Yesterday, the Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” also delivered its mid-cycle tally of support for the Voter ID Amendment.

And coming barely a week after the generally-accurate Survey USA poll showing Voter ID passing by a 2:1 margin, the Strib would have you believe…:

Slightly more than half of likely voters polled — 52 percent — want the changes built around a photo ID requirement, while 44 percent oppose them and 4 percent are undecided.

That is a far cry from the 80 percent support for photo ID in a May 2011 Minnesota Poll, when the issue was debated as a change in state law. Support among Democrats has cratered during a year marked by court battles, all-night legislative debates and charges that the GOP is attempting to suppress Democratic votes.

Republicans and independents continue to strongly back the proposal, which passed the Legislature this year without a single DFL vote.

Wow.  Sounds close!

Sort of; if you accept the validity of the numbers (and unless the DFL is headed for a blowout win, you must never accept the validity of the “Minnesota Poll’s” numbers), and every single undecided voter today voted “no”, the measure would pass in a squeaker.

But are the numbers valid?    And by “valid”, I don’t mean “did they do the math right”, I mean “did they poll a representative sample of Minnesotans?”

To find that out, you have to do something that almost nobody in the Strib’s reading audience does; look at the partisan breakdown of the survey’s respondents.  Which is in a link buried in the middle of a sidebar, between the main article and the cloud of ads and clutter to the right of the page, far-removed from the headline and the lede graf.  Which takes you to a page that notes (with emphasis added):

• The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is: 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other.

That’s right – as with the Marriage Amendment numbers we looked at this morning (it’s the same survey), the Strib wants you to believe…

…well, no.  I’m not sure they “want” anyone to believe anything.  I’m sure they want people to read the headling and the “almost tied!” lede, and not dig too far into the numbers.

It’s part of the Democrat’s “Low-Information Voters” campaign; focus on voters who don’t dig for facts, who accept what the media tells them, who vote based on the last chanting point they heard.

Fearless prediction:  On November 4, the Strib will release a “Minnesota Poll” that shows the Voter ID Amendment slightly behind, using a partisan breakdown with an absurdly high number of DFLers.   It’ll be done as a sort of positive bandwagon effect – to make DFLers feel there’s a point to come out and vote against the Voter ID Amendment (and for Obama, Klobuchar, and the rest of the DFL slate, natch).

And it will be a complete lie.  Voter ID will pass by 20 points, and this cycle of polling will disappear down the media memory hole like all the rest of them.

Question:  Given that its entire purpose seems to be to build DFL bandwagons and discourage conservative voters, when do we start calling the “Minnesota Poll” what it seems to be – a form of vote suppression?

The grandfather – great-grandfather? – of the “Fact-Check” industry, “60 Minutes whitewashes for Obama:

Tonight, CBS aired a 60 Minutes interview with President Obama. But curiously enough, the news magazine show did not air a clip of Obama admitting to interviewer Steve Kroft that some of his campaign ads contain mistakes and that some even “go overboard.”

Anyone remember when “60 Minutes” was the “gold standard of journalism?”

I know – that never really meant anything.

But anyone who doubts that “60 Minutes” is anything but a geriatric propaganda mill for the left has been asleep for half a generation.

Pat Hall is running for Senate in Senate District 57. Here’s his website.

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.

A very wise friend of mine, who has gotten heavily involved in the Ron Paul camp in the past couple of years, asked “So in this election, you have a choice between the guy who’ll take 35% of your income, and the guy who’ll take 39%”.

Er…take the 35%?

And work like hell to get a conservative Senate and keep the House?

I know; many among the Ron Paul supporters – especially the ones who are trying to pretend Gary Johnson is relevant – are claiming there’s no difference between Romney and

Incrementalism is only bad if a) it’s in the wrong direction and b) you can’t at least maintain, if not accelerate, it in the right direction.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writers:

Liberals are having hysterics about Romney’s remark. Conservatives are tying themselves in knots trying to justify it. I wish they’d stop, just stop.

Candidate Romney, seeking donations from wealthy people, played to their prejudices about producers and takers.

Candidate Obama, seeking donations from wealthy people, played to their prejudices about religion and guns.

Both candidates did it and for the same reasons. Look, it’s simple human nature. You must convince donors you are on their side in order to convince them to give you money. It’s a standard campaign fundraising tactic, taught in all the candidate schools and used by every political party.

Utilizing proven fundraising techniques says nothing about the candidate’s true feelings on the issue, and says nothing about the truth of the underlying issue because it’s not an appeal to truth, it’s an appeal to prejudice and we all know it. Candidates don’t say those things because they’re true, they say them because that’s what shakes the money loose, which is all that matters in a campaign fundraiser.

But it’s not politically correct to admit that you appeal to prejudice to raise money so all politicians deny it and their supporters try to spin it when what voters really should do is accept it and ignore it. Campaign fundraising is a distraction from the real questions: what will you do when you get elected to fix the economy and keep the nation safe?

Drop the fake outrage and talk about things that you, as politicians, actually can do something about: the budget, taxes, war. Can we do that, please?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

But it’s the “fake outrage” that gives Obama’s media so much fodder!

Headline lost to history:

“Krauts Keep Kasserine Pass. Roosevelt blames Ronald Reagan. Film “Desperate Journey” insulting to Nazis.”

Have you noticed something?

No “Minnesota Poll” yet this cycle.  Ditto the Humprey Institute.

Usually by this point in an election cycle, they’ve run a poll showing the Republican candidate down by some absurd amount that turns out to be many times greater than the eventual margin of victory (or defeat) for the DFLer.

Now, I’ve been writing about the HHH and Strib “Minnesota” polls for quite some time.  I noted that since 1988, the Strib Minnesota Poll has consistently shorted Republicans by a consistently greater margin than Democrats in their pre-election polls – and that the discrepancy is even greater in elections that end up being closest.  I noted that the HHH poll is even worse – but that in polls where the DFLer appears to be in no danger, their polls end up being more accurate.

It is my contention that the Strib and the Humphrey Institute are allied – at least at the executive level – with the DFL, and use their polls to further the DFL’s ends; everyone involved is certainly aware of the “Bandwagon Effect” – the phenomenon by which voters who believe their candidates have no chance of victory will stay home.

So we’ve seen no “Minnesota” poll so far this cycle; Amy Klobuchar – perhaps the greatest beneficiary of media bias in the history of Minnesota politics, as the daughter of a former Strib columnist – seems to be in no great danger, so the polls say, from Kurt Bills (not to say I won’t do everything I can, personally, to fix that).  I’ll bet dimes to dollars the Strib polls wind up pretty darn close to the election totals, in fact!

———-

But the “Bandwagon” effect is going nationwide; Minnesota in 2008 and 2010 showed that it can keep juuuuuuuuust enough people home, if it’s relentless enough, to tip a close election.

And so you see the mainstream media already declaring the election over, based entirely on polling that is entirely based on the Democrats getting turnout they didn’t even get in 2008.

It is, in fact, the flip side of the “Low Information Voter” strategy they’ve run on their own side – convincing the ill-informed, the querulous and the not-bright that there’s a “war on women” and Obama “stands with the 99%” and “the economy was Bush’s fault but it’s almost back, any day now”; trying to convince people, especially independents, who might be sick to death of Obama and possibly thinking of voting GOP that it’s all hopeless and they should stay home.

Think about it.  Why else would they run polls that are transparently false?  That rely on assumptions that probably didn’t even occur during the post-Watergate election in 1976, much less 2008, much less today?

Because only the high-information voters either dig into the partisan breakdowns (or read the bloggers who do), and the record in Minnesota shows there are just enough incurious, too-busy, ill-informed, and just plain un-bright people to sway the matter if it’s close enough.

The media at all levels – bald-faced cheerleaders like the LATimes and the Strib and the supposedly-ethical ones like NPR alike – are going to be beating the “it’s over” drum constantly ’til the election.

The well-informed people know it’s baked wind.

But it’s not aimed at them.

The “reporting” by “Mother Jones” on Mitt Romney’s “47%” remark is looking, more and more, to be an invocation of the McKay Corolllary (“Any time the liberal media (to say nothing of leftyblogs) “reports” on putative conservative misdeeds, they should be distrusted but verified.  And then, to an almost-mathemetical standard of invariably, distrusted some more.”) to Berg’s Seventh Law (“When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”)

When originally presented by David Corn of Mother Jones, there was no disclosure that part of Mitt Romney’s controversial answer about 47% of voters was missing from the tape.

Since only an edited version originally was presented, there was no way to know if something was missing. After all, it was edited, so of course something was missing by definition.

Romney has admitted that the answer on the video, which he didn’t remember except for the video, was “inelegant.” That’s why Romney asked for the full audio/video to be released.

Corn reacted vigorously to Romney’s suggestion that he only provided “snippets,” and then Corn released what purported to be the complete audio/video in two parts. The “complete” version was consistent with the original edited audio/video. Again, there was no disclosure by Corn that there might be something missing. (Corn added an “update” after my original story ran.”

To the contrary, Corn went out of his way to assert that there was no “filtering” and that the full audio/video had been released. As Corn explained to Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast (emphasis mine):

Is the liberal media making too much of the Romney video? “It feeds into a narrative he’s been fighting all along, that he’s a 1 percenter, not one of us, doesn’t really understand it,” Corn says. And since these are the candidate’s own words, “there’s no filter here whatsoever, there’s no out-of-context argument to be made.”

But there was a filter. As reported in my prior post, Corn has admitted that 1-2 minutes of audio/video are missing. That missing audio/video includes part of Romney’s controversial answer.

Maybe even Berg’s Seventh Law and its McKay Corollary, hitherto nearly airtight, is obsolete and needs strenghening?  Maybe upgrade to the “Sixty-First-Minute Law of Media Bias“; any time the mainstream (to say nothing of overtly liberal) media presents supposedly damaging information about conservatives, they should presumed guilty of dishonest editing or outright manufacturing of evidence until proven innocent”.

The Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance has released its candidate grades.

When reading this, remember – “F*”, with the asterisk, means “didn’t return the questionnaire”.  While most Republicans (and a huge proportion of DFLers outside the metro) scored well, plenty of Republicans in tough DFL districts who would be solid on the Second Amendment very likely let the questionnaire slide; you gotta pick your battles.  Don’t be put off by all the F* grades, anyway.

But most importantly, remember – the Second Amendment is a guarantee of a human and civil right.  I’d vote for an anti-gun candidate no more than I would a pro-censorship one.

Either should you.

You see it in Presidential statements, in Bill Clinton’s pro-Obama ad, and all over the place:

“Deregulation and tax cuts are what got us into this mess in the first place”.

It’s a Big Lie, and they’re repeating it over and over and over, in hopes that they can lop off not only the low-information voters, but maybe a few “moderates” and “Independents” who don’t pay much attention beyond the sound bites.

The melt-down in the financial industry was caused by the socialization of risk and privatization of reward – by the government.

The melt-down had nothing to do with tax cuts.  Democrats say that the deficit was exacerbated by the Bush tax cuts – which is true, if you believe that spending is inviolate and must be paid for rather than cut.

“But non-discretionary spending is, well, non-discretionary”.  Only if you don’t have the guts to change the laws.

Long story short:  the Democrats are lying to you, in hopes that enough of you are uninformed or incurious enough to buy their BS.

There’s really no more artful way to put it.  And I’m getting tired of trying to be artful about it.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

In 2008, Candidate Obama’s pick for Energy Czar, Steven Chu, said: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

On June 30, 2008, gas prices were $4.00 and Candidate Obama said: “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.”

On January 20, 2009, when President-Elect Obama took office, the price of gas was down to $1.84 a gallon. Going backwards, for him.

Today, in St. Paul, gas is back up to:

So have we achieved Secretary Chu and Candidate Obama’s goal?

Gas Prices in Europe are in the $9.00 per gallon range.

No, we have not achieved the President’s goals. We’re only half-way there.

At the convention, President Obama asked for more time to accomplish his goals.

It’s going to be a long four years.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Dying to see what he does with natural gas…

Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein is getting shut out of media coverage.

Wonder why that is?

Mitt Romney didn’t actually say “I Can Relate To Black People, My Ancestors Once Owned Slaves”, didn’t get his slogan from the KKK, and isn’t promising to abolish MLK day.

Hard to tell exactly who these meme’s be aimed at: the lower-information end of the Afro-American voter spectrum, or the more-bigoted college-educated white liberals.

It’s September 10.  Not November.

But the media – basking in the afterglow of an Obama bounce they bent over backwards to manufacture – doesn’t want you, conservative reader, to think that.

It’s “Operation Demoralize” [1], the coastal mainstream media’s effort as part of its duty as the Democrat party’s Praetorian Guard, to try to demonize and demoralize Conservatives and Republicans from hitting the streets, opening their wallets, and above all voting in November.

The Democrats are well aware of the research showing the effects of “The Bandwagon Effect“; put briefly, “if you tell people long and loudly enough that their candidates have no chance, they’ll start to believe it.  Like an abusive spouse telling a partner “you’re ugly and nobody but me will ever love you, so don’t bother trying”, it’s a way to browbeat people out of voting.

And you can expect a lot of it.

Prediction:  Expect a Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” any day showing Obama, A-Klo and the DFL legislative caucuses with improbably large leads.  It’s their MO, never moreso than with the tight races.  And the Bandwagon Effect, I maintain  with little fear of factual contradiction, is why.

[1] No, it’s probably not a real name, and it’s possible there is no actual collusion among mainstream media outlets.  Anything’s possible.

The employment numbers are out today.

Obama’s supporters are saying “Yaaaay, 8.1%” out one side of their mouth…

…and “thank Gaia these numbers didn’t come out before The Light Worker’s speech yesterday” out the other.

While unemployment is down 0.2% to 8.1%, that would seem to be entirely due to the workforce participation rate also dropping 0.2%, to an all-time low of 63.5%.

Let’s put this in context:  this means that 58.36% of the workforce is actually working.   Not only is this 2.22% lower than when Obama took office in 2009 – it’s worse than when the economy had an ostensible 10% unemployment rate in October of 2009 (when the participation rate was 65%).

Most telling, perhaps?  Since mid-2010, we had not been above 58.5% of the workforce employed, except for a few months earlier this year, when the employment rate bounced between 58.5 and 58.6.  It’s been steadily down since June, as the participation rate has resumed its slide.

The Dems are trying to put lipstick on the pig, of course; Extreme-DFL Representative Jim Davnie of Minneapolis tweeted this morning:

Jobs 8/12: Up 96K, Jobs 8/08: Down 84K. Net 180K jobs to the good. Yes better off than 4 yrs ago. Imagine if #GOP worked to help

In August of 2008, the labor force participation rate was 66.1%; today, it’s 63.5%.  That’s 2.6% lower.  The unemployment rate was 6.1% (and getting worse), two points lower than today.  The actual employment rates?  62.07% then, 58.35% today.  Go ahead, Rep. Davnie; make my day, and keep using these stats in public.

If the participation rate drops low enough, we’ll technically have full employment, I guess.

Upside, sorta? I actually heard some of the morning news people mentioning the full context of the unemployment number drop – it’s a function of the number of people leaving the work force – this morning.  Maybe even they can’t ignore it anymore?

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I feel sorry for President Obama. He’s running for re-election but I don’t think he truly wants it. The job’s no fun anymore.

Look, here’s the bottom line: Barry was an affirmative action kid his entire life and Thomas Sowell is correct that affirmative action is harmful to minorities because it throws them into the deep end when they’re not prepared for it. A student who would have succeeded at a second-rank school will struggle against those who made it into a top-rank school on merit. The results show in low minority graduation rates, grades and class rank. Anyone who works with an affirmative action hire knows “minimally qualified” is not the same as “well qualified.”

Nobody knows President Obama’s grades, test scores or class rank at Columbia University or Harvard Law School. He was elected President of the Law Review by popular vote but never wrote a law review article. He worked for an undistinguished law firm and tried no cases. He was an adjunct teacher at the University of Chicago Law School, which there is no performance review. Chicago Democrat Machine trickery got him into the Illinois state senate – where he did nothing of note – and the United States Senate where he voted “present.” Obama stole the nomination from Hillary because in the Democrat hierarchy of victim worthiness, Black trumps Woman. Voters picked the Black guy to assuage their guilt, not for his competence.

Nobody ever expected anything of him, they were happy to have him fill a quota and do nothing embarrassing. Joe Biden nailed it: an articulate, clean, non-threatening Black man who looks good in a suit.

“President Of The United States” sounds like a cool gig but it’s no fun. People criticize every move and that’s a tough adjustment for a pampered kid. Notice how quickly Presidents age in office and ponder the reason for it. Nothing in Barack Obama’s life prepared him for that relentless pressure.

Yes, the Greek columns, stadia of fainting women and a Nobel Prize were cool. But three years on, Rahm is gone and free golf doesn’t outweigh the irritation of everyone demanding decisions then bitching about them. Even worse is the sinking realization that he’s in over his head, the economy sucks, the world is going to pot, he doesn’t actually know what to do and he can’t fake his way out of it. That’s got to be an awful feeling.

President Obama is going through the motions to get re-elected but his heart isn’t in it. The job’s no fun anymore.

I’m at a loss to think of a President who was less prepared for the office.

The sudden change of venue for The One’s acceptance speech tonight – from the 70,000-seat Bank of America stadium to 20-odd-thousand seat Time-Warner Cable Arena – due to a 20% chance of rain, maybe, has led to one major problem for the Dems.  Because while the arena is a fine facility (and, unlike BOA, won’t be over 2/3 empty), with…:

…[s]tate delegate sections already in place. TV sky booths for the anchors. Big impressive stage. Flashy video backdrop.

But balloons? Thousands of red, white and blue balloons up in the ceiling, ready to come cascading down for the finish that America expects?

Nope. Sigh.

The Republicans had balloons aplenty, last week in Tampa, Fla.

Too late for the Democrats. But their spirits are still high. Stay tuned. Organizers are scrambling to come up with another festive way to punctuate the end of the convention.

It’s a pity, really – all that hot air could have been recycled.

But we’re all about the help, here.  So I’m going to throw this open for the audience:  since the Dems can’t get balloons together by tonight, what should they drop instead?

,,.there are not “4.5 million new jobs”.  Or rather, while there may have been 4.5 million jobs created in the past four years, it’s been a piker compared to the jobs lost, downgraded, and sent overseas.

We are not better off than we were four years ago.

But keep on chanting, Dems.  There are only so many dumb voters.

Romney/Ryan, running to peel the “Midwest” away from the Democrats?

A rout of the Democrats along the Great Lakes would be huge not only electorally, but also culturally.

It would marginalize the party as a group of arugula-munching, latte-sipping elites who enjoy their ocean views and heedlessly live off the fat of the land (many on the taxpayers’ dime) as lawyers, journalists, college professors, government employees and entitlement recipients — while the rest of the interior labors to pay the bill and suffers the “regulation” of distant, unaccountable bureaucrats.

In other words, the Heartland Campaign is not simply about Electoral College votes. It’s also a way to frame the Democrats as the out-of-touch party of the status quo — i.e., Big Government — at a time when Big Government has so signally failed the average American.

If it works — and if a Romney administration can successfully grapple with the debt bomb, the entitlement crisis and growing government dependency — it could set back the Democrats’ prospects for years to come.

Which brings us back to Eastwood. In such films as “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and “High Plains Drifter,” he’s the embodiment of rugged, rebellious heartland values.

And those cranky, cantankerous, all-American voters are just who Romney & Ryan need to defeat the coastal elites and return America to its heartland roots.

If it works, and R&R crush in the heardland, leaving the left clinging to the coasts and their suppurating outposts in Chicago, the Twin Cities and Madison/Milwaukee?  Expect to see a lot of mid-November prate and gabble from lefties about coastal secession.

What Obama claims:  GM has come “Roaring” back:

Reality:

“GM is going from bad to worse,” reads the headline on Automotive News Editor in Chief Keith Crain’s analysis. That’s certainly true of its stock price.

The government still owns 500 million shares of GM, 26 percent of the total. It needs to sell them for $53 a share to recover its $49.5 billion bailout. But the stock price is around $20 a share, and the Treasury now estimates that the government will lose more than $25 billion if and when it sells.

That’s in addition to the revenue lost when the Obama administration permitted GM to continue to deduct previous losses from current profits, even though such deductions are ordinarily wiped out in bankruptcy proceedings.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that GM is bleeding money because of decisions made by a management eager to please its political masters — and by the terms of the bankruptcy arranged by Obama car czars Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner.

The Democrat plan: to get the stupid and uninformed to the polls in the greatest numbers possible.

A reader emails:

Driving home from [outstate] today. Going east by Monticello I saw a rig with a big picture of Obama on the rear of his trailer. Below it the caption read “Does this Ass make my Truck look Big?”

I just about lost control of the car with convulsive laughter.

I don’t suspect Obama and his gas prices and his “let’s import oil from Brazil!” policy are seeing a lot of traction among truck drivers.

Democrats who a few months back were praising Chief Justice Roberts for his judicial restraint in respecting the intent of Congress are sniveling like stuck cats that the Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) didn’t find a penumbra emanating from Alida Messinger’s visage forcing them to accept their masters’ complaints without question.

The lawsuits by the ACLU, the League of Women Voters and Alida’s Cause Common Cause  claimed on the one hand that the Voter ID law was just too complicated and not clear enough for public-educated Minnesotans to understand, and on the other than Mark Ritchie had the right to make both measures more complicated and less clear.

I may be a cynic, but I’m frankly amazed the judges disagreed.

And now, the pro-gay-marriage and pro-vote-corruption forces need to do something neither has been able to do:

• The anti-Marriage-Amendment forces need to show the voters a case for changing the definition of traditional marriage a little more convincing than “vote no or you are teh bigot”.
• The pro-fraud forces need to convince Minnesotans that while buying cigarettes or getting a job or buying ammunition or starting a bank account requires that we know someone is exactly who they say they are, exercising our supposedly-precious franchise does not.

It’s a good day.

I’ll await the usual logic-free liberal arguments on both.

UPDATE: Mir. D has an excellent piece on the subject at True North and over at the Neighborhood:

I’ll be honest with you — the Photo ID amendment matters a lot more to me. We’ve been round and round on gay marriage and as I’ve written before, this is a battle that ultimately conservatives are going to lose, mostly because young people are being taught that it is a civil rights issue, especially in the public schools. While I don’t agree with that, the view will prevail and most of the constitutional amendments that are passing in the various states will eventually go away, probably within 10-20 years. At that point we’ll begin the unwitting longitudinal study that will eventually reveal, years after most readers of this feature are pushing up daisies, whether or not gay marriage is a good idea or not. My future grandchildren and great-grandchildren (God willing) will get to suss that one out.

The Photo ID amendment is much more important, because it goes the integrity of elections. Voter suppression is the usual charge you hear, but as a practical matter the real issue is multiple votes and illegal votes. The challenge is getting local election officials and prosecutors, who are partisans, to take such things seriously. Minnesota Majority identified 1,099 cases of felons voting in the Franken/Coleman election and over 200 cases have been either adjudicated or are in the process of being investigated. The rest aren’t going to see the light of day because the local prosecutors can’t be bothered. Franken won the election by on 312 votes…Now the amendments go for a vote. I expect Photo ID to win easily. The marriage amendment will be close. Opponents of both amendments will have ample opportunity to state their case. They just can’t depend on Mark Ritchie to keep his thumb on the scale this time.

And there’s the victory for real justice.

And I never believed the SCOM or Minnesota law had it in ’em.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

President Obama plans to criticize Paul Ryan’s education budget plan.

The criticism would be more effective if the President could point to the superiority of the Democrat budget proposal on education. If the Democrats HAD a budget proposal.

At times, doing something can be worse than doing nothing. Setting the national budget isn’t one of those times, Mr. President.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Unless your interests are better served by letting things collapse and convincing the dumb people that it was Bush’s fault anyway.

The first two parts of this series have been so successful (Part 1, Part 2) that it’s time to try out part 3 of this series.

Q: Did you hear that Mitt Romney made teh birther joke?  He is teh birther!
A: Right.  And Steven Colbert is really a Republican talk show host.  By the way, are you better off now than you were four years ago?

Q: Isn’t Mitt Romney going to repeal “Roe V. Wade?”
A: Presidents don’t “repeal” SCOTUS decisions.  Now, or four years ago.  Speaking of which – are you better off now than you were four years ago?

Q: But Romney opposes abortion rights, doesn’t he?
A: I’m sorry – were you unaware that Republicans largely think abortion is murder?  Just like they did four years ago.  Speaking of which – are you better off now than you were then?

Q: Where are Mitt Romney’s tax records?
A: Dunno.  The fact that the IRS hasn’t slapped a huge lien on him is probably evidence enough that the real answer is “who cares, and are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Q: How about teh tyrannical GOP treating the Ron Paul delegates teh way tehy did?
A: Well, they did better than they did four years ago. The party has every right to focus on the majority and de-emphasize a disruptive minority that hasn’t quite gotten enough clout to change everything yet. Speaking of which – are you better off now than four years ago?

Q: How about Todd Akin?
A: Is he better off than he was four years ago?

Q: Did you see teh poll that shows liberals is smarter than teh conservatives?
A: I asked if you’re doing better than you were four years ago

Q: So is the GOP a big tent, or is it?
A:Who can afford a tent?  Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Q: Do you think the GOP has conceded teh Latino vote?
A: Dunno. But a lot of Latinos are doing worse than four years ago; more undocs are leaving the US than coming here.  What does that tell you?

Q: Ron Paul refused to endorse Mitt Romney.
A: Finally, something that’s the same as four years ago.