Politics – Page 88 – Shall Not Be Questioned

It Failed to Meet Our Goals, So Let’s Do It Again!

One of the running jokes I’ve always heard about the left is that when they see one of their favorite programs utterly and completely fails to fix whatever problem they identified, they say that they just need to do the exact thing again – only harder! I don’t think I’ve ever seen that joke so plainly stated like I did today in this post from a Philly site.

It used to be that cities responded to [wildly swinging rents] with hard rent control, actually preventing price increases, but now virtually all economists on both the left and the right think rent control is a horrible policy that leads to housing shortages. Rent control was great at halting price increases for the small number of people lucky enough to get rent controlled apartments, but for the majority of people it meant higher market rents in all the other buildings.

See, we have the concession that the idea to control the problem was a total and utter failure that actually made the problems they were trying to solve much worse and invited new problems. So what’s the solution they want to see? A newly branded rent control program that’s slightly softer and given a new name – rent stabilization.

The immediate impacts that I can see in the specific policies they cite, even as a person who knows next to nothing about real estate or property management other than having rented with several different property owners, are that buildings would never be improved because rents could not increase beyond a set percentage to pay for it, building owners would have a harder time selling buildings because of mandatory longer term leases that would have to be honored by the next owner, and landlords would be less likely to take risks on renters who don’t come with a perfect background because of a mandatory guarantee right to renew from tenants.

Calling a “bullshit policy” a “manure-infested idea” doesn’t change the fact that it will ultimately hurt people seeking nice and reasonable accommodations that fit their budgets.

I realize that this is way off topic for this blog, but it was just too funny not to share.

Wednesday Tab Clearing

Got a lot built up in the tabs:

Obama just did a better job of targeting low information voters.

In 59 Philadelphia voting divisions, Mitt Romney got zero votes. Even if something isn’t fishy, the groupthink displayed with that is astounding. You almost wish it’s fraud.

Gun sales are up, up, up.

Some post-election advice from a Frenchman.

An Outrage in the UK. Soldier brings a gun back from a war zone accidentally, is charged.

An instructor who has had poor dealings with blogs before, shoots someone in a massive display of training fail.

Roll your own dishwasher detergent. Detergent hasn’t been the same since the government ruined it by demanding the manufacturers remove the phosphates.

Electronic Tolling on PA Turnpike

The Pennsylvania Turnpike wants to go all electronic for tolling. I think the best solution would be to dissolve the Turnpike Commission, and turn the management over to PennDOT (with a stipulation the speed limit remain 65). Then just tear down the tolls and maintain the turnpike with highway funds. Part of the Turnpike’s problem is that Ed Rendell robbed it blind to pay for SEPTA’s inefficiency. I’m not sure how I feel about all electronic tolling, but anything that’ll help prevent old people holding up traffic waiting for a ticket in the EZ-Pass lane is OK by me.

Gun Owner Votes Count

I get so damn sick of the message that individual votes don’t matter. Last election, we had a local state house race that was decided by around 100 votes. That’s so close that it’s painful. Well, this year, we have an even more painful vote – and that’s even with the numbers working in favor of the pro-gun candidate and against the anti-rights guy.

For those who don’t follow Pennsylvania politics closely, we had this legislator named Levdansky. He was the American Hunters & Shooters Association of lawmakers. He proclaims to be a sportsman, but he actively sought to screw all gun owners and even ruin everything for hunters in Pennsylvania by pushing HSUS-dream type bills. He cozied up to anti-rights groups and CeaseFire PA made his attempt to reclaim the office he lost in 2010 their priority House race this year.

Meanwhile, the current incumbent, Rep. Rick Saccone, actually supports Second Amendment and hunting rights.

This year, they are in a rematch. I say are and not were because the race is still to be determined. For a while, Levdansky was up by a few votes, but a more thorough count of all of the ballots in every precinct now puts Saccone up by 36 votes. Three dozen voters.

Because it’s such a close call, it’s going to hearings by the election board which is 2-1 Democratic control. The hearing isn’t until Friday, and the final count isn’t expected until next week, according to various news outlets.

If you happen to know any gun owners who didn’t vote in that race, you might want to give them a piece of your mind. Every vote will matter, and this razor thin margin makes it too close for comfort for any gun owner in the state.

ROI For NRA Spending

I’ve seen a lot of analysis like this that NRA basically blew a wad of cash for nearly nothing. If you look at our overall results in Pennsylvania, things don’t look that bad. But the fact is that in a lot of key races, NRA got beaten badly.

NRA is certainly not alone. A good many groups on the right also sunk huge, often times much much larger sums of dollars into this election with even less to show for it. That will hopefully blunt the damage to NRA’s reputation, but this is going to hurt, for certain. What is the root problem here? I would boil it down to a few factors.

For the past two elections, NRA has had a choice between Barack Obama and a candidate that could be charitably described as a compromise. John McCain was well understood to have gone all “maverick” on NRA at various points in his political career, and while Mitt Romney’s actual record on the issue wasn’t nearly as bad as his rhetoric, that signing statement was bound to dog him. NRA has never been in a position to endorse a candidate for President who was actually strong on our issue, and everyone knows it. NRA did much better in down ticket races where this was not a factor.
No grassroots interest group can hope to do more than swing elections at the margins. When you don’t have a close election, it’s hard to claim interest groups were relevant. NRA suffered extensive losses in their U.S. Senate endorsements. Two candidates probably deserve the blame there, namely Mourdock in Indiana, and Akin in Missouri. Their ridiculous jabbering about rape poisoned the well of GOP Senate prospects, and took most of those races down below the NRA’s margin. That’s not something that could have been helped, because it was a messaging problem created by two bad candidates.
The center-right groups are not reaching younger voters, largely because their use of technology is backwards. NRA actually does a better job in this area than most of the other groups that flushed millions of dollars down the toilet this election, but that’s not saying NRA’s efforts are particularly good. I believe a big component of Obama’s two victories have been his effective use of technology to reach and motivate younger voters, who are not reachable by TV, print or direct mail. We’re finally starting to see the technology revolution come to politics, and it’s OFA who is leading.
The GOP didn’t run on gun rights at all this election cycle. Even Obama’s Fast and Furious scandal got nary a mention. Most pundits believed everyone wanted to hear about the economy, and that if the Democrats made this a culture war election, they would lose. Well, how did that work out? The Democrats pounded the GOP on culture war issues with single women and young people, and won those groups by large margins. Gun rights are actually a culture war issue where there’s no generation gap. Why not attack Obama on the issue?

The bigger question is what to do about it?Â It should be possible to motivate young people on gun rights. If there’s one thing that’s true about Millennials, is that they are extremely socially liberal. If guns are your “thing” — how you like to spend your Saturdays — most Millennials are fine with that. It’s your thing. Millennials don’t make strong value judgements on other people’s choices, and that isÂ requiredÂ to be a strong gun control advocate. The way to market gun rights to Millennials is to make them understand it as a lifestyle choice, and an issue of personal freedom. If you can do that, you’ll sell it to them. To that extent, I actually think blogs that heavily feature the shooting life are more useful for reaching that generation than political gun blogs like mine.

I think everyone on the right needs to understand the OFA machine. This is something I’m very curious about, but I don’t have time right now to try to dig to understand more of how it works. But every center-right group, including NRA, needs to start thinking more seriously about reaching younger voters, and using technology as a force multiplier in GOTV efforts. This means investing a lot more in technology spending, and bringing people on board who deeply understand how young people consume and share information. The days of raising money, awareness, membership and action, by sending oodles of direct mail or making phone calls, if not dead, is nearly so. If NRA and other groups keep messaging to the old, they will die with the old.

Secession Rumors

Apparently the White House is getting flooded with secession petitions, and this is making its way around the boomersphere (those long e-mail chains you get from your parents). It made its way onto a private group I’m in on Facebook. I find this rather disappointing, not because I don’t think the discussion needs to be had, but because I’d rather these people putting energy into petitioning their state legislatures (who can do something to this effect) rather than petitioning Obama (who can do nothing even if he wanted to, which he does not).

I don’t think the time for breaking up the United States is here right now, but I think it’s healthy for the discussion to happen. Here’s a map of places one candidate or another carried the vote by 20% or more.

Can a house so divided stand?

Philadelphia to be Sued

The lawsuit against the City of Philadelphia for publishing gun owner details in violation of state law is moving forward:

Attorney Joshua Prince filed a motion this week in Common Pleas Court, requesting that the suit be sealed to avoid revealing the names of his five clients – and potentially hundreds of others if the case is granted class-action status.

In August, the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections introduced a revamped website, featuring a map that allowed users to view the names and addresses of some gun owners in the city, and the specific reasons why they wanted a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

When the information was initially posted, Mayor Michael Nutter actually defended the posted information by saying that once gun owners appealed their license denials, they lost any right to privacy provided by state law and that the information could be obtained like any other public record. However, now Nutter’s office isn’t willing to make such an argument.

In fact, Prince actually went to test the theory by sending someone to the office that published the information with a written request earlier this fall. Not surprisingly, the request was denied because now the City acknowledges that it isn’t public information at all. So, Mr. Nutter, was your spokesman lying then or are your city workers lying now? I guess we’ll find out what the courts think soon.

Holder May Be Out

According to CBS DC. I couldn’t really understand why Obama stood by Holder, given what a liability he was. But if we’ll have a new Attorney General second term, at least that will be some improvement in the Administration.

Good News: OFA Won’t Be Transferred

Obama For America, which is Obama’s magic turnout machine, won’t be transferred to another candidate. As much as one might appreciate the human political talents of Presidents like Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton, qualities Obama is generally lacking by comparison, Obama’s talent with the raw mechanics of the political process is unrivaled. Or at the least, he was smart enough to hire very smart people to put the OFA machine together. Many of the things OFA did are truly, and stunningly innovative, and their use of new Information Technology to drive turnout has been unheard of until 2008, and then again in 2012.

If the GOP were smart (which is questionable most days) they would be studying the OFA machine in detail and figuring out how to copy it. Despite the fact that OFA will not be handed off to the next standard bearer of the Democratic brand, the Democrats will still retain significant institutional knowledge from OFA. If the Republicans fail to copy these techniques, it would only further doom them to electoral failure.

Raising Taxes

Boehner has signaled to the newly re-elected Obama Administration it may be open to raising revenues, A topic of conversation over at Instapundit. Given that 8 out of the 10 wealthiest counties in the US voted to re-elect the President, I’ve been questioning whether the GOP should really preoccupy itself with defending a constituency that doesn’t vote for it. If Obama insists on tax increases for wealthy Americans, why fight it? They voted for it. Let them suffer the consequences of their choice.