Polls close at 9, or, as they call it in Wisconsin, "8."

Then they will have results.

The Holperin race is the more winnable one, as Bush carried that district 53-47 over Kerry. The other one is always a Democratic district.

High turnout.

More workers are being sent out to address long lines at some polls in the city of Kenosha, where one of two Senate recall elections is being held Tuesday.

Meanwhile, strong turnouts were being reported in northern Wisconsin, site of the other election.

Hello! Via Nice Deb, Steve Eggleston says internal Republican polls have Simac (the Republican challenger) up four points over Holperin (the Democrat incumbent).

Posted by: Ace at 04:44 PM | Comments (323)
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John E (I'll have his link info momentarily) noticed a pattern in the comments.
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Posted by: Ace at 04:23 PM | Comments (167)
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Heard a few minutes of Richard Riordan on a local radio show (Prager?).

He was a 2 term mayor of LA. Republican and reasonably successful. I voted for him both times. I think he left LA a little better off than he found it.

He was chatting about the miserable performance of President Obama. He admitted that he had voted for Obama. He said (paraphrase), "I couldn't vote for a guy from the bottom of his class at the Annapolis over a guy from the top of his class at Harvard."

Please refer to this earlier post.

P58 - The technocrats go to Harvard and Yale. Palin's colleges are abhorrent! This is a new attitude. Truman didn't have a degree!

McCain's record of success after the academy didn't impress Riordan. I recall that McCain was not just a jet-jock - he commanded a large training squadron. The Navy doesn't hand out those assignments to dopes. McCain didn't just command the squadron - he was successful there. But he just didn't have the elite credentials to impress Riordan enough so Riordan helped put Obama in office.

Riordan is one of those special technocrats that worry me. The ones that talk conservative but, once in office, are perfectly happy to administer the socialist regime the left-wingers left him with. Many of them, like Riordan, are quite competent. But they try to make the existing structure work better - they never try to change it! Riordan might not have liked the LA employee pension system but I don't recall that he did much about it.

I'm terrified that Romney is one of those guys. I don't think we can afford one of them in the White House in 2013 - we're too close to the edge. It'll take a lot for Romney to convince me that he has attitude to rip stuff out instead of tweaking things to make them work better.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:16 PM | Comments (219)
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Obama: Bad luck.

Perry: Just good luck.

Is Texas lucky, or has the state benefited from exceptional leadership? As Gov. Rick Perry campaigned Monday in Iowa for the Republican presidential nomination — with the economy dominating the national political landscape — the answer to that question is central to his candidacy.

...

But some economists as well as Perry skeptics suggest that Mr. Perry stumbled into the Texas miracle. They say that the governor has essentially put Texas on autopilot for 11 years, and it was the state’s oil and gas boom — not his political leadership — that kept the state afloat. They also doubt that the Texas model, regardless of Mr. Perry’s role in shaping it, could be effectively applied to the nation’s far more complex economic problems.

“Because the Texas economy has been prosperous during his tenure as governor, he has not had to make the draconian choices that one would have to make in the White House,” said Bryan W. Brown, chairman of the Rice University economics department and a critic of Mr. Perry’s economic record.

Datum: Perry didn't face the economic crisis Obama created for himself.

And if Mr. Perry were to win the nomination, he would face critics, among them Democrats, who have long complained that the stateÂ’s economic health came at a steep price: a long-term hollowing out of its prospects because of deep cuts to education spending, low rates of investment in research and development,and a disparity in the job market that confines many blacks and Hispanics to minimum-wage jobs without health insurance.

Um... isn't the black unemployment rate under Obama like 20%?

Datum: Texas has lots of jobs now, but somehow this will translate to a "long-term" reduction in jobs "prospects" because of a lack of "investment." Meanwhile, by implication, Obama's America has lost millions of jobs but we're ready for that "investment" driven comeback any day now.

Okay, so, so far, we have 1, racism, and 2, it's just luck and stuff.

Not very strong, at least so far.

Incidentally, Rick Perry just emailed me to call Obama a "sinister Count Chocula looking motherfucker."

Oh, and by the way, how are those investments in green jobs workin' out, Chockey?

Is it all you hoped it could be, and still more?

Update: The Economist partly rebuts many of the liberal attempts to spin away the "Texas Miracle," concluding the glib dismissals are off-base.

I would suggest that in the rush to debunk Mr Perry, Democrats are being a little hasty. The Perry campaign is giving the startling statistic that since June 2009, 40% of the net new jobs created in America have been in Texas—a state with less than 10% of the nation's people. The Dallas Fed, earlier this month, reckoned that Texas created 261,700 jobs between June 2009 and June 2011, compared to 524,000 in the nation as a whole. Given the tremendous need for jobs in this country—and grinding unemployment is a horrible thing, not a minor inconvenience—it's a little disheartening to think that people are rushing to dismiss what has happened in Texas just because it's Texas and because Mr Perry, with his accent and his swagger, is the state's governor. So let's put politics aside. Pretend that Mr Perry doesn't exist, and that there's been a dummy stuffed with straw sitting in his office this whole time. What would have happened in Texas?

As Mr Krugman and others have noted, oil prices have helped buoy the economy.... According to Karr Ingram, an economist with the Texas Petroleum Institute, the Texas oil and gas industry added more than 28,600 jobs since June 2010, or about 13% of the state's net jobs in that span. It would also be fair to say that the oil and gas industry has impacts on Texas that are not captured in the traditional indicators. For example, Texas's longtime energy leadership has helped spur its interest in wind power, an industry where it now leads the nation. It may be counterintuitive, but there's a sense among state politicians that if Texas has the institutional expertise to do energy, that should extend to renewables, too. In any case, we can see that oil and gas are important to Texas job creation, but hardly the whole story.

One more stupid claim Krugman makes is that Texas benefited from "regulation."

What regulation? This -- that when the rest of the country was following the Frank Plan for giving mortgages to those who didn't deserve them, Texas bucked the trend, and their banks continued with tight mortgage requirements.

So, um, Texas didn't follow the federal liberal stupidity on mortgage issuance and as a result did not have a catastrophe in the housing market, and this proves he's stupid or benefited from "regulation."

Bear in mind, the Frank agenda consisted of using leverage and political threat to force banks to loosen requirements -- i.e., the mortgage disaster was due to "regulation" -- government intervention in normal business practices not to increase stability and reduce risk, but to increase risk, to achieve a social-policy result-- not due to too little of it. Banks, left to their own devices, had long required sizable downpayments and proof of income, for obvious reasons.

So, fail again.

Posted by: Ace at 02:55 PM | Comments (244)
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I don't see many details, but apparently this large dog, "Emmet Thunderpaws," greets his master, returning from deployment. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:34 PM | Comments (150)
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The hapless serial punk victim Tommy Christoper actually bit on this story.

Jesus.

Anyway, Ed Schultz edited the clip, but even edited, it's still obvious Perry said "the big black cloud" is the debt, which is so "monstrous" it discourages business.

Ed Schultz just clipped out the debt part and claimed he was talking about Obama.

It didn't even make sense.

This is big trouble for Obama and the left. If they think the public wants to hear this fucking nonsense about "black clouds" being racist... oh man do they have a surprise coming.

We voted you into office to prove we're not racist already.

We're not going to vote ourselves into the poorhouse to prove it a second time.

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (558)
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I think six campaign commercials just began filming.

When you open your mouth, Vilsack, is it a constant surprise to you to hear the sorts of things that come tumbling out?

This isn't just a throwaway joke. This quote will be hanged around this administration's neck.

For every other president, having millions of people on food stamps was considered an economic failure. A necessary extension of humanity towards the poor, of course, but a clear representation of the failure in fostering what the poor really need -- job creation.

This administration now tries to spin the ultimate failure as a genuine success.

The only problem here is that there is no clean quote where Vilsack claims food stamps are putting people to work -- the reporter asks the question about one in seven people being on food stamps, and then Vilsack claims it's "putting people to work," but the statement is thus contained partly in a question.

But we sure the hell can paraphrase.

Posted by: Ace at 11:37 AM | Comments (341)
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Texas created more jobs than every state in the union. About 40% (or more, sometimes 48% is cited) of all jobs created during the recession were created in Texas.

Lately, for obvious reasons, liberals have sought to knock this fact down. They note that Texas' unemployment rate just recently began to rise, now at 8.2%, which is middle-of-the-pack as far as states go.

So, why is this? How does the state creating the most jobs have a middling unemployment figure?

Easy. Texas became known as a state where jobs were being created and, guess what, people started moving there. Over 700,000 people have moved to Texas in the past two years.

So while Texas has created more jobs than any state, the surge of newcomers has overwhelmed its job creation, for now, and goosed the unemployment rate to a eh 8.2%.

That blogger, Political Math, constructed a "What-If" chart -- what would Texas' unemployment rate be if it created jobs at its actual level, but if its population did not explode? That is, if its population remained constant?

Compared to other states, with the same assumptions (that is, all states' populations held constant, but figuring in the created jobs), this would be Texas' hypothetical unemployment rate:

Some states fare worse in this analysis, because, for example, they lost population, their people moving away, rather than gaining population.

Look at the top of the graph -- California's unemployment figure is deceptively helped by the fact that tens of thousands of people have deserted the formally Golden State. Add those job-seeking emigrants back in, and the real unemployment rate zooms.

Thanks to gg.

Oh! An explanation for liberal critics:

As Obama's real unemployment rate is deceptively reduced by the number of discouraged workers who have given up seeking work entirely, Texas' unemployment rate is deceptively inflated by the number of encouraged workers seeking opportunities in Texas, fleeing California and the other economic basket-cases.

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Comments (143)
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I had expressed hope that Sunday's 39/54 was a watershed moment, not an aberration, but the new "normal" for Obama.

This isn't proof yet, but with the last three days (of three-day rolling average polling) being 39/54, 41/52, and 39/53, it does suggest this is Obama's new mark.

And it may be all over for him, whatever the polls say. Europe has just slid back as close to a recession as you can get -- 0.2% growth -- and that suggests the US probably will slide at least close to one, too.

If there's a double-dip, it's all over.

Oh, and I was earlier looking for evidence that American patience has a specific time-limit, and that time limit is about 2 1/2 to three years. Maybe this is sort of evidence.

ThatÂ’s what ObamaÂ’s 39 percent signifies. Republicans may not have to win it. Obama is on track to lose it.

Tracks can change. HeÂ’ll bump back into the 40s. And political junkies will watch every hard threshold for Obama, wondering: Is it his worst times or a harbinger of worse times?

Pundits sometimes turn ObamaÂ’s frown upside down. How remarkable ObamaÂ’s numbers are! In these hard times. This was said when he was in the mid-40s. ItÂ’s a misread of the physics of contemporary politics. We are in a hyper-partisan age. Democrats secure ObamaÂ’s floor. WÂ’s approval never dipped below 50 percent among Republicans, even when only a fifth of independents and 5 percent of Democrats approved.

WÂ’s approval rating did not fall to 39 percent until autumn 2005. Bill Clinton fell to 37 percent in his first term. But Clinton had a booming economy at his back by 1996. Obama surely will not.

That's about two and a half years after the start of the Iraq War. And even Bill Clinton's low point was probably about two and a half years after his inauguration, when the economy was growing, but no one seemed to believe that, because hiring and wage increases hadn't yet returned.

So maybe there is something to that.

Posted by: Ace at 10:19 AM | Comments (365)
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This chapter's theme is... ah, who cares. Steyn noted this blog on his web page Sunday!

I like what Steyn says in the big scheme of things but his mannerisms annoy me to no end," say STevo at Ace of Spades. We may have to get a body-double.

We may all be doomed, but I decree STevo gets to be doomed last!

Previously in the series - Day One, Two, Three, Four.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:50 AM | Comments (44)
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