No Runny Eggs

Two weeks ago in his first address to his new staff, Eric Holder stated that the United States remains "a nation of cowards" on issues involving race.   The statement created quite a stir.   Folks, especially those on the right, took offense to Holder’s words thinking that he was pointing directly at them and suggesting that the Right was full of redneck racists.   I have to admit I thought that Holder was talking to us on the right but now I know he was talking to the Left.

Today, Dick Durbin took his frustration with Senator Roland Burris’ intransigence and unwillingness to resign his Senate seat to a new level.   In an interview  with the Chicago Sun-Times, reported by UPI, Durbin stated that race was a deciding factor in seating Burris:

Durbin said a combative and racially tinged appearance by African-American U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., at a Dec. 30 news conference called by now-impeached Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich to announce Burris’ appointment to the Senate added a racial overtone to the situation, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Monday.

“My colleague from Illinois, Congressman Bobby Rush, made strong statements along those lines,” Durbin told Chicago radio station WGN. “They were painful and hurtful, and it became part of this calculation.”

What?   Race baiting and racism on the Left?   Say it ain’t so!

Let me see if I have this correct:

• A leftist, black politician from Chicago, accusing his competitor’s voters of being racists because not all white voters will vote for him while virtually all black voters will, is elected President.
• Rather than hold an election, the Democrats in Illinois decide to have a Senator  appointed by a corrupt Governor.
• The corrupt Governor appoints a black replacement Senator largely because the previous Senator was black and he was getting flack from his black constituency.
• The appointed black Senator goes off to Washington and is refused seating by Harry Reid.   Only after Harry Reid got threats from amongst others, the Congressional Black Caucus, did he roll over.
• The appointed black Senator turns out to be at best, mentally infirm and is unable to remember specific, pertinent events related to Federal investigation or possibly a perjurer.   In either event, he  has become accustomed to his new positions and doesn’t want to leave.
• Black leaders are once again lining up to support Burris….because he’s black:

Rev. Willie Barrow, a leader of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, recently said of Burris, “We put him in, and we’re going to keep him in.”

The difference between the Left and the Right’s view of race was perfectly framed by Rush Limbaugh during his speech to CPAC on Saturday:

Let me tell you who we conservatives are:   We love people. [Applause] When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims. We don’t see people we want to exploit. What we see — what we see is potential.

Holder was right, there are a bunch of cowards in the US that are not willing to talk candidly about race.   Unfortunately that cowardice exists throughout the Democrat party and dictates that the value of an individual is based upon the race, sex or sexual preference group they come from.   That cowardice is what  will hold Burris in a role where because of his “distractions” he will be unable to serve the people of Illinois.

The next time Eric Holder wants to talk about race he may want to focus his comments to those who like him, assume race determines a persons value.   That group is predominantly within the Left.

Senator Chambliss has been called as the winner of the runoff election in Georgia.   This will give the Republicans at least 41 votes, on paper, in the Senate.

While the vote totals appear to be substantially lower than the general election, they still managed to get about 55% of the folks to return for a second time.   55% is a pretty good overall return rate for a runoff.   However, the two candidates fared very differently compared to the average.

I’m working off of numbers from the Secretary of State as of about 10 PM.   At that time, Chambliss had about 64% of the general election total while Martin only received about 50% of his general election total.   95% of the precincts had reported in those numbers.   If this difference holds, and I suspect it will generally based on the precincts left to report, I’ve got the following questions questions:

• 93% of blacks voted for Martin when Obama was on the ballot.   They accounted for 56% of Martin’s vote total.   Did they come out and support an older white man when there wasn’t a black candidate on the ballot?
• With the Democrats within reach of the magic 60 number in the Senate, how many folks switched from Martin to Chambliss?
• Chambliss and Martin split the 29 and under group in the general election.   It will be interesting to see whether that group was able to show up a second time this year.
• Sarah Palin made several campaign appearances for Chambliss.   By all accounts the events were very well attended.   How much, or was she a factor in generating turn out for Chambliss?
• Do you remember how the MSM was carrying on about how the special elections for Mississippi and Illinois told us that conservatism was dead rather than the fact that Republicans know how to run crappy candidates.   Will the MSM be running stories about how Obama has lost his coat tails?

This and more I’d like to see.   I haven’t found any exit polls yet.   When I do, you’ll be the first to know!

And I mean that in a stinky way. Jim Geraghty did the the math on Pew’s latest poll (which has Obama up 53%-38% among likely voters), and found that Pew’s bias is 38.83% Democrat, 32.57% independent, and 28.61% Republican. Jim also notes that Pew’s spread was only off by one percentage point in their end-of-the-race 2006 poll bias (they had it at +4 D, it was +3 D).

Given that Gallup’s tracking polls have Obama up by 2 with the traditional model and 7 with the “expanded” one, something is seriously hosed.

First things first; if you haven’t read Shoebox’s post, go read it now, then come back for some expansion on that.

I briefly noted the disappearance of the PUMAs in a different poll (specifically, the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll) near the end of last month. Since we’re talking about the Gallup weekly aggregate of the daily tracking poll, I’ll use Gallup’s numbers to expand on that.

Gallup has been running the weekly aggregate since the week of June 9-15. That week, Barack Obama’s support was 78% of Democrats/43% of Independents/9% of Republicans, while John McCain’s support was 13%D/39%I/84%R. In terms of Democrats, 22% didn’t support Obama, with 13% specifically supporting McCain and the other 9% either supporting a third-party candidate or “undecided” (which includes not voting).

That held rather steady until the Democratic convention. Pre-convention Democratic support of Obama topped out at 82% the week of 7/7-7/13, and returned to 78% the week prior to the convention (8/18-8/24) when he announced Joe Biden as his running mate. Meanwhile, the Democratic support for McCain never dropped below 10% in that time frame (with the low point 7/7-7/13) and topped out at 14% just before the Democratic convention, while the “undecideds” remained between 8% and 9% (the lower just before the Democratic convention). That tracks rather well with Shoebox’s estimates that, had the PUMAs stuck to their guns instead of party, McCain could have had somewhere around 15% of support from Democrats, though I would have been happy with the 12% average that he did get between June and mid-August.

The Democratic convention week (8/25-8/31), which was immediately followed by McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, provided a boost to the Obama/Biden ticket for Democrats, but not a decisive one. The Obama/Biden ticket saw support from 85% of Democrats that week, with a 9% support to McCain and 6% undecided. Democratic support for the Obama/Biden ticket actually dipped in the next couple weeks: the 9/1-9/7 aggregate saw it drop to 83%, with 11% supporting McCain/Palin, and the 9/8-9/14 aggregate saw McCain/Palin pick up another percent from the “undecideds” to bring that back to the average between June and mid-August.

However, there has been a steady march back to the roost for the PUMAs since then. The Obama/Biden-to-McCain/Palin splits among Democrats have been, in succession, 85%/10%, 86%/10%, 87%/8%, 87%/9% and now 89%/7%.

Shoebox’s reminder back in August that there wasn’t much of a difference between Obama and Hillary Clinton, and specifically his concerns that the PUMAs would remember that before the election, are coming true.

I don’t know if I could keep up with the ACORN sprouts if I were back at the bunker, but I definitely know I can’t on the road. Fortunately, Jon Ham over at Right Angles has, even though he’s termed the explosion of ACORN stories as growing faster than kudzu.

Jim Geraghty has been wondering how John McCain could be gaining among independents and still be losing to Barack Obama overall in various national polls. The popular conventional wisdom is that the current crop of polls are oversampling Democrats. Because he specifically asked for the oddly-missing party-identity numbers from the most-recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, which has Obama up 46%-44% among registered voters now compared to him up 45%-43% among registered voters in August (conducted before either running mate was made known), despite a swing from a 46%-35% Obama lead among “independents” in August to a 49%-34% McCain lead among “independents” in September, I’ll focus on that. I will ignore the “likely voter” component, where Obama leads 49%-45%, for now partly because I need to compare apples to apples (the August poll did not include “likely voters”), and partly because there is not a partisan breakdown among “likely voters”.

Before I get to the party identification explanation, I must note that Obama’s support among Democrats jumped from 78% to 87%. While some of this came from “McCain-ocrats” (McCain’s support among Democrats dipped from 9% to 5%), most of the gain came from the undecideds, as that dropped from 11% to 5%. In any case, I guess the PUMAs are coming home to roost.

Similarily, McCain has also strengthened his support among Republicans, albeit slightly. That went from 90% to 91%, and appears to have come at the expense of Bob Barr. More-pointedly, the percentage of “Obama-cans” remained unchanged at 6%.

Now, to the math. In order to do a comparison between the August and September polls, one has to know the party-identity internals from the August poll. Fortunately, those numbers are part of the August release, and were 34% Democratic, 29% Republican, 29% Independent, 4% Other Party, and an unmentioned 4% “refused to answer”. Since the remainder of the internals grouped the Independents, Other Party’ers, and “refused to answer”‘s together under the “independent” label, that becomes 37%.

I must point out that the 5-point advantage the Democrats had in the August poll is greater than the biggest of recent election-day splits (4 points in favor of the Democrats in 1996 and 2000, which actually beat the 3-point advantage they had in their historic 2006 election).

This is borne out, within rounding errors, by putting the results of a given early-in-the-poll question with three (or more) distinct answers into equation form (specifically, 3 equations) and solving for the three variables of the Democratic, Republican, and “independent” portions of support for each answer.

Since there are several questions in the September poll that meet those requirements, one can average the rounding errors out. I specifically solved the equations for questions 2, 9 (and the composite “ticket splitter” table), 13, and 15, and came up with an average of 34% Democrats, 43% “independents” and 23% Republicans in the September poll.

While there isn’t a massive increase in the percentage of Democrats included, there are a couple of things of note:

– The split between Democrats and Republicans (+11 D) matches the inflated numbers in other recent polls.
– The 21% decrease in the percentage of Republicans belies the conventional conservative wisdom that the selection of Sarah Palin energized the Republican base, at least on a statistical level. I can cite piece of circumstantial evidence (an incredible number of conservative bloggers jumping on the Straight Talk Express) after piece of circumstantial evidence (60,000 for Palin in Florida) after piece of circumstantial evidence (McCain/Palin outdrawing Obama in Green Bay) why this decrease is a bunch of macaca, but regular readers of this place already know why the decrease is a bunch of macaca.

For grins, let’s apply the August partisan split to the September poll, and the September poll to the August split. Had the August partisan split been applied to the September poll, McCain would be up 46%-44%. Had the September partisan split been applied to August, Obama would have been up 48%-39%.

I’ll briefly discuss the other oddity from the Times poll; the 4-point Obama lead among “likely” voters. There is one question that is somewhat relevant; number 3, or the “are you sure?” question. Again, there is not a specific breakdown of “likely” voters, but neither the partisan split among registered voters (91% of Democrats are sure of their choice, 88% of Republicans are sure of theirs) nor the split between the tickets (85% of Obama/Biden supporters are sure, 84% of McCain/Palin supporters are sure) fully-explains why Obama has that increased difference among “likely” voters.

Hillary’s thinking about asking to have her name added to the nomination ballot at the DNC Convention.

ABC News reports:

Sen. Hillary Clinton told a gathering of supporters last week that she’s looking for a “strategy” for her delegates to have their voices heard and “respected” at the Democratic National Convention — and did not rule out the possibility of  having  her name placed into nomination at the convention alongside Sen. Barack Obama’s.

“I happen to believe that we will come out stronger if people feel that their voices were heard and their views were respected. I think that is a very big part of how we actually come out unified,” Clinton, D-N.Y., said at a California fundraiser last Thursday, in a video clip captured by an attendee and posted on YouTube.

“Because I know from just what I’m hearing, that there’s incredible pent-up desire. And I think that people want to feel like, ‘OK, it’s a catharsis, we’re here, we did it, and then everybody get behind Sen. Obama.’ That is what most people believe is the best way to go,” she said.

“No decisions have been made. And so we are trying to work all this through with the DNC and with the Obama campaign.”

To quote Oprah, “YOU GO GIRL”

This would be AWESOME and potentially fatal for the dummycrats in 2008.

Just when you thought all of the disciples were lining up behind their messiah, BAM!!! BIG WRENCH!!!!!

Operation CHAOS Lives!!!!

(H/T – DrewM)

Marc Ambinder broke the news that Team McCain McShame/RNC RAT Lite will be curtailing the anti-vote fraud efforts this year. Why? From Marc…

Sources with direct knowledge of the coordinated Republican effort this year say that high-ranking Republicans, including some within McCain’s campaign, are convinced that GOP efforts in 2004 were damaging.

Obviously. We don’t have President Flipper, and it took the DhimmiRATs until 2006 to get a majority in either House of Congress.

I do believe the operative phrase is FUCK THEM ALL!