Internet Scofflaw

The New York Times reports:

Computer security experts have identified vulnerabilities in the voter registration databases in two states, raising concerns about the ability of hackers and others to disenfranchise voters. . . It took The New York Times less than three minutes to track down the information online needed to update the registrations of several prominent executives in Washington State.

Fixing this problem would somehow be racist, I’m sure.

(Via Instapundit.)

The White House now says that Biden didn’t lie last night when he said “we did not know they wanted more security” in Benghazi. According to the White House, Biden was referring to Obama and Biden personally, not to the Obama administration.

So once again, this president won’t take responsibility for his own administration’s actions.

UPDATE: Non-sequitur alert: Jay Carney says that Biden “obviously” wasn’t referring to the administration not knowing, since that isn’t true.

(Previous post.)

Well, that was interesting. . . I never watch the debates any more — I generally find them insufferable — but I followed it on Twitter and it was pretty easy to get a sense of it. There’s a saying, if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. Joe Biden came in with a third option: blanket them with bluster.

Biden incessantly made faces and scoffed aloud as Ryan was speaking. He also interrupted Paul Ryan 82 times by one count!

I think Michael Barone has it right that a bluster show can work when the audience already agrees with you, but not when they are undecided. This seems to be backed up by CNN’s dial group (for whatever that’s worth), and by CNN’s post-debate poll, which found that registered voters who watched the debate thought that Ryan won by a narrow 48-44 margin. The poll oversampled Republicans by 3 points, so I think we should call this a tie. (A couple other polls found wildly varying results, but both were internet polls of some flavor. CNN’s seems to be the only conventional poll.)

Before the debate, Republicans were salivating about the VP debate, since Biden is an idiot after all. But I read another commentator (sorry, I don’t recall whom) who disagreed. He pointed out that Biden is utterly unconstrained by the truth and could score points just by making stuff up. And that’s just what happened, at least as far as making stuff up (whether he scored points with his lies is harder to say).

ASIDE: Recall how Joe Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign foundered in part because of an incident in which he blustered that he was much smarter than a man he was talking to, based on a set of achievements that he made up. (His campaign also foundered because he was caught plagiarizing speeches and even elements of the life story of a British politician.)

To be clear, I’m not echoing the Obama campaign’s spin of Romney’s debate victory, in which they argued that Romney looked nothing like Obama’s straw-man caricature of him because Romney (not Obama) was lying about all of Romney’s plans. I’m talking about simple facts. For example: Biden falsely said that the Benghazi consulate did not request more security. He falsely said that the HSS contraception/abortifacient mandate does not apply to religious organizations. He even claimed (falsely, of course) to have voted against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The upshot of all this is the Democratic base will be very happy with Biden’s performance, hence the Democrats crowing about his smashing victory. However, he probably lost a little ground with independents. How does this play out in the race as a whole? Democratic partisans who have been depressed since the presidential debate will be encouraged, and Obama needed that (particularly since that group contains the press), but nothing here breaks up Romney’s momentum with independents.

UPDATE: “Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”

Paul Krugman is a master of two disciplines: international economics — which he no longer practices — and lying with statistics. His latest work is classic. He offers the following graph as evidence that Obama’s economic policies are working:

So employment is back where it was before the recession. Great! (It’s surprising that no one knew this, but okay.)

Except it’s not. Not remotely. If you look carefully at the y-axis, you see “Chg. from Yr. Ago”. The graph doesn’t show employment, it shows the derivative of employment!

We haven’t gotten the jobs back. On the contrary, we’ve only gotten job growth back to where it was as the economy turned into recession. There’s no hint here that we will ever get back the jobs we lost.

Here’s the thing about Krugman: He has a Nobel prize; he knows the difference between x and dx/dt. But he thinks his readers won’t notice.

(Via Power Line.)

How insulated from reality is Barack Obama? When he walked off the debate stage, he actually thought he had won.

The story also reports that he blew off debate prep thinking that he only had to show up to win. This guy actually believes his press.

(Via PJ Tatler.)

The Democrats consistently defend election fraud against any kind of reform, like voter identification or purging ineligible persons from the voting rolls. Their reason for doing so is transparent, but they need to put forward a story for the gullible (a.k.a. the press). Their story is twofold: anti-fraud measures are racist, and there’s no fraud anyway.

The former argument is risible, but what about the latter? They keep telling us that there’s no fraud anywhere, and when fraud does pop up, it’s always passed off as an isolated incident. Is that plausible? With the government controlling so much today, the amount at stake is enormous. People spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the outcome of elections. Is it really plausible that no one would try to stuff the ballot box, especially when it is so laughably easy to do?

The truth is, we aren’t finding fraud because we aren’t looking. Democrats generally quash any effort for the government to look, but now private groups are picking up the slack. And yes, it turns out that if you look, you find fraud.

True the Vote looked at elections in New York and Florida and easily uncovered dozens of instances of fraud. Not enough to change the outcome of an election? Perhaps not, but this is just what a private organization with limited resources was able to uncover when it first started looking. Furthermore, they could only look for violations in one category (ineligible voters). For example, wrong-person voting becomes impossible to detect as soon as the fraudster walks away.

Moreover, there are major examples in which fraud did change the outcome of an election. In the 2004 Washington gubernatorial race, the Democrat won by 129 votes (after weeks of shady recounts), in which 1482 people voted illegally. Nearly all those of those were felons, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat. And then there’s the 2008 Minnesota Senate race, in which the Democrat won by 312 votes, with 1099 illegal votes from felons. That one is particularly notable, because it gave Democrats the 60th vote they needed to jam through Obamacare.

As Obamacare destroys our country over the next two decades (the CBO projects an economic collapse by 2035), remember that it only passed because the Democrats cheated.

The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof laments that we let the rich have more stuff.

POSTSCRIPT: All this talk of income inequality is sheer idiocy. Margaret Thatcher nails it:

(Via James Taranto.)

In Maureen Dowd’s flight of fancy about Obama doing debate prep with the West Wing’s imaginary president Jed Bartlet, there is much to laugh at, but my favorite is this:

BARTLET [playing Romney] “I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare.”

OBAMA The $716 billion I’ve cut is from the providers, not the beneficiaries.

Oh! It comes from the providers, not the beneficiaries! Well, then!

Jed Bartlet is supposedly an economist, but Aaron Sorkin is not, and it shows. The idea that there is any difference between cutting from the providers and cutting from the beneficiaries is quite hilariously naive.

Honorable mention is this:

BARTLET “You doubled the deficit.”

OBAMA When I took office in 2009, the deficit was 1.4 trillion. According to the C.B.O., the deficit for 2012 will be 1.1 trillion. Either you have the mathematics aptitude of a Shetland pony or, much more likely, you’re lying.

That is so precious. Yes, if you don’t count his first year in office, Obama’s budget record doesn’t look as bad. After ballooning the deficit in the first year with his stimulus boondoggle (among other things), he can keep spending at the new elevated rate and look like a master of fiscal rectitude.

What is hilarious about this isn’t just the chutzpah of charging Obama’s stimulus plan, passed with virtually no Republican support, to President Bush. What is hilarious is to use this absurd talking point in a piece about how Romney is dishonest.

Yes, indeed; Mr. President, please take Maureen Dowd’s advice. I want to see you try to make that argument on the national stage.

Is Jay Carney the world’s biggest hypocrite? Here he is on September 24:

“There is a certain rather desperate attempt to grasp at words and phrases here to find political advantage and, in this case, that’s profoundly offensive.”

Oh, it’s desperate and offensive to grasp at words and phrases to find political advantage, is it?

September 18:

The White House slammed Mitt Romney Tuesday over a leaked video in which the Republican presidential nominee says 47 percent of the country’s population is “dependent upon government” and believes “they are victims.”

For Obama, we can’t hold him to his actual words (the attacks on our consulate and embassy are “bumps in the road”), but when it comes to Romney he’ll nitpick every word until his nitpicker gets sore.

Is anything the Obama campaign says true? Not his attack on Mitt Romney’s tax plan:

“To pay for huge tax breaks for millionaires like him, Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class — $2,000 for a family with children, says a nonpartisan report,” a recent Obama television ad claims. Don’t believe it, because it isn’t true.

The “nonpartisan” report Obama refers to came out in August from the left-wing Tax Policy Center, . . . purporting to show that Romney would have to eliminate $86 billion in middle-class tax breaks to pay for his 20 percent across-the-board rate reduction.

Its authors — one of whom is a recent Obama employee — have subsequently admitted that in the absence of details about Romney’s tax plan, they simply made them up. They also admitted their numbers came out wrong because they guessed which tax breaks Romney would eliminate and which ones were “off the table.”

Here’s Barack Obama, claiming that the tax code offers incentives to move jobs overseas:

I want to do the same thing, but I’ve actually identified how we can do that. And part of the way to do it is to not give tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas.

Right now, you can actually take a deduction for moving a plant overseas.

Romney’s retort (“the idea that you get a break for shipping jobs overseas is simply not the case”) was fine, but here’s the full explanation:

It’s a lie. There is no “tax break” for shipping jobs overseas. The tax code treats companies that move jobs overseas the same as anyone else. Companies pay taxes on profits, not revenues. So any business expense is subtracted from revenue before paying taxes.

The “deduction for moving a plant overseas” is exactly the same “deduction” as the one for moving a plant to America, or for buying inventory, equipment, or office supplies. You could just as well talk about “tax breaks” for abortion equipment.

The subtext for this is Democrats have proposed to alter the tax code to create tax penalties for companies that do things Democrats don’t like. (Or claim not to like, anyway.) That strikes me as very bad policy.

Moreover, it’s pretty clear that the Democrats view their proposal as politically unpopular. If they thought it would be popular, they would be forthright about it. But they’re not: rather than talking about creating tax penalties, they’re lying about closing nonexistent tax breaks.

I’d very much like to see this succeed:

Small government and free-market capitalism are about to get put to the test in Honduras, where the government has agreed to let an investment group build an experimental city with no taxes on income, capital gains or sales. Proponents say the tiny, as-yet unnamed town will become a Central American beacon of job creation and investment, by combining secure property rights with minimal government interference.

My worry is that the success of a project like this is dependent of the confidence that investors have that the government will honor its pledge. It’s not clear that the best place for this is Honduras, where an insane would-be dictator very nearly took power just a few years ago.

Obama today (paraphrased): Last night I debated someone who claimed to be Mitt Romney, but bore no resemblance to the straw man I’ve been attacking these many months. Tonight that guy isn’t here to rebut me, so I’m going back to attacking the straw man.

I didn’t watch the debate (I never do any more), but if NPR isn’t even talking about who won it, and Democrats are attacking Jim Lehrer, I guess it must have gone very well.

Here’s Barack Obama crying uncle.

UPDATE: Iowahawk: “Obama traditionally struggles when debating people not made of straw.”

In the least surprising news you will see today: Matt Damon’s anti-fracking film is funded by Middle Eastern oil interests.

Hillary Clinton admits that regulation costs jobs. Too bad she thinks the only people who need jobs are in the Middle East.

The Obama administration is refusing to sell its stake in GM because then it would realize a multi-billion dollar loss. This fallacy is literally the very first hit if you Google “classic investing fallacy”.

POSTSCRIPT: My accountant points out that if the government followed GAAP (Generally accepted accounting principles), they would have recorded the loss already. But of course the government never follows the accounting rules that are required in the private sector.

(Via IMAO.)

Sarah Hoyt’s story is well worth reading.

Who would say this, a fundamentalist imam charging people up for their Friday riot, or the president of the United States?

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Apparently both of them.

This is wrong on so many levels. Firstly, if the future must belong to anyone, it is those who support free speech, not those who have people arrested for criticizing Islam.

Second, why is Islam set aside for such delicate treatment? He’s not upset about attacks against any other religion. A broadway show satirizing Mormonism gets nary a peep, and even in the wake of this very controversy, the White House has refused to condemn a notorious anti-Christian art display that was funded by the federal government. (Of course, Mormons and Christians don’t riot. But wouldn’t it be a better policy to discourage riots, rather than reward them?)

Third, how exactly was the Innocence of Muslims video slanderous? I haven’t seen it, but I gather it called Mohammed a pedophile. Slander? The man married a six-year-old girl! (Oh, but he didn’t consummate the marriage until she was nine.)

Fourth, the remark is even worse in context. He had a whole litany of “the future must not belong” lines. All the others refer to murders, thieves, and the like. That’s the category Barack Obama would put critics of Islam in: “the future must not belong to a dictator who massacres his people.”

In other contexts, the president has been saying that it’s not okay to denigrate any religion. He clearly doesn’t really mean it; heck, he’s been staging a whispering campaign against Mormonism (Mitt Romney’s religion) of his own. But let’s pretend that he does mean it. The very idea is insulting. It is okay — no, more than that, it is good — to debate religious ideas. Recently someone discovered a scrap of an old manuscript that suggests that Jesus might have been married. Are Christians calling for its suppression? No, Christians have the confidence to debate their ideas. This notion that we can’t debate religion puts religion in a special category that reason must not enter, and that is frankly insulting. That’s not friendly to religion, it’s hostile to it.

The media clearly agrees that this remark was awful, because they’ve gone complete radio silence on it. The New York Times even had the chutzpah to “Obama Tells U.N. New Democracies Need Free Speech”, because of a throwaway line in support of free speech that he clearly didn’t mean.

(Previous post.)

When your environmental rules require a minimum gasoline purchase of four gallons, your policy has clearly gone off the rails.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Obama campaign has released a web ad encouraging Obama supporters to steal their neighbors stuff, sell it, and send the proceeds to the campaign.

Ancient Rome, it is said, had a simple economy. It exported armies and imported grain. Today’s Washington, DC, is similar:

The American Community Survey released last Thursday found seven of the nations top 10 wealthiest counties now surround Washington, D.C. They include Loudoun County, Va., ranked No. 1, with a median household income over $119,000 dollars a year. Fairfax County, Va., was second with $105,000 and Arlington County, Va., third with just over $100,000 a year in median household income.

For most of our nation’s history, the capital was a backwater. That was proof the founders had done something right. We need to make it so again.

Democrats cannot be pro-life. That’s the position of the Democratic platform committee, who voted down an effort to include a statement in the party’s platform saying that that you can be pro-life and still be a Democrat.

These guys are thugs:

Senior Obama Campaign adviser David Axelrod reportedly contacted The Gallup Organization to discuss the company’s research methodology after their poll’s findings were unfavorable to the President. After declining to adjust their methodology, Gallup was named in an unrelated lawsuit by the DOJ. . .

In response to that email, a third senior Gallup official said he thought Axelrod’s pressure “sounds a little like a Godfather situation.”

“Imagine Axel[rod] with Brando’s voice: ‘[Name redacted], I’d like you to come over and explain your methodology…You got a nice poll there….would be a shame if anything happened to it…’”

ABC News reports:

The Democratic National Convention on Wednesday featured three speakers billed as “former employees of companies controlled by Bain Capital.” They each told compelling stories about jobs lost, allegedly because of the actions of Bain under Romney’s leadership. But it turns out one of those employees never actually worked for a company controlled by Bain Capital.

David Foster was a union organizer (one of the guys who actually brought down GST Steel) and never worked for the plant. But even now, despite having been busted, the Democrats still describe him as “Former employee at a Company controlled by Romney’s Bain Capital”, and his speech certainly gives the impression that he worked for GST Steel:

I’m David Foster, and I was a steelworker for 31 years. For 15 years, I laid brick and tapped the furnaces, and did all that hard, dirty work that turned molten metal into the cars and bridges and buildings that make America what it is today.

I also led the steelworkers in the upper Midwest, including GST Steel in Kansas City, a 100-year old company bought by Mitt Romney and his partners at Bain Capital in 1993.

Liars.

(Via Jammie Wearing Fool.)

. . . can’t use an iPhone. Then, of course, since the man is incapable of admitting a mistake, he blames the phone’s owner.

(Via Moe Lane.)

Mitt Romney is now receiving regular intelligence briefings. This means that he is better informed that Barack Obama, who skips most of his intelligence briefings. Over the past year, the president attended just 38% of his briefings. He missed every briefing in the week leading up to the 9/11/2012 attack.

Always eager to be too clever by half, the White House is actually trying to spin this as a strength for Obama. They argue that he is so smart he doesn’t need briefings; he can get everything he needs from the briefing book. It’s only dullards like George W Bush that actually want to hear from the intel guys directly, ask questions, and have a conversation.

I’m not making this up: Dana Milbank actually says that Bush held intelligence briefings because he didn’t like to read:

This is how it was done in the Clinton administration, before Bush decided he would prefer to read less.

How it was done in the Clinton administration is not a record to emulate. CIA Director James Woolsey lamented his lack of access to President Clinton, and was never once able to obtain a one-on-one meeting. Woolsey said “It wasn’t that I had a bad relationship with the president. It just didn’t exist.” He also reportedly once joked “Remember the guy who in 1994 crashed his plane onto the White House lawn? That was me trying to get an appointment to see President Clinton.”

UPDATE: Since the story broke, Obama’s attendance has improved dramatically, with him attending the meeting five days in a row. The last time that happened was February.

But wait, I’m confused! I thought that Obama was too smart to need intelligence briefings. Did he get dumber? Explain it to me, Dana Milbank!

(Previous post.)

Now that we’re abandoning free speech, can we censor Gangnam Style too? (Warning: do not click on link.) After all, it’s causing riots too.

You can’t make this stuff up: They’re attacking Mitt Romney for paying too much in taxes.

This is an outright lie, and a blatant one at that:

Asked about the Fast and Furious program at the Univision forum on Thursday, President Obama falsely claimed that the program began under President George W. Bush.

“I think it’s important for us to understand that the Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration,” the president said. “When Eric Holder found out about it, he discontinued it. . .”

In actuality, the Fast and Furious program was started in October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency.

The White House then walked back the statement, saying that, even though Obama specifically said Fast and Furious, he actually was referring to the Wide Receiver program. Wide Receiver was entirely unlike the Gunwalker scandal in that it was done with the consent of the Mexican government, and in that  in Wide Receiver the agents actually tried to track the guns, while in Fast and Furious they did not. Even Holder rejected the comparison of the programs.

Moreover, Obama’s claim is still a lie, even if taken to refer to Wide Receiver. Wide Receiver was not shut down by Holder; it was shut down in 2007 after accidentally losing some of the guns.

(Previous post.)

California is planning a big propaganda campaign on behalf of Obamacare, funded by tax dollars of course:

Realizing that much of the battle will be in the public relations realm, the exchange has poured significant resources into a detailed marketing plan — developed not by state health bureaucrats but by the global marketing powerhouse Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, which has an initial $900,000 contract with the exchange. The Ogilvy plan includes ideas for reaching an uninsured population that speaks dozens of languages and is scattered through 11 media markets: advertising on coffee cup sleeves at community colleges to reach adult students, for example, and at professional soccer matches to reach young Hispanic men.

And Hollywood, an industry whose major players have been supportive of President Obama and his agenda, will be tapped. Plans are being discussed to pitch a reality television show about “the trials and tribulations of families living without medical coverage,” according to the Ogilvy plan. The exchange will also seek to have prime-time television shows, like “Modern Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and Univision telenovelas, weave the health care law into their plots.

Americas stubborn refusal to accept what they have been clearly told must be frustrating to these guys.

Obama (that’s the woman-friendly candidate, we’re told) doesn’t think women can be experts on Pakistan:

Just before the White House announcement of a new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, Obama asked Riedel and his team to come to see him in the Oval -Office so he could thank them. . . Obama looked at the CIA officer, who was sporting stiletto heels, and said with clear amusement, “You don’t look like a Pakistan expert.”

If you’re wondering about the provenance of that, that’s the leftist Daily Beast reporting.

(Via Instapundit.)

Awesome.

(Via Instapundit.)

Democrats are attacking Mitt Romney for failing to praise our troops in Afghanistan in his convention speech. It’s no secret that Romney wants the election to be about the economy, while Barack Obama wants the election to be about whether Osama Bin Laden is still alive.

But attacking Romney for supposedly slighting the troops just strikes me as absurdist theater. Our military knows the score. They can see that the Democratic convention’s tribute video featured Russian ships and Turkish planes. No one at the DNC knew any better.

They remember how Obama said that our troops in Afghanistan were just air-raiding villages and killing civilians. They remember how, once president, he dithered for most of a year over whether to send more troops.

Our troops don’t like him. It’s no coincidence that when Obama gave a speech to troops at Fort Bliss at the end of last month, they sat impassively, waiting for him to finish.

But this isn’t really about the troops. He’s not trying to get their votes; he knows that most in the military will vote against him. In fact his party is suing to make it harder for troops to voting. (Obama’s mouthpieces claim their lawsuit is being misrepresented, but the legal documents make their position clear.)

No, this attack is aimed at persuading voters who support the military, but know little about it, and are gullible enough to buy it.

Morgan Wright, the Obama administration official who ran the program that funded Solyndra and other green boondoggles, refuses to testify before Congress, despite a subpoena.

Among other things, Darrell Issa (R-CA) wants to ask Wright about his use of a non-official email account to avoid scrutiny of the loan process.

We knew this already, but you don’t hear it admitted out loud very often:

A top official at a liberal super PAC with the goal of eradicating tea partiers from Congress is telling activists that it’s more effective to label Republicans as racists than criticize their policies.

According to an audio recording obtained by The Daily Caller, Matthew “Mudcat” Arnold, the national campaign manager of the liberal CREDO super PAC, told a gathering of supporters in Aurora, Colo., on Sept. 8 that they’ve realized “policy did not move voters.”

The left’s favorite communist murderer is the centerpiece of the EPA’s memo on Hispanic Heritage Month. For the record, most of Che’s victims were Hispanic.

Mitt Romney’s first tweet of 9/11:

On this most somber day, America is united under God in its quest for peace and freedom at home and across the world.

Barack Obama’s first tweet of 9/11:

The election is in 8 weeks. Sign up to volunteer:

(Via Instapundit.)

What a difference one day can make! The day after pledging, in his convention speech, that he would never turn Medicare into a voucher program, his administration announced that it would be shifting 2 million seniors on Medicare into a voucher program.

There is a difference between the Romney-Ryan proposal and Obama policy though. Well, lots of them, but this one is key: In Romney-Ryan, the voucher program is voluntary; participants would choose whether to enter or not. The Obama program is opt-out, so (in some states) participants are in unless they take some action to stay out, which of course most won’t know to do.

I don’t know the program’s details, but it sounds like a good idea. (Indeed, it sounds a lot like Ryan’s plan.) It’s the hypocrisy that’s striking.