Covid and Restrictions...

 

This popped up in my work feed from a 3rd party email.  I have concerns because there is apparently a new strain of "Covid" in several countries in Africa and our "Betters" will probably try to use the playbook from 2020 to ratchet down again and scare the crap out of the "low info voters" again and push the absentee voting that worked soo well for the Donks, they will try something because a lot of people are disillusioned with the meat puppet presently in the White House.  

Credit: daboost/Getty Images

It was the worst public health disaster in a century and the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. And it did the worst damage to the airline industry since World War II. What can be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that will prevent a repetition, of either the virus or its massive damage?

Every virus is different and methods of dealing with each must be tailored to the virus itself, Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, cautions. But Gupta thinks some lessons from COVID can and should be learned.

Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University puts it more strongly. Like Gupta, Bhattacharya warned against lockdowns and all the other restrictions early in the pandemic. He now thinks something similar to an NTSB review of a disastrous aircraft crash is needed to look at how governments mishandled the virus.

Nearly three years after Gupta, Bhattacharya and many others made their arguments, a raft of studies, research reports and meta-analyses of many studies reached the same conclusion: With the exception of fast and tight border closings of a handful of Asia-Pacific islands, all the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) ordered by governments, including restrictions on air travel, had little effect on virus mortality but imposed massive economic, social, health and other costs on people.   

Source: “A Literature Review And Meta-Analysis Of The Effects Of Lockdowns On Covid-19 Mortality,” Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, Steve Hanke, Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and Study of Business Enterprise, May 2022.

Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh’s Medical School reviewed 600 publications and studies and concluded that lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions and other NPIs inflicted huge “collateral damage,” beyond that of the virus itself.

During the pandemic, heath visits, diagnostics, therapeutics and hospital admissions declined between 30% and 60% for non-COVID illnesses. Mental health also declined, especially for those vulnerable to mental challenges. Pandemic damage thus included an increase of between 2% and 20% in non-COVID mortality, higher in some countries.

Per capita GDP initially declined about 7% in emerging markets, 5% in advanced economies and 4% in low-income countries. Even after recovery, the 2024 GDP in emerging and developing countries will remain 6% below levels expected before the pandemic, according to the World Bank. Borrowing to counter this slump led to the largest one-year increase in global debt since World War II, which will crimp social expenditures of poor countries well into the future. Income inequality increased both within and between nations. Global poverty increased for the first time in a generation, and 90 million people fell into extreme poverty, receiving less than $2.15 per day as tourism and export demand collapsed. About 350 million people were pushed into food insecurity, risking starvation, according to the UN.

Sources: 2022 Actual GDP v. 2013-2019 GDP Trend To 2022; Worldometer, mid-July, 2023

Some of this immense damage was caused by the virus itself or voluntary reactions to the virus. But as much as half the GDP losses were caused by government policies—the NPIs, including travel restrictions—according to economist Douglas Allen of Simon Fraser University, who drew this conclusion after reviewing 100 COVID studies. Yet Allen found that these same policy reactions “had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of COVID-19 deaths.” For different nations, per capita death rates generally showed no relation to the stringency of each country’s NPIs. This was chiefly because people voluntarily changed much of their behavior in light of the virus’s danger to themselves.

Ineffective Travel Restrictions

The ineffectiveness of NPIs in general also characterized travel constraints. In May 2022, a survey of five studies of travel restrictions was published by a division of Johns Hopkins University. The best estimate of the authors was an average of study results, weighted by a judgement on the coverage and accuracy of the studies. This “precision-weighted average” estimated that a wide variety of travel restrictions imposed by many countries had reduced COVID deaths by only 3%.

Individual studies differed widely in their estimates. Only one estimated that restricting travel had significant effects. And this study related only fatalities through May 9, 2020, to the speed of border closures, so its estimate is dominated by the early impact of fast closures by Asia-Pacific islands.

A second study found some effects—a 2%-10% reduction in fatalities—but this too focused on short-term impacts very early in the pandemic. Border closures yielded no effects in a third study, and a later study found that travel quarantines were associated with increased deaths. Another later study similarly found travel restrictions associated with increased COVID deaths. In both cases it is likely that higher mortality drove tighter travel restrictions, not the other way around. But neither study shows tighter controls helped.

Taken together, the travel studies provide no evidence that travel restrictions helped much, except for those fast and tight closures in Asia-Pacific.

As the virus mutated, another study explained why the great majority of travel restrictions grew less and less effective as they were prolonged.  In January 2021, Oxera and Edge Health delivered a report on the impact of UK travel restrictions on the Omicron variant to the Manchester Airports Group. The report concluded that, “when a variant is already highly prevalent in the domestic environment, travel restrictions are likely to have a very limited impact on the growth and the peak of cases and hospitalizations.”

Omicron had been circulating internationally throughout November 2020, and the UK started requiring pre-departure tests and second-day PCRs in late November and early December. Oxera found these new restrictions had only a mild and temporary effect on preventing Omicron’s spread.

“If no travel restrictions had been in place at all in November/December, cases would have peaked seven days earlier and the peak would have been 8% higher. … Now that Omicron is highly prevalent in the UK, if all travel testing requirements are removed in January, there would be no impact on Omicron case numbers or hospitalizations,” the Oxera report concluded.

In other words, once a virus or variant is established in a country, it makes no or very little difference if a stream of visitors who have about the same proportions of infected, immune and vulnerable individuals as the host population enters the country.

“The horse was already out of the gate,” Gupta notes.

Only in that handful of Asia-Pacific islands (or virtual island South Korea) did snapping the door shut fast and keeping it shut until vaccines were available help at first. But early success led to prolonged and costly slumps in Asian travel, domestic growth and the air connectivity crucial to global economic health.

Shutting down international air travel is only effective in a sudden surge of infections, argues Subhas Menon, director general ar the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines. With COVID, “government response was generally knee-jerk as well as isolationist and parochial, unlike when SARS happened,” Menon said.

A Better Plan

What should have been done about travel and other policy choices?

The World Health Organization (WHO) initially opposed border closures. WHO is now strongly encouraging nations to have already prepared plans in place for dealing with respiratory viruses. ICAO now recommends balancing public health risks with the need for air travel and doing regular risk assessments based on evidence. ICAO says it is essential to maintain air connectivity to support global health, safety, food security, tourism, trade and economic growth. IATA has asked governments to learn from the pandemic and avoid closing borders to manage future health threats.

From the beginning, Gupta, Bhattacharya and many other scientists called for focusing protection on the vulnerable elderly and sick population rather than shutting down society, business, schooling and travel.

During the COVID-related travel restrictions, most airlines were forced to store aircraft, like these at Alice Springs Airport in Australia. Credit: Rob Finlayson 

“We knew at the outset that COVID vulnerability was highly specific to the condition of individuals—the elderly and frail, diabetes and very obese,” Gupta said.

Gupta ticks off some ways focused protection might be given. Elderly couples living with each other should stay at home, and relatives should be tested before visits. Recovering virus patients should not be placed in nursing homes, but in special facilities. Nursing home staff can be paid extra for working in two-week shifts and should be tested before duties. Elderly persons living with young, healthy individuals might be evacuated to safe facilities during flu season. The Oxford epidemiologist also thinks a pan-coronavirus vaccine should be developed and stored to be offered to vulnerable people if another coronavirus emerges. She acknowledges all these steps would be expensive, but much less so than the lockdown approach.

“The lockdowns did not do a damn thing,” Gupta summarizes. “The whole idea that we could stop it in its tracks was misguided.”

And lockdowns hurt lower-income workers, who could not work at normal workplaces, the most, while leaving the “laptop” class, who could work remotely, relatively unaffected.

Gupta believes something like the COVID respiratory virus might occur again in the next few decades. As for much more lethal viruses like Ebola, these must be contained in a different way, but their very lethality and visibility makes it much easier to block their spread very early.

WHO has urged tighter controls on wet markets, the source of previous respiratory viruses and initially suspected of originating COVID. Johns Hopkins medical professor Marty Makary has urged for a treaty, using principles from a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, banning laboratories from doing dangerous gain-of-function research.

What all this research adds up to, tragically, is that governments worldwide focused on border shutdowns and travel restrictions that did massive and long-lasting damage to the airline industry and economies but did little to nothing to contain the virus or help their most vulnerable citizens survive. If anything, their policies made them poorer and more vulnerable.

Will those lessons be absorbed and acted upon before the next global humanitarian crisis? Probably not, given how governments have clung to post-9/11 air travel restrictions like the carry-on liquids and gels rules when there are better policies and technologies that could keep air travelers both safe and moving.

The air transport industry, however, should arm itself with the research and data being gathered on the ineffectiveness of government air travel policies through the pandemic and help educate lawmakers and authorities on what they risk if they don’t learn the lessons of the human cost now emerging from the pandemic.

"No Voting Fraud" according to Democrats....

Once they finish insisting they're racist, the leading objection Democrats offer to voter ID laws is the simple claim that voter fraud doesn't really exist - that it's a figment of Republican imaginations or just an out-and-out lie designed to justify ID laws that can then be used to oppress minority votes.
I will even admit that at times I've found this claim mildly persuasive, since I have a hard time imagining a fraud effort big and sophisticated enough to make a difference without someone messing up and getting the whole thing busted. But data tells another story, at least in Nassau County, New York, where Long Island Newsday reports the dead are quite active in local politics, and have been for some time. The writer of the story doubts that what's happening is really fraud, but it seems to me that the possibility is dismissed a bit lightly:

Burwell is one of about 6,100 deceased people still registered to vote in Nassau County, a Newsday computer analysis shows. The former Wantagh resident, who died at age 74, is also among roughly 270 people that records show voted in Nassau County after dying, a group that includes a man who voted 14 times since his death.
Newsday's analysis of voter registration and U.S. Social Security Administration death records found more deceased registered voters in Nassau County than any other New York county, accounting for nearly a quarter of the 26,500 on the rolls statewide. Suffolk County has about 2,490 deceased people registered to vote, with roughly 50 listed as voting after their death.
The votes attributed to the dead are too few, and spread over 20 elections since 2000, to consider them a coordinated fraud attempt. More likely is what investigators in other states have found when examining dead voter records: Clerical errors are to blame, such as a person's vote being assigned to a dead person with a similar name.
But the sloppy condition of the local voter rolls does suggest that election officials are not utilizing all available methods to maintain a clean list. Besides the dead voters, Newsday's analysis also found more than 842,000 registered New York voters who records show haven't cast a ballot in 10 years. Harvard University professor of government Stephen Ansolabehere, an expert on voter list issues, said those registrations are likely not current.

I have no doubt that some of these are indeed clerical errors. But what of the guy who is recorded as having voted 14 times since his death? That's some coincidence - that many clerical errors attributed to one dead voter? What are the chances of that?
Also, if it's common for election volunteers to make mistakes and mark down the wrong person as having voted, wouldn't we also be hearing a lot of stories about live people showing up and being told that they had already voted? Have you ever heard any such stories? I'm not saying they've never happened but if they have they have definitely not gotten very much attention.
Since it's extremely difficult for local clerk's offices to keep tabs on people who have died and need to be removed from voter rolls, why isn't a voter ID requirement a reasonable solution? It might even help with the clerical errors, since election volunteers would presumably be less likely to get a name wrong if they're looking at it written out on an ID card.
The usual objection to this is that poor people are less likely to have ID, and thus voter ID laws contain an inherent bias against them. The simple solution would be to issue voter registration cards, with photos, at the time people register to vote. Then you simply require them to bring the card when they vote. Why is it fine to require people to carry a license with them with they drive, but not to carry a voter registration card when they vote?
Unless you want to make it easier to engage in voter fraud. It's getting harder and harder for the left to offer up plausible-sounding objections to this idea.

"PROUD TO BE A DEMOCRAT" And their vote cancels out ours.......

I kinda wish there was an intelligence test to vote...but that would be raciest or discriminatory or something....But these people votes cancels out ours...Can the republic be saved when the intelligence of the citizens have been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

To Understand the mind of this woman be sure to read the whole 'letter to the editor,' including her definition of a natural born citizen!

From the Carteret County News-Times

(Editor's note: The following Letter to the Editor, published in the Jan. 23 edition, has gone viral on the Web after a reader linked it to a Fox News page. It had received more than 4,000 comments and been shared more than 12,000 times by Tuesday morning.

I can't make this crap up.......

How to steal an election......ACORN style

Democrats.....class acts....let me tell you...

Explaining the 2012 elections....

I saw this from Sultan Knish     He did a very good job stating the case

      "To vote for Obama after years of grotesque economic mismanagement that has no precedent in history, that exceeds the worst actions of Andrew Jackson or Ulysses S. Grant, is not the instinct of an American, but a selfish greedy looter scrambling to grab a few dinner rolls off the tray while the ship is going down. There is no policy justification for voting for a man with the worst economic and foreign policy record in the country's history. There is no American justification for voting for him. Only the Un-American motivation of carving up a dying country into group fiefdoms privileging identity politics over the common good.

This is an Un-American campaign. It is an Anti-American campaign. It is a campaign by those who hate and fear what America was and who resent having to care about anyone outside their own group. Its group jingoism, its dog whistles and special privileges are repulsive and cynical, treating the people of a great nation like a warren of rats eager to sell each other out for a prize from the Cracker Jack box of identity politics entitlements."


In 1980, when President Reagan asked Americans, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago", it was still possible to campaign on a theme as simple as the job performance of the other guy. But now, 32 years later, the campaign hinges on a much more fundamental split among the voting population.

Romney appeals to voters who are dissatisfied with the last four years. Obama appeals to voters who are dissatisfied with America.

This basic gap was obscured in the 2008 campaign by the window trappings of inspiration. Among all the plastic pillars and stolen quotes from poets who stole them from sermons, it was harder to see that the underlying theme of the campaign was dissatisfaction with America. But in 2012, Obama can no longer run as a reformer or an optimist.

The coalition that he committed to last year is a coalition of those who are unhappy with America, not in the last four years, but in the last two-hundred years. Its core is composed of groups that fear democracy and distrust the will of the people. There is no optimism here, but a deeply rooted pessimism about human nature and the country as a whole. It is the Democratic Party's coalition against democracy.

After 2010, the numbers were crunched, and it was clear that Obama and the Democrats could not win a mainstream campaign. Instead, they targeted narrow groups, stirred up conflicts over issues aimed at that group, whether it was union pensions, racism or birth control. There was no more pretense of a national election, only a frenzied rush to polarize as many groups as possible and join them together into an acrimonious coalition, not so much for anything, as against Republicans.

There isn't any inspiration here. Just paranoia over everything from gay marriage to abortion to racial profiling to illegal immigration. A dozen illegal benefits being handed out with the explicit threat that they will be lost if Romney wins. A dozen mini-civil wars being stirred up to divide Americans and set them at each other's throats for the benefit of the Obama campaign.

From Occupy Wall Street to Wisconsin, from Trayvon Martin to Chick-fil-A, the goal of these manufactured conflicts has been to divide and conquer the electorate by emphasizing group rights over individual economic welfare.

Obama can't win on the economy. He can't win on foreign policy. He can't win on any aspect of his administration. All he can do is stir up violence and then promise to heal the country in his second term while winking to all the representatives of the grievance groups. It's not a new game, but the Democratic Party has never played it quite this baldly in a national election. And if it succeeds, then national politics will have finally been reduced to the level of a Chicago election.

We were expected to believe that the typical Obama voter in 2008 was hoping for a better country, but in 2012 there is no more hope, only hate and fear. The typical Obama voter is not acting as an American, but as a representative of an entitled group looking to secure and expand those entitlements at the expense and the detriment of the country at large.

To vote for Obama after years of grotesque economic mismanagement that has no precedent in history, that exceeds the worst actions of Andrew Jackson or Ulysses S. Grant, is not the instinct of an American, but a selfish greedy looter scrambling to grab a few dinner rolls off the tray while the ship is going down. There is no policy justification for voting for a man with the worst economic and foreign policy record in the country's history. There is no American justification for voting for him. Only the UnAmerican motivation of carving up a dying country into group fiefdoms privileging identity politics over the common good.

This is an UnAmerican campaign. It is an Anti-American campaign. It is a campaign by those who hate and fear what America was and who resent having to care about anyone outside their own group. Its group jingoism, its dog whistles and special privileges are repulsive and cynical, treating the people of a great nation like a warren of rats eager to sell each other out for a prize from the Cracker Jack box of identity politics entitlements.

There is not a single Obama voter anywhere in the land who believes that another four years of him will make this country better. Not a single one from coast to coast. No, what they believe is that he will make the country a worse place for those people that they hate. That he will have four more years to sink their ideas deeper in the earth, regardless of how many families go hungry and how many fathers kill themselves because they can no longer take care of their families. What they believe is that Obama will grant their group more special privileges and the rest of the country can go to hell.

In his DNC keynote address in 2004, Obama said, "There is no Black America or White America or Latino America or Asian America, there is just the United States of America." And now he has completely disavowed it. He isn't campaigning to lead the United States of America, instead he is running for the presidency of a dozen little Americas, Trayvon Martin America, Abortion America, Illegal Alien America, Sharia America, Gay Marriage America, Starbucks America and any others you can think of. And if he can collect enough of these little Americas together, then he may get the privilege of running the United States of America into the ground for another four years.

Obama has never been the President of the United States of America. He has been the president of Washington D.C., of Wall Street and of Solyndra. He has been the President of Green America and of Chicago. He has been the President of Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Gates, Penny Pritzker and James Crown. He is the President of George Clooney, Harvey Weinstein and Anne Hathaway. And now, facing disaster, he still isn't running to be President of a country, but of a dozen little countries with money from freshly bailed out Green America and Wall Street, not to mention Hollywood.

The Obama campaign is not accidentally divisive. It did not stumble into divisiveness. It is not even divisive as a byproduct of its real aims. Divisiveness is its aim. Divisiveness is the only way that a divisive administration can hold on to power. The anger and the violence are not an accident, they are the whole point. Set one group against another, feed the hate, massage the grievances and very soon there is no longer a nation but a handful of quarreling groups being roped into a mutual alliance to reelect their lord protector whose appeal is that of the outsider becoming the insider.

Bain is a metaphor whose details don't truly matter. The target audience for that swill doesn't really care where Romney was when a steel plant was shut down. It doesn't care that like so many private equity bigwigs, the man who actually was in charge is one of Obama's bundlers. This isn't about truth, it's about menace. The Bain message is that Romney is a man who takes things away. That is the  image that the UnAmerican alliance is meant to take away. The ominous sense that Obama's era of giving them things is about to come to a close and Romney's era of taking away things will begin.

It doesn't take much prompting for the UnAmericans to come to this conclusion. Thieves are always looking over their shoulders. They always expect to have their ill-gotten gains taken away from them. And that is Obama's true achievement. Like Tammany Hall, he has corrupted a massive section of the population and made it complicit in his criminality. What the old political machines did to cities or small groups of vested interests, the Zero has done to tens of millions, if not a hundred million people, who want him in power not because they think he's the best man for the job, but because he's their crook. The middle man for a crime ring that begins with him and ends with them.

The true insidious evil of the man is that he is the face of a machine of power and privilege that turns Americans into UnAmericans, that corrupts and degrades every ideal and principle, suborns every office and picks every pocket, while wrapping that thievery in the flag and every bit of history that it can filch. The Hussein Way is the clearest expression of the rot at the heart of the Democratic Party, the marriage of leftist agitation and powermongering with the old urban political machines for a level of abuse usually seen only in banana republics.

The abomination in Washington is a welfare-state technocracy that mixes crony capitalism with radical social policy. It steals from everyone and gives back to some. It plays the game of divide and conquer with the panache of marketing executives knowing that the worse the economy is, the more likely everyone is to look in everyone else's mouth. Its worst aspect is its insistence on cloaking its cynicism as righteousness, wrapping every ugly means in the glorious flag of the ends when the truth is that its means are its ends.

Divide and conquer isn't just a means to the greater end of giving Zero Hussein another four years. And perhaps another four years after that. It's also the end. Every tyrant from Joseph Stalin to Saddam Hussein knew that a divided people are easier to rule. The more you divide them, the less likely they are to give you any trouble when you're raiding their last pennies to pay for the latest Green gimmick that your billionaire backers have thrown up all over Wall Street.

Obama is the ultimate Post-American figure passing himself off as the embodiment of all that is truly American. But the UnAmericans got the real message in 2008 and in 2012 there is no other message. There is no more hope and faith, and the ones who have been waiting for are the UnAmericans who think that they are about to come into their own, when they are little more than pawns being used to rob and destroy a great nation.

This is the Post-American, Anti-American and UnAmerican campaign to divide up, carve up and toss aside the laws and traditions of the United States and replace them with the power of arrogance. It is the last stand of a beleaguered nation facing barbarians inside its gate. Every previous election was a contest between two American candidates who wanted to preside over the United States.

This is an election contest between the United States and an emerging Post-American order. That entity will be an American EU run by unelected bureaucrats, governed by politically correct technocrats and upheld by corrupt financial pirates disguising the collective bankruptcy with numbers games so elaborate that they make every billion-dollar con game and pyramid scheme that has come before seem as simple as child's play.

The entity is already here. Its czars are running things in D.C., and its judges are dismantling both constitutional government and democratic elections. It creates a crisis and then makes sure that it doesn't go to waste. It has excellent design skills and terrible planning skills. It has all the money in the world and none at all. It is the Post-American America, and 2012 is its big referendum. The one that will decide whether this Post-American America, this horrid graft of E.U. governance and Mussolini economics, Soviet propaganda and FDR volunteerism, Tammany populist criminality and U.N. foreign policy will be permitted to devour the United States of America.

Obama cannot win an American election. But he isn't running in an American election. He's running in a Post-American election.

Are polls skewed toward Democrats?

I saw this on Weekly standard.   We conservatives have always known that the polls are tilted to the left.  The pollsters tend to ask their own kind......leftist collectivist idealist, ete,ete.  It is a factor of human nature that one tends to associate with ones own kind...and the pollsters tend to bear this out.

This article is compliments of the Weekly Standard

A topic that inevitably receives a lot of focus during election season is the partisan spread of the major media polls. Conservatives regularly complain that the polls are tilted against their side, and thus favor the Democrats.

They have a point.

To be sure, we can conclude that without accusing any pollster of malfeasance. In this essay, Mark Blumenthal of the Huffington Post correctly notes that the problem gets down to using registered voter polls. These tend to oversample Democrats.  The argument in support of them is that, while a likely voter screen would draw a larger Republican sample, it would create more variability as pollsters would be guessing unduly at the final party turnout.

That is a fair point in some respects, although there is a cost associated with either choice. Using registered voter polls might cut down on variability, but they also create statistical bias. That is, the polls tend to oversample Democrats in a systematic fashion. And because partisan support is so strong – with 90 percent of Republicans supporting GOP candidates and 90 percent of Democrats supporting Democratic candidates – you regularly see the Democratic candidates’ margins overstated in polls of registered voters.

Let’s see if we can quantify this a little bit. To begin, we need to know the historical partisan tendencies of the electorate. For that, we can turn to the exit polls going back to 1972.

As we can see, the GOP position suffered enormously because of the Watergate scandal in 1974. Republican identification among voters plummeted 10 points, not to rebound fully until Ronald Reagan basically rebranded the party in 1984.

Ever since then, we have seen both parties pull a relatively constant range of support. This actually pushes back against Blumenthal’s point that there is an undue amount of guesswork in terms of modeling the electorate. In fact, for five elections in a row – from 1984 to 2004 – the GOP fell within a very narrow, 5-point band between 34 percent and 39 percent. Meanwhile, the Democratic band was even narrower, from 37 percent to 40 percent.

Of course, 2008 seems to have broken the pattern. But what was really happening that cycle? The conventional wisdom among proponents of the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis is that this was the general election when the demographic power of the Democratic party was finally realized. But in fact we see the Democratic party still falling in that narrow range of 37-40 percent. The real drop-off comes with the GOP, and the “independent” category was the greatest beneficiary. What I suspect happened is that many marginal Republicans stopped identifying themselves as such in 2008, and instead called themselves independents. This argument is supported by the fact that Barack Obama only won the independent vote in 2008 by 8 points, which compares quite negatively to the 18-point blowout among independents that Democrats scored in 2008. This suggests that a lot of true Republicans were “hiding” in that category four years ago.

Thus, I do not see a substantial shift in the partisan balance within the electorate in 2008, at least not on net. Certainly, Barack Obama attracted a much larger number of the non-white public to the polls (especially African Americans), and he also drew a larger share of this vote than prior Democrats. But these gains were countered by significant declines in Democratic support among whites. Obama lost the white vote by 12 points; while in 1996 (an equally good year for Democrats) Bill Clinton lost it by just 3 points.

I also do not see much reason to alter substantially our expectations in terms of partisan turnout – certainly not in a cycle where most polls suggest an enthusiasm gap that favors the Republican party. The quarter-century trend (1984 through 2008) has seen an average Democratic turnout edge of 3 points, 39 percent Democratic to 36 percent Republican. I’d expect something roughly similar this time around.

This gives us a basis to compare the recent polls of registered voters. How do they stack up to this historical trend of D+3?

    

The clear answer is: they skew Democratic. In fact, every recent registered voter poll with party spreads I could identify had a Democratic advantage that exceeded the quarter-century trend. And the average of all these polls together is 35 percent Democratic to 29.5 percent Republican, or D +5.5

Importantly, these polls show Obama with an average lead over Mitt Romney of 3.5 points. But if they have a 2.5-point Democratic oversample, then what we are really talking about is perhaps a 1-point Obama lead.

Incidentally, this puts these polls much more in line with the Rasmussen poll, which has consistently found a toss-up race. Right now, Rasmussen – a poll of likely voters – sees an R+1.4 advantage in party identification. That is entirely defensible, in my opinion, given the weakness in the economy.

    

A final point: Presidential job approval polls are usually reported among all adults, aged 18 or over. These tend to have an even larger skew toward the Democrats than registered voter polls. For instance, the CBS News / New York Times poll had a D+6 spread among registered voters, but a D+7 spread among all adults. This means that the job approval numbers are probably overstating Obama’s position by an even larger margin. So, the CBS News / New York Times poll had Obama’s net approval at -2, suggesting that among the electorate it’s perhaps around -6. I’d link this back to my consistent argument that presidents rarely win a share of the electorate larger than their job approval to justify my sustained bearishness on Obama’s reelection prospects. I suspect that the Rasmussen poll on job approval is closest to the electorate’s true feelings, and that regularly shows a net disapproval around -5 points, a very bad position for any incumbent.

Here’s my bottom line. It is very difficult to model the turnout for a presidential election this far away from November. There are a lot of tough choices that pollsters must make, and it is not fair to single any pollster out for the decisions it ultimately goes with. Nevertheless, we can and should still be smart consumers of political polling. We need to keep the historical spread between the two sides in mind, and be cautious of polls that show a relatively wide Democratic advantage over the GOP. They are probably underestimating the GOP's electoral strength. 

Jay Cost is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic, available now wherever books are sold

Voting Democrap isn't in the younger voters interest

 

Democrats' Policies Aren't In Young Voters' Interest

 Posted 03/20/2012 06:46 PM ET

Future: Mitt Romney said Monday that he fails to "see how a young American can vote" for a Democrat. He may have something there. Coming generations will be doomed by the progressive policies of today.
Outside of their desire to intern capitalism and replace it with a euro-style welfare statism, Democrats are not a forward-looking group.
Although they fancy themselves as "progressives," their ideas are truly regressive. The future? For the Democrats, it's all about the next election:
• To build and maintain their constituency, Democrats pile up debt that future generations will be liable for.
Consider the federal debt increase during the first three years of the Obama administration.
CBS News reported Monday that it "has now increased more during President Obama's three years and two months in office than it did during eight years of the George W. Bush presidency."
The debt has reached a staggering $15.57 trillion, which exceeds our gross domestic product. Who will pay this bill? Coming generations, of course.
• In seeking the votes of retirees and near retirees, Democrats refuse to fix Social Security.

This entitlement is headed toward financial crisis. In 1950, there were 16.5 workers paying into the system for each beneficiary receiving payments. In 2030, that ratio will have fallen to 2.1-to-1. That's an unsustainable situation, yet Democrats continue to block reforms that will benefit the workers of tomorrow.
• To keep the far-left socialist-Democrat/Occupy wing of the party happy, Democrats agitate for policies that promise economic "fairness" but will actually produce a sclerotic, slow-growth future.
Hammering the rich with punitive taxes is an article of faith among Democrats. Obama showed this perfectly when he admitted during the 2008 campaign that even if cutting the capital gains tax increased federal revenues, he would want the tax rate to be higher "for purposes of fairness."
Look at how Obama's economic policies and overheated rhetoric are choking the recovery.
Companies are holding on to more than $2 trillion in cash and are hesitant to use it to hire or invest because the Democrats have created a hostile investment environment, a regulatory morass and real fear of future tax hikes that will hurt business.
Republicans might not excite young Americans very much. But Democrats should alarm them

HHS thinks that if you live more than amile from a grocery store, you live in a food desert.

I could have soo much fun with this one...Lessee this is geared to the urban areas where large groups of democrat voters live...lets create a new entitlement for them to go with all the other entitlements that they get.  Also the dearth of grocery stores in these areas....well maybe the grocery stores got shoplifted and employee embezzled to death, got tired of bleeding money and pulled out.   So the only places that the poor, unfortunate democrat voter can get the fresh veggies along with the old English or malt liquor assorted adult beverages that they require is at the convenience stores where the Korean clerks watch them like hawks because of the proclivity of the urban democrat dweller to steal anything that isn't nailed down.    Am I not being sympathetic here....?

    

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a House hearing on March 6, 2012 that families having to walk a mile to a grocery store might not be able to get healthy foods. (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)

(CNSNews.com) – The administration’s definition of a “food desert” – an urban area where a significant share of the population lives more than one mile from a grocery store – came under the microscope during a Health and Human Services appropriations hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
Questioning HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, a Republican lawmaker said it was likely most of those present at the hearing lived a mile from their nearest grocery store.
“Do you think that definition should be revisited, because one of the things is, if you are in an urban area a mile away from a grocery store you’re in a food desert – which I would think in so many cases is ridiculous,” said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). “Have you thought of – have you looked at their definition?”
“Ah, we have sir,” Sebelius responded.
“And you think it’s a good one?” Kingston asked.
“Well, I think it’s very difficult for a family buying groceries – if they have to walk a mile with bags of groceries, it may be too far to get healthier food,” Sebelius said.
“You really think that?” Kingston asked.
“I do,” she replied.
Sebelius agreed to take another look at the definition after Kingston pointed out that the definition is silent on how people must travel the one mile to a grocery store – whether on foot, by car or by some other means of transportation.
“Because I suspect in this room most of us might live a mile away from a grocery store,” Kingston said.
“And you walk a mile to get to the grocery store?” asked Sebelius.
“Well, I don’t think the walking part is in the definition,” Kingston responded.
“Well, I’m just suggesting to you sir – “ Sebelius said.
“But it’s not in the definition so, you know, it would also be bad if, you know, you didn’t have a driver’s license, but that’s not in the definition so that’s not relevant,” Kingston said.
“We’d be happy to look at the definition,” Sebelius replied.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last May announced the effort to locate food deserts, which were defined as a “low-income census tract where either a substantial number or share of residents has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store.”
“Tracts qualify as ‘low access’ tracts if at least 500 persons or 33 percent of their population live more than a mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (for rural census tracts, the distance is more than 10 miles),” stated a press release announcing the campaign.
Vilsack said that the effort, and an associated online interactive “food desert locator” map, was in keeping with First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which aims to reduce childhood obesity by increasing access to food deemed healthy and increasing exercise.
“This new Food Desert Locator will help policy makers, community planners, researchers, and other professionals identify communities where public-private intervention can help make fresh, healthy, and affordable food more readily available to residents,” Vilsack said at the time.
Tuesday’s hearing of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education considered President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget request for $940.9 billion for HHS. The subcommittee is responsible for approving $69.6 billion of that funding.

E.U Agrees to a bailout of Greece to the tune of 172 billion EURO

I was reading this article, I have been harping on debt almost as soon as I started blogging.  The E.U thinks that they bailed out Greece, but they basically kicked the can down the road.  Greece will not implement the austerity measures, the politicians have promised soo much free stuff to the population, now the bill is coming due and the population are angry.  They still want all their "free stuff" that has been promised.  The same thing will come here in a few years when the democrat base want their free stuff and the spigot shuts off.
     Something that I noticed in this article is that the government will legislate to force the bondholders to eat the loss.  This disturbs me on several levels  The government will legislate you to lose your money to accept a political settlement?   What happened to the rule of contract law? What about the indenture terms?  The government by imperial fiat made a decree and removed the collective action clause.   What does this do for the bond market?  I guarantee private investors will dump bonds as soon as they are able.  People buy bonds for investments and as a way to save their money in a volatile market.  After this and the imperial edict, they will bail.

• Enlarge PhotoGreece's Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos arrives for a news conference at a ministry hall in Athens, February 21, 2012. REUTERS/Yiorgos Karahalis
• Enlarge PhotoA European Union flag is seen in front of the Parthenon temple in Athens February 21, 2012. REUTERS/John Kolesidis

By Annika Breidthardt and Jan Strupczewski

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Euro zone finance ministers agreed a 130-billion-euro ($172 billion) rescue for Greece on Tuesday to avert an imminent chaotic default after forcing Athens to commit to unpopular cuts and private bondholders to take bigger losses.
The complex deal wrought in overnight negotiations buys time to stabilize the 17-nation currency bloc and strengthen its financial firewalls, but it leaves deep doubts about Greece's ability to recover and avoid default in the longer term.
After 13 hours of talks, ministers finalized measures to cut Athens' debt to 120.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2020, a fraction above the target, securing a second rescue in less than two years in time for a major bond repayment due in March.
"We have reached a far-reaching agreement on Greece's new program and private sector involvement that would lead to a significant debt reduction for Greece ... to secure Greece's future in the euro area," Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs the Eurogroup of finance ministers, told a news conference.
Greece will be placed under permanent surveillance by an increased European presence on the ground, and it will have to deposit funds to service its debt in a special account to guarantee repayments.
The 5 a.m. deal (0400 GMT) was hailed as a step forward for Greece, but experts warned that Athens will need more help to bring its debts down to the level envisaged in the bailout and will remain worryingly "accident prone" in coming years.
By agreeing that the European Central Bank would distribute its profits from bond-buying and private bondholders would take more losses, the ministers reduced Greece's debt to a point that should secure funding from the International Monetary Fund.
Italian and Spanish bond yields fell amid relief among investors that a threat to the wider euro zone had been avoided, although expectations of an agreement had been largely priced into foreign exchange and stock markets.
"It's an important result that removes immediate risks of contagion," Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti told a news conference.
"A nightmare scenario was avoided," said Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos in Athens. "It is maybe the most important (deal) in Greece's post-war history."
While the deal provides time for the euro zone to put new crisis measures in place over the coming months, it means Greece will struggle for years without economic growth.
The austerity measures imposed on Athens are widely disliked among the population and will put pressure on politicians who must contest an election expected in April.
Further street unrest could test politicians' commitment to cuts in wages, pensions and jobs. Greece's two biggest labor unions called a protest in Athens on Wednesday.
An opinion poll taken just before the Brussels deal showed that support for the two mainstream parties backing the rescue had fallen to an all-time low while leftist, anti-bailout parties showed gains.
Anastasis Chrisopoulos, a 31-year-old Athens taxi driver, saw no reason to cheer the deal.
"So what?" he asked. "Things will only get worse. We have reached a point where we're trying to figure out how to survive just the next day, let alone the next 10 days, the next month, the next year."
Conservative leader Antonis Samaras, a strong contender to become next prime minister, said the rescue package's debt-reduction targets could only be met with economic growth.
"Without the rebound and growth of the economy ... not even the immediate fiscal targets can be met, nor can the debt become sustainable in the long-term," he said during a visit to Cyprus.
Parliaments in three countries that have been most critical of bailouts - Germany, the Netherlands and Finland - must now approve the package. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who caused an outcry by suggesting that Greece was a "bottomless pit," said he was confident it would be passed.
STUCK IN TRAGEDY
Many economists question whether Greece can pay off even a reduced debt burden, suggesting the deal may only delay a deeper default by a few months.

"I don't think we should consider that they are cleared of any problems, but I do think we've reduced the Greek problem to just a Greek problem. It is no longer a threat to the recovery in all of Europe, and it is another step forward."
Jennifer McKeown, senior European economist at Capital Economics, said: "The austerity measures it will have to implement and increased monitoring by the troika amidst public outrage will make things harder and drive it deeper into recession. There is a risk of a euro zone exit later this year."
A return to economic growth in Greece could take as much as a decade, a prospect that brought thousands onto the streets of Athens to protest on Sunday. The cuts will deepen a recession already in its fifth year, hurting government revenues.
"We sowed the wind, now we reap the whirlwind," said Vassilis Korkidis, head of the Greek Commerce Confederation. "The new bailout is selling us time and hope at a very high price, while it doggedly continues to impose harsh austerity measures that keep us in a long and deep recession."
EXTRA RELIEF
A report prepared by experts from the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund said Greece would need extra relief to cut its debts near to the official debt target given the worsening state of its economy.
If Athens did not follow through on economic reforms and savings to make its economy more competitive, its debt could hit 160 percent by 2020, said the report.
"Given the risks, the Greek program may thus remain accident-prone, with questions about sustainability hanging over it," the nine-page confidential report said.
The beefed-up monitoring of implementation of the reforms could bolster accusations among some Greeks of interference in domestic affairs but some critics say that is essential.
Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager, one of Athens' most strident critics, told Dutch news agency ANP he had bargained hard for the permanent monitoring mission.
"This program is not something to cheer about," he said.
BOND SWAP
The accord will enable Athens to launch a bond swap with private investors to help put it on a more stable financial footing and keep it inside the euro zone.
About 100 billion euros of debt will be written off as banks and insurers swap bonds they hold for longer-dated securities that pay a lower coupon.
Private sector holders of Greek debt will take losses of 53.5 percent on the nominal value of their bonds. They had agreed to a 50 percent nominal writedown, which equated to around a 70 percent loss on the net present value of the debt.
Juncker said he expected a high participation rate in the deal, a view echoed by the German banking association.
Greece said it would legislate to allow it to enforce losses on bondholders who do not take part voluntarily.
Euro zone central banks will also play their part.
A Eurogroup statement said the ECB would pass up profits it made from buying Greek bonds over the past two years to national central banks for their governments to pass on to Athens "to further improve the sustainability of Greece's public debt."
The ECB has spent about 38 billion euros on Greek government debt with a face value of about 50 billion euros.
The private creditor bond exchange is expected to launch on March 8 and complete three days later, Athens said on Saturday. That means a 14.5-billion-euro bond repayment due on March 20 would be restructured, allowing Greece to avoid default.
The vast majority of the funds in the program will be used to finance the bond swap and ensure Greece's banking system remains stable; some 30 billion euros will go to "sweeteners" to get the private sector to sign up to the swap, 23 billion will go to recapitalize Greek banks.
A further 35 billion or so will allow Greece to finance the buying back of the bonds. Next to nothing will go directly to help the Greek economy.
(Additional reporting by Luke Baker, Julien Toyer, Robin Emmott in Brussels, Daniel Flynn in Paris, Terri Kinnunen in Helsinki, Sarah Marsh in Berlin, Harry Papachristou and George Georgiopoulos in Athens, and Michele Kambas in Nicosia; Writing by Giles Elgood; Editing by Pau

Embrace the season, sing a song...

I think the best way to get through the season, is to embrace the spirit through a song or a carol.


Try this one:
Hey comrade,
I’ve been thinkin’
I passed a park
And it was stinkin’
I then passed it at night
It gave me a fright
Camping in a Marxist Wonderland
Gone away, is our housing
Barney Frank needs de-lousing
He cooked Fannie Mae
Then gave it away
Welcome to a Marxist Wonderland
In the White House there exists a showman
The press pretends that he is just benign
Debtors ask will you pay us fairly
And we say “no, man”
The Workers Party took their place in line
In Oakland
And Zucotti
They found
Another body
It’s the means and the ends
What’s a rape among friends?
Camping in a Marxist Wonderland
In the Senate, there’s a mouthpiece clown
In the House his counterpart’s a witch
The steal, they cheat, they shred the Constitution
Tearing down the system and blaming all the “rich”
When it crashes
Ain’t it thrilling
Cause we’ve stopped all the drilling
Brazil gets our pay
In the old Soros way
Camping in a Marxist Wonderland
Steal their wealth if you wanna
Send it off to Botswana
The free market chokes
On a new climate hoax
Camping in a Marxist Wonderland
Occupy ….Oklahoma
Drugged out and in a coma
We sleep in a tent
It saves us on rent
Camping in a Marxist Wonderland.
Camping in a Marxist Wonderlaaaaaaaand

Darwin Awards for 2011 and Obungler supporters

Yes, it's that magical time of year again when the Darwin Awards are bestowed, honoring the least evolved among us.
Here is the glorious winner:

1. When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California, would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.
And now, the honorable mentions:

2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and after a little shopping around submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company, expecting negligence, sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef's claim was approved.

3. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. Understandably he shot her.

4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn't discovered for 3 days.

5. An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.

6. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer - $15. [If someone points a gun at you and gives you money is a crime committed?]

7. Seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that he'd just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head knocking him unconscious. The liquor store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on videotape.

8. As a female shopper exited a New York convenience store a man grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk immediately called 911 and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher. Within minutes the police apprehended the snatcher. They put him in the car and drove back to the store. The thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he replied, "Yes, officer, that's her. That's the lady I stole the purse from."

9. The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan at 5 A.M., flashed a gun, and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn't open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren't available for breakfast. The frustrated man walked away. [A 5-STAR STUPIDITY AWARD WINNER]

10. When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked on a Seattle street by sucking on a hose, he got much more than he bargained for. Police arrived at the scene to find a very sick man curled up next to a motor home near spilled sewage. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline but he plugged his siphon hose into the motor home's sewage tank by mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges saying that it was the best laugh he'd ever had.

In the interest of bettering mankind, please share these with friends and family unless of course one of these individuals by chance is a distant relative or long lost friend. In that case, be glad they are distant and hope they remain lost.