First they claimed Republicans were waging a “war on women,” which seemed to be working for them until Democratic superstar Hilary Rosen declared her contempt for women who spend their lives raising children at the expense of more elevated pursuits like flacking for the record industry and BP.
Then the effort to shame Romney over his unusual treatment of a family pet went to the dogs when Obama turned out to have a canine tooth, and we don’t mean his cuspids. As a result, otherwise unrelated stories have become occasions for laughter at the president’s expense.
CBS News reports that Greg Stokes, one of the agents fired in the Colombia prostitution scandal, “was recently listed on the internet as the supervisor of the Canine Training Section of the Secret Service.” We hear they once asked Stokes to double as the president’s food taster, but he had to turn down the assignment because it would be a conflict of interest.
We don’t buy it that this is a close election. When you’re getting a Bronx cheer in Boston, things aren’t right. When MSNBC laughs at you, you’re doing something wrong. When gross mismanagement is page one in the friendliest of media, you’ve got a problem. We think that, if the election were held today, the outcome would be far worse than the shellacking of 2010. Of course there are ways to couterbalance these problems come November, but right now it looks about 60-40 to us, despite what they tell you in the media.
The line of polygamists in Obama’s family can be traced back generations in western Kenya, where it was an accepted practice within the Luo (pronounced LOO-oh) tribe. His great-grandfather, Obama Opiyo, had five wives, including two who were sisters. His grandfather, Hussein Onyango, had at least four wives, one of whom, Akumu, gave birth to the president’s father, Barack Obama, before fleeing her abusive husband. Obama Sr. was already married when he left Kenya to study at the University of Hawaii, where he married again. His American wife-to-be, Stanley Ann Dunham, was not yet 18 and unaware of his marital situation when she became pregnant with his namesake son in 1961. The line of polygamists in the Romney family traces back generations, when it was an accepted practice in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His paternal great-grandfathers, Miles Park Romney and Helaman Pratt, were born in the United States but lived for decades in Mexico. Pratt was a Mormon missionary there; Miles Park Romney left Utah for Mexico with a tribe of polygamous Mormons after the Mormon church broke with the practice of polygamy in 1890. Pratt had five wives. Miles Park Romney had four, and 30 children, one of whom was Gaskell Romney. The polygamy stopped at Gaskell, who had a single wife and seven children. One of the children, George, was born in a Mormon colony in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, although he was nonetheless a U.S. citizen. He was Mitt’s father.
the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll has a large Democratic oversample (D+11), so his job approval is positive and fairly healthy looking at 50-45. Ditto the CBS News/New York Times poll that came out last night (D+8) at 48-42. On the other hand, Gallup, Rasmussen, Fox, and a few others consistently show a tighter spread between the two parties, thus making his job approval look worse. For what it is worth, actual election results over the last 10 years tend to reflect the latter batch of polls in terms of party ID, and no election in 20 years has had as outsized a Democratic advantage as what the ABC News/Washington Post or CBS News/New York Times polls regularly “find.”
60% of adults self-identified as Democrats in 1964, and that number has declined substantially since then. The most recent election featured equal numbers of D and R voters. We suppose the NYT and the WaPo think they are influencing opinion with such polling, but perhaps what they are really doing is lulling their readers into a false sense of complacency.
On MSNBC of all places. Recipes from a favorite eating Spot: yorkshire terrier pudding, mutt chop, Pekingese duck, bichon frisee salad, beagle with cream cheese, pure bread. HT: Ace and Ace
With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate
Egypt’s central bank reported that total reserves had fallen to $15 billion, but — more importantly — liquid foreign exchange reserves had fallen to only $9 billion, equivalent to just two months’ imports. Foreign exchange futures markets expect the Egyptian pound to lose half its value during the next year, and Egyptians have responded by hoarding diesel fuel, propane gas and other necessities. With half of Egypt’s population living on $2 a day or less, the expected devaluation would push a significant part of the population below minimum nutrition levels
Katrina vanden Heuvel: “our politics are failing to deal with the massive deep-seeded problems this country has…why do we have inequality akin to Egypt’s?”
The dominant narrative since the beginning of 2012 has been that President Obama has regained his footing after a rocky 2011 and is trending upward. Ask 10 political types who will win in November, and eight of them (or so) will say Obama.
The piece then goes on to discuss conflicting polls, including the flagrantly manipulated CNN poll the other day that had Romney losing by nine points. Meanwhile, a “new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 46% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican in their district’s congressional race if the election were held today, while 36% would choose the Democrat.” That is surely a significant data point.
It only serves Democrats’ interests to use phony samples and adults, not likely voters, if legacy media outlets control the narrative. Otherwise, it’s an unhelpful exercise in self-delusion.
Perhaps the problem is even worse than that. The NYT’s Tom Friedman: “Obama, who has a plan to cut, tax and invest — albeit insufficiently — could lead, but, for now, he seems preoccupied with some rather uninspiring small ball, preferring proposals like ‘the Buffett tax’ over comprehensive tax reform that would lower all rates, eliminate deductions and raise more revenue.” If even Mr. Friedman can see through the malarky that comes from this crew in Washington, things must be bad indeed.
What’s striking about Rosen’s latest ideological sniper attack is that she is not some lone-wolf operative on the fringes of Beltway influence. She works with former White House communications director Anita Dunn at the D.C.-based strategic communications consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker. That’s the same company that promoted the anti-Palin smear movie “Game Change” and that represented liberal Georgetown law school student activist and manufactured War on Women poster woman Sandra Fluke. Smack dab at the intersection of progressive agitation and Democratic Party campaign-season maneuvering. White House visitor logs (which nonpartisan watchdogs point out are woefully incomplete) show that “Hilary B. Rosen” or “Hilary Rosen” has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. at least 35 times, including several direct meetings with President Obama (5); White House senior adviser and consigliere Valerie Jarrett; senior adviser David Axelrod; senior adviser turned 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina; and a parade of communications/media team officials in both the West Wing “surrogate booking” office and the East Wing. Axelrod and Messina, who took to Twitter immediately Thursday night after the social networking site exploded with a conservative mom backlash, scrambled to disassociate themselves from their frequent visitor. POTUS and FLOTUS followed suit. But when you collect and connect the dots, Rosen’s role as a surrogate hit-woman for the White House is unmistakable.
According to the CBO, the Buffett rule would raise $3.2 billion a year (the WSJ says it will actually add to the deficit). 3.2 billion. That’s about a dollar for every word we’ve heard about this gimmick.
The electoral strategy at the White House has included large efforts, coordinated with the media, to shore up support and enthusiasm among key elements of the base. Hence the elaborate theatrical production called the War on Women, and the extended Law and Order episode that the Martin / Zimmerman case has become.
The problem is that the narratives are gross distortions of reality. Those on the Left don’t think so, they think that the narratives are real, that conservatives really are waging a war on women when they’re taking a break from waging their war on minorities. They really believe the things they say, as is clear when they won’t back off saying them after they have become a political liability.
The issue becomes time. You can make a spectacular and inflammatory charge once or twice, but it becomes hard to sustain over an extended period of time if it makes no sense. In the Martin case, even if the most lurid accusations are true, they stand for nothing as a generalization, since there are only 200 such incidents a year in a country of 300,000,000 people, and counterexamples abound. Likewise, using the War on Women cookie-cutter as a template to smear conservatives eventually winds up sounding absurd.
What happens next? We don’t know, but we observe that in some respects, the meta-story has become the story. The Zimmerman story is not an important national story. The contraception story was never an important national story. What both stories illustrate is just how far in the tank the media are for the White House, that they will resort to anything to advance a political agenda. The open and unapologetic corruption in the media is an important national story. We’ll just have to wait and see if it’s true that nature abhors a vacuum.
It is “arguable” that one of the single worst financial decisions a woman can make in this country is to become a mother. Regardless of whether she gets paid…Today’s cynical Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney “Gasp!” is nothing more than this week’s politically flavored sexist-media-loves-a-”cat”-fight. What is “working woman” versus “stay-at-home” code for? For the most part it is code for “what is a woman’s relationship to a man and what is his earning potential?” It’s a paternalistic, sexist framework that subordinates women either way. That’s why this is not about a mommy war. It’s about keeping women dependent
there is a deeper, philosophical reason for the left’s enmity toward full-time mothers, which the Bookworm Room explains succinctly: they are a critical counterweight to the power of the state: I am the counterweight to the state. Therefore, I am dangerous. I am subversive simply by existing. My love for my children is a dominant force that works its way into their psyches and that trumps the state-run schools and the state complicit media world. Some mothers, of course, are entirely in sync with schools and media. They happily reinforce the statist message. But those of us who dont are a powerful anti-statist force and we must be challenged.
the party spread in four of the last five elections since 2002 has basically been an even split between the two sides.
There is no excuse for ignoring the actual turnout results from elections, which are as Jay Cost said. Hugh Hewitt interviewed Dan Balz of the Washington Post on the poll. Balz is not the person in charge of polling; it would be interesting to hear Cost debate that fellow.
It seemed clear enough that Balz believes that the poll’s methodology was just fine. The assumption apparently is that, at this point in an electoral cycle, Democrats have structural advantages among the adult population, and the choice of sample recognizes this. Sometimes, as the election draws near and pollsters switch to a “likely voter” model, specific things happen that begin to favor the GOP from time to time.
It seems likely to us that this is what mainstream media reporters probably believe, that the polls are fair, but circumstances sometimes change as elections near. Of course it would be easy for them to beleive that, because everyone wants his home team to win, and moreover, the methodology of today is what their pollsters have done for decades. However, a sample is a choice, and nothing that was said in the interview explains the oddness of the chart above.
We couldn’t even find the sample in the recent Washington Post poll, but one of our readers did, along with Jay Cost and Ed Morrissey, and it is D+11. We did observe that misleading polls might be counterproductive, and that time appears to have arrived. As Jay Cost notes, despite the sample being D+11, the administration’s approval rating is only D+5. Ouch! Ed Morrissey adds that the health care law continues to be very unpopular, despite the sample bias that should improve its ratings. Sample bias is one of those “man behind the curtain” tricks that we discussed the other day. When everyone can see them, they stop working. Maybe not so much for the Post’s readers, but if so, then the joke’s on them.
Like the curious USA Today poll from the other day, the Washington Post poll says that the GOP candidate is unpopular. And like that other poll, it fails to disclose its sample, or at least we couldn’t find it. So, let’s go down the checklist: it’s a poll of adults, not likely voters, and it won’t even disclose the political affiliations of those polled. (Of course, when they do disclose the sample, the results are the same.) We think we can reasonably reach the conclusion that someone is very unpopular, but that would spoil the narrative that the Post wants its readers to believe. The really odd thing is that this sort of misleading story might be counterproductive to the electoral aims of the Post.
VDH takes us on a tour of the last few years. Hard to believe it’s gotten this bad. (Do you continue to have any doubt just what’s going to take place this November?)
both candidates poll in the mid-40s, while 10 to 12 percent remain uncommitted to either side. Among these uncommitted voters, Rasmussen Reports polling shows that just 22 percent approve of the way the president is handling his job. Seventy-two percent (72 percent) disapprove. As for intensity, just 2 percent strongly approve, and 40 percent strongly disapprove.
So what’s the secret plan that would lead to a second term? Plan A and Plan B don’t appear to be working, and repeating them over and over seems unlikely to increase their effectiveness. What’s next?
Flash back to January, when the War on Women movie franchise opened its theatrical release, a co-production of the government and the media, based on a story written by ad men in Chicago. Then there was a long, improvised sequel offering comic relief as well as a cameo by a big star. Flash forward to the scripted press conference of the other day, and we see the debut of WOWIII. The first reporter asked two friendly questions. The second reporter asked a boring question and then asked about Augusta, which everyone was conveniently well-prepared for. No doubt there will be more of this every few weeks as the administration tries to energize the single women vote.
The AP spins wildly to support its government allies and the NYT editorializes in favor of outrageous statements from the administration. It’s as though we’re living in the middle of a badly acted, badly scripted movie. Everything that’s supposed to be hidden in a movie is visible. The actors are chewing the scenery, and the script has become obvious, visible, tedious and boring. You can actually see the man behind the curtain pulling the strings and orchestrating the special effects. The only thing that is worse than the media’s active participation in this tawdry business is that the men behind the curtain are so arrogant and contemptuous that they don’t even care if you can see them.
