Downsized Upscale wrote:

One other thing. If you start reading how inevitable the tsunami is gonna be, and you think maybe you'll stay home on Election Day because one vote won't matter, I've got two words for you. Pile on.

This election has to be a 'pile on' of epic proportions. The guy at the bottom of the pile has to get up - after the ref separates the bodies - stagger over to the sidelines, drop his helmet to the ground, and limp out of the stadium, body and spirit crushed for the next twenty years.

Exactly.

Here's what I wrote, and I think it's important.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (568)
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Blame Bush for this-- the guy was unpopular when he left, but apparently not unpopular enough for Democrats to keep buttering their bread with him.

A prominent Democratic pollster is circulating a survey that shows George W. Bush is 6 points more popular than President Obama in “Frontline” districts — seats held by Democrats that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sees as most vulnerable to Republican takeover. That Bush is more popular than Obama in Democratic-held seats is cause for outright fear.

Ed linked this earlier, with his take.

This Hotline piece is mostly a lot of obvious stuff-- use Obama for discreet (no cameras!) fundraising, make each election individual and personal, etc. -- but damn, there is this quote:

"He is a walking radioactive disaster," one senior Democratic operative said of the president.

Many people keep offering Mr. Wolf's advice (as usual, his version of it as offered on his cameo on Sesame Street): Gentlement, let's not start soaping each other's backs just yet.

And at this point, I guess I have to really endorse that. This is no point for complacency or just assuming outside forces are going to make this happen.

There are no outside forces. Every American citizen is a force of one. When Americans decide to skip out on their civic, patriotic duty and leave elections up to other people, or to the impersonal, irresistible outside forces that don't actually exist, bad things happen.

There is no "wave" here except the wave we make. We are the wave. And if you're not registered to vote -- you're not the wave. If you're not planning on voting -- you're not the wave. If you're not emailing relatives you know lean right and encouraging them to check Obama's power, to stand up and be counted -- you're not the wave.

There will be no wave at all unless we set our minds on making it happen. Obama's popularity in polls will not restrain him -- we have seen that already. We saw him arrogantly demanding ObamaCare despite 60+% opinion (and strong opinion) against it.

He actually -- kind of -- doesn't care about polls. Maybe that is to his credit. Maybe not; I think he takes a perverse delight in thwarting you, defying you. Making your lives worse.

But he doesn't care much about polls. He doesn't care about what you believe, what you think, what you want. He only cares about power-- and power comes from elections. He cares about what he has the power to do, over your objections.

There is only one way to restrain that power. And just taking pleasure in bad polls isn't it.

We're not sending a message here in this election -- messages mean nothing.

We are sending an opposition. We are sending a majority hostile to his plans for continued socialization of the United States. We are sending a Congressional investigators armed with the subpoena power and the power to put witnesses under oath -- and recommend them for perjury charges, should they lie.

We are not sending a message: it remains in the power of the target of the message as to whether or not he will respond, comply, or defy.

We are sending something he will have little choice but to comply with. That's not a message he can ignore at his whim. That's a reality inflicted upon him by voters which he has no choice but to bend to.

We are sending a hard limit to Obama's power. We are sending America back to Congress.

Don't forget that. And I know some of you feel so burned by politics or GOP betrayals and all of that. I know that. I know many readers here, despite their apparent interest in politics, actually dropped out of the system years ago and now are entirely spectators.

Obama won on a crushing wave of such similarly-disaffected voters coming back into the system to make their voices heard for once in decades.

You saw the power of that.

Please show Obama the power of that as well, but going the opposite way.

It is the contention of many of those disaffected with the system, of conventional two-party politics, that if conservatives would just show what a potent force they really are, the GOP would stop trying to encourage moderates to vote their way and instead focus on disaffected hard-right conservatives to vote their way.

Well, on that score, it's put up or shut up time. Because if you're still sitting out this election, after all you have seen, after the ruin visited upon our country, after socialism has galloped ahead so quickly and so heedlessly -- if at this point you still will not undertake your basic American duty to cast a ballot on election day, then it is clear you never will, and it is clear there is no point whatsoever in chasing your vote, for your vote will never be cast.

You will then have decided to simply live as a spectator in your own political life, leaving the decisions most important to you to other people and to chance, and in that case, the GOP is quite right, on a rational, pragmatic, utilitarian level, to simply ignore you forever and chase the independents and moderates who do vote.

The choice is yours, and the choice could determine the path of American progress or ruin for the next forty years.

Posted by: Ace at 12:39 PM | Comments (219)
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Great.

Update: It appears less serious than that first NYPost report, which claimed an "attempted hijacking." A fresher story now says it wasn't an attempted hijacking, it was rather a phoned-in threat of a hijacking, which probably means it was just bullshit from the start.

Except... you know, for the intent to terrorize and disrupt American life.

No word on whether the phone call was placed in an attempt to further "dialogue," "bridge building," and "moderation."

Corrected/Changed: As a second report comes in, this isn't an attempted hijacking but a hijack threat... I am adjusting the post to reflect new news.

Oh! I just got an AP directive. I'm not supposed to say that a plane with a hijack threat was "heading towards New York City." Instead, the new style guidance is that I'm supposed to say "eastwards" or "on the border of Northeastern New Jersey/Southwestern Connecticut."

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (135)
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Some things they get right on:

Associated Press Deputy Managing Editor for Standards and Production Tom Kent sent the following note to the staff about covering the New York City mosque story:

Aug. 19, 2010

Colleagues,

Here is some guidance on covering the NYC mosque story, with assists from Chad Roedemeier in the NYC bureau and Terry Hunt in Washington:

1. We should continue to avoid the phrase "ground zero mosque" or "mosque at ground zero" on all platforms. (We’ve very rarely used this wording, except in slugs, though we sometimes see other news sources using the term.) The site of the proposed Islamic center and mosque is not at ground zero, but two blocks away in a busy commercial area. We should continue to say it’s “near” ground zero, or two blocks away.

WE WILL CHANGE OUR SLUG ON THIS STORY LATER TODAY from “BC-Ground Zero Mosque” to “BC-NYC Mosque.”

In short headlines, some ways to refer to the project include:

_ mosque 2 blocks from WTC site
_ Muslim (or Islamic) center near WTC site
_ mosque near ground zero
_ mosque near WTC site

We can refer to the project as a mosque, or as a proposed Islamic center that includes a mosque.

It may be useful in some stories to note that Muslim prayer services have been held since 2009 in the building that the new project will replace. The proposal is to create a new, larger Islamic community center that would include a mosque, a swimming pool, gym, auditorium and other facilities.

2. Here is a succinct summary of President ObamaÂ’s position:

Obama has said he believes Muslims have the right to build an Islamic center in New York as a matter of religious freedom, though he's also said he won't take a position on whether they should actually build it.

For additional background, youÂ’ll find below a Fact Check on the project that moved yesterday.

Tom

Notice the new guidance on not saying Obama supports the mosque -- now we have to say he doesn't have an opinion on it. Despite the fact that the NYT reported his aides say he has a STRONG position on it.

But let's pretend, on behalf of our New God.

Sarah Palin expressed her disagreement with the choice.

Pelosi's investigation of Harry Reid & Howard Dean & others who oppose Ground Zero Mosque will be enlightening, we're sure.

Incidentally, because Tweets are so short, people resort to cutting out spaces and stuff to get their sentences in under 140 characters. The Hill repeated her tweet with those space-saving space deletions -- they didn't, as I just did, put the spaces back in.

And I think, as usual, that's to make her look bad. They tweet, so they know people do this all the time, and Tweets look kind of ugly sometimes... but better to publish Palin's cramped-together-to-save-space tweet to make her look as if she doesn't understand there are spaces between words.

By the way: The building in question was in fact party destroyed by the flying landing gear of one of the 9/11 Jet Bombs, so yes, it is in fact Ground Zero.

Thanks to pam.

Posted by: Ace at 11:10 AM | Comments (122)
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Kat from Missouri writes:

We are in the midst of losing an important ideological battle. A battle we cannot afford to lose because it is at the very heart of this war. The enemy believes that freedom and democracy, particularly the freedom of religion, is our most egregious sin and must be destroyed. He thinks it makes us weak.

We are, at this very moment, about to rip out one of our most basic freedoms and hand it to him on a silver platter.

I believe we should step aside and let the mosque be built. Not only that, we should defend their right to do so as we have defended nothing else. If we do not, we hand the enemy a powerful weapon that he can use to bloody us with again and again. He will use it to recruit more men by pointing to it as the truth of OUR oppression of "his" people, our hypocrisy to the very idea of freedom and its real weakness. Who knows how many of our men and women in or out of uniform will pay the price for this one moment?

I cannot and I will not abide handing the enemy this weapon.

Here is the response I just wrote. And, by the way, gloves are off now, just as the MFM's and Democrats' gloves are off with 70% of America.

You felt compelled to share your opinion of how awful Americans are, Seattle Times?

Okay, here's what I'm compelled to say, in that case.

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Posted by: Ace at 10:29 AM | Comments (247)
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Hate speech is on the rise, Time Magazine asserts.

How do we know? Well, geeze-- 61% of the American public thinks the Ground Zero Victory Mosque is not an attempt to further dialogue and understanding. (Actually, it's higher than that-- Time is lowballing.)

Or even if it (doubtfully) began as such an attempt, that attempt failed, the builders now know this, but are going full-speed-ahead anyway because at the end of the day this isn't about dialogue or bridge building -- it's about advertising the power of Islam next to a crater which stands in silent testimony to all the bad elements of the power of Islam.

But this is of course an exhibit for the prosecution in Time Magazine's Case Against America.

Although the American strain of Islamophobia lacks some of the traditional elements of religious persecution — there’s no sign that violence against Muslims is on the rise, for instance — there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that hate speech against Muslims and Islam is growing both more widespread and more heated. Meanwhile, a new TIME-Abt SRBI poll found that 46% of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers. Only 37% know a Muslim American. Overall, 61% oppose the Park51 project, while just 26% are in favor of it. Just 23% say it would be a symbol of religious tolerance, while 44% say it would be an insult to those who died on 9/11.

How is any of that even arguably "anecdotal evidence" of "hate speech against Muslims?" If I disagree with a Muslim, I'm committing "hate speech" against him?

Your MFM at work: If you disagree with us, and you won't buckle under our relentless lecturing and hectoring, you're engaged in "hate speech."

Also: America's Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, notes that enraging 70% of the public at large, 63% of New Yorkers, and most of the 9/11 families is a pretty strange way to "foster dialogue" and "build bridges," isn't it?

On that score, Zionist conspirator Jonah Goldberg notes:

[E]very time there is an Islamic terrorist attack, weÂ’re told that we must brace for yet another anti-Muslim backlash, which never arrives.

Indeed, listening to all of this talk about “crowd” politics from liberals these days, you get the distinct impression that there are a lot of 20-something liberal bloggers, MSNBC talk-show hosts, and newspaper editorial writers who honestly believe that they are not only better than the American public but that they are in fact the duly anointed conscience of this, our embarrassingly backward and bigoted nation. They must stand ever vigilant, lest America’s deep reservoirs of hatred and bigotry burst their levees and spill out through the sluices of the Republican Party.

How does this river of hate manifest itself? The supposedly anti-Muslim 70 percent of Americans who donÂ’t like the idea of building the Cordoba House near Ground Zero mostly also believe the owners have the right to do it if they canÂ’t be persuaded otherwise. Wow, thatÂ’s some crackdown on Muslims.

In any decent society, tolerance must work both ways. If the majority is expected to show respect for a minority, the minority must also show some tolerance for the values of the majority. I’m no strict majoritarian – one with right on his side is the majority as far as I’m concerned. But this isn’t a clear-cut issue of right and wrong. It’s more complicated than that. It’s about deference and decency and common sense. And one of the things common sense should tell us is that it is not only unfair but terribly ill-advised to portray 7 out of 10 Americans as bigots when they are anything but.

More thoughts from Goldberg in another column.

Oh, and Time Magazine, even, has the GOP ahead by 7 among likely voters.

Oh: Check out this editorial from the Seattle Times to make all these points for me...

THE grotesque exploitation by mostly Republican leaders of plans for an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan is harmful to the party and insults the fundamental values of this nation.

Bigoted ranting about a Ground Zero mosque at the site of the World Trade Center attack is a willful distortion of the proposal and New York City geography. The facts are less important to GOP leaders than the political advantage they hope their calculated assaults will generate.

Etc.

These guys throw more hate speech at Americans than Americans throw at Muslims. Yes I realize some Muslims are American.) Can you imagine any professional publication -- or even an unprofessional blog like this one -- denigrating Muslims in those terms in an editorial?

No, it's not done.

But we're the "haters."

Thanks to Andrew's Dad.

Posted by: Ace at 09:52 AM | Comments (148)
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To me, this is kind of interesting and also kind of silly.

First, the numbers.

In March 2009, the percentage was 11 percent. Today, it's 18 percent.

The percentage of those asserting that the president is a Christian -- which he is -- has gone down in that time, from 48% in March 2009 to 34% today.

...The poll indicates that groups who have shown the most willingness to believe the wrong assertion that the president is a Muslim include conservative Republicans -- 34% of whom believe the president is Muslim. Eighteen percent of independents say the president is a Muslim, up from 10% in March 2009.

But even among the president's allies, the numbers are shifting. In March 2009, 55% of Democrats said the president is a Christian, which he is. That number is now 46%. African-Americans, who voted for President Obama overwhelmingly, have also shown a similar shift. In March 2009, 36% of African-Americans said they didn't know the president's religion; that number is now 46%. Self-described liberal Democrats who don't know what religion the president is shifted from 23% to 31%.

These numbers are tied to a poll that show Americans generally aren't too fond of Muslims overall. There's likely a correlation between the drop in Obama's approval and his being linked to an unpopular group.

It's obviously dangerous to think you can know what's in another person's heart but I don't think Obama is any more of a Muslim than he is a Christian.

You can't have spent all that time in Jeremiah Wright's church and really expect mainstream American Christians to say you share their values. Despite all his talk about wanting to find a local church to attend in DC, he never did. The fact is, Obama has made no effort to be seen publicly practicing his faith. Again, the measure of one's faith isn't their public professions of it (lot's of bad people sit in the front row of pews every Sunday around the world) but when you're President, what you say and do matter in the forming of the public's opinion of who they think you are.

Again, with the caveat it's impossible to know what is in the heart of another, I think Obama's religion is the state. He's a leftist. Religion is a tool to use in gaining and holding power but in the end it's not the guiding light of his life.

I think the reason he's seen as a Muslim is because of his family history and it's the kind of religion a leftist would be more in tune with in America. It's the minority religion, fighting to gain a foothold within the existing political and cultural power structure of America. Islam's "otherness" from the traditional American religious experience is akin to the outsider status most leftist have in the American political tradition. Liberals like to bemoan the idea that Obama is viewed as "the other" by many Americans but it ignores the fact that many on the left feel the way. They don't see themselves as part of America's traditions, they hate them. Leftists don't celebrate America, they are too busy"remaking America" to coin a phrase. I think that it is this shared sense of being the 'outsider' which draws Obama more to Islam than to the traditional and dominant Christian outlook.

Add all that to his constant talk about the need to reach out to the Muslim world and his distortions about the importance of Islam in America to his lack of mainstream Christian background and, well, this is what you get.

A few more thoughts.... more...

Posted by: DrewM at 09:08 AM | Comments (261)
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Layoff Shovel ready.

1. Highway 66 in Sevierville, Tenn.

In Sevierville, Tenn., at a cost of more than $38 million, construction on a four-mile stretch of Highway 66 has significantly reduced the amount of traffic to area businesses. Local enterprises that prospered a year ago are now under severe strain due the impediments the stimulus construction on the road has inflicted.

If a construction worker gets a job building a road, and a retail worker loses his job as a result, is that a job "saved" or "created"?

via The Daily Caller on Twitter

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 07:58 AM | Comments (94)
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Consider this part 3 of my "Democrats Are So Screwed" trilogy.

Fifty-one percent of voters approve of Christie, while 36 percent disapprove. ThatÂ’s a major jump from the last Quinnipiac poll, taken on June 17, when 44 percent approved and 43 percent disapproved.

“This is a good poll for Christie," said pollster Maurice Carroll. "People are getting to know him, and they apparently are getting to like him."

President Obama does not fare as well. Fourty-seven percent approve of the president and 47 percent disapprove. In June, 50 percent of New Jersey voters approved of his job performance and 46 percent disapproved.

Christie is also starting to be seen more as a leader and than a bully.

I know there were some folks down on him for things like guns and immigration (and his stance on the Victory Mosque, is not good) but forget for a moment about the conservative base and any national aspirations (which he says he doesn't have). If a hardcore, ass kicking fiscal conservative can do well in deeply blue NJ, there might, just might be some signs people are reaching their maximum tolerance on spending and taxing. I'm still skeptical but if you take those things away, what the hell do the Democrats have?

Posted by: DrewM at 07:45 AM | Comments (66)
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I was going to add this to the last post but it's too much fun not to spotlight.

Obama's Not Even Playing Well In Peoria. Literally.

Illinois voters say they would be negatively influenced if a candidate was endorsed by Barack Obama. And if his support isn't an asset in his home state it's hard to imagine where it is.

40% of voters in the state say they'd be less likely to support an Obama endorsed candidate to only 26% who say it would be an asset. The reality at this point is that Obama turns Republican voters off to a much greater extent than he excites Democrats. That's reflected in the fact that 83% of Republicans say an Obama endorsement would be a negative with them while only 49% of Democrats say it would be a positive. Independents also respond negatively by a 38/19 margin.

...It's becoming increasingly clear that Obama is not much of an asset for Democratic candidates on the campaign trail and that for most of them it would be better if he just stayed away.

If you've lost your own heavily Democratic home state, what exactly do you have left? I guess the editorial page of the New York Times and Andrew Sullivan.

More: Ace posted this late last night but in case you missed it.... more...

Posted by: DrewM at 06:54 AM | Comments (98)
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