A Second Hand Conjecture

The title is what Time Magazine labeled New Jersey’s Senator William Warren Barbour in 1940. The expression takes on a better curve for Sarah Palin, but it fits the occasion of a very partisan and frankly rather phenomenal speech tonight (transcript).

I suppose I’m surprised by the surprise in so many media reactions I’m seeing. Then again it’s a reminder that we on the pro-Palin political right have been following Sarah for over a year now, and this sort of thing is still very much an introduction for others.

Michael Crowley for instance calls Palin’s speech “alarmingly strong” and describes emails from liberal colleagues as “panicked.” I think that’s probably an ungenerous assessment. There is afterall a reason so many on the left have been trying to destroy her these past few days. You saw it this evening. Sarah does have a certain magic. Even when she fumbles in a long speech as she can, it tends to amplify her humanity. A characteristic interestingly shared with Barack Obama and almost totally alien to wizened veterans.

The amplitude of the attention and the stress of the experince is of course very new for Sarah, but you’d never know it from looking at her tonight. I realized I’d become a little emotionally invested in this candidate over the course of the week, with its grotesque slander and innuendo campaigns in the press. When the Republican party in assembly gave her a near endless welcoming ovation I kept saying “don’t cry, don’t cry,” which was slightly sexist for Sarah and slightly for my own sad benefit.

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(photo: WBEZ Chicago Public Radio | site)

Obama’s newish McSame style attack ad mocking McCain’s “original maverick” slogan is fairly good. As Ken Wheaton notes, all the time McCain had to spend trying to convince the GOP he was a loyal Republican, unfortunately produced a lot of pro-Bush statements on videotape. Also, I like the Rovian touch of attacking McCain’s strength: experience.

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Hmmm, oil states controlling production to just barely meet 35.6% of supply so they can keep prices high. That’s bad.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0508/Clinton_OPEC_can_no_longer_be_a_cartel.html

“We’re going to go right at OPEC,” she said. “They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at,” she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

“That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly,” she said, saying she’d use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

But, wait till you see her plan for health care.

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I agree with one of the commenters over on HotAir…

How DARE they call us Indianans. We are called Hoosiers for some gawd damn reason, so call us that when you’re insulting us.

I dare him to come here and say that. It would be a tossup if he were beaten or laughed at. Mostly we’d probably laugh at him, and maybe tar-n-feather him. That’s what he deserves.

UPDATE:

Alright, seems to have been either a hoax, or a dirty campaign trick.

But I will stand by my tar-n-feathering for anyone who got Bill Clinton elected… or nearly any career politician.

One has to ask though, who ultimately benefits from an anti-Clinton attack based on doctored footage?

Maybe this is actually a reverse attack. Now that the ad has been shown to be faked (and quickly,) Hillary will gain some sympathy, because obviously Obama and his crew are using dirty tricks to attack Hillary. So, maybe Clinton operatives put out such an attack, simply because it could be easily defused.

Or, most likely, an army of one decided that this was a good ploy. Occams razor and all…

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Here’s an ad some of you may not have seen. But now (wonder of wonders) since Indiana is a battleground state in the Democratic primary, it’s been getting plenty of air play during the local news programs.

Hillary Clinton:
Right here over 200 Hoosiers built parts that guided our military’s smart bombs to their targets.
They were good jobs, but now, they’re gone to China.
And now America’s defense relies on Chinese spare parts.
George Bush could have stopped it, but he didn’t.
As your president, I will fight to keep good jobs here, and to turn this economy around.
I’m Hillary Clinton and I approve this message because American workers should build America’s defense.

Seems like a simple enough case, doesn’t it. Bush and the Republicans failing to do what she would do.

But wait till you here the kicker about this.
(more…)

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Video flashback from 2004. Bill Clinton:”If one candidate is appealing to your fears and the other one is appealing to your hopes…” You know where that’s going. Ahem. Clearly these were not carved in stone.

(HT: BigDog)

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source image: heartcores

I’m posting the news rather late because…well, because I’m writing from New Mexico. It should come as no surprise to the election observer, that the Land of Enchantment is once again rather late in declaring a winner in an election. This time it was the Democratic caucuses, and the winner was Hillary Clinton. New Mexico is always late because almost every election seems to break even in this politically divided swing state (and partly because alacrity just isn’t the state’s highest virtue).

In 2004 it took the state canvassing board three weeks to finally declare a winner in the presidential election. That year, California managed to get ten million ballots counted in a couple of hours, while New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, was busy complaining to the press about being overwhelmed with merely 7% as many. Incidentally, if you pronouce her name vee-hill-her-own, you could be a native.

But we should hope the occasion of the recount is just ordinary local narrowness, and not an unwelcome portent that the country hasn’t yet overcome her predilection for narrow national election results. On a raw and bitter level, I’d have trouble enduring another post-election experience full of recounts, recriminations, farcical conspiracy theories and obstinate resistance to obvious concessions. Remember this sort of thing?

Kerry won. Here’s the facts. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted….
(TomPaine)

The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election.
(CommonDreams)

Ominously enough, some people are already starting to say similarly strange and obdurate things:

To imply that the New Mexico gives Clinton a win amid a string of losses, is to imply a falsehood.
(Dakota Voice)

This time around I could be pleased with whomever won, if they could give me a Reagan ‘84, Nixon ‘72, or Johnson ‘64 style annihilation of their opponent. A year without another hand recount in New Mexico would be a good thing for this country.

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photo: Talatu-Carmen

Tony Harnden: “Initially, it was said just young people voted for Obama. Then it was young people and affluent white. Then it was young people, affluent whites and black people. Then it was young people, affluent whites, black people and white males. Well, in Maryland last night he won women, Hispanics, Catholics and seniors as well. The way this is going, there’ll soon only be one-legged Asian-American old ladies for Hillary.”

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In an interesting glimpse into the hidden but powerful politics found in retirement homes, the Washington Post says Hillary can still count on strong support from the widows of Leisure World in Maryland. Except that is, from the rake of the joint: a flirtatious 80 year old widower named John Law. Law voted Obama for his dynamism. Single men are of course pretty popular in homes too, which gave the piece its best line: “You know how it is, as soon as the wife passes away, they start with the casserole.”

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At some point along the way Obama became the pragmatist’s choice. Hillary used to own that territory when concerns turned to electability, but that’s all over with now. Perception is as PoliticalBuzz puts it, “Obama is someone who can rally a broad base.” Combining the leftist base with the moderate infrastructure is always difficult. But this time both may be able to consolidate behind Obama. See Judith Gayle for a representative example of the shift that’s going on among progressives. However, the bearded, bereted, wannabe Cuban guerrilla, perhaps isn’t the best image to preach the message of electability.
(HT: Ben Weyl)

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I guess she’s only pro-union when it benefits her.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4218509&page=1

In six years as a member of the Wal-Mart board of directors, between 1986 and 1992, Hillary Clinton remained silent as the world’s largest retailer waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers.

Clinton has been endorsed for president by more than a dozen unions, according to her campaign Web site, which omits any reference to her role at Wal-Mart in its detailed biography of her.

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It’s not to often that a headline comes along that makes me bust out laughing. But the following one did.

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I don’t want to hear any more about how the Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility; none of them are planning to close the current deficit, much less deal with the now-seriously-it-really-is-looming entitlement problem. Their tax code changes will claw back only a small fraction of the revenue lost in the Bush tax cut. If you are surprised, it is probably because the Democrats and the Republicans have a different definition of the tax cuts going “mostly to the rich”. If you mean, “which individuals got the biggest benefit from the tax cuts?”, rich people did, because they pay the most taxes; that is the definition Democrats use. But if you mean “which class of people got most of the money?”, then the answer is “the middle class”. There just aren’t that many rich people; it costs a lot more to hand out a modest amount of cash to 200 million than to hand out a lot of cash to 500,000. So when Democrats repeal only the tax cuts on the top one or two brackets, this may be symbolically rewarding, but it will not actually generate that much revenue for the treasury.Democrats are, of course, planning to spend every bit of the money from their tax increases on new spending, plus it looks like some more. You may now return to forgetting that you ever thought you cared about the budget deficit.

This rant is inspired by this post from Greg Mankiw on Hillary Clinton’s tax plan:

1. The $52 billion estimate seems high to me. The CBO reports that each percentage-point increase in the top two income tax rates–singles making over about $150K, married taxpayers over about $180K–increases tax revenue by only $6.5 billion in 2009. Multiply that by 4.6 (the proposed rate increase), and you get $29 billion, not $52 billion. And even that $6.5 billion is an overestimate, because it includes the top two rates, not just the top rate. I would guess that the Clinton campaign included other tax increases in the $52 billion figure, such as increases in the taxes rates for dividends and capital gains.

2. Even taking the $52 billion estimate at face value, it shows how little revenue would come from increasing taxes on the rich. This is only about 1/3 of one percent of GDP.

3. The passage from Leonhardt makes clear that Senator Clinton wants to spend the extra revenue on other proposals, instead of using it to reduce the long-term fiscal gap.

4. The passage says that this revenue will “help pay” for her other proposals, instead of fully paying for them. The entire package seems to involve either an expanded deficit or other taxes increases (or spending cuts) to be named later.

Actually, as bad as this is it doesn’t come close to the grand stupidity of this suggestion from Hillary on how to solve the housing crisis.

Not that Megan is shocked at her conclusion, but I have certainly pointed out before that any examination of the voting in Congress showed that Republicans were far more fiscally responsible than the Democrats. So I already reached the same conclusion she has. Which doesn’t mean the Republicans in power is a good thing. They have much stiffer backbones in the minority.

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