From Stuiec, Obama's outreach effort to disenchanted young voters: more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:35 PM | Comments (192)
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Smells like teen dispirit.

The college vote is up for grabs this year — to an extent that would have seemed unlikely two years ago, when a generation of young people seemed to swoon over Barack Obama.

Though many students are liberals on social issues, the economic reality of a weak job market has taken a toll on their loyalties: far fewer 18- to 29-year-olds now identify themselves as Democrats compared with 2008.

...

Philip Stricker, 21, a biology major who voted for Mr. Obama but says he has not been paying much attention to politics lately, uses a nontechnical term to describe the phenomenon.

“There’s a vibe,” he said on a recent afternoon, while pumping weights at the gym. “Right now it seems like Republicans just care a lot more than Democrats.”

The actual numbers linked are at Pew.

From a 32% advantage to a 14% advantage, and guess what, most of the Democratic ones ain't even voting this year.

As a near-Millennial myself, now 29 years old (well, I will be 29 in November), it heartens me that so many of my Generation Z'ers are seeing the light.

Or, as we now all call "light," we're now seeing the lizzle-brizzle.

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (226)
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In 1994, Peter Jennings at least had the decency to wait until his boys lost to announce "tonight, the nation threw a temper-tantrum."

Bernie Goldberg was noting this on O'Reilly last week -- this time, they're not even waiting. They can see it coming, so they're getting out their recriminations over their rejection early. Precriminations for prejection, I guess.

I linked Eugene "I have no obvious qualifications" Robinson's headline earlier, but I must link it again, now that Matt Lewis informs me he is so fucking stupid he trotted out Peter Jennings' infamous line, without even being knowing enough to realize what he was doing.

Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they're ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans -- for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn't an "electoral wave," it's a temper tantrum.

... In the punditry business, it's considered bad form to question the essential wisdom of the American people. But at this point, it's impossible to ignore the obvious: The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.

Matt Lewis notes:

Robinson stresses that his argument is not a "partisan" one, but one can't help but notice the convenient timing: Now that voters are swinging to the Republicans, they are throwing a "temper tantrum." (One wonders whether they were throwing a similar tantrum when they got fed up with Bush and voted-in Barack Obama?) ...

He goes on to claim, of course, that Eugene "It was either this or working at a gas station" Robinson's stupidity is "thought-provoking."

Um, sure. Okay.

He's got video of Eugene "At least I'm not Brent Staples" Robinson offering his 16-year-old analysis, too.

Posted by: Ace at 11:17 AM | Comments (134)
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Because sometimes you have to get out the bad blood.

Okay, the rules are this is supposed to be funny so no like real, genuine attacks on people.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (976)
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The scariest horror movie premise in history. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:40 AM | Comments (176)
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Good two part essay on the non-stimulus.

I keep wondering where these guys get their "multiplier" figures from -- they assume (and claim that this is well-established) that if they spend $1 in government money on stimulus, they will get out of that $1.50 in economic activity. Taken to extremes (as credential cretin Paul Krugman sometimes seems to) this results in the absurd result that we should just spend $10 trillion in stimulus because then we'll wind up with an additional $5 trillion in "extra" money, magically "multiplied" out from the initial investment.

First...

Instead of achieving its stated goal of 90% private-sector job creation, ARRA did the exact opposite. More than 95% of any jobs created have been in the government sector (fully outlined on Recovery.gov and confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office).

The original document outlining job creation estimates is no longer available on whitehouse.gov. It was replaced with an “updated” document three pages shorter and without the industry-specific job targets originally outlined. Christina Romer, the now-departed head of the Council of Economic Advisors, wrote the original report based on the private-market analysis done by Mark Zandi of Moody’s. Like most economists, neither of these two have experience with spending multipliers, unlike Harvard’s Robert Barro, whose research suggests their multipliers are at least 100% too high.

I think it's that Mark Zandi who's now telling Obama he must not permit the Bush tax cuts to expire, by the way.

San Francisco’s “Presidio Parkway” project has been in the planning stages for nearly 15 years, and is a very worthy infrastructure investment. The funding was expected to be largely at the state and local level, with some federal help. The gap was to be filled with additional tolls and local taxes. Once the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was implemented, $100 million was allocated to help pay for the Presidio Parkway. No change in the project. No change in jobs. Yet that $100 million is still multiplied by a Keynesian multiplier (1.5-2.5 depending on which Keynesian is doing the math), to estimate the boost it gave GDP. From that incremental GDP, a fantasy job “created or saved” is backed out of the figure.

In other words, this project was going ahead anyway as planned, but the government kicked in some extra money, and based on that, they claimed that all these "new jobs" new economic activity were created.

Except... they weren't. None of this was even close to "new." It had been in the works for 15 freakin' years and was going ahead on schedule.

So what the hell is any sort of claim of "saved or created" or any sort of "multiplier" doing in there?

The most direct reason for the failure of the ARRA was the overly optimistic algebra in its predictions. In order to estimate the job impact of proposed fiscal stimulus, economists multiply government spending by a certain number to extrapolate GDP, and then from there attempt to predict jobs. In the original document predicting ARRA jobs, President ObamaÂ’s economics advisor Christina Romer used a multiplier of about 1.57. The Congressional Budget Office used a multiplier of about 2 in its estimate of 2 million jobs created in the fourth quarter of 2009. Harvard Professor Robert Barro estimates that the actual multiplier for World War II stimulus spending was .8, so he uses a lower estimate for ARRA spending of .6. Romer assumed that filling state budget gaps in education and transportation would have doubled the stimulus affect of the industrial buildup around World War II!

I think a couple of weeks ago Geoff (was it you, Geoff?) figured out the actual economic output, according to Obama's own figures, of each dollar in spending, and it turned out to be... just around 0.8.

By The Way: Donations to this site have a 2.2 economic multiplier. Every dollar you donate fuels an additional 1.2 dollars of economic activity in the Extreme Hobo Sports, discount vodka, and Thai tranny Chakra Adjustment industries.

It's pretty much like you're making a 20% profit on every dollar donated. That's free money right in your pocket, yo!

Seriously. This is the "accepted" multiplier figure for AoSHQ donations. "All economists" agree.

More: At Hot Air.

Tapper at ABCNews:

Asked to what degree he regrets his administration's decision to call this Recovery Summer, the president stammered then said, “I don't regret the notion that we are moving forward, but because of the steps that we've taken. And I'm going to have a press conference next week, where, after you guys are able to hear where we're at, we'll be able to answer some specific questions.”

At the end of the post, a link to a Time article, spinning "funemployment" once again. The headline -- no, seriously, this is the headline:

What's Good About Rising Unemployment

RNC, I have suggested previously that you take clips of the media calling Americans racists and Islamophobes and then end it with the text, "You know who they're voting for."

As a sequel to the ad you haven't yet created, I suggest you collect up all these media claims about "Funemployment" and "What's Good About Rising Unemployment" and "America is Back!" and end with the same text. There was also a New York Times article noting that for the few Americans who do have jobs, a recession or depression is kind of good, because, hey, everything's on sale, right?

Also at Hot Air: A German economist says Obama's too "European."

His idea is that Europe's homogeneous societies make socialism plausible. It doesn't work, really, but it works better than generally experienced. America, on the other hand, is highly heterogeneous, so it doesn't work.

I was actually thinking about this idea the other day. My idea was that in a homogeneous society, where most families are part of the shared culture, there may be a much higher social imperative to work, beyond mere economics. That is, if everyone's on the same page, pushing the same bourgeois value of labor and effort, it will significantly dampen the morally-corrosive effects of welfare and such (the main morally corrosive effect? You can get paid for not working so why be a chump?).

If you're going to substantially reduce the economic/survival imperative of useful employment, you'd better have some powerful substitute for that imperative. And as that substitute, social or otherwise, dissolves away, bad things happen.

That can really break down fast, though. Even in Europe, it's not working as it once did. It has taken a while, but over the generations each new generation has gotten more comfortable with the idea of being on the dole. Whatever was going on in Europe, they didn't stop the morally corrosive effect of welfare, they merely slowed it to occur over five generations instead of two (as happened in America, more or less).

By the way, no, I'm not just talking about blacks. Take any poor white community and remove both the economic penalty and the social penalty for not working and in a generation or two you're going to have a culture of dependency and sloth. We've got that now. When people mock a certain type of white-trash culture, it's not because they're poor -- it's because they're not respectable. They've begun, or completed, casting off the normal social codes that prevent sloth and entitlement and champion initiative and self-reliance.

I think that's what this Kraut is getting at.

You never want to rely on a Kraut's analysis too much, though. You start to hear the fanfares of Wagner and then, you know, you're goose-stepping your way through the Arc du Triomph.

Seriously, RNC: Do my ad. WaPo jive-turkey Eugene Robinson just slapped this nasty headline on to his stupid burblings:

The spoiled-brat American electorate

Do my ad. Come on. Make them both pay a price for their tawdry affair. Chain the media to the Democrats and the Democrats to the media and let 'em both drown from the other's weight.

Posted by: Ace at 08:51 AM | Comments (215)
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Friday before Labor Day grab-bag.

Remember pompous Indiana Congressman Baron Hill? Turns out yelling at your constituents will in fact come back to haunt you at election time.

If you're so inclined, here's the website for Todd Young.

I haven't found any recent polls on the race but RCP says it's a toss up.

The head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says he wants to see Obama "turbocharged" and campaigning for candidates this fall.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chairman Chris Van Hollen (Md.) urged the president to ramp up his efforts on the campaign trail.

"We've got to get out around the country," Van Hollen said during an appearance on MSNBC. "And the president has got to get turbocharged. He's got to go out and make it very clear what the stakes in this election will be."

The DCCC chairman said he didn't think Obama had underperformed on behalf of Democratic incumbents this fall, but if Democrats wanted to perform the best this fall, the president would need to work tirelessly on behalf of incumbents and candidates.

"I think that he's been laying the groundwork, he's been drawing the contrasts," he said. "And I think that he knows better than anybody that between now and Nov. 2, when people are really going to be paying attention, he's got to be all over the country, making it clear what the choice is."

Yeah, good luck with that plan.

Alas, not everyone shares Van Hollen's enthusiasm for an Obama appearance. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is going to avoid being seen with Obama when POTUS shows up in Milwaukee this weekend. Not to long ago the Senator said, "I will stand with the president of the United States anywhere, anytime, no hesitation. I'm proud of what this president has tried to do,". Apparently just not in his home state, this weekend.

Just two years ago, Obama carried the Badger State by 13%. Now he's toxic to a stalwart liberal. The times they do change quickly.

Just a reminder, yesterday I blogged about the Wisconsin Republican candidate for Senate, Ron Johnson. He seems like a solid conservative candidate and he's giving Feingold a run for his money.

Check out the comments on the post, several Cheesehead Morons chimed in with some local knowledge.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:22 AM | Comments (54)
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The BLS released the unemployment rate for August today, which didn't really change much from last month - 9.6% vs. July's 9.5%. That message of "nothing changed" is repeated throughout the report. Frankly, I was looking for something a little more interesting this month - I thought we'd end up at 9.8 or 9.9%. So I went through the stats trying to find out what was shoring up the employment rate.

And I found one thing that changed, and it had changed quite a bit. Turns out it's those damn part-timers who threw me off. The number of part-time employees ballooned by 730K during August - 330K of them forced into part time work by economic conditions. This brought the U-6 unemployment number up to 16.7% - an increase of 0.2 points from last month.

UPDATE: I hope it's obvious that swapping 3/4 of a million full time jobs for part time jobs is not a sign of an improving job market. And as some commenters have pointed out, the unemployment number is still ridiculously high and nothing to "yawn" about. The terrifying part is that the President is promising to do something about it. Mr. President? Please. Just. Stop.

That all said, here's your updated version of The Chart (don't forget that S. Weasel is selling The Chart on t-shirts, coffee mugs, and the like):

Posted by: Geoff at 05:44 AM | Comments (221)
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Brand Democrat™ from Slublog.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:23 AM | Comments (123)
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Looks like the projected four-month-long rescue effort of the trapped Chilean miners is about to turn into a reality teevee show. Per The Sydney Morning Herald:

"One of the trapped Chilean miners is going to have some explaining to do after his wife ran into his mistress at the mine's entrance.

Britain's Sun newspaper reports the wife of Yonni Barrios was stunned and upset to find his girlfriend also conducting a vigil for him."

Upon hearing this news, Mr. Barrios issued the following statement:

"Really, now that I think about it, there's really no need for any kind of rescue. In fact, it's quite comfortable down here. Yep, I could stay down here as long as possible. No real need to come up to the surface, is there?"

Posted by: Genghis at 01:53 AM | Comments (56)
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