One Wonders If Salon Is Beamed From Another Planet

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by Smitty

Elon James White, “Defending Park51, attacking Dr. Laura“:

The common thread between condemning Dr. Laura and defending Park51 is the idea that the persecuted should be protected.

Dr. Laura, in my opinion, should release a record of gangsta rap covers, so that she can use the word which sorts between ‘bigger’ and ‘rigger’ at very high frequency and then be referred to as an ‘artist’.

Past that, though, what does White possibly mean by this use of ‘persecuted’, ‘protected’, and the Ground Zero Mosque (Park 51)? It seems that White may have unexpected-ly progress-ed to an illegal marriage of terms here. Rational people may have thought that ramming a plane into a building and killing nearly 3,000 people would count as an extreme, even ultimate, form of persecution, and that the wishes of the survivors and locals should count for something in deciding the who/what/where/when/why/how that they should/shouldn’t be remembered.

Ace of Spades, as usual, is spot on (Disclaimer: I don’t care about the Stars and Bars in South Carolia):

Is it time to return the Stars and Bars to the South Carolina State House?

I ask because I thought the rule was that an understandable revulsion to the memory of an emotionally-wounding time was enough to win out over a noisy, self-promoting group’s determination to advertise its views in a prominent, highly-symbolic area… but now I find that’s not so true, not so true.

So — Confederate flag at the SC statehouse again?

Because the people flying the flag there say they too have good, non-objectionable motivations for doing so — a reminder of heritage, honoring the dead, etc., etc. But previously we have shown skepticism towards their claimed motivations, and also decided their motivations were irrelevant — it wouldn’t even matter, we decided, if their motives were pure; the important thing was the Confederate flag was too hurtful to have near the people’s house of government.

Again, so I now find out this isn’t the rule anymore.

So if it’s not the rule anymore: Why can’t we have the Confederate flag at the SC statehouse?

Repeat: I’m not interested in seeing the Stars and Bars in South Carolina again. However, it’s worth putting to these clowns on the Left, just for the sad spectacle of their mental gymnastics.

Only in the mind of a modern Liberal can a difference which makes no difference amount to a big difference.

Update: Ace of Spades trots out the flaming skull for the audio tapes of that dovish imam. It’s not like the Left really had significant credibility remaining to destroy.

The Internet: The Elites’ Least Favorite Suppository

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by Smitty

Our favorite Limey, Daniel Hannan notes the following, emphasis mine:

The Internet, as Douglas Carswell argues, is ironing out a kink in our cultural and political alignment, whereby a small elite artificially reoriented our foreign policy, our trade and even our news cycle away from our old alliances and towards Europe. That’s the great thing about the web (or, from a Europhile perspective, the disagreeable thing): it democratises.

Pesky internet giving people tools to force leaders to [NSFW] represent*. Someone should write a book on that.

*Linking Hannan and Kornfeld in the same post for the broadest possible spectrum of English.

It’s FDIC Bank Failure Friday!

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Associated Press:

Regulators have shut down two Florida banks and one in Virginia, lifting to 113 the number of U.S. bank failures this year.

That count evidently omits today’s announced closure of Chicago’s ShoreBank. Bloomberg News reports:

ShoreBank Corp., the Chicago lender operating under a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. cease-and- desist order for 13 months, will be shut and most of its assets will be bought by Urban Partnership Bank, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.
Urban Partnership, created to make the acquisition, will keep branches in Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit and continue to focus on low-income communities, the people said, speaking anonymously because the matter is private.

That’s just the tip of an iceberg of economic bummers in this week’s “Recovery Summer” update. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 57 points today, closing at 10,213 for a net loss of 90 points on the week — down 440 points since Aug. 6. Bloomberg News again:

U.S. stocks fell, extending a second straight weekly decline for major benchmarks, as a drop in commodities pulled oil and metals producers down amid concern the economic rebound may be flagging. . . .
The major indexes capped their first back-to-back weekly drops since July 2 and closed at their lowest levels since July 21. . . .
The S&P 500 has fallen 12 percent from this year’s high in April as signs the economic rebound is stalling overshadowed better-than-estimated earnings growth.

Want some more bad news? Try this analysis of the federal HAMP mortage-adjustment program:

[F]or the median borrower, about 80% of the borrower’s income went to servicing debt. And the median is 63.5% after the modification.
These borrowers are still up to their eyeballs in debt after the modification. . . .
The borrowers [debt-to-income] characteristics are poor – suggesting a high redefault rate over the next year or two.

Further defaults and foreclosures will kill recovery in the housing sector, and without a housing recovery, unemployment will stay high and the banking sector will continue to be shaky. See how this all works together?

Brett Arends at the Wall Street Journal lists 10 reasons for pessimism, including these:

  • 5. People still owe way too much money . . .
  • 6. The jobs picture is much worse than they’re telling you. . . .
  • 7. Housing remains a disaster. . . .

Arends poses this question, “If a laid-off contractor with two kids, a mortgage and a car loan is working three night shifts a week at his local gas station, how many iPads can he buy for Christmas?”

Let’s pause momentarily to consider the possibility that the Chinese real-estate bubble is about to burst. Click and read that, then remember that China is a leading buyer of U.S. Treasuries. If that bubble bursts, how will it affect Beijing’s willingness to buy more of our debt?

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has returned to its policy of buying debt from the Treasury:

The Federal Reserve bought $3.609 billion of Treasuries as part of a program to reinvest principal payments on its mortgage holdings into long-term government debt to prevent money from being drained out of the financial system.

Which is to say, the Fed is trying to stave off deflation. Here’s a video report:

Commercial real estate prices dropped 4% in June and Business Insider noted: “Commercial real estate values are now down 41.3% from the peak in late 2007.”

Now, let’s talk about all those jobs that the stimulus has “saved or created.” Uh . . . California’s unemployment is at 12.3% and Harry Reid’s home state of Nevada just hit an all-time record 14.3% unemployment rate. And things are clearly (but “unexpectedly”) getting worse:

On Thursday morning, the Labor Department said that new jobless claims filed last week unexpectedly rose by 12,000 to hit 500,000, the first time since November that the half-million mark has been reached. . . .
Everyone is familiar with the monthly national unemployment rate . . .
But the new weekly jobless claims number, which is released each Thursday by the Labor Department, gives us a faster, week-by-week snapshot of unemployment. And the picture is getting increasingly ugly.
The latest number marked the third straight week of increase in new weekly jobless claims. That suggests that employers not only are not hiring, it suggests that they’re starting to lay off workers again, and that will start a whole cascade of problems for the U.S. economy . . .

Now, here’s three scary words: “Bond market bubble“:

If over the next year, 10-year interest rates, which are now 2.8%, rise to 3.15%, bondholders will suffer a capital loss equal to the current yield. If rates rise to 4% as they did last spring, the capital loss will be more than three times the current yield. Is there any doubt that interest rates will rise over the next two decades as the baby boomers retire and the enormous government entitlement programs kick into gear?

The minute you start talking bond yields, people’s eyes glaze over, but let’s let Jeremy Siegel try to explain it:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A sure sign that Siegel is right to be concerned about the bond market? Paul Krugman is scoffing.

I’d Vote For A Frickin’ Wiccan

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by Smitty

. . .if that candidate took the Oath of Office in a serious way.

Note to conservatives fretting un-knowable aspects of the Presidential character (is he Moslem?): nice gills.

This argument joins Birtherism in the list of shiny, tangential arguments that can be used to manage the tempo of the news cycle.

As far as what really matters, I’ll offer, in the concrete category, the national debt, and, in the abstract category, the death of Federalism that has led to a Ruling Class and, yes, the debt.

Who gives a flying French fornication if we elected our first Moslem President concurrent with our first black President? That Ruling Class, and the dirty debt diaper we now enjoy, was born and baptized under the tenure of Woodrow Wilson. Yay, Chrisitianity: if you haven’t got a Caesar unto whom to render, sodomize your secular Constitution and see what grows within a century. We’ve gone from

E Pluribus Unum

to the current

Eh? Pluribus? UNUM!

thanks to the kneecapping of the several States via Amendments 16 & 17 and the Federal Reserve Act, AKA the Cosmic Credit Card.

Conservatives, Tea Party celebrants, and the American wing of the Republican Party need to be talking about the Post-Progressive Era. The era when

  • social policies are, appropriately, funded and implemented at the State level,
  • the Federal government does its Constitutional interstate and internation thing, and
  • anyone promoting non-wartime Federal deficit spending is, appropriately, laughed out of office.

The Post-Progressive transition promises to suck. Sorry, no golden hover ponies. But the country has faced stiffer existential challenges with aplomb.

Thus, it really doesn’t matter if the Progressive Era was bookended by a Southern Death Cult-ist and a Hare Krishna; all that really matters is that it end.

Update: having said all that, this is funny.

Dan Collins Is an Evil Right-Wing Islamophobic Neocon Hatemonger

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Really, it’s a miracle he doesn’t have his own syndicated talk-radio show and a primetime slot on Fox News:

At least AP journalists are able to refer to it as a mosque, though I’ve been challenged on those grounds as well, by sympathizers who feel that they can defuse the issue by characterizing it instead as a cultural center. As Jim Treacher points out, that tends to weaken the argument that this is about religious liberties, of which many leftists are suddenly advocates. The best argument that it is a mosque is probably that that’s the way the Cordoba Initiative refers to it. That’s not to mention that on three occasions the State Department has paid for Imam Rauf to travel on their dime to fund raise abroad . . .

Read the whole thing. It’s only a matter of time before the Southern Poverty Law Center, Media Matters and Little Green Footballs join forces to create DanCollinsWatch.com, just to keep an eye on that notorious fomenter of dangerous extremism.

In other news, Ann Coulter sent somebody an e-mail.

WARNING: Polls Are Not Campaigns

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Instapundit links Fisherville Mike’s caution against over-optimism turning into apathy for Republicans. Meanwhile, Karl Rove is trying to forecast the relationship between “generic ballot” polls and the likely GOP gains in November.

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

If all you’re doing is following the national polls — Obama’s numbers down, Republican numbers up — you are seriously underestimating the challenges facing the GOP in House races this fall. Some people are giving outlandish estimates of Republicans gaining of 60 or 70 seats, I’ve been talking to individual campaigns and operatives and, as one operative told me this morning, “I’m just not seeing 40 seats out there.”

Yesterday I talked to a California Republican official who referred to the authoritative California Target Book and said he sees the GOP flipping maybe one — or at most three — of the 34 Democrat-held seats in that state. Considering that California has more than 12% of the seats in Congress, if Republicans can flip that official’s high-end estimate of three seats there, they’d then have to flip 37 districts in the other 88% of the country to take control.

Do the math. It ain’t easy. And given the omens in California — where one Republican says gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman “is looking out for herself and herself only” — it’s discouraging to any prospect that the GOP can flip even one House seat there.

When you start taking the House races district-by-district, looking at individual candidates, historic voting trends in their districts, their campaign funding, their current level of organization, etc. . . . Honestly, it’s scary out there.

All of these Democratic incumbents are sitting on huge reserves of campaign cash, and I don’t know of a single district in the country where the Republican challenger has more money than the incumbent Democrat. (If you know of such a situation, please tell me.)

Worse than the money situation, perhaps, is the lack of precinct-level organization by Republicans. This was a basic problem in the PA-12 special election. With the help of the NRCC, the Tim Burns campaign was able to roughly match the Democrats in terms of money, but the local GOP didn’t have the kind of organizational infrastructure in terms of county and ward committees necessary to mobilize volunteers for door-to-door canvassing operations.

Phone-banking is important, but even the best phone bank is no substitute for a genuine door-to-door campaign, especially when such canvassing is done by local volunteers contacting their friends and neighbors in their own communities. And, as in PA-12, a basic reason Democrats control these districts is because the local GOP is controlled by weak-minded time-servers who have failed to organize effectively.

All this talk about polls and Republican enthusiasm isn’t translating into anything that operatives can see on the ground. “Meet-and-greets are still five or 10 people,” as someone in a key swing district told me.

Think about that: Here is a Republican candidate who stands a reasonable chance of being elected to Congress. The candidate schedules a lunch or cocktail reception in a town — not a fundraiser, mind you, just a “meet-and-greet.” The campaign invites all the local Republicans, and fewer than 10 people show up.

And we’re barely 10 weeks from Election Day!

Politics is about elections, and the evident unwillingness of conservatives to focus on the basic work of winning elections is starting to worry me. There was a big uproar in the blogosphere this week about Rep. Melissa Bean shutting down questions at a town-hall meeting.

OK, what district does Bean represent? Who is her Republican challenger? What do you know about the district and the campaign? If you read my report at the American Spectator, you know a little:

Illinois’ 8th District, running from the northern suburbs of Chicago up to the Wisconsin border, was held by Republican Phil Crane until 2004, and Bush carried the district with 55% of the vote in 2004. Like many other vulnerable Democrats in this mid-term campaign, Bean has refused to debate her Republican challenger, Joe Walsh.

Reporting that kind of basic research isn’t exciting — it’s not a “scoop” that’s going to get a Drudge link — but it’s necessary, and not enough blogs are doing it. A bit more research reveals that Melissa Bean’s got $1.2 million in campaign cash-on-hand, while her Republican opponent’s got just $30,000. Have you contributed to the Joe Walsh campaign?

While we’re at it, here are campaign finance reports on some House races I’ve been watching:

GA-12

  • D – Rep. John Barrow – $665,000
  • R – Ray McKinney – $77,000

CA-36

  • D – Rep. Jane Harman – $202,000
  • R – Mattie Fein – $2,000

FL-22

  • D – Rep. Ron Klein – $2.8 million
  • R – Allen West – $2.2 million

OK, the good news is that Allen West has closed the gap. The bad news is that there’s still a gap.

If even a genuine GOP rock star like West can’t out-raise his Democrat opponent, we should not be surprised that Ray McKinney and Mattie Fein are facing such tremendous disadvantages in funding. Ray just finished a hard-fought primary runoff campaign and Mattie’s report is from June 30, after she’d spent more than $100,000 to win her primary. And neither of their Democrat opponents is showing a multimillion cash-on-hand balance that would put them out of reach if hundreds of conservatives were to start making $10 and $20 online contributions to the Republican challengers.

My point is that winning a House majority doesn’t “just happen” because polls show the incumbent party is unpopular. Victory requires actual candidates running actual campaigns with actual money and actual volunteers in actual districts.

Unless conservatives start paying attention soon, they’re apt to be sadly disappointed on Nov. 2.

UPDATE: The Ace-o-Lanche! Thanks, man.

The Obama Obsession

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Da Tech Guy‘s habit of watching Morning Joe on MSNBC, to get a daily read on what liberals are thinking, is a habit I’ve started to adopt. It’s interesting to watch the Obama-centric worldview in action.

Today, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinsksi spent a full ten minutes discussing with Savannah Guthrie and Evan Wolfson this Pew Poll that shows 18% of Americans think Obama is a Muslim. This evidently loomed large in their minds, and at one point Scarborough made reference to the president’s “critics,” as if these unnamed critics were somehow responsible for this perception.

My Republican consultant friend Ali Akbar — who is, in fact, a Southern Baptist from Texas — could probably explain to Joe and Mika that a certain percentage of the public automatically thinks “Muslim” when it hears a name like Barack Hussein Obama. One need not conjure up “critics” to make this phenomenon understandable.

The MSNBC crew, however, evidently consider it their job to superintend Obama’s public image, and so a thick slice of their morning was spent obsessing over this Pew Poll result. And when we learn that this pushback against the Pew Poll is being orchestrated by the White House press shop, we see how Joe and Mika are required to function as administration mouthpieces.

If all you knew about this poll was what you saw on MSNBC, however, you might have missed other results of the Pew Poll. Fortunately, we have Yid With Lid to point out this important finding:

[T]here is widespread agreement that politicians should be religious. Fully 61% say that is important that members of Congress have strong religious beliefs; just 34% disagree.
Majorities across all major religious groups – with the exception of the religiously unaffiliated – agree it is important for members of Congress to have strong religious beliefs. More than eight-in-ten white evangelical Protestants (83%) express this view, as do roughly two-thirds of white non-Hispanic Catholics (66%) and white mainline Protestants (64%). And about seven-in-ten black Protestants (71%) say it is important that lawmakers have strong religious beliefs.

While Joe and Mika were obsessing over Obama’s image problems, they neglected to discuss this: For most Americans, religion is not about identity politics, it’s about having a firm system of morality — a bedrock sense of right and wrong, good and evil. People quite naturally want their political leaders to possess the kind of deep faith that inspires virtue.

Outside the secularized world of the media elite, religion is still viewed as a good thing, and the people want their leaders to be religious.

In other words: Good news!

Too bad Joe and Mika missed that.

UPDATE: Citing a Byron York column, Professor Glenn Reynolds observes: “Obama famously described himself as a blank screen onto which others projected their impressions. This worked for him for a long time. Now, it’s working against him.”

UPDATE II: Brandon Kiser on the “guilty pleasure” of watching Morning Joe:

The liberal talking heads get under my skin, but at least they’re not like Fox and Friends and talking about koalas in Nantucket or something.

Yeah, it’s pretty much all-politics, all-the-time at MSNBC, whereas Fox and Friends mixes in more general-interest news.

Ace Is Absolutely Killing

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When he’s on, he’s really on:

It would never even occur to me, or any decent person, to erect a Museum of American Achievements in Aviation in Hiroshima.

And here he makes an analogy so brilliant I’m ashamed I didn’t think of it myself. Having been endlessly lectured by our enlightened betters about the need to be sensitive to the feelings of victims, we are now informed that sensitivity toward the survivors of 9/11 ought to trumped by sensitivity toward Muslims.

We detect here the aroma of those “smelly little orthodoxies which now contend for our souls.”