Category — Colorado

The Art and Croissant devotees will flock to see this show before it starts its run on Broadway. Denver promises a riotous opening not seen in 40 years of theater.

He’ll dance his way into your wallet!

 How is this different from today’s taggers gaily altering public space in the modern world. What would the archaeologists of 2230 say about the current trash spray painted on various surfaces by so-called artists du jour.

One man’s art is another’s graffiti.

Thousands of prehistoric rock carvings and paintings of bighorn sheep and other wildlife, hunters wielding spears, and warriors engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

Now, a dramatic increase in natural gas drilling is proposed on the plateau above the canyon, and preservationists fear trucks will kick up dust that will cover the images. They also worry that one proposed solution, a chemical dust suppressant, could make things worse by corroding the rock.

“They’re irreplaceable,” said Steve Tanner, a member of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, which wants industrial traffic to be funneled away from the canyon to protect the art on the sandstone walls. “When they’re gone, they’re gone.”

The more than 10,000 petroglyphs have been a source of fascination and speculation since their discovery in the late 1800s. The art is thought to be the work of the Fremont people, who lived in present-day Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Nevada from 700 to 1300 A.D., and the ancestors of modern-day Ute Indians. [snip]

This graffiti lauds war, animal torture and defaces public property. These antisocial individuals hacked and scraped soft stone, permanently transforming the natural beauty of the area.

Don’t you prefer your sandstone outcrops unfettered by bad childish art?

911 motto: When every second count, we’re only minutes away.

Victim Shot While Calling 911″

A California woman was shot to death as she pleaded with emergency dispatchers to come and help her. Her death will not make the network news programs this evening, but this is the latest reminder that we must take responsibility for our own safety and not rely on the police.

Bill Masters, a libertarian and sheriff of a Colorado county tells the residents of his county, “It is your responsibility to protect yourself and your family from criminals. If you rely on the government for protection, you are going to be at least disappointed and at worst injured or killed.”

Gun control puts honest citizens in the position of having to choose between protecting their lives or respecting the law. What kind of government would do such a thing?
More on gun control here and here.

The Second Amendment says the people have the right “to keep and bear arms.” Government officials, however, insist that they can make it a crime to keep and bear arms.
Open the newspaper, turn on the television, or surf the net, and you’ll find people saying the government can solve our problems and make life better.

This is the happy face of government:

Behind the happy face is an institution that is willing to strip of us of our right to self-defense, and, worse, deprive dying patients of life-saving drugs. Who do these politicians and bureaucrats think they are?

For more on the right to life, go here, here, and here (pdf).

That one needs to even ask these questions should tell of the dismal conditions of today’s institutions.

Questions to Ask Before You Send Your Child to College.

Before you take out a second mortgage or otherwise deplete your savings in order to pay for your child’s college education, you might want to ask the colleges to which your child is applying some questions.

Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible?
If so, why attend such a college?
Does the college allow military recruiters on its campus?
Before being threatened by Congress with a cutoff of federal funds, many colleges denied military recruiters access to their campus. They did so either because of their hostility to military in general or specific hostility to the war in Iraq, or because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gays. If you believe, as reason and history argue, that the American military has done more to preserve liberty on earth than all the professors in all the universities combined, you might not want to send your child to a university that is hostile to the military.
In the political science, English, sociology, anthropology and history departments — or any other liberal arts department — what is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among the professors?
Over 10 years ago, the Rocky Mountain News reported that registered Democrats on the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder outnumbered registered Republicans 31-1. If such a ratio exists in the social science departments of your child’s prospective college, why would you want your child to attend such an institution?
What are the names of the speakers invited and paid with college funds to speak last year at the college?
Just ask to see the previous year’s speakers list. Colleges set aside funds for visiting speakers. One would assume that a good college seeks to encourage thinking and to that end invites speakers throughout the political spectrum. If your prospective college has a speakers list that is balanced 10 to one in favor of speakers from the political left, that will help you decide whether indoctrination rather than exposure to great ideas is the university’s real agenda.
Can my child live in a same-sex dorm and are the bathrooms co-ed?
One generation ago and for all of American history, the university acted in loco parentis, in the place of the parent. You could send your daughter to college more or less assured that the college would act on behalf of her welfare as you would — meaning, for example, that boys had to leave girls dorms by a certain hour. Now, most colleges have no boys or girls dorms and do everything they can to enable boys and girls to fraternize in each other’s rooms at any hour of the night and even share bathrooms.
Is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States the most widely assigned American history book?
If the answer is yes, you should consider sending your son or daughter to another university or at least be aware that you will be paying a lot of hard-earned money for your child to be manipulated into believing that America is a bad country, certainly no better than others, as he or she reads what is essentially a proctologist’s view of American history. Zinn believes, as he told me in an interview on my radio show, that America has done “probably more harm than good in its history.”
Would a typical graduate of your university be able to say anything intelligent about Josef Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Pope John XXIII or Pope John Paul II, differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, Cain and Abel, the Gulag Archipelago, Franz Josef Haydn, Pol Pot, Martin Luther, Darfur, how interest rates affect the dollar, dark matter, and “Crime and Punishment”; explain what the Korean War was about and when it was fought; identify India on a map; and know the difference between the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council?
How could someone be considered in any way educated and not be able to intelligently answer all or nearly all of those questions? If they don’t know about such essential and basic things, what do they know? Movies? The supposed dangers of global warming? The importance of race, gender and class? The meaning of menage a trois (or “threesomes”)? Great gay writers?

Unfortunately, the chances are that if you receive any response at all to these questions, it will be a discouraging one. Outside of the natural sciences, colleges are either more interested in liberal indoctrination than in a liberal arts education, or they enable students to take courses that are so narrowly focused that your child graduate will likely graduate as a cultural and historical illiterate. Why so many Americans go into debt paying so much money to such failed institutions is one of the riddles of the universe.

It is time to demand that universities teach. Forcing them to answer the above seven questions is a good way to begin. Because granting a Bachelor of Arts degree on someone who never heard of Cain and Abel and never heard a Haydn symphony is a fraud.

From a Michelle Malkin repost:

I have had the pleasure of speaking and debating alongside former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm. In Colorado five years ago, we took on an open-borders contingent that was pushing for the illegal alien ID card known as the matricula consular (which I’ve blogged about extensively here.) He’s a true maverick–a Democrat who has long presaged the self-destructive impact of open borders. In 2004, Dick Lamm gave a now-famous speech at one of the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s conferences. The incisive speech, “I have a plan to destroy America,” went viral. I still have at least one or two readers e-mailing it to me every week. I’m reprinting it today. [snip]

I have a plan to destroy America by Richard D. Lamm

I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and they all fall, and that “an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” Here is my plan: [snip]

Go here to read this speech

And from this turkey:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” –Noam Chomsky, American linguist and U.S. media and foreign policy critic.

May I add, no friend of America.

In June of this year the farm bill moving through Congress gave the House and Senate a chance to cut farm subsidies.

The Sugar Racket

[snip] Congress has provided a sweet deal for sugar growers since it imposed import tariffs on sugar in 1789. Controls on domestic sugar production date back to the Jones-Costigan Act of 1934.

[snip] By reforming sugar policies, they could cut food costs for average families, make U.S. manufacturing more competitive, and end unfair benefits for a small group of wealthy sugar barons.

Components of the Sugar Program
The purpose of U.S. sugar policies is to keep domestic prices artificially high. In recent decades, U.S. sugar prices have been typically two or more times higher than prices on world markets.[snip]

Guaranteed Prices.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture runs a complex loan program to support sugar prices. The USDA makes loans to sugar processors, who use their sugar as collateral. In return, processors agree to pay sugar growers certain minimum prices. If the market price of sugar rises, processors can sell their product on the market and pay back the loan. If the market price falls, processors can forfeit their sugar to the government and not repay their loans. The effect is to guarantee prices for both processors and growers. Sometimes other techniques are used to prop up prices, such as paying producers to discard their current inventories.

Trade Restrictions.
[snip] The government applies a two-tiered system of “tariff rate quotas” to limit imports. A lower “in-quota” tariff rate is for imports within a set quota volume. A higher “over-quota” rate applies to imports in excess of the quota. [snip]

Production Quotas.
In addition to controlling sugar imports, the government imposes quotas, or “marketing allotments,” on U.S. production. Each year, the USDA decides what total U.S. sugar production ought to be and then allots it 54.35 percent to beet sugar and 45.65 percent to cane sugar. [snip]
In sum, the sugar industry is a cartel that is centrally planned from Washington.

Effects of the Sugar Program
The taxpayer cost of sugar subsidies is expected to be $1.4 billion over the next decade. More important, federal sugar policies burden American consumers by creating high prices for sugar and for products that contain sugar. The Government Accountability Office estimated that federal sugar policies impose costs on sugar consumers of $1.9 billion annually.

Last year the U.S. Department of Commerce studied the economic effects of federal sugar policies and released a damning report that had five key findings:

• Employment in U.S. food businesses that use substantial amounts of sugar is declining.
• For each sugar-growing and sugar-harvesting job saved by current sugar policies, nearly three confectionary manufacturing jobs are lost.
• Sugar costs are a major reason why some U.S. sugar-using businesses are relocating their factories abroad.
• Numerous food companies have relocated to Canada, where sugar prices are less than half of U.S. prices, and Mexico, where prices are two-thirds as high.
• Imports of food products that contain sugar are growing rapidly because it is not competitive to manufacture those items in the United States.

[snip] Chicago, once the nation’s candy-manufacturing capital, has been hit hard with thousands of lost jobs. Candymaker Fannie May closed its factory in 2004, and Brach’s moved its candy production to Mexico in 2004 blaming high sugar prices. Kraft moved its 600-worker LifeSavers factory from Michigan to Canada in 2002 to access low-cost sugar. Hershey Foods closed plants in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and California and relocated them to Canada.

Sugar policies also cause environmental damage. Large areas of the Florida Everglades have been converted to cane sugar production because of federal protections and subsidies. Sugar production damages the Everglades by land drainage, habitat destruction, and the run-off of chemicals in the fertilizers used by sugar growers.

Conclusions
Given the negative economic and environmental effects of U.S. sugar programs, why do they persist? Because Congress often decides to confer benefits on a favored few at the expense of the general public. In this case, the favored few really are few—about 42 percent of all sugar program benefits go to just 1 percent of sugar growers. [snip]

The Washington Post lamented the political corruption caused by the federal “sugar racket.” More than that, sugar policies are a textbook case of economic damage done by big government intervention in the marketplace. [snip]

In winning the House last year, Democrats portrayed themselves as reformers willing to take on special interests for the benefit of average families. They also promised to run the most ethical Congress in history.

This one small sample of the damage done by congress to the economy is an ice cube to an iceberg. Large corporations such as ADM, Union Pacific, (yup, they farm just enough to collect the loot) among others receive the majority of what we think is going to Ma and Pa Kettle.

The price of wheat, corn, rice, soybeans and other grains are at all time highs. Ethanol use as a fuel raised corn so high that most production is going to fuel, not food. Milk price per hundredweight escalate yet we are subsidizing large and small farms for the production.

All this is a tax on your food, paid before the harvest. Meat and poultry prices shoot up as the outlay for feed climbs. Add the expense of shipping as fuel-operating costs rises; add the middlemen’s appropriation plus the retailer’s revenues to the subsidies for your costs.

Congress takes care of their donors, quite well and they will damn the public to enrich their coffers. The GOP punted on this in 1996 and 2000. So, don’t hold your politicians harmless. Very few of them are untainted. Perhaps the following will help with your ideas of how good the Democrats are.

Farm bill expanding subsides, food stamps passes Senate

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Senate on Friday approved a $286 billion farm bill with an election-year expansion of subsidies for growers and food stamps for the poor.

The bill, passed on a 79-14 vote, expands subsidies for wheat, barley, oat, soybeans and several other crops and creates new grants for vegetable and fruit growers.

It also increases loan rates for sugar producers, extends dairy programs and provides more dollars for renewable energy and conservation programs to protect environmentally sensitive farmland over the next five years.

Enjoy dinner.

Last week, from Senate Globalwarmologist Harry Reid:

“One reason that we have the fires burning in Southern California is global warming.  One reason the Colorado Basin is going dry is global warming”.

Minutes later; asked to clarify….

“No, I, here’s…here’s what I…I didn’t say the fires were burning in Southern California because of global warming”.

WASHINGTON - In a move bound to cheer Republicans and anger his own party, Democrat Senate Majority Leader announced today that sleeping during daytime floor debates will no longer be tolerated.  Long a tradition in the Senate, Reid has now ordered the removal of all sleeping accommodations adjacent to the Senate Chamber.  Also, in a carefully-worded statement, Reid ordered all “soporifics” removed from the Chamber, which includes some reading materials,  some drugs and some Senators.

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) was urged to remain permanently at his seventh home in Colorado, and Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) was immediately dispatched on a year-long fact-finding mission to Pago-Pago.  Senate observers said that neither Senator was effected by the wakefulness requirement, because both were absent pursuing presidential nominations.

Kerry’s unannounced candidacy committee is encouraged by a recent spike in his prospects for his party’s nomination, bringing his figure skyward to a respectable 0%.  Dodd said last week that his solid 4% support for the party nomination will “propel him to the Oval Office”.   Before departing for Pago-Pago, Dodd had no comment on Reid’s new rules.

Reid’s controversial drug restriction policy only effects sleep-inducing medications,  and some illegal substances.  Others, like male-enhancement drugs, hair-loss medications, B-12 injections and anti-psychotic medications are permitted during floor debates.

Long considered a star in Democrat circles, the energetic and youthful Harry Reid cited recent Congressional approval poll figures as his reason for the change.  Reid said, “When our approval rating hit 14%, I did a little subtraction.  I realized that 86% of the electorate wanted us to do something.  By a huge majority, this is what the American people want from us”.

Reid’s colleague, Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill) had this to say about the new rules: “If the Jarhead Pol Pots counting skulls in Anbar can stay awake, so can we!  If the GI-Joe Nazis at Guantanamo can stay awake water-boarding babies, so can we!  God bless our troops!”

Resistance is expected, however, from such venerable Democrat Senators as Robert Byrd (D-WV), who couldn’t be awakened for comment.  But experts believe that the attitude of Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) will prevail.  When asked about Reid’s new wakefulness requirements, Kennedy said “When there’s a vigorous back-and-forth underway, I demand to be aroused!”

I can’t remember a time when a party’s presidential candidates leveled such strong criticism at their own sitting president.  Some people probably thought they’d accidentally tuned into the Democratic debate.  Here’s a sampling:

“It’s a typical Washington mess,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said of the immigration bill Bush wants Congress to approve. 

“I think we were underprepared and underplanned for what came after we knocked down Saddam Hussein,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said on the topic of Iraq.

“The president ran as a conservative and governed as a liberal,” said Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado. “That is what has really been the basis, I think, of the distrust that has developed among the Republican base. It’s well founded.” 

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas said: “The president ran on a program of a humble foreign policy, no nation-building and no policing of the world, and he changed his tune.”

“We went to Washington to change Washington, and Washington changed us,” said former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, once a member of Bush’s Cabinet. “If we’re going to spend money like as foolishly and as stupidly as the Democrats, the voters are going to vote for the professional spender _ the Democrat _ not the amateur spender _ the Republican.” 

If this keeps up, President Bush’s Republican Convention speech will be at noon on local cable access channels.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anybody at the White House is listening.

Liberals always empathize with the criminals and not the victims. We failed the criminal somehow, and they bear no responsibility for their actions. If only we’d spent more on their educations or given them more welfare, they’d be model citizens.

This seems to be the message MA lawmakers are taking from the Columbine and Virginia Tech murders. Beacon Hill bought Seung-Hui Cho’s message that we made him do it and he had no choice. That’s why they’re debating anti-bullying legislation:

Rep. Paul J. Donato, D-Medford, the companion co-sponsor with Barrios of one bill, said bullying is often at the root of spectacular violence, such as the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado and Virginia Tech.

The shooter wasn’t a deranged psychopath; he was the victim of bullying. If only we could stop the bullying, we wouldn’t have shootings.

Where do you start when there are so many holes in an idea? Are we going to put cops on playgrounds to cite the bullies? Although they’d probably be more useful protecting kids on detail than they are standing around roadway construction sites. And who’s going to sentence the offenders? MA judges can’t find it in their hearts to put rapists, drug dealers, and murderers behind bars so I’m guessing little Timmy doesn’t have a lot to worry about here.

And they’ll certainly need a better effort defining bullying than this:

Bruce Caley of Quincy noted that one measure, H.453, proposes to define “bullying” as “any written or verbal expression or physical act or gesture or a pattern of behavior intended to cause emotional distress.”

That definition is like using a bazooka to kill a fly. What behavior couldn’t be covered? Parents, teachers, etc. should obviously stop bullying, but there are things the government shouldn’t and can’t regulate. The state has more presssing issues to worry about. It’s time to move on.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

—Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)

“This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

—Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976  (Science writer)

“This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.”

—Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling” 1976 (Talk show host)

“If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.”

—Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

“The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.”

—Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)

“There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are (sic) hard-pressed to keep up with it.”

—Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

It is quite a mix of personages making up this list: Luddite scientists, doctors, writers, the usual nuts. For this selection, I’ve omitted some of the better-known seers.

The Great Karnac for some reason wasn’t on the list.

Since these are jobs Americans won’t do, we need to scrutinize the applicants’ papers carefully. Right?

Applicants line up to fill jobs left empty by Swift plant raid

By Fernando Quintero, Rocky Mountain News December 15, 2006

GREELEY - The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday.

Among them was Derrick Stegall, who carefully filled out paperwork he hoped would get him an interview and eventually land him a job as a slaughterer. Two of his friends had been taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and he felt compelled to fill their rubber boots.

“Luckily, they had no wives or family they left behind. But it was still sad. They left their apartments filled with all their stuff. I took two dogs one of them had. The other guy had a cat I gave to my sister,” he said.

There goes my month’s budget for tissues.

Greg Bonifacio heard about the job openings on television and brought his passport, his Colorado driver’s license, his Social Security card and even a color photograph of himself as a young Naval officer to prove his military service.

“I don’t want to hassle with any identification problems because of my last name,” said Bonifacio, a 59- year-old Thornton resident of Filipino heritage.

As it turned out, the Colorado Workforce office that was taking applications did not require any identification. That would come later for those who made it past the interview process.

Bonifacio was hoping to get a job in production or fabrication. So was Nathan Korgan, a former construction worker whose company closed and moved to California.

“I feel bad for the kids, but good for me,” said Korgan of Tuesday’s raid.

Like many others who had mixed emotions about the raid, Maxine Hernandez said she was upset that families were torn apart, but believes illegal immigrants should not get work using fake documents.

“I guess I’m in the middle,” she said. “But I do think they should have planned (the raid) better so that innocent children wouldn’t be left behind.”

She’s right! Don’t leave the kids behind. Ship them to their parents’ country of origin so when the criminals arrive, the welcome home party is festive.

Hernandez, who had gone to the employment office because her husband was there to apply for unemployment insurance, decided to apply for a job at Swift on a whim.

“My whole family used to work there. My mom, my aunt, uncles,” she said. “I guess it sort of runs in our blood.”

Obviously, it didn’t run in her blood for years. Why isn’t her husband applying too? The family that works together…

MORE RAIDS!!!! In any other country, your butt would be over the border muy pronto, after you received a bit of hospitality at the Steel Inn for your transgressions.

A wave of the chuck’s tail to The Daily Reporter-Herald

Global warming is happening, but humans are not the cause, one of the nation’s top experts on hurricanes said (last) Monday morning.

Bill Gray, who has studied tropical meteorology for more than 40 years, spoke at the Larimer County Republican Club Breakfast about global warming and whether humans are to blame. About 50 people were at the talk.

Gray, who is a professor at Colorado State University, said human-induced global warming is a fear perpetuated by the media and scientists who are trying to get federal grants.
[snip]

It’s always follow the money.

At the breakfast, Gray said Earth was warmer in some medieval periods than it is today. Current weather models are good at predicting weather as far as 10 days in advance, but predicting up to 100 years into the future is “a great act of faith, and I don’t believe any of it,” he said.

But even if humans cause global warming, there’s not much people can do, Gray said. China and India will continue to pump out greenhouse gases, and alternative energy sources are expensive.
[snip]

Alternative is an apt name for the following sources of energy. Relegation of these power sources to has-been status advanced civilization. If they worked better than what we’re currently using, we’d be using them instead.

Wind Power, once moved sailing ships and pumped water, now is mainly used to sell postcards in Holland. In California, wind farms killed so many birds, the barkheads demanded they shut down ending that power generation trial.

Hydroelectric power sounds like a 5 Year plan replete with Hero of the Union medals. Enough dams and transmission lines and we could be as advanced as the Soviet Union of the 30’s. However, among the Enviro-nuts, anything larger than a clogged toilet line will cause violent protests, so no dams.

Have you seen any Stanley Steamers recently? Beside the attendant pollution, positive feedback systems get a bit involved to operate. Not to worry about avatar vehicles, the unhinged start making guttural noises as soon as the word chop is associated with tree.

The real difficulty with using technology to solve the energy problem is the rejection of technology by the Global Warming freaks. Try mentioning nuclear power and every available erg on earth immediately goes into producing tinfoil berets.

Some of the true believers have mentioned the atom in a positive way. We’ll hear more from them after the visit to the re-education camps.

What the Enviro-nuts really want is for man to disappear. Lets start with them.

I’ve ranted in the past about the accuracy of most polls touted by the media. The media never spends the money necessary to obtain the more accurate polls of “likely voters”, they always settle for the less accurate polls of “adults” or “registered voters”. Historically Democrats fare better in generic polls rather than ones limited to likely voters because voters registered as Republicans are more likely to vote on Election day than their Democratic counterparts.

Well now Gallup has analyzed past polling data and come to the same conclusion.

“A review of historical generic ballot data shows that Democrats almost always lead on the generic ballot among registered voters, even in elections in which Republicans eventually win a majority of the overall vote for the House of Representatives,” Mr. Jones wrote.

The reason has to do with a different turnout for various groups of voters: registered voters, regular voters and, the most accurate of all, “likely voters.” Notably, “In midterm elections, fewer than half of eligible voters usually turn out to vote and Republicans are more likely to turn out than Democrats,” Mr. Jones said.

Such generic polling results, which are given broad distribution in newspapers throughout the country, have fed a growing public perception that Democrats are poised to make major gains in the House races this fall and could possibly win control of the House.

But election watchers who monitor the relatively small number of competitive House races that are up for grabs say that major gains will be an uphill climb for Democrats and a takeover is very unlikely.

“In the House, where Democrats need a net gain of 15 seats, only about three dozen are truly in play today. So far, 17 Republicans and 10 Democrats have announced their retirements. Ten of those Republicans serve in safe GOP districts, where Democrats stand little chance of winning,” writes veteran elections analyst Charlie Cook in the National Journal.

While I’ll admit that Republicans aren’t in great shape right now, I think we need to keep the accuracy of these generic polls in mind. The good news is these polls tend to make Democrats over confident.

As Robert Novak points out, the Democrats have a much bigger hill to climb than the media lets on:

[Read more →]

President Bush spooked the left this Halloween and nominated Samuel Alito to SCOTUS. Alito is the real deal and will serve as the marker in this vicious war over the Supreme Court. Today’s to do list:

• Ankle Biters wasted no time and set it sights on the seven RINO turncoats who will be instrumental in getting Alito confirmed.
• Polipundit has a confirmation vote based solely on Roe, but vote counters should also be watching LA’s favorite mouthpiece, Sen. Mary Landrieu and Colorado’s Ken Salazar. It would be political suicide for either to filibuster.
• CBS’ John Roberts shows us what corner the MSM will be in for this fight.

President Bush has successfully united the base in what looks to be a historic fight. Unfortunately, I am busy at work this week and will not be able to cover all the slanderous comments liberals are making about Judge Alito. Prediction: NO filibuster, final vote 57-43 to confirm Alito.

Bush’s decision to come back to the base-ics could save his Presidency and drive liberals insane while doing it. The MSM is crying in their beers because they thought they outfoxed him. I thought they outfoxed him. But in usual Bush fashion, we “misunderestimated” him……again.