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.

Marco Rubio: Veep in 2012?

Matt Kaminski has a piece in the WSJ on why Marco Rubio scares corrupt pols like Billy-Jeff Blow Job and other top Dems, including BHusseinO:

Something [besides his resemblance to Obama] accounts for Mr. Rubio's rise from a blip in polls against the popular governor in his party, to the runaway favorite tomorrow. He appealed as a different sort of Republican. He kept his pitch upbeat, shunned personal attacks, worked hard to widen support without apologizing for his conservatism, and more noticeably than anyone in this race ran on an unabashed and constantly invoked faith in American exceptionalism.

Bill Clinton sure noticed his success, and recently the former president threw a Hail Mary to stop him by nudging Kendrick Meek—the Democratic nominee who won a contested primary—to leave the race. The deal was intended to get Democrats behind Charlie Crist, who in April fled the GOP in the wake of the Rubio stampede to run as an independent and now stands in second place. Mr. Meek refused, leading the Clinton and Crist camps to get the story out last Thursday night to sap his support. Mr. Crist kept up the charge, calling Mr. Rubio "a tea party extremist" and "right-wing radical." Throughout this race, Mr. Rubio has inspired venom.

His response stayed in campaign character. He didn't call out any of the antagonists by name and repeated everywhere that "this story" showed what's wrong with insider Washington politics. His rallies are largely free of common GOP swipes at Obama, Pelosi and Reid. It's mostly earnest talk of governing philosophies and America's virtues.

Kaminski goes on to register some of Rubio's more attractive traits, other than being the non-scumsucker-Crist in the Senate Campaign:

The GOP's cranky side seems to bother him. He argues that the Republican Party needs to offer up clear alternatives to liberal policy, not just say no, and brighten its tone along the way. Take immigration. "Where Republicans have failed: We should be the pro-legal immigration party, not the anti- illegal immigration party," he says. If he wins, Mr. Rubio will be the most prominent elected Hispanic official in the U.S. from either party.

The immigrant experience provides the raw material for his most resonant message. Mr. Rubio's parents fled Cuba and worked blue- collar jobs all their lives. He paid his way through college and law school.

"The only privilege that I was born with was to be a citizen of the greatest nation in human history," he tells a breakfast crowd of supporters at the Original Pancake House in Palm Beach Gardens. "What makes America great is that anyone from anywhere can accomplish anything." The Obama agenda puts this unique inheritance in jeopardy, he says. Yet he keeps it all upbeat, inclusive, and to many people who see him in person, Reagan-esque.

"He's the only guy I know on the scene today who makes grown men cry," says Jeb Bush. Mr. Rubio is a political protégé of the former Republican governor. They share a preference for (in Mr. Bush's words) "hopeful aspirationalism" to broaden the party's appeal. He adds, laughing, that the younger man is a "much better speaker than I am."

Thank God Florida isn't California, although Rubio does come across like a much younger Reagan in his inclusiveness and lack of eagerness to slander and defame his opponents, two things lacking in scumsucker-parasite Crist.

The years in Florida politics leave some blemishes. The Crist campaign pushed the story that Mr. Rubio misused a party credit card, among other ethical lapses. None of it stuck, to the frustration of Democratic strategists, who insist that in any other year the allegations would have sunk him. Rubio advisers say at worst they amount to sloppy accounting on his part. But these charges will follow him beyond Tuesday, assuming his own aspirations are larger.

Mr. Rubio waves off the national attention as "fleeting most of the time." "Politics is full of one-hit wonders," he says. He adds that his focus is only on tomorrow. But his lead—at 19 points in the Real Clear Politics average of the polls—looks insurmountable. It might be noted that the race for governor, by contrast, is a toss-up.

Who knows what sort of senator Mr. Rubio might make, or how politics will play out in coming years. He has never met or spoken with Sarah Palin, who backed him. But with the political persona unveiled in this campaign, it's not hard to imagine him taking her place as the Republican in America who turns the most heads. For many people to his left, that's a scary prospect.

If you want some kicks, just go over to the comments pages of blogs like TPMDC or Daily Kos. I hope that the steam coming out of their ears will eventually blow their heads to smithereens as Rubio becomes a national candidate in 2012.

JOe Miller Screwed by MSM, Alaska-style

The local CBS skank-den had finished their phone call to Miller's campaign HQ, so they thought, when their subsequent conversation was caught when the phone didn't sit perfectly back in the CBS station's cradle---or something. That's when Miller's HQ caught the following snarky conversation, with a female bitch-whore evidently the chief impresario of the dirty tricks that the Commie CBS squad was planning to pull on Miller:

TRANSCRIPT OF KTVA AUDIO FROM OCTOBER 28, 2010
FEMALE REPORTER: That’s up to you because you have the experience but that’s what I would do...I’d wait until you see who shows up because that indicates we already know something...
[Laughter
[INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE REPORTER: Child molesters...
MALE REPORTER: Oh yes...Joe Miller’s...uh...get a list of people/campaign workers which one's the molester
[INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE VOICE: You know that of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.
[Laughter] MALE REPORTER: We need to find that one person... [INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE REPORTER: The one thing we can do is ....we won’t know....we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the... ‘Hey Joe Miller punched at rally.’
FEMALE REPORTER: Kinda like Rand Paul...I like that. [Laughter] FEMALE REPORTER: That’s a good one.

Now the filthy maggots at the CBS station have a far-fetched explanation that no one believes.

Sarah Palin called these perps "criminals."

I agree.

Raving After Krugboy Shits His Pants

My Pants are Leaking Brown!

Take a look at the comments page of the NYT after Krugman's latest fart in the bath. A bunch of paranoid lefties convinced that everything happening in the 2010 midterms was caused by evil GOP plots, and none of the fucktards considering for a moment that the Tea Partiers are not a part of the Republican Party, but rather vice versa, and that Demonrat libtards are the maggots in the meat. An obnoxious bitch named Aileen in North Carolina whines about the "extreme right teabag crowd" without realizing that she's using an obscene metaphor. Only John Kerr from San Francisco has a good answer to the nutjobs wailing and tearing their garments who infest that ragged fishwrap's comment page:

What a load of rubbish. Other countries are starting to recover without spending like sailors. People outside as well as inside need to have some confidence in US finances and the Dollar. Who would want to invest in the United States of Krugman? No one. Deflation is okay if it pertains to over-priced land and housing. Young people can actually aim to buy a home.
US problems long term are due to losing the race to educate our population and sending the best brains to Wall Street jobs that produce nothing. Our political leaders have wasted all the money that should have been set aside for retirements. Look north and you will find some pensions that actually have real assets instead of worthless IOUs. Our capital markets and technical innovators are our strengths and we need to rebuild confidence in our national solvency and stop penalizing success. And we have to stop listening to 20th century economists who never worked for or managed a business.

As for Krugman, here is the best riposte I've seen recently in the blogosphere re a cockamamie Nobel as moronic as Obama's.

Bye bye Miss American Pie

The Wall Street Journal now stands triumphantly over the land and allows itself a preliminary chortle at the foolish behavior of the Demonrats and their kind, the parasitic bloodsuckers who never started a business or met a payroll:

Perhaps Mr. Obama could have imposed more discipline on this crowd, and we advised him early to do so. He chose not to. We suspect he never wanted to, and multiple reports say he overruled then White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to side with Mrs. Pelosi on health care. Mr. Obama is responsible for lashing his Presidency to the Speaker's mast.

It's especially amusing to hear liberal complaints about the 111th Congress, because the reality is that Democrats have achieved most of what they set out to do. With only 40 Senate votes, Republicans couldn't stop a whisper until Mr. Brown arrived, and even then they let through financial reform and another round of stimulus spending. From her liberal perch, Mrs. Pelosi has a point when she laments that Democrats aren't getting credit for their legislative achievements. And our guess is that soon after November 2 the lads at MSNBC and the New York Times will speak of this as a liberal Golden Age and defend its every act.

That's my guess too as we shove off to friendlier shores for the real Americans homeland, the one behind the Golden Door of the statue of Liberty. Americans are a nation of individualists and were tricked into voting for a self-centered fool and his coven of bitch/witches, both male and female. I just watched the silly shit on Jon Stewart and he is an incorrigible fool. The WSJ expatiates on the subject of Pelosi, that insidious disease of the DEmonrat Machine Politics engendered in Baltimore and now rotting in SF. Hopefully, this botox bomb is the last female speaker we'll see in our lifetimes.

Mrs. Pelosi's real problem is with the American people. They understand what Democrats have achieved, and they dislike it. They thought they had elected a President who would focus on the economy, but instead they got the most far-reaching liberal social policies since the 1960s. Those policies have frightened business and produced a capital and hiring strike. Americans were told the $814 billion stimulus would hold the jobless rate below 8%, but two years later it is 9.6% and the economic recovery has stalled. They were promised fiscal restraint, and instead they got spending at a postwar high of 25% of GDP. They were told ObamaCare would lower insurance costs, but so far it has produced only higher costs and fewer health-care choices. They were promised a tax cut, but they can see tax increases coming next year, in 2013, and later to pay for all the spending. This is what has driven the electorate to the verdict it will render on Tuesday. The irony is that the Democrats most likely to lose next week are centrists and Blue Dogs in the most competitive election districts. Most liberals hold relatively safe seats, and their worst fear is that they'll lose their chairmanships. The exception is Mrs. Pelosi, who would lose her speakership and perhaps resign if Democrats lose their majority. But we suspect she has long believed that losing was possible but worth the risk to pass ObamaCare. You have to break a few careers to make a European entitlement state.

More in sadness than in anger, the WSJ, now the most paid-for circulation newspaper in the USA and perhaps the world, looks back on the last 45 years:

The larger lesson is that we are learning for the fourth time in 45 years that America can't be governed from the left. Democrats exploited the recession and the accident of 60 Senate seats to push the agenda of their dreams, and the American public has recoiled at the effrontery and the results. Repairing the damage of the 111th Congress will take years, and perhaps decades, but the first step is ousting the liberals who once again drove their party off a cliff.

I don't know if he's smart enough to figure it out, but the current POTUS had better get his act together or he'll go the way of Jimmy Carter, eternally ragging about how good his four years in office was and how he is the greatest of our presidents.

Pass the popcorn.

Another Obummer Lapse in Foreign Policy: EU & Russia Cozy Up to Each Other Because of US Disinterest

My Death Panels Will Get Y'all Soon Enough!

BHusseinO can't seem to buy a break nowadays. A recent German/French/Russian "Summit" was held in Deauville to begin to orchestrate the EU's relaxation of its NATO ties and construction of a new "security relationship" with Russia.

...there are obvious factors explaining the French and German initiatives. A major one is President Barack Obama’s perceived lack of interest and engagement in Europe. His failure to attend a Berlin ceremony commemorating the end of the Cold War and his cancellation of a meeting involving the E.U.’s new president has had symbolic weight. At the same time, the U.S. reset with Russia and the administration’s willingness to treat President Dmitri A. Medvedev as a potential Western-oriented partner has given the Germans and French the sense they were free to act on the basis of their own interpretations of the changes in Moscow. In this European view, the United States has become significantly dependent on Russia through its maintenance of military supply routes to Afghanistan and its heightened pressure, albeit in wavering measure, on Iran. Because the reset is portrayed by the administration to be a U.S. foreign policy success, criticism from Washington of Russia is at a minimum.

And Obummer has given the Russians a whole series of passes in other areas, why get so excited about the EU? Including the fact that the EU has no strategic partnership with NATO? Obummer is nothing if not asleep at the switch as the US train barrels down a tunnel to nowhere, which is his apparent foreign policy goal.

Ten days ago, when Mr. Medvedev offered Hugo Chávez of Venezuela help to build the country’s first nuclear power station, the State Department expressed concern about technology migrating to “countries that should not have that technology” — but added (bafflingly), that the relationship between Venezuela and Russia (for years Iran’s supplier of nuclear wherewithal) “is not of concern to us.”

Last week, more of the same. When Mr. Medvedev bestowed Russia’s highest honors at a Kremlin ceremony on a group of sleeper spies who were expelled from the United States last July, a State Department spokesman turned away a reporter’s question with a “no comment.” Washington chooses not to say anything either about Mr. Medvedev’s support, repeated in Deauville, for Mr. Sarkozy’s plan, as next year’s president of the G-20 consultative grouping, to focus its attention on limiting the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

In the Deauville aftermath, the Americans have preferred applauding Mr. Medvedev’s decision to come to a NATO summit meeting in Lisbon next month, following U.S. congressional elections. He is not expected to announce Russian participation in or endorsement of a U.S.-initiated antimissile shield for Europe — the United States’ notionally organic bond in strengthening the alliance’s trans-Atlantic future — yet the Russian president’s appearance as a guest on NATO’s turf could be seen as an important gesture of real cooperation.

Still, for all the Americans’ concern about Europe dealing with Russia on its own, there hardly has been a corresponding public statement from the administration that’s a call for caution about Moscow’s interest in setting up rivalries between NATO and the E.U. For David J. Kramer, a former senior State Department official with responsibility for Russia, the new circumstances show “the Russians now have far more leverage in the U.S. relationship than they should.”

But World Politics Review has a less Manichaen point of view on the zero-sum game that used to be called the Great Game which consisted in keeping Russia within its Soviet boundaries:

Finally, as Vinocur points out by citing a French source at Elysée Palace, it's premature to assess whether Russia's Western turn represents a permanent, or even a durable strategic shift. If you take the 2008 Russia-Georgia War as the highwater mark of Russian belligerence toward the U.S. and NATO, certainly the past year points in that direction.

But it bears noting that in the intervening two years, Russia has essentially accomplished all of the foreign policy objectives previously driving that belligerence. NATO's eastward expansion is off the table. The U.S. European-based missile defense system has been modified and multilateralized (although as Richard Weitz's WPR column today makes clear, it remains problematic). And Russian dominance in Central Asia is re-established.

In light of that, Russia's concerns have now begun to resemble more closely those of Europe and the U.S. -- namely, China's expanding influence, both globally and in Central Asia, as well as regional stability in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

That raises the question that poses the biggest problem to this sort of Russia fearmongering: Assuming the very unlikely emergence of an alignment between Europe and Russia that did replace the trans-Atlantic relationship, in what policy and regional areas would that threaten U.S. interests? Central Asia is a contested space mainly to assure European energy security, which such an alignment would logically moot. Interests in Afghanistan overlap entirely, with differences mainly concerning method (counternarcotics policy, in particular). On Iran, Europe is very closely aligned with the U.S. view, and would more likely exercise a moderating influence on Russia than the reverse. And in terms of balancing against China, Russia's Far East territory would provide a very useful northwestern frontier to preoccupy Chinese strategists. As for counterterrorism, counterproliferation and anti-piracy, Russia has been relatively cooperative, even at the height of its belligerent period.

A lot of the anxiety these kinds of summits provoke can be traced to a lingering distrust of European diplomacy, which is seen by most Americans as not Manichean enough. But the flipside of Europe's pragmatism is that it is driven by self-interest. And it will be quite a while before it is in Europe's interest to abandon the trans-Atlantic relationship. In the meantime, a more closely harmonized relationship with Moscow not only resembles the current U.S. policy toward Russia, but is in everyone's interest

.
Let's hope that after the mid-term elections chastise Obama into a saner look at things, he can get a grip on the foreign policy levers of strategy instead of trying to punish the Brits for being imperialists back a century ago and to soothe the undying hatred that vicious radical criminals like Ortega and Chavez nurture towards the USA.

Unless he's lost all contact with the world as it is.

Eric Boehlert Sux; Ed Shulz is a POS

I'm Here with Stupid!

Johnny Dollar answered chief cook and bottle washer Phil Griffin's challenge to find any on-air solicitations on MessNBC. Ed the Human Torch AKA The Talking Horse has several examples, all the while complaining that HE doesn't raise money on air like those evil people at FoxNEWS do. Eric B[ullshit] concurs.

D-bag Dan Pfeiffer's WH Blog Gets it Wrong & Stupid

I'm VERY Scary

Scarier Than Thou

Sperm=burper Dan starts out his White House blog with an egregious solecism:

...as special interest billionaires continued to pour secret donations of millions of dollars each into front groups supporting Republicans, we asked the obvious question: "What do they expect in return?"

This is especially hilarious in light of the Demonrats' outspending the GOP by almost $200 million so far in 2010.
Like menstruating coeds in a college dorm, the New York Times has an article on which GOP members are getting the most contributions in anticipation of their ascent to great power and sway over the House Ways and Means or the Armed Services Cte.
And the braying Ass[hole] Obama has quieted down about the "secret donations" now that it is becoming apparent that the feckless fuck-ups known as Demonrats are now outspending the Republicans by a good deal more than expected. POLITICO has the following tote-board up so far:

So far, the latest figures show that the Democratic Party machinery has outraised its Republican counterpart in this campaign cycle by almost $270 million. And even when outside spending on television advertising and direct mail is added to the mix, Republicans still haven’t closed the gap. The money race totals come to $856 million for the Democratic committees and their aligned outside groups, compared to $677 for their Republican adversaries, based on figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Why Doesn't NPR Shit-Can Loathsome Nina Totenburg?

I plagiarize and sometimes get CAUGHT!!!

James Taranto asks the question I was hoping someone would put forward. Most interestingly, Taranto asks why the NPR "preference cascade" is still in place about Totenburg, easily the most disliked and loathed "journalist" in DC. Thanks to Dr. Zero, he describes the sitrep thus:

I think one of the reasons the hardcore liberals who run NPR terminated Williams is their desire to abort a preference cascade. . . . As described by Glenn Reynolds in a classic 2002 essay, a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts. Preference falsification works by making doubters feel isolated and alone. . . .
Since a free society makes it very easy for individuals to change their opinions, they must be prevented from even considering such a change. Manufactured consensus is very fragile in a competitive arena of ideas, when there is no fearsome penalty for a "Fresh Air" listener who decides to switch over to Rush Limbaugh.
The manufactured liberal consensus about Islamic terrorism rolled off the assembly line a long time ago. . . . A credentialed, taxpayer-supported NPR liberal cannot be allowed to question this consensus. It will shatter too easily if the clients of liberalism begin connecting dots between underwear bombers and pistol-packing Army psychiatrists. They cannot be left to nod quietly in agreement with the earnest musings of Juan Williams . . . then look around the room and see all the other faithful liberals nodding at the same time. . . .
Juan Williams came too close to understanding ideas he was supposed to hate. The Left is deathly afraid of what happens when its constituents begin to understand the Right. They didn't like the idea of millions watching an NPR contributor break the biohazard seal on strictly quarantined ideas.

This is the dilemma of the hard left and its followers. How can it enforce military discipline on its mymidons while they are always veer closely to understanding and even agreeing with their right-wing counterparts? A dead-above-the-neck specimen like Totenberg will never have this problem, but the decent citizen who has stumbled into the leftist briar patch might suddenly fall off his horse and have a sudden revelation---something that would never happen to a total half-wit plagiarist criminal like Totenberg, and defect to the right a la I. F. Stone.

Of such conversions, true drama and even literature can be made. The orcs and uruk-hais of NPR would never understand the whys and wherefores of a human drama concerning politics and the human place in the moral firmament.

Juan Williams Shit-Canned for Honesty---the NPR Way!

Juan Williams

Juan Williama startlingly told Bill-O the truth the other night and was canned by the ULTRA-LEFT SOVIET CADRE at NPR, where George Soros ships his punt money when he's not subsidizing "Media Mutters" and "Think Process." Soros Slave Vivian [Jewish Name] fired Williams on the advice of the Muslim Brotherhood plant here in the USA, an undercover operation for Muslim terrorists called CAIR, who seem to have, nay, nibble on Vivian's ear with remarkable effects. Despite the fact that 90% of the underpaid media biyotches at NPR are left-wing whores. like plagiarist Nina Totenberg, whose name aptly means "City of Death" in German, bitch Vivian LNU fired one of the VERY FEW conservative [by NPR standards, MOR by everyone sane's standards]. If this is the conservative counterpart to the Foley fiasco in '06, a totally engineered media hoax engineered by means of a disappearing website given all the credibility of the NYT website itself. I wonder if the libturds have anything waiting in the wings to throw the populace whose intelligence BHusseinO seems to disdain off its track, and I guess we'll just have to wait. Meanwhile, here's JUan:

“Now that I no longer work for NPR let me give you my opinion. This is an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff (I was the only black male on the air). This is evidence of one-party rule and one-sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought.”

If bitch-of-the-century Totenberg doesn't resign out of shame for her very ugly existence, I guess I'll never ever listen to that government-supported agit-prop again.

Noonan Scores "Old Republicans" and Democrats in General

Bitch-in-Heat

"Tea Party to the Rescue" is Peggy Noonan's self-explanatory Op-Ed in the WSJ:

Two central facts give shape to the historic 2010 election. The first is not understood by Republicans, and the second not admitted by Democrats.

The first: the tea party is not a "threat" to the Republican Party, the tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn't remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.

View Full Image

Associated Press
In a practical sense, the tea party saved the Republican Party in this cycle by not going third-party. It could have. The broadly based, locally autonomous movement seems to have made a rolling decision, group by group, to take part in Republican primaries and back Republican hopefuls. (According to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, four million more Republicans voted in primaries this year than Democrats, the GOP's highest such turnout since 1970. I wonder who those people were?)

Because of this, because they did not go third-party, Nov. 2 is not going to be a disaster for the Republicans, but a triumph.

This is a victory over GWB as much as it is over BHO:

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration's spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: "We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!" They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

And they not only freed the Washington establishment, they woke it up. That establishment, composed largely of 50- to 75-year-olds who came to Washington during the Reagan era in a great rush of idealism, in many cases stayed on, as they say, not to do good but to do well. They populated a conservative infrastructure that barely existed when Reagan was coming up: the think tanks and PR groups, the media outlets and governmental organizations. They did not do what conservatives are supposed to do, which is finish their patriotic work and go home, taking the knowledge and sophistication derived from Washington and applying it to local problems. (This accounts in part for the esteem in which former Bush budget chief and current Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is held. He went home.)

My wife had lunch with Mitch way back in the day and he was an unlikely hero of the Republican Renewal. And "shame cringe" is a good way to describe GWB as he was unjustly pilloried for Katrina & a number of untoward events completely unfairly, but NEVER TRIED TO DEFEND HIMSELF...! That sort of was the mantra for the Repubs..., never say you're sorry, but never say the Demonrats are a lying bunch of morons, most of all Dingy Harry and Botox Nancy...! If this is some sort of 'gentleman's agreement," it is certainly honored more in the breach by the Demonrats. They deserve MORE than the drubbing they're going to get at the polls next fortnight. But the obnoxious little creep and chronically wrong Fareed Zakaria quoth thus:

There is also this week a striking essay by Fareed Zakaria, no tea partier he, in Time magazine. He unknowingly touched on part of the reason for the tea party. Mr. Zakaria, born and raised in India, got his first sense of America's vitality, outsized ways, glamour and crazy high-spiritedness as a young boy in the late 1970s watching bootlegged videotapes of "Dallas." What a country! His own land, in comparison, seemed sleepy, hidebound. Now when he travels to India, "it's as if the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future. After centuries of stagnation, their economy is on the move, fueling animal spirits and ambition. The whole country feels as if it has been unlocked." Meanwhile the mood in the U.S. seems glum, dispirited. "The middle class, in particular, feels under assault." Sixty-three percent of Americans say they do not think they will be able to maintain their current standard of living. "The can-do country is convinced that it can't."

That's because of a sclerotic GOP and an aggressively socialist Demonrat Obummer---both will be encircled in part by this new populism against 'death panels' and wars against the well-off and the over-the-hill waged by Demonrat shitheads. And Commissar Ron Klein and Citizen Prosecutor Wasserman-Schwartz [!?!] deserved to be dragged naked through the streets of South Florida behind a phalanx of Harleys manned by vets and over-the-hill bikers...!

What the Liberal Elites Still Cannot Understand About the Tea Party

Peter Berkowitz is a Hoover Institution grandee attached to Stanford. He asks the question:

Highly educated people say the darndest things, these days particularly about the tea party movement. Vast numbers of other highly educated people read and hear these dubious pronouncements, smile knowingly, and nod their heads in agreement. University educations and advanced degrees notwithstanding, they lack a basic understanding of the contours of American constitutional government.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman got the ball rolling in April 2009, just ahead of the first major tea party rallies on April 15, by falsely asserting that "the tea parties don't represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They're AstroTurf (fake grass-roots) events."

Having learned next to nothing in the intervening 16 months about one of the most spectacular grass-roots political movements in American history, fellow Times columnist Frank Rich denied in August of this year that the tea party movement is "spontaneous and leaderless," insisting instead that it is the instrument of billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch.

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne criticized the tea party as unrepresentative in two ways. It "constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers," he asserted last month. This was a step back from his rash prediction five months before that since it "represents a relatively small minority of Americans on the right end of politics," the tea party movement "will not determine the outcome of the 2010 elections."

It is safe to say that Krugman, Rich, and Dionne will go through the next convocation of Congress without a clue as to why they lost in 2010. Seriously. They are simply, good "edjucashun' to the side, unable to know where the Federalist Papers originated and why the Federalist Papers are UNIQUE to America. And here's why;

For the better part of two generations, the best political science departments have concentrated on equipping students with skills for performing empirical research and teaching mathematical models that purport to describe political affairs. Meanwhile, leading history departments have emphasized social history and issues of race, class and gender at the expense of constitutional history, diplomatic history and military history.

Neither professors of political science nor of history have made a priority of instructing students in the founding principles of American constitutional government. Nor have they taught about the contest between the progressive vision and the conservative vision that has characterized American politics since Woodrow Wilson (then a political scientist at Princeton) helped launch the progressive movement in the late 19th century by arguing that the Constitution had become obsolete and hindered democratic reform.

Then there are the proliferating classes in practical ethics and moral reasoning. These expose students to hypothetical conundrums involving individuals in surreal circumstances suddenly facing life and death decisions, or present contentious public policy questions and explore the range of respectable progressive opinions for resolving them. Such exercises may sharpen students' ability to argue. They do little to teach about self-government.

They certainly do not teach about the virtues, or qualities of mind and character, that enable citizens to shoulder their political responsibilities and prosper amidst the opportunities and uncertainties that freedom brings. Nor do they teach the beliefs, practices and associations that foster such virtues and those that endanger them.

Those who doubt that the failings of higher education in America have political consequences need only reflect on the quality of progressive commentary on the tea party movement. Our universities have produced two generations of highly educated people who seem unable to recognize the spirited defense of fundamental American principles, even when it takes place for more than a year and a half right in front of their noses.

Hofstadter tp the contrary notwithstanding, the single unique insight of the Federalists should be guarded like the jewel in the pipe that it is. This cannot be a mere "two year wonder."

Michelle Obama Does Burgers and Fries While We Struggle over Arugula

I"LL GET CHOO< MY PRETTY AND YOUR BIG FAT BEHIND TOO!!!

Mayor Bloomberg as the
the ersatz RINO NYC Mayor is a pushover compared to mega-Michelle in the food-czarina department.

Michelle's problems with the law continue as she still has not explained how she lost that Illinois State Bar License in 1994.

Tea Party 'Racism' Charges a Complete Fabrication & Lie!!!

The pig-bitch Norah O'Donnell's standard response to Tea ["Taxed Enough Already"] Rallies is "Racism, Racism!!!" Ditto for Black Caucus single-digit IQ tree-dwellers like Maxine Waters, the aborted fetus from S. California.

Reason Magazine puts paid to these allegations after a UCLA analysis concludes that the charges are baseless, and perhaps so are criminal charges that the Demonrat Party has been making day after day, with always the same results.

Joe 'Plugz & Gnashers' Ready to Run in 2016!!!

No, I don't Have My Head Screwed On Backwards!

The Telegraph's Tony Harnden has relieved America of an immense burden of worry. Joe Biden said:

“No, I won’t. I won’t rule that out. No,” .... when he was asked if he would rule out a 2016 presidential run.

I for one will not have any sleepless nights knowing that 'Good Ol' [Very Ol'] Joe' will be at the end of the Obama tunnel even if it's onjly 2012. Walter Mondale is in the same frame of mind. Heeeeeere's FRITZ!

“He seems to understand working people, he’s got the ethnic background, he puts a lot of emphasis on his faith and his family, and people are comfortable with him.”

Tony Harnden does a nasty turn on Mondale, sadly denigrating this elder statemen whose rocklike integrity earned him the name "The Human Windmill" in an age before flip-flops!

Walter Mondale?! The man who was Jimmy Carter’s veep and lost every state in the union except for Minnesota in 1984? The man who went on to lose in, er, Minnesota in a 2002 Senate race even though the incumbent Democrat, Paul Wellstone, had just been killed in a plane crash and there was an outpouring of grief and appreciation for him? Blimey, I think I’d rather have Osama bin Laden saying nice things about me.
Note, by the way, Mondale’s comment about Biden’s “ethnic background”. Nice point, eh? The Democrats need a white guy in certain parts of the country. Good thing a Republican didn’t say that.

Tony sums up my feeling exactly about the flakey hypocrisy that the Demonrats live and move and have their being inside of.

More Fudge from the Factory

LA Times which Crooks & Liars asserts isn't really a liberal newspaper [!?!] has a few of my protestations, including this one below:

Someone should tell Axelrod that the documentation on the US Chamber of Commerce's foreign contributors is right next to Obama's long-form birth certificate---whereever that is. Obama is a narcissistic and self-destructive egoist, as the campaign reveals as he takes time off from his golf outings [52 so far] to lavish his charisma and love lather on us poor mortals eager to glimpse The Won. And he attacks big business, small business, banks, and the rich in a class-warfare scenario straight out of Das Kapital. As soon as he reveals where all of those credit card donations in 2008 came from, maybe he'll have the credibility to assert that the US Chamber is out of bounds. But since the "International Brotherhood" unions and SEIU are full of foreign-garnered cash and are giving to the Democrats in bundles, maybe he ought to STFU...!

One poster to the LAT noted that UBS is registered as donating over $1 million to the Obama campaign in '08. Ever wonder how many more slipped by under the radar undetected? I think that the Republicans should be taking names and noting where some of these malfeasant Dems live, and start committee hearings right after their election in 2010. But odds are that Boehner won't want to "project a negative image" and will once again, let the Dems escape from the noose. Too bad the Dems didn't do the same with Nixon, who at least was a sincere patriot, whatever else his weaknesses might have been. Not a child-molesting pedophile, like lib-hero Daniel Ellsberg who is now staining PBS & the NYT on forums late in the evening. Ellsberg used to send Polaroid snaps of himself and 10-year old Thai boys from Bangkok to my FSO boss in France, who served with him in Saigon. I guess Jill Abramson is a poor second-string nowadays to his glory days---Dannie-boy must have had quite a dossier that Nixon was after when Ellsberg's shrink's office was broken into...! My main crime in the 'Nam was Tu Do Street and the steam & cream in Vinh Long. And Joe McCarthy was sincerely going after Communists, not American businessmen.

If Obama had any shame, he'd have checked out long ago. Still waiting for all those records of his campaign to be made available...

Obama 2008 Campaign Got Unverified Contributions by the Millions...!

Who's My Daddy? Boehner's My Daddy!

Letter 69 re George Soros "sitting out" this election while his galley slaves at Think Progress and Media Mutters hurl accusations of the US Chamber of Commerce using foreign money to influence the election has even motivated the squalid LOSER now in the Oval Office to come back from his 52nd golf outing to campaign that the GOP is doing what he did in 2008! Oops, I put the last part in by mistake! Here's "reshas" comment number 69:

NEW YORK TIMES: Obama’s “foreign money” claims are bogus. They’re also pretty rich, considering how his 2008 campaign handled foreign credit cards. From that National Journal story: “The lack of a computerized address-verification system would allow the Obama campaign’s computers to accept online donations from U.S. citizens above legal limits, and to accept donations from foreigners who are barred by law from contributing at all.” Perhaps its time to remind people of that issue again. Oh, wait, I just did!

Here’s more on that from 2008: “A breakdown of controls has enabled foreign and other unaccountable funds to pour into the Obama campaign — and it’s not an accident.”

Plus, from the Washington Post: Obama Accepting Untraceable Donations. “Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed. Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged.”

More here. “Then there’s the question of whether foreign nationals are contributing to the Obama campaign. There is more than enough evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Federal Election Commission, including the $32,332.19 that appears to have come from two brothers living in a Hamas-controlled Palestinian refugee camp in Rafah, GA (that’s Gaza, not Georgia). The brothers’ cash is part of a flood of illegal foreign contributions accepted by the Obama campaign.”

You know, I’d kind of forgotten this scandal until Obama brought this stuff up. It didn’t get much attention then, but it may get more this time around.

In the very words of the ancient streetwalker crack whore Jill Abramson---oops, I meant the Grey Lady that used to dominate the MSM until now, when everyone sees that Pinch Sulzberger, Bill Keller, and Jill are the three mouseketeers. Jug-ears just like their plantation master, scion of a slave-holding family on his mama's side and probably descended partly from Arab slavers on his Luo drunken womanizing crooked pol daddy's side! The guy who throws out opening game pitches like a girl and polticizes like a Chicago ward-heeler. Obummer hisself...!

Squalor by the Numbers---Read 'Em and Weep!

The US Treasury has this website where you can see how Obimbo and his orc-horde are raping the nation's banks and putting us all into perpetual penury:

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm

Spending is under the control of Congress. Specifically the House of Representatives. So one needs to look at the changes in deficit under each political party's control. The above government website will set the record straight.

Democrat Control 1950 257,000,000,000
until 1994 4,692,000,000,000
Total Increase of 4,435,000,000,000

GOP Control 1994 4,692,000,000,000
Until 2007 8,506,973,899,215
Total Increase of 3,814,973,899,215

Democrat Control 2007: 8,506,973,899,215
Until Aug 2010: 13,449,652,537,035
Total Increase of: 4,942,678,637,820

Yes, Obimbo has put 5 trillion in debt on the books in less than two years. Pretty depressing, unless you are a freeloading hopeless dependent and want a nanny-state to keep you on the public tit forever.

In the last four years, a Democratic controlled congress has added more deficit (and only to 8/31/2010) than the entire 12 GOP years of recent history.

Drew Stews as GOP Brews New Way to Stymie Ancient Crones

These aren't my real teeth, and I broke every set of braces, now I wash my teeth with lye to get off the potty mouth feeling

Extinct Fossil Re-emerges as Drew whines almost interminably [even in about four paragraphs, they're just that hard to read without gagging] about why the 'liberals' shouldn't desert the Chosen Won---you know, Obimbo the Charismatic Golfer.

The dreary cackling of this ancient termagant is the most recent example of how the brain-dead DC zombies from the past drone on even though they've been dropped by semi-respectable lib publications and remain entombed in some sort of eternal recurrence of a dial tone. Drew is absolutely clueless as to why the Independents and Republicans are almost en masse rejecting the ObamaCare debacle and all his pomps and works. Except for the black urban plantations, his standing among Hispanics is sliding, well, southward. And Drew, even though she must be approaching the century mark, still cannot write a sentence out of the narrow Dem party-hack shill-talk that emanates from the White House Press Corps.

But why read my rant when James Taranto puts this extinct fossil back into the museum of natural history, in this case, un-natural, where she belongs?

Witch! Whore!...Nazi! The Old Media Appropriately Give Their Dying Gasp a Slimy Stinkbomb Sendoff...!

Lez Whore Kaptur Hating on Her Opponent Helped by Hate-Mag Atlantic

Ann Althouse has a great piece on the fake phoney BS the Atlantic's Joshua Green has sent up in a blog-piece called "Witch! Whore!...Nazi!'

Below is a comment that sums up the MSM sliminess in a comment by "Beta Rube" and my following remark:

"About 12 weeks before a major election, the media and Dems start their quest for menstrual synchrony. About 4 weeks before the election, the process is complete.

President Jesus puts the mouth on John Boehner, and lo and behold, he and his ties to lobbyists are on the front page of the NYT. The fact that Pelosi and Reid have both received more filthy lobbyist lucre is irrelevant here. When Jesus speaks, his scribes scribble.

One of these Sundays, 60 minutes will offer a damning, unproven bombshell about God knows what, complete with dramatic pauses and wounded women and children. Oh those heartless Repubs.

None of this matters this time. The Dems are going down and their asshole shills can't stop it.

Bye, Bye old media!"

Thank you, Beta Rube, for the best analysis of the 2010 media whore-streetwalker-mafioso-DNC meltdown yet. This short bit should be engraved in marble on the NBCBSABCNYT tombstones after they are thankfully interred in all but name during the next decade.

Can't come too soon for me! And here's a piece of rant I threw over the transom at the late and once-great NYT[The subject is an article on Nancy Pelosi saying that she is "resolute" because she insists that she will remain Speaker.]:

So Mark Leibovich believes she is resolute. I think a more candid and realistic assessment is that this woman is profoundly unaware of what's going on in 'flyover country,' which seems to be the case with a lot of the commenters on the NYT threads. You know, the people who insist that the rest of the country is 'living in a cocoon,' as NYT Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd commented a while back. The fact that over the last quarter century and more that around 40% of Americans are self-identified conservatives and less than 20% self-identified liberals or 'progressives,' appears not to register with the Pelosis and the Upper West Side victims of academicide and elitist media propaganda. Therefore, a concerted campaign can be waged by the mainstream media against GWB and liberals are enraged when Fox NEWS and the Wall Street Journal don't join in the mass hysteria. Which is what the election of an unexamined and frankly incompetent tyro or neophyte or rookie like Obama is turning out to be---mass delusion fueled by a media unable to examine itself and its own prejudices to such an extent that it is now self-destructing, as the NYT assault on the Tribune organization noted without, of course, recognizing that in a decade or so, the dead-tree NYT will probably be as extinct as the dodo. With the same reputation for sagacity as that long, lost flightless bird...!

Liu Xiaobo & Vargas Fully Deserve Nobels, Unlike Some Recent Bogus Peace Laureates

Vargas Llosa

City Journal praises both Norway and Sweden for attempting to steer a bit away from the maelstrom, to use a local appropriate image, as its recent Far-Left Peace and Literature Laureates have created a giant sucking whirlpool of flotsam and jetsam with the obscure cultural detritus that only the rancid European Left can summon at will. This year, at any rate, bizarre sexual politics or obscurantism will have to take a bye.

Vargas in Stockholm and Xiaobo in Oslo both richly deserve their prizes, having earned them in the marketplace of ideas and political jousting. This somewhat gets away from the silly awards given to Obama and Carter and Gore and Krugman and other utterly second-rate dodos, including the one given Baradei, who singlehandedly allowed Iran to continue its development of a nuke weapon and got a Nobel in one of the sourest ironies of the long history of the Peace Prize.

Guy Sorman ends his short encomium of the unexpected dose of reality that the Nobel Committees have suddenly produced:

Many times in the past, the Nobel Committee has bestowed its Peace Prize on obscure characters in a commendable effort to represent the world’s diversity. In recognizing Liu, however, the committee has rejected any temptation for cultural and moral relativism and elevated a transcendent figure. Liu is a global citizen who fights for universal values: he happens to be Chinese, incarcerated in a Chinese jail. If he were from Zimbabwe or Venezuela, he would voice the same passion for liberty.

The Swedish Academy’s awarding of Mario Vargas Llosa with the Nobel Prize for Literature follows this same surprisingly enlightened pattern. Unlike the difficult, distant poets recognized in recent years, Vargas Llosa is an accessible novelist whose books are translated in most significant languages, often under his own supervision. Vargas Llosa is thus, like Liu, a global citizen. Like Liu, he rejects any notion of exoticism or cultural relativism. An indomitable freedom fighter in Latin America, he has always opposed the notion that authoritarianism—whether Cuban or Venezuelan—is essentially rooted in local culture. He has stood firmly against the political exploitation of ethnicity and skin color in Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela. He shares with Liu Xiaobo a conviction that we are all human beings first, individuals belonging to a global civilization. The liberty that both men defend rightfully belongs to everyone and is not dependent on culture, ethnicity, or history.

There is another nice WSJ expert explaining that Vargas has always been against dictatorships fo either right or left, whereas most of the time, the Stockholm Committee doesn't mind writers like Marquez and Neruda who enthusiastically plump for LEFT-WING dictatorships

I for one don't think we'll see an American get the literature prize for a good while yet, which I personally would give to Don DeLillo---a balanced writer again, so that won't happen in my lifetime or perhaps ever. It may go to Philip Roth or some other prodigy of endurance or horror [Corman McCarthy comes to mind]. My old buddy Carlos Fuentes might get it next year, to balance out the conservative Vargas and stay away from the Eastern Hemisphere, but Carlos is a bit shallow and predictable and derivative, although he is a prince of a fellow. Next year, Bono may get the Prize and this too would be deserved and somewhat balanced, but U2 had better have another hit album or his star may recede across the water and sink in the Western Sea. Or the long-suffering and richly deserving Dalai Lama or even Archbishop Tutu, though like Bono, he's perhaps a bit overrated.

The Wall Street Journal has a succinct video summary of Vargas' career in a Review & Outlook piece:

Winners of the Nobel Prize in literature are typically distinguished by their literary obscurity, suffocating prose and left-wing politics. But every decade or so the prize-givers get it right: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1970, Czesław Miłosz in 1980, Octavio Paz in 1990, V.S. Naipaul in 2001. Right on schedule, this year's prize went to Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa.

Maybe there's a hidden codicil in the bylaws that every decade, like a broken clock, the Swedes fall out of bed without do9ing their usual worship of Satan. For whatever reason, for one short season, there is hope for the benighted Scandanavians.

Pakistan Implodes as Zardari, Military, ISI play double games

Pakistan is going to be a failed nation-state, according to a senior minister in the NWFP I had a long conversation with while drinking endless cups of tea a decade or so ago on my last trip to that country. And as the internal cohesion of the country is tested by catastrophic floods, a low-level civil war in which the army is now beginning to take sides against itself and the nation's police, and a president who is a complete fool and has the charisma left by his martyred wife Benazir Bhutto, but not much else, including brainpower, to keep him on top.

The Economist puts it as bluntly as possible:

Responding to growing public outrage over cross-border drone attacks by the American-led forces in Afghanistan and to revelations in a recent book by Bob Woodward that 3,000 CIA operatives are active in its tribal regions, Pakistan closed the main supply route for NATO convoys. The interior minister, Rehman Malik, said: “We will have to see whether we are allies or enemies.”

Of course, it's been obvious from the beginning of the Afghan presence that Pakistan sees that war-torn country as a pawn in the struggle with India, which the Waziristan base to make mischief inside Pakistan itself is an obviously low priority---yet the foolish Pakis insist that the US is encroaching on a territory over which they admittedly have little or no control:

Given the reluctance of the Pakistani authorities to take on the terrorist groups in North Waziristan, particularly the brutal Haqqani network that is believed to have links with Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence agency), and given growing public fury over encroachments on the country’s sovereignty, the tension is unlikely to go away. Even the one potentially hopeful development this week—reports of American-backed secret talks between the Afghan Quetta Shura Taliban and the government of Hamid Karzai—could cause new strain if Pakistan reacts badly to being left out. A breakdown in relations between America and Pakistan is a real and dangerous possibility.

And if all implodes the way it looks now, the Pakistani Army, which is the only cohesive force in the country, will seize power and once again, the country will have forsaken democracy to pursue the internal demons which torment the country. And then that senior Paki minister's words might prove prophetic: Pakistan will be split into its four constituent provinces and India will have basically become unchallenged, but atomically armed Pakis will not stand for that.

Ergo, a war involving Pakistan & India might go nuclear, and then the fat's definitely in the fire. As Woodward's book outlines, Obama is very much into the details, but according to David Petraeus, so involved that he may become another Jimmy Carter in a Rose Garden of nit-picking and dithering, as Carter did before losing his re-election bid.

Tone-Deaf Obama Whines the GOP is Ignoring its own Pledge

This clown is even thicker than I thought.

This is the jug-eared tone-deaf POTUS at his tone-deaf worst. Does he see any Demo-rats bragging about his own administration's "accomplishments" like the 60% UNPOPULAR health care abomination/fiasco? Only Sen. Feingold who's getting his "lean-forward" behind paddled by a political unknown whose motivation for running was ObamaCare, pure and simple. Feingold started way in front, started touting ObamaCare and is now TWELVE POINTS BEHIND.

The MSM has buried the pledge, being stenographers for the MSM, most of America knows this according the Gallup, and this low-IQ POTUS thinks HE understands why. What a silly fool, pure and simple. The GOP doesn't need the "pledge" to whup his ass, and the butts of the Demo-rats. His first two years are enough for the Repubs to remind voters of, and another drop in employment numbers, which Gallup predicts the "official" numbers will be cooked down to below 10%, puts this guy over the magic 10-level, after PROMISING unemployment wouldn't go above 8% if Congress gave him the Porkulus Package.