Global Warming Conference At Cancun Underbooked!!

Al Gore and the collection of ClimateGate hoaxers will sadly not make it flying first class to Cancun, where Anthropogenic Global Warming will be discussed along with whether the Earth is flat and when the extraterrestrials are going to make their next move.

Read the aricle and laugh your way through Sunday morning.

Paks Demonstrate Muslim "Justice" by Executing a Christian Aid Worker

Asia Bibi, "Blasphemer"

Sandmonkeys are everywhere, and Fareed Zakaria should cease his sanctimonious pontifications against the US or I will come and club him to death with a pig's bladder---a suitable death by one of his fellow porcine trough wallowers. Asia Bibi should be pardoned or Zakaria should be chased out of the US for representing mindless barbarism at its worst.

The insane Muslim drive for infinite aggrandizement now is reaching the limits, or it should, of American patience. I suggest that India & the US both nuke Pakistan to absolute parking lot barrenness if the young woman is killed by a bunch of slavering drooling misfits under the banner of Islam.

Why Demonrats Throw Caution to the Winds, Again and Again.

Charlie Rangel gets off with a slap on the wrist and Tom DeLay gets convicted of money laundering. It's the Demonrats corps of lawyers that get huge torts, make a ton of money, run for office, conspire to make more tons of money, and then finally push the boundaries so hard they break and reality once again is expeienced by the majority, but not by lisping dwarf E.J.Dionne, the gay counterpart to stupid black moron Eugene Robinson. Here's E.J.:

"Almost no one saw this one coming," said GOP pollster John McLaughlin. "Ann Marie was definitely below the radar screen of most political experts."

One person who never saw it coming was Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, who had championed Mr. Maffei as the kind of new liberal Democrat America needs and the Northeast wants. "Absent a Republican wave of historic proportions, his seat now seems out of the GOP's reach," wrote Mr. Dionne back in September.

Ms. Buerkle, whose district includes Syracuse in upstate New York, will join more than 80 other freshman lawmakers. This class is dominated by men and women who, like Ms. Buerkle, have experience outside of law and politics. Her message throughout the campaign stuck a chord with many upstate New Yorkers: "Taxes and regulations are so high in New York that my kids have to leave here to find a job," she said. "That's why I decided to run."

Mr. Maffei got desperate in the final weeks of the campaign and used every trick in the liberal playbook to go after her. The lines of attack included global warming, stem cell research, Social Security privatization and her Sarah Palin connections. None of it worked. The Maffei campaign said yesterday that it may request a hand recount of the ballots, but the result is unlikely to change. Mr. Maffei thought he would win because the Republican Party had moved "so far to the right." In the end, Ms. Buerkle won because the Democrats had moved so far to the left.

The Republican wave of historic proportions washed the sludge and swamp water Demonrats right out of Congress, but their system of giving lawyers enough money so that 90% of the Demons in Congress are lawyers, unlike Mrs. Buerkle. So the crooked assholes will continue to infect and infest American politics until more Buerkles can roll back the tide of crime that Demons wear like a badge of pride.

Shangri-La Where I read Joseph Campbell's Four Books of The Masks of God

Shangri-La Resort where I stayed in the late '80s for THREE Wonderful Weeks

The IRT Truck Show has intrigued me on the History Channel and reminds me of my three-week sojourn at the resort pictured, near Skardu, long before the beautiful buildings were built. I stayed in a small cabin by myself when my Pakistani host was called away from Islamabad on business while I was in country and he suggested I take a couple of weeks off at the resort near Skardu, run by a Pakistani retired general who had been in Hami Humayun's "batch" at Sandhurst decades before. The delightful Hami set up the trip and I found myself in a two-engine prop plane flying around Nanga Parbat, one of the deadliest mountains in the world, as more climbers, I was told, are killed on the mountain and more of the farmers on the lower reaches die of rockslides and avalanches than anywhere else. The plane flew only halfway up the mountain in altitude and the sight of the awesome peak stays with me to this day---partly because it took a good TWO HOURS to fly around it up the only pass leading to Azad Kashmir, the Pakistani part of Kashmir.

I had Campbell's four books called The Masks of God, this was the late eighties and before he'd become a household name, and the weather once I'd reached the simple resort was overcast and my energy depleted by the low oxygen, as we were 12-14,000 feet in altitude. So I tucked into the amazing pageant of the history of man and God [or Gods] from the worldwide worldly view of Campbell for almost a week before it stopped raining all day. By then I was hooked and couldn't put the awesome tomes down. Then the weather cleared a bit and I took a trip up the Indus River Valley to Gilgit, a place I was eager to visit after reading The Gilgit Game about the great rivalry between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century over Himalayan India, which the British narrowly won after some exceedingly close calls.

On the trip in back of a Russian deuce-and-a-half that was immensely sturdy, our truck's rear suddenly hove into space with the wheels barely on the side of the road and myself in the very back of the truck looking out and down at the Indus, crashing in full spate about 1500 feet below, with surges of torrent reaching more than 100 feet above the mean river level. The narrow valley was only about 400 yards across, it seemed, and way over 1000 feet down from the Swedish-engineered and Chinese-built road in the late sixties. Another unforgettable moment---everything is exaggerated at that altitude and the Paki soldiers laughed at my sudden lack of sang-froid.

By the way, when I was there, there was no restaurant nor easy access to the Shangri-La Resort. It had only been built three-four years before and all there was there was the crashed plane---actually not too badly damaged and it seemed to have made a landing then crunched to a stop and jammed its nose in a crevasse with its tail jutting skyward. The office of the resort was attached to the plane and none of the fancy buildings in the picture had then existed---there was no restaurant in the proper sense of the word and I subsisted on lamb and lentil soup, a very delicious fare at that height.

Someday, health and energy-level permitting, I'd love to take Marilyn and Niki to this little piece of heaven on earth, whose memories I will always cherish.

Saudi king in USA for Treatment; Crown Prince Sultan Returns to KSA

King Abdullah has a blood clot after a slipped disk. Crown Prince Sultan is on his way back from Morocco, where he breaks in new brides in the privacy of a fellow king's kingdom.

Both may pass on in the next few years, leaving Prince Nayef, a 79-year old Minister of the Interior, who hates Americans and is a Truther and denies AQ had anything to do with 9/11. First assignment when I arrived in Saudi in 1975 was to read a draft white paper on how to take over Saudi oil fields. I have the final product here in my bedroom.

It may need updating if Nayef and his hateful horde take over KSA.

Podesta Calls for Bureaucratic Authoritarian Dictatorship

John Podesta once upon a time worked for me in a two-man storefront in Brooklyn when we were in the McCarthy campaign in 1968. I lost touch with him in the '80s. At the time, his brother Tony was the big enchilada in the McCarthy campaign & John just a nice young kid from Chicago.

Now he's in charge of American Progress and is calling for a variation on "Bureaucratic Authoritarian' Government. Google it. Brazil tried it in the sixties with disastrous results. Usually this happens in a stand-off situation, but has never occurred in a full-fledged highly developed democratic culture. Here's the treasonous theory:

Former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff John Podesta, now the head of the Center for American Progress, called on President Obama to push forward with his agenda using federal agencies and executive branch power Tuesday, even though Democrats were dealt a blow in the recent midterm elections. Podesta said the American people want the president to move forward with his agenda.

“I think most of the conversation since the election has been about how President Obama adjusts to the new situation on Capitol Hill,” Podesta said. “While that’s an important conversation, it simply ignores the president’s ability to use all levels of his power and authority to move the country forward.”

Note Podesta's use of Clintonesque vocabulary since cast in concrete by MoveOn.org and other far-left entities. "The American people want the president to move forward with his agenda".......is a huge lie, because the election demonstrated clearly that the electorate wanted to STOP the president, not rebuke him for not moving "forward" fast enough.

Podesta lives in the cloud-cuckoo-land of the ultra-left, Soros-financed 'American Process' back ward of American politics. Politics to these technocrats of the political inside baseball world is process, not substance, and vaunting victories over opponents, not accommodations with ridiculous exaggerations of the process, such as the monster health bill, 2600 pages of incomprehensible self-contradictory, economy-destroying nonsense obviously is.

Podesta is skirting unconstitutional activities if he means to shut the Congress out of law-making activities of the administrative variety. Podesta is simply regurgitating the doctrine of Cass Sunstein, a total freak who writes of animal representation in law courts and other beyond-new-age post-postmodern gibberish.

A well-educated guess is that Podesta wants to put the Republican House into the hedgehog "Do-Nothing Congress" Harry Truman inveighed against in 1948 and won an amazing come-from-behind victory. However, the agenda of Obama's butt-boys on the sinister port side of hell cares nothing of Madison's theory that a system of checks and balances might impede the rush toward statist dictatorship ala Venezuela or Cuba---to cite two very unsuccessful horror-show examples, or even try to get their most beloved application of Marxist values, the NorK one-man rule of the Jung-Il clan, morphed into America mutatis mutandis with free dope and other drugs for the true believers...!

No, Madison and Hamilton are Federalists of a different time and mode of thought and action. The frantic, hysterical, girly-man shrieking of the Podestas of the left have NOTHING in common with American values. Go to Russia and China to peddle your ridiculous ranter nonsense.

Not surprisingly, when the shoe was on the other foot in 2005, Podesta sang a completely different tune out of a completely different songbook:

“No one can doubt that President Bush, also, when he took office in 2001, made extensive use of his executive authorities,” Podesta said. “Sometimes I agreed with it, often I didn’t, but he was able to move the policy agenda forward using executive authority.”

In an April 2005 speech about the importance of checks and balances in government, however, Podesta opposed the president expanding his executive boundaries.

“I’m convinced that Americans want the president and the Congress to work together to ensure that judges who populate the federal bench and who serve with life tenure are highly qualified men and women whose views are within the constitutional mainstream,” Podesta said in the April 2005 speech, according to a transcript obtained by The Daily Caller. “The filibuster is a means towards that end. Why? Because it encourages presidents to consult with the Senate and to name moderate, mainstream nominees who will judge cases fairly and without bias, and who will have no difficulty garnering the votes of 60 senators that they need to be confirmed. By removing the safeguard offered by the filibuster, the nuclear option would seriously and perhaps irreparably damage an institution that has functioned since its inception under customs and traditions that ensure an atmosphere of careful deliberation and mutual respect.”

Again, not surprisingly, the bobbing and weaving Podesta refused to return The Daily Caller's requests to clarify his volte-face from 2005.

Sen Rockefeller Wants to ban Fox & MessNBC

Jay Rockefeller, easily the stupidest Senator on the Eastern USA Stuck-on-stupid chart, doesn't think Fox & MSNBC are quality news and wants the FCC to look into banning them.

Of course, Rockefeller is so unendingly stupid that he doesn't know that the FCC has no jurisdiction over cabal networks, only broadcast networks. Now if he wanted to have the FCC look at hare-brain Couric or nitwit-Williams, they're both on broadcast and would very much need to be fumigated at the very least.

However, Rockefeller is certainly off his meds, as the FIRST AMENDMENT happens to ensure that the USG can't banish a network.

However, i do agree with defunding NPR, a truly Nazi operation with the kind of statist biyotch crones who are silly enough to squawk that the government has no "right" to withdraw funding from a far-left wing operation. I look to NPR's days being numbered. And the way PMS crone Woodruff is starting to freak out on air, PBS shouldn't be far behind.

Bloodlands: THE CENTRAL TRAGEDY OF MODERN HISTORY

HISTORY OF OUR TIME AS TRAGEDY

Tim Snyder has written an outstanding book about the region from Poland through the Ukraine and Belorussia. Based on agriculture, the lust for control of these lands by Communist Commissars and Nazi Murderers---each as deadly as the other---is an epic that Snyder ventures to explore after the Iron Curtain hid its central stage for more than 70 years, in the case of the Ukraine.

Both Hitler and Stalin dreamed of a new European order, one in the name of a master race, the other of a master class. Their visions met in the borderlands. In his use of political mass murder to achieve it, Stalin was the trailblazer, an elder statesman of terror. The Soviet-made famine of 1932-33, which killed more than three million Ukrainians, launched an era of horror that ended only with the end of the war.

In this all-encompasing book which has enthralled me for a while now, Snyder takes no prisoners. He compares the Holocaust with the preceding Holodomor, the Ukrainian induced-famine mass-murder "class-cleansing" rampages of Stalin's commissars.

Among his other goals in "Bloodlands," Mr. Snyder attempts to put the Holocaust in context—to restore it, in a sense, to the history of the wider European conflict. This is a task that no historian can attempt without risking controversy. Yet far from minimizing Jewish suffering, "Bloodlands" gives a fuller picture of the Nazi killing machine. Auschwitz, which wasn't purely a "death camp," lives on in our memory due in large part to those who lived to tell the tale. Through his access to Eastern European sources, Mr. Snyder also takes the reader to places like Babi Yar, Treblinka and Belzec. These were Nazi mass-murder sites that left virtually no survivors.

Yet Mr. Snyder's book does make it clear that Hitler's "Final Solution," the purge of European Jewry, was not a fully original idea. A decade before, Stalin had set out to annihilate the Ukrainian peasant class, whose "national" sentiments he perceived as a threat to his Soviet utopia. The collectivization of agriculture was the weapon of choice. Implemented savagely, collectivization brought famine. In the spring of 1933 people in Ukraine were dying at a rate of 10,000 per day.

What Snyder up to now has not written about nor do I think he includes in his book is the unwritten corollary of the cooperation of the Ukrainian resistance to Stalin with the Gestapo and SS in routing out the Ukrainian Jews. Almost all the commissars in the thirties sent from Moscow to take the seed grain which then caused the Holodomor were young Jewish activsts. The Ukrainians reacted against their own Jews in an act of vengeance, only to quickly discover that the Ukrainians themselves were considered "Untermenschen" by the Nazis and treated almost as poorly as the Jews. This Nazi barbarity turned the Ukrainians, who had suffered so much under Stalin, into nationalists when Stalin changed the entire tenor of the war. Indeed, one Jewish refugee from the war told me personally that EVEN the JEWS in the Ukraine looked forward to the Germans taking over, being entirely ignorant of Hitler's racial theories and assuming that their knowledge of German-based Yiddish would give them more cachet with the German occupiers. Many had known the Germans in the brief occupation after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and assumed the Nazis were similar to the relatively benign German occupiers of 1918-1920.

No, the true history of the Bloodlands, which also includes the Polish Holocaust [also 6 million killed throughout the war, according to one source] inflicted by both the USSR and the Third Reich.

This book is not for those of a Panglossian mindset, and its scholarship is peerless---and I have read many dozens of books about the war and the Soviet purges. Snyder ends with a salutary warning:

In the grim postscript to World War II, millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts and Germans were ethnically cleansed from lands they had occupied for generations. Churchill and Roosevelt let Stalin redraw Europe's borders, and all the bloodlands fell into his hands. Unlike Hitler, Stalin realized his dreams of a global empire. His last murderous act was to launch another anti-Semitic purge, in late 1952, before he himself died in early 1953.

"Bloodlands" manages to clarify as well as darken our view of this era. "To dismiss the Nazis or the Soviets as beyond . . . historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap," Mr. Snyder writes. "The safer route is to realize that their motives for mass killing, however revolting to us, made sense to them."

Given that human nature appears to be intrinsically evil, no matter what the amoralists say, we might once again experience the sort of total moral depravity that the Bloodlands saw for twenty-five years. There follow a couple of superb reviews from some of the greatest historians of Europe:

Tony Judt
“For over a decade in the middle of twentieth century, the lands between Russia and Germany were the killing fields of Europe. Tens of millions of civilians from Poland to Ukraine, Lithuania to Belarus were starved, beaten, shot and gassed to death by the authorities and armies of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. We think we know this story and we assign it shorthand labels: Auschwitz, the Gulag. But neither the concentration camps (which were mostly not death camps) nor the Soviet network of labor camps in Siberia (from which many survived) were representative of the worst crimes committed in these years. Jews were without question the supreme victim (and in the Nazi case, the dominant target); but there were many other victims with whom western readers are far less familiar. Without a better grasp of the scale and breadth of the suffering experienced in these lands, we cannot hope to appreciate the true impact of the twentieth century.

“In his path-breaking and often courageous study of Europe’s ‘bloodlands,’ Timothy Snyder shows how very much more complicated the story was. His account of the methods and motives of murderous regimes, both at home and in foreign war, will radically revise our appreciation of the implications of mass extermination in the recent past. Bloodlands – impeccably researched and appropriately sensitive to its volatile material – is the most important book to appear on this subject for decades and will surely become the reference in its field.”

I have Norman Davies Europe: A History and it is one of my favorites:

Professor Norman Davies, F.B.A., author of Europe: A History
“Nearly seventy years after VE-Day, World War Two continues to be perceived through a narrow Western perspective, and many basic problems about the war of 1939-45 remain unresolved. In Bloodlands – which refers to the huge belt of territory between Germany and Russia – Timothy Snyder examines the little known tract of the European continent that was scourged by Stalin as well as Hitler, and reaches some disturbing conclusions. Combining formidable linguistic and detective skills with a fine sense of impartiality, he tackles vital questions which have deterred less courageous historians: Where and when were the largest casualties inflicted? Who were the perpetrators, and which ethnic and national groups were victimized? How can one calculate and verify the numbers? This is a book which will force its readers to rethink history.”

Anne Applebaum's Gulag won the Pulitzer and is a must read for this era and region:

Anne Applebaum, New York Review of Books
“[A] brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century…. Snyder’s original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.”

Finally, The Economist:

“[G]ripping and comprehensive…. Mr. Snyder’s book is revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, he makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe’s modern history…. Even those who pride themselves on knowing their history will find themselves repeatedly brought up short by his insights, contrasts and comparisons…. Mr. Snyder’s scrupulous and nuanced book steers clear of the sterile, sloganising exchanges about whether Stalin was as bad as Hitler, or whether Soviet mass murder in Ukraine or elsewhere is a moral equivalent of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. What it does do, admirably, is to explain and record. Both totalitarian empires turned human beings into statistics, and their deaths into a necessary step towards a better future. Mr. Snyder’s book explains, with sympathy, fairness and insight, how that happened, and to whom.”

Figures don't lie, but liars figure

Clyde Prestowitz has a good article on how bad the US-SouthKorean Trade Pact would have been had S. Korea not backed out at the last minute.

...the Koreans, who have been relentlessly promoting this deal as essential to both Korea's future economic well-being and its national security, suddenly said they couldn't agree to a small increase in imports of U.S. beef or a slight relaxation of emissions rules for imports of small numbers of foreign auto imports.

Since, like China, South Korea already manipulates its currency and imposes a myriad of subtle bureaucratic regulations and informal agreements that make the Korean market one of the most closed in the world, one might wonder why Seoul couldn't agree to these two U.S. requests which would in no way result in any significant increase in Korean imports from the United States. But Obama should really thank his lucky stars for South Korea's economic paranoia because it may save him from his administration's own worst instincts.

I know we're all supposed to be free traders and that opposition to anything labeled free trade is strictly taboo. But really, does anyone truly believe that we have anything like free trade with South Korea? This is a country that, as a matter of policy encourages the infringement of foreign intellectual property, and whose courts routinely annul the Korean patents of foreign based companies.

Yes, the proposed deal would significantly reduce Korean tariffs and facilitate foreign investment in Korea and contains strong language on the protection of intellectual property. But if the courts won't enforce the language what is the point? And tariffs are not the real barriers to foreign penetration of the Korean market, especially since the Korean government can and does manipulate its currency to offset the effect of any tariff reductions. As for facilitating foreign investment in Korea, why do we especially want to do that when we need investment in the United States? Moreover, the proposed deal on investment as presently constituted actually allows the U.S. branches of Korean companies to take disputes over U.S. regulatory rulings and impacts out of the American legal system by appealing to the World Bank and the International Court.

Isn't that something? The United States has consistently refused to join the International Criminal Court on grounds of protecting national sovereignty, but was just on the verge of signing a trade deal that would enable foreign companies to evade the sovereignty of the U.S. legal system in certain disputes. I wonder if the Republicans who have been promoting the deal understand that. But sovereignty is not really the main point; that would be jobs. Here, the deal fails utterly.

Prestowitz went on to get personal:

If you are for the deal, you can easily find a computer model that will confirm your view and vice versa. So let me put it in the words of one of the Korean negotiators whom I know and to whom I posed the question of whether, honestly between friends, he thought the deal would significantly increase U.S. exports to Korea or U.S. employment. His answer was an immediate "no." And no one who knows anything about doing business in Korea believes otherwise.

Obama might be lucky if Clyde is on the ball. Meanwhile, his best line in the article was:

...there are lots of studies by the various think tanks around Washington. Not surprisingly they only prove that while figures don't lie, liars figure.

Of course, the big story of Obama's trip remains the G-20's unanimous rebuff of US requests [Obama doesn't "demand"] to chastise Chinese currency manipulation. All this while the Fed does the same thing for US bonds, getting the wealthy countries who own half the US debt into a jittery mood.

Good footwork, Obama, and I don't think he would have minded going to the World Court to adjudicate disputes with S. Korea a lot anyway.

Wisconsin Shows Demonrats Where to Get OFF

READ EM AND WEEP

My native Wisconsin has finally returned to the GOP, after wandering in the wilderness for decades. The WSJ has all the details.

MSNBC Airs Vicious Demonrat Murderer Wannabe Ted Rall

MSNBC is still confused about Sharron Angle, or at least Lez MadCow and Tweety Matthews are so confused.

Bloomberg Plays Soup Nazi in NYC Role of Jewish Nanny

Bloomberg is turning into a completely obnoxious overseer of New York City's decline into a city of squabbling slaves.

An admitted fan of dumping salt on his own food, Bloomberg said the biggest culprits behind high-salt diets are the food processors that include copious amounts of sodium in canned soup and other prepared foods.
The posters irked soup giant Campbell's, which said they are "not an accurate representation of the company's soup portfolio," spokeswoman Juli Mandel Sloves said.
"Campbell is an acknowledged leader in sodium reduction. We have been reducing sodium across our portfolio for decades," Sloves added.
The campaign costs $370,000 -- $130,000 of which comes from city taxpayers. The rest is covered by the federal government, a city Department of Health spokeswoman said.

So much for chicken soup for the soul.

The Lamestream Media Fights Back Against Palin

The pathetic creeps in DC have their agents combing the country to find dissent among Republicans re Sarah Palin and at last they hit the jackpot!

Alabama Rep. Spencer Bachus (R) told members of the South Shelby Chamber of Commerce that former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was probably the reason for the GOP's failure to take control in the U.S. Senate in last week's election.

Yes, the renowned Republican sage Cong. Bachus shared his thoughts with the South Shelby Chamber and of course, the Washington Post was there to trumpet the news to the nation. This great newspaper, I mean the Shelby County Reporter, of course, is a lodestar of sagacity and philosophical profundity, and the Washington Post does well to transmit its musings to the nation at large, and memeorandum is right to pick this up and push it even further.

Yes, it's come to that, folks, after Sarah punched a huge hole in the GOP and laid the Demonrats into a decade long depression---they will be a midget party after redistricting having lost 682 legislative seats across the state legislatures due to the Tea Party inspired in large part by Sarah Palin---the editorial board of the Washington Post is now picking up expertise from the Shelby County Reporter.

Who wouldda thunkitt?

When is the US going to realize Syria is a Lost Cause?

I'm Jimmy Carter and I hate Jews more than you do!

Damascus is a wonderful ancient city. When I was there last, I was treated like semi-royalty, meeting with several ministers because I was the representative of Amoco Oil Co. at the time. The Oil Minister explained to me why Syria was such a dysfunctional country, and I was amazed that he spoke so freely, assuming that he was being bugged. However, he told me that there were five [5] intelligence agencies in Syria and that you could tell which one was tailing you by the license number and lettering on their black cars...! I swear I'm not making this up!

Bashar Assad is a figurehead who really doesn't control much of anything, unless things have changed recently. Since he's a mild-mannered opthalmologist from London, his British ways are off-putting, making one think he's civilized. However, he's a tool and has no character or steel in his spine.

The US still owes Syria ten times the 241 Marines killed in the Beirut tragedy in 1983 and for the American Embassy explosion in Beirut. But the sophomoric pinheads in this administration keep coming to their door for some sort of foreign policy alms.

Only the Israelis know how to treat the stinking piles of steaming dog-turds that run Syria.

Kristi Noem Will Kick Dem Sen. Johnson out of SD seat

Congresswoman Kristi Noem

Kristi may be the next Senator from S. Dakota.

Johnny Dollar Exposes Moron MadCow

My Real Name is Alice and I'm Nine Feet Tall

Rachel MadCow is a fraud:

Rachel Maddow gave a lengthy defense of the recently suspended Keith Olbermann that spent little time justifying his violation of NBC policy (undisclosed donations to Democratic candidates). Instead Ms Maddow sought to fog the issue by launching into a diatribe about the evils of...Fox News! She kicks it off with a laundry list of sins from ‘Fox News hosts’. Unfortunately, she cites example after example that have nothing to do with Fox! Hannity interviewing his pal John Gomez: Rachel doesn’t tell you this but that was on his radio show. Hannity endorses Kasich: radio. Beck helps Bachmann raise money: again, radio.

Maddow thinks she has a gotcha when she reveals that Sean Hannity headlined a Republican fundraiser. But then there’s this:
The Broomfield Democrats invite you to the Carter Dinner. This is the largest annual fundraising event for the party and this year's keynote will be given by MSNBC's Ed Schultz!
We hear a lot about Rachel Maddow, the great ‘journalist’, the Rhodes scholar. But she doesn’t know when hosts on her own channel are raising money for the Democratic party? The reason is simple: Maddow didn’t do any research. Her idea of journalism is to lift her facts straight from Media Matters, a partisan, agenda-driven website. Since Media Matters didn’t tell her about Schultz’s fundraising, Rip ‘n’ Read Rachel didn’t know about it.

Maddow hones in on Sarah Palin for her contributions and endorsements, inexplicably referring to her as a ‘Fox News host’. In fact, Palin is a contributor at FNC, just as Harold Ford Jr is a contributor at MSNBC. You know Mr Ford. He’s the guy who gave thousands to Dick Durbin (D), Barbara Boxer (D), Jack Conway (D), Kirsten Gillibrand (D), Steny Hoyer (D), and several other (D) candidates in the 2009-2010 cycle. Rachel gave him a pass, but to be fair, how could she have known? Media Matters didn’t tell her. Not to mention Howard Dean, contributor on CNBC who also serves as an analyst on MSNBC. He’s been busy raising money all over the place.

Maddow has a convenient out regarding Dr Dean: since he works for CNBC, he’s ‘not bound’ by the same rules, even though he appears regularly on MSNBC. But wait. If Dean’s political work is irrelevant because he doesn’t come under NBC rules, then why does Maddow spend all that time rattling off Media Matters talking points about people on Fox? They don’t come under NBC rules either! FNC allows its opinionators to make contributions because that’s what they are: opinionators. Like Sarah Palin. Or Harold Ford. On Fox News, journalists host election night coverage; opinionators don’t. On MSNBC Keith Olbermann makes secret donations and violates NBC policy, while hosting what is called a ‘news hour’ and anchoring coverage, including election night, of the very people he gave money to.

By the way, Olbermann writes for, and has raised money for, a website with this stated purpose:
This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog....It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory.
Nothing political there, right?

Rachel Maddow’s holier-than-thou smugness is best encapsulated in her claim that on Fox News, hosts allow fundraising for Republican candidates on the air. Ergo Fox is political, MSNBC isn’t. Ms Maddow’s examples of this happening on FNC? A grand total of: one. John Kasich, appearing on Hannity, gave out his website URL and encouraged donations. It’s the only example Maddow gave because it’s the one Media Matters cited. That’s called ‘journalism’.

What follows is the video Rachel Maddow doesn’t want you to see. In it you will find fundraising URLs spouted by guests and even by hosts. You’ll see on-air soliciations for everything from campaign volunteers to cold, hard cash. Presiding over it all: Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, and--yes--Rachel Maddow. We report, you decide:

TSA SEIU Thugs Act on Lez-Queen Napolitano's Orders to Harass Tea Party Pols

No, I'm Not Janet Reno, But I'm Just as Confused About My Sexual Identity; Now Stop and Let My Boys Grope You.

I enjoy my TSA SEIU Job Groping for Bombs

Janet Napolitano is a vicious SS type post-Gestapo Lez-Queen and she has her TSA thugs harassing Republican and Conservative bloggers as an evident clandestine policy priority. The pitiful Obama who called for a new tone of political dialogue instead inflicts morons like Holder and biyotch thugs like Napolitano on citizens to show them the limits of their individual "rights." A Demonrat Police State is right around the corner:

At the start of the year we highlighted the case of war reporter Michael Yon, who was interrogated without reason by TSA goons who demanded he give them his private email passwords. We also wrote about another case where Steve Bierfeldt, a Ron Paul Campaign For Liberty treasurer, was hounded and harassed by TSA agents for the crime of carrying cash and Ron Paul campaign material.

Maybe Congressman Issa can put TSA at the top of his investigation list, with the DoJ and its careless neglect of voter safety re: the New Black Panther Party right behind at the number two spot. But with all the Chicago-style corruption surrounding Obama, Issa will find it difficult to drain this swamp before 2012. And ever notice how many of the TSA employees are ESL types who bark orders in a Spanish accent so thick as to be sometimes incomprehensible? I have, at Palm Beach International Airport. The most corrupt county government in the USA might have something to do with this, but it could be a corrupt TSA too.

Hello and Goodbye, California, the Lindsay Lohan of States

Hi, I'm Gavin, and I'm Gay...!

Lindsay Lohan is the superbrat of Hollywood, a genuine biyotch who refuses to grow up and is destroying her career---wait, she already DID destroy her career.

California resembles Lohan and is the most CORRUPT and LOATHSOME collection of semi-human beings in the world, spoiled rotten. The rest of the US should put the Western Hemisphere's version of Greece on double-secret probation and at the first opportunity, SHUT IT DOWN.

Thank God we have a Republican House of Representatives that won't allow this reprobate of states any more smack. From now on, Jerry Brown is going to have to get his fix from somewhere else. And if they try to secede, it will be a choice between letting the imbecile leave and giving them the Civil War treatment these clowns deserve.

Thirty-three Years Ago Flying Over India

Diwali from on high

1977 was a great year for me as I finished off my tour as Political Officer in Saudi Arabia at the American Embassy. That year during Ramadhan, we had a very cheap [$100, as I recall] amount to travel anywhere Hajj flights were returning to empty after disgorging their passengers in Jidda. I signed up for a trip to Jakarta and recall on the trip eastward at night flying over India in a Martinair L1011 and all the country from west to east was illuminated. I asked the Dutch pilots what the reason was and they said it was the festival of lights, or Diwali [I guess]. During my three week stay in Bali Sadat announced his trip to Jerusalem and I thought I was truly living in paradise.

On the trip back, the Dutch pilots let me sit in the cockpit and pointed out various sites in Sri Lanka where their Dutch bush pilot friends had crashed decades before. They let me land in Jidda in the cockpit after asking me if I were a licensed pilot...!

Great adventure, one of the best in my life.

Swedish Self-Hatred Displayed on State TV!!!

The YouTube rendition of a Swedish State TV demonstrates how fast Sweden is going downhill, as thisUN report on the Human Development Index predicts. Once a poster boy for freedom, Sweden is 15th in 2010 and is predicted to fall to 45th by 2030. due to unrestrained, unlimited immigration of freeloading Muslim terrorist-wannabes. A native Swede is told to avoid entire neighborhoods in Malmo, its largest port, because roving bands of Muslim gangs have kept the cowardly Swedish police out of their turf.

Pippi Longstockings will be a mulatto prostitute by 2030, according to the UN HDI report.

India's 10% Muslim minority rejects Obama

There are 120 million Muslims in India out of the 1.2 Billion population. The Muslim assault on Mumbai last year killed 170 innocent people.

Can you imagine what the US would be like if 10% of our population were this toxic waste human garbage?

If You Wonder Where the MSM Gets Its Unlimited Hateful Stupidity From....

This specimen of leftist race hatred should fill your belly with attitude...!

The Saudis' Dirty Huge Secret

If you're old enough, you may remember the 1990-91 Gulf War and the exhaustive news coverage of which I was a part, while parked in Riyadh. I got over there as an Oil reporter, but my real Saudi expertise had been acquired while I was Political/Military Officer in the US Embassy during the '70s. So I was VERY familiar with the awesome short-comings of Saudi military and found that their backward lack of cultural and social underpinnings in military arts was true for the entire Arab world, more or less.

My friend Fuad Ajami used to tell me that the Arab world was full of "broken societies" and E.M.Forester described the takeover of Alexandria by the Arabs around 650AD as conquest by "children, who took apart the elaborate city-state as a child would break a watch, not knowing even what the timepiece was existing for:" I worked for three years trying to comprehend the ingrained corruption based on defects of intelligence and character and basic cowardice, because the Arabs are cowards from top to toe, with only a very few exceptions: Here's "Murphy's Law" in Strategy.com:

November 4, 2010: Saudi Arabia has just ordered $60 billion worth of weapons and military equipment. That's in addition to the $50 billion it has spent on that stuff since September 11, 2001. All this is to protect trillions of dollars worth of oil from increasingly likely Iranian aggression. While the thousands of aircraft, helicopters, armored vehicles and other high-tech systems looks impressive, the actual impact of all this lethal hardware depends a lot on the skill of those using it. In this department, the Saudis have some serious problems. And it is generally very difficult to get Saudis to even discuss these problems.
Examples are widely available, and seen daily by the thousands of Western technicians, specialists and trainers hired by Saudi Arabia to keep their high-tech gear operational. For example, Saudis, and Arabs in general, don't care for the Western custom of establishing minimum standards for, say, fighter pilots. It's long been known that it is very difficult to wash out a Saudi pilot who is well connected (especially a member of the huge royal family). There are some very good Saudi pilots, but they are a minority. The rest get by. As long as they can take off and land, they can stay in a squadron. During combat exercises, especially with American squadrons, it's understood that the low overall performance of Saudi pilots is not to be discussed with the Saudis, or anyone else. Junior American officers get irked by this, but it's career suicide to disobey orders on this point. The Saudis do spend a lot of money on training and letting the pilots fly. For this reason, they are considered marginally better than other Arab air forces. But against the Iranians, who more enthusiastically accepted Western training methods, they would have problems. Iranian aircraft are older and less well equipped, but pilot quality would make up for a lot of that.

The problem extends to ground crews, who don't take responsibility seriously and have to be constantly hounded by their foreign advisors and specialists hired to make sure the aircraft are flyable. And when something goes wrong, the foreign experts are expected to take the blame. That's what the foreigners are there for.

Many Saudis are aware of the problem, especially those who have studied in the West, or spent some time there. As a result, there are some very competent Saudi doctors, scientists and bankers. But this minority knows they are up against an ancient and well entrenched culture that does not seek out innovation and excellence as it is done in the West. The more insightful Saudis seek ways to work around these problems. For example, the royal family established the National Guard in the 1930s, as a private, tribal army, that is now almost as large as the regular army and considered more dependable and effective than the regulars. That's because the National Guard troops follow traditional rules of military leadership, and have a personal relationship with the king. Only men from tribes that are known to be loyal to the Saud family may join, and they are expected to make their family and tribe proud. Saddam Hussein, and other Arab leaders, form similar forces. Saddam has his Republican Guard. Despots the world over tend to have a guard force recruited more for blood ties and loyalty, than for anything else.

The regular forces (army, navy and air force) are just government jobs, run by another government bureaucracy. There are lower standards because there are none of the family or tribal ties that demand better. Only in the West do most people give the same devotion and respect to non-family/tribal institutions.

It comes down to a different cultural attitude towards taking responsibility for your actions. It's human nature to avoid failure, or taking responsibility for a mistake. Thus we have the concept of "saving face." One reason the West has made such economic, cultural, military and social progress in the last five hundred years is because they developed a habit of holding people responsible for their actions and giving out the rewards based on achievement. In the West, this sort of thing is taken for granted, even if it is not always practiced.

But in much of the rest of the world, especially the Arab world, things are different. Most Arab countries are a patchwork of different tribes and groups, and Arab leaders survive by playing one group off against another. Loyalty is to one's group, not the nation. Most countries are dominated by a single group that is usually a minority, as in Bedouins in Jordan, Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq (formerly) and Nejdis in Saudi Arabia. All of which means that officers are assigned not by merit but by loyalty and tribal affiliation.

Then there are the Islamic schools, which are so popular in Moslem countries, which favor rote memorization, especially of scripture. Most Islamic scholars are hostile to the concept of interpreting the Koran (considered the word of God as given to His prophet Mohammed). This has resulted in looking down on Western troops that will look something up that they don't know. Arabs prefer to fake it, and pretend it's all in their head. Improvisation and innovation is generally discouraged. Arab armies go by the book, Western armies rewrite the book and thus usually win.

All of this makes it difficult to develop a real NCO corps. Officers and enlisted troops are treated like two different social castes and there is no effort to bridge the gap using career NCOs. Enlisted personnel are treated harshly. Training accidents that would end the careers of US officers are commonplace in Arab armies, and nobody cares.

Arab officers often do not trust each other. While an American infantry officer can be reasonably confident that the artillery officers will conduct their bombardment on time and on target, Arab infantry officers seriously doubt that their artillery will do its job on time or on target. This is a fatal attitude in combat.

Arab military leaders consider it acceptable to lie to subordinates and allies in order to further their personal agenda. This had catastrophic consequences during all of the Arab-Israeli wars and continues to make peace difficult between Israelis and Palestinians. When called out on this behavior, Arabs will assert that they were "misunderstood."

American officers and NCOs are only too happy to impart their wisdom and skill to others (teaching is the ultimate expression of prestige), but Arab officers try to keep any technical information and manuals secret. To Arabs, the value and prestige of an individual is based not on what he can teach, but on what he knows that no one else knows.

While Western officers thrive on competition among themselves, Arab officers avoid this as the loser would be humiliated. Better for everyone to fail together than for competition to be allowed, even if it eventually benefits everyone.

Western troops are taught leadership and technology; Arabs are taught only technology. Leadership is given little attention as officers are assumed to know this by virtue of their social status as officers.

In Arab bureaucracies, initiative is considered a dangerous trait. So subordinates prefer to fail rather than make an independent decision. Battles are micromanaged by senior generals, who prefer to suffer defeat rather than lose control of their subordinates. Even worse, an Arab officer will not tell an ally why he cannot make the decision (or even that he cannot make it), leaving Western officers angry and frustrated because the Arabs won't make a decision. The Arab officers simply will not admit that they do not have that authority.

This lack of initiative makes it difficult for Arab armies to maintain modern weapons. Complex modern weapons require on the spot maintenance, and that means delegating authority, information, and tools. Arab armies avoid doing this and prefer to use easier to control central repair shops (which makes the timely maintenance of weapons difficult). If you can afford it, as the Saudis can, you hire lots of foreign maintenance experts to keep equipment operational. All this is taken for granted inside Saudi Arabia, but looks quite strange to Westerners who encounter it for the first time.

Strategy.com has more on the arts of warfare, but the general lack of responsibility is derived from the ignorance of the Royal Family. Back when I was Pol/Mil officer, the famous "Vice Minister" of Defense, Turki bin Abdul-Aziz, known as Prince 10%, saw his role in the military as a piggy bank. When he ventured away from extortion and corruption, his knowledge of advanced systems was nugatory. He once ended a long conference between high-ranking Saudi and American brass by asking "why can't the Americans make the F-15 easier to fly like driving a car?" Even Prince Bandar bin Sultan shrugged in wonder at the pervasive lack of knowledge that his elders persisted in displaying in public.

This reminds me of the funniest story about Saudi ignorance, which is a subject which would require an encyclopedia to do justice to: After President Eisenhower received King Saud in 1956, Ike promised that a new airport would be built in Dhahran to upgrade the World War II air base the Americans used to bomb Germany with. So the American pilot was dumbfounded when he was flying back to Saudi Arabia with the King and his retinue when suddenly, he was asked to land in the new airport in Dhahran? The pilot explained that it would take a year and change to build said-airport, but the King insisted: "The President told me that the airport would be built and now i want to land on it...!"

Go figure. Working with the Saudis is like going to the dentist who uses pliers and a chisel to do his handiwork. As they say in Texas, the Saudis are "dumber than dirt."

Stupid American Pundits & the Euro-tard Cretins Who Ape Their Nuttiness

Mike Moynihan has a good piece in Reason's Hit and Run:

In the wake of Tuesday’s “shellacking,” I offer a few of my favorite columns from disappointed Obama supporters. This one from former CNN fixture and current Ed Schultz imitator Bill Press, writing at The Hill, insists that American voters aren’t “frustrated” or "angry," they’re simply “fickle and dumb.” In a 245 word piece, Press manages to denounce his fellow Americans as "dumb" a total of three times. No surprise here. Last summer, as Obama’s poll numbers were buckling, Press told his radio audience that the American people were "spoiled."

This atrocity, from Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, accuses Republicans of "fear mongering" unemployment and suggests that there is "something more sinister than voter frustration is behind the seismic shift in Washington." Fear mongering is bad, unless you are fear mongering Indian call center employees:

The next time you drive through a tollbooth and get stuck behind someone who doesn't have the proper amount of coinage to put in the machine, ask yourself when human workers are coming back. Think about these missing jobs the next time you call your credit card company and someone who you know is on foreign soil tries to sort out your issue.

The next time you pump quarters into a soda machine—where's the soda jerk?—think of the jobs we could create by embracing luddism! And the next time you use one of those convenient-yet-job-killing ATMs, think of all of the starving people in West Virginia who would love to work as a bank teller. (Incidentally, I remember my father tossing coins into “the machine” on the Mass Pike way back in the 1980s).

At the perpetually-outraged Daily Kos, I recommend this delightful “open letter to the white right,” accusing honky voters of throwing a collective “temper tantrum” at the polls. The increasingly awful Eugene Robinson, last seen arguing that the nonsense phrase “take back America” was the English-language equivalent of ein volk, ein reich, ein fuehrer, said much the same in the Washington Post: "This isn't an 'electoral wave,' it's a temper tantrum....The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.” Now, now, Eugene. Who’s sounding like the whinging baby here?

Across the European media, reactions were pretty much what one would imagine—racism, Tea Party nuttiness, assurances that the results don’t represent a shift to the right, etc. Germany’s Tageszeitung pursued the racial angle. Denmark’s Politiken thought Danes would be interested to know that Sarah Palin’s daughter didn’t vote, that “California voters would rather [elect] a dead Democrat than a living Republican,” and that there are now, after the exit of Illinois’s ethically challenged Sen. Roland Burris, no blacks in the Senate.

But as usual, Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter wins the day with the predictable headline “Obama Portrayed as Hitler, Stalin, and the Devil"—which probably explains the "shellacking." "Barack Obama was a messiah for voters, received the Nobel Peace Prize and was praised for his talent for communicating,” the paper writes. “Now he’s portrayed as Hitler, Stalin, and the devil. Dagens Nyheter talked to experts about how the storm of criticism effects the American president’s leadership.” And if you were wondering—and I know you weren’t—all of these were news stories, not opinion pieces.

Oh, and I almost forgot this classic: Huffington Post scribbler Frank Schaeffer reveals that Americans voted Republican not only because of unemployment or skepticism of the health care bill, but also because they believe in biblical “End Times” prophesies. Yeah, I don't get it either. So I put the question to you: Which is in worse shape, the state of the American economy or the state of American punditry?

Eugene Robinson is much worse than Bob Herbert, who is merely a single-digit IQ mush-mind. Robinson was chortling in the background as Chris Matthews was being bitch-slapped by Michele Bachmann---too stupid to figure out what was going on.

It's going to be a lot of fun watching hermaphroditic sport-of-nature Rachel MadCow disport her hysterics on the now-nearly unwatchable MessNBC. If ComCast doesn't do a search and destroy operation soon on the mess GE left behind, prepare for more blood-letting on the left's imaginary video game---Blade Runner for midget minds

Michelle Malkin chirps in her take on the fact that Olbermann is not the only malefactor over there on the hysterical left.
On the August 17 edition of ‘Countdown,’ host Keith Olbermann used the donations to do the only thing he’s capable of doing: criticizing Fox News.
“We now have another million reasons why Fox News is the Republican news channel, correct?” Olbermann asked Media Matters president Eric Burns.

Olbermann said that GE, MSNBC’s parent company, donated an equal amount of money to both the DGA and RGA. He didn’t mention, however, that according to OpenSecrets.org, in 2008, 100 percent of MSNBC Cable’s donations went to Democrats and 99 percent of NBC’s donations went to Democrats.
Additionally, so far in 2010, 100 percent of ABC News’s donations have gone to Democrats and CBS Corporation’s PAC has contributed $51,000 to Democrats in 2010.
The Media Research Center previously noted News Corp.’s donations favored Democrats and that other outlets critical of the donation, such as Viacom’s Comedy Central, have all given substantial money to Democrats, yet there is no outrage over their political contributions.

The usual "what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable" double standard of the ultra-left networks and their cable spawn.

Why Colbert and Stewart are Condescending Dolts...

Peter Beinart is one of America's smartest thinkers. His observation about last weekend's big DC rally hits the ball out of the park:

Finally, the focus on “sanity.” Talk about condescending. The Tea Party types who believe that expanding government undermines their freedom are not insane. They’re tapping into a deeply-rooted American fear of government power, one that would be immediately recognizable to Calvin Coolidge or Strom Thurmond... The Tea Partiers, in other words, are making a serious argument, which the left too often tries to dismiss by calling them nuts. In fact, the haughtiness reflected by such insults conceals the left’s confusion over how to respond ideologically. The Obama administration has barely tried to argue that activist government can make people more free—by, for instance, guaranteeing their health care coverage and thus freeing them to leave a dead end job. In America today, as at past moments in our history, there’s a profound debate underway not just about how to right our economy but about the relationship between capitalism and freedom. Pretending it’s not a real debate is a great way for the left to lose.

Economist writer "W. W." goes on to say that:

I think "the left's confusion over how to respond ideologically" to the right's libertarian-sounding arguments flows in part from the left's own confusion about what it stands for. If the contemporary right is an uneasy fusion of conservative and libertarian articles of faith, the contemporary left is an uneasy fusion of technocratic progressive and liberal-democratic conviction. One sees progressive managerial elitism most clearly in the left's public-health and environmental paternalism. The rarely uttered idea is that the people who know best need to force the rest of us to do what's good for us. Whatever you think of this sort of state paternalism, it isn't liberal or liberty-enhancing in any non-tortured sense. The progressive technocrat's attitude toward liberty is: "Trust us. You're better off without so much of it." The more the left is inclined to stick up for this sort of "activist government" as a progressive, humanitarian force, the less it is inclined to couch its arguments in terms of liberty. And that's just honest. More honest, I would add, than social conservatives who in one breath praise liberty and in the next demand the state imposition of their favourite flavour of morality.

Here's a bit I put up on the blog Democracy in America over at the Economist---caution, redundancy alert.

Beinart is precisely right when he talks about the condescension of the liberal left and its constant nattering about the sanity of its opponents, or how "well-read" they are. I find that most Tea Party members are extremely thoughtful and well-read people, just within the ambit of my personal experience. And W.W. hits the sweet spot of the racket with:
"If the contemporary right is an uneasy fusion of conservative and libertarian articles of faith, the contemporary left is an uneasy fusion of technocratic progressive and liberal-democratic conviction. One sees progressive managerial elitism most clearly in the left's public-health and environmental paternalism. The rarely uttered idea is that the people who know best need to force the rest of us to do what's good for us. Whatever you think of this sort of state paternalism, it isn't liberal or liberty-enhancing in any non-tortured sense. The progressive technocrat's attitude toward liberty is: "Trust us. You're better off without so much of it." The more the left is inclined to stick up for this sort of "activist government" as a progressive, humanitarian force, the less it is inclined to couch its arguments in terms of liberty. And that's just honest. More honest, I would add, than social conservatives who in one breath praise liberty and in the next demand the state imposition of their favourite flavour of morality."

This sort of governance, the "soft tyranny of the nanny state," is precisely how the education, media, and Hollyweird establishments are trying to establish a totally new civic mantra, with individual rights hardly even a blip on the moral radar while the so-called "humanitarian humanism" of the techno-left asserts its control over all areas of life in a so-called "democracy."

It's the Ideology, Stupid!

Here's a paragraph from TNR that makes some sense, unlike the usual drivel that Judis and Chait propose in a diurnal fashion:

What about age? The conventional wisdom before November 2 was that seniors enraged or terrified by changes in Medicare would turn out in droves to punish those who voted for health reform while young people disillusioned by Obama’s failure to create the New Jerusalem would abstain. That did happen, but only to a modest degree. Voters of ages 18-29 constituted 12 percent of the electorate in 2006; 11 percent in 2010. Voters over 65 were 19 percent of the total in 2006; 23 percent in 2010—noticeable but hardly decisive. If 65 and overs had constituted the same share of the electorate in 2010 as in 2006, the Republicans’ share would have declined by only .7 percent—about one-tenth of their actual gains.

We get more significant results when we examine the choices Independents made. Although their share of the electorate was virtually unchanged from 2006, their behavior was very different. In 2006, Democrats received 57 percent of the Independent vote, versus only 39 percent for Republicans. In 2010 this margin was reversed: 55 percent Republican, 39 percent Democratic. If Independents had split their vote between the parties this year the way they did in 2006, the Republicans share would have been 4.7 percent lower—a huge difference.

But why did they change? Here we reach the nub of the matter: The ideological composition of the electorate shifted dramatically. In 2006, those who voted were 32 percent conservative, 47 percent moderate, and 20 percent liberal. In 2010, by contrast, conservatives had risen to 41 percent of the total and moderates declined to 39 percent, while liberals remained constant at 20 percent. And because, in today’s polarized politics, liberals vote almost exclusively for Democrats and conservatives for Republicans, the ideological shift matters a lot.

To complete the argument, there’s one more step: Did independents shift toward Republicans because they had become significantly more conservative between 2006 and 2010? Fortunately we don’t have to speculate about this. According to the Pew Research Center, conservatives as a share of total Independents rose from 29 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in 2010. Gallup finds exactly the same thing: The conservative share rose from 28 percent to 36 percent while moderates declined from 46 percent to 41 percent.

This shift is part of a broader trend: Over the past two decades, moderates have trended down as share of the total electorate while conservatives have gone up. In 1992, moderates were 43 percent of the total; in 2006, 38 percent; today, only 35 percent. For conservatives, the comparable numbers are 36 percent, 37 percent, and 42 percent, respectively. So the 2010 electorate does not represent a disproportional mobilization of conservatives: If the 2010 electorate had perfectly reflected the voting-age population, it would actually have been a bit more conservative and less moderate than was the population that showed up at the polls. Unless the long-term decline of moderates and rise of conservatives is reversed during the next two years, the ideological balance of the electorate in 2012 could look a lot like it did this year.

If this is true, the silly analysis of MessNBC and CNN on how to win back the House in 2012 is as time-wasting as it seems. Rather, how to keep the new conservatives alert to the dangers of Obamacide is going to be Fox's main item of business. Here is Chait's Lamentation onanother TNR article.

Why are Republicans in strong position to hold the House [in 2012]? Three reasons:

1. Natural geography. Even if House districts were drawn up with no partisan tilt in mind, Republicans would have a natural advantage. Democrats are frequently clustered together in overwhelmingly Democratic districts, creating ultra-safe seats that waste votes. There are fewer districts that are equally concentrated with Republican voters.

Thus Republicans can win the House even if they don't have more voters who support them. The median House district is about 3 percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole. In order to hold the House, Democrats need to control a lot of Republican areas, some of them extremely Republican areas. The GOP is much less dependent on holding onto seats in unfriendly territory.

2. Redistricting. If that's not a problem enough for Democrats, it's about to get a lot worse. Republicans had their wave election at a very convenient time, putting themselves in position to control numerous state legislatures and thus control the next round of redistricting, which will last a decade. Partisan gerrymandering can be an extremely powerful tool, and combined with the natural geographic gerrymander, can give Republicans an overwhelming advantage, if not quite an absolute lock.

3. Timing. The best way to have a wave election is to have the other party control the presidency during a bad economy or some kind of major scandal. Democratic waves in 2006 or 2008 owed a great deal to the non-existent income growth during the Bush years. The GOP wave owed a great deal to the economic crisis. But in 2012, Democrats will still have the White House, so they won't benefit from an anti-incumbent wave. (They may pick up some seats due to sporadic voters re-engaging.) The best hope of a big wave would come from a deep and extended economic crisis that gives Republicans control of government in 2012, continues through 2014 and paves the way for a midterm backlash. But that's not exactly a positive scenario.

Of course, Chait dares not speak of the Senate, which in 2012 will have 22 Dem seats vulnerable versus eleven GOP, which will make for a landslide opportunity given the number of states now with Republican governors.

I for one can't wait. Let's choose now who would be the grown-up GOP candidate for POTUS...!

Comments About the First Nitwit and His Failed Two Years of Beta Socialism

Here are some comments that I made to the Economist magazine as their editorial staff lurches leftward with the advent of Peter Avent, an American-style JournoList cabal member, polluting the news and editorial product of that once well-written rag.

Obama is the very first far-left president the US has ever had and he's done a great deal of harm already in breaking up the economy and trying to turn the American economy into a soft-tyranny type Euro-nanny state. Obama is clueless as to the formation of capital---having basically acquired a marxist viewpoint in his very limited scholarly exploits [his much vaunted "president" of the Harvard Law Review job was a sinecure ceremonial post, not that of the ink-stained editor in chief]. Obama never had a real professor's job at U of Chicago either. He was an adjunct professor who was given an office over the entire objections of the Chicago Law faculty, merely to satisfy the University Regents. That's been the story of this coddled tyro's life---his "community organizing' was a chimera and since he's been president, his main skill has been reading off a teleprompter, often gaseous speeches more notable for Churchillian grandeur than any practical punch.

He was elected as the non-GWBush, the tongue-tied dolt who tried to put a camel through the needle's eye on guns and butter. The Economist has been taken over by JournoList.serve scribblers like Peter Avent and now suddenly is no longer the sensible mag of old---but still Lexington seems to understand the American way of life which is so scorned by Euro and Latino types who lurch in their own countries sideways at the moment. The US is suffering from a fiscal crisis, not a business crisis, and throwing money at a fiscal crisis simply makes banks balance their books while businesses hunker down and don't borrow to expand---that leaves Obama playing Johnny Appleseed with borrowed money and Boehner having to be the fiscal sheriff trying to rein in silly Keynesian excesses to keep the crooks out of Dodge City. I was going to use Jesus in the Temple with the money-changers, but the secular crowd who reads this mag might miss the reference.

This was in response to a particularly dense example of nitwittery:

One commenter said:


"If Obama would pursue a "leftish" agenda you would give the american people a PUBLIC OPTION which 70% wanted or a single payer system... etc."

I guess the real poll of the people who voted and for the last YEAR have said in over 60% percentages that they want ObamaCare repealed doesn't count in a 70% poll for the public option---one of those polls which Dems specialize in by excluding Republicans and independents---one poll 18 months ago versus about twenty since then which have seen a steady EROSION of support for ObamaCare and a 60% of the voters who want to repeal the ridiculous 2600-page monstrosity.

Here is an excellent observation by a Mr. Naegele:

We are witnessing the end of Barack Obama's presidency. What happened on Tuesday is merely the tip of an enormous iceberg. Between now and the 2012 elections, the twin pincers of the American economy and his Afghan War will seal his political fate. In all likelihood, he will be precluded from running for reelection, just as Lyndon Johnson was in 1968.

See http://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/the-end-of-barack-obama

Regrettably, the Economist does not understand American politics, or the political tsunami that just swept through the country, which will roll through the 2012 elections. For example, the article states:

"[The future of the 'American Right' is] clouded by three . . . things: fury, an absence of ideas and more than a little craziness. Much though the leaders of the tea-party movement claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan, they lack both the Gipper’s sunny optimism and his pragmatism."

This is utter nonsense, and simply reflects the Economist's political wishes and biases.

The fury or anger is shared broadly by Republicans, Independents (who constitute approximately one-third of American voters), "disenchanted" Democrats, and supporters of the Tea Party movement. The pejorative, "American Right," is a misnomer. Those arrayed against Barack Obama are broad-based; and they reflect a growing recognition of who the U.S. president really is—which would have been evident if more Americans had read his book, "Dreams from My Father," before the 2008 elections.

See, e.g., http://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/is-barack-obama-a-racist; see also http://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/the-rise-of-independents

The Economist's biases are further reflected in the following statement: "[B]y backing a stimulus now[, Obama] has a cogent answer to the immediate problem of the stuttering recovery." This too is nonsense, because his last so-called "Stimulus Package" was devised by Nancy Pelosi and her House Democrats, and it did almost nothing to stimulate the American economy and merely wasted American taxpayers' monies.

As a further example of how "out of touch" the Economist is, and how it failed to understand what really happened on Tuesday, the article refers to the "distraction of various Republicans, including perhaps Sarah Palin." To characterize Palin as a "distraction" is the height of far-Left elitist sentiments, which were rejected in America on Tuesday.

If anything, Palin is the darling of the Tea Party movement, which energized the moribund Republican Party and may decide its future—and that of its “establishment.” While there is a long list of other potentially-strong GOP candidates, the often-outspoken Palin has “caught fire” and connects with her audiences like few politicians can. Barack Obama did this prior to the 2008 elections, but he has lost his luster and faded.

daveinboca wrote: Nov 4th 2010 7:02 GMT
@rewt
Yes, the Dems are famous for peeling off one or two Senators from liberal constituencies to join in their plundering of the national wealth or regulating free market processes---then calling the "compromise" bi-partisan. The Dems are specious and spurious, but they bribe Republican outliers very well and we can hope this will redound against them, not in their favor. Even Scott Brown was seduced by Harry Reid after his victory in MA to support a silly paperwork-heavy regulation of the financial industry, an industry few Democrats understand except in gross marxian terms to begin with.

Followed by my commentary:

I have to agree with Mr. Naegele that Palin is doing a marvelous job in recommending candidates who then garner immense support and coast to victory. Here in FL, a virtual unknown named Pam Bondi received Palin's endorsement a week before the August primary and coasted from nowhere to be the GOP candidate for Attorney General, always a steppingstone to the governor's mansion. Young Ms. Bondi pondered in wonder to a talk-radio host that Palin had not even called her up to discuss the endorsement. Palin's pixie dust worked as well as Obama's in 2008 with the exception that Palin has been vetted exhaustively, while Obama still remains a virtual stranger due to lack of due diligence by the lamestream media and the fact that all info about Barry Soetero is kept under lock and key, officially described as "disappeared."

Pam Bondi's story has a happy ending. She beat the Dem hack by a two to one margin with over three million votes at last count. To this day, she's only talked to Divine Sarah on the phone, and knows only that her incorrupt resume and strong conservatism were the touchstones for Palin's endorsement.

Political magicians like Palin come around once a generation, but I doubt she will run herself for POTUS. I do think she might get Marco Rubio into a Vice President slot in 2012---he has genuine brains, charisma, and a true understanding of just what the United States means to a political refugee. And his speech-making powers exceed Obama's and are genuine, not artifacts of professorial paperwork.

MessNBC Morons Hoist by their Own Petard...

I'm the Guy From Apocolypse Now Coming for Your Souls

MessNBC has a ridiculous story on how more Tea Party candidates lost than won. Of course, the clueless dolt who wrote the piece, a biyotch named Alexandra, forgot to mention that most of the Tea Party House candidates who lost weren't in competitive districts, and the 32% who won, including 5 out of 10 Senators, are much more young and energetic than the average run-of-the-mill GOP candidate----or the corrupt machine clowns the Demonrats stuff into office in their "safe" constituencies gerrymandered for their convenience.

And MessNBC, being a non-journalistic endeavour, doesn't note the HUGE swamping of governor's pick-ups [11] and state legislatures [19] which make this an historic election.

Biyotch Alexandra wouldn't know what re-districting is all about---as the census and house districts are calculus to this clueless innumerate intern.

A reader enlightened the thread with the number of Demonrats shit-canned Tuesday, with their states..

Rep. Bobby Bright (D-Ala.)
Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.)
Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.)
Rep. Betsy Markey (D-Colo.)
Rep. John Salazar (D-Colo.)
Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.)
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.)
Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-Fla.)
Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.)
Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.)
Rep. Walt Minnick (D-Idaho)
Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.)
Rep. Debbie Halvorson (D-Ill.)
Rep. Phil Hare (D-Ill.)
Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.)
Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-Md.)
Rep. Mark Schauer (D-Mich.)
Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.)
Rep. Travis Childers (D-Miss.)
Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.)
Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.)
Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.)
Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-N.H.)
Rep. John Adler (D-N.J.)
Rep. Harry Teague (D-N.M.)
Rep. Michael Arcuri (D-N.Y.)
Rep. John Hall (D-N.Y.)
Rep. Michael McMahon (D-N.Y.)
Rep. Scott Murphy (D-N.Y.)
Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.)
Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D)
Rep. John Boccieri (D-Ohio)
Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Ohio)
Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio)
Rep. Zack Space (D-Ohio)
Rep. Charlie Wilson (D-Ohio)
Rep. Chris Carney (D-Pa)
Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-Pa.)
Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.)
Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.)
Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C)
Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.)
Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.)
Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Texas)
Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D-Texas)
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.)
Rep. Glenn Nye (D-Va.)
Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.)
Rep. Steve Kagen (D-Wisc.)

Republican House incumbents who have been defeated

Rep. Charles Djou (R-Hawaii)
Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.)

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44576.html#ixzz14FqNRPUV

Thank you, liberalkat, whoever you are...!
And here's a memo from another commenter:

Republican House incumbents who have been defeated

Rep. Charles Djou (R-Hawaii)
Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.)

___________________

Interesting thing about Cao. He was one, if not the only one, Republican in the House that wanted to work in a bipartisan way with Obama and Pelosi. He went out of his way to work with Obama and Pelosi and tried to compromise as much as he could and even voted for ObamaCare. His reward? Obama personally endorsed his oppenent. Obama couldn't dispatch his bipartisan friend Cao fast enough.

Let's hope Cao has learned the same lesson many of the newly unemployed House Democrats have learned: Never, ever trust a rat like Obama.

Obama is a rat who will stab anyone who gets close to him in the back. He even skipped his mother's deathbed because of "scheduling conflicts" back in 1996!

When is the adult media, as opposed to MSM shit-stained rags like the NYT, going to reveal the true nature of this BEAST!

Sayonara to sick twisted Canuck Psycho Jennings Forever!!!

Ah, Just What I felt!

The Tingle---I'm a True Homo Now Forever!

Tweety-bird Matthews AKA "The Tingler" obviously had Remember about 16 years ago when sicko ladies man Pierre Jennings twisted his moustache and intoned:

"Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It's clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It's the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week....Parenting and governing don't have to be dirty words: the nation can't be run by an angry two-year-old."

-- ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings in his daily ABC Radio commentary, November 14, 1994.

This piece of shit started smoking again "because of 9/11", the toad whined. Thank God this piece of shit went to Hell coughing out his lungs and not repenting for his stupid-ass attitude. He should be happy interviewing LBJ down there and waiting for Obama to descend with the latest Cliff Notes.

Dirk Tingler Bitch-Slapped on National MessNBC

Tweety-bird Matthews got ritually emasculated last night by Michelle Bachmann on MessNBC and everyone's legs are tingling in response!

Michael Barone Spells it All Out

Michael Barone is a true genius of American politics, underappreciated because of his conservative take on politics.

But, say the Obama Democrats, shouldn't ordinary people -- in particular, shouldn't the blue-collar working class -- be grateful to a government that tries to "spread the wealth" (Obama's words to Joe the Plumber) in difficult economic times?

They used to be, the argument would go. In post-World War II America, voters regularly moved toward the Democrats in recession years.

There's a difference, however, that has escaped Obama Democrats but perhaps not ordinary voters.

In recessions caused by oscillations in the business cycle from the 1940s to 1970s, voters were confident that the private-sector economy could support the burden of countercyclical spending on things like unemployment insurance and public works projects.

That spending would stimulate consumer demand, the thinking went, and once inventories were drawn down, manufacturers would call workers back to the assembly line. The recession would be over.

But it's been a long time since we've had a major business cycle recession. The recession from which we've technically emerged, but which seems to most voters to be lingering on, is something different, the result of a financial crisis.

And financial crisis recessions tend to be a lot deeper and more prolonged than business cycle recessions, as economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argue in their 2009 book, "This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly." "The aftermath of systemic banking crises," they write, "involves a protracted and pronounced contraction in economic activity and puts significant strains on government resources."

Barone then upsets the applecart big-time:

The very able economists in the incoming Obama administration seem to have ignored the difference between these two kinds of recessions. Council of Economic Advisers head Christina Romer was surely sincere when she promised that passage of the stimulus package would hold unemployment under 8 percent.

Similarly, administration economists evidently thought the private-sector economy could bear the burden of a national debt that doubled over a decade. It would bounce back like it usually does in a business cycle recession.

Tea partiers took a different view -- and before long, so did most voters. They seem to believe that permanent increases in government's share of GDP will inflict permanent damage on the private-sector economy -- and won't do much, if anything, to move us out of this prolonged financial crisis recession. The evidence so far seems to support them.

In addition, they seem to have understood that the threat of higher tax rates and more onerous and intrusive regulation from this administration would deter business executives from expanding, entrepreneurs from creating jobs, investors from taking risks and consumers from buying things.

Larry Summers could tell business leaders that they had nothing significant to fear from a sophisticated economic adviser like himself. But he was working for a president who told ABC's Charlie Gibson that he would favor higher capital gains tax rates even if they brought in less revenue to the government. This is a president who likes taking rich people's money away from them.

The business leaders know that Summers has gone, while the voters know that Obama remains and will be in office two more years -- but without a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and, perhaps, a Democratic majority in the Senate, if the polls are right.

So besides having an anti-colonialist, Brit-hating, Islamophile double-digit IQ on the emotional IQ scale, what is it about Obama that the USA will abide in the next two years before he is hopefully shit-canned as a second Jimmy Carter?

The line from the Obama camp is that voters are confused, ignorant, misled or even racist; they can't be rejecting the president's party on the merits. But voters, in rejecting the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of government, may be more sophisticated than their supposed betters. Leave the private sector alone, they seem to be saying, so it can recover from the financial crisis recession and once again create the bounteous and unscripted growth that has been the norm in American history.

The first order of business is to defund and hopefully overthrow ObamaCare.

Grapes of Wrath Turn into Demonrat Vinegar

Scott Rasmussen has a nice article on just why the big Republican victory tomorrow may just be a rejection of the Demonrat "tax and spend" policy and not approval of Republican policy goals:

...none of this means that Republicans are winning. The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power.

This is the continuation of a trend that began nearly 20 years ago. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president and his party had control of Congress. Before he left office, his party lost control. Then, in 2000, George W. Bush came to power, and his party controlled Congress. But like Mr. Clinton before him, Mr. Bush saw his party lose control.

That's never happened before in back-to-back administrations. The Obama administration appears poised to make it three in a row. This reflects a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

More precisely, it is a rejection of a bipartisan political elite that's lost touch with the people they are supposed to serve. Based on our polling, 51% now see Democrats as the party of big government and nearly as many see Republicans as the party of big business. That leaves no party left to represent the American people.

Voters today want hope and change every bit as much as in 2008. But most have come to recognize that if we have to rely on politicians for the change, there is no hope. At the same time, Americans instinctively understand that if we can unleash the collective wisdom and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people, there are no limits to what we can accomplish.

What if the GOP Swept the Table---Except for CA's Mice and Men.

Nate Silver has the most interesting take on What If?
I

f a situation like the [Republican Tsunami/Earthquake/Meteor Hit] I described above transpires, it’s going to catch a lot of people by surprise. It really shouldn’t; it’s well within the realm of possibility. If Republicans do turn out to do even better than expected — and mind you, expectations are pretty lofty — here are five explanations that we’ll want to think carefully about on Nov. 3 and beyond.

(We’ll do this same exercise for Democrats at another point between now and Tuesday. Both of these pieces are intended to be devil’s advocate cases, so I’m going to raise the arguments, without necessarily giving as much voice to the counterarguments as I might ordinarily.)

1. Downballot and cross-ballot effects. Republicans are poised to win somewhere from 22 to 28 of the 37 United States Senate races on the ballot. There are also 37 races for governor; the picture there is a bit murkier, but Republicans will almost certainly win a clear majority, and could conceivably win as many as about 30.

With a few exceptions, governor and Senate races are higher profile than races for the House. They’re what get people in the door. Once a voter is in her polling place, however, he or she is usually going to vote the rest of the ballot.

Say a Republican-leaning independent turns out in La Crosse, Wis., to vote for Ron Johnson for Senate and Scott Walker for Governor (both candidates are likely to win). She hasn’t thought much about the House race there, which is between the incumbent Democrat Ron Kind and the Republican Dan Kapanke. If a pollster had asked her who she was going to vote for, she would probably say she was undecided.

It’s going to be a lot more natural for her to vote for Mr. Kapanke, however, the Republican, after having voted Republican at the top of the ticket.

Arguably, you can already see some of these effects in the polling. In New Mexico, for instance, the Republican Susana Martinez has run a very strong campaign for governor and seems likely to win. Sunday morning’s Albuquerque Journal poll, in addition to showing Ms. Martinez ahead, also has Republicans gaining ground in key House races in the state’s 1st and 2nd congressional districts. Perhaps these are enthusiastic supporters of Ms. Martinez who are now coming along for the ride on the rest of the ballot.

Likewise, in Iowa, The Des Moines Register poll, in which the Republicans Chuck Grassley and Terry Branstad have a clear lead in the races for Senate and governor, suggests that Republican candidates for the House are also strongly positioned, although they did not break out results for individual districts.

These effects, of course, would be localized ones by definition. They might tend to help Republicans in states like Iowa, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, where they are doing well at the top of the ticket. But it could hurt them in a couple of places like California and New York where the opposite is true.

2. Unlikely voters voted — and they voted Republican! Almost all pollsters apply likely voter models of some kind, which estimate how likely a respondent is to vote based on their degree of interest in the election, their voting history, and in some cases, their knowledge of things like where their polling place is. On average, these models show Republican candidates performing about 6 points ahead of their standing among all registered voters in these surveys.

Most of the people whom the models deem to be “unlikely voters” are Democrats, who appear to be less charged up about this election than Republicans, or who have more scattered voting histories.

But there could also be a group of Republican-leaning voters who are cast aside by these models: specifically, those who identify themselves with the Tea Party. While we’re still struggling to get a handle on exactly what types of voters affiliate themselves with the Tea Party, some group of them are folks who are dissatisfied with “politics as usual” and may until recently have been disengaged from electoral politics entirely. They might not have voted in 2006 or 2008, and perhaps also not in 2004 and 2000; a few might even be people who cast their last ballot for Ross Perot in 1992 or 1996, or who have never voted at all.

These people may also be deemed “unlikely voters” by the models, especially those that emphasize past voting history rather than enthusiasm. But other types of likely voter models make different assumptions: SurveyUSA, for instance, describes voters like these as “uniquely motivated” and makes some accommodation for them; they’ve shown much better results for Republicans this cycle than most other pollsters.

If these “uniquely motivated” Republicans turn out, but Democratic “unlikely voters” do not, Republican gains could be pretty extraordinary — especially for Tea Party-backed candidates.

3. The incumbent rule, or something like it, makes a comeback. The incumbent rule — the notion that undecided voters tend to break against the incumbent — is something that I’ve spent a lot of time debunking. There isn’t really any evidence that it’s been true in recent elections (the period I’ve studied in detail covers 1998 through 2008). Undecided voters in these elections were about as likely to vote for incumbents as challengers.

So, to cite the incumbent rule as a point of fact as wrong. As a theory, however — particularly one that applies to this election and not necessarily to others — perhaps it will turn out to have some legs. Stu Rothenberg, for instance, argues that the incumbent rule is “relevant only for wave elections,” of which this will presumably be one.

I’m still not completely convinced. Among other things, we don’t know that an election is a wave until it actually happens — 1998, for instance, which looked in advance of the election as though it might be a mini-wave for the G.O.P., turned out to completely fizzle. Arguments that this election is a wave, and therefore we can expect such-and-such to happen, tend to put the cart before the horse.

Still, it doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me that in an election in which both Democrats and incumbents are especially unpopular, undecided voters could tend to break against incumbent Democrats — particularly if the reason they were undecided is because they did not know very much about the candidates (something that will apply more to House elections than races for Senate or governor).

Or, forget about whether the Democrat is an incumbent or not — that may be something of a distraction. Undecided voters could simply break against Democrats period, given Democrats’ poor standing on the generic ballot, whether the Democrat is an incumbent, a challenger, or is competing for an open seat. While, technically, this would not be a manifestation of the “incumbent rule” (although it would probably be misinterpreted as such) it would be bad news for Democrats just the same.

4. The Scott Brown effect. Here is a little pet theory of mine. Say that you’re a fairly conservative Republican in Massachusetts. Your senators have been John Kerry and Ted Kennedy for many, many years. Your representative to the House is a Democrat. Your governor is a Democrat. Your state always votes Democrat for President. You feel compelled to vote out of patriotic duty, and you usually do. But deep down, you’re resigned to the fact that your vote won’t really make any difference, and the candidates you want to win never will. And to be honest, you’ve got a little bit of pent-up frustration about this.

Then Scott Brown comes along. He’s a good candidate. The Democrat, Martha Coakley, is a not-so-good candidate. It’s a weird election, a special election, in which turnout could be low — Scott Brown could actually win!

Do you think you’re not going to be — to borrow SurveyUSA’s term — “uniquely motivated” to vote for Scott Brown? And not just that, but also to campaign for Scott Brown, to donate to Scott Brown, and to tell all your friends to vote for Scott Brown, too?

Of course you’re going to be motivated: it might be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to send a Republican to Washington.

I can offer only anecdotal evidence for this, like the performance of Mr. Brown in January, or the performance of Barack Obama in Indiana in 2008, or the performance of some Democrats who won races for the Congress in some ordinarily very Republican-leaning areas in 2006. But if a party nominates a competitive candidate in a place where it hasn’t been competitive in a long while, it might get every last one of its voters to turn out — they’ll just come out of the woodwork. Not only that, but also the other party’s voters might be complacent, and the turnout operations won’t be as sophisticated as they might be in a district where they had to run competitive elections year after year.

If Republicans knock off a few Democrats in some very Democratic-leaning areas, this could be a big part of the reason why.

5. Likely voter models could be calibrated to the 2006 and 2008 elections, which were unusually good for Democrats. In addition to wrongly excluding some Republican “unlikely voters” (see Point No. 2), it’s also conceivable that some likely voter models based on past voting histories are overrating the propensity of Democrats to vote. The reason could be that some of them are based on past voting history, and a common question is whether the voter had participated in the last two elections.

But the last two elections — 2006 and 2008 — were good ones for Democrats, one in which there was little if any “enthusiasm gap,” or it may even have favored Democrats. This is, in fact, quite atypical: Republicans usually do have a turnout advantage, especially in midterm elections. Their demographics are older and whiter, and whites aged 50 and up are the most reliable voters. If likely voter models are benchmarked to 2006 and 2008 patterns, therefore, they could underestimate the turnout gap, giving too much credit to Democrats who voted in 2006 or 2008 but who don’t ordinarily. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics makes a nice version of this argument.

* * *
You might find these arguments extraordinarily persuasive, extraordinarily unconvincing or somewhere in between. I think some are better than others, and I don’t really mean to “endorse” them.

What we know, however, is that polls can sometimes miss pretty badly in either direction. Often, this is attributed to voters having made up (or changed) their minds at the last minute — but it’s more likely that the polls were wrong all along. These are some reasons they could be wrong in a way that underestimates how well Republicans will do. There are also, of course, a lot of reasons they could be underestimating Democrats; we’ll cover these in a separate piece.

I'll also read Nate's take on the semi-possible outcome that Dems might retain the House of Reps & not lose many seats at all.