I’ve seen few better explanations of the Dems’ “Narratives For The Ill-Informed” strategy:
I used to joke “If a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an extremist?”
It’s not really much of a joke anymore.
Julian Assange waxes poetic about his “ordeal” in London, ending with an impassioned demand for…well, everyone to leave him and his website alone:
He also urged the American government and US President Barack Obama to “do the right thing” and for officials to “renounce its witch hunt against Wikileaks”. He also urged them to drop their “war on whistleblowers”.
He added: “The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation. The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff, or our supporters.
“The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful.
“There must be no foolish talk about prosecuting any media organisations. The US administration’s war on whistleblowers must end.
“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”
I actually don’t have much of an opinion about the leaks that got Assange into this situation – the diplomatic traffic that was allegedly leaked to Wikileaks by Private Bradley Manning.
But I don’t give a whole lot of credit to Wikileaks as journalism. Their first real introduction to Minnesotans was their publishing, in 2008, names and credit card information gotten from a hacking attack on Norm Coleman’s campaign site.
While the “journalistic” community painted Assange’s toenails about the attack, this was not “journalism”; it was political bullying and browbeating.
And I hope Assange does, in fact, wind up in jail, if only over that episode.
Well, that didn’t take long. It’s Eric Boehlert, from Media Matters – George Soros’ attack-PR shop – on Twitter. Emphasis added to keep me from puking:
@EricBoehlert #kindalame former Navy SEALs don’t have guts to admit they’re running a GOP, anti-Obama campaign; http://nyti.ms/N2nYYj
I think the “anti-Obama” bit is pretty obvious. As is the alternative to Obama.
As to the guts?
No huge surprises in the primaries yesterday – at least not at the polls.
But the big news in my book? The Strib’s poison-pen endorsements went 1 out of 3, with an asterisk on that “1”.
In the northeast subs, Karin Housley beat Eric Langness despite getting a snide, snotty, insincere little pseudo-endorsement from the Strib that served mostly as a free ad for the DFL candidate, wannabe professional politician Julie Bunn. Hopefully Housley will go on to earn much tut-tutting from the Strib’s editorial board (or, let’s be honest, Lori Sturdevant, who seems to set the board’s political barometer).
But it was in the western subs that the Strib truly came a’cropper.
In HD33B, Tea Party activists (“community organizer”? Hmmm) Cindy Pugh pummeled career Representative Steve Smith by more than 2:1 – notwithstanding that the Strib gave Smith a glowing endorsement. Glowing – but hardly surprising; while Smith had a few conservative issues (he was a solid Second Amendment supporter and had a Taxpayers League scorecard not too out of line with many GOP leaders), the DFL could count on him to vex the conservative caucus on some key issues. That, of course, is why the Strib endorsed him.
That race was never really in doubt; Pugh had a huge lead from time the first returns came in.
The nail-biter came in Senate District 33. Connie Doepke – the former Representative who decided to buck the SD33 Republicans’ endorsement of Dave Osmek – jumped out to an early lead, which became the only real cliff-hanger of the evening. With every wave of precincts that came in, Osmek whittled away at Doepke’s lead, until close to 11PM, when with three precincts to go Osmek took the lead. The final margin was 107 votes in favor of Osmek.
As Buckley once said, you should vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. Both Pugh and Osmek are running in a district that is solidly Republican – something like plus 22, if I recall correctly. I suspect they’ll both win comfortably.
Housley faces a tougher race; the northeast subs of Saint Paul are just about neutral, and the media will be out to try to re-install Bunn. Housley will need some help.
It’s not the size of the gaffe that counts, it’s the motion of the back-pedaling
Joe Biden isn’t known for subtext – just text.
While the national media has treated Biden as something between a 21st Century Spiro Agnew and that crazy uncle who overstays his welcome during the holidays, Republicans have (dare I say?) celebrated Joe’s Bidenisms as occasional forays into the truth. If Barack Obama represents the modern Democratic Party’s super ego, Biden represents it’s id – the innate instinctive impulses and primary processes.
All of which makes Joe’s latest bombast not terribly surprising:
Campaigning in southern Virginia on Tuesday, Vice President Biden told an audience that Mitt Romney’s approach to regulating the financial industry will “put y’all back in chains,” a remark that triggered a flurry of Republican criticism, including a sharp rebuke from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
“Look at their budget and what they’re proposing,” Biden said. “Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days, he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They are going to put y’all back in chains.”
Biden made the comments at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville, where he kicked off a two-day campaign tour of southern and southwestern Virginia. He spoke before what appeared to be a racially varied audience of 900 people, and one prominent Republican suggested that his language could be interpreted as racially divisive.
The fallout fell on equally predictable lines. The Romney camp tweeted that the comments were “outrageous” and reporters spent the afternoon filing bylines with stories repeating the VP’s gaffe. If anything didn’t go according to script, it was the Democrat response – refusing to acknowledge any error in judgement and actually doubling down on the comment. Biden’s attempt at “clarifying” his words still repeated the claim that Romney/Ryan would “shackle” the middle class.
Are Biden’s comments “outrageous”? No, not by comparison to the media’s attempt to quasi-defend them by providing the sort of context that often seems to be missing from similar Republican errors. Soledad O’Brien led off Anderson Cooper’s 360 by looping numerous Republican officials using the term “unshackle” (ergo, Biden was justified). Politico decried the “death of the high-minded campaign” and despite having only one negative Romney example (in which he hit Biden for a 2007 comment about coal killing more Americans than terrorists), the website placed cover page photos of both contenders, suggesting that both camps have equally contributed to the debasing of the campaign.
Such defenders of context were no where to be found just days ago when Mitt Romney’s factual ad hitting Obama’s new welfare policies had politicos and pundits seeing racial politics. Dan Milbank even unleashed a column that Romney’s ad “incites bigotry.” Perhaps a conservative commentator will rush to pen a piece that explains how Biden’s comments were an attempt at “dog whistle” politics to African-American voters that not only will get published in a major newspaper but go by unchallenged by the Praetorian Guard of the Old Media. But I wouldn’t suggest anyone hold their breath.
The issue shouldn’t be whether or not Joe Biden said something racial but that its become an acceptable part of the political discourse to accuse your opponents of putting voters in a form of bondage that doesn’t involve a safe word. Such a mangled attempt to turn a phrase may pass for the talking heads at MSNBC or on whatever ham radio frequency that Air America continues broadcasting from, but without negative consequences, politicians will continue to feel free to double down on the harshest language possible.
On the one hand, Fareed Zakaria – the perpetually hapless hack for the left – has been suspended for plagiarism.
On the other hand? At least when he plagiarizes, he has a chance of sounding smart.
On his dim little CNN show a few weeks back, in the immediate aftermath of the Aurora shooting, Zakaria noted perfunctorily that (and i’m paraphrasing closely here) “while some people note that there might be a link between psychology and gun violence, you are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts; it’s all about the availability of guns”.
In so doing, he ignored, well, the facts:
So when Zakaria – one of the most noxious anti-Second Amendment orcs there is – says “you’re not entitled to your own facts”, what he really means is “ignore the facts that gut the chanting point I’m repeating”.
Good riddance.
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in re Al Sharpton’s Strib op-ed:
Civil Rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton writes in the Star Tribune to oppose Voter ID because 1 in 4 Blacks, 1 in 5 elderly and 1 in 6 Hispanics don’t have the proper credentials and apparently can’t get them.
Oddly, others can.
The Ramsey County Elections office is next door to the Property Records room where deeds are stored and I spend a fair amount of time working with real estate. I have seen an endless parade of Asian voters the past two weeks. They’re showing up by the van-load. They have guides who speak English directing them to the right office. Older folks are assisted by younger ones. They’re showing up to register and to vote absentee for the primary.
I’ve also seen a few Black immigrants, Somalis or Ethiopians from the way they dress and talk. No “American” Blacks, though. None of the people whose pants are stitched to their underwear, whose caps are on sideways, who have time in the afternoon to prowl the streets looking for 14-year-old girls in Frogtown and who learned to talk from rap videos. Those people can’t seem to make it to the Voter Registration Office.
Plainly, this is not a cultural thing. It’s not a matter of White and Asian people being conscientious and law-abiding while recent illegal immigrant Hispanics (and Blacks whose families have lived in this country for generations) are neither conscientious nor law-abiding.
Plainly, it’s just racissss. And that’s a crying shame.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
And I’ll add that it’s not even a matter of Afro-Americans and Latinos not being conscientious or law-abiding so much as it is the DFL, Sharpton, and their camp-followers in the Media wanting you to believe it; to believe that Black, Latino, elderly and young voters are just too stupid to handle bringing an ID to the polls.
We know better. Right?
Polling shows that a fairly decisive majority of Minnesotans agree, and support Voter ID. The left’s response – other than chanting “Disenfranchisement” and “Racism” – is to claim that the process of getting a free ID is juuuust toooo complicated for voters. And since their strategy does seem to involve trying to win over “low-information” voters – people they can gull into thinking Mitt Romney is a felon who hasn’t filed taxes, that Bain killed a woman, that they’re out of work in 2012 because of what George W. Bush did (or really didn’t) do in 2007), that would be a concern.
As Joe points out, many groups – groups that actually take democracy seriously – are making the logical connection; they’re getting their people registered. Expect not a few legitimate groups across the political spectrum to extend their ‘Get out the Vote” efforts to getting voters registered as well.
Clearly, for the DFL, it’s easier to manufacture bogus votes than to get their low-information rank-and-file to vote legitimately.
Is the WaPo’s “Politifact” biased toward the left?
As we’ve discussed earlier, the Star Tribune has two goals in its “Endorsement” process:
Rep. Steve Smith of the southwest ‘burbs is at best a “moderate” Republican, conservative only only law-and-order issues, and would give “RINOs” a bad name on most other topics – or, as the Strib puts it, “thoughtful and pragmatic”.
And that’s the least of his problems. Talk with any mainstream conservative Republican in the legislature about Smith and you get a lot of head-shaking, eye-rolling and “Oof-da”-ing. From the partisan to the political to the personal, Representative Smith is reportedly a poster child for the downside of life as a professional politician.
But he’s not even a speed bump for the DFL on most issues. and that means “Strib Heart Smith“:
Or as the Strib – and I have it on fair authority that Lori Sturdevant wrote this one too – puts it:
To function well, the perennially divided Legislature needs mavericks — independent-minded centrists willing to occupy the battle-scarred ground between the two parties and to stretch in both directions to strike deals.
But only so long as they stretch to the left.
Seriously – you’ll look long and in vain for similar praise for DFLers who inch to the right. Partly because the DFL excises them from the party like they’re tumors (See Norm Coleman, Randy Kelly, Jerry Blakey, John Harrington). Partly because to the Strib Editorial Board, sticking to one’s guns goes by two names; “populist pugnacity!” on the left, “partisan extremism” on the right.
Smith, naturally, “stretches” obligingly and solely to the left:
For 22 years, state Rep. Steve Smith, 62, a family law attorney [we’ll come back to that] from Mound, has played that difficult and increasingly lonely role. He gets our nod on that basis over Southwest Metro Tea Party founder Cindy Pugh of Chanhassen, who has party endorsement.
Not just party endorsement – like Dave Osmek, she had overwhelming party endorsement.
Which is yet another reason the Strib is endorsing Smith – to do its bit to undercut the GOP – a goal at which Smith is a reliable ally:
Unlike most Republicans, Smith is allied with organized labor — eight unions had endorsed him as of late last week. He opposes the same-sex-marriage ban that most Republican legislators voted to put before the voters this year. He voted for the stadium bill; Pugh says she would have voted no.
On vote after vote after vote, Smith tossed the caucus, and a Republican mainstream that has moved to the right over his decades of incumbency, under the bus – to the point where the caucus finally had to do something:
Speaker Kurt Zellers broke with customary practice two weeks ago by endorsing Pugh over his caucusmate Smith. After the 2011 session, amid rumors about Smith’s relationship with a female staffer (he is divorced), Zellers stripped Smith of the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee. (The woman in question no longer works for the House.)
Want double standards? The Strib’s got ’em!:
By comparison, Pugh, 55, a former general manager of Dayton’s in St. Paul, is an energetic, personable apostle of free-market conservatism….By her own admission, if District 33B voters send Pugh to the Capitol next January, she’ll have a lot to learn.
Pugh is a successful businesswoman, and a key organizer of a political movement, the Southwest Metro Tea Party, that has been turning the formerly “purple” Third CD redder and redder by the year for for the past three years. She is a dynamo. Like many of the recent conservative “Tea Party” class of current legislators, she’s got a lifetime of real accomplishments outside of politics. While the Strib may well prefer someone who’s spent an adult lifetime growing roots in the Capitol, one suspects the voters are getting smarter.
And I did mention double standards, right? You’ll scour the Strib in vain for any patronizing references to the inexperience of, say, Carly Melin, a 25 year old DFL drone-ette whom the DFL trucked straight from Hamline Law School in Saint Paul to the Iron Range just in time to meet the residency requirements, for an insta-endorsement and perfunctory election to the House, notwithstanding the fact that she had no useful experience at anything, much less politics.
If they send Smith, he’ll have a different set of challenges.
He’ll have the kind of challenges that, were he a conservative like Tom Hackbarth, would have gotten obsessive coverage in the Strib.
We hope voters give him a chance to overcome them. Legislative mavericks are in grievously short supply.
No, we’ve got mavericks; a majority of them in both chambers. They broke from the Strib’s orthodoxy.
As to Smith? He’s a RINO. That is forgiveable, personally if not politically. He’s a throwback to an earlier, more useless era in the Minnesota GOP; the Carlson/Durenberger years, when the “Indendent Republican” party went along to get along. May those days be soon forgotten.
What is unforgiveable is that Smith has been one of the leading forces against custody reform in Minnesota. It’s a system that intentionally exacerbates divorces, by enshrining a “winner takes all” custody and support system that inflames divorces (and racks up billable hours for Smith’s fellow “Family Court” lawyers) and, make no mistake, operates in the precise worst interest of children in the vast majority of cases. Minnesota’s current child custody system is a barbaric monstrosity that should be rooted out and killed.
For his decades of supporting this inexcusable barbarism, there is no circle in hell hot or dark enough for Smith (rhetorically and morally speaking, at any rate). He deserves to be pelted with rocks and garbage, mocked and exiled from polite civilization.
But I, and nearly 90% of his district’s Republicans, would be happy to settle for simply retiring from politics, starting Wednesday morning.
“It was a bitchy endorsement”.
That’s what a conservative female friend of mine described the Strib’s “endorsement” of Karin Housley (over Eric Langness) in the SD39 race.
It was an apt description:
Housley, 48, outclasses Langness, 34, and gets our nod, but it’s not an enthusiastic one. The Realtor and radio talk-show host, married to 21-year NHL star and Stillwater hockey coach Phil Housley, is making her second bid for the state Senate. She lost narrowly in 2010 to DFL Sen. Katie Sieben in pre-redistricting District 57.
Years of interest in legislative service should have led Housley to bone up on state issues. Her confession that she hasn’t analyzed the state budget, and her claim that “there’s waste across the board,” might be acceptable from a first-time candidate. They’re troubling the second time around.
Although not “troubling” enough for the Strib to similarly snif about many, many DFLers they endorse notwithstanding much genuine “ignorance” (or, as real people call it, “focusing on priorities”).
Still, we see more potential in Housley than in Langness, director of career services for Anthem College. He’s a former Forest Lake School Board member whose efforts to cut school spending led to his defeat for reelection in 2009.
The message: “at least we don’t know that Housley is one of those big bad conservatives”.
We did say “bitchy”, right?
District 39 isn’t in the habit of sending DFLers to the Legislature. But voters who share our concerns about the GOP contenders should know that former state Rep. Julie Bunn — a Stanford University Ph.D. economist and former Macalester College professor — is the DFL candidate on the November ballot. She warrants their consideration.
“We interrupt this primary endorsement to provide a free, fawning, foot-sniffing ad for a DFLer wannabe-career-politician who’s not running in the primary”.
I’m always amazed that Strib writers and editors are so nonplussed that anyone could accuse them of systematic bias.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has adopted your oldie-but-goodie “a source I can’t name, but is an absolutely dispositive expert on the subject, but no, I won’t tell you who it is so you can judge her veracity for yourself” standard of evidence!
You’re all…validated! Sorta!
That is all!
It’s been a couple of years since this blog has run a “bleg” – asking for donations to defray some of the (minimal) cost of running the blog, and grab a few bucks for the (not minimal) time spent writing what you read here.
Fact is, I don’t need it that much. Business is, oddly, pretty good. Maybe next year.
But I would like you to take a moment to think about popping a few bucks in Gary Gross’ tip jar.
Gary writes Let Freedom Ring, and does some of the top-notchiest reporting there is, anywhere. He does for Central Minnesota what I wish blogging and talk radio paid well enough for me to do in the Metro; he is the backbone of Central Minnesota’s regional conservative alternative media.
Unlike most of the regular leftybloggers, he does a ton of work; one of very few bloggers in the state more prolific than I am. Unlike virtually all of the more prolific leftybloggers, he doesn’t have George Soros or Alida Messinger paying his bills.
Now, Gary’s in a rough financial situation. The details aren’t that important, and I don’t even know many of them to be honest, but we’re not talking malfeasance, here; Gary is no MIchael Lohan or Charlie Sheen.
But he’s having to stretch things pretty far to keep his blog in production.
So if you can possibly spare a few bucks, this’ll be my bleg for the year; drop ’em by Gary’s Paypal donation page.
…that the Light Worker’s campaign is aimed at the one group he’s got a shot with: the not very well informed:
This is an ad, as Ed points out, that even left-leaning Politifact has rated “pants on fire”.
As this blog has been noting for quite some time now, the Democrat strategy seems to be to just toss crap in front of the electorate and hope just enough of it sticks to the dim, uninformed, adolescent, solipsistic and over-emotional to eke out a win.
It worked for Mark Dayton.
I’m chagrinned to admit it to all you liberals, but the break you spent the last three years waiting for has finally arrived; a Tea Partier has been pled guilty to a significant act of domestic terrorism:
One of five men charged with plotting to bomb an Ohio highway bridge pleaded guilty Wednesday and agreed to testify against his co-defendants.
Anthony Hayne, 35, of Cleveland, who has a criminal record for theft and breaking and entering, pleaded to all three counts against him in U.S. District Court. His attorney, Michael O’Shea, said Hayne hopes to get leniency in return for his testimony.
Under the terms of the surprise plea deal, Hayne will have the chance to avoid a life prison term. With the plea and offer of testimony for the prosecution, he could face 15 years to nearly 20 years in prison.
“I don’t think any of these guys intended harm to human beings,” O’Shea said. “I think they just thought this was a way of making some sort of political statement. But I’m relatively confident none of these people had any desires to actually hurt anybody.”…The men also discussed other potential targets, including a law enforcement center, oil wells, a cargo ship or the opening of a new downtown casino, according to a prosecution affidavit.
Er, wait – did I say Tea Party?
I meant…:
The five had been associated with Occupy Cleveland, but organizers of the movement have tried to distance the group from the men. They say the five didn’t represent it or its nonviolent philosophy.
Out of the rat-infested rape camps, a wave of violence and conspiracy.
From the Tea Party? Bupkes. We’re all still waiting on any evidence of that “wave ot Tea Party Violence”.
And waiting.
And waiting.
The British media – who generally make “TMZ” and “Entertainment Tonight” look pretty sober and respectable in comparison – are selling a lot of papers by bagging on Mitt Romney’s “gaffe” over London’s preparations for the Olympics…
…that wasn’t a gaffe at all. They’re the most over-budget games in modern Olympic history. The police are overmatched by the security (to say nothing of traffic) nightmare, and are bringing in the British Army to help – not just in specialist roles (as in Romney’s Salt Lake City Winter games), but for the daily blocking and tackling.
Romney’s right.
But the real question in all of this is: are you, the American taxpayer, worker and voter, better off now than you were in 2008?
That was the Beijing Olympics, if I recall correctly?
If you’re not on Twitter, this article likely won’t make a lot of sense. Don’t worry about it.
If you are on Twitter, the main means of making sense of the torrent of commentary is the “Hashtag”. It’s a little code with a “#” sign in front of it; by having Twitter search for hashtags you’re interested in, you can watch conversations and subjects that actually interest you. For example, the Northern Alliance Radio Netwrok’s hashtag is “#narn“. The Star Tribune started a hashtag called “#Stribpol“.for discussing politics.
The Twin Cities’ conservative alternative media – the mass of pro-liberty bloggers, weekend talk show hosts, tweeps and their followers whose networking has made it among the most potent alt-media scenes in the country – needs its own hashtag. Much of the Twin Cities conservative alt-media’s conversation takes place either in fairly smallish hashtags aimed at niche markets – #narn, #LateDebate – or in the big scrums like #stribpol and #tptalmanac, which are overrun with stalkers, creeps, and the liberal bobbleheads and chanting-point bots.
And I think we need a clearer channel, as it were.
And so I propose the #TCinMN hashtag: “Top Conservatives In Minnesota” (or “Twitter Conservatives in Minnesota”, it doesn’t matter). There were a number of good suggestions – #MNCon and #MNLiberty. But MNCon is too prankable, and MNLiberty is a lot of typing.
I’m going to throw it out there and see what happens. If you’re a tweep, though, by all means sound off – here or there.
UPDATE: Another that works, and is shorter, is #MNTC – “Minnesota’s Top Conservatives” or “Minnesota Twitter Conservatives”.
UPDATE 2: And it’s #MNTC!
While the national polls show the presidential race a statistical toss-up, Nate Silver points out that polls conducted in swing state show Obama with an actual lead of sorts – around three points:.
While that isn’t an enormous difference in an absolute sense, it is a consequential one. A one- or two-point lead for Mr. Obama, as in the national polls, would make him barely better than a tossup to win re-election. A three- or four-point lead, as in the state polls, is obviously no guarantee given the troubles in the economy, but it is a more substantive advantage.
Here’s the part that caught my attention; I’ve added emphasis:
The difference isn’t an artifact of RealClearPolitics’s methodology. The FiveThirtyEight method, which applies a more complicated technique for estimating polling averages, sees broadly the same split between state and national polls.
On the one hand – well, doy. Obama’s an incumbent elected in a wave, protected by a media that serves as his Praetorian Guard. Of course he’s going to be polling well.
On the other hand? My real point in this article is the abovementioned “FiveThirtyEigtht Method”.
I addressed this two years ago – when Silver, who is generally acknowledged to be a moderate Democrat, spent most of the 2010 campaign predicting a 6+ point Mark Dayton victory.
How did he arrive at that number?
But let’s take Silver’s methodology at face value – because he’s a respected statistician who works for the NYTimes, right?
The fact remains that, at least here in Minnesota, two of the polls that were given great weight in Silver’s methodology – the Star Tribune “Minnesota” poll and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute poll, are palpably garbage, and should be viewed as DFL propaganda at best, calculated election fraud at worst.
We went through this in some detail after the 2010 election: there’s an entire category on this blog devoted to going over the various crimes and misdemeanors of Twin Cities media pollsters. ,Long story short – since 1988, the Strib “Minnesota” poll has consistently shorted Republican support in polls, especially the polls closest to the elections, especially in close elections. The “Minnesota” poll’s only redeeming point? The Humphrey Institute poll is worse. In both cases, they tended – moreso in closer races – to exaggerate the lead the Democrat candidate for Governor, Senator or President had. For example, in 2010 both polls showed Mark Dayton with crushing, overwhelming, humiliating leads over Tom Emmer on election-eve. It ended up the closest gubernatorial race in Minnesota history. The “Minnesota” poll was so bad, Frank Newport of Gallup actually wrote to comment on its dubious methodology. I suspect that the results are less mathematical background noise or methodological quicks – which would, if truly random, show distortions that would even out between the parties over time. While it’s not provable without a whistle-blower from inside either or both organizations, I suspect the results shake out the way they do, if you are inclined to believe people have integrity, due to selection bias in setting up survey samples (and, if you don’t have much faith, in systematic bias working to achieve a “Bandwagon Effect” among the electorate. Count me among the cynics; an organization with integrity would have noticed these errors long before a guy like me who maxed out at Algebra I in college and fixed the problem. I’m willing to be persuaded, but you’ll have to have a much better argument than most of the polls’ defenders). The point being, this is the quality of the raw material that leads Nate Silver to his conclusions. And that should give Silver, and people who pay attention to him, pause. I don’t know if the other state polls are as dodgy as Minnesota’s local media polling operations. That’d be a great subject for a blogswarm.Good news, Democrats! Your internal propaganda budget is apparently well-spent!
Democrats have a much more optimistic view of the U.S. economy than either Republicans or unaffiliated adults.
Currently, just 36% of Democrats believe the economy is in poor shape, according to new Rasmussen Reports polling. Nearly twice as many Republicans (67%) offer such a pessimistic view. So do 54% of those not affiliated with either major party.
It’s gotta be either the propaganda budget thing, or most of them work in government jobs that are untouchable until the entire economy Greeces out.
The national telephone survey of 3,500 American Adults was conducted by Rasmussen Reports July 14-20, 2012. The margin of sampling error for the survey is +/- 2 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
Confidence in the survey, of course. Not the economy. Or the accuracy of the pollyannas’ views.
So I told someone I spent some time talking with Tom Emmer on Saturday.
“Oh”, said the person I was talking to, “he’s the guy on those billboards with the guy who looks like David Byrne or Ric Ocasek…”
Mitt Romney, after weighing risks (including taxes) and returns, opting to put money in a Swiss bank account: The biggest crisis they can gin up to draw attentio away from the Obama depression for now ever. and a sign of disloyalty and lack of faith in his nation!
Mark Dayton, after weighing the risks (including taxes) and returns, opting to stash money in a “Dynasty” trust in low-tax South Dakota: “Hey, a guy’s got a right to watch out for his nest egg!”
I must confess, I’ve more or less gotten over trying to each leftybloggers how logic works, except in the odd individual case (and I have to admit that’s more a matter of rhetorical endzone-ball-spiking, bordering on intellectual sadomasochism, than actual interest in education).
I say that partly because today’s subject isn’t a blogger (although he certainly packs the intellectual gear to be a Twin Cities leftyblogger), and partly because, well, I’m at that stage of my life when I question a lot of my own motivations, and sometimes find my answers sorely wanting.
Not as wanting as I find my opponents, naturally.
Like most conservatives, I’ve long since given up reading the Star/Tribune for anything other than material to mock.
And as that last that last weekend’s “Counterpoint” – “Liberals are Right, Conservatives are Wrong“, from retired math teacher David Perlman qualifies.
And today’s liberal rhetorical stunt? The incredibly-difficult “Double Circular Question-Beg” from a Rolling Start!
The rolling start? A smarmy dollop of that other crutch of the liberal “thinker”, smug entitlement:
In “Based on recent rulings, it’s the court’s liberal wing that’s rigid” (June 29), D.J. Tice observed that the liberal members of the U.S. Supreme Court constitute a more lockstep group than the conservatives do.
I think he’s right — but Tice presented this as a criticism of the liberals.
I did say “smug entitlement”:
Here’s the arrogant part: Liberalism is correct and conservatism is wrong.
Perlman follows with some puffery that I’m sure he intends to be self-justifying – math and science are objective, doncha know! – before making with the Big Truths:
The law, unlike mathematics or science, attempts to be based on logic, but it is strongly influenced by interpretation. What, for example, is a “reasonable man”? Reasonable men can disagree.
But the “Reasonable Person” in the sense of the legal theory doesn’t actually get into arguments; it’s a standard, not an anthropological model.
But I digress – but to be fair, Perlman keeps digressing, too.
The purpose of the legal minds who sit on the Supreme Court is not so much to apply logic as it is to interpret the Constitution.
And there, I’ll let my lawyer friends have at it.
And now we come to rigid blocs and the miracle that is the Supreme Court. I can well imagine the behind-the-scenes conversations that go on among the nine justices. I envision congeniality and also heated debate, and I have come to believe that the liberals tend to sway the conservatives far more than the other way around.
And Mr. Perlman seems to have “come to believe” this in much the same way that I “came to believe” in Santa Claus when I was six; I really, really wanted to.
I am, of course, stating Mr. Perlman’s conclusion for him. But as we read onward – and we will, damn the luck – Perlman returns the favor with noxious interest.
I’ll add emphasis here and there throughout the rest of the piece:
Justice David Souter comes to mind right away. Even Justice Sandra Day O’Connor moved to the left in the end. I think the reason is that they are all intelligent people, and intelligent people tend toward liberalism.
It’s a conceit that drives many liberals – and virtually all of them, near as I can tell, who get past high school.
Conservatives decry the liberal bias in the universities. It is true that most college professors are liberals, but I don’t think it has anything to do with bias. It is because college professors are intelligent people, and intelligent people tend to be liberal.
College is where smart people are, so liberals at college must be smart!
I have had many conversations with colleagues about why so many people vote against their own best interests, and the only conclusion that is ever reached is that those people are swayed by emotional arguments, not by intelligent thought.
Liberals are at college; smart people are at college; smart people know what’s in their best interests, and liberals are smart people, so voting liberal is in everyone’s best interest (whatever that is!)!
It’s simple!
But it’s in the next bit that Perlman shows his true mastery of the form; he not only sticks the “Double Circular Question-Beg”, he does it with style!
So, in the end, despite Citizens United, and despite Republicans’ putting extreme conservatives on the Supreme Court, the constitution of the court itself (pun intended) has a tendency to move to the left.
College is where smart people are. Liberals are at college, so they must be smart. Judges when to lots of college, so they are by definition smart, ergo liberal!
Why don’t all you morons understand this? It’s as logical as any circle!
This piece is proof that:
Mr. Perlman: hang out at college some more. You may not get any smarter, but you won’t be inflicting what passes for your “logic” on people via the Strib, anyway.
As I’ve noted repeatedly in the past, the best way to for a Republican, or a “Republican” for that matter, to get fawning approval from the media is to become one of those Republicans that bash conservatives and conservatism. See Arne Carlson, Dave Durenberger, Judi Dutcher.
And so with Richard Posner. via Federal Judge Richard Posner: The GOP Has Made Me Less Conservative : It’s All Politics : NPR.
Judge Richard Posner, a conservative on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, has long been one of the nation’s most respected and admired legal thinkers on the right. But in an interview with NPR, he expressed exasperation at the modern Republican Party, and confessed that he has become “less conservative” as a result.
Posner expressed admiration for President Ronald Reagan and the economist Milton Friedman, two pillars of conservatism. But over the past 10 years, Posner said, “there’s been a real deterioration in conservative thinking. And that has to lead people to re-examine and modify their thinking.”
“I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy,” he said.
Which is fine – the guy’s got a right to an opinion.
But NPR is making up facts. Posner isn’t a conservative, never was a conservative, and hasn’t called himself a conservative in years.
What’s the rule when getting “news” from the mainstream media?
“Distrust but verify. Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more”.
I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here.
Years ago, my old friend Moonbeam Birkenstock – who is much farther left than I am to the right – announced, with great noise and fury, that he was through paying the portion of his taxes to the Feds that went to defense.
“I refuse to contribute to the US military, which exists only to murder children and bomb innocent people” bellowed Birkenstock as we talked at a party.
I grinned a smug grin, pulled a pocket-sized copy of the US Tax Code from my pocket, and announced “You are teh LIER!!! Nowhere in the IRS Tax code can you find a single reference to rifles or bombers or bombs or any sort of military hardware at all!”.
Moonbeam pulled a can of mace and gave me a long, wet blast in the face. And as I coughed and hacked and wiped tears from my eyes, I knew I deserved it.
———-
Eric Austin is a liberal blogger from somewhere in central Minnesota. We’ve run into him before – in one case, admitting in an audio passage that he condoned the bullying of the child of a conservative legislator because, in his words (seriously – follow the link and listen to the audio, if you can stomach it – it may be one of the most vile, reprehensible things I’ve ever heard) her mother had voted against a bill making bullying gay kids extra special illegal.
But that was then. This is now. Perhaps Austin’s rhetoric has improved with time and maturity?
Local conservative layabout, Gary Gross, has been churning out quite a few posts since the Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act is, in fact, Constitutional. Any one of those posts could be the subject of another episode of Gross Inaccuracies but who has the time to keep up with a single childless unemployed blogger who lives off the government he loathes.
OK, ixnay on the whole “improvement” and “maturity” thing, I’d say I’m curious how Mr. Austin thinks this sort of ugly, personal name-calling advances his, or any, argument…
…but I’m not curious. It’s easy. The fact is, it’s incredibly easy for Minnesota liberals to grow to what passes for “adulthood” these days – through their feminized public schools, a university system that marginalizes and expunges conservative dissent from the dominant narrative, and a media that accepts liberalism as the baseline for good and, via its leading figure Jon Stewart, “snark” as its main rhetorical cudgel – without having the foggiest idea how to debate a conservative, or even what real civilized debate is.
Which is why most liberals’ “arguments” start with ad hominem and tu quoque (“Look! My opponent said or did something that is inconsistent with something else he says or does! That invalidates his entire argument!”) and proceed through…
…well…
Today’s episode of Gross Inaccuracies concerns the most ludicrous of these most recent posts about how terribly awfully no good it is to now have Romneycare (oops, I mean Obamacare). Gross fawns over an exchange on Fox News between Sarah Palin and the token Democrat on the show about how there really are DEATH PANELS in the Affordable Care Act.
Here is the relevant part of the exchange from Palin:
There’s a faceless bureaucratic panel and the acronym is the IPAB and the I-P-A-B, what that will be is that is a board that will tell you, Bob, whether your level of productivity in society is worthy of receiving the rationed care that will be the result of Obamacare.
Now there is a board called the Independent Payment Advisory Board but its purpose isn’t anywhere close to what Palin suggests. The duty of the board is to find ways to keep Medicare spending from growing out of control. However, one of its provisions specifically states that it may not recommend “rationing” care.
Right. So – like my friend Moonbeam Birkenstock in the example at the top of this post, Palin has completely botched the entire factual basis of the argument…
…well, no. She has assigned a role to one piece of the bureaucracy that will be practiced by another piece of the bureaucracy. It might be a government agency, or as Austin notes from the mandate tax law…
From the Affordable Care Act:
‘‘(ii) The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums under section 1818, 1818A, or 1839, increase Medicare beneficiary cost- sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria. [emphasis mine]
So what this means – if you accept it at face value – is that the law will not deal, in and of itself, with rationing. That can is being kicked down the road.
Which brings us to a key fact of this debate, one that Obama and Obamacare’s supporters either don’t know or don’t want you to know. It’s true that there will likely never be a room somewhere in northern Virginia with a brass plate on the door engraved with the title “Death Panel Conference Room”, and that nobody in whatever bureaucracy takes over Obamacare will have “Death Panelist” on their job description.
But in modern health care insurance parlance, the term you look for is “Case Management” (sometimes “Care Management”). The term was spawned in the eighties, in the HMO industry, to cover the intersection of insurance, medicine and actuarial science. And it’s the part of the health care insurance industry that goes through the utterly rational process of answering the question “if we have one transplantable liver, do we give it to the 43 year old guy with the curable degenerative enzyme disorder whose productive life expectancy will be increased by (on the average) ten years, or do we give it to the 70 year old chain-smoking diabetic alcoholic who has already run past her life expectancy given her current state of health”
To the 43 year old who gets the liver, it’s how the system works. I suspect to the family of the 70 year old, the body that made that decision could be viewed as a “death panel”.
The facts, however, are…:
While Palin continues to use a lie that has been repeatedly debunked by fact checking organizations and was even named the Lie of the Year by one,
Not by “one” – by “Politifact”, which has been pretty well shown (via the “Lie of the Year” canard and some even more egregious episodes) to be less a “fact checking” organization and more a Democrat propaganda mill.
Austin takes issue with Gross’ explanation of the various bureaucratic roles involved, and reaches some conclusion:
Let’s take a couple things here, Gary. First, the Independent Payment Advisory Board doesn’t look at any “individuals” but rather looks at the Medicare system as a whole and it explicitly states in its mission that it shall not recommend “rationing” health care. Second, the phrase “quality adjusted life years” is not used ANYWHERE in the Affordable Care Act.
This, Austin calls a “lie”. At the most, of course, it’s an “error” – “Lying” requires some intent to deceive.
And, like my friend Moonbeam at the top of the story, the only immediate error (or, if you’re a liberal talking about a conservative, “lie”) is in mixing up different layers of administrators.
Sophistic niggling about different layers of the bureaucracy is the kind of thing that sends tingles up law students and bureaucracy-nerds’ legs. But in terms of the actual effect of Obamacare on real people, they’re all distinctions without differences. They are all parts of a system that will, inexorably, lead to increased shortage, hiked costs and diminished availability.
Which will be arbitrated by some body, somewhere.
And you can call it a “Case Management Process”, a “Death Panel”, or a “Happy Time Commission” for all anyone cares. The result in terms that real people, real taxpayers, care about is always, and can only be, the same.
And with those immutable facts in place, I suppose responding to dissent with snark and ad-hominem is better, to some, than just admitting you’re wrong and addressing that whole “why do you promote the bullying of children?” thing.
Who do Minnesota Liberals hate?
Feel free to particpate in this vital sociological research through Monday night at 11:59PM! Just leave your list of the top ten or so in the comment section (or email it to “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”), in order from most to least hated.
Results will start coming out on Tuesday.
Nominees so far are below the jump.
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