Senate predictions: October 30, 2014

Democrats will probably not be winning this Senate election in 2014. There are too many blue lines below the x-axis (8) and too few above (1). Even if I were to be wrong about this prediction (extremely likely), the next two closest races are Georgia and Alaska. In Georgia, a win in November's election for Michelle Nunn just delays the likely runoff win in January's runoff by David Perdue. And polls in Alaska have a history of overstating Democrats' strength. It wouldn't be too surprising if the median poll spread next Tuesday shows Democratic senator Mark Begich with a small lead, but since 2000, Alaska's polls have shown a 7.2 percentage point bias towards Democrats.

As this is supposed to be an Oklahoma blog, I should say something about the elections for both U.S. Senators and all the state offices in Oklahoma: Republicans will win everything by huge margins. Lankford, Inhofe and Fallin will cruise by huge margins, and the Oklahoma Democratic Party will continue to wallow in obscurity and penury for the foreseeable future.  That is all.



 
Here are today's median poll numbers.

My Letter to the Senators: An Exercise in Futility

Below is my letter to Oklahoma's U.S. Senators Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe. In it, I try to lay out a conservative argument in favor of the DREAM Act. I probably should have made the word "taxpayers" bold and capitalized.

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Dear Senator (Coburn / Inhofe),

I am writing you today to please consider voting in favor of the DREAM Act. You may have heard many arguments both for and against the proposed bill, as have I, but one argument that has not been given a lot of play is this one:

We taxpayers have been subsidizing the education of immigrants without status for years in the public education system. The whole point of public financing of education is that we all share a common belief that an educated population is an economically productive population; it is worth taxpayer funding for the betterment of the common good. And we hear stories all the time about the many immigrants without status in our society who are honor students destined for success in college and beyond.

But our current immigration policy mandates that we deport these students right at the time in their lives when our nation would start to be able to reap the benefits of the education we taxpayers have financed for so long.

How can it make sense to give away to some other country the future economic power generated by these individuals? Why would we want to prevent graduates of our colleges and universities from using their knowledge to form a better society right here in the United States?

Please don’t let trillions of dollars of taxable income go to waste. Please don’t exacerbate “brain drain” by forcing new graduates and young professionals to leave the country.

Please vote in favor of the DREAM Act.

You Can Tell People Hate Democrats Because More Senators Are Becoming Democrats

From Oklahoma's senior Senator Jim Inhofe:

There is no evidence more visible that the American people are already rebelling against the far-left agenda than Senator Arlen Specter switching parties to become a Democrat. He did this for one reason, and that is his advisers told him he couldn’t retain his Senate seat as a Republican. In other words, the same people who supported Senator Specter six years ago have soundly rejected him today.

What? A moderate Republican shifts leftward and this is an indication that his constituency has shifted rightward? Arlen Specter switched parties because the formerly conservative moderates are now voting Democrats into office, leaving behind a Republican party out of touch with Pennsylvania values.

Speaking of values, this quote was found in a NY Times opinion-almalgamator on the subject of gays serving openly in the military. Inhofe is one of several contributors to confuse being openly gay with having sex in front of everyone non-stop.

Red State Debate

The big debate occurred last night. No, not that "town hall" debate from Memphis we sat through between two guys hammering talking points on a round stage with extraordinarily crimson carpet. I'm talking about the one and only debate between two-and-a-third term U.S. senator and biblical literalist Jim Inhofe and one-term state senator and former John Mayer impersonator Andrew Rice. This debate sounded like any debate in the country between a Republican and a Democrat right now, as the Democrat Rice hounded the Republican Inhofe about the current state of the economy and attempted to tie him to the failed policies of George W. Bush. In most states, this would mean that Andrew Rice would have won the debate. In Oklahoma, it just showed how out-of-touch Andrew Rice is with Oklahoma voters.

Jim Inhofe wore his voting record on his sleeve. While John McCain was landing punches with his proclamation that Barack Obama was the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate, Jim Inhofe himself proudly found several watchdog groups that called him the most conservative senator in the U.S. Senate. He's proud of it. His support for Israel's occupation of the West Bank comes from a chapter in Genesis. He wants to openly discriminate against gay people. He voted against banning torture. He voted to make it harder to repay student loans. As the second largest recipient of oil company campaign contributions, he wants to make sure oil companies can drill directly into the skulls of polar bears. He compares environmentalism to Naziism. I only made one of those things up. After proclaiming himself the most conservative member of the U.S. Senate, he stated that there wasn't a race in the country with more idealogically opposed candidates. This would probably be true no matter who the opponent was. And yet, Inhofe leads in the polls by 15-20 points. Oklahomans adore conservatives.

At one point during the debate, Andrew Rice successfully compared Jim Inhofe to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Since I only read about the debate in the paper, I have no way of knowing whether Inhofe's response was "Thanks for the compliment!", "Oh, you're too kind!" or "No way! My family doesn't have a single gay or lesbian member unlike Dick Cheney's family!" Bush may be unpopular everywhere else in the country, but I guarantee you that George W. Bush would win a reelection in this state were it to be constitutionally possible.

Andrew Rice also made a reverse-voter-pledge by urging those whose lives are better off than they were 8 years ago to go ahead and vote for Jim Inhofe. This would be a small voter pool indeed in most other states, but probably not in Oklahoma. Over the past 8 years, our oil-based economy has boomed due to the skyrocketing price of oil. House prices still haven't fallen. Our state budget has been filled with surplusses for years. Unemployment is roughly the same as it was in 2000, and (through August) unemployment has been down from last year. We had a GM plant close in that time period, but who hasn't? We have mostly been able to offset those manufacturing jobs with higher paying jobs. Oklahoma has received a boon from the base realignment commission, which called for increases in the levels of soldiers at our Oklahoma military bases. Our colleges and universities have seen increased enrollment even with tuition rising sharply over the past 8 years. Our state even landed its first professional sports team. All in all, if everyone really thought about it, I'm almost positive a majority of voters in Oklahoma truly are better off than they were 8 years ago. But even those whose lives are not better off probably are going to vote for Inhofe anyways.

Let's face it. No matter what Andrew Rice said, he would never have had a chance against the entrenched and well-funded Jim Inhofe. But he spoke at the debate as if he was talking to favorable audience members in his poor urban Oklahoma City senate district. He should have been more like Brad Henry, our two-term Democratic governor who is more of a moderate on most issues and points out his openness to Republican issues like tax cuts and abortions in debates (even if he doesn't follow through on passing them) and who enjoys substantial rural support.

Everytime Someone Uses the Phrase "Going Green", God Kills a Kitten

It’s rare that my state’s senior U.S. Senator James Inhofe and I agree on much of anything, from social issues to government policy to the role of the media to the separation of church and state. But when it comes to picking sides in the sparring match between the uber-conservative evangelical Inhoff and uber-rich Hollywood producer and global warming activist Laurie David, wife of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David and producer of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, I think I’m going to have to fall in line with Inhofe.

I may have my liberal blogger’s special bathroom pass revoked for saying it, but I can’t stand the way people like Laurie David are cramming the green movement down my throat, trying to guilt me into buy new light bulbs, all the while living in giant mansions and chartering private jets. Laurie David has written a new book for children called The Down-to Earth Guide to Global Warming in which she furthers her environmental challenge to kiddos, encouraging them to become green Nazis who go around unplugging people’s toasters and telling strangers that only morons drive gasoline-powered vehicles. Another more self-promoting tip she gives kids is to ask that her movie An Inconvenient Truth be shown in class.

Laurie David is not a scientist, and probably couldn't explain much about the processes that go on in the atmosphere or anything about thermodynamics. Instead, Laurie David's whole point, as expressed in this interview on the Today show this morning, is not to give children a badly needed education in earth sciences, but rather indoctrinate them into this "go green" movement that doesn't require any knowledge of science. Her green army of youngsters is then to nag their parents about why daddy doesn't drive a hybrid.

We're hoping that kids actually nag their teachers, their principals. There's so much that can be done on the school level and at the home level.

Laurie David and her co-author Cambria Gordon are pushing hard to get this book into not just elementary school libraries, but also elementary school curricula. And because the book is published by Scholastic, and Laurie David is rich enough and well-known enough, they have a pretty good chance at succeeding. Which would be terrible, since the book is almost entirely propaganda. Thats the real shame behind it, too. There really is good science behind the theory of global warming (sorry, Mr. Greatest Hoax Ever Inhofe), but we're not teaching children enough to actually understand the environmental studies.

I heard Laurie David interviewed on NPR this morning (yes, I get the bathroom pass back!), and believe me, no quote in print can adequately capture how smarmy and nauseating she is in her activism. She says things like "we have to change all these light bulbs to compact fluorescents..." and "we tell the kids 'whenever you do something, think about how is that contributing to global warming'" and "one thing we want kids to do is start a 'green team' at school" and "we want kids to start a 'no-waste policy' at their cafeteria" and "we want kids to ask their parents 'why are the paper towels in our house not made of recycled materials?' and 'why aren't we driving a hybrid car?' and 'why haven't we changed all our light bulbs?'" It's like it never occurs to her that some people aren't made out of money. Or maybe she just doesn't care.

It all reminds me very much of a religion, and all the professed infallibility and hypocrisy that goes with it.

- QP