Handicapping The Race

Looking at the Republican potential / declared candidates for President in 2012, here is how I see their chances:

3 to 1 - Paul Ryan: The economy is the single most important issue facing our nation going into 2012. Ryan understands the economics of our government the way few do - and he can explain the economics, albeit a bit woodenly. Most importantly, he has had the intellectual honesty and huevos grande to go where few politicians dare tread, proposing specific reforms to our entitlement boondoggles. Negatives - he says he won't run.
Ability to beat Obama: 54 to 46.

5 to 1 - Chris Christie: His winning wars with the unions and the democratic legislature in NJ have been the stuff of youtube gold. He is articulate and doesn't back down an inch. His ability to communicate is the best of any politician on either side of the aisle.
Negatives - He says he won't run. He wants to keep NJ pensions as defined benefit plans. Lastly, he seems to have RINO tendencies on issues such as gun control, as well as zero understanding of the threat we face from political Islam.
Ability to beat Obama: 53 to 47.

6 to 1 - Mitch Daniels: Daniels too understands economics, having served as Director of OMB. As a two-term Gov. of Indiana, Daniels has taken Indiana from a significant deficit to fiscal sanity. His first day as Gov., Daniels decertified all government employee unions by executive order and did away with the requirement that State employees pay mandatory union dues. In 2008, he passed laws creating a statewide school voucher program and merit pay for teachers. He also oversaw passage of laws penalizing companies who employed illegal aliens as well as denying illegal aliens in-state tuition.
Negatives: His earlier call for a truce on social issues has left SoCon's leery. Moreover, one of his first acts as Gov. was to submit a fiscal plan that called for tax increases. Lastly, he is still playing coy, promising to decide on whether to enter the race "soon."
Ability to beat Obama: 53 to 47.


8 to 1 - Mitt Romney: He is a well known quantity from the 2008 election. He was a very successful businessman and a former governor of bluest of blue Mass. He will likely be able to raise a huge warchest. And lastly, he is the "next man in line," which seems to be the way Republicans choose their nominees.
Negatives: Romneycare, Romneycare, Romneycare. Did I mention Romneycare.
Ability to beat Obama: 51 to 49.

10 - 1 Michelle Bachman: She is still a bit of a mystery to me. She has embraced the tea party and taken strong positions on social issues, leading others more knowledgeable about her than I to say that she has the SoCon vote largely sewn up. I have not heard her debate anyone yet. I do know that she has very strong money raising potential.
Negatives: She has already gotten a bit of the Sarah Palin treatment from the media, claiming that she is an intellectual light weight. If she does well in debates, she could easily move up the ladder.
Ability to beat Obama: 50 to 50.

10 - 1 Herman Cain: An extremely successful businessman and an arch-conservative talk show host. He is likable, well spoken and has the best business bona fides of anyone in the race. He is able to think quickly on his feet and is very knowledgeable about all of the major political issues.
Negatives: No experience in government. His health is also a concern.
Ability to beat Obama: 50 to 50.

15 - 1 - Sarah Palin: She is the most well known of all the potential candidates. She is intelligent, articulate and beautiful. But having been the subject of the most relentless leftwing media jihad in our nations history, she is a wild card. If she enters the race, and she might, I could easily see her placing second, if not first.
Negatives - She has already been successfully labled by the left as an intellectual lightweight. She would have to overcome that label and overcome questions regarding her decision to resign from the governorship of Alaska.
Ability to beat Obama: 49 to 51.

15 - 1 - Jeb Bush: He is the Bush that his family thought would be President. By all accounts, he did an excellent job as Gov. of Florida, making positive changes in the areas of education, medical malpractice and Medicare.
Negatives: He has indicated that he will likely not run. And of course, his last name is Bush - a liability for probably the next 4 to 6 years.
Ability to beat Obama: 49 to 51.

100 - 1 - Jon Huntsman: One of the key issues facing us is the left's insane push to treat carbon as a pollutant, with all the ramifications that has for our economy. A few days ago, Huntsman said he believes in man-made global warming. Moreover, while he was Gov. of Utah, he embraced the stimulus.
Negatives: I don't see much positive about Huntsman at this point.
Ability to beat Obama: 47 to 53.

999 to 1 - Ron Paul: From an uber-isolationist foreign policy to his embrace of the gold standard, Ron Paul is the Republican's crazy uncle.
Ability to beat Obama: 30 to 70.

1,000,000 to 1 - Chuck Schumer: I list Schumer simply to put the chances of Newt Gingrich in perspective.
Ability to beat Obama: 0.

1,000,001 to 1 - Newt Gingrich: Having gone on the Sunday talk shows and played Russian roulette with all chambers filled, Gingrich has destroyed any possible chance of winning the nomination for Republican candidate for the Presidency. But all is not lost. He could still mount a primary challenge to Obama.
Ability to beat Obama: 0

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The New Left Wing Civility - No Change From The Old Left Wing Civility

I am so tired of outrageous acts of the left to silence the speech of those people they dislike. And I would really like to see the right grow some a set and refuse to cave in to left wing primal screams. This from No Oil For Pacifists:

A visit former U.S. President George W. Bush planned to make to Switzerland next week has been canceled because of security concerns, after left-wing groups called for mass protests and rights activists proposed legal action against him for allegedly ordering the torture of terrorism suspects. . . .

. . . Saying it received an "onslaught of personal attacks," a Colorado nonprofit announced in a news release today that it was canceling a scheduled May appearance in Glendale by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Conservatives really need to stop putting up with this. If the left wants to fight, we should, by all means, honor their request many times over.

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Dangerous Maps

Apparently only the Palin map is capable of taking our political dialogue to heretofore unseen levels of militancy in America. Who knew - well, other than Krugman, Faber, Moulitas, the NYT, Rep. Clyburn, Sen. Durbin, etc.

H/T to Rides A Pale Horse, commenting at Flopping Aces.

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Krauthammer: "The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?"

Charles Krauthammer, in a former life, Chief Resident in Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, makes a rare Wednesday appearance in the Washington Post to address the insanity at work in Arizona, and the transparent political gambit using the dead and injured coming out of New York and Washington. Given his perspective both as a former psychiatrist and now, as perhaps the most astute political observer of our time, I quote him in full on this issue.

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the "climate of hate" created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.

As killers go, Jared Loughner is not reticent. Yet among all his writings, postings, videos and other ravings - and in all the testimony from all the people who knew him - there is not a single reference to any of these supposed accessories to murder.

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. "His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world," said the teacher of Loughner's philosophy class at Pima Community College. "He was very disconnected from reality," said classmate Lydian Ali. "You know how it is when you talk to someone who's mentally ill and they're just not there?" said neighbor Jason Johnson. "It was like he was in his own world."

His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with "unnerving, long stupors of silence" during which he would "stare fixedly at his buddies," reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through "grammar." He was obsessed with "conscious dreaming," a fairly good synonym for hallucinations.

This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder - ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.

These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic. And a dangerous one. A classmate found him so terrifyingly mentally disturbed that, she e-mailed friends and family, she expected to find his picture on TV after his perpetrating a mass murder. This was no idle speculation: In class "I sit by the door with my purse handy" so that she could get out fast when the shooting began.

Furthermore, the available evidence dates Loughner's fixation on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to at least 2007, when he attended a town hall of hers and felt slighted by her response. In 2007, no one had heard of Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck was still toiling on Headline News. There was no Tea Party or health-care reform. The only climate of hate was the pervasive post-Iraq campaign of vilification of George W. Bush, nicely captured by a New Republic editor who had begun an article thus: "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it."

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power - military conquest. That's why the language persists. That's why we say without any self-consciousness such things as "battleground states" or "targeting" opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest - "campaign" - is an appropriation from warfare.

When profiles of Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive - and creative - political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill - while intoning, "I'll take dead aim at [it]" - he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel's little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd - unless you're the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

I do not think Krugman or any of the others on the left are delusional. They - Krugman, the NYT, Moulitas, Rep. Clyburn and others on the left - seized on this mass murder while the blood of the innocents was still wet on the ground in a transparent effort to delegitimize their opposition. It is so transparent and so outrageous, so outside the bounds of legitimate political discourse - or as WSJ's John Fund puts it, crossing a moral line - that if there is any cosmic justice in the world, this will rebound against them.

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More On Jared Loughner's Slaughter In Arizona & Leftwing Media Hypocrisy

Two exceptional essays by Byron York and Ed Morissey on the mass murder by Jared Loughner and the media / left's rush to tie this act to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. Byron York compares this rush to the media / left's actions after the Ft. Hood shooting by Nidal Hassan. Morissey builds on that, pointing to CNN's scurrilous reporting, and points to some words used by the left - the very tip of the iceberg - during the last campaign by Obama and the DNC concerning politics and bullseye's on targets for Democratic pickup.

This from Byron York:

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going "to do good work for God." There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not "jump to conclusions" about Hasan's motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

"The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions," said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.

"We cannot jump to conclusions," said CNN's Jane Velez-Mitchell that same evening. "We have to make sure that we do not jump to any conclusions whatsoever."

"I'm on Pentagon chat room," said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. "Right now, there's messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam."

Actually, that was responsible reporting at the time, at least until it became conclusively shown that Nidal in fact was motivated by Salafi Islam to carry out his mass murder. But as York goes on to discuss, in the very hours after this murder, with no evidence initially and then with the mounting evidence to the contrary, the left wing generally, and the left wing media in particular, have been falling all over themselves to tie this to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and the rise in "hate speech" that the left wants everyone to believe is a phenomena unique to the past two years.

Ed Morrisey points out the massive hypocrisy of CNN to speculate that Palin and the Tea Party were responsible in any way for this mass murder and adds:

. . . as has been repeatedly pointed out in the hours since, Democrats have also used crosshairs and bulls-eye imagery in their own political communications, including one in Arizona “targeting” J. D Hayworth of Arizona. As far as the “reload” comment, it was less than three years ago that Barack Obama himself talked about responding to political opponents with a gun analogy:

Mobster wisdom tells us never to bring a knife to a gun fight. But what does political wisdom say about bringing a gun to a knife fight?

That’s exactly what Barack Obama said he would do to counter Republican attacks

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night. “Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

The comment drew some laughs and applause. But it also struck a chord with his Republican rival. John McCain’s campaign immediately accused the Democratic candidate of playing the politics of fear. They also mentioned that Obama said he would use a gun that would be illegal under Obama’s plans to cut down on illegal firearms.

Getting hysterical about the use of war terminology in politics is about as hypocritical as one can possibly get, as Howard Kurtz explained yesterday, especially for journalists covering politics . . .

To add a few thoughts, as to the Tea Party at least, the left would like us to believe that a determination to stop deficit spending, to lower taxes, and an inchoate desire to return to the Constitution at the time of the founding somehow is an invitation to violence. To the contrary, it is a call for a return to law.

The same cannot be said of at least a portion of the violent left wing rhetoric that has been with us since the days of Vietnam. Indeed, that was a world that gave us The Weathermen and many others who called for violence and who, in fact, did commit politically motivated violence, murder and mayhem. And to pretend violent rhetoric is an artifact of the right is ridiculous. The left's violent rhetoric was raised to an art form during the Bush years and, indeed, is still with us.





And on a closely related issue, where is the media outrage when we have seen, over the past few years, vile reverse racism, all of it accepted without comment by the left. Seemingly at the drop of a hat, the left calls virtualy anything they don't like "racism," wholly irrespective of racial animus. These people in fact have motivated mass murders, including the sniper murders by John Allen Mohammed and the murders by Omar Thorton, who last year at a distributorship in Connecticut, killed eight of his co-workers.




Silence.

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Yes, Virginia, There Are Stupid Questions

Whoever said that there are no such thing as stupid questions, only stupid answers - they were 180 degrees of wrong. There are some questions whose answers are so obvious that they leave one wondering how the person asking it is able to breathe without regular reminders. There are some questions that, after being asked, leave one with the firm impression that the person asking it is likely mystified by the daily rising and setting of the sun. The stupid - it really does burn.

So it is today from the Michael Calderone at the Politico where he asks Does the press really vet presidential candidates?

Wait . . . wait . . . . it gets even worse. In excusing the MSM's failure to report on John Edward's, Calderone opines:

And with numerous candidates in both parties to cover, it’s not surprising that news organizations largely ignored the report of a “love child” between Edwards and Hunter just a few weeks before the Iowa vote.

Clearly, there is a disconnect here. You can bet your right arm that had it been McCain or Palin instead of Edwards, the issue of a love child coming on top of their repeated denial of an affair while their spouse was ill with terminal cancer would have had every last reporter in our MSM - and more than a few editors - pivoting and leaving a trail of slime all the way from Iowa to the nursrey inside of Hunter's home.

We just went through an election cycle to elect a man with no experience in the executive or military, a man with no business experience, a man with less then a year in the Senate when he began to run for office, a man with an open history of radical friends and alliances, a man who wrote an autobiography explaining how a preacher speaking of "white man's greed" moved him to his core, and this press turned a blind eye to all of it. Obama sat in the pews of the bomb throwing uber-racist Rev. Wright for 20 years, yet claims that Rev. Wright only spoke sweetness and light whenever he was there. Yet not a member of the MSM bothered to follow up. Where were the people who were supposed to be vetting Obama? Clearly they weren't at John Edward's house either. Those that weren't writing hit pieces suggesting McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist were all in Alaska checking sifting through the frozen dirt in Sarah Palin's home town.

If Calderone does not realize that the left does vet in painstaking detail - but only Republicans - well, suffice it to say, I am amazed he knows enough grammer and has sufficient command of vocabulary even to compose his question.

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She Speaks

Well, she writes, actually, in today's Washington Post, attacking the disaster that is Obama's cap and trade plan. It is vintage Palin, on point and with a bit of cynical humor.

. . . I am deeply concerned about President Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.

American prosperity has always been driven by the steady supply of abundant, affordable energy. Particularly in Alaska, we understand the inherent link between energy and prosperity, energy and opportunity, and energy and security. Consequently, many of us in this huge, energy-rich state recognize that the president's cap-and-trade energy tax would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy.

There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn't lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive! Those who understand the issue know we can meet our energy needs and environmental challenges without destroying America's economy.

Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.

In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan. For example, the cost of farming will certainly increase, driving down farm incomes while driving up grocery prices. The costs of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also increase.

The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics. . . .

Do read the entire article. Palin has composed an excellent piece that hits all the salient points in the cap and tax fiasco.

As to the last part about understanding supply-side economics, after listening to Pelosi, Reid and virtually the entire Democratic Party last year attempt to disavow that supply is actually part of any economic equation, I have my doubts about them. As to the rest of rank and file America, I am sure that is a lesson everyone will learn quite quickly.

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