Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Deroy Murdock lists all the states, cities and universities that invest in Bain Capital.
Democrats convened in Charlotte, NC, will double down on their claim that Bain Capital is really the Bain crime family. They will accuse Republican nominee Mitt Romney and Bain’s other “greedy” co-founders of stealing their winnings, evading taxes and lighting cigars with $100 bills on their yachts.
But Bain’s private-equity executives have enriched dozens of organizations and millions of individuals in the Democratic base — including some who scream most loudly for President Obama’s re-election.
Government-worker pension funds are the chief beneficiaries of Bain’s economic stewardship. New York-based Preqin uses public documents, news accounts and Freedom of Information requests to track private-equity holdings. Since 2000, Preqin reports, the following funds have entrusted some $1.56 billion to Bain:
* Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund ($2.2 million) …
Mark Steyn explains the new rules that can tell us what are “racist” remarks. They’re not called remarks though; the new term is “dog whistles.”
American racism is starting to remind me of American alcoholism. At the founding of the republic, in the days when beer was thought of as “liquid bread” and a healthy nutritional breakfast, Americans drank about three-to-four times as much as they do now. Today the United States has a lower per capita rate of alcohol consumption than almost any other developed nation, but it has more alcoholism support groups than any other developed nation – around 164 groups per million people. France, which drinks about 50 percent more per capita than America, has one-twentieth the number of support groups. The French and Italians enjoy drinking, the English and Irish enjoy getting drunk, and Americans enjoy getting drunk on ever more absurd stigmatizatory excess. At Walmart they card you if you “appear to be under” – what is it up to now? 43? 57? And the citizenry take this as a compliment: Well-preserved grandmothers return from failed attempts to purchase a bottle of wine with gay cries of, “I was carded at Costco! They’ve made my weekend!”
And so it goes with American racism: The less there is, the more extravagantly the racism-awareness lobby patrols its beat. The Walmart carding clerks of the media are ever more alert to those who “appear to be” racist. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared this week that Republicans use “Chicago” as a racist code word. Not to be outdone, his colleague Lawrence O’Donnell pronounced “golf” a racist code word. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell observed that Obama was “working to earn a spot on the PGA tour,” O’Donnell brilliantly perceived that subliminally associating Obama with golf is racist, because the word “golf” is subliminally associated with “Tiger Woods,” and the word “Tiger” is not-so-subliminally associated with cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, lingerie model Jamie Jungers, former porn star Holly Sampson, etc, etc. So by using the word “golf” you’re sending a racist dog whistle that Obama is a sex addict who reverses over fire hydrants.
While we’re on the subject of GOP white supremacists, former Secretary of State Condi Rice spoke movingly of her rise to the top from a childhood in segregated Birmingham, Ala. But everyone knows that’s just more Republican racist dog-whistling for “when’s Bull Connor gonna whistle up those dogs and get me off stage?” Meanwhile, over at The Huffington Post, Geoffrey Dunn, author of “The Lies Of Sarah Palin” (St. Martin’s Press, 2011, in case you missed it), was scoffing at Clint Eastwood’s star turn at the convention – “better known as the Gathering of Pasty White People,” added Mr. Dunn, demonstrating the stylistic panache that set a-flutter the hearts of so many St. Martin’s Press commissioning editors. Warming to his theme, Mr. Dunn noted that Clint had been mayor of “the upscale and frighteningly white community” of Carmel, California. …
John Fund explains how Akin can bow out of the Missouri senate race.
… Should Akin decide that his sliding poll numbers — he now trails McCaskill by ten points and many of his own supporters want him to exit the race — dictate dropping out, he will certainly want a say in who replaces him. John Brunner, a wealthy businessman, and Sarah Steelman, a former state treasurer, both challenged him in the GOP primary and are viewed as unacceptable by Akin forces. On the other hand, Wagner is respected in the Akin camp and a sufficiently conservative presence to satisfy Tea Party members who are suspicious of anyone the Missouri GOP establishment might anoint.
Should Akin leave the race and be replaced by Wagner, both candidates would have to petition a court to get off the ballot before September 25. But state election laws would allow a swap in which Wagner took Akin’s place and he reclaimed the Republican nomination for his House seat. His current district leans strongly Republican; he would be likely to hold it against a Democratic opponent this fall.
“It’s clunky, but it would work so long as it doesn’t look like a back-room deal,” one Akin supporter who is a Missouri delegate told me. “Todd would be treated with dignity and could go back to the House and we would have a candidate with very strong skills who could beat McCaskill.” …
Joel Kotkin writes on the new class war.
… Obama’s core middle-class support, and that of his party, comes from what might be best described as “the clerisy,” a 21st century version of France’s pre-revolution First Estate. This includes an ever-expanding class of minders — lawyers, teachers, university professors, the media and, most particularly, the relatively well paid legions of public sector workers — who inhabit Washington, academia, large non-profits and government centers across the country.
This largely well-heeled “middle class” still adores the president, and party theoreticians see it as the Democratic Party’s new base. Gallup surveys reveal Obama does best among “professionals” such as teachers, lawyers and educators. After retirees, educators and lawyers are the two biggest sources of campaign contributions for Obama by occupation. Obama’s largest source of funds among individual organizations is the University of California, Harvard is fifth and its wannabe cousin Stanford ranks ninth.
Like teachers, much of academia and the legal bar like expanding government since the tax spigot flows in the right direction: that is, into their mouths. Like the old clerical classes, who relied on tithes and the collection bowl, many in today’s clerisy lives somewhat high on the hog; nearly one in five federal workers earn over $100,000.
Essentially, the clerisy has become a new, mass privileged class who live a safer, more secure life compared to those trapped in the harsher, less cosseted private economy. …
… The GOP, for its part, now relies on another part of the middle class, what I would call the yeomanry. In many ways they represent the contemporary version of Jeffersonian farmers or the beneficiaries of President Lincoln’s Homestead Act. They are primarily small property owners who lack the girth and connections of the clerisy but resist joining the government-dependent poor. Particularly critical are small business owners, who Gallup identifies as “the least approving” of Obama among all the major occupation groups. Barely one in three likes the present administration.
The yeomanry diverge from the clerisy in other ways. They tend to live in the suburbs, a geography much detested by many leaders of the clerisy and, likely, the president himself. Yeomen families tend to be concentrated in those parts of the country that have more children and are more apt to seek solutions to social problems through private efforts. Philanthropy, church work and voluntarism — what you might call, appropriately enough, the Utah approach, after the state that leads in philanthropy.
The nature of their work also differentiates the clerisy from the yeomanry. The clerisy labors largely in offices and has no contact with actual production. Many yeomen, particularly in business services, depend on industry for their livelihoods either directly or indirectly. The clerisy’s stultifying, and often job-toxic regulations and “green” agenda may be one reason why people engaged in farming, fishing, forestry, transportation, manufacturing and construction overwhelmingly disapprove of the president’s policies, according to Gallup. …
Karl at Hot Air posts on the goals of Eastwood.
… Eastwood was not “rambling.” He improvised within a structure, making a clear and concise case for dumping Obama.
Eastwood’s approach to this performance was not accidental. Eastwood is — by reason of his resume — the foremost expert in the world on Clint Eastwood fans. Harry Callahan may have understood that a man has to know his limitations. Eastwood knows his… and he also knows his strengths. A man does not produce and star in dozens of Clint Eastwood movies without having thought deeply about and received the benefit of copious market research into what appeals to people about Clint Eastwood.
From the standpoint of political science, it would be fair to hypothesize that appeals to both disaffected and libertarian voters (which is something of a feat) in a way that Mitt Romney could never hope to do. More colloquially, it would be fair to suggest that Eastwood appeals to the sort of people who gravitated to H. Ross Perot in the Nineties. He appeals to people who distrust institutions, who think that conventional politics fails the American people. The sort of people for whom Harry Callahan, Will Munny, Frank Horrigan, Luther Whitney and Walt Kowalski have an emotional resonance.
So why would Eastwood deliver a conventional political speech? Had he delivered his material as a series of slick-sounding zingers, it would have been the sort of speech the media expected from Chris Christie’s keynote address. But that would have been: (a) not in keeping with the Romney campaign’s softer approach; and (b) diminishing and disappointing to Eastwood’s target audience. Most of the chattering class failed to grasp this. Some on Team Romney failed to grasp this. But the evidence coming in, both anecdotally and from polling, suggests Eastwood still has his finger on the popular pulse in a way pols and pundits never will.
Mark Steyn with more on this saying, “Play Clinty For Me.”
Like William F. Gavin, I hugely enjoyed Clint Eastwood’s turn last night, but I’m not sure I agree that it was “unintentionally hilarious” and that “he forgot his lines, lost his way.” Clint is a brilliant actor, and a superb director of other actors (and I don’t just mean a quarter-century ago: In the last five years, he’s directed eight films). He’s also, as Mr. Gavin observed, a terrific jazz improviser at the piano — and, in film and music documentaries, an extremely articulate interviewee. So I wouldn’t assume that the general tenor of his performance wasn’t exactly as he intended. The hair was a clue: No Hollywood icon goes out on stage like that unless he means to.
John Hayward writes:
“The intended recipient was not Mitt Romney, the convention delegates, or even Republican voters, but rather wavering independents. Clint was there to tell them it’s OK to find Obama, his ugly campaign operation, and his increasingly shrill band of die-hard defenders ridiculous. It’s OK to laugh at them.”
I’m not sure he could have pulled that off if he’d delivered a slick telepromptered pitch. …
Jim Treacher has another off the charts demonstration of Prez Narcissist. The tribute to Neil Armstrong has a picture of The One looking at the moon.