Prayer is all well and good... but God helps those who help themselves.
People are stupid, lazy, ignorant, and stubborn.
(Oh... and did I forget to add delusional? Deliberately blind?)
The country is going down the $hitter and while thank God we've experienced a partial reawakening of the American Ideal and American Spirit via the Tea Party, by the same token the Tea Party is actually looked upon negatively by more Americans than look upon it favorably!
Now of course a large part of the explanation for that goes back to my "lazy and ignorant" critique. Most people buy the crap the mainstream media sells. It really is that simple.
Ah... but folks... it's not just ignorance! A huge segment of the American People simply don't revere the Constitution and don't give a damn for the Rule of Law except as the law can be bent and twisted to meet their own selfish wants and needs!
Yep. It's not all ignorance, folks. A great deal of the problem is simply that there are millions and millions of Americans out there who - like Obama - want to "fundamentally change" America.
Of course there's that old saying, "Be Careful What You Wish For," but now we return to my "stupid, delusional, deliberately blind" critique.
(*SHRUG*)
Most Americans don't read much unless they're forced to. And of the Americans who enjoy reading... comb the best sellers lists... the non-fiction best sellers lists...
(*SIGH*)
Hey... it's not simply our "Shades of" culture. No. It's that the average American (and I'm talking college educated... even graduate "trained") is (deliberately) poorly educated in history, philosophy, economics... well... pretty much everything applying to the causation of the decline and fall of the Founders' hopes, dreams, and expectations.
I try to educate folks. God knows I try! But by and large... few people want to be educated. That's the problem.
Oh, well... enough of me ranting! On to Newsbites!
(You'll find the actual newsbites within the comments section!)
10 comments:
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/242227-with-defeat-of-cybersecurity-bill-obama-weighs-executive-order-option
Senate Republicans recently blocked cyber-security legislation, but the issue might not be dead after all.
* WHAT THE HILL WRITER "MEANT" TO SAY WAS THAT THE UNITED STATES SENATE - ACTING IN ACCORD WITH THE CONSTITUTION - DECLINED TO APPROVE LEGISLATION THAT MANY SENATORS FEEL WOULD FURTHER DEPRIVE AMERICAN CITIZENS OF THEIR BASIC CONSTITUTIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS, UNDULY BURDEN PRIVATE BUSINESSES, AND GIVE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TOO MUCH ADDITIONAL POWER.
The White House hasn't ruled out issuing an executive order to strengthen the nation's defenses against cyber attacks if Congress refuses to act.
* AN "EXECUTIVE ORDER." HEY, FOLKS... HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED THAT THIS ISSUE OF "EXECUTIVE ORDERS" IS RARELY EXPLORED BY THE MEDIA? IT'S AS IF "EXECUTIVE ORDERS" ARE A REPLACEMENT FOR THE RULE OF LAW! FOLKS... THEY'RE NOT! A LEGITIMATE "EXECUTIVE ORDER" IS PURSUANT TO LEGISLATION PASSED - NOT A "STAND-ALONE LAW"... AND CERTAINLY NOT A "STAND-ALONE LAW" IN DIRECT OPPOSITION TO THE EXPRESS WILL OF THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH.
* FOLKS... THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. UNDERSTAND... THE MEDIA DOES EVERYTHING IN IT'S POWER TO SOFTEN THE POLITICAL PLAYING FIELD TO A STATE WHERE THE RULE OF LAW IS WHAT OBAMA SAYS IT IS. THIS IS NOT AN EXAGGERATION! THIS STORY IS A MICROCOSM!
* I'LL LEAVE IT TO YOU, THE READER, TO UTILIZE THE ABOVE-PROVIDED LINK AND READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE. THE HILL SPINS FOR ALL THEY'RE WORTH... BUT BOTTOM LINE... WE'RE TALKING A BASIC BATTLE BETWEEN THE FORCES OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE RULE OF LAW VS. THE DEMOCRATS AND THE MEDIA.
* OH... AND FOLKS... WHEN THE SHOE IS ON THE OTHER FOOT REPUBLICANS OFTEN PULL (OR TRY TO PULL) THE SAME SHIT! I'M NOT ADDRESSING THIS AS A PARTISAN! I'M ADDRESSING THIS AS SOMEONE WHO REVERES THE CONSTITUTION! ULTIMATELY THIS ISN'T A QUESTION OF WHETHER THE BILL SHOULD OR SHOULD NOT BE PASSED; RATHER, THIS IS A QUESTION OF IS THE UNITED STATES STILL A NATION UNDER THE RULE OF LAW... OR NOT.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443687504577563000563259044.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
After more than a year and a half of debate, last week the Massachusetts legislature passed a far-reaching "cost containment" bill that Democratic Governor Deval Patrick is about to sign. It is the inevitable postscript to the model that Mitt Romney introduced in 2006.
* ROMNEYCARE... (*SIGH*)
The claim then, as with the Affordable Care Act, was that health care would be less expensive if everyone had insurance.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
* THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT BEING... (*DRUM ROLL*)... THAT "INSURANCE" IS NO LONGER INSURANCE IN ANY REAL ACTUARIAL SENSE. (*SIGH*)
Soon [after passage of RomneyCare,] Massachusetts Democrats leaked that their political strategy all along was to expand coverage [promises] only, because had RomneyCare seriously squeezed providers it never would have overcome industry opposition. "Bending the curve" on costs could be saved for another day, once a vast new government liability was locked in.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Sure enough, 79% of the newly insured are on public programs.
Health costs — Medicaid, RomneyCare subsidies, public-employee compensation — will consume some 54% of the Massachusetts state budget in 2012, up from about 24% in 2001.
(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)
Over the same period state health spending in real terms has jumped by 59%, while education has fallen 15%, police and firemen by 11% and roads and bridges by 23%.
(*MORE SARCASTIC CLAPPING*)
Meanwhile, Massachusetts spends more per capita on health care than any other state and therefore more than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Costs are 27% higher than the U.S. average... (15% higher when adjusted for the state's higher wages and its concentration of academic medical centers and specialists.)
The health-care postman always rings twice, and now medicine itself is the target, instead of unsympathetic insurance companies. Under the plan, all Massachusetts doctors, hospitals and other providers must register with a new state bureaucracy as a condition of licensure — that is, permission to practice. They'll be required to track and report their financial performance, price and cost trends, state-sanctioned quality measures, market share and other metrics.
* MORE BUREAUCRATIC PAPER-PUSHING... LESS ACTUAL MEDICINE PRACTICED. (OH... AND HERE'S THE THING - YA GOTTA PAY ALL THE PAPER-PUSHERS!)
An 11-member board known as the Health Policy Commission will use the data to set and enforce rules to ensure that total Massachusetts health spending, public and private, grows no more than projected gross state product through 2017, and 0.5 percentage points lower thereafter.
* I SMELL RATIONING... (*SHRUG*)
No registered provider is allowed to make "any material change to its operations or governance structure," the bill says, without the commission's approval.
* DOES THIS SOUND LIKE AMERICA TO YOU... OR THE OLD SOVIET UNION?
The commission can also rewrite the terms of provider contracts with insurers and payment levels and methods if they are "deemed to be excessive."
* UNDERSTAND, FOLKS... THE GOAL OF THE LEFT IS TO PUT THE INSURANCE COMPANIES OUT OF BUSINESS AND REPLACE THE WHOLE SYSTEM WITH SINGLE-PAYER GOVERNMENT MEDICINE. (*SHRUG*)
As the commission "polices" the market, it can decide to "supervise" the behavior of any provider that exceeds some to-be-specified individual benchmark — that is, doctors and hospitals that are spending too much on patient care. These delinquents must submit a "performance improvement plan" that the commission must endorse.
(*SNORT*)
In other words, the commission is empowered to control the practice and organization of medicine.
(*SIGH*) (*NOD*)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/harry-reids-gutter-politics/2012/08/06/b3546bfe-dfcf-11e1-8fc5-a7dcf1fc161d_blog.html
* FROM RICHARD FRIGGIN' COHEN NO LESS!
In “The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is portrayed as corrupt. His name is Pat Geary.
In real life, a senator from Nevada is a jerk. His name is Harry Reid.
Reid is where he loves to be: the center of controversy. He has accused Mitt Romney of paying no taxes for 10 years. Romney denies the accusation and challenged Reid to put up or shut up. In an apparent response, Reid repeated the charges on the Senate floor. Countless aides have echoed their boss. They and he attribute their information to a source they will not name.
Whether such a source exists, really, is beside the point. It could be that someone did indeed tell Reid that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Journalists get that sort of tip all the time, and their responsibility is (1) to check it out and (2) identify the source. Reid has not done the latter and apparently has not done the former, either. The truth is that Reid doesn’t really care if the charge is true or not. He would prefer the former, but he’ll settle for the latter.
For Reid, this is yet another brazen and tasteless partisan attack. As majority leader, he has managed to sink the public image of the Senate even lower than it would otherwise be. He contributes to bad feelings, gridlock and the sense — nay, the reality — that everything is done for political advantage. Reid is a crass man, the very personification of the gaudy and kitschy Las Vegas Strip.
Still, he is not some backbencher, but the Senate majority leader. He is the face of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the ally of President Obama. Yet, not a single Democrat has had the spine to rebuke Reid. The White House has been given the chance and explicitly ducked its duty. Other members of the Senate have run for cover. They fear Reid and, if truth be told, sort of like what he’s doing — constantly needling Romney, keeping him on the defensive about taxes and his insistence on releasing only two years of his returns.
The politics of this squabble are delightful. But Reid has managed to draw both his party and his president into the gutter with him. When Reid accuses the Republicans of being overly partisan, he now lacks all credibility. For a long time it’s been difficult to believe anything he says. Now, it’s impossible.
As for Obama, he is tarnished by this episode. The fresh new face that promised us all a different kind of politics is suddenly looking cheesy. The soaring rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has come to ground in the mud of Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.
http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/politics/Beaches-Close-for-Obama-Visit-Reports-165135156.html?dr
President Barack Obama will be in Fairfield County to attend two fundraisers on Monday and it appears that a state beach and park and a town of Westport beach will be closed all day, on a day forecast to be near 90 degrees, because of the visit.
* THERE'S YOUR "MAN OF THE PEOPLE!" (*SNORT*)
Obama will be at a...$35,800 per person dinner at the Westport home of powerhouse movie producer Harvey Weinstein, apparently prompting the closure of Burying Hill Beach and Sherwood Island.
(*RAISED EYEBROW*)
The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection issued a release on Friday that Sherwood Island State Park, which includes 235 acres in Westport, will be closed to the public on Monday due to “a special event at the park.”
The fundraisers (Obama will also be at a $500-per person reception at the Stamford Marriott) could add about $2 million to Obama's coffers.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* HOW IS THIS SHIT EVEN LEGAL...?!?!
http://www.myfoxny.com/story/19199785/security-breach-at-newark-airport
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials say United Airlines checkpoint operations at Terminal C at Newark Liberty International Airport were shut down Sunday after TSA and local authorities tried to find a passenger that wasn't fully screened.
* AND GUESS WHAT...?! THE PASSENGER "ESCAPED!" THE PASSENGER FLEW...!!!
The Terminal C shutdown threw vacation plans and flight connections into chaos. Law enforcement sources told Fox 5 News there wasn't just one close call here – there were two and both had to do with potential bomb making materials.
The TSA says a woman who set off an alarm managed to get past a screening point and onto a flight to Cleveland without being checked for what caused the alarm.
* AND... ONTO... A... FLIGHT...!!!
The TSA says it notified the Port Authority Police after the incident. The Port Authority says every single passenger had to be re-screened.
* EXCEPT THE WOMAN WHO GOT ON THE FLIGHT... THE WOMAN THEY WERE LOOKING FOR!
Law enforcement sources told Fox 5 News what officials left out of their public statements – that the woman had tested positive for residue of possible explosive material on her hands, and slipped away from the TSA before she could be thoroughly screened.
* OUTSTANDING!
(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP FOLLOWED BY AND EQUALLY SARCASTIC STANDING OVATION*)
About two hours earlier there was another incident that was detailed in a report obtained exclusively by Fox 5 News. Sources say a positive explosives alert it was generated by an oversized checked bag that set off an alarm for possible explosives material.
The bag went missing for about 45 minutes.
* ONE... MORE... TIME...
The bag went missing for about 45 minutes.
(*SIMPLY...SILENCE*)
The TSA says the bag was eventually found and the Essex County Bomb Squad determined it was not a threat.
(*MORE SARCASTIC CLAPPING*)
United Airlines says after the three hour shutdown, flights resumed and they were able to accommodate most passengers.
* MOST PASSENGERS...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313120/medicaid-america-s-worst-health-care-program-avik-roy
In July 2010, at NRO’s Critical Condition blog, I wrote about a University of Virginia study published in Annals of Surgery finding that surgical patients on Medicaid endured a 97% higher likelihood of in-hospital death than patients with private insurance and a 13% greater chance of death than those with no insurance at all.
A number of scholars on the Left expended more effort trying to debunk the UVA study and the dozens of others that support it than addressing Medicaid’s many flaws.
Others, such as The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, conceded that “for certain populations and particularly in certain states, [Medicaid is] unambiguously inferior to private insurance,” all the while describing my “novel and brash” criticisms (and those of others) as a “conservative assault on Medicaid.”
Progressives recognize the real problem: If Medicaid is fundamentally flawed, it follows that ObamaCare is, too.
* AND HERE'S THE "NEW" PROBLEM, FOLKS:
ObamaCare aims to add 17 million more Americans to Medicaid’s ledgers.
(*SHRUG*)
This has led to a surreal circumstance in which anything that suggests that Medicaid offers even a minimal benefit is trumpeted in the press, whereas the overwhelming literature describing Medicaid’s flaws is ignored.
Hence the avalanche of attention that has been showered upon a recent Harvard study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, arguing that Medicaid indeed does save lives compared with having no insurance at all. The debate is over, declared the New York Times. “The new study should lay that canard [of Medicaid’s poor outcomes] to rest.”
* NOT SO FAST!
But a look under the hood of the Harvard study reveals a different story. The authors compared three states that expanded their Medicaid programs — Maine, Arizona, and New York — with neighboring states that did not — New Hampshire, Nevada and New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. The Medicaid expansion was associated with increased mortality in Maine, and with decreased mortality in Arizona and New York. That’s hardly a definitive outcome.
(Indeed, demographic differences between New York and Pennsylvania could explain the entirety of the “benefit” that the authors ascribed to New York’s Medicaid program.)
Yet the authors’ conclusion — that Medicaid saves lives — hinges entirely on the comparison of New York with Pennsylvania.
Without it, the authors would have shown no difference in outcomes between those with Medicaid and the uninsured, because the results in Maine and Arizona would have canceled each other out.
The study lacked rigor in other ways, too.
The Harvard economists looked only at county-level data about mortality and Medicaid; they had to make assumptions about which patients had enrolled in the program, and when.
* ON THE OTHER HAND... (KEEP READING!)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
The extensive clinical research showing Medicaid’s poor outcomes, such as the UVA study, has reviewed millions of individual patient records to learn what happened to specific patients with specific forms of health insurance.
Medicaid’s problems are not that hard to understand. Medicaid is the largest line item in most states’ budgets, and it continues to grow at a faster pace than tax revenues. In theory, the program is jointly run by the states and by the federal government, so states have the ability to rein in costs. But in reality, Washington bureaucrats veto most reforms that states seek to make in their Medicaid plans.
By and large, the Department of Health and Human Services blocks states from curtailing eligibility for Medicaid, and the 1965 Medicaid law prevents states from raising co-pays or deductibles for many services. So states are left with one option: paying less to doctors and hospitals.
In many states, Medicaid pays doctors a fraction of what private insurers pay.
In 2008, in California, a doctor made 38 cents on a Medicaid patient for every dollar he made seeing a privately insured one.
In New Jersey, a doctor made 33 cents.
In New York, 29.
And states continue to decrease Medicaid physician fees, because it’s the only lever they have.
As a result, most doctors choose not to see Medicaid patients, because they can’t keep their practices alive if they do. That, in turn, makes it hard for Medicaid patients to get doctor’s appointments for annual checkups, routine care, and even urgent medical problems. A 2011 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that many doctors refuse to see Medicaid children complaining of seizures, uncontrolled asthma, and even broken arms.
* THE NEXT TIME YOU GO TO THE SUPERMARKET, FOLKS, AND THE BILL RINGS UP TO $100... TELL THE CASHIER YOU'LL PAY $29... SEE HOW FAR THAT GETS YOU!
* HEY... OR TRY THIS... SEND THE IRS A CHECK FOR 29% OF WHAT THEY SAY YOU OWE THEM NEXT YEAR! SEE HOW THAT GOES!
A study by two MIT economists found that three-quarters of physicians receive lower fees for treating Medicaid patients than they do for the uninsured, because the uninsured pay in cash for routine health expenses. Cash is hassle-free. Medicaid, on the other hand, requires doctors to fill out tons of time-consuming paperwork, and if they make any errors at all in their form-filling, they risk being denied payment after the fact.
It may well be that Medicaid does offer a modest benefit to some people at the bottom of the income ladder. But it’s also true that Medicaid offers worse health care to the millions of low-income Americans who today enjoy high-quality private insurance, and often lose that coverage when states expand Medicaid.
(Most important: Is a “modest benefit” the standard we expect of a program that costs taxpayers $450 billion a year, squeezing out spending on education and national defense?)
Before we expand Medicaid we should reform it by handing the program fully over to the states or directly to the people it is meant to help.
Those who claim to care most about the poor should be at the forefront of reform, instead of doubling down on the broken status quo.
* FAT CHANCE!
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313125/auto-bailout-casualties-john-berlau
In the Obama auto bailouts, jobs were not all created equal.
The administration moved heaven and earth to save the jobs and generous benefits of General Motors and Chrysler workers who belonged to the United Auto Workers, ripping up the contracts of bondholders and secured creditors to give the UAW an enlarged stake in the new companies.
* AND...
“As a result,” notes Amy Payne of the Heritage Foundation, “even after the reorganization, GM still has higher labor costs ($56 an hour) than any of its foreign-based competitors.”
* AND...?
But non-UAW workers affected by the bankruptcies were not so lucky.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
At a former GM subsidiary, Delphi, which manufactures automotive parts, 28,000 UAW workers were paid full pension benefits that GM had promised, but 41,000 other workers were not.
* BUT... 41,000... WERE NOT...
(*SHRUG*)
As Todd Zywicki, professor of law at George Mason University, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee: “Had new GM treated Delphi’s UAW and non-union employees equally, the Treasury could have paid $1 billion less for the GM bailout. Instead, some workers became more equal than others.”
* THAT'S THE OBAMA "ANIMAL FARM" WAY!
And perhaps no workers were less equal in the bailouts than the employees of GM and Chrysler dealerships.
About 100,000 mostly blue-collar jobs — a number approaching the total work force of GM and Chrysler, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer — were put on the chopping block by “Team Auto,” the Obama administration’s auto-bailout task force, which insisted on extraordinarily rapid closures of auto dealerships during the government-organized bankruptcy proceedings.
Mitt Romney’s new ad highlights the impact of the closures on one dealership in Lyndhurst, Ohio. The owner, Al Zarzour, speaks of having to lay off “30-some” employees when his Chevrolet dealership was put on the GM closure list in 2009.
Obama supporters as well as right-leaning Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin cried foul, claiming that the dealer closings were necessary for the automakers’ viability and that virtually no dealership jobs would exist had the auto companies gone into a normal bankruptcy. But an acclaimed new book, Bailout, by Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), shows that the first half of this critique is false and the second half highly tenuous.
* OOPS!
“Is Romney saying that in a ‘managed bankruptcy’ these dealerships wouldn’t have closed?” asks Rubin. Romney hasn’t responded yet, but Barofsky argues forcefully that the Obama administration pushed for many more closures than bankruptcy and restructuring experts deemed necessary. In Bailout, Barofsky paints a far more devastating portrait of the Obama administration’s arbitrary dealer closures than does the Romney campaign, whose attacks on them have been relatively mild.
Contrary to the administration’s claim that the dealer closings were entirely GM and Chrysler’s decisions, Barofsky writes that Obama’s “auto team had pressured the companies to close the dealerships” more rapidly and in greater numbers than the firms had wished. As a result, more than 2,000 dealership agreements were terminated within a few months in 2009.
Barofsky concludes that “relatively little thought had gone into Treasury’s determination that the dealership closings had to be immediate.” He reports that after “interviewing many of the same experts Treasury had consulted,” his group of auditors “found remarkably little support for the auto team’s determination that the viability of GM and Chrysler depended on their closing so many dealerships so quickly.”
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 2 of 2)
In Rubin’s critique of Romney’s ad, she asks, “Do Republicans actually believe that GM didn’t need to reduce costs and capacity?” (She seems to be unaware that dealerships, which basically have franchises from automakers to sell vehicles, impose no direct costs on the car manufacturers. “Auto companies don’t pay their dealers anything directly,” as Obama’s auto-bailout czar Steven Rattner notes in his book, Overhaul."
Rattner adds that “floor-plan loans” to dealers, such as the “line of credit” Zarzour refers to in the Romney ad, are of little risk to automakers. Rattner writes that “the historical loss rates on floor plan had been close to zero,” because “most dealers are personally liable for floor-plan loans.”
So why close so many dealerships so quickly?
Rattner argues that “every industry expert agreed that having fewer, more productive dealers results in higher total sales and lower marketing expenses for an automaker.” But, Barofsky writes, although experts agreed that “dealerships should be reduced over time, there was substantive disagreement about where dealers should be closed and how quickly it should be done.” In particular, he recalls, several experts consulted by his office disputed that any rural dealerships needed to be closed, citing the “distinct advantage that GM and Chrysler had in those areas over foreign competitors.”
Barofsky explains that GM appeared to agree. Initially only 18% of the dealership closings it targeted were in rural areas. But “that number jumped dramatically,” he writes, “after Treasury directed it to accelerate the closings, with rural dealerships making up nearly half the dealerships slated for termination.”
* AFTER TREASURY DIRECTED...
(*SHRUG*)
Given this evidence, it is correct to argue that many dealers would have fared better if GM and Chrysler had gone through a traditional, court-approved bankruptcy along the lines that Romney advocated rather than through the politicized bankruptcy that Obama’s team put together. At the very least, it would probably have given dealers like Zarzour more time to make arrangements with GM’s competitors, minimizing job losses.
PolitiFact reports that after the dust settled, Zarzour became general manager of a Mitsubishi dealership. A traditional bankruptcy could have laid down an orderly process for his old Chevrolet dealership to transition to Mitsubishi sales.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration, as I noted on NRO last year, continues to overestimate the number of jobs “created” by the bailout, shamelessly including jobs at foreign auto dealerships such as Zarzour’s new shop and at the domestic plants of foreign manufacturers. But Ohio governor John Kasich points out that, of the 73,000 jobs created in his state since 2011, only 700 were “direct jobs” in auto manufacturing. PolitiFact, which examines campaign claims, largely backs up Kasich on this matter.
And then there are the jobs not created and businesses not opened because of the shabby treatment of GM’s bondholders and Chrysler’s secured lenders. The Obama administration designed a restructuring that disregarded two centuries of bankruptcy precedent to give disproportionate ownership stakes to the UAW and, in Chrysler’s case, Fiat.
George Mason’s Zywicki summed it up eloquently in the Wall Street Journal: “By stepping over the bright line between the rule of law and the arbitrary behavior of men, President Obama may have created a thousand new failing businesses. That is, businesses that might have received financing before but that now will not, since lenders face the potential of future government confiscation.”
So it is perfectly legitimate to spotlight those who have fared worse because of the auto bailout. There are many victims of the government’s meddling in the auto industry, and their stories have yet to be told.
http://www.dickmorris.com/the-real-poll-numbers/
* AS MY REGULARS KNOW, I'M NOT MUCH FOR THE "HORSERACE" ASPECT OF POLITICS. HOWEVER... THIS LATEST DICK MORRIS COLUMN DOES FIT NICELY WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF "BEWARE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA!"
The media is trying to create a sense of momentum and of inevitability about the Obama candidacy.
One benighted Newsweek reporter even speculated about a possible Democratic landslide.
(*SNORT*)
On Friday, I saw the real numbers. These state-by-state polls, taken by an organization I trust (after forty years of polling) show the real story. The tally is based on more than 600 likely voter interviews in each swing state within the past eight days. The trend line is distinctly pro-Romney. Of the thirteen states studied, he improved or Obama slipped in nine states while the reverse happened in only four.
To read the media, one would think that Romney had a terrible month. In fact, the exact reverse is true.
Romney is currently leading in every state McCain carried plus: Indiana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina, and Colorado. If he carries these states, he’ll have 228 electoral votes of the 270 he needs to win.
To win the election, Romney would then have to carry Florida where he trails by two points, and either Virginia (behind by two) or Ohio where he’s down by only one.
If he carries all three of these states and also wins all the others where Obama is now at 50% or less – Iowa, New Mexico, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey — he will get 351 electoral votes, a landslide about equal to Obama’s 363 vote tally in 2008.
The strong probability is that Romney does, in fact, carry Florida, Ohio, and Virginia and a share of the other states where Obama is below 50% of the vote.
So don’t believe the garbage being put out by the media.
The attempt to portray Romney as not catching on and as dropping in the polls is ludicrous. It is, at best, the product of incompetent polling and, at worst, the result of deliberate media bias. But Romney is winning and expanding his lead each week. That’s the real story.
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