For the benefit of our Commander in Chief, a look at a recent, modern, counterinsurgency use of the bayonet – which is still issued as standard equipment to infantry around the world:

In May 2004, approximately 20 British troops in Basra were ambushed and forced out of their vehicles by about 100 Shiite militia fighters. When ammunition ran low, the British troops fixed bayonets and charged the enemy. About 20 militiamen were killed in the assault without any British deaths.

Soldiers of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – the “Argylls” – who carried out a successful bayonet charge in Basra in 2004, killing 20 Mahdi without casualties. Although to be fair to President Obama, they were not on horseback.  

The bayonet charge appeared to succeed for three main reasons. First, the attack was the first of its kind in that region and captured the element of surprise. Second, enemy fighters probably believed jihadist propaganda stating that coalition troops were cowards unwilling to fight in close combat, further enhancing the element of surprise. Third, the strict discipline of the British troops overwhelmed the ability of the militia fighters to organize a cohesive counteraction.

I can imagine a Scottish squad leader muttering “That’s jooost crrrrezzy enoof to wairk”.

If the shoe were on the other foot, can you imagine a Democrat – any Democrat – passing on a story like this?

They don’t call it a horse-race for nothing.

As a rule in polling, outliers tend to get ignored.  Or you can choose to believe that Bush won Hawaii in 2004, Alf Landon won a 1936 landslide, or that Clinton v. Dole was a nail-biter.

But it becomes harder to ignore an outlier when it’s A) close to the election and B) one of the oldest and most respected polling outfits in the nation.  Thus as the media enters Campaign 2012’s home stretch, the narrative of a nip-and-tuck contest looks decidedly jeopardized by Gallup showing Mitt Romney with a 7% lead – and such an outcome apparently has to be challenged:

With a record of correctly predicting all but three of the 19 presidential races stretching back to 1936, Gallup is one of the most prestigious names in the business and its outlier status has other polling experts scratching their heads.

“They’re just so out of kilter at the moment,” said Simon Jackman, a Stanford University political science professor and author of a book on polling. “Either they’re doing something really wacky or the other 18 pollsters out there are colluding, or something.”

The caveats to Gallup’s polling (as with any pollster) are well-versed.  But to find an answer as to why Gallup posts a major Romney lead while the Real Clear Politics average of pollsters shows essentially a tie has nothing to do with credibility or collusion.  It has everything to do with turnout.

Take the recent IBD/TIPP poll as Gallup’s doppleganger with Obama leading by 5.7%.  Democrats are outsample Republicans by 7%.  The UConn Courant showing Obama up 3%?  The sample shows Democrats with an 8-point advantage.  Gallup plays their cards close to the vest, not showing the partisan affiliation of their likely voter model.  But their registered voter breakdown still shows a Romney lead, albeit of a modest 3% and is likely based on their party affiliation polls showing Democrats up 4 points.

Gallup says it determines its “likely voters” by asking whether they have voted in the past, if they know where their polling place is located, and other similar questions. The formula has been tweaked this year to take into account the increasing prevalence of early voting.

Gallup’s Newport pointed out that the firm’s likely-voter formula has more accurately predicted the election results than its wider poll of all registered voters going back to the 1990s and, in fact, the likely voter prediction tended to slightly favor Democratic candidates.

The idea of a single pollster being simply a part of a larger trendline is accurate, even if most media outlets tend to overlook that fact to trumpet their own poll to the exclusion of competitors and thus create news rather than report it.  Yet even if we exclude Gallup’s results, the trendlines have to be concerning for Obama’s camp.  Despite wielding turnout margins better than what propelled him into office four years ago, many polls show Barack Obama at best narrowly ahead – and more commonly tied or behind.

Gallup might be overstating Romney’s support, although the pollster’s worst estimations of support were in the 5-6 point range and happened in 1936 and 1948.  In the modern era, if anything Gallup has consistently overestimated Democratic support at the polls, giving Obama 2% more, Kerry 0.7% more and Clinton 2.8% and 5.7% more in his campaigns.  Which may mean that despite a 7% lead causing headaches among the media, Mitt Romney may…hold for dramatic effect…lead by more.

Last night on Twitter, I twote “Binders” is so Big Bird.”

This morning on Hot Air, Ed points out that Mark Halperin – no conservative tool, he – points out the same thing at greater length; we’re under three weeks to the election, and Obama is still trying to pin his hopes on sophomoric “gotchas”:

As Ed notes, it’s a sign of political exhaustion from a campaign that

…won’t run on his agenda, because he either doesn’t have one (and he certainly hasn’t published one or pushed it at either debate, choosing to attack Romney instead), or because, as Mickey Kaus writes, any honesty about his second-term agenda would cost him the election

Binders!

Big Bird!

Contraception!

Squirrel!

Bonus question:  If Obama loses – and if Alita Messinger’s similar campaign ends up falling short of flipping the legislature and bogging down both Constitutional Amendments here in Minnesota – do you suppose the Dems will re-evaluate their strategy of the past few years of going all-in for the low-information voter?

Romney:  Referring to large assortument of qualified women as “binders”.

Obama:  Misery for women.

Discuss.

“The biggest surprise of the night was when Meatloaf bailed the President out on his Libya answer”

— Gary Miller, from Facebook

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The President knew nothing about ATF gun-running, Solyndra’s solar panels or Secret Service prostitutes. Now we learn he knew nothing about terror threats in Libya.

It seems the President has been completely shut out of the government he’s supposed to be running. It’s almost as if his own employees see him as nothing more than an Affirmative Action token hire. They apparently believe he really is just an articulate, clean, bright, nice-looking Black man, someone to be paraded for the cameras occasionally but kept away from all the real decision-making. “Have another round of golf” they tell him, “Don’t worry about us, we’ll take care of everything.” Except they don’t; and he gets blamed for it.

That must suck. I wonder if he’s lonely.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

He’s showing some of the signs of having spent four years as a figurehead for others.

Since Slow Job brought it up last night – here is the record of spending for the past two administrations:

Via Instapundit

By the way – I missed this part of the debate last night, but Biden lied about his votes on both wars.

No wisecrack followups for either of those factoids.

Please please please please please please please oh Father in heaven let this be true.

Open letter to any fighter-attack pilots or tank gunners in the audience; what’s the next step up from “Target Rich Environment?”

UPDATE:  And father in heaven, if you’ll indulge me in one more…

The smirking?  The 82 interruptions?  The incoherent girly giggling?

No big deal.  I expected that from Biden.

Biden’s approach to the debate was, in a conventional social sense, “rude” – but this is politics.  Conventional rules, at least under the surface, are more or less irrelevant.

For starters, Biden is well aware that virtually nobody changes their mind over the Veep debates.  The Veepstakes are all about getting bases jazzed for the final sprint.  And what you saw was the comparison of the tactics the campaigns believed with reach their various bases.

Ryan was thoughful, on point, intellectually cogent, and stayed on the message – “we’re going to start making the tough choices, and get people back to work” – the sort of things the conservative base is concerned with.

Biden was arrogant, blustery, giggly, interrupting constantly – he was, in fact, the very model of the modern Liberal.  The model of the lefty base is, in fact, Fast Eddie Schultz and Chris Matthews.

I don’t think it was just boorishness, though.  Biden is a bobblehead, but he’s not stupid.  I think he knows that if the whole country was talking about what a jabbering, smirking, inappropriately-giggling jag he was, they would spend less time talking about the past four years, Benghazi, four years of 8% unemployment (not to mention the most important issues of the past year, last Wednesday’s debate and Big Bird).

So far, it’s working.

But the part that I wanted to yell from the mountaintops?  Bident’s closing statement.  He stated his purpose, and the administration’s as making sure the “playing field is leveled, they, in fact, have a clear shot, and they have peace of mind”

Government-leveled playing fields are level.  They are as clear as an IRS form.  And government doesn’t give peace of mind (barring the bits and pieces of safety net that actually serve as safety nets, which we already paid for, thank you very much), it only takes it away.

Red meat tofu for a not-so-bright base?  Absoluteley.

Deserving re-election?

Pfft.

Lara Logan shreds the Administration’s lies on Afghanistan:

Remember all those years Democrats looked their knowing looks and said “but Bush hasn’t gotten Bin Laden!”, concluding with a smug grin like a toddler who’d just filled a diaper. We’d reply “if they killed Bin Laden tomorrow, the war wouldn’t end” – but they were too busy showing the diaper, apparently, to pay attention.

Sometimes it sucks to be right.

We’ve had two stories in the past few weeks about traditionally-DFL sinecures softening up, bit by bit.

The first was yesterday; Aaron Brown notes that HD6B – the post-redistricting home of Iron-Range DFL political statue Tom Rukavina – has seen the local paper endorse the Republican challenger, nurse and political newcomer Jason Colangelo, over career DFL/union Jason Metsa:

Aaron “Minnesota” Brown:

In all likelihood, this race will fall easily to Metsa.

But I’m going to keep an eye on 6B because Colangelo has done well in winning over some notable support thus far…Last week he received a remarkably enthusiastic endorsement from the Duluth News Tribune and I predict that editor Bill Hanna is cooking up an epic Mesabi Daily News endorsement for Colangelo after the MDN bludgeoned Metsa before his August primary win over Lorrie Janatopoulos.

Colangelo might be green, but he is following a playbook that I’ve always considered the GOP’s best chance on the Range — unabashedly pro-union, some fairly reasonable ideas for an expanded Range economy, all while preserving the GOP base on social issues. Enough to win? Not likely this year, but if Colangelo “beats the spread” on this one we could a more competitive challenge from him in the future, provided he can handle the heat of increased scrutiny.

This, in “normal” times in Minnesota, is unthinkable.

But these aren’t normal times.  Brown:

But if Rep. Chip Cravaack’s attempt to turn the Range GOP red with a tent revival of mining politics works, watch out here.

And there are rumors filtering down from the Range that Cravaack’s strategy is hitting paydirt in some unexpected places.

More as those rumors get more substantial.

More at noon.

The last round of Education Minnesota (the state’s biggest teachers’ union) TV ads includes one with an older guy (I can’t find the video online – perhaps EdMinn knows we’re lurking?) saying – paraphrasing closely here:

I support education.  Even though my kids aren’t in school anymore.  Even if I don’t have a lot of money for other things…this state built a great education system because people sacrificed…!

That’s a pretty slinky bit of rhetoric, there.  Ingeniously manipulative.

Of course, the public school systems have never had more money – the Republicans have added plenty of money over the past two years, by the way, although with what result I can’t tell, and either can anyone else.  And we do no have a great education system, not anymore.  We have an adequate one, very good in some places, rotten to the core in others.

But what EdMinn is asking is for you, Joe Schlub Public, is to dig deep and sacrifice, for…

…for what?

For better schools?

The Teachers Union has very little to do with how your kids are actually educated.  That’s between you and your school board.  No, the teachers union pretty much exists to protect teachers from capricious firing and lousy work conditions (not a bad thing in and of itself) and keep adding to, or at least prevent subtraction from, the pay and benefits the unions have already exacted from the politicians they helped elect in the first  place.  They don’t write curricula.  They don’t set education policy (directly).

What the ad is really telling Minnesotans is “we need you to sacrifice – like, work until you’re 70 – so that we can keep retiring with near-full-pay at 50”.

So pony up, all you lazy private sector serfs!  Er, taxpayers!

Yesterday we published the now-infamous (albeit still ignored-by-the-MSM) video of Barack Obama’s Kanye-West-like speech to a group of African-American activists about the racism tied to the aid to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

As Paul Mirengoff notes, not only was it racist, it was completely false:

Obama’s claim was false. A few weeks before Obama gave his Hampton speech, Congress had waived the Stafford Act in connection with $6.9 billion in federal aid for New Orleans.

But it gets worse for Obama. Neo-neocon points out that Obama was one of 14 Senators who voted against the waiver of the Stafford Act. So not only was Obama’s complaint false, it was one he would have lacked standing to raise, given his vote on the issue.

Now, Obama voted against the Stafford Act waiver because it was part of a bill providing funds for the war effort in Iraq. Apparently, Obama’s desire to make sure the surge failed and we lost to al Qaeda in Iraq trumped his concern for the good people of New Orleans. Or maybe it was all posturing, Obama’s specialty, since he knew the money would go to Iraq and the Stafford Act would be waived regardless of how he voted.

Perhaps Obama should have voted “present.”

I suggest all of the above, plus the fact that being a Democrat in Chicago means never being accountable to anyone.

Of course, the mainstream media does their best to keep that going nationally.  It’s just gotten a lot harder to do that.

…that while everyone knows Mary Franson (GOP HD8B) supports the Marriage Amendment…

…that her opponent, retired school teacher and endorsed DFL challenger for the seat Bob Cunniff, hasn’t made his opinion on this bill public yet.  His website and facebook page are silent on the subject.

Just in the interest of free inquiry, it might be good for people to ask Mr. Cunniff what he thinks about this intensely fractious issue.

(Or try to.  His campaign website includes no way of contacting the campaign or the candidate, other than the ‘Volunteer!” page.  You might have to persevere a bit).

If you get an answer, by all means leave a note in the comments.

UPDATE:  Welp, here’;s a real profile in courage (via commenter Jay McCue):

He winds up and gives that issue a 55-yard kick down the road.  “It’s up to the voters”.  Right, that’s correct.  But how do you stand on it?

They said if I voted for Barack Obama, racism would prevail.

And they were right:

“Down in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later,” he begins, “there’s a law, federal law — when you get reconstruction money from the federal government — called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when you get federal money, you gotta give a ten percent match. The local government’s gotta come up with ten percent. Every ten dollars the federal government comes up with, local government’s gotta give a dollar.”

“Now here’s the thing,” Obama continues, “when 9-11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act — said, ‘This is too serious a problem. We can’t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you gotta put in. Well, here’s ten dollars.’ And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation. We don’t expect you to come up with y’own money, here. Here’s the money to rebuild. We’re not gonna wait for you to scratch it together — because you’re part of the American family.’”

That’s not, Obama says, what is happening in majority-black New Orleans. “What’s happening down in New Orleans? Where’s your dollar? Where’s your Stafford Act money?” Obama shouts, angry now. “Makes no sense! Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!”

It’s a remarkable moment, and not just for its resemblance to Kayne West’s famous claim that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” but also because of its basic dishonesty. By January of 2007, six months before Obama’s Hampton speech, the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina. Compare this to the mere $20 billion that the Bush administration pledged to New York City after Sept. 11.

Even if you are a low information voter, this has got to be sinking in, doesn’t it?

I’ve lived in Saint Paul for most of the past 25 years.

And in that time, the half-life of a GOP campaign sign in my neighborhood is roughly five days.  They – every single one of them – gets stolen or destroyed.

“It’s just kids out pranking” say the local DFLers.  “There’s nothing political about it”.  But my DFLer neighbors’ signs remain blissfully undisturbed.

(And at least one source reports to me that they’ve seen a middle-aged woman in a mini-van stealing Tony Hernandez signs.  Pranking kids?  I think freaking not).

Whomever it is, it means either…:

• The DFL in Saint Paul runs a perennial campaign to silence dissent, or…
• DFL-leaning “Kids” (and “moms”) have no respect for difference of opinion.

Neither of them is a particularly flattering verdict of the Saint Paul DFL.

I got this email earlier this week:

This is a burned Vote Yes sign in the Macalester Groveland neighborhood of St. Paul.

There are several Vote No signs up and down our block. All unscathed.

This needs reporting.

This is not the first time this has happened.

More of that respect for diversity, I guess.

This week, we’ve been looking at the DFL-endorsee Brian Barnes and his campaign for the MN Third Congressional District seat held by Erik Paulsen.  Yesterday we noted they bobbled a niggling but, er, Federal regulation on their new batch of lawn signs.

Today?  We’ll get serious.

Earlier this week, the Barnes campaign sent a fundraising email to their mailing list; they just spent a ton of money getting a Minneapolis creative agency to produce a TV ad, and those don’t come cheap.

That’s fine.  Everybody does it.

But here’s where it gets interesting.  The third paragraph in the email says (I’ve added the emphasis):

Every dollar at this point goes toward getting our message to persuadable voters. We have been steadily closing the gap on Congressman Paulsen. We started with voters supporting Barnes 24% and Paulsen 39% in May, and we’ve gained 20 points to his 8! In fact, he is beginning to lose voters since we’ve been successfully showing voters he only talks like Jim Ramstad, but he votes more extreme than Michele Bachmann.

Let’s back that up for a moment; amid the awkward phrasing (are they claiming the race is 47-44 or not?), there are some questions.

What polling?

According to sources familiar with the history of the race, Barnes’ former campaign manager, Tom Beckfield, last month said that there had been no polling in this race.  That’s as of August.  And we know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Dems’ national campaign organization and warchest, had done no polling in the 3rd CD – or at least they’d not released any into the public domain.  So if Barnes has national polls, they’re illegal.

Beyond that?  The campaign included no polling expenditures in their FEC reports through July.

But the fundraising email claims to have tracked results from May through the present.  Via what polling?

The source notes that the Barnes campaign is doing intermal push-polling.  Are these the results that the email is trumpeting?

Since the campaign reports no polling expenses, and the DCCC hasn’t done it, what else could it be?

If you see Brian Barnes, ask him if you could.

(There are times I wonder – what if we had a group – perhaps a whole industry, with printing presses and transmitters and stuff, whose job it could be to check this sort of crap out?)

Tomorrow:  If you live in Waconia or Minnetonka, one of Barnes’ staffers has something to say to you.

David Harsanyi at Human Events has ht a retrospective on the “highlights” of the Obama Personality Cult. 

Of course, it’s his socialist and anti-market philosophy that I really dislike about the guy.  But the personality cult he and his handlers built around himself always seemed vaguely…

…North Korean?

That’s one word for it.

I’ll say this – even if I were still a liberal, this would have made me extremely uncomfortable.  And yes, that is a bipartisan thing;  a lot of Ron Paul supporters are a little less messianic, but not much less personality-focused.

Read Harsanyi’s whole piece.

He’s a busy, busy man.

It was in observance of “Talk Like A Pirate Day”, yesterday.

Perhaps we should respond with “Talk With An Israeli Prime Minister” day…

UPDATE:  As commenter Jeff Rosenberg (Hey, Jeff!) points out, Media Matters has leapt to the President’s defense, noting that the photo above is three years old.

The MM4A piece is silent on what the President was doing.   Playing golf with Jay-Z?  Meeting with (and bowing to) Somali pirates?   Playing video games with his daughters?  At an Eva Longoria fundraiser?  We don’t know.  All we do know is, it wasn’t “meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu at this crucial moment in both nations’ history”.

The media – in carrying out their role as Obama’s Praetorian Guard – has been doing its damnedest to try to paint Romney’s “47%” remark as a huge gaffe.

But Mitt was right; 47% of the people don’t pay taxes.  And in some cases – the poor – there may be a reason for this.

The lefty and media (ptr) came out with all sorts of rationalizations and tu quoques –

• “Republican states pay less than average!” was one I saw on TV yesterday (Channel 9 was duly parroting the Media Matters chanting points), which is hilarious, given that the states they point out invariably have lower per-capita incomes and costs of living than the Blue states; you’ve got liberals bitching about progressive taxation!
• “Many rich people pay no taxes!” – Leaving aside the obvious answer – it’s a red herring, the middle class and wealthy as a whole do pay the vast majority of this nation’s tax burdeen – well, gosh, d’ya suppose we should simplify the tax system to remove some of the byzantine loopholes?   A flat tax would sure fix that…
• “Part of that is the Bush Tax cuts!” – This is a dumb evasion.  The Bush tax cuts were across-the-board.  But it’s hordes of “targeted tax cuts” that have so imbalanced the system – because the tax system has long been an instrument of redistribution.

But whatever the qualifications and rationalizations, whatever the reasons for some and the outrages of others, the fact remains that this society can not survive with, soon, less than half of its people paying in.

Romney should not back off of this statement.  His campaign has been far too timid lately; while for about a week or two after the Ryan selection he was cooking with gas, rife with promise that this nation could finally have The Big Conversation it’s needed for at least a generation (the one that Tip O’Neill blocked thirty years ago), he’s been running a campaign only a weasel consultant could love since then.

We need to reform entitlements.  We need an America where everyone has some skin in the game.  Above all, we need a nation that doesn’t believe government is something we “belong to”, but rather something we hire to do some distasteful jobs.

At the Dem convention, John Kerry (did you know he served in Vietnam?) gave tribute to US veterans – in front of a photo of a flotilla of Soviet-era Russian ships.

As the Daily Caller notes, the airplanes the Dems used in their tribute to American vets? Turkish F-5s flown by Turkey’s equivalent of the Thunderbirds.

But this blog has learned that it could have been much worse.  Below the fold.

(more…)

It’s been one gaffe after another for The One this past week.

But you’d never know it from the media.

…is counting on all those German electoral votes he worked so hard to get four years ago, he might face an uphill fight…

Obama apparently thought he’d get three warning letters.