Minor Thoughts from me to you

Mark Hemingway examines the accuracy and objectivity of the nation's "fact checkers". The checkers don't fare so well.

If these examples are laughably transparent attempts by the AP to weigh in with its own opinions against the opinions of the GOP candidates​—​thinly disguised as “fact checking”​—​they’re not unusual. And the rare occasions where fact checkers deign to deal with actual facts and figures inspire little more confidence.

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On Saturday, the Obama campaign released this ad attacking the Romney Medicare proposal. The ad doesn’t walk some sort of narrow line between misleading and deceiving, it’s just simply a pack of lies from top to bottom.

Yuval Levin provides his own analysis of a recent Obama campaign ad, related to Medicare reform.

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on Saturday, the Obama campaign came out with a new ad, approved by the President, claiming that Mitt Romney’s Medicare plan could require seniors to pay $6,400 more a year for health insurance. That claim is not only false, but brazenly and incontrovertibly so. Indeed, almost everything in the ad is wrong except for the phrase “I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.”

Democrats making things up about Republican reform plans? I'm shocked, simply shocked!

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Mr. Obama's suggestion that he is "only" responsible for 10% of what the government does is ludicrous. Note that in addition to his stimulus, what he calls "emergency actions" include his new health-care entitlement that will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even using low-ball assumptions.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page analyzes a recent Obama statement about the deficit ("90% of that is as a consequence of [things I'm not responsible for]."). The results are not pretty.

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In the end, Rector thinks he knows why he hasn’t been contacted by fact checkers. “They didn’t want the answer. .  .  . If they really wanted the answer, all they had to do was pick up the phone and I would talk to them until they would fall asleep,” he says. “I have the lowest possible expectations for these people.”

Mark Hemingway writes at The Weekly Standard about the media fact checkers and the debate over the Obama Administration's changes to welfare work rules.

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The Democratic Senate has not adopted a budget in three years. This is not only flagrantly irresponsible, it is a violation of federal law. Outgoing Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, who is retiring at the end of the year, apparently felt pangs of conscience, because he decided it was finally time for his committee to mark up a budget. He announced that the committee would do so, starting tomorrow.

A standard markup process begins with the committee chairman laying out a proposal, with the chairman and the ranking minority member giving opening statements. This is followed by an amendment process, in which amendments to the proposed legislation (here, the budget resolution) are offered and voted on. The markup process concludes with a committee vote on the bill or resolution as amended. In this case, Conrad assured ranking Republican Jeff Sessions that amendments would be allowed, and as recently as a few hours ago, Conrad’s and Sessions’s staffs were working out details of the amendment process.

Then, earlier this afternoon, Conrad gave a press conference in which he made the stunning announcement that there will be no budget markup after all. Instead, he will present a budget to the Budget Committee tomorrow. There will be no amendments and there will be no votes; not, at least, until after the election. Apparently Conrad had been proceeding on his own initiative, and at the 11th hour Harry Reid–supported by members of his caucus who do not want to have to go on record in favor of any budget–shut down the process.

Even though Republicans are more than happy to vote "on the record about" budgets, never fear. It's Republican obstructionism and a "do nothing" Republican Congress that's keeping Washington paralyzed.

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The evidence that Romney is lagging in the polls because voters are upset about a “war on women” -- rather than because of a bruisingly negative primary campaign or the recovering economy -- is pretty thin. But Republicans are responding not just to the polls but to the persistent mythology of the gender gap.

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post recently fell prey to this conventional wisdom, writing that “the GOP has suffered from a gender gap in every presidential election since 1980.” Suffered? Of the eight presidential elections from 1980 to 2008, Republicans won five four if you exclude 2000. Republicans carried women, albeit narrowly, three times; Democrats carried men twice. Republicans can lose even while winning men, as in 1996. Democrats can lose while winning women, as in 2004.

The evidence suggests that women are more inclined than men to vote for Democrats, but this gap doesn’t consistently help either party. It isn’t the case that the larger the gender gap, the worse Republicans do. Republicans did seven points better among men than women in 2004, when they won. They did five points better in 2008, when they lost.

Obama barely won men in 2008. If this race is at all competitive, he will lose them this time. And that’s not all we can predict. Romney will win among large subgroups of women: those who are married, those who are white, those who go to church regularly. Gender isn’t the principal determinant of women’s votes any more than it is of men’s.

I love reading about the inside baseball of politics.

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SPM’s consideration of taxes will help Obama’s reelection campaign if (and I believe it’s more like when) the Census Bureau surprises everyone and releases its related report in October of next year instead of November, as it did this year, and attempts with media help to give it greater credibility than the official measurement. By far the largest tax low-income families pay is the payroll tax. In 2011, that tax was reduced by two percentage points. As a result, when next year’s SPM report comes out, millions of Americans will no longer be “low income” under its framework. I can imagine the campaign verbiage already: “Who first broached the idea of eliminating part of the payroll tax? Why, it was Barack Obama, who singlehandedly moved millions into the middle class in one bold move, undoing much of the damage of the past decade’s misguided policies.”

Cynical and paranoid? Perhaps. But hasn't the past 50 or 60 years taught us that it's hard to be too cynical when it comes to our government?

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Take-aways: Ron Paul is not racist, an anti-semite, or anti-gay. He is however, from a much older generation and is personally uncomfortable around gays, clueless about Hispanic and Black culture, and opposed to the nation of Israel. Also, he very nearly voted against the Afghanistan War.

This is worth a read, to get a better read on Ron Paul.

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Peggy Noonan, on Newt Gingrich.

And that is exactly what I've been hearing from Newt supporters who do not listen to talk radio. They are older voters, they are not all Republicans, and when government last made progress he was part of it. They have a very practical sense of politics now. The heroic era of the presidency is dead. They are not looking to like their president or admire him, they just want someone to fix the crisis. The last time helpful things happened in Washington, he was a big part of it. So they may hire him again. Are they put off by his scandals? No. They think all politicians are scandalous.

The biggest fear of those who've known Mr. Gingrich? He has gone through his political life making huge strides, rising in influence and achievement, and then been destabilized by success, or just after it. Maybe he's made dizzy by the thin air at the top, maybe he has an inner urge to be tragic, to always be unrealized and misunderstood. But he goes too far, his rhetoric becomes too slashing, the musings he shares—when he rose to the speakership, in 1995, it was that women shouldn't serve in combat because they're prone to infections—are too strange. And he starts to write in his notes what Kirsten Powers, in the Daily Beast, remembered: he described himself as "definer of civilization . . . leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces."

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Ron Paul's new ad explains perfectly why I'm not interested in nominating Newt Gingrich.

I don't like to see Presidential candidates engaged in this kind of crony capitalism.

The Emerging Technology Fund was created at Mr. Perry's behest in 2005 to act as a kind of public-sector venture capital firm, largely to provide funding for tech start-ups in Texas. Since then, the fund has committed nearly $200 million of taxpayer money to fund 133 companies. Mr. Perry told a group of CEOs in May that the fund's "strategic investments are what's helping us keep groundbreaking innovations in the state." The governor, together with the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the Texas House, enjoys ultimate decision-making power over the fund's investments.

… All told, the Dallas Morning News has found that some $16 million from the tech fund has gone to firms in which major Perry contributors were either investors or officers, and $27 million from the fund has gone to companies founded or advised by six advisory board members. The tangle of interests surrounding the fund has raised eyebrows throughout the state, especially among conservatives who think the fund is a misplaced use of taxpayer dollars to start with.

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These are words that make me want to vote for Rick Perry. Today, if possible.

And I’ll promise you this: I’ll work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your life as I can.

These are the concerns that make me worry about having Governor Perry become President Perry.

I’d like to hear some of the more thoughtful conservatives lining up behind Perry weigh in on this. Here’s how I see it: A state government has no more awesome, complete, or solemn power than the power to execute its own citizens. If you’re going to claim to loathe big government, this is one area where you ought to be more skeptical of government than any other. Hell, if for no other reason than that it can’t be undone.

The problem here isn’t necessarily that Perry presided over the execution of a man who was likely innocent. If Perry had shown some concern about what happened in the Willingham case, maybe set up an investigation into what went wrong, perhaps even attempted to suspend executions in Texas until he could be sure checks were in place to prevent the execution of an innocent, the way George Ryan did in Illinois—if he’d done any of that, he’d at least have shown some appropriate skepticism. He’d have shown that he’s at least cognizant of the fact that government employees in law enforcement and criminal justice are just as fallible and subject to the trappings of power, bureaucracy, and public choice theory as government employees in, say, tax collection or the regulation of business.

Instead, Perry couldn’t even acknowledge the possibility of doubt about Willingham’s guilt.

This made me snicker.

But then, when I look at the field of candidates, I get that "Directed by Michael Bay" feeling. It's not as bad as I felt in 1996 when it was clear that Bob Dole was going to be the nominee. That was like watching Stephen Hawking heading out to sea on a surfboard. You didn't know exactly what would happen, but you knew it would end badly.

-- Jonah Goldberg, in today's G-File, on the field of potential 2012 Presidential candidates

Ramesh Ponnuru ponders what a Sarah Palin vs. Mitt Romney primary battle would look like.

He thinks it would probably be an ugly battle that could injure the party in a general election.

I think it'd be nice if neither one of them won. The one doesn't realize that she gives half of the country the screaming heebie-jeebies. The other can't admit that RomneyCare was a bad idea and is virtually indistinguishable from ObamaCare.

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All Republicans have to do is hold the House, win the Presidency in 2012 and pick up 3 seats in the Senate — and not have any defections in the Senate while voting. Then it's a lead pipe cinch that ObamaCare will be repealed.

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Mississippi governor Haley Barbour wants to run for President. As governor, he's supported farm subsidies, corporate welfare, and eminent domain abuse. Why would I want to vote for him, exactly?

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