Interesting.

Of course, the Gallup poll -- which I've come to take as the best poll -- has Obama up by five points at the moment. Over a week ago Romney began losing ground and Obama gaining it; as Allah notes, though, this spike occurred before the ObamaTax decision, so it can't be that.

Personally I think it's mostly noise. It happens. Romney goes up, then Obama goes up; but both remain, over time, around 46-47%.

Among registered voters, note.

But given that this has been going on for a week and a half, and the five point lead is sort of big (Obama's biggest lead in a while, since May), there must be some reason, apart from noise, his numbers are going up. I can't imagine what that could be, unless, as Allah suggests, it's Hispanics breaking even harder for him than they did in 2008.

I do expect there will be some kind of Roberts Bounce. The less informed voters tend to be swayed by headlines like "Obama wins." Anything positive like that moves their needles. But will the bounce persist? I doubt it; they usually don't anymore. I can't imagine too many people are going to care that the Supreme Court blessed a law they hated even before it was contested in court at all -- that is, they didn't previously need a court to tell them they didn't like it, so I don't think this will swing them very much.

Plus, as it gets out that Roberts flipped his vote, they'll be even less inclined to say the Supreme Court is an important final arbiter.

I don't know what any of this conflicting poll stuff means.

I do know that voters vote on underlying conditions, and those underlying conditions seem to be deterioriating, quickly, at the worst possible time for Obama.

Obama needs a sudden burst of good economic news now. Instead, the best he can hope for is stasis. And what he's rooting against is yet a second dip.

Rasumussen Sees No Lift For Obama: And Rasmussen has not been very favorable to Romney, either. Their poll of likely voters has Romney on top, 46-44. A week before, they had it exactly the other way around -- Obama 46, Romney 44.

Posted by: Ace at 02:06 PM | Comments (307)
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Of course, of course. Because they were white, and weren't chasing a plum posting at a law school needing some "diversity."

Her mom listed herself as white on a census form, and her aunt was listed as white on a death certificate upon which Elizabeth Warren's name appears. I think the Daily Caller is suggesting, but can't say with certainty, that Elizabeth Warren filled the document out.

Barnes’ revelation that Warren’s mother identified as “white” conflicts with a story she has told about her parents eloping over her mother’s heritage.

“In the 1930s, when my parents got married, these were hard issues,” Warren said. “My father’s family so objected to my mother’s Native American heritage that my mother told me they had to elope.”

It was a different time, then. People didn't accept mixed marriages between pale white and fishbelly-white.

Posted by: Ace at 01:08 PM | Comments (150)
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Orin Kerr doesn't know, but speculates it had to be a clerk or even a conservative justice.

One problem I have with the leak: Roberts is now a Liberal Super Hero. And the conservatives don't like him, and are leaking about him.

If you think, as I do, he's a weak man and a politician first, you have to worry that he is now Owned and Operated by the liberal caucus, don't you?

He wrote an opinion to get Loved by All the Right People. Well, he has that now, and furthermore, All the Right People are the only people who love him. The wrong people don't love him any longer. So where do you imagine a weak, affirmation-seeking man would go next?

I think we just saw the birthing of a 5-4 liberal majority, something that will only be undone if a Republican president is elected, and gets to choose two (or at least one) more conservative justices.

And that's a hard thing to do. Because while Democratic presidents have a perfect track record of picking absolutely-partisan, reliably liberal votes, Republicans are only batting .500.

This, I think, is the main reason for that:

Another factor is that liberal Supreme Court nominees can tell you precisely how they stand on key issues and still get confirmed. In her 1993 confirmation hearings, Ginsburg declared the right to abortion “central to a woman’s life, to her dignity” and was confirmed 96 to 3. Breyer declared abortion a “basic right” and was confirmed 87-9. Imagine if a conservative nominee said the opposite? Their confirmation battle would be a nuclear war.

Liberal nominees can simply affirm liberal positions, while conservatives must speak cryptically in terms of their judicial philosophy. And as we saw last week, those philosophical statements do not necessarily indicate how they will vote on the bench. During his confirmation hearings, Roberts famously compared the role of a judge to that of a baseball umpire whose job “is to call balls and strikes.” This was taken as a promise that, as President Bush put it, “he’s not going to legislate from the bench.”

This suggests that Republicans can no longer confirm liberal justices, at least not until a treaty is reached on this point. We cannot confirm their guys, while our guys must, essentially, have no paper trail in their record. "No paper trail" means that liberals can't say definitively that he's one of those Crazy Right-Wingers; but "no paper trail" means that conservatives can't definitively say he's a Crazy Right-Winger, either.

I don't think liberals are going to agree to vote for conservative justices until there's an actual "crisis," and by "crisis," I mean conservatives simply refuse to confirm known liberal justices (and appellate judges, too). That will of course be a "crisis" in their eyes, and therefore the media will play up the Crisis in the Judiciary.

But that's what it will take.

And speaking of love, Howard Kurtz notes the media has a man-crush on Justice Roberts, and he actually uses those words in the headline.

The liberal lionization of John Roberts is roaring through the media.

...

One moment he is the bête noire of the left, a right-wing legal hack who lied about being a neutral umpire, and the next he is a profile in courage, rising above petty partisanship to do the right thing.

Is this a classic case of what many on the right carp about—that conservatives are depicted as having “grown” and “evolved” only when they move to the left?

In some ways, sure. But the story is more complicated than that, turning on a justiceÂ’s nuanced view of his role and that of the high court.

And while some conservatives are angry at Roberts—a few have even called him a traitor—the right-wing media have been remarkably restrained in reporting on the chief justice’s apostasy.

But make no mistake: much of the MSM is in gushing mode.

Ah, "nuanced view." Of course he can't make the case of media bias without undermining it, claiming it's "nuanced."

No, it's not. The media was writing apocalyptic stories about the Rogue Court and the evil Justice Roberts the day before the ruling; after the ruling, he's the greatest justice since Louis Brandeis.

There's no nuance there. To the extent there's "nuance," the media should still hate him if it were not a partisan institution, because he claimed what they said was an outrage: that the Commerce Clause has limits.

But they're partisan, so the important thing to them is Obama's Big Win.

Donald Trump calls a spade a spade:

It's a disaster and obviously it would have been better if it was knocked out, but Justice Roberts wanted to be loved by the Washington establishment. And by the way, he is now loved," Donald Trump said about Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts' decision to uphold the individual mandate in President Obama's health care reform bill.

"Because the way they're talking about him, it's unbelievable. So he is a beloved man to the liberals and to the Washington establishment," Trump added.

They'll always have this advantage -- the people whose Love counts for so goddamned much -- until we take the culture back.

Thanks to @rdbrewer4.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 AM | Comments (343)
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Unexpectedly, I'm sure.

Will this week, the week ended June 16, get revised higher next week? We literally cannot remember the last time it wasnÂ’t. So itÂ’s a good guess than when allÂ’s said and done, last week, the week ended June 16, will probably be around 390,000 or so.

For one thing, that’s just terrible, close enough to 400,000 — a level that is broadly speaking a demarcation line between job growth and job losses — to keep the Obama Reelection Committee members up at night. This week is also key because it’s what’s called the survey week, or the reference week, the week that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses as the baseline for its monthly jobs report.

I didn't know what that meant, so I looked it up: Apparently, while we speak of the "June jobs report," the survey for unemployment occurs in the last week of the month.

Unemployed persons [are defined as...]: Persons aged 16 years and older who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week.

So, if I understand this right, the actual monthly unemployment figure is based on a one-week snapshot, and that week was a bad one.

Which is another way of saying that it will somehow tick down by 0.1%. No matter how many people are unemployed, somehow it's almost always falling by 0.1%.

Thanks to CDRM.

Posted by: Ace at 11:22 AM | Comments (230)
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The patient was misdiagnosed, bad drugs pumped into his system, and now he's in critical condition.

"This is not good," said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist at BTIG, an institutional brokerage. Though the report "does not mean recession for the broader economy, it is still a terribly weak number."

The trade group of purchasing managers said its index of manufacturing activity fell to 49.7. That's down from 53.5 in May. And it's the lowest reading since July 2009, a month after the Great Recession officially ended. Readings below 50 indicate contraction.

It's not just that we've gone into contraction in this area -- it's that we did so by a big, sharp fall. At the same time most other indicators are pointing downwards.

This guy says this number doesn't mean recession for the broader economy. I assume he means it doesn't necessarily mean recession.

Okay, that would be fine, if consumer spending, consumer confidence, hiring in other sectors, and GDP were growing. But they're not.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (177)
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Some background on this fighting between Romney and the Washington Post on outsourcing:

The Washington Post's own fact-checker examined Obama's charge that Romney was involved in outsourcing, and found it misleading enough to rate Four Pinnochios. There simply wasn't any evidence Romney sent jobs overseas. And the ad was deliberately misleading when it attempted to cast jobs outsourced to other companies within the US, using American employees as jobs outsourced to other countries.

But then a front-page article ran in the Post, giving Obama the headline he wanted, even though it was contrived just for that purpose.

See, before we were discussing whether Romney outsourced jobs overseas from the firms he took over. Well, he didn't, I guess. So the Washington Post tries a new tact -- did he invest in companies that assisted other companies with their outsourcing needs?

And thus the headline runs:

RomneyÂ’s Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas

That's written to make it sound like it is affirming Obama's charge -- but in fact the companies that Bain invested in were not outsourcing their own employees. They were helping other companies outsource parts of their business.

Mitt RomneyÂ’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.

During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Note that the article's attempt to mislead people into thinking Bain was taking American jobs and shipping them overseas worked. The article is deliberately written, and especially headlined, so that a casual reader draws just that conclusion.

Even a news organization, like CNN, which really should be more than a casual reader gets it wrong, just as the Washington Post had intended:

report first published more than a week ago detailing Bain Capital's record of sending jobs overseas continued to roil on the campaign trail Monday, as President Barack Obama's team contested a fact-check that called into question their attacks on rival Mitt Romney, who headed Bain for more than a decade.

The original article, published in the Washington Post on June 22, said that Bain Capital, a firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and left in 1999, had invested in multiple companies that "specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India."

Again, we're actually not talking about Romney taking over a company and sending jobs overseas. We're talking about a couple of companies that already existed, which Bain invested in, which provided a business-to-business service for other companies, to outsource some of their business. And "outsource" can mean "outsource to another company in America," by the way, though they're hoping you think "outsource" means "Mexico and India."

Now Romney lobbied to get the Washington Post to retract this Obama-coordinated article. For one thing, he notes that "outsource" is different than "off-shore." For another thing, he says he wasn't even running Bain when they invested in these companies.

The Washington Post conspired with the Obama campaign to provide a headline which was misleading enough that Obama could use it in his campaign ads making a different claim (that Romney raided companies, then sent off American jobs to foreign countries). It refused to retract.

Now the Washington Post's fact-checker, who caused all these problems by telling the truth, has to cover for his own employer's partisanship, and also pretend there is no dispute between himself and the newspaper on this point.

And here he gets dishonest, because he claims:

The actual [Washington Post article in question] article, in fact, does not say that transfers of U.S. jobs took place while Romney ran the private equity firm of Bain Capital. Â…

The Obama campaign moved quickly to define what the article said, claiming that this transfer of jobs took place while Romney ran Bain. ThatÂ’s not what the original article said.

The article does not say transfers of U.S. jobs took place while Romney ran the private equity firm of Bain Capital? Maybe not, but it sure implied the shit out of it in the headline:

RomneyÂ’s Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas

Why is "Romney's" in that headline if they didn't mean to suggest that Romney ran the firm at that time?

He's also wrong to say the Obama campaign quickly moved to re-define that headline to suit its own purposes.

No. I believe this was done deliberately, to provide Obama with exactly that cover. So the Washington Post can say "Gee, they took our headline and used it to mean something else."

That headline was written for the precise purpose of being used to mean something else.

I think Nolte's quite right-- the Washington Post is coordinating with team Obama, negotiating what their headlines could/should say, to help him.

Posted by: Ace at 10:23 AM | Comments (150)
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Also, gay.

Posted by: Ace at 09:37 AM | Comments (291)
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With John Roberts' surprising decision last week, the fate of the country's healthcare system has been thrown back to the people, who have one last chance to kill Obamacare before it kills them by electing Mitt Romney President, electing a GOP majority to the Senate and holding the House in November.

Hyperbole? Maybe. But if the current state of the UK's NHS is any indication of where we're headed, and I think it is, the gravity of the situation facing us is pretty clear.

Avik Roy, the excellent healthcare blogger at Forbes, has a good piece over at NRO on the do-or-die nature of November's election and what conservatives must do to win the day. Short version: we need to remind our friends and neighbors why Obamacare is so bad, and fast:

... there is one aspect of Obamacare that, above all others, will matter to the broadest swath of American voters: the degree to which the law drives up the cost of health insurance. And this is the message that opponents of Obamacare must hammer home.

When President Obama was campaigning in 2008, he repeatedly promised that Obamacare would reduce, on an absolute level, Americans’ health premiums. “We’ll start by lowering premiums by as much as $2,500 per family,” candidate Obama said in October of that year.

But the opposite has happened. In 2011, the average family health plan cost $15,073, a jump of $1,303 — 9.5 percent — from 2010, the year that the president signed Obamacare into law. Over the same period, median household income increased by only 4 percent, from $49,445 to $51,413. That means that, for the average family in 2011, health premiums amounted to a staggering 29 percent of household income.

Read the whole thing, and we'll have much, much more on this topic over the coming weeks here at the HQ. But let me remind you what Obamacare's architects view as the end-state of their grand plans ... more...

Posted by: andy at 05:33 AM | Comments (680)
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July, oof.

Pasadena is discontinuing its red-light camera program, citing "lack of enforcement from Los Angeles County courts, time wasted by Pasadena police officers and questions about the cameras' effectiveness in improving traffic safety."

Uber, a car service I've written about here before, is planning to expand service to include hybrids, SUVs, and an icecream truck.

Sen. DeMint is cutting ties with his amazingly successful Senate Conservatives Fund so it can convert into a super PAC.

The Waldo Canyon fire is 55% contained. Also, it rained a little bit, so that's helping.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:51 AM | Comments (220)
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When Worlds Collide was released in August, 1951. At that time, Marilyn Monroe was taking bit parts and going to college. The Wikipedia entry for Monroe says this about her life and career at the time:

Following Monroe's success in these roles, Hyde negotiated a seven-year contract for her with 20th Century Fox, shortly before his death in December 1950.[33] It was at some time during this 1949–1950 period that Hyde arranged for her to have a slight bump of cartilage removed from her somewhat bulbous nose which further softened her appearance and accounts for the slight variation in look she had in films after 1950.

In 1951, Monroe enrolled at University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied literature and art appreciation.[34] During this time Monroe had minor parts in four films: the low-budget drama Home Town Story with Jeffrey Lynn and Alan Hale, Jr., and three comedies: As Young as You Feel with Monty Woolley and Thelma Ritter; Love Nest with June Haver and William Lundigan; and Let's Make It Legal with Claudette Colbert and Macdonald Carey, all of which were filmed on a moderate budget and only became mildly successful.[35] In March 1951, she appeared as a presenter at the 23rd Academy Awards ceremony.[36] In 1952, Monroe appeared on the cover of Look magazine wearing a Georgia Tech sweater as part of an article celebrating female enrollment to the school's main campus. In the early 1950s, Monroe unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Daisy Mae in a proposed Li'l Abner television series based on the Al Capp comic strip, but the effort never materialized.[37]

The IMDB entry for Monroe says nothing about When Worlds Collide. Likewise, the entry for When Worlds Collide says nothing about her. The official website for Monroe says nothing. And several Google searches have come up empty. The movie was made at Paramount Studios, but that might have been before her contract with 20th Century Fox took effect. Or maybe the contract with Fox prohibited anyone from using her name in association with movies made at other studios at the time. Who knows?

But look at this picture. Her hair is the right color--Monroe's natural, pre-bottle blonde color. She has a widow's peak. And you can just see the mole on the right side of her face (her left). Certain lines in her face seem slightly different, the nose and maybe the chin, but the mole convinces me it's her. Also, it's plausible she would take a few bucks to sit in that chair for a while at that point in her career.

Posted by: rdbrewer at 10:44 AM | Comments (548)
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