Archive for the ‘internet/free speech’ Category

Polls aren’t elections: Ann Marie Buerkle vs McClatchy Newspapers

Posted: November 24, 2010 by datechguy in congress, internet/free speech, opinion/news, politics
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My first meeting with Ann Marie Burekle was the day that Syracuse Post-Standard declared that she was down double digits. The poll itself was suspect but as my friend Robert Stacy McCain often says Polls aren’t elections. (this is what I constantly remind those who say Palin can’t win due to a poll that the election isn’t held today) That day Ann Marie said this:

(UPDATE video added)

Now forgetting that the poll was…shall we say interesting all that poll proved in the end was one (or both) of two things.

The Syracuse Post-Standard had an agenda

Ann Marie Buerkle worked incredibly hard and managed to turn it around in two weeks

I thought of that last night when I saw this story that leftist blogs have been jumping on:

New poll undercuts GOP claims of a midterm mandate

By Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers

A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

I don’t know Steven Thomma, he may be a good writer and a nice guy and kind to animals but I know this much. He is trying to BS me and the left blogs are doing the same.

We just had an election where Republicans running against Obamacare won more seats than anyone has seen in over 50 years and you are trying to tell me there is no mandate because of your poll? As I left in comments:

Yeah all those 63 or 64 congressional seats mean nothing next to a POLL

how stupid do you think we are?

Apparently they think we are pretty stupid. Lucky for people who are not suckers we have Robert Stacy McCain at the American Spectator who isn’t buying it. His piece is called The Republican Mandate:

Those people did make a difference, and in the process made laughingstocks of pundits who said they couldn’t do it, chief among them E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post.

“It will be very hard for Republicans to take the House if they don’t break the Democrats’ power in the Northeast — and they still have to prove they can do that,” Dionne wrote five weeks before Election Day, in a column that featured this quote from Dan Maffei: “When we do retain the majority… people are going to look at the map and see that the Northeast held.” Dionne predicted: “Absent a Republican wave of historic proportions, [Maffei’s] seat now seems out of the GOP’s reach.”

Unfortunately for Maffei and Dionne, that “Republican wave of historic proportions” came crashing ashore Nov. 2 with enough power to flip six seats in New York into the GOP column. In addition to Buerkle’s hard-fought win in the 25th District, Republicans also captured previously Democrat-held seats in the 13th, 19th, 20th, 24th and 29th districts. New York’s six GOP pickups was the most of any state. Republicans gained five seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania, while adding four seats in both Florida and Illinois. If such widespread victories are not a mandate for House Republicans to oppose the Democrats’ liberal agenda, whatever could be?

How did two guys in fedoras know to visit Ny-25 in October when EJ Dionne who unlike me doesn’t have to go door to door to business to pay for his radio show? We went there any saw for ourselves!

If you choose to believe Steven Thomma and McClatchy that is your prerogative. Just don’t expect us to believe or trust your opinion

And yes this will be a topic on Saturday.

Update: Put the actual video in

Stop Shouting writes the post of the decade

Posted: November 22, 2010 by datechguy in blogs, internet/free speech, media, opinion/news
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The blog stop shouting has only 4 posts in it over the last 3 years, but this one should be repeated everywhere.

You MUST go to her site and read this but I’m going to grab just a few pieces to share its awesomeness:

I have been silent long enough. I have bent, I have yielded, I have endured slander, dishonesty, ad hominem attacks and actual physical threats.

Anger is a powerful motivator.

She talks of an encounter with Code Pink, first via reason and then via counter protest, it is a priceless story, she continues:

The Left likes to use what they believe to be witty signage (although I am not sure how BUSHCHIMPHITLER qualifies as “witty”), props and sheer numbers of die hard believers and rent-a-students to validate the “justness” of their cause-du-jour and to manufacture a sense of widespread support for their “issue”.

So we took your tools and began to employ them against you. And you don’t like it very much. Except we don’t have to pay anyone to come to our rallies, and that just infuriates you further.

The left absolutely positively refuses to believe that the Tea Party is grass roots because none of their operation is, instead you get stuff like this via Ann Althouse:

Bill Lueders’s Isthmus article is subtitled “The Triumph of Stupidity.” He asks UW-Madison political science professor Charles Franklin how people could vote the way they did, and when Franklin answers “They’re pretty damn stupid,” he says “Thank you, professor… That’s the answer I was looking for.

Althouse continues:

Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don’t go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn’t that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don’t agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people?

Pretty damning, I’m sure the public would resent it, if they ever knew it was said as Byron York explains:

But Franklin is the real star of the story. If you read his quotes in mainstream publications, you’ll find a series of measured statements on political trends. Democrats appealing to the youth vote in the run-up to the midterms are “betting long odds, given the very long history of low turnout in midterms among young voters,” Franklin told the Washington Post recently. Final pre-election polls suggested “a Republican wave of genuinely historical proportions,” he told USA Today. Feingold’s problems had “more to do with the mood of the country than with Feingold himself,” he told the Boston Globe.

It’s all pretty unremarkable stuff. And readers would have no idea what Franklin really thinks about the voters whose opinions he’s measuring and commenting on. But now they do.

Well the Military Mom of 4 at stop shouting knows what they think and has this message to Franklin and the rest of the left in denial:

Either way, I am confident you can deduce the “tone”of my rebuttal.

Realizing that you are losing your grip on the public schools, that the youth that propelled the boy-king to victory have abandoned you, that the bitter, blue collar white workers are now Tea Party grandmas and grandpas, that you have lost control of the federal checkbook and the legislative calendar,

now you want to petition for peace?

now you cry out for civility and consensus?

I have a message for you:

Go. To. Hell.

Go read the whole thing, it will make your day!

Update: Key update from Althouse, all via Glenn

One of these things is just like the other

Posted: November 19, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech
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China 2010:

A Chinese woman has been sentenced to a year in a labor camp for retweeting a Twitter post that mocked Chinese protesters who smashed Japanese products during a recent demonstration, her fiance said Thursday.

On October 17, Cheng Jianping, under the username wangyi09, added a few words to a message written by her fiance, before resending it on Twitter.

Eleven days later on the day the couple had planned to marry, Cheng’s fiance, Hua Chunhui was taken away by the police from his office in the southeastern city of Wuxi.

Well that’s horrible! It’s a good thing we live in America where the political class would never consider suppressing those who disagree with them…oh wait

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER (D-WV): “There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future.”

Hillbuzz nails it:

If Senator Rockefeller is so casually saying things that 20 years ago would have had him run out of town on a rail, just imagine what these nuts are saying behind closed doors in their Leftist cloisters.

Expect the media to give this the attention it deserves sometime after Joe Scarborough endorses Sarah Palin for president.

Christopher Hitchens nails it in two sentences

Posted: November 14, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, opinion/news, short films/interviews
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I am really going to regret when Christopher Hitchens is gone, and I confess it will be for my own loss of a person who’s writing gives me pleasure and his almost Cryanoistic honesty to his own beliefs (even when they are horribly wrong i.e Christianity) rather than for pity as he has lived a pretty interesting life and everybody has to die eventually.

The latest interview of him in the London Observer conveys all of the joy of reading Hitchens that I have but there is one line that is so important and so true and so totally ignored that it should be screamed from the mountaintops to everyone particularly to Thomas Freedman and the left:

As an aside on Mugabe, he makes one of those observations that are so precisely to the point that you wonder why so few other commentators ever get round to coming to it emphasis mine. “Darfur, Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea, anywhere that the concept of human rights doesn’t exist, it’s always the Chinese at backstop. And always for reasons that you could write down in three words: blood for oil.”

This is the most vital part of the piece for two reasons. the first being that he cuts to the truth of the current world situation in two sentences, but the second is due to the interviewer Andrew Anthony unintentional indictment of the entire intelligentsia of the world who have not been willing or able to speak that basic truth.

Red China (and yes I use Red deliberately) has long supplanted Russia as the main focus of human rights abuse and supporter of same around the world. The rest of the world fearing their military and coveting their potential economic power ignore this truth but the reality is there. Hitchens is willing to say it. Nobody else dares because they see no personal profit in it, much easier to make a living hitting the United States.

As I said I’ll miss Hitchens when he is gone, and so will millions who stand up for freedom of speech around the world.

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