LIVE AT FIVE – 05.24.11

On the eve of Tuesday’s special election, the most recent polls in New York’s 26th District are a good-news/bad-news tale: The good news is that support for fake “Tea Party” candidate Crazy Jack Davis has been cut in half since a month ago, when Davis — who ran as a Democrat in 2004, 2006 and 2008 — was getting 23% support in this traditionally Republican district.

The bad news? One out of eight voters is so stupid they’re still going to vote for that protectionist bozo Crazy Jack — or at least that’s what they’re telling pollsters:

Kathy Hochul (Democrat) . . . . . 42%
Jane Corwin (Republican) . . . . . 36%
Jack Davis (Crazy) . . . . . . . . . . . 13%

Republican Jane Corwin is trailing by 6 points, according to this poll, but we remember that polls last October that showed Democrat Dan Maffei leading by 12 points two weeks before he lost to Republican Ann Marie Buerkle in neighboring NY-25.

This is definitely still winnable for Corwin, despite the Davis candidacy and despite two or three layers of GOP bungling that I don’t even want to get into now. Democrats want to claim this anomalous election as a national repudiation of Paul Ryan’s budget-cutting plan and a harbinger of Democrat victories in 2012. However preposterous that claim may seem, it is nonetheless the spin you’ll be hearing Tuesday night and Wednesday if Hochul wins. A sampling of the latest news stories:

Politico: “Republican Jane Corwin badly wants to be the candidate of change in Tuesday’s special election, but the wave that swept 63 new Republicans into the House last November might have passed her by. . . . Corwin finds herself in a race that has largely become a referendum on Medicare and the budget proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).”
National Journal: “Furor over Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget and its changes to Medicare have been the driving issue in this campaign. Hochul points to April 15 as the defining day in her campaign — the day the GOP caucus overwhelmingly voted for the House Budget Committee’s plan that would alter Medicare for future seniors.”
Time: “The first election since House Republicans passed Paul Ryan’s budget has become a referendum on the two parties’ differing visions of the fate of Medicare and a potential bellwether for races nationwide in 2012.”

You get the drift. Whatever Democrats decide is the big issue in an election, most journalists feel obligated to agree is the big issue, and so the media and Democrats are united in trying to portray NY-26 as a referendum on the Ryan plan.

If the Republican wins? Oh, well, never mind. And as Sam Foster at The Lonely Conservative points out, another poll has Corwin within four points, which is margin-of-error territory. A strong conservative turnout could make the difference. A couple of hard-hitting ads for Corwin:

JANE CORWIN FOR U.S. CONGRESS

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Congress, Election, New York, Tea Party

My Kids: Smart and Good-Looking

Posted on | May 23, 2011 | 10 Comments

Hey, these things are hereditary, right? Friday, my son Jim graduated from high school and Saturday, my daughter Kennedy graduated from college. I thought readers might want to see a few photos of these young scholars and their siblings. Read more

Category: Family

Good News! ObamaCare Helping Insurance Companies Make Record Profit! (And Rick Ungar Rides Again)

Posted on | May 23, 2011 | 2 Comments

Because stuffing profits into the pockets of Corporate America is what the progressive movement is all about, right?

When last we heard from Rick Ungar, the death of a Census worker in Kentucky prompted him to declare: “Send the Body to Glenn Beck.” Two months later it was revealed that Beck had nothing to do with it, and the supposed victim of a right-wing lynching had in fact committed suicide.

However, progressives (who apparently include the editors of Forbes magazine) are quite flexible in their standards of journalistic credibility, so that the otherwise discredited Ungar is permitted to inform us that ObamaCare is working just fine and dandy.

Ungar’s “reporting” is for the most part a rehash of a May 3 story — which Ungar doesn’t bother to link, much less credit — by Phil Galewitz of Kaiser Health News:

Hundreds of thousands of young adults are taking advantage of the health care law provision that allows people under 26 to remain on their parents’ health plans, some of the nation’s largest insurers are reporting. That pace appears to be faster than the government expected.
WellPoint, the nation’s largest publicly traded health insurer with 34 million customers, said the dependent provision was responsible for adding 280,000 new members. That was about one third its total enrollment growth in the first three months of 2011.
Other large insurers said they have added tens of thousands of young adults. Aetna, for example, added fewer than 100,000; Kaiser Permanente, about 90,000; Highmark Inc., about 72,000, and Health Care Service Corp., about 82,000.
The Health and Human Services Department has estimated that about 1.2 million young adults would sign up for coverage in 2011. The early numbers from insurers show it could be much higher . . .

Ungar’s plagiarism of a three-week old story is nevertheless treated as sufficiently newsworthy to merit its own Memeorandum thread, and no one seems to notice that the “good news” is not really so good at all.

These 20-somethings, whose coverage under their parent’s insurance plans is now mandated by federal law, obviously don’t have employment sufficiently lucrative to include health benefits of their own. Many of them are no doubt unemployed — as are nearly 17% of Americans under age 30 — and living back home with their parents, as do most recent college graduates, saddled with an average of more than $20,000 debt.

So ObamaCare has compelled insurance companies to subtract a few hundred thousand young people from the ranks of the uninsured, although it is impossible to say how much actual healthcare will be delivered as a result. This is exactly the problem with mandated coverage: Most young people are healthy and don’t need insurance, except for catastrophic coverage policies (i.e., with a $5,000 deductible) in case of a car wreck or something.

Never mind. Their parents are now paying to have their grown kids covered up until age 26. The insurers are no doubt happy to have the new clients, although the additional coverage doesn’t really solve any health-care problems — unless the profitability of insurance companies was a problem you were worried about.

Category: Health Care

Tornado Destroys Joplin, Missouri

Posted on | May 23, 2011 | 2 Comments

Via Associated Press, here’s video of the killer storm:

At least 90 people are confirmed dead and a news photographer who visited Joplin said: “The Home Depot is leveled. . . The Wal-Mart is destroyed. Gas stations, buildings. Everywhere I could see was either heavily damaged or completely destroyed.” The headlines at the Drudge Report sum it up:

Three-Quarters of Joplin, MO Destroyed... Damage Unimaginable... Town Unrecognizable...

HEARTLAND DEVASTATION

All of which is to say, it’s a catastrophe. Longtime reader Nathan Cossey, who lives in the suburbs of Kansas City, called today to tell me that his relatives in Joplin are alive and well. But with this kind of devastation, the survivors are going to be suffering for a long time. The Red Cross is responding. Now would be a good time to hit their tip jar.

Category: Missouri, Video

‘That’s Not a Poll That’s Psy-Ops!’

Posted on | May 23, 2011 | 9 Comments

So says Da Tech Guy about an Associated Press poll that surveyed nearly twice as many Democrats (35%) as Republicans (18%). You will perhaps not be surprised that this poll shows Obama with a 63% approval rating.

Speaking of “psy-ops” — psychological warfare — let me explain something: Nothing so sways the independent voter as bandwagon psychology.

Lacking any clear partisan or ideological commitment, the independent voters is likely to support whichever candidate his friends and neighbors support. This is why yard signs and bumper stickers make a difference in campaigns. Believe it or not, some voters may base their vote on whichever candidate has the most yard signs in his neighborhood.

Furthermore, independent voters like to vote for the winner. Polls showing Obama ahead will, of course, encourage Democrats and discourage Republicans. More importantly, however, such polls will sway independents toward Obama.

It is always a mistake to think of independent voters as moderates or “centrists.” It is more helpful to think of them as “low-information voters” who don’t pay much attention to politics, and whose judgments are influenced more by superficial impressions of candidates than by deeply held political beliefs.

Category: Barack Obama, Da Tech Guy, Election 2012, Polls

Did National Magazine Award Winner Scott Horton Spin a Guantanamo Myth?

Posted on | May 23, 2011 | 4 Comments

The award considered the “Pulitzer for magazines” went to Scott Horton of Harper‘s for an article asserting that three detainees at Guantanamo Bay were tortured to death in 2006. U.S. officials say the suspected terrorists committed suicide in a sort of jihadi publicity stunt.

Alex Koppelman explores the possibility that the award-winning article promoted a hoax, noting that several investigative reporters — including Sy Hersh, Brian Ross of ABC News and Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News — all researched the same story, and spoke to the same sources, and concluded that the death-by-torture allegations were at best unproven:

A New York Times reporter was also approached by the parties who’d been pushing the allegations of homicide and cover-up at Guantánamo, a person close to the situation says.
Only after the big guys passed was the story shopped to Horton. He won for reporting, but in fact the story fell right into his lap, factual flaws and all.
“We couldn’t really believe it when the piece came out,” one of the reporters who looked into the story says. “I can’t believe Harper’s, I really can’t.”

(Via MediaGazer.) The “investigative” story that falls into a reporter’s lap — handed to him pre-packaged, as it were — is more common than people outside journalism suspect. This was the basic narrative of David Brock’s big Anita Hill scoop: Brock was supplied with a research dossier by Republican staffers for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and parlayed that “gimme” into a reputation as an ace investigative reporter. Or at least that’s what my sources say.

Category: Journalism, Terrorism

‘Nice Bit of Driving!’

Posted on | May 23, 2011 | 16 Comments

So shouts one of the Irish spectators in Dublin, where Obama’s limousine got stuck on a speed-bump while leaving the U.S. Embassy there:

At the 10-second mark, you hear the first scrape as one of the police cars leadintg the motorcade bottoms out. Then at 16 seconds, the presidential limo (an armor-plate vehicle known as “the Beats”) gets stuck and the crowd says: Ooooohhh!

Drew M: “My question is, what the hell was the Secret Service agent driving the limo doing drinking a Slurpee while on duty?”

Category: Barack Obama, Ireland

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The Other McCain

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LIVE AT FIVE – 05.24.11

NY-26 UPDATE: Are 13 Percent of Voters Really Going to Vote for Crazy Jack?

My Kids: Smart and Good-Looking

Good News! ObamaCare Helping Insurance Companies Make Record Profit! (And Rick Ungar Rides Again)

Tornado Destroys Joplin, Missouri

‘That’s Not a Poll That’s Psy-Ops!’

Did National Magazine Award Winner Scott Horton Spin a Guantanamo Myth?

‘Nice Bit of Driving!’

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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