What’s new Today
Story #1 has a warning for Democrats from James Carville. #2 looks at the actions by the Obama campaign
and their actions indicate they know they are in trouble. #3 looks at what happened yesterday and from
the Democrats point of view it wasn’t a good day. #4 relates Obama’s economy with Kim Kardashian’s
wedding. #5 has the latest on Elizabeth
Warren’s troubles and it isn’t limited to her heritage. #6 tells you the difference between Spain and
the USA or the difference between learned helplessness and earned success. Finally in #7 is an update about the primary
in the Wisconsin governor recall.
Today’s thoughts
How
unpopular is Barack Obama in West Virginia? In the primary yesterday Obama got 59% of the
democratic primary votes and Keith Judd and federal inmate in Texas got 41%. He won 10 counties and qualifies to have a
delegate at the Democratic National Convention.
The
Wisconsin Democratic Primary had less than 627,000 voters (split among four candidates).
This was less than the 665,000
who voted for Scott Walker in the uncontested Republican Primary and far less than the 900.000 who signed the
recall petition.
It appears the Democrats can be for
states’ rights upon occasion. Nancy Pelosi claimed medical marijuana is
both a health issue and a states’ right issue.
“They
[Republicans] don’t care what anybody says except for themselves and their
corporate masters, like the Koch brothers.”
Howard Dean demonstrating what Jonah Goldberg’s Tyranny of Clichés is all about.
1.
Carville: WTFU
A long time ago a great three-time governor of Louisiana,
Earl Long, said about Jimmie Davis, the two-time not very good governor of
Louisiana, "You couldn't wake up Jimmie Davis with an earthquake."
As I go around the country and see various Democrats and
talk to them on the phone, honestly I'm beginning to think that we have become
the party of Jimmie Davis.
My message
is simple: WTFU. Translated -- wake the you-know-what up, there is an
earthquake.
You think that Democrats around the country are going to win
-- as I hear time and time again from people on the street.
Democratic fundraisers, activists, supporters, and even
politicians alike have somehow collectively lapsed into the sentiment that the
president is going to be reelected and that we have a good shot to take the
House back while holding the Senate.
I ask: What are you
smoking? What are you drinking? What are you snorting or just what in the hell
are you thinking?
Look
around the world -- do you see any governments or incumbents winning any
elections out there? Did it happen in small elections in
Germany or Britain, big elections in France and Greece or how about huge
elections in the United States in 2008 and 2010? Please folks -- wake up!
The
polling? Not that encouraging.
The latest Democracy Corps poll was 47-47. The Real Clear Politics average of
polls has the president up a whopping three-tenths of a percentage point. And I
am hearing the garbage that Democratic donors are telling Democratic
fundraisers ..."Obama has it in the bag."
Newsflash: Nothing is in the bag. Nothing can be taken for
granted. Everybody from the precinct door-knocker, to the Chicago high command,
to the White House, to the halls of Congress, to the Senate and House
committees, to congressional leadership, here is a simple message: If we don't get on the offense, reconnect
with the American people, talk about how the middle class is in a struggle for
its very existence, hold the Republicans accountable and fight like the
dickens, we are going to lose….
I agree
with Carville’s observation about incumbents.
Obama is in big trouble and the Democrats don’t even know it. Romney wins by at least as much as Obama did
in 2008.
2.
Obama
the Underdog
…
Actions speak louder than spin,
and the moves of Obama’s campaign officials this past week indicate
they are awfully worried about their
prospects. The most recent telltale sign is that
they went up with an early, expensive $25 million ad buy on Monday in
nine swing states, attempting to reintroduce the president in the best
possible way. This was no rinky-dink purchase;
it cost nearly one-quarter of the Obama campaign’s war chest of $104
million at the beginning of April. Going up with such a significant buy so
early is the equivalent of abandoning the running game in football when your
team is down by a couple of touchdowns.
The ad itself is in search of a cohesive message. The first part underscores
how severe the recession was, as a preemptive defense for why the economy
hasn’t turned around faster. The second half argues that America is “coming
back,” thanks to job growth over the past year. It’s that part that will prove
to be a tough sell. Indeed,
it was top
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg who advised the campaign in February that
this is the type of message -- saying things are getting better when voters
don’t agree -- that polls miserably “and produces disastrous results.”
But Obama’s campaign officials can’t utilize the time-tested “are you better
than you were four years ago” message because it doesn’t ring true, so
they have to argue things are getting a
little better and the administration needs more time. It shows how limited
the Obama playbook is this time around—
mobilize
the base, lambaste the opposition, and hope enough independents will hold their
nose and vote for you. It’s hard to believe that Obama’s campaign is
confident of victory, as
Time’s Mark Halperin reported on Monday. More likely,
campaign officials are putting on an awfully good game face in light of what
promises to be a very challenging reelection.
http://nationaljournal.com/columns/against-the-grain/obama-the-underdog-20120508
Obama seems to think he’s tried hard
and so he deserves another term. It
doesn’t work that way.
3.
Democratic good news: The Earth still circles the sun
So, some great surprises on primary nights, beyond Indiana…
In Wisconsin ,
Scott Walker received
more votes running against no one in the Republican primary than the two major
Democratic candidates got combined.
In North Carolina, “
No Preference”
garnered 21 percent in the Democratic Party presidential primary against Barack
Obama.
In West Virginia
,“A felon
incarcerated in Texas took one in three votes away from President Obama in West
Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday. Keith Judd, who is
serving time in a federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, for extortion, took 37
percent of the vote, with 50 percent of precincts reporting. Obama captured the
remaining 63 percent.”
I’m sure the night could have gone worse for Democrats, but… I’m not sure
how….
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/299443/democratic-highlight-last-night-earth-did-not-crash-sun
The more you look at the polls the
more you realize how bad it is for the Democrats. The close polls on the Presidential race show
a bias toward Democrats. If you
eliminate the bias, Obama is significantly behind.
4.
Desperately
avoiding Obamanomics
…
The real unemployment rate, when you
include the underemployed and those who’ve simply given up looking for jobs
that just aren’t there, is almost 15 percent. Since Obamanomics was
unleashed - increased taxes, increased regulations, wildly increased spending and
weak-dollar monetary policy -
a million
fewer jobs exist in America, median household income has dropped nearly 10
percent, housing prices have hit an almost 10-year low, gas prices have
doubled, a record number of Americans are on food stamps, and the federal
debt races toward $16 trillion (around $140,000 per taxpayer).
The only way out of this abyss is, of course, private-sector economic
growth. In the aftermath of the recession of the early 1980s, for example,
President Reagan’s economic strategy was
exactly the opposite of Mr. Obama’s: lower taxes, lower spending as a
percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), reduced regulations and
strong-dollar monetary policy. That produced
an average GDP growth rate of 7.1 percent. Now, three years into
Obamanomics, America’s GDP growth rate has slowed to a crawl: 2.2 percent.
The administration would like you to
think we’ve turned the corner, but calling our current economic status a
recovery
is like calling the product of
a Kim Kardashian wedding a marriage. Technically, it meets the definition,
but, come on, nobody’s buying it….
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/8/desperately-avoiding-obamanomics-and-obamacare/
I thought the analogy to Kim
Kardashian’s wedding was a good one. But
even in Obama’s video he uses big employment numbers which get much smaller if
you look at the rate per month. We are heading for our third summer of no
recovery.
5.
Elizabeth Warren: The more you know, the less qualified she
seems
… In fact,
colleagues
and media for years have complained about her scholarship. It's notoriously
sketchy. And so is her pedigree.
First the research. Claiming to be an "authority" on bankruptcy
law,
Warren has written papers and books
wildly inflating the role medical bills play in personal bankruptcies.
A Northwestern University peer review
of her 2005 paper on the subject, for example, ripped it apart, arguing
"
the methods were so poor they gave
cover to those who want to dismiss the problems of the uninsured — they can say
the only paper out there uses a suspect method."
ABC News suggested she was exercising a hidden agenda to promote a government-run
health system. Sure enough, President Obama in 2009 seized on her findings to
argue for socialized medicine: "The cost of health care now causes a
bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds."
In fact, as ABC pointed out, the claim cannot be supported by empirical
evidence. Asked where he got the flawed data, the White House cited the 2005
study by "Professor Warren."
In 2010, as Obama was floating Warren's name as someone to run his new
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
"The
Atlantic" magazine reviewed her academic work and found a disturbing "pattern" of using bogus metrics
to inflate the case for left-wing causes. "Deeply, deeply
flawed," it said of her research.
"This
isn't Harvard (Law) caliber material — not even Harvard undergraduate."
It was a nice way of saying she's a hack….
http://news.investors.com/article/610773/201205081849/warren-scholarship-found-deeply-lacking-academic-vigor.htm?p=full
It appears this woman is a fraud in
just about every way you can be a fraud in the academic world.
6.
Earned Success vs Learned Helplessness
…In the end, I concluded, what set the United States apart from Spain was the difference between
earned success and learned helplessness.
Earned success means defining your future as you see fit and
achieving that success on the basis of merit and hard work. It allows you to
measure your life's "profit" however you want, be it in money, making
beautiful music, or helping people learn English. Earned success is at the root of American exceptionalism.
The link between earned success and life satisfaction is
well established by researchers.
The University of Chicago's General Social Survey, for example, reveals that
people who say they feel "very successful" or "completely
successful" in their work lives are twice as likely to say they are very
happy than people who feel "somewhat successful." It doesn't matter
if they earn more or less income; the differences persist.
The
opposite of earned success is "learned helplessness," a term coined
by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the
University of Pennsylvania. It refers to
what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply
give up and stop trying to succeed.
During experiments, Mr. Seligman observed that when people
realized they were powerless to influence their circumstances, they would
become depressed and had difficulty performing even ordinary tasks. In an
interview in the New York Times, Mr. Seligman said: "We found that even
when good things occurred that weren't earned, like nickels coming out of slot
machines, it did not increase people's well-being. It produced helplessness.
People gave up and became passive."
Learned
helplessness was what my wife and I observed then, and still do today, in social-democratic
Spain. The recession, rigid labor markets,
and excessive welfare spending have pushed unemployment
to 24.4%, with youth joblessness over 50%. Nearly half of adults under 35 live
with their parents. Unable to earn their success, Spaniards fight to keep
unearned government benefits. ..
Obama
is looking for Americans to accept learned helplessness. Everything he is doing is with that in
mind. His attacks on success, expansion
of the welfare state, and crony capitalism is moving us directly toward Europe
and Spain in particular.
7.
Meanwhile in Wisconsin
….Democrats
have a huge enthusiasm gap
I saw it at my SW
Madison polling place where some of the old folks, now widows, who supported me
in my county board campaigns a decade ago, hobbled to cast their votes for
Scott Walker.
Ann of
Althouse also saw it. “Our
casual assessment of yard signs in Madison says anti-Walkerites have resigned
themselves to defeat. They've already attained closure. It was enough to force
Scott Walker into a recall election. He's been unsettled and harassed. No
point saying they're actually supposed to win, then, is there?”
The Hard Left is in a
dither over Barrett's refusal to show up for an announced "Unity
Rally" today in Madison. Instead, they’ll meet privately at Barrett’s
Milwaukee home. They’ll probably be a news media “opportunity.” Barrett
has lost the true believers, people like The Crapper, the Big Labor blogger
disciplined for blogging on the taxpayers’ time on his Milwaukee County job. On
his Cognitive
Disobedience blog, he says this about his party’s recall nominee:
"It's like having a boyfriend who says he loves you but
doesn't want to be seen with you in public."
“Remember Barrett's
rhetoric about putting Madison on a diet, and picking on prisoners with sexual
identity disorders? Tearing us down by picking on public employees and
vulnerable populations is not ending the civil war, it's tamping one side
down.”
Liberals are preparing for doomsday. Saw James Hoffa of the
Teamsters (role model for American youth) on the Mr. Ed Show Monday night on
MSNBC, talking about Wisconsin. He
starts out "Even if we lose ..." The camera went to Comrade John
Nichols who, very uncharacteristically, was momentarily at a loss for words….
Wisconsin
is looking good for Scott Walker. The
entire article is worth reading.
