Talk about an inappropriate use of federal funds: The Democratic and Republican conventions received $136 million in taxpayer subsidies.
It is healthy for America that the president be criticized and even mocked. Deference to a Dear Leader has no place in a democracy. It’s healthy for race relations, too, that he be judged on his record rather than held to a lower standard in the name of racial progress. When a black politician is treated just like any other politician, that’s genuine progress.
And then there’s this:
Obama’s journalistic supporters live in a bizarre alternate reality in which a politician’s actual words mean nothing. When the president says something foolish and offensive, he didn’t say that. Meanwhile every comment from a Republican can be translated, through a process of free association, to: “We don’t like black people.”
Taranto’s second point above suggests to me that there are a lot of people on the left whose recent behavior is making them ripe targets for some very healthy ridicule.
Read the whole thing.
Scott Rasmussen: “While partisan activists tune in when their team’s big show is on the air, most unaffiliated voters view the conventions as a waste of time and money.”
Read the whole thing. His analysis of the meaninglessness of the political conventions to the ordinary voter is right on the money. More significant, his willingness to separate himself from the political atmosphere of Washington and try to empathize with those ordinary voters illustrates clearly why he is today’s most reliable pollster.
Leftwing civility: The makers of a documentary critical of the Occupy Wall Street movement have received threats of violence against themselves and their families in advance of the film’s premiere.
“We’ll be legitimately raping Brandon Darby and Lee Stranahan for the next several days while they are tied up with the movie premier at the RNC,” reads an email from occupyaunmasked2012@gmail.com. The email includes Darby’s and Stranahan’s cell phone numbers.
One tweet reads, “While @Shanahan is in Tampa this week, should Texas rapists be told where to find his wife since he supports the rape of everyone else?”
“My wife is home with our four kids and freaked out,” Stranahan told The Hollywood Reporter. “She’s sick to her stomach.” Stranahan and Darby each said their home addresses have been published online by those who claim sympathy to OWS.
If you depend on the conservative commentary about Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech yesterday at the Republican convention to find out how he did, you would have no doubt that this was the greatest and most effective speech since Genesis. To quote just one report:
Paul Ryan’s speech, in two words? Nailed it. Everything that I like (and surmise that others will like as he becomes more and more familiar to them) about Paul Ryan was on perfect display during his half hour-ish on stage. He was intelligent without being intimidating; he was stern and serious but still optimistic and even funny; and he hinted at his wonkiness without getting into jargon and maintained his approachability. But the most beautiful thing about Paul Ryan as the potential vice president of the United States is his uncanny knack for breaking through populist myths and shrill leftist attacks and instead communicating the merits of free-market economics and small government, all without being shrill or polarizing.
Because I’m not spending a lot of time watching these conventions, mostly because they really are nothing more than public relations events staged by both parties, I didn’t see the speech live. After reading reports like the one above, however, I decided late last night to go to youtube and dig up Ryan’s speech and see this amazing performance for myself.
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The Republican Party, as part of their national convention taking place in Florida this week, yesterday released their party platform for the upcoming election campaign.
Normally, I don’t waste my time with party platforms. No one really reads it, and no president ever follows it. Granted, it can give you a general sense of where a party and candidate is headed philosophically, but this is politics. If you think philosophy is their number one priority then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.
However, this document is helpful to us, at least when it comes to the nation’s space effort, as it actually devotes one entire (though short) section on the subject. Considering how vague Mitt Romney has been on what he will do with NASA and space, and how schizophrenic the Republicans in Congress have been, any hint on how they might approach this particular program should they win the election is helpful.
Here is the entire statement of the Republican party platform on the subject of space exploration:
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How not to go cave exploring:
An international crew of six astronauts will start training for a caving adventure designed to prepare them for spaceflight. CAVES, an abbreviation of Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills, prepares astronauts to work safely and effectively and solve problems as a multicultural team while exploring uncharted areas using space procedures.
Or to put it more bluntly, overly complicated, bureaucratically organized, and not very efficient. For example:
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We’ve only just begun: Two more evangelical colleges have joined the lawsuit against the Obama administrations’ contraceptive drug mandate under Obamacare.
Why a New York Times’ science columnist is bad for science.
Leftwing civility: An aide to Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren threatened and pushed a reporter this weekend, knocking his video camera to the ground.
I like the aide’s comment at the end of the video: “You’re messing with the wrong people.” Video below the fold.
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An evening pause: Apropos of the uplifting nature of modern political debate, especially on the left, let’s find out why “Bob is a racist.”
Modern political civility: Todd Akin, whose stupid comments about rape have practically destroyed his Senate campaign in Missouri, is receiving death threats against himself, his family, and his staff.
I don’t know if the threats are coming from either the left or the right. The left kind of wants Akin to stay in the race so that Claire McCaskill has a better shot at winning. Yet, the left has also been quite willing in recent years to express and even commit violence against their opponents. For these kinds of death threats to come from the left would not be unusual or surprising. The right meanwhile is furious at Akin, mostly because of the absolute stupidity and ignorance exhibited by his comments. It is likely that the comments will cost them an easy Senate win, which in turn might cost them control of the Senate. Yet, threats of violence from the right are rare.
Thus, it is hard to say what politics might be instigating these threats.
It really doesn’t matter. The threats are horrible, and are far worse than anything Todd Akin said. I hope the police find and arrest every single person who sent a threat.
Leftwing civility: A Connecticut gay man has pleaded guilty to sending hundreds of threatening letters, including death threats, to the director of a conservative organization opposed to same-sex marriage.
Some quotes from his letters:
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A rose by any other name: NASA scientists are in a battle with astronomers over who gets to name things on Vesta and Mars.
This is not a new problem. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has maintained its power over naming everything in space since the 1960s, even though the IAU has sometimes ignored the wishes of the actual discoverers and explorers and given names to things that no one likes. For example, even though the Apollo 8 astronauts wanted to give certain unnamed features on the Moon specific names, the IAU refused to accept their choices, even though those astronauts were the first human beings to reach another world and see these features up close.
Eventually, the spacefarers of the future are going to tell the IAU where to go. And that will begin to happen when those spacefarers simply refuse to use the names the IAU assigns.
Coming soon to a country near you! In order to control the out-of-control costs of RomneyCare, Massachusetts has just passed a law that places the state in control of every doctor and everything they do in the practice of medicine.
It’s worse than you think:
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NASA has announced its next planetary mission, a lander to Mars that will drill down thirty feet into the planet’s surface.
Though exciting in its own right, this mission is far less ambitious than the two missions which competed against it, a boat that would have floated on the lakes of Titan and a probe that would have bounced repeatedly off the surface of a comet. I suspect the reason this mission was chosen is the tight budgets at NASA, combined with Curiosity’s success which makes it politically advantageous to approve another Mars mission. As the NASA press release emphasized,
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A detailed, fact-based look at the successes and failures of the Obama administration.
Sadly, they are mostly failures. What is significant to me is that this article is from liberal Newsweek of all places. It is another data point indicating that even the intellectuals on the left are beginning to realize how much of a failure Obama has been.
This Ohio newspaper editorial about the Presidential race and the choices it offers us might be the most forcefully blunt I have ever read.
Read it and then return. Back yet? Okay, two comments:
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The modern leftwing disconnect from reality.
[L]ast week a man called Floyd Corkins shot another man called Leo Johnson, the security guard at the Family Research Council, a “conservative” group, according to the muted media coverage, or a “hate group,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who spray that term around like champagne on a NASCAR podium. Mr. Corkins, an “LGBT volunteer,” told his victim, “I don’t like your politics.” In his backpack, he had one box of ammunition and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Had he had one Chick-fil-A sandwich and 15 boxes of ammunition, he might have done more damage. Or then again perhaps not, given that, as bloggers Kathy Shaidle and “the Phantom” pointed out, he reached his target and then started “monologuing,” as they say in The Incredibles….
I’m not blaming Floyd Corkins’s actions on the bullying twerps at the Southern Poverty Law Center or those thug Democrat mayors who tried to run Chick-fil-A out of Boston and Chicago. But I do think he’s the apotheosis of narcissistic leftist myopia. He symbolizes that exhaustion of the other possibilities — the dwindling down of latter-day liberalism to ever more self-indulgent distractions from the hard truths of a broke and ruined landscape. Our elites have sunk into a boutique decadence of moral preening entirely disconnected from reality: A non-homophobic chicken in every pot, an abortifacient dispenser in every Catholic university, a high-speed-rail corridor between every two bankrupt California municipalities.
Read the whole thing. Steyn once again notes the bankruptcy of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party, which — unless the American public rejects it — will lead to the bankruptcy of our country and probably the world.
Not good: A federal court has thrown out a lawsuit by an automobile industry consortium that wanted to prevent the EPA from approving the use of 15% ethanol in gasoline.
One businessman’s comment on Barack Obama.
It starts here and only gets better.
As a small business owner all I can say is that I think the current sentiment in the small business community is that we didn’t sign up for this shit. Y’all can vote for whatever the hell you want but we are not going to be a part of it.
A modern intellectual looks at the Syrian revolt and immediately concludes that it was caused by global warming!
Climate change: is there anything it can’t do?
Seriously, the drought in Syria might be a factor behind the revolt, but to assert that the drought was caused by global warming is weak at best. There is no data to make that assertion, none at all. All we have is the opinion of some global warming scientists that such extreme droughts might happen more frequently as the Earth warms. And since the temperature increase as predicted by those very same scientists has not occurred, we should take all their predictions with a big grain of salt.
Racists! 400 economic experts have signed a petition supporting Romney’s economic plans.
They also condemned the efforts and future proposals of the Obama administration.
Leftwing civility: An elderly leftwing protester spits in the face of at Romney supporter at a campaign event today.
When the left made the accusation that a tea party protester had spat at a Democratic Congressman during the healthcare debate, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide video proving it happened. Three years later that award remains unclaimed, since the only videos of the event show nothing of the sort took place. Today, not only was this disgusting act actually done by a Democratic protester, in mere hours the video is all over the internet.
Tells us something about who are the uncivil ones in this debate.
What does this tell us? New data now suggests that in swing states there has been a significant decline in Democratic registration contrasted with big gains for Republicans voter registration in the upcoming election.
The numbers are startling. Two key quotes:
In Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada — tossup states where direct election-year comparisons could be drawn — the numbers are striking. Democratic rolls increased by only 39,580, less than one-tenth the amount at the comparable point in the 2008 election. At the same time, GOP registration has jumped by 145,085, or more than double for the same time four years ago. Independent registration has shown an even stronger surge, to 229,500, almost three times the number at this point in 2008.
And this:
Based on recent data, Democratic registration has declined by more than 800,000, or 5.2 percent; Republican enrollments were down about 80,000, or 0.7 percent; and independents were up 486,677, or 6.4 percent, in [battleground] states.
These numbers favor the Republicans by 3.5 to 1 and 10 to 1, respectively, numbers that are astonishing. More significantly, these numbers are for the swing states, the very places where voters have been undecided and willing to shift from one side to the other. Thus, these numbers tell us that these voters are now swinging strongly in one direction, and that direction is towards the Republicans.
