(via @adambaldwin) Scare quotes deliberate: for all I know, ‘Coretta’ is a composite of three or four African-American girls that President Barack Obama bullied as a kid.

“I’m not her boyfriend!” I shouted. I ran up to Coretta and gave her a slight shove; she staggered back and looked up at me, but still said nothing. “Leave me alone!” I shouted again. And suddenly Coretta was running, faster and faster, until she disappeared from sight. Appreciative laughs rose around me. Then the bell rang, and the teachers appeared to round us back to class.

No wonder Barack Obama underpays women who work for him. He’s been carefully taught to treat ‘em that way.

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(Via Hot Air) Specifically, North Carolinian voters on Tuesday’s Amendment One vote banning same-sex marriage:

African-Americans voted 2-1 in favor of the North Carolina amendment banning gay marriage Tuesday, but the White House is betting that black voters there and beyond will stick with the president, despite broad resistance to legalization.

…and that’s it. There’s no backup for that at all in the article. The question is of some interest – African-American opposition to California’s same-sex marriage laws gave social conservatives a completely unexpected victory on 2008′s Election Night – but if there are actual exit polls publicly available then I have yet to see them. For that matter, ABC News reported today (May 10, 2012) that there was no exit polling in North Carolina for Amendment One. At all.

So where did Politico get that number?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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Here are the final results of last night’s primary contest, and presumably a variant of this[***] will end up on Democratic political operatives’ desks across the breadth of Wisconsin:

Note that that total does not include the almost 20K of ‘Republican’ votes accumulated by ‘Republican’ Arthur Kohl-Riggs, given that the use of square quotes in both cases is justified.: he’s not a Republican, and neither were his supporters. And let me make this one point: Kohl-Riggs demonstrates why I don’t really believe in strategic opposite-side voting and/or Operation Chaos-style shenanigans.  I am not convinced that such things worked, and yesterday’s results seems to back me up on that. Yes, I know that Republican spoiler Isaac Weix came in second in the LT-GOV primary recall (which is why nobody on the Left is bring that race’s total voters up); but I should note that he did not, in point of fact, actually win.

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I’m not really going to stay up and watch this one, but here’s a quick question spawned from the results thus far:

With 10% of the vote in, why does the Republican who isn’t actually REALLY in a contested primary have more votes (78,370) than all of the Democrats in the contested primary combined (69,627)?

[UPDATE: Well, now it's 16%, and Walker is continuing to do better than all the Democratic candidates on this one.  Democrats were supposed to be enthusiastic about this recall, yes?]

[ANOTHER UPDATE: Yes, I'm just being a troublemaker.  Your point?]

[POSSIBLY LAST UPDATE: Oh, OK, with 24% of the vote in the Democrats finally caught up to the guy without a real opponent.  Well, it was funny while it lasted.]

[ANOTHER UPDATE ON THE VERY HEELS OF THAT UPDATE: Spoke too soon!  Spoke too soon!  The full update has Scott Walker ahead again!  Time for a page break: this is actually starting to get interesting.]

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This is pretty much exactly what I want to hear coming out of Mitt Romney’s mouth when it comes to things like that ridiculous ‘Julia’ slideshow* from the Obama campaign.

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Yeah, when’s that primary in Massachusetts, again? Because the general election is going to be a trip:

…the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that her husband, Ms. Warren’s great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.

In case you were wondering: O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Cherokee’ ancestor; and by ‘Cherokee’ I mean ‘actually probably Swedish.’ See AoSHQ for more. Also, see Legal Insurrection for the original revelation.

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…No, actually, the AP demonstrated professional ethics. Twice.

The Associated Press reports today that it learned last week of a thwarted Al Qaeda-affiliated plot to bomb a U.S.-bound airplane, but did not report on it because of an agreement with the White House and the CIA. However, the AP did decide to report the story one day earlier than the White House had requested.

“The AP learned about the thwarted plot last week but agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way,” the AP’s Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman report. “Once those concerns were allayed, the AP decided to disclose the plot Monday despite requests from the Obama administration to wait for an official announcement Tuesday.”

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How bad is it for Democrats in North Carolina right now? This bad:

The gist of the video is as follows:

When asked if he supported Obama, [Rep. Mike] Mcintyre told the reporter he wasn’t doing “political interviews” at a prayer breakfast because “it wouldn’t be appropriate.”

But – as the video later notes – Rep. McIntyre will talk about how he’s for North Carolina’s Amendment 1 banning same-sex marriage! He’s for it. Dear God, please, people need to believe that he’s for it*…

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This Breitbart article about McCain’s 2008 campaign team is infuriating me far too much for me to write coherently about it for very long, so let me be brief: speaking professionally, I agree with it. The faction of Team McCain represented by Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace should not be allowed anywhere NEAR a Republican Presidential campaign for the rest of their lives.

And I mean it: the main campaign was a collection of professional political malpractice that seemed content to merely put up enough of a fight to satisfy honor, then lose gracefully. While I like and respect most of the people who were directly involved in handling New Media aspects for McCain, it became incredibly clear by the end of the 2008 election cycle that the McCain campaign essentially treated those people with about as much respect as they did us; which is to say, none at all. The campaign would have happily ignored us completely, if they thought that they could get away with it; as it was, they made sure that we knew that our inclusion was both grudging and resented – and literally muted whenever possible.

How bad was it? Let me put it this way: I’ve already gotten more out of Romney’s campaign than I ever have out of McCain’s – and Mitt Romney isn’t even the official nominee yet. The bottom line is that it turned out that John McCain wanted to be the nominee a heck of a lot more than he ever wanted to be the President, and while I’m sure that McCain feels that his team acquitted themselves well in the 2008 general election the rest of us are… somewhat unpersuaded.

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• Q. “Should student loans be priced differently according to major?” (see here and here for more)
• A. Yes.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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It’s all because of racism, of course:

But the main quarrels Democratic voters [in Jefferson County, Ohio] have with Mr. Obama have nothing to do with race. They include his rejection of one proposed route for the Keystone pipeline, a stance they say will harm this area, whose backbone, the Ohio River, is lined with metal mills and coal mines.

Oh, I’m sorry, but that was paragraph fifteen. Presumably the NYT decided that its readers weren’t going to read past paragraphs three and four:

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As somebody commented privately, Obama’s just trying to mess with our heads now.  Oh, sure, the man’s going to pretend that starting his campaign on May 5th is to honor Cinco de Mayo, but nope: it’s all about the Commies.

But that’s OK: we here at the People’s Glorious RedState Revolutionary Collective can mess with heads, too.

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Not that I actually ever ‘had’ one of those – what’s that? Oh, it’s a nerd thing. You’ll get guys claiming that they’re going out with this girl that they met online, only she lives in Canada so it’ll be a while until you meet her. I do not judge: that could have been me.

So I mostly just find this entertaining (that explicitly includes the title):

Why it matters that Obama dated a composite and ate a dog

There was a brief media firestorm yesterday when Vanity Fair broke the news that Obama’s famous “New York girlfriend” was a fiction. She appears in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, described in some detail by her appearance, voice and mannerisms. But a new biography of Obama – with an excerpt published in Vanity Fair – “reveals” that she was actually an amalgam of several different women. Politico immediately ran with “Obama: ‘New York girlfriend’ was composite” and Drudge headlined with “Obama Admits Fabricating Girlfriend in a Memoir.” Coming hot on the heels of the news that the Pres once ate a dog, his weirdo factor seems to have hit the roof.

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…Mind you, Chris Matthews thinks that he’s complimenting the President by comparing him to William Shakespeare’s Henry V. The context is the President’s not-a-naked-campaign-ploy-at-all visit and speech in Afghanistan yesterday, and it predictably caused Chris Matthews to start up with the sycophancy. Precise quote? “It was right out of Henry V actually, a touch of Barry, in this case, in the night for those soldiers risking their lives over there” (H/T: Hot Air Headlines).

:pause:

Henry V.

Oh, dear. See, this is why literary references should be reserved to the professionals. ‘Professionals’ being defined as ‘people are who not Chris Matthews,’ of course.

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Download audio here

(For RedState’s review of The Tyranny of Cliches, please see here.)

We had the opportunity to talk with Jonah recently about his new book The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.  You can download or listen to it below; the interview mostly involves a basic look at the book and what went into writing it, but there’s at least one place where Woodrow Wilson gets smacked around a little.  Having read the book, I recommend it for anybody looking to challenge individual progressive duckspeaking on, well, a fundamental level…

Interview with Jonah Goldberg.

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Jonah Goldberg has a new book out coming out tomorrow – the full title is The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas – which will be seen by many to be a sort of sequel to his previous (and very useful work Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. I say ‘sort of sequel’ because The Tyranny of Cliches is not exactly an expansion of Liberal Fascism as it is a book that references a lot of the same events and themes as its ‘predecessor,’ only from the angle of ‘how progressives manipulate language’ as opposed to ‘how progressives manipulate history.’ Capsule review: The Tyranny of Cliches does an excellent job in puncturing several progressive delusions about their ideology, including the one about how progressives don’t really have an ideology in the first place; you want to read it.

The central message of The Tyranny of Cliches is Progressives have a consistent ideology, which they then proceed to pretend is not an ideology at all, but instead mere ‘Pragmatism.’ The reason why this is important is because ideologies can be and are rigorously questioned and challenged as a matter of course; but if one can instead get people to treat an ideological position as merely being something that ‘everybody knows,’ then it theoretically becomes easier to get people to unquestionably endorse said position. Hence, ‘tyranny of cliche:’ cliches are of course self-contained and internally consistent thoughts* that most people in a culture understand and accept. Having progressive ideas and concepts slip into that shared consensus would go a long way towards having those ideas and concepts adopted and used.

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I hate to admit being wrong, of course, but I’m pretty much stuck here.  You see, last week I RedHotted a post where in passing I more or less indicated that I didn’t think that it was particularly fair to ding MA senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren for her claims of Native American ancestry.  When I read the story, it seemed that she had merely repeated it as an anecdote from her family history – which is to say, something that I’ve done myself (family history claims a Huron great-grandmother; I have no evidence whatsoever for this).  I also didn’t really think that it was all that big a deal that Harvard University was claiming minority status for her for a time; universities do weird things for publicity, she wasn’t running for office when it happened, and besides, Harvard stopped doing that a while back anyway.  I figured that there were more important things that I could be doing with my time.

Well.  This is what happens when you trust the ethical sense of a progressive politician.  It turns out that Elizabeth Warren in fact claimed minority status:  specifically, in the “Association of American Law Schools’ annual directory of minority law teachers” (H/T: @CoonDawg68) from 1986 to 1995 (more about this at The Volokh Conspiracy (via Instapundit), which also has some interesting details about  ‘racial fraud’ as a legal concept in Massachusetts).  As the Boston Herald helpfully notes, universities would have had access to this information… which, presumably, would include their hiring committees.  Are we really expected to believe that Harvard University didn’t consult the AALS minority directory as part of their vetting process?  In fact, are really expected to believe that the University of Pennsylvania didn’t, either?  – Because I don’t, and that means, again, that I was wrong.  And I’m sorry about that.

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In three parts:

1. The current President of the United States campaigned on a platform that included the closing of the prison for international terrorists at Gitmo.
2. Gitmo is, in fact, still open. But they’ll get to it Real Soon Now (SPOILER WARNING: they won’t).
3. The Right noted at the time that Gitmo was going to remain open. On more than one occasion. We, in fact, told people time again and again and again and again that Barack Obama was not going to close Gitmo. Which means that nobody really has an excuse for being surprised.

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I need to push back on this cover-their-rear statement by Politico on the ‘surprise’ flipping of the House of Representatives in 2010.

[House Speaker John] Boehner doesn’t play political prognosticator often. But when he does, those close to him say, there’s usually a calculated reason. In April 2010 — almost two years ago exactly — the then-House minority leader said in a radio interview that an astounding 100 seats were in play in that year’s midterm elections, a figure he said was broader than “anything we’ve seen around here during my 20 years” in the House.

Few from either party believed Boehner at the time, but his assessment proved accurate. Republicans put about 100 Democratic-held seats in play, ultimately winning 63 of them to seize the majority.

(Bolding mine) Actually, people who read RedState (or MoeLane) were prepared for that scenario. People who read Sean Trende at RCP were prepared for that scenario. People who read Hot Air and AoSHQ were at least prepared for the possibility.  In fact, people who were following the election using right-leaning sites and news sourcess were by and large prepared for what happened. But the people were relying on the Daily Beast or the Left-blogosphere or, well, Politico for their political content? …Yeah, those folks ended up being kind of surprised in November. Usually unpleasantly.

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This is an old story – one that Jim Geraghty (via the Morning Jolt) reminisced about while noting the time that Mitt Romney saved a bunch of people* from drowning – that relates the time that Mitt Romney had somebody take a swing at him on a flight. Supposedly, Romney had asked the guy in front of him to put his seat up before takeoff (Romney and his wife flew economy class, by the way**), the guy swung on him, situation resolved by local security forces. Nothing unusual, right? …No, that’s just what THEY want you to think. There’s a conflicting report.

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