Your post, sir, is officially a waste of my time. Welcome to my blacklist. Bye!

Just political posturing. Cut any deal whatsoever to get the Republicans to raise any tax anywhere by $1. They think the whole Republican ediface will shatter from $1 in tax increases. Because that worked with Bush Sr 20 years ago.

They are all still focused on fighting the battles of the 90s.

OK, I give up. Going to try to sleep again. Goodnight, all.

OK, for the record, that wasn’t me! Also, I’m not female. Still, that’s the pose.

I’m not there yet. Can’t do the arms over the head, just reach around with one arm and steady myself with the other. I need to swing the front leg further up to provide better balance to free up the other arm.

Goal-oriented yoga.

Trailer for the new Bond film is out, but it doesn’t show much. Movie #23.

Perfect weather, if a few degrees warm. No rain in a while, the ground has gone into its talcum powder phase.

Lovely crescent moon with Venus tonight. Would have been worth a picture if I had a suitable camera. Alas, my camera is crap.

See if this works:

King Pigeon Image

Evening peeps. Too tired to get to sleep. Also too warm – going to have to pull the extra blankets off the bed.

Went to yoga tonight. When the instructor asks for special requests, I keep asking for “King Pigeon”. She keeps giving me dirty looks, but we do it anyway. It’ll be a while before I can really do it – it’s brutal on the hips and knees.

In 2010 I spent a lot of time musing on ways the polls were off, that it was going to be bad but not that bad. But the polls ended up being spot on. Since then I’ve been wary of trying to second guess the polls.

But I’m still second-guessing the polls here. The likely voter models are Republican-rich. They seem to be predicting a pro-Barrett turnout LESS than the number of people who actually signed the recall petition, which makes exactly no sense.

The polls seem to show very few undecideds, which does make sense. Decideds are much less likely to be influenced by advertising. The air war may not make all that much difference. More important may be reminding people that there IS and election and WHEN it will occur.

Even the “Walker by 5″ result is just outside the margin for error, and I don’t think the likely voter models are anywhere near that accurate.

Screw the polls. It will be close, but this can be won. GOtV.

On the bright side, “Forward” is better than the last slogan, “Winning the Future”, which turned out to be the title of one of Gingrich’s books.

Next cycle someone will use “All the Good Slogans Were Taken” and the other team will use “Us Good, Them Bad”.

The Republicans want this race to be a referendum on Obama. They don’t want to mention Romney at all. No interviews except on Fox, no questions from reporters. Refuse to answer questions about policy. Use all the SuperPAC money to run attack ads. Whine and play the victim whenever someone says a bad thing about Romney.

If he can get away with actually not talking from now through the election, he might have a chance. I don’t believe it can be done, but stranger things have happened.

If we could rec comments here you would get a rec for “ethical limbo bar”.

Regarding this particular ad campaign: what a frivolous waste of money by someone whose taxes should obviously be much higher. Four years ago Obama was a largely unknown quantity and implying that he was in thrall to a Scary Negro Preacher and thus was a Scary Negro had some effect. Like him or not, Obama is now a known quantity and character attacks are much less likely to be effective. Anyone who would be convinced by this already won’t vote for him, and nobody else cares. It will change almost no votes.

Regarding SuperPAC spending in general – this is why it is not as scary as it might be. Republicans have been in non-stop attack mode against Obama since the moment he locked up the nomination. What are they going to say that they haven’t already said? Whose mind are they going to change? Here is someone just repeating the old attacks.

Meg Whitman’s campaign in California showed that you can reach a point of saturation where additional ads simply have no effect. Once your target audience sees your messages three or four times a night, running another dozen ads doesn’t help, people just tune it out.

I pity the people who are still watching television. Two billion dollars in attack ads over the next six months – it will be brutal. You’ll be begging for an ad for cars, pizza, or adult diapers.

Jeff Foxworthy

That name sounds familiar … wasn’t he on that Tee and Vee thing people watched in the 20th century?

there’s a way to meet in the middle here that doesn’t upset the status quo too much.

And isn’t that what’s really important? Making sure that the people currently on top stay on top. Tweak a few things around the edges, as long as it doesn’t cost too much.

Growth is over. Economic system that depend on growth are falling apart. They can’t be fixed, they need to be replaced.

First world nations still have plenty of wealth to meet peoples’ needs, but not enough to support bloated militaries and an obscenely wealthy class. That’s where austerity starts and ends.