John Cusack asks the question most of us had the answer to five years ago.  I add emphasis:

“One is forced to asked the question: Is the President just another Ivy League A**hole shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some sh*thole for purely political reasons?” asked actor John Cusack in a recent piece published yesterday on TruthOut.org.

Cusack was sharply critical of President Obama’s decisions to continue President George W. Bush’s drone program and continuing the war in Afghanistan.

Yep.

And he’s an Ivy League as*hole for having a Homeland Security director who turns peaceful right-wing protesters into a fearsome fascist terror network, dabbles with reinstating the “Fairness Doctrine”, squatted on the Fourth Amendment, accelerated the militarization of the nation’s police, nationalized healthcare and tore the Constitution to shreds.

Glad you’re finally catching on.

To:  Everyone in the USA
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant who’s been through it all before
Re:  “Sequestration”

Hey, everyone,

You may not remember this, but we’ve been through all this before.  Remember the “partial government shutdown”, back in the nineties?  It was a whole big nothing-burger.

Oh, the Clinton Administration tried to make sure that the people felt whatever pain was generated – closing parks, cramping down on the voters.  But as a rule, the whole thing affected nobody.

And here in Minnesota, we had a “complete” shutdown two years ago (which, again, wasn’t – the courts kept most of the government going as “essential”).  It lasted a few weeks.  Then Governor Messinger Dayton abandoned it, when he realized Minnesotans, for all his efforts to squeeze and scare them – shutting down state parks and highway rest areas, threatening to lay off teachers – barely noticed any difference.  While the media did its best to prop up the Messinger Dayton line, the people of Minnesota heard the gales of calumny but saw and felt a big fat nada burrito.  Even Governor Messinger Dayton – as cosseted and isolated from reality as his staff keeps him – noticed; on his trip around the state to whip up support for the DFL budget, he saw tepid crowds of union droogs, and a few professional protesters, and realized he had nothin’ (which may be why Dayton makes so few public appearances these days).

So it’s time for “sequestration” – the “radical” budget cuts that Obama and the super-di-duper commission agreed to as a stick to lead everyone to the “carrot” of an actual federal budget.  We’ve been waiting nearly 1,400 days for a budget from the Democrat-addled Senate, so Washington figured a “stick” was needed.

By the way – how radical and drastic are those cuts?:

Yep. They’re not even cuts.  They’re reductions in the increase.  Indeed, almost completely worthless, if cutting spending is your goal, but really nothing but a fart in the wind; sort of like “dropping HBO” in your family budget, even though your gas bill is rising and your teenage kids are costing more and more.

Obama will try to make “sequestration” hurt; he’ll slow down the TSA lines, he’ll gundeck some ship overhauls and clamp down some military maintenance budgets, he’ll inveigle some big cities to lay off a few cops and teachers, he’ll shut down Yellowstone as the cameras record photos of crestfallen children.  Hell, Joe Biden may even personally try to close the gates at Disney World.

But there is no there, there.  It’s a scare tactic, engineered by Obama and his compliant media.

It needs to be ignored.

That is all.

To: President Obama
From: Mitch Berg, Cranky Peasant
Re: Your visit.

Mr. President,

Your visit to the Twin Cities yesterday, the media assures us, was not just because it was yet another city that is utterly safe territory for you.  It’s because, supposedly, Minneapolis is a leader in “curbing gun violence”.

Let’s put it on the table.

While Minneapolis has the highest violent crime rate in Minnesota, its crime rates have been dropping over the years not because of anything the Minneapolis DFL establishment has done – they have been utterly useless, in fact – but because Minnesota is, despite being a purple-addled state, a very gun-friendly place.  State law prohibits cities from having different gun laws from the rest of the state – and the rest of the state is as solidly pro-Second-Amendment as anyplace west of the Mississippi.  We have good, solid carry permit law; law-abiding Minnesotans aren’t harried by excessive stupid laws…

…like people in your native, crime-ridden Chicago are, and like you want the rest of us to be.

Minneapolis, along with Saint Paul, are the parts of this state that most aggressively hassle gun law-abiding gun owners.  Left to their own devices, both would happily turn into little Chicagos (in more ways than just guns).  And they are the parts with the most crime.

That, as they say, is all.

(PS – Well, OK – not “all”.  Henco Sheriff Stanek actually has the right idea:

As a strong supporter of the 2nd amendment, Sheriff Stanek talked about how the problem is one of access.

“Gun ownership isn’t a privilege, it’s a right guaranteed by the Constitution,” said Sheriff Stanek. “We have an access problem; people already prohibited by law from owning or buying a gun should never have access to firearms. We shouldn’t impose on the rights of law abiding citizens to try to solve this problem. Gun control alone will not solve the complex problem of guns and extreme violence.”

Indeed, as Chicago shows us, it’ll only make it worse).

Unemployment is the same today as during the last inaugural.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The President issued a secret Executive Order directing the United States military to kill American citizens because the President thinks they’re suspicious characters or possibly terrorists.

The President considers a proposed Executive Order directing the United States law enforcement agencies to seize privately owned firearms because the President doesn’t like firearms.

The President considers a proposed Executive Order directing the United States Treasury to issue a worthless coin to “pay” the national debt because the President doesn’t like the constraints of a budget.

Common theme: the law is an obstacle to doing what the President wants to do, so rather than obey the law or work through the democratic process to change it, he flouts it.

This is the attitude and those are the actions of a King, not a President.

We don’t have a King in America.

That attitude and those actions are un-American.

The President’s attitude and actions are un-American.

I oppose the President’s attitude and actions.

The President is Black.

I am a racissssssssssssss.

Never mind, nothing to see here, move along.

Joe Doakes

It’s only “overeach” if consequences are exacted.

I’m seeing many people changing their traditional “PBO” (“President Barack Obama”) references to KBO (or “King…”).

This is incorrect.Given Obama’s non-royal lineage, it’d be more correct to refer to him as “BC” (Barack Caesar).

Please see to this.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

No less respected economist than Paul Krugman is recommending the US pay down its national debt by minting a Trillion-Dollar Coin. He suggests it be made of platinum because that’s really valuable. I say it should be rubber, not only because “rubber check” accurately captures its value, but because there’s precedent.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.”

Obviously, we won’t call it a Ningi, that sounds weird (and we’d owe Doug Adams royalties). We’ll call it a $1 trillion dollar coin. But why stop at one? Why not go all out and issue 16 trillion-dollar coins to pay off the entire national debt completely?

And while we’re at it, why not raise the minimum wage to $100 so we’ll all be rich? And throw in free cosmetic surgery, paid for by Obamacare.

Rich, handsome, debt free . . . now THAT’s the kind of Hope and Change I was looking for.

Joe Doakes

Como Park.

I’m afraid to ask an esteemed economist like Prostetnic Vogon Krugman how we’re going to pay for a trillion dollars worth of platinum – or what that’ll do to the world’s platinum supply.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

As our “leaders” debate how to solve the fiscal cliff, the President seems intent on making sure the rich pay most of it.

Let me just note some of the “tax the rich” schemes that already have been tried and found to be failures at best, counterproductive at worst: Window tax,Brick tax, Wallpaper tax,Hearth tax, and Yacht tax.

Look, here’s the deal:  rich people are rich, they’re not stupid.  Jack tax rates too high and they’ll simply move and take their money with them.

In every one of these schemes, the rich altered their behavior to avoid the taxes, the poor didn’t pay taxes anyway, so the burden fell squarely on the middle class – too “rich” to be exempt, too poor to escape.

President Obama is a Harvard scholar.  His advisors are the smartest in the world.  He cannot be unaware of history.  Why is he intent on repeating it?

Why are Republicans even thinking about letting him repeat it?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The State Department’s internal report is out and as a result, Congress is rushing to fortify the barn door.

What I still want to know is: whose idea was it to tone down American consulate security to present a more welcoming, more open appearance to Mid-East locals to enhance America’s image in the world? Who decided Benghazi should be a temporary facility, and an unguarded one at that?

The “welcoming appearance” theory of diplomacy always held the danger our diplomats could be attacked because we intentionally did not cower behind machine-gun toting Marines. But if it was the correct theory, then Benghazi was an unfortunate incident but not cause to fortify and arm up. The fact we’re abandoning the theory makes it look as if we’re rebuking the proponent of the theory and wasn’t that . . . President Obama himself?

So, the President’s idea was wrong: dangerously, stupidly and perhaps even criminally so? Is that what we’re saying? Cuz that’s certainly what it sounds like we’re saying, just not in so many words. Spell it out for me. Was Barak Obama’s signature diplomatic initiative flat wrong?

Joe Doakes

Como Park.

That’d be a great question for our Secretary of State.

If we can ever find her.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

December 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff charged in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

December 11, 2012, President Obama’s “fiscal cliff” negotiating position: “Madoff was a piker.”

Joe Doakes

Como Park

What was it Stalin said?  “Fifty Billion is a crime, Twenty Trillion is a statistic?”

Something like that.

“Smart Diplomacy” apparently means “represent your country abroad with egomaniacal empty skirts who gave you lots of money“:

The commander in chief is mulling whether to appoint Wintour, one of his biggest reelection campaign fundraising bundlers, as ambassador to the United Kingdom or France, according to Bloomberg News’s Hans Nichols.

(Facepalm)

NOW notes that Obama’s cabinet is about 30% women, and they are not amused:

Currently, the president, who garnered 55 percent of the women’s vote on Election Day, has eight females in his 23-member cabinet. According the National Organization for Women, that number isn’t nearly high enough.

NOW president Terry O’Neill, in an interview with The Daily Caller, explained that she would like to see complete gender parity in Obama’s second-term cabinet.

To pay back all the chits that the Administration owes, it also needs to have 2-3 Afro-Americans, 3-4 Latinos, an Asian, a gay secretary (maybe two for affirmative action)…

…and it’d probably be the right thing to do to make ’em all unionized.

Read more:

To:  Over-The-Top Obama Personality Cultists
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Trumped.

To whom it may concern:

Too easy.

That is all.

There was never a problem in the Rockaways, Winston.  There was never a problem in the Rockaways:

With the media’s silence and the public’s amnesia over the impact of the hurricane, President Obama has once again received a free pass on yet another issue of national importance. The media’s outcry over the devastation after Katrina led to a massive influx of aid in the form of governmental agency involvement, subsidies, and private charitable organizations’ assistance. Without that outcry, the victims of Sandy should be wondering what kind of attention they would be receiving if the president’s party began with an R, not a D.

Silence.  We are now moving forward.

Heckuvva job, Obama-y.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Instapundit reports:

“KATRINA ON THE HUDSON EAST RIVER: Occupy Sandy Volunteer Sounds Alarm on ‘Humanitarian Crisis,’ Near-Complete Absence of Government Aid in Coney Island Projects. “Just three hours ago I was speaking with seniors for whom I was the first person they talked to since the storm. . . . People literally have no power, no food, no water, no bathrooms–they’re defecating in buckets. And there is no one to answer to for it.”

We were assured Bush’s hatred for Black people was the reason FEMA’s response to Katrina was so bad in New Orleans. Appears Bush didn’t limit himself to hating New Orleans Blacks. He must have hated Black New Yorkers with a passion, to be motivated to reach out 4 years later to foul up this disaster response. For a guy so roundly reviled as an idiot, he certainly does have a long reach.

Too bad for poor President Obama. No wonder Clint Eastwood’s “empty chair” speech stung so much, hit too close to home. We should be more sensitive. The pathetic response to Hurricane Sandy plainly is not President Obama’s fault. In fact, we should pity him: must suck to be a completely powerless figurehead after four years on the job, facing the prospect of four more years of total uselessness.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

You’re doin’ a great job, Obama-y.

The American people voted for Santa Claus.

If you work in the medical device business, energy, or many other American industires you may be getting a visit from his evil twin, “The Bill”, as companies start to announce layoffs.

I forget – did Nate Silver predict this, too?

After the 2004 elections, as Democrats whinged and caviled about the ravages of life under George W. Bush, I wrote a long story about life after a breakup of the United States into, broadly, red and blue America.

An epic hurricane strikes the upper Atlantic seaboard.  And the recovery was…:

 Worse? The relief effort – the attempt to bring food, fuel, clothing, even fresh water to the storm’s victims, especially the hundreds of thousands left homeless or without power – was bogged down by a civil and bureaucratic turf war that beggared the imagination.

 

Dennis Kucinich, Minister of Peace, ordered units of the Peace Force to the affected area. But at the edge of the damaged areas in Boston, Providence, New York, Hartford, Philly/Camden and Trenton, the convoys of troops were met by teams of armed agents and lawyers from the Ministry of Disaster Preparedness, the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Housing. Under court order, the MODP agents ordered the MOP troops to hand over their weapons; most complied. These weapons – rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers – were handed over to Housing and Labor agents, and hundreds of AFL-CIO, Teamsters and AFSCME members who’d been deputized as “provisional agents”, who proceeded to go door to door serving pre-printed injunctions against homeowners carrying out repairs without union labor on the job. Homeowners who failed to comply were arrested, and their insurance payments attached by the unions as damages by drumhead civil courts issuing summary judgements under the Emergency Law Act of 2008.

Some said the chapter was over the top.

In the wake of Sandy, I’m not sure it went far enough.  An electric line repair crew from Alabama was sent packing in Jersey for being non-union:

Crews from Huntsville, as well as Decatur Utilities and Joe Wheeler out of Trinity headed up there this week, but Derrick Moore, one of the Decatur workers, said they were told by crews in New Jersey that they can’t do any work there since they’re not union employees.

The crews that are in Roanoke, Virginia say they are just watching and waiting even though they originally received a call asking for help from Seaside Heights, New Jersey.

The crews were told to stand down. In fact, Moore said the crew from Trinity is already headed back home.

I really can’t make it up fast enough.

Way back on May 5, 2011, we took a pool; when would the pictures of Osama Bin Laden “be leaked” (completely against the Administration’s will, naturally)?

The answer:  Not just yet.

But there’s  still five days.

If it’s not the greatest parody ever, it’s right up there:

I mean, seriously.

Contestant:  “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

Trebek:  “Correct, and you have the board…”

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?