Tag: politics

Or so Gallup appears to indicate:

Gallup released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue very worried. If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011 (e.g. Michigan where he is up 48 percent to 44 percent), Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.

I haven’t been hearing as many rumblings about Democrats attempting to encourage Obama to step aside; most of them now appear to involve Biden stepping down as vice-president. But I wouldn’t be convinced that he won’t until he actually accepts the nomination at the Democratic convention this summer. In addition to the eligibility and intra-party pressure issues, Obama simply doesn’t strike me as the sort of personality who is willing to lose when he has the option of claiming instead that he didn’t even try to win.

The charade of the Newt Gingrich comes to its inevitable end:

Last week, New York magazine’s John Heilemann pointed out a deep truth about Newt Gingrich’s peculiar presidential campaign: The very media elite that Gingrich delights in hammering has actually been in his corner all along. The press likes a horse race; the press likes outsize personalities; the press favors an underdog; and the press even takes a strange sort of delight in being ruthlessly attacked.

Of course most political reporters don’t want Gingrich in the White House. But they’ve had every incentive to keep him in the headlines and overrate his odds of defeating Mitt Romney for the nomination.

Tuesday night’s Floridian drubbing won’t change those incentives, so we can expect a last burst of media chatter about how Gingrich could still recover, ride a wilderness campaign to a Super Tuesday comeback and fight Romney tooth and nail all the way to the convention. But chatter is all it will be. For Gingrich and his media enablers alike, the dream died in Florida….

The sooner Gingrich is out, the better. The only substantive choice is between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. Even if Romney ultimately turns out to be the clear and unabashed choice of Republicans, as I expect him to be, at least people will have been presented a clear choice between debt-laden doom and the only way out of the banking abyss.

Karl Denninger, himself a Catholic, points out the absurdity of the Roman Catholic Church finally finding something in Medicaid to which it can object:

The Church already supported this unjust law for decades. By supporting mandated cost-shifting of medical care and the tax system that funds it, most-particularly (but not limited to) Medicaid, the Catholic Church has long supported these procedures with their direct employment tax dollars as well as espousing the belief that the Church laity is morally (say much less legally) bound to pay said taxes despite the fact that some part of those taxes, no matter how small, is used to fund these procedures, drugs and devices.

You, Mr. Sample, along with the rest of the Bishops emitting this speech and all the prelates who gave this sermon (or any derivative of it) are hypocrites. Forced cost-shifting of “procedures that violate conscience” was just fine so long as it could be foisted off on the congregation and in fact was fine so long as it was “hidden” among the weeds!

The Church has been paying its employment taxes without complaint just like everyone else, even though Medicaid provides for birth control pills and other related services including, in some cases, abortion!

There has been no organized objection, no refusal to pay those taxes and no call for the laity to refuse to pay those taxes.

Now, Catholic Bishops and prelates, you see the price of your own hypocritical behavior and “forced charity.” Rather than stand on liberty, personal choice and conscience you have deigned to seize only on this specific instance in Obamacare while leaving the provision of Medicaid, which everyone has to pay for that has earned income or pays employees, including the Church, alone!

Where were you in the 1980s? In the 1990s? In the 2000s? When Obamacare was being debated — and Catholic Charities supported it? Oh, it was all ok then, because you felt Catholics had an obligation to cede our particular moral values for the “poor” and “less advantaged” irrespective of how that need for care happened and irrespective of personal liberty, freedom and morality.

Unfortunately, while most people are idiots, even non-idiots are completely incapable of drawing logical conclusions concerning the probable consequences of current trends. I remember how my father’s political activism was regarded with amused indulgence by a friend of his, who believed that his concerns about the creeping expansion of government were completely overblown. It didn’t matter how many new laws and bureaucratic outrages were cited by my father, they were always waved off as trivial and irrelevant. However, once the State of Minnesota announced its plans for revising health insurance, which had a direct and negative effect on this friend’s income, he suddenly became tremendously concerned about the terrible dangers of government involvement in the economy.

It was, of course, much too late by that time. And since he had never had any concerns about the effects of government expansion on others, he had neither right nor reason to expect anyone else would give a damn about their effects on him. Thus the State conquers, slowly, inexorably, laying one small brick at a time.

I think it is great that the Roman Catholic Church is finally being leashed and brought to heel. Perhaps now it will finally understand that a government that possesses the power to dictate to others in accordance with your wishes is a government with the power to dictate to you in accordance with the wishes of others. The Church has always been at its best when it is standing in opposition to the governments of the world, and at its worst when it is working in collaboration with them.

Santorum, Gingrich presumably to follow post-South Carolina….

From National Review Online:

A Tight Race in S.C.
By Rich Lowry

There are now three polls in S.C. showing the same basic trend–Romney essentially flat but on top, Gingrich in a solid second, and Santorum falling back a bit from his post-Iowa highs.

This is just getting downright embarrassing for the “conservative” media.

Mitt Romney’s top ten campaign contributors:

Goldman Sachs
Credit Suisse Group
Morgan Stanley
HIG Capital
Barclays
Kirkland & Ellis
Bank of America
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
EMC Corp
JPMorgan Chase & Co

At least Obama had the decency to lie to America and pretend that he wasn’t going to hold her down while the bankers took turns raping her. If the Republicans are foolish enough to nominate Mitt Romney and he wins the general election, he is going to permit the pillaging of the American economy in a manner that hasn’t been seen since the Roman legions pillaged Carthage.

39% Romney
23% Paul
17% Huntsman
10% Gingrich
9% Santorum

Lost in the inevitable media hype about Romney winning New Hampshire and Iowa is the fact that he actually performed rather poorly in light of his supposed inevitability. Here are the winning percentages of the last three meaningful New Hampshire primaries:

1996: 27% (Buchanan)
2000: 49% (McCain)
2008: 37% (McCain)
2012: 39% (Romney)

The fascinating thing is that Romney only got 7% more votes in 2012 than he did four years ago, assuming that the present numbers hold up, despite campaigning there ever since the last primary. And he performed about as expected; the two final polls had him at 37%. This is pretty bad for a candidate who is supposed to have the nomination sewn up already, in fact, it indicates that most Republicans simply don’t want to vote for him. The Huntsman vote is probably the largest collection of pure anti-Romney votes, as there is no reason to see them as anything but a protest given the ideological similarities between the two Mormons.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, outperformed. He was supposed to win around 17% of the vote versus 15% for Huntsman. Gallup had him as low as 12%. Instead, he got 23%, which in consideration of Santorum’s very poor performance, puts him in a strong position as the alternative to Romney. So, Perry is done, Huntsman isn’t a player but can pretend to be for a little while, and both Gingrich and Santorum should be done but won’t quit before South Carolina.

We can be confident that Paul did much better than expected in New Hampshire because National Review’s Corner has assiduously, and bizarrely, avoided discussing him in 20 posts about the primary, despite devoting several apiece to Huntsman, Gingrich, and Santorum.