Matthew Vadum, at American Spectator, notes that Barack Obama has selected as Director of the Census the most partisan possible figure, a leftwing sociologist previously involved in democrat efforts to supplement real enumeration with creative estimates of supposedly uncountable homeless and minority democrat voters.

A practitioner of the statistical voodoo known as “sampling” has been selected by President Obama to head the Census Bureau, which is poised to carry out the decennial census next year with ACORN’s help. Liberal pressure groups and Democrats have long favored using statistical modeling, a practice controversial because it’s flagrantly unconstitutional and because it opens up the counting process to political manipulation.

“A sampling process would open the census to the worst kind of political manipulation,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) recently said. “The Constitution clearly requires a count of every person, not a best guess that could be influenced by political rather than empirical considerations.”

The president’s nominee is Robert M. Groves, a professor of the alleged discipline known as sociology at the University of Michigan.

Republican lawmakers are justifiably alarmed, the New York Times reports.

Some news agency story.

Barack Obama’s political career began with the winning of an Illinois State Senate seat by taking control of the process and getting all his democrat party opponents (in a one party race) kicked off the ballot. Barack Obama’s career reached its present zenith, at least in part, through other process short cuts like the democrat party’s rules committee awarding him primary delegates from Michigan where he did not run and duplicate registrations and votes courtesy of ACORN.

Newsmax:

The Obama administration is ending the Census Bureau’s traditional autonomy – a move that has Republicans outraged over the White House’s politicization of counting Americans.

Last week, an administration official revealed that the yet-to-be-named director of the Census Bureau will report to the White House rather than Commerce Secretary nominee Judd Gregg, a Republican.

What this move undoubtedly signifies is the Obama Administration’s intention to make an end run around the Constitution’s specification of an “actual enumeration” every decade to permit statistical estimates of non-actually-enumerated democrat constituencies in order to enlarge the congressional representation and budgetary apportionment for inner-city, one-party democrat-controlled districts. The estimating would be done by hardcore democrat party partisans, of course, who can estimate with the best.

Mr. Gregg should never have agreed to accept the Secretary of Commerce appointment in the context of such a cynical and opportunistic partisan manuever.

———————————–

UPDATE 2/13:

Senator Judd Gregg announced, very politely, that he was declining the appointment due to “irresolvable conflicts.” Good for him.

The Telegraph describes how Global Warming manages to keep setting new temperature records, even in the face of colder weather.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Ed Driscoll visits Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth and explores how history can be turned on a dime.

7:25 video

Via Glenn Reynolds.

D.J. Drummond, at Wizbang, explains Obama’s miraculous recovery in Gallup’s Polls.

Obama’s support goes up and down, but the Liberal and Moderate Democrat support for Obama has been steady all of September. Odd, isn’t it? And support for Obama among Conservative Democrats went down four points in the last week, even though his overall support is supposed to have gone up four points. How to figure that?

Perhaps it’s in the Independents. …

Hmmm, again. Obama gained support among Independents in the last month, but he actually lost two points among Independents in the last week. So that 4 point gain overall is still a mystery.

Nothing to do, then, but look at the Republicans. It would really be something if he’s improving support from GOP voters:

Ouch. Obama lost six points among Liberal and Moderate Republicans in the past week.

Conservative Republican support for Obama …

No change there in the past week.

Taken altogether, there is no group of political identification where Obama’s support has increased in the past week. Mathematically, therefore, there is only one way in which Gallup could show an increase in Obama’s overall support, when none of the party identification groups showed improvement for him.

Before I explain that possibility, I want to look at John McCain’s support by specific party identification groups. The man, according to Gallup, lost four points of overall support in the past week,

Conservative Republican support for McCain…

Interesting. McCain’s support among Conservative Republicans went up a point in the last week.

Wow, McCain’s support from Liberal and Moderate Republicans climbed by seven points in the past week, and yet we are told his overall support fell by four points? That is very odd, wouldn’t you say? It must have been the Independents, perhaps?

Independent support for McCain …

Stranger and stranger, McCain’s support among Independents went up by four points in the past week, just as his support from Republicans increased, yet we are told his overall support went down by four. Very hard to explain that using the math most of us learned in school, isn’t it? Well, there’s just one place left to look. Maybe somehow McCain used to have significant support among Democrats, but lost it? Let’s find out:

Conservative Democrat support for McCain …

Hmpf. Once again, a group where support for McCain went up (3%), but the overall says he went down.

Moderate Democrat support for McCain …

Steady there, so that one does not explain it.

Liberal Democrat support for McCain…

It’s only a point, but again we see McCain’s numbers in this group went up.

So, put it all together, and in the past week Obama has stayed steady or lost support in every party identification group, yet Gallup says his overall support went up four points. And McCain stayed steady or went up in every party identification group, yet we are supposed to accept the claim that his overall support went down by four points? Anyone have an answer for how that is even possible?

Well, actually I do. There is one, and only one, possible way that such a thing can happen mathematically. And that way, is that Gallup made major changes to the political affiliation weighting from the last week to now. Gallup has significantly increased the proportional weight of Democrat response and reduced the weight of Republican response.

Read the whole thing.

Campaigning in Virginia coal country, Joe Biden actually described himself as “a coal miner” from the Northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite region.

In his first visit to Southwest Virginia, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, speaking at the United Mine Workers’ annual fish fry here on Saturday, was quick to tout his ties to coal.

“I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pa.,” Biden said. “It’s nice to be back in coal country. … It’s a different accent [in Southwest Virginia] … but it’s the same deal. We were taught that our faith and our family was the only really important thing, and our faith and our family informed everything we did.”

Biden, a U.S. senator from Delaware, told the story of his great-grandfather, a mining engineer who was elected to the state Senate in 1904 and was rumored to be a Molly Maguire, a member of a secret organization tied to union activism and crime in the Pennsylvania coalfields in the 19th century.

“He went out of his way to prove that he wasn’t, and we were all praying that he was,” he said.

The mines closed when Joe Biden and I were kids. Biden obviously was never a coal miner personally. Still, those of us from miner’s families do identify with a certain kind of culture and tradition, and consider ourselves connected to our father’s and grandfathers’ lives of hardship, danger, and hard labor.

Joe Biden moved from Scranton to the Delaware suburbs at the age of ten. Biden campaigns on his purported coal mining, Roman Catholic roots, but his politics have always been upper middle class suburban liberal.

I haven’t read Biden’s autobiography, but Ann Coulter has, and she reports that Biden tells a very different story there.

According to Vice Plagiarist Biden’s own autobiography, his father was to the manor born. Biden’s grandfather was an executive with the American Oil Co., and his father had all the advantages in life. “My dad,” Biden writes in “Promises to Keep,” “grew up well polished by gentlemanly pursuits. He would ride to the hounds, drive fast, fly airplanes. He knew good clothes, fine horses, the newest dance steps.”

Matt Pressman at Vanity Fair explores the many ways in which Americans hate the New York Times.

It’s such a given in the media business that few even stop to notice it: people love to hate The New York Times. They read the paper every day, and seemingly could not function without it, yet they never tire of, and often seem to delight in, pointing out its errors, biases, and various other real and imagined shortcomings. They’re a bit like the callers on sports talk radio—hopelessly devoted to an institution, but wanting nothing more than to voice their (often very loud) opinion about how awful and disappointing it is. …

The most commonly cited explanation was that same nagging emotion that makes the French love to hate America and computer geeks love to hate Microsoft: envy and resentment. “The Times is the coxswain, the one setting the pace for the entire culture,” Jonah Goldberg says. “Sociologically, it just matters more.” (“Ideologically, it drives me fucking bonkers,” Goldberg couldn’t resist adding.) “It occupies a position that no other newspaper does,” adds Alex Pareene. “So you get more offended when they’re using that platform to promote David Brooks or something.”

Then there’s the question of the paper’s attitude. “Almost in inverse proportion to its own survivability, The New York Times becomes more and more holier-than-thou,” says Michael Wolff. “You’ve lost your way journalistically, you’ve lost your way from a business standpoint, you’ve lost your way from an authoritative standpoint, and yet you are still so holier-than-thou.”

Goldberg echoes Wolff’s complaint, saying, “The idea that ‘we’re not part of that club’ feeds a sort of resentment on both the left and the right.” Goldberg says, among his conservative brethren, the paper’s offenses occasion “an eye-rolling thing—there they go again.” But when the Times “screws the left,” he says, “it feels like a matter of betrayal. So, in some ways the rage is much more intense.” …

Wolff, it’s fair to say, has stopped expecting better. “Once, it mattered. Once, it set an agenda,” he says of the Times. “But it’s like a time delay: We know you’re over with, but you don’t know it, and you’re still here, so die! Let’s not put a fine point on it. They don’t do anything right. Their journalism is not good, their view of the world is not correct.”

Megan McArdle does to the leftwing professoriate at University of Chicago who signed a letter protesting the establishment of a Milton Friedman Institute (God forbid!) at their university what a Jack Russell terrier does to a rat.

I haven’t heard such transparently wishful claptrap since my fifteen-year-old boyfriend tried to convince me that sex provided unparalleled aerobic exercise.

Barack Hussein Obama is a radical leftwing democrat from Chicago, a city where private ownership of handguns is banned. But the upcoming Pennsylvania primary will play a crucial role in the bitterly contested race for the democrat party’s nomination, and Obama, as the Politico reports, is not letting his record of total and complete support for gun control and gun confiscation stop him from going after the votes of Pennsylvania gun owners.

After all, Obama knows just how stupid those deer hunting hicks really are. All he has to do is make a deal to gain the endorsement of a backwoods democrat state rep from Elk County to vouch for his acceptability to sportsmen, and do a little of his personally patented fancy footwork around the issue, and he’ll get plenty of rube votes.

He’s not pro-Gun Control. Goodness gracious, mercy me, no! He’s a Constitutional Law professor, and supports the individual right to keep and bear arms (for hunting and target shooting). He’s merely for “reasonable and common sense” regulations, which you can bet will limit you to owning very limited types and calibers of firearms and ammunition, and which will allow you to own guns as long as you obtain the necessary permits and register each and every one, and then keep them locked up, inaccessible, and unusable except at the properly licensed shooting range or hunting facility at which you actually be permitted to use them under proper supervision, of course.

Barack Obama did not hunt or fish as a child. He lives in a big city. And as an Illinois state legislator and a U.S. senator, he consistently backed gun control legislation.

But he is nevertheless making a play for pro-gun voters in rural Pennsylvania.

By highlighting his background in constitutional law and downplaying his voting record, Obama is engaging in a quiet but targeted drive to win over an important constituency that on the surface might seem hostile to his views.

The need to craft a strategy aimed at pro-gun voters underscores the potency of the issue in Pennsylvania, which claims one of the nation’s highest per capita membership rates in the National Rifle Association.

It also could provide clues as to whether Obama, as one of the Senate’s more liberal members, can position himself as an acceptable choice to a conservative-minded demographic in later primary contests and in the general election.

“Guns are a cultural lens through which they view candidates,” said Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way, a progressive think tank. “If you are seen as way off on that issue, then you seem way off on everything. If you are seen as OK, if the lens is clearer, then they continue to look at you and size you up on other things.”

“For Obama, who is less known and is from Chicago, a city guy and an African American, the feeling is that he is anti-gun,” Kessler continued. “By handling the Second Amendment correctly, he starts to get a hearing among these folks.”

Obama aides would not discuss the campaign’s strategy. While the effort so far in Pennsylvania appears modest, it is noteworthy for a race that has largely avoided such direct engagement with gun owners.

The campaign has asked gun rights advocates like state Rep. Dan Surra, a Democrat from rural Elk County with an “A+” rating from the NRA, to form a coalition of supporters who can vouch for Obama.

“It is clear out there that I am for Obama, and they have reached out to me as a sportsman and a gun owner,” Surra said Thursday. “There has been an outreach to pro-gun legislators, pro-gun people who are sympathetic to Obama’s message.”

The campaign sent an e-mail this week to the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, saying it would “appreciate all sportsmen taking time to learn the facts: Our candidate strongly supports the right and traditions of sportsmen throughout Pennsylvania and the United States of America.”

And with an endorsement last month from Sen. Bob Casey Jr., Obama got a boost within a community that the Pennsylvania Democrat has courted assiduously. As part of an initiative to move beyond his party’s traditional bases during the 2006 Senate campaign, Casey visited stock car races, demolition derbies and gun clubs. Campaign operatives to both senators are now working closely together.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton does not appear to be making the same level of effort. She has reminded audiences in the last few months that she learned to shoot a gun during childhood vacations in Scranton and bagged a duck as an adult. But neither the state Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs nor her pro-gun Democratic supporters have heard of any specific campaign outreach. …

Obama has long backed gun-control measures, including a ban on semiautomatic weapons and concealed weapons, and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month. He has declined to take a stance on the legality of the handgun prohibition in Washington, D.C., which the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing, although Obama has voiced support for the right of state and local governments to regulate guns.

In the Senate, he and Clinton broke on one vote, in July 2006. Siding with gun-rights advocates, Obama voted to prohibit the confiscation of firearms during an emergency or natural disaster. Clinton was one of 16 senators to oppose the amendment.

A two-page white paper on Obama’s website doesn’t mention his voting record.

Instead, he introduces himself as a former constitutional law professor who “believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he greatly respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.”

“He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns for the purposes of hunting and target shooting,” the paper states. “He also believes that the right is subject to reasonable and common sense regulation.”

Melody Zullinger, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs who received the Obama campaign e-mail on his gun record, said Obama sounds like he is “speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”

“I was at one of our county meetings last night and I mentioned this to [federation members],” Zullinger said Friday of the Obama outreach. “Everyone basically blew it off and weren’t buying it.”

Obama’s approach is similar to one advocated by Third Way, which issued a seven-step blueprint in 2006 to close the “gun gap” with Republicans. In a memo on its website, the group urges progressives to avoid silence on gun issues, and instead “redefine the issue in a way that appeals to gun owning voters.”

Don’t you loathe politicians… all politicians?

This amusing 1:44 video mocks the whole gang of them as one after another invokes the phony baloney mantra of the 2008 primary campaign.

The operational alliance between the radical left and the mainstream media was demonstrated in its most conspicuous form today, when a bogus exercise in propaganda by a collection of radical leftists (funded by the usual gang of wealthy poseurs) was served up as supposed “news” by AP

A study by two nonprofit (but highly partisan) journalism organizations (funded by George Soros, Barbara Streisand, and other less-than-disinterested parties) found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

and the New York Times.

Big Lizards explains who is behind this.

“A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations…”

The Fund for Independence in Journalism says its “primary purpose is providing legal defense and endowment support for the largest nonprofit, investigative reporting institution in the world, the Center for Public Integrity, and possibly other, similar groups.” Eight of the eleven members of the Fund’s board of directors are either on the BoD of the Center for Public Integrity, or else are on the Center’s Advisory Board. Thus these “two” organizations are actually joined at the hip.

“Fund for Independence in Journalism…”

The Center is heavily funded by George Soros. It has also received funding from Bill Moyers, though some of that money might have actually been from Soros, laundered through Moyers via the Open Society Foundation.

Other funders include the Streisand Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts (used to be conservative, but in 1987 they veered sharply to the left, and are now a dyed-in-the-wool “progressive” funder), the Los Angeles Times Foundation, and so forth. The Center is a far-left organization funded by far-left millionaires, billionaires, and trusts.

Selective quotations and old leftist lies (including Joe Wilson’s) are simply repackaged in an on-line database by a gang of “progressives” funded by the usual suspects, and this exercise in self-gratification is treated as “news.”

Daily Kos cites a poll of 1461 Iraqis taken by a “respected British marketing research firm” which proves the US is responsible for the violent deaths of more than a million Iraqis so far.

And Ray Drake, at Davids Medienkritik, cites German media reports of numbers of US anti-war demonstrators.

ARD Tagesschau, SZ and SPIEGEL ONLINE – “4,000 to 6,000” anti-war demonstrators
ZDF and Die Zeit – “About 10,000” anti-war demonstrators
TAZ – “Tens-of-thousands” of anti-war demonstrators
Die Welt – “50,000 anti-war demonstrators”
Die Presse (Austrian media site) – “Around 100,000 Americans marched against the war…”

Do I hear 200,000? 500,000? 1,000,000 anti-war demonstrators? Going once – going twice – sold!