#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Does Romney want to kill Americans?
Former U.S. presidents seldom publicly criticize the current occupants of the White House. It is even more unusual for them to criticize a sitting president who belongs to their own party. But this did not prevent Jimmy Carter from criticizing Barack Obama’s policy asserting the president’s right to murder Americans at will without due process in an article he wrote for the New York Times.
Powerline exposes the latest iteration of a stupid old Democratic trick:
It happens all the time in talk radio: a caller will say that he is a lifelong Republican, and will recall fondly how he voted for Ronald Reagan. Then he says that today’s Republicans have gone too far, and for the first time ever he is voting for a Democrat! These callers are nearly always lying. If you look them up, you likely will find that they are Democratic Party precinct chairmen.
The Obama campaign is trying to perpetrate the same deception. It has just released a video called Republican Women For Obama, which features four or five women who claim to be Republicans, or to have been Republicans until recently. But, of course, they are appalled by Mitt Romney–it is hard to say why, apart from a couple of discreet references to abortion, but did they really just now figure out that the Republican Party is pro-life? The ad is surprisingly ineffective, but it is also dishonest. At least one of the women who pose as “Republican women for Obama” is a long-time Democrat.
Her name is Maria Ciano, and BuzzFeed finds that she has been a registered Democrat in Colorado at least since 2006.
Of course, there is an easier way of knowing that the woman isn’t a Republican than combing through her Facebook page and voter registration. First, she is an unmarried Hispanic woman. Second, one has to be a pretty extreme Democrat to be appalled by Mitt Romney’s “right-wing” ways.
UPDATE: Obama is clearly getting desperate. President Barack Obama said Mitt Romney has locked himself into “extreme positions” on economic and social issues and would surely impose them if elected, trying to discredit his Republican rival at the biggest political moment of his life.
Romney is a flip-flopper, not an extremist, and everyone knows it. Obama’s 2012 campaign is looking more hapless than Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic 2008 team.
I find this criticism of Paul Ryan by Paul Krugman to be richly ironic, coming as it does from a man whose economic philosophy is based on an imaginary science called “psychohistory”:
So far, most of the discussion of Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, has focused on his budget proposals. But Mr. Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would ordinarily be a good thing. In his case, however, most of those ideas appear to come from works of fiction, specifically Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader; even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through that part. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life.
If Ryan wants to silence Krugman’s attempts to attack him in this vein, he need merely point out that Atlas Shrugged is considerably more mature fiction than Foundation, the adolescent science fiction novel that Paul Krugman never outgrew.
The good professor always sends a lot of traffic to Amazon when he links my books, so it only seems fair to help him out in return, especially when it costs nothing to nobody. Download his PDF on the Obamacare decision – no registration or cost required – and apparently he’ll get to count some kind of academic coup or something. It actually makes for pretty interesting reading, and it’s only 21 pages, but more importantly, downloading it will make some leftist professor whose paper on 19th Century Transgender Law in the Third Ruritanian Republic gets bumped down a notch cry.
It’s moderately funny too. Consider the following quote: “This has led some commentators to suggest that Roberts’ holding in Sebelius was, like Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison, a sort of Trojan horse, smuggling in a victory over an important legal principle while shrouding that victory behind a win on the general issue for the other side. There are two problems with this conception: One is with the understanding of Marbury that it embodies, and the other is with the understanding of NFIB that it embodies.”
Translation: “No, you idiot Republicans, it’s exactly what it looked like. Roberts stabbed you in the back, so quit pretending you liked it.”
So we’re told Joe Biden is heading to Tampa during the Republican National Convention… I wonder what sort of kabuki show starring the bumbling Vice-President is in store. How desperate are the Democratic elders to get someone else, anyone else, on the ticket? Is it just a feeble attempt to steal the media limelight or is there something darker in the works?
I was at RNC-New Orleans in 1988, as my parents were delegates. At one point, due to the black suit and shades I was wearing, I was drafted to help three bodyguards hold the doors at a Minnesota Senator’s cocktail party against some literally filthy Democratic protesters who were trying to get in. These things get a little messier on the ground than they usually appear on TV. The parties are surpassingly excellent, though.
Intrade says Romney is going to lose. Nate Silver, the expert meta-pollster of FiveThirtyEight fame, says Romney is going to lose. Rasmussen Reports has the Electoral College count at 247 to 206 in favor of Obama, with 85 votes in the toss-up category. With the exception of Gallup, most of the major polls are predicting an Obama victory in November.
I don’t think so. I think the Republican Romney/Ryan ticket is going to win in November.
Of course she turned down the offer of Number Two. She must be Number One!
“Up until just a couple of weeks ago the White House was putting out feelers to see if Hillary would accept the vice-presidential nod and replace Joe Biden. Bill Clinton was, I’m told, urging his wife to accept the number two slot. He saw this as a great launching pad for her for running in 2016.”
I note that my prediction of an Obama drop-out is still in play…. I mean, why were the Democratic elders trying to drop Biden if it weren’t for their concerns about the electoral problems of his boss?
Sarah Palin isn’t invited to speak at the Republican convention? This outrage must not stand! We must do something! John Hawkins sends an email:
As you may have heard, Sarah Palin isn’t being given a speaking slot at the Republican National convention. Not only is Sarah Palin the single most prominent woman in the Republican party, a strong advocate of the Tea Party, and an electrifying speaker, she was the also VP candidate in 2008 and was one of the biggest impact players for the Republican Party during the 2010 elections. Not only does Sarah Palin deserve an opportunity to speak, she would be a tremendous asset at the convention.
Towards that end, I’m going to try to collect 10,000 signatures from conservatives who think Sarah Palin should be given a speaking slot. If you’re one of those conservatives, your signature, your link, and any help you can give on Facebook and Twitter would be much appreciated.
Won’t you please help? Think of the children!
Rush Limbaugh needs to untie the other half of his brain. The half he’s using now is clearly dysfunctional:
Radio giant Rush Limbaugh says he’s “jazzed” about Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate, and he expects an instant economic recovery if the Republican ticket wins in November.
“I guarantee you, if Ryan and Romney win this election, you’re gonna see the stock market go through the roof,” Limbaugh said this afternoon. “You’re gonna see small businesses start to hire. It’s gonna happen so fast, you’re not gonna believe it, the moment it’s known that Obama’s out of office.”
Limbaugh, the top-rated voice of the political right in America, says a true conservative is finally on the presidential ticket.
So, if Romney and Ryan are elected, the machines that make up the bulk of the stock market trading are going to kick it up another notch? And who is this “true conservative”? It certainly isn’t the guy with the voting record that belongs to Ryan (WI). Limbaugh is putting the Stupid in Stupid Party with this inane commentary. I’d be very interested to know precisely how Limbaugh thinks Romney and Ryan are going to make a 350 percent debt/GDP ratio disappear overnight.
Many Republicans are understandably pleased by Mitt Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate. Unlike Marco Rubio, Ryan is a natural-born American citizen and actually eligible for the office. Unlike Tim Pawlenty, he is not a spineless coward with all the charisma of fat-free vanilla yogurt. And unlike Robert Portman, he is not a member of the extended Bush family. He is intelligent. And unlike the current presidential administration, he’s capable of actually putting a budget together, which is a talent that should not go unremarked considering that the country has been operating without one for more than three years now.
Thanks to Slurtebrautfust for the list of Ryan votes. And there was one more well worth noting: YES to Budget Control Act of 2011 that raised the debt ceiling.