Diageo/Hotline Poll: Obama Approval Drops 9% in a Month
— Ace

Let me clarify that that isn't even a net drop. That's just the pure drop in approval.

This link mentions the poll, but the press release AHFF Geoff sends me is more complete.

Obama Job Approval Rating Drops Nine Points

Poll Finds Decreased Confidence in Stimulus Spending and Concerns Over Deficit

Double-Digit Increase in Percentage of Voters Saying Country Is On the "Wrong Track"

New York, July 15, 2009 - The Diageo/Hotline Poll of 800 U.S. registered voters conducted by FD from July 9-13, 2009, finds that the percentage of American voters who approve of the job President Obama is doing has dropped nine points to 56%. The previous Diageo/ Hotline Poll, conducted from June 4-7, found that 65% of voters approved of the job he was doing.

Obama's Job Approval Ratings

With 56% of voters approving of the job he is doing, the Poll finds President Obama's job approval rating is at its lowest level recorded in the six monthly Diageo/Hotline Polls since President Obama took office.

Interestingly, compared to June, the decrease in Obama's job approval ratings is being driven primarily by decreases among male voters (-15 points), Independent voters (-15 points), and rural voters (-15 points).

The three groups whose atypically high support for a liberal presidential candidate got Obama elected.

...

The Poll also finds that the percentage of voters who say that "things are seriously off on the wrong track" has increased 12 percentage points from a record-low of 43% in last month's Poll to 55% in today's Poll.

And would people vote for him again? As of the moment, it's... not looking good for him.

...

Additionally, in looking ahead to 2012, the Poll finds that 42% of voters say they would vote to re-elect President Obama, while 39% say they would vote for someone else. The June Poll found that 46% of voters said they would vote to re-elect President Obama and 30% of voters would vote for someone else.

1, these numbers are statistically equal, and 2, any incumbent below 50% is in trouble. In fact, any incumbent below something like 52 or 53% is in trouble.

Decreasing Levels of Confidence in the Stimulus Package

The Diageo/Hotline Poll also finds a significant decrease in voter confidence in the stimulus plan passed in February. Specifically, the Poll finds only 39% of voters are confident the stimulus plan will be successful in turning around the economy, a decrease of 13 percentage points from the 52% of voters who expressed confidence in June.

...

Strong Opposition to Additional Stimulus and Quicker Recovery vs. More Debt

In the context of decreasing levels of confidence in the current stimulus package, coupled with discussion about the viability of another one, the Poll shows very little support for a proposal for another stimulus package, with only 36% saying they would support such a proposal and 52% saying they would oppose it, with 40% saying they would strongly oppose it.

At the same time, it is clear that concerns over the prospect of greater deficits trump concerns over economic recovery.

Actually, if Obama were pursuing smart policies that actually spurred recovery, a quick recovery would reduce deficits, as tax receipts go up and social welfare payments go down. But he's not, so the people chose sub-optimal Option B, as they're not offered the optimal option.

Congressmen have also taken a big hit -- Democratic Congressmen's approval dropped eight points, and Congressional Republicans' approval dropped nine points. The National Journal highlights the latter finding in a neener-neener taunt, without also noticing that Democrats in Congress lost a statistically-equivalent amount.

All branches and all parties are taking about the same hit here. But that doesn't mean the hits are equal -- Democrats, after all, control things.

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Requiem for a TOTUS
— Ace

Right-hand TOTUS, 2009 - later in 2009.

Godspeed, my friend. You will be missed.

Right-hand TOTUS leaves behind a devoted sister, Left-hand TOTUS.

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Shocker: "Global Warming: Scientists' Best Predictions May Be Wrong"
— Ace

Science, settled, is. Some assembly required.

ScienceDaily:

No one knows exactly how much Earth's climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study suggests scientists' best predictions about global warming might be incorrect.

Stop. Crazy-talk.

The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth's ancient past. The study, which was published online July 13, contains an analysis of published records from a period of rapid climatic warming about 55 million years ago known as the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM.

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

The deuce you say.

What could possibly account for all that warming that can't be explained by Carbon Dioxide ("The Invisible Killer")?

Oh, who knows. As my all-time favorite comment has it, "If only there were some... natural mechanism by which to explain variations in global temperature. It would have to be massive, though. On the scale of our own Sun."

During the PETM, for reasons that are still unknown, the amount of carbon in Earth's atmosphere rose rapidly. For this reason, the PETM, which has been identified in hundreds of sediment core samples worldwide, is probably the best ancient climate analogue for present-day Earth.

Reasons unknown = reaction to rising temperature. In the temperature records -- most of which are inconveniently from pre-industrial and even pre-human times, with no factories or cars -- temperature rises first, and then carbon dioxide rises.

Why? Well, I don't really know, but as the eminent Princeton physicist always notes, carbon dioxide levels spike every year. In the autumn/winter. Because vegetation that has been bottling up carbon dioxide as part of their composition suddenly dies, liberating that "stored" carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere as it all decomposes.

Does something like that happen when the temperature gets warm, thus increasing vegetative cover, which then pumps CO2 in the air when the excess vegetation begins its inevitable die-off? I don't know and neither do "scientists" because they won't entertain the possibility that temperature variations is due to anything except cars.

In addition to rapidly rising levels of atmospheric carbon, global surface temperatures rose dramatically during the PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by about 7 degrees Celsius -- about 13 degrees Fahrenheit -- in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.

But CO2 levels rose only 70%, not nearly enough to explain the warming.

...

The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating during the PETM. "Some feedback loop or other processes that aren't accounted for in these models -- the same ones used by the IPCC for current best estimates of 21st Century warming -- caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM."

I don't know if you've seen it, and it's kind of old by now, but the EPA hushed-up a report that greatly undermined the theory of "climate change" and forbid the writer to mention it and took him off all activity having to do with the subject. They suddenly decided he should just initial grant applications, a fairly unskilled task, so unskilled, in fact, that even Barack Obama was able to manage it while at the Annenberg Challenge.

The report is here.

The left claims his report shouldn't be paid any mind because "he's not a scientist, he's an economist." And: The report contains "no original research."

First: He is a scientist, having graduated college as a physicist. His graduate work is indeed in economics -- but his undergrad degree is in physics, which makes him a scientist. And far more of a scientist than most of the people the left insists we must listen to, such as Al Gore.

Second: Economics is in fact the most relevant skill in these analyses.

Why? Because the case for global warming is made not through any particular science or study but by crunching huge data-sets from lots of different studies using the basic economic device of regression analysis to spot driving factors. The paper that pushed the "hockey stick" model of global temperatures contained no original research, either. What it did was feed lots of data into a regression analysis computer to plot temperatures.... and got it completely wrong, by the way, something now acknowledged. Quietly.

Had the guy running the program actually been an economist trained to do such statistical crunching he might have noticed his program was flawed and would make virtually any data-set fed into it into a hockey-stick.

You know those "models" we're always told "prove the case"? Same thing economists do every day. (And just as accurate in their forecasts, too!)

Third: One of the guy's biggest complaints is that the EPA has done no research of its own on this topic, but instead simply accepts the findings of outside groups (the IPCC, mostly).

Given his complaint is that the EPA has done no original research before announcing its conclusions, it seems awfully strange that the big knock on this guy is that he hasn't done any "original research."

In addition, the man was given four or five days to write his report. What "original research" did they expect?

The research he noted wasn't his, but greatly undermined the case for carbon-induced "climate change."

One problem the left just can't get around: CO2 levels have not only risen but accelerated in their rise for 11 years, but temperature has dropped from its 1998 peak, pronouncedly in the past year.

None of their vaunted models predicted this before it happened, and, even after the data is in, their vaunted models still fail to explain or duplicate what happened in real life.

They shrug this off as if it's no big deal. Even after the actual data comes in and rubbishes their predictions, they still can't get their models, even retroactively, to produce the temperatures actually observed.

But this is science, and it's quite settled.

Thank you drive through.

Thanks to Dave @ Garfield Ridge.

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Schwarzenegger Gets the Message
— Ace

Arthur writes:

Arnie = Jerry Brown

And I mean that in a good way. My fondest memory of Gov. Brown was the night Prop 13 passed. He was strongly against it all through the election cycle. That night, after it passed by a landslide, he was talking as if he was for it all along. My point is, he got the message! Arnie is getting the message.

He writes that in response to Schwarzenegger's sudden conversion to the tea-partiers' point of view:

American Power notes the shift:

Listen to that message: Balance the budget; no tax hikes; rationalize government by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. This line, in pure form, has been completely alien to the Schwarzenegger administration since the recall of 2003. Yet it's the standard program among tea party patriots across the country today. We're "Taxed Enough Already," remember?

After campaigning as a fiscal conservative, the Governor has repeatedly violated his "no new taxes" promises. Voters approved $15 billion in bond revenues in a 2004 special election. Proposed by the Governor as a budget solution (complete with a "spending cap"), "critics called Prop. 58 a ruse, saying, correctly, that it was weak and opened the way for more borrowing, spending and taxing by politicians." And when state services indeed continued to grow, Schwarzenegger failed to reform finances with his set of ballot initiatives in 2005 (see, "Voters Reject Schwarzenegger's Bid to Remake State Government").

The defeat Proposition 1A on May 19th handed the Governor his third strike - and clearly, he was out!

So now he's "standing firm for a balanced budget"! Golly Gee Willikers!!! You think?

And now it's not about whether you're a Republican or a Democrat? Hello tea party patriots! That's what folks have been saying all year.

A lot of readers are cynical about Republican leadership (and you can put scare quotes around either one, or both, of those words) and pessimistic about the chances for political change.

There is no doubt that government itself has a liberal bias, and no matter who is elected to office, she will find out that while a lot of things are difficult to achieve, nothing is harder to achieve than cutting spending. The permanent government establishment has set it up to be so, and the various constituencies dependent on government spending can make a lot of noise.

But even though the odds are stacked against us, we actually can pressure government officials to do the jobs they were elected to do. Yes, they will avoid this at almost every cost. Yes, they view doing their jobs as the least attractive path and will resist it until they have no other paths left open to them. But ultimately, if we stay united and noisy and implacable, they will bend.

Eventually.

There's way too much dark talk of actual revolt. Not only is such talk scary, but it is also a fantasy solution to real-world problems, and as such, counterproductive. Any emotional energy directed towards this fantasy solution is not being directed towards a realistic solution. Someone who's really convinced that the situation is absolutely hopeless politically is obviously not going to be very enthusiastic about political agitation.

Anyone talking like that has kind of given up, and basically is playing right into Obama's Clowad-Piven plans. I don't know if this is actually part of the Cloward-Piven strategy, but Obama wants nothing more than for his opponents to feel marginalized and helpless and dispirited and... broken. Politically broken people don't vote and don't agitate -- why should they? It's futile.

But it's not futile. And no one on our side is actually marginalized at all. Low taxes and limited government and pretty much the entirety of the conservative program have long had strong appeal for the public; that appeal has not simply disappeared.

Obama was not elected primarily for his ideology; indeed, he had to hide it and actively lie about his ideology (and enlist the entirety of the MSM to lie on his behalf). The election turned instead on managerial competence; the GOP was deemed to have been found wanting, so much so the public was willing to entertain the possibility that a man whose executive experience summed to signing grant applications by left-wing organizations might just happen to have undiscovered talents as a leader.

Schwarzenegger was and is the ultimate RINO, and no one can have any delusions that he really believes in cutting spending. Nor that, were the pressure lifted from him, he wouldn't happily go back to the path of least resistance, raising taxes and increasing spending.

But it is irrelevant for our purposes whether or not he actually believes in this or if he'd chose it absent coercion. He doesn't and he wouldn't. The point is that even in supposedly ultra-liberal California, the public's appetite for increased taxes is very low, and the public's tolerance for wasteful spending is almost as low. And that public pressure can, ultimately, effect change.

Quote: I forgot I'd wanted to quote Dr. Samuel Johnson: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Maybe We Just Should Have Told Him Cutting Spending Was Like Sexual Release. Light content warning for Schwarzenegger's quotes from Pumping Iron. more...

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Top Headline Comments 07-15-09
— Gabriel Malor

For comments on the items in the Top Headlines sidebar. A link to these comments is stickied at the top of the Top Headlines column.

Much Later: There's lots of good stuff in the Top Headlines today. If you're looking around for something to read...

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Sotomayor Hearings Day 3 Open Thread
— Gabriel Malor

If you are so inclined...

Update: Via muffy, there is live streaming of the hearings at MSNBC.

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First Pitch Coverage (lack thereof) Gets Noticed
— Dave in Texas

Eh. A bit much ado about, etc. Yeah, he short hopped it.

The audible boos surprised me a little.

Ok not much.

By contrast,
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Liberal Law Professor: Sotomayor Either Perjuring Herself or Unqualified
— Ace

He's not addressing her Wise Latina denials, but rather her claim that judging involves nothing but application of the law to facts. She says this, of course, to denigrate the role her racialist ideology might play in her decision-making; if it's nothing but facts and already-settled law, then there's little room for mischief.

She's denying that there exists something called "theory of jurisprudence," which includes such doctrines as originalism, strict constructionism, and, of course, the ever-flexible and ever-expanding doctrine of the "Living Constitution." As she doesn't want to admit she's an adherent of the latter, she claims there's no such thing as judicial philosophy whatsoever.

For example, faced with a legal question about which the Constitution is absolutely silent, a conservative justice would say there is no Constitutional dictate either way: A law is permitted to exist; it is also permissible to have no law. Lacking a constitutional source of authority, a judge herself has no authority to set policy.

On the other hand, someone like Sotomayor does not stop her inquiry simply because she finds that she has no authority whatsoever to make a ruling that binds anyone. She then looks to international law; the always-popular "changing social mores and norms;" "public policy considerations;" anagrams of Ricky Martin song titles; etc.

So, yeah, she's lying. Or else she's so stupid she doesn't even realize she's making a choice about judicial philosophy at all -- like man of the stupid and liberal (BIRM) she is entirely unaware that there is any other philosophy than the one she believes in, to the point where she denies it's a philosophy or choice at all and believes it to be simply the natural and inevitable order of things.*

But it's not as untrue as her claim that she meant anything other than what she seemed to mean in when she said a wise Latina, with the richness of her experience, would more often than not come to a better conclusion than a white man.

But I'll take it.

Oh, and she also lies about what she said previously about international law "informing" US constitutional law.

Andy McCarthy also confesses that Sotomayor is changing her story so much that "it's not the easiest thing for a simple white guy — at least this one — to keep up with a wise Latina."

A wise Latina, she previously said, would "choose to see" different facts than a non-Latina. This wise Latina is giving full proof to that as she "chooses to see" an awful lot of "facts" about her judicial philosophy and her previous statements that others plainly don't.

* See Peart, Neil, et al., "Freewill."

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Overnight Open Thread – Surf & Turf Edition– (genghis)
— Open Blog

Thanks to Maetenloch & Gabe for filling in the last couple of nights despite the fact itÂ’ll take me weeks to undo all the damage they did to the ONT. I told them not to let you stay up lateÂ…

Item #1: This is a couple of days old but itÂ’s a follow-up to a post I did a couple of weeks back regarding PeTAÂ’s plan to protest a convention of veterinarians in Seattle because fish will be tossed. (I canÂ’t find the original post right this second to reference but will tack it on if and/or when I do.)

”SEATTLE - A fish flap unfolded in Seattle today as group of half-naked animal-rights activists dressed like fish took on a national veterinarian group that's meeting in Seattle. The activists - members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - wanted the vets to cancel a salmon-tossing exhibition by the popular Pike Place Market fishmongers.”

PeTA’s protest consisted of the always-original tactic of laying on a sidewalk in ridiculous costumes and playing dead which has worked for countless numbers of leftish protest groups going back to the ‘70s and beyond:

”Demonstrators donned fish-tails and shimmery paint to call attention to what they say is the vet group's disrespect for marine life. Some laid topless on the sidewalk and others carried signs that said things like "Gutted Alive."”

There’s a photo included with the article so you can be the judge on how fishy they look. I think they may’ve mistaken mermaids (and in one case a merman) for fish though. And we’re not talking Daryl Hannah circa “Splash” era mermaids either, though I suppose with enough tartar sauce and lemon there might be a workaround here. This also provides me with a chance to bring up one of P.J. O’Rourke’s greatest quotes ever when he was describing animal rights protesters in one of his collections of articles (I forget which one). P.J. posed an interesting philosophical question when he asked: “If meat is murder, are eggs rape?” Profound.

Hey look! More stuff below the fold!
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Dick Morris: ObamaCare Will Destroy Medicare, and Shift the Elderly from the Top of the Medical Care Heap to the Bottom
— Ace

Via Kausfiles, Dick Morris proposes a deadly attack on ObamaCare.

ObamaÂ’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access. Indeed, the principal impact of the Obama health care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.

It is so ironic that the elderly - who were so vigilant when Bush proposed to change Social Security - are so relaxed about the Obama health care proposals. BushÂ’s Social Security plan, which did not cut their benefits at all, aroused the strongest opposition among the elderly. But ObamaÂ’s plan, which will totally gut Medicare and replace it with government-managed care and rationing, has elicited little more than a yawn from most senior citizens.

ItÂ’s time for the elderly to wake up before it is too late!

Kaus wonders if conservatives are essentially too principled to make political hay in defending a program most of us aren't (or weren't) strong supporters of.

I can only speak for myself: I can adapt.

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