The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In Case You Missed It: Democrats Waving White Flag on Taking Back House in 2012

Posted on | March 30, 2011 | 17 Comments

Thanks to Moe Lane for pointing this out. In the immediate aftermath of the mid-term GOP tsunami, Democrats were boasting about how many of the Republican freshmen they were targeting for 2012. In the past few months, however, these boasts have been significantly downsized. Jim Geraghty at National Review reprints this e-mail from the National Republican Congressional Committee:

IN NOVEMBER 2010, THE DCCC SAID IT WAS TARGETING 61 DISTRICTS CARRIED BY OBAMA: “The DCCC has identified 61 seats currently held by Republicans in districts that Barack Obama won in 2008.  ‘Republicans won a lot of seats they have no business winning,’ said a top Democratic strategist. ‘It’s going to be a full-on recruitment cycle [and] Israel is the perfect person for that.’” (Brian Beutler, “Blue Dogged: Meet Steve Israel, The Incoming Chair Of The DCCC,” Talking Points Memo, 11/23/10)
EARLIER THIS MONTH, THEY SCALED THAT BACK TO 37 SUBURBAN DISTRICTS: “Representative Nancy Pelosi’s selection of Mr. Israel to lead the Congressional campaign had much to do with his district, a swath of Nassau and Suffolk Counties where Democrats hold a modest registration edge but independents decide elections.  The path to retaking the House, both say, leads through 37 similar suburban districts, home to nine million independents who voted for President Obama in 2008 but deserted the party in the 2010 elections.” (David M. Halbfinger, “L.I. Congressman Leads Uphill Charge Toward a Democratic House,” New York Times, 03/19/11)
NOW, THE DCCC HAS BEEN FORCED TO FOCUS ON ONLY 14 DISTRICTS: “The Democratic Party is taking aim at 14 freshmen Republicans in the House, of 87 elected, whom it deems the most vulnerable…the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is focusing on districts where Mr. Obama and Senator John Kerry both won as presidential nominees and where Democrats have a registration advantage.” (Jennifer Steinhauer, “Hardly Settled in House, but Already in Hot Seat,” New York Times, 03/27/11)
ACTUALLY, THEY EVEN GOT THAT NUMBER WRONG.  IT’S 13 DISTRICTS WON BY KERRY, NOT 14: “All told, 63 Republicans in the 112th Congress will hold seats that President Obama carried in 2008 and, of that group, 13 will hold seats that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) also won in the 2004 presidential race.” (Chris Cillizza, “The Obama Republicans,” The Washington Post’s “The Fix” blog, 11/11/10)

Which is not to say that Republicans can shift into neutral and expect to coast to re-election, of course. We’re way too early in the cycle to start trying to predict what the results will be on Nov. 6, 2012. “But it’s pretty remarkable that we’re not hearing much talk about Democrats retaking the House in 2012,” Geraghty says.

And I would add that, if we take this as evidence of demoralization and disarray in Democrat ranks — combining it with Obama’s sagging poll numbers — this provides a strong argument against GOP leaders rolling over easy on the budget showdown.

Republicans should listen to Rick Crawford.

UPDATE: Linked by The Lonely Conservative and welcome, Instapundit readers! Reports that Republican budget negotiators have settled for $33 billion in cuts — after initially promising $100 billion in cuts — are not exactly being applauded by Ace of Spades.


Category: Budget, Congress, Democrats, Election 2012

Homo Bureaucratus: A Goal Set Is Essentially A Goal Achieved

Posted on | March 30, 2011 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Via SOL/PuffHO:

Seeking to show the public he understands the burden of rising gas prices, President Barack Obama set an ambitious goal of reducing U.S. oil imports by one-third by 2025, and vowed to break through the political gridlock that has stymied similar initiatives for decades.

So, yeah, Jimmy C. made the DoE, back in ’77.
This has been a smashing success, where smashing is like repeatedly putting the forehead against the wall at a medium pace, and success is like failure. Here is some fun background:

The major impetus for efforts at energy planning and coordination was the “energy crisis” of the mid-1970s stimulated by the OPEC Oil Embargo of October 1973. Congressional concern focused on matters of energy reliability, environmental protection, reasonable prices, economic stability, and national security.

Presidents Nixon and Ford responded to the energy crisis with several initiatives centered predominantly on controlling oil supplies and prices. President Carter introduced his National Energy Act, consisting of five pieces of major legislation supported by the declaration that the energy crisis was the “moral equivalent of war.” The National Energy Act addressed a wide range of energy regulation from traditional fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas to conservation and rate design. In an attempt to coordinate all of these activities, Congress passed the Department of Energy Organization Act in 1977 (P.L. 95-91, 91 Stat. 565). In 1980 Congress passed the Energy Security Act, which addressed alternative energy sources from solar power and geothermal to oil shale and tar sands.

The Department of Energy Organization Act was based upon Congressional findings that the United States faced an increasing shortage of nonrenewable energy resources, thus increasing its dependence on foreign energy supplies, particularly oil, and presenting a threat to national security; that a strong national energy program was needed; that energy policy was fragmented in the federal government; and that a national energy program needed to be integrated and coordinated.

Will Jake Tapper ask exactly how the disastrous drilling policy in the Gulf of Mexico supports this goal, one wonders?
iOwnTheWorld says it graphically.

Category: Barack Obama

Random Freaking Adults (Again)

Posted on | March 30, 2011 | 11 Comments

From time to time, I find myself obliged to give this little lecture. I get tired of repeating myself, so listen up:

LEARN TO READ POLL DATA PROPERLY OR
STOP TELLING ME ABOUT POLLS

Every two years from 1998 through 2006 (five consecutive elections), my job at The Washington Times required me to compile a weekly graphic of key election polls, in addition to whatever other campaign coverage I was writing or editing. Then, when I cut loose and went freelance in 2008, I spent the next two-and-a-half years up to my eyeballs in campaign politics. And so I became something of a connoisseur of public-opinion methodology.

Polls are sometimes wrong. I keep flashing back to Oct. 17, when a poll showed Democrat Dan Maffei leading by 12 points over Ann Marie Buerkle, who beat him on Election Day less than three weeks later.

Polls are not predictions. The further in advance of an election you take a poll, the less the poll can tell you about the outcome of the next election.

In March 2009, Obama’s approval rating was 64%. Eight months later, Republicans swept the off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, then in January 2010 won the Massachusetts special Senate election, and rolled on to a historic 63-seat House pickup in the November 2010 mid-terms. So, in the span of 20 months, Obama went from Mr. Can’t-Be-Beat to Mr. Can’t-Catch-a-Break — but none of that could have been predicted on the basis of the March 2009 polls.

This lack of poll predictivity is true, no matter whether you like the poll result or not. Stupid people reading political polls typically make one of two basic mistakes:

  1. Cherry-picking positive numbers. In other words, “Let’s believe the numbers that look good for Our Team, and ignore the numbers that look bad.” This is how Pelosi and the Democrats screwed up in 2010. They listened to consultants and strategists who told them to ignore poll numbers showing that ObamaCare was deeply unpopular with likely voters, because various sub-questions about health care still looked good for Democrats. And I remember in 1998 how Republicans cherry-picked polls telling them how popular impeachment was, and then got their asses kicked in the November mid-terms.
  2. Chicken Little. Doom-and-gloom panic at the first hint of negativity in the numbers is not helpful. It’s easy to get scared out of your shorts by looking at polls taken when the public is in a general mad-as-hell mood. But it’s important to remember that partisan affiliation seldom swings suddenly in one direction or the other. Even when parties put forward truly wretched candidates, they still usually get their basic share of the electorate: John Kerry got 48% in 2004; John McCain got 47% in 2010. So hysterical freakouts over a downward blip in the poll numbers is almost never justified. The sky is probably not falling.

What caused me to reiterate this lesson today is that a friend called to my attention a study released by a University of Washington academic, which claims to show a yawning gap between regular conservatives and Tea Party supporters.

“Rift in the Right: Many Conservatives Reject the Tea Party’s Paranoid Views” makes for a catchy headline, but when you start scratching under the surface of this study, the stench of bovine excrement is overpowering.

Try as I might, I could find nothing there that told me how the UWash survey was identifying “conservatives” (except by asking people to label themselves), nor was their any apparent effort to screen for likely voters, or to match the “conservative”/”Tea Party” self-IDs to partisan affiliation. When you consider that 20% of self-identified “conservatives” voted for Obama in 2008, you realize that this label doesn’t necessarily mean to some people what most of us think it means. So taking a sample of random adults (i.e., 18-and-older, not screened for registered voters or likely voters) and then asking them whether they’re “conservative,” prior to surveying them on a bunch of tendentious questions, isn’t likely to provide you with any information that’s really useful, from the standpoint of electoral politics.

Much more relevant, it seems, are two separate polls — Gallup and Quinnipiac — showing Obama scraping rock-bottom. These numbers are something to keep in mind when (taking their talking points from Chuck Shumer) the media begin proclaiming that Republican “Tea Party extremists” are losing in the budget showdown.

I was born at night. But it wasn’t last night.

Category: Barack Obama, Polls, Tea Party

Should Justice Kagan Recuse Herself From Deliberating ObamaCare Suits?

Posted on | March 30, 2011 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

CNS News has some DOJ insight:

“Brian, Elena would definitely like OSG to be involved in this set of issues,” Katyal told Hauck in his 1:05 p.m. email. “I will handle this myself, along with an Assistant from my office [name redacted] and will bring in Elena as needed.”

In February and March 2011, having followed through on the assignment Kagan first gave him in January 2010, Katyal signed documents that the U.S. Justice Department filed in two separate U.S. appeals courts countering the lawsuits brought by Virginia and Florida against the health-care bill that the Senate passed that Christmas Eve two years ago.

The Jan. 8, 2010 email chain cited above, along with others the Justice Department provided to CNSNews.com in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, raise questions about whether Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan ought to recuse herself from the health-care cases officials from her former office will soon argue in her court.

RTWT.
While I would like to think that the Administration and its appointees would be concerned about the integrity of their oaths and the actions which follow them, three patterns that seem common to the 2.5 years in Obamareich are: Read more

Category: Uncategorized

Disagreeing Agreeably

Posted on | March 30, 2011 | 31 Comments

by Smitty

American Power links Levin noting the Ron Paul people being intolerable. It’s a variation on the douchebag theme. Anybody can identify the faults in the logic of others. In Alinsky mode, you need to find that flaw and just pack it with every round of rhetorical artillery available. Or, as Genghis said:

The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.

Contrast the Khan job we’ve seen from some of the Ron Paul followers, or the union in Wisconsin, with Reagan:

The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.

Twenty years ago, in the struggle to survive college, it occurred to me that “If you give your detractors ammunition, they will shoot it at you.” Thus, the question mark is the more powerful form of punctuation when engaged in a serious argument. Trotting out the exclamation point and the CAPITAL LETTERS is handing the other side a few more rounds to fire back.

Another lesson to share is: “Never argue with a drunkard, or a fool.” If you want to practice your arguments with an ideologue, fine, but understand that you could get the same aerobic value on the treadmill. A final thought in this brief meditation is that being gracious is a cheap investment that pays off with honest people. The younger me was all about running up the score in the argument by pointing out technicalities, or going for the Fool’s Mate when the interlocutor missed an obvious point. Now that I’m the bald old bastard forgetting things, a gentle mention without so much triumph helps the understanding so much more.

So, to that Ron Paul fan who once accused me of ‘spreading lies’ when I referred to Pauls ‘non-interventionist’ foreign policy approach as ‘neo-isolationism’, a difference that still makes precious little difference to me: you did little to advance your game, sir.

* * * UPDATE * * *
SPECIAL NOTE TO RON PAUL SUPPORTERS
from ROBERT STACY McCAIN

This is not the evil neocon Bushbot blog you want to hate. From the very beginning of this blog, it has been my policy to avoid direct criticism of Dr. Paul or his supporters, whom I view as potential allies in the long twilight struggle against the goddamned useless GOP Establishment. Exactly why Smitty decided to pick this particular fight at this particular moment, I don’t know. Being deployed to Afghanistan can do weird things to a guy’s mind, I suppose. But we are still not the evil neocon Bushbot blog. That’s called “Hot Air” and the guy you want to argue with is called “Allahpundit.” Go argue with him. Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bob Barr. That is all. Thank you. — RSM

Category: Ron Paul

Chuck You, Schumer

Posted on | March 30, 2011 | 9 Comments

Jay Homnick of The American Spectator contemplates the shamelessly sleazy senior senator from New York:

By a weird quirk of fate, I was present as a sixteen-year-old boy at a local meeting of well-meaning Jews who were gulled into making him State Senator for the neighborhood where I grew up, in Brooklyn, New York. The same boobs later bought his malarkey and promoted him to the United State Congress. I saw the sleaziness, the deception, the insincerity, the manipulation — and to cap it off, the absolute disdain for the people whose vote he sought.
Now he is ensconced in the United States Senate, beyond the reach of the naïve Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn and Queens to call back the monster they created. He learned early that these people who strive for morality and integrity in their lives are gullible about things taking place in faraway Washington, D.C. So he learned to attend every synagogue dinner and every major bar-mitzvah and wedding. He had a driver zipping him back and forth on Saturday nights from event to event, shaking hands and mouthing a few words in Yiddish or Hebrew. Burning the midnight snake oil: all style, no substance. . . .

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, the media keep dutifully providing stenography for Senator Shutdown. (“Chuck’s talking points? In my story? Without even mentioning that these are Chuck’s talking points? Doggone it! How does this darn stuff keep happening?”)

Category: Democrats, New York, Senate

Libya: Serious or Not?

Posted on | March 30, 2011 | 29 Comments

One of the reasons I’m having trouble taking the war in Libya seriously is that President Obama keeps treating it like another opportunity for political posturing. He gives his big nationally televised primetime speech on Monday and is off to wine and dine $30,000-a-plate donors on Tuesday while Vice President Joe Biden vacations in Aspen.

Wait, did I say “war” in Libya? I meant “kinetic military action.”

There I go again, cracking jokes. But if what is happening in Libya really matters, then why has the U.S. become involved on such a half-assed basis? If it was important, wouldn’t Congress have been consulted before we started shooting cruise missiles at Tripoli?

The Don’t-Call-It-a-War is being conducted under a United Nations “humanitarian” mandate that doesn’t include overthrowing Qaddafi. Only air power is involved, with no U.S. boots on the ground. It is being fought (or should I say “kinecticized”?) by a coalition led by the French while “the United States will play a supporting role” so that “the risk and cost of this operation — to our military and to American taxpayers — will be reduced significantly.”

Insert punchline here.

We have a war that’s not a war, in which we are merely “supporting” a mission supposedly limited to protecting civilians, yet Obama continues to boast about getting rid of Qaddafi.

CBS headline: Obama: Qaddafi regime’s “days are numbered”

MSNBC headline: Obama: ‘Gadhafi will ultimately step down’

If Bush was mocked by liberals for his “cowboy” swagger, at least he was willing to assume the political risks associated with being Gary Cooper in High Noon. Obama apparently expects to be taken seriously while playing Woody from Toy Story 2: “Ride like the wind, Bullseye!”

These jokes just write themselves, you see, and the biggest challenge of Barack’s Excellent Libyan Adventure is trying to keep a straight face while discussing it. Read more

Category: Barack Obama, Libya

LIVE AT FIVE – 03.30.11

Posted on | March 30, 2011 | Comments Off on LIVE AT FIVE – 03.30.11

TOP NEWS
Jerry Brown Declares California Budget Talks Dead

Governor Brown calls an end to bipartisan budget talks

GOP refuses to cut a deal to raise taxes

Walmart Sex Bias Case Divides Supremes
Justices dubious about statistical claims, “corporate culture” allegations by plaintiffs

Japan’s Nuclear Crisis
French, US reactor experts flown in to help resolve Fukushima situation



POLITICS
County Judge Tells Wisconsin Collective Bargaining Law Isn’t In Effect

Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi

State attorneys maintain Sumi has no authority to enjoin the Legislature and her TRO is meaningless

Revised Collective Bargaining Bill Advances In Ohio

Alaska’s Clash With Feds Over Resources And Rights Heats Up

DC School Reform Efforts Under Suspicion After Allegations Of Inflated Test Scores

Exonerated Inmate Won’t Get $14 Million

Senate Delays Vote On 1099 Requirement Repeal



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Home Prices Falling In Most Major US Cities (Video)
House GOP Introduces Bills To Quickly Wind Down Fannie And Freddie
Parts Shortages Spread To US Plants Of Japanese Automakers
Amazon Cloud Drive: A Solution In Search Of A Problem?
The 3DS, The IPad, And The Future Of Gaming
Apple’s “App Store Trademark”: A Farce Of Jobsian Proportions



SPORTS
Cavs Pull Off Stunning Upset, Beat The Heat

Cavs guard Anthony Parker shoots over Dwayne Wade

Sweet revenge for Cavaliers, who come back from blowing an early 23-point lead

Trio Of Former Players Point To Bonds’ Trainer

BCS Task Force To Decide Fiesta Bowl’s Future

Rockets Cruise Past Lowly Nyets 112-87

Anaheim Approves $75 Million Relocation Package For Sacramento Kings



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
AMC Greenlights Fifth Season Of “Mad Men”

More Christina Hendricks = better!

Slated to open March 2012

Kevin Federline Spawns Again

Christina Aguilera Raunchy Pix For Sale

Rob Lowe On His Early Years As An Actor

Warner Chief Sets Sights On “Justice League” Movie

Lindsay Lohan Won’t Be Charged In Rehab Fight

Mila Kunis Blasts “Black Swan” Controversy

George Clooney May Be Called As Witness In Berlusconi Prostitution Trial



FOREIGNERS
UK’s Hague Hints At Gaddafi Exile Possibility
Syrian Cabinet Resigns, But Will That Satisfy Protesters?
India, Pakistan Leaders Pad Up For Cricket Diplomacy
Ivory Coast Rebels Continue Advance, Closing In On Abidjan And Cocoa Port
Le Carre Snub Disappoints Booker Prize Judges
UK Rejects EU Call For Car-Free Center Cities By 2050
Carter To Meet With Dissidents During Cuban Visit



BLOGS & STUFF
Legal Insurrection: Schumer Passes On Anti-Tea Party Talking Points
Marco Rubio: Why I Won’t Vote To Raise The Debt Limit
Michael Yon: Calling Bullshit On Rolling Stone
Allahpundit: Michael Barone – Has The Tea Party Given Up In Wisconsin?
AmSpecBlog: Howard Dean Says Dems Should Be “Quietly Rooting” For A Shutdown
Jammie Wearing Fool: Shocker – DOJ Whitewashes Black Panther Case
The Sundries Shack: The Administration’s New Cash For Clunkers Program Will Be Fine If We Never Do The Math
Thomas Sowell: Voting With Their Feet

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five
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