What To Expect Between Now And Election Day

 

With just under a week to go until the election, I think it's a good time to assess where we are and what to expect.

Caveat: This analysis does not figure in possible unexpected 'black swan' events! As we've seen, literally anything can happen!

As I and others predicted, as we get closer to election day the public polling were going to tighten up considerably. This is no accident. The stuff showing Hillary Clinton 12 points plus ahead was always bogus and a political tactic to try and dampen enthusiasm and turnout for Trump. Having seen the rabid crowds Trump was drawing at his rallies and even more important, hearing what people were actually saying on the street it was obvious that tried and true tactic wasn't working this time out.

At this point the media commissioned public polls are merely trying to retain a scrap of credibility for next time by reflecting far more accurate numbers. It's interesting that polls like the L.A Times/USC and Investor's Business Daily that always showed Clinton and Trump fairly close together and even showed Trump ahead at times. They  haven't changed anything like the degree of most of the others  to show this 'tightening' effect.I'll mention some polling in this analysis just for giggles. but here's an excellent rule to follow this week:

Bottom line, ignore the polls, and that especially applies to exit polls and calls by the networks on Election Day.

Rest assured they will be skewed, both deliberately and simply because a lot of people will have very good reasons to keep their choice private given the bullying Hillary's supporters exhibit at every opportunity. Even putting a Trump sticker on your car is asking it to be vandalized and maybe worse. It's how the Left operates.

Believe nothing in terms of results until it's all over. And to be frank, perhaps not even then...  

So. who's going to win?

It's impossible to say with certainty because this is not going to be an honest election. Evidence of blatant voter fraud has already been found in Texas, Indiana, Colorado and Florida, and it will certainly occur in California, Philadelphia and Detroit.

But there are several key items that will decide how the election is going to go:

• Yes, there's going to be voter fraud. But Donald Trump has brought a number of people back into the game who haven't voted for years out of sheer disgust. Added to those numbers, we have over three and a half million self-declared Republicans sat 2012 out because they were not going to vote for yet another GOP product in Mitt Romney. If a substantial number of these two groups are going to show up at the polls, it's likely to out weigh the voter fraud numbers in some states. Three states in particular come to mind; Pennsylvania, Michigan and Colorado.If Trump flips any of them, (and in Colorado and Pennsylvania, things are pretty much all tied up, with Clinton's slight lead in the Keystone State well within the margin of error) it will be a good night for Trump. As with much of life, it depends on who shows up and whether there are enough of these unknown Trump supporters to offset the fraudulent votes. For voter fraud to successfully swing things, it has to be close so we'll see.

• What happens with Black America and how they vote.  Donald Trump has done something the GOP should have done years ago, actually going to the black community and directly addressing their problems, hopes and aspirations. Romney and McCain, unintentionally perhaps, insulted a decent amount of potential supporters by not only failing to do this but ignoring them completely in 2008 and 2012.
  
  The Donald isn't ignoring them, he's actively courting them and talking about real problems and real solutions to people who bear the brunt of having to live with the effects of decisions made by the cabal in DC. How much of an effect this is going to have is impossible to guess, but all indications are that Trump will get more black support than any GOP presidential candidate in years. Yes, the majority of black voters will still vote to stay on the Democrat Plantation. But for the most part they're not all that excited with Hillary, who isn't offering them anything but the dysfunctional status quo. So black turnout for Hillary is probably going to be lower than it was in 2012, while Trump's black supporters are a lot more likely to turn out and vote, just like most Trump supporters. It's impossible to predict accurately but it might be enough to offset some of the voter fraud. I wouldn't be surprised to see Donald Trump getting between 20-30% of the black vote this year. If that number is somewhere between 25-30%, especially in the battleground states, I think we end up calling the Donald Mr. President.

• Another variable is how high the 'shy Trump supporter' numbers really are. As I mentioned, a lot of Trump's supporters are off the grid poll-wise because they aren't 'likely voters.' They haven't seen anyone for awhile they actually wanted to vote for until now. And the numbers of even a lot of the ones on the grid can't be reliably estimated. Nor will they on Election Day in the exit votes. If some bozo with a microphone got in my way and asked me how I voted, my response would be limited to 'get lost' along with a descriptive noun. Ditto when it comes to pollsters calling on the phone. I'm going to tell someone who has my name, phone number and probably my address how I'm voting? That has to be even more true for this election than usual if you're black, Hispanic, female, gay, or live in some terminally Blue State.

• And finally, the #NeverTrumper effect. There's polling evidence that a number of #NeverTrumpers have been having second thoughts as the election gets closer and they actually begin to smell what a Clinton Presidency is likely to be like. Even Rat Ryan finally succumbed and admitted he had voted for Trump as it became obvious that he was in serious danger of losing his seat, and I expect to see some similar conversions-or at least lip service - in the coming days. In more than a few states a defection of some Gary Johnson supporters would put Trump well ahead of Hillary in some surprising places. How many actual votes Trump might get (and Hillary might get from Jill Green)are another variable.

Donald Trump has managed to get this far while fighting off the Democrats, their blatantly partisan media, and the Republican establishment of his own party while being outspent 50-1. If he wins, it will be one of the biggest political upsets in history.

But then Trump is not your typical candidate in any sense, the majority of the electorate is in an angry, ugly mood and insurgency is in the air. And to paraphrase Michael Moore, it would be the biggest 'up yours' to our self-appointed Ruling Class ever, a class the American people increasingly see Hillary as representing.  I wouldn't underestimate these sentiments.
 
We'll know how all this plays out in about a week.

Why Michael Grimm Shouldn't Resign

Congressman Michael Grimm (R-NY), the lone GOP representative in the New York City area (Staten Island) has announced that he will resign effective Jan. 5, two weeks after he pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion.

What Grimm actually did was to under-report his employees’ wages while he was owner of the Manhattan restaurant Healthalicious.

Grimm's decision was apparently made after a conversation with Speaker John Boehner.

I think this was a huge mistake on Grimm's part.Instead of caving, he should have looked Boehner in the eye and told him, 'I'll resign right after Charlie Rangel does.'

Why should he disenfranchise his constituents or be held to a higher standard than Charlie Rangel?

Tax evasion is a crime, no doubt. But if you compare what Michael Grimm did to what Charlie Rangel got away with, Rep. Grimm would have been far better off not pleading guilty and taking his chances with the House.

If nothing else, that would have pointed out, yet again, that Democrats, particularly black Democrats are held to far different standards than Republicans by their peers and especially by the media.

The Beginning - GOP Underdog Wins Seat In District Obama Carried Twice

Florida's 13th District in Pinellas County is the epitome of what Democrats like to call 'purple'. While the long time congressman was CW Young, a very non-Tea Party sorta Left-leaning Republican, the district itself had gone for Barack Obama twice, 52 percent to 48 percent in 2008 and 50 percent to 49 percent in 2012. So when Young died in October of cancer, Democrats saw this as a prime pickup opportunity.

They ran Alex Sink, who was well known statewide and an experienced campaigner who won the 13th district during her run for governor in 2010. She received top tier funding from the DNC and outside Democrat groups to the tune of around $7 million, outspending GOP Candidate David Jolly by a 4-1 margin. And she was a priority candidate for the Democrat leadership. Former President Bill Clinton and other Democrat luminaries did events and made Robocalls for her. She seemed a cinch to win.

David Jolly, on the other hand was a a little-known, second- or third-tier Republican, a former staffer of Young's who became a lobbyist. He largely got the nomination because Sink looked so strong and no one else wanted it.He got some support from the RNC as a non-Tea Party republican, but nothing like the level of Sink's, especially since the conventional wisdom was that it was her race to lose.

Sink blanketed the airwaves with negative ads,painting Jolly as a crooked lobbyist who hated women an dgays and would cut grampa and grandma's healthcare and social security to nothing before raising the price on the quality moist dog food so all they could afford would be that dry kibble, if that. In a district where 1 in 4 voters is a retiree, that kind of falsehood resonated.

The Democrats even resorted to what I'll call the Virginia Strategy (where it put Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the governor's mansion),bringing in a 'libertarian', Lucas Overby as a straw man to suck up Republican votes on the Right. Rand Paul again

On the other hand, Jolly mostly ran his campaign on old fashioned shoe leather and personal appearances with voters, and ultimately, his likeability compared to Sink's shrill rants started to tip the polls his way.

In the end, this particular nice guy finished first against long odds, winning by two points, 48.5 to to Sink's 46.7 percent. Lucas Overby picked up 4.8 percent, almost enough to put Sink over the top but not quite.

A number of people are referring to this as a result of the unpopularity of ObamaCare, and there's some truth in that. There's no question that Jolly was able to tie Sink to ObamaCare, since she has always been a cheerleader for that misconceived legislative error. But more than just ObamaCare, it's a sign that the president's entire act isn't going over the way it used to and that the American people are tired of his incompetence and autocratic nature, tired of the lies, the sleaze and the scandals. if Overby hadn't been in the race as a Democrat wingman, David Jolly's win would have been a lot more decisive.

For his part, like his predecessor Jolly is no partisan ideologue. In his victory speech, he made a point of saying that it was time to put the rancor and nastiness of the campaign aside, and that his chief goal was serving the constituents of Pinellas County, not an agenda.

Ultimately, the reason Jolly won is because he was able to take that message to the voters, and enough of them believed him to give hiom an impressive win.

Will Democrats Lose The Senate? What The Analysts Forget To Figure In

 

Sean Trende is the senior elections analyst for the popular site RealClearPolitics, and a fairly smart guy when it comes to forecasting and analyzing elections and things political.

He has an interesting piece up that caught my eye today entitled,How Likely Are Democrats to Lose the Senate?


In it, he goes through a meticulous mathematical analysis based generating a large number of random values within prescribed limits in order to the likelihood of a Democrats losing the senate, and it really is an impressive piece of figuring,based on models used by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight,another gifted analyst.

His end conclusion? :

With all of that said, this is a very, very challenging map for Democrats. As things presently stand, the map probably makes them underdogs to hold the Senate. Barring some sort of change in the national environment or meltdown in the Republican nominations process -- neither of which is impossible -- Democrats are likely in for a very long night on Nov. 4.

However, there is another factor that he and most other political analysts ignore that makes this kind of speculation pretty moot. He doesn't mention that In two straight elections, (2010 and 2012) President Obama was able to get away with massive voter fraud,which included using the Justice Department to suppress the active duty military vote. Here are a few factoids from 2012 alone to ponder:

*In 59 voting districts in the Philadelphia region, Obama received 100% of the votes with not even a single vote recorded for Romney. That's a mathematical and statistical impossibility.

Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by 166,214 votes in Ohio in 2012, out of 5,489,028 votes cast. So Obama’s victory margin was just 3 percent, 50 to 47 over Romney. In Ohio, an estimated 1 in 5 'voters' shouldn't be on the rolls at all, because they're deceased, felons or have multiple registered in other states (an estimated 1.8 million dead people and nearly 3 million who have registered to vote in multiple states). When Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted sought permission from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to clean up the rolls in a Feb. 10th letter, Holder never even bothered to reply after multiple attempts.

Not surprisingly, voter fraud in Ohio is already known to have occurred in 2008 and 2012, and at least 3 Cincinnati poll workers have already been convicted of voter fraud in the 2012 elections.

In North Carolina, the Obama Campaign was directly implicated in major voter fraud.


Similar story in Philadelphia, where again President Obama got a suspiciously high turnout and vote tally in many locations.

It's also a matter of record that President Obama won in every state that did not require a Photo ID to vote and lost in all but four state that did, and three of them (Michigan, New Hampshire, and Hawaii) were fairly Blue states anyway, and in the other, Florida, there were also reports of voter fraud that are difficult to assess because the Justice Department refused to investigate a single case of voter fraud nation wide. The DOJ is now attacking the voter ID laws in at least 4 Red states I can think of offhand,including Texas.

And if you think voter fraud doesn't affect senate elections, ask Senator Franken.

While President Obama is not running in 2014, it's a reasonable assumption that he will intervene again to the degree possible to ensure the continuation of his agenda and to fend off the very real threat of impeachment.

Also, it's worth noting that Washington, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois, Maryland,, DC, Connecticut, ,Vermont and Puerto Rico have all passed laws allowing illegal aliens driver's licenses, which means they also automatically get voter registration documents. Such laws are pending in Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. Voter fraud in California and in Colorado involving illegal aliens and absentee ballots is already a documented fact.

In some of these states, especially places like California where there is also no voter ID requirement and the existing Democrat state government winks at voter fraud that favors Democrats, you are unlikely to see a Republican senator elected.

Does this mean that the Democrats will hold on to the Senate? Not necessarily. But it certainly means that any analysis that doesn't figure democrat voter fraud in is inherently flawed, unfortunately.

Going Democrat-Lite will make GOP a permanent minority

 

My latest is up at The Washington Examiner. Here's a slice:

Democrats smirk that the muscle of the Hispanic vote is going to make them a permanent majority and make the Republicans extinct, while much of the GOP consultant class pontificates that the 2012 election was a message for the Republican to embrace amnesty and to drop any vestige of conservatism.

Peter Wehner's recent piece in Commentary is fairly typical of the sort of pieces prophesying demographic doom. Are they right?

The entire concept of lumping a very diverse group of people into a convenient label should be a warning sign in itself that something's amiss here.

That is, after all, the sort of identity politics more commonly practiced by Democrats. But using figures that come from Pew,  the math tells us a different story altogether.

Hispanics are 9.07 percent of the current electorate (23.7 million voters). Of those, only 12 million or so of that 23.7 million voted in 2012 and they went for President Obama by 67.5 percent, a whopping eight million of the 12 million whom voted. That's just about one third of the entire Hispanic vote available.

In my universe, that means almost two thirds of the current Hispanic vote is either Republican or up for grabs.

That's what all the verbiage and punditry is about, a grand total of less than 3.5 percent of the entire electorate, much of it already living in blue states like California, New York and New Jersey. And that doesn't even account for voter fraud in places like California that are unfettered by voter ID laws.

There's a similar disconnect going on with Asians, another group that's been cited as a demographic Republicans are losing.

Asians are an even more diverse group than Hispanics, but the figures lump together East Asians like Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Koreans with Filipinos, Pakistanis, Indonesians and Indians (a fairly diverse group themselves).

Since they're not broken down but lumped together as a group, the best figure available is that Americans of Asian ethnicity constitute 3 percent of the electorate, about 6,450,000 voters.

I couldn't find the percentage of the Asian electorate that actually voted, but let's be very generous and assume a 40 percent turnout, a huge leap given how low the 2012 turnout was.

Obama got 73 percent of that Asian vote, so we're talking about 1,883,400 votes mainly concentrated in Blue states.

That's a grand total of 28 percent of the available Asian electorate if we're talking a 40 percent turnout. In any event, that means that 72 percent of the Asian electorate is either Republican or available.

I'm not suggesting that conservatives ignore Hispanic or Asian voters, although the thoughts of the Washington Examiner's Byron York' on the matter  are worth considering.

But the way to attract them is not to lump them together as a "group" but to appeal to their actual interests. A message of fairness, conservative principles, school choice, prosperity and economic growth clearly articulated is what's going to appeal to them.

Read the whole thing here at the link.

The GOP Establishment Screws Another Conservative - With Some Unexpected Help

The elections in New Jersey and Virginia are over.

In New Jersey, Chris Christie, who was facing a Democrat non-entity galloped to a 60.5 re-election win. The only counties the Democrats carried were Essex, where Newark is located and next door Hudson county, both with large black constituencies. It was not unexpected.

Christie, who undoubtedly has presidential fever is obviously positioning himself as 2016's alternative to the Tea Party, something dear to the GOP establishment's heart and soul. Christie made a huge point about how his re-election should be a lesson to Republicans. “I know that if we can do this in Trenton, N.J., then maybe the folks in Washington, D.C., should tune in their TVs right now and see how it’s done.”

He made a point of lecturing Republicans about how to win elections, saying, “We don’t just show up in the places where we’re comfortable, we show up in the places we’re uncomfortable. You don’t just show up 6 months before an election.”

This is all very well coming from an incumbent in a Blue state with some of the worst gun laws in the country, where taxes are high, the economy still remains poor and public employee unions still hold sway in spite of the governor's well publicized YouTube outings. The Democrats and their media allies devoted zero resources to defaming, demonizing and defeating him, and the worst Chris Christie had to contend with last night was the usual voter fraud in Newark.If Christie does get the GOP nomination in 2016, things will be very different.

In Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli came within a hair of defeating former DNC head Terry McAuliffe.

Cuccinelli, an unabashed conservative Republican was totally abandoned by the RNC. He was outspent 10 to 1 by McAuliffe, who also received substantial money and shock troops from the unions, pro-Amnesty groups like La Raza and radical environmental groups who like his radical, job killing positions on coal, carbon taxes and global warming.

He also got get out the vote appearances from Vice President Joe Biden, his old boss Hillary Clinton and President Obama among others, with Obama concentrating on ginning up the black vote for McAuliffe.

With all that, McAuliffe was only able to get 48% of the vote, while Cuccinelli got 45.5%, a spread of 2.5 points.

What beat Cuccinelli was the Obama funded 'Libertarian' candidacy of Robert Sarvis, who a number of people whom consider themselves conservatives and who normally vote Republican pulled the lever for and who ended up with 6.6% of the vote. If even one third of the Sarvis vote had gone to Cuccinelli, he would have won. I'm sure Obama considers it money well spent.

Cuccinelli was no RINO, but a conservative and a decent public servant. While he had a few missteps, next to Terry McAuliffe's record they pale into insignificance. A lot of the people who voted for Sarvis are undoubtedly justifying what they did as a 'protest vote', even though both Senator Rand Paul and his father canvassed the state for Cuccinelli warning people that Sarvis was no Libertarian and that they were being played.

So they made their protest and put Terry McAuliffe in office. Elections have consequences. I have a feeling those conservatives who voted for Sarvis are going to be feeling the effects of that protest vote in ways that are going to be painful and that they aren't going to appreciate. What Terry McAuliffe is going to do to Virginia is what Barack Obama has done to the United States. Meanwhile the GOP establishment is high fiving themselves,preparing to ignore the Republican base again and lining up behind Chris Christie as 'the Tea Party alternative, the guy we can win with in 2016.'

And the usual suspects are already out there on TV, radio and on the 'net trumpeting this as a 'message to the Tea Party'

To those of you who voted for Robert Sarvis, you're entitled. But divide and conquer is a old but effective strategy, and this time I think you fell for it. We could have won this one. We should have.

Fear And Loathing - The RINOs Versus The Lions

Strange days indeed, when Republicans eat their own over something that seems to be a no brainer - defunding the deeply unpopular ObamaCare and avoiding a national trainwreck.

The GOP establishment, which seems to have difficulty finding its behind with both hands is facing mounting discontent over President Obama's signature achievement. In fact, it's this president's legacy, if you don't count unprecedented debt, Benghazi, Syria, Fast and Furious, lavish vacations, IRS-gate and a slightly improved golf score.

But for most Americans, who now have taken ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's advice and are finding out what's actually in ObamaCare now that the bill's passed and the legislation is taking effect, it's a nightmare. The most conservative estimates are that ObamaCare will increase healthcare costs for an average family of four by $7,450 between 2014 and 2022..if you can manage to see a doctor in anything like a timely manner.

And those figures do not account for the additional costs incurred if the president gets his way and legalizes 11 million plus illegal migrants, virtually all of whom will qualify for the taxpayer funded subsidies.

Even President Obama's allies the unions are jumping ship on ObamaCare at this point.

When conservative Republicans in the House and in the Senate actually took a look at the poll numbers and spoke to their constituents, it seemed like a no brainer that with President Obama pushing for yet another expansion on his credit card to raise the debt ceiling, this would be an incredible time to own this issue and connect with the American public by funding the government but defunding ObamaCare.

When the GOP establishment proved reluctant, the conservatives in the House and Senators like Utah's Mike Lee and Texan Ted Cruz led the charge to mobilize conservatives. They got well over a million signatures on an online petition and defied expectations by succeeding in getting a budget through that defunds ObamaCare.

And that when the RINO crap hit the fan.

The bill has to go to the Senate, where the Democrats will need to get 60 votes for cloture in order to end debate so Democrat majority leader Harry Reid can pass a new budget that funds ObamaCare by a simple majority and send it back to the House. If Reid
can't get cloture, the budget bill stays in the Senate and forces Reid and the Democrats to publicly own both ObamaCare and the onus for shutting the government down. Senator Cruz explains this admirably to FOX News commentator Chris Wallace here:



Guess who Reid's allies are in getting cloture?

None other than Arizona RINO John McCain, his sidekick Lindsay Graham and the rest of the RINOs on the so-called Gang of Eight. And they're not limiting themselves to merely disagreeing with Cruz and conservatives. They're trying to destroy them politically.

As Chris Wallace revealed, the RINOs actually sent him opposition research on Cruz prior to his interview with Cruz on his Sunday show, which Wallace, being an actual journalist refused to use or reveal where it came from. And as Tammy Bruce correctly surmises, if they're sending it to Chris Wallace, they're sending it to everyone.:

“This has been one of the strangest weeks I’ve ever had in Washington. As soon as we listed Ted Cruz as our guest this week, I got unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats, but from top Republicans to hammer Cruz. Why are Republicans so angry at Ted Cruz?”

Well, for one thing, it's not all Republicans, but the RINO faction led by John McCain. They loathe Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson and others from the Tea Party class of 2010 because they're conservatives first rather than Republicans, and came to Washington to govern and try to take back the country rather than going along with the Old Boy network and business as usual. Like the members of the House, they haven't been in Washington long enough to become insulated within the DC bubble from the people that sent them there, and they still retain the principles they ran on.

Worst of all, they refuse to show deference to their 'betters', carpet chewers and sell outs like McCain.

ObamaCare is a particular sore spot with the RINOs because the waiver Obama gave Congress applies to the RINOs and their staffs, and they damn well don't want to lose it because of what McCain famously called 'wacko birds'. So they're willing to break Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment in spades and provide oppo research to damage fellow Republicans.

Sarah Palin, as usual has the right of it. She demands that Wallace reveal which Republicans sent him the material intended to damage Senator Ted Cruz (h/t The Noisy Room):

Sarah Palin        ✔ @SarahPalinUSA

@FoxNewsSunday Keep it TRULY fair & balanced. Release the GOP names encouraging you to trash @SenTedCruz. No more anonymous sources.

7:13 AM - 22 Sep 2013

1,139 Retweets 295 favorites

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As I mentioned previously, defunding both the mandatory and discretionary funding for ObamaCare is definitely possible. Congress does exactly that with the Hyde Amendment, which prevents funds going to MedicAid from paying for abortions with exceptions for incest and rape. It's done via a rider that is attached to the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services and has passed every year since 1976.


The RINOs, short sighted as usual, would rather not make waves.Losing elections has taught the Stupid Party nothing, although Cruz and his fellow lions appear to have learned something.

At the very least, this would put President Obama and Harry Reid in the uncomfortable position of having to whip their fellow Democrats into line to support shutting down the government to save a piece of legislation the vast majority of American hate...with the 2014 midterms coming on. The results of this might end up being surprising.

On the other hand, we have, apparently, a contingent within the GOP who have no allegiance to small r republican principles, or really, any principles whatsoever aside from getting re-elected again. Something is going to have to give, and it may just be the Republican Party.

That sharp, cracking sound you hear is the political borders re-aligning, and it may just be the start of the GOP establishment going the way of the Whigs.

Soccer Dad: "How I learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Sequester"

My pal David Gerstman, AKA Soccer Dad has a new gig blogging at the esteemed site Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion, and his opening salvo there is out today. Here's a slice:


A recent Washington Post editorial, The blame game over sequestration concludes:

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama seems content to warn of dire cutbacks in everything from naval operations to firefighters and to accuse the GOP of risking them to protect the wealthy. The Republicans denounce the sequester as Mr. Obama’s brainchild (though they accepted it as part of a 2011 budget deal) and say they won’t vote for any more tax increases. Both sides are obviously playing a political blame game, which must give way to serious bargaining soon — or the country will be the loser.

Yesterday Washington Post op-ed columnist Ruth Marcus wrote Republicans rewrite history on the sequester:

The tax debate is now closed,” House Speaker John Boehner proclaimed in The Wall Street Journal.

But why? The deal that Boehner asserts closed the tax debate involved less revenue than the $800 billion he was willing to ante up as part of the debt-ceiling negotiations in 2011. It involved less revenue than the $1 trillion he was offering last December in the cliff talks. By way of comparison, the original Simpson-Bowles plan called for more than $2 trillion in new revenue.
…
The Republican argument — we gave on taxes, now it’s time for spending cuts — also ignores the full history of spending cuts. The debt-ceiling deal — the one that created the supercommittee and sequester — also locked in $917 billion in spending cuts.

There’s one little detail that both accounts leave out. A previous deal was reached in 2011. Earlier this week John Boehner wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

During the summer of 2011, as Washington worked toward a plan to reduce the deficit to allow for an increase in the federal debt limit, President Obama and I very nearly came to a historic agreement. Unfortunately our deal fell apart at the last minute when the president demanded an extra $400 billion in new tax revenue—50% more than we had shaken hands on just days before.

It was a disappointing decision by the president, but with just days until a breach of the debt limit, a solution was still required—and fast. I immediately got together with Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell to forge a bipartisan congressional plan. It would be called the Budget Control Act.

The plan called for immediate caps on discretionary spending (to save $917 billion) and the creation of a special House-Senate “super committee” to find an additional $1.2 trillion in savings. The deal also included a simple but powerful mechanism to ensure that the committee met its deficit-reduction target: If it didn’t, the debt limit would not be increased again in a few months.

Boehner added that sequestration was more or less forced onto Congress by the President as part of a mechanism to avoid another debt ceiling fight prior to his re-election campaign. What’s important here is that it was the President who scuttled an earlier deal. Neither the Washington Post nor Ruth Marcus acknowledge this. Boehner isn’t making this up.

Read the rest here.

Election Predictions Roundup

A number of interesting points of view here, worthy of a round up.

Let's start with Jay Cost, who predicts a Romney win:

When I started making election predictions eight years ago, I had a very different perspective than I do today. I knew relatively little about the history of presidential elections or the geography of American politics. I had a good background in political science and statistics. So, unsurprisingly in retrospect, I focused on drawing confidence intervals from poll averages.

Since then, I have learned substantially more history, soured somewhat on political science as an academic discipline, and have become much more skeptical of public opinion polls. Both political science and the political polls too often imply a scientific precision that I no longer think actually exists in American politics. I have slowly learned that politics is a lot more art than science than I once believed.

Accordingly, what follows is a prediction based on my interpretation of the lay of the land. I know others see it differently--and they could very well be right, and I could be wrong.

I think Mitt Romney is likely to win next Tuesday.

For two reasons:

(1) Romney leads among voters on trust to get the economy going again.

(2) Romney leads among independents.

Cost sees the economy as the issue this year, and with the expected Dem turnout and Romney's edge among independents ad being decisive. Full disclosure...I've known Jay since his old Horserace Blog days and his track record is a pretty good one.

Michael Barone, probably the dean of American political writers sees the key to the election in Romney's rise in support in affluent suburbs:

..polling shows Romney ahead in Colorado, which Obama carried by 9 points last time, and the race closing in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, which Obama carried by 14, 10 and 16 points, respectively.

That tends to validate my alternative scenario that Mitt Romney would fare much better in affluent suburbs than Republican nominees since 1992, running more like George Bush did in 1988. The only way Pennsylvania and Michigan can be close is if Obama's support in affluent Philadelphia and Detroit suburbs has melted away.

This also helps explain why Romney still narrowly trails in Ohio polls. Affluent suburban counties cast about one-quarter of the votes in Pennsylvania and Michigan but only one-eighth in Ohio.

A pro-Romney affluent swing is confirmed by the internals of some national polls. The 2008 exit poll showed Obama narrowly carrying voters with incomes over $75,000. Post-debate Pew Research and Battleground polls have shown affluent suburbanite Romney carrying them by statistically significant margins.

In particular, college-educated women seem to have swung toward Romney since Oct. 3. He surely had them in mind in the foreign policy debate when he kept emphasizing his hopes for peace and pledged no more wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.

My other alternative scenario was based on the 1980 election, when vast numbers of voters switched from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan after their single debate one week before the election. In that debate, the challenger showed he had presidential stature and the incumbent president seemed petulant and small-minded.

We saw an even more vivid contrast between challenger and incumbent in the Oct. 3 debate. In the next two debates, Obama was definitely more focused and aggressive. But Romney held his own, and post-Oct. 16 polling showed him improving his standing even though many debate watchers thought Obama won on points.

What we may be seeing, as we drink from the firehose of multiple poll results pouring in, is a slow-motion 1980.

Karl Rove, whatever one my think of him understands retail politics. He makes his 51-48, at least 279 electoral votes prediction for a Romney win, and his analysis of Ohio is particularly interesting:

Adrian Gray, who oversaw the Bush 2004 voter-contact operation and is now a policy analyst for a New York investment firm, makes the point that as of Tuesday, 530,813 Ohio Democrats had voted early or had requested or cast an absentee ballot. That's down 181,275 from four years ago. But 448,357 Ohio Republicans had voted early or had requested or cast an absentee ballot, up 75,858 from the last presidential election.

That 257,133-vote swing almost wipes out Mr. Obama's 2008 Ohio victory margin of 262,224. Since most observers expect Republicans to win Election Day turnout, these early vote numbers point toward a Romney victory in Ohio. They are also evidence that Scott Jennings, my former White House colleague and now Romney Ohio campaign director, was accurate when he told me that the Buckeye GOP effort is larger than the massive Bush 2004 get-out-the-vote operation.

Democrats explain away those numbers by saying that they are turning out new young Ohio voters. But I asked Kelly Nallen, the American Crossroads data maven, about this. She points out that there are 12,612 GOP "millennials" (voters aged 18-29) who've voted early compared with 9,501 Democratic millennials.

Are Democrats bringing out episodic voters who might not otherwise turn out? Not according to Ms. Nallen. She says that about 90% of each party's early voters so far had also voted in three of the past four Ohio elections. Democrats also suggest they are bringing Obama-leaning independents to polls. But since Mr. Romney has led among independents in nine of the 13 Ohio polls conducted since the first debate, the likelihood is that the GOP is doing as good a job in turning out their independent supporters as Democrats are in turning out theirs.

He also deconstructs a recent poll:

Desperate Democrats are now hanging their hopes on a new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll showing the president with a five-point Ohio lead. But that survey gives Democrats a +8 advantage in turnout, the same advantage Democrats had in 2008. That assumption is, to put it gently, absurd.

CNN shows the president up by 3% in Ohio, inside the margin of error, but again the turnout assumption relies on 2008 and the mechanics reveal a +6 oversampling of Democrats.


Rasmussen sees Ohio dead even.In fact, he sees the entire election as too close to call.

I also note that President Obama drew a measly 2,800 crowd in his last Ohio appearance..while Mitt Romney's draw in his was around 25,000.

Jim Geraghty notes that the president is spending his last campaign weekend in Wisconsin, while Mitt Romney is campaigning in Pennsylvania, which tells you the candidate's internal polls are telling them something. Or as Geraghty puts it:

Obama is in big trouble in Wisconsin. He is spending his last weekend in a state that last went Republican in the 1984 Reagan landslide.

Team Romney is going hard after Pennsylvania because both internal and public polling show significant movement toward Romney in recent days. Yesterday, Rep. Ryan and Sen. Marco Rubio drew large and enthusiastic crowds in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, Romney will hold a campaign rally in the Philadelphia suburbs. Who would have thought that Obama would spend the last days of the campaign defending a solidly blue state, while Romney makes a play for another one?

We'll see whose right in just a few days.

Ah, Those Polls...The New Campaign Tool

Usually, I limit the attention I pay to polls, because I realize that there's only one that counts, and it happens on Election Day.

But we're seeing a new development here, and it's insidious and worrisome.

Sometimes in past elections, you'd see an outlier poll or three that was obviously skewed. What new this year is that we are seeing an organized attempt to corroborate seriously cooked polls commissioned by the Obama Media with a serious media narrative by those same outlets that keeps working on drumming in the message that Mitt Romney is losing badly and that President Obama is inevitable.

The idea, of course is to dampen Republican voter enthusiasm, fundraising  and turnout.

Aside from oversampling Democrats, the Obama Media polls are getting the results they're getting from overestimating Democrat turnout.Let's examine how this works.

In 2008, the electorate that elected Barack Obama was 39% Democrat, 32% GOP and 29% Independent, a  D+7 electorate. And Barack  Obama defeated McCain by 7 points, the same margin.
In 2004, the electorate was 37% Democrat, 37% Republican, and 26% Independent.. President Bush beat John Kerry by 3 points nationally.

What alomost every Obama Media poll is doing is assuming to get their results is that the  Democrats equal or increase their share of the electorate over 2008, which was their largest in decades. That isn't going to hasppen.

2008 was a special year, with a seriously unpopular lame duck Republican in teh White House, with economic anxiety that was primarily created by the Democrat congress but was manipulated by their friends in the media to cast a taint on the GOP nominee that year, John McCain.

The Democrats had a young, charismatic Barack Obama selling hope n' change to camouflage his non-existent resume, someone who was a mirror for whatever people wanted to see in him.Since he had no real record, he was able to run on promises. And to add to the mix, John McCain was a flawed candidate disliked by much of his own party, ran one of the worst campaigns in living memory and,because McCain opted for public financing while Barack Obama famously broke his word on that subject and went private, McCain was outspent roughly ten to one.

None of these factors exist today. President Obama has a record he needs to run from, the financing is pretty much a level playing field this year, Barack Obama has a muchg tougher candidate to face  and Republican enthusiasm is a lot higher than it was in 2008, with higher percentages of Republicans and independents in the battle ground states and lower percentages of registered Democrats. Recent polls from AP, Politico and the daily tracking polls from Rasmussen and Gallup all figure in what will be a relatively lower turnout of Democrats in 2012 as compared to 2008, and they all  show the race essentially tied. Only those polls showing an electorate with Democrat affiliation equal or greater than 2008  show Obama with any sizable lead.

The proof on the ground  of this is that we're seeing President Obama speaking at smaller venues to smaller crowds than he did in 2008. If he was really pulling away, he be speaking tol arger crowds in bigger venues.

Another factor driving things is that the Obama Campaign spent a massive amount of money on ad buys right after their convention, while the Romney forces held off for the stretch. That may or may not have been a wise strategic decision, but we'll see.

My sense of this is that the country is divided right now, and that there's a great deal of flux in at least 10-15% of the electorate. In spite of the media's best efforts to keep it out of the news, a lot of Americans are waking up to the fact that the country is in dire economic straits and that things are getting worse, not better. And the economy is going to be the main issue of this election.

Mitt Romney has yet to sell  at least a part of the electorate that he is the man to lead us to an economic recovery, and the Obama Campaign's 'look a squirrel' strategy has done a decent job of distracting people from the president's own abysmal record, with the active participation of the ever helpful Obama Media.

However, in the debates, even though they are being hosted primarily by Obama partisans, Governor Romney  will have a chance to talk to the American people unfiltered and President Obama will likewise have to face up to his dismal performance.Americans are going to watch the debates and make up their minds.

One thing you can expect, of course, is that no matter how well Governor Romney actually does in the debates, the Obama media will call it for the president and release new polls showing the president 'won'. Expect skewed exit polls showing President Obama winning handily and early calls of states ala' Florida in 2000 to occur in a final effort to suppress GOP turnout.

Many of these people refer to themselves as journalists when  in fact,they're just campaign operatives.

Most of them have no idea how damaging this is.

Distrust of America's media is at an all time high, and what's even worse in many ways is the fact that a significant part of the media no longer evenmake an effort to hide thei rbias any more.

That's a very dangerous place for a free society to be in.

Jay Cost: Real Numbers Prove Romney And Obama Are Essentially Still Tied

Jay Cost over at the Weekly Standard is consistently one of the smartest guys in the room when it comes to American politics and his take on the supposed 'Obama is the front runner' theme is as always, of interest:

As we wait to see the extent and duration of Barack Obama’s post-convention bounce, it makes sense to do a little analytical house cleaning. In particular, a meme developed over the summer that Barack Obama was a strong favorite to win reelection, thanks to a sustained and substantial lead over his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, particularly in the swing states.

This impression has been facilitated in part by several factors: an aggressive Obama PR operation that courts the media in an attempt to create a “bandwagon” effect, registered voter polls that often over-sample Democrats, left-leaning journalists who often assume an Obama advantage; former Obama campaign consultant Nate Silver, whose black-box statistical model for the New York Times has shown an outsized lead for the president (and whose 2010 model consistently placed the battle for the House as a tossup, while giving Democrats a 20 percent chance of holding the House on Election Day), as well the proliferation of surveys conducted by Public Policy Polling, which does regular polling for the hyper-partisan union, the Service Employees International Union.

I want to look at the data from a different perspective. In particular, let’s look at non-partisan, likely voter polls that RealClearPolitics used in its averages from the month of August (multiple polls from the same pollster were averaged and counted only once). What do we see?



Cost goes on to show similar charts for the battle ground states that essentially show the same thing...a tie.

His final conclusion? : My instincts tell me that by the time of the debates, we will be back to precisely where we were in August – both candidates essentially tied and stuck 3-5 points below 50 percent. Time will tell.

I think he's 100% on the money, with one exception...the only reason it's still this close if because the Romney campaign haven't forcefully attacked this president on his failed record yet.

As Jay Cost says, time will tell.

Read the whole thing here.

Washington Post: Dems Spent $1.5 Mil To Help Akin Win Missouri GOP Primary

Seems like it's turning out to be a pretty wise investment on their part:

Senate Democrats got exactly what they wanted in Missouri on Tuesday night. Now comes the hard part.

Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s primary victory clearly boosted vulnerable Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill’s survival odds this fall. But to win, McCaskill will have to make the general election campaign as much about her opponent as herself.

That’s easier said than done. But Akin — and some of the things he’s said in the past — does make it a bit easier.

There’s a reason why Democrats spent over $1.5 million trying to help Akin win his three-way primary. He was the most conservative candidate in the field — and the most unpredictable one. He shook up his campaign staff late last year. He recently released a head-scratching and jumbled campaign ad. And Democrats have already launched a microsite highlighting his controversial statements that won’t play well with moderates. (“America has got the equivalent of the stage III cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,” Akin once said.){...}

“I’m not going to tell you this is definitely a gimme for McCaskill, but I think the framework of the race is different,” said Democratic strategist Roy Temple, a veteran of Missouri politics.

Akin’s uncompromising brand of social conservatism, for example, might lead him to say something that may give political moderates — the same moderates who don’t like the economic policies advanced by Obama and Senate Democrats — pause in the Senate race.

Everything has to go right in the fall for McCaskill to survive. Akin has to slip up, she has to be flawless, and it may even take a little luck. But on this day, Democrats can argue that much of the race has gone right for them so far, with Akin’s win being the latest example of their strategy succeeding. And they’d be correct.

This was written August 8th, by the way.

Interesting the way these things work out.Spend some cash to get a gaffe prone idiot to win the primary and then just wait for him to do your work for you.

Just turning the election focus from Obama's abysmal record and his performance on the economy to the abortion issue was probably worth it all by itself.

Of course, the big question is whether this cynical ploy did the country any good as a whole. But as I might have mentioned before, I don't think that's really what concerns the leadership of the Democrats at the moment.

Bipartisanship? What's That Really Mean?

Today's Washington Post has a 3 pager purporting to show that independents favor cooperation between the two parties and less partisan warfare.

The backbone is a study the Post did with the Kaiser Family Foundation that polled 3,000 randomly selected adults designed to 'to explore the views of the growing number of people who decline to pledge allegiance to either party.'

We've seen what the WaPo's polls are like before, and as usual,the WaPo declined to post a link to the mechanics, but the entire flavor of the article can pretty much be sampled by the opener:

President Obama and Mitt Romney are waging one of the most partisan campaigns in recent memory, energizing their bases with heated rhetoric and harsh tactics. But among political independents, some of the most prized voters in the electorate, speaking more softly about the other side may be a key to winning their support.

This is insidious and biased on a number of levels.

The entire theme of  "a harsh, partisan campaign" was absent from the pages of organs like the Washington Post for months while the Obama Campaign and its surrogates were calling Governor Romney a tax cheat, a felon, a racist who wanted to put black people back in chains and a murderer. No one had much to say about commentary that appeared with sly digs at his religion, or his wife, or claimed that his father would be ashamed of him.

The WaPo, to my knowledge, didn't even call President Obama to account when he outright lied in yesterday's press conference about his deliberately negative campaign.

The dinosaur media first deigned to notice the negative campaigning when Governor Romney finally had enough and told President Obama,  "take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago."

It was only after that speech that we saw dozens of articles in media outlets like the WaPo commenting on how 'negative' and 'partisan' the campaign had gotten.

So for the WaPo to now to refer to the two campaigns as being equally partisan with "heated rhetoric and harsh tactics" is the height of cynicism and partisanship in and of itself.

And it also gives rise to a good look at what bi-partisanship and cooperation between the two parties means to the WaPo and other media organs like them.

The dinosaur media often refers to 'moderate Republicans'. It's a cute phrase that essentially means one thing: Republicans usually willing to vote for all or part of the Democrat's agenda and it's commonly applied to people like Maine's Senator Olympia Snowe.

Think about it. You never see the phrase 'moderate Democrat' used. There are very few Democrats who vote with Republicans all or part of the time, as you'll see if you examine the roll calls on votes.The Democrats have almost completely driven them out of the party, as they did to Joe Lieberman. But the rare Democrat that does vote with Republicans even part of the time is invariably described not as 'moderate', but as 'conservative'.

If you examine in your own mind the connotations the word moderate has, you'll see this is no accident.

Because what the Washington Post and their brothers and sisters in the dinosaur media really want when they make calls for 'bi-partisanship' and 'a softer tone' is not for Democrats to move from the left to the center, but for Republicans and Republicans only to move towards the left. They want all Republicans to be 'moderates' and vote for the Democrat's agenda.

And most of all,they want Republicans to put up with the most scurrilous and bitter attacks from Democrats without responding.

Speaking as an independent myself, I reject this out of hand.

Politics is indeed the art of the possible, and quid pro quo concessions are part of what makes a democracy work. But to demand it of the right side of the aisle while giving the left a pass is not  a call for concessions but a demand for a full scale abandonment of principle.

During President Obama's first two years in office, he had a veto proof majority in congress. During that time, when ObamaCare and the so-called stimulus were being crafted, the Republican minority was locked out the room - literally. Long standing rules in the senate and the House were thrown out at the Democrat's whim in order to get their agenda passed, and even the reconciliation process was misused in order to get ObamaCare passed.

There were no calls for bi-partisanship and softer rhetoric then. Certainly no one in the dinosaur media wrote pieces like this crying for it. Instead, they were busy cheer leading for the Obama Administration and how historic and wonderful the new regime was.

No, the call for bi-partisanship and the articles about the bitter divide in Washington came after the 2010 midterms, when the Republicans took the House and enough Senate seats that they couldn't simply be locked out of the room and abused any longer.

Personally, I'd be more than happy to see the two parties working together. And in fact when both parties honored the basic principles on which this nation was founded, America benefited from that co-operation..

Where there are Democrats prepared to be moderate and work for fiscal sanity, the sanctity of private property, freedom of choice in other areas besides killing babies, the full use of America's energy resources, the downsizing of government and a strong national defense - in short, for the good of the country rather than to appease special interest groups - I welcome them and their ideas as part of the solution.

In the absence of that, they're merely part of the problem, and I could care less about bi-partisanship that involves them.

In fact, I reject it utterly. Because it has no meaning.

Romney And Obama Have Narrow Margins To Victory On The Electoral Map

It's far too early to be making any predictions on the coming Obama/Romney matchup...unless you're Chris Cilizza at the WAPO and have a deadline and an editor breathing down your neck. Then you might come up with a piece with the title "Mitt Romney’s road to presidency this fall looks narrow on electoral map" :

It’s no secret that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has a narrow path to win the presidency this fall. Nowhere is that reality more apparent than when examining the electoral map on which Romney and President Obama will battle in November.

A detailed analysis of Romney’s various paths to the 270 electoral votes he would need to claim the presidency suggests he has a ceiling of somewhere right around 290 electoral votes.

The truth of the matter is that both candidates are pretty much neck and neck, a large part of the country isn't even paying attention to the campaign yet, Mitt Romney has yet to choose a running mate and there have been no debates, assuming President Obama chooses to participate, which he very well might not. So a 'detailed analysis' is an impossibility at this point.

But just for giggles, let's look at both candidates and the electoral college matchup in the race for 270 votes.

Barack Obama starts out not only with the advantage of being able to campaign and fund raise on the taxpayer's dime, but with all but guaranteed victories in several populous blue states like California, New York and Illinois for a total of 104 electoral votes. Actually, these are really huge margins in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area.He's also pretty certain to take the rest of the West Coast (Washington and Oregon plus Hawaii for another 23 votes), most of New England and the Northeast (Another 51 votes including Rhode Island, Vermont Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, DC, Delaware and New Jersey). That totals up to 178 votes.

Mitt Romney will almost certainly take solid red states in the South (Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina and Tennessee) for 65 votes, Kentucky, Indiana and West Virginia for 24 votes, and the Red states in the Heartland (Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas,Nebraska, The Dakotas, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana ) for another 78 votes, and Alaska a total of 170 votes.

After that, we start speculating as things are far too close to call at this point.

Looking at the numbers, it's fairly likely that Barack Obama could carry New Mexico (5 votes) because of it's high Hispanic demographic, Minnesota(10 votes), which normally goes Democrat.Colorado (9 votes) could go either way. It's also fairly likely that Mitt Romney will take the deep Red state of Arizona (11 votes) and that Missouri(10 votes) and North Carolina (15 votes) will also return to the Republican column this year.

Assuming it breaks down this way ( a big assumption but not unlikely)you have Obama with 202 votes and Romney with 206.

Almost everything else is in play.Romney is personally popular in Michigan(16 votes) and New Hampshire,(4 votes) where the depressed Obama economy is also an issue. He will also likely win Nevada (6 votes) because of the Mormon vote and the nation's highest unemployment. Virginia,(13 votes) like Colorado has become more and more purple as the overflow of government dependent workers from DC populates Northern Virginia. The Old Dominion could be the one southern state where the Democrats are able to hang on, depending on the relative turnout of the northern and southern part of the state.Iowa (6 votes) went Blue last time and could very well do so again.

That brings us to the key swing states - Wisconsin (10 votes), Florida ( 29 votes), Ohio(18 votes), and Pennsylvania(20 votes). That's where I chiefly think this election is going to be won and lost.

If the Democrats win in Virginia, Iowa and Colorado, Obama's total will be 230 votes.To win, he will have to take three of the above four states and can afford to lose Florida as th eone he doesn't carry. If Virginia goes Republican, he will have to win two of the above states, plus Florida.If Obama wins in Michigan and Virginia, he only need any two of the above four states.

If Mitt Romney comes in having lost Virginia and Colorado but having won in Michigan, he will have 228 votes, 232 if he wins in New Hampshire as well. He'd need only Florida and one other of the key swing states to win. Without Michigan, Virginia or Colorado,he'd need Florida plus any two of the remaining key battleground states to win.

I cite these figures just to show you that both candidates have similar margins of victory at this point.

Some other factors worth noting that actually might give Romney something of an advantage:

Rob Portman, the popular Republican governor of Ohio and Senator Marco Rubio,very popular in his home state of Florida are both on Romney's short list as a choice for running mate.

Pennsylvania has been an historically Democrat state, and the chances are Obama will win there. However,the depressed Obama economy will be a factor and anything can happen

A signpost as to what will happen in Wisconsin will be the June recall elections. So far, Republican Governor Scott Walker is still ahead in the polls and the millions of dollars spent by the public employee unions had an inconclusive effect on Republicans in the State Senate, although it did cut down the GOP majority. Should Walker prevail, that could be a sign Wisconsin will be voting GOP come November.

Stay tuned..

The Battle Over Student Loans - A Great Indicator Of The Difference Between The Two Parties

The latest dogfight in DC Land concerns student loans.

Because of a previous 'accounting' ruse the Obama Administration used to free up funding for other programs it wanted, the rate on the over one trillion in outstanding student loans, now at 3.4 percent interest on subsidized Stafford student loans is set to double on July 1st.

Needless to say, President Obama has been using this mess he created as a talking point to try and get younger voters to pull the lever for him in 2012 by blaming it on Republicans and not being exactly truthful about why the problem exists in the first place.

The democrat plan for creating the funding needed to make this go away is exactly what you'd expect from them - raise taxes prohibitively on millions of the nation's small businesses:

Senate Democrats and the White House are seeking a one-year freeze in the interest rate. The $6 billion cost would be offset by limiting a tax provision that allows some owners of so-called S-corporations to avoid paying Medicare payroll taxes on their earnings, Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, told reporters yesterday.

Harkin said the legislation would require the Medicare payroll tax on income of more than $250,000 a year earned at S-corporations with fewer than three shareholders.

“This is a loophole that needs to be closed anyway,” he said. “So this is the right time to do it and for the right cause.”

Note that the freeze is only a temporary one year band-aid while the tax on the millions of American small businesses organized as sub-chapter S corporations would be permanent - $9 billion over 10 years according to the CBO . And these small business, many of them family owned who plow these profits back into their businesses to fund growth and yes, new hires would be penalized for no other reason than being small, somewhat successful and a ready made target. Some 'loophole'!

By the way..did you know Harkin was a well known war hero in Vietnam?

The Republicans support maintaining current interest rates, but they have a different way of paying for it - taking the funds out of ObamaCare:

In the latest political chess move, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, scheduled a House vote for Friday on legislation preventing the 3.4 percent interest rate on subsidized Stafford student loans from doubling as scheduled on July 1. In a bitter pill for Democrats, the measure's $5.9 billion cost would be paid for with cuts from President Barack Obama's health care overhaul bill.

Boehner announced the vote in an abruptly called news conference Wednesday that followed days of pounding by Obama and congressional Democrats. It also came two days after the GOP's presumptive presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, tried defusing the issue by embracing the call for freezing interest rates, putting more pressure on congressional Republicans to back the effort or look isolated.

"What Washington shouldn't be doing is exploiting the challenges that young Americans face for political gain," Boehner said. He also accused the president of "campaigning and trying to invent a fight where there isn't and never has been one."

Congressional GOP aides said Republicans were working on the legislation for some time and unveiled their bill to try to prevent Obama from escalating the dispute. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss party strategy.

Hours before Boehner spoke, Obama wrapped up a two-day trip to three college campuses in which he cast himself as the students' champion and Republicans as the ones standing in the way of resolving the problem.

"How can we want to maintain tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans who don't need them and weren't even asking for them?" Obama said at the University of Iowa, mocking the GOP. "I don't need one. I needed help back when I was your age." [...]

The House GOP bill would cut a $17 billion prevention and public health fund Obama's law created for immunization campaigns, research, screenings and wellness education. Republicans have dubbed it a "slush fund" and sought to cut it to finance a variety of projects, succeeding earlier this year to help pay for maintaining doctors' Medicare reimbursements.

The back story here is what a large chunk of that slush fund is actually earmarked to be used for - President Obama's re-election efforts.


Most of the pain from ObamCare kicks in well after the 2012 elections, when the president could care less since he won't be answerable to voters anymore. Except for one inconvenient part.

Over 12 million seniors rely on the Medicare Advantage program for their healthcare needs, since it covers gaps in vanilla Medicare coverage.

As you know, this president and his party paid for ObamaCare by essentially stealing half a trillion dollars from Medicare, including huge cuts in reimbursement rate for physicians who take Medicare Advantage that will essentially doom the program and force seniors back to vanilla Medicare.

Unfortunately for the Obama Campaign, seniors are going to find out about this in October right before the election, when according to federal guidelines, seniors have to pick their Medicare program.

Given that seniors vote in far higher percentages than most other groups, this does not bode well for the president's election prospects.

So a cynical scam has been developed to shift just enough money out of an ill-defined ObamaCare slush fund to delay the whip coming down until after the election:

It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election.

This political ticking time bomb could become the biggest “October Surprise” in US political history.

But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.

The money is to come from funds that Health and Human Services is allowed to use for “demonstration projects.” But to make it legal, HHS has to pretend that it’s doing an “experiment” to study the effect of this money on the insurance market.

That is, to “study” what happens when the government doesn’t change anything but merely continues a program that’s been going on for years.

Obama can temporarily prop up Medicare Advantage long enough to get re-elected by exploiting an obscure bit of federal law. Under a 1967 statute, the HHS secretary can spend money without specific approval by Congress on “experiments” directly aimed at “increasing the efficiency and economy of health services.”

Past demonstration projects have studied new medical techniques or strategies aimed at improving care or reducing costs. The point is to find ways to lower the costs of Medicare by allowing medical technocrats to make efficient decisions without interference from vested interests.

Now Obama means to turn it on its head — diverting the money to a blatantly nonexperimental purpose to serve his political needs.

A Government Accounting Office report released this morning shows, quite starkly, that there simply is no experiment being conducted, just money being spent. Understandably, the GAO recommends that HHS cancel the project.

Yes, the president is planning to divert some of the tax payer dollars in his ObamaCare slush fund into gaming seniors into picking their usual Medicare Advantage program, thinking nothing's changed...until it's too late.

It's just another street game of three card monte to him, but it's life and death to millions of senior citizens, who don't deserve to be victimized.

It's doubtful that Congress could thwart this by simply taking access to the funds away, because the Democrat majority in the Senate will see to it that it doesn't happen. But earmarking these funds for other purposes and hugely publicizing this with a House investigation to generate headlines and embarrass Democrats into going along would not only work but provide the GOP with another election issue to use against the president and his enablers.

Harry Reid Uses Nuclear Option - And May Just Have Sealed ObamaCare's Doom

Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled an unprecedented maneuver in the Senate yesterday that is undoubtedly going to have major implications for the way Senate business is conducted in the future.

Following a routine cloture ( end of debate) vote on the Chinese currency bill Reid is touting,Senate Republicans attempted to use the rules of the Senate to attach a post-cloture amendment that would have required a vote on the president's jobs bill he wants passed now, now, in its original, highly embarrassing form.

Because the Senate Democrats lack enough votes to enforce cloture or pass the bill, they were put in the position of having to vote against the amendment, which would have exploded President Obama's myth that only the Evil Republicans are the obstruction to getting his jobs bill passed.

What Reid did then was to object to the affirmative ruling on the amendment and force a vote along party lines, 51-48 to disallow the amendment and change the Senates rules to stop the minority party in the future from offering post cloture amendments ...even though he had to ignore the Senate parliamentarian's ruling to do it.

This thuggish behavior, known as the Nuclear Option, is exactly what the bi-partisan Gang of 14 got together to prevent back when the GOP had the Senate majority, in order to safeguard the rights of the minority party.

The Republicans like Lindsay Graham and John McCain who formed the Gang of 14 back then reasoned that the day would come when they would be in the minority and they expected the Democrats to likewise honor the agreement when things changed.

Suckers.

However, as the Senate Republicans who formed the Gang of 14 noted back in 2005, things change.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and most of the other Senate Republicans were absolutely livid at being sandbagged and said do openly. The odds of a GOP takeover of the Senate in 2012 are pretty good, and Harry Reid's little parliamentary mugging is not going to be forgotten.

Come January 2013, look for ObamaCare and other elements of Obama's agenda to be dismantled in exactly the same way if the GOP takes the Senate.

That's a very good thing on its face, but a bad thing overall because the precedent Reid just set is going to further poison the climate in DC and make it harder for the two parties to work together.

A despicable action from a fairly despicable man. It takes a rare bird to crap in his own nest.

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Democrats Draw A Hard Line - Tax Increases Before Any Spending Cuts

I predicted this would happen, and it certainly wasn't much of a stretch.

When Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner gave in to President Obama's desire to raise the debt ceiling, much was touted about a so called 'super committee' made up of six Democrats and six Republicans who were to come up with recommendations to cut the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years. it they weren't able to agree by November 23, Boehner and McConnell stupidly allowed themselves to be maneuvered into agreeing to massive automatic spending cuts, with a majority coming from the defense budget.

With a made to order deal like that, is it any wonder the Democrats are taking a hard line? If they dig their heels in, they get what they want either way. Either they get the tax increases they want, thus making the Republicans complicit in unpopular tax increases or they get massive cuts in the defense budget, where President Obama wants to slash by $700 billion anyway.

Virtually every Democrat member of the committee (James Clyburn, Chris Van Hollen and Xavier Becerra from the House, Max Baucus , John Kerry and Patty Murray from the Senate) are notorious for being on the far Left of the Party and never seeing a tax increase they didn't like. The GOP, on the other hand, went out of its way to avoid anyone associated with the Tea Party or on the party's conservative wing. The closest thing the GOP side of the committee has to that is Senator Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania.

I still like Pat Caddel's description of our two parties...as he often says, there's the corrupt party and the stupid party.

If the stupid party is to survive, they had better smarten up.

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The Secret Blue State Plan To Steal The 2012 Elections

The deep Blue states above all have something in common. They're all ruled by solid Democrat majorities in their State Legislatures and they've all passed legislation designed to favor Democrat urban strongholds, disenfranchise less populated Red States and have a decisive effect on the 2012 election.

And very few people know about it.

The legislation is known as The National Popular Vote bill, and there's an ongoing attempt to get it passed in as many states as possible. It's mainly being championed by Democrats, with a sprinkling of Republicans to give it the aura of 'bi-partisanship'.

The states above control 138 electoral votes. Because they've all signed on to The National Popular Vote Act, those electoral votes will automatically go to the candidate who gets the most popular votes nationally - regardless of how the citizens of these states actually vote.

For instance, let's say that in 2012 the largely Republican voters in downstate Illinois and some of the suburbs manage to outvote the Democrats, corpses, illegal aliens and vagrants put together by the ward bosses and the machine in Chicago and Cook County. Because the Democrats in the Illinois Legislature have managed to push the National Popular Vote Act through, Illinois' 20 electoral votes would go not necessarily to the Republican candidate the majority of voters in the state chose but to whichever candidate got the majority of votes nationally. If Barack Obama were to win the popular vote nationally by even as little as 100 votes, Illinois' 20 electoral votes will automatically go him.

This scenario is also known as Al Gore's wet dream.

None of these states held a referendum on this. It was all done by legislative fiat.

It's also interesting to look at some of the people behind this.

The Chairman, Dr. John Kozas of Los Altos California is a wealthy lefty who made his money from co-inventing the scratch-off lottery ticket and then lobbying state governments to sell them. Among many other far Left and socialist groups and candidates he's supported as a donor and/or bundled for is Howard Dean's Democracy For America ( DFA) political organization, Berkeley nut case Rep. Barbara Lee, Senator Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison, The Democratic Farmer/Labor Party, the DNC, Senator Boxer's PAC for a Change, and of course, Barack Obama. The list is a long one.

Tom Golisano is a prominent business man with deep pockets who was the co-counder of the Independence Party of New York, a party split between Perotistas and a strong Marxist element. He was also a Kerry donor. Forbes estimates his personal wealth at $1.2 billion.

Barry Fadem, the president, is a long-time Democrat operative in California, who worked for Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally arguably one of the most incompetent and perhaps racist public officials in state history. He's another Boxer donor, as well as to ActBlue, an organization that seeks to organize boycotts to penalize businesses thought to be too 'Republican'.

Jason Roe was a Republican operative in the northeast with all that implies until he got a little too close to Jack Abramoff.

National Popular Vote Secretary Chris Pearson is another long time far Left Democrat operative who worked with admitted socialist Bernie Sanders and the Progressive Party.

Larry Sokol is a longtime Democrat legislative staffer and lobbyist in California. His connections were instrumental in shepherding the Nation Popular Vote Bill through the California Legislature.

Former Minnesota GOP Representative Laura Brod is something of the odd person out here.While the cast of the group is overwhelmingly Left- leaning, Brod says there is a conservative argument for NPV.

She claims that this is a state's rights prerogative according to Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution, that the current system means that national candidates spend their time and resources and craft policy based on the needs of battleground states while ignoring states with little electoral clout and states they feel they have no chance of carrying. Brod's argument is that NPV will make every vote count and force National candidates to campaign in every state. These arguments all have some validity. Democrat nominees usually give Utah and Texas a pass and Republicans do the same to Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Where she's mistaken, in my opinion is the ultimate outcome. Widespread adoption of the NPV would simply give the Democrats an opportunity and the incentive to build up huge vote tallies in the corrupt urban strongholds they control by means fair or foul in an attempt to simply overwhelm voters in smaller Red states.

Voting illegal aliens, dead people, 'activists' being carted from state to state taking advantage of same day registration and felons in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City and similar areas wouldn't just affect those states anymore...it would infect the voting process throughout the country and ultimately make the Electoral college irrelevant.

This is a Trojan Horse. And that's exactly why this group is mainly led by Left wing Democrats and why legislatures dominated by Democrats in Blue states are in love with it.

Make no mistake about it. This is a well-funded, highly organized group and could have a major impact in 2012. And hardly anyone knows about it.

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