h/t Nita
Friday, November 9, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Why It's Too Early To Evaluate Election Turnout
Election turnout in 2012 as of right now is 117.5 million, dramatically lower than 2004, let alone 2008.
Turnout in 2008 was 131.5 million, in 2004 122.3 million, and in 2000 105.4 million.
Hurricane Sandy badly disrupted voting in densely populated areas of the eastern seaboard, especially in hard hit New York, namely in Queens, Long Island and Staten Island. The difference in New York alone between 2008 and 2012 to date is 1.6 million, and 600,000 in New Jersey.
Add to this the late voting arrangements for voters in New Jersey, and the absentee and military vote being tabulated after election day and the turnout numbers for 2012 could yet change significantly, even if relatively few races might be impacted by the outcome.
It's still too early to draw sweeping conclusions about the meaning of the turnout until we know more exactly what it is.
Rush Limbaugh Is Grasping At Straws To Explain Romney's Loss
Yesterday Rush informed us that maybe Romney lost because there are now more of "them" than of us.
In other words, we on the right are now demographically outnumbered by Democrat Hispanics, Blacks, etc. and won't be able to win anymore without more of "them" in the Republican Party. That is the reflexive interpretation of the Republican Establishment, as reported here:
"It's not about geography anymore with the Republican Party," said Margaret Hoover, a Republican strategist and CNN contributor. "It's about demographics, and we've got to start thinking about growing the party."
Today he's changing his tune. Today he's blaming . . . the white or conservative or Christian Republican base!
In other words, because Romney may have underperformed McCain's turnout (by 2.8 million) therefore Republicans didn't turn out for Romney.
Well, how does Rush know they were Republicans? What if they were independents?
I don't know how you can blame the base when for the first time ever I had to wait in line to vote on Tuesday, in deep red semi-rural Michigan, like many others all across the country.
And I don't know how you square that with the fact that it wasn't even close in South Carolina, ground zero for Tea Party antipathy toward Mitt Romney. The right everywhere held its nose and turned out, not for Romney it is true, but to defeat Barack Obama.
And now Rush is blaming US!
Gee, thanks Rush. You've just given the Establishment another reason to exclude conservatives from the Republican Party, and it isn't even true.
Turnout yesterday won't be precisely known for weeks, and it is important to wait, not just to learn the Republican turnout, but the Democrat contrary to what Rush is saying today.
In 2008 McCain slightly underperformed Bush in 2004 in the swing states, but in 2008 Obama way outperformed John Kerry from 2004, by 3 million in the swing states if I remember correctly. Obama won in those states by a margin of only 1.4 million. A half million Republicans weren't to blame for that.
"The Electorate Always Gets Things Right", Illustrated From The Bible
"The wisdom of crowds", according to Jude Wanniski, John Tamny and the libertarian quacks of Forbes Magazine, illustrated from the Bible:
"And all the people brake off the golden earrings which [were] in their ears, and brought [them] unto Aaron. And he received [them] at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These [be] thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." -- Exodus 32:3f.
Hours After Re-election, Obama Moves Against Arms Industry
Obama's way of attacking our Second Amendment check on tyranny isn't overt. He takes the circuitous route by attacking capitalism generally and specifically the arms manufacturers, who thrive on trade.
Hours after re-election he's back in negotiations over the UN treaty which would control trading of arms. His Democrat-controlled Senate could ultimately ratify this treaty, thus by-passing the politics of the issue in the Republican-controlled US House.
Better stock up. Once he ruins a few companies here, and limits the import trade, guns are going to get harder to come by.
This is what giving Obama more time meant during the campaign season. And Republicans had a candidate who never brought it up or made it an issue.
Too late now.
Reuters reports here:
Hours after U.S. President Barack Obama was re-elected, the United States backed a U.N. committee's call on Wednesday to renew debate over a draft international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global conventional arms trade.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Hey John Tamny! Did The Electorate Get It Right Last Night?
The invisible hand of the electorate and the invisible hand of capitalism cannot be falsified by anything, because they are, well, invisible, here:
Put plainly, Wanniski argued that the electorate always gets things right, or in his words:
“…the electorate as a whole is wiser than any individual member in understanding its interests, it is wiser than any economist or group of economists.”
No doubt many readers are scratching their heads in response to the above, but as Wanniski put it to the late William F. Buckley (paraphrase), “You’re likely smarter than every individual inside a packed football stadium, but collectively those individuals are smarter than you are.” The wisdom of crowds….
We may not have always liked the end result, but the electorate has always been right. ...
The electorate unhappily gave [George W. Bush] another shot; one it presumably came to regret. ...
Obama ... [i]s as a result presiding over a sick economy that should be strong, and as the electorate dislikes failures, Obama’s days in the White House are numbered. ...
The electorate is dying to fire Obama, history says it will given its aversion to failures, yet Romney’s timidity with regard to policies actually meant to grow the economy point to a close win for Romney when it should be a rout. Wanniski’s electoral model says so.
The libertarians are as bat-shit crazy as the Keynesians.
Presidential Aspirant Rep. Michele Bachmann Narrowly Re-elected In MN
Results here.
Her stand on many of the issues approximated real conservatism, but her district appears less inclined to vote for her after the presidential run.
Romney's Path From 206 Ended At 266
Romney was competitive only in Florida with 49.3% (29), Virginia with 47.8% (13) and Ohio with 48.2% (18), with no evidence beyond that suggesting a path to victory, just hope (!) for the best.
Where've we heard that before? From a real liberal, Barack Obama. The opposition could smell our weakness in our imitation of them. And the voters wisely recognized that faux liberalism is no substitute for the real thing. Republicans didn't offer the country a clear alternative to Obama, just a facsimile.
This suggests money spent in places like Michigan was a big mistake, where Obama finished with 53.5% to 45.6%. And believe me, I received numerous robocalls and a fair number of live calls from Republicans trying to win the presidential here. Romney should have arguably allocated more time and money in places like Pennsylvania and Colorado.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Power Companies Pretend News Doesn't Exist, Just Like Liberal Media
Power companies in Long Island and the Rockaways in Queens have simply removed some areas there from their outage maps because power cannot be restored to effectively destroyed service points, aka homes, reports CBS News here.
Kind of like how the media have pretended there's no there when it comes to problems with the Obama biography and record.
If you ignore them, they don't exist.
Gee, I wonder from whom the power companies learned that trick?
Benghazi? Who's that?
Rush Says Rasmussen Puts Republican Registrations +5.8 Over Democrats
Here:
Rasmussen's out with his final Summary of Party Affiliation, as of October 31st.
This is a huge sample of people that Scott Rasmussen asks are they Republican or Democrat or independent or what have you. He has the Republicans at their highest party affiliation he's ever recorded since he's been doing this. Basically it's Republicans plus six: Republicans 39, Democrats 33. The actual number is 5.8. We'll round it up to six points. Rasmussen had the exact turnout in 2008 at Democrats plus seven.
Rasmussen has a +/- 4 margin of error in his polling, which is basically dead even in the daily presidential tracking poll, so I'll go out on a limb and say Romney gets +5 in the popular because of his overwhelming advantage with independents and in Republican registrations, and maybe 285 in the Electoral College: 206 per Rasmussen's current assumptions, plus Florida (29, hello seniors), Virginia (13, hello defense industries), Ohio (18, Kasich and Co.), Wisconsin (10, Walker and Co./Paul Ryan) and Colorado (9, pro-family voters).
Monday, November 5, 2012
Male Median Earnings Are At 1960s Levels
"[T]he earnings of the guy in the middle have declined 20% over the last four decades. As a result, the median earnings of men are back to the levels that prevailed in the 1960s."
-- Michael Greenstone, MIT, quoted here
Your Congressman Could Be On His Parents' Insurance Under ObamaCare
Guess what?
Your Congressman could theoretically stay on his parents' healthcare insurance under ObamaCare, which allows a child to stay on his parents' plan until the age of 26.
How so?
"No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years." -- Article. I. Section. 1. of The Constitution of the United States of America
So an enterprising young individual could get himself elected to Congress at the age of 25 and still be on his parents' plan.
That's insane!
Neal Gabler Can't Face It That Democrats Have Betrayed Social Security
Here, for Reuters:
"There is no gainsaying that the basic purpose of the [Ryan] budget is to dismantle New Deal and Great Society programs that assist the poor and gradually remove the juice from the third rail by privatizing Social Security and essentially voucherizing Medicare. To save the country from the flood of debt, they must save us from FDR and LBJ."
The Ryan Budget isn't even the law of the land because Democrats have stopped it in the Senate. But for two years, two years!, Democrats have enthusiastically advocated and voted for reductions in the payroll tax, removing the juice from Social Security, in order to put cash into people's hands and stimulate the economy. Democrats did this in the lame duck session in December 2010, when they still had complete control of the US government: House, Senate, White House:
Looks to me like Democrats represent the biggest threat to the sacrosanctity of Social Security.
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