As noted yesterday, at 6:01 p.m. tomorrow, the “polls from nowhere” relating to Ohio’s GOP US Senate primary race that are being circulated underground will officially be declared rubbish, and anyone who wants to be considered something other than a rumormongering hack or victimized ignoramus will have to SHUT UP about them from that point forward.

….. Unless detailed support is provided.

No raw data, or even a specifically identified source, has surfaced as of yet.

The clock is ticking …..

Only comments responsive to the request will be allowed through.

Pierce-ing Posts, daily until the election, is sampling current blog posts both in and out of the S.O.B. Alliance, occasionally going to Old Media coverage, and bringing important prior posts to the attention of late-comers to Ohio’s US Senate contest.

Don’t forget to visit Bill’s site, his blog, and his Contribute page.

____________________________

FROM THE CURRENT BLOG CROP

Porkopolis Endorses Pierce

Go here.

Porkopolis on Mike DeWine’s Energy Schizophrenia

Porkopolis is so NOT surprised that thousands of dollars of campaign contributions from coal companies makes our incumbent senator partial to pulling coal out the ground at relatively great environmental disruption, while drilling for ANWR at minimal disruption is out of the question.

If DeWine’s Lack of Response to Me Is Any Indication ….

….. This squib from the Cleveland Openers blog is correct:

Brown’s likely November opponent, incumbent Republican Mike DeWine, has not hit the campaign trail to talk about his priorities …..

I made a call to DeWine campaign headquarters last week requesting a schedule of appearances, especially in the Cincinnati-Dayton area. That call went unreturned, because there was probably no campaigning taking place.

How totally for granted is Mike DeWine taking the vote on May 2? How totally surprised might he be late in the evening on May 2?

OLD MEDIA MORSELS

A West Virginia paper outdoes most of Ohio’s — by mentioning all the names of the candidates on the ballot.

Clueless Bob Bennett

If this isn’t an “I have no idea what I’m doing” quote (may require subscription), I don’t know what is:

“I don’t think there’s any question about it. This is going to be our toughest challenge yet that we’ve had recently,” said Bob Bennett, the state Republican chairman. He says Republicans need to focus on new schools built and other accomplishments. “I’m not the least bit pessimistic, but I think we have a struggle.”

The best reponse he has is “schools built?” Either vote for Bill Pierce to get someone with a clue, or find all available lifeboats.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

Mark at WoMd on the Bogus “One-issue” Issue

An early charge from the DeWine camp was that Bill Pierce was obsessed with the results of teh Department of Labor dispute that ultimately took down his business and is chronicled in his book “Take Comfort and Solace,” and was running merely out of revenge. Any of us who have met and talked with him know that the history is important, but that to call it an obsession of his is laughable (Did anyone hear him mention it on Pundit Review Radio? Didn’t think so.).

Mark took the argument down further back in February:

He is easily dismissed by “those in the know” as a “one issue candidate”, or someone “with an ax to grind.” Excuse me, aren’t all candidates someone “with an ax to grind”? I mean, isn’t the whole point of running because you think you can do a better job than the person currently in there? I mean, come on.

Some of the greatest changes made to our country were done by people with an “ax to grind.” Civil Rights, integrated baseball, equal rights for women, just to name a few. I am sure we would not dismiss Martin Luther King, Jr. with, well, he’s just got a beef with the government.

Mr. De”Whine”, and all you establishment GOP dregs of intellectual society, have you ever stopped and thought for a moment that maybe we need MORE candidates with a legitimate agenda, or ax to grind? I do. I am tired of candidates from both parties with no agenda other than getting elected. It is high time we had some issue candidates. Maybe then, they will be less career politicians and more citizen legislators.

____________________________

BECAUSE he is an “issues” (ALL the issues) candidate, I have endorsed Bill Pierce for Senate, and have provided nominal financial support for his campaign. BizzyBlog is a member of Blogs for Pierce.

Steyn notes how people can be obsessed with questionable (at best) threats, and pretend that the big ones are no big deal:

But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah, that’s just some racket cooked up by the Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist buddies to give Halliburton a pretext to take over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying about nukes is so ’80s.

….. So what should we worry about? How about — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — “climate change”? That’s the subject of Al Gore’s new movie, ”An Inconvenient Truth.” Like the trailer says: “If you love your planet — if you love your children — you have to see this movie.” Even if you were planning to kill your children because you don’t want them to live in a nuclear wasteland, see this movie. The mullahs won’t get a chance to nuke us because, thanks to rising sea levels, Tehran will be under water. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, says the Earth will “likely be an uninhabitable planet.” The archbishop of Canterbury, in a desperate attempt to cut the Anglican Communion a slice of the Gaia-worship self-flagellation action, demands government “coercion” on everything from reduced speed limits to ending cheap air travel “if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die.”

Environmentalism doesn’t need the support of the church, it’s a church in itself — and furthermore, one explicitly at odds with Christianity: God sent His son to Earth as a man, not as a three-toed tree sloth or an Antarctic krill. An environmentalist can believe man is no more than a co-equal planet dweller with millions of other species, and that he’s taking up more than his fair share and needs to reduce both his profile and his numbers. But that’s profoundly hostile to Christianity.

Here’s an inconvenient truth for “An Inconvenient Truth”: Remember what they used to call “climate change”? “Global warming.” And what did they call it before that? “Global cooling.” That was the big worry in the ’70s: the forthcoming ice age. Back then, Lowell Ponte had a huge best seller called The Cooling: Has the new ice age already begun? Can we survive?

The answer to the first question was: Yes, it had begun. From 1940 to 1970, there was very slight global cooling. That’s why the doom-mongers decided the big bucks were in the new-ice-age blockbusters.

And yet, amazingly, we’ve survived. Why? Because in 1970 the planet stopped its very slight global cooling and began to undergo very slight global warming. So in the ’80s, the doom-mongers cast off their thermal underwear, climbed into the leopardskin thongs, slathered themselves in sun cream and wired their publishers to change all references to “cooling” to “warming” for the paperback edition. That’s why, if you notice, the global-warming crowd begin their scare statistics with “since 1970,” an unlikely Year Zero which would not otherwise merit the significance the eco-crowd invest in it.

But then in 1998 the planet stopped its very slight global warming and began to resume very slight global cooling. And this time the doom-mongers said, “Look, do we really want to rewrite the bumper stickers every 30 years? Let’s just call it ‘climate change.’ That pretty much covers it.”

Climate change — the term that works whether your current fear of choice is global warming or cooling, stronger or weaker storms, more frequent or less frequent storms….. you get the picture. Clever.

And where is the apocalypse that was predicted?

More from City Journal’s Kay Hymowitz, with a monster HT to S.O.B. Alliance Member NixGuy. A big point: It’s done a lot, but it’s not the whole answer. Read the whole thing to get the missing link.

Then read this piece I came across from Christian Science Monitor (HT Lucianne) that tells us just how difficult solving the “missing link” problem will be.

Follow-up question: Anyone have a link to how low the caseload would be if it were not for illegal immigration, or a way to estimate it?

______________________________

UPDATE: I think I just found an answer to the previous question, though I’m having a difficult time believing it. The good news is that Euphoric Reality (HT Right on the Right) has the stats; the not-so-good news is Heidi at ER quotes them from previously published LA Times pieces without linking them (not possible, thanks to the LAT subscription wall) or linking back to previous ER posts that contain them.

So with that warning, here’s the stat (first item in the second list at the post):

Less than 2% of illegal aliens are picking our crops but 36% are on welfare.

IF, IF, IF that’s correct, and there are 12 million illegals here (that seems to be a rough consensus based on what I’ve read), then there are roughly 4.3 million illegals on welfare, which would be over 80% of the current caseload in the graph above. I’m not quite believing it. Further insights are welcome. See UPDATE 2 for clarification.

UPDATE 2 — Got this e-mail:

The stats you are quoting from Euphoric Realty are absurd, just as you surmised. I don’t have time to fact check all of them, but when I first saw Heidi’s post reproduced elsewhere I took the time to fact check #2 – another one that seemed just to wild to believe.

“Fact” #2 states:
Of the 10 million people in L.A. County, 5.1 million people speak English. 3.9 million speak only Spanish.

This is demonstrably false (the e-mailer is absolutely correct in pointing out the falsehood. — Ed.). The link from the US Census is here:
http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po47b.htm

As you can see, less than 5% of hispanic in LA County do not speak english. That works out to a little less than 400,000 people. In other words, the “fact” is off by about a factor of ten.

If I were you I would update your post to reflect the fact that these statistics are wrong, or I would ask Heidi to provide sources.

Finally, I think that the answer to your original question regarding illegals and welfare is that illegals affect welfare rolls only slightly (unless you count education and emergency healthcare as “welfare” – a trick popularized by Pete Wilson). That having been said, I suspect that specific, hard numbers on the issue will be hard to come by.

Very good points. I believe the trick in the “welfare” numbers is more in Food Stamps than it is in education and health care. I’m certain that families who only get food stamps are not in the “welfare caseload” graphed above (the population on food stamps is in the 20 million range, I believe), yet would be considered by the people who put out the 36% stat above to be receiving some kind of government assistance (often shorthanded to be “welfare”).

To load it into your own iTunes, go to Podcasts and type “pundit review” (with the space) in the search.

Or, if you either don’t have iTunes or don’t want to load the interview into it, click HERE to listen right now.

Brain Shavings is an intensely good blog that goes all over the place and still does it all well. I suspect most of us in the S.O.B. Alliance would be interested in obtaining any brain shavings he has to spare, which is why he deserves the heartiest of Welcomes.

Free Links:

• PunditReview Does a Takedown on Taxing Oil Companies’ “Windfall Profits” — It ought to make the big fans of the idea hesitate a little to know that the Communist Chinese government has decided to do just that.
• Speaking of which, I wonder how Unocal shareholders, whose company was bought by Chevron last year, would be feeling right now if they had instead been bought by Chinese government-dominated CNOOC instead? My opposition, and others’ of course, to the CNOOC-Unocal deal looks at least a teeny bit smarter at the moment.
• A judge has kept a city worker from being fired for excessively surfing the Internet on the job — Expect more employers to cut off access to all but internal links if this ruling sticks.
• Now THAT Is Fast Food — Papa John’s has test marketed guaranteed 10-minute pizza delivery, and claims a 99%-plus success rate.

Lunchtime Reading:

• Get It While It’s There — Rush had an opening half-hour for the ages yesterday on Mary McCarthy and the administration’s enemies in the CIA and at State, and much more. It will only be up until about 6PM today, so see it, or save it, while it’s still there. His core contention is that Bush is being victimized by his “new tone” position when he first took office, when he didn’t get put the Clintonistas onto the street. I have to agree.

A police detective richly deserved an award that usually goes to firefighters:

(more…)