Early Reaction To VP Debate

Courtesy of Matt Drudge's drudgereport.com, we learn that a CNN poll finds 48% thought Ryan won, 44% believed Biden won. I suppose that means 8% called it a tie or had no opinion.

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace called Biden's behavior "disrespectful" and "contemptuous," as reported by Business Insider. CNN's Gloria Borger called Biden's behavior "condescending" and spoke of his excessive chuckling and eye-rolling, as reported on RealClearPolitics.

Fox News senior analyst Brit Hume characterized Biden's behavior in the following way, as reported by RealClearPolitics:

I thought it was rude and I have a feeling it will come across to a lot of people as rude. It looked like a cranky old man to some extent debating a polite young man.

Quote of the Day

Jay Cost, political analyst for The Weekly Standard, writing about political polling methodologies and our understanding thereof:

We absolutely, positively must remember polling in 2012 is politicized as never before, and it is incumbent upon the consumers of political polls not to accept the data naïvely, but to perform due diligence to see what goes into the product.

Amen, brother.

A Question

The conventional wisdom is that the mainstream media (MSM) want Obama to win; I've no argument with that notion. On the other hand, they want the race to be seen as close so you will read what they write, listen to what they say. Here's why.

Let's suppose they were reporting that one candidate was far ahead of the other, what would people on both sides do? Those favoring that candidate would take the upcoming win for granted and not watch/read, while those favoring the other candidate would be turned off by the foredoomed process and neither watch nor read. The result: little interest in the MSM.

What generates viewers and readers is a close race, one where either candidate has some reasonable chance of winning. And that is exactly what is being predicted by most media, mainstream and otherwise.

My question is this: How much of the presidential race's closeness is real and how much is driven by the media's interest in stimulating readership/viewership? We'll know in early November.

Failure to Execute

Marc Thiessen, writing opinion for the Washington Post, condemns the Obama administration's lame response to the attack on our consulate in Benghazi and the murder there of our ambassador to Libya. The only thing he omits is that the president and his people have been too busy campaigning to attend to the duties of the office.

Thiessen's article is worth your time. Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.

Turkey vs. Russia

Turkey shares a border with Russia. Many of the peoples of the former Soviet Union (aka the Empire of the Russ) were ethnic Turks, spoke a Turkic language, even if they lived in one of the Stans.

Turkey sees itself as the "home" of all the Turkic peoples in the same way Spain sees itself as the "home" of all Spanish-speaking peoples. Furthermore, Turkey. and its predecessor the Ottoman Empire, are historic enemies of Russia, going back centuries.

Know all of the foregoing as prologue to understanding a seemingly innocuous Reuters article which reports a Syrian plane forced to land in Turkey was carrying Russian arms destined for Syrian armed forces. Truly, nothing is "innocuous" in the relationship between Turkey and Russia, or Russia's ally, Syria.

The Dog That Didn't Bark

On California streets you could almost forget there is a presidential election in less than a month. I saw a car window sticker for "MITT" today and was amazed. I see almost no Obama/Biden materials either. This in a liberal college town, of all places.

There are great advantages of not living in so-called "battleground states." The whole presidential level paraphernalia saying "vote for me" is missing, but not missed.

Everybody takes Wyoming for granted; it will vote Republican. Likewise everybody takes California for granted; it will vote Democratic.

Hence, the only yard signs and billboards are for local candidates: state legislature, city council, county supervisor, and maybe for sheriff. Such folk mostly can't afford TV ads, so we don't see many - how nice.

A Permanent Underclass?

On September 30 of this year I wrote of those not working and no longer seeking work, thus no longer officially considered "unemployed" by the government:

What if many of these people have found a way to survive without working and like not working? Maybe they aren't discouraged but are instead in one way or another "retired." Perhaps they now draw disability payments or early retirement benefits.

Today, The Weekly Standard documents people becoming wards of the government in really large numbers. Over the last four years the number of employed persons has declined modestly, while the number on disability enrollment has increased 17.6%, the number on Medicaid has increased 19.3%, and the number drawing Food Stamps is up 65.2%.

Most frightening of all is this line from the Senate report being quoted:

Overall, there are nearly 80 means-tested federal welfare programs and, according to the Census Bureau, nearly 110 million people in the United States receive benefits from at least one of them. (This figure includes exclusively means-tested welfare programs, not entitlements like Medicare Or Social Security). 

In other words, roughly one American in three gets a poverty-based government handout. It isn't 47% but it is nevertheless a lot. How many of the 110 million will voluntarily go back to work if the government benefits continue?

Separatism in Europe

The Flemish and Walloons in Belgium don't like each other, and the Catalans want out of Spain as do the Basques. Northern Italy is tired of "carrying" southern Italy and Sicily, and the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland are at arms' length.

The Scots want out of the United Kingdom, can the Welch be far behind? The various ethnic groups within Estonia, Latvia, Moldova and the Ukraine don't love each other. And of course the Armenians and Azeris have issues.

In addition to all of the above, there are forces trying to pull apart the European Union. See this Der Spiegel article for details on several of these conflicts. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link.

A Hopeful Sign

Breitbart's Big Government reports survey results from The American Community Survey showing that median family income is down in every battleground state except Iowa and Wisconsin. When family income is down, people feel it.

Quote of the Day

Dennis Byrne, writing in the Chicago Tribune about President Obama's poor debate performance:

Obama's fatal flaw is not just his policies (as bad as they are), but the fact that he isn't and never was cut out to be president. He's not up to it.

COTTonLINE has been saying this for four years.

Less Than a Month

It may turn out that Obama's October surprise was doing a particularly poor job on the first debate - surprising his own party as well as the Republicans.

Win, lose (or draw?) the presidential race will be over in less than a month. Over, that is, unless we have a "Florida hanging chad" experience again - unlikely.

We will have reconfigured the U.S. Senate too, for better or worse. The likelihood is that we''ll have a narrow GOP majority, nothing like enough to override the 60 vote/filibuster barrier. Seeing less of Harry Reid would be pleasant.

Numbers in the House of Representatives will change too, but no serious analyst suggests the Republican majority will go away. Nancy Pelosi is much more bearable as House Minority Leader, where "bearable" = "largely invisible."

The next great political milestone will be whether or not we fall off the fiscal cliff on January 1. Odds are against it, but gridlock is hard to break.

Romney's Muscular Foreign Policy

Mitt Romney gave a speech at Virginia Military Institute in which he laid out his foreign policy. It sounds very much like what Ronald Reagan would say.

Business Insider prints the entire text. My only criticism is that the speech is too long.

Good News for the Right

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press has released a post-debate poll which shows Romney ahead of Obama 49% to 45%. Pew has no history of leaning right, so these figures are particularly painful to the left.

The debate moved the opinion metrics. Since a month ago Romney's numbers are six percentage points better, Obama's six points worse.

Weird Stem Cell Science

Scientists from Britain and Japan have won a Nobel Prize for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells. Such cells may provide the material to generate cures for nerve disorders, including Parkinson's. See this Reuters article on the Yahoo News site for details. 

Maybe we can grow George Weasley a new ear? Maybe we could grow younger versions of ourselves, sans brain, to have spare parts available throughout our lives? 

Wonderful, fanciful possibilities flow from this discovery. I imagine science fiction authors will find fodder for new stories in this development. 

Bad News in Venezuela

Hugo Chavez has won reelection in Venezuela, according to this Reuters article. That is bad news for oil-rich Venezuela, for other nations in the region, and for the U.S.

Like Juan Peron in Argentina some decades ago, Chavez is very popular among his nation's poor. Even more than our President, Hugo Chavez believes in the redistribution of national wealth.

Despair of a Liberal Arts Major

Virginia Heffernan writes digital culture for Yahoo News. Here she complains about the declining value of her (or somebody's) college education. What she writes makes a certain sense, and yet.....

I've a nephew who did what she more-or-less recommends, dropped out of college to go work in computers. The DrsC tried hard to convince him to finish, all in vain. 

In vain, that is, until the economy crashed and he lost his high-paying job. Then he found that in a tough economy people with his skills and a degree were getting the IT interviews and jobs, he wasn't. Then he finished his degree.

It turns out that requiring particular colleges, degrees and majors is a quick-and-dirty way for HR units to winnow an overwhelming stack of applicants into a manageable number to screen for hiring. Count on them  to hire these supposedly "more qualified" applicants in less-than-boom times. Which is why your children should finish their degrees.

Travel Blogging

If you've noticed that the COTTonLINE blog has been unusually quiet during this politically active week, it is because the DrsC are engaged in their biannual migration. In autumn it's from Wyoming, which was beginning to get cold, to California, where until recently high temperatures have been in the 90s.

The other DrC says she notices traffic is lighter than most years, which she attributes to the higher fuel prices. As is often the case, she is probably correct. The long-haul truckers are still out there, but the passenger vehicles are somewhat less prevalent.

Interstate 80 is sort of the backbone of the continental U.S., running from San Francisco via Chicago to New York, truckers call it "the superslab." We've driven many hundreds of miles on it.

Driving west along I-80 in northern Nevada we saw a big steam locomotive (No. 844) pulling a Union Pacific passenger train, somewhere between Lovelock and Fernley. The Union Pacific is known to keep a couple of the last steamers at their yards in Cheyenne, engines that they use for promotional tours to keep the enthusiasts happy.

A web search reveals this trip was Sacramento to Cheyenne and onward to Kansas City and down to Texas. A railroad buff's dream, this trip.

Old 844 ain't purty but she's got presence. We stood alongside her when she had steam up, at a stop she made in Oroville a couple of years ago. The heat radiating off her, the smells of lube, oil and steam, the simple overwhelming size of the thing is almost frightening.

Job Creation Sluggish

Read a description of how the unemployment numbers and job creation numbers are created. Turns out the latter is the key number, and we're not creating jobs nearly fast enough to get out of the hole we're in. See the Market Watch article for details.

Greenfield on the Debate Debacle

Writing for Yahoo News, long-time political analyst Jeff Greenfield takes a look at the first presidential debate of 2012 and really unloads on Obama. Greenfield is, if anything, more on the left than the right so you can take his criticisms of The Won to the bank. Greenfield says:

If this debate—as one-sided as any I have ever seen—does not change the landscape, if Obama retains a small but measurable lead, it means that the election is more or less over.

Who Do You Trust?

Today's news brings two articles with different results. Gallup reports their polls show 47% approve of the job President Obama is doing, while 46% disapprove. Apparently 7% have no opinion. Presidents normally are not reelected with less than 50% approval.

On the other hand, Yahoo News has this article by a respected forecaster who predicts an clear Obama win, and tells you why he makes this prediction. Of course he is predicting votes in the electoral college whereas Gallup is measuring current public opinion. As we know, these two do not track perfectly.

Who is ahead? Nobody knows for sure.