Total Votes Cast 2012 Presidential Election Now Up To 122.94 Million

Data here.

As of right now third party voting plus Romney's share still comes to less than Obama's, at 49.45%.

Who's More Willing To Let Bush Tax Cuts Expire? GOP Or Dems?

Josh Barro thinks it's the Republicans, here:

Democrats cannot force Republicans’ hand unless they are more willing than Republicans to let all the Bush tax cuts expire. And they won’t be. A full expiration might well cause a new recession, which would be even more politically damaging for the Barack Obama administration than for congressional Republicans. Congress is already about as unpopular as it can become, and Republicans know they are not going to get their legislative agenda enacted in the next two years anyway. But a new recession would greatly interfere with Obama’s second-term plans.

Republicans Attacked ObamaCare. Hispanics Overwhelmingly Supported It. Any Questions?

The idea that Republicans alienate (can I say that?) Hispanics because Republicans are against amnesty for illegal immigrants is ludicrous. Hispanics love the welfare state and the party which stands for it, especially its newest iteration in ObamaCare:

The poll, which surveyed 887 likely Latino voters, shows that 62 percent of respondents approve of the overall job Obama has done with health care while in office, including his creation of the controversial plan for comprehensive health care reform. The poll was conducted the Sept. 11-13 and the margin of sampling error is +/- three percentage points.

More here.

Heather Mac Donald gets it right, for National Review, here:

"It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation."

Thomas Sowell Summarizes Obama's First Term

"[I]t is amazing how long the rotten can hold together, if you don't handle it roughly."

Here.

Thomas Sowell Recognizes Tom Dewey In Mitt Romney

Thomas Sowell recognizes Tom Dewey in Mitt Romney here, as did we, and divines the horrible consequences of Romney's loss:

Quite aside from the immediate effects of particular policies, Barack Obama has repeatedly circumvented the laws, including the Constitution of the United States, in ways and on a scale that pushes this nation in the direction of arbitrary one-man rule.

Now that Obama will be in a position to appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his evasions of the law and usurpations of power, this country may be unrecognizable in a few years as the America that once led the world in freedom, as well as in many other things.

Barack Obama's boast, on the eve of the election of 2008-- "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America"-- can now be carried out, without fear of ever having to face the voters again.

This "transforming" project extends far beyond fundamental internal institutions, or even the polarization and corruption of the people themselves, with goodies handed out in exchange for their surrendering their birthright of freedom.

Obama will now also have more "flexibility," as he told Russian President Medvedev, to transform the international order, where he has long shown that he thinks America has too much power and influence. A nuclear Iran can change that. Forever.

Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama? You or your children may yet have reason to recall that as a bitter memory of a warning sign ignored on election day in 2012. 

Hurricane Sandy Victims Search For Gasoline

In the Mad Max movies, it took an apocalypse to start the war for gasoline. In 2012 in New York and New Jersey it only took a Category 1 hurricane.

Oh yeah. We're so advanced.  

Republicans Lose Again Because They Offered No Conservative Alternative

Andrew McCarthy for National Review here gets it, even if I would quibble about the precision of his election results:

In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are already too much like Democrats. ...

Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. ...

[T]he Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that? ...

Republicans talk about limited central government, but they do not believe in it ... They look at a money-hemorrhaging disaster like Medicare, whose unsustainability is precisely caused by the intrusion of government, and they say, “Let’s preserve it — in fact, let’s make its preservation the centerpiece of our campaign.” ...

Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government — by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money — is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along. ... No matter what they say in campaigns, today’s Republicans are champions of massive, centralized government. They just think it needs to be run smarter — as if the problem were not human nature and the nature of government, but just that we haven’t quite gotten the org-chart right yet.

That is not materially different from what the Democrats believe. ... Tuesday pitted proud progressives against reticent progressives; slightly more preferred the true-believers. For Americans who don’t see much daylight between the two parties — one led by the president who keeps spending money we don’t have and the other by congressional Republicans who keep writing the checks and extending the credit line — voting wasn’t worth the effort.

McCarthy thinks about 2 million fewer voters showed up in 2012 than in 2004, which is "staggering", except that his election math already looks just a little off. Today I'm showing 122.5 million total votes in 2012, and 122.3 million in 2004, eight years and two elections ago. Still, that is a staggering comparison when you realize that the population has grown by a net 21 million over the period.

Clearly, as McCarthy says, the voters in 2012 "shrugged", but the shrug was actually bigger in 1996 when Republicans again characteristically picked two other moderate losers in Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. Fully 8% fewer ended up voting in 1996 than in 1992 (1% fewer voted in 1988 than in 1984).

Starting with 1968 and ending with 2008, the average increase in total votes cast in the presidential from election to election has been 6%. 2012 compared to 2008 shows 6% fewer votes cast. The slightly smaller shrug over moderate Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan may reflect the distance in time and understanding from the debates over conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s.

The single biggest gains in total votes cast, incidentally, occurred in 2004 in Bush 43 v. Kerry (16% more votes cast than in 2000) when war in Iraq put patriotism center stage (just barely 51% voted for that despite buying off seniors with Medicare Part D in 2003), followed by 1992 in Bush 41 v. Clinton (13% more votes cast than in 1988) when the issues were breaking the no new taxes pledge (43% voted against that) and "that giant sucking sound" (19% voted against that).

Republicans still haven't learned how to put conservatism all together and wrap it in a bow.

Of 7000 Banks, 3500 Need Recapitalization, 2000 Need To Sell

So note various experts in this story by Stephen Gandel for Fortune, who concludes:

Mortgage rates are about one percentage point higher than they would be if we had more competition. Apply that to all mortgages, and that higher interest rate costs consumers about $100 billion a year in extra interest. Not to mention all those who can't actually get refinanced. I'd say that's pretty good evidence that we should figure out a way to keep small banks around.

The bottom line: Dodd-Frank will not go away because Obama is not going away, so up to as many as 6300 banks may go away, destroying what's left of free market competition in banking. The people are already the losers, and stand to lose even more.

Since the beginning of 2008, 460 banks have failed.

Larry Kudlow Slanders Christ On His Radio Program

Larry Kudlow, former Democrat, member of SDS, drug addict and alcoholic, and supposedly a Jewish convert to Christianity, slandered Christ in the final hour of his radio program yesterday. That's a lot of "formers".

He did so while attacking Paul Krugman for advocating that the Bush tax cuts be allowed to expire as a remedy for the fiscal cliff, ridiculing the idea with the ever popular provincialism "for Christ's sake".

Obviously the defeat of Mitt Romney has pushed all of Kudlow's buttons at once. He began the program with a full-throated denunciation of the Pat Buchanan wing of the Republican Party and its anti-amnesty stance on illegal immigrants, saying it must be "crushed".

You can take the man out of the SDS, but you can't take the SDS out of the man.

You can not hear a podcast of Kudlow's program anytime you don't want to, here.

Larry Kudlow Declares War On Pat Buchanan Wing Of Republican Party

Just now on the radio show, saying the anti-amnesty wing, the Pat Buchanan wing, of the Republican Party must be defeated and "crushed".

Two back to back defeats of liberal/moderate Republican candidates for president continue to be misinterpreted by the fifth column on the right.

They should join the Democrat Party once and for all.

David Frum Loves The 47%

Here: 

"To be a patriot is to love your country as it is. Those who seem to despise half of America will never be trusted to govern any of it. Those who cherish only the country's past will not be entrusted with its future."

David Frum should know a thing or two about patriotism. He's from Canada.

Did the Founders love England as it was, or any of the huddled masses yearning to be free love the hellholes they came from as they were?

Gold To Oil Ratio Skyrockets to 20.11

The sale on oil relative to gold just got much better.

The action, however, is mostly on the side of gold, which is movin' on up because of Obama's re-election.

He aims to tax and spend, but the US House stands in the way of that, which takes some of the pressure off the need to borrow money or print it, which is negative for gold. But with Ben Bernanke serving at his pleasure at the Fed, dollar devaluation through quantitative easing is still positive for gold and negative for the dollar.

Gold doubled under Obama's first term, from $850 the ounce to $1,730 today. I wouldn't be surprised to see that happen again.

$3,400 the ounce in 2016?

Just the thought of it makes my nose bleed.

Don't Blame The 47%

Don't blame the 47%.

• The percentage which Romney said wouldn't vote for him in the general (the takers)
• The percentage which did vote for him in the general (the makers)
• The percentage which didn't vote for him in the Republican primaries (the achers)

Instead, blame Romney (the faker).

Obama Spotted Repairing Power Lines In New Jersey

h/t Nita

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.

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.

Why WI Senator Elect Tammy Baldwin Loves Football

"Tammy Baldwin is . . . the state’s first female senator and the first openly gay candidate ever elected to the chamber."