He’s done the focus groups and they have done the data mining, and the ad is not aimed at my demographic, so what do I know about its effectiveness. But even so, it is the sleaziest and most disgusting ad I have ever seen in politics. They are working on getting the right number of electoral college votes and as I have been saying all along, their approach will look odd because we don’t see what they do. They are the ones with the terabytes of information and there is a strategy behind all this, that’s for certain.

And of course what they count on most is that they will not be sprung by the media who accept and share every one of the premises that are the foundation for Obama’s campaign. This article on Obama’s apology tour describes the radical left advisers who crafted where he went and what went into the teleprompter. The key point:

The president has followed a ‘doctrine of mea culpa’ crafted by a handful of radical advisers who have urged him to, in so many words, apologize for America’s war on terror and nuclear superiority.

Discussion of Obama’s deep left background has gone into hibernation in this election. It’s not there because it gets no resonance from where it needs to feed, which is in the media. Billy Ayers and Jeremiah Wright at least figured to some extent in the last election but not this time. Mitt Romney understands every bit of this but sees no advantage in moving along this trail. But we here should remember just who Obama is and the groups that he represents. A second set of four years would make the United States a very different place from what it is today.

And if you would like the text of the Obama ad, you can find it here. And thanks to Gab for sending the article on the apology tour.

Did they get the idea for the ad from the Australian Greens? Token raises this very intriguing idea. Compare and contrast:

And a similar ad for Putin:

But this one was posted to Youtube on 20 February 2012 so SH-Y was ahead of them both by two years. But you can see the genealogy quite well in the descent as the same grubby idea is passed on from one to another. Thanks to Infidel Tiger for the link.

This is more than just a conceptual error though it is a conceptual error as well. Obama was speaking in Colorado and was of course reading from his teleprompter, which said:

I want those manufactured here in C…

And when he saw the “C” which was the first letter of Colorado he just went ahead and interpolated China because he doesn’t really know where he is or what he’s saying. He’s just reading from a script someone else has written. Either that or he’s ignorant and vacant between the ears.

The BBC did a poll round the world about the American election and it turns out that we here in Australia are second, just after the French, in preferring Obama to Romney. Are we that out of it, tuned out, left wing, media driven or what? I cannot tell. But it is a worldwide phenomenon with us not that much different from Canada so it’s hard to pick the reason. I knew we Romney types were in a minority, but not that small a minority. You can read my full posting on this at Quadrant Online.

The debate is today on a Wednesday, unlike the previous two which were on a Friday (in Australia, that is). Not to be missed.

As I mentioned on an earlier post, there are the things that must be done to fix the American economy and to restore some kind of order in America’s foreign relations. That is Romney’s speciality. There are also the things that can be said that will gather votes but if implemented would bring further ruin to the United States and to us along with them. That is Obama’s speciality. If the result of the American election interests you, it may all come down to this hour and a half. It will be Mitt Romney’s sound policy and good sense against Obama’s disastrous policy record and far left agenda. Obama also promises to be more aggressive. Mitt will just be Mitt.

The viewing details here in Australia:

Wednesday October 17: Presidential debate #2: Foreign and domestic policy

Watch the debate live on SBS ONE or streamed live on the SBS World News Australia website from 12pm ADST.

And the verdict is:

Can’t tell if it’s universal but it’s how I saw it. Obama was better and Mitt was the same and therefore by being the same was still ten streets better than the president.

Or at least their politicians are. These are results found in a study conducted by two researchers at UCLA:

‘Female politicians with stereotypically feminine facial features are more likely to be Republican than Democrat, and the correlation increases the more conservative the lawmaker’s voting record,’ said lead author Colleen M. Carpinella, a UCLA graduate student in psychology.

The researchers also found the opposite to be true: Female politicians with less stereotypically feminine facial features were more likely to be Democrats, and the more liberal their voting record, the greater the distance the politician’s appearance strayed from stereotypical gender norms. . . .

In fact, the relationship is so strong that politically uninformed undergraduates were able to determine the political affiliation of the representatives with an overall accuracy rate that exceeded chance, and the accuracy of those predictions increased in direct relation to the lawmaker’s proximity to feminine norms.

[Via Instapundit]

The front page story in The Age today:

Gillard files missing, say lawyers
Search fails to find ‘slush fund’ records

It begins:

A FILE detailing Julia Gillard’s role in helping set up a union slush fund from which her former boyfriend stole hundreds of thousands of dollars has disappeared.

Law firm Slater & Gordon yesterday said it could find no documents relating to the work done by Ms Gillard — a former salaried partner of the firm — in establishing the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association in 1992.

Police believe the association was used by Ms Gillard’s former boyfriend and senior AWU official Bruce Wilson to steal more than $400,000, including about $100,000 which helped fund the purchase of a Fitzroy unit bought with Ms Gillard’s professional assistance.

Slater & Gordon managing director Andrew Grech told The Age last night that the firm had not been able to locate any documents relating to the controversial transaction.

‘We have not been able to identify any such documents following extensive searches of our archival records,’ Mr Grech said.

‘If there are such documents, we don’t have them. They could have been misplaced, or lost. I simply don’t know.’

Anyway, that’s how it begins. How it will end is anyone’s guess.

Why was that man laughing?

They just don’t come bigger than this. Obama says he had an off night during the first debate and that if you read the transcript instead of looking at the body language he took Romney apart. But those who watched, and the analyses that came later, were almost unanimous in seeing a decisive win for Mitt Romney. Romney was in command. He totally outshone and overshadowed a tongue tied and incoherent President, supposedly our modern Demosthenes, Pericles and Cicero all in one. Or at least that was the general perception until he was forced, for almost the first time since he began his run for president, to defend his policies in public, under challenge and without a teleprompter. Obama’s dismal showing has led to a surge in support for Romney and unless Obama can pull it back in this debate, the odds that he is about to lose the election will become very short indeed. But once again I point out the one advantage Obama has which is the phenomenal data mining operation he has put in place. Once more I raise that passage from Peggy Noonan written well over a year ago:

The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’

There are the things that must be done to fix the American economy and to restore some kind of order in America’s foreign relations. That is Romney’s speciality. There are also the things that can be said that will gather votes but if implemented would bring further ruin to the United States and to us along with them. That is Obama’s speciality. If the result of the American election interests you, it may all come down to this hour and a half. It will be Mitt Romney’s sound policy and good sense against Obama’s disastrous policy record and far left agenda.

The viewing details here in Australia:

Wednesday October 17: Presidential debate #2: Foreign and domestic policy

Watch the debate live on SBS ONE or streamed live on the SBS World News Australia website from 12pm ADST.

Here is the text that goes with the chart:

The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported. [My bolding]

Had the reverse been the case, the news would have, of course, been front page and top of the bulletin across the world. If we had been worrying about being hit by a meteorite, the whole world would have been in collective relief that we had escaped. Not with this. Here we are dealing with people with other agendas running, not just a selfless desire to save the planet from a rise in temperature. Without the data to support them, those agendas will not go away, but it will be harder to make the case given just how contrary to the facts the global warming argument has become.

This is from Ryangirl as you will see why. Not your usual Macro 101.

[Via Instapundit]