Asymptotic.

The 42% identifying as conservative represents a continuation of the slight but statistically significant edge conservatives achieved over moderates in 2009. Should that figure hold for all of 2010, it would represent the highest annual percentage identifying as conservative in Gallup's history of measuring ideology with this wording, dating to 1992.

Oh, and this is interesting: More Nearly as many independents say they're conservative than moderate:

And Wal-Mart moms now very much against ObamaCare and anti-"incumbent:"

“They’re conflicted,” said Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who co-authored the study. “They like Obama, and they want more activist government. But when it gets to specifics, they disagree.”

On one hand, 60 percent of those polled said that they believe “government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of the people.” But specific policy proposals that require a more heavy-handed government — take the recently passed health-care overhaul, for example — find favor from only 14 percent of the group. In fact, 42 percent said that the Affordable Care Act would make things worse for them and their families.

But the finding that will likely make incumbents and political strategists most nervous is that more than 61 percent of the group said it disapproves of the job that Congress is doing in Washington. With so many battleground states for the taking in November, the study shows that Wal-Mart Moms are tilting toward Republicans.

Posted by: Ace at 10:56 AM | Comments (155)
Post contains 260 words, total size 2 kb.

I guess this is sort of a thing, huh?

"The case was not investigated any further because detectives concluded there was insufficient evidence to support the allegations," the Portland Police Bureau said in a prepared statement Wednesday, responding to inquiries from all over the world after the National Enquirer broke the story on its website.

In her detailed Jan. 8, 2009, statement to a Portland sexual assault investigator, the woman said she was called to the hotel about 10:30 p.m. Oct. 24, 2006, to provide a massage for Gore, who was registered under the name "Mr. Stone." Once inside his ninth-floor suite, she said he pushed her hand to his groin, fondled her buttocks and breasts, tongue-kissed her and threw her down on the bed as she tried to thwart his advances.

She also said Gore had finished a beer and opened a bottle of Grand Marnier while she was in the room.

While the Police Bureau considers it a closed case, it said it would reopen it if new evidence is received.

The ninny Howie Kurtz reports the National Enquirer did not pay for this story -- the woman's lawyer asked for $1 M, but they did not pay it.

Also, according to a source, the woman is confirmed to have been summoned to give Gore the massage at the time specified. 10:30 at night, which some read as suspicious, but if you're on a hectic schedule and have been out all day, it's understandable. (Follow up question: Was he working until then? If he was just sitting in his room for a few hours and then decided at 10:30 he needed a full-body release, well...)

It's hard to believe. Even if believed, which I might be inclined to, that Al Gore asked for a happy ending, it's hard to believe he then reacted to her refusal not with abashment but with a full-on sexual assault.

On the other hand, it has long been my belief he sort of went insane after 2000.

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (141)
Post contains 370 words, total size 2 kb.

I know he's probably pissed off at the online right, but, look, all the Daily Caller did was "hug" him a little.

More, And That's It: Erick Erickson writes that he thinks Weigel was doing exactly the job the WaPo actually intended him to do: Cover elements of the right that could be mocked as "fringe" and then so mock them.

Geraghty says the real problem is Journo-List:

I suppose itÂ’s possible that Journo-List really was set up to be a place to connect reporters and policy wonks, as Ezra Klein contends. Those of us on the outside canÂ’t help but wonder if itÂ’s how liberal bloggers and major left-of-center voices in the mainstream media work out their message coordination and sort out their differences away from the eyes of the public.

I’m on a conservative mailing list called Rightblogs, and from what I have seen, it succeeds at hiding conservative disagreements about as effectively as BP controls oil spills. If Rightblogs was set up to ensure that conservatives settled differences among themselves away from the eyes of the public, I think we can declare it an epic catastrophic failure on par with picking Ryan Leaf with the second overall pick in the NFL Draft. Of course, I think it was just set up as a way for conservative bloggers to talk to each other; the vast majority of messages seem to be variations of, “hey, look what I wrote!”

FWIW, I am not on a "Right Blogs" list and in fact never even heard of it.

I am so out of the loop.

I just did a search of my mailbox and see that I have several emails forwarded from "Rightblogs." Like ten.

Never noticed it. (I have over 90,000 emails in my Inbox.)

Okay, One More: There are two sayings. One about Hollywood: "It's show business, not show friends."

Another about politics: "Politics is show business for ugly people."

Putting them together, then: Politics is show business for ugly people, not show friends for ugly people.

That's Dan Riehl's take, and he doesn't give a whit about Weigel's affability.

Posted by: Ace at 09:36 AM | Comments (142)
Post contains 369 words, total size 3 kb.

mrp just linked this video from 2008.

Almost seems as quaint as hula-hoops and fallout shelters. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:38 AM | Comments (137)
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.

At the moment, just that headline from commenter Guy Fawkes.

I'll keep checking for a link, though.

Review, Not Change? Drew sends this Telegraph pieces saying Petraeus intends to review the ROE's, not necessarily change them, but this is from last night and there is a chance the word is now "change."

Even if it's not -- everything in the military is "reviewed" of course. Even if he's "reviewing," I'd say that it's 99.99% likely he's changing them.

Fox Link: Mixed -- a source says he will in fact modify the ROEs, but Petraeus pushes back and says he's just reviewing them.

Answer, then: He's changing them but of course wants the formality of a "review process" first. I don't expect it will last long.

You can't have troops out there operating under ROEs they know are horrific and now know that the new general knows are horrific, too.

As John Kerry said, "Who wants to be the last man to die for a lie?" In this case, for "lie," substitute "ROEs that kill American soldiers and allow Taliban to escape."

The review process must be very brief, now that word has been leaked.

Posted by: Ace at 07:50 AM | Comments (94)
Post contains 214 words, total size 2 kb.

I am speculating that it was his hatred of conservatives as revealed on JournoList-- and his endorsement by Ezra Klein as "one of our own" -- that got the WaPo to hire him.

The man's entitled to his opinions, and he's entitled to share them. That's not what I object to.

Rather, it's the impossible hypothetical of the WaPo hiring me to cover the left side of things.

To cover the right, you need to know the right, you need to talk to them. Further, you need to like reading right-ish commentary.

Why do I say that? Because anyone who's good at his job likes his job; that is to say, he uses a substantial amount of his free time actually doing job-related activities because he fundamentally likes his job. Almost anyone (except those with Batman-level discipline and willpower) who is good at his job will, if you check, be found to have a substantial advantage over his colleagues, because while they punch out at 5 to pursue their real interests, he's spending a lot of time after 5 o'clock doing his job.

Because for such a person, "pleasure" and "work" aren't really entirely separate categories. They flow easily into each other.

And that is one of the real keys for excellence.

Those Wall Street guys doing all sorts of research as they take the train into NYC? They will always do better than their colleagues reading Scott Turow novels on their way to work. They got lucky -- they found the perfect job for themselves. Something they like doing, and thus, are pretty much guaranteed to make a mint doing it.

You just can't force yourself to do a lot of down-time work for a job you don't enjoy. Well... you can. And you'll be unhappy, and it will be a constant struggle.

But if you happen to find a job you really like? You're golden.

This is why Dave Wiegel doesn't seem to really know what is going on on the right side of things, and pushes spin he finds on the left side of the blogosphere.

It's because, fundamentally, he hates us, so every minute he spends giving Hot Air or National Review a desultory glance is very much labor, and very much the sort of labor he doesn't enjoy.

And with his freetime? He uses that to catch up on the leftwing blogs he actually enjoys.

Small wonder, then, that whenever a controversy breaks, Dave Wiegel is Johnny On the Spot for reproducing leftwing blog memes.

But of course that's what the Washington Post wanted. They don't want an actual conservative writing this blog; such a person would be very much up on conservative thought, but such a person would also be eager to transmit such thought to Post readers, and that's not what they want.

The Post created this position begrudgingly and for the sake of appearances. And that's precisely what Wiegel delivers. A begrudging repetition of a few headlines he saw on the right side of the aisle, for the sake of appearances only.

Anyway, here are some of the best quotes from JournoList, as reported by the Daily Caller, but do check in there. It's often down right now due to overload, but check in later.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh famously said he hoped President Obama would “fail” in January, 2009. Almost a year later, when Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, Washington Post reporter David Weigel had a wish of his own. “I hope he fails,” Weigel cracked to fellow liberal reporters on the “Journolist” email list-serv.

“Too soon?” he wondered.

...

“Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” Weigel lamented in one February email.

Like I was saying: Despises conservatives and ergo despises his job.

A real conservative would love this job, and therefore be much better at, but the Washington Post doesn't actually want someone to do a good job.

They want crap, and they got it.

In other posts, Weigel describes conservatives as using the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” According to Weigel, their motives include “racism” and protecting “white privilege,” and for some of the top conservatives in D.C., a nihilistic thirst for power.

“There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes,” Weigel wrote.

Of Matt Drudge, Weigel remarked, “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.”

In April, Weigel wrote that the problem with the mainstream media is “this need to give equal/extra time to ‘real American’ views, no matter how fucking moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up ads.”

...

Right wing “memes” begin in “WND/FreeRepublic/talk radio swamps,” Weigel wrote, referring to conservative websites World Net Daily and Free Republic. Sometimes, they spread like a virus into liberal sites, a fact that clearly upsets Weigel.

After Sarah Palin claimed Obama’s health care legislation included “death panels” that would ration health care, for instance, the Huffington Post reported that many Americans believed the claim was true. Weigel suggested that reporting on the subject might be counter-productive to liberal policy aims. The Huffington Post, Weigel pointed out, ran “a picture of Sarah Palin, linking to a poll that suggests 45 percent of Americans believe her death panel lie. But as long as the top liberal-leaning news site talks about it every single hour of every day, I’m sure that number will go down.”

Is Dave Wiegel here to report, or here to decide what reportage best advances the liberal agenda?

Obviously, the latter.

Weigel seems to harbor special contempt for a type of conservative he calls a ratfucker, a favorite phrase of his.

Republicans? “Ratfucking [Obama] on every bill.” Palin? Tried to “ratfuck” a moderate Republican in a contentious primary in New York. Limbaugh? Used “ratfucking tactics” in urging Republican activists to vote for Hillary Clinton in open primaries after Obama had all but beat her for the Democratic nomination.

Reached by phone late Thursday and asked about the e-mails, Weigel responded, “my reporting, I think, stands for itself.”

And so it does.

If You Want An Obama-Supporting Consensus-Liberal Covering the Conservative Movement... Might I suggest T. Coddington Van Vorhees VII?

T-Cod wrote an amazing piece yesterday about his newfound doubts that "this Obama fellow is equal to the task."

Summer once again tiptoes in on crepe soles to the eastern extremities of Long Island; affording, as is its wont, fresh opportunities to enjoy the providence of nature and the financial acumen of one's forebears. Despite the looming spectre of global climate change the lawn is verdant and lush, and my gardener Hideo informs me the hibiscuses are in especially fine fettle.

I was just talking about this with a guy yesterday.

This is what I want to know from Iowahawk: What resources does he crib from to do these?

When I say "crib" I don't mean he's plagiarizing; but I mean, what old-timey stuff is he reading to so easily come up with antique expressions like "in fine fettle"?

Because if he's just coming up with that stuff off the top of his head, then I'm really pissed off and jealous.

Ben Smith: Says mostly what I just said, but with some facts in place of speculation.

Like, for example -- Ezra Klein did in fact suggest Wiegel as the conservative movement reporter, despite the fact he's an out-and-proud liberal (with some libertarian tendencies).

The current flap over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel has its
roots in a fact that suprised me when I learned of it earlier this
year: The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under
the false impression that he's a conservative. The new controversy
over the revelation that he's liberal is primarily the Post's fault,
not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper's brass to put
him in an unsustainable position.

...

But the Post seems simply not to have understood what they were
getting when Klein suggested they hire him. National editor Kevin
Merida told me for my story on the subject in May that he never asked
Weigel about his politics, and Klein said he presented him to the
paper simply as the best reporter covering conservatives. (Weigel's
blog is subtitled, "Inside the conservative movement.")

...

One thing nobody argues is that publications should misrepresent and
misidentify their own reporters. The Post set Weigel up for a fall,
and themselves for embarrassment, and that's what they got today.

One of Ben Smith's points is that Wiegel became best known for his snarky, insulting coverage of the fringe/conspiratorial right, and also, pretty much, the mainstream right too. Liberals loved reading this, he says.

But that sort of undermines Smith's assertion that the WaPo didn't know what it was getting in Wiegel.

Offers Resignation: Aw, damn. It's too bad when political spats have a human cost.

Dave Wiegel should write a column for the Washington Post. Just not this column.

More: At Cuffy Meigs, including a relevant Far Side cartoon.

Really, it was his immediate left-wing hackery in the Etheridge case -- demanding, as the wingnuts did, to know "who these 'students' are!" instead of "how dare a Congressmen assault a reporter" -- that represented the slipping of the mask.

We already have a place for that -- it's called the Democratic Underground.

Posted by: Ace at 07:40 AM | Comments (214)
Post contains 1681 words, total size 11 kb.

That headline probably seems a little underwhelming -- but that's because the story is a little underwhelming, at least as of yet.

Mere knowledge of something isn't itself some sort of breach. We don't know how long he entertained the idea of a straight up bribe. Or if he played footsie with Blago.

But for now, that's the story, a not-quite-fully-baked cake.

Posted by: Ace at 07:05 AM | Comments (72)
Post contains 76 words, total size 1 kb.

Sort of, as they at least ponder the question of whether he's the best governor in the country. Or the worst, as they of course have to ask, too.

But they concede he's definitely the most robust and transformative.

In short, Christie is governing like a one-termer, enacting every conservative proposal he campaigned on and mounting, as Weigel puts it, "the most energetic challenge to the liberal consensus [anyone] can remember."

It's no surprise that liberal New Jerseyans are not happy with the painful sacrifices that Christie is demanding—some of my friends and relatives among them. But anyone on either side of the aisle who's fed up with our focus-grouped, winning-is-everything political culture should be watching Governor Bully closely. Christie's crusade is not about 2012 or 2016; he doesn't seem to mind being unpopular. Instead, it's about testing conservative principles against the hard stuff of reality. New Jersey's constitution endows the governor with more power than most of his counterparts, and so far Christie has not been shy about exercising it.

As a result, the Garden State has suddenly become a fascinating test case for GOP governance: can a conservative response ameliorate this fiscal crisis, at least on the state level? Can Republican leadership—as opposed to the Republican oppositionism we see in Washington—actually solve problems? If the notoriously misgoverned (and largely ungovernable) New Jersey considers itself better off in a few years' time—if businesses are moving back to the state, if unemployment is down, if the budget deficits are under control, if the balance between taxes and services is more reasonable—Chris Christie will deserve most of the credit. If not--and there's reason to think that might be the case--conservative policymaking will suffer a blow. Rarely are the battle lines so clearly drawn.

Weigel and Co. are correct, in other words, to point out that what's happening in New Jersey right now is the real deal. But it's the policy implications that are interesting, not the politics—at least for the moment.

Chris Christie

You can't stop 'm. You can only hope to contain 'm.

Posted by: Ace at 06:27 AM | Comments (104)
Post contains 350 words, total size 2 kb.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:17 AM | Comments (69)
Post contains 8 words, total size 1 kb.

Well, "rout" is as good a word as any to describe what happened to equities yesterday. The Dow closed down 145 points at 10,152.80 and the S&P 500 was off 18 points at 1,073.69. DAGGER's bold gambit of earlier in the week has failed. He shakes his fist and blames his failed scheme on Scooby and those meddling kids.

Democrats: Give us $30 billion. GOP: Um....no. Democrats: Come on! GOP: Nah. Democrats: How come? GOP: One, I don't have it; and two, you're already into me for more than a trillion already. Democrats: So what's another measly $30 billion? Please? GOP: Man, just fuck off. Seriously. Democrats: WHY DO YOU HATE THE POOR! GOP: I don't hate the poor. I just hate you.

Never rule out simple stupidity, guys. It's usually all the answer you need.

more...

Posted by: Monty at 03:06 AM | Comments (148)
Post contains 1193 words, total size 9 kb.