The Face of Ingratitude

and its voice.

"The president is well aware of what happened when a bunch of his nominees were sent up, with the filibuster," Specter added, referring to Senate Democrats' success over the past four years in blocking the confirmation of many of Bush's conservative judicial picks. "... And I would expect the president to be mindful of the considerations which I am mentioning."

This isn't a threat, is it? No, heaven forfend!

Here's a guy who has his Senate seat today only because W backed him. He's done everyone a favor with this unintended moment of candor. Time to put the guy out to pasture. The left has made a sacrement of preventing strict-constructionists on to any federal court because, presumably, strict-constructionism is a threat to Roe v. Wade.

The real issue is what the proper role of the courts is under our constitution. Leftists want the courts to be an ersatz federal super-legislature with unlimited jurisdiction, and accountable to no one. Senator Specter wants to help them realize this goal. None of this is consistent with our constitution, therefore they must oppose all strict-constructionists. The "right" to abortion is their straw man in this fight.

The continuation of Constitutional government in this nation depends on not putting the likes of Arlen Specter in charge of approving the President's appointments to the courts. W made a mistake backing this guy. Let's hope he recognizes that now.

The Choice Behind the Choice

About 9:00 PM MST on election night I was pursuaded that W had won it. At about 10:30 PM I was driving home and remembered that I had run out of Port and thus had nothing suitable with which to toast the victory. So I swung by the store.

The store and my home are both in the most thoroughly Republican precincts of the most thoroughly Republican districts of this, the most thoroughly Republican of the alleged "swing" states.

At the checkstand I greeted the checker with my standard, "How are you this evening?"

The checker, a girl in her late teens, replied to the effect that the election results would determine both that and her willingness to continue living in this country. I didn't press for specifics, because, well, let's face it, I'm not looking for political analysis from teenage grocery checkers. Really, I'm just not. My reply was meant more as a civics lesson, "If you need a ride to the airport, let me know. Have a good evening."

My read is that she was a W supporter and none too happy about the rigged exit-polling data. Nevertheless, there is something else at work here that needs to be addressed. The problem here is not restricted to the young, but so far I have personally run in to it only in people not over 25.

There are two choices Americans face in every election. One is Red vs. Blue; the other is Jeffersonian democracy vs. a dictatorship where you like the dictator.

I offer these options to anyone who is so despondent about the results of a single election they don't believe they can go on:

1. If it's really the end of the world, shoot yourself.
2. If it's just that you can't stand not getting your way in elections, move somewhere where they don't have elections. For leftists try North Korea, Cuba or Venezuela. [The latter is especially for those who want the illusion of elections, but don't want to miss out on the jailing of dissidents.] For more nationalistic facists, I suggest Russia. Either way, let me know, I will gladly take you to the airport.
3. If it's neither of the above, then for pity's sake, get over yourself. This is an electoral democracy. It's not all about you. Narcissists are never going to like democracy nor the free market.

This is the choice behind the choice, if you cannot love America unless it conforms to your own narrow Utopian ideal, then you are never, ever, ever going to start liking it.

Great Metaphors as Long as You Don't Visualize

This from Mark Steyn:

As long as Democrats prefer phantom enemies to real ones, they will be increasingly irrelevant. If I were a Dem, I'd support any candidate who pledged to de-celebrify the party and disown the paranoid Left. That's the big lesson of this election: on Tuesday, the bottom dropped out of Moore's underpants.

I did warn you not to visualize. Full text here.

Mr. Steyn also mentions the strange case of Cameron Diaz which I treated here.

Darn Good Analysis

John Podhoretz in today's NY Post:

Democrats will have to accept reality. And the reality is this: Democrats voted for Bush in large numbers because they like him. They admire him. They want him to be president. They don’t think he’s an idiot, a fascist, a warmonger, a religious fanatic, a kook, a liar, a cheat, a monster, a bad guy. They think he’s done a good job. The Democratic Party has spent four years demonizing George W. Bush, and in part because of their stupid, useless, senseless negativism, Terry McAuliffe & Co. lost 4 million voters.

Full text here.

I was asked to participate in a counter-protest 4 years ago. One of the signs I made bore this slogan: Democrats vs. Reality: the struggle never ends! I'm not betting any money on the left moderating its tone. When they get desperate they become more shrill.

A New Day in Way I Wasn't Expecting.

I haven't yet found a quote that denotes Chirac crying in his vichyssois, but I got a nice surprise this morning. Putin is quoted by reuters thusly:

"I can only feel joy that the American people did not allow itself to be intimidated, and made the most sensible decision," (via yahoo)

Amazing candor from a Russian head of state.

There are also some nice plain quotes in that article from Berlusconi and Kwasniewski. Needless to say, terrorist sympathisers are not happy with the outcome. That much I was expecting.

I Take It You Haven't Been Following the News

Saw this (via Real Clear Politics) at USAToday.com, dated 1-Nov-04:

More than 20 years ago, the Iowa legislature pioneered a system of turning redistricting over to technocrats instructed to create districts that are compact in shape and respect county lines as much as possible. They are barred from considering voting patterns or incumbents' political interests. It has led to more competitive races in Iowa.

Now an initiative pushed by outraged voters has forced Arizona to go that route.

I have to assume that no one at USA Today reads a newspaper. It is amazing to me how many things they can get wrong in one sentence.

• The Arizona initiative in question was passed 4 years ago.
• It did not put technocrats in charge. The redistricting commission is partisan by design, and its rules are guaranteed to create a majority of left and far-left among commissioners.
• It did not bar the commission from considering voting patterns nor political interests, but rather commanded the commission to consider them.
• It was not passed on the basis of outrage, but rather by a privately-financed campaign of misleading advertisements. The financier himself was the newly-selected chair of the Arizona Democrat Party, Jim Pedersen.
• After writing the rules, packing the commission and running the proceedings according to their own tastes, Democrats sued because they were displeased with the outcome.

Yes, it is unfortunate that we have widespread incumbent protection. It is also unfortunate that the USA Today has a policy of protecting misinformed, intellectually-lazy editors.

EDIT: Fixed the chronology. Jim Pedersen became chairman of the ADP before personally financing the initiative which created the redistricting committee.

Don't Listen to Me

I thought that before the first polls close I should add that my record of predicting election outcomes is ignominious. So if this prediction is off, it will be nothing new for me.

I am clearly not in tune with the masses. This is an electorate which gave the Arkansas hustler 2 terms and never took a real liking to 7-UP Gold.

On the other hand, my observation is that the block that put El Hefté over the top in both cases is one that seems to have broken for W. I call these the "Horserace Voters". They are the people who believe that the objective is to vote for the candidate you believe will win, rather like betting on a horserace. Apparently they have been given to believe that they win a piece of candy or something if they pick the winner.

Perhaps having our elections so close to Halloween is a bad idea.

As Pinkerton Was to McClellan, part 3

Powerline talks about the data-massaging issue here. Most important is the link to this report by Larry Kudlow.

Two things to notice:
1. even a relatively honest pollster like Ed Goeas has to make a lot of value judgements about the electorate to produce a poll number.
2. even a professional liar like Mark Mellman needs to make his poll move toward what the data really seems to be telling him as the election draws near (but only then).

One thing the pollsters can't hope to account for is the shenanigans that their customers, the news show biz, will engage in on election day.

Four years ago the news show biz called the election in Florida before the polls had closed in that state. By doing so they drove potential voters away from the polls and turned what would have been a 10,000-ish vote win for W in to a litigatable "tie".

Some suggest that they don't dare do something like that again. I ask, "why wouldn't they?" What consequences did they actually suffer for their interference in the democratic process? (Hint: sack of air)

UPDATE: (2-Nov-04 2:00 PM) Well it looks like the shenanigans from the news show biz this time come in the form of rigged exit polls. They apparently mean to use these as their basis for proclaiming Kerry in the lead all day long. It remains to be seen whether they will start calling states before the real polls close.

UPDATE: (2-Nov-04 4:13 PM) Now it looks like the exit polls in question are not so much "rigged" as "rumored". Not much difference there in the end.

Make Chirac Cry

It's no secret that Saddam's anti-aircraft missile supplier, Jacques Chirac wants to see Kerry win and W lose. It's hard to establish a comprehensive surrender to the jihadists when those naughty Americans insist on opposing tyrrany. He loves Kerry - a man who lacks the strategic vision to win at parcheesi.

I'll make no secret that I want to see Chirac crying in his potage tomorrow

...and no, I don't want the Pentagon to award any contracts to firms from a country which was clearly on the other side in the war to liberate Iraq. Perhaps they could pony up those bribes Saddam paid them to help build some decent infrastructure for the innocent people they betrayed with their perfidy.

As Pinkerton Was to McClellan, part 2

Please read the first part of this below for context.

I was having breakfast with a friend and fellow political activist on Saturday. He was expressing his confidence based on the poll averages at Real Clear Politics. I like what they've done, but when it comes to the polls I must say that the average of 8 kinds of excrement is still excrement. No matter how many you average together, all of those polls represent carefully massaged data, intended to please the people who buy the product: the news show biz.

Exhibit A in this argument is in the poll internals. While the pollsters tell us that overall the electorate is evenly divided, in moments of candor they will admit that the among women, the candidates poll about even. This must be more or less consistent through all the polls, because the news show biz has made no effort to market the "gender gap" story.

The "gender gap" is something they marketed vigorously in every election since at least 1980. They used to take glee in beating up Ronald Reagan over how his opponents polled roughly 10-15 points better among women than he did. We heard this also used as a cudgel with which to beat up W when the final polls had Gore 10 points ahead among women.

This year, there are no "gender gap" stories in the news show biz, and the polls that have gone on record show the women's vote evenly divided. So how is it, that the overall electorate is evenly divided if half the electorate has moved 10 points toward W? Shouldn't that mean that W has approximately a 5 point structural advantage over his position 4 years ago?

Well, if you're a pollster you can "adjust" your model of "likely voters" to sample another 5 percentage points of Kerry supporters, and voilà! The electorate is evenly divided. That is, after all, what your customers want to hear...

...and the customer is always right, n'est-ce pas?

As Pinkerton Was to McClellan

so the various polling agencies are to the news show biz.

In 1862 George McClellan was in command of the Army of the Potamac. This force, largely organized and trained by Gen. McClellan personally, numbered some 87,000 when it marched to face Lee's Army of Northern Virgina in September of that year.

McClellan, ever the cautious general, was convinced that his enemy outnumbered him by perhaps 2 or 3 to one, and asked his spy service, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, to reconnoiter. Certainly enough, the Pinkerton agents confirmed Gen. McClellan's assessment. Of course, the Pinkertons understood, that to tell Gen. McClellan that his enemy, in truth, numbered only 40,000 would have brought them a rubuke and probably cost them their jobs, so they told him what they believed he wanted to hear.

Modern polling agencies are no different. In this case their masters are not generals, but the various agencies of the news show biz. It is no wonder that the polls reflect an evenly divided electorate. The news show biz has been insisting that it is so for 4 years now.

Polling is not a matter of asking a set number of people the same questions and recording the responses. That is one step in the process, but those "raw" numbers are never what comes out the back end [pun intended]. Instead the polling agencies use elaborate sampling models to determine which of the respondents to count as part of a "representative sample". Now, there is good reason to use such models, but the devil is as always in the details. Like any proprietary system of data reduction, such models are subject to abuse. In this case, if your master insists vehemently that the electorate is divided exactly evenly then by George you'd better make sure your model produces that outcome.

The trouble is that there is ample evidence that this conclusion may be false. Most importantly is the outcome of the mid-term elections of 2002. As you may recall, the news agencies were quite certain that the inevitable march of history told us that the President's party loses ground in the midterm elections. All the polls we were shown seemed to confirm this idea. Unfortunately, the voters seem to have missed that memo because they handed the President's party a set of huge victories in 2002.

It didn't take long for the news show biz to forget about that and go back to the story they had previously written that the electorate was deeply and evenly divided. They've been telling this story, over and over for another 2 years since. As for the 2002 election not following the narrative: "Nothing to see here. Move along." They had the story they wanted to tell, and they've stuck to it. Their dutiful lackies, the polling agencies, seem to have fed them the numbers they wanted, just as the Pinkertons did to McClellan. When the battle is at last joined, we shall see.

Scientific Election Predictions

I saw that Mark Steyn was having a contest on his website to predict the outcome of the election. So I fired up the magic 8-ball and started shaking. After that I double-checked my answers against a bag of fortune cookies.

Using my methods, I should be at least as reliable as the major polling agencies.

1. Bush 51.8 Kerry 47.1

2.Bush 330 Kerry 208

3. Last state to decide: Pennsylvania

4. Blue to red: Wisconsin
Red to blue: New Hampshire

5. Maine split: b) Three for Kerry, one for Bush

6.a) George W Bush will receive in Texas: 64.3
b) Dick Cheney will receive in Wyoming: 70.7
c) John Kerry will receive in Massachusetts: 59.8
d) John Edwards will receive in North Carolina: 38.3

7. Senate: 54 R, 44 D, 1 Ind (VT-Looney) and 1 in Louisiana not decided until December. (I predict it will go R)
House: 231 R, 203 D, 1 Ind (VT-Looney)

8. Dem incumbent senator looser: Daschle
Rep incumbent senator looser: none

9. Daschle 47.5, Thune 52.0.

10.Bush: AL(9) AK(3) AR(6) AZ(10) CO(9) GA(15) FL(27) HI(4) IA(7) ID(4) IN(11) KS(6) KY(8) LA(9) ME(1) MI(17) MN(10) MO(11) MS(6) MT(3) NC(15) NE(5) ND(3) NV(5) OH(20) OK(7) OR(7) SC(8) SD(3) TN(11) TX(34) UT(5) VA(13) WI(10) WV(5) WY(3)

Kerry: CA(55) CT(7) DC(3) DE(3) IL(21) MD(10) ME(3) MA(12) NH(4) NJ(15) NM(5) NY(31) PA(21) RI(4) VT(3) WA(11)

More on this later.

UPDATE: (2-Nov-04, 11:53AM) The smudge on the bottom of my morning coffee mug seems to support my predictions. To clarify, I would give W a larger national number and also call Pennsylvania and New Mexico for him except that I believe that both the Quaker State and the kooky banana republic on my eastern border will be decided by fraud.

AdSense Gets a Time-out

I've had to put Google's AdSense ad bar in to time-out because it is being a very bad boy. At last count they had 4 pro-Kerry ads and 1 pro-jihad. This, as you may have divined, is 180 degrees out of phase with the opinions expressed here. I have contacted them about this and we'll see how it goes. If they can only advertise to the antithesis of my expected audience they won't be coming back.