The Dumbest Things "Right" Wing Bloggers Did in 2008
The Village Voice has a recap. Of course for the more sensational stories, they rely on blogs I never heard of. The "Obama murdered his grandma" story? Comes from the ever popular Liberty Lounge, a forum and not a blog. Among others, the Village Voice mentions Jeff Jarvis (a liberal), No Quarter (headquarters for the Hillary-supporting PUMAs), Bill Bradley (not that Bill Bradley, but still a liberal).
No mention of the birth certificate madness, or the desperate attempt by the conservatives to derail the McCain nomination, two legitimate bits of nuttiness from the starboard.
Here's how I rate the quarterbacks. Rivers looks like he's head and shoulders above the rest of the league:
1 Philip Rivers 9,407 2 Kurt Warner 6,626 3 Drew Brees 6,591 4 Chad Pennington 5,512 5 Peyton Manning 5,095 6 Aaron Rodgers 4,277 7 Matt Schaub 2,614 8 Tony Romo 2,511 9 Matt Cassel 1,847 10 Jeff Garcia 1,647 11 Matt Ryan 816 12 Shaun Hill 484 13 Donovan McNabb 331 14 Seneca Wallace 286 15 Eli Manning 278 16 Jay Cutler 111 17 Trent Edwards (157) 18 Jake Delhomme (464) 19 Jason Campbell (769) 20 David Garrard (2,204) 21 Kerry Collins (2,332) 22 Joe Flacco (2,363) 23 Brett Favre (2,516) 24 Ben Roethlisberger (2,683) 25 Kyle Orton (2,892) 26 JaMarcus Russell (3,209) 27 Dan Orlovsky (3,371) 28 Gus Frerotte (3,648) 29 Tyler Thigpen (4,124) 30 Derek Anderson (5,468) 31 Ryan Fitzpatrick (5,885) 32 Marc Bulger (6,345)
It amazes me that an 8-8 team has the best player in the league at the QB position, but then San Diego is not exactly a typical 8-8 team, with a net point differential of +92. The Chargers did score more points than any other team in the league. Philip Rivers should be (and probably will be) the NFL's MVP this season.
No deaths and few injuries. "Deeply disturbing." Hamas lacks the technology to aim its rockets. They're taking potshots. In response, the Israeli government launched air strikes that have now killed more than 280 Palestinians, injured hundreds beyond that, and further radicalized thousands in the Occupied Territories and millions in the region.
That encapsulates much of the commentary from the portside. Hamas fires these random rockets, accidentally killing some Israelis (and some Palestinians). And mean old Israel responds with precision munitions.
Note as well that Israel is, as Ralph Peters puts it today, damned if they do, dead if they don't. Ezra is concerned about the cycle of violence, but what does he suggest instead? That the Israelis turn the other cheek? He notes that the response will come in the future:
It will come in months, or even in years, when an angry orphan detonates a belt filled with shrapnel, killing himself and 25 Israelis.
Good thing the Israelis have the checkpoints and the wall, huh? Um, not according to Klein:
The rocket attacks were undoubtedly "deeply disturbing" to Israelis. But so too are the checkpoints, the road closures, the restricted movement, the terrible joblessness, the unflinching oppression, the daily humiliations, the illegal settlement -- I'm sorry, "outpost" -- construction, "deeply disturbing" to the Palestinians, and far more injurious. And the 300 dead Palestinians should be disturbing to us all.
When a young child touches a hot oven, it learns a lesson: Don't touch the oven when it's hot. Liberals apparently think that the child should begin plotting its revenge against the oven.
His name pops up a lot on the conspiracy theory websites regarding Mike Connell's death. For example, nutty professor Mark Crispin Miller:
That is a highly censored version of the deposition, leaving out such details as Connell’s early willingness to talk; his quick reversal after Karl Rove threatened him (threats that came up in his deposition, in a section that’s now sealed); the fact that he was pointedly stonewalling on Nov. 3; and the affidavits of Stephen Spoonamore, who knew Connell well, and had worked with him, and formally attested Connell’s eyebrow-deep involvement in the “vote fraud” in Ohio (among other places), and Connell’s close working relationship with Karl Rove.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Stephen Spoonamore is a conservative Republican, a former McCain supporter and a very prominent expert at the detection of computer fraud. He’s the star witness in the Ohio lawsuit, right, in which Connell was involved. He has done extensive work of this kind, involving computer security, and had therefore worked with Connell, knew Connell personally and knew a lot of the people who were involved in the sort of cyber-security end of the Bush operation.
Well, let's see if Stephen Spoonamore is a conservative Republican, shall we? And the first place to check is Open Secrets, which maintains lists of donors to political candidates. And what do we see, but that Stephen Spoonamore donated $1,750 to Howard Dean in 2003.
Ah, one of those conservative Republicans. He did donate $500 to John Sweeney (R) in 2004.
I will continue to dig into this in the next few days. But as with everything the Connell conspiracy theorists come up with, there's a lot that they appear to be lying about.
It took years for the 9-11 Truthers to get to the stage where the idiot Left is on the Mike Connell plane crash. Get Mark Crispin Miller on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: Now, he had asked the Attorney General Mukasey for protective custody, because of threats to him and his wife?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: He reported threats to his lawyer, Cliff Arnebeck....
When dealing with 9-11 Truth books and documentaries, we've developed a little metric called TTFLOM, which stands for Time To First Lie Or Mistake, and that's gotta be some sort of a record. Goodman is wrong when she says that Mike Connell asked Mukasey for protective custody, and Miller is wrong when he says that Arnebeck was Connell's lawyer.
In fact, Arnebeck is the fruitcake lawyer who was bringing a lawsuit claiming that Bush did not win Ohio in 2004. Arnebeck had subpoenaed Connell in the case and then claimed in a letter that "sources" had told him that Rove had threatened Connell and his wife. Obviously if Arnebeck represented Connell he would have simply said that his client had told him that he'd received threats.
But Miller gets even nuttier:
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, that’s a good question. We can’t ask him, unfortunately. I mean, this is kind of a grisly thought, but, I mean, I think we should be asking where the body is? We’re told that a trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell. But then we read elsewhere that there was nothing left but debris and that the fireball was enormous. So maybe he wasn’t on the plane. I mean, who knows, when you’re dealing with people as deep as these?
That's the theme of an LA Times column this morning. Although you can probably guess the punchline: What they love about America is that they can criticize how awful it is:
Sure, we liberals claim that our love is deeper because we seek to improve the United States by pointing out its flaws.
And:
Fox News' Sean Hannity loves this country so much, he did an entire episode of "Hannity's America" titled "The Greatest Nation on Earth." In that one hour he said, several times, "the U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth." One of the surest signs of love is it makes you talk stupid.
Because, you know, there are oodles of better countries than the United States, like Cuba, for example or the ones he goes on to name:
Conservatives feel personally blessed to have been born in the only country worth living in. I, on the other hand, just feel lucky to have grown up in a wealthy democracy. If it had been Australia, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Italy, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Israel or one of those Scandinavian countries with more relaxed attitudes toward sex, that would have been fine with me too.
Yeah, France was a heckuva place to live in in the early 1940s. And Ireland has only recently qualified as a wealthy Democracy; it was only 30 years ago that the US had to restrict immigration from the Emerald Isle.
But it's an interesting story and people are talking about it, but I remember the nuts on the right talking about Vince Foster, so I'm not going to indulge myself in conspiracy theorizing but here's a post where somebody does exactly that.
Edsall, who has a reputation for credible, quality journalism, spoke to a "close friend" of Connell, who worked "extensively" with the consultant before his death, and who believes Connell "was more involved in that than a lot of people were let to believe." The friend added that Connell "may have been 'developing second thoughts' after years of being convinced that 'working for the Republican cause was doing God's work.'" Edsall added, "As it stands now, whatever Connell knew about the activities of Karl Rove and other Republican operatives will go with him to his grave."
The implication, I suppose, is that Connell had damaging information, may have been prepared to share it, and his plane crash was the possible result of foul play.
The Edsall piece is here. The scum-sucking bottom feeder had the stones to call his grieving wife:
In a telephone interview, Connell's wife Heather adamantly declared "he was a good man. He did nothing wrong. He wasn't about to talk, because there was nothing to talk about. Nobody did anything wrong. We won the elction fair and square. Deal with it." Asked if he ever spoke about the disputed emails, Heather Connell said "I have no clue about that. I just know it's not him."
CSIRO researchers said householders should know that each bulb turned on in the name of Christmas will increase emissions of greenhouse gases.
Robert Stacy McCain computes the cost to Texas taxpayers of the raid on the polygamous community where girls were getting married and concludes it was a bad idea:
The cost to taxpayers of the raid and investigation was more than $12 million -- a million per underage marriage. Twenty-six mothers originally suspected of being underage were eventually determined to be adults.
Left unsaid is what level of expense per underage marriage the "Other" McCain would accept as reasonable.
The greatest conspiracy theory ever, as my buddy James B put it:
Longtime blog buddy Satire and Theology has some interesting photos of himself demonstrating various martial arts moves and a pretty good joke at the end.
Our longtime blog-buddy Gayle has a nice thought for all this holiday season. I have to admit, I have not exactly been the most Christian of people this year, battling the Right in January and February, the Left until election day, and now the Right again over the Birth Certificate stuff. My New Year's Resolution should be to keep my mouth shut when I think the Right is off the track.
Dan Rather is still insisting that the memos he showed on Bush's TANG service were never proven to be fakes:
"Nobody has ever proven the documents to be anything but what they purported to be," Rather says. "What the documents stated has never been denied — by the president or anyone around him."
What an idjit. It is not up to everybody else to prove the documents were false (although clearly they were phony). It's up to Rather to prove the documents were valid.
One of Zaidi's brothers, Uday, told AFP he had been able to visit him in custody for the first time on Sunday and charged that the journalist had been tortured by his captors to force him to sign a statement.
"I met my brother for around an hour. He has been tortured while in detention for 36 hours continuously. He has been hit with iron rods and cables," the brother said.
I'm shocked! Surely they could have given him a five-minute break! The judge is denying it:
"Muntazer's brother is lying, because there are only bruises on Muntazer's face that he received during the arrest and they are small ones," Kenani told AFP.
"Even if it were true that he had been tortured with electric shocks, it would leave burns on his body, and you will see Muntazer during the trial, so you can judge for yourself.
An FBI informant tried to write an oped for the Times on the real Bill Ayers after the former domestic terrorist published a self-serving column in that declining rag. You can read the informant's piece at PJ Media.
Billy goes on about how the Weather Underground came into existence because “peaceful protests had failed” and “after an accidental explosion killed three comrades.” The explosion of the townhouse in Greenwich Village was the result of a bomb factory which was preparing bombs containing roofing nails for use at a Fort Dix enlisted club. The inclusion of roofing nails can have but one purpose and that’s to injure or kill people. Prior to this event Bill’s wife, Bernardine Dorhn, placed a bomb of the same design at the Park Police Station in San Francisco and killed Officer McDonnell. Additionally, I was still inside the Weather Underground when the townhouse blew up and the commitment to sabotage and terrorism had already been established and the purpose was the overthrow of the United States government.
Now don't get me wrong, I think Matt Yglesias is an awesome blogger. But very plausibly he could be an even awesomer blogger if he were allowed to speak his little mind.
White House consultant who rigged 2004 election dies suspiciously
So much for her not being a conspiracy nutbar. One of the commenters over there chips in with this bit of fruitcakery:
The list of the conveniently dead and 'suicided' of those who threaten the fascist empire grows by the day.
Someone really should do a thorough project absent any partisan politics of just how many people who have met their premature demise over the last few decades.
They have, it was called the Clinton Death List and it was nutty. I'm sure there's a Bush Death List out there as well.
Michael Connell, the crucial techno- lynch pin in the theft of the 2004 election, and much more, is dead at the age of 45. His unnatural, suspicious death raises serious questions about the corruption of the American electoral process that now may never be answered.
Unnatural? And note that this detail raises some suspicions about Larissa the Loon's claim that he was a "source" for her:
Connell recently wrote the following in his New Media Communications newsletter, regarding Barack Obama's election: "In our 230 year history, our democracy has suffered worse fates. It's just that none come to mind right now."
Anybody who wrote that would not likely be furnishing information to Raw Story, which is a fruitcake lefty site. Fitrakis is still harping on the idiotic exit polls:
At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio's presidential campaign. The Buckeye State's 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.
But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion---in Bush's favor---between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.
Never mind that the exit pollsters themselves admitted they got it wrong.
Like all conspiracy loons, Fitrakis overemphasizes the unlikeliness of the crash:
An accomplished pilot, flying in unremarkable weather...
Charles Starkey, a former Navy pilot and director of safety for a Cleveland-area private jet company, said Friday night's cloud cover and misty, cold conditions presented challenges for even the most experienced pilots.
In a 30-minute time frame around the crash, the weather deteriorated quickly as visibility around the airport diminished from nine miles to a little over one mile with a low ceiling.
In such cases, pilots typically are forced to rely on the plane's instruments rather than their own vision, which can contribute to crashes, Starkey said.
Without getting into specific details, 19 Action News reporter Blake Renault reported Sunday evening that 45-year-old Republican operative and experienced pilot had been warned not to fly his plane in the days before the crash.
"Connell...was apparently told by a close friend not to fly his plane because his plane might be sabotaged," Renault said. "And twice in the last two months Connell, who is an experienced pilot, cancelled two flights because of suspicious problems with his plane."
The "close friend" goes unnamed, of course.
Let me add here my sympathies to the Connell family. He sounds like a fine man and he leaves behind a wife and four children, and does not deserve to be maligned by conspiracy nutters after his death as the man "who rigged [the] 2004 election".
My sister suggested that we take in a movie this evening, and I could have said no, but I knew it would be good for her to get away from the kids for a couple of hours. The movie we saw was Yes Man, featuring Jim Carrey.
Terrific film, very funny with great characters. The plot is fairly similar to Liar, Liar; Carrey plays a lowly loan officer at a bank whose wife has divorced him and who habitually says "No" to everything. A friend coaxes him to come to a seminar that advertises "Yes is the New No", with a revival-type spirit. Carrey gets singled out for some one-on-one treatment and agrees to say "Yes" to everything.
Coming out of the seminar a homeless man asks him for a lift, then borrows his cellphone. Carrey drops him off in a park and discovers that he's run out of gas and his cellphone battery is dead, so he has to hoof it to the nearest gas station. Sounds like Yes isn't working for him, right?
But at the gas station he meets a pretty girl who offers him a ride back to the park on her scooter, and before you know it, he's got a girlfriend again. He starts approving loans he would never have allowed before, and the top management promotes him for his excellent production. He takes up guitar lessons and ends up coaxing a guy down from the ledge by playing him a song.
Of course, not everything goes smoothly; in a key scene the Feds have noticed that he's learning Korean, and how to fly and he has also signed up for an Iranian bride, so they arrest him on suspicion of being a terrorist. And in the end he does have to learn to say no to some things.
But it's all great fun, with Carrey's usual terrific physical comedy and sense of timing hitting on all cylinders. Highly recommended!
I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully.
Nope, she's not a crackpot:
Just to be very clear and state again, I am not claiming conspiracy theory or direct relation to Karl Rove or the White House in any of these events. What I am saying, however, is that these possible relationships cannot and should not be overlooked by investigators. There are far too many serious and reasonable questions that must be answered for the public.
Not a tinfoil hatter:
Okay children - because that is what I am going to call adults who willfully mis-read information. I will say this AGAIN (as I have twice in the above entry and also used bold case so that no one would miss the caveat), I am NOT - I repeat NOT - saying this was a). a murder, b). that it was in any way connected to the White House or to Karl Rove, and c). that I am convinced of any of the above three.
Well, except that she has dabbled her toes in the 9-11 nutbar swamp:
At least this might finally explain a nagging problem I have had with the FBI's most wanted poster of OBL, which makes no mention of September 11, 2001 among the crimes OBL is wanted for....
This of course is one of the things that the conspiracy kooks always bring up. But the fact of the matter is that the FBI's most wanted posters list crimes that the perp has actually been indicted for. The Feds have not yet indicted Osama for 9-11 because they already have enough to hold him for on the 1998 embassy bombings, for which he has been indicted.
One police officer, who accompanied him to prison, said the journalist, a Baghdad correspondent for the Cairo-based Al-Baghdadia TV, had been subjected to violence throughout the journey. The officer, who asked not to be named, said he witnessed security forces beating Zaidi in the car with such force that his ribs were broken. "I felt sorry when I saw them beating him. His mouth was badly injured and he did not utter a single word throughout until one of the guards hit him in his left eye with a gun. Then he cried out that he couldn't see, and I saw blood inside his eye. I am a police officer but even I have to say I felt proud of what he did."
Me too. That guy who got him with the gun to the eye is a hero. Maybe somebody could come up with flash video game where we smack him around a bit?
Don't expect his shoes to pop up on ebay anytime soon:
The originals, however, have been destroyed by investigators trying to determine whether they had contained explosives, which may come as a blow to Zaidi when he learns that Saudi Arabian Mohamed Makhafa had, reportedly, offered $10m for his 'shoes of dignity' and their 'high moral value'.
Michelle Malkin has a post up about the initial denial of the Change.Gov domain name to the Obama Campaign, and the subsequent reversal.
The day after the election, on Nov. 5, GSA Chief Information Officer Casey Coleman overruled Alterman after apparently receiving a waiver from Chris Lu, Executive Director of Obama’s Transition Project. As reader Lance discovered through his FOIA request, Ms. Coleman did not elaborate on the granting of this waiver except to say that she had “determined that it is in the best interest of the Federal Government to register the subject domain name.”
It's fair to point out that since "change" was a mantra of the Obama campaign that it would have been inappropriate to grant the domain name to the campaign prior to the election. On the other hand, Obama will presumably not be running on that slogan in 2012.
It seems Barack Obama is giving us a cabinet with no Jewish members. Plenty of Jews in non-cabinet top spots (Axelrod, Summers, Orszag) so I guess we’ll have to just run things from behind the scenes.
I don't know that it really matters, except to the bean counters. But liberals obsess over these things--how many gays, how many women, how many blacks, etc.
That's the conclusion I suspect the media will reach pretty soon in the Coleman/Franken recount:
Two votes are all that stands between Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken, according to the Associated Press tally in the state’s still-unresolved Senate race.
Coleman’s shrinking lead, combined with a state Supreme Court decision handed down Thursday, has suddenly heightened the prospects that Franken, who has trailed in every count since Election Night, could end up winning the seat after all the votes are counted.
Can't stop counting yet, because the Democrat hasn't yet taken the lead. But soon, very soon.
ABC News’ Rick Klein and Teddy Davis Report: Despite trailing by a narrow but consistent margin since Election Day, Democrat Al Franken has pulled ahead of Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., in the seemingly never-ending recount in Minnesota, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports.
I don't actually think it was a good step politically, even though I agree that often punching hippies in the face is, sadly, politically smart. But it would be nice if someone like, say, EJ Dionne, would confront Warren's bigotry and suggest it isn't the change we can believe in. But I assume it'll just be the dirty f*cking hippies and Teh Gay. Because anti-gay bigotry is very centrist!
Here's where I see the task of the future for us dirty f*cking hippies and feminazis and such: To teach politicians that 'social issues' is not about what we eat for Thanksgiving or how we arrange flowers. Those issues are about freedom, justice, economics, dignity and respect.
Apparently this dirty effing hippies thing is some sort of term of self-endearment that the lefty bloggers use amongst themselves. I don't know how accurate it is.
Pastor Rick Warren, President-elect Obama’s choice to deliver the inaugurual invocation, has espoused far-right views on gay rights, including likening same-sex marriage to polygamy and incest.
Well, it is certainly arguably like polygamy and incestuous marriage; if you buy the argument that the government should not be in the business of telling people who can marry whom, then clearly there is no rationale for banning polygamy and (arguably) incestuous marriages. I'm not saying gays are polygamists or incestuous; just that the same argument applies in either case.
I always try to add here that I do recognize that there are a lot of problems that gay couples face which marriage would solve. Those are the things they should be focusing on rather than getting marriage.
No surprise, he does it badly, probably because he's reading Krugman and Brad (Gutless Punk) DeLong.
I’ve heard some economists argue that we’re pursuing some kind of misguided strong dollar policy that’s responsible for our currency’s refusal to devalue, but I don’t actually see what policy that might be. We appear to be doing everything you would do to shake investor confidence in U.S. public finances and spark a decline in our currency.
Interest rates are very low in the US right now, which would ordinarily signal a declining currency. But you can't just look at interest rates or else everybody would invest in a country which had high interest rates (which are offset by high inflation). With inflation almost certainly to be negligible or even negative over the next year or two, investors are happy to take the low interest rates in the US as part of a "flight to quality" that quite commonly occurs during times of economic recession.
In addition, the countries we've been running a trade deficit with (notably China) are keeping their dollars in the US in an effort to prop up the currency. They saw what happened to Japan in the early 1990s when the yen rose spectacularly against the dollar, resulting in a decade and a half of no growth for the Rising Sun.
Caroline Kennedy will be nominated to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate. It makes no sense at all, except as a "fairy tale" ending. Hence it is what will happen. Heck, I thought it was absurd that Hillary got to run in the first place, so why should we expect logic to enter into it at all.
A pair of gay penguins thrown out of their zoo colony for repeatedly stealing eggs have been given some of their own to look after following a protest by animal rights groups.
Last month the birds were segregated after they were caught placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their eggs.
But angry visitors to Polar Land in Harbin, northern China, complained it wasn't fair to stop the couple from becoming surrogate fathers and urged zoo bosses to give them a chance.
In response, zookeepers gave the pair two eggs laid by an inexperienced first-time mother.
'We decided to give them two eggs from another couple whose hatching ability had been poor and they've turned out to be the best parents in the whole zoo,' said one of the keepers.
'It's very encouraging and if this works out well we will try to arrange for them to become real parents themselves with artificial insemination.'
It's certainly not by following this prescription--err, description:
Who is he: Rob the Custom Bicycle Store Owner.
Rob Wong is a second generation Korean American whose parents immigrated here in the 1950's during the War. He is married and has three children. Growing up in San Francisco, he was the first person in his family to go to college, graduating with honors from Cal in 1991. That fall, he enrolled at a Masters Program at Stanford only to drop out six months later to join a Silicon Valley start-up. After 5 1/2 years of 90 hour weeks, the company went public and Rob became wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.
Rob survived the dot com bubble intact but shaken. He decided to return to work only to learn that steady work is less available. He accepted several consulting jobs and continued with his life.
If you read it, basically what the poster has done is create a biography that sells the candidate. But biography seldom trumps party ideology, absent other factors. Barring some huge scandal that brings down the Democrats, the idea that Republicans can win in San Francisco is absurd. Look at the last election; Nancy Pelosi got 72% of the vote; her nearest competitor was Cindy Sheehan with 16%. After that came the Republican Dana Walsh with 10%.
So how in the world do the Republicans win in San Francisco? Answer: They really can't, and it's ridiculous to try. A gay Korean Medal-of-Honor winner custom bike shop owner who's very liberal on social issues but hates taxes would probably be lucky to get 25% in SF.
So why the exercise? Why is Next Right highlighting this post?
Because they are stuck on this ridiculous idea that the Republican Party has to compete in all 435 congressional districts. It's the whole "50-state strategy" from Howard Dean and the nutroots, but flipped around to the GOP.
Let me get this straight. You're going to push money to candidates that have no chance of winning in the hopes that this will force the Republicans to send money to candidates that have no chance of losing?
The 50-state strategy is a recipe for failure. That's not to say that the Democrats shouldn't work on developing the party in all the states, but sooner or later you've gotta concentrate on where you can get the best bang for the buck. There is no sense in a Democratic presidential candidate campaigning in Massachusetts, or in Idaho. They have to focus their efforts on the swing states--Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio for example.
Exactly! By furnishing resources to candidates who are going to lose by 20 points or more, you are denying them to candidates who are going to lose by 5 points or less. This is Poly Sci 101 stuff. Dean (along with much of the left wing of the Democrats), apparently believes in what I like to call "The Lost Tribe" theory, which is that there is an untapped group of radicals around the country who would vote Democratic, but nobody's speaking to them, so instead of voting they stay home.
This seems quite dubious at best, but let's assume they're right, and there's another 5% of non-voters who would be energized by a more Leftist policy from the Democrats. Where do you put your money then? Quite obviously in the closest races; the ones where an additional 5% could put you over the top. Dean and the bozos over at Swing State Project are leading the Democrats to disaster.
Now, you know how it is, the Democrats did win in 2006 and 2008, but they won in the places where they were already close; the problem was that the ground shifted out from under the Republicans with the Iraq War being the problem in the former year and the economy in the latter.
So having scorched the 50-state strategy, I can hard turn around and endorse the even more absurd 435-district strategy.
This post is an attempt to claim that Republicans can win anywhere without sacrificing any conservative "principles"; that is, without being one of those dreaded RINOs. Note that there is no discussion of Rob's positions, other than generally being upset about the homeless and heh, the omnipresent problem of public fornication. And this must be a mistake:
At the same time, this Gay Marriage stuff has gotten under Rob's skin. While he has gay friends, and doesn't really have a problem with Gay Marriage, he was appalled by the arrogance of the CA supreme court decision and quietly voted against Prop 8.
First, No on 8 was the pro-gay marriage position, so either Rob was inconsistent or the writer's botched the argument. If gay marriage has gotten under his skin and he opposes it, he's going to lose in SF by a large margin.
Personally I doubt it, and that has nothing to do with her. I respect Sarah Palin and thought she got jobbed by the media during the campaign. That said, VP nominees on losing tickets their first go-round have a terrible record when it comes to the next time:
2004 Edwards: Nope 2000 Lieberman: No 1996 Kemp: Negative 1988 Bentsen: No 1984 Ferraro: Nope 1976 Dole: No, but did become the nominee 20 years later 1972 Shriver: No 1968 Muskie: Nope 1964 Miller: No 1960 Lodge: Negative 1956 Kefauver: No 1952 Sparkman: Who? 1948 Warren: No 1944 Bricker: Nope 1940 McNary: Nein 1936 Knox: No
Of course, VP nominees who actually became VP have a much better track record, with Gore, Bush Sr., Mondale, Humphrey, LBJ (special case obviously), Nixon and Truman (special case) all getting the endorsement of their respective parties at the next possible convention.
What if the shrinking working class all decided to stop paying our Federal taxes? What if we organized in every Congressional district and state to overthrow our Robber class government by huge electoral majorities?
What if we organized to throw monkey wrenches in the cogs of the US war machine by sustained actions against military recruitment centers, ports and bases all over the country like activists did in the Port of Seattle and active duty soldiers did during Vietnam?
Millions of jobs have been lost and off-shored since George took office. What if this Revolution of Values organized to support one another in these sustained actions for true change? What if the workers took over every plant and started on the path to clean, renewable and sustainable forms of energy, farming, and transportation?
We can do it, in reality, but it will take millions of us committed to the Revolution like the millions of people in Cuba have been for decades.
Yet more proof that Cindy was a loony lefty well before her son's heroism in Iraq.
Back in the 1970s, National Lampoon had an issue dedicated to the question, "Is Nothing Sacred"? The idea was that NatLamp's writers and artists were not above lampooning anything, no matter how much it might offend some people. And the cover image?
A new film is coming out about Che's life and death, and you can probably tell from the resume of the director what it's going to be like:
Steven Soderbergh is no stranger to political material, directing tough films about the war on drugs (“Traffic”) and environmental laws (“Erin Brockovich”), as well as executive producing the Middle East drama “Syriana” and co-creating the HBO lobbyist miniseries “K Street.”
Ugh. Here's the "relevance" of Che today:
Why make “Che”? What relevance does it have to 2008?
“We’re certainly seeing the result of what happens when you make profit the point of everything, where money that’s being earned doesn’t represent any particular product or labor on anybody’s part. That can’t sustain, because it’s magical thinking. It can’t go on indefinitely, because eventually it crashes. Che’s dream of a classless society, a society that isn’t built on the profit motive, is still relevant. The arguments still going on are about his methodology. “
His dream was noble, but his methods left something to be desired? One could say the same about Stalin, I suppose.
I apologize for the light posting lately; none of the hot stories has inspired me to have a take. But over at Marathon Pundit, my longtime blog-buddy John Ruberry has been all over the Rod Blagojevich story. John's an Illinois resident and has been tracking Obama and Blago for years, so you know you'll get more insight over there. Check it out!
This came up on a conservative email list I belong to, where a bunch of people are still insisting that Barack Obama has not proven that he is a natural born citizen of the United States. There are a fair amount of similarities between 9-11 "Truthers" and "Birthers":
1. Insistence that the missing document is the key. Folks who debate creationists frequently refer to this as "the god of the holes"; wherever there's a hole in evolutionary theory, this is where god resides. For a long time, Truthers insisted that WTC-7 was the key, because the government (in the form of NIST) had not provided an explanation for its collapse. Of course, NIST released its report on WTC-7 this summer, and so the "Truthers" are back to pointing at other holes and/or trying to prove NIST wrong. So it is with "Birthers"; the missing birth certificate is the smoking gun.
2. Unwillingness to accept other forms of evidence. There were numerous eyewitness accounts of the damage to WTC-7, and abundant evidence that the Fire Department was well-aware of the possibility of collapse of the building hours before it fell. Similarly, the "Birthers" are unwilling to accept the Certificate of Live Birth. They are unwilling to accept the Honolulu Advertiser birth announcement from 1961. They are unwilling to accept the word of a Hawaii state official that Obama was born there.
3. Multiple, contradictory theories are embraced. The "Truthers" say that a refueling tanker hit WTC-2, or maybe it was a missile, or a fighter plane, or that nothing hit the Tower, it was all done with computer graphics. "Birthers" claim that Obama might have been born in Kenya. Or maybe he was born in Hawaii, but his Indonesian stepfather changed his citizenship to Indonesian. Or maybe he was born in Hawaii but because his father was British, he has dual citizenship and is not a natural-born US citizen.
4. Conspiracy theorists often believe in multiple theories. Phil Berg and Alex Jones, who are pushing the "Birther" crap, also push 9-11 Troof. Jerome Corsi, who's a "Birther" also peddled the North American Union nonsense as well.
You've gotta love the Birth Certificate Troofers, just like the Trig Troofers. They've been shot down again at the Supreme Court. Actually this isn't a Birth Certificate case, this is an even odder one, where the plaintiff claimed that Obama isn't a natural born citizen even though he was born in the USA because his father was a British subject. That's even nuttier than the Birth Certificate one.
As pointed out by Charles at LGF, the Birth Certicate Troofers all claim they are defending the constitution. Simple question: How many of these constitution defenders have seen President Bush's birth certificate?
It is not conservatism; it is sore loserism and quite radical in its intent. Respect for election results is one of the most durable bulwarks of our unity as a nation. Conservatives need to accept the fact that we lost the election, and get over it; and get on with the important business of reviving our country’s economy and defending its citizens, and — by the way — its Constitution.
If anything, Horowitz is too kind to the Birthers by granting them their premise. Look, if there were any real evidence that Obama was born outside the USA, I'd say that the constitution has to be upheld. But there is no such evidence, and there is plenty of evidence that he was born in Hawaii.
Michelle Malkin, Captain Ed Morrissey, and many other conservative bloggers have pointed out how nutty all this is. But we're all in on the plot, or have drunk the Obama Kool-Aid.
Here's an interesting article on the topic that this blog probably focuses on more than any other.
Do you see a pattern? Back when my father -- who joined the Army at the age of 16 and was in Pearl City 67 years ago today -- was island-hopping with his artillery unit across the Pacific, some medals went to men who selflessly died for their country, but more often to those who made the enemy die for theirs.
Sacrifice was important, but winning was paramount.
This is no denigration of our brave soldiers in Iraq, but an observation about what the people awarding medals are thinking now vs. then.
Of course, there have been medals awarded to those who made the other poor bastard die for his country; Brian R. Chontosh and Leigh Ann Hester come to mind. But it's still a valid argument that those two should be more celebrated for their accomplishments than they are.
Gail Collins used to be one of the regular OpEd writers at the New York Times before she was kicked upstairs to be the editor of the editorial page. It's clear why they did it, because she was the worst of the OpEd writers, and on a page that features Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert, that's pretty bad.
Consider today's offering from her feeble brain. She bashes Saxby Chambliss:
Anyhow, the Georgia runoff was more important than you might imagine. Certainly more significant than anything Chambliss has done since he skipped a closed-door Senate session on Iraq intelligence data to go golfing with Tiger Woods. His victory means that the Republicans will have at least 41 seats in the Senate when Barack Obama becomes president. (This is actually going to happen eventually. I promise.)
Never mind that most of the Democrats didn't study the Iraq prewar intelligence either.
The article mostly gripes about how unfair it is that the Democrats won't have 60 seats in the Senate. Inevitably she hops on the Joe Lieberman-bashing bandwagon:
Besides, if the Democrats did get the 60 seats, one of them would belong to Joe Lieberman. You may recall that although Lieberman spent the last year campaigning for John McCain (and, as it turns out, donating money to Republican candidates for the senate), the Democrats were so desperate to keep him in their caucus that they caved in to his demands to keep his committee chairmanship. If Lieberman had turned out to be Mr. 60, he would not only have wanted the committee, he would have insisted on being carried to all its meetings on a litter, borne by the fellow senators who failed to appreciate him, with Lindsey Graham running ahead, clashing cymbals.
Jeez, Gail, leave the humor to Mo Dowd, who is at least capable of being funny.
Interesting portrait of Naomi Klein, leftist nutbar in the New Yorker.
It confirms much of what we've long known about the far Left; that it runs in families. Klein's parents and grandparents were left-wing agitators; her grandfather's brother moved to the USSR after the communist revolution there. So in that sense, it's not surprising. But I did enjoy a few bits, including this:
Because Klein doesn’t expect much from any politician, she doesn’t spend time wishing Obama were more progressive. “I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s,’ ” she says. “The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if people don’t like where Obama is they should move the center.” To this end, Klein has been taking every opportunity to call for the nationalization of the oil companies. “It’s the job of the left to move the center,” she says. “Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.”
Yes, let's propose something really crazy so that then something only mildly crazy can get accomplished. And get this discussion of a leftist group:
The evening was sponsored in part by the Platypus Affiliated Society—a student-teacher reading group that focusses on the Frankfurt School and the Second International period of Marxism—and a few of Platypus’s members, tall, thin, pale young men, had set up a table out front. Platypus was founded on the idea that the left didn’t have a proper sense of its own history, especially the bad bits, and that a study of that history would help it emerge from the troubled state in which it found itself. (“Protest has devolved into an insular subculture of self-hatred, frustration, and anxiety derived from a pathological attitude towards social integration,” a typically morose editorial in the Platypus Review declares.) Given its emphasis on self-criticism, Platypus was not a natural constituency for Klein’s work, but because she was coming to the campus the group read “The Shock Doctrine,” and also Hayek and Friedman. “The conservatives engage the questions of freedom and utopia directly,” Ian Morrison, the editor of Platypus’s newsletter, said. “We were very struck that Klein seemed to back away from utopianism, because we feel that the left has liquidated itself in part because it’s conceded talk about freedom to someone like Bush.” Platypus’s interrogation of the past has led it in a variety of directions. Several of its members also belonged to the new Students for a Democratic Society, a revival of the new-left group from the sixties. In August, Platypus participated in a historical reënactment, in Grant Park, of the 1968 Democratic Convention, minus the police. “As a group of young, largely inexperienced activists it was the only organizing framework we could find which emphasized active participation,” read a writeup of the event in the Platypus Review. “Other forms seemed linguistically and ideologically flaccid. . . . We didn’t want to view our history—our radical history—as if from a riverbank, we wanted to jump in and splash around in it. . . . We debated, for instance, the ethics of nominating a live pig for the presidency: what should we feed it, and where would it stay?”
LOL! Of course, these Platypus guys didn't realize they'd just be imitating the TV show Green Acres from the 1960s, which had a pig named Arnold Ziffel running for President.
This gal attracted some attention by putting a message of impeachment on a Christmas tree ornament that will be hung in the White House:
The nine-inch ball is covered with swirly red and white stripes -- and, in tiny glued-on text, salutes the Democratic congressman's support for a resolution to impeach President Bush. (Also showcased: Washington state's 1919 labor strike, its suffrage movement and the violent anti-World Trade Organization riots of 1999.) Lawrence sent it off to D.C. in September and was very surprised it was accepted for the tree -- and that she was invited to this afternoon's White House reception for the artists, which she flew to D.C. to attend.
Well, the part there that immediately caught my eye was the bit about "glued-on text". My theory is that the quality of art is inversely proportional to the number of words incorporated into the art. Sure enough, it looks like Lawrence is more of an aspiring editorial cartoonist than an artist. Check out some other examples:
I occasionally get hate mail written in the teeniest, tiniest scrawl that will go on and on for pages. I’m always fascinated by the painstaking script — and the amount of time that must have gone into working out whatever strange pathologies gripped the writer.
After that near-miss, my wife and I decided we should hide in different rooms. While we hoped to be together at the end, our primary obligation was to our children. We wanted to keep one parent alive. Because I am American and my wife is Indian, and news reports said the terrorists were targeting U.S. and U.K. nationals, I believed I would further endanger her life if we were together in a hostage situation.
Imagine having to make that kind of decision. Excellent article, great writing.
Brown's instincts kicked in with bullets whizzing by and mortars exploding around her. This young woman, who was not even supposed to be in front line combat, threw her body over the wounded paratroopers to protect them. "It was an uncontrollable situation," she remembers. "And I just dove over Spray, 'cause Spray can't defend himself. It's not like he can go anywhere to take cover. So, I dove over him. Make sure he didn't get any shrapnel or anything from it."
Then, while still under fire, Santos and Brown dragged the injured men into a pick-up truck. Brown once again covered them with her body as Santos drove them to an area where they could be treated.
Not all war heroes are men. Kudos to Private Brown!
Oh, my, this is one of the funniest things I have ever read.
Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam -- for example, Ayatollah Khomeini's "Blue Book" and its helpful advice on romantic matters: "If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer." I'll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: "A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin." Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year-old wife, but the Ayatollah's not clear on that.
As the terrible events of Wednesday night unfolded, the staff of what had been Bombay’s finest hotel leapt into action. Scores of tales later emerged of unnamed workers hiding guests, barricading doors, tending the vulnerable and issuing orders.
Dalbir Bains, a British businesswoman, was with friends beside the hotel pool when the first crackle of automatic gunfire was heard a short distance away. “We heard shots and saw a man who’d just been shot. The terrorists were just behind us as we ran,” she said.
She made her way upstairs to Sea Lounge, a café on the first floor of the hotel, where the guests were still unaware of the fast-approaching threat. “Within seconds the staff had locked the doors, turned off the lights and told everybody to get on the floor,” she said. “They were fantastic. They saved lives.”
Maddow's partner, artist Susan Mikula, believes the "unlikely" label is just code for lesbian: "She goes from Stanford to Oxford to activism to radio, then TV? What's so unusual about that? Is it because she is a gay lady?"
Yes, because it is so unusual for lesbian women to host talk shows. Ellen Degeneres, Rosie O'Donnell and now Rachel Maddow.
What's really unusual is how far left Maddow is; that's the "unlikely" part of the story, not that she's gay. Rosie's a liberal but Rachel's a flaming leftist.
It's time to acknowledge that Obama's appointments thus far are quite reassuring. One of the reasons why I opposed Obama during the general election campaign was that he was the blank slate, the tabla rasa on which people were writing their own hopes and dreams. My concern was that we didn't know what we were buying. That was why Ayers and Wright were so troubling.
But Obama's nomination of Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff was a very good sign. Emanuel is one of the most despised Democrats by the netroots, right up there with Joe Lieberman. The nomination of Hillary Clinton (not yet official at this point) to State again indicates more a centrist position than a liberal posture. Ditto with Gates, if he is asked to stay on at Defense.
Indeed, the netroots are grumbling that they are not getting anything out of this administration for "progressives". Dennis Kucinich's Department of Peace seems to be going nowhere.
It's not the same as getting a centrist Republican. But it's about as good news as we could get coming out of the election.
"The list [of disappointments] is getting awfully long," wrote the blogger bmaz at Firedoglake. "Almost as long as Barack Obama's arm that he used to take our money and efforts to get himself elected. All we have seen is the short arm he has used to punch us in the face and collect street cred with villagers for having done so." Open Left's Chris Bowers wrote on Friday that he felt "incredibly frustrated ... [W]hy isn't there a single member of Obama's cabinet who will be advising him from the left?" Even Pat Buchanan -- not exactly the world's most liberal guy -- apparently thinks Obama needs to throw a bone to progressives after the start the transition is off to.
The New York Times has now published not one, but two OpEds suggesting that Bush should step down now, and not wait until Obama's inauguration.
Putting Barack Obama in charge immediately isn’t impossible. Dick Cheney, obviously, would have to quit as well as Bush. In fact, just to be on the safe side, the vice president ought to turn in his resignation first. (We’re desperate, but not crazy.) Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would become president until Jan. 20. Obviously, she’d defer to her party’s incoming chief executive, and Barack Obama could begin governing.
Obviously. And let me suggest that this whole senate confirmation of Obama's cabinet should be eliminated. And he should be allowed to add, say, twenty members to the Supreme Court, and let's do away with his reelection in 2012 because that's just a formality that's going to get in the way of his enacting the will of the people. And let's also do away with that pesky little amendment that bans presidents from serving more than two terms.
Mike Mussina was a solid pitcher, great at times. He never got hurt and was never awful. For the most part, every time he took the mound his team had a chance to win. But he’s not an all-time great, he’s not an immortal. Only immortals should go into the Hall of Fame.
Right now, there are six or seven (depending on where you stand on Roger Clemens) current or recently-retired hurlers who are pretty much locks to go into the Hall over the next 5-8 years. Those pitchers are Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Mariano Rivera, John Smoltz and possibly Clemens. Does Mike Mussina really belong in the same group as those guys? Of course not. You could argue (and the Yankee fans are gonna love this one) that Pedro Martinez and Curt Schilling deserve to go ahead of Mussina, and you wouldn’t be nuts.
It's my considered opinion that Mussina should definitely go into the Hall of Fame; he's way above the dividing line. Consider his 270-153 career won/lost record. That's 127 games above .500. Granted, Mussina labored for some good teams in his career, but that's an extraordinary number. Tom Glavine is 102 games above .500. Greg Madddux is 128 games over sea level. Randy Johnson is 135 games up.
Price brings up a few pitchers who have a few more wins than Mussina:
Many Moose supporters will bring up his 270 wins, but if you’re gonna use that as a barometer, then Jim Katt (283), Burt Blyleven (287) and Tommy John (288) should go in ahead of him.
But they also have lots more losses; Kaat was only 46 games above .500, Blyleven only 37 games and John 57 games over even.
He got a lot of attention for his interesting charts and graphs, but like a lot of math-oriented folks, he doesn't analyze things other than numbers very well:
This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don't win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism's strengths). Rather, the key lies in the second passage that I highlighted. There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.
Perhaps Nate could provide us with a similar analysis for the question of why the New England Patriots don't win Super Bowls anymore. Hilariously, the exchange that leads to this observation is when Nate denies that Barack Obama launched his political career at Bill Ayers' house. He's just amazed that the guy he's interviewing seems to believe this nonsense, and concludes that it must come from listening to too much conservative talk radio.
Now, of course, Barack Obama did launch his political career at Bill Ayers house. Now maybe Nate has some sort of definition of "launch" or "career" or "house" that enables him to deny it. Maybe there was a phone call that Obama did just before going over to meet Ayers that really is the official launch.
But Nate doesn't bother with that, because he doesn't see the necessity of persuasion. Everybody knows that Barack Obama didn't launch his political career at Bill Ayers' house. Ayers is just a professor of education who lives in his neighborhood.
TalkLeft, which is actually a pretty sensible liberal blog, talks about the silly indictment of Dick Cheney for abuse that went on in a Texas prison. But get this:
Unfortunately, of all the real and imagined crimes for which Cheney and Gonzales deserve indictment, these are far down the list.
3
Cheney and Gonzales deserve indictment for imagined crimes?
Did anybody catch NBC's "going green" for Sunday Night Football yesterday? At halftime, they featured Bob Costas and Meredith Viera somberly (but not soberly) presenting a segment on global warming. To let us know how seriously NBC takes global warming, they had flown Viera, a camera crew and I presume her makeup artist and hair stylist to Sydney Australia, which according to Viera is facing the loss of its famed Opera House due to the rising sea levels. Viera informed us that the sea levels could rise as much as 200 feet; that's only one order of magnitude greater than Al Gore's nutty claim of 20 feet (which is in turn, an order of magnitude greater than the IPCC's claim of 18 inches). Viera also mentioned that the Today Show would be broadcasting from the Snows of Kilamanjaro, which are disappearing, possibly because of NBC's lighting for the Today Show set.
Guys, if you really want to set an example, get the NFL to move your game to the mid-afternoon, when all those stadium lights won't be necessary. And tell the audience to turn off the TV and sit quietly for three hours, trying not to breathe too fast.
Look, folks, this is fruitcake stuff. Don't buy into it. The evidence that Obama was not born in Hawaii is non-existent. The evidence that he was is abundant. We'll look like idiots for believing this nonsense.
Obviously both of them, but more important for the future is whether it was the GOP that dragged down McCain or McCain that dragged down the GOP. As I noted in my last post Jeff Goldstein seems to think that if the Republicans had just nominated Fred Thompson, they would have won easily.
So I thought I'd take a look at the issue. McCain/Obama wasn't the only race on the ballot on November 4th, there were also many states (33 to be precise) that had statewide races for the US Senate. How did McCain do as compared to the Republican candidates?
Pretty well, actually. For starters, we throw out Arkansas, as Mark Pryor did not have a GOP opponent on the ballot. Excepting that state, McCain did better than the GOP candidate for Senate in North Carolina, Virginia, Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota and West Virginia, for a total of 19 states. McCain did worse than the GOP candidate in Alabama, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming, for a total of 13 states. Of the states that McCain did worse in, only two (Maine and Minnesota--pending recount) elected a Republican to the Senate, yet gave their electoral votes to Obama. On the other hand, there were five states (Alaska, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia) which went for McCain but sent a Democrat to the Senate.
In the thirty-two states, McCain got 49.3% of the vote, while the GOP candidates for Senate got 46.8% of the vote, a 2.5 percentage point swing. Note also that in the two cases where McCain lost but a GOP senator won (Maine and Minnesota), in neither case was it some "real" conservative. Susan Collins is currently the third-most liberal Republican senator with a 52.2 rating from the American Conservative Union, and Norm Coleman's lifetime rating of 73.0 puts him comfortably on the left side of the GOP. Essentially they were more liberal than McCain, so they did better in their home states.
So it appears obvious to me that the GOP dragged down McCain rather than the opposite. I can understand why those who supported some other guy in the primary would try to claim that McCain cost the GOP the election; the evidence does not back them up.
The theory is almost too perfect to be true. Barack Obama, the son of politically progressive parents, was born Aug. 4, 1961—almost nine months to the day after John F. Kennedy was elected to the White House. Is it possible Obama was conceived on that historic night?
And if so, could history repeat itself? In the hours and days since Obama's victory, many of his exhilarated supporters have been, shall we say, in the mood for love.
Hilarious. First, there was no baby boom in 1961. In fact, by 1961 the baby bust was on. And considering these are liberals, it seems more likely that we will see an Obama abortion boom a few months down the road.
South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint on Friday became one of the first high-profile Republicans to publicly criticize John McCain following his electoral defeat, blaming the Arizona senator for betraying conservative principles in his quest for the White House.
There's this bizarre notion that somehow the Republicans would have won if only they'd nominated a "real" conservative--Mitt Romney, I suppose, whom DeMint endorsed for the nomination. This is simply denial of the realities of 2008. The Republicans were going to lose this election no matter whom they nominated; McCain at least kept it close.
"McCain, who is proponent of campaign finance reform that weakened party organizations and basically put George Soros in the driver's seat," DeMint said. "His proposal for amnesty for illegals. His support of global warming, cap-and-trade programs that will put another burden on our economy. And of course, his embrace of the bailout right before the election was probably the nail in our coffin this last election. And he has been an opponent of drilling in ANWR, at a time when energy is so important. It really didn't fit the label, but he was our package."
And which of those issues hurt the GOP in the fall? Answer: None of the above. Obama voted in favor of the bailout. So essentially what McCain did was take all those issues off the table. And, oh, did anybody mention immigration during the fall campaign? I can't remember it even coming up.
Jeff Goldstein endorses DeMint's comments and adds a note in the comments that he thinks Fred Thompson would have crushed Obama. This is denial. Thompson performed in the primaries like he'd taken a couple of Sominex; why on earth would anybody think he'd suddenly come to life in the general? The simple fact is that Thompson didn't have the fire in the belly that you need to win an election. Do you really think he would have been out there campaigning day after day like McCain did? Heck, his team had a tough time getting him to do more than one campaign event a day back during the primaries.
Maybe this debate doesn't matter. Maybe Obama will be a Jimmy Carter and the conservative base will be able to nominate whomever they want in 2012. We shall see.
Note as well that unlike some others, I am not blaming Sarah Palin for the loss. I do that for two reasons: first, because I like Sarah Palin and felt she got jobbed by the media; and second, because it's the same argument that the conservatives are raising about McCain, that we coulda won if it hadn't been for X. Unless X is the financial crisis, I don't buy it.
In a new afterword to his memoir, 1960s radical William Ayers describes himself as a "family friend" of President-elect Barack Obama and writes that the campaign controversy over their relationship was an effort by Obama's political enemies to "deepen a dishonest narrative" about the candidate.
Is community service synonymous with slavery? Whether that service is mandated or suggested, could it in any way be construed as enslaving citizens? This week, an acquaintance noted the “irony” that college students would be required by a black president to do community service. She then pointed out the 13th Amendment.
The plan as originally floated was to make it compulsory, which would not be slavery, but would probably end up being "make work". What a shock, a former community organizer wants to require people to do volunteer work?
Michele used to be an excellent blogger, but to be honest, I mostly read her comic-book related posts, not her political stuff, even though we were on the same side of the aisle back then. Here it seems she's tilting at strawmen.
Well, looks like the Holy War for the soul of the Republican Party is on. One of the warriors who would like to drum folks like me out of the tent is old Cat Scratch Fever himself, Ted Nugent.
As the Republican Party begins to retool, rebuild and return to the "less government is best government" conservatism that makes America work, the first thing the GOP needs to do is to lock the RINOs out of the discussion. Heavily armed with an abundance of conservative attitude, my hunting buddies and I will provide security to ensure RINOs are kept downwind from the discussion. If allowed to participate, RINOs will continue to rot the Republican Party from within and diminish it in the eyes of the public. Enough is enough.
John McCain has been a RINO on campaign finance, immigration, global warming and other issues and look what happened to him. He had reached across the aisle so many times to cut deals with the liberals that he had to pick Governor Palin, a true conservative, to try and lure disenfranchised and disgusted conservatives back into the fold. Didn't work. Senator McCain was the wrong candidate at the right time. RINOs lose elections; conservatives win them.
So is Ted saying there that disenfranchised and disgusted conservatives didn't come back into the fold? That they let Obama win rather than vote for someone they consider a RINO? I hope that's not what he's claiming, because in that case he's the one who's a RINO.
Look, there are two realistic scenarios for the next 4-8 years. One has the Republicans regrouping, and tacking towards the center on some issues, not all. The other has them saying "Screw the moderates we can win it without them." There is a possibility that one could work out, but it really depends on Obama being another Jimmy Carter, not something that I am going to root for.
This is a center-right country. It is not a right-wing country, no matter how much crunchy cons might wish it to be so. Ronald Reagan won with a big tent; if we shrink the tent we will not win.
In reading this post about how some gal got tickets to see the election night special at the Daily Show, and then got hosed when VIPS were pushed to the front of the line:
I don't believe in being entitled to anything just because I'm a fan, or am a bigger fan than this person or that person.
But I am owed. Not the cost of my flight. Or the cost of my hotel. Or even the vacation days I took, which I could have used to visit my family. What I'm owed is the experience of witnessing history take place somewhere other than alone an empty bar on 11th Avenue, sucking on a can of Bud Light, feeling completely emotionally empty.
I can appreciate that the experience sucked, and that you feel like you got hosed. But nobody can give you back that evening, and so it's silly to claim that's exactly what you're owed.
Part of the enjoyment of reading the post comes from the fact that she's clearly an Obamabot.
John Cole's Balloon Juice used to be a conservative blog; now it's a liberal blog, and in the future it will probably be a libertarian blog the way he's going.
And before I close, let me finish with this. I left the right because they were such *ssholes I could not stand it anymore. You left good graces with the left because you were too much of an *sshole, and they troll-rated you into oblivion. I may have been wrong about a lot of things in the past, and will be in the future, but I left the GOP because it was a cult.
Note that here he is addressing another liberal blogger in those sorts of terms. Personally, I am glad he's no longer on our side.
There have been layoffs at Current Media, the cable network co-founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
A statement from Current put the number of layoffs at about 60 positions, with 30 more to be refilled, the company said in a statement. That's less of a hard hit than the 20 percent cuts that a source close to Current hinted to CNET News on Tuesday. The statement read: "Approximately 60 positions have been eliminated in the company's three U.S. offices, and approximately 30 new positions created," the statement read. "Many of those whose positions were eliminated have been placed in the new positions. Current will have approximately 410 employees (after these staffing adjustments)."
Al Gore firing people? Couldn't he have just sold some of his Google options and kept them on? My god, he's become Gordon Gekko!
In short, the Republican Party will probably veer right in the years ahead, and suffer more defeats. Then, finally, some new Reformist donors and organizers will emerge. They will build new institutions, new structures and new ideas, and the cycle of conservative ascendance will begin again.
That's spot on. The problem with the Republican Party is that they've been so successful with some of their ideas (lower taxes encourage growth) that the Democrats have now co-opted them. Oh, sure, Obama may fiddle around with the upper-end tax rates a bit, but nobody's talking about bringing back the 90% marginal rates of the 1950s or even the 70% bracket of the 1970s.
Proven? Where? And where in the MSM did anyone report that Trig was not her biological son? All I did was ask questions - and never received any proof of anything.
Yep, and that's exactly what the 9-11 Troofers say. "We're just asking questions. Nobody will give us proof!"
On the Trig question, I tried for two months to get some kind of basic, evidentiary proof. I asked publicly; I asked privately; the McCain campaign simply refused to give any actual records and attacked the press merely for asking questions.
He tried for two months? What kind of a retard would keep asking stupid, offensive questions about this nothing-burger of a story?
I'm helping a friend of mine who's taking a finance course. The textbook for the course is called Fundamentals of Corporate Finance by Brealey, Myers and Marcus. In general the book is solid, but I did find one gaping error.
In Chapter 7, while discussing some of the problems with IRR, they give an example of an office building with two options. Under scenario one, they construct the office building for $350,000 and sell it one year later (after completion) for $400,000. In the second scenario, they lease it out for three years at 16,000 per annum, and sell it at the end of the third year for $450,000. They point out correctly that the IRR under the first scenario is 14.29% and the IRR under the second scenario is 12.96%. However, they claim that an NPV calculation of the cash flows at a 7% discount rate is higher for the second scenario, and therefore the second scenario is the better option. Here are the cash flows they present (000s):
What did they miss? It's a bit tricky, but they missed what the developer did with the $400,000 at the end of the first year. Assuming he could reinvest it safely at 7%, there would be additional cash flows of $28 (000s) in years two and three, which have to be factored into the analysis. If you add those cash flows back in and do the NPV analysis, you'll find that the first scenario is indeed the better option.
Note: This is not to say that there are not other problems with IRR. But the example given is quite plainly mistaken.
By now you've probably heard that lots of new parents are naming their baby boys "Barack". While certainly some people are doing this, this detail from the past makes me dubious:
There have been other presidential naming trends in the past century, according to Social Security Administration data. Franklin jumped to No. 33 in 1933, up from No. 147 in 1931. Dwight surged in the 1950s and Lyndon in the 1960s. Theodore hit its peak in the first decade of the 20th century.
Okay, I was born in the 1950s, and was a youngster in the 1960s. I didn't know anybody named Lyndon or Dwight growing up. Indeed, the only other Lyndon I've ever heard of was Lyndon LaRouche, and he plainly wasn't named after LBJ.
Beer will taste better and contain fewer calories, our cars will all get 1000 miles to the gallon, and the bitter partisanship will end.
There are some who now believe that although power politics is here to stay, the era of intense polarization and frenzied demonization might begin to recede as a President Barack Obama goes back to that old standby of American politics used by so many Presidents: the task of trying to forge consensus. Consensus does NOT mean not taking strong stands or upsetting some who oppose specific policies. It means trying to get as many Americans from as many walks of life on board as possible by trying to woo, sway and win over, versus to simply politically dominate.
Of course, that's stuff and nonsense, as is much of the rest of the article. Get this:
Given the number of votes Obama got — the most a presidential candidate has gotten since LBJ in 1964 — and his big electoral college margin, his backers will argue persuasively that he has a mandate. But even there that doesn’t mean (a)riding roughshod, targeting, and demonizing those who disagree with him, OR, (b)not taking a stand, advocating policies and enacting them.
I don't know what the heck Gandelman means by that. Obama got more votes than anybody since LBJ in 1964? LBJ got 43 million in 1964, a number that was surpassed by Nixon's 46 million in 1972, Reagan's 44 million in 1980, Reagan's 54 million in 1984, Bush, Sr.'s 48 million in 1988, etc. Electoral college votes? Nope, Obama's 349 is fewer than any president got from 1980-1996. Percentage of the vote? Negative as well.
The idea that Obama is not going to be every bit as partisan as Bush is wishful thinking. I've commented before (as has Obama) that he's a tabla rasa, a blank slate on which people have projected their own hopes and desires.
