How unpopular is ObamaCare’s mandate to buy health insurance? This unpopular:

With roughly a third of all precincts reporting, the anti-mandate vote is at … 75.8 percent. Good lord.

That’s from earlier in the evening. The final results are in, here, and with all precincts reporting, it’s 71% to 29%.

Spin that, Barry.

UPDATE: I should have said: spin that, L.A. Times editors. Because they are up to the task. For one thing, the vote doesn’t even make the front page of the L.A. Times. For another, they explain away the vote in this way:

Tuesday’s vote was held in conjunction with the state’s Democratic and Republican primaries, but GOP voters were expected to dominate the balloting because their primary included several contests that stirred greater interest.

That’s true, but it doesn’t explain the results entirely. I counted the number of votes in the top race on the ticket (for U.S. Senator). There were 315,787 votes cast for Democrats, and 580,947 cast for Republicans. Meaning 64% of total voters in the Senate race were Republican. Meaning that even if every single Republican voted against the mandate, that wouldn’t get you to the 71% opposition seen in the results.

Oh — and there could be another reason so many voters were Republicans, besides the fact that their races were so gosh-darned interesting. Namely: nobody wants to vote Democrat in these days of Obama’s 41% approval rating.

These tidbits didn’t make it into the story. That’s why you come here.

I know it’s all the rage to be fed up with the GOP. Lord knows I have been fed up with them many times, and no doubt will be again.

But if you’re going to go around claiming that there is absolutely no difference between the parties, and pretend as if anyone who seeks to elect more Republicans is an unprincipled sellout, could you do us all a favor and stop bitching about ObamaCare?

You know: that bill that Republicans didn’t vote for?

That is all.

[Posted by Karl]

That’s the message buried in a polling memo from the New Democrats at Third Way:

Less than two years after leaving office, only 25% of Americans believe that if Republicans return to power in Congress their economic agenda will mean a return to former President Bush’s economic policies. 65% say that a Republican Congress will promote a “new economic agenda that is different from George W. Bush’s policies.” Even Democrats and liberals are unconvinced that a Republican Congress means a return to Bushanomics. And moderates and Independents, the key swing blocs in all major policy debates, have completely divorced congressional Republicans from the economic philosophy and failed policies of President Bush.

WaPo blogger Greg Sargent reports that “[t]his has some Dems worrying that the central Dem message has yet to sink in with voters,” but noting that the poll shows “if the public is persuaded that voting Republican would be a return to Bush policies, it has a dramatic impact on voter attitudes.”

Actually, the word needing emphasis in that sentence is if — the biggest two-letter word in the English language. The Third Way poll is broadly consistent with the new Rasmussen poll showing that voters now see Obama as equally to blame as Bush for the country’s current economic problems. Can key voter blocs be persuaded otherwise?

The Dem theory seems to be to try to re-tie the GOP to Bush by staging fights over the Bush tax cuts, and so on. But what if voter intent is not driven by their perception of Congressional GOP candidates? What if the reverse is true?

For example, in 1994, the Congressional GOP knew they were likely to win a majority before the end of July. Although we cannot know whether 2010 will have a 1994-sized wave, we can hypothesize that many indie/moderate voters have already looked at the current state of the economy — and the current state of the war in Afghanistan — and decided they don’t like what they see very much. And that the Democrats’ passage of unpopular legislation may have them yearning for gridlock, which does not even require a high opinion of the GOP. Perhaps they form an anti-Democrat voting intent from the basics, and their opinion about the Congressional GOP follows, rather than the other way around.

The Democrats’ message of “We May Be Incompetent, But They’re Crazy” may work in provable cases (and perhaps depress indie/moderate turnout) but not in general. Some voters seeking a divided government won’t care if the GOP candidate is “crazy,” “extreme,” etc. Others want to believe things can get better and will convince themselves the GOP is a suitable alternative. That’s Hope and Change returning to bite the Donks in the rear.

–Karl

The repeat drunk driver was out on bond pending a deportation hearing. Now a nun is dead:

The man charged in connection with the Sunday crash that took the life of a Bristow nun is an illegal alien who was out on bond awaiting a deportation hearing, police said Monday.

Prince William County police notified U.S. Immigration and Naturalization officials about the status of Carlos A. Martinelly Montano, 23, of Bristow after both his first and second drunken driving arrests, said county police spokesman Jonathan Perok.

. . . .

Police say Martinelly swerved off the right side of the road, hit a guardrail, careened across the incoming lanes, hit a jersey wall and then slammed head on into a Toyota carrying the three nuns.

Sister Denise Mosier was killed instantly, and two others were flown to the hospital, where they remained Monday in critical but stable condition, police said. . . . Sunday’s crash marked his third drunken driving arrest in five years.

. . . .

Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of Supervisors, called the nun’s death “appalling.“

“The despicable thing is that this criminal was … handed over to ICE twice, and released by ICE twice. He’s gone out an killed a nun. That’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with immigration enforcement in this country,” said Stewart, who has drafted legislation for stricter illegal immigration laws statewide. “The blame is on representatives in Congress for being so flaccid on the issue, and they continue not to fund the deportation of illegal immigrants in this country.”

Good thing the Obama administration is fighting measures in Arizona that would direct local officials to identify and deport illegal alien criminals.

Thanks, Barry!

Another victim of our refusal to take illegal immigration seriously

Thanks to Steve Sturm and H(S)M.

A constituent argues to Democrat Congressman Pete Stark that, by declaring health care a right, he is essentially imposing a form of forced labor on others to provide for that right. She then asks him, if this is the case, what limitations are there on the federal government? His answer, delivered very calmly, is commonplace yet chilling:

I think that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life. Now, the basis for that would be, how does it affect other people. In other words . . . The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country.

Watch it for yourself:

Thanks to A.W.

Stark is preternaturally calm in this clip, a stark contrast to his normal freakout demeanor in which he resembles the washing machine in the last few seconds of this clip:

(Via Ace.)

I think I liked Stark better when he was threatening to beat a Republican and calling him a “wimp” and a “fruitcake.” Or when he said that we were sending kids to Iraq “to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement.”

At least he provided entertainment with those ridiculous quotes, providing a sort of clownish buffoonery that we could all laugh at.

This, by contrast, is just creepy.