THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† Every Bubble Bursts Eventually: In this Wall Street Journal op-ed, Karlyn Bowman and Andrew Rugg of the American Enterprise Institute note that aging Baby Boomers (AKA the Flower Children of the ‘60s) – a demographic that’s growing faster than any other - is becoming more conservative, which creates the possibility that “[i]f the GOP can successfully win over the near and new olds, graying America could officially turn red”:
For the first time, people over 45 represent a majority (53%) of the voting-age population.
Since 1964, the Census has asked people whether they voted on Election Day, and the age skew is unmistakable: Older Americans vote more than younger ones. In 2008, 49% of 18-24 year olds reported voting. Compare that to the 72% for those ages 55-64 ("near olds"), and 70% for those 65 and older ("new olds"). …
A study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center also shows a substantial increase (18 points) between 1974 and 2010 in conservative identification for the 55-64 (near old) cohort. They also moved 11 points in the Republican direction during that period.
Despite their ideological shift, the near olds are not a reliable Republican bloc -yet. In 2008, 45-59 year-olds made up 30% of the electorate. They split their votes between Barack Obama and John McCain evenly: 49% to 49%. (Compare that to the national electorate, which voted 53% to 46% for Mr. Obama). Of those 60 and older, 51% voted for Mr. McCain, compared to 47% for Mr. Obama. …
The unpopularity of President Bush at the end of his time in office, coupled with Mr. Obama's exciting candidacy, gave Democrats an 11-point advantage over Republicans among self-identified registered voters 50-64 years old, according to 2008 Pew data. But they're not looking as satisfied with the president's party these days. So far this year, the Democrats only carry a five-point advantage. Among those 65 and older, Democrats had an eight-point advantage in 2008; the GOP now has a two-point advantage. Among whites, the shifts in these age groups toward the GOP are also dramatic. Whites in the 50-64 year-old age group split 45% to 45% in 2008; now the Republicans have a nine-point advantage (50% to 41%). In 2008, Republicans had a two-point advantage among the 65+ group. It is now 12 points.
But it’s hardly news that people become more conservative as they reach retirement age. Has Obama inspired a similar ideological shift amongst those who are decades away from the last major rite of passage of adult life? The Washington Times notes that “the young voters who once identified with the youthful, relatively unknown senator from Illinois are having a severe case of buyer’s remorse.” Syndicated columnist Michael Barone explains why “white Millennials [voters under 30] have been moving away from the Democrats”:
The Democratic edge in party identification among white Millennials dropped from 7 points in 2008 to 3 points in 2009 to a 1 point Republican edge in 2010 and an 11 point Republican lead in 2011. …
It's not hard to come up with plausible reasons for these changes. Obama campaigned as the champion of "hope and change" in 2008 and assured crowds of young people, "We are the change we are seeking."
But the change they have seen is anything but hopeful. Youth unemployment rates have been at historic highs. Young people have seen their college degrees produce little in the way of job offers. …
Instead of allowing Millennials space in which they can choose their own futures, the Obama Democrats' policies have produced a low-growth economy in which their alternatives are limited and they are forced to make do with what they can scrounge.
Baby Boomers and Millennials have little in common, but are drifting rightward together as a result of an inexorable conservative tide. The Christian Science Monitor reports:
Over the past four decades - and more sharply over just the past few years - the geopolitical center of America has shifted rightward. It hasn't happened on all fronts - certainly, there are some areas where the country has clearly moved to the left, such as views on gay rights. But on a host of other issues, from guns to the role of government, the center of debate has edged closer to the conservative position, while activists on the right have moved even further out on the political spectrum.
The move has been most pronounced on fiscal matters. In Washington today, when it comes to the size of government, the debate isn't over whether to cut spending, but by how much. It's not over how much to raise taxes to help alleviate a fiscal shortfall, but whether any kind of tax increase - even on the wealthiest few - is valid. …
Conservatives, of course, would argue that any tilt to the right is a validation of their ideas. Yet the situation is more complex than that. Many factors have contributed to the nation's rightward drift.
For one thing, frustration over what is perceived as wasteful government spending – under both Democratic and Republican administrations – has grown. The Bush administration's massive spending on everything from a new prescription drug bill to the war in Iraq pushed the national debt to new heights, a trend that has continued during President Obama's tenure. Voters saw the government spend huge sums on such things as financial bailouts and health care – little of which seemed to make a noticeable difference in people's lives. …
Indeed, one of the main forces behind the recent rise in conservative views - particularly on the issue of the size and role of government - is a widespread sense that the political system is fundamentally broken: Politicians on both sides of the aisle are seen as big spenders who are tools of special interests. …
This sourness about government has led conservative activists to hold even Republican officials to more stringent tests - requiring them, for instance, to sign "no new tax" pledges. And increasingly, they are willing to challenge those politicians who fall short, pushing them further to the right.
What all this boils down to, according to CSM, is that Barry Goldwater is hip again. Whodathunkit?
† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: As the fog of hopium is lifting, the 2008 coalition that voted Barack Obama into office (he wasn’t using his middle name back then; only “racists” were) is finding that they’ve “lost that lovin’ feelin’,” as The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan put it. She argues that Obama is the living embodiment of the adage that "familiarity breeds contempt" - or, more accurately, familiarity with his inauthenticity breeds contempt (which should worry Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney):
[N]obody loves Obama. This is amazing because every president has people who love him, who feel deep personal affection or connection, who have a stubborn, even beautiful refusal to let what they know are just criticisms affect their feelings of regard. At the height of Bill Clinton's troubles there were always people who'd say, "Look, I love the guy." They'd often be smiling - a wry smile, a shrugging smile. Nobody smiles when they talk about Mr. Obama. There were people who loved George W. Bush when he was at his most unpopular, and they meant it and would say it. But people aren't that way about Mr. Obama. He has supporters and bundlers and contributors, he has voters, he may win. But his support is grim support. And surely this has implications. …
Why is Mr. Obama different from Messrs. Clinton and Bush? "Clinton radiated personality. As angry as folks got with him about Nafta or Monica, there was always a sense of genuine, generous caring." With Bush, "if folks were upset with him, he still had this goofy kind of personality that folks could relate to. You might think he was totally misguided but he seemed genuinely so. … Maybe the most important word that described Clinton and Bush but not Obama is 'genuine.'" He "doesn't exude any feeling that what he says and does is genuine." …
He was good at summoning hope, but he's not good at directing it and turning it into something concrete that answers a broad public desire.
This makes him “a loser,” writes Noonan, and in America, “nobody loves a loser.” Obama has no one to blame but himself for his loserdom,
Instead of drawing clear lines and putting forward detailed proposals, the president has played Mr. Compromise - ceding ground to Republicans here, sermonizing about Tea Party intransigence and Washington gridlock there, and fleshing out his preferred approach reluctantly, if at all. …
It’s one thing to bemoan politics-as-usual when you’re running for the White House. It’s quite another to publicly throw up your hands over our “dysfunctional government” when you’re the man the voters put in charge of it.
But The Washington Post’s policy wonk Ezra Klein thinks Obama has plenty of company in abdicating leadership, calling the debt ceiling compromise hammered out by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-NV) “lowest-common denominator lawmaking” because of the trigger that will make automatic spending cuts if Congress doesn’t pass a second round of deficit reduction totaling $1.5 trillion:
There are no taxes. No entitlement cuts. No stimulus. No infrastructure. Less in actual, specific deficit reduction than there was in the Simpson-Bowles, Ryan, or Obama plans, and even than there was in the Biden/Cantor or Obama/Boehner talks. The two sides didn’t concede more in order to get more. They conceded almost nothing in order to get a trigger and a process, not to mention avoid a financial catastrophe. …
Perhaps this deal signals the end of the need to actually reach an agreement, however. If the Joint Committee fails, the trigger begins cutting spending. If negotiations over taxes fail, the Bush tax cuts expire and revenues rise by $3.6 trillion. Neither scenario is anyone’s first choice on policy grounds. But you can get to both scenarios without Republicans explicitly conceding to higher taxes or Democrats explicitly conceding to entitlement cuts in the absence of higher taxes. Politically, that’s the lowest-common denominator, and that might mean it’s also the only deal the two parties can actually make. But that’s because it’s the only deal that doesn’t require, well, making a deal.
All the more reason to have a chief executive has the personal suasion to steer Congress on a course he has set. In other words, to lead. The debt ceiling crisis was the defining moment of Obama’s presidency, and voters “are beginning to understand that he is a man without a core set of principles thus incapable of guiding the ship of state … [t]he Obama Presidency is over”
proclaims American Thinker:
Barack Obama's only interest in the debt ceiling debate was to raise the borrowing limit sufficiently to get by the next election, and as a cudgel to denigrate the Republicans. His concern was not for the American people and the impact of overwhelming national debt, nor an impending and inevitable credit downgrade. Rather, he was determined that raising the debt ceiling would not become an issue during the presidential campaign. …
He has abdicated all responsibility to the Congress, in particular the House of Representatives, which has little choice but to assume a role they are not structured to do: lead the country as best they can until November 2012. The American people, suffering under the burden of high joblessness, eroding housing values, inflation and dramatically declining economic growth with no prospect of any immediate relief, are increasingly resigned to the fact that they must focus on surviving as best they can until the election. …
The die is now cast. He has made permanent in the minds of a majority of American people the image of a man incapable of being President. There is nothing he can do in the remaining 16 months before the election, particularly as the United States is clearly headed into another severe economic downturn, to change that perception.
The Stiletto predicted Obama would be former NYC Mayor David Dinkins writ large, and he has surpassed even her lowest expectations.
† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: The recession has turned the Tooth Fairy into something of a tight wad, The Washington Times reports:
Children across the country are getting short-changed for their teeth, according to a new study from Visa Inc. They're waking up to find less money under their pillows. …
[T]he average price per tooth dropped to $2.60 this year from $3 in 2010.
On the East Coast, last year's highest-paid children are now the lowest paid ones. The price of a tooth dropped 38 percent to $2.10. In the South, children also took a big hit to their piggy banks as the price was cut 21 percent to $2.60.
The price for teeth in the Midwest and West Coast remained stable. Children in the Midwest noticed a decline of 3 percent, or 10 cents, to $2.80. While West Coast youngsters actually saw the price edge up to $2.80 from last year's $2.70.
The number of parents who can't afford to fund the tooth fairy is also growing. It's at 10 percent this year, up from 6 percent last year. …
Another 7 percent of children get less than a dollar.
Meanwhile, there are fewer big spending tooth fairies out there. The number of children who receive $5 or more fell to 18 percent from 22 percent last year.
†
Despite a 90% cutback in harvesting on federal lands (which constitute 46% of Oregon and Washington combined), the population of spotted owls continues to decline, as do rural communities that once prospered across the Northwest. In some areas, spotted owls are vanishing at a rate of 9% per year, while on average the rate is 3%. …
The final Revised Recovery Plan, issued on June 30, calls for expanding protections for owls beyond the nearly six million acres currently set aside. Ironically, it also calls for the "removal"- i.e., shooting - of hundreds of barred owls, a larger and more adaptable rival of the spotted owl that competes for prey and nesting sites, and sometimes breeds with the spotted owl. …
The Fish and Wildlife Service says the species could be rejuvenated over the next 30 years at a cost of about $127 million. But that money will do little if anything to rejuvenate the depressed rural communities of the Northwest where still more timber land will be off limits to harvesting.
The truth is that no one fully understands why the spotted owl continues to decline. …
The spotted-owl saga provides convincing evidence that it's time to re-examine our objectives and methods in species protection, followed by appropriate amendments to the Endangered Species Act.
†
Human Events reports that an audit conducted by the Traditional Values Coalition of research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health found that over the past 2.5 years the federal agency gave more than $30 million to Chinese scientists to research Chinese medical issues - with more than $90 million going to the Chinese government over the last decade. One of those grants was a $367,686 study to find out whether hos in southwestern China start hooking before, or after, they become drug addicts.
Here’s something else your tax dollars are supporting: Medical treatment for Major Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of the 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood that left 13 dead and 32 wounded. Oh, and he “has retained his military rank and continues to get paychecks from the government,” The Blaze reports. You will be paying for his criminal defense, too.
† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Fed Up With Farmers): Remember that stunt comedian Steve Colbert and the United Farm Workers of America pulled last year inviting Americans to "Come on, take our jobs"? Didn't think so, but it turns out that Americans couldn't take fruit-picking or sheep-shearing jobs from illegals. Not because these are jobs that "Americans don't want to do," but because they are jobs that farmers don't want Americans to do. The New York Times reports that “[f]armers across the country are rallying to fight a Republican-sponsored bill that would force them and all other employers to verify the legal immigration status of their workers”:
The bill was proposed by Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. It would require farmers - who have long relied on a labor force of immigrants, a majority here without legal documents - to check all new hires through E-Verify, a federal database run by the Department of Homeland Security devised to ferret out illegal immigrants. …
Supporters of E-Verify, an electronic system that is currently mandatory for most federal contractors but voluntary for other employers, argue that it would eliminate any doubt about workers’ legal status. But farmers say it could cripple a $390 billion industry that relies on hundreds of thousands of willing, low-wage immigrant workers to pick, sort and package everything from avocados to zucchini. …
Mr. Smith said requiring employers to determine that new hires were eligible to work would prevent illegal immigrants from taking jobs at a time of high joblessness for Americans. “We could open up millions of jobs for unemployed Americans and legal workers,” he said.
But farmers and their advocates scoff at that notion, saying that regardless of high unemployment, few American workers are willing to sign up for what are often hard, hot and long hours in the fields.
“People just don’t want to do farm work,” Mr. Wenger said. “They don’t want to pick berries. They don’t want to pick lettuce. And the pay is just as good as working at the hamburger shop or making up hotel rooms, but they just don’t want to do the work.”
Oh, really? Well, the anti-illegal immigration Stand With Arizona blog reports on “a stunning and unexpected” Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) report that accuses Hamilton Growers of Norman Park, GA of “regularly denying work hours and assigning less favorable assignments to U.S. workers,” as well as of “discharging U.S. workers and replacing them with H-2A guestworkers”:
The H-2A guest worker program is a temporary visa program which is regularly abused by both foreign nationals, who typically deliberately overstay their visas (they are only valid for up to 364 days) as well as growers, who very often claim to have “H2As” employed, but know full well their workers are simply illegals who presented phony or no ID when hired. In Georgia, the vast majority of foreign nationals working fruit and vegetable growers are illegal aliens.
But this case demonstrates, as plaintiff’s lawyer Leah Lotto said, “the lengths to which growers will go to avoid hiring a U.S. work force in favor of more easily exploitable” foreign workers. … [T]he roughly 40 American farm workers who sued Hamilton Growers said they were “assigned fewer hours and made less money” than foreign workers, and that some of them were “eventually fired because of their race.” They were all thrilled to have the work, but disgusted with how they were treated in contrast to the H-2A foreigners.
And here's the kicker: The Sacramento Bee reports that Mexico’s unemployment rate is the mirror image of ours - 4.9 percent vs. 9.4 percent – and its economy is growing at nearly four times the rate of the U.S. economy, picking fruit is now a job that Mexicans won’t do and they are heading back South of the border.
† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II): Washington Post columnist George Will nicely summarizes the portion of the book "The Declaration of Independents" by Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch that broadens the scope of George Mason University economics professor Donald Boudreaux's question, “Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education?”:
Since 1970, per pupil real, inflation-adjusted spending has doubled and the teacher-pupil ratio has declined substantially. But math and reading scores are essentially unchanged, so we are spending much more to achieve the same results. America has the shortest school year in the industrial world, an academic calendar - speaking of nostalgia - suited to an America when children were needed on the farms and ranches in the late spring and early autumn. “No other industry,” Gillespie and Welch write, “still adheres to a calendar based on 19th-century agricultural cycles - even agriculture has given up that schedule.”
This is but one example showing that in today’s topsy-turvy political landscape it’s liberals – not conservatives – who are reactionaries (“Preaching what has been called nostalgianomics, liberals mourn the passing of the days when there was one phone company, three car companies, three television networks, and an airline cartel, and big labor and big business were cozy with big government.”)
Meanwhile, consider this modest progress made by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg in pruning the unproductive or twisted branches from the tree of knowledge (AKA The Board of Education) by ending automatic tenure for teachers after their third year on the job:
Under tougher evaluation guidelines that the city put into effect this year, 58 percent of teachers eligible for tenure received it … A decision on tenure was deferred for 39 percent of eligible teachers, up from 8 percent a year ago. Three percent of eligible teachers were denied tenure outright in both years. …
While state law outlines the general procedures for awarding tenure to teachers, the details are left to individual districts. “We’ve turned what had been a joke interpretation of the state law,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “to make it something that you have to work hard, earn, and show that you are better than the average bear” to get.
Under the city’s new standards, teachers are rated on a four-point scale as highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective, based on students’ tests scores, classroom observations, feedback from parents, and other factors. (Previously, they were simply rated satisfactory or not.) Principals, who make recommendations on tenure, and supervisors, who make the decisions, were allowed to give tenure only to teachers who were rated effective or better for two consecutive years.
† Updates To Previous Posts (Romney: The Sequel): Frank Rich, who is now ensconced at New York magazine, reminds us that former Gov. Mitt Romney's (R-MA) bona fides as a savvy businessman and job creator are as phony as everything else about him:
No one doubts that Romney is a shape-shifter par excellence, whether on abortion, health care, cap and trade, or the Detroit bailout (which he predicted would speed GM and Chrysler to their doom). In his last presidential run, he was caught fabricating both his prowess as a hunter and a nonexistent civil-rights march starring his father and Martin Luther King. But to masquerade as a latter-day FDR is a new high in chutzpah even by his standards. The only examples he can cite as a job creator are his "turnaround" of the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002 and his ability to grow Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he founded, from "ten employees to hundreds."
The most significant workers he added to the payroll in Salt Lake City were sixteen lobbyists, at a cost of nearly $4 million, to solicit taxpayers’ subsidies - "more federal cash than any previous U.S. Olympics," according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s hard to square with Romney’s current stand that jobs will bloom across the land if government stops giving any handouts (even to tornado victims, he said in the GOP debate) and lets the free market work its magic. As for his fifteen years in the corporate-buyout business, he was best known for the jobs Bain shredded at the once-profitable companies it took over and then demolished for parts.
It’s a record Romney perennially tries to cover up. It may have cost him his Senate race against Ted Kennedy in 1994. In that campaign, Romney was stalked by a "Truth Squad" of striking workers from a Marion, Indiana, paper plant who had lost jobs, wages, health care, and pensions after Ampad, a Bain subsidiary, took control. Ampad eventually went bankrupt, but Bain walked away with $100 million for its $5 million investment. It was an all-too-typical Romney story, which is why Mike Huckabee could nail him with his memorable 2008 wisecrack: "I want to be a president who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off." Stephen Colbert recently topped Huckabee, portraying Romney as a cross between Gordon Gekko and Jack Kevorkian because of the profitable mercy killings of companies in Bain’s care. When Romney was governor, his record was no better. A Northeastern University analysis of his term (2003-6) found that Massachusetts was one of only two states to have no growth in their labor forces. The other was Louisiana, which happened to have an excuse named Katrina.
† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II): Here's another case of the MSM reflexively associating guns with criminals. Only this time it is a young boy ... a young black boy, who was characterized as "a future criminal." Mediaite reports:
Chicago CBS affiliate WBBM has issued an apology after taking the comments of a four-year-old child out of context in relation to a shooting in the area. …
The story in question involved a drive-by shooting in the area, and several locals were on about whether they were fearful of future attacks. The four-year-old in question responded “I’m not scared of nothing,” and when asked if he would stay away from guns, retorted “I’m going to have me a gun!” And that’s where the original broadcast ends. The next line that was conveniently omitted? “I’m going to be police!”
The Maynard Institute rounded up the outrage in the academic community about portraying a four-year-old black boy as a “gangbanger in waiting”– and the NAACP reacted to the piece with disgust.
† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Is This Why We Fight?): Almost exactly a year ago, 25-year-old Khayyam and his 19-year-old wife Siddiqa were stoned to death by several hundred villagers in northern Kunduz Province (AKA “innocent Afghan civilians”) – all male, and a few of them blood relations - for eloping. History may be about to repeat itself. Another young couple who tried to elope, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, were intercepted and when “[a]n angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged” they were rescued by police, after which “the mob’s anger exploded,” The New York Times reports:
They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security. [Emphasis, The Stiletto.]
The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unsteady legal system. But they face harsher judgments of family and community. Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out. “What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed. … Both say they want to be together, but there are complications. Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.
Even if she agrees to erase her “debt” to the family of the man who died trying to keep her from marrying the boy she loves, there is the debt she owes to her family’s “honor.” And that debt can only be paid with her life. We spent wasted 10 years in Afghanistan to rescue these hopelessly backward and violent people from the Taliban only to find they prefer mob rule and Sharia law to the democracy we tried to purchase for them with our blood and treasure. It’s time to leave them to their own devices, while continuing the drone attacks that will keep Islamofascist terrorists too busy looking over their shoulders to be able to use the country as a base of operations again.
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