Via USA Today, with not-so-fine whines, and a “dream on” sequence:

Sen. Richard Lugar defeated in Indiana’s GOP primary

Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana was defeated in the state’s Republican primary Tuesday, ending the 36-year career of a GOP elder statesman and handing the Tea Party movement its biggest upset victory so far in the 2012 elections.

Lugar was ousted by State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, whose campaign against the veteran lawmaker was backed by conservative groups including the Tea Party Express, the anti-tax Club for Growth, the National Rifle Association, the Tea Party-aligned Freedom Works, and former Republican Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks election spending, outside groups invested $4.5 million in the race.

… Mourdock’s victory will redouble Democrats’ effort to pick up Indiana this November in their ongoing battle to maintain their Senate majority, currently held at 53-47. Democrats believe Mourdock’s conservative record and Tea Party ties will make him an alienating force in a general election.

In the Hoosier State, Mourdock’s victory will turn enthusiastic conservatives and those with Tea Party values out in droves. Democrats’ climb just became more uphill.

Memo to the Ohio Republican Party aka the Ohio Stupid Party: Maybe you ought to consider having competitive primaries for key state and national positions sometime instead of constantly clearing the field for incumbents and other favored cronies.

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UPDATE: Lugar lost by 60-40%. That may the strongest primary repudiation of an incumbent senator I have ever seen.

The last national press reports on the five men arrested Monday for plotting to blow up a Cleveland-area bridge reassured everyone that none involved were in responsible roles in the Occupy movement. On Thursday, the Associated Press’s Thomas J. Sheeran wrote that Occupy Cleveland spokespersons “said the men were associated with the group but didn’t represent Occupy Cleveland or its non-violent philosophy.” An earlier AP report paraphrased a claim that they “had been associated with the anticorporate Occupy Cleveland movement but don’t share its nonviolent views.” Reuters carried this quote: “They were in no way representing or acting on behalf of Occupy Cleveland.”

Well, last night, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Michael Sangiacomo reported that at least one of the five was once in a sufficiently responsible position within the Occupy group to represent it while signing a lease for space the group used. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the wire services just noted and others will do with what follows (bolds are mine):
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Memo to Peg, who attempted yesterday to resuscitate a failing primary campaign for six-term incumbent Indiana Senator Dick Lugar: We’re tired of excuses. Really, really tired.

Even if we grant Noonan’s contentions that Lugar is a smart guy, that his instincts lean conservative, and that throwing his institutional senatorial memory overboard would be regrettable if he is replaced (I don’t concede Items 2 or 3), that doesn’t make up for two things: He hasn’t followed through on his conservative instincts often enough, and he is out of touch.

On conservative follow-through, two sources:

• Club for Growth — 2010, 70%; 2011, 80%; Lifetime up to 2011, 65%. Translation: A completely dismal record until it started becoming clear that he would be vulnerable — and even then he could only manage 29th place among all senators.
• Numbers USA’s grade for Lugar on immigration issues — D

On being out-of-touch, I’ll quote Noonan:

… 35. That’s how many years he’s been in the Senate, how many years he’s lived and worked primarily in the environs of Washington, not Indiana, where apparently he no longer has a home. That was a mistake.

That’s not a “mistake,” Peg. It’s a betrayal.

Richard Mourdock for Senate.

Yesterday, Time’s Joe Klein may have produced the single dumbest analysis post ever. Absurd as it is, it’s still important, because it probably betrays Barack Obama’s election strategy, with which the press will gleefully cooperate. The strategy is: Make it about anything and everything besides what I and my administration have and haven’t done, because it hasn’t impressed anyone, and we know it.

Klein’s entry (HT Hot Air Headlines) at Time’s Swampland, which should be named Fever-Swampland, was so brain-dead that he failed to cite a single example of an incumbent facing reelection (vs. a successor seeking election for the first time) in attempting to make his case:

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Friday evening during the TIB radio show, I became aware of this item at Seth Morgan’s Facebook haunt:

congrats to Bob McEwen for being asked to lead in the branding of the OH GOP and be a leading spokesperson

It was followed this morning by a forwarded email from elsewhere originally sent last night, which read in part (spelling errors in original fixed):

During his remarks, Bennett described a special role for former Congressman Bob McEwen, one of our SCC candidates who won in 2010. He envisioned McEwen, whose speaking skills are considered to be on the Reagan/Palin/Rubio level, fulfilling a new function as spokesman. The role will not be directed so much to “preaching to the choir”, except as necessary for motivational purposes, as to educating and persuading the pubic about our conservative beliefs, especially on college campuses and in “swing” communities. If your organization is in such an area or can stage an event in such an area, Bob McEwen is your guy.

(Aside: McEwen is nowhere near any of the three people mentioned in speaking skills. His conservative message is powerful because conservatism is powerful, but in delivery he’s on a par with a better-than-average corporate trainer, and I’m being generous. But I digress.)

My response to the emailer, leaving out that person’s name and slightly reformatted for a blog post, follows:
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Projection.

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This column went up at PJ Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Thursday.

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On April 3, President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the annual media luncheon sponsored by the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press. Obama, whose proposed budget in February was so farcical that Congress rejected it unanimously in late March, bitterly criticized Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget plan — which the House did pass but Harry Reid’s Senate has refused to consider, “despite the Senate Parliamentarian’s finding … that the law requires it” – as “thinly veiled social Darwinism.”

According to Wikipedia, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics tells us that “A ‘social Darwinist’ could just as well be a defender of laissez-faire as a defender of state socialism, just as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist.” Historially, left-wing regimes have resorted to “survival of the fittest” social Darwinist offenses against humanity far more frequently than those on the right, especially if one classifies Nazi Germany as the predominantly leftist enterprise that it was.

In light of that history and current reality, Obama’s “social Darwinism” accusation directed at Ryan and the GOP is especially outrageous, coming from a guy whose administration has in so many ways been engaging in a slow-motion variant of it for over three years. The harm to relatively vulnerable and powerless groups arguably began with the advent of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy almost four years ago as Obama’s general election campaign shifted into high gear.

Take the job market. The most disproportionately unfit for gainful employment are those who haven’t obtained a high school diploma or its equivalent. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for those in this group who are 25 or older reached 15.9% in November 2010, and is still 12.6%:

In the 20 years the government has tracked this statistic, all 38 of the highest (i.e., worst) readings have been during each of the Obama administration’s 38 full months in office. Also note that the monthly reading for this challenging group fell to its lowest level on record in October 2006 during a Republican administration.

That’s not even the whole story. During the first quarter of 2012, this group’s seasonally adjusted average employment-population ratio of 40.2% was three points, or almost 7%, below the same ratio during fourth quarter of 2007, and has barely budged since the recession officially ended in June 2009. Oh, and because certain ethnic categories are heavily represented in the over-25 high school dropout category, the statistics just cited demonstrate yet again that the Obama economy has hit blacks and Hispanics the hardest.

The long-term unemployed are also extraordinarily vulnerable. In a normal recovery, risk-averse employers who are understandably reluctant to hire from this group end up doing so anyway as the job market tightens. The trouble is that this job market, except in certain professions, hasn’t appreciably tightened in over four years. If we added those who are sitting on the sidelines who would really like to be working but who aren’t considered part of the workforce to the current unemployment rolls, the jobless rate would be between 9.4% and 10.5% instead of the reported 8.2%.

While acknowledging that poverty as defined in the U.S. is nothing like the misery seen in so much of the rest of the world, the official poverty rate increased from 13.2% to 15.1% during Obama’s first two years to a level not seen since the early 1990s. The deterioration has been so dramatic that the Census Bureau has created a rigged contraption called the Supplemental Poverty Measurement whose purpose appears to be to create an artificial impression in future years that things are improving when they really aren’t.

Social Security is unsustainable in its current form, yet Obama has no answer other than to let it keep going and going. Social Security’s actuaries have told us that the system will be forced to permanently cut benefits by about 25% in 2036 if nothing is done. Those for whom Social Security is their only or predominant source of income would be hurt the most if that occurs. Every year the economy continues to underperform will move the benefit-reduction date closer.

Medicare and Medicaid are unsustainable in their current forms. Congress’s “solution,” ObamaCare, with its spiraling projected costs, work-demotivating and marriage-destroying subsidies, byzantine bureacracy, and individual liberty- and religion-disrespecting compulsions, would make matters far worse.

This brings us to the administration’s most fundamental “survival of the fittest” elements.

Rather than fretting over out-of-power Paul Ryan and the Republicans making decisions about who will live and who will die, the people we have to worry about are in the White House or advising it right now:

• Ezekiel (“Zeke the Bleak“) Emanuel would prefer to ration medical treatment based on the following priorities: “youngest-first, prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value.” Emanuel has also written that we should “not (be) guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia,” and that in emergency situations with scarce resources medical professionals should use a “cycle of life” priority in deciding who should get treatment, giving preference to people 13 to 40 years old (as long as they are reasonably healthy, of course).
• Science czar John Holdren co-wrote a book advocating forced abortions, mass sterilization, and a “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens, and has never unequivocally disavowed his attachment to these ideas.
• Barack Obama himself infamously told the daughter of an elderly woman who received a pacemaker that it would be more appropriate from here on out that people in such situations be limited to taking pain pills.

The prospect of full-fledged “social Darwinism” is far more real under a continuation of our autopilot government combined with the implementation of ObamaCare than it is under anything Ryan or Republicans have proposed.

Taking it even one step further, if you want to see social Darwinism in its rawest form, just wait until a government which runs trillion-dollar deficits until it falls off the financial cliff has to radically slash everything in sight to survive. You don’t want to think about what it will be like once everyone starts fighting over the leftovers in a country which has become largely if not mostly detached from its Judeo-Christian moral roots. If it ever comes to that, it surely won’t be Paul Ryan’s fault.

Ouch:

The truth about what their elders have done to Millennials and younger people hurts, but Whittle’s final message, after encouraging them to learn and liberate themselves, is crucial: While doing all of that, “Hang in there.”

At the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar is floating the notion (saved here at host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) that members of the Supreme Court who seem inclined to strike down ObamaCare might do so without fully understanding it. Translation: Those dummies.

The AP reporter makes a claim which reads like a desperate talking point from Team Obama (and maybe it is). The essence of the “argument” is that if you have a required minimum plan design which includes many items individuals and families would never use and would never buy if left to their own devices, and you force them to purchase a health insurance policy with that design (or possibly better), it really isn’t a bad thing any more if you allow some choice in copays and deductibles.

Of course, Alonso-Zaldivar was able to quickly find several people to back up his assertion that certain of the Supremes might be “misunderstanding” the situation, while almost completely avoiding the core Commerce Clause-violating idea that not buying is not an option. Excerpts follow (bolds, including the four bolded words — “that may be true” which nuke the asinine argument being made, are mine):

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And its propagandists. (Artwork mostly via Ed Driscoll at PJ Media.)

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Note: This column went up at PJ Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Saturday.

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The Associated Press describes itself as “The Essential Global News Network.”

It is indeed essential — to Barack Obama, and for the next seven months, his reelection campaign. Recent management actions and “news” coverage at the AP confirm that it is no longer pejorative to call the wire service the Administration’s Press, or even the Administration’s Propagandists.

How the AP conducts itself and reports the news is no arcane matter.

Many if not most Americans have no idea how often they meet up with AP content every day.  Those top-of-hour two-minute syndicated radio broadcasts you hear on the way to and from work? There’s a good chance that at least half of its content was adapted from AP copy. The national and international stories in your newspaper’s print edition and at its web site? Most of it probably came from AP. The national TV networks? In terms of beat reporting, they’re mere shadows of their former selves, and liberally use content from AP — and, to a lesser extent, the New York Times, which is no longer even trying to be the “newspaper of record” it was in previous decades — as their starting point, and often their ending point. This in turn filters down to local TV newsrooms, which don’t have the resources to pay much direct attention to goings-on outside their city or state.

Organizationally, the AP is the oddest of entities, a “not-for-profit cooperative of news organizations … solely focused on finding, reporting and distributing news.” Its tax status gives it an obvious advantage over anyone who would dare try to launch a competitive enterprise of similar scope (gosh, is AP even exempt from sales tax on purchases of materials?). Although some dues-paying news outlets have become restless in the past few years, it is relatively insulated from the normal financial pressures businesses face.

The wire service’s journalists are represented by the News Media Guild, a militant subset of the Communications Workers of America. The AP became unionized in the wake of a 1937 Supreme Court decision. Dissenting justices in the 5-4 case contended that the First Amendment’s freedom of the press should keep news organizations free from all government interference in their operations — in this case, at the hands of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ruthlessly aggressive National Labor Relations Board. They prophetically warned that allowing journalists to form unions would forever compromise the ability of a media outlet to “preserve its news service free from color, bias, or distortion.” Did it ever. The AP should be all about, and only about, who, what, where, when, why, and how — just the facts. Instead, the current trendy phrase at AP is “Journalism With Voice,” which at bottom means “more interpretation,” i.e., even more spin and bias.

Last year, in the midst of the mayhem in Wisconsin over Governor Scott Walker’s budget-repair legislation, supposedly objective AP reporters constantly insisted that Walker was “eliminating” and “stripping” public-sector collective-bargaining rights and that he was committing an “assault on the public employee unions.” A year ago, after GOP Congressman Paul Ryan introduced his budget plan, the Guild’s web site ran an appalling cartoon making the “humorous” claim that Ryan’s real goal was “to euthanize the elderly, and then process them into tasty snack crackers.”

The Guild thinks so little of even the perception of objectivity that it was “fully behind the radical message of Occupy Wall Street,” and hasn’t given any indication of modifying that support, despite the movement’s crimes, violence, sexual assaults, filth, and unreimbursed costs to taxpayers. Demonstrating that it has also been completely coopted in the 75 years since the Supreme Court decision just noted, management assigned seven reporters to cover the largely disbanded movement’s six-month anniversary; the resulting report still managed to avoid any reference to Occupy’s myriad documented offenses.

Just four of the many AP outrages against journalism in the past two weeks include the following:

• An AP reporter wrote that supporters of the Keystone Pipeline “say it will create over 1,000 jobs.” Well, I guess “over a dozen” would also have been technically true. Supporters’ estimates actually range from 2,500 to 500,000, depending on whether they are referring to direct jobs or are also including gains from spin-off employment.
• When Congress unanimously rejected Obama’s farcical budget proposal, AP waited until the fifth paragraph of its report to tell readers that the vote was 414-0 (specifics almost guaranteed not to get mentioned over the airwaves), and would only describe it as “overwhelmingly rejected” by a “GOP-run Congress” in order “to embarrass Democrats.”
• In the first four days after the New Black Panthers issued a bounty for the capture of George Zimmerman in the tragic death of Trayvon Martin, AP reports cryptically noted the existence of a bounty just once, with no mention of its source.
• A truly bizarre and Orwellian sequence of AP dispatches over the course of one business day on the consumer confidence report from the Conference Board went from “falls” to “dips slightly” to “roughly flat” to (brace yourself) a “rosy outlook.” The index fell from 71.6 in February to 70.2 in March.

The AP cranks out a constant barrage of risible reportage to relatively disengaged voters. Thanks to news feeds on smart phones, tablets, and computers, the servings of half-truths and falsehoods are on average probably more frequent, and thus over time more damaging. Meanwhile, New Media’s center-right presence on consumer devices is lagging.

AP management also seems to no longer care about appearances. Outgoing CEO Dean Singleton’s introduction of President Obama at the wire service’s annual luncheon on April 3 was so disgracefully obsequious that, according to Charles Hurt at the Washington Times, “[I]t was more like he proposed to him.”

Team Obama’s reelection campaign could hardly be happier about all of this.

Excellent, and very sad:

Key conclusions:

Power, once granted, will be used.

… Slowly, slowly, people of both parties have gained the kind of power the Constitution was designed to protect us from.

They have the ring.

And both our incumbent President (who, as explained in the video, pretended in a “signing statement” not to want the powers to detain American citizens without cause included in the National Defense Authorization Act — but who in reality made sure his apparatchiks shepherded the bill through Congress with those powers intact) and his perceived leading challenger aren’t troubled … because, well, they would never, ever use it.

As Whittle notes, “Power, once granted, will be used.”

Guess it’s just a matter of how much time it will take.

From PJTV (HT Taxmanblog):

Scott Ott’s wrap-up question:

Asking someone to prove that they are who they say they are. If it’s a proven precaution at the headquarters of those who fight for your civil rights, then how can they object to applying the same screening measure to guard your electoral franchise?

They object because they have no shame, Scott.

It’s not about “disenfranchisement.” It’s about enabling fraud.

From “Coalitions for Santorum,” in what is said to be “A memo detailing flawed delegate counts from John Yob, delegate strategist, to Mike Biundo, campaign manager”:

Re: Delegate Math
The Media’s Delegate Math is Wrong

There are a couple of fundamental flaws with the delegate counts that the media keeps that reveals that this race is much closer than they report:

1) Florida, Arizona, and quite possibly Puerto Rico will be proportional rather than Winner Take All. They broke RNC rules by going winner take all before the window and therefore RNC Members and/or the convention will enforce the rules and make the delegations proportional. This will reduce Romney’s delegate total substantially and increase the other three candidates’ respective delegate totals.

2) National Convention Delegates are elected at County, District, and State conventions rather than by the initial beauty contests in many states. For example, in Washington State Romney was allocated 25 delegates, Paul 8 delegates, Santorum 7 delegates, and Gingrich 0 delegates. The Santorum and Paul campaigns are working together in Washington State and the result will be more delegates for Santorum and Paul and a dramatic decrease in delegates for Romney. Santorum will also over perform in most other states that use this process and Romney will underperform.

3) Unbound delegates – The media continues to put unbound delegates in their counts in the territories and other states. These folks can change their mind, or have yet to make up their mind, and should not be counted as if they are bound.

The REAL Count

Our current internal count that takes into account ongoing county, district, and state conventions is as follows (combined total of non-Romneys is 591 — Ed.):
- Romney – 571
- Santorum – 342
- Newt – 158
- Paul – 91

Texas is Going Winner Take All

The state of Texas is in the process of announcing that they are going to go Winner Take All rather than proportional. This will have a dramatic impact on the delegate projections, tighten the race after Santorum wins Texas, and significantly hinder Romney’s capacity to ever get 1144 delegates because he will not get his proportion of the state. Simply put, this is a Game Changer. The race is almost even if you account for a Rick Santorum win in Texas under a Winner Take All system, and there is a clear Conservative Majority with Newt Gingrich.

The Calendar Moves to May

The month of April was always going to be difficult but the calendar gets much more friendly for Rick Santorum in May. North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Nebraska, Oregon, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Texas might lead to Santorum winning roughly 7 out of 8 states in May, and heading into the June 5th primaries with a freight train of momentum.

Conservative Majority with Newt Gingrich

The campaign continues to reach out to Newt Gingrich’s team to work together on County, State, and District conventions to prevent Romney from achieving 1144 and to elect a Conservative Majority of delegates.

Conclusion

This race is much closer than the media and Establishment Republicans would like to report and there and events such as Texas are dramatically changing the future landscape in a manner that is positive to Rick Santorum and negative for Mitt Romney.

The other campaigns are beginning to work together more closely to prevent Romney from reaching 1144 and it is starting to pay dividends.

The month of April was always going to be a difficult month for Rick Santorum but it will still be close enough so that when he wins the conservative states in the month of May the race will be approximately even going into the Republican National Convention.

Romney’s challengers have to perform, but the above math, if correct, would indicate that Romney really can’t unequivocally claim to have a majority of delegates — and is far from guaranteed a majority before the Republican National Convention.

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UPDATE: Richard Viguerie at Conservative HQ–

… the delegate counts being published by the Romney campaign and the media are simply inaccurate.”

Gosh, that couldn’t be because the establishment press would love to see Romney as the nominee, would it?