Chamber of Commerce data

Common sense told me the Chamber of Commerce attack was all BS, but I never was sure how much so. Thanks to Jack Kelly, now I do:

Led by President Barack Obama, Democrats are trying to make campaign finance an issue, by charging — without a shred of evidence — that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is funding its advertising campaign in part with foreign money.

The flimsy basis for this charge is the Chamber has overseas affiliates for which it charges dues. Revenue from these dues amounts to less than $100,000 a year. The Chamber's budget this year is about $200 million. The Chamber plans to spend about $50 million on independent advertising this year, mostly on behalf of Republicans.

So calling it BS was an undersell; this was a fairy tale of epic proportions.

Foreign revenue amounts to only 0.0005 (1/20 of 1%) of their overall budget, and .002 (1/5 of 1%) of their advertising budget this year (not all of which is on Republicans, so that overstates it some).

The president has established himself as a hyper-partisan attack dog, but even in that context this fable diminishes him and the office. This level of sleaze is best left for the Alan Graysons of the world.

Mr. President, you're better than that.

The entire column is worth a read, as he also addresses special interests and influence buying in elections. The, ummm, money quote:

The funding of our politics chiefly by special interests is one big reason why we're falling off a fiscal cliff. For an expenditure of millions, special interest groups — be they labor unions or Wall Street bankers — reap billions in taxpayer subsidies.

Our politicians respond more to the special interests which provide them with money than they do to constituents who can provide them only with votes.

This is the problem with the Leviathan state, and why it is the biggest threat to our freedom. It is way too easy to bribe politicians into stealing our money to pay back the bribers.

1994 v 2010

James Taranto opens his Tuesday BOTWT with an insightful comparison of the 1994 and 2010 political environments.

I was especially struck by this Gingrich-Obama parallel:

Speaker Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, had something of an Obama problem: Having run a stunningly successful campaign, he was too full of himself, overambitious and insufficiently disciplined to do his new job well.

Spot on.

Also, the obvious theme:

Some of the Democrats' biggest mistakes of 2010 have been the result of "learning the lessons of 1994." That year, the Dems failed to enact a ruinous and unpopular health-care "reform" package, and they got trounced in midterm elections. Somehow this year they convinced themselves that if they succeeded in enacting a ruinous and unpopular health-care "reform" package, things would turn out differently.

There is a staggering level of cognitive dissonance, and lack of self-awareness, in thinking that there is something wrong with the voters or their understanding of Obamacare.

The problem is the very idea. Americans would prefer to make their own medical and health decisions, not have them imposed by force by an overbearing federal government. That is something that is unlikely to change, given that decades of propaganda gone into selling the idea to multiple generations has failed.

Although I guess trying to make future generations dumber by giving teachers' unions free reign over education policy is a solid back up plan.

Quick hits

Some political quickies:

I’m sorry, I just fail to see how the exposure of a group of major media figures coordinating efforts to suppress news damaging to the Obama campaign and to propagandize in an attempt to get him elected is news. Are people seriously surprised to hear that this was happening? Could anybody have thought it was not?

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Looks like one Obamacare lie has been exposed pretty quickly:

The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new "high-risk" insurance program under a provision of the federal health care legislation enacted in March.

It has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of pro-abortion Governor Edward Rendell under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania.

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How perfect is it that the president of a former civil rights organization which, having become obsolete, devolved into a garden variety hate and grievance group is named…Ben Jealous? It’s downright eponymous.

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Tom Sowell echoes my feelings on said organization: “[T]hat an organization like the NAACP, after years of fighting against genuine racism, should now be playing the game of race-card fraud is especially painful to see.”

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More Sowell: “[Voting for Obama thinking that he would be a post-racial president] was an honest mistake of the kind that decent people have often made when dealing with people whose agendas are not constrained by decency, but only by what they think they can get away with.”

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Jack Kelly on Obama’s curious decision to object to al Qaeda because, of all things, racism:

Objecting to al Qaida mainly because its leaders may harbor racial prejudices is kind of like objecting to Hitler mainly because he gave preference to tall blondes with blue eyes.

Al Qaida is objectionable because of the many murders it commits in pursuit of its Islamo-fascist ideology, which is objectionable enough in itself. The president's comments -- and more so those of his aide -- give the impression he'd think better of these terrorists if they had a diversity officer and an affirmative action program.

Barack Obama pledged to be America's first "post-racial" president. But in office, he's been more obsessed with race than any president since Woodrow Wilson, who imposed segregation on the federal government.

Wait, I've seen that movie before!

Brilliant take from James Taranto on the suggestion that Scott Brown is presidential material:

C'mon, Scott Brown? His victory last week was undoubtedly impressive, but let's put things in perspective. Brown is merely a state senator, and by the time of the next presidential election, he will have served less than a full term in the U.S. Senate. What could possibly give anyone the idea that he's experienced enough to go to the White House?

Honest partisans on either side should be willing to admit that the experience and fitness for office of Obama and Palin in 2008, and Brown in 2012, are the same. The dishonesty comes from the Democrat who claimed last fall that Obama was qualified for office but Palin a joke, or the Republican who claims now that Palin would have done a better job than has the comically overmatched Obama.

All.The.Same.

Quick hits 12/19

More links and tweets that have caught my eye, with a bit of commentary:

Telling sentence: “The majorities opposing Obama on the Guantanamo issue are even larger than those that oppose him on national health care.”

Some encouraging medical news.

The green mind at work: Prince Charles used up seven months’ worth of the average British person’s “carbon footprint” yesterday flying to Copenhagen on an executive jet to make a speech on climate change.

Oklahoma City’s Wednesday night shoes

John Stossel: “Someone will ration health care. In America, insurance companies usually do it. In most of the rest of the world, governments do. Costs skyrocket under both systems. Its time we tried the third option: let individuals use their own money to buy health care.”

John Hinderaker: “Don't fall for the pretense that the international ‘green’ movement is about anything other than anti-free enterprise and anti-American ideology.”

Robert Heinlein: “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.”

How many people remember that Obama, during his campaign, promised a net spending cut?

There are still 14 days left, but I’m declaring this the photo caption of the year.

And this the bookstore display of the year.

When the directions say “Roll it on over the head” this is NOT what it means.

Climate change: nature’s way.

Tiger and PC in domestic violence

Why does an attempt to transfer the right to make medical decisions from the people to government surprise anybody? Did you expect a Chicago machine politician to show an enthusiasm for civil liberties?

Foreign Object Damage asks: “Does it concern anyone else that anger is the only emotion that President Obama has displayed in public over the last month?” What, did you think he wasn’t really part of the Angry Left?

Thogocracy update: Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla) wants to imprison a local critic. This idiot exemplifies the police-state mindset.

John Stossel on the matter: “Bullies like Congressman Grayson illustrate the danger of government power; government is the only entity that can legally use force. That makes government a fearsome master. It can use force to take our money, and homes, and our freedom.”

From @Jeff_Jacoby: Ex-soldier finds a gun, turns it into the police, & is promptly arrested for possessing a firearm. Beyond Orwellian.

Happiest state ranking, Texas a disappointing 16th (Austin must be dragging us down).

Ridiculous photo caption editorializing.

Tweets from the wild Mavs-Rockets game I attended:
From STEIN_LINE_HQ: Brace yourself: Mavs found pieces from two Landry teeth embedded in gash in Dirk's right elbow
From STEIN_LINE_HQ: Landry taken straight to hospital. Mavs needed 30 minutes to clean up Dirk's elbow just to get ready for X-rays.
From @kpelton: This Houston-Dallas game will not go down as a monument to quality NBA officiating.
From @MFollowill: Hearing stories the process of picking the teeth of dirk's elbow was quite gruesome. Didn't know if it was his bone or Landry's teeth. Wow!

Quickies

More quick notes, offered with little or no commentary:

Of all of Obama’s broken campaign promises, does this one now look silliest? "The biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that's what I intend to reverse when I'm president of the United States."

Obama’s power grab is unmatched since at least FDR.

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Eric Cantor on the same subject: “The president has embarked on an end-run around the legislative branch of historic proportions. To be sure, the appointment of a few special officers to play a constructive role in a given administration is nothing new. What is new is the elevation of so many czars, with so much authority on endless policy fronts. Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances.”

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Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): "I love these members that get up and say, 'Read the bill!' Well, what good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you've read the bill?"

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Thoroughly unshocking stat: Tax burden of top 1% now exceeds that of bottom 95%.

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Other unshocking news: Organic food is no healthier.

Jeff Stier of the American Council on Science and Health: “It’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole. It was already proven that people aren’t getting sick from pesticides on food, so the organic crowd claimed their food was more nutritious. Now that that has been disproved, they’re going back to the pesticides thing.”

I’ll remind you that bullshit is organic.

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Politicizing justice: Obama Political Appointees Reportedly Overruled Career Justice Officials In Dropping Charges Against New Black Panther Party for Voter Intimidation

Protecting voter intimidation…change we can believe in!

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Dan Rather: not a fan of a free and independent press.

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Our “47 million uninsured” at a glance

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John Hinderaker: “[I]f a bill is too vast for a Congressman to read and understand, it is too big to pass.”

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Condescension runs in the family.

Gates’s daughter gets catty about Crowley’s daughter: “she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner.”

But they’re enlightened haters!

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Did they paint each other’s toenails afterwards? Obama Hosting Senate Dems for Pep Rally, Cake?

Quick hits

Some quick things I've run across, offered with little or no comment:

Ouch: “Short of writing ‘get whitey,’ It's difficult to imagine how Judge Sotomayor could have fouled up the Ricci case any more than she did. Let's count the ways.”

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Nah, no need to read bills before voting on them: TARP tax break recipients include NASCAR race track builders, Burger King, and a London rum producer. Let’s rush through cap and tax!

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Michael Kinsley on health care rationing: “Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he’d get it and you wouldn’t, it’s rationing.”

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BOTWT reader Joe Engel asks if a gay lawmaker voting against gay marriage is hypocritical, isn’t also the smoker Obama signing anti-tobacco legislation hypocritical? It has to be both or neither.

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Strange headline here: "Analysts say home loans will soon be hard to get with bad credit". Good news, but why “soon”? Why would it have ever been otherwise? The ability to repay should be the only consideration for determining whether loans should be granted.

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Ann Coulter nails the fatuousness of yet another of Obama’s moral equivalencies, this one from the Cairo speech:

Obama said, "Now let me be clear, issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." No, he said, "the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life."

So on one hand, 12-year-old girls are stoned to death for the crime of being raped in Muslim countries. But on the other hand, we still don't have enough female firefighters here in America.

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Glen Reynolds on Al Franken: “Caligula sent a horse to the Senate. Minnesota is just sending part of the horse.”

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The first lady's unfortunate disrespect of Queen Elizabeth showed that one does not have to be white to be white trash.

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Megan McArdle: “There’s a reason that most countries do not attempt to fund large welfare states with a very progressive income tax, the way we do. The income of the wealthy is fungible, mobile, and volatile. These are not strengths from the vantage of the tax system.”

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Populism in action: “A health care rally drew only four people to U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker’s office Thursday. Sponsored by MoveOn, a national public policy advocacy organization, the rally was intended to support expanded health care for the poor.”

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Jeffrey Miron: “The fundamental problem underlying the financial crisis was government policy. Instead of undertaking enormous new policies, we should try to fix or eliminate bad policies and focus on efficiency rather than redistribution. Doing nothing new and simply working with pre-existing procedures would have been much better than anything we’ve done so far.”

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A call for honesty from James Gibney:

Every product whose ingredients benefit from a subsidy should include the following language on the label:
"This product has been subsidized by the U.S. government at taxpayer expense. For more information, please visit usda.gov."

And every product that benefits from tariff protection should have the following language on the label:
"This product is protected from foreign competition by U.S. import tariffs. Its price is higher as a result. For more information, please visit usitc.gov."

Gratuitous, but funny

Andrew Young is a former aide to John Edwards, the ambulance chaser turned empty suit presidential/VP candidate who turned out to have had a baby with his mistress Rielle Hunter (which the press knew about but covered up to aid his 2008 candidacy, but I digress) while his wife was fighting cancer. He's now writing a tell-all book, which will only be interesting to those who are taken by salacious tales of inconsequential people.

Despite the overwhelming lack of importance of any of these people, I'm compelled to bring it up because it has emerged that Edwards and Hunter made a sex tape, leading the New York Daily News to issue this bit of genius:

"[the tape] show[s] [Edwards] taking positions that weren't on his official platform."

POW!

Buyer's remorse, etc.

Scattershooting while wondering what ever happened to Demetrius Calip:

Mark Tapscott: “The contrast is no longer between the young, personable, historic candidate Obama and a creaky, cranky old Republican White Guy, it’s between what America thought it was getting in a President Obama (cool, reasonable and beyond partisanship) and what it now sees as the reality of a President Obama (government spending out of control, an uncertain hand on foreign policy, broken promises, more bureaucrats, etc. etc.). Put another way - what we see now is neither what we were promised, nor what we expected.”

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Bizarre box score of the year: in their loss to Cleveland, San Antonio had five players in double figures, but nobody scored more than 11.

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Random stat, from a study in the Journal of Macroeconomics: “a 1% increase in government size decreases the rate of economic growth by 0.143%.”

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Oh what a difference an election makes; Glenn Reynolds with some links showing that, suddenly, dissent is no longer the highest form of patriotism and that, suddenly, it’s ok to question the patriotism of anybody who disagrees with the president. None of those “Question O-thority” t-shirts tolerated there, I suppose. They said there would be change we can believe in, and they were right!

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On the same theme, it is apparently now not a problem for the president to twiddle his thumbs while FEMA responds late and weakly to a storm and many Americans, coincidentally mostly of a different race than the president, die. That the obvious analogy between Obama’s response to the early February winter storm and Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina was not drawn is yet another indictment of a mainstream press that has become nothing more than a vehicle for disseminating Democrat Party talking points.

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Lest you think this is a recent phenomenon, recall the beginning to the New York Times story on drunken Senator Ted Kennedy’s vehicular homicide of Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969: “Tragedy has again struck the Kennedy family.”

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Nancy Pelosi rightly drew a lot of abuse for her statements that STD prevention stmulates (an unfortunate choice of words, that) the economy. I liked Mark Steyn’s take:

Makes a lot of sense. If we have more STD prevention, it will be safer for loose women to go into bars and pick up feckless men, thus stimulating the critical beer and nuts and jukebox industries. To do this, we need trillion-dollar deficits, which our children and grandchildren will have to pay off—but, with sufficient investment in prevention measures, there won’t be any children or grandchildren, so there’s that problem solved.

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From the same column, an etymology lesson: “Stimulus” comes from the verb stimulare, which is Latin for “transfer massive sums of money from what remains of the dynamic sector of the economy to the special interests of the Democratic party.”

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You might be a Taliban if…you refine heroin for a living but have a moral objection to beer.

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Did you catch that Hamas legislators voted to introduce crucifixion to the Palestinian Territories? When your defining characteristic is the desire to exterminate Jews, you wouldn’t want to avail yourself of any of the tools of the trade, now would you?

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Don’t they really have to have a revote in the Minnesota Senate race? With more than 25 precincts having more ballots than voters who signed in (one ended up with 177 more votes than voters, even more were more ballots than there are actual voters in the precinct, but they counted them anyway), and opposite standards being used to count votes in different precincts, it’s pretty obvious that any result from the November election will not be legitimate.

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A “Those who don’t learn from history…” lesson from Walter Williams:

In 1893, there was a depression; we got out of it without a stimulus package. There was a major recession of 1920-21; though sharp, it quickly reversed itself into what has been call the "Roaring Twenties." In 1929, there was an economic downturn, most notably featured by the stock market collapse, after which came massive government intervention — you might call it the nation's first stimulus package. President Hoover and Congress responded to what might have been a two- or three-year sharp downturn with many of the policies President Obama and Congress are urging today. They raised tariffs, propped up wage rates, bailed out farmers, banks and other businesses, and financed state relief efforts. When Roosevelt came to office, he became even more interventionist than Hoover and presided over protracted depression where the economy didn't fully recover until 1946.

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And, of course, Japan tried 10 stimulus bills in eight years and trillions of yen in public spending in the 90’s, yet unemployment grew worse and the economy remained stagnant. The track record for massive government spending to combat an economic slowdown is thus: zero successes, two spectacular failures.

But I’m sure it’ll work this time!

Math geeks unite! etc.

Scattershooting while wondering what ever happened to Swen Nater:

Tuesday was Square Root Day, 3/3/09. I know I was partying, 7 years is a long time to wait for another chance.

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Some apologies.

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Sign of the times: The per capita rate of civilian killings in the border city of Juarez, Mexico in 2008 was nearly three-and-a-half times as great as the per capita rate of civilian killings in the Iraqi province of Baghdad

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More transparency in the Obama administration? Not so much: When Vice President Joe Biden spoke to the annual meeting of AFL-CIO officials at the plush Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach on March 5, television cameras were not allowed to cover his speech – on orders from the White House, Fox News quoted the AFL-CIO as saying.

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More evidence of the decline and fall of American Journalism. From the New York Times corrections page: “An editorial on Feb. 22 stated incorrectly that unlawfully entering the country is not a criminal offense. It is a misdemeanor for a first-time offender.”

Yes, a major newspaper editor did not know that illegal immigration was, you know, illegal. And still has a job, despite such fundamental ignorance.

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I was surprised to learn that Steve Nash, was the lowest-drafted player (15th) ever to win the MVP award. I would have guessed that some late first rounder or second (or later, in the old days) rounder would have done so at some point, given that some have become major stars.

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Ari Fleisher asks MSNBC why they are not "going after Democrat members of Congress for why they aren't distancing themselves from Keith Olbermann.”

I think it’s obvious: because the White House hasn't ordered them to.

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Just like Bush, but faster!: “From Election Day 2000 to Election Day 2008, the S&P 500 fell 29.8%. From Election Day 2008 til the afternoon of March 6, it’s down 33.3%.”

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Encouraging sign: Mississippi bans revenue-light cameras; Upon Governor Haley Barbour's signature, Mississippi would join Alaska, Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin which have also banned automated citations (red-light and speed cameras) through judicial or legislative action. A similar ban passed the Montana state House of Representatives last month and currently awaits Senate action. An attempt to ban cameras in Missouri ran into a roadblock in a state Senate committee.

Hopefully Texas will see the light (pun intended) and follow suit; this is a scam whose time has passed.

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A note on buyer’s remorse from The Atlantic: “Like the college students who stayed up late to be inspired by his campaign rallies only to find Obama’s first significant action to be a stimulus program that will transfer about a trillion dollars from them to the Baby Boomers, Silicon Valley Obama supporters are likely to find that a government-dominated economic era will not a great one in which to start companies that threaten big incumbent corporations that have juice with the government. I hope they appreciate the irony.”

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Michael Barone with a sad tale showing that racism may be on life support but is still alive:

"Detroit City Council President Monica Conyers, wife of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, presides over a hearing where white witnesses are advised to leave the room. Congressman Conyers joined the Judiciary Committee in 1965, when the Chairman was Emanuel Celler and the ranking was Republican William McCulloch, co-sponsors of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. What would they have thought of this? As a nation, we have become more tolerant and inclusive in the years since 1965. Detroit, alas, seems to have moved in the opposite direction."

Voting with their wallets

Interesting summary of market movement from Powerline reader Bill Otis:

McCain's bounce had evaporated, and Obama re-took his lead in the polls, in mid- to late-September. At that time (September 19, specifically), the Dow Jones stood at 11,388.

By the end of September, as Obama's lead widened and solidified, the Dow had fallen to 10,325.

It continued its slide through October. The day after the election, it dropped 486 points to 9139.

By inauguration day, when reality could not be finessed any longer, it had fallen to 7949.

In the month since the inauguration, it has continued to drop, and is now at 7530 [Ed.: Now 7466.]. This is the lowest it has been in 12 years, lower by a considerable measure than it was in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 (when the denizens of Wall Street had to fear not just for their portfolios, but for their physical survival).

To sum it up, the market has lost a third of its value in a scant four months -- the four months in which it became clear that Obama would become, and then did become, President.

While it would just be mindlessly partisan to claim that the decline is entirely due to Obama's ascension on the one hand, so would it be mindlessly partisan to deny that a significant portion of the decline is a reaction to Obama's ascension and fear of what he has and might do on the other.

Because, of course, the stock market is not so much as a snapshot of current economic conditions as an anticipation of the future.

Gerrymandering

Here is a set of maps of the 20 most gerrymandered congressional districts in the country, showing the ridiculous lengths to which states will go to rig elections. For the record, the count is 16 Democrat, 4 Republican, but the fun is in the maps themselves.

Teaching hate

Fascinating piece by John Kass of the Chicago Tribune:

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we're all united now, let's consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching "inclusion," and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

"McCain Girl."

"I was just really curious how they'd react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters," Catherine told us. "I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be."

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain's name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

"People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn't be wearing it," Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

"One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed," Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren't the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

"In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain," Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college.

"Later, that teacher found out about the experiment and said she was embarrassed because she knew I was writing down what she said," Catherine said.

One student suggested that she be put up on a cross for her political beliefs.

"He said, 'You should be crucifixed.' It was kind of funny because, I was like, don't you mean 'crucified?' " Catherine said.

Other entries in her notebook involved suggestions by classmates that she be "burned with her shirt on" for "being a filthy-rich Republican."

Some said that because she supported McCain, by extension she supported a plan by deranged skinheads to kill Obama before the election. And I thought such politicized logic was confined to American newsrooms. Yet Catherine refused to argue with her peers. She didn't want to jeopardize her experiment.

"I couldn't show people really what it was for. I really kind of wanted to laugh because they had no idea what I was doing," she said.

Only a few times did anyone say anything remotely positive about her McCain shirt. One girl pulled her aside in a corner, out of earshot of other students, and whispered, "I really like your shirt."

That's when you know America is truly supportive of diversity of opinion, when children must whisper for fear of being ostracized, heckled and crucifixed.

The next day, in part 2 of The Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment, she wore another T-shirt, this one with "Obama Girl" written in blue. And an amazing thing happened.

Catherine wasn't very stupid anymore. She grew brains.

"People liked my shirt. They said things like my brain had come back, and I had put the right shirt on today," Catherine said.

Some students accused her of playing both sides.

"A lot of people liked it. But some people told me I was a flip-flopper," she said. "They said, 'You can't make up your mind. You can't wear a McCain shirt one day and an Obama shirt the next day.' "

But she sure did, and she turned her journal into a report for her history teacher, earning Catherine extra credit. We asked the teacher, Norma Cassin-Pountney, whether it was ironic that Catherine would be subject to such intolerance from pro-Obama supporters in a community that prides itself on its liberal outlook.

"That's what we discussed," Cassin-Pountney said about the debate in the classroom when the experiment was revealed. "I said, here you are, promoting this person [Obama] that believes we are all equal and included, and look what you've done? The students were kind of like, 'Oh, yeah.' I think they got it."

Catherine never told us which candidate she would have voted for if she weren't an 8th grader. But she said she learned what it was like to be in the minority.

"Just being on the outside, how it felt, it was not fun at all," she said.

Don't ever feel as if you must conform, Catherine. Being on the outside isn't so bad. Trust me.

This is both fascinating and disturbing at the same time because of the setting.

If this experiment had been conducted on a college campus, with the student subjected to the same level of hate from the same kind of bigots, it wouldn't even raise an eyebrow - no place is more intolerant, more hostile to dissenting ideas, than the modern college campus.

But to see this girl subjected to this kind of hate, and to see such naked displays of bigotry by middle schoolers? That is chilling.

Acknowledging that some of them may be some precocious children in the sample (I, fascinated with the coming Bicentennial and our founding, was reading the Federalist Papers and forming my own political foundation at about that age), I have to think that much of this comes from the parents. And that is what upsets me so about this story.

A young teen does not just decide on his own that people with whom they disagree politically should be burned alive, crucified or killed. That level of hate must come from observing the most hateful and bigoted behavior imaginable in the home, and having it driven home that this kind of thing is somehow acceptable. Much as a young southerner in the 1930's might have seen nothing wrong with wearing sheets and burning crosses, which is really no different than what happened here.

It's child abuse, pure and simple. As the cliché goes, such people shouldn't be allowed to reproduce.

Sometimes you forget to post, etc.

I ran across this file that I apparently put together and forgot to post, so if any of it seems dated realize that it's more than a week old.

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Pacifists and other assorted America-lasters tend to discount the threat of a nuclear Iran, often because they claim that the mad mullahs are many years from accomplishing anything. The problem with that spin is that last fall the head of the UN's nuclear "watchdog" said that Iran would need three to eight years to acquire an atomic bomb. And then this summer he said six months to a year.

My point is not to say that the threat is imminent, although it clearly could be and the UN thinks it is. My point is that we do not know, and this existential threat is one issue where we cannot afford to be left standing by while they complete the task.

Bottom line, the next president simply must stop Iran from going nuclear. Whether it is in his first month or well into his first term, it is a necessity and will go a long way toward how history judges his presidency.

And here’s a hint: pure diplomacy will not get the job done. They are not going to voluntarily give up their pursuit of the bomb, no matter how nicely we ask them, contrary to the fantasies of the wimpy foreign policy crowd.

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In beating SMU 34-7 in windy and rainy conditions last Saturday, Navy ran 77 rushing plays and 0 (ZERO!) passes. Have we seen that since the 1920’s, if even then?

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I’m shocked, shocked, to learn that the US tax system is not only more progressive than tax hells like France and Sweden, it is second only to Ireland as the most progressive in the Western world.

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Washington and Washington State are a combined 0-14 against the spread vs. 1-A opponents this year. No word on whether Barney Frank has proclaimed them to be in great shape.

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Possible fake name alert…did the Gainesville Sun really find somebody named Dick Hunter to feature in the lead for this story on a Gay Pride Festival?

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An odd rule in North Carolina could hurt Obama. When you cast a straight ticket vote in the state, it does not count for the presidential or (nonpartisan) judicial elections. It’s a rule that Democrats put in to help their state and local candidates.

Democrats created the straight-ticket law in the 1960s. More conservative than the national Democratic party, state Democrats feared that relatively liberal candidates at the top of the ticket might reduce their appeal among straight-ticket voters, so they made sure the presidency would be a separate question for voters.

This led to a presidential undervote of 18,000 in 2004, as straight-party voters who were not careful or were not aware of the law failed to vote for president (some could have done so by choice, but you would think that would be a very small percentage). It is ironic that the most liberal major candidate in history could be hurt by a law meant to protect state Democrats from exactly such a candidate. You reap what you sow.

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Assault with a deadly smelling weapon:

Fort Pierce woman accused of shoplifting, brandishing a female sanitary napkin
A 27-year-old woman accused of shoplifting cologne and trying to touch an officer with a “well-used and bloody female sanitary napkin” Tuesday is facing charges, according to an arrest affidavit released Wednesday.

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Three papers who endorsed McCain are booted from Obama’s traveling party. If he wins, the assault on free speech will be breathtaking, given how heavy-handed they’ve been during the campaign.

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You say you always wanted to sleep with a virgin? Are you sure? Positive?

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White Supremacists for Obama

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I’m agnostic (because I see such things as unknowable), but this is the kind of thing that makes you think there is a God, and He is a just God:

"Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday - the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922."

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No wonder Obama is so fond of big government – he categorically refuses to give any financial help to his own family, even though they apparently need it:

Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama's best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.

A second relative believed to be the long-lost "Uncle Omar" described in the book was beaten by armed robbers with a "sawed-off rifle" while working in a corner shop in the Dorchester area of the city. He was later evicted from his one-bedroom flat for failing to pay $2,324.20 (£1,488) arrears, according to the Boston Housing Court.

It gets worse: Bob Krumm notes that "The most damning part of the Obama aunt story is that once his campaign found her living in squalor they told her to not talk to the press until after the election, but they didn't try to help her."

Well, they are strapped for cash, after all.

Yes, the story is from a London paper; you know the US media is in full-blackout mode on stories unkind to Obama at this late date.

And oh yeah, did I mention she’s an illegal alien?

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I had no idea that Bill Ayers dedicated one of his books to RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan (among others). I can see why Obama chose him as a mentor; he’s such a sweet guy.

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The Massachusetts state income tax repeal initiative: change we can believe in.

The market weighs in

Stocks fall 500 points on postelection nerves

It was the biggest-ever drop following a presidential election, although if that is in absolute terms (Bloomberg doesn't say) then it may not be what I would consider the real record. But in any case it appears that the vaunted "Obama discount" that has supposedly been built into the market was not fully in effect.

If he can avoid silliness like "economic stimulus" or stupidity like tax increases (of any kind) the market should recover a good deal in the coming months. The more government interference we get, the longer the slowdown will last, bottom line.

UPDATE 11/7/08: The freefall continued on Thursday. The two day drop in the Dow was the largest since the 1987 crash - and that's the real decline, percentage, not absolute dollars.

The world's first response

The first reaction from one of our enemies is, predictably, to test Obama to see if he will give in to intimidation:

Russia will deploy missiles near NATO member Poland in response to U.S. missile defense plans, President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday

Expect more of this kind of thing, although even I'm surprised that it only took a few hours to start.

How successful were the media?

Anecdotal, but this suggests they were "pretty damned successful" in providing cover for Obama:

Sheen, of Lincoln, Nebraska, says his vote is coming down to one issue: abortion. Sheen says he's "definitely pro-life" and he's trying to decide whether Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain is more in line with his views.

Hell on earth

From ABC News:

Among the other voters who have shown up to vote at Shoesmith Elementary School this morning, where Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., will vote: Louis Farrakhan and William Ayers.

Seriously.

Welcome to the South Side of Chicago.

Howard Dean supporting McCain?

Or is he a hypocrite? His words from 2005 are instructive:

We need more than one party in charge. And the vote on Tuesday is going to be critical to decide whether American democracy still allows those of us who didn't vote for the president to have any say in running the country whatsoever.
[...]
Someday, the Democrats will be back in charge again. Do we want a Democratic Party that's in charge of everything? Well, you know, I suppose it's my job to say yes. But the truth is, as an American, it's better when parties share power. It's better when even those people who didn't win the election have something to say.
[...]
[There] is a culture of corruption and abuse of power in Washington. This is what happens when one party is in charge of everything.

KO on the election

My buddy Kevin O'Neill offers the kind of election analysis that only he can provide, from a sports gambling list e-mail (in the context of McCain as a wagering proposition):

McCain overperformed to the polls in primaries, while Obama underperformed to the polls in some of the critical swing states. This is called the "Bradley effect", where Ivy Leaguers don't do as well in elections as they did it polling. It is so-named because Bill Bradley, who attended Princeton, consistently would draw only 62% of the votes in his New Jersey Senate races after polling at 67% or higher. Obama, of course, went to Columbia and attended law school at Harvard. Is this a double Bradley effect, perhaps? This anti-Ivy League factor is in effect for the first time in a while, as in the last two election cycles, both major party nominees were Ivy Leaguers. This could really help McCain.

Of course there will likely be more votes in Ohio than there are voting age citizens. But perhaps this offsets the ACORN fraud factor, proving that favoring Obama has not cornered the drug-addled celebrity demographic, he picked up the critical Aerosmith lead guitarist endorsement. And I know a lot of people don't make up their mind until Joe Perry has spoken, though Brad Whitford is clearly more knowledgeable on defense issue.