Obama asked for "flexibility" from Russia to surrender on missile defense, Putin says, No Time And Space For You!

The White House confirmed in a statement late Wednesday that Putin told Obama on a phone call he'd be sending Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in his place. Putin claimed he was too busy finalizing cabinet appointments to make the May 18-19 G-8 Summit at Camp David. Yet the Obama administration had moved the gathering to the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland from the planned venue in Chicago partly to accommodate Putin.

Whether or not the schedule change marked an intentional snub, the let-down comes less than a week after the nation's military chief of staff warned that Russia would consider preemptive strikes, if a dispute with the United States over a Europe-based missile defense system worsens.

Russia vehemently opposes the planned placement of radars and missile interceptors in Romania and Poland, saying they would undermine Russia's nuclear deterrent. The United States says the system is needed to protect against potential missile attacks by Iran and that the installations could not act against Russian missiles.

Putin probably figures if gays didn't have to wait until after the election to get theirs from Obama why should he have to wait for his?

Much like SSM, Obama has been clear all along on his intentions about surrendering our missile defense program.

Keep in mind Obama has already hurt missile defense plans through proposed decommissioning of Navy ships that are key to his supposed commitment to the program. Republicans are desperately fighting to save this crucial capability.

Normally I'd point out that showing weakness emboldens an adversary but the fact is Obama and Putin aren't adversaries when it comes to destroying the US' missile defense capabilities. They simply differ on how and when to best accomplish it.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:29 AM | Comments (133)
Post contains 331 words, total size 3 kb.

NO BOUNCE FOR BARRETT (SO FAR).

The Governor leads his opponent by the same margin found by Daily Kos' PPP poll three weeks ago.

There are very few undecideds, as Marquette University, numerous pundits and we here at AOSHQ have said for a while. Just 2% of voters polled say they are undecided at this point, 2% are vying for a 3rd party choice, and 1% are presumably clueless. This was a poll of 500 Likely Voters, in case there were any questions about RV/LV.

From here on out, it is safer to follow Likely Voter models as we are getting a real sense (confirmed by Tuesday) of who is motivated for turnout. This isn't going to be a D+3 or D+2 or even D+1 crowd. At best for Barrett it looks to be about even, at worst, R+3 (again, pulling from the shock voter turnout amonsgt Republicans Tuesday). Ignore any "adult" or "registered" polling unless there is an LV subsample. Today's Rasmussen poll is R+3. Walker leads 51-43 with Independents.

PPP will be doing another poll for DailyKos, if this confirms the lack of a bounce Barrett has serious work to do if he hopes to knock out Walker.

Guess that turnout Tuesday really did indicate something.

Get the latest polls & projections via twitter here or search hashtag #AOSHQDD

Posted by: CAC at 07:02 AM | Comments (98)
Post contains 241 words, total size 2 kb.

Happy Thursday.

The news this morning is dominated by Obama's big flip-flop evolution, and I couldn't really give a damn. So how about a music video instead? Here, a cover from some of my favorite YouTubers: more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:37 AM | Comments (469)
Post contains 44 words, total size 1 kb.

Evenin', 'rons and 'ronettes. It's a little bit of a grab-bag tonight, but let's do this thing!

Massachusetts honored its oldest living veteran, 104 year-old Irene Davey, today. She and her husband joined up together on the same day in '43 to serve in the big one. From an older interview:

"'Release a man to help your man' was a common motto of the time," Davey said from her Brown Street home. "What it meant was if a woman could take a man's job, that man was released to join the armed forces. That made the armed forces stronger, helping your man who was in the armed forces be that much safer."

A Smart Military Blog™ salute, Mrs. Davey, and thank you for your service. more...

Posted by: andy at 06:01 PM | Comments (587)
Post contains 439 words, total size 4 kb.

"Total loss."

“Yes, the Karma was the origin of the fire, but what exactly caused that we don’t know at this time,” he said. The car was a complete loss.

According to Baker, the driver arrived home in the Fisker, pulled into the garage, and less than three minutes later the car was in flames. It reportedly was not plugged in at the time of the fire and the KarmaÂ’s battery remains intact.

You paid for this, thanks to the Stimulus, and Obama's demented dartboard investment strategy.

Obama has rejected capitalism and its so-called "creative destruction."

In its place, Obama offers fiery destruction.

Posted by: Ace at 04:02 PM | Comments (337)
Post contains 139 words, total size 1 kb.

First up: Jon Lovitz.

I'm starting to wonder if he's as Democratic as he says, or as he was. He says he's okay with a 1% tax increase for his income bracket -- that's sort of Democratic; then again, as part of big spending cut/deficit reduction package, you'd have a lot of Republicans agreeing on that much of a tax increase, too.

But the conservative part comes when Piers Morgan states that the deficit is "thirteen trillion, maybe fourteen trillion," Jon Lovitz, the comedian, comes in and (accurately) says "It's almost sixteen trillion and going up up up."

That's kind of conservative, isn't it? Yes, I'm saying knowing the fact itself is conservative. Liberal boob Piers Morgan, who, pretending to speak authoritatively about policy, ought to know that, but he doesn't, because he spends the bulk of his intellectual energy (such as that might be) worrying about soft liberal-type things.

Lovitz, on the other hand, seems to spend time on stuff like the exact level of the deficit, tax levels, capital gains taxes and the idea that investment income has already had a tax paid on it once, and so on.

Maybe he is still a Democrat -- but he seems to spend a lot of time reading stuff that conservatives read, and not the sort of stuff that liberals are on about. When it comes to the mind, you are what you read-- and Lovitz seems to be reading about economics from a classical, non-leftist point of view.

Lovitz doesn't back down on anything here.

He notes that "many more" people in Hollywood are disenchanted with Obama than who let on. Allah wonders if he means disenchanted from the left.

I don't think so. The whole context of the discussion is about class warfare and this claim that the rich, who pay around 90% of all federal taxes, aren't paying their "fair share." I do not think he's suddenly shifting his critique into something about, say, gay marriage.

And then there's Chris Matthews. This fat old pervert is, as usual, talking about how "earth-shattering" Obama is.

He then realizes that Obama can be actually accused of shattering the earth, or at least its economic and political foundation, which is not a good thing, and changes that up to "earth-shaking."
more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:28 PM | Comments (123)
Post contains 420 words, total size 5 kb.

Funny. more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:02 PM | Comments (72)
Post contains 29 words, total size 1 kb.

Big number, but if the Marquette Law poll released last Wednesday is to be believed...that number is actually low.

MU found that of the voters confirming they would be voting in the Democratic primary, 17% were Republicans.

We will never know the actual numbers per party since there was no exit polling.

Assuming that even HALF of that number stuck by their decision to cross over to cause some mayhem, that means that over 50,000 votes on the Democratic side were just devilish Republicans, bringing the total turnout to over 676k for our side.

If you go by the Marquette number, those "hidden Rs" swell to an additional 110k, bringing total turnout to 736,000: nearly matching Prosser's share in 2011 for a primary.

There is no way to spin turnout Tuesday in the Democrat's favor.
Walker won more votes overall than he did in the primary he faced in 2010- 360k out of 616k total cast (which was contested, mind you)- he won 626k clear this time.

Falk, union hope, was annihilated by Barrett, and that was with mischievous Republicans thinking she was the weaker candidate.

Dane County gave the Democrats a massive edge in votes of about 80,000, but proportionally that did not materialize in Milwaukee, which is a big concern for anyone trying to unseat Walker. If you remember earlier discussions here at the AOSHQDD, depressed Democratic turnout in Milwaukee county relative to the rest of the state actually saved Justice Prosser. The Madison vote will show up. The pro-Walker vote will show up from the Milwaukee burbs. Will traditional Presidential-race Democrats in Wisconsin's largest city bother for a special election, even one as hyped as this? So far, the little evidence we have points to a big fat nuh-uh.

Walker won the largest uncontested share of a primary vote for governor last night in 40 years. His base is behind him when they really didn't need to show up at all.

These numbers should encourage us, but don't let up. Walker needs to win by a convincing margin and continues to need our support.

Still, fun to gloat if just for a day.

Posted by: CAC at 02:11 PM | Comments (129)
Post contains 388 words, total size 2 kb.

When Harold MacMillan was asked what he most feared might derail his government, he famously, possibly apocryphally, said "Events, dear boy, events."

Although campaigns and candidate quality (personality, charisma, authority) do matter, events -- actual facts -- matter a great deal more.

Obama has bad facts, bad events. The only truly good event was capping bin Ladin, but bin Ladin had been isolated and cut off from Al Qaeda's actual governing leadership for years and years, thanks to Bush's manhunt for him. A good thing, true, but bin Ladin was in semi-retirement, watching porn all day in his squalid, dirty compound.

And on the other side of the ledger, the bad facts? Just about everything else.

Via the Captain, a liberal starts imagining the unimaginable.

The three most recent national polls—Democracy Corps (D), Gallup/USA Today, and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll—underscore how tough a reelection campaign Obama faces and why it’s fair to call him an underdog at this point. He’s stuck at 47 percent against Mitt Romney in all three surveys, with the small slice of undecided voters tilting against the president. His job approval ranges from 45 percent (Democracy Corps) to 48 percent (Battleground). Those numbers are hardly devastating, but given today’s polarized electorate, they’re not encouraging either.

Obama’s scores on the economy are worsening, even as voters still have mixed feelings on who’s to blame. In the Battleground survey, nearly as many voters now blame Obama for the state of the economy (39 percent) as those who don’t think it’s his fault (40 percent). In both the Battleground and Democracy Corps polls, 33 percent said the country is on the right track, with 59 percent saying it’s on the wrong track—numbers awfully similar to the state of play right before the 2010 Republican landslide. These are several leading indicators that suggest the trajectory could well get worse for the president as the election nears.

And speaking of events -- there are, of course, a lot of unknowns lurking out there, ready to become known at any moment; and one strains one's imagination trying to think of unknowns which could suddenly spring up which help Barack Obama.

Whereas one has little difficulty thinking of Sudden Events which would damage him further -- France and Greece, for example, imploding, while following policies which seem an awful lot closer to Obama's program than to Mitt Romney's.

And why even go abroad searching for monsters? What if California or Illinois melts down? What if they default, and/or their bonds stop selling?

The economy seems unlikely to improve dramatically -- indeed, it seems softening, worsening, deteriorating. It seems far more likely that, if the economy were to suddenly move from a slowly-degrading flatline, it would deteriorate precipitously, rather than suddenly improve markedly.

A sudden 6% jump in GDP would help Obama... but that seems less likely than a -2% double dip of the recession. Neither are very likely at the moment, but the former seems fanciful while the latter seems like a genuine possibility.

Even to the extent that election campaigns matter -- Is Obama's campaign a strong one?

The [$25 million ad campaign talking up an improving economy and job growth] is itself is in search of a cohesive message. The first part underscores how severe the recession was, as a preemptive defense for why the economy hasn’t turned around faster. The second half argues that America is “coming back,” thanks to job growth over the past year. It’s that part that will prove to be a tough sell. Indeed, it was top Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg who advised the campaign in February that this is the type of message -- saying things are getting better when voters don’t agree -- that polls miserably “and produces disastrous results.”

But Obama’s campaign officials can’t utilize the time-tested “are you better than you were four years ago” message because it doesn’t ring true, so they have to argue things are getting a little better and the administration needs more time. It shows how limited the Obama playbook is this time around—mobilize the base, lambaste the opposition, and hope enough independents will hold their nose and vote for you.

Obama's ads must, due to facts, remain a muddle -- it's bad, but it's getting better, not quite as bad as it could be. We must do better, because we cannot be satisfied with the horrible economy as it is, but who knows, it could be worse.

And Romney's ads? Romney's ads will show no such nuance -- they will paint the economy as the worst economy since the Great Depression. A message which has the benefits of being arresting, dramatic, easily conveyed, lacking in complication and nuance, and true.

Look at this, just one of many:

By the way, Romney's had harder-hitting ads than that in this past year. And the Republican Governors' Association cranks out the best, horror-movie-trailer ads I've ever seen, and they can be expected to put out some doozies this year.

Remember the "Remember November" ads?

They'll be turned to 11 this year. (And I suggest Romney borrow some of the cinematic techniques the RGA is employing.)

What's Obama's response to that going to be? That Romney is wallowing in unpatriotic negativism?

Yeah, that claim, that an opponent is being "unpatriotic" and "betting against America" when he points out "negative" economic realities just doesn't sell. I've seen people try that for years.

What it really sounds like is "Please stop saying that, it is absolutely catastrophic for my campaign fortunes."

Back over at the Hot Air link, James Carville warns liberals that they have to get out of the liberal cocoon and "WTFU," or Wake The F*** Up.

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (348)
Post contains 967 words, total size 7 kb.

Manning the Ace of Spades HQ Decision Desk, I have been tracking the elections since the beginning of the year, with a daily tracker on the sidebar for several weeks now.

I am pulling North Carolina off the swing state tracker and giving it to Romney. It may somehow be close via a convention bump, but President Obama is not going to carry it. Digging through turnout numbers and the yawning discrepency in some polling, it is clear that his narrow 14,000 vote victory from 2008 will neither be duplicated or expanded.

This is the second state the President will lose that he carried in 2008. Indiana was the first and conceded by his own pushers months ago. Nebraska's 2nd Congressional district is going to Romney as well, so Romney has flipped 26 electoral votes, with six months to go.

I will be updating Wisconsin projections later this week reflecting the record-level turnout amongst Walker supporters. It will bounce about in the next four weeks, and updates at the DD will reflect that, but Walker has rewidened his lead and is currently favored to beat the recall.

Follow me on twitter or search the hashtag #AOSHQDD for polling and projection info as election season continues.

Posted by: CAC at 11:58 AM | Comments (114)
Post contains 225 words, total size 1 kb.