If you’ve not yet seen this brief video, it’s worth watching. It captures the moment when Democrat conventioneers allegedly voted to amend their platform. (Video 1.31 mins)

When the first voice vote is taken, it’s too close to call. Same with the second voice vote.

In the third voice vote, the “nays” — those opposing the Strickland amendment — seem to have a slight edge.  But clearly, 2/3’s of the delegates did not vote for the amendment. 

The delegates know that, too. And the losers, who were really the winners, jeer.

The vote was to reinsert references to God & Jerusalem (full story HERE)

Watch the Senator avoid a question with an unprecedented Acadamy Award performance. An unparalled performance….

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) Torn Apart On “God” Being Deleted From Platform

Last night I watched the entirety of the Democrats’ Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina so you didn’t have to, because we’re friends like that, and I’m apparently a glutton for punishment.  I’ve always wondered how straight guys really feel when they complain about having to sit through something interminable like the Academy Awards where they wonder how much longer this thing on the screen can drag on…and I think I understand a little of that this morning.  The Republican Convention at times felt like an Oscars’ telecast too, when various lists of names were read aloud and the audience in their seats politely applauded, but the Democrats’ telecast last night was just dull with what seemed like endless screaming and yelling into the microphone. Honestly, if you’d had asked me two days ago if I would have dreamed that something with almost nonstop screaming and yelling could be DULL, I’d have laughed at you, but somehow Democrats pulled that off.  I actually have a pounding headache today from the at times endless parade of Democrats who ranted and raved in rambling diatribes. Here and there, that angry wall of sound was punctuated by ten moments of genuine craziness you probably should know about for any chats by the water cooler today.

10. Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio embarrassed my home state by actually saying, and I quote:  ”If Mitt Romney were Santa Claus he’d have fired the reindeer and outsourced the elves!”.  This was just embarrassing.  Since he left office in 2010, Strickland has lost all ability to speak to people on camera. He yelled into the microphone and told really bad “jokes” at Mitt Romney’s expense, like that Santa thing.  ”If Mitt Romney were a soda can, he’d be the one where the tab broke off and you’d have to get a fork or something to pry it open and it would explode in your face because Mitt Romney hates you”.  There was a lot of rambling Occupy Wall Street garbage here, with Strickland saying Romney was too wealthy but Barack Obama could relate to regular people.  Oh, really?  Surprisingly enough Strickland didn’t tell everyone about the $35 million beachfront mansion that wealthy Chicago bankers are currently purchasing for the Obamas to live in after they leave Washington in January.  The only thing funny about Strickland’s speech is how stupid these attacks on wealth are when the people who have lived-it-up the most on other people’s dime are THE OBAMAS.

….read 2-10 HERE

Like William F. Gavin, I hugely enjoyed Clint Eastwood’s turn last night, but I’m not sure I agree that it was “unintentionally hilarious” and that “he forgot his lines, lost his way.” Clint is a brilliant actor, and a superb director of other actors (and I don’t just mean a quarter-century ago: In the last five years, he’s directed eight films). He’s also, as Mr. Gavin observed, a terrific jazz improviser at the piano — and, in film and music documentaries, an extremely articulate interviewee. So I wouldn’t assume that the general tenor of his performance wasn’t exactly as he intended. The hair was a clue: No Hollywood icon goes out on stage like that unless he means to.

John Hayward writes:

The intended recipient was not Mitt Romney, the convention delegates, or even Republican voters, but rather wavering independents. Clint was there to tell them it’s OK to find Obama, his ugly campaign operation, and his increasingly shrill band of die-hard defenders ridiculous. It’s OK to laugh at them.

I’m not sure he could have pulled that off if he’d delivered a slick telepromptered pitch. As Mr. Hayward suggests, the hard lines packed more of a punch for being delivered in the midst of a Bob Newhart empty-chair shtick from the Dean Martin show circa 1968. Indeed, they were some of the hardest lines of the convention and may well prove the take-home (“We own this country . . . Politicians are employees of ours . . . And when somebody does not do the job, we’ve got to let them go”), but they seemed more effective for appearing to emerge extemporaneously from the general shambles.

The curse of political operatives is that they make everything the same. A guy smoothly reading platitudinous codswallop while rotating his head from the left-hand teleprompter to the right-hand teleprompter like clockwork as if he’s at Centre Court watching the world’s slowest Wimbledon rally is a very reductive idea of “professionalism.” Even politicians you’re well disposed to come across as slick bores in that format. Which is by way of saying Clint is too sharp and too crafty not to have known what he was doing.

Oh, and next time ’round, he should sing.

Incidentally, I’m not generally in favor of what Rob Long would call “working blue,” but, if you’re going to do it, doing anatomically impossible sex-act cross-talk with an invisible presidential straight-man in front of the Republican Convention is definitely the way to go.   

Ed Note: Watch it for the first time or watch it again.

At time of writing, polls show the race for the presidency to be tight.  General consensus seems to be that whoever wins, the 2012 election will be won by a bat squeak.

Yet to many, especially those of us on the right, it seems peculiar that Obama is still remotely in the race.  With high unemployment, minimal GDP growth, a 100% increase in food stamp costs, and out-of-control spending, many conservatives are asking how just under half of the American population can possibly want more of the same.

While it is not possible now to get into the many reasons certain people will vote Democrat in November, I propose that all polls, not just left-leaning polls, may be being strongly misled by their data, and Romney/Ryan may actually have a huge lead not seen in polls.

It is my contention that this is due to a mix of the infamous Bradley effect and what is known in Britain as “the Shy Tory Factor,” with both coming together to exaggerate just how popular Obama is in America.

The Bradley effect is a much-debated polling distortion that is easy to demonstrate but difficult to prove.  The idea that when a black or minority candidate is on the ticket against a white candidate, certain voters may lie under pressure from a pollster, worried about being seen as a racist for choosing the white candidate over the minority, sounds highly plausible.  The consequence, should the Bradley effect be in play, would be a skewed poll indicating that the minority candidate is in better political shape than his or her opponent.

Some argued that while it may have been a factor in the past, it was not a factor in the 2008 election, when Barack Obama was elected convincingly, just as polls predicted.

Yet this dismissal may be premature.  A closer look at the statistics shows that predictions for how much of the white vote Obama would win were strongly exaggerated by polling companies.  For instance, a CBS poll near election day predicted that McCain would win the white vote by a mere 3%, and on election day the Republican actually brought in 12% more of the vote than the Democrat.  Had it not been for an unusually high turnout among blacks and minorities, Obama’s landslide would have been a lot closer.

Therefore, there is no reason why we cannot expect at least a similar Bradley effect this year.  In fact, it could possibly be even stronger — after all, the liberal smear that those who oppose Obama are racist is one that really took off since Obama took office, specifically with the rise of the Tea Party.  This could serve only to magnify the Bradley effect, as some white voters may feel ashamed of being seen as sympathetic to a “racist” organization.

Yet there is another factor that, mixed with Bradley, could radically distort the numbers — and it is a concept not known in America, but known very well in the United Kingdom.  Called “The Shy Tory Effect,” it could be the little-known variable that could be hiding a landslide for Mitt Romney.

The concept was coined after the British general election of 1992, the result of which stunned the pollsters, the politicians, and the media.  After 13 years in office, the ruling Conservative Party was Thatcher-less and divided.  Led by their extreme Welsh socialist leader Neil Kinnock (the same Neil Kinnock whose speeches Joe Biden had already rippedoff), the left-wing Labour Party were firmly ahead in the polls.  Britain was drifting toward a socialist authoritarianism that they hadn’t experienced since the 1970s.

As election day approached, Labour held a chunky lead, causing Kinnock to yell giddily into the microphone in his final speech to the Party before election day, “We’re all right, we’re all right” repeatedly, to rapturous applause.  

It seemed Labour had it in the bag.  The only exception was the cool and collected Tory prime minister, John Major, whose internal polling suggested that things were not as they seemed.

As the results came in on election night, Labour started off celebrating.  However, by 10 o’clock, the BBC’s exit poll predicted that Labour might not win, but there would be a hung parliament, which would still probably cause Kinnock to be prime minister of a coalition. 

Yet the final result was a total shock — a comfortable win for the Tories, losing a few seats, but picking up the highest total number of votes for any political party since 1951.  Left-wing pundits couldn’t explain what had happened.

The explanation for the gap between polls and reality was eventually named “The Shy Tory Factor.”  Since the ascension of Thatcher to Downing Street in 1979, the Tories had been presented as a nasty, evil party that wanted to destroy communities in their war against the miners, gut health care, and take money from the poor to give to the rich via the poll tax [i].  Does this sound familiar to any Americans at all?

While the policies of the Conservative Party were popular, the media and the screeching left had helped turn the Tory brand into a toxic one that many people didn’t want to be associated with in spite of their secret support.  Therefore, when polled, the shy Tories answered Labour, but voted Conservative.

Although this happened twenty years ago and in a different country, I propose that the important characteristics that make up the Shy Tory Factor are present in America in 2012.  According to the mainstream media, the Republicans want to deny people health care, throw Granny off a cliff, and generally reduce the country to a Dickensian nightmare when the rich get richer, and do so by pulling bread out of the mouths of the hungry.  Mixed with the aforementioned labeling of Republicans and Tea Partiers as racist, this is quite a suppressive combination.

While this blend of the Bradley effect and Shy Tory Factor may not affect voters in red states, in purple states it is not difficult to see why those intending to vote Republican may not wish to publicly identify as so, even to a pollster promising anonymity, in fear of being judged as the new Jim Crow.

The other note worth mentioning is that, in the Shy Tory Factor, the only person who knew of its existence before the election was the leader, whose internal polling is usually more accurate.  Could this be why Obama’s team seems to have gone into panic in recent weeks?  Do they know something the polling companies don’t?

The Bradley effect has been influential, if at all, only by a few overall percentage points.  But if it is wrapped up with an American version of the much more powerful “Shy Tory Factor,” we conservatives may be in for a treat in the form of a massive landslide come the first Tuesday in November.

adamchristophershaw@hotmail.com“>Adam Shaw is a British conservative writer based in New York.  His blog is The Anglo-American Debate.  Follow him on Twitter: @ACShaw

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/how_the_shy_republican_could_be_masking_a_landslide.html#ixzz254V13k9s