I'm noting this because I said it would happen. As part of the long-anticipated "Obama Comeback" narrative, media noted that Obama had opened up a 48-44 lead on Romney, in Gallup surveys. I said, because I am Wise In Such Things, it was mostly noise, and Gallup had these two trading a few points back and forth for months, with the main persistent finding being a tie.

With registered voters.

The new ABCNews/Washington Post poll also shows it as a tie, at 47-47, with registered voters, and assuming its partisan splits hold for the election, as Captain Ed notes. So, as long as Obama overperforms his 2008 +7 D split (and his +0 D 2010 split), and gets a +9 D voting sample, and registered voters do not skew Democratic as compared to actual voters, then it's a tie.

Posted by: Ace at 09:56 AM | Comments (205)
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275 murders already this year. Maybe if Rahm says "please" to the gang-bangers.

Emanuel puts the blame for the city's recent eruption of violence on gangs. The city has adjusted its strategy to focus on gang violence, he told CBS News. Certain liquor stores and communities where gangs congregate have been closed, and abandoned buildings have been boarded up or torn down.

He's also making an appeal to gang members.

When questioned about the death of 7-year-old Heaven Sutton, who was caught in the crossfire of rival gang members as she sold candy in front of her home in June, Emanuel commented, "It's not about crime, it's about values." He was pressed to clarify the comment.

His response:

"We've got two gang-bangers, one standing next to a kid. Get away from that kid. Take your stuff away to the alley. Don't touch the children of the city of Chicago. Don't get near them. And it is about values. ... And I don't buy this case where people say they don't have values. They do have values. They have the wrong values. Don't come near the kids—don't touch them.

I wonder what kind of weapons these inconsiderate thugs are using to commit so many murders. Surely it can't be guns since Chicago has an outright ban on handguns outside of one's home.

Why it's almost as if murderous thugs have no respect for life or the law. Clearly we need more laws then!

Posted by: DrewM at 09:51 AM | Comments (97)
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"Washington is broken", "The Republicans are just the party of no", "Obama can run against the do-nothing Republican Congress". We've all heard variations on these themes since the 2010 mid-terms.

As is his wont, EJ Dionne has a perfectly silly little blog post that perfectly captures the conventional, and incorrect, establishment version of the world.

One of the problems facing President Obama has been to make clear that the popular things he wants to do are being blocked by Republicans in Congress. If voters think that “Washington” or “the political system” is broken, they are as likely to blame inaction on Obama as on the Republicans. Obama, after all, is president. One of his tasks is thus to make clear that he wants Washington to act and that his efforts are being blocked by opponents caught up in right-wing ideology — or simply determined to bring about his defeat.

...

One of the central skirmishes over the next four months will be over whether Obama takes the blame for Washington gridlock or whether voters place the onus squarely on Republicans in Congress. By challenging Congress “to do what we agree on,” Obama is trying to highlight what is actually going on. This will be one of the most important definitional struggles of the campaign.

The excised portion of the post is about Obama's desire to raise taxes on people making more than $200,000 a year but it could be any number of issues. Taxes are just Obama's and therefore the MSM's topic of the day.

The reality however is very different.

In 2006 and the 2008 the Democrats were on a roll, they took control of both houses of Congress, the presidency and eventually had a super-majority in the Senate.

What was the reaction of the American people? A quick and massive change of course to reverse the Democrat's 4 year sting of gains. In other words, voters massively rejected what the Democrats were actually doing.

Yes, mid-term elections are different from presidential elections but politics and governance are about results. The last time the last time the American people spoke they said to Obama, Pelosi and Reid, "STOP IT! STOP IT NOW!".

Democrats of course don't want to admit they've been rejected and chastised. They and their media allies spin a crushing rejection of Democratic governance as a demand for "bi-partisanship" and "compromise".

This of course is sheer nonsense. The GOP House was never going to be more than a brake applied to the worst of Obama's impulses. The job is to not fall prey to conventional liberal wisdom that in taking power from the Democrats the people were saying, "work with the Democrats", it's finishing the job and undoing as much of the damage that has been done.

Republicans, starting with Mitt Romney and running down to every competitive Senate and House race need to remind voters that this is the time when we admit the mistake of electing Obama and finish the job of getting rid of him.

If you think voters really want more Obama, you are listening too much to the likes of EJ Dionne, Jon Huntsman and Jeb Bush. Voters know better. I just hope Republicans "leaders" do too.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:15 AM | Comments (126)
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First Stockton, CA now Scranton, PA.

Drink!

Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty cut everyone's pay -- including his own -- on Friday, saying the state's sixth-largest city is broke because the City Council blocked his proposed tax increase. Doherty, a Democrat, warned nearly 400 police officers, firefighters and public works employees about his doomsday plan, prompting a Lackawanna County judge to order the city to pay full wages to all employees, citing that it is a violation of their contracts. Hours later, the payday envelopes went out, and, despite the judge's order, they were light.

...

The city of Scranton has battled budget woes for years, but the problems reached a boiling point after the City Council blocked Doherty's plan to raise taxes to cover a $16.8 million shortfall, opting instead to borrow money to cover the budget gap.

“The mayor is trying to strong-arm the council into doing what he wants, but it’s the city’s employees that are paying the price,” [president of the local firefighters union John] Judge said, adding that the workers in his department saw their paystubs go from about $1,500 every two weeks after deductions to a gross pay of about $600. “This is not a case of no cash. It’s a cash-flow problem.”

Well, no. If your solution to a problem is a 29% tax hike as the mayor has proposed, you have a spending problem not a cash flow problem.

Public unions, including cops and firefighters, need to understand that residents aren't simply piggy banks that can be raided at will forever and ever. Public services are created to ensure a certain quality of life but at some point the equation tips the other way and the "services" become a unbearable burden.

Citizens don't exist to serve the needs of public sector workers. As the costs become prohibitive, they will either find another way to get the services, move or simply do without.

Public workers, including first responders, really need to understand something....no one is irreplaceable.

Posted by: DrewM at 05:36 AM | Comments (541)
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Happy Tuesday.

The President is now taking fire from both the Left and the Right for his often-debunked claims about outsourcing.

Folks on the Left are mad that Obama failed to live up to his protectionist promises in 2008 to curb outsourcing via the tax code and immigration policy. Obama's tight relationship with GE, which was a pioneer in outsourcing, is cited as part of their problem.

On the Right, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is making a surprise trip to Cedar Rapids, IA today, where Obama has two campaign events. Priebus will announce a new campaign tool, ObamanomicsOutsourced.com, hitting Obama for billions of wasted taxpayer dollars that went to foreign-owned companies or to create jobs overseas, mostly in the stimulus. Like, for example, in Mexico:

Click over and tool around the website.

Also in the news, a new ABC/Washington Post poll finds that Obama is losing swing-voting independents by a record 14 percentage points. There's some other mixed results in the poll, particularly on voter enthusiasm, but that count of independents explains why Obama is struggling so much.

Obama's tax hike proposal is dead on arrival in the House and the Senate, where even the Democrats realize that raising taxes is bad for the economy (and bad for their reelection hopes). Also noted in the piece: several Dems plan to vote this week to repeal Obamacare.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:43 AM | Comments (192)
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Fat Is Officially Incurable (According to Science)

Yep that's the bad news:

Here's a much larger analysis of every long-term weight loss study they could find. They all find the exact same thing: You can lose and keep off some minor amount, 10 or 15 pounds, for the rest of your life -- it's hard, but it can be done. Rarer cases may keep off a little more. But no one goes from actually fat to actually thin and stays thin permanently.

Well except for a few lucky freaks who do maintain major weight loss. And how rare are these people? Pretty freakin' rare:

Well, this person did the math, and as far as they could tell, two out of 1,000 Weight Watchers customers actually maintain large weight losses permanently. Two out of a thousand. That means if you are fat, you are 25 times more likely to survive getting shot in the head than to stop being fat.

But, but, but what if I cut out processed and junk food, avoid corn syrup, work out, stop watching TV or drinking alcohol, stay active, and basically live like the Amish do - I'll be thin then right??

Nope - it turns out that even the Amish who do all the 'right' things lifestyle-wise still get fat:

Among the Old Order Amish, the adult women had an average BMI of 27.8 - about 162 pounds for a 5'-4" woman - and the men had average BMIs of 25.7 - about 180 pounds for a 5'-10" man. "The prevalence of overweight and obesity in [Amish] men was 54.0% and 10.1%, respectively, and in [Amish] women was 63.7% and 30.5%, respectively." They are not thinner than the rest of country, despite untold amounts of physical activity and healthy living.

And it turns out that all that physical labor that they're famous for has a relatively small effect on weight:

for a man of average Old Order Amish height and BMI, working out 16 hours versus 12 hours a day would equate to about a 15 pounds difference; and for a woman, working out 14 versus 10 hours a day would correlate with a whole 12 pounds difference in body weight. These nominal weight differences would still not transform someone naturally obese into someone thin.

Okay, but they get sick just like regular American slobs too right? Nope:

The Amish don't diet and the ideal of slimness is foreign to them, according to the German researcher. Stoutness and robustness is considered an asset for hard field work among the men and childbearing for the women. Yet, the Amish have lower rates of heart disease and rates of type 2 diabetes that are only about half that of the general American population.

So they're heavy but not necessarily unhealthy.

The goal here is not to depress you but to point out that losing and keeping off a lot of weight permanently is really, really hard. And since genes and biology are involved, there's likely no magic diet or behavior bullet that will ever change this. So if you're kinda big, odds are that you'll never become a long-term thin person - but you can be a thinner and healthier version of you.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:55 PM | Comments (623)
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Via @rdbrewer4, from the sidebar, too silly not to link.

Why is Lanny Davis attempting to DM Morgan Fairchild?

You know my theory, because it's probably your theory, too.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:04 PM | Comments (253)
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Useful, I think.

Obama's ads are raking Romney for Bain, and then you have Robert Gibbs saying "no one knows" if Romney is a tax evader. Suggesting he might be (despite no one, including the IRS, ever having alleged such a thing).

But Robert Gibbs wants you to wonder about it.

So yeah, call the Liar a Liar already.

Might as well call him a socialist, too. Or perhaps: "No one knows" if Obama is a Marxist socialist radical indoctrinated at the knees of Marxist terrorist Bill Ayers.

In a conference call Monday morning, senior staff said Romney’s surrogates would stop shying away from the word “lie” in responding to Democrats’ attacks on his business record, and plan to go on TV to call Obama a “liar,” the source said.

“They are very fed up with these attacks,” said the source…

“The feeling was that nobody is watching this right now,” said the source. “They had a time frame to respond to the Bain attacks… But today the counterattack with the surrogates is going to begin.”

This is the only way Obama can beat Romney -- so yes, Romney had better squash this gambit as forcefully as possible.

By the way, I don't really buy this argument from Bill Kristol, echoed/reported by AllahPundit:

The question isn’t whether Romney’s within a few points, it’s why he isn’t leading outright as the Obama economy circles the drain in a tightening, accelerating spiral. Team Mitt seems to be banking on 1980 redux, when an avalanche of swing voters finally gave up on Carter and embraced Reagan after the debates. Is there any strong reason to believe that’ll happen again? With Reagan, the concern was that he was too “radical” and maybe too old to be trusted with the presidency. Once voters felt reassured about his competence and vision, they broke. No one’s worried about those things with Romney, though, despite the Democrats’ dumb insistence that he’s the wingnuttiest nominee since Barry Goldwater. Everyone, including his opponents, accepts that he’s sharp, sober, and cautious. He’s presidential material. So what’s going to change after the debates this time?

I addressed this idea earlier today. I think we tell ourselves stories to make simple, understandable narratives out of complex, multivariable events. Humans are natural storytellers, after all. Our brains cannot process all the enormous information in the world without the aid of stories. (Even our eyes do this: Our eyes engage in a lot of processing of visual stimulus before sending it on to the brain, creating a "story" in pictures for us.)

The story we tell of the Carter/Reagan campaign was that the public was iffy on Carter, but had deep reservations about Reagan's smarts and, actually, sanity, and then the debates settled all that, and then Reagan went ahead.

Well, sort of. First of all, Reagan's huge advantage never really showed up in the polls -- it showed up in election returns. Pollsters were caught off-guard, and were baffled. Witness this 1980 article from Time Magazine, as pollsters speculate what went wrong.

Reagan's landslide challenges the pulse-taker profession

For weeks before the presidential election, the gurus of public opinion polling were nearly unanimous in their findings. In survey after survey, they agreed that the coming choice between President Jimmy Carter and Challenger Ronald Reagan was "too close to call." A few points at most, they said, separated the two major contenders.

But when the votes were counted, the former California Governor had defeated Carter by a margin of 51% to 41% in the popular vote—a rout for a U.S. presidential race.

Some polls -- like the NBC poll -- had Reagan surging ahead. Most pollsters did not detect the surge, though.

And, as that quote suggests, while some people think Carter was ahead before the debates, he really wasn't.

But a review of the late 1980 polls shows that while Reagan soared over the final week (following the campaign's one and only debate on Oct. 29), the contest up until that point was tightly competitive, not trending toward the incumbent Democratic president. At the time, the Associated Press reported "new polls say the race between the two men remains too close to call."

A post-election summary of polls by then-CBS News pollster Warren Mitofsky shows that at no point over the final two weeks did Carter have a lead bigger than three percentage points. There is a published Gallup poll not included in that report showing Carter up six among likely voters in a poll conducted Oct. 24 to 27. Whether six or the eight points cited today, Carter's advantage in Gallup polling was offset by similarly large Reagan leads in NBC-Associated Press or DMI (Reagan's pollsters) polls.

I think, in retrospect, we tend to seize on one poll -- possibly an outlier, and thought of such at the time -- in order to illustrate whatever point we wish to make. If we want to gin up enthusiasm for a losing cause, we note "Gee, Gallup had Carter ahead by six points a week before the election," overlooking the other polls that put it as even, or put Reagan ahead. And then this one poll becomes our Moral for the Story we tell about the election.

But even beyond that, I think it's wrong to think too humanly about big, complicated, multivariable affairs like political elections. It's a good, simple story that the public had doubts about Reagan, until the one debate satisfied those doubts, and then Reagan one. Nice and clean.

But what if the country were doing well under Carter, and Reagan turned in the same charming, reassuring debate performance? Would the debate have turned the election then?

This gets to my point about underlying factors being crucial, and nearly determinative, to predicting election outcomes.

Yes, voters may have seized upon Reagan's debate performance as a reason to vote for him... but due to underlying factors (economy, hostage crisis) they were already looking for a reason to vote for him.

I'm not sure if his debate performance was a game-changer so much as a justification for people to do what they were already inclined to do.

When couples divorce, there's usually some precipitating event -- a singular event -- which spurs the actual decision. "The last straw," as they say. But the last straw was the last straw only because there were so many hundreds of straws before that one.

I believe in the concept of preference cascades and tipping points. I think the country is poised for a preference cascade; I think most undecided voters are looking for a reason to vote against Obama.

Whether it's a debate, or some Obama gaffe, or a charming Romney appearance on some news show, or a global depression... When you're looking for an excuse, you'll eventually find one.

Obama usually gets 46-48% support, in polls. But I consider 5-8% of that support either nominal (I'm saying I support him, but I really don't) or extraordinarily fragile (I'll give him one last chance).

It's an unhappy marriage. The public is very disappointed in Obama, and by the all gods of Hyboria, is Obama disappointed right back at a public too stupid to understand his awesomeness.

Everyone's looking for an excuse to get out of this unhappy arrangement. Including, I think, in his heart of hearts, Barack Obama.

They'll find that excuse. I don't know what it'll end up being, but they will find it.

And then, in 20 years, the Story of the election will be "Oh right, Romney put the election away when he picked [Insert Candidate Name Here] as Vice President."

But that won't be the truth of it. The election was actually all but decided when the third sub-100,000 jobs report came down, way back in early July.

Posted by: Ace at 02:37 PM | Comments (178)
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FoxNews says...

For the first time, federal officials also revealed that Terry and an elite squad of federal agents initially fired bean bags -- not bullets -- at a heavily armed drug cartel crew in the mountains south of Tucson in December 2010.

Now, this was long suspected by Fast and Furious investigators -- Katie Pavlich's book mentions it in Chapter One-- but this is the first official confirmation of this sad fact.

She reported that Border Patrol policy required them to use beanbag ammunition as "warning shots" -- despite the fact they shot these "warning shots" even as they told the bandits to drop their plainly-visible weapons.

It's one thing to require beanbag ammunition when confronting unarmed men. But when demanding that openly armed men drop their in-plain-sight AK-47s?!?!

Has Holder modified this requirement, or is this another thing he wants to call Executive Privilege on?

At Gateway Pundit, a commenter notes the grim and bloody irony that Brian Terry was disarmed by the very government that armed his murderers.

Thanks to Dr. Spank.

Posted by: Ace at 01:38 PM | Comments (264)
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You're free to have any opinion you like, but understand there will be penalties assessed for having the wrong one.

More at Instapundit: So much for that "New Civility" bullshit.

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (61)
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