The Senate editor of The Cook Political Report, Jennifer Duffy, notes that the toss-up races don’t always break evenly. She points to the Democratic wave year of 2006, when the party won 89 percent of the nine races that The Cook Political Report rated as toss-ups before the election. In 2008, Democrats won 78 percent of the toss-up races, while in 2004, a good year for Republicans, the GOP won 89 percent of the most competitive races. In other words, these wave elections produce a cascading effect in which the close races often break disproportionately toward the wave.

For reasons unexplained they don’t mention 1994. I have to imagine that that, too, was a year in which the overwhelming majority of “50/50 tossups” in fact went in one direction.

By the way, I am using The War Between the Undead States sort of unfairly, in sort of a strawman sort of way. We’ve discussed this (very pleasantly) in the comments before, and he agrees with the basic principle. But… I don’t know, I forget why, he still doubts this basic tendency will occur. He sort of notes, on an intellectual level, that this happens, but in his gut, in his intuition, it isn’t really there.

About the Spin: Some readers are worried about setting expectations too high, because, if we then win, but fall short of the bar we’ve set, the MFM/DNC gets to spin it as a loss.

That doesn’t really scare me for the same reason The Black Knight’s claims of “flesh wound” don’t bother me. Yeah, okay, you still have your had. Score. Wow, you like totally won and stuff.

also:

U.S. College Pushes Anti-American, Pro-Islam Book

-By Warner Todd Huston

We send our students to college to learn what they need to know to become good American citizens. From this knowledge we hope that they will realize useful, maybe even successful, lives. Perhaps they’ll even gain personal improvement through introspection from it all. At least that’s what we used to think. Apparently, these days we send kids to college to be trained to hate the U.S.A. and at least in the case of Brooklyn College to learn that today Muslims are treated as badly as the African Americans or the Japanese internees of our past.

Brooklyn college has assigned all incoming freshmen to read a book titled, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America,” by Moustafa Bayoumi. The book is a series of vignettes imparting the immigration stories of seven Muslim Americans and their claims of the discrimination they’ve met in a post 9/11 America. Bayoumi could have written an uplifting tale of the freedoms America offers, but instead it is little else but an attack on America.

The story supposedly regales us of the lives of Muslims who have “found themselves part of the newest suspect class in the United States.” Bayoumi, also a Brooklyn College English professor, absurdly claims that the Muslims in his book — and by extension throughout America — have gone “from simply invisible to being regarded with suspicion and even actively pursued” by the U.S. government.

The New York Daily News leads us through Bayoumi’s conclusions:

Bayoumi sees America more darkly. In the book’s afterword, he writes that “Muslims and Arabs are scrutinized for sedition at every turn,” that Arab-American life includes “substantial government surveillance and repression,” that “today, everyone – immigrant and citizen, activist and spectator – has become vulnerable,” that “spies and government informants have penetrated Muslim-American communities” and that “torture has been normalized into American culture.”

In sum, he asserts, “What we are currently living through is the slow creep of imperial high-handedness into the rest of American society, performed in the name of national security and facilitated through the growth of racist policies.”

Bayoumi is obviously a raging anti-American. He outrageously believes that Arab Americans are facing the same situation that Japanese Americans faced when FDR ordered their internment during WWII.

In an interview with Penguin Books, Bayoumi said the following:

I believe we will come to see this period as being gripped by a similar kind of mass hysteria that fueled the Palmer Raids and Japanese Internment. What’s depressing is that this would happen in our post Civil Rights era, when I thought we would have learned from the mistakes of the past.

This is flat out nonsense. Muslims face nothing like the sort of fear and discrimination Japanese Americans faced during WWII. In fact, Muslim Americans today face nothing so bad as the race hatred that Jewish Americans face today. FBI stats show that Jews are several times more likely to be the victims of racial and religious discrimination than are Muslims. Muslim discrimination barely registers as a blip on the FBI’s stats.

The last year that the FBI has released full data for hate crimes is 2008, but it shows that hate crimes against Jews far out number those against Muslims.

FBI Hate Crime Statistics: Religious bias

* Of the 1,732 victims of anti-religious hate crimes: 66.1 percent were targeted because of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
* 7.5 percent were victims because of an anti-Islamic bias.
* 5.1 percent were victims because of an anti-Catholic bias.
* 3.6 percent were victims because of an anti-Protestant bias.
* 0.8 percent were targeted because of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
* 2.8 percent were victims because of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).
* 4.0 percent were victims because of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).

In light of these stats, Bayoumi looks like a wild-eyed polemicist instead of an aggrieved minority.

Yet here is this author making these absurd claims anyway. Worse his book was chosen by an American college as an important text for incoming freshmen and his lies raised to the heights of important “literature.”

This is what Brooklyn College is teaching its students, that Muslims are being treated as badly as were Japanese Americans who were rounded up by the thousands and sent to camps under armed guards. Bayoumi also used the example of the Palmer Raids, a campaign set in motion during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency when some 500 known American left-wing radicals were rounded up and forcibly deported.

So, where are the concentration camps for Muslims that this evil United State has created to oppress Muslims? Where are the hundreds of Muslims forcibly deported? Where are the mounting cases of anti-Muslim discrimination in these United States?

There aren’t any.

Because of this incident, Brooklyn College has already lost the support of one wealthy alumnus. Bruce Kessler, Class of 1968, has cut the college out of his will because of the assignment of Bayoumi ‘s book to incoming freshmen.

Kessler says that Bayoumi is a “radical pro-Palestinian professor.”

Looking over Bayoumi’s screed it’s hard to fault Kessler’s logic.

by Laryn

We hear today that President Obama has granted “Direct Access” of the White House to the Muslim Brotherhood, but refused even a quick meeting with Texas Governor Rick Perry while Obama was visiting in the State. A booby prize was offered to Perry, granting him a meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Counterrorism Czar John Brennan. Perry declined the “opportunity,” but no booby prize for the Muslim Brotherhood, who are meeting as we speak at the White House tonight. The White House declared there will be “no red tape” for the Islamic terror backers. Did I mention there is another Iftar dinner at the White House for the “brothers,” after the meeting White House workshop?

Muslim Brotherhood

So what is the purpose of the workshop? From Big Peace taken from the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) newsletter, this is the purpose

…Leaders from Muslim organizations around the nation, particularly social service organizations, are invited to a workshop with representatives from the DOA, Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Health and Human Services, the White House, Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security, and more. Twenty five to thirty Muslim leaders representing 20 Muslim organizations are expected to attend the workshop.

According to a representative of CCMO, this workshop is designed to clarify how Muslim nonprofits, mosques, Islamic centers, and social service organizations can strengthen their communities through more direct access to opportunities provided to social service agencies at the Federal level. “It will hopefully help cut through some of the red tape and shine light on the many opportunities for funding, government assistance, and resources that we just don’t know about at the local level,” said Elsanousi.

More from Christine Brim at Big Peace on the redistribution of your money:

This workshop constitutes an abdication of their professional responsibility by all government participants – and a taxpayer-funded government stimulus program for the attending Muslim Brotherhood-associated groups. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, is a global Islamist political movement dedicated to imposing Shariah law on all nations and institutions. Their credo is “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

Why do we think some of these groups attending, possibly all, may be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood?

Because the sponsoring organization – the Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations (CCMO), co-sponsoring with the Department of Agriculture – has a long history of associations with the Muslim Brotherhood. They also signed a 2009 American Muslim Task Force statement threatening to “suspend” relations with the FBI, because the FBI was investigating possible links to homegrown terrorism in mosques and other Muslim organizations.

Obama gave this Iftar speech last year at the White House:
(more…)

The United States and China discussed human rights at a round of high-level talks. One might be surprised that the meeting did not so much focus on the egregious atrocities that have gone on under this Communist tyranny from the time of its founding to this very day. Rather, Obama administration officials allowed America to be berated on issues such as homelessness and the new Arizona immigration law.

Before America as a nation takes this criticism seriously, perhaps we should consider what the law entails and how this compares with what goes on in Red China.

The Arizona law will permit police to ascertain an individual’s identity and thus legality after initial contact. Essentially, this isn’t anything that isn’t already authorized by law and is perhaps an even better guarantor of individual liberty and dignity than what is already permitted.

In a number of decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that police could compel an individual to identify themselves even when it had not been established that the law had even been violated or that there was probable cause indicating such. Interestingly, there were no riotous mobs in the streets when it was thought these kinds of identity checks were only going to be aimed at actual Americans.

Even if scores of those with no legal standing in the United States are removed from the streets of Arizona as a result of the new law, they will still fair considerably better than those taken into custody in dictatorships. In Iran, several American coed tourists straying over the Islamic Republic’s border with Iraq were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

And unlike illegals here, those there are not fawned over with lavish government handouts with their bureaucratic benefactors hoping the outsiders will recast the entire society in a foreign image.

It could be properly argued that the American students deserved some kind of punishment for violating another country’s sovereign borders. What likely cannot be argued against is that the accommodations they languished in made Camp Gitmo look like a swanky New York City hotel. Guards there are not going out of their way to provide American delicacies or to treat our holy books and founding documents with a nauseating degree of deference.

In China, one house church pastor sentenced to prison was allowed to languish and suffer without access to his diabetic medicine. And it could be argued that he can be considered one of the lucky ones. It has been claimed that organs are regularly harvested from dissident Tibetans and Christians.

If Red China had the illegal alien problem plaguing the United States, do you honestly believe authorities there would do little than look over the papers of these transnational vagrants, whisper sweet nothings in their ears, and release them on their recognizance which many have very little of to begin with given their connections to the drug trade, human smuggling, and assorted gangs. And given the propensity of a certain atrocity to occur throughout Chinese history (be it during the Great Cultural Revolution or in rumors a few years back regarding what was being done to fetuses), if a wife in China told her husband that they would be having a little Mexican later that evening that wouldn’t mean he should expect to have a taco or burrito for dinner.

Many infringements upon human rights stem from an improper understanding of the relationship between social institutions such as government and the individual. In America, the extremes of these have been minimized in part due to the assumption that the individual possesses worth of his own created in the image of God. The individual is not owned by the state.

As an officially atheistic socialist country, the Chinese Communist Party and state see themselves as the highest authority with these determining that it is not so much the individual that counts but rather the group as a whole. After all, if we are simply nothing more than animated primordial ooze as the Darwinian insists and upon which Marxist-Leninism rests, it is kind of hard to get worked up over one person when there are over a billion more walking around easily capable of taking the place of a defective cog in the machine of state.
(more…)

submitted by Patty

If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a TelePrompTer installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?

If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan’s holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia , would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the nonexistent “Austrian language,” would you have brushed it off as a  minor slip?

If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the United States , would you have said that he is clueless.

If George W. Bush would have flown all the way to Denmark to make a five minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him walking out his front door in Texas , would you have thought he was a self important, conceited, egotistical jerk.

If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to “Cinco de Cuatro” in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?

If George W. Bush had misspelled the word “advice” would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potatoes as proof of what a dunce he is?

If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he’s a hypocrite?

If George W. Bush’s administration had okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually get what happened on 9-11?
(more…)

also:

Thought for the Day

Islam / Women’s Rights, Democracy, and Freedom of Religion are incompatible. Only one will survive in the end.

From Gateway Pundit

The patriotic crowd that had already gathered at the Lincoln Memorial today in our nation’s capital stood and sang “God Bless America” at 6:30 AM during a sound check.

No wonder the left hates these guys.

THE CROWD IS MASSIVE!

The BBC posted this photo of the giant rally today.
Glenn Beck announced, “I heard two estimates from the media. One was 300,000 and the other was 500,000. So, who knows just how many are actually here today.”
Organizers were expecting 100,000 patriots at the rally.

The state-run media is predictably annoyed with this patriotic rally.

The rally is streaming live at the Restoring Honor homepage and is also playing on C-SPAN.

Freedom’s Lighthouse has lovely Sarah Palin’s speech at the rally.
What an awesome speech!

Meanwhile, Al Sharpton’s counter freedom rally managed to attract only 3,000 supporters.

also:

Hate Crimes in US: More Attacks on Whitey Than Muslims

You certainly won’t see this make any headlines in the state-run media.

According to the FBI there are more hate crimes against Caucasians than against Muslims in the United States.
McClatchy reported:

Hate crimes directed against Muslims remain relatively rare, notwithstanding the notoriety gained by incidents such as recent vandalism at the Madera Islamic Center.

Jews, lesbians, gay men and Caucasians, among others, are all more frequently the target of hate crimes, FBI records show. Reported anti-Muslim crimes have declined over recent years, though they still exceed what occurred prior to the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

“We see hate crimes generally go in spurts, and are often in relation to international or domestic events,” Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Friday.

In 2008, 105 hate crime incidents against Muslims were reported nationwide. There were 10 times as many incidents that were recorded as anti-Jewish during the same year, the most recent for which figures are available.

The number of anti-Muslim hate crimes leaped to a record 481 in 2001, apparently prompted by the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. It hasn’t been nearly that high since.

All told, 7,783 reported hate crime incidents occurred in 2008, including 1,381 in California. These incidents can take many forms.

also:

This November America will turn toward socialism-Marxism or go back to a democracy

From Gateway Pundit

US taxpayers are forking out $16,000 to pay for Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s three-nation outreach trip to the Mideast. This is the same imam who is behind the Ground Zero Victory Mosque and who blamed the US for the 9-11 attacks.
Via Breitbart:

AP News reported:

American taxpayers will pay the imam behind plans for a mosque near the Manhattan site of the Sept. 11 attacks $3,000 in fees for a three-nation outreach trip to the Middle East that will cost roughly $16,000, the State Department said Wednesday.

The department said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf will get a daily $200 honorarium for the 15-day tour to Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which is intended to promote religious tolerance.

Airfare is included, as well as the standard federal government per diem for expenses and lodging in each of the cities he will visit, spokesman P.J. Crowley said. Those per diem rates range from nearly $400 to nearly $500, according to official documents.

The imam’s organization, The Cordoba Initiative, referred questions on the matter to the State Department.

Rauf starts his tour Thursday in Bahrain and ends it in the United Arab Emirates Sept. 2. At each stop he is expected to discuss Muslim life in America and promote religious tolerance. He will not be allowed to raise funds for the mosque on the trip, Crowley said.

From Powerline

The “Jobsgate” story seems to have taken another turn. Readers will recall that Joe Sestak, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Pennsylvania, stated back in February that the Obama White House offered him a job if he would decline to challenge incumbent Arlen Specter. The White House eventually admitted that it did indeed offer a position to Sestak and, in addition, offered a choice of three jobs to Andrew Romanoff if he would back out of the Senate race in Colorado.

In a memo written by the White House counsel’s office, the administration stated that Rahm Emanuel “enlisted” Bill Clinton in its effort to induce Sestak to concede the nomination to Specter. According to the memo, Clinton “agreed to raise with Congressman Sestak” potential job “options” that were to be considered as “alternatives” to his Senate candidacy. “White House staff did not discuss these options with Congressman Sestak,” the memo insists.

But now, Bill Clinton is denying involvement in the effort to push Sestak aside. Campaigning for Sestak in Wilkes Barre, Clinton said, and then repeated, “I didn’t try to get [Sestak] out of the race.”

Clinton’s denial can, perhaps, be reconciled with the White House’s account. It is possible that Emanuel enlisted Clinton, that Clinton agreed to undertake the task, but that (for whatever reason) Clinton didn’t live up to his agreement.

But even this unlikely scenario leaves a problem for the administration. For Sestak has made it clear that someone, on behalf of the administration, offered him a position in exchange for bowing out of the race, and the White House agrees with him. If Clinton is telling the truth, then who made the offer? The White House says it didn’t and Clinton says he didn’t either. So whodunit?

Rep. Darrell Issa, who has been pursuing this matter, promptly took note of Clinton’s problematic denial. If the Republicans take control of the House, he will surely add this development to his list of areas to explore.

Via Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator.

By J. Robert Smith

Based on the people’s primal right to self-defense, the Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona is a declaration of moral abandonment. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton’s ruling that stays portions of the Arizona illegals law abets the administration’s moral abandonment — and, not incidentally, stands good law on its head.

The Obama administration asserts the de jure paramountcy of the national government in the enforcement of immigration laws and border defense, yet de facto, the national government has been wholly inadequate in executing the aforementioned duties. Its inadequacy flows chiefly from political sources rather than reasons of resource or competence. The national government stands accused of a failure of will. Thereby, the Obama administration and the national government are defaulting in a basic duty to the people: to attend to their defense.

The obscenity of the Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona is that, in practical terms, it asserts the legal right of the national government to do as little as it chooses to provide for immigration enforcement and border defense. The administration’s underlying argument topples common sense and common decency. The lawsuit makes national immigration laws mere façades — if Washington chooses. It argues that the people have little say in securing the nation’s borders. (more…)

It’s Grueling… Recovery Vacation Summer Continues: 2 Vacations Down – 2 to Go For Obama Family This Month

from the Gateway Pundit

As Rush says, “The Obamas party like royalty as the country boils over in disgust.”

Two down – Two to go…
The Obama’s four vacation month is half over.
The Exurban League reported via FOX Nation:

While many Americans are cutting back on their vacation plans or eliminating them altogether, Barack Obama is setting an aspirational example for all of us. Sure, times are tough, but perhaps we can enjoy a life of leisure vicariously through our betters.

On July 16-18, the Obamas enjoyed their first summer vacation in beautiful Bar Harbor, Maine. The idyllic town has long been favorite summer getaway for the rich and powerful going back to the Gilded Age. Truly a resort fit for a king public servant.
(more…)

Ed Lasky

Jonathan Schanzer writes a very good , brief article in the Weekly Standard regarding efforts by some Americans — including Barack Obama’s old friend, Rashid Khalidi — to send a ship to break the blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. This is a blockade designed by Israel to prevent Hamas from continuing its terrorism against Israel. He quotes Andy McCarthy, who had previously asked the same question, and focuses on one point in particular raised by McCarthy:

In the end, it is McCarthy’s third point that is the most convincing: The Justice Department, under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, could also investigate American flotilla organizers for providing material support to a terrorist group….

According to a Supreme Court decision in June (Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project), the prohibition against material support can apply even when the offerings are not money or weapons.
(more…)

Jobless and Staying That Way

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Americans have almost always taken growth for granted. Recessions kick in, financial crises erupt, yet these events have generally been thought of as the exception, a temporary departure from an otherwise steady upward progression.

But as expectations for the recovery diminish daily and joblessness shows no sign of easing — as the jobs report on Friday showed — a different view is taking hold. And with it, comes implications for policymaking.

The “new normal,” as it has come to be called on Wall Street, academia and CNBC, envisions an economy in which growth is too slow to bring down the unemployment rate, while the government is forced to intervene ever more forcefully in a struggling private sector. Stocks and bonds yield paltry returns, with better opportunities available for investors overseas.
(more...)

And out-of-touch leaders don’t see the need to cool things off.

*
By PEGGY NOONAN

It is, obviously, self-referential to quote yourself, but I do it to make a point. I wrote the following on New Year’s day, 1994. America 16 years ago was a relatively content nation, though full of political sparks: 10 months later the Republicans would take the House for the first time in 40 years. But beneath all the action was, I thought, a coming unease. Something inside was telling us we were living through “not the placid dawn of a peaceful age but the illusory calm before stern storms.”

The temperature in the world was very high. “At home certain trends—crime, cultural tension, some cultural Balkanization—will, we fear, continue; some will worsen. In my darker moments I have a bad hunch. The fraying of the bonds that keep us together, the strangeness and anomie of our popular culture, the increase in walled communities . . . the rising radicalism of the politically correct . . . the increased demand of all levels of government for the money of the people, the spotty success with which we are communicating to the young America’s reason for being and founding beliefs, the growth of cities where English is becoming the second language . . . these things may well come together at some point in our lifetimes and produce something painful indeed. I can imagine, for instance, in the year 2020 or so, a movement in some states to break away from the union. Which would bring about, of course, a drama of Lincolnian darkness. . . . You will know that things have reached a bad pass when Newsweek and Time, if they still exist 15 years from now, do cover stories on a surprising, and disturbing trend: aging baby boomers leaving America, taking what savings they have to live the rest of their lives in places like Africa and Ireland.”

(more…)