And now the president of the United States is leading and promoting an intimidation of average American citizens, many of whom voted for him.

Do not think that all of these people showing up at town hall meetings are Republicans.  A lot of these people are Democrats.

Last night, McLean, Virginia.  The president of the United States, at a fundraiser and he basically just told the Republicans: Just get out of the way.

OBAMA:

I expect to be held responsible for these issues because I’m the president.

But I don’t want the folks who created the mess — I don’t want folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking.  I want them just to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess.

I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.  Am I wrong, Virginia?

FOLLOWERS:

No!

This is not the man people thought they elected.  The people who made the mess? Once again he’s whining and moaning that somebody else gave me this mess.

Mr. President, two million people have lost their jobs since your “stimulus” bill was signed into law.

This economy is foundering ever since you came into office.  You have almost doubled the federal deficit this year and who knows what’s going to happen to the national debt.  But he doesn’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking.  He’s got a snitch website!  How in the world can he enforce this request or desire that he has for the folks who made the mess to just stop talking?

OBAMA:

I need every one of you to knock on doors and make phone calls and get fired up once again so that we can go towards the future!

He is no longer the president.  He is a candidate.  He’s got a plan.  This thing is now called “health care.”

So the community organizer is organizing.  The community agitator is agitating.  The only one sending out organizing memos nationwide is President Barack Obama, and community agitators can’t start bitching when communities agitate.

Brad Miller is a Democrat Congressman from North Carolina. Now Brad Miller claims that hundreds of Congressmen have received death threats.  He offers no substantiation, and I’ve looked around.  I don’t see anywhere on the World Wide Web where hundreds of Congressmen have made charges similar to Miller’s.  Have you seen that?  Hundreds of Congressmen? The president of the United States travels around every day, 24/7.  The more he goes out, the more his poll numbers drop — and he’s out there every day pitching health care.  If he can do it, then certainly our precious little Congressmen can sure as hell meet with their constituents.

Associated Press:

“White House Advises Dems on Health Care Protests — Top White House officials counseled Democratic senators Thursday on coping with disruptions at public events on health care this summer, officials said, and promised the party and allies would respond with twice the force if any individual lawmaker is criticized in television advertising.”

Is it not amazing?  Here are our elected officials — members of the House of Representatives, the US Senate — and they have to get instructions from the White House on how to deal with their voters.

They have to get instructions from the White House, and the reason for this is the whole thing is a lie.

Everything they are selling is a lie, and they have to get instructions on how to sell the lie. The dirty little secret is Obama has to lie.  He can’t tell the truth.  This country is not what Obama is.  This country is not of the same values.  This country is not oriented in a core value way the way Obama is.  And more and more people in the country are seeing this.  And so when you’re a senator, a United States senator and you have to get instructions from the White House PR machine how to deal and talk to your voters, the translation is, “You’ve got to go out and lie this way.”

Now, what this is all about is the focus grouping they’ve done has forced them to change the terms.  It’s not health “care” reform.  It’s health “insurance” reform now and bashing the insurance companies.

Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner.

“Last week I wrote in this space that Obamacare could be the death of AARP because it would expose to the rank-and-file of the 40 million member seniors group how their Washington leaders have been taking them for a ride for many years. The AARP leadership scoffed at that suggestion, but check out the video of a Dallas AARP meeting in this post by Moe Lane at Red State. The leadership wanted to give the members the usual dog-and-pony show in favor of government-run health care, but the members weren’t buying it,” and as soon as the members said, “No, we don’t believe what you’re saying “the leaders got up and left. Evidently, you either sit down, shut up and listen to your leaders in AARP, or they abandon you.

“If it happened in Dallas,” it can happen in any other city in the country.

David Axelrod — who is Obama’s word-speechwriter guru — has also given instructions to Democrats via talking points.

“Axelrod and Jim Messina, the White House deputy chief of staff, met with the Senate Democratic caucus Thursday afternoon to strategize over how to talk about healthcare during the August break, and this is the famous meeting where they say, “If they hit you, we’re going to punch back twice as hard.”

This is from the White House.

Now, you’ve seen pictures.  I’m sure you’ve been on the websites.  You haven’t seen the pictures on television; the Media’s not talking much about this.  But you’ve seen the pictures of these people.  They are the most harmless, blend-into-the-crowd people.  A couple of them may be wearing suits.  But they are not even all that dressed up.  A lot of them are elderly.  They are nonthreatening.  They have made no threatening moves. They have made no threatening remarks. Nothing whatsoever.

Obama sends out his army.

This is Mussolini-type stuff.

This is the president of the United States who cannot deal with opposition.  There will not be any.  He is going to silence it.  He’s sending his union thugs out to physically assault, in some cases, and to in all cases intimidate average Americans who just want some answers.  And nobody’s willing to provide them the answers.

All they’re getting is lies.

Neil Cavuto had one of the organizers of the Sacramento tea party, Mark Meckler, and asked him about this infiltration and the threats.

Cavuto :

“Mark, how seriously do you take these threats?”

MECKLER:

We don’t take them seriously at all, and I’ll tell you why. It’s not that they don’t exist. We expect people to attempt to infiltrate. The reality is this is a very broad-based grassroots movement. There is no leader at the top, there’s no individual event that they could disturb that would cause us a problem nationwide. Also the people, we trust the grassroots. We know that the people are skeptical of anybody approaching these events and we believe that people are going to handle it well. In fact, we invite everybody to come to our events. We don’t care whether they’re from ACORN, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, we want them all there.

Yes, and they will all be there, trying to cause trouble…

These are people that are going to show up with anti-Obama slogans, they’re going to show up with pro-tea party slogans, that’s what they’re going to make themselves out to be, and they claim they’re going to try cause all kinds of trouble for the cameras.

The organizers claim,

“We’re not worried, we’re going to outnumber them, they can’t bring this about,”

but all it’s going to take is two malcontents causing a problem with the right Drive-By camera and that will be the only video anybody will see. The Media are not reporting on this now, and they’re not going to report on this as it happens.

This just flies in the face of the notion they put forth that this is a country in unified enthrallment of the Obama administration.

John O’Hara, who is the organizer of the Chicago Tea Party.
Mark Meckler there from Sacramento.
Cavuto :

“John, if the malcontents from ACORN show up, something tells me they’re not going to be sharing the same placards. Are you worried about that?”

O’HARA:

No, Neil, I’m not worried about it at all. If ACORN wants to send some of their paid pretend activists to show up, that’s fine.

MECKLER:

The people understand what these movements are about. The people who are involved understand that they’re not racists, they’re not fringe, they’re not even partisan. I mean these are events where we’ve got people across the board — Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals, Libertarians, you name it, everybody’s coming out to these events.

O’HARA:

The real fringe group here, again, is these critics, ACORN, with their paid activists. It’s a typical left-wing smear campaign with ad hominem attacks rather than getting at the real issues we’re talking about.

So the organizers know it’s being talked about, they know it’s in the works, they know that ACORN and others are going to show up.

I don’t know how many of them are actually going to wear pro-Obama stuff.

I mean infiltration means you try to blame them. Taking it over would be another thing.  But they would love to be able to create the impression that the tea party supporters, the anti-Obamanots are a bunch of violent, out of control, destructive — like ACORN really is, and ACORN knows how to cause trouble ’cause it’s their business.

So we’ll see. I’m glad to see that the organizers are not being off-put by this. In fact, they’re welcoming ACORN to become part of the festivities.

These are grassroots things. These things have sprung up on their own.

But these things are exciting because they are the American people, who are just reacting to this thing, and it’s a great illustration

— and I hope they’re all huge, and this is people who have no leadership, no elected leadership.

We don’t feel they’re being represented anywhere, and they’re taking matters into their own hands.

And we are going to try to demonstrate to their leaders and to the Washington elites and the media, that not everybody has fallen in and not everybody is a bunch of  Obamamites following along with the diminution of the American private sector.

It just isn’t happening.

God Bless You All…

“The Irrational Electorate.”

By Larry Bartels who directs the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics in Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, published earlier this year by the Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press.

Now, when you print it out, it runs four or five pages.I’m not a scholar, and Mr. Bartels is, and, to me, the first part — I had to read this a bunch of times. It reads like gobbledygook, and what it is is an analysis of a whole bunch of studies worldwide over many, many decades of the electorates, the electorates in democracies.

Some excerpts.

One sentence in this piece — and this is about how people determine who they are going to vote for. People are very short term in their focus. They tend to vote based on how the economy is going, rewarding or throwing the bums out regardless of party.

But here’s some interesting bits for you.

“A team of psychologists led by Alex Todorov established that candidates for governor, senator, or representative who are rated as ‘competent’ by people judging them solely on the basis of photographs are considerably more likely to win real-world elections than those who look less competent. Brief exposure to the photographs — as little as one-tenth of a second — is sufficient to produce a significant correlation with actual election outcomes. A follow-up study showed that the electoral advantage of competent-looking candidates is strongest among less informed voters and those most heavily exposed to political advertising.” So, the follow-up study said the electoral advantage of competent looking candidates is strongest among less informed voters. One-tenth of a second, somebody looking at a picture, will form more of a lasting impression on how somebody’s going to vote than what their issues are? I know that’s how a lot of people get married. Well, it is. You know people make jokes about this, but a lot of people get married on the basis of one-tenth of a second, on how somebody looks. And if you’re going to make a decision on who you going to marry on the basis of one-tenth of a second looking at them or a picture of them, well, it’s a far less of a commitment to vote for somebody than to get married to them. But the less informed you are the more powerful the visual impression of somebody you think looks competent.

“A team from UCLA found that most of the effect of any given ad on voters’ preferences evaporated within one week, and that ‘only the most politically aware voters exhibited . . . long-term effects.'” In another study, “A major ad buy produced a seven-point increase in voter support for the featured candidate a day after the ads aired,” but two days later the lead was gone. So we can assume that, again, most people are not politically aware round the clock, 24/7, and those who aren’t can be moved by an ad for a day, and the ad’s effect vanishes after one day. Another paragraph here: Issues matter less than they seem. People attribute their views to the candidate they like and adopt their candidate’s views.

This and one more to explain Obama.

“Voters consistently misperceived where candidates stood on the important issues of the day, seeing their favorite candidates’ stands as closer to their own and opposing candidates’ stands as more dissimilar than they actually were. They likewise exaggerated the extent of support for their favorite candidates among members of social groups they felt close to. … Political scientist Gabriel Lenz found very little evidence that people actually changed their vote because of the Social Security debate. What happened, mostly, was that people who learned the candidates’ views on privatization from the blizzard of ads and news coverage simply adopted the position of the candidate they already supported for other reasons. The resulting appearance of ‘issue voting’ was almost wholly illusory.”

So if your candidate has one issue that you like, and you’ve seen one-tenth of a second of an audio or a picture of the guy, and you’ve determined you like him, and then he runs an ad that you really, really dig, you’ll forget the ad in one day, but it will make your support for him go way, way up. You won’t remember why you support him. The support will be even more profound and deep. Then the candidate comes out and voices something you totally disagree with. You’ll reject that because you like the guy.

“Ah, that doesn’t matter. I don’t care about that.”

He’s right on whatever issue that is most important to the person. Everything else is irrelevant, plus the likability factor.

Good voter behavior stories: Woodrow Wilson and shark attacks.

“In the summer of 1916 a dramatic weeklong series of shark attacks along New Jersey beaches left four people dead. Tourists fled, leaving some resorts with 75 percent vacancy rates in the midst of their high season. Letters poured into congressional offices demanding federal action.”

Now, we’re talking, again, 1916.

“Letters poured into congressional offices demanding federal action; but what action would be effective in such circumstances? Voters probably didn’t know, but neither did they care. When President Woodrow Wilson — a former governor of New Jersey with strong local ties — ran for reelection a few months later, he was punished at the polls,” because he didn’t do anything about sharks. “He lost as much as 10 percent of his expected vote in towns where shark attacks had occurred,” ’cause he hadn’t done anything about them.’

“The 1936 election has become the most celebrated textbook case of ideological realignment in American history. However, a careful look at state-by-state voting patterns suggests that this resounding ratification of Roosevelt’s policies was strongly concentrated in the states that happened to enjoy robust income growth in the months leading up to the vote. Indeed, the apparent impact of short-term economic conditions was so powerful that, if the recession of 1938 had occurred in 1936, Roosevelt probably would have been a one-term president. It’s not only in the United States that the Depression-era tendency to ‘throw the bums out’ looks like something less than a rational policy judgment. In the United States, voters replaced Republicans with Democrats in 1932 and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher peddling a flighty share-the-wealth scheme, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased went on to dominate politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems far-fetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions.”

Ideology and issues had nothing to do with it.

SIMPLE TRUTH:

Whoever was in charge when the thing went south got punished. Whoever was in charge when it came back got rewarded.

This is a longer piece from the Wilson Quarterly. It’s a much longer piece than what I shared with you here by Larry Bartels, the Irrational Electorate. It’s a scholarly work trying to explain why voters do what they do when they do it in democracies.

The accused killer, Edwin Ramos, allegedly sprayed their car with an AK-47infamous MS-13 gang from El Salvador. after he was blocked from making a turn. Now, Ramos, it has been learned, is an illegal immigrant who belongs to the

In addition, Ramos has committed at least two other felonies during his illegal stay in California. And even though he was facing deportation, he was released from police custody because San Francisco liberals have declared their town a safe haven for illegals — a “sanctuary city.“

Of course, the liberals on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors who enacted the laws preventing local law enforcement from turning over illegals to the feds should never be called to account for their complicity in these murders. Oh, no: Because, after all, only racists and xenophobes would dare suggest that immigration laws actually be taken seriously.

Everybody knows that.

It’s everybody’s best interest that the victims’ surviving family just bury their dead and shut up. They should stop their public demands for justice because, after all, there are larger issues to think about, my friends. We wouldn’t want to offend a large potential voting block, or make people feel unwelcome in our country, with all this undue attention on a few murders…

What would be the point of that?

What kind of people are we becoming?

“More Americans now view energy as a serious concern than at the low point of the 1979 energy crisis, according to a Politico analysis of historical Gallup Polls. And the percentage of voters who consider energy issues ‘very important’ in determining their vote has also risen dramatically since the last election, from 54 percent in October 2004 to 77 percent in a recent poll released by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press… Distress over gas prices could hardly come at a worse time for Republicans. Voters usually blame a poor economy on the party that controls the presidency, and there are few more potent reminders of hard economic times than the high cost of fuel at the pump. … Thus far, it’s McCain who has most suffered from that irritation. On an issue that three in four registered voters believe will be ‘very important,'” it is the Republicans who are taking the heat.

Now, I understand the theory that the party in power, the president, the executive gets the blame for all of these things. And the polling data in this story says that the Republicans are lagging Democrats by 15 points on energy, and McCain is even further behind the GOP than that.

If this poll is accurate, what it means is that those of us who want to increase supply are getting blamed. Well, now, if the American people actually knew who wants to increase supply — and by doing so, lower prices — then they would also find out who is standing in opposition of all that.

And it’s our old buddy Chris Matthews that doesn’t even know it’s going on, and all of his leftist buddies who are doing everything they can to attack and shut down the US economy and its growth. So the party that’s trying to do something about this — the people trying to do something about it, to increase production — are getting blamed for the problem when the problem exists primarily because of leftists, the last 30 years, who have done their best to shut down the domestic oil industry.

See post: Democrats, Media, and oil – what a party.

Now, the Republicans are not sitting back.

From the Cybercast News Service:

“As expected, gasoline prices keep rising, and Republicans are placing the blame squarely on the Democrat-led Congress. Republicans apparently see ‘pain at the pump’ as a key election issue. …

“House Republican leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) called it ‘insane’ that the Democrat-led Congress is still refusing to allow increased production of American energy. ‘Today marks another dubious day for this Do-Nothing Democratic Congress. On their watch, gas prices have soared to new heights, and by refusing to schedule a vote on a plan to increase American-made energy to help lower gas prices, congressional Democrats are complicit in this unprecedented surge in fuel costs,’ Boehner said on Sunday. … ‘Every American has a right to ask: What will it take for the Democrat-controlled Congress to finally take action and help ease the pain of the Pelosi Premium on behalf of struggling families and small businesses? Speaker Pelosi has the power to schedule a vote on our plan to begin breaking America’s costly dependence on foreign sources of energy. She should not wait another day to do so.'”

Republicans are putting this out.

Have you seen this anywhere? Have you seen this statement from Boehner? Before reading this, did you know the Republicans were on the warpath on this?

No. Because, as they often say, whatever they do will not get covered.