Ron Johnson - The Wisconsin Way Redux

I wrote earlier this month about "the Wisconsin Way" -- the pragmatic conservatism of Governor Scott Walker and Representative Paul Ryan.   I should have mentioned a third, newer, but just as strong voice for common sense, pro-business conservatism:  newly-elected Senator Ron Johnson.   Johnson, a businessman who ran for Senate without any political experience and beat three-term Senator Russ Feingold soundly, has a great article today in the Washington Times, talking about what we need to get the economy going.   Read the whole thing; he has a great list of bullet points, all of which would be great to enact.   Here's the introduction, which hits all the right notes:

When stock prices were plunging earlier this month, President Obama strode to the teleprompter and utterly failed to calm the markets or the American people. Sadly, they saw what I saw - and have come to exactly the same conclusion: Mr. Obama does not know what to do. He never did.

Since taking office in admittedly tough economic conditions, the president has taken America 180 degrees in the wrong direction. His failed $825-billion stimulus, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the explosion of his administration's other job-killing regulations have combined to put a stranglehold on our economy. Until these policies are reversed, the lack of confidence that dampens consumption, business investment and job creation will be the order of the day. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is blinded by ideology and refuses to acknowledge the harm his agenda has wreaked on America and our economic future.

Fortunately, some in Congress understand the harm his agenda is causing and are working hard to reverse course.

As a thought experiment, imagine how much uncertainty would be removed and the level of confidence that would return if the entire Obama agenda were repealed tomorrow. A pretty pleasant thought, isn't it?

We can't repeal the additional $4 trillion that has been added to our nation's debt during his tenure, but we can repeal his agenda - the sooner the better. I can't think of a more effective first step in any "jobs program," and I challenge anyone to come up with a better one. I'm confident the president's umpteenth attempt at a jobs program will be nothing more than a slight variation on already-tried-and-failed themes. Why would we expect anything different or think he has any personal knowledge on how to create jobs?

Michael Ramirez Nails It

The best conservative cartoonist going, Michael Ramirez nails our incredible shrinking President:

And While I'm On The Topic Of The Global Warming Scam

Consider this article from Investor's Business Daily, discussing the recent experiments at CERN:

The results from an experiment to mimic Earth's atmosphere by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, tell researchers that the sun has a significant effect on our planet's temperature. Its magnetic field acts as a gateway for cosmic rays, which play a large role in cloud formation.

Consequently, when the sun's magnetic field allows cosmic rays to seed cloud cover, temperatures are cooler. When it restricts cloud formation by deflecting cosmic rays away from Earth, temperatures go up.

Or, as the London Telegraph's James Delingpole delicately put it:

"It's the sun, stupid."

This new finding of 63 scientists from 17 European and U.S. institutes from an experiment that's been ongoing since 2009 is, if we may paraphrase Vice President Joe Biden, a big deal. Which is exactly why the mainstream media, with so much invested in global warming hysteria, is letting last week's announcement from CERN pass like a brief summer shower, ignoring it.

Here's another article on the CERN experiment from the Financial Post:

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”

But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes had — not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.

“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.

The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.

Yet this spectacular success will be largely unrecognized by the general public for years — this column will be the first that most readers have heard of it — because CERN remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success. Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

Again, an intelligent citizenry in a democracy should be highly skeptical of so-called "experts" -- but particularly so when they are apparently willing to corrupt the scientific basis of their own fields by ignoring contrary evidence that would impact their own careers and livelihoods.   The global warming industry won't want to hear the CERN evidence, but on its face what CERN has discovered should be earth-shaking.   

Science, Experts, Models and Uncertainty

Our society tends to think of science as high school physics class, and maybe as the first week of high school physics class.   You have plastic pucks on an air table, which should create the illusion of a frictionless surface, and you bounce them off of each other and you study two dimensional motion, collisions, angular momentum, torque, center of mass, etc.   But the world isn't two-dimensional, and the number of variables in real world problems is infinite.

For instance, consider this article from The Fiscal Times:

What caused the financial crisis that is still reverberating through the global economy? Last week’s 4th Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany – a meeting that brings Nobel laureates in economics together with several hundred young economists from all over the world – illustrates how little agreement there is on the answer to this important question.

Surprisingly, the financial crisis did not receive much attention at the conference. Many of the sessions on macroeconomics and finance didn’t mention it at all, and when it was finally discussed, the reasons cited for the financial meltdown were all over the map.

It was the banks, the Fed, too much regulation, too little regulation, Fannie and Freddie, moral hazard from too-big-to-fail banks, bad and intentionally misleading accounting, irrational exuberance, faulty models, and the ratings agencies. In addition, factors I view as important contributors to the crisis, such as the conditions that allowed troublesome runs on the shadow banking system after regulators let Lehman fail, were hardly mentioned.

Macroeconomic models have not fared well in recent years – the models didn’t predict the financial crisis and gave little guidance to policymakers, and I was anxious to hear the laureates discuss what macroeconomists need to do to fix them. So I found the lack of consensus on what caused the crisis distressing. If the very best economists in the profession cannot come to anything close to agreement about why the crisis happened almost four years after the recession began, how can we possibly address the problems?

What?   Nobel Prize-type economists don't understand how the financial crisis occurred?   Our experts upon whom we rely so much lack expertise on the essential issue?   Really?   The same experts who told us that if we borrowed, oh, a trillion fucking dollars from our grandchildren, then the economy would recover?

Or consider this, similar point, from an article about Hurricane Irene:

The computer models, and the meteorologists who wielded them, put in a "gold medal" performance when it came to predicting Irene's track — but there was much more uncertainty about the intensity of the storm. That's typical for tropical storms, said Frank Marks, director of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory's Hurricane Research Division. "Irene really exemplified the issues that we've been trying to tackle," he told me.

Hurricanes typically follow a pattern in which an outer ring of storms will tighten up to replace an inner ring surrounding the hurricane's eye, intensifying the storm system in the process. In Irene's case, that pattern (known as eyewall replacement) was interrupted, and the storm didn't gather as much strength as most of the models suggested. "Some of the models did represent it well," Marks said, but there wasn't enough confidence in those models to change the storm forecast.

Researchers have been working to reduce the error rate for hurricane track and intensity forecasts through the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, with the goal of a 50 percent reduction from 2008 levels by 2018. The University of Washington's Cliff Mass, an expert on weather modeling, said Irene showed that much more progress still has to be made on predicting a storm's intensity.

"The classic is good forecast for track, bad forecast for intensity," he told me. "Let's face it: This happens all the time. ... To get the intensity right, you have to be able to predict the inner workings of the storm, and that's what we don't do well yet."

What?   The meteorology experts who have been telling us for years that global warming will make the seas rise and devastate the planet can't tell us how hard the wind will blow in a storm?   Really?  

An intelligent citizenry listens to experts when they have demonstrable expertise in their fields.   I listen to doctors in deciding how to treat my children's illnesses, for instance.   But an intelligent citizenry should be highly skeptical of so-called "experts" who purport to have answers to questions whose variables are so numerous and complex as those that govern the functioning of our economy or long-term weather patterns.  

And we should be extraordinarily skeptical of so-called "experts" whose solutions to problems involve taking money from taxpayers and arrogating power to themselves.

Girl of the Day - The Magical Wife (Elizabeth Montgomery and Barbara Eden)

When I was growing up in the 1960s, most mothers stayed home while dads went to work and the kids went to school.   So, from both the dads' and the kids' perspective, magical things happened while Mom was home alone.   Laundry miraculously cleaned itself and folded itself and put itself away.   Food miraculously appeared in the refrigerator and pantry, and dinner was miraculously ready when we got home.   The house miraculously cleaned itself.   And, meanwhile, Mom was beautiful and perfect and sweet and smart and read books and volunteered in the community and.... how exactly did she get all that done?   It must have been magic! 

In retrospect, then, it probably was predictable that TV shows of the 1960s often centered on the "magical Mom," who accomplished all that she did through actual Magic.   Two of the biggest hits were Bewitched with Elizabeth Montgomery and I Dream of Jeannie with Barbara Eden.   Montgomery played about the hottest witch ever seen who unaccountably was married to a nebishy advertising executive, and Eden played a genie discovered by an astronaut after splashdown.   Needless to say, they were both the first crushes of probably millions of American boys, and it's easy to see why:

Point of personal privilege:  these gals have nothing on the Regular Wife, who also works magic on a daily basis.  

The Desperation Strategy

Yesterday I noted an anonymous blogger named Ulsterman who posts "interviews" with an anonymous "White House Insider."   Again, I don't know if these interviews are real or fiction (albeit detailed and plausible fiction by a writer who can write very good, realistic dialogue).   But a recent interview with the White House Insider relayed this supposed Obama re-election plan:

Ulsterman:  How?  What’s the plan?  What’s going to be different from all the other campaigns?
Insider:  You’ve already seen it.  A taste of it.  Race.  The race card.  Racism.  Race-race-race.  It’s all they fucking got to run on these days. 
Ulsterman:  Race?  Hasn’t Obama played that one out already?  It’s become a joke.
Insider:  Played it out?  No, not…you might think so but no…his people are going to raise the issue of race to a level this country hasn’t seen since the Civil Rights movement.  White guilt got Barack Obama the nomination.  White guilt got Barack Obama into the White House.  At least it was a big part of it…they are not sure they can run on the economy by summer of 2012.  Motivation is way down – the people on the ground.  Many of them will be sitting this one out.  The campaign conducted over five internals in the last few months. Each time the one issue that came back favorably for the president was the color of his skin.  People are not comfortable…white people are not comfortable going against a person of color....  Look, you got generations of voters in this country who have been hammered with guilt for being white.  Schools, television, movies…decades of this racism shit coming at them from all sides.  White guilt is very real. I’ve used it-done it myself… countless times in an election campaign.  And for Barack Obama…his re-election team – they are banking on it bringing victory in 2012.  Even if it means the threat of race riots.  They are willing to go that far – go down that road if need be.  If the Obama team can’t guilt enough of White America into voting for them in 2012 – they are just fine with trying to scare the shit out of them to do it. 

Okay, that's certainly scary.   But is it real, or is it fiction?   We don't know, and we may never know.   On the other hand, if that is Obama's plan, there's evidence that it's being put into action already.   Here is an article from Politico today talking about recent comments from a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Andre Carson (D - IN):

A top lawmaker in the Congressional Black Caucus says tea partiers on Capitol Hill would like to see African-Americans hanging from trees and accuses the movement of wishing for a return to the Jim Crow era.

Rep. Andre Carson, a Democrat from Indiana who serves as the CBC’s chief vote counter, said at a CBC event in Miami that some in Congress would “love to see us as second-class citizens” and “some of them in Congress right now of this tea party movement would love to see you and me ... hanging on a tree.”

Carson also said the tea party is stopping change in Congress, likening it to “the effort that we’re seeing of Jim Crow.”

Speaking from Milwaukee, where we have already had two serious incidents this summer of black-on-white mob violence (on the Fourth of July and at the opening day of State Fair), this is an extraordinarily dangerous brand of demogoguery, essentially an incitement to riot.   If the White House is directing it (as the White House Insider interview might be read to suggest), it's an extraordinarily desperate strategy.   It makes you fear for your country.

Birthday Today - Van Morrison

It's Van Morrison's 66th birthday today.   Has there ever been a better, more soulful rock and roll singer?   I doubt it.   Stevie Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band once said that Morrison's late 1960s album Astral Weeks "was like a religion to us."    Here's Morrison doing a great song from that album, "Ballerina," live in Montreaux in 1980:

Compare and Contrast

Rick Perry as a young man in his early 20s, fresh out of college, in the Air Force, flying a T-38 fighter (this was a training aircraft; he was assigned to fly and did fly C-130 transports):

Now, here's Obama in his early 20s.   Hmmmm, seems like a different kind of guy:

Social Security as a Ponzi Scheme

Veronica de Rugy in NRO has this funny Venn diagram comparing Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme to the federal government's Social Security program:

The only difference to me (but it's a big one) is that the victims of Madoff's fraud did not know it was a fraud until the end.   But we've all known all along that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme -- that the "trust fund" or "lockbox" is filled with nothing but our own IOUs to ourselves, payable by our future, our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren.   We are all co-conspirators in this conspiracy to defraud generations of Americans yet to be born.

Take This With a Grain of Salt

There is an anonymous blogger named Ulsterman, who has, over the past couple of years, published "transcripts" of his conversations with a supposed White House "insider," who is also anonymous.   The conversations ring true, but they could be simply the truth of good and intelligent fiction, much like the dialogue of a Hemingway or a Tolstoy rings true, in that it tells us some truth about the world we live in.   For these reasons, they must be read with a big grain of salt.   That being said, his most recent posting is chilling (again, possibly in the way that a horror movie is chilling):

President Obama, when he is in his de facto office upstairs – the one that is closer to Jarrett’s own office, and a short hop over to the residence, he spends his time there often in shorts, or sweats, a t-shirt, and those sandal things…flip-flops.  There is a large screen television in there and that’s where hours of his time are spent when he is actually at the White House. Day in and day out.  The First Lady rules the residence, and the president heads over to his 2nd floor West Wing study.  Starting around last spring, he started to take regular briefings in there.  And the instructions that went out on those briefings to the president were that they were to be most importantly – brief.  Anything more than about 15 minutes is unacceptable to Obama.  So let’s look through the eyes of someone heading into Barack Obama’s upstairs office at the White House to give him a briefing.  Maybe it’s on national security.  Maybe the economy.  Energy policy. Whatever – doesn’t matter.  The scenario being played out these days is pretty much the same regardless of the particulars.  You knock on the door – it’s always closed.  Always.  Often you have to knock for some time before being given approval from inside to enter.  The big screen will be on – the volume loud.  You can easily hear it from outside the door.  The sports channels are the ones most commonly playing, though sometimes the channel will be set to music, or Fox News.  Sometimes Valerie Jarrett might be there, but most often it is just the president and his personal aide.  A large leather chair will be facing the television – it’s well worn.  Not part of the White House furnishings but something the president must have brought in from back home.  That’s where you’ll most often find the President of the United States – the most powerful man in the free fucking world.  He often sits with one leg draped over one of the chair’s arms and the other leg stuck straight onto the floor.  Shorts, sweats, a t-shirt, and like I said, no shoes or just those sandal things that so many of the younger people like to wear these days.  And that leg that’s draped over an arm of the chair will be bopping up and down, like…like someone with  a lot of nervous energy.  Like a kid does.  And there’s the smell of smoke hanging on the president.  The guy never quite smoking – that was all bullshit.  I told you that already.  In fact, there’s one of those smokeless ash trays on the desk in there.  And that desk, it’s a mess.  Magazines spread out all over it.  Stupid shit too.  Real low brow reading material the president is into.  People.  Rolling Stone.  Lots of those tabloid things.  The most common thread with this shit is it’s about the president.  If it’s about him, he’s gonna read it.  Good or bad – doesn’t matter.  If somebody is talking about him, he’s reading it.  He’s watching it.  Whatever.  The guy’s self-obsession is off the fucking charts. 

So that’s what you first see when you enter the room – the upstairs office of President Obama.  Next you’re gonna notice how small the guy looks.  Really thin.  He pads his suits up you know.  The top end.  The shoulders.  It became an actual issue during the 2008 campaign – some of his handlers were saying it made his neck look too small.  Fact is, it made his neck look just like it is – small.  The guy is scrawny.  All knees and elbows sitting in that chair.  Sometimes he gets up when you come in, sometimes he remains seated and will just turn the volume on the TV down with the remote and say, “What you got?”  That foot is bouncing up and down while you give him the briefing, but he rarely looks over at you – always looking at whatever is on the television.  If it’s Jarrett in the room, or the personal assistant, one of them is there to keep the time.  Your time.  Don’t go over that fifteen minutes.  And even if the president doesn’t look like he hears a word you’re saying, they are listening to everything.  Every goddamn syllable coming out of your mouth, and if something is said they don’t like, they jot down notes.  Been told it’s to use for the end of day summary they give the president – their own version of what is important and what can be ignored…and who might need to be pushed down, or pushed out…or whatever.  So you’re looking at the president, this skinny guy, who’s ignoring you, who’s dressed like some kind of fucking frat boy wannabe, with somebody else taking notes on what you’re saying, and then you get up and walk out.  The president might acknowledge you on some days, give a little nod, maybe even a thank you, but most often he just continues to look at the TV, bounce that foot on the chair, his skin looking off-color, pale, the eyes out of focus, the hair a helleva lot more gray than is shown in public, the wrinkles around the mouth far deeper…and the hands.  His fucking hands are so…they are just these thin little stick digits.  They are like these long-fingered woman’s hands.  And his wrists, you could wrap your own fingers all the way around those wrists – again, so much like a woman’s hands.  Almost freakish.  Certainly not the strong alpha-male type image that America was given during the 2008 campaign.

That’s who you see in the room – the real Barack Obama.  Pretty fucking unsettling.  Those world leaders, they sensed this.  They saw through the façade and saw who was running the United States of America, and the word went out – “Don’t count on this American president  – he doesn’t have a fucking clue.”  And they’re right.

Again, take this with a grain of salt.   Just because it has the density of detail of truth -- and it does -- doesn't make it so.   But still... chilling.

Girl of the Day - U.S. Open Version (Caroline Wozniacki)

I strongly suspect that the tennis being played today is far superior to the tennis that was played thirty or so years ago by Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and that like.   But the popularity of watching tennis among the casual, general sports fan, is at a very low ebb, and the popularity of playing tennis is even lower.   When I was a teenager, it was literally impossible to get on a public tennis court without waiting.   Now, it's practically impossible to find anyone using them -- vacant tennis courts litter the American landscape like archaelogical sites.   Perhaps it's different abroad, where most of the great tennis players now come from.   Perhaps in the Spain of Rafael Nadal, or the Switzerland of Roger Federer, or the Serbia of Novak Djokovic -- the three giants of today's men's tennis.    Perhaps in Denmark, where the current women's #1 comes from -- Caroline Wozniacki.   Wozniacki has been #1 for almost a year, yet has never one a Grand Slam tournament.   Maybe she will in the U.S. Open, which just started yesterday.   If she does, I suspect her name and face will become very widely known in America -- she's a pretty cute girl, not Anna Kournikova cute, but still... cute:

Oh, and since I mentioned Kournikova:

OK, that's just wrong.

Girl of the Day - If We're Going to Hell in a Handbasket, We Might As Well Have Fun Version (Marilyn Monroe's Heart Belongs to Daddy)

I've been reading Mark Steyn's new book, After America.   So I'm more than usually cynical and depressed.   In such moments, you have to fall back on the mental list of what makes life worth living.   The Regular Family:  Wife, Son, Daughters, Dog.   The St. Louis Cardinals.   The Green Bay Packers.   The Duke Blue Devils.   Listening to good music at the tip of your fingertips on Youtube -- I listened to Arturo Toscanini conduct Beethoven's Fifth last night and then, with the click of a button, I listened to 1975 Bruce Springsteen doing "Kitty's Back."   What a great world we live in.  

And, of course, there's this sort of thing:



Let me also say:  the Polish subtitles really do it for me.   Again, what a great world!

Oh, And One More Thing...

Who exactly is the dunderhead in this picture?

This was today.  President Wonderful used his teleprompter-in-chief (TOTUS) to give a three minute introduction for his new economics adviser, Alan Krueger of Princeton (a huge lefty, by the way, who thinks a VAT tax would be just peachy). 
Is he really so incompetent that he can't give a three-minute talk off-the-cuff about a relatively minor government appointment?

The question answers itself.

More on the Rick Perry is Dumb Meme

Ace of Spades is noticing the same new trend in the Mainstream Media, specifically, the lefty political blog, Politico, where the blogger argued for the proposition that Perry is unintelligent by noting that -- I kid you not -- although he had been an Air Force pilot for five years, all he did was follow flight plans:

Where exactly does this guy think a flight plan comes from if not the pilot who has ultimate responsibility for the flight? I don't think being a pilot means you are a genius but it does mean a couple of things...

To fly a plane like a C-130 you have to understand how multiple systems work and interact with each other. You don't have to be an electrical engineer but you have to have a working knowledge of electrical systems. You don't have to be physicist but you have to have a passing familiarity with the physics of flight. You don't have to be a meteorologist but you have to have an understanding of weather and the mechanics of the environment you are going to fly into.

When you learn to fly, you get to learn a good bit about a lot of things. You might not be an expert on any one of these things but you have to be able to grasp the basics, how they interact with each other and how to balance competing challenges and limitations.

More importantly, as an intellectual exercise learning to fly (especially at the military level) means havi8ng a disciplined mind. You get hit with a lot of information and you have to be able to retain it, prioritize it and most importantly, when push comes to shove, be able to use it in the proper way.

That's actually not bad training for an executive when you think about it.

All of that is exactly right.   Who is the Left to tell us that Perry's background as an Eagle Scout, yell leader at Texas A&M, door-to-door salesman while he was in school, commissioned officer and pilot in the Air Force (with overseas tours in Europe and the Middle East), and cotton farmer up until the age of 34 somehow isn't "intellectual" enough for national politics?   By the time he was 34 and entering politics in the Texas House of Representatives, he had done all those real jobs and was married and had a baby son; his second child would follow soon after.   To me, that sounds like a grown-up who's had some significant life experiences and work experiences.  

Meanwhile, at age 34 Obama had graduated from college, gone to law school, practiced a little law (not much), been a community organizer in Chicago, and gotten himself a position as a part-time lecturer at a law school.   He was married, but he had no children yet.  Yet based on those "accomplishments" he had managed to get a book contract for his first "memoirs."   Other than the chutzpah to write his memoirs after not having done much to remember, how exactly is it that Obama was more accomplished as of that age than Perry?   What exactly is the evidence that he was smarter?   Because he'd gone to Columbia and Harvard Law?   Because he'd taught at the Uniersity of Chicago?   If you leave out the names of the schools, his record was actually pretty meager.   Really, is that all the Left has left -- snobbery because he went to cooler schools?

Show me the transcripts!

Sheesh!

On the Topic of Conservatives Whose Intelligence Is Routinely Derided By Liberals

Walter Russell Mead is becoming one of my favorite bloggers.   Today he's writing about Clarence Thomas, and it's a doozy.   Mead takes as his jumping off point the recent article by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker, and basically lays out why Thomas, far from being the dolt he's been made out to be by the MSM, is actually the intellectual leader of the Supreme Court's right wing:

There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm.  Twenty years of married life have not erased the conventional liberal view of his character etched by Anita Hill’s testimony at his confirmation hearings.  Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher.  Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.

At most liberals have long seen Thomas as the Sancho Panza to Justice Antonin Scalia’s Don Quixote, Tonto to his Lone Ranger.  No, says Toobin: the intellectual influence runs the other way.  Thomas is the consistently clear and purposeful theorist that history will remember as an intellectual pioneer; Scalia the less clear-minded colleague who is gradually following in Thomas’ tracks.

The point about Thomas' intellectual leadership is important, but I just want to make one point about Thomas' supposed sexual indiscretion, which was such a focal point of his confirmation hearings.   Starring Anita Hill, the Democrats in the Senate put on a show trial, accusing Thomas of the ugliest forms of sexual harassment.   Yet, as I've written before about other issues, it is often most revealing to try to see what isn't there.   The Thomas-Hill hearings were in 1991.   It's twenty years later.   What isn't there?  

Well, what isn't there is any evidence whatsoever that Thomas has ever indulged in any similar behavior in the twenty years since.   Not one whiff of scandal, not one hint of infidelity or indiscretion, not one moment of ungentlemanly conduct, nothing, zip, nada.   As anyone who has been around men who are womanizers can tell you, leopards don't often change their spots.   If Thomas was a vulgarian, a sexual harasser, a serial groper, or whatever else it was that the Left tried to paint him as, all human experience points to the conclusion that he would still be that person, that he wouldn't have changed, and that there would be evidence that he has continued the same predatory behavior.   But there isn't.   Again:  nothing, zip, nada.   It's like Big Foot.  If Sasquatch existed, it stands to reason that you'd see more examples of the species, roaming the Pacific Northwest woods.   Species don't occur in singletons; they evolve from hundreds, if not thousands, of generations.   But we don't see large populations of Sasquatches, do we?   My conclusion:   that Sasquatch was a hoax.

I reach a similar conclusion about Clarence Thomas and his supposed harassment of Anita Hill.   The incentive for Hill to lie to make herself part of the biggest story in town in 1991 was huge; she could make herself a hero to the Left.   And maybe she even convinced herself that her story was true over time; as a lawyer, believe me, it happens all the time.   But it wasn't true.   It was a hoax.   If Clarence Thomas was what they said he was, there would be more evidence.   But there isn't.  

And the fact that the Democratic Party went to the mattresses to label a successful black man as a sexual predator is a scandal of the first magnitude, a moral failure of supposed "liberals" that ought to shame them, but won't.   It's a sad commentary, but it appears that Clarence Thomas is having the last laugh.   He's 63.   God willing, he'll be on the Court for another 15-20 years.

Rick Perry, Dunce

Get ready for this meme.   The MSM won't want to mention Perry's extensive experience as an executive and they'll belittle his consistent conservatism on the issues.   So they'll do what they always do with Republicans -- they'll say he's dumb.   Here's Hot Air noting the opening notes of what will be a symphony of condescension:

Doubts about Perry’s intellect have hounded him since he was first elected as a state legislator nearly three decades ago. In Austin, he’s been derided as a right-place, right-time pol who looks the part but isn’t so deep – “Gov. Goodhair.” Now, with the chatter picking back up among his enemies and taking flight in elite Republican circles, the rap threatens to follow him to the national stage.

“He’s like Bush only without the brains,” cracked one former Republican governor who knows Perry, repeating a joke that has made the rounds....

Perry has been governor for three terms and the latter part of Bush’s interrupted second term, more than 11 years in a high-profile office.  That leaves plenty of room to debate his record, but his rumored lack of brainpower has mysteriously not kept him from successfully running one of the largest, most populous, and most visible states in the Union.  Perry went through a high-profile primary fight in 2010 against US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison without the press discovering this supposed intellectual defect, but now that he’s running for President, we are supposed to believe that Perry has lost 30 IQ points?

Notice that these memes never get applied on the other side of the aisle, either.  Did any media question Obama’s intelligence when during the campaign when he made these whoppers?

• The Selma March in 1965 did not contribute to his birth in 1961.
• Kansas tornadoes in May 2007 killed 12 people, not “ten thousand”.
• Afghans do not speak Arabic.
• Within 24 hours, Obama reversed his assertion that Iran did not pose a “serious threat” to the US to an assertion that the threat is “grave”.
• “On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.”
• 57 states

No, they didn’t.  Why?  Because the media only uses the weird, scary, and idiot memes for Republican candidates, that’s why.

This is so old and tired it's hard to even get too worked up about it.   Does anyone really believe some jerk on MSNBC or some idiot in the New York Times when they start talking about how dumb the Governor of one of the biggest and easily the most successful states in the country supposedly is?  

Republicans should be demanding to see Barack Obama's transcripts every day from now until November 2012.   See if the country would want to re-elect our first affirmative action President.

And the Katrina/Irene Comparisons Begin...

WNYC apparently wins the Race to Compare Obama/Irene to Bush/Katrina.   You have to go to the bottom of the article to find out that Katrina was a massive Category 5 hurricane, while Irene is a tamer Category 2 tropical storm.  

Look for this angle to be pushed constantly over the next week or more.    As liberals in the media might say, this is the one they've been waiting for.  

The Inevitable Hurricane Irene Is Caused By Climate Change Mainstream Media Meme

It was inevitable.  From today's NYT:

The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change?

The short answer from scientists is that they are still trying to figure it out. But many of them do believe that hurricanes will get more intense as the planet warms, and they see large hurricanes like Irene as a harbinger.

I've bolded the key sentence.   They don't know that there's any connection betwen climate change and hurricanes.   They "are still trying to figure it out."   Which begs the question:

Why exactly is this a news story? 

Hurricane Irene and the Media Shitstorm That Will Follow

 

UPDATE:   Bumped to the top.   I wrote below:  The media is just dying to rehabilitate Obama, and they'll move heaven and earth to help him out.   A natural disaster provides just the opportunity they're looking for, and don't think that the Obama White House hasn't been planning numerous photo-ops for the President where he can look, well, Presidential.  

What did I tell you?  

***

Pardon my language.   I just want to get on the record two predictions.

1.  Hurricane Irene will peter out and not cause much damage.   The MSM always hypes weather, and particularly in August when there's not much real news.   

2.  If Hurricane Irene does not peter out and actually causes destruction on the East Coast, this will be a huge story that will be highlighted by frequent comparisons of Obama's wonderful management of the crisis (no matter what he does or fails to do) and GWB's criminal mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (no matter the facts of what he did or didn't do).   The media is just dying to rehabilitate Obama, and they'll move heaven and earth to help him out.   A natural disaster provides just the opportunity they're looking for, and don't think that the Obama White House hasn't been planning numerous photo-ops for the President where he can look, well, Presidential.  

Oh, and if it goes bad, particularly if New York City gets hit badly, you can bet that the media will suddenly rediscover that Michael Bloomberg, the NYC Mayor, is a Republican (albeit a liberal RINO).   It will be all his fault, and not the fault of the Democratic union-dominated entrenched incompetent bureaucracy in New York City government.

Girl of the Day - Elizabeth Banks

Elizabeth Banks has been in a number of decent recent comedies, including The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Definitely, Maybe, and this year's Our Idiot Brother, never quite breaking out into big-time stardom.   She's awfully cute, but I can't help thinking that she plays better as a kind of bitchy second banana rather than as a romantic lead.   Anyway, the Regular Son and I saw Our Idiot Brother today:  it's pretty funny, and Paul Rudd is charming as a kind of modern stoner Prince Myshkin (from Doestoevsky's The Idiot).   Nothing great, but an enjoyable 90 minutes.  

Call Me A Crazy Right-Wing Extremist, But...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York's decision not to allow any clergy at the memorial service for 9/11 strikes me as just weird.   I can't imagine a scenario where a prayer before such a service isn't offered as a matter of course.   We offer prayers at Inaugurations and at the opening of every day of Congress.   So I'm less offended by the decision than I'm just baffled.   It's a very, very strange choice by an increasingly out of touch Mayor.   Where's common sense?   Where's common decency?  

Of  course, this is the same Mayor Bloomberg who thought building a mosque at Ground Zero was just peachy, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.   And who think trans-fats in foods are a great danger to society, but getting the streets cleared after a snowstorm is just too much.   Mark Steyn, as always, captures the idiocy of Bloomberg as an example of the liberal elite:

By the way, doesn’t government have a compelling public purpose in keeping the streets free of snow? Too boring for Bloomberg, who flew off to his weekend pad in Bermuda and left New Yorkers without second homes offshore to make the best of it. That’s the very model of a can-do technocrat in the age of Big Government: He can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger but he can’t regulate it on to Seventh Avenue.

Very, very odd hierarchy of values.    

"Public" Education in Wisconsin -- The Not So Good, Very Bad and Exceptionally Ugly Teachers' Union Protest

Messmer Catholic School is a "choice" school in Milwaukee that provides an alternative to Milwaukee's dismal public schools.   The teachers' union doesn't like school choice and doesn't like Governor Scott Walker.   So when Walker went to Messmer to read to grade-school students, it was a perfect storm, and an opportunity for the teachers' union to protest.   Funny that, though -- the only purpose of protesting is, of course, to raise awareness of an issue, but if the protestors here wanted to raise awareness, the only message they sent was that they are intellectually vacant, rude, and (probably) criminal (the school was vandalized the night before the visit).   In other words, I can't believe they persuaded anyone, and I'm certain that their antics had the opposite effect on many people who might not have supported Walker otherwise.   Here's a video of the union shenannigans:

Slow Joe and the China Gaffe

The White House moved quickly to spin Joe Biden's unconscionable gaffe in China in which he said he "fully understood" China's one-child policy and wouldn't "second-guess" it.   The story will probably have a short shelf-life, since the mainstream media is dominated by ardent pro-choice partisans who have strange and hypocritical views of women's rights -- if a conservative merely speaks against abortion, trying to persuade American women to think about the morality of abortion, he's threatening to take us back to the days of back-alleys and coat hangers, even though he's not forcing anyone to do anything; but if China actually forces women against their will to kill their children, well, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.   

But it's worth recalling what the U.S. Congressional/Executive Joint Commission on China actually has stated about the "one-child policy."   Here, for instance, is a chilling paragraph from the Commission's 2010 report: 

Local officials continue to monitor the reproductive cycles of Chinese women in order to prevent unauthorized births. The Chinese government requires married couples to obtain a birth permit before they can lawfully bear a child and forces them to employ contraceptive methods at other times. Although Chinese law prohibits officials from infringing upon the rights and interests of citizens while promoting compliance with population planning policies, reports from recent years indicate that abuses continue. Violators of the policy are routinely punished with fines, and in some cases, subjected to forced sterilization, forced abortion, arbitrary detention, and torture. In some cases surgical sterilization may be required of Chinese women following the birth of their second child.  Mandatory abortion, which is often referred to as ‘‘remedial measures’’ (bujiu cuoshi) in government reports, is endorsed explicitly as an official policy instrument in the regulations of 18 of China’s 31 provincial-level jurisdictions. In 2010, the Commission found that local officials continued to coerce women with unauthorized pregnancies to undergo abortions in both urban and rural areas across China’s major regions.Biden can't say that he didn't know about the Chinese policy.   It's a freakin' U.S. government report, for crying out loud.   He knew.   And he "fully understood" and wouldn't "second-guess" it.

Shameful.  

Girl of the Day - First Day of High School Version

It's the first day of high school for the Regular Son.  So there's a good chance that worrying will replace blogging for today.  

However, in honor of the Regular Son, here are some of the more memorable movie high school girls from movies in the 1980s, when comedies about high school seemed to be everywhere.   First, Phoebe Cates, whose career as far as I can tell hit its peak with her first movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and a particular scene where she emerged from a pool:

Next, opting for the more intellectual type, there was Molly Ringwald from Sixteen Candles:

Ringwald became a huge star for fifteen minutes in the 1980s, but I'm not sure whatever happened to her.   However, as I would hasten to tell the Regular Son, hot girls in high school don't necessarily stay hot as they get older.   That's why you want to look for tall, thin, smart, Catholic girls who read books.   (Sound familiar, kid?)

Finally, here's Mia Sara from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.   I'm also not sure what she did after that, but I remember thinking then (and still thinking now) that she was way too good for Matthew Broderick:

Anyway, kid, I hope you had a nice day at high school.   Of course, since it's an ALL-MALE CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL, you won't be seeing any girls who look like this anytime soon.

The Z-Man Eviscerates the O-Man

Mort Zuckerman, editor of U.S. News and World Report (and a billionaire businessman), was a supporter of Barack Obama in 2008.   No more.   Here he is in today's Wall Street Journal, tearing the Teleprompter-in-Chief a new one:

It is no surprise that many have begun to doubt the president's leadership qualities. J.P. Morgan calls it the "competency crisis." The president is not seen fighting for his own concrete goals, nor finding the right allies, especially leaders of business big or small. Instead, his latent hostility to the business community has provoked a mutual response of disrespect. This is lamentable given the unique role that small business especially plays in creating jobs.

The president appears to consider himself immune from error and asserts the fault always lies elsewhere—be it in the opposition in Congress or the Japanese tsunami or in the failure of his audience to fully understand the wisdom and benefits of his proposals. But in politics, the failure of communication is invariably the fault of the communicator.

Many voters who supported him are no longer elated by the historic novelty of his candidacy and presidency. They hoped for a president who would be effective. Remember "Yes We Can"? Now many of his sharpest critics are his former supporters. Witness Bill Broyles, a one-time admirer who recently wrote in Newsweek that "Americans aren't inspired by well-meaning weakness." The president who first inspired with great speeches on red and blue America now seems to lack the ability to communicate any sense of resolve for a program, or any realization of the urgency of what might befall us. The teleprompter he almost always uses symbolizes and compounds his emotional distance from his audience.

We lack a coherent and muscular economic strategy, as Mr. Obama and his staff seem almost completely focused on his re-election. He should be spending most of his time on the nitty-gritty of the job instead of on fund raisers, bus tours and visits to diners, which essentially are in service of his political interests. Increasingly his solutions seem to boil down to Vote for Me.

Incompetency and arrogance are a strange and unappealing brew.  

Preference Cascade Update - The Negative 20s Are Here to Stay

Rasmussen's approval index -- which has also been called the "passion index," because it measures relative intensity of political sentiment -- has Obama at -24% today, with 21% registering strong approval of the President, and 45% registering strong disapproval.   This is the 17th straight day with an approval index for Obama lower than -20%.   Before August 2011, the longest stretch with a negative 20 rating was four straight days, with both related to the President's response to natural disasters:  in mid-March 2011 (right after the tsunami and reactcor meltdown in China) and mid-June 2010 (right after an Oval Office speech about the BP Gulf oil spill).   What's happening now is different.   Yes, it's related to the S&P downgrade and the debt, but this isn't a reaction to a natural disaster (which might tend to dissipate over time as the world doesn't end).  Rather, it's a reaction to the President's actual performance at his basic task and, I think, to his strange choice to take off for a 10-day luxury vacation in which he is too often seen playing golf.  

This is not a "do something, Emperor!" moment, in other words; it's a "the Emperor has no clothes" moment.   When you're getting headlines from the New York F'in Times like "Obama Interrupts Golf Game for Earthquake Briefing," you're in trouble.

Preference cascade!   Catch it!

***

By the way, it might be worth noting that, in golf, as in everything else, Obama's a lefty.

The New York Times' Anti-Catholic Bigotry Comes Out of the Closet

Bill Keller, the former editor of the New York Times, has written an article today that essentially says that the Republicans running for President who are Christians are members of a bizarre cult that correct-thinking Americans (read:  East Cost liberal elites) should be suspicious of.   It's getting a lot of criticism in the conservative blogosphere (see here) so I'll just address the points that hit close to home.   About Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Senator who is running (albeit far back) for President, he writes:

Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

Santorum, of course, is a practicing Roman Catholic.  I cast no aspersions against Evangelicals, but since when did Roman Catholicism become a "fervid subset of evangelical Christianity"?   And since when did it become appropriate for editors and columnists at the "paper of record" to opine that a candidate's Catholicism should raise "concerns about their respect for... the separation of fact and fiction"? 

Keller goes on to note that he was raised Catholic himself.   The unspoken point of this admission is that, though raised Catholic, once he became a sentient adult, and a member of the educated liberal elite, he put aside such childish things.   Okay, well, it's not so unspoken.   Here's more Keller:

Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.

You can almost hear the sneering condescension as Keller maligns an article of faith -- transubstantiation -- that more than a billion Catholics believe around the world, and that is believed by nearly 80 million of his fellow Americans.   This is bigotry, plain and simple, and if he'd said something similar about Muslims he'd be out of a job.  

But the most offensive thing to me is the palpable sense that Keller simply thinks he's smarter than the rubes who still believe in Catholicism.   The Catholic Church I attend has as parishioners judges, doctors, lawyers, engineers, business owners and executives, architects, professors, teachers.   And, oh, by the way, it also has both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.   Are they all stupid for their beliefs, Mr. Keller?   Where exactly did you go to school?   What are your credentials?  

Oh, I see, he went to Pomona College in California, graduating with a B.A. in 1970.   Good school, don't get me wrong:  it ranks right up there with Bowdoin in Maine and Carleton in Minnesota and Davidson in North Carolina.   A nice little liberal arts school.   I might have gone to one too if I hadn't been able to get into a better place.   Anyway, the New York Times Company website makes no mention of any honors at Pomona, and Keller has no graduate degrees, although he apparently did some kind of management program at the Wharton School in his early 50s.
  
Meanwhile, my wife's uncle, a Roman Catholic priest, had a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and was Phi Beta Kappa.   And Tim Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, where Keller lives and works, also has a Ph.D.  

And Santorum, that lay Catholic weirdo, has a B.A., an M.B.A., and a J.D.  

And Michelle Bachmann (that evangelical weirdo), has a B.A., a J.D., and an L.L.M.

I'm just sayin'.   Both sides can play at this game.  


***

Oh, by the way, does anyone recall Keller writing articles about how we must "question" Joe Lieberman's "mysterious" or "bizarre" beliefs as a member of a "fervid subset" of the Jewish faith when he was the Democrat's nominee for Vice-President in 2000?   I didn't think so.   Lieberman, a good man and a true patriot, is an observant Orthodox Jew, keeps a kosher home, and observes Shabbat.   I suppose a lot of Americans (liberals) might view that as "suspect" too, but I don't suppose that Keller or anyone else would write that in the New York Fucking Times.    Not good for business.   Meanwhile, evangelical Christians are among the most solid supporters of Israel in America, a fact which I doubt gets mentioned much in the NYFT.

As you can tell, this sort of anti-Catholic bigotry really gets the Regular Guy steaming.

Birthday Today - Elvis Costello

One of the Regular Wife's favorites, Elvis Costello turns 57 today.   Costello was one of the few great songwriters who came out of the punk scene, and his music has grown the most and lasted the longest, in my humble opinion.   He's shown up recently, for instance, on one of our favorite shows, Treme, playing with New Orleans jazz musicians.  

Anyway, to quote another of the Regular Wife's faves, this one goes out to the one I love:

Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and The Wisconsin Way

I heard Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker interviewed on the Rush Limbaugh show yesterday.   Rush was out, and his guest host was Milwaukee's own Mark Belling, who is a very good, very funny conservative talk show host here, and for the last few years has often subbed for Rush.  

Something Walker said really struck me -- he talked a lot less about the ideology of conservatism and more about "results."   His most famous accomplishment to date as Governor (less than a year) was, of course, pushing through a budget bill that both balanced the state budget (changing a two year deficit of $3.6 billion into a surplus of $300 million) and changed the political dynamic of local budgeting by eliminating collective bargaining for public employee benefits.   Benefit packages (retirement and health care) have been destroying the budgets of local governments for years, as teachers' unions and public employees' unions have negotiated ever-higher benefits to be paid for by their neighbors' ever-higher taxes.   In fact, Wisconsin has been essentially the nation writ small, as fewer and fewer private sector workers pay higher and higher taxes so that a larger and larger number of public sector workers can retire earlier with better benefits than the plebes can ever hope for.

Walker changed that, and there have been almost immediate results.   Just one example:  for years the teachers' union ran its own insurance company and wrote into local contracts that the health insurance for teachers in particular school districts could only be purchased through the WEAC (Wisconsin Education Association Council).   WEAC, as a monopolist, did what monopolists do -- it jacked up the prices to confiscatory rates.   Now, however, school districts are free to get health insurance at any company and (voila!)  they are saving millions.  

And Walker did all this without raising taxes.

The point is that Walker is not an in-your-face conservative; he's a results-oriented Governor and executive who happens to also be conservative.   But he doesn't stress the conservatism, he stresses the results.  And he does it with a fairly light touch rhetorically; while the Left in Wisconsin vilifies him in over-the-top protests, he coolly keeps on message about low taxes, balancing the budget, giving local governments the tools they need to balance their budgets, limiting regulations, bringing back jobs to Wisconsin, etc.   And he always knows what he's talking about.  It's a good model.

Similarly, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan is not an in-your-face conservative; he comes off as a nice guy, a reasonable guy, because he is, in fact, a nice guy and a reasonable guy.   He also always knows what he's talking about with regard to the federal budget -- that's why Obama really really didn't want to have him run for President, because he knew he couldnt' debate him.   Ryan simply sticks on message:  low taxes, low regulations, reducing the size and intrusiveness of government, balancing the budget, reforming entitlements.   It's not ideological, or at least it's not overtly ideological.   As much as I hate the word, and hate the connotations of elitist social engineering, Ryan, like Walker, is essentially a technocrat.   He's talking about doing real things to get real results.   He's not talking about impossible dreams of a suddenly conservative utopia in America.

Why does Wisconsin produce conservatives like Walker and Ryan who are results-oriented rather than purely ideological, and who are nice guys who exude reasonableness and competence?   I think the reason has a good deal to do with how split Wisconsin is as a state politically.   We are a 50-50 state with extraordinarily close elections every four years for President.   (We might have had a recount in 2000 and 2004 if it had come to that.)   We had a recount just this year in a Supreme Court race (the Prosser-Kloppenburg fiasco).   It's a very, very evenly divided state, so Republicans who want to win and govern end up having to appeal, not just to conservatives (as they might be able to get away with in Utah, or Nebraska, or Oklahoma, or Alabama, or Kentucky), but also to independents who, while not thinking very much or very deeply about politics, will invariably vote for whomever they think can make their lives better, i.e., for tangible results.  

Ace at Ace of Spades made a similar point about Rick Perry yesterday.   Perry is an in-your-face conservative, but he also has results he can point to, namely, the fact that Texas leads the nation in job creation.   People are voting with their feet to move to a Texas led by Rick Perry.   That's pretty persuasive to independent voters, even those who might not like Rick Perry's Texas style or evangelical conservatism.   Here's the general point Ace made:

I want a fairly strongly conservative candidate. But, in order to persuade voters who do not share my philosophy, I want that candidate to have a record of non-ideological achievements, things that no one can argue aren't good, in addition to his ideology.

That gives you two chances to win a vote, rather than one. The ideological conservatives in a general election will choose, obviously, the more ideologically conservative candidate. Against Barack Obama, it's safe to say we get most of these.

But the less-ideologically motivated voters will not necessarily vote for the more-conservative candidate. They might; then again, they might not.
Having no strong ideological preference for a candidate, they will base their vote, as they always do, on non-ideological factors.

Charisma. "Seems like a regular guy" (which is in fact code for "not super-ideological like many of the professional politicians I, as a disengaged independent, tend not to like"). Experience -- reassurance that when it comes to the non-ideological skills of management, a candidate can actually work the basic functions of an executive office.

And, most important of all, actual positive results of a non-ideological sort.

Walker has all of these.   He's a "regular guy" -- he actually lives in my hometown of Wauwatosa.   He's got real experience as an executive -- he was Milwaukee County Executive for eight years before becoming Governor.    And he is producing tangible results.  

Call it "the Wisconsin Way."   National Republicans should take note.

Political Math Guy Puts Us Some F***in' Knowledge

This guy from the website Political Math has the easiest and clearest way to understand the national debt I've seen.   This is pure genius:

The Department of Unsurprising Consequences (of Liberal Policies)

File this in the Department of Unsurprising Consequences (of Liberal Policies):

Illinois started to create jobs as the national economy began to recover. But just when Illinois’s economy seemed to be turning around, lawmakers passed record tax increases in January of this year. Since then, Illinois’s employment numbers have done nothing but decline.

Data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms this downward trajectory. When it comes to putting people back to work, Illinois is going backwards. Since January, Illinois has dropped 89,000 people from its employment rolls.

Here's the graph accompanying the article.   Note the inflection point:

When will they ever learn?

Girl of the Day - Planet of the Apes Version (Frieda Pinto)

The Regular Son and I went to see the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which was remarkably exciting and remarkably stupid all at the same time.   Glaring plot holes were everywhere -- did none of the neighbors or friends or postmen or refrigerator repairmen ever notice that the "scientist" character played by James Franco (not believeable for a second, but put that aside) had a ridiculously smart ape living in his house playing chess and wearing clothes?   No one noticed?   He never spilled the beans to anyone?   And the pharmaceutical company he works for... no one ever noticed that he was stealing vial after vial of its experimental Alzheimers drug?   And no one ever noticed that his father, whose Alzheimers was the reason Franco's character went into science in the first place, has miraculously gotten better?   Oh, and in the climactic battle scene, none of the highly trained Army personnel considered the possibility that the apes might outflank them?  And none of them called in, oh, air strikes on the apes and instead let them get into hand-to-hand combat with them?  

I don't know, maybe it's me, but I expect more from my talking ape movies.  

Anyway, here's Frieda Pinto, who was also in Slumdog Millionaire, and appears in Rise as Franco's girlfriend: