The LAT, I am guessing, tarted up the headline to read "Revenge of the White Men," because that is the only way left to liberals to explain their defeats. (Well, that and the public being too stupid to know what's good for them.)

The actual article, written by a guy from RealClearPolitics who I assume isn't some wild-eyed lefty, points out that that is the media's go-to method of denigrating opponents of their liberal boyfriends. Doesn't seem to slow the LAT any.

Millions of white men who voted for Barack Obama are walking away from the Democratic Party, and it appears increasingly likely that they'll take the election in November with them. Their departure could well lead to a GOP landslide on a scale not seen since 1994.

...

Pollsters regularly ask voters whether they would rather see a Democrat or Republican win their district. By February, support for Democrats among white people (male and female) was three points lower than in February 1994, the year of the last Republican landslide.

Today, among whites, only 35% of men and 43% of women say they will back Democrats in the fall election. Women's preferences have remained steady since July 2009. But over that same period, white men's support for a Democratic Congress has fallen eight points, according to Gallup.

White men have moved away from Obama as well. The same proportion of white women approve of him -- 46%, according to Gallup -- as voted for him in 2008. But only 38% of white men approve of the president, which means that millions of white men who voted for Obama have now lost faith in him.

The migration of white men from the Democratic Party was evident in the election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts. His opponent won 52% of white women. But white men favored Brown by a 60%-to-38% margin, according to Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates polling. Once again, Democrats could not win enough other votes to compensate for the white male gap.

...

In 1994, liberals tried to explain their thinning ranks by casting aspersions on the white men who were fleeing, and the media took up the cry. The term "angry white male" or "angry white men" was mentioned 37 times in English-language news media contained in the Nexis database between 1980 and the 1994 election. In the following year, the phrases appear 2,306 times.

Tarnishing their opponents as merely "angry" was poor politics for the Democrats. Liberals know what it's like to have their views -- most recently on the war in Iraq or George W. Bush -- caricatured as merely irrational anger. Most voters vote their interests. And many white men by the 1980s had decided the Democrats were no longer interested in them.

Those ex-Obama-supporters may indeed be angry. It's one thing to feel as if someone isn't looking out for your interests. It's another thing to feel betrayed by someone who claimed to be looking out at your interests but who lied about it.

Posted by: Ace at 04:29 PM | Comments (232)
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CNN, last of the true-believin' Mohicans. (Well, maybe not the last, but among the last.)

Even CNN's juiced poll finds majority disapproval of their boyfriend.

This is a poll of adults, as usual for these Obama-loving pollster, offering a very skewed and overly-optimistic estimate of how their boyfriend's doing.

For the first time, a CNN poll has found that a majority of Americans disapprove of President Obama's job performance.

According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Monday, 51 percent of respondents disapprove of Obama's job performance and 46 percent approve of it.

Obama's approval rating has dropped steadily each month since December, when it was 54 percent. His highest approval rating in a CNN poll was 76 percent in February 2009 shortly after he took office.

...

[H]ealth care was the policy area that drew the second highest negative rating, with 58 percent registering disapproval. The highest negative rating was 62 percent for his handling of the federal deficit.

The difference between 1994 and now, Obama pronounced with typical modesty, is that now Democrats have him.

Yes, they have him. And that may make a difference... but perhaps not the difference he thinks it will.

Thanks to PhilJ.

Posted by: Ace at 03:44 PM | Comments (423)
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A lot of people claiming that we can never repeal this bill. They cite the examples of Social Security and Medicare.

It will be difficult to repeal it, just due to the fact that it's going to be hard to overcome a Democratic filibuster to repeal -- I may be wrong, but Republicans have never had 60 votes in the Senate, ever. (Well, who knows, maybe after the Civil War or something.)

But if this bill is as unpopular as I think it is, we can probably repeal this.

It's important to point out the differences between this bill and Social Security and Medicare. Those bills had bipartisan support... partly because they each had a bipartisan constituency. Everyone gets old, Democrat and Republican, conservative and liberal. While seniors might tend this way or that, it's never been the case that one party dominated the elderly.

On the other hand, Obama's bill is aimed with laser-like focus on heavily-Democratic constituencies at the expense of every other constituency. There are niche groups that will be aided by the bill (maybe) which may be considered a bipartisan constituency, but those groups are small.

Obama's bill is simply an method of giving the poor raises by rescinding raises from everyone else.

Make no mistake, this bill is intended to make the Haves pay extra to cover the Have Nots. In some cases it does so directly -- taking $500 billion from seniors with Medicare to give health insurance to younger people. In most other cases, it will do so indirectly, in much the same way that our Medicare system of below-market reimbursements impels drugstores to raise prices on everyone else in order to not take a bath on its Medicare clients. Obama's bill contains a lot of legally-required cross-subsidization and encourages a lot more economically-necessary cross-subsidization.

On the net, everyone who has insurance now -- through Medicare, or through their employment, which is really part of their wages, paid instead to a third party to purchase an insurance plan -- will have to give up part of their weekly check to buy a pricey policy for someone they don't know.

This is not the sort of bill that becomes "unrepealable" as Social Security and Medicare would. Social Security and Medicare paid their benefits to everyone who became elderly; there was something in each program for everyone. Sure, there were a lot of people who did not get out of these programs what they paid into it, but they got something out of it. Even if some richer seniors only got 80% back or so, well, eight cents on the dollar isn't a deal you'd normally take but it's also not so horrible a deal you'll get riled up enough to change your political behavior.

That has always been the secret of how the progressives shift income from the middle class to the poor -- they establish programs which have benefits for the middle-class, too, even if those benefits are less than what the middle class actually pays into the system. The middle class at least feels like it's getting something out of the deal, and, well, if they're not quite getting out of the deal as much as they put in, they shrug it off in the interests of being nice and helping the needy and so on.

But this bill doesn't do that. There is, in fact, no benefit for the 85% of the country that have part of their salaries diverted into a third-party insurance plan. There is nothing for them but additional taxes and additional rationing of their care so that part of their salaries -- I am stressing, a health insurance plan is just a part of your salary -- can be paid to someone else.

On top of that, the plan will add trillions to the deficit, as even with all those new taxes and rationing of care and impounding people's salaries to give them to someone else, it still isn't paid for.

I just don't see this like Social Security or Medicare. Those benefited the middle class, and furthermore benefited everyone, eventually (assuming they didn't die earlier in their lives). This bill benefits only a discrete, easily-identifiable fraction of the population at the direct and unambiguous expense of everyone else.

I just don't see this plan ever becoming popular with those being forced to hand over larger and larger parts of each paycheck to perfect strangers. People are never going to be unsure whether or not they're the ones Taking or they're the ones being Taken From.

And the Taken From is 85% of the country.

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (445)
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John Adams wept.

A suspected al Qaeda organizer once called "the highest value detainee" at Guantánamo Bay was ordered released by a federal judge in an order issued Monday.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi was accused in the 9/11 Commission report of helping recruit Mohammed Atta and other members of the al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, that took part in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Military prosecutors suspected Mr. Slahi of links to other al Qaeda operations, and considered seeking the death penalty against him while preparing possible charges in 2003 and 2004.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson granted Mr. Slahi's petition for habeas corpus, effectively finding the government lacked legal grounds to hold him. The order was classified, although the court said it planned to release a redacted public version in the coming weeks.

Mr. Robertson held four days of closed hearings in the Slahi case last year. Mr. Slahi testified via secure video link from Guantánamo Bay, said his attorney.

"They were considering giving him the death penalty. Now they don't even have enough evidence to pass the test for habeas," said the attorney, Nancy Hollander, of Albuquerque, N.M.

Why don't they have evidence against him? Because they used some harsh techniques to get him talk. See they weren't trying to build a criminal case against him, they were trying to get information about future attacks.

This is the choice the lawfare model forces us to make...prevent attacks or build criminal cases. Doing both is almost impossible.

Remember when Obama, Holder and Gibbs assured us that there was no possibility that KSM wouldn't be convicted? How's that promise looking right about now?

Via Keep America Safe

Posted by: DrewM at 12:58 PM | Comments (129)
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Liberals are still spinning this as Neugebauer calling Stupak a "baby killer" (we all know he's a whore) but if you listen, it sounds like Neugebauer is telling the truth and he said "It's a baby killer", meaning the bill without the Stupak Amendment.

Either way he's apologized.

Ok, here's where I lose whatever fighting credibility I may have earned today with some...elected Republicans have to cut this out (yelling and name calling). As we saw over the weekend the media will make up enough crap about Obama's opponents without giving them more ammunition. Is it unfair Democrats get away with saying whatever they want about Republicans? Yes. News flash...life isn't fair.

The more time we spend fighting over our right to say dumb stuff or whining about the free pass of the Democrats is time lost that could be spent fighting the abomination that is ObamaCare. The audience here is the American people, they don't care about this kind of fight. We need to keep them focused on the fact that they are about to get screwed and only one party can and will stop that. Anything else is noise and any loss of focus helps Obama.

Look back to the founding fathers. There was a lot of trash talking back in the day but the leading figures stayed out of it (at least in public) and let their proxies handle it for them. That's what we in the blogosphere, talk radio and opinion media are here for. Let us do the name calling and the insults. The public face of the party, the elected representatives and candidates, have to stay out of this. They have to be on their best behavior, above it all and focused on the end goal.

We can settle scores later. Right now there's one mission: ObamaCare delenda est!

Added: Of course this provoked a whole thing in the comments. Let me just say, I'm not against tough talk. Look at Boehner's speech, look at Coburn's threat. Great stuff.

Outbursts however, don't play as well. As SlaveDog put it in the comments..."We need more Ryan and less Neugebauer."

Posted by: DrewM at 12:18 PM | Comments (360)
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Via Powerline, David Hogberg at Investors Business Daily takes a look at 20 ways the Senate health care and reconciliation bills make us less free.

Here are a few.

1. You are young and don’t want health insurance? You are starting up a small business and need to minimize expenses, and one way to do that is to forego health insurance? Tough. You have to pay $750 annually for the “privilege.” (Section 1501)

2. You are young and healthy and want to pay for insurance that reflects that status? Tough. YouÂ’ll have to pay for premiums that cover not only you, but also the guy who smokes three packs a day, drink a gallon of whiskey and eats chicken fat off the floor. ThatÂ’s because insurance companies will no longer be able to underwrite on the basis of a personÂ’s health status. (Section 2701).

9. If you are a large employer (defined as at least 101 employees) and you do not want to provide health insurance to your employee, then you will pay a $750 fine per employee (It could be $2,000 to $3,000 under the reconciliation changes). Think you know how to better spend that money? Tough. (Section 1513).

16. The government will extract a fee of $2 billion annually from medical device makers. If you are a medical device maker what you will pay depends on your share of medical device sales in the U.S. So, if you sell 10% of the medical devices in the U.S., what you pay will be 10% multiplied by $2 billion, or $200,000,000. Think you, as a medical device maker, know how to better use that money, say for R&D? Tough. (Section 9009 (b)).

The reconciliation package turns that into a 2.9% excise tax for medical device makers. Think you, as a medical device maker, know how to better use that money, say for research and development? Tough. (Section 1405).

And on and on.

I find the penalty for not covering employees interesting. If it stays at $750, isn't every employer simply going to drop health coverage, pay the per capita fine and pocket the difference? That might not work in a boom economy where employers are competing for workers but in tight times like these, a job without insurance is better than no job at all.

Even at 2 or 3 thousand dollars per employee it might be worth it for some companies to dump health care coverage. I'm not sure what group rates are for big employers but I'd think it's got to be close to that number and then factor in all the costs associated with a company administering a plan, including all the HR types you could lay off and it's probably a money maker for companies.

Then you have to pay your the individual mandate fine for not being covered and/or go get your own policy. That policy will be heavily subsidized making you dependent on the government and adding to the cost of the program beyond what's already "budgeted".

Then we would hear from the left not that we should repeal this crap but that we need more government in the form of either a public option or single payer. The answer is never, ever less government, even when government is the problem.

ObamaCare delenda est!

Posted by: DrewM at 11:05 AM | Comments (257)
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But we are going to save sooooo much money that unicorns will be free! Who wouldn't lend us money based on that business plan?

The bond market is saying that itÂ’s safer to lend to Warren Buffett than Barack Obama.

Two-year notes sold by the billionaire’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in February yield 3.5 basis points less than Treasuries of similar maturity, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Procter & Gamble Co., Johnson & Johnson and Lowe’s Cos. debt also traded at lower yields in recent weeks, a situation former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. chief fixed-income strategist Jack Malvey calls an “exceedingly rare” event in the history of the bond market.

...“It’s a slap upside the head of the government,” said Mitchell Stapley, the chief fixed-income officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Fifth Third Asset Management, which oversees $22 billion. “It could be the moment where hopefully you realize that risk is beginning to creep into your credit profile and the costs associated with that can be pretty scary.”

Much more at the link.

The bottom line is bond traders don't give a rat's ass about Hope, Change and Yes We Can! They are looking at the numbers and the US simply is borrowing way beyond its means. That's going to make debt less attractive to investors and as we run up more debt to pay for this crap, it will cost us more to entice buyers, that in turn runs up our debt and we're in a vicious cycle.

Oh and we will be running up a lot more debt. We all know the CBO numbers are fantasy but if you take a look at how wrong financial projections have been for previous social programs, you see just how screwed we are.

It's almost as if someone were trying to destroy the country or something.

ObamaCare delenda est!

Posted by: DrewM at 09:51 AM | Comments (207)
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David Frum knows who is responsible for the massive taxes and government power grab yesterday...conservatives like Rush Limbaugh. (warning, link to Frum's site)

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not ClintonÂ’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt RomneyÂ’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

...There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

First, it's hard not to read a lot of Frum's rants and conclude he's burning with envy for people who have success and influence he can only dream of. I mean, he's David Frum! He wrote 2/3's of the phrase 'axis of evil' (he wrote 'axis of hatred' and Michael Gerson had to fix it)! Why don't people pay him millions of dollars and listen to his advice?

Let's pretend for a second Frum has a point that deserves to be taken seriously.

There's no proof that Obama wanted Republican votes. I mean, he'd happily take them but not at the cost of adding any Republican ideas into the bill. Sure, he'll add some undercover patients to ferret out Medicare abuse or a shell of a tort reform project. But real tort reform? No. Real efforts to eliminate state barriers? No.

You know why Obama wouldn't compromise on those things? He didn't have to. Frum admits this when he points out that the House and Senate Democrats have larger liberal bases than they did in the early 90s.

Ideologues like Obama don't compromise when they don't have to. Obama didn't have to. Well, that's not true, he wanted a single payer system but had to compromise on that. Yet Frum thinks a guy who only gave up on the idea of socializing the entire health care system in one shot was actually dying to cut a free market deal with Republicans.

There's a name for people who believe that sort of thing...idiot.

David Frum may well be comfortable with a half a loaf of freedom (which will quickly shrink under ever increasing pressure for ever more 'reform') but that just means he's a liberal.

I know this maybe hard for you to understand David but some things are worth fighting for.

Added: Slublog reminds me of something I meant to include...Jake Tapper reports that Gibbs is passing around this column by Frum.

There's a two word name for guys like Frum...Useful Idiot.

ObamaCare delenda est!

Posted by: DrewM at 09:04 AM | Comments (238)
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If you missed it, here's the speech House Republican leader and soon to be Speaker John Boehner gave last night in the lead up to the vote. It's about 10 minutes long but worth it.

Line of yesterday's debate was from Rep Linder (R-GA) "This has never been about health care, this is about government".

Guys, I know you want to beat up on the GOP, so do I. I have in fact spent a fair amount of my time here on the blog doing that but it doesn't matter any more. Today is Day 1. We need to give these guys a chance, a closely monitored and enforced chance but looking back accomplishes nothing. They may break our hearts (and our country) in the end but right now we hang together or hang separately.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the opposition party you have, not the one you wish you did.

ObamaCare delenda est!

Posted by: DrewM at 08:17 AM | Comments (146)
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Hi, itÂ’s me Drew.

Yeah, I know we havenÂ’t always gotten along. IÂ’ve said some nasty stuff about you, refused to return your calls and thrown your letters in the trash without even reading them. And letÂ’s be honest, you had it coming, what with all the times youÂ…no. This isnÂ’t about the past. We donÂ’t need to rehash all the problems we have with each other. We have bigger problems than those and a common enemy.

In an effort to get our new relationship off on the right foot, let me just say you guys (especially in the House) were magnificent in fighting health care. No seriously. I thought the ‘summit’ was going to be a trap like the one the Emperor laid for the rebels above Endor but you sniffed it out like Lando Calrissian and Admiral Ackbar. Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Tom Coburn, hell even Lamar! Alexander were magnificent in calling Obama out on his bullshit.

Mitch McConnell even kept the Maine sisters and George Voinivich on board. ThatÂ’s a manÂ’s day work right there by anyone's accounting.

Now, you didnÂ’t have the numbers in the end to stop it, of course if you hadnÂ’t fucked things up for the 8 years itÂ…no, I said itÂ’s a new day so we wonÂ’t go there. As I was saying, you didnÂ’t have the numbers but you won the argument.

I donÂ’t expect you guys to stop being politicians. Even the founders were politicians who fought some nasty battles within their own group and could be as mean and petty as any generation of politicians. But I need, America needs you to step up here. You need to be statesmen on a mission as much as you can. Something bad happened last night and I think you know it. There werenÂ’t the usual stupid politician tricks, you guys looked scared. And youÂ’re not scared for your political lives, none of you is in any trouble (other than maybe Sen. Burr from N.C.) , I think a lot of you were flat out scared for your country. ThatÂ’s good, thatÂ’s a start. It focuses the mind. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 07:42 AM | Comments (216)
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