Month: January 2012

We’ll learn the result of the Florida primary tomorrow night. Most signs indicate that Romney will win. Then, on Saturday, they’ll hold the Nevada caucuses. Most likely, Romney will win those, too. That will give him some momentum going into next Tuesday’s caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota. I’m not seeing much of a pulse from Ron Paul’s campaign, but Colorado is probably his best chance to make himself relevant again. Next Tuesday will also be the first obvious opportunity for candidates to drop out. If Romney runs the table from Florida to Colorado and Minnesota, his opponents will have to find a way to survive until the next contest. And the next contest won’t be until February 28th, in Arizona and Michigan. Will Rick Santorum hang around?

Gingrich and Paul might be determined to stay in the race regardless of what happens over the next eight days, but they’d be better funded, get better press coverage, and receive less pressure to drop out if they can win something before the long hiatus.

Wow, this is just awesome:

Gingrich: I wouldn’t accept debate versus Obama moderated by reporters

Newt Gingrich threatened Monday to skip any debate as the Republican nominee versus President Obama that’s moderated by a member of the media.

“As your nominee, I will not accept debates in the fall in which the reporters are the moderators,” Gingrich said at a rally in Pensacola. “We don’t need to have a second Obama person at the debate.”

… Gingrich has made his debating prowess a central selling point of his candidacy, promising fantastical showdowns with Obama in the general election. A frequent applause line for Gingrich, for instance, is his promise to challenge the president to seven, three-hour Lincoln-Douglas style debates….

I am so very, very sorry this guy won’t be the Republican nominee. The only thing that would be more advantageous for Obama than getting to stand on a podium and watch Gingrich unleash hours of obnoxious, self-important cockamamie rhetoric in debates would be Gingrich engaging in a divaesque refusal to debate Obama unless the presidential debate commission changed all the rules that have applied to debates for decades, just to accommodate Newt.

And, really, what an idiot: doesn’t Gingrich realize that, without debate moderators as foils, he’d be back home right now, as much of an also-ran as Bachmann, Huntsman, and Perry? His insults of debate moderators have been the only real high points (although I don’t think that’s the right expression) of his campaign.

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But it occurs to me that we may be getting a glimpse of Newt Gingrich’s possible future.

I could see him riding the rails from town to town, with nothing but a portable lectern and a cardboard valise, offering to take on any and all comers in … a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates! Three hours! No moderator! Come one, come all! Step right up! Do you think you have what it takes to out-pontificate The Mighty Newt?

He could be like an itinerant pool hustler — except he’d be an itinerant pool hustler of civilization-altering transformational change! It would be awesome! Maybe he could even do one of these debates on the moon!

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

Any effort to explain media bias in favor or against any of the presidential candidates should really start with an examination of why, exactly, the Establishment press corp developed such a gargantuan man-crush on John McCain in 2000. I don’t know if I can provide a precise answer to that question. Part of it was that the press corp was, at that time, largely made up of men who had avoided military service in Vietnam. They seemed to get some kind of vicarious thrill out of McCain, who they constantly heralded as a ‘hero,’ even though his military service and career were the furthest thing from heroic. No one could dispute that McCain had suffered terribly while serving the country, and that was fetishized by a group of men who hadn’t suffered at all. So, that was the starting point. McCain was a real man. Bush and Gore were spoiled brats who only got where they were because of their daddies.

But admiration for McCain and a certain sense of personal inadequacy only goes so far in explaining why the press corp fawned all over the senator from Arizona. Just as important, John McCain made himself extremely accessible. He traveled around in his Straight Talk Express bus and mingled freely with the reporters. He told bawdy jokes. He provided good quotes. He helped the reporters meet their deadlines and keep their editors happy. And he fed them well. He acted as if he liked the people covering his campaign, and maybe he did. The result was that reporters largely forgot that John McCain, too, only got where he was because of his daddy. They forgot that he had been even more of a spoiled brat than Gore and Bush before he wound up in the Hanoi Hilton. They didn’t talk about how many planes he had destroyed. They didn’t dwell on how close he came to being expelled from the Naval Academy or how he graduated near the bottom of his class. They didn’t talk about how he ditched his wife after she was disfigured in a car accident. They turned his ethical lapses in the Keating 5 scandal into a virtue that had launched his principled crusade to redeem himself.

To summarize, the press saw in McCain someone who embodied the courage they lacked, who suffered while they were comfortable. They saw him as absurdly virtuous, which he was not. And they liked him. They were drawn to his personality and appreciated that McCain treated them well and made their jobs easier.

In other words, there really wasn’t much of an ideological bias. Reporters didn’t like McCain because he was more or less conservative than Bush or Gore. They did like that he occasionally criticized his own party or took an unorthodox stand, but mainly because it allowed them to cast McCain as a “maverick.” McCain’s main asset with the press was his personal biography and his friendly and respectful accessibility.

Compare that to Mitt Romney’s personal biography and his unfriendly, truculent inaccessibility. If you want to know why today’s press corp isn’t too keen on Mitt Romney, you don’t have to go as far as Joe Trippi. Yes, the press wants the contest to continue and they want to have some excitement, but the press isn’t just engaging in sensationalism.

A bias that favors sensationalism is a bias that by definition favors Gingrich, who is sensational in every sense of the word. The kind way of describing this is to say that Newt is recognizably human: He is, as BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith puts it, “a flawed, interesting man with a story that includes success and failure.” A more colorful way is offered by the National Review’s Jim Geraghty: “He’s Rex Ryan, with an enormous ‘Can you believe what this guy said?’ factor in every appearance.” Or, perhaps even more apt, Gingrich is a candidate forever on the verge of spontaneous human combustion—and what reporter in his right mind would want to drive a guy like that out of the race any sooner than necessary?

Trippi comes closer to the truth when he talks about Romney.

Most plainly, there is the media’s antipathy to the kind of disciplined, unspontaneous, inaccessible campaign that Romney is running. Also to the fact that, hey, let’s face it, he’s not exactly a Roman candle of a candidate. Then there is the temperamental gorge that separates him from most journalists. “Reporters are the kids in the back of the classroom, throwing spitballs,” says Lewis. “McCain would be sitting back there, too, saying, ‘I’m not listening to this B.S.,’ and so would Gingrich. Romney is the guy sitting up in front, raising his hand to every question. Reporters listen to Arcade Fire; Romney listens to the Carpenters and Donny and Marie.”

The suspicion of Romney is even deeper than that, however. Ever since his run in 2008, when his contortions on various issues earned him his reputation as an inveterate flip-flopper, the members of the ­media—and his rivals, then and ­today—have regarded him as a phony, his candidacy based on, as Smith puts it, “some ­really brittle half-truths about his consistency.” But now there is a creeping sense that he may be something worse; that on a range of issues, notably his finances, Romney is making claims that may be less than fully truthful.

But, again, it’s not that Romney is a liar. Newt Gingrich may be the most accomplished liar in the entire country. Romney’s bigger problem is that he treats reporters as the enemy, denies them access, probably doesn’t feed them all that well, and doesn’t make their jobs easier. On top of that, the press corp can’t relate to his personal biography. They may have skipped the Vietnam War, but they didn’t do it knocking on doors in France as a Mormon missionary. They may admire personal wealth, but not really so much when the fortune is made as a vulture capitalist. And Romney doesn’t tell any bawdy jokes.

The press may be pulling for Gingrich to stay in the race and do lasting damage to Romney, but it’s not because they like Gingrich or strictly because they want to sell papers or get page-views. They just don’t like Mitt. He’s given them no reason to like him.

Life is tough and it’s going to get a whole lot worse. The world’s population is rising dramatically just as climate change is acting to reduce food crops, and we are running out of traditional forms of energy. It don’t look good for humanity, folks:

As the world’s population looks set to grow to nearly 9 billion by 2040 from 7 billion now, and the number of middle-class consumers increases by 3 billion over the next 20 years, the demand for resources will rise exponentially.

[B]y 2030, the world will need at least 50 percent more food, 45 percent more energy and 30 percent more water, according to U.N. estimates, at a time when a changing environment is creating new limits to supply.

And if the world fails to tackle these problems, it risks condemning up to 3 billion people into poverty, the [UN] report said. […]

“The current global development model is unsustainable. To achieve sustainability, a transformation of the global economy is required,” the report said.

Fortunately, the legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has the answer, and they aren’t waiting until all hell breaks loose in 20-30 years. They’ve made a decisive decision now to get our world back on the right path.

On Tuesday, the PA House decided it made sense to declare 2012 the “Year of the Bible”—and unanimously passed a resolution doing just that, 193-0.

You can read the whole resolution here. Now a certain communist, atheist fascist, Muslim, Kenyan Dictator and his brainwashed followers might think this is a violation of the US Constitution, but who cares what they think? The important thing is that Pennsylvania legislators saw the serious problems that exist in our world today and acted on them.

Sure its a non-binding resolution, and no it won’t feed the hungry or heal the sick or stop war or any of that other petty nonsense that so many political agitators on the left like to argue about, but it might just do the one thing that really matters: spur an interest in the Greatest Book ever written, and by encouraging Bible study, we might just be able to save the souls of millions of people, maybe even billions. Sure, they’ll suffer from poverty, disease and lack of food, but they’ll go to heaven when they die (likely sooner rather than later), and isn’t that all that matters?

I mean all that stuff about Jesus saying we should feed the hungry, minister to the sick, help the poor, love your neighbor and so on and and so forth, well that was all just stuff you can do if you’ve got the time to bother. Sort of like those extra assignments your teachers would give you if you wanted to earn some extra credit. It’s not like its really necessary or anything, cause as we all know salvation is handed out on a pass/fail basis.

So thanks to all you 193 members of the Pennsylvania House for recognizing that the proper response to the liberal pinko doomsayers and their “United Nations” conspirators is a good dose of that old time religion. You know, if we only make good Christians out of everyone everything will work out just fine. One hundred and ninety-three Pennsylvania politicians ought to know.

So go read your Bible boys and girls and save the planet in the process!

What has Obama done to polarize the country?

“Obama’s ratings have been consistently among the most polarized for a president in the last 60 years,” concludes Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones in a memo summing up the results. “That may not be a reflection on Obama himself as much as on the current political environment in the United States, because Obama’s immediate predecessor, Bush, had similarly polarized ratings, particularly in the latter stages of his presidency after the rally in support from the 9/11 terror attacks faded.”

They’re chanting “Kenya” at Republican rallies. This has nothing to do with George W. Bush and his shitty presidency.

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Chance to compare speeches:

Jan. 30, 1961: JFK’s Full State of the Union [VIDEO]
President Kennedy discusses the recession and unemployment in his address.  

JFK Inaugural Address

Eisenhower’s legacy and his farewell address to the nation on Jan. 17, 1961. [Video]

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

As far as I know it was Hunter S. Thompson who coined the term ‘shithammer.’ I can’t really imagine anyone else coming up with it. What does it mean? I guess it’s a little like pornography. You know it when you see it. In any case, the shithammer is a key word or concept in political discourse, and I have to praise John Heilemann for using it correctly.

And what of Gingrich’s pledge to carry on his crusade all the way to Tampa? That’s takeaway number three. Pledges to continue the fight unabated in the face of harsh and/or humiliating outcomes are staples of presidential campaigns. And they are also patently meaningless. (Please recall Jon Huntsman’s feigned brio on the night of the New Hampshire primary — and his departure from the race a few days later.) But in Gingrich’s case, he might be serious, so much has he come to despise Romney and the Republican Establishment that has brought down on him a twenty-ton shithammer in Florida, and so convinced is he of his own Churchillian greatness and world-historical destiny. The same antic, manic, lunatic bloody-mindedness that has made him such a rotten candidate in the Sunshine State may be enough to keep him the race a good long time.

The original shithammer was a million pounds. Twenty-tons doesn’t seem so bad. Seriously, though, Heilemann is doing a fairly decent homage to Thompson in his analysis of that state of play in Florida. It should be remembered, however, that our politics got so depressing that Thompson opted to kill himself.

Jim Manley needs to put down the Twitter machine. I understand the impulse to call Allen West an asshole, but the spokesman for Harry Reid has about a zillion better things to do. Allen West is a political midget. He’s nobody. He’ll probably be redistricted out of existence by his own party in Florida. There is no reason to give a shit what he says. To respond to him undermines the dignity of the Senate Majority Leader. Allen West is the Eric Massa of Republican politics. He’s probably an even more accomplished snorkeler. Leave the high school stuff to the bloggers.

Update [2012-1-29 22:52:11 by BooMan]: Never mind. Manley has moved on from Reid’s office. He can say whatever he wants about whatever he wants.

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Nice! Just a short entry ’cause it’s after midnight and freezing outside!

Judge rules OccupyTheHague permitted to stay. City invokes ordinance for homeless[!] people during freezing temperatures.
[poor Google translation of title – Oui]

More niceties …

The Stupid Gets Burned – Geert Wilders taken to task  
[it’s about time, he has been getting a free ride in the Dutch media!]

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."