Dr. John Lott looks at the attempt by the left to steal themselves another Senate seat: When voters woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 -- a total change over 4 days of 504 votes. Amazingly, this all has occurred even though there hasn’t even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today, and their final results will be sent to the secretary of state by Friday. The actual recount won’t even start until November 19. Correcting these typos was claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races. Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct. To put this change in perspective, that single precinct’s corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races. The two other precincts (Mountain Iron in St. Louis county and Partridge Township in Pine county) accounted for another 100 votes each. The change in each precinct was half as large as the pickup for Obama from the corrections for the entire state. The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to “exhausted county officials,” and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large. Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482). It was also true that precincts that gave Obama a larger percentage of the vote were statistically more likely to make a correction that helped Franken. The recent Washington State 2006 gubernatorial recount is probably most famous for the discovery of ballots in heavily Democratic areas that had somehow missed being counted the first and even second time around. Minnesota is already copying that, though thus far on a much smaller scale, with 32 absentee ballots being discovered in Democratic Hennepin County after all the votes had already been counted. When those votes are added in, they seemed destined to cut Coleman's lead further. Indeed, it is probably through the discovery of new votes that Franken has his best shot of picking up new votes. Despite the press pushing a possible replay of election judges divining voters’ intentions by looking at “hanging chads” to see if voters meant to punch a hole, that shouldn’t be an issue in Minnesota. The reason is simple: optical scan vote counting machines return ballots to voters if no vote is recorded for a contested race. The Associated Press piece with the title “Most Minn. Senate ‘undervotes’ are from Obama turf” misinformed readers about what undervotes really imply. The Minneapolis Star Tribune headline similarly claimed "An analysis of ballots that had a vote for president but no vote for U.S. senator could have recount implications." Voters themselves insert their ballot into the machine that reads and records their votes, and if the machine finds that a vote isn’t recorded, voters can either mark the race that they forgot to mark or didn’t mark clearly. Or if voters “overvoted” and accidentally marked too many candidates, voters can also get a fresh ballot. There should be no role to divine voters’ intentions. If a voter wanted a vote recorded for a particular race, the machine tells him whether his vote in all the races was counted. But voters also have the right not to vote in particular races. In this election, 0.4 percent of Minnesotans didn’t want to vote for president. The number for the Senate race was only slightly higher at 0.8 percent. For congressional and state House races, the rates were 3 and 3.5 percent. This pattern of fewer people voting in less important elections has been observed as long as people have studied elections. There are always at least a few people who don’t vote for even the most closely contested races at the top of the ballot and fewer people follow and vote for races the farther down the ballot that you go. But this is not evidence of mistakes, quite the contrary. With ACORN filing more than 43,000 registration forms this year, 75 percent of all new registrations in the state, Minnesota was facing vote fraud problems even before the election. Even a small percentage of those registrations resulting in fraudulent votes could tip this election. To many, it just seems like too much of a coincidence that Minnesota's one tight race just happens to be the race with the most "corrected" votes by far. But the real travesty will be to start letting election officials divine voter's intent. If you want to discourage people from voting, election fraud is one sure way of doing it.
Minnesota is becoming to 2008 politics what Florida was in 2000 or Washington State in 2004 -- a real mess. The outcome will determine whether Democrats get 58 members of the U.S. Senate, giving them an effective filibuster-proof vote on many issues.
I don't think the left realizes what a deeply dangerous game they are playing. Americans are willing to accept the governance of politicians who they dislike and did not vote for as long as they know that those politicians were fairly elected. Take away the underpinnings of Americans' faith in the honesty of the process and their willingness to tolerate what they disagree with can also disappear.
In Florida 2000 Americans witnessed the Democrat party attempt to use the Florida courts to rewrite the rules over and over again until they finally got the outcome they wanted. They read the stories about how left-wing "community organizers" with ACORN registered one person as many as 73 times and turned in voter registration forms filled out by people with names like "Mickey Mouse". They watched the governorship of Washington state being stolen by the miraculous appearance of thousands of previously unnoticed ballots which were all marked for the Democrat candidate.
They have watched the press, another foundation of a functional democracy, abandon its duty to be accurate reporters of the truth in order to become partisan advocates. This has been going on for decades but in the recent election it became so overt that major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post aren't' even bothering to deny it any more.
It has been said that there are three boxes which any free society must depend upon if it wishes to remain free. The first two are the soap box and the ballot box. As long as people are free to express their opinions and argue for their causes and the press is both able and willing to report on the debate in a fair and accurate manner the population can remain informed enough to make good choices in who will lead them.
And as long as they have the freedom to enter the voting booth and cast a ballot secure in the knowledge that it will be fairly counted and that their vote will not be diluted by fraud (ballot box stuffing, people voting more than once, people who are not legally entitled to vote being allowed to vote) they will accept the results and continue to obey the laws and give due respect to legal authority.
However if the people come to believe that the soap box and the ballot box have been corrupted and cannot be relied upon to produce results which fairly represent the will of the citizenry their last recourse will be to the third box, the cartridge box, and they resort to arms to redress their grievances.
The left has already destroyed the faith of the people in the traditional media and they are making serious (and public) plans to shut down the new media with the Orwellian "Fairness Doctrine".
If they are also allowed to destroy the public's faith in the electoral process by simply stealing (and in such an open manner) any election which they need to steal to get the number of legislative votes they need to be able to rule without effective opposition then a great many people just might start to see the cartridge box as the only remaining means of effective dissent.
If the left then pours gasoline on the fire that they have already ignited by trying to disarm the population many people are going to see the preservation of liberty through armed rebellion as a thing which they must do now or never.
If the left ever does manage to push America to the point of civil war they will lose. There simply aren't enough of them and they aren't the ones who own all the guns. We are.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
A dangerous game
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
It's an ill wind that blows no good
The nation faces some hard times ahead however there are some good things about Obama's victory that real Americans can be grateful for.
1. Hillary Clinton will never be president. She will not dare try to take the nomination away from her own party's incumbent president in 2012 and by the time 2016 rolls around she will be too old. It isn't fair or right that our society judges women more harshly on their appearance than it does men but it most certainly does. If Fred Thompson was too "old and decrepit" to be elected in eight years Mrs. Clinton will be as well.
2. There will not be a member of the Bush family on the ticket ever again.
3. The economy is entering a recession and it looks to be a bad one. The party in the White House always gets the blame for a bad economy and it is better that a Democrat wears the bullseye for the next four years. Especially since the Democrats are largely responsible for the mess we find ourselves in.
4. John McCain will not be the next president. If anyone doubts McCain's true character all you need to do is contemplate the look of orgasmic bliss on his face during his concession speech as he talked about how very eager he was to help Obama lead the nation. If McCain had been elected president the first thing he would have done was run "across the aisle" to repair relations with his good and dear friends on the extreme left-wing of the Democrat party. Then he would have dedicated himself to being the kind of president that the New York Times would approve of in glowing editorials. The Republican party clutched a viper to its bosom in John McCain. Not having his venom running through our veins for the next four years gives us a chance for survival.
5. Sarah Palin was introduced to the Republican party which promptly fell in love with her. Her ability to almost carry the moribund McCain campaign across the finish line makes her the front runner for the nomination in 2012.
6. The clueless idiots in the McCain wing of the Republican party are further discrediting themselves with their almost unbelievably crude and stupid attacks against Governor Palin.
7. The media unmasked itself and there is now not even the pretense of objectivity about them. The average American citizen now realizes that he cannot depend upon the network news or the daily newspaper to tell him the truth. This will only hasten the final collapse of the old media.
Thank you Sarah
I saw this posted on Right Wing News and thought it was a magnificent idea. Governor Palin is getting huge amounts of cards, letters and even flowers from real Americans who love her and are eager to have her as our leader, but through the wilderness period we are entering now and as our president in 2012.
Public service can be thankless work if you're a conservative who lives the values. Your very existence is viewed as a threat to the power brokers and the entrenched smarty-pants set. This country is still a Republic governed by and for the people. I thought it might be nice to let Sarah Palin know that her valiant efforts to get John McCain elected did not go unnoticed and that she's supported by the people who matter--the voters.
Here is her address:
Third Floor
P.O. Box 110001
Juneau, AK 99811-0001
Will Obama be a one termer?
From US News and World Report, by James Pethokoukis.
Just "one and done" for Barack Obama's presidency? Recall an ominous passage in his otherwise joyous election-night speech: "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term." Maybe the tone was suggested by one of Obama's economic advisers like Jason Furman or Austan Goolsbee. It's the battered economy, after all, that will be President Obama's greatest domestic policy challenge. As such, it will also be his greatest political challenge, too -- but one where failure may already be baked into the cake.
That's right, the "O" in "Obama" may stand for "One Term." For starters, there's a strong chance that when voters head to the polls on Nov. 2, 2010, they likely will still think the economy is awful. Not much debate about that. (Good chance the Democrats' two-election winning streak comes to an end.) And while voters may be somewhat patient for two years, patient for four years? Really unlikely. If history is any guide at all, voters may still be terribly cranky about the economy when they cast their ballots on Nov. 6, 2012 and thus likely choose the 45th president of the United States -- be it Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal or some other Republican without "Bush" for a last name. Once again a "change" election for an impatient America. The same bad economy that doomed John McCain in 2008 will have sunk Obama, as well.
Here's the political and economic math: Let's assume the current downturn turns out to be as painful as the 1990-91 recession. It's an apt comparison. As Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Gary Stern said earlier this year," The situation we confront today is reminiscent, in several salient ways, of the headwinds environment that prevailed in the aftermath of the 1990-91 recession."
Among those "headwinds" Stern referred to: an imploding real estate bubble, a construction bust, a banking crisis, and a credit crunch. Sound familiar? The nation's gross domestic product fell 3.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 1990 and 2.0 percent in the first quarter of 1991. But even after the economy started expanding again, the unemployment rate kept rising until it hit 7.8 percent in June of 1992 vs. a low of 5.2 percent in June 1990. Recall that in January of 1992, President Bush, running for reelection, told New Hampshire voters that the economy was in "free fall" even though the economy was later shown to have grown at a robust 4.2 percent during the first quarter of that year.
See, it takes a while for people to really perceive that an economy has turned around, especially if unemployment is high. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election on the economy ("it's the economy, stupid") even though GDP had been growing for six full quarters. According to Gallup, 88 percent of Americans thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" in October 1992 with some 60 percent saying the economy was "getting worse." Two years later, it was the Democrats turn to feel the brunt of widespread economic anxiety as the Republicans captured both the House and the Senate. Even though the economy had then been growing for 14 straight quarters and the unemployment rate was down to 5.8 percent, 72 percent of Americans still thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" and 66 percent though the nation was headed in the wrong direction.
That's right 3 1/2 years after the 1990-91 recession ended, the economy was still weighing negatively on voters and hurting the incumbent political party. Is it so hard to imagine, then, that three or four years from now voters will also be unhappy about the state of the economy and blame the party in power, the Obamacrats?
And then there's this: The 2008-09 recession may actually be far nastier than its 1990-91 twin. Every day, Wall Street forecasts worsen. Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs, expects a jobless rate of 8 1/2 percent by the end of 2009 and drifting a bit higher in 2010 for the biggest cumulative rise in unemployment since the Great Depression. And over at JP Morgan Chase, economists are predicting the economy will shrink 4.0 percent this quarter and 2.0 percent during the first three months of 2009. And on top of all that, you have the $7 trillion of lost national net worth. (Think higher investment and business taxes will help?)
No wonder Obama's political advisers just told the New York Times that they're already fretting about the 2010 midterms. They may also want to worry about 2012. Team Obama shouldn't expect this election euphoria to last four years if the economy struggles and struggles. (Wait until oil prices and interest rates start rising again.)
Obama's election is often compared to that of Ronald Reagan's in 1980. Both gentlemen were voted in to fix an ailing economy. But the 1982 recession took a huge chunk out of the Gipper's popularity. He had just a 35 percent job approval rating at the start of 1983, just two months after Republicans lost 27 seats in the House in the midterm elections. But Reagan's presidency was saved by an amazing economic rebound. The economy surged at a 4.5 percent pace in 1983 and at a mind-blowing 7.2 percent clip in 1984 as unemployment dropped from a high of 10.8 percent in December 1982 to 7.2 percent in November 1984. The Long Boom was underway.
Reagan worked his magic with tax cuts. Obama is trying to do the same with government spending. But stimulus packages are only supposed to keep the recession from getting worse or morphing into a mini-depression. I don't think anyone expects that $500 billion in hot money to return America to prosperity. Only time (and the private sector) can do that, especially with a downturn caused by a credit crisisa and deflating asset bubble. And four years may not be enough time for the Obama presidency to traverse that long road or complete that steep climb.
I agree with almost everything Mr Pethokoukis says here but I do have one quibble and one caveat.
The quibble is that the voters in 1994 were frightened by Hillary Clinton's massive Stalinist socialized health care plan and disguested by scandals like the House Bank and House Post Office affairs. They had lost faith in the Democrats who controlled the legislature and believed that the president was trying to take the country in the wrong direction and so were not disposed to see the economy as doing well.
The caveat is that it is very difficult for me to believe that Obama's economic advisers can be stupid enough to tell him that he can raise taxes at the beginning of a recession and not make that recession much worse than it would otherwise be.
If Obama can be convinced to extend the Bush tax cuts through 2012 and even cut corporate income tax rates and the capital gains tax (he can point to the economic miracle of Ireland and say that he is learning lessons from Europe - that should confuse the loons in his party for a while) he could come out of this as the "cool headed leader who steered his nation through a massive financial crisis and back to prosperity".
On one level it is almost impossible for me to believe that Obama will not do something like this since it would cement his popularity, lead to his party strengthening its control of the House and Senate in 2010 and all but guarentee his reelection in 2012 and, by the way, be really good for the nation.
Then I look at the fact that he has Michigan Governor Granholm on his economic team - that's right the Governor Granholm whose economic policies have had Michigan in a one-state recession for years - and I am forced to the conclusion that Obama and his party simply don't get it and probably never will.
There's more to life than politics
OK, I admit it. I'm an Eve geek which means that I'm excited about the new Quantum Rise update. Here is the trailer:
Monday, November 10, 2008
The Great GOP Civil War
There is a civil war going on within the Republican party. This fight for the heart and soul of the party is being waged between two broad factions which could be termed the Conservatives and the Moderates. Another pair of names which would apply are the Reagan Republicans and the McCain "Republicans".
The war between these two factions for control of the GOP began in earnest with the rise of Barry Goldwater and the Conservatives achieved their greatest victory in the election of Ronald Reagan. Since the time of Reagan the Republican party has run one presidential candidate after another who has pretended to belong to the Reagan wing of the party but in fact has been more closely aligned with the Moderates.
In 2008 the Republican party choose a candidate who called himself conservative but who had in fact been at open war with conservatives for years. The Moderates seized upon McCain as their last best hope to either drive conservatives out of the Republican party or at least marginalize them to the point where they could be totally ignored. The Moderates hoped that they would be able to hold up a McCain victory as proof that "Reagan was dead" and that the truism that "when Republicans run a conservative in national elections they win" was no longer true, if it ever had been.
The problem was that back even before Senator McCain had the Republican nomination locked up his campaign had internal polling which showed that McCain's hold on the conservative base would not be strong enough to bring them out in numbers large enough to have any hope of winning the election (this was before the full extent of Obama's radicalism was known). This caused the campaign to bypass the people that McCain would normally have wanted as his running mate (Joe Lieberman, Tim Pawlenty) or that political expediency might have otherwise forced him to pick (Mitt Romney) and instead choose a died-in-the-wool Reagan conservative.
This led the McCain campaign to Sarah Palin who had the added appeal (to McCain) of being a reformer who had taken on the Republican party in her own state (in McCain's mind true glory can only be achieved by people who oppose Republicans).
The problem for McCain and his "insiders" was they they simply had no real idea of what a bad taste McCain's nomination had left in the mouths of the party faithful. When Sarah Palin's name was announced as the VP pick the wave of pure joy which swept through the Republican party must have been a very unwelcome wakeup call for the McCain campaign and the Moderate/McCain wing of the Republican party.
The contrast between Sarah Palin's night at the Republican convention and McCain's night tells you everything you need to know. Palin electrified the room, filling the hall with an energy which haddn't been seen since Ronald Reagan departed the political stage 20 years ago. In contrast McCain's night could have been titled The March of the RINOs as McCain and his soul-mate Lindsey Graham put the room to sleep.
The undeniable fact is that the one and only time McCain took the lead and seemed likely to win the election was right after Sarah Palin was named as his running mate.
Now that the election is over and McCain's loss has proved the truism that "when you give the people a choice between a democrat and a Democrat they will pick the Democrat" the Moderates are desperate to create a narrative of the campaign which places the blame for the defeat on anything other than the fact that McCain was a RINO. It is acceptable to believe that McCain lost because he was too old or because he wasn't bright, cheerful and optimistic enough but you must not, under any circumstances, think that McCain lost because of all those years on the Sunday shows trashing his fellow Republicans or all those pieces of "signature" legislation that he had his name stuck on with left-wing partners like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold.
But the Moderates have another option before them as well. Rather than just blaming the fact that McCain was an old fart running against a young telegenic man who could read a speech better than anyone else in the history of the world (as long as someone else wrote it for him) they can kill two birds with one stone and blame Sarah Palin, the Reagan conservative.
This is the reason why the McCain campaign "insiders" are leaking bizarre lies about Governor Palin's behavior during the campaign. Not only do they hope to absolve themselves of any blame for McCains loss they hope to destroy Mrs. Palin's future political viability.
Why is this so important to them? Read this report from Rasmussen:
Right now Sarah Palin is the most popular living politican in the Republican party and the front runner for the 2012 nomination. And she's a Reagan Conservative.Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Republican voters say Alaska Governor Sarah Palin helped John McCain’s bid for the presidency, even as news reports surface that some McCain staffers think she was a liability.
Only 20% of GOP voters say Palin hurt the party’s ticket, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Six percent (6%) say she had no impact, and five percent (5%) are undecided.
Ninety-one percent (91%) of Republicans have a favorable view of Palin, including 65% who say their view is Very Favorable. Only eight percent (8%) have an unfavorable view of her, including three percent (3%) Very Unfavorable.
When asked to choose among some of the GOP’s top names for their choice for the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, 64% say Palin. The next closest contenders are two former governors and unsuccessful challengers for the presidential nomination this year -- Mike Huckabee of Arkansas with 12% support and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts with 11%.
Three other sitting governors – Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Charlie Crist of Florida and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota – all pull low single-digit support.
These findings echo a survey earlier this week which found that Republicans were happier with their vice presidential candidate than with their presidential nominee. Seventy-one percent (71%) said McCain made the right choice by picking Palin as his running mate, while only 65% said the party picked the right nominee for president.
You see the problem for the Moderates? How can "Reagan be dead" if the most beloved Republican in the nation is the one being hailed as "the new Reagan"?
The moderates know that if they are to have any hope of picking the next Republican nominee they must destroy Sarah Palin. She is everything they hate and abominate. She is an unashamed conservative, a devout Christian, a gun owner, not a product of the Ivy League, she has worked with her hands and would do so again, she didn't have her Down's Syndrome baby chopped to pieces and sucked into a jar at an abortion mill, she doesn't really believe in human-caused global warming and she wants to drill in ANWAR.
The very reasons that the McCain wing of the Republican party hate Sarah Palin is why I and most other Republicans love her. This is why I started the Palin 2012 blogroll and why I am writing this piece.
This is why I believe that conservatives must unite behind Sarah Palin and promote her cause. Even if there is someone you personally like better the fact is that any other Republican would have to work long and hard to just arrive at the point of name recognition and popularity that Mrs. Palin already occupies. Sarah has a head start. Help her build on that.
And keep the faith the Moderates will lose. The relative moral strength of the two sides is clearly seen in the fact that the conservatives greatest victory came in their election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency while the greatest Moderate victory to date has been the nomination of John McCain to the candidacy.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Getting the GOP's House in order
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In Defeat, Republicans Opting for Insanity The well-known definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. House Republicans appear to be insane. When then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) stepped down in 2006, Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) was elected to replace him. Boehner went on to lead Republicans with a bland, lame, uninspiring legislative agenda. Voters, led by conservatives who sat on their hands, rewarded him by kicking Republicans out of the majority in November of that year, hoping Republicans would wake up and change their evil ways before the White House was on the line. They didn't. Learning nothing from that Election Day massacre, House Republicans re-elected Boehner as Minority Leader. He - and they, collectively, under his leadership - went on to bore the electorate with an unimaginative legislative agenda in opposition to a Democrat-led Congress under Speaker Nancy Pelosi which was even less popular, if you can believe it, than President Bush himself. Under Boehner's leadership, Republicans couldn't even agree to back a moratorium on "earmarks" and ended up backing that larded-up $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Custer-like, Boehner then went on to lead his troops this week to yet another embarrassing election defeat against the most unpopular Congress in modern polling history. As conservative columnist George Will pointed out this week, Boehner has now lost some 55 seats in two short years.
There are two things to take from Will's point: One, Boehner has really stunk up the court; and two, under Boehner things could still get WORSE. I'm not saying Boehner is a bad guy or that he's not necessarily a good conservative. I'm saying that when a coach has back-to-back seasons as rotten as Boehner, the team usually fires the coach. But not Team GOP. Indeed, word coming out of Washington this week indicates Republicans are about to commit yet another act of political insanity by electing Boehner once again as House Minority Leader. But don't blame all conservatives in the House for this insanity. It appears it may be only ONE conservative responsible for this pending disaster - just like it wasn't all of George Washington's officers who sold out to the British. Recognizing that Boehner, clearly enamored with power, was unwilling to do the right thing and step aside graciously, House conservatives, especially those who belong to the Republican Study Committee (RSC), were planning to run one of their own - highly regarded conservative Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) - for Minority Leader. Among those planning the conservative challenge and participating in the strategy sessions was former RSC Chairman Mike Pence (R-Indiana). And then Pence sold them out. According to a source close to the situation in Washington, on Thursday - unbeknownst to House conservatives - it was discovered that Pence had cut a deal to support Boehner for yet another term as Minority Leader in exchange for Boehner backing Pence for the #3 leadership position as Republican Conference Chairman. If true, Pence put his own personal ambition ahead of the best interests of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. If this "deal" was indeed struck and is affirmed in the leadership elections scheduled to take place in a week, House Republicans will not only continue traveling down the now well-worn path of electoral failure, but Pence's betrayal will divide the GOP ranks even worse than before. So movement grassroots conservatives, if they have any hope of turning their fortunes around in 2010, need to give John Boehner the old "Harriet Miers" treatment. As you'll recall, President Bush tried to name his longtime friend and highly under-qualified Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. The conservative movement was furious and rose up in unified opposition, eventually forcing Miers to withdraw from consideration. Conservatives need to rise up and oppose Boehner's re-election as the House GOP Minority Leader in the same manner - or forever hold their peace. Let the calls, emails and faxes begin!
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What now for the last, best hope?
I noticed several times during the past election season that if one wanted to fine print media which was covering the election the way actual journalists were supposed to report the news rather than as unpaid Obama press secretaries would it was necessary to go to the British media. Here is another example of that.
Peter Hitchens writing on the online version of the Daily Mail:
The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.
It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.
Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.
If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.
Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).
I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.
And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.
[. . .]
I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.
They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.
Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.
These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.
They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?
Mr. Hitchens is correct in his analysis of what Barack Obama and his party's leaders want for America. However he is wrong in believing that a majority of the American people voted for that program knowingly.
The more success Obama has in enacting his agenda the worse off the nation is going to be and the more likely he will be to be a one-term failure like Jimmy Carter (who he closely resembles policy-wise).
Now some of THIS I believe
From the New York Times:
Ms. Palin. . . was the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and Mr. McCain’s that raged from mid-September up until moments before Mr. McCain’s concession speech on Tuesday night. By then, Ms. Palin was in only infrequent contact with Mr. McCain, top advisers said.
“I think it was a difficult relationship,” said one top McCain campaign official, who, like almost all others interviewed, asked to remain anonymous. “McCain talked to her occasionally.”
But Mr. McCain’s advisers also described him as admiring of Ms. Palin’s political skills. He was aware of the infighting, they said, but it is unclear how much he was inclined or able to stop it.
The tensions and their increasingly public airing provide a revealing coda to the ill-fated McCain-Palin ticket, hinting at the mounting turmoil of a campaign that was described even by many Republicans as incoherent, negative and badly run.Like I said. THIS I believe. In fact I would have been shocked if it had turned out any differently. John McCain is the blood enemy of conservatives and conservatism and Sarah Palin is the closest thing we have had to Ronald Reagan since his retirement in 1988.
One of the greatest fears that I had during the latter part of the campaign was that McCain, whose choice of Palin was - in his mind - nothing more than a gimmick and a bone to throw to conservatives, would come to realize that Mrs. Palin was far more popular than he was and that if he won it would only be because of her. I feared that this would ignite McCain's legendary temper and cause him to freeze her out of the campaign or even cut her down publicly in some way.
It would seem that McCain did resent her popularity but that he retained enough reason to continue to make public appearances with her. After all it was only her presence that allowed McCain to draw a crowd of any size.
It would be difficult to overstate how pleased I am to hear that Governor Palin went into this campaign with an agenda of her own. Her political instincts are surely good enough to have realized that a McCain victory was all but impossible (remember, if you give the public a choice between a democrat and a Democrat they will pick the Democrat). That she saw the campaign as a convenient vehicle to establish herself on the national stage and further her own presidential ambitions has me almost weeping with relief.
The greatest fear that I have had since last Tuesday is that Mrs. Palin would go back to Alaska and swear off national politics because of the incredibly vile treatment she received at the hands of the media, the left-wing of the Democrat party (sorry, redundant) and even her own party and her own campaign's "insiders".
That doesn't seem likely to happen and that gives me some hope for the ultimate survival of the Republic.
A Hollywood star who isn't a moron
Last night a friend of mine asked me if I had seen the Chuck Norris 2nd Amendment ad that ran before the election. I hadn't because I get my TV through a satellite dish and there weren't all that many political ads on Direct TV. But everything makes its way to YouTube sooner or later so I was able to find it:
I agree with my friend. Chuck Norris is now my hero. There are Hollywood stars who are big gun collectors, including Arnold and Sylvester Stallone, who have never so much as lifted a finger or uttered one word in defense of their fellow citizens' 2nd Amendment rights. Then there are big Hollywood names like, Stephen Spielberg, who collect guns and love to shoot but who actively support more gun control laws and gun banning politicians.
Then there are stars who will come out in support of gun owners rights like the late Charlton Heston who became the face and voice of the NRA and Tom Selleck who has done "I'm the NRA" ads but neither Selleck nor Heston has ever been photographed (for an NRA ad) holding anything other than a flintlock musket or a double barreled shotgun. And none of the stars who have gone on the record supporting their fellow gun owner's rights has ever gotten specific about their support for SELF DEFENSE as a primary reason to own a firearm.
Until Chuck Norris.
Of course Chuck hasn't got much to lose as far as his standing with the Hollywood elites is concerned. In addition to being a gun owner and advocate for 2nd Amendment rights Mr. Norris is a couple of other things that Hollywood hates. He is a conservative Republican, a police officer and a committed Evangelical Christian.
If it wasn't for the fact that the people who actually go to movies and watch TV shows love him so much he wouldn't have a career at all.
The Norris ad reminded me of this gun store commercial that I saw on YouTube a while back.
Only the government of the UK and American left-wing loons like Joe Biden wouldn't think of that as a happy ending.
Saturday, November 08, 2008
Palin responds to the lies
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Gov. Sarah Palin denounced anonymous criticisms leveled at her by former John McCain aides as lies, including allegations that Republican lawyers were traveling to Alaska to reclaim her high-priced wardrobe and that she didn't know Africa was a continent. "Those accounts are not true," the former Republican vice presidential candidate said in her first public comments on the matter since the election Tuesday. Palin returned Friday to her Anchorage governor's office and said she had no immediate plans to build on her newfound national name-recognition and popularity with the Republican base for a possible 2012 presidential run. Instead, Palin said, she wanted only to get back to the governor's desk to advance a proposed pipeline tapping Alaska's vast North Slope natural gas reserves and to prepare Alaska's proposed 2010 budget. CNN (of all things!) investigated the weird allegations that were leveled against Governor Palin and found them to be utterly false. This is why you don't see them burning their way through the media right now. Anyone who reports on them as anything but a hoax will look like a deranged fool. Of course the left-wing loon websites will always take them as gospel but they already thought that she was a corrupt incestuous adulteress so what are you going to do? The fact that the nutjobs who post on places like dailykos hate her is one of the best recommendations she could ask for. There are two interesting questions about why these accusations were made. One is the why of it. Why are McCain "insiders" leaking vile lies about the woman they picked and vetted? The other is why they thought they could get away with spreading a bunch of false rumors which could easily and quickly be discredited. The answer to the first question is partly that they want a scapegoat for the failure of themselves and their candidate but mostly it is an attempt to preserve the dominance within the Republican party of the "McCain wing", that is the moderate/liberal/"reach across the aisle"/country club - Blue blood wing of the party. You know the ones I'm now calling the Defeat Wing. This is something I'm going to write more about later today so check back in if you are interested. The second question, about why they thought they could get away with it, is simple to answer. They thought the press would cover for them. Whenever anyone from the Democrat party lies about any conservative the media simply assumes that the lie is true and it becomes part of the accepted narrative. Whenever John McCain has ever lied about and trashed his fellow Republicans the media has just accepted whatever he said as being true as well. So these scumbag "McCain insiders" just thought that the media would accept what they were saying as absolute truth and make no effort whatsoever to do any kind of fact checking. The real puzzler is why CNN (of all things!) bothered to do any kind of investigation and then why they reported on the fact that the lies were in fact lies. Perhaps someone over at CNN has some trace of journalistic ethics left? Perhaps this was an act of contrition to remove some of the guilt associated with colluding with a Marxist presidential candidate in his efforts to lie his way into office and ruin the country? Whatever the reason the refutation got out there quickly enough to keep the lies from becoming part of the public narrative of the campaign and for that we can be grateful. PS - there's another really big question here. Any time in the campaign when someone on the Republican side would do so much as mention Barack Obama's middle name McCain would break the speed of light to get to a camera and denounce that person. So why did he not utter one public word of condemnation of the slanders against Gov. Palin? She's only the person who almost put him in the White House.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Why we lost
The election of 2008 is over and now conservatives can begin their real battle. There is a war going on for the soul of the Republican party and the moderate/centrist/liberal wing of the party is going to do everything in its power to cement their control and drive out social conservatives, gun owners and religious believers.
You might think that this will be difficult for them since their chosen candidate, John McCain, just went down to a humiliating defeat. However defeat doesn't bother this bunch. They KNOW that if they get their way that the Republican party will be a permanent minority and they are fine with that.
They will have enough power on the fringes to get the things they really care about done, like having loopholes inserted into the tax code so that they can hide their personal wealth and they will be invited to all the right cocktail parties and they won't be embarrassed by having people at those parties ask them to "explain" Jerry Falwell or Sarah Palin.
One of the tactics that the Defeat Wing of the Republican party is going to use is the attempt to make any rational analysis of the Republican defeat off limits by disallowing any effort to blame McCain. The next thing they are going to do is attempt to destroy Sarah Palin because they see in her another Ronald Reagan who has the potential to capture the heart and the imagination of the nation and pull the party and the nation back to the right.
I The following article by George Neumayr from the American Spectator's website touches on the truth about why the GOP lost this election and reveals some of the Defeat Wing's opening salvos against Governor Palin.
According to Newsweek, "On the Sunday night before the last debate, McCain's core group of advisers -- Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, adman Fred Davis, strategist Greg Strimple, pollster Bill McInturff and strategy director Sarah Simmons -- met to decide whether to tell McCain that the race was effectively over, that he no longer had a chance to win. The consensus in the room was no, not yet, not while he still had 'a pulse.'"
This spirit of defeat explains why McCain staffers spent the last week or so of the campaign leaking against Sarah Palin. By the end of the race, the choicest pieces of inside-the-beltway elitism were coming not from Barack Obama but from McCain's own staffers. Palin and family, the staffers let it be known, were clinging to their God, guns, and newfound Neiman Marcus items.
"Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast." That is the description Newsweek received from an "angry aide."
That the staffers had given up by October also explains why the most potent attack on Obama came not from the campaign but from pure happenstance outside it: Joe the plumber's accidental meeting with Obama.
McCain acted like that was the first time he had ever heard Obama's thoughts on economic redistribution. Had the campaign exhausted its opposition research budget at Neiman Marcus? To anyone even remotely paying attention, Obama's understanding of taxation as tool of economic redistribution was clear long before Joe the plumber arrived on the scene. Obama had used the word redistribution repeatedly in his writings and speeches.
McCain's last-minute reliance on the gimmick of Joe the plumber made it easy for the media to dismiss his charge of "socialism" against Obama as feeble name-calling. Many months early, the McCain campaign could have been developing that case, and it wouldn't have taken much effort: Obama had let slip socialist, even Marxian, assumptions in his thinking several times, from his Marxian description of religion as an opiate for the masses to his bald calls for "confiscating" the profits of oil companies to his open class warfare.
By the end of the race, the McCain campaign seemed to depend on the latest Drudge Report links for the few talking points it could rouse itself to make. Obama's casual comment about bankrupting the coal industry had been gathering dust for months, only becoming an issue via Drudge at the last moment.
Even when the campaign occasionally stumbled down a promising avenue of attack, it would stop and dart down a new cul-de-sac. Take the ad it ran early on about Obama's work with Planned Parenthood to spread sex-ed propaganda in elementary schools. That ad hit its target squarely enough to generate days of grousing from Joe Biden and, in a rare moment of irritation, Barack Obama. Obama's surrogates in the press also spent days frowning over the ad, another measure of its effectiveness. But where was the follow-up?
The McCain campaign could have rolled out a series of such ads. Instead, social conservatism was henceforth treated by the McCain campaign as a no-go area. For example, the day after the Connecticut Supreme Court imposed gay marriage on the people there, McCain said nothing about the decision. Not a word as far as I could tell was even spoken during the campaign about Obama's de facto support for gay marriage.
Meanwhile, Obama was running ad after ad about his belief in "parental responsibility," crafting an unchallenged image of himself as a centrist. Accidentally, Obama ended up doing more to pass the traditional marriage initiative Proposition 8 in California than McCain: the high turnout of blacks to vote for Obama meant they also voted on Proposition 8, which they supported overwhelmingly.
That McCain lost while traditional marriage amendments across the country, no thanks to him, won is a fitting final note to the haplessness of his campaign. The media perked up briefly in October at the possibility of a rift when Palin strayed from the McCain script by endorsing the marriage amendments. But that quickly passed and the campaign staffers got back to topics of more interest to them, such as, if Newsweek is right, Palin's jackets and John McCain's inevitable defeat.
Of course the Defeat Wing's attacks against Sarah Palin are nothing but a pack of lies. The unfailingly cheerful and energetic Sarah Palin the nation saw on the campaign trail bears absolutely no resemblance to the fictional construct of the Defeat Wing's diseased imagination.
This is an attempt to be the first out of the gate with an "official narrative" of why McCain lost and to have the blame fall squarely on the conservative Palin rather than the RINO McCain.
Be thankful for small favors
We can be grateful that Obama's margin of victory in the popular vote was great enough that it will not give birth to any "ACORN stole the election" conspiracy theories.
One of the most corrosive influences on American politics over the past eight years has been the myth of the stolen election from Florida in 2000. Even though a group of left-wing newspapers, led by the New York Times, went to Florida and counted every ballot and concluded that Bush won fair and square the left was never able to abandon the illusion that Gore was the "real" president and that every single thing that Bush did was illegitimate.
This was the largest single factor in creating the phenomena of Bush Derangement Syndrome in which the left was unable to credit President Bush with doing anything right even when what he did was entirely in line with their own program.
The "Stolen Election" isn't the only myth to have disastrous effects on a nation. After WWI the myth of the "Stab in the Back", which said that the German army was not defeated by its enemies on the battlefield but was stabbed in the back by sinister domestic forces (The Jews), helped prepare the way for Hitler's rise to power.
We do not need to fall into Obama Derangement Syndrome. If Obama tries to fulfill his promises to bring about a trillion dollars in new spending and to declare war upon the productive sector of the American economy conservatives will have plenty to legitimately criticize him about. Remember how the left sacrificed every last shred of its credibility by chasing "Florida 2000" off into the outer fringes of loon-land. We cannot let that become us.
Miss Ann is talking
That means that YOU are listening!
Last night was truly a historic occasion: For only the second time in her adult life, Michelle Obama was proud of her country!
The big loser of this election is Colin Powell, whose last-minute endorsement of Obama put the Illinois senator over the top. Powell was probably at home last night, yelling at his TV, "Are you KIDDING me? That endorsement was sarcastic!"
The winner, of course, is Obama, who must be excited because now he can start hanging out in public with Bill Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright again. John McCain is a winner because he can resume buying more houses.
And we're all winners because we will never again have to hear McCain say, "my friends."
After Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election, Hillary Clinton immediately announced that, henceforth, she would be known as "Hillary Rodham Clinton." So maybe Obama can now become B. Hussein Obama, his rightful name.
This was such an enormous Democratic year that even John Murtha won his congressional seat in Pennsylvania after calling his constituents racists. It turns out they're not racists -- they're retards. Question: What exactly would one have to say to alienate Pennsylvanians? That Joe Paterno should retire?
Apparently Florida voters didn't mind Obama's palling around with Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, either. There must be a whole bunch of retired Pennsylvania Jews down there.
Have you ever noticed that whenever Democrats lose presidential elections, they always blame it on the personal qualities of their candidate? Kerry was a dork, Gore was a stiff, Dukakis was a bloodless android, Mondale was a sad sack.
This blame-the-messenger thesis allows Democrats to conclude that their message was fine -- nothing should be changed! The American people are clamoring for higher taxes, big government, a defeatist foreign policy, gay marriage, the whole magilla. It was just this particular candidate's personality.
Republicans lost this presidential election, and I don't blame the messenger; I blame the message. How could Republicans go after B. Hussein Obama (as he is now known) on planning to bankrupt the coal companies when McCain supports the exact same cap and trade policies and earnestly believes in global warming?
How could we go after Obama for his illegal alien aunt and for supporting driver's licenses for illegal aliens when McCain fanatically pushed amnesty along with his good friend Teddy Kennedy?
How could we go after Obama for Jeremiah Wright when McCain denounced any Republicans who did so?
How could we go after Obama for planning to hike taxes on the "rich," when McCain was the only Republican to vote against both of Bush's tax cuts on the grounds that they were tax cuts for the rich?
And why should Republican activists slave away working for McCain when he has personally, viciously attacked: John O'Neill and the Swift Boat Veterans, National Right to Life director Doug Johnson, evangelical pastors Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and John Hagee, various conservative talk radio hosts, the Tennessee Republican Party and on and on and on?
As liberal Democrat E.J. Dionne Jr. exuded about McCain in The Washington Post during the Republican primaries, "John McCain is feared by Democrats and liked by independents." Dionne proclaimed that McCain "may be the one Republican who can rescue his party from the undertow of the Bush years."
Similarly, after unelectable, ultraconservative Reagan won two landslide victories, James Reston of The New York Times gave the same advice to Vice President George H.W. Bush: Stop being conservative! Bush was "a good man," Reston said in 1988, "and might run a strong campaign if liberated from Mr. Reagan's coattails."
Roll that phrase around a bit -- "liberated from Mr. Reagan's coattails." This is why it takes so long to read the Times -- you have to keep reading the same paragraph over again to see if you missed a word.
Bush, of course, rode Reagan's ultraconservative coattails to victory, then snipped those coattails by raising taxes and was soundly defeated four years later.
I keep trying to get Democrats to take my advice (stop being so crazy), but they never listen to me. Why do Republicans take the advice of their enemies?
How many times do we have to run this experiment before Republican primary voters learn that "moderate," "independent," "maverick" Republicans never win, and right-wing Republicans never lose?
Indeed, the only good thing about McCain is that he gave us a genuine conservative, Sarah Palin. He's like one of those insects that lives just long enough to reproduce so that the species can survive. That's why a lot of us are referring to Sarah as "The One" these days.
Like Sarah Connor in "The Terminator," Sarah Palin is destined to give birth to a new movement. That's why the Democrats are trying to kill her. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is involved somehow, too. Good Lord, I'm tired.
After showing nearly superhuman restraint throughout this campaign, which was lost the night McCain won the California primary, I am now liberated to announce that all I care about is hunting down and punishing every Republican who voted for McCain in the primaries. I have a list and am prepared to produce the names of every person who told me he was voting for McCain to the proper authorities.
We'll start with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Then we shall march through the states of New Hampshire and South Carolina -- states that must never, ever be allowed to hold early Republican primaries again.
For now, we have a new president-elect. In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, we owe it to the Democrats to show their president the exact same kind of respect and loyalty that they have shown our recent Republican president.
Starting tomorrow, if not sooner.
A - Freakin - Men!
I'll have more on the themes that Miss Ann raised tomorrow.
Tonight I'll just say this. Back during the primaries I warned the Republican party that if the American people were given a choice between a democrat and a Democrat they would choose the Democrat.
A caller to the Rush Limbaugh Show expressed it perfectly this morning when he told McCain that the next time he "crossed the aisle" to just find a comfortable seat, sit down and stay there.
I say the same thing to all the other closet Democrats who unmasked themselves by either supporting Obama or trashing Sarah Palin. You are not wanted or welcome in the Republican party any longer. We finally understand that you will do more harm than good by being among us so just make it official and change your registration.
Any tent big enough to cover you will not be able to win a national election so don't let the door bump you on the ass on your way out.
Don't go away mad; just go away.
Tonight's Music
To celebrate the start of the Palin 2012 campaign and the founding of the Palin '12 blogroll here is Governor Palin's theme song.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Wishing the little messiah well? Not in this life.
Regular reader and one of this blog's best friends Syndi sent this via email:
I warn true conservatives, following down the road of "me too" which the RINO's have been treading is the path of destruction. Moderation and the abandonment of conservative ideals is what gave us John McCain, as well as our recent defeat. The aggressor sets the rules in any contest. Eagerly letting the Democrats set the rules by which we are allowed to compete and by which we may present our ideals is folly.
Socialism and virulent anti-Americanism is now at the helm of our nation and cooperation by conservatives is just that-cooperation with socialism and virulent anti-Americanism.
Appeasement is appeasement by any other name. A "spirit of cooperation" means only one thing to the Pelosi/Reid/Obama junta when it is coming from the Republican party or the conservative movement which it claims to represent: Weakness.
It is the conservative reasoning that our 'adversaries' operate on the same principles we do. They don't. We continually fail to understand it because it doesn't make sense. When you seem faced with an impossibility or a contradiction remember one of the precepts of critical thinking: There are no impossibilities only a mistaken PREMISE.
Whatever the mindless sheeple of the Left think they voted for, be it justice, equality, or a free ride, the leaders KNOW their ultimate goal is the end of American exceptionalism, the implementation of a paternal state of tyranny on the rights and individuality of Americans, and the eternal power of the failed Marxist ideologies of the past.
Our goal cannot be cooperation and bipartisanship, not if we hope for any success. Cooperation is acquiescence, and expecting ANYTHING from the leftist cabal now in power except further erosion of our nation is delusional.
A - Freakin' - Men!
Not only is this fellow the luckiest man in the world for being married to the lovely and gracious Syndi he is also smarter than the (nominally) conservative pundits who are beating the "let's wish the little messiah well" drum.
Now I will say this. I honestly do hope that Obama does a great job as president. By that I mean that I hope that he looks around the Oval Office on his first day as president and realizes that all the Marxist bulls--t he spouted when he was on the outside looking in seems a whole lot less "cool" now that he will actually bear the responsibility for the consequences.
I pray that this knowledge reforms his entire outlook on life and politics and causes him to govern in such a way that the people who voted for him say "What happened to Barack, he has eliminated the capital gains tax and the corporate income tax and cut the top marginal rate lower than it was under Reagan and doubled military spending and bombed Iran and sent in the Marines to destroy their nuclear weapons facilities and kill every last one of the ruling mullahs - he's actually worse than Reagan ever dreamed of being!"
In other words I hope that he goes down in history as being the greatest president American has ever had, by becoming a completely different person than he is right now.
But that's not likely to happen so as long as he remains the hate-America socialist that he is right now I will oppose him and as long as he remains the enemy of the America left to us by our Founders I wish him nothing but failure, humiliation and disgrace.
Is American now a left-wing nation?
Some people have speculated that Obama's victory means that the nation has deliberately chosen to take a turn to the left. That we are no longer a center-right nation but have become center-left or maybe even just left in our outlook.
I do not believe this to be true for several reasons. One is that Obama made his signature issue tax cuts. Exit polls showed that 58% of the electorate believed that Obama would cut their taxes. This does not indicate a population which is desiring a shift to the left.
Second the Wall Street Journal has an article today about how voters in various places voted against a number of environmentalist wacko ballot measures. The left has hung many of its hopes of robbing Americans of their wealth and freedom on environmentalism. Its rejection by voters does not indicate a nation eager to lurch to the left.
Then we have voters in Arizona rejecting a ballot measure which would have made it easier for employers to hire illegal aliens and voters in California approving a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage.
Again not signs that the electorate is swinging leftward.
In the end what happened Tuesday was that Obama, with the help of a media which was totally in the tank for him, was able to convince voters that he was a moderate Democrat in the Bill Clinton mold who would cut their taxes and bring back the prosperity of the 90's while healing the nation's racial divisions.
Not a shift to the left, just proof that you really can "fool all of the people some of the time".
Some lessons
From Taipei Times:
Democrat Senator Barack Obama won most of the votes from women, blacks and Hispanics and siphoned off enough white support to leave Republican Senator John McCain with no way to win.
[. . .]
Obama drew the votes of two-thirds of Hispanic voters — heavily courted by both candidates — and 95 percent of blacks who went to the polls.
A healthy lead among women voters typically is key to a Democratic presidential victory, and Obama attracted 56 percent of their votes. He split the overall male vote with McCain.
[. . .]
Obama, who will become the first black president and at age 47 one of the youngest, ran away with the youth vote. He won the under-30 crowd by 34 percentage points, even better than Democrat Bill Clinton’s 19-point advantage when he defeated Bob Dole in 1996.
First lesson. I and the others who screamed from the rooftops that it was a mistake for the GOP to embrace amnesty and open borders have been vindicated. John McCain was the leader of the amnesty movement and Hispanic voters rejected him by an overwhelming margin.
Second lesson. Women's suffrage was a mistake if you judge its results by the standards of the women who originally advocated for it.
The women who began the push for granting women the right to vote argued that because wives were already accustomed to managing the household budget that women voters would be fiscal conservatives who would hold the government to strict standards of fiscal discipline and accountability.
They also argued that because women tended to be more sincere and devout in their Christian religious faith that women voters would cause the government to hew more closely to Christian morality and more effectively uphold Christian values and principles.
Today we know that women voters are the biggest supporters of the legalized murder of children and the most fanatical supporters of the ruinous welfare state. If Susan B Anthony and the others were telling the truth about what they hoped for women's suffrage to achieve then they must surely be turning over in their graves.
The fact is that the Founders realized that a universal franchise would destroy the nation so they limited the vote to those who they believed had the greatest stake in the survival of the nation as a free and prosperous place and at the time of the founding that was white male landowners.
The "white" part of the equation is now obsolete but not the "male" part and not the idea behind the "landowner" part.
Taking these criteria in turn we first come to "white". This was simply an artifact of 18th century attitudes about race which we have moved beyond.
"Male" we have already touched upon but the question is why do women tend to vote in ways which will destroy the nation? The answer is revealed in the fact that most married women vote Republican while most single women vote Democrat. Women are hardwired to seek a protector and provider. This is because pregnancy and caring for small children makes them vulnerable and limits their ability to gather their own food. This doesn't mean that all women will always act the same way just that there is a predisposition to act in a certain way among the entire population of women which will make the majority of them act in certain ways most of time.
Single women are tend to place government in the place of protector and provider, causing them to vote for the party which seeks to make government richer and more powerful. But when a woman marries a man whom she loves and trusts a chemical switch trips in her brain and she stops seeking a protector and provider. This allows married women to engage the political process with their intellect rather than their emotions and tends to make them Republicans.
All humans have this biological programming. It is God's way of ensuring that the current generation creates the next generation and that we take proper care of them until they are able to take care of themselves.
Then we come to "landowner". At the time of the founding the gentleman farmer sat at the top of the social pyramid. Professional men like lawyers and doctors and skilled workers like blacksmiths and carpenters saved their money against the day in which they could buy their very own farm and till the land.
This attitude was why George Washington wished for his epitaph not to be "father of his country" but simply "he was a farmer".
So the Framers restricted the franchise to landowners because the land holding farmer was the backbone of the economy in their day and they wanted the only people voting to be those who had a stake in the preservation of the nation as it was then constituted.
Who comprises the backbone of the nation's economy today? The answer is the investor class. Whether you are investing in your own business or holding publicly traded stock the fact that you have risked your capital to build something makes you the 21st century gentleman farmer.
Final lesson. Obama ran away with the youth vote. That is those who are least knowledgeable, least experienced and most immature chose Obama. Hardly a ringing endorsement.
If you want to achieve liberty and prosperity for the United States of America and lock those conditions in to as near a state of permanence as possible the best way to achieve that goal is to restrict the franchise to men and married women who either own successful businesses (successful being defined as generating a profit large enough for the owners to live on) or have a significant part of their net worth invested in stocks or non-government bonds. The age when one becomes eligible to vote should be 30 unless you join the active duty military, in which case you should receive the franchise immediately even if you are 17 and joining under a parental waiver.
Many will complain that this is not fair and they will be right. However "fairness" is not the goal The goal is to achieve the maximum amount of individual liberty and prosperity. "Fairness" expressed as universal suffrage has gotten us nothing but the welfare state, massive national debt, sky high taxes and Barack Obama in the White House.
Clearly "fairness" is not a worthwhile goal and we should abandon it for the much more desirable rewards of freedom and wealth.
Be careful what you wish for
I'm going to say something critical of Sean Hannity so first let me give credit where credit is due. Sean Hannity was one of the three people (the others being Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber) who almost succeeded in dragging John McCain across the finish line.
However Mr. Hannity said something on his radio show yesterday which was just plain stupid.
Sean said that he really doesn't thing that President Obama will be successful, but that he wishes him success. I know that he is trying to show himself as being superior to the Democrats who fell into Bush Derangement Syndrome however he really needs to think about what he is wishing for.
Barack Obama is an extreme left-wing socalist who wants to remake America into a place the Founders would not recognize.
For the good of the country I hope he fails utterly! I hope there is a backlash so bad that when Obama leaves office in four years America is more conservative than it has ever been in its history!
I'm sure that what Hannity actually meant was that he hopes that Obama will not be the man that his past histroy and associations reveal him to be. I wish for this as well. I wish that the real Obama will turn out to be the man who campaigned for office on the promise of sweeping tax cuts and that he will govern from the center like Bill Clinton mostly did and that the nation will prosper economiacally like it did during Clinton's time in office.
However wishing is good time wasted and there is very little hope that Obama will turn out to be anything other than the kind of man who would take pleasure in the company of men like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, that is a blood enemy of the United States.
By the way, as long as we're talking about talk radio Mark Levin had the best response to the elections on his show last night.
And still on the subject of talk radio I did not watch any of the election coverage on TV. Instead I listened to Levin's show on Sirius radio which led into Cam and Company and their NRA radio show. That was the best election coverage I've ever experienced. Even though the news was mostly bad it was still very well done. That is how I will spend all my upcoming election nights.
Taking the good with the bad, part 2
This actually hurts worse than losing the White House:
Traitor Jack Murtha was able to hold on to his House seat. I suppose that it was the high turnout in support of Obama which put this wretched and detestable corrupt little man over the top.
Apparently the people in Murtha's district are not rednecks and racists. They are just fools who vote for crooked politicians who call them racists and rednecks.
Here is an open letter to the Pennsylvania Republican party which was written by Leo J. Pusateri, Jr. and posted on Murtha Must Go, the blog he founded and which I have the honor to be a sometime contributer to:
To the leadership of PA-GOP...
I guess I don't understand it.
You have had a chance to knock off the most corrupt, democrat congressman, possibly in the history of the United States, who sits ensconsed in your own backyard much like Jabba the Hut, and you keep on shooting yourselves in your collective kneecap. Jack Murtha slanders and unlawfully convicts those who put their lives on the line to defend us and our way of life, and you don't so much as lift a finger to depose his ass. Alternately, you actually enable his re-election.
You didn't lift a finger when Diana Irey ran against the gasbag in '06.
You were active in trying to keep Lt. Col.William Trower Russell, an honorable veteran, off the ballot; he had to get in on a write-in campaign after the local GOP had him tossed off!!
You chose not to take an active part in deposing a democrat politician who has lived high on the taxpayer hog for thirty-four (soon to be 36) friggen years!!
And then you have the gall to still want money from your constituents???
Since May 19 of 2006, after Murtha played judge, jury and executioner to the Haditha Marines, I (and some talented, like-minded friends) have maintained the blog, Murtha Must Go!!
Isn't it kind of pathetic that people from around our nation, myself being from Minnesota, others from Chicago, etc., who clearly recognize what a scourge Congressman Murtha is on the national political scene, care more and do more to expose Murtha than does the Pennsylvania GOP???
Are you that comfortable wallowing in Murtha's abject debauchery that you, too, are willing to look the other way?
Are you, as are many a corn-fed dependent PA-12 constituent, blinded by the pork?
Must the remainder of the people in this nation, disgusted by Murtha's traitorous behavior that has literally taken its toll in lost lives, continue to do the heavy lifting that the PA GOP continues to refuse to do?
Don't get me wrong. I'm still going to go after Murtha. I'm still going to expose the corruption, and I won't rest until he either gets unseated or takes a well-deserved frog march and perp-walk in front of a thousand cameras.
But it would be nice to get a little help once in a while.
Sincerely,
Leo J. Pusateri, Jr.
Founder and Editor of Murtha Must Go!!
This attitude of the Pennsylvania GOP goes a long way to explain why a state which is mostly rural and full of gun owners and religious believers who live their personal lives as conservatives keeps voting for left-wing scum like Jihad Jack Murtha and the little messiah.
Taking the good with the bad, part 1
First some of the good news.
Al Franken was not able to defeat Norm Coleman. It was a very close vote but Franken's total is lower. You can go here to see the numbers and a red/blue map of Minnesota.
With the total so close I would imagine that there will be an automatic recount but all looking more closely at the votes will likely do is result in a bunch of ACORN generated fraudulent Franken votes being thrown out.
I'm still here
An unusually heavy workload plus a bad cold are cutting into my blogging time. However I will try to keep putting up new content every day.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Just a word of warning
In a couple of hours the results of exit polling are going to be leaked to the press. The Drudge Report will post them first and then other media will use that as an excuse to run with them as well.
These exit polls are going to show a big win for Obama is in the making.
Do not believe them!
The exit polls are entirely an artifact of the identity of the people doing the survey, the people who are willing to stop and talk with an exit poll taker and the location where the exit polling is being done.
There are going to be two kinds of people taking the polls. One will be female college students who will mainly talk to other young women (this is why the exit polls had Kerry winning big four years ago) and the other will be large black men who look like they just got out of prison. These men will be trained to speak polite words but to use body language and facial expression to radiate an air of extreme menace. They will be told to approach white people, invade their personal space and project the message that "I will beat you to death on this very spot if you don't tell me you voted for Obama".
There are two reasons for cooking the exit polls. One is to depress Republican votes. If you are planning to vote after work or if you live out West and think the election is already over you might not bother to vote. This hurts McCain and it kills Republicans down the ticket.
The other reason is to give the networks cover when they call states for Obama at the earliest possible moment and hold off calling them for McCain until the last possible second. They can say, "yes it is true that the actual vote count shows that 70% of the people in Tennessee voted for McCain but we had exit polls that said that showed an Obama landslide".
This serves to depress Republican turnout on the West coast. Not only does this help Democrats in California it hurts the prospects of the anti-gay marriage amendment to the CA state constitution.
Do not think for one second that the mainstream media and the Democrat party (sorry, redundant) would hesitate to stoop this low. Remember how they called Florida for Gore in 2000? This was done while the polls in the heavily Republican panhandle were still open.
This cost Bush at least 5000 Florida votes and set up Gore's attempt to steal the election.
So remember just keep the faith, ignore the media and do the right thing and vote.
And if Obama does win all that does is guarantee a big Republican landslide in the midterm elections and put Sarah Palin in the White House in 2012.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Here's some good news
For those of you who were outraged when congressman Jack Murtha (D of course - PA) slandered the United States Marine Corps when he pronounced the Marines who were accused of murdering civilians at Haditha guilty before the investigation had even begun I have a bit of news which is guaranteed to raise a smile.
Jihad Jack Murtha is going down and he's going down hard. Read all the details over at Murtha Must Go.
As Murtha slips in the polls, as the press no longer covers for him, as other leftist scumbags who he thought were his friends (like Nancy Pelosi) won't return his phone calls he just grows more and more unhinged.
And the best part is that once he is out of the House of Representitives he will no longer be able to duck the libel suits filed against him by some of the Haditha Marines.
Murtha, who is a Marine Corps veteran (to the eternal shame of the Corps) wanted to be the Democrat leader in the House which would have made him Nancy Pelosi's number 2 (and isn't #2 such an approprate designation for Murtha). At the time the Democrats were doing everything in their power to secure a defeat for the United States in Iraq and Murtha thought he could get the power he lusted after by selling his soul to the traitor wing of the Democrat party.
He failed. He ruined himself for nothing. All Jihad Jackie has left in store for him is defeat and obscurity followd by a solitary death and, I suspect, an eternity in the flames burning in the pit reserved for traitors and cowards.
Couldn't happen to a more deserving piece of crap.
And now to take a break from all the serious crap and have a bit of fun. Here are a couple of videos from the new B-52's CD Funplex
Next is another fan video (the same fan, actually) featuring the song Eyes Wide Open.
Next is the band's official video for the song Funplex:
The Final Day
The candidates for president have today to make their final pitches to the voters. The better polls show a razor thin race with Obama ahead by fewer than five points, which is not enough to overcome the polls' built-in overestimation of Democrat support.
On Friday Zogby had McCain ahead but within the margin of error. Polling by Zogby done over the weekend suggests that was a fluke because his weekend polling suggests that Obama is now ahead by 7.1%.
Polls done over the weekend are known to significantly inflate the Democrat's numbers because so few Republicans are home by the phone on weekends (this is because Republicans tend to have families). I am frankly surprised that a pollster as credible as Zogby would even release a weekend poll as I have heard him discuss their worthlessness.
In any case the election remains too close to call but my gut tells me that most people who were undecided as of Friday are not going to take a chance on the American Chavez (if not Castro).
But I remind you again:
Obama doesn't lose unless you actually get out and vote!
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