CALIFORNIA SENATE RACE: Dianne Feinstein Walks Out On Interview When Asked Why She Won’t Debate Opponent.
Archive for 2012
September 9, 2012
OBAMA’S SUPERMARKET-SCANNER MOMENT: World’s Smartest President Has Trouble With iPhone. “See, I still have a BlackBerry.”
Relax, Republicans. You only have to beat this guy and Joe Biden. And, somewhere, Rutherford B. Hayes is laughing.
SO, GETTING A STRONG AND FAVORABLE REACTION TO SARAH HOYT’S PIECE ON RIGHT-LEANING PUNDITS SPREADING FEAR AND DESPONDENCY.
I got a very negative email from a pundit who shall remain unnamed yesterday. I quoted Patton: “Do not take counsel of your fears.”
Some of this is coming from people who didn’t like Romney in the primaries. But I have to say, the press would be the same no matter who the GOP had nominated. This election is about Barack Obama and his disastrous record. The press wants to save him. Don’t be suckered.
UPDATE: A followup email from Sarah:
You don’t have to like Romney. You just have to like him better than Obama. Remember Heinlein said there is often no one you want to vote for but there is always someone you want to vote against. And if you don’t like him better than Obama — why not? Even if he is all you think, a squishy, soft social-democrat (I don’t think so, but you can read it that way) he’s not a hard-core Marxist Leninist. And if you think there’s no difference, you need remedial reading. I suggest The Black Book Of Communism for a start.
Glenn is absolutely right that whoever the Republicans had nominated would get this treatment. Republicans are ALWAYS evil/stupid. The difference right now seems to be the media-Democrat complex is also trying to fracture the Republican base. Maybe I’m seeing trolls under every bridge but all of a sudden, after a period of unity, there’s a lot of moaning and belly-aching about how Romney is no better than Obama. And Republicans are falling for it, even though the comments are virtually identical, word per word across the sites.
Get over it. Romney is better than Obama. He’s not ideal — who is? — but we’re not (thank heavens) a monarchy looking for a perfect king. We’re a sovereign people looking for the best of two candidates. We can’t go back to sleep after he’s elected. We have to stay awake, watch over our employee and make him fear our wrath and our firing him if he goes astray. But first we get rid of the total dud we (well, not me, but…) hired in 08. Frankly, I’m looking forward to the Tea Parties to keep Romney in line. But first I donate and I campaign so we can hire him. THEN we keep him in line.
Indeed.
MORE: Reader George Milonas writes:
This air of inevitably for Obama benefits Romney not Obama. Republicans are depressed for no reason. If you create the image that Obama is going to win no matter what, it’s the Democratic voter who is going to stay home figuring Obama is going to win anyway. Republicans are incredibly motivated. They’re going to vote no matter what. The Democrats won’t. I think we should lie to pollers and increase the inevitability for Obama. We’re going to show up even if there is a plague of locusts coming at us. And the truth of the matter is the only thing that matters in this election is who shows up.
I have written on that point myself. And — as things like the Chick-Fil-A affair demonstrate — the grassroots have more grit than the punditocracy and the establishment.
THEY’RE NOT TEA PARTIERS SO THEY’RE NOT NEWS: Occupy activists plead guilty to conspiracy and weapons of mass destruction charges.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Cartoon Edition.
UP TO 50% OFF ON End-of-Season deals on mowers and landscaping tools.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Who Is Dumber, Joe Biden or Barack Obama? “Maybe such blunders are insignificant. Then again, maybe they aren’t. If you can’t count to four, or keep track of the difference between 50 and 57 states, maybe that helps to explain why you don’t understand the significance of a $16 trillion debt. In a world where numbers are all just a fog, what’s the difference?”
BOSTON HERALD: ANOTHER DISMAL MONTH. “The celebration confetti hadn’t even been swept from the floor of the Democratic National Convention when the latest jobs numbers were released — and they aren’t pretty. So President Barack Obama can talk all he wants — as he did Thursday night — about “moving forward,” but the dismal 8.1 percent unemployment rate dipped slightly only because more than half a million Americans had stopped even looking for work. And that is the saddest news of all. If those who had stopped looking for work and those working part time when they would rather work full time were factored in, the real unemployment number would be 14.7 percent.”
JORDAN WEISSMAN IN THE ATLANTIC: The Democrats’ Single Least Credible Idea: An ‘All of the Above’ Energy Plan.
AT AMAZON, A BIG FALL SALE ON hunting, shooting, and fishing gear. And as I’ve noted before, congrats to Amazon for carrying shooting gear, something some online merchants — I’m looking at you, Google — won’t do.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What’s Going on With Yosemite and Hantavirus? “So far, eight Yosemite visitors are confirmed to have contracted the virus, with three dead of Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome—a variation of Hantavirus that’s not communicable between humans, but which can be transmitted to humans through contact with excrement, saliva, or urine from infected mice. The National Park Service, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), are aggressively trying to contact people who recently visited Yosemite and could be at risk.”
BOOSTING SPACE TRAVEL WITH CROWDFUNDING. “Michael Laine was just looking for $8,000 to restart the LiftPort Group and put it on a path toward someday building a space elevator on the moon — but with a few days left to go on his Kickstarter campaign, the venture has attracted nearly $70,000 and counting. Which actually poses a challenge: What will he do with all that money?”
IT’S NOT LIKE REPUBLICANS ARE UP AGAINST THE TITANS, HERE: Obama Pulls a Biden, Tells Audience, “Three Proud Words – Made in the USA!” (Video).
SARAH HOYT GOES AFTER THOSE SPREADING FEAR AND DESPONDENCY ON THE RIGHT.
Yesterday at various blogs I read over and over again that the Dem convention gave Obama a big bounce, that he’s winning, that his approval is now over 50%, that their enthusiasm is as high as that of the Republican crowd, that–
And then you look at the polls that caused this “sky is falling” fit. What are those polls? Those polls are, in fact, the same old sh*te. They poll all adults, which you KNOW skews Democrat. They poll registered voters, which you know skews Democrat. They poll with a skew of 4% Democrats over Republicans as though this were still 2008, as if 2010 had never happened.
Then all the people on the right echo these as though they were legitimate and say “oh, but the polls were correct before.”
Really? The polls were correct before? When? The very last polls before the elections, when pollsters try to salvage their reputation? Sometimes. More or less. Kind of. But up till then when something can be got from the propaganda and from seeding despondency on the right, the polls have been insanely skewed.
Beyond all that, 2008 and before was a different game. The unemployment statistics used to be more or less correct, too, and, oh, yeah, the Justice Department didn’t used to sue pollsters. Neither of those is true anymore.
Read the whole thing.
Related: ‘Operation Demoralize Is Working Just as Planned.’ Only if you let it.
Another reader emails: “Don’t get sucked in by Obama’s MSM.. . the only way he has a chance is if the GOP support is suppressed.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: It’s You, Not Him: Six Reasons Why The Sex Is Bad.
IN NORTH CAROLINA, Obama Voters Explain Buyer’s Remorse.
NFIB V. SEBELIUS: FIVE TAKES is still #2 on the SSRN Top Download list, with nearly 3000 downloads. Thanks to everyone who was interested enough to download it!
BURSTING THEIR BALLOON: “A maker of condoms purported to be from the town of Condom in southwestern France has been ordered to pay 10,000 euros ($12,600) for false advertising after the provenance of its prophylactics was found to be Malaysia.”
EVERYTHING’S GOING TO HELL IN EUROPE: Bottle Shortage Threatens Oktoberfest.
MANY PATRONS REPORT HAVING A DEEP APPRECIATION OF THE ART: Strip club claims lap dances are art. “The strip club’s bid to be spared a £78,000 tax bill is being backed by a cultural anthropologist who has studied exotic dance and visited Nite Moves.”
FROM REBECCA HAMILTON, thoughts on manliness and fatherhood. “Daddy was teaching more than how to ride and care for a horse, more even than not to steal. He was teaching me a whole set of values. He was also, though neither of us was aware of it, teaching me about men. There wasn’t a plan in this. I feel confident that my daddy never read a single book on how to raise kids. He didn’t make dates to ‘have a talk’ with me or attempt to manipulate me. He just talked to me as part of our daily interactions. Like I was a person.”
JUNK DNA NOT ACTUALLY JUNK. And here I thought the science was settled. “Junk. Barren. Non-functioning. Dark matter. That’s how scientists had described the 98% of human genome that lies between our 21,000 genes, ever since our DNA was first sequenced about a decade ago. The disappointment in those descriptors was intentional and palpable. . . . But it turns out they were wrong. In an impressive series of more than 30 papers published in several journals, including Nature, Genome Research, Genome Biology, Science and Cell, scientists now report that these vast stretches of seeming “junk” DNA are actually the seat of crucial gene-controlling activity — changes that contribute to hundreds of common diseases. The new data come from the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project, or ENCODE, a $123 million endeavor begun by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in 2003, which includes 442 scientists in 32 labs around the world.”
IS APPLE A “SINFUL” STOCK?