This information is so valuable to me on November the 8th!

All the problems investors face—from a fiscal meltdown to the various economic woes around the world—add up to one daunting prospect: Another possible recession just over the horizon.

As the financial world puts Tuesday's presidential election behind it, the light in the tunnel could be an economic freight train.

Really?! And this information is just coming to light, huh?

Then what shall I make of this?: "Improving National Outlook Key To Obama Victory."

Our economic confidence was up, apparently because the media pushed the fake 7.8% unemployment rate story (and forgot to tell people when it went back up).

And now we're facing a recession -- and we just realize this now after the election is over.

Why, that's just so lucky for Obama.

How does he manage to luck into such astonishingly well-timed information from the press?

It's almost like it's not mere chance at all, but rather some kind of intent lurking behind it.

Posted by: Ace at 01:07 PM | Comments (489)
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I can't figure this Mystery out.

Can you?

The markets took heavy losses for a second day in a row Thursday in a broad-based retreat late in the session. Every major sector closed to the downside.

According to preliminary calculations, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 121 points, or 0.93%, to 12812, the S&P 500 dipped 17 points, or 1.2%, to 1378 and the Nasdaq Composite slumped 41.7 points, or 1.4%, to 2896.

The S&P 500, considered one of the best barometers of U.S. equities, tumbled 2.4% on Wednesday in its worst day on a percent basis since June. The losses added up in late trading on Thursday as well, with the S&P sinking 1.2%.

Troll Busting: Thank you for letting me know about the Stormfront invasion. I've been busily feeding hashes into the Trollbuster, but just realized it's currently not working. Usually it trollbusts immediately.

I've put into Pixy for the IPs to be banned. This takes longer.

Headline improved by AnonymousDrivel.

Posted by: Ace at 12:37 PM | Comments (368)
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What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us:

Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.

The entire purpose of this project was to digitize the decades-old practice of strike lists. The old way was to sit with your paper and mark off people that have voted and every hour or so, someone from the campaign would come get your list and take it back to local headquarters. Then, they'd begin contacting people that hadn't voted yet and encourage them to head to the polls. It's worked for years.

more...

Posted by: JohnE. at 12:36 PM | Comments (669)
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I'm just astonished to learn this.

Iran fired on an unarmed U.S. drone last week as it was hovering in international airspace, the Pentagon announced Thursday.

Spokesman George Little said the incident occurred Nov. 1 at 4:50 a.m. ET. He said the unarmed, unmanned drone was conducting "routine surveillance" over the Persian Gulf when it was "intercepted" by Iran. He said the MQ1 Predator drone, which was not hit, was not in Iranian airspace.

Little said the U.S. government has protested to the Iranians.

But they didn't protest to the Americans. I guess they forgot to inform the Americans. They remembered to inform the Iranians of their displeasure. But the Americans? Must have slipped their minds.

I've got my Astonished Face on. My eyes are all like "Whaaa...?" and my mouth's all "Huhhh...?"

Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (301)
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After a loss, you're supposed to take stock. Ask the Big Questions. Ruthlessly question your assumptions, even your core beliefs.

You're not supposed to make up silly excuses and tell yourselves happy stories about why you lost. You're not supposed to make up a narrative where you should just do all the same things again.

Hacks do that. Genuine thinkers, on the other hand, probe deeply into their starting assumptions and suggest Big Changes.

I get all that, and that's true 90% of the time.

But what if the data actually suggests that Random Chance played a greater role in this election than any other?

Datum: 12% of all voters made up their minds in the last week before the election.

This was right when Sandy struck -- and crucially, in the aftermath of Sandy. Sandy struck Monday, into Tuesday morning, before the election.

Datum: 42% of voters said in exit polls that Hurricane Sandy was "important" to their vote.

Datum: Earlier polls had Romney winning Independents by 10 or more points. In exit polls, he won Independents by only 5. That's the sort of barely-winning margin where the other candidate can still prevail. Bush narrowly lost independents in 2004, for example.

Datum: One of the key reasons for Romney's surge was the feeling that he was the more bipartisan choice. He ran hard on that. And he was leading in many polls on leadership. But in exit polls, he lost the leadership question. Why?

Datum: We're all now saying "the polls were right." But if the polls were right, they were also right earlier. What to make of Romney's former lead in the polls, which vanished as Election Day approached? Why did he go from about a +1 in the RCP average before Sandy, to a -1 after Sandy? In Gallup, he want from +5 pre-Sandy to +1 post-Sandy; one doesn't have to think those numbers are precisely right to still realize there was a big shift away from Romney, to Obama.

If, as we are all now saying, "the polls were right," then they were right pre-Sandy, too. If they weren't right pre-Sandy, why is the left covering Nate Sliver with laurels? His entire thesis was "the polls are right," and not just at the end, but the whole way through.

Datum: Bush was ahead in polls by 3 points going into the 2000 election. Then the DUI story broke on the weekend before the election. He wound up losing the popular vote by around 0.5%. Late breaking news which had a greatly disproportionate impact on the vote. Its importance was not due to its actual importance -- its importance was due solely to its recency.

What if the whole election was swung by a random Black Swan event which had nothing to do with anything that was being debated throughout the past two years?

I think people are averse to crediting so much to chance and chaos.

I think chance and chaos play a much, much bigger role in our lives than we're comfortable admitting. We tend to screen it out. Why does one man die at 41 while another man lives to 93? Why does one driver skid to a harrowing but safe stop on the shoulder of the road, while another car skids beneath an 18-wheeler, killing all inside?

What if all the work and effort and thought and prayers we put into this race were undone in 48 hours by a hurricane no one saw coming until October 27th?

This doesn't mean there's nothing to improve on. Our GOTV effort, early reports are indicating, was poor. The vaunted ORCA program often didn't work at all; as information comes in, this might be called a huge failure. Romney grew into a good candidate, and seemed sincere and warm at the end of the campaign... but seemed out of touch and robotic for most of it.

And Akin's and Mourdock's decision to really ramp up the War on Women narrative lost us all sorts of otherwise gettable votes.

But while we look for Big Important Reasons why we lost the election, we shouldn't ignore Small Stupid Reasons we lost-- because the data do seem to be indicating we lost quite a few votes for the smallest, stupidest, randomest reasons imaginable.

Hey, I Keep Saying This! But "jackleg" provides a good quote about it:

“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.” -- Aldous Huxley

Intellectuals tend to be scornful of the obvious and stupid, because they prize their ability to see the subtle and the clever.

But 90% of the workings of the world are, in fact, obvious and stupid. If you search only for the subtle and clever, you'll actually wind up missing the solution 90% of the time.

Note Well: Let me repeat again that of course this is not the only reason Romney lost. I listed nine more yesterday; six more have occurred to me since. And of course Obama did many things right -- like microtargeting nonvoters with racial/class/gender Otherizing appeals. (Congratulations, Lightworker! You've healed a nation!)

But let's not overlook the obvious and crudely stupid here, either, as we set out to say Clever Things.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (423)
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Makes sense. Why start now?

Attorney General Eric Holder might not be sticking around for a second term.

Holder told law school students at the University of Baltimore School of Law that he does not know if he will stay in his job.

“That’s something that I’m in the process now of trying to determine,” Holder said. “I have to think about, can I contribute in a second term?”

If by "contribute" you mean "murder Mexicans and US border agents" -- I'm sure you could find a way. You always have before.

In very related news, the "Innocence of the Muslims" filmmaker will be serving a year in prison for parole violations to placate the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Posted by: Ace at 10:00 AM | Comments (219)
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It's terrible. It's never happened before.

A President despised by one party has won an election despite having the economy against him and a deteriorating situation in a country he invaded, and, despite growing whispers that he's simply not up to the job, he wins narrowly in a victory fueled by highly-motivated occasional voters who marched out to support him.

The candidate beaten by this weak, lame-duck president had good qualifications on the key issue of the election. Sure, that candidate lacked charisma and warmth, and was a wealthy New Englander viewed skeptically by much of the country, but he did have a background which gave him inarguable authority to speak on the most important issue of the day.

And sure, he basically won the primaries not through impressive political skill and charisma and vision, but simply because he was the only plausibly qualified would-be president among a gaggle of unlikely pretenders, many of whom were simply too extreme or too flamboyant for the country at large.

And sure, a blitz of negative ads partially turned his key qualification into a negative, by questioning his character in his dealings in his prior career.

But, overall, he was a credible candidate, and polled very close to the incumbent throughout the campaign season. He wound up losing, but by a narrow margin.

Still, that narrow margin is still a margin.

The winning party talks up a realignment that will permanently keep them in power. The losing party is despondent at that notion-- they sense it's true. How can we beat anyone, the losing party things, if we cannot beat this unqualified, dishonest, smug, man who has set the country on a suicide mission which will destroy it?

Why can't the country see through the Imperial Presidency of this corrupt corporate cronyist? What's wrong with America? What's wrong with us?

The losing party thinks they'll never win an election again.

And then... comes 2006, when the Democrats capture Congress under the sterling, brilliant, charismatic leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And comes 2008, when a very experienced, very qualified community organizer wins the White House.

It's happened before.

It's all happened before.

Thanks to a reader, Andrew, who pitched this basic idea in an email. Correction: It was Andrew, not Allen. Sheesh. I hate myself sometimes.

Posted by: Ace at 09:38 AM | Comments (308)
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I'm not saying he's depressing. I'm saying the results are depressing, so any analysis will be depressing.

The American people voted Tuesday; reality votes in the weeks and months to come. The markets will take into account the fact that weÂ’re likely to see similar gridlock in Congress for at least the next two years. The fiscal cliff and sequestration will have to be dealt with in one way or the other. Those who set the national credit rating will have to contemplate whether the outlook warrants another downgrade. The ticking time bomb of our entitlement programs will show less and less time before detonation. Taxes are probably going to go up.

Oh, and the world, full of those seeking a weaker America, may become a more dangerous place. You may see those hostile to our values testing their luck.

...

Republicans need to confront the fact that because of demographics and a party infrastructure that has gotten very, very good at bringing out the vote in presidential years, Democrats are going to be very, very tough every four years. One of the strange aspects of this year is that I would have argued that Obama wasn’t all that charming. His favorable numbers dipped. He was dismissive in that first debate, snarky and combative in the second, constantly saying things that his campaign had to explain — “you didn’t build that,” “the private sector is doing fine,” “Romnesia,” “voting is the best revenge” . . . and he still won.

Ari Fleischer points out the silver lining is that so far, Romney is winning independents. ThatÂ’s not a silver lining, thatÂ’s worse news: Democrats donÂ’t really need independents anymore.

If there is some good news, it's that there are early indications that our GOTV effort in Ohio was bad. I say that's good news because, if true, it indicates a mechanical problem that can be fixed.

There's also this: Obama's team targeted non-voters in a sophisticated system called NARWHAL which seems to have worked. Why is that good news? Because any technological advantage will be quickly ripped off, imitated, pirated.

The real campaign is startlingly simple: it is the Obama team's fanatical pursuit, behind the scenes, diagram by diagram, plan by plan, of what politicos call the "base vote." These are the Democratic leaners who will be deciding not between Obama and Romney, but between voting for Obama and not voting at all. Starting in the spring, the Obama campaign launched elaborate efforts to reach the different communities of such base-voters in every key state: African-Americans, Latinos, women, gay men and women—each is now getting bombarded with tailor-made messaging and organizing. A barbershop and beauty shop program for black voters, for example; visibility at Pride events for LGBT voters; Spanish-language radio ads for Latinos. As a strategy, it's a rabbit-from-the hat kind of move, trying to pull votes out of nowhere. During the long, lean months of summer, when anxious Dems were fretting about a reelect stuck in low gear, during the sudden reversal in the early fall when all of us were focusing on Romney's aimlessness and Obama's seeming invulnerability, and now again with everything tied up, this, just this, is what consumes the strategists in Chicago. Just the base vote. (Even a catastrophic super-storm hasn't altered their plans: "As we continue our daily updates on the state of the ground game, we want to turn attention to the African American vote," read a memo from the campaign, as much of the Eastern Seaboard remained without power.)

So forget what you know about undecided voters. Forget about the oldster white guy, sitting at the counter at the Taste-T Café, reading aloud from a story about the budget deficit and still making up his mind about which candidate suits him better. The oldster is going to vote for Romney, okay? Forget, too, his daughter, the soccer mom—wait, make that the waitress mom—gripping the wheel of her minivan as she hears on the radio that another Republican candidate has semi-condoned rape. She is going for Obama. The issue is her college-age son, at this moment snoozing in an upper bunk at State U. Young Zach likes Obama. So do his buddies. They appreciate that they can stay on their parents' health care plans until they're 26 if they need to. They like that the wars are ending. They're indifferent to Romney, at best, because the guy seems like—the president's words, now—"a bullshitter." The only question is, are Zach and his buddies even going to bother to vote?

When I first read about NARWHAL, I was very skeptical. I thought it was the campaign spinning some Secret Magic Button that would allow them to win in the face of 8% unemployment. I'm not skeptical now.

On Jan. 22, a young woman in a socially conservative corner of southwestern Ohio received a blast email from Stephanie Cutter, a deputy campaign manager for Barack Obama. Years earlier, the young woman had registered for updates on ObamaÂ’s website, completing a form that asked for her email address and ZIP code. For a while, the emails she received from Obama and his Organizing for America apparatus were appeals to give money and sign petitions, and she responded to one that required that she provide her name. The emails kept on coming, rarely with anything an Obama supporter could disagree with, and certainly not the type of hard-edged political message that could scare one away.

But Cutter’s note was different. She boasted of a new administration rule that would require insurance plans to fully cover contraception as part of the president’s health care reform law, and encouraged her recipients to see the policy as reason to rally around Obama’s re-election. “Think about how different that is from what the candidates on the other side would do,” Cutter wrote. “Our opponents have been waging a war on women’s health—attempting to defund Planned Parenthood, overturn Roe v. Wade, and everything in between.”

It was a message that sat well with the young Ohioan who received it. She was single, liberal, sensitive to medical costs—but she had never told the campaign any of those things, and the one piece of information she had provided (her ZIP code) could easily mark her as the type of traditionalist Midwestern woman who would recoil at efforts to liberalize access to birth control. Indeed, she found it hard to believe that many other residents of her ZIP code would look as favorably upon a rallying cry to defend Planned Parenthood as she did.
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Those who have worked with Obama’s data say that it is an email that would have never been sent in 2008. The campaign knew very little about the 13 million people who had registered for online updates, not even their age or gender or party registration. Without the ability to filter its recipients based on those criteria, the campaign stuck to safe topics for email blasts and reserved its sharp-edged messages for individual delivery by direct mail or phone call. In those channels, the campaign could be certain of the political identities of those it was reaching, because the recipients had been profiled based on hundreds of personal characteristics—enough to guarantee that each message was aimed at a receptive audience.

This year, however, as part of a project code-named Narwhal, ObamaÂ’s team is working to link once completely separate repositories of information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to every arm of the campaign. Such information-sharing would allow the person who crafts a provocative email about contraception to send it only to women with whom canvassers have personally discussed reproductive views or whom data-mining targeters have pinpointed as likely to be friendly to ObamaÂ’s views on the issue.

It's creepy, and it seems like it should be illegal, but apparently it worked. It turned out a few million non-voters, turned them into Obama voters, and turned the election in Obama's favor.

Obama did lose ten million voters (actually, probably less, when all votes are tallied). But he turned out people who'd never voted before, or voted rarely, by figuring out just what provocative, scare 'em message to send individual non-voters.

One thing that strikes me is that Obama is, has been, and will continue to make more or less naked racial/gender appeals to his voters. The sort of appeals that Republicans are not allowed to make.

This appeal -- appeal to one's tribe -- is powerful. It's also racist, and divisive, and promotes an Us vs. Them mentality... all those things which are terrible if a Republican even hints at it.

But for Obama and the Democrats, it's Game On. They can sow the seeds of Hate -- always a strong motivating emotion in an election -- without any embarrassment and without being called on it by anyone.

Posted by: Ace at 09:10 AM | Comments (297)
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Ok, break time is over, back on your heads.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida will headline Iowa Gov. Terry BranstadÂ’s birthday fundraiser on Saturday, Nov. 17

(In case you don't get the old joke)

Posted by: DrewM at 08:42 AM | Comments (197)
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From @baseballcrank

Yes, the Oprahization of politics sucks but it's a reality. Telling voters, "Hey idiots, you're voting for the wrong reasons" is not going to carry the day.

As conservatives we deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. The challenge is to change this reality, not bitch about it.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:41 AM | Comments (641)
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