A current events round-up for conservatives
THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Turning back the tide of information overload with a digest of the latest developments in news conservatives need to pay attention to:
† The Magic Is Gone: The New York Times reports that Dems have given up all hope of winning the white working class voting demographic (related article, second item on the page) and are instead trying to cobble together a center-left coalition of educated middle class whites and uneducated low-income minorities:
All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment – professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists – and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.
It is instructive to trace the evolution of a political strategy based on securing this coalition in the writings and comments, over time, of such Democratic analysts as Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira. Both men were initially determined to win back the white working-class majority, but both currently advocate a revised Democratic alliance in which whites without college degrees are effectively replaced by well-educated socially liberal whites in alliance with the growing ranks of less affluent minority voters, especially Hispanics. …
In the United States, Teixeira noted, “the Republican Party has become the party of the white working class.” [emphasis, The Stiletto].
A recent Pew Research Center study of partisan identification bears out Teixeira’s observation: “a 15-point Democratic advantage among whites earning less than $30,000 annually has swung to a slim four-point Republican edge today.”
For this strategy to work, white elites in all age groups need to re-up with the Obama campaign, but there are indications that college students who are nearing graduation and recent grads are ambivalent about giving Obama their votes or have decided to look for paying work in “a deadened job market” instead of volunteering to re-elect him, The New York Times reports:
In the last election, Sandra Allen hosted a group of fellow Brown University students at her home to call voters in North Carolina and Indiana on Election Day, a common practice in the Obama campaign. Mr. Obama won those states to the shock of Republicans.
Asked if she would be doing similar work for Mr. Obama this time, Ms. Allen responded: “Not now. And I will not be streaking across the main green of any campus with hundreds of thrilled people were he to be re-elected next year.”
Ms. Allen graduated last year and, after surveying the job market, decided to take refuge in graduate school to wait things out. “I’m not optimistic,” she said.
Jason Tieg, 22, a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho, voted for Mr. Obama with great enthusiasm in 2008. But now, struggling to find a part-time job to help him through school, he is not even sure he would do that again. “I got a job in July as a custodian on campus, but I lost it again when they needed to cut down.”
“I don’t know if I’ll support him next year,” he said.
The Pew study also found that “[a] seven-point Democratic advantage among whites under age 30 three years ago has turned into an 11-point GOP advantage today.”
† SOTU = Stuff Our Taxes Underwrite: Government incompetence? There's an app for that! Geekosystem reports on the findings of Rich Jones of the indie software developer site Gun.io, who filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to investigate a $200,000 Android app developed by U.K.-owned Eastern Research Group Inc. for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that was supposed to provide heat safety tips, a heat index converter, and access to information from NOAA’s weather database but “is not exactly in working order”:
I really cannot stress how bad this application is. Firstly, it isn’t actually capable of the function it is supposed to do. When I first tried the application, it told me that it was currently 140F in Boston. It is also extremely slow, it looks like butt, and it crashes all the time. It is completely horrible in every way. If I had to reproduce it, I’d say that it would take be [sic] about 6 hours at the maximum. At my hourly rate of $100, that’s $600. …
Now, while this looks very damning for OSHA, it’s important to note that in the world of government, apps and smartphones are still relatively new. Also, most agencies don’t have the in-house talent to create such apps, nor the knowledge to critically asses such an app, and rely heavily on outside contractors. It’s likely that OSHA knew they wanted an app, but had no idea how to go about building one or even describing what they wanted it to do. Throw in the bureaucratic red tape inherent in all government projects, and perhaps some over ambition on the part of the contracted developer (or any number of possible subcontracted developers), and you get a barely functional $200,000 app. That’s all speculation, of course.
† Mama, Don’t Take My Incandescent Bulbs Away: The Washington Times reminds us that we have only about four weeks left to stock up on 100-watt-incandescent light bulbs:
Beginning Jan. 1, Obama administration extremists will impose massive financial penalties on any company daring to produce a lighting product that fully satisfies ordinary Americans.
The Republican House hasn't done enough to stop this. Rep. Michael C. Burgess, Texas Republican, added language to the Energy and Water Appropriations bill to prohibit the ban's implementation. A Senate committee deleted this sensible amendment in September, and it's been quite a while since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has allowed an up-or-down vote on a funding bill.
† Dispatch From Bizzaroland: The Washington Post thinks that having “distanced himself from the congressional supercommittee – politically and geographically” President Barack Hussein Obama sought to avoid “putting his leadership on the line for a long-shot deal.” But the way The New York Times sees it,“[i]n remaining aloof from the special deficit committee in Congress even as it collapsed … President Obama showed his calculation more clearly than ever before: Republicans will never agree to raise taxes on the wealthy to balance any spending cuts, so let the voters decide.” But here’s the thing: Obama risks being seen as “failing to lead on a serious threat to the country’s future, the mounting federal debt” (related article, third item on the page).
† Is This Why We Fight?: The base chaplain at Camp Marmal, an “isolated” German military base in Afghanistan that hosts NATO forces, was ordered by U.S. Army brass to remove a large cross that had been “prominently” displayed outside the interfaith chapel for more than two months, Politico reports: “We are here away from our families, and the chapel is the one place that feels like home,” a service member at Camp Marmal told POLITICO. “With the cross on the outside, it is a constant reminder for all of us that Jesus is here for us.” … † Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: Cash-strapped companies and municipalities are planning to sit out this year’s Tournament of Roses parade (“[f]or the first time in anyone’s memory, there will be no team of Clydesdales representing Budweiser”), The New York Times reports: Several cities have had to abandon plans to put up floats for the parade, after doing so for decades. One company that had built floats for 25 years announced that it was going out of business, after its most reliable customers dropped out of the parade. … Nearly every city in Southern California – and in hard-pressed regions across the country – is struggling with deep budget cuts, trimming back park services and reducing the city staff. In the last few years, five cities have dropped out of the parade and several more considered doing so, only to be rescued by private money. Other cities have drastically scaled back their floats to save money. And few of those who left expect to re-enter the parade anytime soon. … In the middle of the 20th century, the parade was a way for small towns in the San Gabriel Valley, northeast of Los Angeles, to attract newcomers. The sun shining on the snow-capped mountains would stoke the westward dreams of viewers bundled up in the Midwest and the Northeast, or so the hope went. “The message was always ‘Come to Southern California and grow,’ and everyone wanted to be a part of that,” said Joe Mathews, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a Pasadena native who has attended dozens of parades. “But that’s a hard sell to make these days, when there is a real slowdown in the number of people coming, and Californians are really schizophrenic about whether they actually want more people.” As if things weren’t bad enough, Occupy Pasadena protesters “plan to bring 40,000 people to the parade and form their own “human float” at the end of the route”: “We’re in a crisis situation, and we can’t pretend that everything is as hunky-dory as people in power want us to believe, when there are tens of thousands of people unemployed here,” said Peter Thottam, the lead organizer for the Rose Parade protest. “The parade has been a cultural embodiment of corporatization and militarization of our society. There are thousands of people there, and millions of people watching it on television, and we want to bring our message to them.” These typically clueless Occupy protesters are unaware that corporations – particularly, defense contractors – have traditionally been the drivers of economic and employment prosperity in CA and cutting back on defense spending will hamper the state’s recovery, as with previous recessions. † AZ Becomes The Epicenter Of Civility: The Wall Street Journal reports that “typical offenses in the financial district and Tribeca usually are limited to minor matters such as hawking fake Rolexes and operating unlicensed food carts” but during the Occupy protest of Zuccotti Park, there was a spike in violent crime (a police spokesperson notes "many of these were assaults against police officers"). Curiously, the worthies running the University of Arizona's National Institute for Civil Discourse have thus far said nothing about the protesters use of physical force to get their message across (whatever that message was), or about the endemic rape and violent crime in these encampments nationwide. Nor have they weighed in to debunk attempts by the MSM and Dems to liken Occupy protests with the peaceful, law-abiding Tea Party movement. Really, just what is this organization good for, anyway? Take, for instance, the “White House Shooter.” The MSM doesn’t wait even a nanosecond before linking every shooting incident to the Tea Party or to statements made by prominent conservatives or Republicans, but blaming the usual suspects seemed too far-fetched even for the most biased journo considering that Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez was not “a typical white person” (he is of Mexican heritage) and had spent time at the Occupy D.C. encampment but since he blended in with the other malcontents, no one could specifically recall him being there (a detail the broadcast media declined to report, BTW). When police had determined that he was not linked to any radical organizations, that seemed to be the end of it – Ortega was just another mentally disturbed man who had slipped through the cracks of our mental health system. The New York Times, however, just knew he had to be a right-winger and kept probing until they found the um, smoking gun: Ortega-Hernandez had lived in UT (“the state has long been stereotyped as violently antigovernment and racist” and Ortega was influenced by a conservative talk show host): The federal charges accuse Mr. Ortega of attempting to assassinate President Obama. They say acquaintances claim that Mr. Ortega was trying to kill Mr. Obama because he considered him “the Antichrist.” … Mr. Ortega is a Mexican-American whose family knows the sound of ethnic slurs and worries mostly about its restaurant business, not politics. People here say that the only thing that could have motivated Mr. Ortega was mental illness – but that they did not realize the severity of it until it was too late. … The AK-47 that Mr. Ortega is accused of using to fire on the White House was registered to [Jake] Chapman, who … sold the gun to Mr. Ortega in March for $550 and that he believed it was the first gun Mr. Ortega owned. Mr. Chapman, 21, said he had not heard Mr. Ortega talk of taking violent action. But more than a year ago, he recalled, Mr. Ortega and others watched an antigovernment film on the Internet called “The Obama Deception,” which was written, directed and produced by Alex Jones, a Texas-based conservative talk show host who has espoused a number of conspiracy theories involving the federal government. † All The News That’s Fart To Print: Christopher Lincoln, Mary Moore and Joseph Nouerand, who all worked as salespeople for FBK Products of West Palm Beach, FL, pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring to commit wire fraud for scamming roughly a dozen elderly victims out of $1 million by convincing them to buy unnecessary septic tank products – including more than 70 years worth of toilet paper by claiming that new federal government regulations required use of the special TP they were selling, The Miami Herald reports: In phone pitches, salespeople claimed the company was affiliated with the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. One product, the $199 Septic Remedy treatment, would eliminate the need to have their tanks pumped, the company claimed. Victims were also told that they needed special soap, detergent and toilet paper or their septic tanks would not pass federal inspection. But the EPA does not regulate septic tank products, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Three other FBK salespeople are awaiting trial.
Pentagon spokesperson Commander William Speaks confirmed the cross was removed and told POLITICO, “The removal was, in fact, in accordance with Army regulations” and pointed out that the Army chaplain manual prohibits permanent display of religious symbols. …
[T]here had been no complaints from Muslims – there are two mosques on the base – or Jews, who had recently conducted a service in the chapel without incident.
“I really don’t understand why Christians are always attacked. If it was a crescent moon on top of a mosque, it would never be taken down,” said an Army serviceman.
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