Fair Weather Fans Of Gallup Polls

Newsbusters notes that the White House loved the Gallup polls when they were going Obama's way.

Comments

[James Hansen]

Don't worry, I'll be able to fix those numbers up.

[anduril]

Here are some numbers to think over: 12 reasons the job market is worse than you think, and a pithy quote from David Goldman aka Spengler:

The level of un- and underemployment is so huge by historical standards as to make the usual sort of measurement questionable. With nearly 20% of the population unable to find proper work, there is a different sort of workforce. The vast majority of job creation in the US during the past two generations came from small businesses, which display only vaguely on the radar of government agencies as well as the bigger private surveys. The financial crisis killed small entrepreneurs as surely as Joseph Stalin killed the kulaks, and the roots of the economy are dead and dry.

[anduril]

Nazi-ism is rearing its ugly head in the most unlikely spots. Here we see it at American Thinker, of all places, focusing on race in coverage of the Tiger Woods story: Look who's clubbing Tiger Woods now.

Unlike Eugene Robinson, however, who gracefully avoided actually mentioning WHITE WOMEN in his WaPo column, Claude Sandroff sprinkles race-laden terms on liberally (pun intended):

For Juan Williams, Jesse Washington and Eugene Robinson, Tiger is not primarily the world's greatest, richest and most dominant athlete. He is not an individual allowed to live and die by his own code of conduct. For them, Tiger is not a self-determining soul, but a black man who must live by- and never violate- their constraining tribal rules.

They are furious at Tiger, not because he cheated on his wife, but because his wife is white and all of his affairs were with white women. If only Tiger had filled his carnal cornucopia with something other than blondes they might have forgiven his unrestrained adultery. Apparently, he might have remained in the good graces of some, or might have been completely ignored if he had been able to find just one black cocktail waitress or porn star to bed during some of his lonely moments on the road.

Juan Williams, a regular Fox contributor, seemed to be upset last weekend that Woods had not followed the more politically acceptable model of black marriage as defined by Barack Obama. Egged on by the ultimate racial provocateur Geraldo Rivera, Williams admitted that by marrying an American black woman, Obama automatically earned a special authenticity, since through his wife he could stake vicarious claims on her lineage, which dates back to the slave South. Before marriage, Obama had no link to American race struggles and could lean only on white prep school elitism and his Kenyan ancestry. So Obama married well, or at least in a politically correct way according to the prevailing and acceptable racial narratives. Tiger Woods did not; he chose the Barbie route. For Eugene Robinson who wrote of the "Barbie-of-the-Day revelations," some racial epithets are more acceptable than others.

[anduril]

And now from our Buy in Haste Repent at Leisure Department: Jewish support for Obama continues to fall

[glasater]

Pethokoukis got that 'quote' from Spengler.

[anduril]

As I said: "a pithy quote from David Goldman aka Spengler." Pethoukokis links to Goldman/Spengler in his 12th reason.

[Neo]

I see (above) that Hansen is on the move to "hide the decline".

I suggest the Barack "seize the day" because it will only get worse from here. He now has the Right and the Hard Left going for their "pitchforks" while that Grayson monster stumps down city blocks like a cheap japanese kiddie movie.

[anduril]

PUBLIC SERVICE POST:

Linux, Windows, or Mac: You need to patch Adobe Flash: Adobe has just released not one, not two, but six critical Flash Player patches, so update Now.

I don't think about Adobe Flash much. I just use it. I think that's the case for most of us. Almost all the video on the Web is in Flash, and we just take it for granted. That's a mistake. Like any other popular application, it can be an easy way for a cracker to hack into your computer.

Take Adobe Flash's latest round of patches. Adobe doesn't say a lot about exactly what it's fixing in its security advisory, but out of the seven security bugs they're fixing, six of the repairs are on problems that "could potentially lead to code execution."

That's a fancy way of saying that they could be used to bust into your PC. Once there, they could install malware, rip off your personal data, and in general make your life a living hell.

[anduril]

From Politico, here's your real SHOCK POLL result:

Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama's declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited. The closeness in the Obama/Bush numbers also has implications for the 2010 elections. Using the Bush card may not be particularly effective for Democrats anymore, which is good news generally for Republicans and especially ones like Rob Portman who are running for office and have close ties to the former President.

[matt]

those polls keep galluping downwards.....

[anduril]

Steve Sailer blogs re Heather Mac Donald on "The Bilingual Ban that Worked". What it's about is the success in California switching from bilingual education to English immersion. There's a link to MacDonald's article and a lot of discussion. Heartwarming anecdotes, too:

Self-esteem seems fine. “I didn’t know how to speak English in first grade,” says a husky fourth-grade boy at Adams Elementary School in Santa Ana. “I just figured out at the end of the year and talked all English.” The boy’s classmates, who are sitting next to him at a picnic table under a pepper tree for lunch, jostle to get in on the interview. They are fluent in schoolyard insults. “He’s a special ed!” one boy says of another. “I am not a special ed, you liar!” retorts the target. The fifth-grade girls at a table nearby complain that the boys are lazy. A slender girl has recently arrived from Mexico. Her translator for that day, a tiny blue-eyed girl named Lily, drapes her arm lovingly around the new immigrant and will sit next to her in all their classes, explaining what the teacher is saying. The pair and their fellow pupils amble back into the school after lunch, any signs of psychological distress well concealed. No one reports unhappiness at speaking English in class; on the contrary, they brag that it’s easy.

[anduril]

Here's a link to a looong article about US-Iran Talks: The Road to Diplomatic Failure. It's interesting for its own sake--discussion of negotiations with Iran re their nuclear program with lots of detail. However, for my purposes here are the important paragraphs:

But there was a more fundamental, objection to the ElBaradei proposal. According to the reformist website Kaleme, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s electoral rival and the leader of the post-election opposition movement, said that, if the conditions demanded by the ElBaradei plan were carried out, "all the efforts of thousands of scientists will go to the wind." Conservative parliamentarian Hesmatollah Falahatpisheh said any deal with the West involving the export of Iran’s LEU stocks should be conditioned on ending the economic sanctions on Iran, particularly a lifting of sanctions on raw uranium imports." And Mohsen Rezai, the conservative secretary of the Expediency Council, said that Iran should retain 1,100 kilograms of the roughly 1,500 kilograms of LEU in its stockpile rather than sending 1,200 kilograms abroad, as called for in the ElBaradei plan.

Those objections to the plan all reflected recognition that the ElBaradei draft would deprive Iran of the bargaining leverage they have so painfully accumulated in the form of its LEU stocks. Senior Iranian national security officials had acknowledged in informal conversations that their main purpose in accumulating low enriched uranium was to compel the United States to sit down and bargain seriously with Iran. They had observed that, in the past, before the enrichment program began, the United States exhibited no interest in negotiations. From that strategic perspective, Iran is now in a position to negotiate with the United States in a way that it was not under Rafsanjani and Khatami, thanks to its LEU stocks.

Neocons like Michael Ledeen are fond of claiming that the US should be supporting efforts for regime change in Iran. Presumably the new regime would be people we could deal with--reformists, supporters of "democracy." We are led to believe that this new regime would be more tractable than the Islamic Republic. My contention, and that of Ariel Ilan Roth, has been that from a geo-strategic standpoint it makes sense for Iran to to everything in its power to acquire nukes. So, note what's being said in the article--objections to the proposed deal (read the article for details) came not simply from bad hardliners but from the opposition as well! They may be the opposition, but they're still proud Persians, and they're not about to sell their country out to anyone.

So where does that leave us? Well, if there really is no military solution short of a full scale nuclear assault on Iran--as Meir Javedanfar suggested this morning--then Roth is right that the real solution is to find a way to live with a nuclear Iran.

No one ever said life is simple. Except Neocons.