RedState Morning Briefing May 16, 2012 Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge. 1. Will Mitch McConnell Stand With Conservatives Against Obama & the Federal Reserve? 2. Narcissist in Chief Adds Himself to Every Presidential Biography (Except Ford) 3. The FY 13 NDAA Keeps Terrorists Off U.S. Soil without Compromising Civil Liberties 4. The DNC seems to be sitting out the Wisconsin recall. 5. House Republicans Still Hate Spending Cuts 6. Washington Post Promoting Misleading Filibuster Arguments ———————————————————————- 1. Will Mitch McConnell Stand With Conservatives Against Obama & the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve is not my issue. Audit it if you want, I’m with you. But it’s not something that drives me crazy or makes me passionate. But there is one issue that really gets me and the Fed has been at the center of it lately — crony capitalism. Barack Obama has nominated Jeremy Stein and Jerome Powell to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors for six years each. Senator David Vitter (R-LA — HAFA Score 85%) placed a hold on both men. They are creatures of Wall Street and, in the biggest red flag of the day, both Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have been pressuring Senator Vitter to drop his hold. The issue here is bailouts. Mark Calabria notes the Federal Reserve has bailout powers, but it needs the support of five Federal Reserve governors. Stein and Powell are both in favor of the Federal Reserve continuing to bailout banks and other entities with little oversight. Harry Reid can bring these men to the floor any time he wants. The word in the Senate is that he is about to. Please click here for the rest of the post. 2. Narcissist in Chief Adds Himself to Every Presidential Biography (Except Ford) Many have called President Obama’s election historic, and rightly so. His presidency however, is another matter entirely. It’s historic in a lot of senses be it his record breaking debt accumulation & spending or his being the first president to have a rainbow halo placed on his head. But compared to the historic achievements of other presidents that did things like ending slavery or saving the planet, he falls woefully short. Unless you ask him. Please click here for the rest of the post. 3. The FY 13 NDAA Keeps Terrorists Off U.S. Soil without Compromising Civil Liberties This week, the House will fulfill our most important constitutional duty by debating the FY 13 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). In accordance with the framer’s intent, this act is the primary check that Congress can apply to the Executive Branch on defense and national security policy. Last year, constitutional conservatives raised the alarm bell about some provisions in the FY 12 NDAA; provisions that many were concerned would grant President Obama far reaching powers to detain American citizens without trial. The bill ultimately passed, but has become the subject of countless town hall meetings, tweets, and Facebook posts in the months since. The debate has become so heated that many believe that the NDAA is a bill that deals strictly with detaining terrorists. It is much more than that. Aside from dictating how the military can handle any al Qaeda terrorists they capture, the FY13 NDAA deals with the full scope of national security issues. There is much in it, from a rejection of the Obama administration’s effort to raise health care fees on military retirees; to making sure the President doesn’t trade our missile defenses away to the Russians, that Conservatives can be proud of. Please click here for the rest of the post. 4. The DNC seems to be sitting out the Wisconsin recall. You know, when I saw this secondhand whine from Wisconsin Democrats upset that the DNC apparently wasn’t prepared to throw half a million dollars at the general recall election, I assumed that this would be resolved. I mean, really: the Left has already thrown away tens of millions of dollars; what’s a bit more? Admittedly, not throwing utterly horrible money after bad (we’ve passed the ‘throwing good money after bad’ stage already) would be the right answer, in a strictly utilitarian sense; but the state party is in a bad way right now. They sort of need an indication that the President cares for more than his own election, right? Please click here for the rest of the post. 5. House Republicans Still Hate Spending Cuts Last week, the House passed H.R. 5326, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, by a vote of 247-163, providing $51.131 billion in discretionary appropriations for fiscal year 2013. That’s $1.61 billion or 3% below the amount of funding provided for these programs in fiscal year 2012–and $731 million or 1.4% below the amount requested by the president for fiscal year 2013. Not terrible, but clearly there was room to cut more spending, right? Surely House Republicans realized that Americans want them to cut more spending than 3%–and be more than 1.4% below where President Obama is, right? Please click here for the rest of the post. 6. Washington Post Promoting Misleading Filibuster Arguments Ezra Klein at the Washington Post put out a piece promoting Common Cause’s lawsuit to have the Senate filibuster declared unconstitutional. Klein repeats myth after myth about the filibuster. This piece should commence an interesting national debate finally putting the argument to bed that the filibuster is somehow unconstitutional. Abolition of the filibuster will lead to a Senate with less time for debate and limited transparency for the American people. It is interesting to note that these short sighted leftists may be laying the table for an easy repeal of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank and extending the Bush tax cuts. Clearly, Republicans control of the Senate is within reach (see RCP analysis of Senate polls). There is also a 50-50 chance that Republicans win the presidency. Liberals are trying to get rid of the one tool they would have to stop Republicans from dismantling the Obama legacy of higher taxes and more regulation. I have to imagine that some Republicans will want to take liberals up on the offer of ridding the Senate of the filibuster in January of 2013. Please click here for the rest of the post.
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Morning Briefing for May 16, 2012
(H/T: Hot Air Headlines ) Apparently the President wants to spend his extremely hypothetical second term doing the following: Repealing DOMA; Passing another DREAM Act; ‘Reforming’ Wall Street; and ‘Investing’ in schools. Now, I’m not going to fall into the trap of getting sidelined discussing the merits of any or all of those proposals*. Instead, I’m going to ask: just how stupid does President Obama think Democrats are , anyway? From 2009 to 2011 the Democratic Party had between 256 to 258 votes in the House, and 57 to 60 in the Senate. If the President was such a blithering incompetent leader that he couldn’t pass wish-list legislation then , in what alternate universe could anyone legitimately expect him to pass a similar list in any hypothetical future administration? – Because the Democrats aren’t going to enjoy that kind of lopsided majorities in Congress again any time soon. In fact, starting next January they’re probably not going to enjoy a majority in Congress at all . You know, I’m used to the President lying to me . It’s a thing. I’ve almost grown comfortable with it. But Obama lying to his own base is pretty darn low-rent of him. Especially since he’s just doing it to get money out of them… Moe Lane ( crosspost ) *And, according to the Fox News article , the Romney campaign isn’t taking the bait either. Romney and the Republican National Committee, though, are sticking to the issues of the economy and spending. The Republican National Committee released a new web video Monday slamming Obama for his “broken promises” on deficits and debt. Which is, of course, the right call to make.
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Obama insults his base with his ‘second term’ wish list.
In a long election season, it’s never wise to get too high or too low over any one poll. Presidential elections are won at the state level, but statewide polling is fairly sporadic at this stage of the race, so we’re stuck reading national polls a lot. But the latest poll is bad news for President Obama. We all know the major issues by now to look for with individual polls: some polls are adults, and are totally useless, because only registered voters can vote. Polls of likely voters, in turn, are vastly more accurate and less Democratic-biased than polls of registered voters, many of whom also don’t show up to vote. Most polls are also reported after weighting to achieve some guesstimate of the partisan breakdown of the general electorate among Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Even polls that don’t feature egregious hackery are an inexact science, because they rest on the pollster’s current assumptions about the D/R/I split and the ‘screen’ they use to decide who is a likely voter. If the shape of the electorate is not as projected, the poll will be wrong. Polling averages tend to be steadier than individual polls conducted over a few hundred respondents, and they show a tight race – the RealClearPolitics average shows Obama up 46.5%-45.1% , while the left-leaning TPMPolltracker average shows Romney up 46.1-44.2 . Those averages smooth out possible outliers like last Friday’s jaw-dropping Rasmussen poll showing Romney up 50-43 among likely voters. And the averages themselves get more reliable as more of the pollsters start polling likely voters – right now, Rasmussen is virtually the only pollster reporting regularly conducted polls that is polling likely rather than registered voters. Looking at RCP, Rasmussen’s mid-April poll is the last likely voter poll showing President Obama in the lead. All that said, the Obama campaign cannot be happy with the results of the latest CBS/New York Times poll – a poll of registered voters done by two organizations notoriously unfriendly to Republicans* – showing Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama 46-43. Some breakdowns below the fold. 1. This is a registered voter poll, which as noted above means it tends to favor Democrats. The weighted party-ID split is 36% D, 30% R, 34% I. 2. The trend is negative for Obama – 48-42 lead in February, 47-44 in March, tied 46-46 in April, down 43-46 in May. Whatever the methodology, if you use it consistently and show a clear trend, that says something. 3. Gender gap? Romney leads 45-42 among men, actually down from a 49-43 lead last month, but after all the “war on women” hoo-ha, Obama’s 49-43 lead among women has flipped to a 46-44 Romney lead. 4. Oddly, Obama for once is polling behind his approval rating, which is up to 50% in this poll. One of the common themes of the past few years is that he tends to poll above his approval rating – people tend to like him or say they do, but don’t think he’s getting the job done. This, compared to the general personal and political unlikeability of Mitt Romney, is one reason why I tend to agree with Michael Barone’s third scenario that there’s a good chance that undecided voters wait until the last minute to resign themselves and break for Romney , much as happened in the primaries among reluctant voters who felt they had run out of better options. The poll dropped some of the questions in last month’s survey about Romney, but that poll had him tied even though voters said by 60-34 that they can’t relate to him and by 62-27 that he says what people want to hear, not what he believes. In other words, it’s only Romney’s inherent flaws as a candidate that are even keeping this race close – people neither especially like nor trust Romney but are still dissatisfied enough with Obama to give him a shot. The longer the polls look tied, the worse things get for Obama, because it means voters haven’t bought his various efforts to make Romney radioactive. Remember, all this occurs against a backdrop of voters unhappy with the direction of the country and thus predisposed to change horses. 5. Despite its near-unanimous popularity among the media, entertainment and academia, Obama’s support of same-sex marriage is not an asset; by 25-16 (22-14 among independents), more voters say they are less likely rather than more likely to vote for Obama after his change of position on the issue, whereas by 23-17 (20-20 among independents), voters say they are more likely to vote for Romney as a result. Just under 60% of voters don’t consider the issue a factor. Notably, the poll found that the public, by 50-46 (50-47 among independents) favors amending the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Meanwhile, by 67-24, voters think Obama’s change of position on the issue is politically expedient rather than principled. In other words, the voters think he’s being political and doing something unpopular. This is not where you want to be in an election. Yet another reason why I refer to Romney-Obama as the collision between a resistible force and a movable object. 6. 62% of voters named the economy as the number one issue and another 20% named the budget, the deficit or health care. This race will be dominated by the big-picture domestic issues, not foreign policy or social issues, as much influence as those have on the baked-in partisan divides. * – The National Journal has some thoughts on the oddities of the CBS/NYT poll’s methodology . POSTSCRIPT: Bad polling news for Obama is also bad for his campaign for another, more immediate reason. Both of these candidates are unusually dependent on raising vast sums of money. Obama, as a number of press accounts recently have noted, has mostly lost the confidence of Wall Street fundraisers, who were a huge element of his fundraising in 2012. Romney, by contrast, as a former private equity guy, has a natural base of support throughout the financial industry. But many potential donors are terrified of donating to Romney and seeing Obama win, given this White House’s well-known efforts to target and intimidate private citizens who donate to the opposition. Perceptions shifting away from an inevitable Obama victory could have a disproportionate effect on the fundraising balance of power.
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CBS/NYT: Romney 46, Obama 43 Among Registered Voters
In the great minds think alike department, Tim Carney also writes about the fundraising benefits of Barack Obama’s marriage “evolution.” (Perhaps Tamron Hall will shut off my microphone too.) He quotes Rahm Emanuel as saying, “Gays are the next Jews of fundraising.” Last week, NBC’s Chuck Todd compared gay donors to Wall Street money. My point isn’t that there is anything illegitimate about people spending money in pursuit of their political goals. Pace McCain-Feingold, political giving is free speech. But it is interesting that the ubiquitous liberal objections to money in politics go out the window when it comes to the super-rich promoting social liberalism or furthering progressive objectives.
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Liberal Money in Politics is Good Money
By all accounts, it’s been a bumpy week in the news. The question of gay marriage clearly topped the charts with the president fighting his post hoc war of words against voters in the Tar Heel state. The CIA mobilized its double-agents to sniff out the next generation in underwear bombs. Meanwhile, in Damascus, Syria witnessed a steep uptick in violence, while a Russian commercial jetliner slammed into the side of an Indonesian volcano. At the polls, France broke left , and Greece broke bad . On the bright side, however, I’m very much looking forward to spending some old drachmas on my next trip ’round the Aegean, because there’s no chance the Eurozone survives this latest mess. Until then, I’ll have to lean on something a little closer to home to pass these troubled times. Although native to the Philadelphia ‘burbs, I’m a lifelong fan of Kentucky bluegrass and the commonwealth’s homegrown blends of corn-mashed bourbon. Sipping a dram of that charred-oak cocktail, smashed with mint and simple-syrup, is an annual treat when the three-year-olds Run for the Roses . This year, I’ll happily admit I didn’t lose any money, but a couple juleps cost me my cares. So it was with great pleasure that I read this morning that the owners of Maker’s Mark, my go-to brand when it comes to the brown stuff (“On the rocks, splash of water, thank you.”), won a major victory at the Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals. Judge Boyce Martin ruled that the iconic red wax seal, dripped on the Marker’s Mark bottle, is protected “trade dress,” and, as such, it’s shielded from imitation, duplication, copycats and clones. As the Wall Street Journal ‘s Joe Palazzolo ( big h/t ) notes, Judge Martin clearly reveled in his historic defense of our native spirits and, frankly, the American way. His opinion opens: Justice Hugo Black once wrote, “I was brought up to believe that Scotch whisky would need a tax preference to survive in competition with Kentucky bourbon.” While there may be some truth to Justice Black’s statement that paints Kentucky bourbon as such an economic force that its competitors need government protection or preference to compete with it, it does not mean a Kentucky bourbon distiller may not also avail itself of our laws to protect its assets. This brings us to the question before us today: whether the bourbon producer Maker’s Mark Distillery, Inc.’s registered trademark consisting of its signature trade dress element — a red dripping wax seal — is due protection, in the form of an injunction, from a similar trade dress element on Casa Cuervo, S.A. de C.V.’s Reserva de la Familiatequila bottles. We hold that it is. The judgments of the district court in this trademark infringement case are AFFIRMED.
