…The One apparently “won” the debate last night…
…where “won” apparently means “showed up with a pulse”, “forestalled mass suicide among liberals” and, with a little help from Candy Crowley and the assembled mainstream media, didn’t get too many lies and fabrications called out.
The definition apparently had little to do with wooing undecideds, though.
I’m all about the clarity.
Joe Doakes writes:
Pioneer Press On-Line forwarded article from NationalJournal “fact-checking” the debate, that included this bit:
Romney on assault weapons ban:
Responding to a question about assault weapons, Romney said, “We, of course, don’t want automatic weapons, which is already illegal in this country.” Actually, the federal ban on assault weapons — first enacted in 1994 under former President Clinton — expired in September 2004, during the George W. Bush administration.
Um, kids, Clinton’s assault weapons ban did not affect fully-automatic weapons, which is what Romney was specifically talking about. He knows the difference that you evidently do not. The “fact-check” sounds like it was written by one of our old friends.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Yep.
Attention, media “fact checkers”; we covered this the other day. Read it and learn something.
“The biggest surprise of the night was when Meatloaf bailed the President out on his Libya answer”
— Gary Miller, from Facebook
I’m the first to admit that confirmation bias hits everyone. Myself included.
But for the life of me, I’m not sure how anyone, ever, could say Barack Obama even came close in the debate last night…
…except among a base that needed a spiff to keep them from driving into bridge abutments aroiund the country, and maybe to give the low-information voters that are the Democrats’ only real growth market a fresh charge on their chanting points. By those standards – “victory” means your supporters get a morale boost, and idiots get a fresh dose of “Planned Parenthood” – then yes, the president’s performance was adequate.
Of course, like Ringo Starr, he only did it with a little help from his friends:
Romney had the President on the ropes, stammering and babbling over his Adminstration’s performance in re Benghazi – and Crowley in effect came off the bench to tackle Mitt.
As predicted.
The best thing about the debate after sleeping on it? The Libya issue is going to be front and center in the headlines for the next five days, until the foreign policy debate. And this time The One won’t have Candy Crowley to save him.
…but as a Second Amendment activist I found myself very, very jazzed that we finally have a Prez candidate who not only can articulate the difference between Automatic and Semi-Automatic weapons…
…but actually did it, on national TV.
In the history of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Debate Parties are among the most legendary events.
Eight years ago (!) at the Minneapolis Hilton, they set out 100 chairs and one porta-bar in a ballroom with a jumbotron to watch the final debate between Dubya and Kerry. 700 turned out; it was the first time we on the NARN ever figured we had an audience. It was amazing. It was also the first time we met many of our audience regulars, including our latest NARN colleague Brad Carlson! It was an amazing evening.
Four years ago, at the Biden/Palin debate at the late great Trocadero? We drew close to 500, which was a completely full house. It was a fantastic night.
And Monday night, we’ll be doing it again!
Join us at the Blue Fox in Shoreview on Monday, 10/22 for the final Presidential Debate of this season.
Brad Carlson and I will be MCing, and doing a Q and A before and after. There’ll be some special prices, and the food is really really good!
Also – before the debate, there’ll be a silent auction to benefit the Kurt BIlls for Senate campaign. Come on out and bring a few bucks to benefit Bills, and stay for the party!
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
Holy Cow, it turns out Hillary Clinton actually DID win the election and actually HAS been running the government while Obama golfed.
I Knew It!!
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Truly a profile in courage.
On Obama’s part, naturally.
…and lost?
Women are defecting from Obama in the swing states, according to USA Today/Gallup:
And don’t sweat the non-battleground numbers, Real Americans; they include California, New York, Massachusetts and other states that are definitely not battlegrounds…
Losing a “War on Women” – and by losing, we mean “having it shown to be a febrile propaganda cookie that women shunned in droves” – may be among the best things that could happen to American society.
Follow-up quiz: In the wake of this polling, will the Obama Administration’s attempts to scare The LIttle Ladies back into compliance with The Party be:
A: Desperate
B: Very Very Desperate
C: Pathetically Desperate
D: Overdrive/maximum overboost/Baghdad Bob-level desperate?
(And for all you history buffs – if the Dems lose the “War on Women”, does that make the Sandra Fluke kerfuffle sort of a Gleiwitz Incident?)
Retired SCOTUS Justice Stevens is many things.
This piece in the WashEx is evidence for all of the above:
Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens called for Congress to tighten gun laws in the wake of shootings such as the one that took place in Aurora, Colorado.
So Aurora can be as safe as Chicago!
Stevens noted that the legal precedent for restricting gun rights — United States vs. Miller — still stands, despite the ruling in the 2005 Heller case that overturned the Washington, D.C., ban on owning handguns, even in one’s own home.
Which proves the “dinosaur” case.
The “senile” case? That comes next (with emphasis added by me):
“[Miller] was generally understood to limiting the scope of the Second Amendment to the uses of arms that were related to military activities,” Stevens said today during a question-and-answer session after a speech today with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s Legal Action Project. “The Court did not overrule Miller [in Heller].
That’s technically true. Heller overruled a specious, logically-vacuous train of opinion in lower courts that Miller meant that the Second Amendment was not a right “Of the People”, but that it might refer to assemblies of people like the National Guard.
Remember the bolded bit. We’ll be coming back to it very shortly.
Back to Justice and Dolt Stevens:
Instead it ‘read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns . . . Thus, the Second Amendment provides no obstacle to regulations permitting the ownership or the use of the sorts of the automatic weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in Virginia, Colorado, or Arizona in recent years.”
For starters, Stevens – like the entire generation of bobbleheaded activists that spawned him – contradicts himself; he said Miller was limited in scope to the use of military weapons – which are, largely, “automatic”. Meaning…
…well, not what “Justice” and senile fool Stevens thinks. Here’s some remedial firearms education: this is “automatic”:
This is “Semi-Automatic” – a mode found on many hunting firearms and possibly the majority of personal defensive handguns:
It was semi-automatic weapons that were used in virtually every major shooting – not full automatic. The death tolls were not a function of gun’s firing mechanism, but of the fact that the victims were packed into small spaces and rendered defenseless…
…by the laws the likes of Justice Stevens foisted on us.
Stevens also had a recommendation for people who keep a weapon in their homes for self-defense purposes. “Maybe you have some kind of constitutional right to have a cell phone with a pre-dialed 911 in the number at your bedside and that might provide you with a little better protection than a gun which you’re not used to using,” he said to laughter.
My next 200 rounds at the range is dedicated to you, “Justice” Idiot Stevens.
As will be my next semi-automatic rifle purchase.
You’re welcome.
Leah Barkoukis notes something that should replace the tingles in Chris Matthews’ and Barack Obama’s legs with chills of dread.
For this entire election, the Obama Administration, and Democrats up and down the food chain, have been laboring mightily to pound a couple of sound bites into voters’ heads; that Republicans will take away contraception and send illegal immigrants back across the border and give tax breaks to billionaires while soaking the middle class, that Barack Obama ended the war on terror by killing Osama Bin Laden, and that the economy is chugging right back to life and even if it doesn’t it’s Bush’s fault anyway.
These are aimed at the “Low-Information Voter” – the people who don’t care much about politics, who don’t really follow issues in depth, whose votes are swayed by the loudest chanting points in their minds when they go to the polls (among those who can be convinced, at any rate; union Democrats and single-issue pro-lifers don’t figure in this).
But what happens if the meme rattling about the low-information voters’ heads isn’t fictional wars on womyn and the poor? What if, in spite of the media’s best efforts, the single “chanting point” on their mind is the one they see with their own eyes, and hear from their families and friends? That the economy sucks and nobody cares who inherited it from whom?
That, Barkoukis says, is Why Lindsay Lohan’s Endorsement Matters:
Lohan is a low information voter convinced that (a) employment is really important, (b) thinks that employment is not being sufficiently handled by the White House right now and (c) thinks that Mitt Romney is better equipped to handle employment.
That arguably logical sequence is all that it takes for a low-information voter to support Mitt Romney. The thing is, there are millions of voters like her. That should terrify the Obama campaign.
A stopped clock is right twice a day. It is a fact that Obama’s policies will institutionalize U6 numbers in the double digits. Linday Lohan may not know what a U6 number is. Either may your underemployed nephew who graduated from college with a degree in anthropology two years ago and has been temping ever since while living in your sister’s basement. But both of them – your idiot nephew and Lohan, whose father is reportedly unemployed – know what their lying eyes tell them.
One b-list actress and rolling train wreck isn’t a trend, of course. But let’s presume for a monent that a significant chunk of low-information voters are, improbably, focused on something that matters. Bad news for Obama, ja?
Question for Minnesota: does this mean Minnesota voters will shun the Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s low-info voter campaign?
Or, counterintuitively, does the success of the GOP legislature in taming the state’s fake “deficit” and helping unemployment edge down to a near-low in the US actually harm them in the battle for the not-overly-informed?
Houston “Organizing For America” office closed and director fired after a James O’Keefe operative caught them actively abetting vote fraud disenfranchised the multiple-American community.
One down, many many many to go (including an episode in the video below where our friend Erin Haust visited the OFA office in Hopkins, MN):
And then maybe the Minnesota Office of the Secretary of State!
This is my first round of predictions for this cycle. It’s neither complete nor final.
Second CD: John Kline wins by eight.
Third CD: Erik Paulsen beats Brian Barnes by 14.
Sixth CD: MIchele Bachmann beats Jim Graves by at least 12, setting a pattern – Bachmann wins by double digits – that stands until at least 2020 (and who knows what the next round of redistricting will do).
Eight CD: For all their money the Dems pour into this race, Cravaack wins by two.
OK – your turn.
The media is having its usual bout of victorian vapours over this picture.
This would fool MPR, the AP, or any leftyblogger.
But as Stacey McCain notes, there is just not a chance in hell this isn’t a false-flag:
I can pretty much guarantee that this man photographed at a Romney rally in Lancaster, Ohio, is not in fact a Republican, but rather is a plant sent out by the Democrats as a dirty trick.
- Clue #1: Wearing a “Romney/Ryan” sticker on the back of his T-shirt. Nobody does this. Nobody.
- Clue #2: It’s kind of chilly in Ohio this time of year, and the guy’s wearing only a T-shirt, while those around him are wearing coats.
What’s the old saying? “If something is too good to be true, it probably is”?
That’s true for photographs too, isn t it?
My guess is that this guy also wore a coat when he entered the rally, then stationed himself toward the back of the crowd (in front of the riser where the press photographers are stationed) and then removed his coat to expose the T-shirt, with the explicit purpose of having it photographed.
- . . . aaanndd, Clue #3: No name? A press photographer is going to take a picture like this and make no effort to ID the guy? Nuh-uh.
Fearless prediction: This will turn out to be a bit of false-flag slander. This is what the Democrats, nationally and here in Minnesota, do when they’re in trouble.
Second fearless prediction: given the way it’s disappeared from the media, they are probably on the brink of finding that the shooting at the Obama headquarters in Denver was a false-flag, too – just like the one four years ago.
I coudln’t get to this one last week; the ChiTrib endorses…
…a conservative Republican for Congress. Even the ChiTrib thinks Jan Schakowsky (IL-9CD) is “too partisan”
We have in the past gone hot and cold on Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the 9th District. She’s always up for a good debate and it’s a pleasure to spar with her. But she’s also one of the most partisan, liberal members of the House.
When the Democrats finished drawing the new congressional maps, Republican Tim Wolfe awoke to find himself living in the 9th. The district is considered safely blue. Wolfe lives in Arlington Heights, a pocket of red voters who were tossed into the 9th by mapmakers to protect the Democratic tilt of other districts. Wolfe decided he had to run against Schakowsky. “You know what Jan is going to offer,” he says. “More government, more taxes, more debt, more government intrusion. … She stands for the exact opposite of what I stand for in most cases.”
Am I the only one wondering if Schakowski owes one of the publishers a chit of some kind?
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
The President knew nothing about ATF gun-running, Solyndra’s solar panels or Secret Service prostitutes. Now we learn he knew nothing about terror threats in Libya.
It seems the President has been completely shut out of the government he’s supposed to be running. It’s almost as if his own employees see him as nothing more than an Affirmative Action token hire. They apparently believe he really is just an articulate, clean, bright, nice-looking Black man, someone to be paraded for the cameras occasionally but kept away from all the real decision-making. “Have another round of golf” they tell him, “Don’t worry about us, we’ll take care of everything.” Except they don’t; and he gets blamed for it.
That must suck. I wonder if he’s lonely.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
He’s showing some of the signs of having spent four years as a figurehead for others.
In an era where the United States can send troops and inflict mayhem halfway around the world with, it seems, little visible effort, it’s hard for modern American to realize what a major undertaking simply getting troops across the atlantic, much less halfway around the world, was.
Not just getting them there, mind you, but keeping them supplied with food, ammunition, fuel and everything else a military needed to fight in the field.
And then there was the whole fighting thing.
It was seventy years ago yesterday that the 164th Infantry Regiment landed on Guadalcanal.
“Who? What? Where?”
Listen up.
———-
For all the shock and awe that Pearl Harbor was, World War 2 itself didn’t catch America flat-footed. Much of the nation’s leadership had seen war as more or less inevitable for the better part of a decade. FDR had started a national buildup to war in the mid-thirties, modernizing and adding to the US Navy starting in about 1934.
And he’d started calling up the National Guard not long after Hitler’s ransacking of Europe.
And so the 164th Infantry Regiment – comprising most of the North Dakota Army National Guard – had been called into federal service 20 months earlier, in February of 1941.
Troops of the 164th Infantry, drilling at Camp Claiborne five months before Pearl Harbor.
By Pearl Harbor, they had been training for ten months, and were among the most combat ready units in the US Army, and were thus selected to make the long trip across the Pacific Ocean with two other National Guard regiments – the 182nd Infantry from the Massachusetts National Guard, and the 132nd Infantry from Illinois – to the island of New Caledonia. There, the three units were organized into a division, the “Americal Division”, short from “American Caledonian” (later officially called the 23rd Infantry Division) in May of 1942.
Over the first six months of the war, Allied planners juggled two disparate goals; find some way to start taking offensive action against the Japanese, and defend Australia.
Achieving the first goal, naturally, was the subject of a massive strategic wrangle; the Army, led in the Pacific by General MacArthur, favored an “island-hopping” campaign through the southwest Pacific up through the Philippines; the Navy (along with the Marines) favored a direct assault through the Central Pacific. The battle between the two strategies would be the major strategic decision of the war in the Pacific…
…and was rendered moot by the news that the Japanese were building an airstrip on a dismal, malarial island in the Solomon Islands chain, Guadalcanal. In combination with other airfields in the Solomons, this could support further advances on bases like Fiji, New Caledonia and New Guinea; if each of those fell, the supply lines from the US to Australia would be cut off, rendering Oz useless as a base. With Darwin already under air attack, the threat to Australia was dire.
Henderson Field. Today, it’s Honiara International Airport, serving the Solomon Islands.
And so the first step in MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign went ahead. On August 7, the First Marine Division – the first division-sized unit in the Pacific ready for combat – landed on Guadalcanal and seize the Lunga Point landing strip from the Japanese engineers who had just completed the field the night before; the Japanese engineers had gotten an extra ration of sake rice wine for getting the job done early. The Marines quickly took the airfield, renamed it Henderson Field (after a Marine squadron commander killed at Midway Island in June), and landed Marine fighters and dive bombers, who promptly went into action.
Over the next two months , the battle seesawed back and forth; the Marines decimated the first round of Japanese defenders and counterattackers; the Japanese ran reinforcements to the island and, after dealing the US Navy a bloody defeat at the naval Battle of Savo Island in mid-August, bombarded the airfield with several of their cruisers and battleships. Mired in the malarial, swampy muck, the Marines held their perimeter.
The 164th Infantry, under Colonel Robert Hall, was dispatched from New Caledonia to reinforce the Marines against the fresh Japanese troops. Seventy years ago today, they landed; two of the regiment’s three battalions took positions on the east side of the perimeter, allowing the Marines to consolidate against the expected attack from the west. The third battalion, the 3rd/164th, was held in reserve.
Ten days later, on the night of October 24th, the Japanese would launch what would end up being the most serious ground attack on Henderson, attacking the Marines along the Matanikau river, the western anchor of the beachhead. Their scouts had uncovered a gap in the Marine lines inadvertently left when one of the Marine battalions changed its orientation to the south. The Japanese, heavily outnumbering the Marines, launched an attack into the gap against one 700 man Marine battalion, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment. While the attack was badly coordinated, it still drove a wedge into the Marine lines. The Marines called for reinforcements; the 3rd of the 164th moved into the line as the Japanese attacks peaked.
The 164th had some disadvantages; they were new to combat – indeed, they were the first US Army unit to take offensive action in World War 2; except for the Army garrison in the Philippines, they were the first Army unit to fight at all. And they were being fed into the line piecemeal, in platoon and company-sized groups (40 to 160 men), to react to various crises on the Marine front as the situation developed.
They had a few advantages, too. They were the first American unit to carry the M1 “Garand” rifle in action. The rifle – the first semi-automatic rifle issued in large numbers to combat troops – would go on to be called “the greatest implement of war ever invented” by General Patton later in the war. Patton was being a little hyperbolic, but the M1 gave each North Dakotan roughly double the firepower of the Marine fighting along side him, who was still carrying the World War 1 vintage M1903 Springfield bolt-action rifle, to say nothing of the Japanese infantry with their bolt-action Arisaka rifles (cousins of the Springfield via their mutual design parent, the German G98 Mauser, but firing a much weaker round of ammunition). And in the desperate, confused action in the dark and in the jungle, when the Japanese closed to ranges too close for the Marines’ artillery to be used, the extra firepower was vital. And they were from North Dakota, where even today the average eight year old can hit a running squirrel in the head with a .22 in the dark at 75 yards. [1]
The M1 Garand. The standard American infantry rifle for the rest of the war, it served through Korea, and with some troops in Vietnam, Latin America and reserve units in the the South Korean military until the 1980s.
The North Dakotans held up, meeting and beating the Japanese in the brutal night jungle fighting, and went on to carry the attack to the Japanese, helping drive them from the island (or, as it’s known in the annals of the First Marine Division, The Island).
Troops of the 164th on Guadalcanal.
And the regiment of 2,200 North Dakota tractor drivers and mechanics and teachers and railroad workers and high school kids earned a rare honor. While the Marines, then as now, have made it a matter of their own esprit de corps to look down on the Army (they usually referred to soldiers as “Doggies”. But the Marines’ commander, General Vandegrift, paid the 164th a very rare honor after the Battle of the Matanikau:
But that was all a week and a half in the future. Seventy years ago today, the 164th were just the first US Army unit to take offensive action when they stepped ashore on a malarial cesspool that none of them could have found on a map six months earlier.
164th Infantry troops on Guadalcanal
And when I was a kid growing up in Jamestown thirty-odd years later, most of my classmates couldn’t find it, either. The town’s National Guard unit at the time, H Company (which had been a part of 2nd Battalion of the 164th) had been an Guadalcanal. Many of the names on the Roll of Honor above the junior high entrance, listing Jamestown High School graduates who’d died in the wars up to that time, had served in the 164th – and the ones that came back, and were in not a few cases still serving as senior NCOs in the town’s National Guard unit at the time, like most World War 2 veterans, were still years away from talking about their war.
I used to dream of being able to write their story – doing a Steven Ambrose-style reconstruction of the war that that regiment of depression-era kids from the middle of nowhere fought, in a place that could not possibly have been less like North Dakota. Other priorities intervened, of course; the guys who were in their late sixties when I hatched the idea of doing the history of the 164th are in their eighties and nineties now, the ones that are still with us at all.
Chalk it up among my life’s great regrets.
[1] I made that part up. Allow a guy a little homer hyperbole, will ya?
Happy Birthday United States Navy!
…a Scandinavian-American to the bone, a little innate ethnic pessimism is always struggling with my normally optimistic nature.
Deep in my liver, I do feel as if the Democrats could sweep all eight Congressional districts this fall. Indeed, given that they have an incumbent President, the Dems should feel humiliated if they don’t win the Presidency and flip both chambers of Congress next month.
So that part of me always has a hard time reacting to news like this: when adjusted for a more realistic weighting, the latest KSTP/SUSA poll shows Cravaack ahead of Rick Nolan.
Gary Gross (with the odd bit of emphasis added):
First, this KSTP-SurveyUSA poll oversamples Democrats by a 7-point margin. That can’t be justified, especially considering the fact that the Cook Report listed MN-8 as a D+3 district in 2010. Chip’s won over more Iron Rangers, meaning the Cook Report’s PVI rating is more like D+2 this year.
Second, Chip gets 89% of MN-8 Republicans, 6% of MN-8 DFLers and 53% of MN-8 independents.
Third, the proper weighting of the district is 35% DFL, 34% GOP, 31% independent. That means Chip gets 30.2 votes from Republicans, 2.1 votes from DFL voters and 16.5 votes from independents for every 100 voters. That’s 48.8 votes per hundred for Chip. That’s assuming there isn’t an enthusiasm gap, which there is. That enthusiasm gap favors Chip by a pretty solid margin.
Fourth, Rick Nolan gets 7% of Republican votes, 87% of DFL voters and a pathetic 36% of independents. That means Nolan gets 2.4 votes from the GOP, 30.5 votes from the DFL and 11.2 votes from independents per 100 votes. That’s a total of 44.1 votes per 100 for Nolan.
After factoring the enthusiasm gap that favors Chip, this race isn’t as close as the horserace figures indicate. This race is still competitive. Still, this snapshot must have Chip’s campaign smiling.
This race has been the Holy Grail for MInnesota DFLers. If they don’t beat Cravaack, Duluth will be the new Arnhem.
Since Slow Job brought it up last night – here is the record of spending for the past two administrations:
Via Instapundit
By the way – I missed this part of the debate last night, but Biden lied about his votes on both wars.
No wisecrack followups for either of those factoids.
Chuck Woolery on Twitter last night:
Biden, my strong catholic belief has driven me to support gay marriage, abortion forced birth control on the church and blatant lying. Amen
— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) October 12, 2012
I do have to confess; not since Ben Vereen’s prime, or maybe the heyday of Riverdance, have I seen tap-dancing like pro-“choice”, pro-gay-marriage Catholics rationalizing their politics with their faith (or at least the cafeteria version of it).
Please please please please please please please oh Father in heaven let this be true.
Open letter to any fighter-attack pilots or tank gunners in the audience; what’s the next step up from “Target Rich Environment?”
UPDATE: And father in heaven, if you’ll indulge me in one more…
The smirking? The 82 interruptions? The incoherent girly giggling?
No big deal. I expected that from Biden.
Biden’s approach to the debate was, in a conventional social sense, “rude” – but this is politics. Conventional rules, at least under the surface, are more or less irrelevant.
For starters, Biden is well aware that virtually nobody changes their mind over the Veep debates. The Veepstakes are all about getting bases jazzed for the final sprint. And what you saw was the comparison of the tactics the campaigns believed with reach their various bases.
Ryan was thoughful, on point, intellectually cogent, and stayed on the message – “we’re going to start making the tough choices, and get people back to work” – the sort of things the conservative base is concerned with.
Biden was arrogant, blustery, giggly, interrupting constantly – he was, in fact, the very model of the modern Liberal. The model of the lefty base is, in fact, Fast Eddie Schultz and Chris Matthews.
I don’t think it was just boorishness, though. Biden is a bobblehead, but he’s not stupid. I think he knows that if the whole country was talking about what a jabbering, smirking, inappropriately-giggling jag he was, they would spend less time talking about the past four years, Benghazi, four years of 8% unemployment (not to mention the most important issues of the past year, last Wednesday’s debate and Big Bird).
So far, it’s working.
But the part that I wanted to yell from the mountaintops? Bident’s closing statement. He stated his purpose, and the administration’s as making sure the “playing field is leveled, they, in fact, have a clear shot, and they have peace of mind”
Government-leveled playing fields are level. They are as clear as an IRS form. And government doesn’t give peace of mind (barring the bits and pieces of safety net that actually serve as safety nets, which we already paid for, thank you very much), it only takes it away.
Red meat tofu for a not-so-bright base? Absoluteley.
Deserving re-election?
Pfft.
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
Looking at this chart, you might think non-farm employment has returned to pre-recession levels. No, the left side (Y-axis) measures CHANGE in jobs.
In other words, we’re no longer losing 7 million jobs per year as we did in 2009, we’re adding a million or so per year. But we’re nowhere close to where we were before the whole thing tanked.
Charts are supposed to make data EASIER to understand, to REDUCE confusion. What this one does is exactly the opposite. Since the guy releasing the chart is a Nobel Prize winning economics professor as well as a big Obama supporter, I have to wonder why.
Hat tip: http://www.powerlineblog.com/page/2?layout=blog
Joe Doakes
Como Park
I’ll quibble with Joe on one point.
Charts are supposed to make data…serve a purpose. Usually, that purpose is “make it easier to understand”, it’s true. But by no means always.
In this case, the Administration is using them to conceal facts in plain sight, and gull the low-information voter.
Saint Paul’s business sector is collapsing. If downtown business occupancy rates are under 30%,it’s only because state government has been renting so much of it; the City is also party to the destruction of the downmarket but once-at-least-breathing University Avenue business strip. Crime is rising, the school system is garbage (although the superintendent is doing the usual fine job of pre-emptively foisting the blame on the taxpayers), and with over 1,000 vacant properties (with many more forfeited via one path or another to the city, which is busy dumping them on the market for peanuts after filtering them through the non-profit system that helps install so many of the City Council in office), it’s impossible to sell a house without getting the fiscal Abner Louima treatment.
The Saint Paul Council, and Mayor Coleman, are at a loss for a response other than “tax the living crap out of whoever in the city still pays taxes”. And building indoor ice rinks and traffic roundabouts and bike expressways.
So when it comes to the whole “run a responsible city government that doesn’t impede the city’s success”, the Saint Paul City Council is a big fat flop
But everyone’s got their sweet spot. The St. Paul City Council does excel at worthless smug symbolic frippery:
St. Paul became the first city in Minnesota to formally resolve that federal military spending needs to be trimmed.
A resolution sponsored by St. Paul City Council member Amy Brendmoen unanimously passed the seven-member board Wednesday, Oct. 10. It asks the state’s congressional delegation to support shifting funding priorities from military operations to the needs of local communities.
“The bottom line for me is that federal spending impacts the money that goes to local initiatives,” Brendmoen said.
Of course, some of our old friends are involved (emphasis added):
Wednesday’s council meeting was attended by members of various anti-war and social justice groups, as well as state Sen. Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, and anti-war activist Coleen Rowley.
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, a professor [shouldn’t that have scare quotes? – Ed.] of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, said that if every American taxpayer received a bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, St. Paul taxpayers’ share would total an estimated $1.7 billion over the past decade.
I guess you have to be a highly-educated “peace studies” “professor” to think “military spending” is done in the form of “government goodies” coupons that can be redeemed for more ice rinks and light rail trains.
But what if that putative 1.7 bill had been available for local spending, rather than exacted by the IRS or borrowed from China?
With people like Sandy Pappas and the Saint Paul City Council in charge, we’d have gotten $1.7 billion more in ice rinks, drinking fountain art and electric cars for city employees.
This sort of thing is apparently all the rage among PC liberal circles these days:
Other major cities to pass resolutions in favor of trimming military spending are Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Hartford, Conn. Rowley said peace activists have approached the city councils in Eagan and Lakeville but have yet to receive responses. They also plan to approach Apple Valley, Inver Grove Heights, Shoreview and Mounds View officials in coming days.
If we could trade “trimming the defense budget” with “sending the city councils of Saint Paul, Philly, LA and Hartford to Afghanistan”, I think it’d be a fair trade for everyone.
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