Hey, It's Only Rape

Let us revisit an NFL issue that is really about liberals. When the video of Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée in a New Jersey elevator hit the news, liberals went crazy and sanctimoniously demanded that anyone accused of domestic violence be immediately terminated and shunned by society without trial and rights be damned (“NO TOLERANCE!!”). I noted at the time that as always with liberals, this extreme reaction was just a knee-jerk response meant to satisfy their self-righteousness, and that before things were over, they would completely flip their “principled” positions. Not only did they do that, but now uber-liberal sportswriter Peter King is actually arguing that we should ignore serial rapes. No... I'm not kidding.

When the Rice issue first arose, every single liberal sportswriter I can name immediately dashed out columns trying to outbid each other on smug political correctness... Rice needs to be suspended! Suspended?! Heck, he needs to be banned for life! For life? You mean forever!! Hell yes! And the NFL needs to get back the money they paid him! And it doesn’t matter that his stupid fiancée doesn’t want him punished... victims can’t be trusted when they defend the accuser..

Essentially, no punishment was harsh enough. Rice’s rights meant nothing to these writers because they claimed that domestic abuse is such a horrible thing that ideas like innocence until proven guilty should be pushed aside. The allegation itself should be enough to destroy this man’s career and ban him for life, and shame on the NFL for not acting on this immediately!... that was the take every single liberal took on the subject.

But these are liberals who were doing the talking, and as I’ve pointed out many times, that means they make extremist snap judgments, which they immediately use as a way to smugly claim moral superiority and then judge conservatives harshly for not being as “enlightened” as they are. But they won’t stick to these extremist positions. To the contrary, they will reverse their position as the “fairness” of the situation shifts until they are actually taking the exact opposite position they originally took... though they will still wallow in their claims of moral superiority for taking the extremist position. Thus, when the situation is the powerful Rice versus a helpless woman, it is ok to punish Rice harshly because she is the victim. But once it becomes the powerful NFL versus the helpless Rice, then Rice becomes the victim and they see it as unfair to let the NFL harm him.

In this instance, it took a few days for the first liberal to break ranks. This liberal realized that by suspending Rice without a hearing, the NFL was harming the career of a young black man in violation of the union contract the NFL has with its players... and that’s just wrong. With a handful of additional players soon finding themselves suspended as well (this time without videos to bring out visceral emotions), the cabal of liberal sportswriters soon began to fret about the players’ rights and how the evil NFL was trampling all over them. Bad NFL! Why would you do such a thing?

Not only did these sportswriters attack the NFL for acting before all the evidence was in, but they wanted the NFL to wait to do anything until after the criminal trials were done. Moreover, they decided that banning a player for life was just too harsh. Why would the NFL ever think this was ok? In fact, not only was banning too much, but suspending the player with pay was considered too harsh according to these liberals. Yep. And they smugly proclaimed that they were the defenders of civil rights.

So that’s where things shook out. These liberal sportswriters claimed moral superiority because they took the principled position that someone accused of domestic abuse must be immediately terminated and shunned from society. Then they flipped that around when the NFL punished Rice and they claimed moral superiority for protecting the rights of Rice... the same rights they demanded to have stripped. Talk about ironic! And the whole time, they accused anyone who didn't agree with them of being evil. Amazing.

And now it gets worse.

Among the smuggest of these liberals was Peter King of Sports Illustrated. This guy is an obnoxious, brainless, groupthink-bound liberal who thrives on liberal smugness, all the while imagining that he is a moderate and that everyone except those crazy right-wingers must naturally agree with him. King went through the exact process outlined above, from demanding immediate execution without trial all the way to blasting the NFL for being too harsh. Now he’s done this...

King is one of the few voters for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And Darren Sharper is up for consideration this year for entry into the Hall. Who is Darren Sharper? Sharper is a defense back for the New Orleans Saints who arguably belongs in the Hall for what he did on the field. But there is another side to Sharper too. See, Sharper has been charged with drugging and raping three women in Los Angeles, two women in New Orleans and one woman in Arizona. Yep. He stands accused of drugging and raping six women!

Naturally, King is outraged by this and wants to keep him out of the Hall of Fame, right? I mean, if just the allegation of domestic abuse is enough to ban someone for life from the NFL without even waiting to see if the allegations are true and despite the pleas of the victim not to punish the player, then surely six separate rape allegations in three different states is enough to avoid giving a player the discretionary honor of being elected to the Hall of Fame, right?

Wrong.

King thinks the Hall of Fame voters need to ignore the rape allegations. Here is his reasoning:

I mentioned in this column last week that former Green Bay and New Orleans safety Darren Sharper would be eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame for the first time in 2016. . .

Sharper stands accused of serial sexual assault in California, Arizona and Louisiana, in some cases by using drugs on the women he attacked.

So some media people, and quite a few fans, picked up on my note, and the reaction was intense: How can you consider a man sitting in jail, accused of drugging multiple women and raping them, for the Pro Football Hall of Fame?

I understand the emotion involved in a case like this. The crimes are deplorable and reprehensible, and if true, Sharper should be imprisoned for a very long time. [BUT]

To clarify the way the Pro Football Hall of Fame works, we have a bylaw that says we can consider only football-related factors in determining a candidate’s worthiness for election....

Maybe you would say: If a candidate is convicted of a felony, he cannot get into the Hall of Fame. Leaving the scene of an accident is a felony. Arson is a felony. Selling drugs is a felony. Animal cruelty is a felony. Should those crimes be enough to automatically eliminate a candidate?

Maybe you would say: Don’t complicate things! It’s obvious that a very serious crime, such as murder or rape, should bar a candidate from the Hall. Obvious to whom? There are 46 voters for the Hall of Fame. Do you want to leave it up to the conscience of each individual voter as to what constitutes a crime serious enough to ban a person from the Hall?

I don’t. The voters for the Hall of Fame should consider what a player did on the field, and the influences of a coach on the game and how many games he won, and the contributions that other figures have made to the sport.

Beyond that, the slope is far too slippery.

Did you see that? Some voters might think rape or murder is a serious enough crime to consider, but King sees that as too dangerous of a slippery slope. Hence, he argues that the voters need to do what the bylaws say and ignore these rapes. Isn’t it funny how he took such a harsh position (ban a player for life and end his economic career) because of a single punch, which the victim doesn’t even want punished, but when it comes to something far less live-affecting (being elected into an honor society), he argues that we should overlook serial rapes. Un... f*cking... believable.

The hypocrisy of this is stunning.

Moreover, keep in mind that the left loves to accuse the right of condoning rape. Outside of a couple of religious zealots, however, no one on the right has ever condoned a rape that I am aware of. Yet, here is smug liberal King doing just that: “Ignore the six rapes because he deserves this award!”

Welcome to the mind of liberals.

Thoughts?

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Wake Me Up Before You Vote Vote

I saw an odd headline the other day about Michelle Obama. According to the headline, she was encouraging “women and minorities” to “wake up,” like some sort of call to arms. This struck me as an interesting appeal, especially given Obama’s track record with both groups. But it turns out that wasn’t what she meant. She literally meant to wake up and not to sleep through voting day. Good grief.

To start with, let me laugh at Michelle Obama having to tell her supporters to get their lazy butts out of bed. That really adds to the stereotype of her followers being lazy and useless, and it explains why they aren’t more successful. Seriously, what normal person needs to be told to get out of bed by their leaders? The pathologically lazy is about all who come to mind.

She did try to expand the point a bit to include those who simply aren’t paying attention, but that hardly makes it better. Basically, she wants her supporters to go grab their sleep nephews or college dorm mates, their indifferent aunts and neighbors, and the rest of their lazy families “who are like, no, I ain’t going to vote, or I couldn’t wake up.” So I guess laziness runs in families. Anyway, nice grammar, lady.

But let's look at the bigger picture, shall we? Let us assume Madame O actually meant “wake up and realize what is happening to you.” This is a rather ridiculous thing for her to say. Do you know why? Well, consider her behavior and her husband's record and you'll see.

First, Madame O has spent her time suckling off the taxpayers. Five star hotels. Shopping in the most expensive shops around the world. Taking Air Force One to restaurants. This woman has lived like Marie Antoinette on steroids. For her to claim that somehow these poor, supposedly-oppressed women and minorities should support her is borderline insane. Imagine if Warren Buffett made the same appeal! Not to mention, they already support her! Every penny of the social security they collect from the few who work and every dollar of the benefits the rest get that gets taxed goes to pay Michelle's lavish lifestyle. So her appeal to wake up really should be met with, "What the hell are you doing with my hard-earned money?"... and maybe a guillotine.

Then there’s her husband. He has presided over a collapse in minority employment, minority household incomes, and minority net worth. They took the brunt of the housing bubble because they owned the subprime homes and nothing was done to bail them out. They were tricked by liberals into getting worthless degrees in African American or Gender Studies which left them unemployable and with vast debt. Liberals run the schools that seem to specialize in not teaching minority kids to read and write or do math. And Obama has done nothing to shake any of this up, even as middle class white parents are pushing their kids into charter and private schools at amazing rates. To the contrary, he's tried to block the door to save his teachers union buddies. He didn't fix the housing issue either, preferring instead to send trillions to the nation's largest banks. He's done nothing to help small (minority) businesses get credit either.

From the ranks of identity politics, he’s presided over the collapse of the black Congressional district under the Civil Rights Act with nary a genuine peep. He’s watched helplessly as voter ID laws quickly spread around the country. He’s whined, but done nothing else, as Affirmative Action basically has been strangled by the Supreme Court. He did appoint a black guy as Attorney General and an Hispanic chick to the Supreme Court, but neither is all that competent and won't make anyone proud. Beyond that, his minority appointments have been few and far between, and the White House continues to pay women far less than it pays men, not to mention it fought the extension of benefits to gays for as long as Obama thought he could. And look at Hispanics. He’s made all kinds of false promises to them!

So what exactly has Obama done to help minorities? We know what he’s done to crush them, but what has he done to help? The answer is nothing.

You know, Michelle is right, it is time for minorities to wake up and to see that Obama and the democrats are not their friends. So yeah... wake up. Oh, and get out of bed and get a job.

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Some NFL Thoughts

Some thoughts on the NFL draft.... The NFL just held its draft last weekend to MASSIVE ratings.

● A Brilliant Event: The NFL draft is utterly brilliant. This one event allows fans of teams who have stunk since the Civil War to believe that their team finally has a chance to win the Super Bowl. Why do fans believe that? Because the NFL sells these college athletes as “the missing pieces.” They sell them as guys who can join a team of misfits and completely make that team into something they have never been. And to help sell this myth, they talk about guys like Tom Brady being found in the 6th round and how Brady lifted the sad-sack Patriots to Super Bowl glory.

Of course, this is all marketing. The vast majority of rookies wash out. Even with first round picks, many will never be more than a backup and more than half won’t make it to a second contract. Moreover, you’re really only talking about a couple guys being added to a roster of 53 players. As impactful as they might be, one or two rookies alone can’t improve an entire team.

Further, with regard to these late round gems, that’s a real myth. You can count on one hand the number of great players found in the later rounds in the last twenty drafts. Indeed, that’s why they always mention Brady, because he’s one of the few obvious examples. By the way, with regard to Brady, there is a bit of a myth to this. Brady didn’t life the Patriots to Super Bowl contenders, they already were when Bledsoe got hurt. So Tom took over an excellent team. Had he gone to Cleveland, he would be forgotten by now most likely.

Anyway, the draft is sold to fans on the same principle as the lottery: you could be the long shot, but they do just enough to hide this fact and to give everyone hope that this year will be different. And NFL fans buy into this BIG time! It really is brilliant.

● The New Civil Rights Movement Cancelled: For months now, the sports journalism world has been obsessively pushing the idea of the NFL’s first gay athlete. The reason is actually quite simple. Most sports journalists got to where they are by writing books or papers on the integration of various sports, and these armchair civil rights warriors want to see themselves leading the charge, so they have been casting about for a long time now for anything they can latch onto as their Selma.

Well, they think they found it in gay athletes and for months now they’ve been pushing this idea that they were going to shine a light on these evil homophobic white, male owners and force them to finally breakdown the rainbow curtain that has kept gay athletes from joining the ranks in the NFL. Only it didn’t work that way.

See, it turns out that those evil white owners have no problems with hiring gays. And those evil white racist coaches apparently don’t have any problem with gay players either. And except for a few players (each of who has been black, mind you), the players have pretty said, “We don’t care.” The fans don’t seem to care either.

Indeed, it turns out that the only people who were sure that gays would never be accepted and that someone would need to send in the National Guard to integrate football were the journalists. So it’s been a real let down for them (almost a comic let down) to see them whine about equality only to learn that there have been gays in the NFL, to whine about homophobic owners only to learn that they have non-discrimination policies and have hired gay employees, to whine about players not accepting gays only to be met with a near universal “if he can play, then I don’t care what he does.” You can hear the air sputtering out of their self-righteous balloons.

Anyway, their last hope was that Michael Sam wouldn’t be drafted and they really played that up. They cautioned us not to expect too much, this is the homophobic NFL after all. They talked about needing to change the league, etc. etc.

Then he got drafted.

So much for their ability to re-enact the Civil Rights Movement and then write books about how THEY made it happen. I guess now they'll have to do their jobs instead.

As an aside, said player Michael Sam, is busy ruining the goodwill he developed by claiming he should have been drafted sooner. Given his limited skills, he should consider himself lucky he got drafted at all.

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Misreading The War On Women

Last week, I pointed out that the fringe gets a really distorted view of reality from their leaders. To give you a sense of how distorted, let's take apart an article published at the Daily Caller about the “War on Women.”

According to the article, Pelosi and Reid are planning to use the “War on Women” playbook for the 2014 election. The author, however, dismisses this as “overplayed propaganda” and she asserts that it won’t work because the Democrats are “missing the big picture.” Hence, she boldly declares, “As a Republican woman, I say bring it on.”

Oh boy.

While it will certainly play well with the fringe, the assertion that the “War on Women” attack is “overplayed propaganda” is ridiculous. In 2012, the Democrats won a stunning statistical victory among women. They won single women by 40%. That's not 40-39, that’s a 40 percentage point difference. In other words, seven of every ten of these women voted for the Democrats. That means their “War on Women” strategy was amazingly effective, and dismissing it as “overplayed propaganda” is wishful thinking. Instead, we need to find a way to defuse it.

The author argues that this has already happened, but her argument is seriously flawed. According to her, women will now reject the “War on Women” meme because of Obamacare. See, a recent poll showed that 60% of women oppose the disastrous law. Ergo, argues the author, they will shun the propaganda of the “War on Women” playbook and will turn out to help us thump them Democrats good.

Yikes. There is so much wrong with this assertion.

First, there is no indication in that poll or any other poll that opposition to Obamacare translates into voting out the Democrats. And what the author ignores is that outside of a tiny minority, people make up their minds how to vote based on general affinity with a political party rather than the basis of single issues. So opposition to Obamacare is just one fact to weigh against things like the “War on Women,” it is not a trump that will overpower all other issues. In fact, if it were such a trump, then we would see it in the generic polls, but we don't. To the contrary, the Democrats lead the Republicans 41% to 37% in the generic polls. This would not be true if her assertion were valid.

But wait, she adds, a study by some group found that supporting Obamacare cost incumbent Democrats 5.8% at the polls in 2010. Add that to the fact that sitting Presidents lose seats in midterm elections and “[the] Republicans are once again on solid ground.”

//sigh

Ok, let’s unwind this. First, this would again show up in the generic polls, but it doesn't. Secondly, this effect was not repeated in 2012, and there's no reason to believe that this issue would vanish in 2012 only to return in 2014. Public anger doesn't work that way. It sparks, then it dies. It doesn't come and go. More importantly, she misunderstands the dynamic of the last couple elections. Obama had MASSIVE coattails in 2008 when he won and his party way over-performed what one would expect from a normal election. The result was that the Democrats won many seats they would not normally have won. Thus, 2010 represented a normalization in many ways as the Republicans won those seats back. By comparison, in 2012, Obama had no coattails and did not over-perform. If anything, he underperformed for a winner. That suggests there aren’t any overextended Democratic seats to be lost in 2014.

And keep in mind that even in 2010 (and in 2012), the Republicans failed miserably in Senate races, i.e. races that didn't involve gerrymandered constituencies.

Further, the 2010 victory was spurred by low Democratic turnout and exceedingly high Republican turn out. Turn out should in theory favor the Republicans in 2014, except that these days the fringe pride themselves on not voting. And if they didn't turn out in 2012 when the election of Republicans could have stopped the law ever being implemented, there's no reason to think they'll turn out in 2014 when there's no chance of influencing the law and after years of smears by the fringe against the Republicans.

Finally, the author tries to bolster her argument by claiming that Democratic lies about Obamacare also will bring out these women: “If the implications of the healthcare law weren’t enough to turn away women voters, the lies Democrats have told them should.” Yeah, right. Except, this is all already calculated into the opposition to Obamacare, and all these lies were well known in 2012 and didn't swing women to the GOP.

All right. So what's the point? The point is that these are the kinds of articles that flood The Daily Caller and Breitbart and other fringe sites. Articles like this provide false confidence and keep the right from asking the basic questions they should be asking: why did women abandon us in record numbers, what about the “War on Women” proved so effective, and how do we win women back? The first step to solving a problem is to admit you have a problem. This article and the hundreds of others like it and the parrot effect of talk radio keep the far right from realizing that.

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The End of Identity Politics (1960s – 2013ish)

Our fringes, left and right, won’t like this, but there is more evidence all the time that identity politics is a dead issue with the public. I wrote about this last year and the proof just keeps on coming. Observe.

For those who don’t know, identity politics is a political strategy pushed originally by the left to drive a wedge between minorities and the rest of America so the left could secure their loyalties. The idea was to make these groups paranoid so they would identify only with others of their own kind, who would then band together and vote for leftists who promised to protect them from whites, males, straights, etc. Hence, black leftists told blacks that whites want to return them to slavery. Women were told that males want to take away their jobs and their right to control their bedroom lives. Gays were told that straights want to criminalize their lifestyles again. And so on. And each group was told they were oppressed to make them feel like victims. Talk radio hosts then brought this same tactic to the right and told whites/males/heterosexuals that they were the real victims and that everyone else was out to get them.

Both of these sides now spend their time scaring their own audiences with quotes from obscure idiots on the other side and with boogeymen tales to keep their audiences paranoia of the enemy... "Did you hear about that one guy who said that thing? You know THEY all think like that, don't you?"

But the public at large has rejected all of this. How do I know?

Well, for starters, there was the shocking poll from Rasmussen that I mentioned last July. Rasmussen found the following:

● 37% of Americans think “most blacks are racist.”
● 18% of Americans think “most Hispanics are racist.”
● 15% of Americans think “most whites are racist.”

These numbers were shocking because they were a total repudiation of everything the left and right had been saying. The left routinely claims that all whites are racists, even those who fight racism, because it is inherent in our natures. The talk radio right counter that blacks and Hispanics are racist militants who are determined to oppress whites and turn America in a Browndystopia. Yet, the public clearly rejects this: 8 in 10 reject the liberal claim and more than 6 in 10 reject the conservative claim (this number is likely higher because of the near-constant use of false racism charges by blacks who get into trouble).

Then there’s this. Even though a Pew poll found that women earn just 84% of what their male counterparts earn, only 15% of women say they have been discriminated against personally because of their gender. So much for accepting the idea that all women are oppressed.

But the best evidence comes from other sources. As I’ve always pointed out, the problems with polls are threefold: (1) bias by the pollster, who coincidentally is never held accountable if they are wrong, (2) bad methodology, including limitations of the questions and poor sample selection, and (3) the fact that people don’t tell the truth. And in terms of telling the truth, I don’t even mean that they necessarily lie. When confronted with polls, a lot of people will tell the pollster what they have been told is the appropriate answer, whether they believe it or not. Others will respond with their aspirations rather than the reality. So we need to look somewhere else.

To give you an example, people tell pollster that they have nothing against fat people. That is the “politically correct” answer. But this isn’t borne out in reality, where voters willing vote for things to try to force fat people to lose weight (like the 16 oz. tyranny), where surveys have shown that fat people earn less and are held in lower esteem than thinner colleagues, and where neither Hollywood nor Madison Avenue (advertising central) cast fat people as anything other than comic relief.

If you think about it, you will realize that Madison Avenue (and to lesser extent Hollywood) are the ultimate source of information about the state of our culture. Why? Because their livelihood depends on them correctly diagnosing cultural trends. If they misunderstand a prejudice and cast a fat guy to sell their cologne, sales will tank or even worse they might spawn a negative meme or protests by outraged groups, and they will be fired. Get fired a couple times and you’re done as a company. So getting it right is vital... unlike with pollsters and talking heads.

So why am I talking about advertising? Because I’ve seen two fascinating ads lately that relate to the issue of identity politics. In the 1990s, when identity politics was in its heyday, you took your professional life in your hands if you made a woman or a black the villain or the butt of a joke. The Nazi-like forces of identity politics proclaimed not only that all films ads must include blacks and women, but they must always be shown in positive, stereotype-rejecting ways. Thus, women and blacks were portrayed as bosses, professionals, leaders and winners. If two people competed, the black or woman won. They could never be portrayed as stupid, out of touch, or as the butt of jokes nor could be they be cast as criminals, racists, sexists, or as nasty people. Was. Not. Done. Television and films were the same way. Heck, even if the film was about gangs, the gangs were typically shown as multiracial, with a white businessman ultimately being behind them and with the white gang members being the psychotics.

Little by little though, this seems to be breaking down. The first sign was the return of white male managers and smart white males. Suddenly, not every woman on television was automatically smarter than the males around her. Girls being shown playing sports have vanished too -- a trend that was pushed heavily by feminists in the 1990s.

Then came the Microsoft tablet ad. In this ad, a white guy(and white woman) are upset to hear that the new guy got a great new tablet simply because the new guy spilled coffee on the older computer they gave him. In the abstract, this makes the new guy sound clumsy. But there’s more. The new guy is shown essentially bragging about the event in such a way that the commercial suggests that the coffee spilling was intentional. That makes the new guy a bit of a villain. Here’s the catch. The new guy is black. Showing a black guy as either clumsy or a villain or "working the system" and bragging about it would have been impossible in the 1990s... but there is it.

At the same time, in the remake of Red Dawn, there is one collaborator shown... the mayor. Guess what? He’s black. It has long been a stereotype that blacks are of questionable loyalty to America -- this was the counterargument to desegregation of the military. Portraying a black character as a collaborator in an invasion would have brought screams of racism in the 1980s or 1990s... but there it is.

Then came the Jack in the Box ad. In this ad, Jack is walking to a meeting and the woman walking next to him is a real dingbat. She doesn’t know how to complete words (she speaks in text speak) and she doesn’t know what a watch is. Essentially, this is a dig at young people. But had this been done ten years ago, the assistant would have needed to be male... this was a woman.

So what you have here is advertisers, who need to be at the forefront of culture and need to be right in their diagnosis of culture, are no longer afraid to poke fun at women and blacks. This tells us that they are no longer worried about the public freaking out about identity politics.

Finally, we have this. The two most popular female characters among women right now, without a doubt, are Anastasia Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey, a woman who is submissive and needs a strong man to take control of her life and make her happy, and Stephanie Plum... a horribly incompetent bounty hunter who can’t compete with the much more competent men in her life. Both characters would have been savagely attacked by feminists in the 1990s and probably suppressed. Similarly, fat and incompetent Melissa McCarthy and incompetent Kristen Wiig are quickly becoming the two most bankable female stars of the moment. And don’t forget, this is a country that elected a black man as president and may elect a woman soon. This is a country that has happily embraced a large number of black leading men and several tough-gal leading women in action films. News readers can be male or female, black, white or other, as can athletes. None of this would be true if the public was as obsessed with race as the fringes are.

All of this above strongly suggests that the public at large has rejected identity politics and is “moving beyond” race and gender. That’s good for the country and ultimately great for conservatism.

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Feminism: Hillary-ous

Camille Paglia is the favorite feminist of conservatives, though she’s not a conservative. The reason they like her is that she periodically takes aim at sacred liberal cows and slaughters them with abandon. She’s done that again in a wide ranging interview, which is interesting for several points, including her depants(suit)ing of Hillary Clinton.

Indeed, the headline grabber from the interview is Paglia taking down Hillary: “It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton is our party’s best chance.” She notes in particular that Hillary has no qualifications whatsoever and a history that doesn’t really inspire:

“She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished – beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband?”

She also slams Hillary for failing in the one instance where she actually had some authority, i.e. Benghazi, though her criticism does strike me as a little off in this regard – she says Hillary should have resigned, which seems politically unrealistic. In any event, it’s interesting to see a liberal point out that the Empress has no pantsuit.

Anyway, more interesting was what Paglia said about feminism. Paglia is a feminist, but isn’t a traditional feminist. She’s part of a different group of feminists who really don’t like the people we normally think of as feminists. In fact, when she first appeared on the radar screen, it was in her struggles against the feminists, who were at the peak of their power in the 1990s. And what she notes now is something we’ve pointed out before here: feminism is dead.

“Oh, feminism is still alive? Thanks for the tip! It sure is invisible, except for the random whine from some maleducated product of the elite schools who’s found a plush berth in glossy magazines.”

That is exactly right. The feminism Rush called “Femi-nazis,” which was born in the 1960s and peaked when it dominated academia, Hollywood and the nation’s universities in the 1990s is dead except for a couple random whiners, and the ideology it constructed has been abandoned. I love this quote in particular: “They keep dusting Steinem off and trotting her out to pin awards on her, but she’s the walking dead.”

It’s interesting to have a real insider confirm this and put a reason to it (one of which actually matches my Fifty Shades argument as you’ll see in a moment). So what reason does she give for feminism being dead? Partisanship is the big reason, and puritanicalism.

According to Paglia, feminism got crushed because “[t]heir shameless partisanship eventually doomed those Stalinist feminists.” In other words, they became so aligned with the Democratic Party that they became just another interest group and lost the respect of the public at large. Unions made this mistake too. Both unions and feminists decided they could get what they wanted through the Democratic Party rather than trying to win the public. Thus, they stopped pressuring everyone but Democrats. This destroyed their “moral authority” because they came to be seen as partisan rather than principled. In other words, rather than their cause being about equality for women, people came to see the cause of feminism as being the election of Democrats. So whether or not they were right as a matter of principle no longer mattered.

Indeed, Paglia notes that this is a continuing problem today:

“While it’s a big relief not to have feminist bullies sermonizing from every news show anymore, the leadership vacuum is alarming. It’s very distressing, for example, that the atrocities against women in India — the shocking series of gang rapes, which seem never to end — have not been aggressively condemned in a sustained way by feminist organizations in the U.S. . . The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World.”

Paglia doesn’t specifically connect this dot to partisanship, but that is the logical cause of what she notes. Since feminists have aligned themselves with the Democratic Party and since the Democratic Party has aligned itself with “people of color” against white males, Christians, and the West, it goes against party politics to criticize things like Muslim atrocities or to point out that the rest of the world is a racist, sexist sh*thole. Hence, feminists have remained deafeningly silent about various atrocities as they instead focused their energies on things like getting healthplans to pay for condoms for rich girls. Because of this, feminists have squandered their credibility because it’s clear they are no longer about “women,” they are about “Democrats,” just like unions are no longer about workers, they are about Democrats.

In addition to the above, Paglia adds the following. First, she notes that old-school feminists were puritanical. Indeed, they worked hand in hand with the Religious Right in the 1990s to try to stop pornography. And in the process, they alienated the vast, vast, vast majority of women because women aren’t actually opposed to sex like those feminists thought they were. To the contrary, most kind of like it. Of this, Paglia says that these “Stalinist feminists. . . were trampled by the pro-sex feminist stampede of the early ‘90s.” This is my Fifty Shades point. Feminism imploded because it tried to impose a condition that ran counter to what women wanted, so they rebelled.

So what are the takeaways? Well, feminism is dead, at least in the form it took until the 1990s. It died because it lost the public through partisanship and it lost women through being puritanical, and those womyn are relegated to history and a few pointless academic posts at this point. It also explains why modern feminists won’t speak out for women today, not in any serious context, and why they are unlikely to regain any influence with the public any time soon. Finally, Paglia confirms that even liberals recognize that Hillary is an empty pantsuit.

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IQ, Race, Science and Politics

This will be an odd discussion. It's about IQ. But first, some background.

The article that sparked today's discussion was published at Politico by a man called Jason Richwine. I don't trust Richwine. He co-authored the ludicrous Heritage Foundation report about the supposed cost of immigration. Even worse, a thesis he wrote in college was then unearthed in which he made some racist suggestions about immigrants; he also wrote briefly for a "white nationalist" blog. The Politico article is his attempt to resurrect his reputation. In my opinion, he fails pretty miserably because he distorts what the problem was with his thesis: the problem wasn't that he discussed IQ, it was that he started suggesting that we keep Hispanics out because they have low IQs.

So why discuss his article? Well, before he starts spinning to defend his thesis, Richwine presents a credible set of facts that interest me. In particular, he notes that there is a huge disconnect between the scientific community and the media when it comes to the issue of IQ. He notes that if you listen to the media, you will hear that IQ is considered meaningless by the scientific community, that there are no ethnic and gender differences and those that do exist are the result of biased questions, and that no legitimate scientist really pays any attention to the whole idea. Science, however, has a different take. Indeed, Richwine notes that there IS a consensus in the cognitive ability field that:

● Virtually all psychologists believe there is an intelligence factor that explains the performance of individuals on cognitive tests, and IQ tests measure that factor.

● IQ scores correlate with educational attainment, income and other socioeconomic outcomes.

● A person's IQ score is influenced by their genetic make up and environmental factors. It tends to remain stable after adolescence.

● There is an observed difference in IQ scores among different racial/ethnic/gender groups, with northeast Asians scoring the highest, followed by whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by blacks.

● Psychologists have tested and rejected the notion that racial/gender differences are the result of biased testing. They have not, however, accepted the idea of a genetic cause for these differences because no link has yet been shown between DNA gene combinations and intelligence.

In other words, everything the media claims is false is actually true and media claims that the scientific community has reached a consensus that these things are false is backwards, as the consensus goes the other way. To prove the consensus, Richwine cites numerous books and studies and even a committee report by 52 experts from the American Psychological Association which noted the above; against these, he lines up quotes from hack journalists who say things like, “IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore.” (Ana Marie Cox -- The Guardian, May 2012).

So let's forget Richwine and talk about the above bullet-points. These strike me as true. I know this in two ways. First, since at least the 1980s, leftists have struggled to disprove the above. The fact they keep struggling and have now gone into "it is heretical to say this" mode suggests it is true. Moreover, they've even gone so far as to remove testing questions from things like the SAT when minorities or women fared poorly on those questions, yet the differences persist despite these efforts to rig the tests. In my book, massive continuing statistical consistency is proof. Secondly, anecdotally, some of this is obvious. It is obvious there is an intelligence factor. It is obvious that some people are more intelligent than others. The people who seem more intelligent not only tend to do better in education and employment, but they score better on tests too. That suggests that intelligence is real, can be measured, and does impact our success. I can also say that I've met a ton of geniuses and quasi-geniuses and successful people, and they are disproportionately Asians and honkeys and male. Thus, it seems there are race/gender differences as well.

Now, I can't and won't say that this is 100% true because it's not; there are individuals in every group who are near the top or near the bottom of the human race. There are people who are well above average and well below average for their own groups and for other groups. But as groups, there appears to be noticeable differences which lead to different outcomes for the group average. I also cannot tell you if the difference is genetic, cultural or environmental. I doubt it is genetic though, or you would have consistency. In other words, if being purple made you stupid, then there would be no smart purples... but there are. Ergo, I think the race/gender differences are the result of something other than race or gender.

Why this matters to me is this: it exposes the left's thinking and that they don't care about people.

If we know that purples as a group will have lower IQs by the time they hit adulthood than blues, and we know that IQ will correlate with other measures of success, then in my opinion, we should be looking for the cause so we can find a solution to help purples do as well as blues. If there's something purple parents or purple teachers or purple celebrities are doing wrong, then we should find out what it is and fix it. If it's something blues are doing to purples, then we should find it and fix it. If it's environmental, perhaps pollution in purple neighborhoods, then we should fix it. This is true of blacks, Hispanics, whites, or anyone else who doesn't do as well as the top group. Indeed, when we find evidence of something that negatively affects a group of people, we should always investigate and find solutions.

But that's not what liberal journalists and educators do. Instead, they scream bloody racist murder at anyone who dares to suggest there is a difference. Then they go back into denial mode because that is their dogma. But what kind of people are we that we let whole groups of people get handicapped just to "prove" dogma?

Unfortunately, this seems to be getting worse too. The go-to solution these days is to demand that problems not be discussed for fear of hurting "acceptance." Everyone from race groups to gender groups to fat groups are taking this stance. How idiotic. It's like a demand that we let people fail lest we suggest that people who are failing just might be failing. I can't say this is unique. In fact, it's been pretty common throughout history, but it is unhelpful.

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50 Shades of Feminism

Today I’m going to share an observation I’ve made over the past year. It involves the book (three books actually) “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the death of liberal-feminism. Here’s the bottom line: “Fifty Shades” is a watershed moment that has altered the course of inter-gender relations. Yep.

In many ways, my generation bore the brunt of feminism.

Liberal feminism (as distinguished from “conservative feminism”) has always been about economic power. Essentially, liberal feminists view women as economic inputs who need to out-earn men so they can take over the patriarchal power structure blah blah blah oppression! This is why feminists pushed the idea of divorce in the 1960s. They realized that women who married were much more likely to drop out of the workforce and become useless to the struggle. To fix this, they advocated a combination of birth control to stop women from being burdened with kids and no-fault divorce to weaken the marriage commitment so women would always keep one foot in the economic door. Basically, if you can’t trust your husband to be there, then you need to maintain an independent existence.

The effects of this hit in the 1970s and 1980s as many of the kids I grew up with became the first generation of kids from broken homes. It was a mess. Indeed, while feminists published politicized studies to try to convince the public that divorce was harmless to kids, it was obvious to all us that this wasn’t the case.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, feminism took the next step: de-feminization of girls. This was when young women were told that they were no good if they didn’t compete with men. If you didn’t play sports like the boys, you were a loser. If you didn’t want to be President or a CEO, you were a loser. Housewives are losers. . . oppressed cookie bakers. This was the time feminists began attacking things like makeup and high heels and Satan herself. . . Barbie. This was the age of gender neutral toys, of forcing girls to play soccer, and “try lesbianism. . . everybody’s doing it.” This was the time a number of feminists openly spewed ideas like “all sex is rape.” The early 1990s were also the point where you would meet womyn in law school who wanted to become “reproductive rights lawyers” or divorce lawyers who “only represent other women.” This was the time feminists claimed that 25% of all women had been raped and PSAs warned women that all middle-age white males were abusers. This was when there was a big push to make women keep their last names when they married – a trend which died in the 2000s – and when single-motherhood was celebrated.

This destroyed the dating scene for my generation. For one thing, many women responded to the above by becoming neurotic man-haters. But even beyond them, there was tremendous confusion. No one understood the new rules - some women viewed common courtesies as oppressive or sexist. None of the males I knew wanted one of these de-feminized creatures and most of the women didn’t want to be like that, but it was so pounded into people that this was expected that few dared say otherwise. The result was that my generation married later and, of all the women I’ve spoken too, the women of my generation are the most unhappy and are uniquely uneasy about their sexuality. . . I haven’t found this in any other generation.

Anyway, around that time, I discovered a female underground. There seemed to be a large number of women who really hated the feminists and the feminist vision of what they should be. They were, however, afraid to speak out for fear that other women would be nasty to them. Conservatives weren’t a helpful alternative either. So they had no voice.

By the 2000s, however, liberal feminism was killing itself with its owing idiocy. It’s one thing to say that women are treated unfairly, it’s quite another to whine that the English language oppresses you or to claim that all men are rapists. It also seemed that women weren’t particularly happy with the demands liberal feminists were placing on them. This was when I noticed the rise of a new branch of feminism, which fits with the modern “conservative-feminist” view of feminism. These women describe themselves as “feminists” but see feminism as being about giving women the same choices men have to chart their own courses. They don’t buy into the competition theory of liberal-feminism, nor do they want to de-feminize women or emasculate men. But they also don’t buy the “promiscuous women are evil” routine of the Bill Bennetts and Rick Santorums.

In short order, this view appears to have become the vast-majority view of the American public. What’s kept this group off the radar screens, however, is that the MSM is dominated by liberal-feminists and the conservative opposition is dominated by the so-cons, and neither group wants to acknowledge this “silent majority” who reject both ideological camps. Moreover, this group has no leader and hasn’t had an event to galvanize them and to expose how large their support really is, e.g. the Stonewall riots for gays, Selma for blacks, publication of “The Feminine Mystique” for feminists, etc.

Then came “Fifty Shades of Grey.” This book has caused a silent revolution.

“Fifty Shades” is about a woman who decides she wants to submit sexually to some guy. This is interesting because the idea of a woman submitting to a man flies in the face of liberal feminism in a big bad way because it fundamentally rejects the one commandment of liberal feminism: women are worthless unless they try to dominate men. What makes this book REALLY interesting, however, is its popularity. “Fifty Shades” has sold 70 million copies, which is a monster amount these days, and they’re making a movie. More importantly, this is one of those rare books which people know even if they haven’t read it. Even more importantly, women ARE admitting they’ve read it, and what’s more, they’re talking about it openly. They’re talking about it in book clubs, on blogs, and on television. You may recall me mentioning that I’ve spoken to bunches of women Rush hates, well, they all talked about this book too at one point or another. . . they’re all fascinated by this book. This never could have happened in the 1990s. In fact, I doubt this book would have been published in the 1990s. And if it had, feminists and their allies in the media would have silenced the book as hateful, sexist and anti-woman. And I certainly can’t imagine women in the 1990s, who were cowed by feminists, admitting they’d read it. But now they are.

Now, before you get the wrong idea, I should point out that I don’t think this means vast numbers of American women are looking to become sex slaves. Far from it. Indeed, the conversations I had never went like that. What I found instead was that women are using the book as an opportunity to ditch the idea that women need to compete with men and that all relationships need to be equal. In effect, this book has become the catalyst for making it acceptable for women to declare that they’re ok with women letting their husbands run their relationships. . . if that’s what they want.

That sentence is the key point. It’s key because it tells us what is really going on here.

These women are using this book as a catalyst to change the course of feminism away from the anti-male garbage of liberal-feminism and toward the supposed original purpose of feminism: freedom of choice for women. In other words, this is not a rejection of feminism, it is instead a reformation. These average women are basically saying, feminism is about choice and they want all the choices. . . not just the approved choices. And in so doing, they are rejecting the very basis of liberal feminism. Frankly, I see this as being as significant as if blacks suddenly rejected affirmative action and all the other things the race lobby have demanded and they instead declared an intent to see the world as color-blind. Same thing here. Moreover, this appears to be a mass movement, even if it hasn’t been covered by the MSM. . . like the Tea Party, the liberal-feminist MSM is blind to this.

Ultimately, what I think this means is that conservative-feminists have won. The public has decided that genuine freedom of choice is the order of the day and they are done politicizing sex. Naturally, ivory-tower feminists will still rant about the phallus lurking under their beds and pulpit-conservatives will rant against promiscuous women destroying the fabric of once-great America, but I don’t think the public is listening anymore, and I think historians will look back at this book as the moment everything changed.

Thoughts?

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Female Teachers Are Sexist

One of the more interesting facets of political correctness is the number of contortions the politically correct must go through to avoid stating the obvious. The latest example involves a study which dances around the question of why girls do better than boys in school, but then do worse than boys on standardized (objective) tests and once they leave the school environment. The obvious answer from their study is that female teachers are sexist, but saying so is taboo.

Before we delve into this, here’s a quick reminder of how political correctness works. The politically correct separate people by race and gender and then assign goodness/badness based on those groups or genders. If you happen to be in a “good group,” then nothing bad may be said about you. In fact, to say bad things about you would be labeled racist or sexist. And if you happen to be in a bad group, then nothing good can be said about you or that would be labeled racist or sexist as well. Girls are in the good group. Boys are in the bad. Hence, thou shalt not criticize girls or praise boys. If there is a gap where girls do worse than boys, that is the result of bias. But if there is a gap where boys do worse than girls, that's because boys are bad students.

So what am I talking about?

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development just completed a study of 17 countries and they discovered something interesting. For quite some time now, it’s been true in most countries that girls get better grades in school. They graduate in higher numbers, get more degrees, and generally have better grades. Hence, girls appear to be better students. BUT there is this pesky problem that boys routinely beat girls on standardized tests and in the real world of employment. In fact, this study found that if you compare standardize tests to grades, the boys grades are way below what the standardized testing would predict. Up to now, the explanations offered by feminists have been to assume that the grades must be right because girls are good and thus a result which shows girls being better must be right, and they've explained away the standardized test problem as the testing being biased in favor of boys. They also claim that income disparity is the result of sexism.

Well, this study has uncovered a wee bit of a problem with this. According to the study, the gender divide in grades is the result of the teachers judging the girls to be better behaved... not better students. This is purely a subjective measure and the study actually termed this "bias." That's a huge step toward truth. Of course, they did their best not to call this gender bias/sexism, but that's what it is. Instead, they said it was bias toward the well-behaved and against the not well-behaved, but that's nonsense. For one thing, the label of which was well-behaved and which wasn't was subjective and is a tautology, i.e. circular reasoning: teachers favor the well-behaved, who are girls, because we have defined girls as well-behaved. Break that down logically and you will see that "well-behaved" is just another word for "girl" and you get "teachers favor girls."

And this is borne out by the standardized testing because it shows that boys do better than the girls in terms of what they really learn. That means that when the students are tested objectively, i.e. in an arena where the teachers cannot warp the grades, the girls do much more poorly than they do when the teachers are able to warp the grades. Logic tells us this means the teachers are favoring girls unfairly. Basically, women teachers favor female students because they like girls better even though the girls are not better students.

Moreover, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The study found that because of this bias, the girls benefited from better grades which meant better opportunities and the boys were harmed because they were denied the opportunities and they were told to lower their expectations. Thus, the teachers set the boys up by giving them worse opportunities and then held that against them when they graded the boys. This, frankly, calls into question the validity of the entire system.

Think about this in terms of race because that will clarify this. Imagine if black students sat through classes taught by white teachers and they were marked down repeatedly, consistently and across-the-board by those white teachers on the subjective scoring system used by the teachers. But once those black students were allowed to take standardize tests, i.e. tests that do not know if a student is black or white or male or female and which the white teachers cannot grade in a way to favor the white students, the blacks suddenly did much better than the grades they were given and in fact outperformed the higher-graded white kids. How fast do you think everyone would start yelling racism? And don't you think they would be right?

Yet, because of political correctness, women are per se considered incapable of being sexist. Thus, even though the obvious answer to the facts presented above is that female teachers (who make up 84% of teachers) are systematically lowering male grades because they don't like the males as much as the females, no one is talking about that because they don't want to raise the issue of gender discrimination by female teachers. But that is exactly what is going on.

And to be clear, sexism doesn't even need to be intentional to make this happen. As has been shown in any number of contexts, bias can take many forms, including a simple lack of empathy or devaluing of traits that are more common with the other gender/race and overvaluing traits that are more common with your own race. Thus, for example, a creative writing teacher might grade a lousy essay on a subject they sympathize with higher than a brilliant essay on a subject they care little for. That's human nature, and study after study has shown that people do behave this way, even if they don’t think they do. So why do we ignore the obvious effects of bias when a system where 84% of teachers are females uses subjective criteria (like classroom participation) to determine that girls are better than boys even as objective criteria expose those subjective criteria to be wrongly applied?

If you want to improve the education system, the first thing to do, honestly, is to stop avoiding the obvious problems just because it's politically correct to do so. The problem isn’t that boys are somehow incapable of learning as well, it’s that female teachers favor girls. And the way to fix that is either to hire more male teachers and to make sure kids get both, or to separate kids by sex... or start using standardize tests to set grades (hint, hint).

Thoughts?

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Bobby Jindal Reads Commentarama

Bobby Jindal has long been a favorite of this site, though many other “conservative” sites hate him because. . . well, he’s a governor, so he tries to govern rather than burn the state to the ground in the name of some futile attempt to demonstrate his purity. My biggest concern with Jindal has been that he’s struck me as more technocratic than political. But in the past couple weeks, he’s shown that he gets it. . . or he reads Commentarama! :)

In the past two weeks, various contenders for 2016 have been making news. Newt is being his typical a-hole self, attacking Romney and everyone else with bombastic and unconstructive verbal jabs meant make people think Newt be smarts. Chris Christie has been trying to explain why embracing Obama the day before the election wasn’t a problem. Paul Ryan is trying to fight Obama for the good of the country, which I can respect but is not my preferred strategy at the moment. Marco Rubio went to Iowa and assured us he does love rap.

Meanwhile, Bobby Jindal has been giving interviews all over the place and gave a solid speech as the incoming Chairman of the Republican Governor’s Association. What has impressed me with Jindal is that he seems to get it.

Jindal called on the party to “stop being the stupid party” and to make an effort to attract a broad swath of voters. As he put it, we need to “campaign for every single vote.” Absolutely. Unfortunately, that is something many conservatives don’t understand as they continue to talk about us losing because we didn’t get out the vote. A party that wants to represent America must actually represent America, not just one shrinking part of it.

And in that regard, Jindal noted that we need to come to terms with liking the people we are seeking to attract. And the first step in that is to stop insulting them: “You don't start to like people by insulting them and saying their votes were bought. . . We also don't need to be saying stupid things.” His second comment there was a direct reference to Indiana and Missouri, but it applies much more broadly too. It applies to all the things we talked about the other day which come across as hateful, racist, sexist and religiously exclusive. It applies to what Jindal called “dumbed-down conservatism” and “simplistic” and “bizarre comments” which “insult the intelligence of voters.”

But even more importantly, Jindal beat the same drum I’ve been beating for a long time: “Simply being the anti-Obama party didn’t work. You can’t beat something with nothing.”

Hallelujah! I’ve been making this point for a long time and I am deeply frustrated that the party doesn’t get this. Romney had a platform, though he didn’t sell it well. But beyond him, the party really doesn’t stand for anything people want. Yes, it produced an official “platform” – the one which whines about abortion and censoring the internet to save the children, but beyond that the party has produced no ideas since the age of Jack Kemp and his enterprise zones. Seriously, if you think about it, tell me what you think the Republican Party is offering other than the status quo and opposition to the Democrats. Are you satisfied with the state of the country? Doubt it. So why do you think a platform of “we’ll make sure nothing changes” will resonate with anyone?

We need to put forward a bold, yet simple to understand and easy to personalize, series of policies that promise to improve: (1) the jobs market, (2) the small business environment, (3) individual economic security, (4) the housing market, (5) retirement, (6) health care, (7) education, (8) national security, and (9) the environment. We need to tell people how our policies will make their lives better!

And as we think about this, we need to focus on the people who really do matter to this country: the middle class. Our policies need to tell the poor how they will become middle class, tell the middle class how we will protect what they have earned, and tell the aspirational class how we’ve cleared the way for them to benefit from the risks they take. Indeed, we need to tell the artists, the inventors, and the entrepreneurs that the government will stop punishing them, stop trying to stop them, and stop taking the benefits of their efforts. The one thing we do NOT need to do is to promise to protect the rich and powerful. Again, Bobby Jindal put this well:

“We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything. We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.”

This is exactly the point. But sadly, right now we have it backwards. Right now, the Republicans have become the party of Wall Street, of the rich, and of Big Oil. Those are the only groups that are guaranteed to get a blank-check defense from Republicans and that needs to stop.

I’m liking Jindal’s new approach a lot. There is much wisdom here and we need to see if he can transform his ideas into policies. Let’s hope he succeeds.


As a final aside, Rick “the socialist” Santorum wrote an editorial this week as well. In it, he blames Romney while saying we shouldn’t blame Romney. Then he endorses the get-out-the-vote argument as the reason we lost. He shoots down the idea of Hispanic outreach as “analyses coming largely from the academic and pundit crowd.” And he suggests that what we really need to do if we’re going to win is to promote policies that “encourage family stability.” Retard.

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Necessary Changes To The Republican Party

Back in 2009, I did a series called Rebuilding the Republican Party in which I explained what the GOP needed to do to survive. They didn’t listen. And exit polling shows the GOP suffering from the exact same problems this time. Romney lost because of singles, youths, and minorities. This needs to change or forget ever winning again. It’s time to return to our ideological roots and promote the individual and individual freedom.

Let’s start by highlighting the problem. There is a belief in conservative circles that the country is much more conservative than liberal and we just need to win over conservative independents. This belief comes from polling which shows the country as 38% Democrats, 32% Republicans and 29% Independents, with independents leaning right. But “independents” turns out to be a meaningless category. Indeed, Romney won independents yet lost the election. What really matters are “moderates.”

In that regard, we find 35% conservatives, 25% liberals and 41% moderates. BUT, 60% of the “moderates” broke for Obama, meaning they are liberals. When you break this down, you find that 50% of Americans are conservatives and 50% are liberals. In other words, we're a 50/50 country. So forget the idea of tapping into a pool of hidden conservatives. If we want to move the needle, we need to look at the groups we lost overwhelmingly and we need to figure out ways to win back their more centrist members. Here's how...

● The Gender (read: “Single”) Gap: Women account for 53% of the electorate and Obama carried them by 11%. Romney carried men by 7%. But that doesn’t tell us what’s really going on. The real key is single people.

Romney won married men by 20% and married women by 6%. These two groups made up 29% and 31% of the electorate (60% in total). So how did he lose? He got blown away among singles. Indeed, Romney lost single men by 20% and single women by 40%! These two groups made up only 18% and 23% of the electorate, but the huge gaps made up the difference.

If the Republicans ever want to win again, they need to win more single people, particularly single women. To do that, we need to understand the problem. So realize this. First, Reagan won both groups (he won men by 28% and women by 10%). So there is nothing inherently “wrong” with singles being Republicans. Nor was there something wrong with Romney. McCain didn't face a “war on women” attack or smears about his father being a bigamist, and he did 3% worse with women than Romney. What this means is that the party has a structural problem which developed after Reagan.

When you look at polls or talk to these people, what you will hear is outrage/terror about the Republican Party’s various stances on social issues. This is particularly true with single women who are turned off by the party’s attacks on gays, its obsession with abortion and contraception, and its rhetorical attacks about “family values” which imply that only married people with kids and church-goers are moral.

The Solution: If the GOP wants to win singles, particularly single women, it needs to stop hating gays, it needs to stop conflating going to church or being married with being a good American, and it needs to stop obsessing over abortion. I recommend removing abortion from the platform or stepping it back to “safe, rare, restricted, and no government funding.” Leave the rest for churches to push, not government policy. And shoot the first person to talk about restricting other forms of contraception. . . Rick Santorum. I recommend making gay marriage a question of individual conscience (so as not to interfere with religious freedom) while putting support for civil unions and anti-discrimination laws in the platform. I recommend removing talk of the party believing in God and instead shifting to talking about protecting everyone's right to believe... in any religion or no religion. And I recommend eliminating all talk of constitutional amendments on any social issues -- that's pointless and whacky. Also stop signing those stupid fringy pledges! They're a trap.

● The Youth Vote: Romney won old people, but got crushed with the young. 19-29 year olds favored Obama by 26%. Even 30-44 year olds favored Obama by 10%. Together, they made up 46% of the electorate. The next 38% of the electorate were tied. Then Romney won oldsters by 12%. So there is a youth problem which the seniors don’t make up for.

The youth problem can be attributed to several things. On the one hand, the youth vote is the direct result of GOP stodginess and intolerance on issues like gays and abortion, and its lack of visible minorities. But more importantly, another huge turnoff is the GOP’s rhetorical attacks on college education and seeming unwillingness to help young people leave college without crushing levels of debt, i.e. without making them slaves to banks. The GOP’s attacks on internet freedom don’t help either. Nor does the GOP’s image as the party of Big Business. Indeed, many of these young people drifted to Ron Paul and then Gary Johnson and finally back to Obama because the GOP seemed to offer no hope that it cared about people rather than corporations.

The Solution: It’s time to understand that these are issues of economic freedom. I recommend the GOP come up with a genuine plan to (1) help every American go to college while (2) reducing the cost of college so young people aren’t enslaved for the first 20 years of their economic lives. Don't forget, government caused this problem. I recommend supporting total internet freedom and fighting censorship in any form. That means dropping the heinous idea of regulating the internet to promote morality (i.e. “protecting children”) or doing the bidding of corporate America through anti-piracy laws. I also recommend that conservatives stop defending big companies. Talk about people, not companies. Fight cronyism in any form. Talk about the American dream!! Our party should be focused on helping average people strive to make their lives better, to build a business, buy a house, send their kids to college... not protecting the balance sheets of multinational corporations. All of these are conservative values, so why aren't we doing them already?

● The Minority Gap: The minority gap is beyond critical. Obama won Hispanics by 44%, Asians by 45%, blacks by 88% and Muslims by 70%. Muslims and Asians only make up 2% and 3% of the public, but blacks make up 13% of the electorate and Hispanics make up 11% of the electorate, and growing. There are several glaring problems here.

● Asians are generally industrious, business-minded and education-minded, which should make them natural GOP allies, especially as liberal affirmative action is hurting Asian students in California. How did we lose them by 45%? Because the party comes across as hostile to non-whites. Moreover, the party has offered nothing in the way of education and its focus on “business” has been on oil companies, not small businesses.

The Solution: Court these voters. Also, we need to rediscover the American dream. We need to protect the little guy and not worry about the big guy. Warren Buffett and Wall Street can take care of themselves, and they don't like us anyway.

● For a party that claims to cherish religious freedom, Muslims should be natural allies. But they aren’t. Why not? Because of open bigotry by conservatives, be it accusing all Muslims of being terrorists, to careless talk about bombing the Middle East, to paranoid freak-outs about the appointment of a single Muslim judge to a meaningless municipal judgeship.

The Solution: It’s time to start mentioning Islam along with other religions when talking about religious freedom, and it’s time to stop pushing symbolic ideas like banning sharia law (which can’t be put in place under our constitution in any event).

● Blacks and Hispanics should be much closer to 50/50, but they aren’t. Again, the problem is the appearance of bigotry. Conservatives treat blacks and Hispanics like unpleasant neighbors who need to be humored every four years. They do not treat them like part of the family. They use hyperbolic speech, they are afraid to speak the truth and they talk down to these people as if they are children. They even make bizarre racial-tinged attacks on things like rap music and “ghetto culture.” When they conduct outreach, it’s a token appointment of the whitest black/Hispanic guy in the room to a meaningless position, or it’s an attempt to go along with some Democratic plan to buy loyalty.

On Hispanics, conservatives have created a serious problem with talk of deportation. Polls show that 60% of Hispanics know someone who is here illegally. That makes deportation a personal danger to them. Making this self-inflicted wound worse, talk of deportation is just gratuitous because it won’t happen. Moreover, conservatives talk in racist terms about Hispanics. They imply that all Hispanics are here illegally. They imply that all Hispanics are criminals. And they imply that all Hispanics are the same.

The Solution: Fixing the Hispanic problem will require a radical change in thinking. We need to realize that deportation isn’t going to happen, so learn to accept the idea that these illegals are here to stay. The GOP needs to go on a “listening tour” in the Hispanic community (so they get credit for acting) and then propose an amnesty – don’t wait for Obama. AND conservatives need to shut the hell up about it. The more they whine, the less credit conservatives will get for having changed. Until we do this, we are just delaying the inevitable and we’re making the wound bigger.

The GOP also needs to conduct real outreach. Every Congressman should hire Spanish-speaking staffers whose job would be to do what they do for everyone else, i.e. meet with Hispanic constituents every day of the year and help them get benefits, get permits, and get through the immigration system. They need to actively court Hispanic business owners and hook them up with their other donors. They need to encourage their friends in the banking industry to make loans to these people. They need to court mothers with children by telling them about the educational reforms they want. Start winning them over, one vote at a time, day after day in a thousand districts across the country.

They need to do the same with blacks. Even a 5-10% shift would be seismic.

Finally, they need to appoint a LOT of Hispanic, black, young and female Republicans to prominent positions. Right now there are basically none. I also think the next Republican presidential ticket must include a dark-skinned Hispanic and a youngish woman. This will help with minorities, with single women and with the young.

Conclusion

The GOP can turn this around, but they need to take decisive action. I'm not saying to become libertarians. Their obsession with drugs, conspiracies and their inability to recognize a proper role for government make them too far gone. But we need to offer people something better than the message of: (1) we fear minorities, (2) we want to control single women, (3) we only like married Christians, (4) we hate college kids, and (5) the American dream is to be a slave of corporate America.

Conservatism needs a reboot. It’s time to talk about personal economic freedom, the freedom to build the American dream on a level playing field. It’s time to fully include minorities in that dream. And it’s time to stop undercutting that message by acting like the morality police. It’s time to give people a reason to support us, not fear us.

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Supreme Courtin' It

There’s a lot of buzz suddenly about the Supreme Court possibly changing the course of the election. The thinking is that with the Supremes about to hear several controversial cases right before the election, that could excite one side or the other to turn out. Uh... no. Few people connect the Court to the election. Moreover, the Court won’t be issuing rulings until after the election. Still, there are some interesting cases coming up.

● Case No. 1: Affirmative Action. Fisher v. U. of Texas is an affirmative action case arising out of the admissions program at the University of Texas. Texas uses race as a consideration in its admissions to ensure educational diversity. Nine years ago, in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court said this was acceptable, but the Court has since moved to the right.

When it was originally created, affirmative action was approved by the Court on the basis that it would involve discrimination in favor of certain groups to address “prior wrongs.” This meant, it could be used only where there had been prior discrimination. This was meant to justify discriminating against people who never discriminated themselves because supposedly their racial/gender group had benefited even if they hadn’t. Over time, however, it spread to virtually everywhere, and it got the point that it applied to more than 60% of the public including people who had just arrived in America. That’s when the Court began reining it back in.

In this case, Fisher, who is white, claims that she would have been admitted to the school if she had been any other race. Texas counters that diversity is important to them. Obama’s Justice Department has backed the University.

It’s not clear what the Court will do, though Justice Roberts has attacked affirmative action in the past as being “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas all opposed the Grutter case allowing race to be used at all, and Alito likely sides with them. So it’s possible the Court will end the use of race in admissions and hiring, or at least require proof of direct discrimination. That said, they could also rule much more narrowly by saying that race may not be used where a goal like diversity can be achieved through some race-neutral means (like taking the top X% of high school graduates within the state or looking at family income). Or they could just affirm the present order.

● Case No. 2: Gay Marriage. The Supreme Court is likely to take on two gay marriage cases. The first involves the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA defines marriage federally as between a man and a woman and denies around 1,000 federal benefits (tax breaks, social security benefits, burial services, etc.) to gay couples who have been legally married in their home states. Obama’s Justice Department has refused to defend the law and several lower courts have already ruled it unconstitutional. How the Supreme Court will rule is unclear, but I suspect they will strike DOMA down.

In the past, the Supreme Court has overwhelmingly struck down laws which denied gays the same rights and protections afforded to heterosexuals. In Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, the Court struck down a law making gay sex illegal. In Romer v. Evans in 1996, the Court struck down a Colorado amendment which banned the passage of gay rights laws. It’s likely that the Court will conclude that DOMA illegally discriminates between lawfully married couples and will strike it down.

The Court may also take on the more significant Hollingsworth’s case, which involves California’s Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California. Prop 8 was struck down by the Ninth Circuit on narrow grounds rather than on the basis of some right for gays to be married, but the practical effect of that ruling would be to allow California to go forward with gay marriage.

The Supreme Court could refuse to hear the case (deny cert) in which event the law would remain struck down. Or it could affirm the decision or overturn it. If I had to guess, I would say the Court avoids deciding whether or not there is a right for gays to marry and will instead find some technical reason to affirm or overturn the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. My guess is that ultimately (in some later ruling), the Supreme Court will affirm the right of the states to make up their own minds on the issue of gay marriage, and in anticipation of that ruling, it will stick very closely to making sure that each side complied with California’s legal process in this case. Thus, whichever side should have won under California’s election/legislative process will prevail. . . but the issue won’t be decided under the United States Constitution. But you never know.

● Case No. 3: Voting Rights Act. In 2006, the Congress extended the portion of the Voting Rights Act which requires state and local governments “with a history of discrimination” to get advance approval from the Justice Department before they can change their voting rules. Congress extended this law 25 more years and Bush signed it. It applies to Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, as well as some counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota, Michigan and New Hampshire.

When the Court reviewed this provision in 2009, it expressed significant skepticism, but did not rule on its validity at the time. Said Justice Roberts:

“We are now a very different nation [than the one that first enacted the Voting Rights Act]. Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.”

With Congress renewing the law but without making any changes, and with these states arguing that any discrimination was in the distant past, it’s likely that if the Court hears this case that it will strike down or significantly narrow this provision. The practical implications of this can be seen in things like the recent Voter ID laws, which essentially need Justice Department approval or need to be litigated in advance. Without this provision, states would be much more free to pass these law and would no longer be presumed to have discriminatory intent.

Thoughts?

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Democrats Prove Smarter At Platform Making

The platform issue has been frustrating, if truth be told. The Republican platform, as always, was a mess. It was fringey and utterly obsessed with social conservative issues. The Democratic platform is not a mess. Yes, their ideology is horrible, but they are much smarter about how they present it.

The Democratic platform begins with a whole bunch of misleading points. Apparently, under Obama, your taxes went down $3,600 despite the constant tax increases as well as Obama’s repeated attempts to repeal the Bush tax cuts. And Obama wants you to know that Romney wants to raise your taxes! Obama also helped small businesses by giving them tax breaks to buy healthcare under Obamacare. He made Medicare “stronger” by “saving” $4,200 per senior by cutting $700 billion from Medicare. Not to mention, he fixed the doughnut hole in coverage (which was fixed under Bush). And don’t forget, he saved the auto industry! They even claim he “restored fiscal sanity” by reducing the deficit by $4 trillion. . . total lie.

Obama signed free trade agreements and told China to stop manipulating their currency. Never mind, the Democrats stopped those treaties until the Republicans forced the issue and China laughed Obama off. He also ended lobbying. . . although leftist Politico just ran an article talking about how nothing has really changed for lobbyists.

The platform also makes a slew of promises to each interest group they have. It promises money for HIV/AIDS research to help black and Latino men. Obama’s wants to hire 100,000 new teachers and spend more on Head Start. He “saved” $60 billion for the student loan program by pushing banks out of the process and he “invested” some of that money in Historically Black Colleges and he wants to increase the amount you can borrow under student loans -- thereby making the problem of affordability worse, rather than better.... but college kids are too stupid to realize that.

He wants the Federal government to hire 100,000 Americans with disabilities by 2015. He wants to buy biofuels to get the votes of farmers, and he mentions that he’s brought them record profits (forget the harm this has done to consumers). He supports the government working with faith-based organization, which he identifies as “critical allies in meeting the challenges that face our nation and our world – from domestic and global poverty, to climate change and human trafficking.” Obama also wants to stop voter ID laws which he claims stop blacks from voting. He wants to give companies incentives to hire wounded veterans. He wants civil rights laws for gays, gay marriage, and equal pay laws for women, and he wants free “prenatal screenings, mammograms, cervical cancer screening, breast-feeding supports, and contraception” for women.

But more importantly, the platform is written in code so that each interest group can see the promises they are getting, but the overall statement sounds very reasonable to the uninitiated. Here are some great examples:

● For the environmentalists, he wants an “all of the above energy plan” based on new emission rules and fuel efficiency standards to make alternative energies more profitable. In other words, he claims to love all forms of energy while promising to make oil and gas so expensive no one wants to use it.

● He wants to “out-build” the world on infrastructure and talks vaguely about “standing up for workers” through the National Labor Relations Board. Again, if you don’t know what he’s talking about it, it sounds like he’s concerned with all workers, but he’s only talking to unions.

● He promises to stabilize the housing market to punish “irresponsible lenders [who] tricked buyers into signing subprime loans” by allowing every “responsible homeowner” to refinance. Forget that no one got tricked into these loans and the people who need refinancing aren’t responsible homeowners. This is a bribe hidden as protection from predators.

● Consider the issue of abortion. Here is what the platform says:

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way. We also recognize that health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. We strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s decision to have a child by providing affordable health care and ensuring the availability of and access to programs that help women during pregnancy and after the birth of a child, including caring adoption programs.

Notice how reasonable this sounds. The word abortion is only used twice here, as compared to the Republican platform which couldn’t stop talking about it. Notice also how rather than talking up abortion, this very much reads like it seeks to curb abortion and notice how it ends with an insistence on protecting women who choose to have a child. This isn’t consistent with their normal rhetoric at all or their voting records, but it certain comes across as reasonable, not-obsessed and not extreme. Do you see the words "government financed"? No, huh? It's in there under "regardless of ability to pay."

● Guns are similar. How often have we seen Democrats try anything they could to take away gun rights. Look at liberal cities that even banned guns. Yet, the platform says “We recognize that the individual right to bear arms is an important part of the American tradition, and we will preserve Americans’ Second Amendment right to own and use firearms. We believe that the right to own firearms is subject to reasonable regulation.” Again, this sounds quite reasonable and never hints at their obsession, unless you know the idiosyncratic meaning of the words they are using.

● Internet freedom is another good example. Whereas the Republicans spoke of censoring the internet for the children, the Democrats talk about defending internet freedom and “opposing the extension of intergovernmental controls over the Internet.” Forget that they are the driving force behind interjecting the government through net neutrality laws and they joined all the anti-piracy SOPA stuff.

● Finally, we come to immigration. The Democrats have been the party of open borders, of sanctuary cities, of amnesty, of benefits to illegals, and of opposition to anything that might integrate immigrants into America. Indeed, even suggesting that immigrants learn English is enough to be branded a racist by the Democrats. Yet, they say this:

Democrats know there is broad consensus to repair that system and strengthen our economy, and that the country urgently needs comprehensive immigration reform that brings undocumented immigrants out of the shadows and requires them to get right with the law, learn English, and pay taxes in order to get on a path to earn citizenship.

That sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Too bad, this isn't the Democratic position.

As I said above, these platforms have been an exercise in frustration. The Republicans couldn’t stop talking about abortion and taking extremist positions whenever one was available, and the Democrats’ platform is packed with lies and distortions. But I have to hand it to the Democrats that their platform sounds reasonable. . . unless you know what each word really means when translated into policy.

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