Devastating New Poll For Swing-State Dems About Obamacare

Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Government, Healthcare

Writes Robert Bidinotto:

This critical Wall Street Journal article may turn the tide on the ObamaCare vote:

The central argument used by Team Obama to line up wavering congressional Dem support for ObamaCare is: ‘You’ll pay a heavier price in November if we fail to pass ObamaCare, than if you vote for it.'”

This poll proves that this claim is a big lie. It’s the first survey to demonstrate conclusively that swing-district Democrats will pay a heavier price at the polls in November if they vote YES for ObamaCare, than if they vote NO. In fact, if they vote against it, voters are significantly more likely to cut them slack in the next election.

From the poll:

“Sixty percent of the voters surveyed will vote for a candidate who opposes the current [health-care] legislation and wants to start over.” But “the survey does provide a little good news for wavering Democrats. A congressman can buy himself a little grace if he had previously voted for health-care reform but now votes against it. Forty-nine percent of voters will feel more supportive of that member if he does so, 40% less supportive. More dramatically, 58% of voters say they will be more supportive of their congressman’s re-election if he votes against the bill a second time. However, for those members who voted against it in November and vote yes this time, 61% of voters say they will be less likely to support their re-election. Over a third of respondents say they will actively work against a candidate who votes the wrong way or for the candidate who votes the right way.”

[SNIP]

Bidinotto thinks “that it is critical that this survey receive the widest possible attention, especially among swing-district congressmen.” He has a request: “Please link to it on your websites and forward this message to others, including your representative. It may just tip the balance in the vote this week.”

I hope so.

Toyota Shakedown Continues

Business, Government, Republicans, Technology, The State

Torquemada’s onslaught against Toyota has signaled to others in the business of shakedown to try their luck. That was what James Sikes, in his unstoppable Prius, was up to, as the malfunctioning media broadcast a blow-by-blow account of his Prius gone wild, while network bimbos looked on, shaking empty heads and tsk-tsking loudly.

Sikes was trying out the trick Rhonda Smith of Sevierville, Tenn., pioneered, and with which she won the Congressional inquisitors to her side. Smith’s run-away “Herbie” was a Lexus 350 ES sedan. You don’t want to get into one of those death traps.

Toyota Motor Corp. dismissed the story of a man [Sikes] who claimed his Prius sped out of control on the California freeway, saying Monday that its own tests found the car’s gas pedal and backup safety system were working just fine.

The automaker stopped short of saying James Sikes had staged a hoax last week but said his account did not square with a series of tests it conducted on the gas-electric hybrid.

The Regulator in the person of U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif) was looking over Toyota’s shoulder during the testing. We’re safe! He follows the proud tradition of the Floridian Republican, John Mica and Jason Chaffetz.

During the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform inquisition, last month, “in florid language,” Mica blasted a Toyota official: “‘I’m embarrassed for you, sir,’ Mica shrieked, clutching his smoldering toupee. Not much better was Chaffetz. This Republican admonished Mr. Inaba for an internal Toyota brief that called ‘the American government safety agency under the Obama administration less ‘industry friendly.'”

This revelatory reality—at least to Republicans—had pushed the Toyota team into a dalliance with the regulators. Any serious student of economics knows that regulation forces an entrepreneur to substitute viable, voluntary trades and transactions with politicized decision making. But what does Chaffetz [and his fellow Republicans] know?

Yelling About Yellen (The New BO Appointee)

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Labor

In an economy of high unemployment and inflation, Barack Obama has gone and appointed as vice chair of the Federal Reserve a woman called Janet Yellen, by whose “economic” model inflation is the result of “too many people working and too much economic prosperity.” Or at least, that’s how Larry Kudlow distills the theory.

That such an economic theory exists attests to the degree to which economics and politics have become intertwined. Certainly, “Keynes’s political creed guaranteed a hand-in-glove relationship between the state and its stooge economists. Most of what Keynes advocated entails giving the state enormous confiscatory powers.”

Is “the Phillips-curve model,” Yellen’s preferred theory, an extension of Keynesianism, or is it just some form of free floating statism? I have no idea. But since most economists are servants of the state in-waiting, following the Phillips Curve—which posits “a consistent inverse relationship: when unemployment is high, wages increase slowly; when unemployment is low, wages rise rapidly”—has given rise to “a menu of policy options.” Examples, courtesy of the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, are:

with an unemployment rate of 6 percent, the government might stimulate the economy to lower unemployment to 5 percent. Figure 1 indicates that the cost, in terms of higher inflation, would be a little more than half a percentage point. But if the government initially faced lower rates of unemployment, the costs would be considerably higher: a reduction in unemployment from 5 to 4 percent would imply more than twice as big an increase in the rate of inflation—about one and a quarter percentage points.

OF COURSE, the unquestioned premise of these phillipic prescriptions is that “stimulus” does indeed lower said unemployment rates. Only in The Oink Sectors.

Update III: An Idol For The Age (Of The Idiot)

English, Feminism, Gender, Literature, Media, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

It is bad enough having to hear Maureen Dowd touted as a gift from God. Fittingly, Camille Paglia described Dowd as “that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen. She’s such an empty vessel. One pleasure of reading The New York Times online is that I never have to see anything written by Maureen Dowd! I ignore her hypertext like spam for penis extenders.” To hear the same reverence reserved for Tina Brown, whom I’ve always thought of as no more than an editor of glossies—and the author of a gossipy, somewhat obese book about the anorexic dolt, Diana—is startling.

On “Tina’s emergence in England during the 1970s,” a friend writes: “In those days she was regarded as nothing more than a mildly attractive literary moll. The notion that she would one day be considered a serious biographer or an arbiter of cultural standards would’ve struck people back then as insane. I don’t imagine that THE NEW YORKER will ever recover from her despotism.”

Update I (March 14): Before she married a bigwig, she bedded a couple. Auberon Waugh and Martin Amis are examples. “Her relationship with Waugh,” writes Wikipedia, “served as a great boost to her writing career, as he used his influence to get attention drawn to her.”

Update II: From George’s excerpt we learn that Brown fears castrating others. Only males can lose their appendages. She’s outed herself as a castrater. Is this something to be proud of?

Update III: Here’s Fred Reed (via The Other Robert) in praise of Mexican women and against the Anglo-American Woman. The toxicity of the second class explains why younger American men are “Manly No More”:

“It is not easy to explain to an American readership under forty what is meant by being a woman. We are accustomed to androgynous, litigious, Prozac-sucking shrews who would inspire erectile dysfunction in an iron bar. Yes, there are exceptions and degrees, but here is the main current. (If there is anyone with less respect for women than the average squalling dyke feminist, I haven’t met it.)”

“Feminists of course say that femininity cannot be distinguished from subservience. But it ain’t so. The Mexicanas I know are not subservient. They work harder and bitch less than we do. They are not weak. They do not need support groups, Depacote, Paxil, Welbutrin, or classes in self-esteem (which idea they find puzzling or ridiculous). They are self-sufficient adults.”