In 2008, Lawrence O’Donnell wrote a flattering teleplay about a certain Democratic candidate. The candidate was bold, clever, relentless and heroic. How times change. Imagine O’Donnell treating that candidate the way he treated Hermen Cain. Can’t imagine that? We can’t either. But the really interesting change is that some of the GOP field are not cowering before the hostile Democrat media. For decades the legacy media have acted as though their viewpoint is that of a majority of the country, when it’s simply untrue. Is it just us, or is the 30% beginning to sound like the 30% they are? HT: Wretchard
In 2005, Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of their own parties dovetailed with the perceptions of the electorate as a whole. Today, while voters as a whole agree with Republicans’ evaluation of their party as conservative, they disagree with Democrats, who on average see their party as moderate rather than liberal.
So when Independents, who see themselves as modestly right of center, say that Democrats are too liberal, average Democrats can’t imagine what they’re talking about.
Compounding the problem, the American people are gradually polarizing. According to Gallup, twenty years ago, as Bill Clinton began his presidential campaign, self-described moderates formed the plurality of the electorate — 43 percent; conservatives were 36 percent, liberals 17 percent.
By the summer of 2011, the conservative share had risen to 41 percent and liberals to 21 percent, while moderates declined to 36 percent, surrendering their plurality status to conservatives. Because nearly all conservatives now vote for Republicans and liberals for Democrats, the share of the shrinking pool of moderates that Democrats need to build a majority is now larger than ever.
Another Gallup finding that should alert Democrats is the ongoing collapse of public confidence in government. A survey released earlier this week found that Americans now believe that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends, the highest estimate ever recorded. Twenty-five years ago, that figure stood at only 38 cents…
Tellingly, a number of at-risk Democratic senators up for reelection in 2012 have already refused to go along with key elements of the president’s recent proposals.
The beltway media are almost unanimously Democrats. They live in an echo chamber where, as Galston says, “they can’t imagine what independents are talking about” when they say that the Party has become too liberal.
21% of the country may be a small sliver, but it’s still a lot of people and they have a disproportionate influence on politics, even with the ascension of the New Media. Blue voters and donors are highly concentrated in places like New York, LA, DC, Boston, the Bay area, and Chicago, but they have the media megaphone as well as the campaign dollars.
On issue after issue over the last two years, from the GZM to the 2010 election and on and on, we have seen that the opinion shapers of the Beltway media and the NYT have been losing, sometimes by 70-30 margins. They’ve often explained this by saying that the majority is stupid and hateful. That is a bad strategy.
Mr. Galston has performed a valuable service for his party and particularly its opinion shapers. But honestly, does anyone expect the writers at the Times or the Post to change their opinions after so many years? If anything, we expect the shouting to get louder and the accusations more absurd.
We don’t really know that much about what constitutes 95% of the universe. And even the things we think we know may not be true. BBC:
The speed of light is the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics — as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity — depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it. Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another. The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance. The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance
Lots of theories in the comments section here; we blame global warming for the anomaly. Time for the another look at the amusing LHC video again.
Ann Althouse is conducting a poll about a new political ad. Some of the commenters have said that the ad is over the top after the first 20 seconds. They’re missing the point. The first 20 seconds is the ad. The next 40 seconds is fluff and CYA. It’s part of a strategy to get the media infuriated with someone who would dare call their man President Zero. Roger Simon wrote about this.
It’s also part of Governor Perry’s branding strategy for the base. Ponzi scheme, president zero, etc. Quick: name a phrase or quote made famous by Governor Romney. Waiting. Still waiting. We’re not claiming that it’s going to be an ultimately successful strategy. Mr. Perry may not perform well, and there certainly are a lot of influential people who don’t like him. Time will tell.
We’re of the opinion that twitter is mostly a bad idea, but it does have its moments:
From thorninaz: “Hey #attackwatch, I saw 6 ATM’s in an alley, killing a Job. It looked like a hate crime!”
From chuckdevore (Republican state legislator in California): “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean a big majority of us isn’t out to get you…”
From EddieRobbins: “My neighbor removed his Obama bumper sticker. I think he’s a racist.”
From DickMeyers: “Bless me #AttackWatch for I have sinned. I have muttered naughty words about our Dear Leader 9 times & have doubted his divinity a few times”
From joaniekensil: “Ate refried beans & chips for breakfast which is sort of racist foodist – Carbon emissions to follow.”
From PoliticalGravity: “Saw a kid with a lemonade stand and she didn’t have a permit.”
From DrFreeLance: “I saw a werewolf drinkin a pina colada at Trader Vic’s, and his hair was perfect.”
Funny stuff. (More amusing things here and here.) But as the twitter revolution demonstrated, you don’t actually have to be using twitter to make a fool of yourself.
74% of voters throughout the country believe that businesses and consumers are over-regulated. Further, another 67% believe that regulations have increased over the past few years. These percentages include majorities of all partisan affiliations, with 91% of Republicans, 75% of Independents and 58% of Democrats saying businesses/consumers are over-regulated…
70% believe increasing the number of regulations on American businesses will result in more jobs moving overseas. Also, majorities agree that the increasing number of regulations have created uncertainty for large and small businesses (66%), and that agencies who enforce regulations fail to consider how their decisions lead to increased prices for consumers and job losses (69%).
Every voter has seen wasteful and ridiculous regulatory creep in his lifetime. It should be an easy issue to exploit, and a powerful issue too, given the large majorities of D-R-I that agree. But what would be the best way to do so for maximum visual impact?
The kids’ lemonade stands that cops and bureaucrats now shut down? The TSA-ing of America in a video that fast-forwards from 1972, when there was no airport screening at all, to today’s long lines for intrusive body searches? Maybe you have an idea.
Watch the video before it disappears. The punchline is at 1:10. It won’t be any surprise to you who made the statement above. BTW, the video above only cost the taxpayers $550 million to produce. Chump change.
A rabid Doberman Pinscher jumped on stage at a Tea Party rally in Missouri on Labor Day and barked at the crowd for nearly twenty minutes before people realized he was not a candidate. The dog, later identified by its owner as “Mister Buster,” held the crowd spellbound as he barked, growled, and frothed at the mouth, eventually receiving a standing ovation for his exertions. Gwendolene Thomason, 42, a Tea Party supporter from Jefferson City, was one of the hundreds on hand who were convinced that the Doberman was a Tea Party candidate
As is sometimes said: If you have the facts on your side, argue the facts, If you have the law on your side, argue the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law on your side, pound the table. It’s going to be a very long 15 months.
They’ve really gone nuts. It’s almost inconceivable that this will get far worse before November 2012, yet it will somehow.
“His work as governor is unparalleled in its frontal assault on women,” said Siobhan Bennett, the president of the Women’s Campaign Forum, citing statistics on women living in poverty and without health care in Texas and Perry’s active opposition to abortion. “He has gone farther out on a limb legislatively in his capacity as governor and has been expressly anti-woman in the legislation he has done.”
“He is beyond what we expect from conservative Republicans on the gun issue,” said Dennis Henigan, the acting president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, who cited Perry’s support for gun rights on college campuses and said it was a sharp contrast with Romney’s “moderate” record. Perry’s rise, he said, had already become “a strong mobilizing force” for gun control activists, whose agenda has been largely ignored by the Obama administration. “People are perceiving a very real threat that he could be the Republican nominee,” said Henigan, calling the prospect “quite frightening.”
Barry Lynn, whose Americans United for Separation of Church and State is on the front lines of keeping religion out of public life, also labeled Perry an extreme figure. “He doesn’t just go to religious right gatherings — he creates religious right gatherings, and that’s a big difference,” he said, citing The Response, a 30,000-person event Perry led in Houston in early August.
The response to all this may be found at 1:10 of this video.
We decided to make this movie (it took about 20 minutes to do so) after the previous week’s media stories about one potential Republican presidential candidate began to sound just like the dialogue in our little vignette. Imagine how much worse it’s going to get if Perry actually turns out to be the GOP candidate.
It’s hard to imagine how the country gets through the next 15 months with a more-of-the-same economic policy, though we have no reason to expect anything else from this crew. Apparently a part of the current political-media strategy is to turn up the volume against those average Americans called the Tea Party (here and here, for example), but it’s hard to see what the purpose of that is.
If America’s predicament was a work of fiction, we could imagine all sorts of lurid plot twists, evil-cracker-plots, peasant uprisings and so forth. But it’s not a work of fiction, though the attempt to paint nice people who want to cut the budget as extremists does have its humorous elements. So what’s the next plot twist? We can’t go on reading this dreary book month after month after month without something to break the monotony.
(Of course treating every business in the country like Gibson Guitar could create a series of diversions, but it’s very hard to see a happy ending for the authors of that plot line in November 2012.)
The other day we recommended some excellent and free educational resources. Now here’s one that’s been right under our nose but we were unaware of until just now: iTunes U. Interesting courses from places like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Berkeley. Don’t be surprised when the $550 billion in student loans created during the education bubble run into trouble.
We spoke of the end of a fireworks display. Here comes the last bottle rocket. Washington Post:
President Obama sought to reassure jittery investors Monday following a credit rating downgrade, declaring that the United States “will always be a triple-A country” regardless of an agency’s grade…Immediately following Obama’s remarks, U.S. markets continued to lose ground. As he began speaking, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 426, or 3.7 percent, to 11,018, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index had declined 58 points, or 4.8 percent, to 1,141. Half an hour later, the Dow was down 474 points…At day’s end, the Dow had plunged 635 points
The faculty lounge has no new ideas, and needs a new teleprompter to boot. How embarrassing is this “will always be a triple-A country” business? Hard to see how this goes on unabated for another 18 months. The satire now writes itself, yes it does.
Glenn Reynolds comes out in favor of tax increases, specifically urging the repeal of a tax break from the fifties:
One of the things that’s been floating around the Web over the past week is a video clip from 1953. It’s a short film produced by the motion picture industry, seeking the end of a 20 percent excise tax on movie theaters’ gross revenues that had been imposed at the end of World War II as a deficit-cutting measure…In the film, figures ranging from industry big shots to humble ticket collectors talk about how the tax is hurting their industry and killing jobs…
I would be agitating to repeal the “Eisenhower tax cut” on the movie industry and restore the excise tax. I think I would also look at imposing similar taxes on sales of DVDs, pay-per-view movies, CDs, downloadable music, and related products. I’d also look at the tax and accounting treatment of these industries to see if they were taking advantage of any special “loopholes” that could be closed as a means of reducing “tax expenditures.”…
I note that FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who approved the Comcast merger, left the commission to take a lucrative job at Comcast…Because much of their value to their employers comes from their prior government service, I think that the taxpayers deserve a share of the return, say in the form of a 50 percent surtax on any earnings by political appointees in excess of their prior government salaries
Gee, maybe the media would form their own tea party. But what then would they say about themselves?
Who is the most effective politician in the US? A long-time blogger answers that question:
I think Obama is easily the winner and currently stupidly under-rated – and drowned out by all the noise in the conservative-media-industrial-complex.
Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP’s broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama.
On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation.
Yes, there have been failures. The election of Scott Brown; the 2010 mid-terms; the surrender to Netanyahu and AIPAC; the botched and ill-conceived war in Libya; the failure to embrace Bowles Simpson up-front; the collapse of cap and trade (maybe not such a bad thing anyway). But notice what hasn’t happened. Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin? Where are his Katrinas?
Well, there’s that “unprecedented blow to the world’s largest economy.” But maybe we’re nitpicking.
We encourage you to get acquainted with Khan Academy and Tech Guy Labs. They are a window into how university education will be likely changing due to technology. Salman Khan is a polymath who delivers hundreds, if not thousands, of fascinating mini-lectures on all sorts of subjects. We’d wager that more than 80% of college courses aren’t as chock-full of knowledge and as succinct and well-delivered as those of Mr. Khan.
If Khan’s formula is an excellent replacement for the college lecture, Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy Labs offers something of a replacement for the college seminar. Laporte broadcasts a technology radio program for six hours on the weekend, and offers all sorts of other tech programming live and on podcasts. One of the interesting features is his seminar — really, it’s a chatroom — with a thousand participants or more online during the broadcasts. In those instances when the highly knowledgeable Laporte doesn’t know the answer to a particularly arcane question, the hive often provides real-time answers to questions that come in live over the phone lines. We’ve never encountered a more well-informed group of seminar participants.
There’s one other improvement over current college practices that both Khan and Laporte offer — participation is free. College education in most cases does not deliver good value for the money. Expanding educational opportunities in this country by expanding scholarships is clearly a vastly inferior policy approach to lowering delivery costs. But politicians prattle on, do they not?
tens of thousands of Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square on Friday for a day that had been billed as one of unified protest against the interim military government. But the turnout was lopsided, dominated by members of religious movements, ranging from the most conservative, the Salafists, to the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood…demonstrators called out, “The people want to implement Sharia,” a strict code of Islamic law…blogger and activist Nora Shalaby wrote on Twitter that the Salafists were “diverting us from the real demands of the revolution bc of their selfishness.”
Yeah, right. As we noted back in February when the media found its latest fleeting Utopia, Egypt is a country where 84% of the population thinks apostates should face the death penalty. Twitter indeed.
We noted below that Rick Santelli and Glenn Reynolds are apparently American Taliban. Probably we have to add Salman Khan of the amazing Khan Academy to the list. Just watch as he explains that the obligations of the federal government are unsustainable. Why, that’s just like setting off bombs in Afghanistan, isn’t it?
