If you like politics or political theatre it's time now to refresh your memory by heading over to the Wiki entry on the Ames Straw Poll.
It's a fund raiser for the Iowa GOP, but for a a couple of days on either side of Aug. 13, the world's media will treat it like the Oracle of Delphi.
Some bulletins from the initial skirmishing:
Ron Paul shelled out $31,000 for the most expensive tent site outside Hilton Coliseum. It is the same ground Mitt Romney used to win the straw poll and then cleverly lose the caucus race four years ago.
A candidate who wanted to remain secret wadded all the stepins at the tent auction in state GOP headquarters. The other candidate representatives stalked out in protest, and Congressman Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan then agreed to lift his veil. (Editorial comment: I doubt keeping his candidacy secret will greatly challenge Mr. McCotter. Nevertheless, he is being added to your crucial TMR candidate list.)
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It costs $30 to vote in the poll, plus money to get your people from Manly and Fertile* to Ames. The Paul campaign has offered fork over $20 of the poll tax and is running some buses from the outlying provinces to Ames. It's a big bet by Paul forces that he can show well enough that CNN quits calling him crazy.
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*Real places, and we like remembering the headline in a weekly which said "Manly Man Marries Fertile Woman."
Jun 24, 2011
No, it's probably not a conspiracy of silence
I think the AP report on its own hot poll just reflects a headline mindset that that only the most fashionable candidates rate a mention. In this case that excluded Ron Paul from newsthink.
A fresh AP/GfK poll attempted to measure the favorability/unfavorability ratings of the "top" ten GOP candidates, and Paul was included. The writer assigned to turn the poll into publishable words didn't think Paul's showing was newsworthy. The good doctor didn't rate even a nod.
The more detailed report -- unpublishable in general news files -- tells a different story. In total favorability ratings, Paul beats everyone in the field except Romney. He beats Bachmann, Palin, Gingrich and the rest of the headliners.
Not surprisingly, he fares more poorly in the unfavorable category -- beating "only" Gingrich, Palin, and, err, Romney. Twenty-one years of being snickered at folks who talk on the electric teevee channels will do that to a guy.
Caution: Polling geekery alert:
The news report in the first cite above uses numbers different from the raw poll results. The narrative story deals with favorability ratings among Republicans only, while the data in the second covers opinions of all people polled. The number-crunching methodology to get from one to the other isn't reported. There's nothing necessarily sinister in that, and it doesn't alter the point that the news story contains a large black hole.
A fresh AP/GfK poll attempted to measure the favorability/unfavorability ratings of the "top" ten GOP candidates, and Paul was included. The writer assigned to turn the poll into publishable words didn't think Paul's showing was newsworthy. The good doctor didn't rate even a nod.
The more detailed report -- unpublishable in general news files -- tells a different story. In total favorability ratings, Paul beats everyone in the field except Romney. He beats Bachmann, Palin, Gingrich and the rest of the headliners.
Not surprisingly, he fares more poorly in the unfavorable category -- beating "only" Gingrich, Palin, and, err, Romney. Twenty-one years of being snickered at folks who talk on the electric teevee channels will do that to a guy.
Caution: Polling geekery alert:
The news report in the first cite above uses numbers different from the raw poll results. The narrative story deals with favorability ratings among Republicans only, while the data in the second covers opinions of all people polled. The number-crunching methodology to get from one to the other isn't reported. There's nothing necessarily sinister in that, and it doesn't alter the point that the news story contains a large black hole.
Jun 22, 2011
It's nice to be nice, but sometimes it's nicer to have a gun
The lady at the Kum and Go counter in Humboldt tried to be pleasant to the robber that night. He wanted smokes and cash. She handed them over. So he shot her dead.
He was in practice. An hour earlier he killed a another nice lady at an Algona convenience store.
Of course this makes me think of a fellow luckier than the two unarmed convenience store clerks. That good citizen forgot to obey his employer's (Walgreen's) Compromise Policy. His punishment was less permanent.
'course, the Humboldt/Algona killer kid (17) had a pretty good excuse. Earlier in his recent adventures he had swiped a pack of ramen noodles and feared getting caught. So he stole a family gun and his mom's SUV and took off for Mexico, or maybe Amsterdam, via my neighborhood.
And a technical note if you please: The first version of the Register story had the young man armed with a 40 mm handgun. Bofor long, multiple layers of fact checking and editorial oversight (which is to say a wry reader comment) prompted a correction to .40 caliber.
He was in practice. An hour earlier he killed a another nice lady at an Algona convenience store.
Of course this makes me think of a fellow luckier than the two unarmed convenience store clerks. That good citizen forgot to obey his employer's (Walgreen's) Compromise Policy. His punishment was less permanent.
'course, the Humboldt/Algona killer kid (17) had a pretty good excuse. Earlier in his recent adventures he had swiped a pack of ramen noodles and feared getting caught. So he stole a family gun and his mom's SUV and took off for Mexico, or maybe Amsterdam, via my neighborhood.
And a technical note if you please: The first version of the Register story had the young man armed with a 40 mm handgun. Bofor long, multiple layers of fact checking and editorial oversight (which is to say a wry reader comment) prompted a correction to .40 caliber.
Pixie Dust
The baited* breath of Chairman Bernanke is due to be expelled at 2:15 p.m. in his second-ever press conference as Fed boss. The presser follows a 12:15 p.m. interest-rate release from the FOMC, (an acronym for the Federal Payday Loan Committee).
Ordinary folks like you and me await all this with bated breath. We have played along with the Fed's monetary gag for so long that, like it or not, we have a personal stake, survival, in the Charminization-rate of the American dollar.
I'm going to suggest a certain questioning attitude in listening to Ben. As he speaks, try to get a handle on just how he proposes to continue printing our way to something a majority of American voters will accept as "prosperity."
There's something to be said for the view that it's already too late, but Ben has to try. He has formidable enemies in the welfare classes as represented by vote whores in our legislatures and executive mansions. Further, he may have an enemy in his personal economic dogma. As smart as he is, the man's soul is larded with Keynes as propagandized by Samuelson.
And he is very smart. So are his fellow Federal Reserve Board governors. They're too bright to bless policy which they expect could lead to an American Weimar -- inflation coming at lightning speed and increasing exponentially.
(The German currency stabilized after the Armistice at something like 60 marks per American (gold- and silver-backed) dollar. That in itself represented massive inflation, but at least it held until June of 1921. That summer brought further bad policy which devalued the mark to about 320 per dollar in September. By December, 1922, it took 8,000 marks to buy one Greenback.
(Translate the number to the United States, 2011, and use our favorite benchmark, the price of bacon, now about $5 per pound. That Weimarization level would boost it to $666 per pound. Your grandma starves. Your kids resemble the photos from Biafra, 1967-70.)
And that will not happen in the United States. The Washington, D.C. powers in which Ben is embedded understand that that level of misery would lead to a United States version of the putsches. Someone will remind them of the Reichstag elections of April 10, 1932.
The president, whomever he might be at the time, and all our subordinate electees could not endure in the face of that kind of upheaval short of trying to impose martial law upon a people less docile than the demoralized and defeated Germans.
So summon up what optimism you can and, for the time being, rule out the sort of hyper-paced borrowing and printing that would, in a relative eye blink, instigate the putsches.
Instead, watch for Ben's hints at something as bad, but en route on slower train, possibly buying enough time to tinker the economy back into something viable for another generation or two.
How much room does he weasel for a QE3 and a QE4? How much of our problem does he blame on, say, Greece rather than Washington and the 50 state capitols? How does he explain the 50-1 leverage of his balance sheet? How forcefully will he hammer home to the political masters that they have long since bought the last vote we can afford?
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*Correct. Baited with, among many other adulterants, a concoction of unicorn methane, pixie dust, smoke, mirrors, and ethanol subsidies
Ordinary folks like you and me await all this with bated breath. We have played along with the Fed's monetary gag for so long that, like it or not, we have a personal stake, survival, in the Charminization-rate of the American dollar.
I'm going to suggest a certain questioning attitude in listening to Ben. As he speaks, try to get a handle on just how he proposes to continue printing our way to something a majority of American voters will accept as "prosperity."
There's something to be said for the view that it's already too late, but Ben has to try. He has formidable enemies in the welfare classes as represented by vote whores in our legislatures and executive mansions. Further, he may have an enemy in his personal economic dogma. As smart as he is, the man's soul is larded with Keynes as propagandized by Samuelson.
And he is very smart. So are his fellow Federal Reserve Board governors. They're too bright to bless policy which they expect could lead to an American Weimar -- inflation coming at lightning speed and increasing exponentially.
(The German currency stabilized after the Armistice at something like 60 marks per American (gold- and silver-backed) dollar. That in itself represented massive inflation, but at least it held until June of 1921. That summer brought further bad policy which devalued the mark to about 320 per dollar in September. By December, 1922, it took 8,000 marks to buy one Greenback.
(Translate the number to the United States, 2011, and use our favorite benchmark, the price of bacon, now about $5 per pound. That Weimarization level would boost it to $666 per pound. Your grandma starves. Your kids resemble the photos from Biafra, 1967-70.)
And that will not happen in the United States. The Washington, D.C. powers in which Ben is embedded understand that that level of misery would lead to a United States version of the putsches. Someone will remind them of the Reichstag elections of April 10, 1932.
The president, whomever he might be at the time, and all our subordinate electees could not endure in the face of that kind of upheaval short of trying to impose martial law upon a people less docile than the demoralized and defeated Germans.
So summon up what optimism you can and, for the time being, rule out the sort of hyper-paced borrowing and printing that would, in a relative eye blink, instigate the putsches.
Instead, watch for Ben's hints at something as bad, but en route on slower train, possibly buying enough time to tinker the economy back into something viable for another generation or two.
How much room does he weasel for a QE3 and a QE4? How much of our problem does he blame on, say, Greece rather than Washington and the 50 state capitols? How does he explain the 50-1 leverage of his balance sheet? How forcefully will he hammer home to the political masters that they have long since bought the last vote we can afford?
---
*Correct. Baited with, among many other adulterants, a concoction of unicorn methane, pixie dust, smoke, mirrors, and ethanol subsidies
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