Category — Polls

Went to go vote before work but the lines were too long. I will be going back this afternoon.

Your mission for today:

Ignore the Polls.

Ignore the Media.

Ignore the Exit Polls.

Ignore the Early Results Tonight.

Ignore them all, they are all designed to make you give up and stay home. I don’t know how this election will turn out but I can damn well tell you that I will go down swinging. Get out and vote and let the chips fall where they may.

If you live in Massachusetts, don’t forget to vote Yes on 1.

As the market continues to plummet and bad polling numbers continue to roll in it is easy to declare that all is lost and we should just give up.  Do not give in to that temptation. As The Anchoress notes, that is exactly what the democrats and their accomplices in the media want you to do.

I’m getting a sense that some people are freaking out, out there, that it’s three weeks to election and so it’s time to hyperventilate.

Of course that’s not true. Three weeks is still a huge chunk of time in an election, and things turn on a dime. The whole point of the big “landslide” story is the press helping Obama out some more; it is meant to make you despair and not go vote. It’s a game. While they’re saying “landslide,” and Charlie Gibson is acting like he’s in heat, Obama’s lost another point at Rasmussen.

The truth is, he’s not closing the deal, he can’t close the deal unless ACORN goes out there and registers 105% of voters, slashes tires and does all the stuff they have done (with little-to-no press coverage) with increasing vigor in each election.

They know that if they can depress turnout on election day, not only will Obama win, he will also have large majorities in both houses of Congress causing the country to take a sharp left turn. So whatever you do, don’t let the media determine the winner. Forget the polls and get out and vote and let the chips fall where they may!

As for the polls, take them with a grain of salt. Especially the state polls.

Even this brief examination reveals that the state opinion polls were often wrong, and often to a materially significant degree. In 2004, both Bush and Kerry’s support were commonly under-estimated, but in several groups’ work, all of Bush’s support was underestimated and Kerry’s support was much more likely to be over-estimated. The margin was also often wrong, and to a significant degree. State polls, therefore, are not proven to be a valid predictor of election results.

Update: Click here for another look at polling and Obama’s inability to close the deal.

When ABC’s Poobah of Polling, Gary Langer, pollster extraordinaire, heard,”My friend doesn’t like you.” followed by “I don’t like you very much either.” he should have realized his troubles.

There will be a serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; that is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why.

Why? People lied to you. flat out, keister kicking lied. They lied to you in 2000 and again in 2004. That’s why! Want another three reasons: Brokaw, Rather and Jennings. One more reasson, anything National Public…

Why? Pollsters are dispicable. They are the ones who tell you how the movie ended as you wait to purchase seats. The gender of your kid is disclosed before you and wifey even decide on a lubricious moment. Pollsters are the kids sitting in front of the class, who raised their hand just to let you know “I’m smarter than you.”

I get polled frequently, why I don’t know. Maybe it is the low telephone number on the landline or the abode’s address, Home for Divorced Crossdressers.

Anyway, I lie to the pollsters, nary a truth is uttered in their presence. If there is a chance of slipping in an outrageous answer, I go for it. Best are the online polls, where they promise coupons for answers. I give them Hotspur’s zip code and OP’s e-mail address.
Depends! My favorite product, so proud of product preformance, I wear them outside my pants.
Carnuba Car Wax! Far better than scented sex oils, comes with an approved by NAMBLA label for longevity in those intimate moments.
K-Y Jelly! One difficult moment occurred when I answered the shopping poll about the product. I wasn’t clear who was asking the questions, either Lowe’s or Louise’s Boutique. Told them I thought the product was horrible. I applied is as directed and my windows still leaked.

This Suffolk University poll shows Mitt Romney up 29/25 on John McCain in NH. If it represents truth on the ground, Mitt’s commercial blitz against McCain might be having an impact. But keep this important fact in mind, the poll projects that more than 25% of the votes cast in the Republican Primary will actually come from independents. Those independents are projected to break overwhelming for McCain.

If this were a party only primary, McCain wouldn’t be a serious threat to anyone. Sadly, if McCain wins, the media will proclaim its favorite RHINO the front runner when in reality, his Republican support is thimble deep.

A McCain ticket might trounce its rival for the independent vote in November, but can it drive its own party to the polls? I don’t see the prospect of 4 more years of “compassionate” conservatism rebranded as the Straight Talk Express driving a huge turnout in November. And if the specter of another President Clinton isn’t lurking, say hello to President Barack Obama.

Non-believing US voters feel demonized

One presidential hopeful is a preacher, another proudly Mormon, and most openly tout their Christianity. In an arena where faith can make or break a politician, the one in 10 Americans who profess no religion feel left in the cold.

“They’re very disconcerted,” said Darren Sherkat, an atheist sociology professor specializing in religion at Southern Illinois University. [snip]

I’m sure this gentleman has a solid religious background from which to expand his knowledge of faith and beliefs.

Ian Thomas, 25, got involved in political campaigning as a student and in 2005 ran for a place on the school board in his local district in Pennsylvania.

Days before the vote, a county council member emailed local community groups disparaging Thomas for having an atheist bumper sticker on his car, and for writing a letter about atheism to a local newspaper.

“They are entitled to their beliefs and free speech but it doesn’t make a sound foundation for elected officials who makes our laws … to promote an Atheist that we know anything about,” read the ungrammatical email, shown to AFP. [snip]

But they are also “the least tolerated group by conventional standards of religious toleration in the US,” Sherkat said. [snip]

One might say the sins of their “religion” are visited upon them; who believes the Missouri Synod or the Archdioceses of NY and DC sued to remove “In God We Trust” from coinage. Or wishes to eradicate the word God from general use. Why do they want “religious toleration” since they reject religion

“Legally, there is no religious test for office, but culturally there obviously is,” he said, as polls showed Republican Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, surging ahead in key early nominating states. [snip]

More than one in 10 US adults have no religious affiliation, according to the census figures.

Having no religious affiliation does not default to atheism or agnosticism.

But a Gallup poll in February found more than half of voters would not back an otherwise well-qualified candidate from their favored party if that person was an atheist. [snip]

“The fair question would be to ask … will you impose your theology on civil law?”

And another fair question is, from what body of law was civil law derived? Heh?

“There is no candidate that an atheist would vote for … other than maybe Ron Paul,” Shermer said, naming a Tennessee lawmaker, a long-shot Republican contender.

“He’s a libertarian who feels absoutely (for) separation of church and state.”

“Many of the candidates would be acceptable to me regardless of their religious faith,” Stark told AFP. “Jimmy Carter (who became president in 1977) was perhaps the most personally strident conservative Christian — and I think he did a wonderful job.”

That last statement about sums it up; what further proof of the absence of reason is necessary, except that Ron Paul is from Texas.

A charmingly lucid methodology to a significant problem, this should surpass the moonbat EU members before long, dispersing wisdom like pixie dust on the wind, leaving them broached like dead whales.

Switzerland: Europe’s heart of darkness?

Switzerland is known as a haven of peace and neutrality. But today it is home to a new extremism that has alarmed the United Nations. Proposals for draconian new laws that target the country’s immigrants have been condemned as unjust and racist. A poster campaign, the work of its leading political party, is decried as xenophobic. Has Switzerland become Europe’s heart of darkness? By Paul Vallely
At first sight, the poster looks like an innocent children’s cartoon. Three white sheep stand beside a black sheep. The drawing makes it looks as though the animals are smiling. But then you notice that the three white beasts are standing on the Swiss flag. One of the white sheep is kicking the black one off the flag, with a crafty flick of its back legs.
The poster is, according to the United Nations, the sinister symbol of the rise of a new racism and xenophobia in the heart of one of the world’s oldest independent democracies.

A worrying new extremism is on the rise. For the poster – which bears the slogan “For More Security” – is not the work of a fringe neo-Nazi group. It has been conceived – and plastered on to billboards, into newspapers and posted to every home in a direct mailshot – by the Swiss People’s Party (the Schweizerische Volkspartei or SVP) which has the largest number of seats in the Swiss parliament and is a member of the country’s coalition government.

With a general election due next month, it has launched a twofold campaign which has caused the UN’s special rapporteur on racism to ask for an official explanation from the government. The party has launched a campaign to raise the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to reintroduce into the penal code a measure to allow judges to deport foreigners who commit serious crimes once they have served their jail sentence.

But far more dramatically, it has announced its intention to lay before parliament a law allowing the entire family of a criminal under the age of 18 to be deported as soon as sentence is passed.

It will be the first such law in Europe since the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft – kin liability – whereby relatives of criminals were held responsible for their crimes and punished equally.

The proposal will be a test case not just for Switzerland but for the whole of Europe, where a division between liberal multiculturalism and a conservative isolationism is opening up in political discourse in many countries, the UK included. [snip]

Dr Schlüer is a small affable man. But if he speaks softly he wields a big stick. The statistics are clear, he said, foreigners are four times more likely to commit crimes than Swiss nationals. “In a suburb of Zürich, a group of youths between 14 and 18 recently raped a 13-year-old girl,” he said. “It turned out that all of them were already under investigation for some previous offence. They were all foreigners from the Balkans or Turkey. Their parents said these boys are out of control. We say: ‘That’s not acceptable. It’s your job to control them and if you can’t do that you’ll have to leave’. It’s a punishment everyone understands.” [snip]

What an agreeably cogent approach to parenting and crime control this is.

And it is all so worrying to human rights campaigners that the UN special rapporteur on racism, Doudou Diène, warned earlier this year that a “racist and xenophobic dynamic” which used to be the province of the far right is now becoming a regular part of the democratic system in Switzerland.

Dr Schlüer shrugged. “He’s from Senegal where they have a lot of problems of their own which need to be solved. I don’t know why he comes here instead of getting on with that.”

Such remarks only confirm the opinions of his opponents. Mario Fehr is a Social Democrat MP for the Zürich area. He says: “Deporting people who have committed no crime is not just unjust and inhumane, it’s stupid. Three quarters of the Swiss people think that foreigners who work here are helping the economy. We have a lot of qualified workers – IT specialists, doctors, dentists.” To get rid of foreigners, which opponents suspect is the SVP’s real agenda, “would be an economic disaster”.

Here’s the usual liberal drek, a leap from the logical Particular to the Universal where every foreigner is frogmarched out of the country. Sounds suspiciously like our own brand of loons. With the left, there is only all, no terms used like some, few or most.

Dr Schlüer insists the SVP is not against all foreigners. “Until war broke out in the Balkans, we had some good workers who came from Yugoslavia. [snip]

The abuse of social security is a key problem. It’s estimated to cost £750m a year. More than 50 per cent of it is by foreigners.”

Does this not sound familiar? This is happening in our own social programs.

There is no disguising his suspicion of Islam. He has alarmed many of Switzerland’s Muslims (some 4.3 per cent of the 7.5 million population) with his campaign to ban the minaret. “We’re not against mosques but the minaret is not mentioned in the Koran or other important Islamic texts. It just symbolises a place where Islamic law is established.” And Islamic law, he says, is incompatible with Switzerland’s legal system.

Islamic law (Shari’a) is incompatible with any democratic form of law, no exceptions.

To date there are only two mosques in the country with minarets but planners are turning down applications for more, after opinion polls showed almost half the population favours a ban. What is at stake here in Switzerland…is a clash that goes to the heart of an identity crisis…of a globalised economy, increased immigration flows, the rise of Islam as an international force and the terrorism of 9/11. Switzerland only illustrates it more graphically than elsewhere. [snip]

He is fiercely proud of his nation’s independence, which can be traced back to a defensive alliance of cantons in 1291. He is a staunch defender of its policy of armed neutrality, under which Switzerland has no standing army but all young men are trained and on standby; they call it the porcupine approach – with millions of individuals ready to stiffen like spines if the nation is threatened. [snip] The transfer of power from the commune to Brussels would seriously change things for the ordinary Swiss citizen.”

Switzerland has the toughest naturalisation rules in Europe. To apply, you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years, pay taxes, and have no criminal record. The application can still be turned down by your local commune which meets to ask “Can you speak German? Do you work? Are you integrated with Swiss people?”

It can also ask, as one commune did of 23-year-old Fatma Karademir – who was born in Switzerland but who under Swiss law is Turkish like her parents – if she knew the words of the Swiss national anthem, if she could imagine marrying a Swiss boy and who she would support if the Swiss football team played Turkey. “Those kinds of questions are outside the law,” says Mario Fehr. “But in some more remote villages you have a problem if you’re from ex-Yugoslavia.”

The federal government in Berne wants to take the decision out of the hands of local communities, one of which only gave the vote to women as recently as 1990. But the government’s proposals have twice been defeated in referendums.

The big unspoken fact here is how a citizen is to be defined. “When a Swiss woman who has emigrated to Canada has a baby, that child automatically gets citizenship,” Dr Schlüer says. But in what sense is a boy born in Canada, who may be brought up with an entirely different world view and set of values, more Swiss than someone like Fatma Karademir who has never lived anywhere but Switzerland?

The truth is that at the heart of the Swiss People’s Party’s vision is a visceral notion of kinship, breeding and blood that liberals would like to think sits very much at odds with the received wisdom of most of the Western world. It is what lies behind the SVP’s fear of even moderate Islam. It has warned that because of their higher birth rates Muslims would eventually become a majority in Switzerland if the citizenship rules were eased. It is what lies behind his fierce support for the militia system. [snip]

The drama which is being played out in such direct politically incorrect language in Switzerland is one which has repercussions all across Europe, and wider.

Neutrality and nationality
* Switzerland has four national languages – German, Italian, French and Romansh. Most Swiss residents speak German as their first language.

* Switzerland’s population has grown from 1.7 million in 1815 to 7.5 million in 2006. The population has risen by 750,000 since 1990.

* Swiss nationality law demands that candidates for Swiss naturalisation spend a minimum of years of permanent, legal residence in Switzerland, and gain fluency in one of the national languages.

* More than 20 per cent of the Swiss population, and 25 per cent of its workforce, is non-naturalised.

* At the end of 2006, 5,888 people were interned in Swiss prisons. 31 per cent were Swiss citizens – 69 per cent were foreigners or asylum-seekers.

* The number of unauthorised migrant workers currently employed is estimated at 100,000.

Sippenhaft or Sippenhaftung-Liberals ought to love this concept:

It should be noted that other totalitarian regimes have used similar practices, even if they have not codified them in law. During Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s many thousands of people were arrested and executed or sent to labour camps as “relatives of the enemies of the people.” One well-known example was Anna Larina, wife of Nikolai Bukharin. Similar practices took place in the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. A prominent example is Deng Pufang, son of Deng Xiaoping. They also take place currently in North Korea.

As much as the White House says the polls don’t matter, I bet they’d kill for a 10 point bump right about now. To be effective, you have to maintain some level of popular support. The White House may find its predicament “liberating”, but it also liberates your opponents and the wayward members of your party. At this point, it’s hard to see anything major coming out of the White House over the next 18 months.

How did the President Bush get from a very lofty popularity height to Nixonian approval ratings? Let’s start with trying to do too much. Did an unpopular president really think he could lead an unpopular war while also pushing a deeply unpopular immigration bill? Good gamblers know the odds, and they were definitely stacked against him.

Next, the White House pushed a lot of policies that were unpopular with its constituents over a long period of time. It also compounded its liberal bent with an inability to pass legislation on conservative issues like defending marriage and Social Security reform.

And while the president pushed the right away, he was never going to get a corresponding amount of support from the left. The immigration bill was very lenient, but the left felt it didn’t go far enough. Ted Kennedy wrote the No Child Left Behind Act, but liberals always claimed it was underfunded.  In reality, there was practically nothing President Bush could do to make the left happy.

Did I mention the unpopular war? The left was never going to support the War on Terror. The best result there would have been a winning effort that made criticizing it politically dangerous. That’s how the White House got votes from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to authorize the effort in the first place. But not only were they never going to garner true support from the left, the White House made the right deeply suspicious of the effort by not prosecuting it as aggressively as they could. Isn’t the whole “surge” effort a tacit admission that not every effort was being made to win the war?

Now when you combine all of the above with things like Katrina, it creates a general sense of weariness and a longing for something new. The big question in 2008 is going to be whether that weariness extends to the Republican Party or not. If it does, a lot of Republican politicians could be looking for jobs in the dreaded private sector.

Have we finally driven enough stakes into the amnesty vampire?  I half expect another reincarnation effort given that such an awful bill could receive majority support in the US Senate.  In the bizzaro world of the US Senate, the polls mandate an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, but on immigration, they refuse to be intimidated by the “minority”, which actually happens to be the majority.  Remember, they know what’s best for you.

Journalists dole out cash to politicians (quietly)

News organizations diverge on handling of political activism by staff

BOSTON - A CNN reporter gave $500 to John Kerry’s campaign the same month he was embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq. An assistant managing editor at Forbes magazine not only sent $2,000 to Republicans, but also volunteers as a director of an ExxonMobil-funded group that questions global warming. A junior editor at Dow Jones Newswires gave $1,036 to the liberal group MoveOn.org and keeps a blog listing “people I don’t like,” starting with George Bush, Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition, the NRA and corporate America (”these are the people who are really in charge”). [snip]

But with polls showing the public losing faith in the ability of journalists to give the news straight up, some major newspapers and TV networks are clamping down. [snip]

But news organizations don’t agree on where to draw the ethical line. (Compare policies here.) [snip]

And some donors wield quiet influence behind the scenes, such as the wire editors at newspapers in Honolulu and Riverside, Calif., who decide which state, national and international news to publish. [snip]

Several of the donating journalists said they had no regrets, whatever the ethical concerns.

“Probably there should be a rule against it,” said New Yorker writer Mark Singer, who wrote the magazine’s profile of Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, then gave $250 to America Coming Together and its get-out-the-vote campaign to defeat President Bush. [snip]

George Packer is The New Yorker’s man in Iraq.
The war correspondent for the magazine since 2003 and author of the acclaimed 2005 book “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq,” Packer gave $750 to the Democratic National Committee in August 2004 and $250 to Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett, an anti-war Democrat who campaigned unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress from Ohio in 2006.

In addition to his reported pieces, Packer also writes commentary for the magazine, such as his June 11 piece ruing Bush’s “shallow, unreflective character.”

“My readers know my views on politics and politicians because I make no secret of them in my comments for The New Yorker and elsewhere,” Packer said. “If giving money to a politician prejudiced my ability to think and write honestly, I wouldn’t do it. Fortunately, it doesn’t.”

His colleague Judith Thurman wrote the New Yorker’s sympathetic profile of Teresa Heinz Kerry, published on Sept. 27, 2004. Ten days later, the Democratic National Committee recorded Thurman’s donation of $1,000. She did not return phone calls.

Their editor, Remnick, said that the magazine’s writers don’t do straight reporting. “Their opinions are out there,” Remnick said. “There’s nothing hidden.” So why not disclose campaign donations to readers? “Should every newspaper reporter divulge who they vote for?”

Besides, there’s the magazine’s famously rigorous editing. The last bulwark against bias’s slipping into The New Yorker is the copy department, whose chief editor, Ann Goldstein, gave $500 in October to MoveOn.org, which campaigns for Democrats and against President Bush. “That’s just me as a private citizen,” she said. As for whether donations are allowed, Goldstein said she hadn’t considered it. “I’ve never thought of myself as working for a news organization.”

The list: Journalists who wrote political checks
And their explanations, from ‘Yikes!’ to ‘They’re all in somebody’s pocket’

There are some rather circuitous answers in this group of folks. Not all have a firm grasp on the difference between reality and their view of it.

What if GW Bush Quit? (Humor-Lifted from GOE)

What if GWB resigns? This will touch a lot of hot buttons - for a shortsighted audience - with Nancy Pelosi to lead us. We all have our disagreements with President Bush. Immigration, U.S. Attorney firings, Iraq, Darfur, etc. are all hot topics these days. An ordinary Maniac wrote the following “speech” yesterday. While satirical in nature, all satire must have a basis in fact to be effective. A person who does not write for a living composed this piece. Sent with the author’s permission.

The speech George W. Bush SHOULD give:

Normally, I start these things out by saying “My Fellow Americans.” Not doing it this time. If the polls are any indication, I don’t know who more than half of you are anymore. I do know something terrible has happened, and that you’re really not fellow Americans any longer.

I’ll cut right to the chase here: I quit. [snip]

Hmmmmm! What if…

Wholesale deportation of the government to Mexico might work.

NBC/WSJ poll: President’s, Congress’ ratings drop to lowest levels ever

Republicans abandoning Bush

WASHINGTON - As President Bush attempts to revive the controversial immigration reform bill he supports, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that Republicans are abandoning the president, which has dropped his job-approval rating below 30 percent — his lowest mark ever in the survey. [snip]

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, argues that these numbers have crossed below the political “Mendoza line,” referring to the feeble .200 batting-average mark in baseball. [snip]

Also in the poll, only 23 percent approve of the job that Congress is doing, a decline of eight points since April. That number is within striking distance of the 16-percent rating Congress held in October 2006, just before Republicans lost control of both the Senate and House in last year’s midterms.

While Campbell says that the low approval rating reflects “poorly on the Democratic leadership” in Congress, he wouldn’t hit the panic just yet if he were Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “If these numbers were popping up six months, eight months from now, then I’d be concerned.”

Furthermore, the survey — which was taken of 1,008 adults from June 8-11, and which has a margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points — shows that just 19 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction. That’s the lowest number on that question in nearly 15 years.

By comparison, a whopping 68 percent think the country is on the wrong track. [snip]

They merit every bit of the condemnation. For a ostensible representative republic, our government is a disgrace. Our elected officials are like a running horse with the bit in it’s teeth; out of control and determined to go over the cliff.

Mr. Drummond responded to my rebuttal post where I challenged his assertion that conservative repudiation of President Bush’s policies is wrong in the comments section. However, we are like two ships passing in the night. Unfortunately, his post is an appeal to emotion and doesn’t really address the issues that conservatives have with President Bush’s policies:

He doesn’t lie, he doesn’t quit, and he doesn’t cheat. If that makes me a ‘Bushbot’ or whatever Kos-like name you want to stick on me, fire away. I know Integity when I see it, and I won’t change my tune because you yell louder.

So the president walks little old ladies across streets and says nary a cross word to anyone, but how is that relevant to a discussion of his policies? Was Harriet Miers the right choice for the Supreme Court? Is the massive expansion of government good? Is the illegal immigration bill right for the country? Has the president handled Iraq well? These are legitimate questions that need answers and analysis because even if I accept the view of President Bush as Super Politician, he’s still human.

Mr. Drummond’s answer is to have faith in our pilot:

I’m sure it makes you feel real tough to pretend you’re somehow in charge of the nation, but all you’ve done is shoot the pilot.

But when people board planes, they have a destination in mind. If the pilot takes them to Dallas instead of San Diego, should we blame the passengers for being irate? But isn’t that what you’re suggesting here? Conservatives shouldn’t be angry that the president decided Dallas was a better destination. They should blindly follow him because political elites know what’s best for us. I happen to believe it’s the passengers, and in our case the electorate, who should ultimately decide where the plane goes. Additionally, I use the word electorate in its broadest sense since most polls indicate not too many people like his immigration plan, the direction of the Iraq War, or the president’s policies in general.

I remember, or at least I think I remember, a time when conservatives used to question policies and examine results. We challenged liberal notions on programs, like welfare, where liberals made similar “faith” based arguments. It didn’t matter to them that the system trapped generations of families in a vicious cycle of poverty because they had good intentions. Even if I believed that President Bush had the purest of intentions, I’m focusing on the results and policies because that’s what matters.

These issues are simply too important to pat the president on the back for giving it the old college try and not worrying about the score. For example, the bipartisan CBO says the illegal immigration plan won’t significantly dent the steady stream of illegal immigrants hopping the border, but the president has the best of intentions.

There’s an interesting post over at Wizbang by DJ Drummond excoriating conservatives for not blindly following President Bush and the Republican Party. Many of you may remember him from the breakup of PoliPundit. There, like here, illegal immigration led to an explosive war of words that culminated in a number of bloggers leaving. However, my feeling is that illegal immigration is the straw that broke the conservative camel’s back and not the one that exposed the Republican Party’s base as a bunch of nativists and racists (as even the president and his cabinet secretaries proclaim). Interestingly enough, Mr. Drummond feels that calling conservatives who don’t toe the party line “haters” somehow elevates the tone of the conversation, but party elites feel the same way too.

But after reading the post, Mr. Drummond appears only to firmly believe in being a Republican. How else to explain his oft repeated claim that voting for Democrats would never be a viable option? I guess many people believe the parties have done the hard intellectual work for you, and once you’ve picked one, you never have to worry about those pesky issues again. The party elites are doing all the thinking for you now, so just enjoy the ride.

If you don’t approve of the president and party’s policies, well, according to Mr. Drummond, W has a 32% approval rating, so he doesn’t need you anymore. Amongst the other 68% of us who don’t agree with the president, there are independents and Democrats. Their party selection allows us to instantly discount their opinions and demonstrates how convenient the party selection paradigm is. So now that the unbelievers are winnowed out, Mr. Drummond only needs to address the “haters”; however, he never does get around to addressing us or more importantly the issues.

In my book, calling us “irrational malcontents” and “spittle-flecked individuals”, there he is raising the bar on our intellectual discussion again, isn’t addressing us or the issues. In fact, he doesn’t offer any defense of the president or party on the merits. One of the few nods he makes to any issue at all is to state that everyone “deserted” the president in 2005 and 2006, which raises the question about whose party is it anyway? Does the Republican Party exist to serve the president, or do he and it exist to serve us? And all of that ignores a discussion about whether the president should be serving the country as a whole, and not just his respective party, which would certainly bring the independents and Democrats back into play. Then in his final flourish, he ends by stating that the party is growing, which certainly runs contrary to most of the polls I’ve seen. People self-identifying as Republicans appears to be declining, not growing.

The whole post reads like one big Republican “card-check”. Send in your money, pull the right levers, shutup, and enjoy the glorious future with no thinking required. Thanks, but no thanks. Many of us believe in something much larger than merely being Republicans.

Things are looking up for the Romney campaign: 

The poll, conducted by Survey USA for WBZ-TV, was taken after the first debate among Republican presidential candidates last week. It shows 32 percent of likely GOP voters in New Hampshire favor Romney, compared with 23 percent for former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and 22 percent for Arizona Senator John McCain.

None of these candidates is Ronald Reagan’s legatee.  Mitt’s campaigning to the right of his rivals, but was previously a “compassionate” conservative.  Giuliani is socially liberal, and McCain took great pleasure in tweaking the party’s conservative base. 

The door is open for a real conservative to grab this nomination.  However, I don’t see anyone with the money, organization, and name recognition to oust the current frontrunners.  Unless something happens to shake this race up, we’ll be choosing between the lesser of 3 “compassionate” conservatives. 

A couple of illegal immigration updates for you. There’s a huge May 1 illegal immigrant rally planned for Los Angeles. Is shutting down LA going to make people more or less likely to support illegal immigration? Won’t a few fence sitters go the other way? Protest, don’t work (those of you who do), close down streets, make life miserable, do whatever you want because it won’t change my opinion. In America people follow the laws even if they don’t like them. So should you.

Second, the pollsters inform me that I’m way out of touch on the illegal immigration issue:

Seventy-eight percent of Americans polled in a survey said they believe illegal immigrations living in the U.S. should be allowed to pursue citizenship, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted April 13-15.

Even in MA you’d be very hard pressed to find numbers like that in support of amnesty. I’m not sure where USA Today/Gallup came up with those people, but I doubt it’s representative.