Bloodthirsty Liberal

I can see him dancing around the ring like Muhammmad Ali in his prime, skipping shuffling, calling out his challengers:

C’mon “Uncommitted”, let’s see what you got! I can take on all no-names and imprisoned felons, and kick all of their asses!

President Obama easily won Tuesday night’s Democratic primary in Kentucky, capturing 58 percent of the vote.

That sounds like a solid victory. But with the president running unopposed in the Bluegrass State that means more than four in 10 voters didn’t pick him.

Who did they choose instead? Forty-two percent of those going to the polls rejected the president in favor of “uncommitted.”

And, according to Louisville’s Courier-Journal newspaper, in 67 of Kentucky’s 120 counties, “uncommitted” received more votes than the president.

Over in Arkansas, where he had an actual opponent, Obama lost a similar percentage of the vote. According to preliminary returns from the state’s open primary, John Wolfe, a lawyer from Tennessee, is polling at about 40 percent.

Though little known, Wolfe is no stranger to politics. The Washington Post reports he was previously on the primary ballots in Louisiana, Missouri and New Hampshire, and will be on next week’s ballot in Texas. He has also run four failed campaigns for Congress.

Both Kentucky and Arkansas are considered solid red states for the general election and their less than enthusiastic support for the president comes as no surprise. Still, as the AP points out, “it’s a bit embarrassing for the Democratic Party and highlights Obama’s political weakness in Southern states.”

Just two weeks ago, more than 40 percent of voters in West Virginia’s Democratic primary chose a federal inmate named Keith Judd over the president.

These were Democrat voters, remember, not Republican neanderthals (tautology!). Primaries tend to bring out the extreme voter—or rather not to exercise the average voter to leave home or work to pull the lever for Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul or whomever. So, these voters came out with a purpose. They may vote “Uncommitted”, but they do so with great commitment.

PS: I was going to comment that this is what happens in states that sue over ObamaCare, but neither Arkansas nor Kentucky has signed on to the lawsuit that 26 other sates have. Obama will win California, New York, and other big electoral college states—but he will certainly lose the majority of states. It remains to be seen whether he can win enough battleground states to eke out reelection, but I am hopeful and growing more convinced that he cannot.

53,000 removed from the Florida roles, but other states take no action.

I have learned that Florida election officials are set to announce that the secretary of state has discovered and purged up to 53,000 dead voters from the voter rolls in Florida.

How could 53,000 dead voters have sat on the polls for so long? Simple. Because Florida hadn’t been using the best available data revealing which voters have died. Florida is now using the nationwide Social Security Death Index for determining which voters should be purged because they have died.

Here is the bad news. Most states aren’t using the same database that Florida is. In fact, I have heard reports that some election officials won’t even remove voters even when they are presented with a death certificate. That means that voter rolls across the nation still are filled with dead voters, even if Florida is leading the way in detecting and removing them.

But surely people aren’t voting in the names of dead voters, the voter fraud deniers argue. Wrong.

Consider the case of Lafayette Keaton. Keaton not only voted for a dead person in Oregon, he voted for his dead son. Making Keaton’s fraud easier was Oregon’s vote by mail scheme, which has opened up gaping holes in the integrity of elections. The incident in Oregon just scratches the surface of the problem. Massachusetts and Mississippi are but two other examples of the dead rising on election day.

Aggie, how do you know that the dead will vote for Obama? Simple. I know a fair amount about Chicago.

- Aggie

Let’s see who gets out of jury duty because he or she is not a US citizen, yet votes.

Watch the whole thing. At the end, there are faculty members at U North Carolina counseling students to vote more than once in a single election.

- Aggie

I can get you two on the aisle in the orchestra, half price—but that’s my final offer. Make that quarter-price. Ten percent. I can’t go any lower.

Oh, just take them!

Richmond, Va. — President Barack Obama has been in campaign mode for months, but he made it official Saturday in front of enthusiastic young supporters at two events that illustrated some old strengths and significant new hurdles for the incumbent.

If a white Republican had kicked off his candidacy in the capital of the Confederacy, wouldn’t the press have raised a stink? Just asking.

Anyway…

The big Obama show — heralded by a huge “Forward” banner atop OSU’s Schottenstein Center and a fire-’em-up presidential introduction from first lady Michelle Obama — was less targeted at the national media than his 2007 announcement in Springfield, Ill., when the Obama campaign sought to project the image of an unstoppable nationwide movement.

This time, Obama’s team is localizing its message and targeting key constituencies — students, veterans, women, Latinos, African Americans — in too-close-to-call states such as Ohio and Virginia, while firing up young voters and volunteers whose support Obama sorely needs.

If the carefully choreographed kick off was any indication, Obama will face some challenges in recapturing the 2008 magic — especially among young voters who weathered three years of souring job prospects and rising college costs.

The campaign was only able to muster 14,000 supporters at the first event in an arena designed to hold more than 18,000. Several thousand empty seats ringed its upper deck, mostly out of view from the cameras.

Unless, of course, the cameras showed the crowd. But why would they do that? That would be reportage, news. Not their line of work, don’t you know.

So, the candidate who once promised to bring us together, to unite in post-partisanship is appealing to key demographics in battleground states. I feel so included!

No wonder no one gives a hoot. He’s a slightly swarthier Walter Mondale.

Looks like no one likes you. Forward my a**.

And he’s burning through cash fast.

Last July, President Obama’s campaign announced that it had raised an average of $29 million in each of the previous three months for itself and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I was only mildly impressed. After all, that was well below the $50 million a month needed to reach the campaign’s goal of a $1 billion war chest for the 2012 race.

Seven months later, I’m even less impressed. Through January, the president has raised an average of $24 million a month for his campaign and the DNC. Next week, the Obama campaign will release its February numbers, but the president is on track to be hundreds of millions of dollars shy of his original goal.

The entire article is interesting. Check out the link.

- Aggie

Bigger than expected increase in February.

The pace of job creation by private employers accelerated more than expected in February, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.

The private sector added 216,000 jobs last month, the ADP National Employment Report showed, topping economists’ expectations for a gain of 208,000.

January’s payrolls figures were revised up to an increase of 173,000 from 170,000.

Good news for The White House.

- Aggie

Turns out you can fool all of the people all of the time

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 28% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Thirty-nine percent (39%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11 (see trends).

The president is benefitting from improved perceptions about the strength of the economy. Thirty-seven percent (37%) now expect the economy to be stronger in a year while 35% expect it to be weaker. That’s a huge turnaround from last November when 27% expected a stronger economy and 48% were expecting the economy to get weaker. It’s the first time in more than two years that optimists how outnumbered the pessimists. They were even in December 2010. Rasmussen Reports tracks consumer confidence on a daily basis and the tracking shows overall confidence has improved significantly in recent months.

In a potential Election 2012 matchup, the president posts a 49% to 42% lead over former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. The numbers are very similar if former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum is the Republican nominee. In that case, the president leads 49% to 41%. Among unaffiliated voters, the president leads Romney by 10 and Santorum by 16. Matchup results are updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update).

One week before the Florida primary, Romney and Obama were tied. In the week leading up to that event, Romney fell behind by margins ranging from two to six points. The GOP hopeful has fallen further behind since that time. Over the past week, he has trailed the president by margins ranging from four to ten points (see tracking history for all candidates).

Etc. NY Times has a glowing article about the turnaround. Of course things can change dramatically, but it isn’t looking too good for the Republicans on February 15, 2012.

- Aggie

The latest from a Chi-Com loving, Saudi-shilling pundit putz:

The Republican party is playing Scrabble with lousy letters and should sit out the November election, says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

He said that the party’s inability to come up with a candidate who in his view does not offer constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises” has left it without any reason to event try to dethrone President Barack Obama.

Writing the day after Governor Mitt Romney won in the party’s primaries in Maine, Freidman stated, “You know how in Scrabble sometimes you look at your seven letters and you’ve got only vowels that spell nothing? What do you do? You go back to the pile. You throw your letters back and hope to pick up better ones to work with. That’s what Republican primary voters seem to be doing. They just keep going back to the pile but still coming up with only vowels that spell nothing.”

He charged that the GOP, initials for the Grand Old Party, “has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub.”

What is it with liberals and democracy? Yesterday it was Betty Warren trying to stifle any competition in the primary—when she’s got the backing and the money of the entire national Democratic machine. Today it’s one of the pre-eminent op-ed columnists of the New York Times (i.e. a boob) calling for the effective cancellation of the presidential election. Why do they hate representational government?

Here’s my radical suggestion: hold the elections—all of them—as planned. Let the people decide. I know I can get arrested for saying that. I hope somebody reports me to the Obama Stasi web site. If you feel you have to shun me next time you see me, I’ll understand.

To employ Friedman’s labored and asinine metaphor, people may settle for playing “aerie” or “oeuvre” or even “queue” rather than look at the jumble of Zs, Xs, Js, Ws, Hs, and Ks Obama represents. It looks enticing, but what are you supposed to do with it?

What does the Left do when presented with incontrovertible evidence of voter fraud, perhaps the greatest single threat to representative democracy?

Attack the evidence:

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe vowed in an interview with The Daily Caller on Tuesday to continue making sting videos to expose waste and fraud in government despite criticism from liberals who have attacked him over the tactics he uses.

O’Keefe and his group Project Veritas most recently made news in January by producing a video during the New Hampshire primary showing how easy it is for someone to commit voter fraud.

“Absolutely,” O’Keefe said, when asked if observers can expect more videos soon from his organization.

He had tough words for the liberal activists who claim he and his operatives broke the law with their New Hampshire video by successfully obtaining ballots in the name of dead voters in the state because there is no voter identification law.

“There is a long tradition of turning people who expose the ineptitude of government into political prisoners,” he said. “But it’s just un-American.”

A coalition of liberal groups including People For the American Way, Daily Kos and Granite State Progress on Thursday plan to submit more than 100,000 petitions to New Hampshire’s attorney general asking him to investigate O’Keefe for the video.

I once belonged to People for the American Way. Either they changed or I did.

Sorry for the title, don’t come after me, please, I’m hiding in a closet in an undisclosed place in.. uh… Maryland.. yeah… that’s the ticket.

It’s just that in addition to the obvious problems with Mitt as a candidate, the bigger problem could be Ron Paul.

Obama won the Presidency in 2008 because of the youth movement that he was able to put together. Long-time readers know that I view youth movements with horror. Think Nazi Germany, that was a youth movement. Communist movements are youth movements. This doesn’t mean that the leaders are young – although the oldest person in Hitler’s original cabinet was 40 – it just means that the followers are young and idealistic. Idealism in small doses is great. When it takes over, it is a mob and it tramples and destroys everything in its path.

Ron Paul is leading a youth movement. Many of his voters in New Hampshire, where anyone, even the dead, can get a ballot, told reporters that if Ron Paul isn’t the candidate, they will vote for Barack Obama. Ron Paul or Barack Obama. Sound strange? What do they have in common? Well, they are both leaders of a radical youth movement. The children of baby boomers have come of age.

The Democratic convention will be a tightly scripted TV extravaganza extolling the Prince and his wise and kindly rule. The Republican convention could conceivably feature a major address by Paul calling for the abolition of the Fed, FEMA and the CIA; American withdrawal from everywhere; acquiescence to the Iranian bomb — and perhaps even Paul’s opposition to a border fence lest it be used to keep Americans in. Not exactly the steady, measured, reassuring message a Republican convention might wish to convey. For libertarianism, however, it would be a historic moment: mainstream recognition at last.

Put aside your own view of libertarianism or of Paul himself. I see libertarianism as an important critique of the Leviathan state, not a governing philosophy. As for Paul himself, I find him a principled, somewhat wacky, highly engaging eccentric. But regardless of my feelings or yours, the plain fact is that Paul is nurturing his movement toward visibility and legitimacy.

Paul is 76. He knows he’ll never enter the promised land. But he’s clearing the path for son Rand, his better placed (Senate vs. House), more moderate, more articulate successor.

And it matters not whether you find amusement in libertarians practicing dynastic succession. What Paul has already wrought is a signal achievement, the biggest story yet of this presidential campaign.

You wonder how Obama can win Florida? This is how.

- Aggie