Interesting finding. This is not yet working out the way I imagined.

Rasmussen reasons that soon enough the field will be winnowed from the large field to the more realistic smaller field, and looks ahead to where Republicans will be then.

In a three-way race between Romney, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry, Romney earns 34% of the vote, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary Voters. Bachmann picks up 27% support, while Perry, the only one who has yet to formally declare heÂ’s a candidate, gets 26%. Five percent (5%) like some other candidate, and eight percent (8%) are undecided.

So close to a three way tie, but not quite, as Romney leads.

What's more, if it becomes a two man race between any two of them, it's a closer tie:

The race is a virtual tie, however, if itÂ’s a two-way race. In a showdown between just Romney and Bachmann, 44% of primary voters support Romney, while 42% favor Bachmann. The remaining 14% either like another candidate or are undecided.

Pit Romney against Perry alone, and the former Massachusetts governor earns 43% while the Texas governor gets 39%. Nine percent (9%) prefer another candidate, while another nine percent (9%) are undecided.

A matchup between Bachmann and Perry finds the two candidates deadlocked with 39% support each. Twelve percent (12%) support another candidate, and nine percent (9%) are undecided.

Posted by: Ace at 02:15 PM | Comments (322)
Post contains 263 words, total size 2 kb.

The hierarchy of media values again:

1. The progressive agenda

but where that can't be had, then:

2. "Compromise"

which is to be cajoled from the right when they threaten:

3. The Conservative agenda.

Here's Don Lemon, making it obvious.

Rand Paul was badgered Why won't you compromise? Stop using your Republican Talking Points.

Fat Tarantula Face Raul Grivalja is asked Wouldn't it be better if Democrats fought harder for their principles?

Shameless.

Why is it necessary, according to the media, that conservatives fight less hard and liberals fight more hard?

What "objective" standard do they rely on to assert this?

Posted by: Ace at 01:04 PM | Comments (267)
Post contains 155 words, total size 1 kb.

Sorry for this being the theme of the day. But it just keeps coming.

Bear in mind, the sainted-though-alive Gabby Giffords was shot in Tucson. And represented Tucson.

Supposedly this was caused by Sarah Palin deploying the age-old visual metaphor of placing bullseyes on targeted districts. (See, when you're targeting a district, it's like a that's what you're aiming at, right...?)

And of course a general "climate of hate speech." War metaphors. Intemperate language.

Now with Gabby Giffords returning to Congress, a Tucson cartoonist decides to mark her comeback with a silly badly-drawn cartoon fantasy about killing his Tea Party opponents.

Richard Cohen, who was very very bothered by such hot talk when he saw some political advantage in being bothered, now pens this:

The odd thing about the Tea Party is that it uses Washington to attack Washington. This is a version of Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarian movements use democratic institutions to destroy democracy. (This is what Islamic radicals will do in Egypt.) [Note: Arendt is chiefly known as a historian of the Third Reich, too-- ace.] Note that the Tea Party is nowhere near a majority — not in the House and not in the Senate. Its followers have only 60 seats in the 435-member House, but in a textbook application of political power they were able to use parliamentary rules to drive the congressional agenda. As we have known since Lenin’s day, a determined minority is hands down better than an irresolute majority.

So, let's see-- in that one paragraph, Tea Party Congressmen are compared to 1, Nazi totalitarians, 2, Islamist totalitarians, and 3, Communist totalitarians.

Incidentally, America has gone to war with all three groups.

Does anyone in the media notice this? Or are they having too much fun making the comparisons to realize how breathtakingly contradictory and self-serving they're being?

In a blog post, John Podhoretz notices.

Jonah Goldberg s a remarkable rant about press bias over at National Review Online you really have to read. [I linked it earlier-- ace] He takes on the fact that liberal commentators and liberal politicals now feel entirely free to refer to conservative Republicans, especially those aligned with the Tea Party, as terrorists, jihadists, thugs, dictators, and the like, without fearing the consequences of media blowback. But IÂ’m struck by a quality shared by all those who engage in increasingly uncontrolled rhetoric about the role of the members of Congress who opposed a debt-ceiling increase and any deal: They sound impotent.They are hurling violent words at the people they dislike because they cannot believe their own arguments are not winning the day.

...

It isnÂ’t, of course. These words are tossed about because the people who speak them are becoming aware of the fact that they have lost the national argument they believed they had won in 2008. They are revealing themselves as losers, sore losers, bad losers. And Joe Nocera, Paul Krugman, Fareed Zakaria, and others arenÂ’t making arguments.

Again, it must be underlined that Gabby Giffords, the wounded woman said to have been shot due to such angry talk, just returned to Congress today, and even that poignant fact is not enough to cause a single liberal a moment of introspection and self-evaluation.

This is all impotent, as Podhoretz says, a bout of name-calling by ridiculous people behaving like children.

It may be something else, as well. It may indicate that these people are so detached from reality that it is only now that it has occurred to them that they lost the elections of November 2010.

Perhaps until now they just pretended this all away. Perhaps only now when the consequences of that election are being felt do they finally realize they've lost.

The media focused relentlessly on signs carried by political ingenues at Tea Party rallies. Boo, hiss, this particular everyday American had a Gadsden Flag which implies, you know.

That was unconscionable.

But here we have the paid professional writers of the professional left writing 700 word columns far worse than the amateurs they previously castigated.

Again: Does no one notice this at all?

Posted by: Ace at 11:37 AM | Comments (549)
Post contains 697 words, total size 5 kb.

A little schadenfreude. If we're miserable, at least they're more miserable.

AllahPundit rounded up reactions to this deal last night, with Peter Kirsanow providing one of the more displeased takes on the right.

Many British papers are declaring this to be Obama's surrender. One quotes American liberal-but-won't-say-so Dave Wiegel:

This debt deal is a gun-to-the-head recanting of everything Obama and his Democrats say they believe in.

And of course there is Paul Krugman's continued hysteria.

Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe itÂ’s just me, but I see a pattern here.

...

Make no mistake about it, what weÂ’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.

It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isnÂ’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

In the long run, however, Democrats wonÂ’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nationÂ’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it canÂ’t.

One thing I notice from a lot of leftists today (like that other columnist whining about "terrorists" earlier) is how quickly the left proclaims that democracy can't work... when they lose a political fight.

Their entire definition of democracy (and government) "working" is "The left wins." The moment the left does not win, democracy is ruinous.

This is not new, of course. One critical difference between a classical liberal (of which "conservatives" are one strain) and a leftist is a respect for the process, the procedure, of democracy.

Leftists do not have any great regard for the process of voting, or for securing the consent of the governed. What they care about almost entirely is outcome -- if democracy can produce the outcomes they wish, then bully for democracy; if it results in outcomes they oppose, then perhaps we need to look at another system.

Perhaps one in which some kind of educated, civilized Vanguard (to give it a name) makes all important decisions on behalf of "The People."

This is not new. This is the standard leftist model, dating back all the way to 1793 and the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.

It's similar to (and not coincidentally so) the divergence between leftists and classic liberals on economic opportunities versus economic outcomes. Classic liberals desire a system in which economic opportunities are maximized, a system in which the most people possible will be prosperous; leftists fixate not on the process of wealth creation but only the machinery of wealth confiscation and redistribution -- determined to intervene (and take away people's liberty) in order to arrange outcomes the way they wish.

People like Krugman support democracy in exactly the same way they support capitalistic enterprise -- which is to say they don't, but need to occasionally mouth platitudes about each to hide their real agenda of destroying both in favor of a socialist tyranny.

Krugman's colleague at the Times, Tom Friedman, has been championing the supposed efficacy and wisdom of the Chinese autocracy for a year now. Democracy's nice and all, but if we're going to really solve this Global Warming Varying crisis, we're going to need to better insulate the government from the desires of the people.

There is an old saying that democracy is the absolute worse form of government, except for all the others.

But there remain true believers in critical institutions who are pretty willing to give that other form of government another chance.

Just one more chance. It'll be different this time. We know better now. Whereas previous tyrannies of the left thought they were smart enough to actually make all this work, we actually are smarter.

For a more sanguine take from someone on the right, moderate-ish conservative Jon Podhoretz thinks Obama's bluff was called, and, precisely as he described it, it did turn out to be a bluff.

After his bluff was called...

[J]ust 10 days after Obama insisted he would not agree to any deal without tax hikes -- "Don't call my bluff, Eric," he warned House Majority Leader Eric Cantor -- he assented to a deal without any tax hikes.

"I'm going to the American people on this," Obama told Cantor. And he did. He gave three press conferences and a nationally televised prime-time address from the Oval Office. And over the course of the week he did so, his poll numbers plunged 10 points.

...

There was no evidence from the political behavior of the major players that Obama was winning any argument on any point.

...

What do you call a leader who can't lead -- who has lost the ability to turn the public discussion and turn the conversation in the direction he wants and needs it to go?

You call him a loser.

"This may bring my presidency down," Obama reportedly told Cantor in their testy exchange, "but I will not yield on this."

He yielded on this. And it may bring his presidency down.

Posted by: Ace at 10:33 AM | Comments (287)
Post contains 970 words, total size 6 kb.

You see, the reason people weren't spending and investing six months ago was that they were worried about something that happened the past month.

Guess what? He also wants to spend some more to spur the economy. There's a shock, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 09:13 AM | Comments (418)
Post contains 103 words, total size 1 kb.

And Glenn Beck thinks he might be drinking on the job, because he slurs "war" as "wah" and "president" as "prezzh."

Sarah Palin calls Biden's "terrorist" slur "quite appalling, quite vile.

Posted by: Ace at 08:22 AM | Comments (219)
Post contains 73 words, total size 1 kb.

Column headline: The Tea Party's War on America.

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of AmericaÂ’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didnÂ’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if thatÂ’s what it took.

...

For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: TheyÂ’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, theyÂ’ve gotten so much encouragement.

Damn those right-wingers for being so crude as to deploy, and be whipped into frenzies, by hyperbolic rhetoric suggesting violent solutions.

This is just the latest supeheated burst of violent rhetoric from the terrorists of the left. (Hey, fun! Thanks for the tip, guys!) Taranto compiled more such talk. (Link fixed to point to yesterday's column, where this came from.)

A New York Times editorial calls the deal "a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists. . . . This episode demonstrates the effectiveness of extortion. Reasonable people are forced to give in to those willing to endanger the national interest." Haha, remember "civility"?

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman is even huffier: "By demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, [the deal] will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status. . . . What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question."

Roars Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect: "The United States has been rendered ungovernable except on the extortionate terms of the far-right. For the first time in modern history, one of the two major parties is in the hands of a faction so extreme that it is willing to destroy the economy if it doesn't get its way. And the Tea Party Republicans have a perfect foil in President Barack Obama."

What makes this not just hypocritical but ironic and poorly timed is that the supposed victim of "rightwing hate speech" -- Gabby Giffords, shot down by a schizophrenic who believed grammar, which he had trouble comprehending, was a government mind-control program -- just made a triumphant return to the House, to a bipartisan ovation.

Apparently the left, having claimed that Giffords was shot due to "superheated, violent rhetoric," has staged a large-scale, coordinated outbreak of precisely such rhetoric to, I guess, welcome her back. I guess their operating theory is that a sharp change in rhetoric -- to be less superheated and violent -- would be too big a transition for her to manage at this time, so they thought it would be a good idea to recreate the conditions which they claim led to her shooting.

Same Idea: Jonah Goldberg made the mistake of watching the Today show, and saw the same absurd hypocrisy at work.

And yet you know the next time thereÂ’s the slightest, remotely exploitable tragedy or hint of violence, the same reporters, editors, producers and politicians are going to insist that blood was spilled because of the right wingÂ’s rhetoric.

Well, go to Hell. All of you.

Goldberg trots out the hypothetical of "what if Dick Cheney called his opponents terrorists?"

Frankly, I think that needs to be done. I think the right should say exactly what the left says. This will highlight the hypocritical contradictions in the media narrative.

Yes, we should call them terrorists, and should say they are making "war on America," and they are taking hostages, and they are holding guns to our heads.

If they're really so frightened of such rhetoric, perhaps the only way to make them take ownership of their own war-talk is to deploy their exact same terms of debate ourselves.

Posted by: Ace at 07:55 AM | Comments (168)
Post contains 695 words, total size 5 kb.

And now, for a much needed breath of fresh air in this stale old debt crisis story, I bring you:

Matt Damon.
MATT DAMON.
_{(Matt Damon.)}

If you can last more than 45 seconds, you are a bigger moron than I.

More classic MAttdAMoN after the break. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:49 AM | Comments (131)
Post contains 55 words, total size 1 kb.

The debt-ceiling bill passed the house, and is now on the way to the Senate, where it is expected to pass. We're trying to empty the ocean at thimble-full at a time, but I guess you have to start somewhere. Let's hope the cuts actually materialize, and that our good Solons on Capitol Hill stay true to their no-tax pledges.

The extended and bitter partisan wrangling over the bill has given Wall Street the fidgets; there are few things investors hate worse than uncertainty. The article posits a kind of karmic payback for Wall Street's excesses during the subprime meltdown of 2008, but to me, this is pretty much politics as usual. (As Insty often says, we have the worst governing class in a long, long time.)

The victory of the Hobbits has enraged Gollum. Gollum hates the Tea Party, My Precious, yes he does. He hates it forever! Savor the flavor, but stand back lest you be hit by flying spit:

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of AmericaÂ’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didnÂ’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if thatÂ’s what it took.

Yet another story about the imminent death of the Socialist Left. I'm skeptical because Socialists are like cockroaches -- stomp them out in one place and they just crop up in another. The weeds of envy, the will to power, and the urge to get something for nothing are evergreen in the human heart.

Central Falls, RI has declared bankruptcy and voided all contracts with the public-sector employee unions. This after the unions and retirees refused to accept cuts to their benefits to save the city money. One aspect of the debt-ceiling deal is that states and cities are going to be receiving substantially less money from the Feds, which in turn is going to put even more pressure on state and municipal budgets in the years to come. Expect a lot more stories like this.

Italy is now really feeling the sovereign-debt hurt that the rest of the PI(I)GS have been in for the past two years or so. Europe is careening from crisis to crisis while we've been focused on our debt-debate over here; we may be seeing the slow-motion collapse of the eurozone before our very eyes.

This Financial Times piece says something I've often said myself: By all rights, the Unites States does not deserve a triple-A bond rating. We ought to get a downgrade, and we would have long since if the ratings agencies were doing their jobs properly.

Over at Forbes, an interesting article on monetary reform. The market may force a move back to the Gold Standard (or some other commodity-backed standard). I personally consider it inevitable -- the era of sovereign fiat money is drawing to a close, and will be seen by historians as a colossal mistake that was partly responsible for the ocean of debt we have now, I think.

California's teacher's pension system, CalSTRS, is on a dangerous path to insolvency. As are most public-sector pension systems in that state.

Ninny Matt Yglesias finds the prospect of raising the Social Security retirement age "quite horrifying". Well, I have a feeling poor old Matt is going to find a lot of things horrifying as the welfare state runs out of money.

The value of public-sector job security.

Our baseline result was that job security for federal government employees was equivalent to a 1.5 percent to 3 percent increase in pay. (There is some recent academic work cited in our paper showing that this may be an underestimate—a German survey found that individuals stated they would accept a more than 10 percent pay cut to receive public sector levels of job security.) Importantly, though, our baseline result assumes that federal employees who lost their jobs would, after a period of job-searching, find new employment at similar pay. However, our working paper also showed that federal workers receive a significant salary and benefits premium over similar private sector employees. This is where job security becomes particularly valuable, because it protects not only against lost income during unemployment but also against being forced into a lower paying job afterward. When this factor is accounted for, the value of job security rises to around 17 percent of pay.

Slublog sends this piece: Consumer incomes up, spending down. This is called "deleveraging", and it's been going on for a long while now in fits and starts. (The income-increase is pretty tiny, and can probably be explained by more people working overtime hours or working other jobs.)

UPDATE 1: All together now! I wanna hear you in the cheap seats! Unexpectedly!

UPDATE 2: Pooty-poot thinks we're parasites. Maybe we can send Cankles McClusky back over there to give him a new Reset button. I don't think he's feeling the love any more.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 05:09 AM | Comments (323)
Post contains 867 words, total size 7 kb.

Bahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. *wipes tear*

No, really, they mean it this time. Having done all that America requires of them on spending cuts and debt reduction, it's gonna be all jobs, all the time. Which in true Democratic form requires spending bills...

This is via Politico's Playbook, a morning news email that provides pretty good intel on what the other guys are up to.

Dems want to change the subject fast, and polls show the need to talk more about jobs. Party officials say jobs will be their key message in August, followed by Hill action after Labor Day. Many Democrats fear the budget fights of this year have distracted from the issue that will be central to voters in the fall of 2012 - and officials want to get Paul Krugman off their backs.

[...]

A Senate Democratic official tells Playbook: "There is nothing stimulative or jobs-based in this final deal that got struck. That's unfortunate, but it also gives us an opening in September that we can say, 'We've met you halfway and passed a huge, historic debt-reduction measure. Now it's time to do something for jobs.

Newsflash for Senate Democratic officials: restraining the Obama Administration's over-regulation of businesses, large and small, will allow them to create jobs. Continuing to let the President regulate the life out of job creators will continue to net you the historic unemployment rates that have become a hallmark of progressive governance.

The July jobs report will be out Friday...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:29 AM | Comments (123)
Post contains 254 words, total size 2 kb.