Take three minutes and forty-five seconds and watch this.
RomBot5000 Severely Moderate 2.0 Download
That was my first thought, too: “Does that junk work?” “Does it has an off button?”
WASHINGTON, D.C.— In the face of what looked increasingly like an inevitable blowout by President Obama, Washington beltway wags were ecstatic this week after the nearly powered-off Rombot5000 provided the presidential race with an all-important infusion of high-grade lithium energy.
The surprising up-tick came immediately after an emergency software update just prior to the first presidential debate, dubbed by anonymous programmers as “Severely Moderate 2.0.” Romney Campaign spokesman, Ben Dover, refused any characterization the update was emergency in nature, saying, “This was a planned incremental update, anticipated by Mr. Romney long before his main operating chip had become inarticulate.”
Dover was also tight-lipped about who actually writes and authorizes the downloads, referring all inquiries to the “Billionaires For Romney Consortium.”
Asked if the Rombot5000 would be performing in the next debate with the same upgrade, Dover said it didn’t really matter. “Our polling indicated we would not only win the first debate, but also that we would easily win all three debates, as well as the November 6 election.”
Pressed on specifically how their polling results were anything more than just the biased opinion of a few hundred Republicans, Dover said he wasn’t going to answer hypothetical questions, but that he did have an unspecified quantity of sodium chloride we could “all go pound.”
Tin Foiled Again (Update)
Three GOP Stooges, from left to right, Steve Forbes, Jack Welsh, Allen West, see Signs of an Obama conspiracy emanating from Der Tube
Sasquatch might as well have traipsed across the White House lawn Friday with a lost Warren Commission file on his way to the studio where NASA staged the moon landing. – Yahoo News
In the wake of a laughable GOP convention and an uplifting Democratic one, followed closely by the devastating disclosure of the Romney 47% moocher vid, polls showed Obama opening up a significant lead over Romney in the swing states, with favorable down-ticket results for the Democratic senate candidates as well.
This gave rise to the skewed polls conspiracy in which Wingers howled about a cabal of biased poll takers and librul media-ites working overtime to discourage Republican voters from showing up to vote. As if their overwhelming hatred of President Blackenstein (h/t Bill Maher) wasn’t motivation enough.
The angry peasant mob hadn’t even made it to the White House Castle gates to vent their latest outrage when they were hit by yet another thunderstorm of cognitive dissonance, the September job numbers. What the rest of the country welcomed as much needed rain during a long economic drought, the Wingers saw as a devastating flood that swept away one of their major talking points— unemployment over 8% during the entirety of the Obama Administration, proof that that Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to lower the rate below 8% was as bogus as his current proposals and promises.
Now, there is always a certain amount of fluctuation in the final numbers of most economic metrics, such as GDP, which routinely undergoes two modifications after initial estimates are made. The uncertainty in estimating unemployment numbers is reflected in the divergent numbers provided by the two main data sets used for their calculation—monthly polling by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of some 50,000 households, the Household Data survey; and numbers provided by a list of employers, the Establishment Data survey. The Household Survey showed that for September “Total employment rose by 873,000”; and the Establishment Data showed “Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 114,000.” (Employment Situation News Release, October 5, 2012, Bureau of Labor Statistics)
The smaller number in the Establishment Data is likely due to the fact that during an economic recovery, new employers are missed in monthly surveys that coincide with accelerations in the rate of recovery. This was the case in September, which more fully accounted for rises in the July and August numbers. Similarly, the slowdown in GDP in the second quarter caused a downward revision in the employment numbers for those months. In general, underestimations are more common in uptrends, overestimations more common in downtrends, because of the inherent time lag factor. All of which creates an unavoidable, structural margin of error that necessitates subsequent revisions.
The spread between last month’s rate of 8.1% and this month’s 7.8% can thus be explained without resorting to wild conspiracy theories. But in the GOP zeitgeist, the imagined presence of sinister Democratic plots plays into the larger narrative of Winger victimhood. How else to explain that despite their imagined superiority they don’t have total control of the US government? And why current polls shows them to be the losers that they are?
That September’s unemployment number came in under 8% is proof of a diabolically engineered October Surprise, a deliberate manipulation of BLS data whose minions are acting on the orders of Obama’s re-election machine, identified by former GE Chairman Jack Welch in a tweet as “these Chicago guys.” Asked by Chris Matthews whether he had any proof, Welch admitted he had none, and insisted he wouldn’t change a single word of his tweet.
That didn’t stop other GOPers like former presidential candidate and Welch fellow plutocrat, Steve Forbes, from jumping into Teh Crazy pool. They were joined by right wing whackos like radio squawk host Laura Ingraham; Teabagger inspiration and CNBC reporter Rick Santelli; Michelle Bachmann‘s male counterpart in the House of Representatives, Allen West, and of course Fux News’ leading conspiracy monger, Eric Bolling and Fux’s chief business host, Stuart Varney. (For a sampling of conspiracy tweets, see Media Matters’ compilation, and TPM’s tevee compilation.)
Prior to the conspiratorialists’ hijacking of the debate, the GOPers explained that the decrease in the unemployment rate is due to a number of factors; an increase in part-timers (often a preliminary to full time employment); lazy people content to live off “free stuff,” like unemployment insurance; and people who have simply given up because the economic outlook is perceived as being so dismal. (Never do we hear from the Willardites, or the MSM for that matter, about the 7,600 Baby Boomers who turn 60 every day, the traditional retirement age, but are still counted as individuals no longer looking for work.)
But the tin foil hat crew, aka Job Truthers, has broken new ground. Conn Carroll, the Washington Examiner’s senior editorial writer, tweeted that while he didn’t think that the BLS cooked the numbers, it was rather the case of “a bunch of Dems [who] lied about getting jobs.” The implication being that the Free Stuffers are an integral part of the poll skewing conspiracy, who hope to re-elect Obama by making the employment picture look rosier than it is, just to keep those checks a-comin’.
Now, all this could be passed off as just so much election year craziness, of no consequence after Nov. 6. But with public trust in government already at a modern low, assailing the reputation of a critical government agency like the BLS, composed of career economists who have a history of serving both Republican and Democratic administrations in an exemplary, non-partisan manner— that is the real danger here.
TPM describes the BLS and its operations as follows:
For starters, the Bureau of Labor Statistics isn’t currently run by a political appointee. For most of Obama’s term, the commissioner was a holdover appointed by President Bush. The current acting commissioner John Gavin is a career BLS economist, not an Obama appointee.
The underlying data behind the BLS reports is also publicly released and used by analysts across the private sector and academia, meaning a conspiracy would have to survive scrutiny from trained economists of all political stripes.
Nor is there much time to cook the books at the top level if they wanted to.
Even if the Rethugs manage to lose this year’s election through sheer foot-shooting incompetence, they can point to success in their long range goal of undermining the public’s trust in government, as well as their trust in “facts.” Their previous strategy of obstructionism and polarization is being augmented this election cycle by attacking the credibility of previously unassailable government institutions, as well as vital private and public polling agencies.
Even if they lose, they win.
Or so they think.
UPDATE (10/9): Wacky Welch out at Reuters and Fortune Magazine.
Sez Fortune:
Welch said he will no longer contribute to Fortune following critical coverage of the former CEO of General Electric, saying he would get better “traction” elsewhere. On Friday, Welch suggested that the Obama administration, calling them “these Chicago guys,” had manipulated the monthly jobs report in order to make the economy look better than it actually is just weeks before the election. Welch has been battered by criticism since making the suggestion on Twitter.
Debate Post-Mortem (Update)
Big Bird responds to Romney’s promise to carve him up for Thanksgiving dinner
As the debate post-mortems flood in, the overwhelming consensus is that Willard Mitt Romney won, at least on style. Charlie Pierce begins his critique of President Obama’s performance with a boxing analogy:
The thing is, if you’re going to play rope-a-dope, sooner or later, you have to come off the ropes and throw a punch. You bounce off the ropes and land the left and then the right over the top, and then the other guy goes out of the ring in a blanket. Otherwise, it’s just a way to get yourself punched in the stomach a lot. Along about the 48-minute mark of Wednesday night’s debate, it became clear to me that the president simply was not going to do that.
And, because of the president’s unaccountable lassitude — is it possible that the whole angry-black-man kerfuffle ginned up on the right on Monday got into the man’s head a little? — Willard Romney was able to portray himself as a firm, principled national figure of what passes for the rational center. I didn’t think that was possible.
In my view, a better metaphor would be a mixed martial arts match. Obama entered the cage with heavily padded 20 ounce boxing gloves while Romney opted for 4 ounce MMA grapplers that allowed him hit a lot harder and wrestle and pin O to the mat. As for the re-release Monday of a 2007 vid of Senator Obama delivering a public critique of the Bush Administration’s of post-Katrina aid to New Orleans, I do believe it was a deliberate attempt to get inside O’s head, muting his natural instincts to throw some elbows lest he conform to the angry black man racial stereotype that the right is always ready to smear him with.
Style issues aside, Mitt “make up a number” Romney offered nothing of substance. Unless his performance as a substantial liar counts. Big Orange has started to make a list:
Romney lied:
When he claimed that “pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan.” They’re not.
When he said that President Obama had “cut Medicare by $716 billion to pay for Obamacare.” Obama didn’t.
When he denied proposing a $5 trillion tax cut. He did.
When he said President Obama had “added almost as much to the federal debt as all the prior presidents combined.” Not even close.
When he resurrected “death panels.” That was called “one of the biggest whoppers of the night.”
When he stated that half the green energy companies given stimulus funds had failed. Only if three out of nearly three dozen is half.Stay tuned. These just scratch the surface.
ThinkProgress uses a less confrontational term– “myths.” Some 27 of them delivered in a mere 38 minutes, to be exact. Romney’s biggest whopper remains his promise to balance the budget while raising defense spending by $2 trillion; and by extending the Bush tax cuts and implementing new ones that overwhelmingly favors the uber rich and corporations. Kaching-– add another $5 trillion debt to the US Treasury.
Now, Romney claims that it will all be paid for by cutting costs in discretionary programs (sans defense), and by closing tax loopholes and eliminating exemptions. But he has adamantly refused to identify which loopholes and exemptions he would eliminate. And the only cut out of the discretionary budget that he identified was to end the public subsidy of the Public Broadcast System, which includes among other programs, debate moderator Jim “call me a feckless whimp” Leher‘s Newshour, and Sesame Street.
If Big Bird becomes the main course for the Romney’s Thanksgiving spread, expect the appetizers to include Kermit frog legs, served up by a submissive staff of former educators: Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, and Mrs. Sparklenose.
UPDATE 10/5: Huffpo quotes Rick Santorum on killing Big Bird:
“I’ve voted to kill Big Bird in the past,” he said when asked about his position on the issue. “So, I have a record there that I have to disclose. That doesn’t mean I don’t like Big Bird. I mean, you can kill things and still like them, maybe to eat them, I don’t know.”
Pass the gravy.
Rethug Dog Food Redux
The Grand Poobah of Obama Derangement Syndrome, Glenn Beck, photographed inside a voting booth
Twenty eight months ago, US posted a diary titled: Republican Dog Food.
Excerpt:
“… former Republican Party leader Rep. Tom Davis this week observed that “the Republican brand is in the trash can. . . if we were dog food, they would take us off the shelf.”
Which inspired the following comment:
So distressed at Barack Obama’s successful “Change” theme, the Repugs have tried to claim some of that turf as their own with their new campaign slogan—”Change You Deserve.” Unfortunately for them, that is the trademarked advertising slogan for the anti-depressant Effexor, used to treat generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder in adults. (Who said that the Most Highs don’t have a sense of humor?)
Nearly two years later, we did a followup titled Teh Crazy Poll, which cited a number of poll derived metrics pertaining to Obama Derangement Syndrome [ODS], concluding with this:
“Bruce Bartlett, Deputy Assistant Secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department during the George H.W. Bush Administration, gets the last word. In his post yesterday titled Why I Am Not a Republican:
“I can only conclude from this new poll of 2003 self-identified Republicans nationwide that between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Time for an update. In Republican brand tanking with electorate, Big Orange blogger Joan McCarter cites a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, that includes the following graph:
Joan sums it up as follows:
“The favorability ratings for both the GOP and the tea party are totally underwater, with just 39 percent approving of the GOP and 32 percent liking the tea party. Among self-identified party members, Democrats have a five-point edge over Republicans in favorability, 89 percent of Democrats are positive, versus 84 percent of Republicans. And here’s where it gets interesting.
The difference is that 32 percent of Americans in this survey identify themselves as Democrats, vs. 25 percent as Republicans, levels that have held essentially steady the past three years. That’s down for the GOP, which achieved parity with the Democrats in 2003 but has lost ground since. (Independents now predominate, accounting for 39 percent in this survey.)
Intensity of sentiment is another challenge for the Republican Party: Substantially more Americans see it “strongly” negatively than strongly positively, 33 percent vs. 18 percent, while the Democratic Party breaks even (28 percent on both sides).On the other hand, because fewer Democrats are registered to vote, the Democratic Party slips among registered voters to 48-46 percent, favorable-unfavorable, essentially an even split. The GOP, though, remains underwater among registered voters, 42-53 percent.
Ah, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Killa The Magilla
I know you’re wondering too, who the effen hell is Omney Yan? No— really. Who is he.
“The taller the tree, the sweeter the peach
I’ll give you the whole megillah* in a one word speech”
—Frank Sinatra in Come Blow Your Horn
Quoi de neuf, chiens.* You Leftist Elitists may be unacquainted with Magilla, a cartoon gorilla from the Gorillini tribe, who spends the bulk of his time languishing in the front window of Peebles’ Pet Shop eating beaucoup bananas and being a general drain on a small businessman’s bottom line. Mr. Peebles would heavily discount Magilla’s asking price, and Magilla wound up being repeatedly outsourced for brief quixotic episodes in the “real world”; typically, to Wall Street thieves who needed someone to bail out break into a bank or two, or some other less imaginative malfeasance.
A las, Magilla was always returned to the Pet shop, and full refunds demanded. Because even in cartoons, it’s not about the tasty carrots or the power of cheese; it’s all about the money. Always.
On the other hand. “Megillah” is also one of the five books of the Hebrew scriptures; notable as a long and tedious account of a sort of holocaust prequel, the entire reading of which is often used as a natural sedative during the Jewish holiday of Purim. Hence the birth of the phrase, “The full megillah.” Funny thing; Ahasuerus, dickish ruler of Persia at the time— yeah, same old Persia— also suffered from— wait for it— insomnia. But there was no Book of Esther yet; the poor schmuck had to rely on the not-so-efficacious court records being read to him to help him sleep.
Bof. Where was I— So what has this got to do with the debates between President Obama and Omney Yan? Well yada, the likelihood of some one of Romony’s speechifyin’ sycophants coming up with the zinger “Killa the Magilla” is, adMittedly, much much slimmer than Chris Christie after a twelve month twinkie pizza bender; but hey they’re dorks; it could happen.
More to the point is the narrative around creating zinger “moments” the LoFos (Low information Voters) can extract from what must pass for their cortical overlays, and bring it to bear in the present moment in such a way that it hermetically divorces it from every other stenchi-fied thing they have on file about Mitt Romoney. And at this late date, that should be enough dope to knock down a dancing horse.
So the chances of one of those clowns writing a zinger like that— and having it delivered effectively by the Romoney 2012-5000DW6-J are— in a “one word speech”—
unimaginable.
* What up, dawgs?
Cognitive Dissonance & The Unskewed Polls
Limbaugh just before his head explodes in a fit of cognitive dissonance
“Never get high on your own supply.” —Notorious Big.
When the polls started turning up for Obama and the down ticket Dems after the DNC convention, the GOPers dismissed it as a “sugar high.” Some high octane sugar, that. Obama now leads in all nine swing states, each outside the margin of error. Worse for Team Romney, the internals showed a double digit drop in the number of people saying the country is on the wrong track. Obama’s favorability ratings have now risen to the crucial 50% level. Romney’s pick of Paul “Voucherize Medicare” Ryan to be his Veep has hurt him in the crucial senior demographic. And Obama now leads on the question of who is the better candidate to improve the economy, formerly Romney’s greatest strength. While the post-convention bounce could have been explained away as a short term effect, the political impact of the leaked 47% vid has unmistakably bent the arc of the campaign towards Obama and the Dems, leaving the Rethugs flailing around for a new narrative spin.
Enter one Dean Chambers, an obscure right wing blogger who claims to have scientifically “unskewed” the polls by eliminating a presumed oversampling of the number of Democratic respondents. Presto change-o — Romney actually enjoys a substantial lead. (For an analysis of why Chambers’ methodology sucks, see this article from TPM, featuring a critique from the former champion of GOP leaning pollsters, Scott Rassmussen himself.) Citing what is rapidly becoming known as the “Poll Truthers” movement, ThinkProgress reports that:
Rush Limbaugh also outlined the pollster conspiracy on his radio show: “They’re all Democrats. They’re all liberals. They just have different jobs. The polls are the replacement refs. They see certain things. They don’t see other things. They don’t call certain things, and other things go by. In this case, what they’re trying to do is exactly what they’ve done in your case: frustrate you, make you pull your hair out, say, what the hell’s happening to the country? They want you thinking the country’s lost. They want you thinking your side’s lost. They want you thinking it’s over for what you believe. And that makes you stay home and not vote. That’s what they’re hoping.”
Limbaugh, while doing his best to rally his troops, is thus planting the seeds of a post-election narrative that blames the liberal media and their co-conspirators in the pollster business. Jason Linkins and Elyse Siegel over at HuffPo write that there is a longer term goal, with a clever Catch-22 hook:
So you should look at “Unskewed Polls” as less of a strategic effort to get Romney elected, and more of a long-game effort to mount a war against pollsters once the election is over. (They will magically have a case, no matter which way the election turns out: if Obama wins, pollsters are in the tank; if Romney wins, pollsters are terrible and wrong about everything.)
I would offer a third possibility: that the Rethugs are seeding a post-election rationale to be employed after they steal the election: “See, there was polling precedent that showed Romney was winning all along.” I’m not ready to abandon that possibility just yet, given their track record in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. (See, e.g., former DNC communications spokeswoman and current MSNBC political analyst Karen Finney‘s repeated warnings about same.) But for now I am more intrigued by Billmon‘s analysis over at the Big Orange titled, “Skewed polls and the paranoid style” (the latter phrase being an homage to Douglas Hoffsteader‘s 1964 classic essay, “The Paranoid Style”).
The most striking feature of the current right-wing obsession with “skewed polls” is that it combines two of modern conservatism’s most pronounced tendencies: A complete rejection of empirical reality, and a deep conviction that said reality is in fact a conspiratorial plot by the enemies of America (a.k.a. the liberals) to poison public opinion— to win through deception what they cannot achieve openly. Memories of the right’s insistence that all was going well with the bloody occupation of Iraq are hard to avoid— likewise the manufactured “debate” over the causes and consequences of global climate change, the imaginary role of ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act in the subprime mortgage meltdown, and just about every other instance in which conservative ideology has had to come face to face with the cold, hard facts of life. In each case, the knee-jerk conservative response to inconvenient (and unfriendly) truths has been to mimic Adam Savage’s line from Mythbusters: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” Except Adam was being ironic. They are not.
The “complete rejection of empirical” reality and substituting a different one was, of course, enshrined in the political universe when a Bushian political operative, widely believed to be Karl Rove, told author Ron Suskind:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”[2]
Writer and blogger Julian Sanchez describes this cognitive mindset as “epistemic closure”:
One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile. Think of the complete panic China’s rulers feel about any breaks in their Internet firewall: The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It’s not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative. Rather, it’s that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between “critic of conservatives and “wicked liberal smear artist” undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter. If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely— maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation. A more intellectually secure conservatism would welcome this, because it wouldn’t need to define itself primarily in terms of its rejection of an alien enemy.
h/t Chris Hayes.
Billmon again:
There simply is no getting around the fact that the mentality of the modern grassroots conservative movement is in almost all particulars the spitting image of a 20th century totalitarian political party— an “epistemically closed” loop of self-reference and self-delusion. In other words: a cult. The upshot is that one of America’s two main political parties has managed to turn itself into the proverbial insane asylum run by the inmates. . . But for most sane (or at least semi-sane) people, there comes a point where you realize you’ve lost the thread and have to back up a bit— and maybe enter rehab. But epistemic cults have no such corrective mechanisms. They never go in reverse, never question their own assumptions, and most of all never ever admit error. Their belief systems are too fragile. Break the gestalt, even in one place, and the entire edifice may come crashing down. Which may explain why totalitarian cults that actually achieve unchallenged state power usually end up astonishing the world not just with their barbarity, but with the sheer zaniness of their thinking. They can’t stop themselves from taking their obsessions to the ultimate extreme.
Or as The Urantia Book might put it:
But life will become a burden of existence unless you learn how to fail gracefully. There is an art in defeat which noble souls always acquire; you must know how to lose cheerfully; you must be fearless of disappointment. Never hesitate to admit failure. Make no attempt to hide failure under deceptive smiles and beaming optimism. It sounds well always to claim success, but the end results are appalling. Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world of unreality and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment.
