Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Hodge-Podge Page

80% of GOP primary voters still undecided

Rick Moran

According to the latest CBS/New York Times poll, it's still anyone's ballgame.
New York Times:
With the nation's first nominating contests just two months away, a large majority of Republican primary voters have yet to make up their minds about the candidate they would like to see as their party's nominee for president in 2012.
About eight in 10 Republican primary voters say it is still too early to tell whom they will support, and just four in 10 say they have been paying a lot of attention to the 2012 presidential campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
Herman Cain, the former restaurant executive, is riding a wave of support among Republican primary voters that has placed him in a statistical dead heat with rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, in a race that has been characterized by momentum swings among the candidates.
The poll found Mr. Cain with the highest level of support, with 25 percent of Republican primary voters, and Mr. Romney with 21 percent. This difference is within the poll's margin of sampling error.
Adding to the fluidity of the contest, about one in 10 Republican primary voters say they would like to see someone else nominated.
This is by no means a done deal for Romney, or for Cain either. Newt Gingrich is lurking out there and has slowly been rising. Who knows where he'll be in two months?
Perry has the money to get back in the race and has just released a tax plan that should be popular with conservatives. If Cain starts to fall back, Perry has a chance to crawl back in the race.
It doesn't seem like it, but two months can be an awfully long time in politics.




Former one-term House member sues over lost 'career'

Jerry Shenk

 So, this is what it's come to. A one-term Democratic House member jettisoned by his constituents in 2010 is suing campaign critics for "loss of livelihood."

From US News:
"When voters in Ohio's 1st Congressional District threw Democrat Steve Driehaus out of office after only one term, he did not bow out gracefully. No, he decided to get even. So he did what anyone does in today's culture: he sued somebody."
Driehaus sued the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that supports pro-life candidates for Congress, for "loss of livelihood."
We've all heard of career politicians, but, who knew that a single two year term entitled an elected official to a lifetime livelihood? It's remarkable that the same self-important politicians who enjoy the benefits and protections of incumbency and oppose term limits on the fiction that elections are term limiting can make so fatuous a claim.
More:
"During the 2010 elections the Susan B. Anthony List engaged in a campaign to identify and call out a group of allegedly anti-abortion-rights members of Congress who provided the margin that allowed President Barack Obama's reform of the nation's healthcare system to get through the U.S. House of Representatives. The Susan B. Anthony List said their vote in favor of the law, which did not include any pro-life protections, amounted to a betrayal of their pro-life principles."
Judge Timothy S. Black of the U.S. district Court, an Obama appointee and former president and director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Cincinnati, is allowing the suit to go forward.
Apparently, in the age of Obama, telling the truth about politicians and the bills for which they vote has become actionable. In today's world and in Obama's courts, the First Amendment to the Constitution can be legally suspended over a simple difference of opinion, and that rejected liberal politicians should be indemnified from unfavorable election results.

 Vodkapundit Stephen Green on Moran's new show

 AT's Blog Editor Rick Moran and Hot Air's Jazz Shaw have teamed up to produce a new show on Blog Talk Radio.

It's called the RINO Hour of Power - a tongue in cheek look at politics that promises to be both amusing and serious at the same time. There will be no sacred cows when these guys get rolling as both sides of the political spectrum will come in for a royal trashing.
Tonight's special guest is Vodkapundit Stephen Green. The boys will discuss the GOP presidential race and other hot issues making news.
You can catch a live stream of the show here. A podcast is available for downloading shortly after the end of the show.
And don't forget to click the "follow" button below the logo for email updates about the show.

Joe Biden screws up

Jeannie DeAngelis

Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States and unofficial defender of Gotham, has recently warned America that if Barack's Stimulus II/$450 billion jobs bomb isn't passed, phantom rapists and murderers will emerge from the shadows to inflict injury on unsuspecting Americans. 
Recently, when asked to clarify his statement that, if Stimulus II isn't passed, "Murder will continue to rise, rape will continue to rise, all crime will continue to rise," a testy Mr. Biden responded to a persistent inquisitor by saying: "Don't screw with me."
Then, when asked about the popularity of the nationwide Occupy movement, Joe colorfully shared a similar sentiment.  According to 'Don't screw with me' Joe, Wall Street's feisty activist demonstrations are popular simply because "The middle class has been screwed."
So, besides shielding helpless women from rapists, Mr. Biden believes the jobs bill is the key to getting the national screwing to stop.
Yet, for a man so concerned with preventing Americans from being 'screwed,' Joe Biden seems relatively unconcerned that Occupy Wall Street is 'occupying' the NYPD police force to such a degree that "The number of people shot surged 154 percent two weeks ago -- to 56 from 22 over the same week last year -- and spiked 28 percent in the last month."
Playing the murder/rape card for political expediency, Vice President Biden is obviously over-exaggerating. However, what may be closer to the truth is that, in high-crime areas, fewer police on the job could threaten public safety.  Take for instance New York City, home to Occupy Wall Street. It's there that a group of "high-ranking cops point the finger at Occupy Wall Street protesters" for the increase in New York City crime, because "instead of being sent to Jamaica, Brownsville and the South Bronx... special crime-fighting units ...are on Wall Street" dealing with dancers, drummers and dumpsters.
According to a NYPD spokesperson, "Normally, the task force is used in high-crime neighborhoods where you have a lot of shootings and robberies." So while Joe cites fictional 911 operators being unavailable to assist rape victims calling out for help due to lack of a jobs bill, he's yet to address the large numbers of New York City police officers who are presently unavailable to respond to actual emergencies because so many are preoccupied attending to "rowdy crowds" on Wall Street.
Vice President Biden is worried that if the jobs bill isn't passed, "murder, robbery and rape will continue to rise."  However, thus far, Joe has chosen to ignore that "when OWS marches, as many as 3,000 cops a day could be called on to keep the peace. That's about 10 percent of the total force."  A 10% decrease in police presence in historically dangerous urban neighborhoods is, to paraphrase Joe Biden, 'screwing up' law enforcement's ability to maintain a safe environment for "real people" who the Vice President claims need "real relief right now."
If Mr. Biden feels so strongly about cops being available to prevent imaginary rapes in Flint, Michigan, then where's his outrage over the actual bullets boomeranging over Broadway that, while he's out defending his murder/rape theory, injure and kill real human beings?
Moreover, what could possibly be the rationale behind using the threat of a nationwide rape epidemic and making such an extreme argument to justify passing unpopular legislation while ignoring shootings taking place in real time because police are engrossed in controlling a mob marching in support of a bill that Biden claims will ensure police personnel are on hand to put a stop to crime?
The Vice President's lame attempt to justify thrusting the nation deeper into debt by warning of nonexistent murders and imaginary rapes while simultaneously sanctioning a movement that in actuality does sap much-needed law enforcement from high-crime areas, does nothing more than assist in a type of political screwing that Joe brings up every time he opens his mouth.
Thus, an empathetic Joe Biden's solidarity with Occupy Wall Street's demand for a jobs bill is another in a long list of self-defeating examples of the duplicity exposed by his and his party's over-the-top rhetoric that is repeatedly contradicted by liberals' utter lack of willingness to take action against any reality that threatens to 'screw' with their political agenda. 

The scientific finding that does not settle the climate-change debate

By S. Fred Singer     

Before you write off Bachmann, Cain, and Perry as cynical diehards, deniers, idiots, or whatever, [WashPost Oct 24] consider this:
Why are you surprised by the results of the Berkeley Climate Project?  They used data from the same weather stations as the Climategate people, but reported that one-third showed cooling — not warming.
They covered the same land area – less than 30% of the Earth’s surface – with recording stations that are poorly distributed, mainly in US and Western Europe.  They state that 70% of US stations are badly sited and don’t meet the standards set by government; the rest of the world is likely worse.
Unlike the land surface, the atmosphere showed no warming trend, either over land or over ocean — according to satellites and independent data from weather balloons.   This indicates to me that there is something very wrong with the land surface data.  And did you know that the climate models, run on super-computers, all show that the atmosphere must warm faster than the surface.  What does this tell you?
And finally, we have non-thermometer temperature data from so-called “proxies”: tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, stalagmites.  They don’t show any global warming since 1940!
The Berkeley results in no way confirm the scientifically discredited Hockeystick graph, which had been so eagerly adopted by climate alarmists.  In fact, the Hockeystick authors have never published their temperature results after 1978.  The reason for hiding them?  It’s likely that their proxy data show no warming either.
One last word:  In their scientific paper, submitted for peer review, the Berkeley scientists disclaim knowing the cause of the temperature increase reported by their project.  However, their research paper comments: “The human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated.”  I commend them for their honesty and skepticism.


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