We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
"Politics is downstream of culture." That's what the man says, and it certainly seems true these days. It's what I have been thinking. Sales, marketing, and branding matter.
Optics, rhetoric and perception matter. Though the new Democratic Party’s economic policies are based on antiquated ideas of early 20th century progressivism and European welfare states, it, not the GOP, is perceived as party of forward looking ideas.
If Republicans have any hope of persuading independents, they’ll need charismatic people, people who look and sound like a modern America and not a boardroom of Brahmin, because real-world competency is no match for fresh packaging and a good slogan. Welcome to democracy.
The fact is that the same people who run around instructing Republicans that they need to appeal to Latinos, blacks and women are aghast when exactly that happens. Are liberals agonizing this week over the defeat of Florida's Congressman Allen West -- a black man -- by a whiter than vanilla liberal named Patrick Murphy? Are they made furious by the defeat of a conservative black woman named Mia Love by yet another liberal white boy in Utah? Hardly. They are doing somersaults. Are they celebrating the fact that a woman --Michele Bachmann -- will be returning to Congress after defeating yet another one of those damnable white men, Democrat Jim Graves? Are they signing up for Palin in 2016? Are you kidding? They are beyond teeth-gratingly depressed and angry at the mere existence of both Bachmann and Palin
A book: Far From the Tree - "He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender." http://www.amazon.com/Far-From-the-Tree-ebook/dp/B007EDOLJ2/ref=kinw_dp_ke
"I think a lot of stuff will be coming out over the next few weeks and months that was carefully kept off the radar before Election Day." http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/157280/
In The New Yorker, a Boston physician studies The Cheesecake Factory in an effort to decide whether Big Medicine can be more efficient and effective than the usual: Big Med. It begins:
It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the “Skinnylicious” menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. It’s a linen-napkin-and-tablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. There’s wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but there’s also buffalo wings and Bud Light. The kids ordered mostly comfort food—pot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon.
The place is huge, but it’s invariably packed, and you can see why...
I'm no fan of Big Med - I practice Cottage Med and I prefer to do it my own way. However, it's a fascinating article and actually makes me want to try a meal at The Cheesecake Factory too. I had thought of it as a kind of cheesy place, but I love wasabi-crusted tuna as long as it is just seared.
When American people can get beyond any infantile expectations of government, it can be wonderful to see what they will do for eachother. Believe it or not, when last night's snowstorm was predicted, the tiny number of inept and seemingly useless FEMA people fled the flooded boroughs of NYC in their SUVs. (See BAD SIGN: FEMA office on Staten Island closes 'due to weather')
The list of fools who have brought this disaster upon us certainly also will include New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the gelatinous clown who (a) hogged up a prime time spot at the Republican convention to sing his own praises; (b) embraced Obama as the hero of Hurricane Sandy; and (c) then refused to appear at campaign events in support of Romney's presidential campaign. Good luck with the remainder of your political future, governor. It is unlikely Republicans shall soon forget your perfidious betrayal.
The electorate is complicated, and factors of culture and geography can dictate party identification more than any specific policy. And yes, the Republicans rolled out some ghastly candidates. But that shouldn’t fool anyone; there’s been a fundamental shift in how Americans view government’s role in society, and the GOP is losing the argument.
There was no theoretical hope peddling this time around. There was a record. And Barack Obama also promised the most explicitly left-wing agenda in presidential history — more government, more taxes, more dependency, more bailouts, more regulations — and he won easily. He promised universal health care, more crony “investments” in proven economic losers, more interference in markets — yet he cruised.
Conservatives may be shocked by statist slogans such as the Democratic National Convention’s “government’s the only thing that we all belong to,” and they may be scandalized when they hear a candidate say “you didn’t build that,” but their neighbors … well, not so much. When you can’t beat a candidate who — judging him on his own terms — owns both a brutal economic record on jobs (this is the first time since FDR that a president has won re-election with an unemployment rate this high) and the feeblest economic recovery in the nation’s history, it’s time to rethink what you’re doing.
...as concerned as the White House was during the last 30 days of the campaign, its polls never showed Mr. Obama slipping behind Mr. Romney, aides said. The president was helped in no small part by the tremendous amount of money the campaign built up, which had permitted him to pound his Republican rival before he had ever had a chance to fully introduce himself to the nation.
This is from before the snow began falling yesterday (ignore the House Finch on the upper right). I don't see these guys very often. Sorry for poor photo quality through the window.
Via Call Me Stormy blog, "Today’s dancer isn’t from the movies, but from real life. She’s Anastasia Skukhturova, a tall and luscious Russian, and this past weekend, she won the Second Annual Pole World Cup, defeating 60 pole-dancing competitors from 25 nations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil."
I finally have my power back (no thanks to government but with thanks to private industry who had a big job to do) just in time for a cold Nor'easter with snow blowing in and, while deeply disappointed but not surprised about the national elections, I am finding them interesting to reflect upon.
A few things I have been thinking about are these:
- the MSM runs interference for Dems, with passion and without regard to their professional integrity. They have done so since Nixon. It's worth billions in campaign funds or, really, it's priceless. They still have vast reach and influence in the culture at large. Just ask Obama.
...there is the fact that relatively few Americans actually pay for the government they consume. To a greater extent than any other developed nation, we rely on upper-income people to finance our federal government. When that is combined with the fact that around 40% of our federal spending isn’t paid for at all–it is borrowed–it is small wonder that many self-interested voters are happy to vote themselves more government. Mitt Romney proclaimed that Barack Obama was the candidate of “free stuff,” and voters took him at his word.
- What's with Hispanics? Are they a solid voting bloc? Would Rubio have made a difference? Who knows. He was my choice.
- I give Mitt Romney a lot of credit for the nature of his campaign. A good man, not a rock star.
...when all was said and done, the lines of people who feed off the political machine were there, and the handlers of the machine cast their multiple votes and carried off their manifold frauds because their own private economy depended on it.
Every time people ask me why the left has such a grip on this country, my answer is because they worked for it. It's the answer that most people don't want to hear, but it's true. The left has been planning this for a while. They have been playing the long game, building the infrastructure and indoctrinating generations. And to beat them, we will have to do the same thing.
The right is 40 years behind the left and it remains a disorganized collection of potentials seeking a compass point.
Damn, those first two hours sure were fun, weren't they? Right up until around 9:30 Eastern when PA was called for Obama. Pretty much all downhill from there.
Better luck next time.
The three scariest headlines I saw this morning were all on ABC News:
Yet again, Florida hangs in the balance. Only this time, it doesn't matter.
President Barack Obama held onto a slim lead in Florida early Wednesday, but he didn't need the largest swing state to win re-election.
At this precise moment, Florida is still undecided. The only one so, no less.
Speaking of which, you know that stereotype you have about us South Floridians lazing around the beach all day long being served fancy drinks by scantily-clad wahines? The reason it's a stereotype is because it's true.
But, like the victims of Hurricane Sandy struggling to get their votes cast, we South Floridians faced our own horrific weather-related challenge yesterday:
Yep, it's tough living down here, but somebody's gotta do it.
Below the fold I'll offer up some notes on why this wasn't as bad as it seems for the Repubs, and why it's not as good as it seems for the Dems. Fair is fair.
The Times Of Israel just published a new piece from me: "Anti-Israel Circles Of Influence On Campus." The focus is on faculty. Students may suffer but they come and go. The professors stay on, to indoctrinate more students, many of whom will go on to leadership positions in the US or their countries of origin.
I use the example of one prominent US campus. Names are named. "There are many other professors at UCSD who could be highlighted. The ones chosen are to illustrate how the ripples of influence on attitudes toward Israel emanates from the core Israel haters to the euphemistic ones to the useful idiots, and thus on to gullible students and faculty." To quote myself, "What one sees is circles of influence, with the inner circle providing the splash and outer circles adding to the wave. It is that wave that creates a campus atmosphere which gives the impression that the entire campus is critical of Israel and that, it is charged, creates a hostile atmosphere for Jewish and pro-Israel students and faculty."
This is similar to what is occurring on many other US campuses. The leading figures at each interact with their like at other campuses and influence many others at other campuses. Exposure is an important remedy.
It is Tuesday, 8:18PM in San Diego, and Fox and CBS both just called the election for Obama.
The Democrats look to actually be picking up some Senate seats, the Republicans holding the House. All Republicans can hope and pray for during the next four years is that court challenges slow the Obamashackle to tie America down in regulatory chains, China keeps buying our increasing debt, that the very aged Supreme Court justices take their vitamins, and the international jackals transform into lambs. Not much to hang a hat on, is it? Actually, much reason to feel hanged. If you have children, better get them to learn to live frugally, study and work hard, and develop resilience and intestinal fortitude. That's all that will save them.
I'll leave it to others, maybe myself Wednesday morning, to sound smart about this debacle
‘The most important election since 1860′ - Jason (12) asked me which presidential elections were most important. I answered, 1800 for setting the Jeffersonian course of the new nation, 1828 for Andrew Jackson's version of "power to the people", 1860 for Lincoln, the Civil War, and the decades of recriminations after, 1932 for FDR's reshaping of America, 1980 for Reagan resteering America back to confidence and prominence, 2004 for rejecting defeatism, and 2012 for again a major fork in the road for America, which is looking from the electoral projections we're f**ked. What are your pick(s)?
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff of the Obama White House, said the election would be decided in “five states and 500 precincts,” and it may have been even fewer.
and
The United States is populated by groups of people who may as well be living in different countries. They have separate histories, cultures and visions for the future. They are two distinct nationalities, divided by mutual distrust and joined by mammoth public debt.
Thanks to all for keeping Maggie's going and/or for keeping me going in Sandy's aftermath. As we Conservative-Libertarians always say, "It takes a village." I had gotten so accustomed to working and sleeping in the cold (28 degrees F when we woke up this morning), the central heat of the past couple of hours feels a little suffocating.
Also, thanks to all those linemen and utility engineers from Canada and all over the country. Good guys who do real work and make real things. Finally, as in the Academy Awards, thanks to my Mom who kept calling to make sure if we were OK. Bless her heart, she had no heat or power in her place either, but she said "We're fine. We have blankets and candles. I can read next to the wood stove with your Dad."
Bruce has kindly agreed to do the honors once again tomorrow morning (yes, it feels tense!), but I'll unload some items right now:
I'm sorry to let you all know Marianne suffered a pulmonary embolism on July 23, 2012 and died September 25, 2012. She would love it you raise a shot of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey in her honor tomorrow after Romney wins this election. Oh, how she wanted her vote to be counted in this election! She was my dear friend; I miss her so, as I know all of you who had the privilege of knowing her will miss her as well. I have been working to get her beloved husband Downs settled into an assisted living here in Houston. Please pass the word on to those who I don’t have email addresses on. She was a great lady.
S. Colette Chapman
A toast to our friend Marianne, regardless of election results.
Admittedly, the news sounds pretty grim. The thought of people suffering from the bitter cold really tugs at my heartstrings. I'm just filled with empathy for the innocent souls who-
Oh, hold on a sec.
Sorry about the interruption. Had to turn the A/C on. It was getting a little stuffy in here. Damn Florida Keys weather.
Anyway, I thought this whole global warming thing was settled and we could expect to see this silly 'winter' business turned into a quaint anachronism by now, but apparently this isn't so.
With that in mind, I'm reposting my own contribution to the subject of staying warm, originally titled "How To Survive Living In A New England Igloo".
First, let us examine my credentials. Do I have the right to opine on cold weather living, someone basking in the warm, balmy Florida Keys?
Well, I lived in that wimpy state of New England for three years and breezed through those delightful minus-10-degree days without a qualm. But living in the quaint province of New England was nothing compared to living in what many consider to be the coldest hell on earth:
A Northern California coastal fog belt zone.
And surviving.
It all starts with the feet. Keep the feet warm and the entire body follows.
It's been sort of amusing watching people from the right side of the blogosphere weigh in for over a year with political advice for Willard Romney. They'd take a flurry on the pizza guy. Look over there, they'd say! If only Romney was a fat, loudmouthed ex-congressman, smug for no reason, then he'd get somewhere. Yelling RON PAUL! would solve everything. Why doesn't he foam at the mouth like the porcine blowhard from New Jersey? Romney just smiled and kept going. Let's face it: Romney is the Amiable Terminator. He won't stop until he's shaken the hand of every Sarah Connor in the phonebook, and asked each in turn if she needs some canned food to tide her over until payday. Then he goes back to the phonebook and starts in on all the Sarah Connellys.
Romney is a rare thing in American public life. He is what he is. You can see how pleasant, but stiff, he is in that video. He cannot be what he is not, even while his position requires that he mix with people who are not like him. Some might call that good manners. People who have no manners don't recognize good manners in others. They call it standoffishness, or aloofness, or call you a robot for being polite. Many see decency as a kind of accusation. There's no other way to evaluate the Republican response to Romney. They don't know what to make of a decent, earnest person. They were hoping for devious so they could win. The other side does that constantly, why shouldn't we? Romney's not interested. He owes you nothing if he loses. You owe him a lot for him even taking up the cudgels on your behalf. He's successful and happy and politics is bucket of guts to step in for a person like him.
Blog writers are just blog commenters that go first, and they all know what Romney should be doing. They envision the perfect candidate -them. I might point out to these kings of that rock there to this clod of earth under their shoes, that Romney got himself elected Governor of Massachusetts. You're giving political advice to a Mormon Republican who figured out how to be elected governor of Massachusetts.
Romney's detractors on the left aren't worth talking about. Romney and his family could be defamed --and Lord, weren't they -- but there's close to nothing in his personal or public life that isn't above reproach. People are imperfect creatures of course, but every once in a great while you meet people who seem incapable of deliberate misbehavior. The human foibles we are all subject to can be teased into imprecations of malice, but any reasonable person can see there's no there, there in the Oakland of Romney's misdeeds. He's a nice person, a capable and commendable businessman, a competent and genial public administrator, he's married to a nice person, they raised a large crop of nice people together, and so forth.
I come not to praise Romney, nor to bury him in predictions and advice. I'd just like to express my thanks to him, here, where he surely will not see it, for allowing me, once in my life, to vote for an entirely decent, honorable, and capable person to be the chief magistrate of the United States. That has never happened to me before. To me, he cannot lose. America might. It won't be his fault.
It's just gravy that a vote for him is a vote against his opponent, who is, and always has been a malicious, callow, greedy, grasping, low-rent A-hole. I won't even mention it.
We should probably feel lucky if we know the outcome by this time tomorrow.
Legions of lawyers are ready to enter the fray in case Election Day turns on a legal challenge. One nightmare scenario would be for the results in a battleground state like Florida or Ohio to be too close to call, with thousands of absentee or provisional ballots yet to be counted.
One possibility is that an automatic recount will be triggered, says Husted. Ohio law requires a recount if the vote margin between the candidates is a quarter of a percent or less of the total vote — or about a 150,000-vote difference.
But a recount is just one of several things that could delay the final count.
In Ohio, about 200,000 voters are expected to cast provisional ballots because they don't have identification, because they requested an absentee ballot but showed up at the polls instead, or for other reasons.
But those ballots can't even be counted until 10 days after Election Day according to Ohio law.
For those of you sans TVs, a live streamcast will be available here.
Final thought: Remember, regardless of who wins the presidential election, there's a lot more at stake here. Congressional and state legislative races are also vital. It all adds up.
"Why did CBS release a clip that appeared to back up Obama's claim in the second debate on Oct. 19, a few days before the foreign policy debate, and not release the rest of that interview at the beginning?
"Why on the Sunday before the election, almost six weeks after the attack, at 6 p.m. does an obscure online timeline posted on CBS.com contain the additional "60 Minutes" interview material from Sept. 12?
"Why wasn't it news after the president said what he said in the second debate, knowing what they had in that "60 Minutes" tape -- why didn't they use it then? And why is it taking Fox News to spur other media organizations to take the Benghazi story seriously?"
Remembering 1980: Are the Polls Missing Something?: "On the one hand, Romney backers point to Gallup’s projections for a shrinking electorate to claim the polls have way overstated Obama’s advantage....On the other hand, Obama aides David Plouffe and Jim Messina have been saying for months that their single-minded goal is an expansion of the pro-Obama electorate and that their very well-organized ground game will deliver it on Tuesday." -- On the other hand, and another hand, and another, only the Hindu Goddess knowing, there are and will be other explanations come Wednesday morning.
The issue is that when you look at the world from these sorts of institutional lenses, identifying problems becomes relatively easy. Solving them becomes very hard. It's no mystery how you get economic growth. You need to provide opportunities and incentives. But how do you make that political equilibrium? How do you make it so that everybody in society actually agrees and abides by a system that provides those incentives and opportunities even if it's not in their short-term interests? Those are the real challenges and that's exactly the sorts of issues we're seeing in Europe, it's the sorts of issues we're seeing in the United States, it's the sorts of issues we're seeing in Turkey. The problems are reasonably easy to identify. Developing solutions to them is hard because you cannot develop the solutions from the outside. It's not an engineering problem. At the end of the day you really need the grassroots solution to it. You really need people themselves to start taking part in the political process because any solution you impose from above is not going to stick unless it has the support of the people, unless the people themselves are the ones who push for it, who demand it, and who implement that solution. DARON ACEMOGLU is the Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. In 2005 he received the John Bates Clark Medal awarded to economists under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. He is the author of Why Nations Fail.
I don't know who is going to win this election but I'd bet a dollar that Obama will pull it off. Most elections, you pretty much know who will win, but not this time.
Here's one thing I do know: A flock of about 20 of these guys arrived at my feeder the day after the storm (I do not refer to the Tufted Titmouse in the photo.) They stayed all day, then disappeared.
Thanks to these good guys who took a long drive to help out. That crane is lowering transformers and other apparatus dangling from broken utility poles dow the road from me.
Is There Such a Thing 
FEMA: 
Damn, those first two hours sure were fun, weren't they? Right up until around 9:30 Eastern when PA was called for Obama. Pretty much all downhill from there.
It is Tuesday, 8:18PM in San Diego, and Fox and CBS both just called the election for Obama. 
I received this email a few days ago:
