen or so “swing states” where both campaigns are concentrating their efforts.

Having been skeptical about polls that showed implausibly bad results for Romney — who will certainly not lose Ohio by 10 points, no matter what numbers any damned pollster reports — I am not going to abandon skepticism now, just because the poll numbers are more in line with my beliefs or preferences.

Nevertheless, for several months, I had been saying that I thought the outcome of the election would hinge on the debates, and the one-sided ass-whupping Romney put on Obama may have triggered a decisive shift that the polls are already beginning to detect.

If you check the Real Clear Politics national average, you see that Sept. 26/Oct. 1, Obama held a lead of four or more points after having been tied with Romney just a month earlier. According to Gallup’s tracking poll, Obama had led by 6 points most of the way from Sept. 19/Oct. 2. Both of these key indicators now show a trend toward Romney, who has closed the gap to 3 points in Gallup and 1.6 points in the RCP, which is mirrored in recent state-by-state results for Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Wisconsin.

However, to emphasize again, polls are a lagging indicator. What is important in studying election polls is to follow the trendline, and we don’t yet have enough results from different firms to be able to say (on Oct. 7) that Romney’s looking like a definite winner for Nov. 6.

In the short term, however, Mitt has gained ground and, if we extrapolate the current trend another four days, by the time Joe Biden walks into Thursday’s debate with Paul Ryan, Biden will know that he and Obama are behind the eight ball: Already trailing in most national polls and no better than even in the key swing states.

C’mon, be honest: Does anyone in either party think Biden can win that debate with Ryan? The human gaffe machine versus the top Republican budget wonk? Word out of the Romney camp is that, leaving nothing to chance, Ryan is being debate-prepped within an inch of his life. Now imagine the cool, smart and well-prepared Ryan facing off against a Joe Biden who knows that the polls are already showing Romney pulling ahead.

Joe’s gonna be under heavy pressure, sweating like a pig, and if he cracks under the strain, a decisive Ryan win Thursday could add another two or three points to Romney’s poll bounce. Extrapolate that trend a bit further . . .

Well, best not to get too far ahead of ourselves, piling one hypothetical contingency atop another. But it is possible to imagine a scenario where Mitt Romney comes into the Oct. 16 debate sitting on a 4-point lead in the national polls with just three weeks to go before Election Day. And if I can envision such a scenario, you know that Democrats must be imagining the same possibility with a sense of Fear and Loathing. 

Complete panic may sweep through the Democrats and, as Pete Da Tech Guy likes to quote General Sheridan, “Ride Right Through Them — They’re Demoralized as Hell!”

Don’t get cocky, but here’s just a bit more encouragement from Ohio: Not a lot of love for Obama in Cleveland lately.

Finally, check out this campaign message sent out Saturday night by the Romney campaign:

MEMORANDUM

To: Interested Parties
From: Gail Gitcho, Communications Director
Date: October 6, 2012

Re: President Obama’s $5 Trillion Falsehood

There was wide agreement on Thursday morning that Mitt Romney won the first presidential debate of the general election. Why? Because he laid out the clear choice voters face this November between a real recovery or four more years like the last four years.
Middle-class families have been devastated in the Obama economy. Twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work. Median incomes have declined by more than $4,500 since President Obama took office. Today, nearly one in six Americans is living in poverty. That’s clearly not the real recovery our nation needs. And since President Obama has an indefensible record on the issue voters care about most – the economy – he’s been forced to resort to diversions, distractions, and outright deceptions about both his own record and Governor Romney’s proposals.
The most glaring example was his accusation that Mitt Romney is proposing a “$5 trillion tax cut.” But Jim Lehrer had barely thanked the audience for watching Wednesday’s debate before the fact checkers swooped in and declared President Obama’s claim to be false. By Thursday night, even the Obama campaign itself had to admit its charge was untrue. Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter admitted the falsehood saying, “Well, okay, stipulated, it won’t be near $5 trillion.” In fact, multiple independent studies confirm that Mitt Romney’s tax reform plan will stimulate economic growth. This growth together with a broader tax base – these studies conclude – mean we can lower tax rates without increasing the deficit.
But what is even worse than President Obama’s deception about Gov. Romney’s proposal is the truth about his own. To be clear: the President has already raised taxes 21 times during his first term in office. And his only plan for a second term is to raise even more taxes – $2 trillion worth, in fact. Middle-class families and small-business owners will suffer most as a result, since his tax plan will subject nearly one million business owners to higher taxes, threaten more than 700,000 jobs, and cost the United States $200 billion in economic output. A study conducted by the independent and nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute (AEI) calculated that the annual cost of the debt President Obama has already racked up and the new spending he has proposed would amount to $4,000 per year in higher taxes on the middle class. And nearly five million middle-class Americans will be subject to a tax hike once Obamacare’s individual mandate is fully implemented.
Clearly, the Obama campaign was in full damage control mode at the end of this past week. Given such a devastating record, it’s no surprise Barack Obama will say and do anything to avoid talking about his middle-class tax-hike plan. And with 31 days to go until Election Day, we fully anticipate Mitt Romney will be hit by many more baseless attacks in the weeks to come as President Obama continues to avoid talking about his failed policies.
All we can do is fight back with the truth, plain and simple: Our country can’t afford another four years like the last four years. Mitt Romney has a plan to create 12 million jobs and turn our economy around, and he is the candidate who will deliver meaningful reforms to achieve the real recovery Americans need and deserve.

– –

by Smitty

A fine outpouring of feminist piffle:

ONE thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood. Men are now experiencing a set of limits — externally enforced as well as self-imposed — strikingly similar to the ones Betty Friedan set out to combat in 1963, when she identified a “feminine mystique” that constrained women’s self-image and options.
Although men don’t face the same discriminatory laws as women did 50 years ago, they do face an equally restrictive gender mystique.
Just as the feminine mystique discouraged women in the 1950s and 1960s from improving their education or job prospects, on the assumption that a man would always provide for them, the masculine mystique encourages men to neglect their own self-improvement on the assumption that sooner or later their “manliness” will be rewarded.

Not to wish harm on anyone, but I should like to round up these “gender identity” feminists and park them all on a tropical island, with all the materials and tools they need to build their utopia.

I’m guessing after about a month or so this men==women nonsense would drain away.

Or, I could be wrong. Maybe the women would build some aesthetically pleasing masterpiece, some testosterone-free tropical Eden. Certainly replete with fashionable porn.

via Althouse and Insty.

by Smitty

Via Althouse, we have Politico pointing to the 10 October SCOTUS argument on Affirmative Action:

In court briefs, the Obama administration has backed the University of Texas’s right to run its affirmative action program. It’s being challenged by Abigail Fisher, a white undergraduate applicant who was denied admission. But Obama aides have a history of being skittish about getting publicly enmeshed in debates over race — and education-related affirmative action in particular.
A federal government policy statement on the use of race in education languished in protracted interagency debates until last December.
“It took three long years to pull that policy out of the Obama administration. It was only after we pestered and cajoled them that they finally got it out,” John Brittain, a civil rights activist and law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, said in an interview soon after the document was released. “The administration had a paralysis of analysis. …. Overall, the Obama administration just has a reluctance to take on race and equality, and when they do so everything is so carefully sanitized and scrubbed to make sure it’s the least offensive thing possible.”

This blog would like to suggest that Romney say something like:

“Racism is intolerable, and antithetical to the liberty upon which this country was founded. Sure, you can point to where the reality took time to catch up to the ideal, but that does not negate the ideal itself. In contrast, Affirmative Action is to liberty what the Hammurabi Code is to vision and dental health; great work if you’re an optometrist or dentist, but cui bono, other than bureaucrats?
A Romney Administration would seek to eliminate all federal Affirmative Action legislation. It is fundamentally wrong for a taxpayer of Asian extraction to fund a system that may be used against that taxpayer. Liberty and meritocracy are essential to who we are as Americans, and continuing to fund systems used by the likes of Elizabeth Warren to tilt the game in her favor is just false.”

I submit that such a statement would be worth 2-3% on election day.

He doesn’t have a free cellphone, and he’s not the 47 percent:

by Smitty

Say. No. More!

DAYTON, Ohio
No, not me. I haven’t lost it yet. I’m talking about Team Obama telling reports to “f–k off,” among other things. The situation is not as rosy for the Democrats as the media would have you think, but I’m under pressure — gotta drive to an event in Cincinnati this morning — so I’ll just quickly cite my American Spectator column:

Reporters circled around Reince Priebus at a campaign rally Monday in Lima and one asked the Republican National Committee chairman what he thought of polls showing Mitt Romney trailing President Obama in this crucial battleground state. Priebus said he was satisfied that the GOP challenger was “within a field goal” of the incumbent, and made a bold prediction: “We’re going to outspend the DNC 10-to-1 [in Ohio] for the next six weeks… We’re going to crush ’em on the ground.”
Such confidence might surprise those millions of Americans who know only of the presidential campaign what the major news media tell them. More than 1,500 people turned out in Lima on a Monday afternoon to see Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan. The size of the crowd that packed inside the Allen County Veterans Memorial Civic and Convention Center might seem a significant indicator of GOP strength in the heartland, but it was scarcely noticed or mentioned in the horse-race coverage of the election campaign. Instead, the media’s narrative of the race relies heavily on poll numbers suggesting that Obama’s re-election is all but assured. Among these is the most recent Ohio poll, by the University of Cincinnati, that showed Obama above the magic 50-percent threshold, leading Romney by five points, 51-46.
This theme was made explicit in an Associated Press article over the weekend with the headline, “Tide shifts to Obama in most competitive states.” Such tendentious reporting has drawn increased skepticism from critics, including Tom Blumer, who suggest it is part of a deliberate effort to create a false sense of momentum for the Democrat. And when the media are caught in gross errors — e.g., reporting that 18,000 people attended an Obama rally at a 5,000-seat arena — this skepticism seems entirely justified. In fact, there are reasons to believe the momentum has actually begun to shift toward Romney and Ryan, given the recent debacle in Libya, which Ryan hit hard in his speech Monday in Lima. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

 

 

PREVIOUSLY:

• Sept. 24: Scenes From Ryan Rally in Lima, Ohio
• Sept. 24: GREETINGS FROM LIMA, OHIO
• Sept. 24: The Best Revenge: Ohio-Bound
• Sept. 23: Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Worldwide Headquarters of Crazy, Inc.