The Shiznit

Well folks, the democrats have officially slid into a state of pure insanity. Recent events include: giving somebody crack to "register" voters (such as Mary Poppins); telling seniors that Bushhas a "secret plan" to take away their checks; telling young people that Bush has a "secret plan" to re-institute the draft (notwithstanding that this measure - which would require congressional approval of course - was introduced by the democrats earlier this month and was voted down 401-2 or something); telling mothers that being a mom is not a "real job" (not to mention being a teacher or a librarian); telling americans that the war on terror isn't really a war, but that they'd win it anyway; out of the blue pointing out than an opponents daughter is gay (thus was the first leg of their one-two punch bashing children and spouses of opponents); telling people in Nevada that Kerry would keep nuclear waste from being stored in Nevada (although he has cast several votes making it easier to store waste there); officially boiling down their case for the presidency to one word - Haliburton (notwitstanding the fact that even the New York Times admitted the day after the vice presidential debate, "[T]here is no evidence Mr. Cheney has pulled strings on Halliburton's behalf" and "The independent General Accountability Office concluded that Halliburton was the only company that could have provided the services the Army needed at the outset of the war."); and calling the commander in chief "brain dead" (Joe Biden).

I guess it makes sense because it is becoming more and more obvious that they are losing. There is no question that Bush is leading now.

The Mason-Dixon state polls for the last two days (yesterday they released Red Battleground States, today they released blue battleground states) are good news for the Prez. The Mason-Dixon polls were by far the most accurate polls in 2002 - getting 23 of 24 winners right and being off by an average of 1.8% (as opposed to Zogby's abysmal results). Here they are:

Red States:
OH: Bush +1
NH: Bush +3
WV: Bush +5
NV: Bush +10
CO: Bush +6
MO: Bush + 5
NC: Bush +8

Blue States:
PA: K46-B45
OR: K46-B45
WI: K45-B45
IA: B49-K43
NM: B49-K44
MI: K47-B46
MN: B47-K45

Also, I am a premium member to Rasmussen's polling service, which gives daily tracking numbers for selected battleground states. Bush is up 2 in Florida, up 3 in Ohio, and tied in Minnesota. Other state polls today include Quinnipiac's florida poll - Bush up 1 - and the Detroit News Michigan poll which - get this - shows a 4 pt Bush lead. Also, the most recent polls in Wisconsin and Iowa (both blues) show Bush ahead and trending upward.

Great piece today by Michael Barone - THE political guru today - that breaks down the state of the nat'l polls. He estimates that if the election were held today, Bush would win 51-47. He explains this by showing what he believes to be the ceiling for the two parties (53-54% for reps and 51-52% for the dems) and the polls when taken as a whole.

Another great piece by Coulter today. She's my personal favorite of course.

Among his other pointless carping about the war in Iraq, Kerry keeps
claiming the military is overextended. His supporters claim Bush has a secret
plan to bring back the draft. Whatever happened to all those gays who wanted to
join the military? We haven't heard a peep out of them lately. How about
rounding up a "Coalition of the Fabulous," Sen. Kerry? And what does his good
pal Mary Cheney tell him about that?

With the election a few weeks away, the two main reasons Kerry has
settled on for why you should vote for him are: (1) Dick Cheney has a lesbian
daughter, and (2) Halliburton!

.......

Most amazingly, the Democrats have the chutzpah to complain that Bush
claimed he was a "uniter" and yet(!), "have you ever seen America more divided?"
– as the Democrats' Demosthenes Edwards put it.

This from a candidate (I almost said a "man") whose campaign falsely
accused the president of stealing an election, barring a million black voters
from the polls, and sending a thousand American soldiers to their deaths just
for oil.

Coincidentally, the very day of the vice presidential debate, a gun was
fired into a Bush-Cheney campaign office in Bearden, Tenn. – one of a series of
violent attacks on Republican offices around the country. (You can tell it was
Democrats firing those guns because none of the shots ever hit anything.)

Also that day, a group of liberal loonies stormed a Bush-Cheney office
in Orlando, Fla., and ransacked the place. A few weeks earlier, a 62-year-old
woman in Manhattan was beaten with a cane by an 86-year-old woman for carrying a Bush-Cheney sign.

On the basis of their own insane, violent behavior toward Republicans,
Democrats demand to be put in the White House – so the violence will stop. At
this rate, it's only a matter of time before the Kerry campaign announces that
anti-Bush insurgents control most of the Bush-Cheney 2004 headquarters, and that
the sooner the U.S. pulls out of those quagmires the better.

If only we could get Democrats to show a little of that manly anger toward the terrorists, maybe Americans would be able to trust them with national security.

She rules. Btw, has anyone else noted the recent increase in usage of the term "chutzpah"? I guess it's one of those words without a good english translation. Pretty cool.

Finally, a must read piece (subscription required) by the 2004 Nobel Prize winner in economics. In what seems to me to be perfectly obvious, he concludes that labor supply is not fixed, and indeed it is inversely related to the marginal tax rates. His paper is available here and should be required reading for every Kerry supporter. To wit:

Let's begin by considering a commonly held view which says that labor
supply is not affected by tax rates. This idea holds that labor participation
would remain steady when tax rates are either raised or lowered. If you are a
policy maker and you subscribe to this, then you can confidently increase
marginal tax rates as high as you like to attain the revenues you desire. Not
only that, but you can move those tax rates up and down whenever you like and
blithely assume that this will have no effect on output.

But economic theory and data have come together to prove this notion
wrong, and we have many different laboratories -- or countries -- in which we
can view live experiments. The most useful comparison is between the U.S. and
the countries of Europe, because these economies share traits; but the data also
hold when we consider other countries (more on those later).
This issue is
encapsulated in one question that is currently puzzling policy makers: Why do
Americans work so much more than Europeans? The answer is important because it
suggests policy proposals that will improve European standards of living (which
should give a boost to its gross national happiness, by the way). However, an
incorrect answer to that question will result in policies that will only
exacerbate Europe's problems and could have implications for other countries
that are looking for best practices.

Here's a startling fact: Based on labor market statistics from the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Americans aged 15-64, on
a per-person basis, work 50% more than the French. Comparisons between Americans
and Germans or Italians are similar. What's going on here? What can possibly
account for these large differences in labor supply? It turns out that the
answer is not related to cultural differences or institutional factors like
unemployment benefits, but that marginal tax rates explain virtually all of this
difference. I admit that when I first conducted this analysis I was surprised by
this finding, because I fully expected that institutional constraints are
playing a bigger role. But this is not the case. (Citations and more complete
data can be found in my paper, at http://www.minneapolisfed.org/.)

Let's take another look at the data. According to the OECD, from
1970-74 France's labor supply exceeded that of the U.S. Also, a review of other
industrialized countries shows that their labor supplies either exceeded or were
comparable to the U.S. during this period. Jump ahead two decades and you will
find that France's labor supply dropped significantly (as did others), and that
some countries improved and stayed in line with the U.S. Controlling for other
factors, what stands out in these cross-country comparisons is that when
European countries and U.S. tax rates are comparable, labor supplies are
comparable.

And this insight doesn't just apply to Western industrialized
economies. A review of Japanese and Chilean data reveals the same result. This
is an important point because some critics of this analysis have suggested that
cultural differences explain the difference between European and American labor
supplies. The French, for example, prefer leisure more than do Americans or, on
the other side of the coin, that Americans like to work more. This is
silliness.

.....

This analysis has important implications for policy -- and not just for
Europeans, but for the U.S. as well. For example, much has been made during this
election season about whether the current administration's tax cuts were good or
bad for the economy, but that is more a political question than a policy
consideration and it misses the point. The real issue is about whether it is
better to tweak the economy with short-lived stimulus plans or to establish an
efficient tax system with low tax rates that do not change with the political
climate.

What does this mean for U.S. tax policy? It means that we should stop
focusing our attention on the recent tax cuts and, instead, start thinking about
tax rates. And that means that we should roll back the 1993 tax rate increases
and re-establish those from the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Just as they did in the
late 1980s, and just as they would in Europe, these lower rates would increase
the labor supply, output would grow and tax revenues would increase.

I just cannot get over how stupid liberals are. I cannot. If they had their way, we'd be just like Europe - a once great civilization that became impotent in its slide into moral relativity and multilateralmania.