swimming freestyle

Noonan v. Palin

Peggy Noonan is kinda hit and miss for me.  Sometimes she seems she just can't figure out how to say what she wants to say and there have been a couple times when she's just been furiously vacant, as when she recently suggested we should all just ignore U.S. use of torture because it was just too unseemly.

But Ms. Noonan nailed her column today on Sarah Palin, taking the Palinphiles talking points and unraveling them:

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

Ouch.

Focus groups allow pundits to "fine tune" their positions

Ever wonder how all those cable news pundits form their positions?  From the Onion:

New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time

Some perspective on that Rasmussen poll

Polls are fun and sometimes enlightening.  And sometimes they appear to be more than they are.

A couple days ago, I wrote a post on the new Rasmussen poll of Republican voters and their choices for the 2012 GOP presidential nominee.  Here's one of the questions Rasmussen posed to those Republican voters:

1* I know it’s a long way off, but suppose the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary were held in your state today. If you had a choice between Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty, for whom would you vote?

25% Romney
24% Palin
22% Huckabee
14% Gingrich
1% Barbour
1% Pawlenty
6% Some other candidate
6% Not sure

Sarah Palin supporters were quick to jump on the poll results as confirmation the governor was still a big player in GOP politics and stunts like bailing from her responsibilities as governor were no big deal to the "true believers".  But before those Palinphiles break out the champagne, they ought to think back to their elementary school math class when they learned (or, perhaps, didn't learn) about decimals.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll in April showed about 21% of Americans identifying themselves as Republicans.  The Rasmussen poll surveyed Republicans only and found 24% of them claiming they would vote for Sarah Palin in 2012. 

OK, getting the calculator here....0.21 x 0.24 = 0.05.   If your math is a little rusty, that 5% of Americans who would vote for Sarah Palin in 2012.

To be fair, Ms. Palin would undoubtedly get some Independent voters and perhaps even some Democratic votes as well.  But to suggest that Sarah Palin, at least at this point, is a big time formidable force in the 2012 presidential race is nonsense.

Panetta admits CIA misled Congress

A couple months ago, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, asserted the Central Intelligence Agency misled Congressional members when it came to disclosing details about its use of torture during the interrogation of war on terror detainees.

The Speaker received some support and corroboration from a number of other members, both Republicans and Democrats.  But the GOP leadership cynically thought it was an opportunity to make some political points with fake outrage that Ms. Pelosi would dare question the CIA.

"I think her accusations against our terror-fighters are irresponsible and, according to the CIA's record, Speaker Pelosi was briefed on what had been done," said Sen. Kit Bond, the senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "It's outrageous that a member of Congress would call our terror-fighters liars." (Link)

Guess what? 

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, has told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that the C.I.A. concealed "significant actions" from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said.

In a June 26 letter to Mr. Panetta discussing his testimony, Democrats said that the agency had "misled members" of Congress for eight years about the classified matters, which the letter did not disclose. "This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods," said the letter, made public late Wednesday by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the signers. (Link)

It's not likely the GOP will make much noise about this as it exposes Sen. Kit Bond and his co-conspirators as petty liars. 

The tragedy, of course, is that the real story will be lost; that the CIA deliberately acted independently and illegally without oversight.

I suppose one can infer that's acceptable to the new Republican Party.

FOX News celebrities ≠ smart either

When the topic turned to recent Finnish and Swedish research that proposed married folks are less inclined to develop Alzheimer's Disease, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade must have thought it was the perfect moment to demonstrate that even knuckleheads have can score a gig on a major network television show.

Uh, other species?  Like kangaroos or albacore tuna?  And what's with the whole "pure genes" thing?  Yuck.

Since I'm full of axioms today...

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

Elected ≠ Smart

I remember being a boy and having such reverence for elected officials.  I was certain that they were the smartest of the smart, that they had the wisdom and judgment to debate the worlds most complicated issues. 

Jeez, was I sooooo wrong.  Here's Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen, after voting to open up uranium mining in the state and assuring Arizona citizens that all those fancy regulations are really kinda lame since the earth has "been here 6,000 years" without all that environmental nonsense.

(h/t TYWKIWDBI)

About that Gallup poll

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet  -  Juliet in William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"

I read the recent Gallup poll on American's ideology the other day and chalked it up to another case of confusing labels with ideology.  While polls have consistently shown Americans consider themselves "conservative", drilling a wee bit deeper reveals Americans have decidedly liberal views.  And one not need look further back than the 2008 elections, when Americans overwhelmingly elected a Democratic president and Congress, to question the "depth" of American's conservatism. 

Here's a chart from the poll:

It strikes me that simplified polling terms like "conservative" and "liberal" might be ultimately misleading and American's response to the rather simple question is invariably going to be influenced by political party marketing, the news of the day, and peer pressure.

I used Juliet's line at the beginning of the post to suggest what folks call their ideology is far less significant than how they end up voting.  There's another famous saying that's equally apropos:

"Call me anything you want.  Just don't call me late for dinner"

Top Ten Messages On Sarah Palin's Answering Machine

From last night's Letterman:

Republicans polled on their 2012 presidential nominees

Rasmussen polls have become increasingly known as outliers and particularly slanted in favor of conservative positions.  I have no idea whether that's purposeful, but it's well known that the design of questions can have a remarkable effect on the outcome of a poll.

But Rasmussen's new poll of Republican voters is interesting, nonetheless. 

1* I know it’s a long way off, but suppose the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary were held in your state today. If you had a choice between Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty, for whom would you vote?

25% Romney
24% Palin
22% Huckabee
14% Gingrich
1% Barbour
1% Pawlenty
6% Some other candidate
6% Not sure

2* Okay…regardless of who you would vote for, which candidate would you least like to see win the Republican nomination in 2012…. Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour or Tim Pawlenty?

9% Romney
21% Palin
10% Huckabee
15% Gingrich
21% Barbour
15% Pawlenty
11% Not sure

A couple interesting things about the poll;

  -  As the survey was conducted subsequent to Sarah Palin's decision to bail on her responsiblities as governor, it's the first glimpse into how Ms. Palin's actions are being regarded by Republicans.  While she's essentially tied with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee as a frontrunner, she also leads the field in the ranking of candidates Republicans would least like to see emerge as the Party nominee.  Some kind of bipolar condition for the Republicans.

  -  Given that all three of the frontrunners ran for the office (or Vice President in Palin's case) and were rejected by their own party, they pretty clearly have to play some serious catch up over the next couple years.

  -  What happened to Bobby Jindal?  Already a goner for the Republicans?

The U.S.; a republic or a corporatocracy?

"Corporatocracy" is the term Allison Kilkenny used in an essay today to describe our current state of federal governing.  Dovetailing nicely with yesterday's post on health care lobbyists, Ms. Kilkenny notes that something on the order of $1.4M a day (yes, you read that correctly - that's 1.4 MILLION dollars PER DAY) is being spent by large health care companies to lobby Congress during these health care reform debates.

So, while poll after poll presents overwhelming evidence that Americans want a public option included in the reform, its reasonably safe to assume that the companies pouring all that money into Congress will get the health care reform that they prefer instead. 

In her article, Ms. Kilkenny recalls that Canada took steps to curb lobbyists influence with their 2008 Federal Accountability Act.  The act includes provisions for documenting arranged meetings between lobbyists and government officials, and imposes stiff monetary penalties for violations of the Act.

No such law exists here.  As the chart yesterday indicated, health care companies know this is crunch time and are pulling out all the stops to guarantee an outcome that's favorable to them and their stockholders.  And as the chart also made clear, this isn't a Republican issue or a Democratic issue.  It's a Congressional issue.  It needs to be fixed.

Maybe there's something to be gained here by recalling the definition of republic:  : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.  (My emphasis and italics)