Tag: politics

A portrait in irony

Our favorite “Nobel Prize”-winning economist, Paul Krugman, laments Mitt Romney’s successful stealing from the Democratic playbook:

Mitt Romney has been barnstorming the country, telling voters that he
has a five-point plan to restore prosperity. And some voters, alas, seem
to believe what he’s saying. So President Obama has now responded with
his own plan, a little blue booklet containing 27 policy proposals. How
do these two plans stack up?

Well, as I’ve said before, Mr. Romney’s “plan” is a sham. It’s a list of
things he claims will happen, with no description of the policies he
would follow to make those things happen. “We will cut the deficit and
put America on track to a balanced budget,” he declares, but he refuses
to specify which tax loopholes he would close to offset his $5 trillion
in tax cuts. 
Actually, if describing what you want to see happen without providing
any specific policies to get us there constitutes a “plan,” I can easily
come up with a one-point plan that trumps Mr. Romney any day. Here it
is: Every American will have a good job with good wages. Also, a
blissfully happy marriage. And a pony. 

So Mr. Romney is faking it. His real plan seems to be to foster economic
recovery through magic, inspiring business confidence through his
personal awesomeness.

Translation: Romney has no economic plan for economic recovery except for appealing to the pagan economic gods of the animal spirits.  Which, if you will recall from your reading of the General Theory, is pure Keynesian economics.  I find it absolutely hilarious that the great Keynesian champion is directly criticizing the very heart of the economic theory that forms the basis for his own Neo-Keynesian synthetic approach.

As an added bonus, he damns the man he is attempting to defend by faint praise.  He writes: “Mr. Obama’s booklet comes a lot closer to being an actual plan. Where
Mr. Romney says he’ll achieve energy independence, never mind how, Mr.
Obama calls for concrete steps like raising fuel efficiency standards.”

Translation: it’s not an actual plan, but it is “a lot closer” to being one.  But one either has a plan or one does not; how is “raising fuel efficiency standards” any less fake than “cutting the deficit”?  It’s not any more specific, it’s merely a smaller generality.

The reality is that neither presidential candidate has a plan that goes beyond “print and pray”.  Neither Romney or Obama can do anything to foster economic recovery, as they have outsourced that responsibility to Helicopter Ben Bernanke, who appears grimly determined to demonstrate that no matter how many times it is proven that one cannot inflate one’s way to prosperity, if one has a hammer, the problem MUST be a nail.

Obama is out of control

In case you doubted that Obama is sabotaging his re-election campaign, Matt Drudge brings the following incident to your attention:

When asked whether he had a message for a six-year-old supporter,
President Barack Obama took the opportunity to describe his opponent
Mitt Romney as ‘a bullshitter’.

The extraordinary comment – most
American newspapers decline even to print such a word – came at the end
of an interview with ‘Rolling Stone’ in which Obama was asked possibly
the softest softball question ever lobbed at him.  As he left the
Oval Office, Eric Bates, executive editor of ‘Rollin Stone’, told Obama
that he had asked his six-year-old if there was anything she
wanted him to say to the president and she had responded: ‘Tell him: You
can do it.’

According to Bates, Obama grinned and said: ‘You know, kids have good instincts. They
look at the other guy and say, “Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can
tell.”‘

Now, he’s not wrong.  Mitt Romney is a bullshitter supreme.  The man is the flippiest of flip-floppers and naturally produces a prodigious quantity of the stuff.  As, of course, does Obama, athough he is not so much a bullshit artist as a mid-witted con man.  But there are certain things you simply do not say when you are, or are at least popularly supposed to be, the President of the United States.

At this point, it clearly isn’t enough to just keep the man away from the press corps, his handlers are going to have to gag him and hide him in a closet until November 2nd.  I mean, he can’t even talk to his most fervent supporters without committing silly gaffes.

Debate the debate

“Foreign policy took command of the campaign spotlight Monday at the
third and final debate between President Barack Obama and Republican
Mitt Romney, two weeks before Election Day in a close race for the White
House dominated by pocketbook issues and the economy.  Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recent attack on the U.S. Consulate in
Benghazi, Libya, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions were all ripe for
disagreement in the 90-minute event at Lynn University.”

Feel free to provide the color commentary or keep score if you’re watching.

WND column

Polls and the next president

Interest in the presidential election is heating up. Independents and
undecided voters are gradually coming around to their decisions.
Democrats are shrieking about the threat to Roe vs. Wade and warning
that Mitt Romney intends to put women and gays into concentration camps,
where they will be forced to wear sacred chastity belts. Republicans
are shouting that this time it really and truly is the most important
election ever and warning that Barack Obama wants to turn America into a
communist Islamic republic and launch an attack on Israel.

None of these dire warnings are true. 

The polls say Romney can’t win

In which we note the latest Gallup poll:

According to the latest Gallup survey, Mitt Romney is polling 52% of likely voters. At this point in the race he is ahead of:

  • Where Jimmy Carter was in 1976 (47%)
  • Where Ronald Reagan was in 1980 (39% — Carter was six points up)
  • Where George H.W. Bush was in 1988 (50%)
  • Where Bill Clinton was in 1992 (40%)
  • Where George W. Bush was in 2000 (48%)
  • Where Barack Obama was in 2008 (49%)

Cue Nate Silver complaining: “But… but… the 538 state poll model estimates that Obama has a 172.3% chance of winning!”

    Mailvox: a reason to not vote

    I think we can all agree that blame for the present parlous state of the nation clearly lies with JartStar:

    I had some fun today with some of the guys at work about voting. They
    asked me while we were on break who I was going to vote for and I
    explained that I no longer vote. The looks on their faces were priceless
    and when they inquired why I offhandedly explained that I had voted my
    entire life and things have steadily gotten worse, I feel bad about
    that, and my voting has made the country worse. I then apologized to
    them all for what I had done and the three out of the four of them went
    into near hysterics.

    The Israeli Jew proclaimed it would be better for
    me to show up and vote randomly than not vote, and one of the two Indian
    immigrants tried to pull me aside to explain that I wasn’t really the
    problem.

    So this is my new reason for not voting when people ask: The state
    of the country to a large degree my fault and I’m stopping now before I
    make things really bad.

    It’s definitely a more entertaining excuse than relying on reason and being forced to endure a monologue on how Mitt Romney will preside in a TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MANNER than Barack Obama, even though the extent of their actual policy differences appears to be that Romney is slightly more enthusiastic about Israel, Wall Street, and gun control while Obama is slightly more enthusiastic about Saudi Arabia, immigration, and feminism.

    Of course, as I have conclusively proven, there is absolutely no chance that your one presidential vote makes any difference at all.  None at all.  Either that one vote will not make a difference to the outcome, or in the extremely unlikely event that the outcome of the state vote rests upon your one vote, the courts will render it void by pronouncing their own verdict on who won the “election”.

    The argument for random voting being better than not voting is informative, though. Such a position would indicate that to the person who holds it, the preservation of the illusion of democracy is more important than democracy itself.

    So much for “Alpha Mitt”

    I told you that Mitt Romney, for all his height, financial success, and executive hair, was a Beta.  One display of dominance in the first debate, the first in what is now six years of running for president, does not an Alpha make.  Recall that before the debate, Scoobious Doobius noted this:


    “In terms of “game” theory (as opposed to “game theory”), it’ll be
    interesting to see tonight if things turn into the classic “real alpha
    versus beta huffing and puffing and trying to look like an alpha” sort
    of thing. If Obama takes that bait, then I’ll be a little more
    open-eared towards the predictive power of game.”

    The case, she is closed.  Obama not only came out huffing and puffing, but he even managed to prevent Romney from dominating him the way Romney had in the first debate.  The real indicator of Romney’s Betatude was not that he failed to AMOG Obama a second time, but rather the way in which he permitted a woman to not only overrule him, but the rules set out for the moderator prior to the debate as well.

    There is no excuse for this failure.  A true alpha would have shut her up and forced her to submit to him without even requiring an appeal to the rules.  But, given how the rules were not only clear, but Candy Crowley openly declared her intent to flout them before the debate, Romney’s failure to shut her up and force her to stick to her appointed role is conclusive proof that he is not, and has never been, an alpha male.

    All he had to do, the first time she opened her mouth in violation of the rules, was read them to her and ask her what part of them she did not understand.  Later, when she attempted to play fact-checker, he should have immediately asked her what the score was, then informed her that if she isn’t keeping score, she isn’t the judge of the debate and she should stick to her moderator duties as she agreed prior to the debate.  The fact that Romney’s failure to deal with the woman led directly to him fumbling his best opportunity to publicly drive home Obama’s responsibility for the Libyan debacle is merely rubbing salt in the wound.

    Romney cracks 50

    Thus spake Gallup:  Romney 50%, Obama 46% Among Likely Voters.  Obama down sharply among men, college grads, and Southern voters vs. 2008

    If Romney manages a similar rout again tonight, we could end up seeing a landslide in a few weeks.

    Game and the election

    I try to keep the two blogs fairly separate these days, since a relatively small number of people are interested in both econ/religion/politics/literature on the one side and intersexual relations on the other.  Also, the intellectually ruthless approach utilized here tends to work better on matters more objective than the socio-sexual hierarchy.  However, there are times when the two perspectives come together as one, which was the case with a question from GK concerning why women have suddenly begun turning towards Mitt Romney in the presidential election.

    My thought is based around one of the keys to understanding female behavior, which is that it is often
    aversion-based.  Men find this difficult to understand because their
    behavior tends to be positive, in the sense of “I want X, therefore I
    will do Y.”  The aversion-based female pattern tends to be more oriented
    towards “I don’t want X, therefore I will do Y”.  The increased female
    support for Romney has little to do with Romney himself, much with less
    his policies or Obama’s policies, but rather the collective socio-sexual
    fury of a group of women duped.

    Read the rest at Alpha Game.

    Suzhi and the sheng nu

    It’s strange, isn’t it, that so many organizations formed for the advancement of women’s rights were established by left-wing parties like the Fascist Party in Italy and the Communist Party in China.

    They are articles about single, professional women published on the Web
    site of China’s state feminist agency, the All-China Women’s Federation.
    The Communist Party founded the Women’s Federation in 1949 to “protect
    women’s rights and interests.” 

    It must be a coincidence.  But these days, it isn’t hard to imagine either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama agreeing to establish a state feminist agency, assuming of course that Housing and Urban Development doesn’t already qualify.

    I do rather like the idea of referring to unmarried women over the age of 27 as sheng nu, however.  Especially since comes with the imprimatur of an official international State Feminist Agency.  It would really be sexist to refer to them any other way.  However, looking at it from the long-term perspective, it is ominous that China has been actively seeking to encourage its best and brightest women to breed instead of pursue an education since 2007.

    Iran is doing this.  China is doing this.  The USA and the nations of the West, on the other hand, are encouraging their best and brightest women to sterilize themselves.  Which societies would you bet on in the long run?