Promises, promises

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Ouch!:

President Obama’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

(1) His job approval rating, as measured by Gallup, plunged to a new low of 38 (with 54 percent disapproving) on Tuesday — before “rebounding” to 39/53 today.

(2) His numbers in a crucial swing state he carried in 2008 look even uglier.

(3) Dissatisfaction and buyer’s remorse is on the rise among Iowa and New Hampshire…Democrats.

(4) The housing market remains terribly enervated, and analysts believe 2011 could be its weakest year on record. This underscores this administration’s glaring housing policy failures.

(5) Several central promises of his signature “accomplishment” continue to be exposed as fallacies by non-partisan number crunchers.

(6) Nearly 8 in 10 voters say the country is on the wrong track.

(7) His presidency hit a grim (and, to use his own words, “unpatriotic”) milestone, just two-and-a-half years into his first, and perhaps only, term.

(8) Another trillion-dollar-plus deficit is on the way, and projections of a future course correction are based on deeply unrealistic growth and policy assumptions.

(9) A new poll shows that few Americans believe race relations have improved since 2008. Even many of Obama’s opponents hoped racial progress would be an apolitical dividend of his presidency.

(10) Despite its rosy formulas, the CBO estimates unemployment will remain north of eight percent through 2014.

(Make sure you check out the guy in the video at the 3:00 mark)

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“What she said”

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Michael Tomasky:

Barack Obama hasn’t been much of a domestic-policy president from nearly anyone’s point of view. And it’s a little hard to picture how he might ever be seen as such—that is to say, even if he’s reelected, he’ll probably have a Republican House or Senate (or both) that will thwart him at every turn, so the best he’ll be able to say is that he presided over a slow and very difficult economic recovery, which presumably will finally happen by January 2017. But foreign policy could be a completely different story. Here one can see how he might become not just a good but a great foreign-policy president.

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Gee, who’s in charge of foreign policy these days? Isn’t it whats-her-name, that old lady that tried to steal the nomination from Obama? You know, the one who kept schooling him during their debates. The one whose paper he copied off of.

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Ouch!

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Politico:

David Limbaugh, the conservative author and brother of Rush, tweets an image you’re likely to see again.

[...]

UPDATE: Perry spokesman Mark Miner emailed this response: “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

As we reported recently, Perry himself also questioned on the stump the fact that Obama had never served in the military.

Also, the folks at Media Matters emailed over to note that Obama was not actually 22 in that photo, he was in college, and here is the original.

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You can say that those two pictures don’t prove anything and you would be right. But that’s using logic.

Some things, including the best ads, don’t appeal to logic. They go for an emotional reaction.

Is it fair? No. Is it effective? Yes.

BTW – Why didn’t the McCain campaign use a similar ad?

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I love a good rant

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Riverdaughter:

Really, who the F^&* does Amanda Marcotte and Rebecca Traister and Jonathan Capehart and ThereIsNoSpoon etc, etc, etc think they are???

You threw a tantrum in 2008 and had to have your way. You bought the Obama brand without question and got all of the rest of us into this pickle. And it wasn’t even like he ran away with the nomination by a landslide. The nomination was a squeaker and he only won because the party changed the rules so it could ignore the will of the largest, most Democratic states in the country. He didn’t run a brilliant campaign. He ran a ruthless one and he bought a lot of superdelegates with the money from the finance industry. And because of the cluelessness of the left activist base, a good chunk of the middle class is suffering with no end in sight. Some of us (yours truly) have lost jobs and livelihoods because you insisted on putting an untried, inexperienced, political cypher in a job he wasn’t ready for. We told you that over and over and over again. He’s not even a real Democrat from what I can tell. And now you guys presume to tell US that we can’t have a choice in the matter of the next presidency?

[...]

Amanda and Rebecca and Jonathan are in denial. They’re in denial because they are afraid. They’re afraid because the Republicans could win. The Republicans could win because the economy is really in bad shape. The economy is in really bad shape because Republicans are obstructive assholes and because Obama didn’t know how to deal with them. He doesn’t know how to deal with them because he didn’t have that part figured out before he ran and he doesn’t have a political philosophy. But fear tactics are not going to get Obama re-elected. We’re not buying it, Amanda. The party needs to stop being so craven and scared and replace the guy at the top because we are not voting for him next year.

Suck on that, Amanda.

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Just a couple points:

The economy is in really bad shape because Republicans are obstructive assholes and because Obama didn’t know how to deal with them.

No, no, no, a trillion times no! Obama got everything he wanted for two years. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for four of the last five years. Where’s all this FDR-style New New Deal legislation that the GOPers are obstructing? It DOES NOT EXIST.

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But fear tactics are not going to get Obama re-elected.

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Barack Obama’s acceptance speech on August 28, 2008:

“And that’s to be expected, because if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters.

If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.”

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Obama will run on two things. The fear card and the race card. That’s all he’s got. Hopenchange motherf**kers!

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Dawg Days of Summer

This is what a president looks like x 2

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This is an open thread

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Mr Un-Popular

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Nate Silver:

Why Another Democrat Wouldn’t Do Better Than Obama in 2012

You know that a president is having a rough time when you start to see speculation that his party would be better off if it replaced him on the ticket.

There has been more of this recently: the political scientist Matthew Dickinson argued that Democrats would improve their chances if Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in a primary challenge. The astute Ed Morrissey of the blog Hot Air wondered if Democrats might benefit if Mr. Obama simply declined to run for a second term.

President Obama’s re-election bid is in quite a lot of trouble, with falling approval numbers and sour economic forecasts. But it’s probably mistaken to assume that those problems would just go away if Democrats replaced him with another candidate.

The evidence, if anything, points in the opposite direction: Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, and probably gives the Democrats a better chance of maintaining the White House than another Democrat would. Three pieces of data to consider:

First, Mr. Obama’s personal favorability ratings — which continue to average about 50 percent — are considerably higher than his approval ratings, which are now around 40 percent. It’s not uncommon for favorability ratings to track a point or two ahead of approval ratings — but this is a particularly large gap. Voters remain reasonably sympathetic to Barack Obama, the person, even if they’re growing less and less thrilled with his performance.

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I’m gonna join Riverdaughter and others by going on record that I don’t believe Obama’s personal favorability rating is actually as high as most polls seem to show. I think a lot of people are so gun shy about being falsely accused of racism that they don’t want to admit that they don’t like him.

Face it – he’s not very likeable. That has nothing to do with the color of his skin. It has to do with his haughty arrogance, supercilious attitude, contempt for others, emotional detachment, failure to accept responsibility and whiny complaints whenever he doesn’t get his way. He’s not exactly Mr. Congeniality.

People feel much more comfortable saying they don’t like Obama’s policies and job performance. This is why we see a unusually large gap between his favorability and approval ratings.

People lie to pollsters. But next November when people are in the privacy of the voting booth I expect they will honestly express their feelings. The Obots and the media (but I repeat myself) will, of course, blame racism. They’ll be wrong, but you can bet that “The Obama Effect” to become a permanent part of our political lexicon.

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Natural Disasters, Bad Luck Politics, and the Mandate of Heaven

Because of yesterday’s earthquake, I decided to talk about something that’s been kicking around in my head ever since Obama talked about bad luck on his America Under The Bus Tour last week.

“Over the last six months, we’ve had a string of bad luck. There have been some things that we could not control. You had an Arab Spring in the Middle East that promises more democracy and more human rights for people, but also drove up gas prices. Tough for the economy, a lot of uncertainty. And then you had the situation in Europe, where they’re dealing with all sorts of debt challenges. And that washes up on our shores. And then you had a tsunami in Japan, and that broke supply chains and created difficulties for the economy all across the globe. So there were a bunch of things taking place over the past six months that were not in our control.”

He already got a lot of well-deserved derision and scorn for that bit of “Bo ate my homework” excusifying, so I’m not going to pile on. I want to talk about  luck. Luck is constant in life; sometimes good, sometimes bad. This is so universal that every culture has at least one deity of Fortune or Chance. Here’s the thing. When things are going well, you are healthy, making a decent living, prospects are good, then bad luck is merely an annoyance, a temporary set-back. However, when you are ill, not eating regularly and subsisting on junk, and the future is bleak, luck is everything. This is true for individuals, for families, and for nations. This is part of what went into the ancient Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, which said that Heaven would bless the authority of a just ruler, but would withdraw its favor from bad rulers, which would lead to that ruler’s overthrow. The signs that a ruler had lost  the mandate of Heaven included, guess what, poverty and natural disasters. This seems superstitious at first glance but when you think about it it actually makes a lot of sense because poverty and natural disasters, under a bad ruler, equal widespread suffering. Under a good ruler, poverty is limited and disasters are quickly mitigated. Oil spills are shut down and cleaned up right away. FEMA works. Suffering is alleviated.

If it seems un-American for me to talk about the President as a “ruler” and to invoke an ancient Chinese concept to boot (hey, everything comes from China these days, even MLK monuments), consider that it is Obama who has, from the start, claimed the trappings of the divine right of kings when he, upon undeservedly grabbing the Democratic nomination, said:

“generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that … this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.”

By invoking bad luck as an excuse, Obama has confessed that he has lost his claim to a “divine” mandate. Nobody follows an unlucky leader.

It keeps getting better and better

"There goes a librul now!"

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The New Yorker:

A Different Kind of Texan

Non-Texans are bound to look at Perry and see a reprise of Bush’s swagger and twang. In Texas, however, the two men are seen as very different. Bush has money, a famous name, and two Ivy League degrees. Perry has none of those assets. Bush was a businessman; Perry was a cotton farmer. When Bush was governor, Democrats were still a factor in Texas politics, and he was notably bipartisan; under Perry, the two relevant parties are the Republican Party and the Tea Party. He leans toward the radicals.

Perry is the first graduate of Texas A & M to govern Texas. When he was a freshman, in 1968, the student body looked much like him: white, male, determinedly rural. Aggie jokes of the country-bumpkin variety are still standard fare in Texas. (“How many Aggies does it take to screw in a light bulb? One, but he gets three hours of credit.”) At A & M, Perry ran the winning campaign of his friend John Sharp for student-body president. In response, Sharp got his friend elected one of the campus’s five “yell leaders”—male cheerleaders. Perry considered being a yeller the higher office. A typical yell is: “Squads left! Squads right! / Farmers, farmers, we’re all right! / Load, ready, aim, fire, BOOM!” During tense moments in a football game, yellers grab their balls and shout, “Squeeze, Aggies!”

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It may come as a surprise to some people but Dubya was born in Connecticut. That makes him a Yankee. Like him or not, Perry is the real deal.

From Althouse:

A reader emails:

Squeezing is only figurative, and the yell leaders do it when the football team is attempting to kick a field goal. Before the ball is snapped, they run down to the end zone and kneel down on one knee, abreast of one another with one hand over their crotch, waiting expectantly for the kick. The “squeeze” is a figurative gesture, nobody really squeezes. It’s all done in good fun–a bombastic notion that self-induced pain would affect an outcome on the field. People in the stands do it also, even girls.

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I’m laughing too hard to comment

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The religion of science

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British scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins, in a WaPo column ironically titled “On Faith”:

Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact

There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

[...]

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

[...]

Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur to a human mind. The power of a scientific theory may be measured as a ratio: the number of facts that it explains divided by the number of assumptions it needs to postulate in order to do the explaining. A theory that assumes most of what it is trying to explain is a bad theory. That is why the creationist or ‘intelligent design’ theory is such a rotten theory.

What any theory of life needs to explain is functional complexity. Complexity can be measured as statistical improbability, and living things are statistically improbable in a very particular direction: the direction of functional efficiency. The body of a bird is not just a prodigiously complicated machine, with its trillions of cells – each one in itself a marvel of miniaturized complexity – all conspiring together to make muscle or bone, kidney or brain. Its interlocking parts also conspire to make it good for something – in the case of most birds, good for flying. An aero-engineer is struck dumb with admiration for the bird as flying machine: its feathered flight-surfaces and ailerons sensitively adjusted in real time by the on-board computer which is the brain; the breast muscles, which are the engines, the ligaments, tendons and lightweight bony struts all exactly suited to the task. And the whole machine is immensely improbable in the sense that, if you randomly shook up the parts over and over again, never in a million years would they fall into the right shape to fly like a swallow, soar like a vulture, or ride the oceanic up-draughts like a wandering albatross. Any theory of life has to explain how the laws of physics can give rise to a complex flying machine like a bird or a bat or a pterosaur, a complex swimming machine like a tarpon or a dolphin, a complex burrowing machine like a mole, a complex climbing machine like a monkey, or a complex thinking machine like a person.

Darwin explained all of this with one brilliantly simple idea – natural selection, driving gradual evolution over immensities of geological time. His is a good theory because of the huge ratio of what it explains (all the complexity of life) divided by what it needs to assume (simply the nonrandom survival of hereditary information through many generations). The rival theory to explain the functional complexity of life – creationism – is about as bad a theory as has ever been proposed. What it postulates (an intelligent designer) is even more complex, even more statistically improbable than what it explains. In fact it is such a bad theory it doesn’t deserve to be called a theory at all, and it certainly doesn’t deserve to be taught alongside evolution in science classes.

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Most of you are probably aware that I was raised in a fundiegelical church (Nazarene) but I don’t roll holy anymore. Although I often discuss freedom of religion and quote scriptures in support of political arguments, I rarely discuss my current religious beliefs.

I am an equal opportunity snark dealer, and I don’t consider religion to be taboo. But I am troubled by the sneering contempt I often see for people of faith coming from progressives and even some liberals.

Ignorance and lack of education are NOT positive qualifications in today’s Republican party. In fact, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to have 4-year college degrees. One factoid I ran across in college is that Newt Gingrich’s congressional district in Cobb County, Georgia has the highest average of college graduates in the nation.

Rick Perry attended Texas A&M University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in animal science. Sarah Palin also has a bachelor’s degree (from the the University of Idaho) and her father, Charles R. “Chuck” Heath, is a science teacher. I’m pretty sure neither one of them is ignorant of the theory of evolution.

Dawkins points out that life is incredibly complex. Believers in “intelligent design” point out that same fact but argue that the complexity of life is proof that the universe didn’t just happen. They accept the theory of evolution but argue that it is the mechanism the creator used to make the world as it is today.

Evolution does not explain where life began. When I took biology they taught us the Law of Biogenesis – that all life comes from preexisting life. Science would have us believe that at some point “increasingly complex molecules” in a “primordial soup” spontaneously made the jump from non-life to living cells, after which evolution took over. No one has yet recreated this event, however.

As for the origin of the universe itself, believers in intelligent design argue that the “Big Bang” theory is not inconsistent with the Genesis account of creation. They also point out that science has yet to disprove the existence of God.

From a political standpoint, sneering contempt for large numbers of people, many of whom are Democrats, is not conducive to winning elections. But for all their superior intellect, some people can’t seem to grasp that concept.

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