Robert Samuelson:

At the peak in 2006, “Spain started nearly 800,000 homes — more than Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom combined,” noted a 2009 IMF report. Construction workers represented one in eight jobs (the U.S. figure at the height of the American real estate bubble was one in 18). Even after correcting for normal inflation, Spain’s home prices more than doubled from 1995 to 2006…Unemployment is almost 24 percent; among those under 25, it’s 50 percent. Tax revenues have dropped sharply. In 2011, the budget deficit was 8.5 percent of the economy…

Greece, Portugal and Ireland succumbed to similar predicaments. After interest rates soared on their bonds, they had to be rescued by loans from other European countries, the European Central Bank and the IMF. The trouble is that Spain’s economy is twice as big as Greece’s, Ireland’s and Portugal’s combined. And financially precarious Italy has an economy that’s 50 percent larger than Spain’s. Is there enough money to bail out these countries?

And in Greece until now, support for the two major political parties “has never fallen below 77 percent, and it often exceeded 85 percent. Recent polls for the coming contest give the two parties a joint percentage that lies between 33 and 40 percent.” The falcon cannot hear the falconer and so forth.

Jay Cost:

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.

The Conventional Wisdom, according to the WaPo:

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.

On one of the Sunday shows (via RCP) a political adviser said this:

The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class, that gives people a chance to get ahead, gives their kids a chance to get ahead and an economy that continues down the road we’re on

We blame George W. Bush! This is such an interesting slip-up from so many angles. No wonder they want to change the subject, and are using outlandish narratives to energize the base and keep people distracted.

Jay Cost, in a piece we wrote about previously, where a WaPo poll sample was D+11:

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.

Huh? Oh well, it fits the meme they are selling. Their internal polling must be horrid to keep up this nonsense. Proper response: more jobs, lower gas prices, no more made-up distractions from reality.

The other day there was an odd poll result that alleged the unpopular Mitt Romney was especially unpopular among women and trailing 51-42 in swing states. The results didn’t sound right to us. We still can’t get the internals. Neither could the WSJ. We’ll check back when the internals appear.

According to the USA Today piece, women are 41-24 D-R overall, but married women split almost evenly D-R. Got to motivate the single women to vote in greater numbers than they typically do. But how? So now we perhaps know a little more about the strange questioning at the GOP debate back in January.

Pew has a fancy poll report with nice graphics and lots of pious palaver to give a deep and scholarly gloss to its headline that Mitt Romney is very unpopular with women and that Captain Suds is the cat’s meow. You have to get to page 66 of its 71 page report to discover that the sample is 51-40 or so D-R, with leaners. So typical, and wrong. Gosh, if it had been 80-20, what would the headline have been? A lot of make-work for nothing in a report like this.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post is a lot more efficient in its delivery of rubbish. Its poll of how terribly unpopular Romney is was one page long and had one question — and the Post didn’t bother to disclose its sample. Now that’s the kind of GIGO we like!

Meanwhile, have you noticed that the media treats this entire election season as though 2010 never happened? Independents flipped 33 points, for gosh sake. Apparently that election didn’t count or something.

More of the same dreary economic news. But who cares, as long as the War on Women and the War on People continues to be waged by those evil opponents of all that is good and sacred to the community organizing community. We think a better plan is needed when unemployment is a disaster, and when the country is being taken down other perilous roads as well. Maybe the media can convince us and a majority of voters otherwise, but we’re dubious. Still, they’re going to try like heck to convince us that cockamamie ideas are respectable. So what we have is an election that will decide just how indoctrinated and ill-informed are the American voters of today.

Looks that way.

The usual trickery is the sample. Sometimes it’s not so obvious, however. Take this odd Bloomberg poll and related story, for example. The sample seems plausible, though the amount of non-leaning Independents is unusually high. So what accounts for the results? Shoddy workmanship? Corruption? A bit of both? The poll of 1002 adults contains 746 “likely” voters, or about 75%. Rubbish. In 2008, around 64% of adults voted. Furthermore, the poll did absolutely no testing to verify that the “likely” voters were in fact what they claimed to be. It’s always something with these guys. (We wonder if the reporters sometimes actually write their polling stories in advance and just wait to fill in the numbers later.)

The Pew poll sample is 51-40 D-R, including leaners. Care to guess what the poll’s election predictions are? Bonus fun: when is $900 billion not $900 billion? When it’s $2 trillion or so.

The AP discusses atiny sliver of the 1-2 trillion barrels of oil in the US:

The Permian Basin of West Texas is experiencing an oil boom, leading some of the region’s top oilmen to predict that Texas oil production will double within five to seven years. Oil drillers over the last eight years have found that the dense oil rock of the basin surrounding Midland and Odessa responds well to hydraulic fracturing, releasing lush yields. Total oil production last year in Texas averaged more than 1 million barrels per day for the first time since 2001.

“Right in the basin, we could get up to 2 million barrels a day,” Jim Henry of Midland-based Henry Resources told The Dallas Morning News for an article in its Sunday’s edition. “I’ve been totally surprised by the amount of oil we’re finding out in the shale zones,” Scott Sheffield, chairman and chief executive of Irving-based Pioneer Natural Resources Co., told the newspaper. “We have 30 billion barrels of new oil discoveries,” said Tim Leach…

“I could paint a scenario for you where we are producing 3 million more barrels per day by 2016, which would almost get us to the point where we could eliminate 60 to 70 percent of our OPEC imports,” Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Smitherman told The News. “With that greater control over our own energy security, we could care less about what happens in the Strait of Hormuz.”

It is absurd to be dependent on what goes on in the Strait of Hormuz, and it is absurd, as well as completely unnecessary, to put up with high oil prices when we have so much oil. It’s Economics 101, War and Peace 101, and — at least it used to be — America 101. Meanwhile, Captain Fantasy continues his Magical Misery Tour.

We won’t even tell you the poll results. All you need to know is the sample and you can guess what the narrative will be. A story about politics based on talking with 800 people. 136 of them aren’t even registered to vote and over 200 appear not to have voted in 2008. Self described Ds are 344 and Rs are 280, including leaners. More of the same narrative in search of a peg. Who cares what a group like this thinks about anything? HT: HA

Back on January 7, it merely looked bizarre when George Stephanopoulos questioned Mitt Romney for almost 4 minutes on the subject of contraception in a GOP debate, as we’ve previously observed. The question seemed to come from outer space, as the audience reaction showed. Now, two months later, it turns out that this theme is part of the administration’s re-election strategy, and not, as it were, a Fluke. The administration needed a wedge issue to shore up support among women voters, and to demonize the opposition. We suppose that’s fair enough as far as the politics go.

It’s not fair enough as far as the media establishment goes. The Stephanopoulos harangue of Romney now seems to have been intended to elicit a blunder from the GOP frontrunner before the issue became a big deal and the governor’s advisers would have briefed him about it in detail. Asking the question was okay; spending four minutes on it seems to us evidence of active collusion between ABC News and the White House. It’s hardly the the worst complicity by the media in spreading vile lies about the administration’s opposition, but it’s particularly egregious since it illustrated just how carefully a Media-Administration narrative is created and rolled out over time. It’s as though we’re all living in a work of fiction like The Matrix. We’re being fed planned fictional narratives meticulously story-boarded in advance by the administration and given a helpful narrative arc by the media. It’s frightening that the media are this corrupt and compliant.

And speaking of fiction — if this past week were a novel, its most dramatic plot twist to date took place when the media’s number one tormentor, Andrew Breitbart, 43, suddenly and shockingly dropped dead while walking alone in Brentwood after midnight. Quite a few people were pretty happy about it, including, we presume, some who are smart enough to avoid using twitter. You’ve got to admit that it’s just the sort of thing you’d see in a thriller about the corrupt American media establishment.

There are only a few important issues in the campaign of 2012. However, the media no doubt will be paying less attention to these and more to creating and sustaining a helpful narrative arc to the stories that the administration and its advisers have selected as useful electorally. Very depressing.

You may recall this computer sound effect from Star Trek. Now watch this video of Governor Romney, perhaps particularly around the one minute mark. There’s a little gap before his responses every so often, as if the speaker were trying to access data that is stored remotely. It’s a bit disconcerting. And now we’re not surprised at the latest surprise in the GOP race, namely that the latest vessel for the base’s views, Rick Santorum, is suddenly leading in the polls by 15 points. The base does not want a synthetic, made-up character, or a guy who looks the part but can’t act. We shall see whether there are more surprises ahead.

Following hard on the heels of the good “jobs” news from the mysterious disappearance of the American workforce, the Washington Post has another cheerleading story for the administration (“improved public confidence in his economic stewardship”) based on a “poll.” There’s just one little problem with the poll. It doesn’t disclose its sample. Cooked books, cooked polls. Ugh. What an ugly year 2012 is shaping up to be. Aren’t the “journalists” who “report” on “polls” and “jobs” like this embarrassed, even a little bit?

A few days ago, Mitt Romney was ahead in SC, and it was all about Saul Alinsky versus Gordon Gekko, but it turned out that Newt Gingrich won handily. Here’s some of what he had to say (we could not find a transcript of Gingrich’s victory speech in South Carolina, so we essentially created one below):

So many people who are so concerned about jobs, about medical costs, about the everyday parts of life, and who feel that the elites in Washington and New York have no understanding, no care, no concern, no reliability, and in fact do not represent them at all.

In the last two debates we had…where people reacted so strongly to the news media, I think it was something very fundamental that I wish that the powers that be in the news media would take seriously. The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and to become some kind of other system, and the reaction…People completely misunderstand what’s going on. It’s not that I am a good debater, it’s that I articulate the deepest held views of the American people…

If Barack Obama can get reelected after this disaster, just think how radical he would be in a second term…there are a number of key issues we have to talk about with the President. I believe this campaign comes down to economics, including jobs, economic growth, balancing the budget, the value of money, comes down to national security, what threatens us and what to do about it, but the centerpiece of this campaign is about American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky…

What we are going to argue is that American exceptionalism, the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. He draws his from the Saul Alinsky, the radical left-wingers, and people who don’t like the classical America…

One of the keys issues, and I’m prepared to take this straight to the President and frankly, straight to the elite media…is the growing anti-religious bigotry of the elites…The second big theme that every South Carolinian understands is jobs, economic growth…I want to go into every neighborhood of every ethnic background in the country and say to the people very simply, if you want your children to have a life of dependency and food stamps, you have a candidate and that’s Barack Obama. If you want your children to have a life of indepedency and paychecks, you have a candidate and that’s Newt Gingrich…

Part of our long-term security interests is having an American energy policy. I want America to become so energy independent that no American President ever again bows to a Saudi King. Let me give you an example of a common sense conservatism that solves problems. You have well over $29 billion of natural gas offshore. As President I will authorize on the very first day the development of it. That natural gas will create jobs that, in Louisiana, average $80,000 apiece. In addition, it generates royalties. Part of the royalties should be used to modernize the port of Charleston, which affects 1 out of every 5 jobs in South Carolina.

But it’s not enough just to find the money. The Corps of Engineers bureaucracy is so long and so stupid that they currently take 8 years to study, not to do the project but to study the project. We fought the entire Second World War in 3 years and 8 months. Now if you can beat Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in 3 years and 8 months, it is almost unimaginable that it now takes 8 years to study the project…

The President’s decision to veto the Keystone pipeline…you have to wonder how out-of-touch with reality this administration is…The President says, no, we don’t want you to build a pipeline from central Canada straight down, with no mountains intervening, to the largest petrochemical center in the world, Houston, so that we would make money on the pipeline, we would make money on managing the pipeline, we would make money on refining the oil, and we would make money in the ports of Galveston and Houston shipping the oil.

Oh no, we don’t want to do that because Barack Obama is taking care of his extremist left-wing friends in San Francisco. They think that will really stop the oil from getting out. No. Prime Minister Harper…is going to cut a deal with the Chinese, and they will build a pipeline straight across the Rockies to Vancouver. We will get none of the jobs, none of the energy, none of the opportunity. An American President who can create a Chinese-Canadian partnership is truly a danger to this country.

Gingrich certainly owes a great deal to the much-reviled media, and possibly to Romney’s mishandling of his tax issue. More surprises ahead no doubt, but even Romney partisans know that important changes are needed, and quick.