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Democrats resort to busing in people to fill up DNC convention

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Romney vs. Obama: campaign fundraising
Romney vs. Obama: campaign fundraising

Fox News reports.

Excerpt:

College students from across North Carolina will arrive in Charlotte by the busload. Same with members of predominantly black churches in neighboring South Carolina.

Their goal: help fill a 74,000-seat outdoor stadium to capacity when President Obama accepts the Democratic nomination Thursday night.

[…]Democrats have been fretting for months over whether the president can draw a capacity crowd at Bank of America Stadium. Polls show voter enthusiasm is down, as are Obama’s crowds for his battleground state campaign rallies.

[…]Thursday’s event is certain to draw comparisons to 2008, when Obama accepted the Democratic nomination before a capacity crowd at an 84,000-seat stadium in Denver. There was little concern back then over whether Obama would fill the stadium, in part because he was easily attracting tens of thousands of people to his campaign rallies across the country.

This time around, Obama’s crowds are far smaller. He drew his biggest audience at his campaign kick-off rally in May, a 14,000-person crowd at Ohio State University. About 13,000 people attended Obama’s rally at the University of Colorado in Boulder Sunday.

Not surprising, given that Obama kicked-off his re-election campaign in a half-empty stadium. The only people who are going to vote for this guy are the people who are dependent on federal government welfare and spending.

And look, Obama is losing badly in the fundraising, too: (links removed)

Mitt Romney has extended his lead over President Obama in this election cycle’s race for campaign cash.

The Republican had almost $186 million in cash on hand at the end of July, compared to $124 million for Obama — figures that include donations made to the campaigns, party committees and joint fundraising efforts.

[…]In 2008, Obama shattered all previous fundraising records by bringing in an excess of $750 million — far more than John McCain.

But Romney has dashed any hopes Obama might have harbored for continued dominance in 2012. The past two months have been particularly fruitful for the Republican challenger, as Romney’s team produced a haul of more than $200 million in June and July.

Over the same time period, Obama’s campaign mustered a comparatively modest $147 million.

And the gap between the candidates may be widening. The Romney campaign has said its fundraising totals have increased in recent days after the addition of Rep. Paul Ryan to the ticket.

Republicans have an even bigger money advantage when spending by super PACs and other outside groups is included.

According to the latest data from the Center for Responsive Politics, outside conservative groups have spent $221.5 million this cycle, while liberal groups have spent $55.6 million.

Romney wasn’t my first, second, or third choice for the Republican nomination, but he sure knows how to raise money. We’ll see whether he is able to hold his own in debates with Obama. I think that given the choice between four years of disastrous economic failures and four years of flip-flops, America will take the flip-flops.

UPDATE: Looks like the busing in wasn’t enough: Obama is moving his speech from the 74,000 capacity venue to a 20,000 capacity venue. Well, that’s one way to get a packed house.

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Couple arrested for using legally-owned gun to defend home from burglars

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Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail, which I found very disturbing.

Excerpt:

  • Police received 999 call from a man who said he had opened fire on four intruders
  • Man, 35, fired shotgun at gang who broke into his isolated cottage in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire
  • He and his wife, 43, called police immediately after shooting
  • Couple arrested on suspicion of GBH and four men detained on suspicion of aggravated burglary

The couple arrested after two suspected burglars were shot during a midnight break-in at their remote rural home had been robbed three or four times already, it has been reported.

Police descended on the farm cottage in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire after receiving a 999 call from a man who said he had opened fire on four intruders.

The homeowners, who have been named as 35-year-old Andy Ferrie and his wife Tracey, 43, were understood to have called police immediately after the shooting, at 12.26am yesterday morning.

Mr Ferrie’s mother Susan Spilner told the Sun newspaper: ‘This is not the first time they have been broken into. They have been robbed three or four times. One of them was quite nasty.”

[…]The man who dialed 999 told officers he had fired his shotgun, which is licensed and legally held, and the intruders fled.

Minutes later, ambulance paramedics were called to treat a man with shotgun injuries. The 999 call was understood to have been made by one of the suspected burglars.

A second man was treated for shotgun injuries after he walked into Leicester Royal Infirmary, around ten miles from the cottage.

Neither of the men’s injuries were said to be serious.

The householder and his wife were arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm.

He is thought to be a farm worker who kept the shotgun legally as part of his job. Four men in their 20s and 30s were also arrested on suspicion of aggravated burglary.

I checked the population of their city and it’s 25,000 people. That is just scary to me.

The UK took a hard turn to the left over the last couple of decades under the Labor Party. They believed that disarming law-abiding citizens in order to protect criminals would reduce crime. In addition to arresting law-abiding citizens, the UK also has strict gun control that prevents law-abiding citizens from defending themselves from criminals. For example, in 1997, the UK banned handguns. The result of that policy was that violent crime more than doubled in the four years following the ban. So not only is there this initiative on the secular left to coddle criminals with lighter sentences, but there is also the effort by the secular left to disarm law-abiding citizens.

Men in particular are meant to use force against criminals. But that distinctive male role is not OK with the UK Labor Party, who do not like distinctions of good and evil in any case. This inability to protect their families is stressful for men. Many men are not interested in getting married because of this stress. The whole point of marriage for a man is that there will be respect for his male roles from his family as well as from the state. The refusal of the government to punish criminals is not reassuring to men. And the government’s tendency to not let men do what needs to be done and use their judgment in cases like this just makes marriage seem less attractive to us.

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Who pays the bill for handing out $2.2 trillion of entitlements per year?

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This article by Nicholas Eberstadt is the most popular article on the Wall Street Journal right now. I found it through Doug Ross’ links.

First, a quick review of the entitlement situation:

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined.

The growth of entitlement payments over the past half-century has been breathtaking. In 1960, U.S. government transfers to individuals totaled about $24 billion in current dollars, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 2010 that total was almost 100 times as large. Even after adjusting for inflation and population growth, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown 727% over the past half-century, rising at an average rate of about 4% a year.

In 2010 alone, government at all levels oversaw a transfer of over $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services. The burden of these entitlements came to slightly more than $7,200 for every person in America. Scaled against a notional family of four, the average entitlements burden for that year alone approached $29,000.

Government’s job used to be to handle responsibilities like roads and bridges or like defending us at home and to defending our national interests abroad. But now government seems to be more interested in redistributing money taken from job creating businesses and their workers to those don’t create jobs and those who don’t work. What happens when you punish people for trying to succeed and reward people who don’t even try?

This is the result of wealth redistribution:

The proud self-reliance that struck Alexis de Tocqueville in his visit to the U.S. in the early 1830s extended to personal finances. The American “individualism” about which he wrote did not exclude social cooperation—the young nation was a hotbed of civic associations and voluntary organizations. But in an environment bursting with opportunity, American men and women viewed themselves as accountable for their own situation through their own achievements—a novel outlook at that time, markedly different from the prevailing attitudes of the Old World (or at least the Continent).

The corollaries of this American ethos were, on the one hand, an affinity for personal enterprise and industry and, on the other, a horror of dependency and contempt for anything that smacked of a mendicant mentality. Although many Americans in earlier times were poor, even people in fairly desperate circumstances were known to refuse help or handouts as an affront to their dignity and independence. People who subsisted on public resources were known as “paupers,” and provision for them was a local undertaking. Neither beneficiaries nor recipients held the condition of pauperism in high regard.

Overcoming America’s historic cultural resistance to government entitlements has been a long and formidable endeavor. But as we know today, this resistance did not ultimately prove an insurmountable obstacle to establishing mass public entitlements and normalizing the entitlement lifestyle. The U.S. is now on the verge of a symbolic threshold: the point at which more than half of all American households receive and accept transfer benefits from the government. From cradle to grave, a treasure chest of government-supplied benefits is there for the taking for every American citizen—and exercising one’s legal rights to these many blandishments is now part of the American way of life.

As Americans opt to reward themselves ever more lavishly with entitlement benefits, the question of how to pay for these government transfers inescapably comes to the fore. Citizens have become ever more broad-minded about the propriety of tapping new sources of finance for supporting their appetite for more entitlements. The taker mentality has thus ineluctably gravitated toward taking from a pool of citizens who can offer no resistance to such schemes: the unborn descendants of today’s entitlement-seeking population.

We used to want to earn our own success. Now we want to live on the backs of children not yet born. Slavery is a horrible crime, no matter where it is practiced. Isn’t it a kind of slavery to live it up now and then pass the bill for it on to generations not even born yet? It strikes me as a kind of slavery – taking an unfair portion of the income of others so that we can live at a higher standard than what we can afford through our own choices and labor.