Author: Mark Noonan

Poll: GOP Holds 7 Point Lead in “Generic” Ballot

Mark Noonan15 Comments

From Rasmussen:

…A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 44% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate, while 37% would choose the Democrat instead. The GOP’s lead is up five points from a week ago, the first full week survey since Congress and the president agreed on a spending cuts deal to raise the federal debt ceiling. Last week’s two-point gap was the narrowest lead Republicans had held since mid-May.

Republicans have led on the Generic Congressional Ballot every week since June 2009, leading by as much as 12 points and as little as two…

Liberals were happy with a Gallup poll of adults last week showing a 7 point Democrat lead…but a poll of likely voters is always better, and from what I can tell the Gallup sample was heavily over-weighted for Democrats.  Got to keep one thing in mind as we approach the House contest in 2012:  if the Democrats win, it means Nancy Pelosi is back in the Speaker’s chair…this will always motivate GOPers and GOP-leaners and discourage Democrats and Democrat-leaners.  And this is over and above the advantage the GOP will gain out of re-districting…people just don’t like Nancy Pelosi and other than corrupt hacks and fools, no one wants her holding the gavel, again.

Additionally, this poll continues to show something astounding – a long-term GOP lead in voter support on the Congressional level.  In all my life, I’ve never seen anything like it.  I put it entirely down to just how much TEA Party is injected in to the GOP…the more TEA, the more support.  The only thing which could really ensure a GOP Congressional loss next year is if we ditched the TEA Party.  Always remember that the Democrats want the GOP to break with the TEA Party because the Democrat leaders know that the TEA Party is where the GOP strength is.  Pelosi and Reid want more Specter, less Rubio…and which do you think will propel the GOP to victory?

That all said, don’t get cocky, GOPers…we’ve a long, hard fight in front of us and we have to be fully prepared if the Democrats choose to lie, cheat and steal their way to victory.  Ready to counter it, ready to overcome the pain and anger we’ll feel when they dump the refuse on us.  Get ready for the political fight of your life – something you’ll tell your grand children about.

Financial Crash, The Sequel

Mark Noonan5 Comments

From Gonzalo Lira over at Zero Hedge:

…Now, I used to write for the movies—I can tell you the secret to writing a good sequel: Use the exact same elements, the exact same story structure—hell, even use the exact same lines!—but make sure the sequel is bigger: Bigger sets, bigger explosions, bigger stars, bigger everything—a bigger bang for the buck.

2011’s The Sequel is certainly going to deliver that bigger bang—because it’s a lot bigger than 2008: The total sovereign debt of the PIIGS is about €3.1 trillion. That’s 20% of the eurozone’s GDP—just the PIIGS, just those five, forget about France, Belgium and the UK, which if added up easily doubles that €3.1 trillion figure.

Compare that to 2008, when the total toxic assets the Federal Reserve wound up having to buy amounted to about $1.5 trillion—about 11.5% of the U.S.’s 2008 GDP.

In other words, the current situation is over twice what 2008 was—and might wind up being four times the 2008 price tag. And that’s just the nominal value of the toxic debt at the core of the current situation. We have no idea what the total value of the indirect exposure via derivatives is going to add up to.

So! We’ve seen that we’re structurally at the same place we were in 2008: Unpayable debts held by a fragile financial sector, with massive indirect exposure by way of derivatives that no one has bothered to tally up and regulate.

We have furthermore seen that—like all good sequels—2011 is going to have a bigger bang: We currently have more debts on deck than in 2008, at least twice as much, as a matter of fact…

Do read the whole  thing – Lira is figuring September/October for the big meltdown, perhaps triggered by a major bank failure in the Eurozone.  Doesn’t matter what the trigger is of course…the fact is that the crash is already all set to go, it just takes an unmistakable exposure of just how bad it all is for the next financial crash to bury the world under a mountain of bankruptcies.  As I keep saying, there is too much debt in the world to be paid back…its not a matter of if we’ll crash, but of when.

 

Liberalism’s Pervasive Racism

Mark Noonan76 Comments

They just can’t stop gnawing that bone – from the Washington Post:

With House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) announcement Thursday of her three appointees to the bipartisan debt “supercommittee,” the panel’s 12-member roster is complete. It represents a broad range of ideological views, from House Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) on the right to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on the left.

But the group’s membership is marked by a problem that has plagued Congress — a lack of gender and racial diversity…

This just gets so tiresome – it doesn’t matter what a person’s sex or skin color is – all that matters is what they believe and what they do.  I wouldn’t care if the entire panel was made up of differently-abled trans-gendered persons of color…as long as they were patriots who had America’s best interests at heart.  The problem is not a lack of sex and skin color differences, but the fact that the liberal members of the panel – black, while, male and female – are rigid, left wing ideologues who only care about getting Obama and the rest of the Democrats re-elected.

This liberal racism just goes too far these days…everything is based upon skin color or sexual identity.  No one is allowed to broaden their mind and look at things from a different point of view.  We’re to have the “black view” or the “woman view” or the whatever view…no way that I, as a white man, can look with sympathy upon a black man, no way that he can do the same for me.

Utter rot – complete racist nonsense.  Way past time to end this sort of garbage.  America no longer has any place for people to play racial politics…and that is another thing we’re going to have to fight to end through the 2012 campaign.

Out and About on a Monday Morning

Mark Noonan33 Comments

War in Libya Update:  It is still going on, you know?  Oh, you forgot?  Good:  that is just what Obama wanted you to do.

Associate Press report:  China’s policy of slaughtering unborn children is good!  No, really, since a lot of kids are being killed, those who manage to survive have more money spent on them!  So, let’s go kill even more and make the world a better place…

Bachmann would re-instate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Gloom and Doom Update:  Eurozone is doomed.  No, not just Greece, but also Italy…and then France.  It’s not just me, boys and girls – lots of people are seeing the end of the current global financial system.

Hitchens on the London riots putting blame squarely where it belongs – on our Ruling Class which has made a hash of everything.

Rasmussen:  people still think Obama sucks.

Harry Reid:  the TEA Party will fade away.  Yep sure will…as soon as Harry and the rest of liberalism is on the ash heap of history.

DNC Chief: Obama Doing Just Swell

Mark Noonan7 Comments

From The Hill:

President Obama’s reelection effort is in “remarkably good shape,” the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) asserted on Sunday.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), the DNC chief, said that she doesn’t think the president’s bid for a second term is in trouble…

Uh, yeah – whatever:

HAT TIP:  Gateway Pundit

More Guns, Less Crime

Mark Noonan12 Comments

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Virginia’s bars and restaurants did not turn into shooting galleries as some had feared during the first year of a new state law that allows patrons with permits to carry concealed guns into alcohol-serving businesses, a Richmond Times-Dispatch analysis found.

The number of major crimes involving firearms at bars and restaurants statewide declined 5.2 percent from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011, compared with the fiscal year before the law went into effect, according to crime data compiled by Virginia State Police at the newspaper’s request.

And overall, the crimes that occurred during the law’s first year were relatively minor, and few of the incidents appeared to involve gun owners with concealed-carry permits, the analysis found…

An armed population is a free and safe population – also, a more well-mannered population.  This is just natural.  If we’re armed, we can’t just be oppressed at will.  If we’re armed, criminals think twice about committing crimes.  If we’re armed, everyone minds their manners because they’d rather not accidentally insult someone who is carrying a gun.  Neatly stated by John Wayne in The Shootist:

I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I expect the same from them.

In the end there are only two types of people who don’t want an armed population – people who just don’t understand freedom and tyrants.

39%

Mark Noonan9 Comments

That is Obama’s approval rating – from the LA Times:

President Obama’s summer woes have dragged his approval rating to an all-time low, sinking below 40% for the first time in Gallup’s daily tracking poll.

New data posted Sunday shows that 39% of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance, while 54% disapprove. Both are the worst numbers of his presidency…

Not the sign of a man who is cruising to re-election.  But, also, don’t get cocky, GOPers.  Obama will have a billion dollars to spend and he’ll spend every dime of is slandering the GOP candidates.  No lie will remain untold, no gutter unexplored, in Obama’s quest for a second term.  So, be happy that people are fully awake to how bad Obama is, but don’t let down your guard for a second.

Morality on the Cheap

Mark Noonan31 Comments

Ad Week has the details on MTV’s new campaign to get people to care:

Every day, our global community faces an endless list of serious issues, from famine to poverty to global warming. Now, evidently as part of an MTV campaign, Twilight star Nikki Reed is asking people everywhere to “give a ****”—both figuratively and, ahem, literally.

“I may be famous, but I actually give a ****,” the actress says in the sort-of-mock PSA below. The Give a ****movement, she says, is based on the Dalai Lama’s theory (heavily paraphrased) that “If enough people take the time to simply give a ****about the world’s problems, even if they don’t actually do anything but just give a ****about them, the world’s problems will cease to exist.”…

You know, it could be that merely saying we care is not as important as acting as if we care.  I know that being generous is difficult – it eats up time, money and resources which one can spend on the self.  I, myself, am not nearly as generous as I can be…C. S. Lewis put it best when he judged that if charity doesn’t pinch a bit, then it isn’t enough.  In other words, unless you are giving up something for yourself, then you’ve really given little (see Mark 12:41-44).  While it is at least somewhat of an advance to actually take thought for the sufferings of the world, if there is no follow-through to action, the thoughts tend to moral sterility.

My worry here is that we are falling ever further in to a morality on the cheap.  Sort of like the self-esteem nonsense in public schools where kids are taught to feel great about themselves even if they don’t accomplish anything.  The world is filled with suffering…and no amount of thinking about it and wishing others well will do the trick.  We actually have to get our hands dirty and help the less fortunate.  I am concerned with the lack of challenge here – the stroking of the modern ego where everyone wants to feel that they are swell, even though all of us are sinners – not one of us having the right to feel we’ve ever done enough, loved enough or helped enough.

A better program might have been to show someone getting off the couch, setting aside the video game and going out to find someone who needs help.  They are all around us…right now, probably not a thousand yards from where you sit reading this, there is someone who needs help.  But to ask you to do that requires more than just some sort of nebulous, half-morality…it requires an appeal to conscience; an appeal to the fact that we are all of us creatures; contingent beings who owe every last thing we have to Another, and thus have a moral obligation to do what is right, not just think about what is wrong and feel good about ourselves for so doing.

Santorum Claims Iowa Momentum

Mark Noonan8 Comments

From the Santorum Campaign:

Former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) far exceeded expectations in Ames and finished 4th in the Ames Straw Poll.

Today’s results were simply vindication for Senator Santorum’s belief that a clear, consistent and proven conservative record resonates with Americans. Outspent in Iowa by more than six to one in comparison to his nearest competitors, Senator Santorum showed that leadership trumps showmanship and that the American people deserve more than just television commercials, news conferences and empty promises…

Santorum has a point – he certainly wasn’t expected to do well in Iowa…a northeastern politician who was little known in Iowa managed to come in fourth (he certainly did better than Romney…another northeasterner who was beaten by Perry, who only announced on Saturday).

We’ll see if Santorum can build on this – he’d probably have to come in third, at least, in the Iowa caucuses to be taken seriously…and then he’d have to come in second in New Hampshire.  That is a high bar – he’ll have to outdo Paul’s legion of dedicated supporters while taking voters away from Pawlenty.  In New Hampshire, Romney is almost certain to win (and if he doesn’t, then he’s done), so the contest is for second place…if Santorum can do that, then he’s off to the races.  Not the nominee, by a long shot, but it would vault him in to the top tier of candidates.

It is still anyone race to win – Romney, Perry and Bachmann are the heavyweights; Santorum is one of the second tier candidates, all of which have their chances to break in to the top.  We have a very strong field of candidates, only two of which give me grave concerns should they be the nominee – Huntsman (was Obama’s ambassador, after all) and Paul (love him on economics, consider him completely wrong on foreign and defense policy).  Any one of them will get my vote and enthusiastic support against Obama because the safety of the United States requires that Obama leave office on January 20th, 2013.

UPDATE:  MN GOP wants Pawlenty to run for Senate.  That is an exceptionally good idea.  Doesn’t guarantee us a Senate seat from Minnesota, but ensures that the Democrats will have to fight tooth and nail to keep Klobuchar’s seat…and, of course, Pawlenty has already shown he can win State-wide in Minnesota.