Nice.

Someone... Demanded a link or screenshot. Because my credibility isn't good.

Well, okay, but I didn't want to link it and I didn't have the time to white-out all of his personal information.

But I've done that now. Here's judyneric going even further than barbra, not only listing ever tax lien against him and all of his property records, but even his speeding tickets and other offenses, which I'm not sure are strictly speaking public records.

Here you go. I can also screenshot his speeding tickets, too, if you want them.

Corrected/Apologies: I called the guy asking for proof an asshole, because he knocked me, but that wasn't fair. He was right to ask for it.

Posted by: Ace at 02:38 PM | Comments (83)
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Eh. Making predictions which are then borne out to establish the validity of a theory or model is soooo passe.

Science is not only settled; it's outdated. "The New Science" is much better. No more of this squabbling and quibbling over proof and evidence. It's such a drag, man.

That takes up so much time. Time that could be more usefully spent applying for IPCC and US Government grants.

In Bizzarro World, meanwhile, the IPCC and Al Gore and the MSM actually confess their mistake, and attempt to modify their theory to accord with actual real-world empirical observation, rather than simply repeating, once again, "All of our computer models prove it."

In the real world? Not so much, not so much.

Thanks to Christoph.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (25)
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Racist, I know. Which is good. If McCain's willing to be a racist on handouts for those who pay no taxes whatsoever -- spreading the wealth from those who produce a lot of it to those who produce very little, if any, of it -- perhaps he'll finally dare to make the less racist point that Obama voted present on reforming Fannie and Freddie, the Democrats' previous most prominent spread-the-wealth institutions.

Of course, that was covert spreading the wealth -- subsidizing mortgages for bad credit risks by putting good credit risks on the line for their defaults.

That covert, indirect system of spreading the wealth worked out so well Obama now wants to take it to the next level -- direct, open income redistribution.

Via Hot Air, with the MSM's new determination to vet Joe the Plumber more rigorously than the vetted Barack the ACORN Trainer.

I think this subhed from a NYT front-page headline r on Joe Wurzelbacher says it all:

‘Joe the Plumber’ Is Under Scrutiny

Yes, I'll be he is.

Joe Wurzelbacher's purported distant relationship to Charles Keating is newsworthy, the left is telling me, while Barack Obama's friendship and protoge relationship with terrorist William Ayers is not.

I'm sorry - - what's Joe Wurzelbacher running for again? As far as I know he hasn't declared for Congress.

Yet.

Note that the story isn't really Joe -- it's Barack Obama's answer about spreading the wealth.

Note however the NYT chooses to focus on denigrating and attacking the man who elicited the remark, rather than the remark itself.

What is the object here? If you can prove that Joe Wurzelbacher, say, is consistently late paying his Columbia Record House subscription, that means Obama didn't say what he said?

Is that how it works?

Obama endorses socialism, so the game is to personally destroy the man who inadvertently elicited Obama's endorsement of socialism?

Let's say Joe the Plumber kills hobos, as I do. What the hell does that have to do with the fact that Obama said he wanted to "spread the wealth"?

Thanks to Andy the Squirrel.

Soooo... The media sleuths have now ferreted out that Joe the Plumber voted in a Republican Primary.

Meanwhile, they do not bother to report that Barack the Presidential Candidate was a member of the radical ACORN political wing, the New Party.

I'm so glad the MSM has its priorities straight.

Shock: Joe Wurzelbacher not related to Charles Keating, despite the leftwing blogosphere "reporting" this earlier.

Well, fuckheads. There are pretty credible reports of a close relationship between Obama and The Terrorist Bill Ayers. Maybe you can put some of your energies into that.

Posted by: Ace at 01:40 PM | Comments (108)
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Joe the Plumber scoffs; he considers anything
but headbutts, dropkicks, and cock-punches to be
"dishonorable" in hand-to-bear combat

Twang!

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (53)
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An email I just wrote to someone in the media. I'm writing it to everyone else in the media, too:

Hey, XXXXXX. Assuming you are interested in a story that might get you a
lot of notice, while hurting Obama...

Obama has asserted in two debates he wrote a letter warning the
SecTreas of the impending subprime crisis.

He has never produced this letter. It is not on his website.

Is anyone in the media going to ask him to provide this letter? It
seems rather elemental to me that if someone makes an assertion of
prescience without providing evidence for it, the natural, automatic,
instantaneous response should be, "Okay, let's' see the letter."

Any interest at all? Or is his word satisfactory on this point?

Correction, of Sorts: Obama did write a letter -- after the housing market was already tanking, and people were going into foreclosure.

This is hardly "warning of the danger on the horizon." It's warning of the danger already past the door.

He misrepresented this "warning."

Thanks to Danny.

Fact Check: Half true. And not the important half.

We asked two economists, one with a right-leaning group and one with a left-leaning group, if a warning issued in 2007 could have made a difference to the problems of October 2008. Both of them said it was too late by then, because the questionable loans and securities had been issued by that point.

"The horse was already out of the barn," said Dean Baker, an economist and co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

"Everyone with a brain who was paying attention knew that there were big problems associated with outstanding subprime risk," said Charles Calomiris, a professor at Columbia Business School and a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But, he added, "There was little that the Fed could have done after March 2007 to prevent the crisis from happening."

So Obama is right that he wrote the letter. Saying Bernanke and Paulson didn't do anything about it sounds harsh, but it is a rough approximation of what happened. But Obama's letter was largely confined to the problems of low-income homeowners who were losing their homes. It was not an early warning on the economic collapse of '08. We rate his statement Half True.

Obama's warning came as the crisis was already unfolding. A year after Republicans attempted to pass reform into law -- which he blocked, by permitting a filibuster -- and two years after John McCain called for this reform.

And, as long as we're playing this game, six and four years after Bush called for such reforms in 2001, and then called for them again in 2003.

Barack Obama participated in the scam -- until it began to blow up in his face.

And then he dashed off a CYA letter "warning" of the problem he had previously blocked solving.

When Obama was presented with the opportunity to actually do something that could avert the crisis -- pass crucial legislation enacting reform -- he voted present.

But he's really proud that a year later, when bomb he'd built began to blow up in his face, he wrote a letter noting that the bomb he'd built seemed to be blowing up.

Thanks to Doug.

Best Part of Letter:

How to support independent community-based-organizations to provide counseling and work-out services to prevent foreclosure and preserve homeownership where practical.

That means ACORN, the same group the Democrats tried to create a $20+ billion slush-fund for in the earlier bailout package the proposed.

Thanks to Tinian.

Posted by: Ace at 12:35 PM | Comments (81)
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Slip of the tongue, yes.

Freudian slip? Eh, probably not even that. She just stammers over the word "contributor."

Maybe she couldn't get the Sarah Palin t-shirt story out of her head.

Harmless, I'm sure. But very awkward. She winds up in the position of having to apologize for saying a word she's not permitted to admit she said on TV. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (52)
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That's the traditional likely voter model. The HopeyChangey model of course has him up by more, but no one ever trusts that -- if everyone who claimed they would "definitely" vote did in fact vote, pollsters wouldn't have to ask questions like "how many times have you voted in the past six years" and "do you know the location of your nearest polling station" to ferret out the real likelies.

Obama will do better than likely voter models suggest -- but not nearly as good as the HopeyChangey "if you say you're likely to vote, we believe you" model. Somewhere in the middle, probably edged to the side of the traditional model.

Of course, that doesn't include the Bradley Effect, if one exists. A lot of pollsters don't believe there is such a thing, and even dispute it happened to Tom Bradley, for whom it is named, in the first place.

But others do. There's a reason why exit polls showed a huge Kerry win in 2004: When someone who is clearly liberal -- young and/or female and/or minority -- asks you for whom you voted, with all of that pent-up self-righteous identity-politics judgmental sneering ready to spring out if you answer "wrong" -- there's a natural instinct to either not answer at all or to answer untruthfully in the "right way."

Hey -- I am a living testament to the Bradley Effect. I know a lot of liberals. Here's me discussing politics in real life:

"---"

"---"

(vague nod intended to give the misperception of basic agreement)

"---"

"Where am I politically? Oh, uhhh... I guess I'm a libertarian, I guess you'd say."

And if I'm talking to a liberal-leaning girl I'd like to screw... well oh my. One isn't responsible for the sorts of things one says when sporting a proto-boner.

Or here's a real-life discussion I had with a landlord in Massachusetts. I was friendly with him because he lived downstairs. But even though we talked, we didn't talk politics until I saw his computer was open to Michelle Malkin's site.

"Oh, you read Michelle Malkin? I actually kinda-sorta know her. I'm a conservative. Sorry I never mentioned it. I didn't want you to hold it against me."

-- "No problem. I didn't mention it either. I assumed you were a liberal, too."

Really happened. I have to conceal my occupation whenever I'm renting for fear of being tossed out for the Scarlet R.

Ann Coulter's latest column discusses this. And it's not merely a "Bradley Effect" as regards black candidates. It's a Bradley Effect concerning the entire party presumed to represent black interests -- the Democratic Party. The fear of being labeled a racist by a judgmental stranger may be responsible for Democrats' consistent underperformance at the polling booth as compared to the polls.

The Washington Post debates the reality of this, tending to doubt it. But I thought this was interesting:

Still, there is little reason today, some experts contend, for people answering public opinion polls to hide their true intentions.

"For people to lie, there generally has to be a stigma attached to telling the truth," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. "There is none affiliated with saying, 'I'm voting for Hillary' or 'I'm voting for McCain.' "

Oh, for God's sakes, what nonsense. Of course there is. Obama has stoked that stigma through the primaries and now in the general election campaign.

He doesn't look like the other presidents on the dollar bill. Perhaps you'd heard that.

Kohut theorizes that polling discrepancies do not come from respondents who lie, but from people who decline to participate in polls. That is a growing problem, with studies showing that as many as half the people contacted for polls refuse to participate. Kohut recently conducted a study in which interviewers spent months repeatedly calling people back until they agreed to talk. He said that helped him see who is often missed in polling.

"Poorer, less-educated whites don't like to do these polls as much as better-educated people do," he said. "The refusals come from the same class of people who tend to be the most racially intolerant."

Bitter, clingy racists. Or maybe they're just sick of being branded as such when they fail to vote in the ways their would-be masters demand.

Anthony Greenwald, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, said he also does not buy that people are lying to pollsters. "What I do buy," he said, "is that there were lots of undecided people who didn't have an answer before the phone rang and were generating one on the spot."

Greenwald, who has studied the primary contest between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that when people in polls are prodded to answer a question, they know that, unlike in the voting booth, their response will have no consequences. So they may say they are supporting a candidate they have not actually decided on.

Pollsters say they build in controls to account for possible hidden racial feelings that can skew results. Kohut said he tries to elicit more-honest answers by matching the race of the interviewer and the respondent. Others try to push people to test the intensity of their backing of a particular candidate and often toss out whites who express tepid support for black candidates.

But Jon Krosnick, a professor of political science, communication and psychology at Stanford University, noted that black callers tend to get more pro-Obama answers in surveys than white callers do, no matter the race of the respondent.

That would seem to be evidence of a Bradley Effect of some sort -- blacks are more comfortable truthfully saying they support Obama when speaking to a fellow black, and whites are more likely to claim they support Obama when speaking to a black interviewer, even if they're, you know, not.

"Leaning Obama." Or "undecided." "Undecided," just like Joe the Plumber.

Who doesn't sound very undecided to me. But Joe the Plumber seems to understand the stigma of announcing publicly, "I'm voting for McCain."

Anyone notice that it's only one side of the aisle that feels this need to hide their political affiliations? Well -- until recently. Hillary Democrats got beat up on with the same crap.

Great Catch! Brandon points out this Kohut guy asserts there's absolutely no stigma in saying one is voting for McCain or Hillary against Obama, directly before going on to brand those most likely to refuse to answer among the "most racially intolerant" voters in the country.

Nope! No stigma whatsoever, Kohut! Just being called "the most racially intolerant" of all Americans! Water off a duck's back and all.

I cite Dave Chappelle for the proposition that whites-- or rather non-Democrats generally -- don't like to reveal their political affiliations to strangers. Or even acquaintances.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (103)
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Jake Tapper wrote a very good post about Democrat overconfidence, and gave it a very funny title.

Some of Obama's supporters thought differently, and Tapper added this to the end:

UPDATE: It did not even occur to me, until a poster below accused me of being racist, that anyone would think my invoking of the line "Check yourself before you wreck yourself" had anything to do with Obama's race.

It does not.

It has to do with my frequent use of silly pop culture references, and the fact that I am a big fan of Ice Cube.

And if their treatment of Joe the Plumber is any indication, the media and Obama's supporters (but I repeat myself) will do everything they can to make sure those who disagree with The One pay the price for such blasphemy.

Posted by: Slublog at 11:48 AM | Comments (38)
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Getting press.

On-line industry press, but it's still press.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (27)
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You may know it better as Michelle Malkin's story, as she's the one who pushed it wide and far. But it's these Palestra cats who actually discovered this. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:37 AM | Comments (29)
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