Fear Not (Well, Not as Much)

Michael Barone, who formerly worked for Democratic pollster Peter Hart in the late 70's, has some much-needed advice for anyone thinking that the most recent polls show that President Obama already has the race won.  Barone notes that many conservatives point out that "Mitt Romney is running ahead among independents in many polls but trails overall." As he further observes:

This can only happen if Democrats have a big lead in party identification, as they did in 2008. In the exit poll then, 39 percent of voters identified themselves as Democrats and 32 percent as Republicans. 

In contrast, exit polls showed an even break on party identification in 2004 and 2010. But many September and some earlier polls showed Democrats with an even bigger party identification lead than four years before. 

That seems implausible. Party identification does change over time, as exit polls indicate. But it usually shifts gradually rather than suddenly, as current polls suggest. 

There is evidence that since the Charlotte, N.C., convention, Democrats have become more motivated to vote and have narrowed the advantage in enthusiasm Republicans have had since 2010. In which case more Democrats may be passing through screening questions and getting polled.

And earlier in the piece, he takes note that because of widespread cell phone use, the response rate is only 9%.  Please take some time and read Paul Rahe's extended take on Barone's piece here.

The race is far from over.

We Knew it All Along

Steven Rattner, a counselor to the Treasury Department in the Obama administration, finally admits the goal of socialized medicine, a goal he thinks in which Obamacare has come up short:

WE need death panels. 

Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.

Read this and weep:

No one wants to lose an aging parent. And with price out of the equation, it’s natural for patients and their families to try every treatment, regardless of expense or efficacy. But that imposes an enormous societal cost that few other nations have been willing to bear. Many countries whose health care systems are regularly extolled — including Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have systems for rationing care.

Bumps in the Road

Working off President Obama's recent comment that the current on-goings in the Middle East are just "bumps in the road," Michael Ramirez puts to paper their full logic in visual form:

It's a Long Way to the Top

"Obama's Way," the much-hyped Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis, writer of Moneyball among other poplar works, is an interesting read.  Lewis, a liberal, got to meet with President Obama on three separate occasions over a six month time frame and get a taste of what it's like to be president -- or I should say what it's like for President Obama.  Critics and publicists alike have hailed the piece as "groundbreaking" and "unprecedented."  It is very long (about 9 pages worth of material) but there are a lot of political teachings that can be taken from it.

Also, please read Andy Ferguson's look at Lewis's piece.  Ferguson, probably one of my favorite writers in politics, takes down the veil and shows it for what it truly is.

A sample:

In making his decisions, Lewis explains, the president attends meetings. Beforehand, he is given a list of the people who will be there. Many people speak at these meetings. The president listens to their arguments. He considers the actions they recommend. And when he’s not ­satisfied with the actions they’re recommending, he asks them to come up with other ideas, sometimes on short notice. In the end, he adopts the arguments he’s persuaded by and chooses the actions he agrees with. 

It’s incredible. Perhaps he is The One.

A side note to something the Ferguson mentions in passing:  In trying to see Lewis's career as it really is, Ferguson says that the book Moneyball was about a baseball general manager -- Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics -- who applied social science to baseball.  Ferguson deems that this was a failure, because -- though he doesn't say this specifically -- the A's have only recently become relevant again in the A.L. West and have been bad for most of the last decade.  But that's because a majority of the other baseball teams, including teams with money like the Boston Red Sox (which the A's don't have), copied what Beane did.  Most, if not all, baseball teams today have a sabermetrician, who goes through the most obscure stats imaginable.  The leg up that Beane had is now gone.  That's what's happened. (Though Lewis does sometimes take sabermetrics too far.  After all, seeing people as numbers and equations to be solved sounds like something in government:  agencies.)

Broken

Jay Nordlinger has many gems in the latest Impromtus, but I think this one says the most about the current state of politics:

You may have been told — it is one of those Rules to Live By — that you must never, ever compare anything to the Nazis. Because the Nazis were unique. Anyone who says, “It’s like the Nazis,” is a moron, and an offensive moron, at that. 

It is certainly true that people are promiscuous with the Nazi card. Better to call no one a Nazi, ever, than to call people Nazis when they’re not the least bit like Nazis.
But guess what? There are people in the world like Nazis: Saddam Hussein’s Baath party; the Assads’ Baath party; the Iranian dictatorship; Hezbollah; Hamas. 

And you know? Democrats ... who so freely call the liberal democrats in the Republican party Nazis, almost never call Assad and the rest Nazis. They are far tougher in their rhetoric on Republicans than on these Middle East actors: who openly admire the Nazis, and imitate them. 

Strange, no?

Sickening, to say the least.

Obfuscation

In an interview with David Letterman that aired last night, President Obama said the following:

First of all, he did not inherit over a trillion dollars in debt from the Bush Administration.  As John Hinderaker notes, the Democratic-controlled Congress waited until after Obama was sworn in office before they passed massive spending increases.  Letterman then actually went further and asked Obama  how much total debt has been accrued.  President Obama said he didn't know precisely and then failed to give an answer to the relevant question (as Jonah Goldberg said tonight on Fox News, Obama saying he didn't know something precisely doesn't mean that he couldn't have given out a ball park estimate).  Even he knows how bad it sounds to say out loud that we are 16 trillion dollars in debt.  This is really about as low as it gets.  Preying on stupidity is not the way to go.

A campaign commercial should be made out of this immediately and sent out to all the battleground states tomorrow.

A Bundle of Contradictions

Charles Kesler takes to the pages of National Review to look at Barack Obama's view of the Founders and their principles (this essay is adapted from his book, which is must buy).  Dr. Kesler finds that in Obama's political thought as expressed in the pages of his bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, lie many contradictions and shows his uncomfortable blend of modern liberalism, Jeremiah Wright-inpsired teachings, and postmodernism.  

Here is Kesler on Obama's misreading of the Declaration of Independence:

The Declaration of Independence “may have been,” he writes artfully, a transformative moment in world history, a great breakthrough for freedom, but “that spirit of liberty didn’t extend, in the minds of the Founders, to the slaves who worked their fields, made their beds, and nursed their children.” As a result, the Constitution “provided no protection to those outside the constitutional circle,” to those who were not “deemed members of America’s political community”: “the Native American whose treaties proved worthless before the court of the conqueror, or the black man Dred Scott, who would walk into the Supreme Court a free man and leave a slave.” Obama doesn’t argue, as Lincoln did, that the Supreme Court majority was in error, that Dred Scott was wrongly and unjustly returned to slavery, and that Chief Justice Roger Taney’s dictum — that in the Founders’ view the black man had no rights that the white man was bound to respect — was a profound mistake. On the contrary, Obama accepts Dred Scott as rightly decided according to the standards of the time. He agrees, in effect, with Taney’s reading of the Declaration and the Constitution, and with Stephen Douglas’s as well. Despite his well-advertised admiration for Lincoln, Obama sides with Lincoln’s opponents in their pro-slavery interpretation of Jefferson and the Declaration.

Contrary to the teachings of Abraham Lincoln, the man with whom Obama constantly links himself to politically, Obama believes in Chief Justice Taney's view of the Founding, an odd move considering Obama's respect for Frederick Douglass, who held the same views as Lincoln did on the question ( Harry Jaffa has shown as a young lawyer in 1819 Taney himself expressed views in line with Lincoln and Douglass).

Obama's rejection of the Declaration also mirrors the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons, which taught of the inherent racism of the American Founding and it's principles:

In truth, Obama’s repudiation of Wright’s statements was extremely equivocal. He calls the reverend’s charges “not only wrong but divisive” – that is, untimely –because the American people are “hungry” for a “message of unity” right now. Wright expressed “a profoundly distorted view of this country,” Obama says, “a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” What that means becomes clearer a little later, when Obama declares, “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is . . . that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made.” Yet Obama’s own candidacy confirms “that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.” In blunt terms, Wright wasn’t wrong that America was, and was intended to be, a racist or unjust nation; he was wrong, however, to speak as though the country were as racist or unjust as it used to be. “America can change” not in the sense of living up to its first principles but in the opposite sense, of moving away from them. Except, that is, from the deepest principle of all, which expresses “the true genius of this nation”–our belief in change itself, or in the deliberative process that produces such change. Only the “narrative” of America, the movement away from its founding principles as originally understood, deserves liberals’ allegiance.

Even more stark though is Obama's seemingly rejection of "absolute truth":

To quote from The Audacity of Hope:

Implicit . . . in the very idea of ordered liberty was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.

There is no absolute truth — and that’s the absolute truth, he argues. Such feeble, self-contradictory reasoning is at the heart of Obama’s very private and yet very public struggle with himself to determine whether there is anything anywhere that can truly be known, or even that it is rational to have faith in. Anyone who believes, really believes, in absolute truth, he asserts, is a fanatic or in imminent danger of becoming a fanatic; absolute truth is the mother of extremism everywhere. 

Although it’s certainly a good thing that America avoided religious and political tyranny, no previous president has ever credited this achievement to the Founders’ rejection of absolute truth, previously known as “truth.” Is the idea that human freedom is right, and slavery wrong, thus to be rejected lest we embrace an “absolute truth”? What becomes of the “universal truths” Obama himself celebrates on occasion? Surely the problem is not with the degree of belief, but with the falseness of the causes for which the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, and the jihad stood. A fervent belief in religious liberty is not equivalent to a fervent belief in religious tyranny, any more than a passionate belief in democracy is equivalent to a passionate longing for dictatorship.

But later, Kesler notes that Obama "admits that 'I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty — for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.'"

In reading this piece, and in reading The Audacity of Hope, I am further convinced that Americans are not born, they are made.

It Was 225 Years Ago Today

Today is the 225th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, which still to this day is the best governing document that has ever been made by man.  As Alexander Hamilton stated in the first Federalist,

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

The document opens by referring to "We the People."  But what kind of People?  Are the People a band of thieves or are they a moral People, capable of self-government?  It was this that Ben Franklin had in mind when he gave the following answer to a gentleman who had asked him what government the Founders had created:  "A Republic, if you can keep it."

The Constitution was made for a certain kind of people with certain virtues.  We should keep this in mind every day and examine whether or not we still are the People presupposed by the Constitution.

A National Embarrassment

Jesse Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota and all-around crazy conspiracy theorist, says that the CIA is behind the uprisings in the Middle East:

NEW YORK — Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, an avid and prolific conspiracist, says it’s possible the U.S. government is intentionally inflaming the current turmoil in the Middle East. 

“Who knows what caused it? Let’s remember the CIA’s job is to go out and create wars,” Ventura told The Daily Caller during an extensive interview. 

Pressed on whether he really believes the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated the attacks on America’s embassies in the Middle East, Ventura said, “I have no idea, but I don’t trust my government if that’s what you’re asking me. They’ve lied to me too many times recently.” 

Ventura, author most recently of “DemoCRIPS and ReBLOODlicans: No More Gangs in Government,” listed a number of incidents in which he believes the government lied to the American people. 

“How do I believe them when all that comes out of there are, lies, lies and more lies?” he asked. “Their credibility is zero with me now. I can’t tell you what caused this stuff. Who knows what underlying is going on?” 

Ventura lamented what he sees as American meddling around the world.
“Well, I think us mingling in all these countries’ affairs — I mean, we have military bases in what, 160 countries throughout the world? That’s an empire,” he said.

And in typical Ventura fashion, at no time during the interview did he condemn the attacks or blame the mobs for their savagery.

The One's New Clothes

Michael Ramirez has the perfect take on the media's obsession with Mitt Romney's response to the mob uprisings in the Middle East and how they have abdicated the larger story regarding the Obama Administration:

Just some background on what prompted this particular rendering:  U.S. embassies in the Middle East are being taken over at an increasing rate.  American flags are being tossed aside (or burnt) and in their place now stand the black flags of Al-Qaeda.  Four Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador to Lybia Chris Stevens, were killed in Benghazi by a mob (in a sad irony, Stevens helped many of the very same people rise up against their government during the so-called Arab Spring).  Flag burnings are now even taking place outside of the U.S. embassy in London.

Throughout all of this has been the strategies taken by the Obama Administration (or lack thereof).  The U.S. embassy in Cairo made statements prior to the uprisings that were later reaffirmed in principle by both the President and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on the importance of condemning "the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims."  In trying to blame the uprisings on a movie that shows Muhammad to be a less-than-honorable guy, it subtly shifts the blame from the actual wrongs taking place and almost gives a pseudo-jusitifcation for what's been going on.  And I've read more than one political commentator make the point that the mobs having RPG's and other high-grade weaponry means that they didn't just form at random.

President Obama has weighed in and said that this is one of those times that we should put politics aside and focus on the country.  But only a short while later, in an interview with Steve Kroft from  60 Minutes, Obama lambasted Mitt Romney's denunciations of the  U.S. embassy's pathetic statements and Romney's critique of his foreign policy (though Obama and his administration rejected those very same statement as well).  Obama said that Mitt Romney should have all of the facts before he speaks (which he did), an interesting critique coming from a man who is famous for speaking without knowing all the facts himself (see Gates, Henry Louis).  And, as Steve Hayes points out in a brilliant piece, Obama's campaign team didn't think to stop practicing politics before or after the murders in the Middle East.  I would add that Obama must have forgotten when in 2004, the Kerry campaign was putting the U.S. death toll in the Iraq War front and center (his campaign took time to let Americans know when the 1000th soldier was killed).  I just stop and wonder what the reaction would've been by the MSM if President Bush would have flown off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas the very same day American embassies were being overrun and a U.S. Ambassador was killed.

UPDATE:

Al-Jazeera, that paragon of anti-Americanism, confirms that the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi was premeditated.  This is even more evidence that the priorities of the Obama Administration are completely backwards.

A Real Fact Check

The editors at National Review take on the Obama campaign's charges in recent campaign commercials that Mitt Romney will raise taxes on the middle class and cut taxes for the rich:

The Obama campaign says that Mitt Romney plans to raise taxes on the middle class and cites a study from the Tax Policy Center as evidence. Given that the only sets of eyes that have seen the Romney tax plan in detail reside in the skulls of Mitt Romney and his closest advisers — if indeed Romney has finalized his thinking on the issue, which he probably hasn’t — such analysis is at best speculative. That fact is clear at least to the gentlemen at the Tax Policy Center, who have written that if Romney’s final plan does indeed, as he has suggested, eliminate preferential tax treatment on some specific investments — namely interest accrued on life-insurance policies and municipal bonds, both tax-free under current law — then, in the authors’ own words, “an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral.” The Obama campaign is attributing to the TPC study a certainty that its authors do not share, an act of dishonesty.

And:

Romney is a nuts-and-bolts details man, and he is also prudent. He has laid out his tax plan in very broad strokes communicating his guiding principles, which are to make the tax code flatter and simpler. To that end, he proposes lowering all tax rates by 20 percent and offsetting the forgone revenue by eliminating certain tax breaks for high-income taxpayers, and lowering and reforming business taxes. The TPC study argues that there are not sufficient revenues to be had from eliminating those tax breaks to make up for the rate reductions, leaving an annual gap of some $86 billion. The Obama campaign picked up that $86 billion and simply pretended that the Romney tax plan would make up the difference with higher taxes on the middle class — a proposal Romney has specifically and repeatedly rejected. 

Ending the aforementioned preferential treatment for life insurance and municipal bonds (an option that Romney’s chief economic adviser has said is “on the table”) would go a long way toward covering the gap that TPC projects, but the study’s authors did not include that in their estimates, because Romney has not specifically said that he intends to do it. TPC also assumes that by “high income” Romney means households earning more than $200,000 a year or more, but the top fifth of incomes begins at about $150,000 a year. Eliminating or reducing tax preferences for those households as well as the $200,000-and-up group would also enable Romney’s twin goals of lower rates and revenue neutrality, as analysts at the American Enterprise Institute have shown.

The Big Lie

In his column today, Jonah Goldberg confronts the perhaps the biggest lie the Obama campaign has been attempting to peddle:

“After all that we’ve been through, I don’t believe that rolling back regulations on Wall Street will help the small businesswoman expand or the laid-off construction worker keep his home,” [Obama] explained to a enraptured crowd. “We have been there, we’ve tried that, and we’re not going back.” 

This is an appeal to the mythology of the Bush years as some kind of anarcho-capitalist dystopia in which “market fundamentalism” reigned and Republicans tried to shrink government to the point where “we can drown it in the bathtub” (to quote anti-tax activist Grover Norquist). 

This was always a bizarre liberal hallucination. Government grew massively under President Bush. He was a bigger spender than any previous president going back to Lyndon Johnson. He massively expanded entitlements, grew food-stamp enrollment (almost as much as Obama did) and nearly doubled “investments” in education. He created a new Cabinet agency — Homeland Security — and signed into law sweeping new regulations, like No Child Left Behind, Sarbanes-Oxley, and McCain-Feingold.
This, according to Democrats, amounts to telling Americans “you’re on your own.”

I always wonder why Mitt Romney has said next to nothing about confronting this fairy tale (Paul Ryan has implied arguments against it in certain speeches).  Simply knowing you have the better argument doesn't guarantee anything in politics.

Don't Panic

The MSM has been reporting for the past few days about the bump Obama received after the DNC and how polls overall have shown him breaking away from Mitt Romney.  But fear not:

As Republicans have gotten nervous over screaming poll headlines in recent days, there have been a lot of references to polls in prior elections that turned out to be wildly off-base. Carter led Reagan for much of the 1980 campaign; Mondale led Reagan at one time in 1984; and Michael Dukakis–remember him?–had a 17-point lead over George H. W. Bush after the Democratic convention in 1988. Those elections were three of the biggest Republican landslides in history. (I don’t think George McGovern ever led Richard Nixon.)

It's amazing to think that Dukakis at one point in time had that large a lead on 41.   And it's also a bad sign for Obama when the latest CNN poll oversampled Democrats by a margin of 12 percent and shows him up only by 8%.

The Party of Abortion

Jonathan V. Last has an eye-opening article in the upcoming editition of the Weekly Standard titled "The Party of Abortion," which details how the Democratic Party has shifted on the question of abortion.  As Last notes, in 1992 Bill Clinton stated that abortions should be "safe, legal, and rare" (certainly an odd way to describe a supposed constitutional right) and even in 2004, John Kerry "told a group of Democratic strategists in an after-action strategy session, “they needed new ways to make people understand they didn’t like -abortion."

But as the country has gone steadily towards being more pro-life, the Democrats have paradoxically gone decisively in the opposite direction.  Just look at the 2012 DNC, for starters:

In the first prime-time speech of the first night of the convention, the Democrats featured “former Republican” Maria Ciano (she’s been a registered Democrat since at least 2006). “[Republicans] want to deny me the power to make the most personal decisions about my life,” Ciano said. “The America I love respects the dignity of women. The America I love is a place where, when we say ‘freedom,’ we mean my freedom to make decisions about my life, not someone else’s freedom to make them for me.” 

Ciano was followed by NARAL president Nancy Keenan, who opened by insisting that “the Democratic party believes that women have the right to choose a safe, legal abortion with dignity and privacy.” Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick agreed a short while later in his remarks from the stage, saying, “We believe that freedom means keeping government out of our most private affairs, including out of a woman’s decision whether to keep an unwanted pregnancy.” 

On the second night of the convention, the Democrats continued to make appeals based on abortion rights. The head of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, opened the 8 o’clock hour on the convention stage by claiming that Mitt Romney is campaigning “to overturn Roe v. Wade,” and “we won’t let him.” Later, liberal icon Sandra Fluke promised that if President Obama is reelected, women will retain “the right to choose.” The message was unmistakable: The Democrats believe abortion rights should be a central facet of their appeal to voters.

I know that the conventional wisdom suggests that Republicans should abide by the James Carville's approach of "it's the economy, stupid" but I think that it cannot be forgotten that the economy and "social" issues rest on a different sides of same coin.  Certainly either Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan could take a few minutes and discuss which party really is extreme on abortion and then link it to the teachings of the Declaration of Independence:  that it is unjust to wipe away of an entire class of beings for the benefit of someone else.  With the Democratic Party providing a completely unvarnished view of how they think (and probably always did privately) on abortion, the GOP should not let this opportunity get away from them.

Also, please take some time to read this post at Postmodern Conservative, which touches on this topic and others.

My Way or the Highway

I didn't watch any of the DNC last night (I watched the Cincinnati/Pitt game instead), but I did watch about half of President Obama's speech this morning.  I had to stop it in the middle because the of the numerous straw men and the overall shrill tone.  Hearing the argument that it's either his way or some Republican-created anarchy state where government is abolished and everyone is left to fend for themselves just really gets old after a while.  

Charles Kesler, who has a new book coming out that you should pre-order immediately, sums up Obama's speech:

As for its larger themes, the speech showed a president very much on the defensive. One reason it didn’t soar is that he had to insert many proleptic passages, reassuring his audience that despite what the Republicans are saying and what an innocent listener might gather, he’s all for inalienable rights, responsibilities, individual initiative, free enterprise, citizenship, Israel, and God. Amid such an elaborate smoke screen, little in the way of offensive operations could be conducted. 

Connected to his defensiveness was his new false humility. His old false humility recalled the classic joke about conversing with an egotist. “But enough about me,” says the egomaniac. “Let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?” I’m the indispensable leader, Obama used to say, but I depend upon you the people to hope that change is possible, and so follow me. Together, we will be the change we’ve been waiting for. 

In the new version, the mood is significantly darker and the choice starker. The people face “two fundamentally different visions of the future,” and if they don’t choose the right (Left) one, it’s not his fault. He admits he, like Lincoln, is not perfect. But the choice is clear. “My fellow citizens,” he says, “you were the change,” in the past tense, notice. But “if you turn away now, if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible, well, change will not happen. . . . Only you have the power to move us forward.”. In other words, don’t blame him if the country goes to hell under Romney-Ryan.

And the overall problems that plagued both conventions:

Grammar and style were problems for most speakers at both party conventions, alas, but a bipartisanship of low standards is not good. The president said, for example, “when you pick up that ballot to vote [what else would you do with it?], you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation.” Strike “of any time,” please. I’m reminded of his speech a few years ago when he hailed ordinary Americans’ “doing their business.” He meant “attending to.” Has he never walked that expensive dog of his?

Going Deeper

Hadley Arkes has some thoughts on what was missed by political commentators yesterday after a reference to God was re-inserted into the Democratic party platform:

For it’s not a matter of one word more or less, one or more mentions of God. The real heart of the issue is that most of the people in that hall, in the Democratic convention, really don’t accept the understanding of rights contained in the Declaration of Independence: The Declaration appealed first to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” as the very ground of our natural rights. The drafters declared that “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal,” and then immediately: that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” George Bush was not embarrassed to insist that these are “God-given rights,” as opposed to rights that we had merely given to ourselves. For if we had given them to ourselves, we could as readily take them back or remove them. Newt Gingrich made this point during the primaries; it’s not as though the point were so esoteric as to seem mystical or somehow remote from the understanding of ordinary folks. And Paul Ryan touched on this understanding of natural rights during his own speech at the convention. He could surely respond even now by putting the question to Obama and the Democrats, and putting it in the terms of a dare and wager: If we took a survey on this matter, we bet that about 70–80 percent or more of the delegates at the Democratic convention would be too embarrassed to say that these rights were given to us by our Creator, the Author of those Laws of Nature. And we could bet that, in contrast, about 80 percent of the delegates at the Republican convention would assent to that proposition without a trace of hesitation. Why not put the question so that the heart of the matter does not fade?

I wish Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan would take up Dr. Arkes on his offer.  I think it would pay off dividends.

How Evil is Mitt Romney?

One observation from watching bits and pieces of the DNC tonight:  Most, if not all, of the speakers tonight seem to all start with lines like "Mitt Romney is not a bad guy but..." and then go on to detail how he likes to fire people, steal 401Ks and put away the money in his offshore bank accounts, push old people, women, poor people, and any other minority group he doesn't like off cliffs, strip away all education funding, rescind all regulations so that there are nails in our soup cans and toxic levels of mercury in our water, repeal all taxes that apply to the rich so that the tax burden falls on the poor, allow police to deport anyone who looks foreign born, etc.

A speaker sometime earlier tonight, beginning his remarks with the above aside, went on to say that Mitt Romney has no moral compass.

Sounds like a good guy to me...

God Returns, Democrats Boo

Just about twenty minutes ago, delegates to the DNC voted by voice vote to amend the party platform to include a reference to God and specify that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, both of which were taken out during the making of the 2012 party platform earlier in the week.  Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa, the head of the DNC, called a voice vote and after three tries (even after the third try, some members of the media in the arena observed that the nays still outnumbered the ayes) Villaraigosa declared that the ayes had a two-thirds majority and the platform was thus changed.  After the change occurred, a chorus of boos filled the arena -- only this time, it was much more of a disgrace then when fans of the Philadelphia Eagles booed Santa Claus.

Certainly not a scene the Democrats wanted to create.

Yesterday, Sen. Dick Durbin went into a tirade when asked by Fox News' Brett Baier why the references to God and Jerusalem had been taken out.  Durbin, acting as though even asking the question was a Republican plot, tried to turn the tables and accuse Baier and Fox of being biased (hardly an original accusation).

Contra Durbin, when people make choices, they have reasons for making those choices.  There was a reason why those two references were taken out; the Democrats obviously just don't want to talk about those reasons publicly (Although some groups did not shy away when expressing their thoughts) .  The fact that President Obama personally intervened to put references to Jerusalem and God back in the platform make this all the more interesting.

Ironically, it was the Democrats whose goal it was to change the subject and make the DNC about social issues.  Now, that very line of attack has backfired in a big way.

Whatever Happened to Civility?

Over the weekend, the head of the California Democratic Party, John Burton, said the following about Paul Ryan:

“They lie and they don’t care if people think they lie,” Burton told the San Francisco Chronicle, referring to Ryan's RNC speech. “Joseph Goebbels: It’s the ‘Big Lie,’ you keep repeating it.”

John Burton was supposed to be at the DNC but an unfortunate "pre-scheduled root canal" came up on his schedule so he will not be able to attend.

Today, Pat Lehman, the head of the Kansas Democratic delegates, said the following about Paul Ryan:

She said education is the only route most Americans can use to improve their lives and “the thought of having our public education system basically devastated, I’m really worried about that.” 

Lehman said her biggest concern about the election itself is voter-identification laws that Republicans have pushed through in a number of states, including Kansas. 

She said the purpose is to suppress the vote, especially among Democratic-leaning constituencies such as elderly voters. And she scorned the Republicans’ contention that the laws are designed to combat voter fraud. 

“It’s like Hitler said, if you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big lie, and if you tell it often enough and say it in a loud enough voice, some people are going to believe you,” Lehman said.

Another One Bites the Dust

If you still think fact checking columns are the pinnacle of political thought, read this and weep:

GREENVILLE, N.C. - Paul Ryan is not only the GOP vice presidential nominee, he's also the House Budget Chair, and obsessed with data and numbers, but despite his passion for math, some numbers he threw out with a new attack line today need some fact checking. 

Let's start at the beginning. In comparing President Obama to Jimmy Carter, Ryan said in July 1980 the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and "for the past 42 months it's been above 8 percent under Barack Obama's failed leadership." 

Both parts of this sentence are true according to the Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, but in July 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president, unemployment was at 9.4 percent. In July 1982 it was higher at 9.8 percent. 

In July 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president, unemployment was at 7.7 percent. 

Is what Ryan said factually correct? Yes, but it leaves out some important data.

Ok, so Ryan didn't technically lie, but he left out some "important data."  So in other words, he told the truth.

The Assault on Paul Ryan

Minutes after Paul Ryan gave his speech at the RNC last Wednesday night, fact checkers were out in full force, searching through his speech for anything that didn't comport with the way they see things.  And did they find many things that fit that descriptoin, chiefly among the Ryan's argument that involved the GM plant in Janesville, WI and his blasting the president for ignoring the findings of the Simpson-Bowles Commission.  

Steve Hayes finds that these fact checkers may want to actually take time from reading Democrat Party talking points and look at the facts.  Here are his observations on the articles that accuse Ryan of lying about the Simpson-Bowles Commission:

Here’s the funny thing about most of these articles: They fail to cite a single fact that Ryan misstated or lie that he told. In most cases, the self-described fact-checks are little more than complaints that Ryan failed to provide context for his criticism of Barack Obama. For example, virtually every one of these articles included a complaint about Ryan’s comments on Obama and entitlement reform. In accusing Obama of failing to lead on entitlements, Ryan noted that Obama had ignored the findings of the Simpson-Bowles Commission that the president himself had empaneled. The complaint: Ryan did not mention that he had served on the commission and voted against its findings.

Could Paul Ryan have gone out of his way to disclose his role? Of course. Does his failure to do so constitute a “lie”? Hardly. There’s an additional irony here. None of those accusing Ryan of omitting important context noted in their reports that Ryan, both before and after voting against Simpson-Bowles, authored comprehensive and detailed plans to address entitlements and debt—something that might be considered important context for their critiques of Ryan.

I've noticed that in many these fact checking columns, the authors really need to go back to second grade and figure out what is a fact and what is an opinion.  So many of these columns treat every word said by a politician as a statement of pure fact.

Hayes continues on what they missed in their accounts of the GM plant in Janesville:

Ryan didn’t claim that Obama was responsible for the closing of the GM plant, he faulted Obama for failing to do what he’d suggested he’d do: Save it. It’s an important distinction. If Ryan’s intent had been to deceive, he wouldn’t have introduced his critique noting that “we were about to lose a major factory” when Obama told workers, “this plant will be here for another 100 years.” Second, Kessler was simply wrong to claim “the plant was closed in December 2008, before Obama was sworn in.” The plant was producing trucks as late as April 2009, several months after Obama was sworn in. On February 19, a month after Obama’s inauguration, the Janesville Gazette reported on the imminent closure: “General Motors will end medium-duty truck production in Janesville on April 23, four months to the day after the plant stopped building full-size sport utility vehicles. About 100 employees associated with the line learned of the layoffs Wednesday.” 

It’s true that GM, in the summer of 2008, had announced its intention to put the plant on standby. But if announcing something accomplished it, I would have long ago announced that I’d lost 30 pounds. The plant was not, in fact, “closed in December 2008.”

And furthermore, the plant is still not even closed for good.  It can re-open again in the future.

The massive irony in all of this:

But the narrative was set. How did this happen? Immediately after Ryan finished delivering the passage on the GM plant in his speech, top Obama adviser Stephanie Cutter sent this tweet: “Ryan blaming the President for a GM auto plant that closed under Pres Bush—thought he was smarter than that.” With one click after another, Cutter’s false claim became accepted wisdom. 

So we are left with this irony: Paul Ryan was accused of lying because journalists and self-described “fact checkers” relied, at least in part, on a misstatement of fact that came directly from the Obama campaign.

It wasn't just hyperbole when I stated at the top of this post about the fact checkers relying on Democratic Party talking points.  It's a sad state of affairs.

Fact Checking Eastwood

Ned Rice at Brietbart.com fact checks Clint Eastwood's "speech" (I don't know why people keep calling it that) in the spirit of the usual treatment Republicans and conservatives get by the self-appointed fact checkers:

Those Republicans are at it again. Here are just a few of the distortions, half-truths, and outright lies in the remarks actor Clint Eastwood made during the Republican National Convention last night.

“I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, 'what’s a movie tradesman doing out here?'” 

Mr. Eastwood did not, in fact, know what we were all thinking.

“So I -- so I’ve got Mr. Obama sitting here." 

Numerous reviews of the videotape have confirmed that President Obama was not, in fact, sitting in the chair during Mr. Eastwood’s remarks. 

“I was even crying. And then finally -- and I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there is 23 million unemployed people in this country."

The number of unemployed Americans did not reach 23 million until after President Obama’s inauguration so Eastwood’s statement makes no sense chronologically.

“But, I thought maybe as an excuse -- what do you mean shut up?” (LAUGHTER)

Eastwood was suggesting that someone in the chair had just told him to shut up when, as has been noted, there was clearly no one in the chair.

“OK, I thought maybe it was just because somebody had the stupid idea of trying terrorists in downtown New York City.”

The idea that giving Khalid Sheik Muhammed a public forum with which to advance his violent agenda as “stupid” is Mr. Eastwood’s opinion, not a fact.

“But you thought the war in Afghanistan was OK. You know, I mean -- you thought that was something worth doing. We didn’t check with the Russians to see how did it -- they did there for 10 years.”


During their 10-year occupation of Afghanistan the people Eastwood refers to here were known as the Soviets.


“And I thought -- I thought, yeah -- I am not going to shut up, it is my turn.” (LAUGHTER)

Again, Eastwood was suggesting that someone in the chair had just told him to shut up when, as has been noted twice already, there was clearly no one seated in the chair.

“I wondered about when the -- what do you want me to tell Romney? I can’t tell him to do that. I can’t tell him to do that to himself.”

Depending on which variant of “it” one prefers it is, in fact, possible to do that to ones self. Especially if you’re one of the women the Republican Party is currently at war with.

“You’re crazy, you’re absolutely crazy.”

Even if one accepts, for the sake of argument, Eastwood’s conceit that President Obama is seated in the chair, there is currently no public record of the President having been diagnosed with any mental illness.

“You’re getting as bad as Biden. Of course we all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic party.”

Joe Biden is not the intellect of the Democratic party, he is the Vice President of the United States.

“Kind of a grin with a body behind it.”

Joe Biden is clearly more than just a grin with a body behind it. He also has hair plugs.

“A stellar businessman. Quote, unquote, ‘a stellar businessman.’”

Bill Clinton’s actual quote regarding Mitt Romney was: “There’s no question that in terms of getting up and going to the office and, you know, basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who’s been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”

“And I think it’s that time. And I think if you just step aside and Mr. Romney can kind of take over. You can maybe still use [the] plane, though maybe a smaller one. Not that big gas guzzler you are going around to colleges and talking about student loans and stuff like that.”

President Obama mainly uses Air Force One to attend Democratic fundraisers, to vacation in Europe, and for golfing trips.

“You are an -- an ecological man.”

President Obama’s credentials as an “ecological man” are a matter of opinion. Critics note that since 2008 ocean levels have continued to rise and the Earth has yet to begin healing itself.

“Why would you want to drive that around?”

Air Force One is not driven, it is flown.

“OK, well anyway. All right, I’m sorry. I can’t do that to myself either.”

As has previously been noted, even a man of Eastwood’s advanced years can still do that to himself to a certain degree.

“We own this country.”

Even a cursory audit of the federal government’s books would suggest that China owns this country.

“Politicians are employees of ours. And -- so -- they are just going to come around and beg for votes every few years.”

Not all politicians “come around and beg for votes every few years.” Many of them offer bribes or other inducements.

“Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether you’re libertarian or whatever, you are the best.”

This one is partially correct. While Democrats are clearly the best, a broad consensus exists within the scientific community that Republicans are intrinsically evil and that most Libertarians are just pot heads.

“And we should not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go.”

To cite just one example which refutes this outlandish claim, before becoming vice president Joe Biden was a United States Senator for 36 years.

“We do not have to be [mental] masochists and vote for somebody that we don’t really even want in office just because they seem to be nice guys.”

What do you think we did in 2008? 

Out of Touch

I saw this article on the Yahoo! scrolling news bar just a little while ago.  It details what President Obama encountered when he first stepped off Air Force One in Sioux City, Iowa today:

The article, written by Devin Dwyer of ABC News, then goes into the background of the whole "you didn't built that" meme: 

The message appeared to be a response President Obama's "you didn't build that" remark from a July campaign rally, when he was trying to explain that government - not businesses - constructed public infrastructure on which the economy relies. Republicans have used the four words to attack Obama as out of touch with the realities of owning and operating a small business.

Dwyer writes that the message "appeared to be a response" to Obama's now-infmaous comment about small business.  What is immediately obvious to anyone following current politics with the slightest degree of attentiveness takes some time for Dwyer to figure out (obviously trying to figure out the meaning of neanderthal-like symbols scrawled on a cave wall takes some time to decipher).  Dwyer breezily describes Obama's stance that "government -- not business -- constructed public infrastructure on which the economy relies."  While Government may be the origin of much of the funding for building roads and bridges and other critical infrastructure, where does that money come from? But that aside, Dwyer's description isn't an accurate representation of everything Obama said and implied.  Obama's words, in context, mean much more than that.

Here is the paragraph in full in which those famous remarks were said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Not only does government provide the necessary infrastructure, but it directly causes the success or failure of a business (notice the pronoun "that" refers to business, not roads and bridges).  But if government has the power to create a business, then they certainly have the power to close down a business.  This is what is plainly there and what so many were upset about, the media notwithstanding.  This teaching certainly seems to be "out of touch," to say the least.