What’s New Today
Story #1 asks
if the Bain attacks by Obama are working.
#2 is a Gallup Poll that says no they aren’t. #3 looks at the strategies used by each
camp. Is Romney playing a rope a dope on
Obama? #4 tells you the real story of
how the internet came into being. #5 is
an excellent ad by Scott Walker that Romney needs to take national. #6 is more bad polling news for Obama. #7 takes a look at Obama’s charge that Bush
got us into the mess we are in and looks for the truth. Did he or didn’t he? #8 looks at the left’s paranoia regarding the
Tea Party. #9 goes on to look at
fracking and the health risks. It seems
the left is the party of science except when they don’t like the answer science
gives them.
Today’s
Thoughts
In a recent Rasmussen poll, it was
found that Obama’s approval rating among
uncommitted voters is a scant 29%. What
this means is that when the election happens you can count on Romney getting about 3 out 4 uncommitted
voters.
"Before
I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement." Ronald Reagan
FactCheck.org researched the
Obama assertions and reported that “we
found no evidence to support the claim that Romney — while he was still running
Bain Capital — shipped American jobs overseas.”
The CBS/NYT poll shows 56 percent of Republicans are enthusiastic
about voting in November, compared to
just 27 percent of Democrats. This
is a very important number. Obama’s
strategy is to get a huge turnout which isn’t likely with those numbers.
Over the past few weeks, President Obama and his campaign team have launched a furious attack on Mitt Romney's record as head of Bain Capital, a highly successful venture capital firm.
There is clear evidence that the attacks have had some impact. Forty-one percent of voters now see Romney’s record in the private sector primarily as a reason to vote for him, but an equal number see that record as a reason to vote against the GOP challenger. That negative perception is up 8 points over the past couple of months.
Yet while raising negative perceptions of Romney's record in business, the Bain attacks have failed to bring about any change in the overall race for the White House. For weeks, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll has shown the president's support stuck between 44 percent and 46 percent every day. Romney's numbers are in a similar rut -- 44 percent to 47 percent.
One reason for the lack of impact is that the Bain attacks have not reached a point where they raise doubts about Romney's character. Sixty-seven percent of voters believe the former governor of Massachusetts is at least as ethical as most politicians. Comparing Romney to other politicians may not be setting the bar very high, but that's his peer group these days. Using the same standard, the president doesn't measure up quite as well: Just 60 percent believe he is at least as ethical as most politicians….
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_scott_rasmussen/bain_attacks_fail_to_shake_up_presidential_race
It appears that while Obama’s attacks may be hurting the public perception of Romney, they appear to be hurting Obama’s as well. Being 7% behind Romney on being at least as ethical as most politicians represents a huge drop for Obama.
2. Gallup says Bain attacks aren’t working
WASHINGTON – Despite concerted Democratic attacks on
his business record, Republican challenger
Mitt Romney scores a significant advantage over President Obama when it comes
to managing the economy, reducing the federal budget deficit and creating jobs,
a national USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.
By more than 2-1,
63%-29%, those surveyed say Romney's background in business, including his
tenure at the private equity firm Bain Capital, would cause him to make good
decisions, not bad ones, in dealing with the nation's economic problems
over the next four years.
The findings raise questions about Obama's strategy of
targeting Bain's record in outsourcing jobs and hammering Romney for refusing
to commit to releasing more than two years of his tax returns. Instead, Americans seem focused on the economy,
where disappointment with the fragile recovery and the 8.2% unemployment rate
are costing the president.
To be sure, Obama retains significant advantages of his
own. By 2-1, he's rated as more likable
than Romney. By double digits, those surveyed say the president better
understands the problems Americans face in their daily lives. He has an 8-point
advantage on being seen as honest and trustworthy.
However, Romney has
the edge when it comes to being able to "get things done," and
the broad landscape seems tilted in his favor:…
This poll is a
disaster for Obama. With the economy
playing such an important role it is almost inconceivable that Obama would be
reelected in November.
3. Romney’s Rumble in the Jungle
Remember the famous "Rumble in
the Jungle," where an aging Muhammad Ali outfoxed a youthful, overeager
George Foreman in one of the greatest fights of all time?...
…When they finally entered the ring,
Ali astonished everybody by cowering against the ropes and letting Foreman beat
him mercilessly. To this day it is not clear whether Ali's corner knew what was
going on -- they kept yelling at him to get off the ropes and move around. For
eight rounds Ali took literally hundreds of blows until Foreman had punched
himself silly. Then he suddenly jumped off the ropes and decked the arm-weary
Foreman with a flurry of five punches.
That's the kind of fight Mitt Romney should be fighting --
and is fighting -- against Barack Obama.
There is no sense in trying to match Obama, gutter-punch for gutter-punch.
The Obama team has obviously decided (what else could they do?) that the
President cannot run on his record. Therefore the only thing to do is hit
Romney with whatever comes to hand. There won't be any attempt to be logical or
consistent. Anything that turns up they
will throw at him.
Thus, when the Boston Globe
runs a stupid story saying Romney was "lying to the American people"
because his name appeared on Bain Capital SEC filings after he had left the
firm to run the Salt Lake Olympics, Obama's team didn't wait a day before announcing
Romney had "committed a felony" and "should go to jail."
When it turns out Fortune had
already vetted the whole issue six months ago and it involved nothing more than
a procedural matter -- well, on to the next issue.
Obama is punching himself silly. He has reached the point where he is ad libbing and that
puts him out of control. His now famous outburst about "You didn't build that [business]" -- which may have been the
turning point in the campaign -- was right off the top of his head. You
know perfectly well he's been saying the
same things for years with Valerie Jarrett and Bill Ayers. It's only his
careful self-censorship that has kept these things under control. Now he's
losing it…
Not only is Obama losing it, he is also losing his
likeability. You cannot conduct such a
negative campaign of throwing mud without getting dirty yourself.
4. Obama was wrong; the government didn’t create the Internet
….That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s technologists were trying to
connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a
"world-wide web." The federal government was involved,
modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced
Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications
during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the
1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record
straight: "The creation of the
Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an
Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer
networks."
If the government didn't invent the
Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed
the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit
for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company
where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s
that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.
Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto)
and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According
to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers
of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to
connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We
have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his
colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We
have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under
government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators
. . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."
So having created the Internet, why
didn't Xerox become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the
disconnect between a government-led view of business and how innovation
actually happens….
… As for the government's role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995,
when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation
was closed—just as the commercial Web began to boom. Economist Tyler Cowen
wrote in 2005: "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market
critique of large government. Here for
30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring
information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a
decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most
important technological revolutions of the millennia."…
A fascinating piece which explains what actually
happened. Al Gore didn’t invent the
internet nor did the Defense Department.
Government and academia worked too slowly for the private sector and
they took over and commercialized it in less than a decade. So when Obama says the government created the
internet, we can say “you didn’t build
that,” and we will be a lot more accurate than BHO and the Democrats.
5. This should go national
This is a Scott Brown ad, but it works for Mitt Romney as
well. Watch it, it’s worth the
time.
6. Why Obama will lose in November
Two-thirds of likely voters say the
weak economy is Washington’s fault, and more blame President Obama than anybody
else, according to a new poll for The Hill.
It found that 66 percent believe paltry job growth and slow economic recovery is the
result of bad policy. Thirty-four percent say Obama is the most to blame,
followed by 23 percent who say Congress is the culprit. Twenty percent point
the finger at Wall Street, and 18 percent cite former President George W. Bush.
…
The poll, conducted for The Hill by Pulse Opinion Research, found 53
percent of voters say Obama has taken the wrong actions and has
slowed the economy down. Forty-two percent said he has taken the right actions
to revive the economy, while six percent said they were not sure.
It’s over for Obama and the Democrats. 53% think Obama has taken the wrong actions
and if you look at the election Obama is doubling down on what he’s done. How do you vote for Obama to continue the
actions you think are harming the economy?
You don’t.
A key attack line in President Obama's campaign stump speech these days is to claim that the country has tried Mitt Romney's economic policies already, and they were a dismal failure.
Romney, he says, wants to do two things: Cut taxes for the rich and massively deregulate the economy.
"The truth is," Obama says, "we tried (that) for almost a decade, and it didn't work."
Bush-era tax cuts and deregulation, he argues "resulted in the most sluggish job growth in decades" along with "rising inequality, surpluses turned into deficits, culminating in the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes."
There's just one problem. Obama's got his history wrong.
First, Bush was no big deregulator.
In fact, under Bush, the size and cost of the federal government's regulatory machinery increased dramatically, as Bush imposed dozens of major new rules…
…To be sure, much of the Bush-era regulatory increase came as a result of the government's takeover of airport security in the wake of 9/11. But even excluding that, federal regulatory spending climbed 30% and regulatory jobs jumped 11% under Bush.
In addition, an analysis by the Heritage Foundation found that Bush-era regulations imposed about $30 billion in new economic costs.
One of them, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, imposed vast new rules on the accounting and securities businesses, generating at least 20 new rule makings at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Sarb-Ox has been widely blamed for reducing the number of U.S. initial public offerings.
"Far from shrinking to dangerously low levels, regulation grew substantially during the Bush years," noted Heritage's regulatory expert James Gattuso.
http://news.investors.com/article/619084/201207230805/obama-tells-tall-tales-about-bush-years.htm
The left has a great deal of difficulty dealing with the actual facts. They’d much rather make their charges and hope no one calls them on it. Certainly the MSM won’t so what are they worried about? Romney is taking in more money that Obama is over the past two month. Romney and the Republicans will have the money to put on ads that actually tell the American public what the facts are. That is what Obama is scared of.
8. The Left’s paranoia of the Tea Party
Whenever a new cause or movement is
born, and a large number of people feel
passionate about it, there's always the danger that it will inspire someone --
perhaps just a lone nut, or perhaps a group of them -- to destroy human life in
its name. This is true even of the most legitimate, mainstream movements,
which can suffer unjustly by the actions of a rogue sympathizer.
Someday this may happen to the Tea
Party movement. So far it hasn't, because there
has been no Tea Party violence. The only victims of Tea Party
"extremism" are politicians who lost their positions in peaceful
elections. One could be forgiven for not knowing this, given the extreme
bias with which some in the liberal media treat the Tea Party….
…In February 2010, a man named Joseph Stack committed suicide by flying
his small airplane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. New York
Magazine, after reading his online suicide note, immediately declared that
"a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten
sign at a tea party rally." The Washington
Post's Jonathan Capehart added that "his alienation is similar to that
we're hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement."
Neither mentioned that Stack had
approvingly quoted "The Communist Manifesto" and denounced capitalism in his last message to the world. That may
be a relevant detail if you're trying to blame his crime on a movement that
believes the opposite.
Months later, right after the famous attempt to bomb Times Square,
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
suggested it had been carried out by someone "with a political agenda who
doesn't like the health care bill or something." The would-be bomber,
a Pakistani immigrant, later said in court: "If I'm given a thousand
lives, I will sacrifice them all for the life of Allah."
The following January, a shooter in Tucson wounded Rep. Gabby
Giffords, D-Ariz., and killed six others. In all his wisdom, Paul Krugman
leaped to judgment immediately: "We don't have proof yet that this was
political, but the odds are that it was." He insinuated on his New York Times blog that Tea Party activists were
back to finish the job after Giffords survived the 2010 election sweep. In
fact, the killer was a deranged loner with no coherent political ideology, and
no connection to the Tea Party.
All that has happened since the Tea
Party began -- and all that hasn't happened -- undermines the credibility of
Krugman, Ross, Capehart, and other pundits who carelessly associate it with
violence. When we try to explain violence like last week's theater massacre, we
look to irrationality as the first explanation. It takes a uniquely arrogant
sort of journalist to use this same irrationality to explain anyone who
disagrees with him politically.
The left is aching to connect the Tea Party with
violence. But violence is much more of a
left wing “tool.” Look at Occupy Wall
Street. The known violence there is
brushed aside by the MSM and attributed to a few kooks or elements that weren’t
really OWS. Can you image what would
happen if someone who was a member of the tea party did something like
that?
9. Fracking: the
Debate
…"The
debate is becoming very emotional. And basically
not using science" on either side, said Avner Vengosh, a Duke
University professor studying groundwater contamination who has been praised
and criticized by both sides.
Shale gas drilling has attracted national attention because advances in technology have unlocked
billions of dollars of gas reserves, leading to a boom in production, jobs, and
profits, as well as concerns about pollution and public health. Shale is a
gas-rich rock formation thousands of feet underground, and the gas is freed
through a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which large
volumes of water, plus sand and chemicals, are injected to break the
rock apart.
The Marcellus Shale covers large parts of Pennsylvania, New
York, Ohio and West Virginia, while the Barnett Shale is in north Texas. Many
other shale deposits have been discovered.
One of the clearest examples of a misleading claim comes from
north Texas, where gas drilling began in the Barnett Shale about 10
years ago.
Opponents of
fracking say breast cancer rates have spiked exactly where intensive drilling
is taking place — and nowhere else in the state. The claim is used in a letter
that was sent to New York's Gov. Andrew Cuomo by environmental groups and by
Josh Fox, the Oscar-nominated director of "Gasland," a film that
criticizes the industry. Fox, who lives in Brooklyn, has a new short film
called "The Sky is Pink."
But researchers
haven't seen a spike in breast cancer rates in the area, said Simon
Craddock Lee, a professor of medical anthropology at the U of T Southwestern
Medical Center in Dallas.
David Risser, an epidemiologist with the Texas Cancer
Registry, said in an email that researchers checked state health data and found no evidence of an increase in the
counties where the spike supposedly occurred.
And Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a major cancer advocacy
group based in Dallas, said it sees no evidence of a spike, either.
"We don't," said Chandini Portteus, Komen's vice
president of research, adding that they sympathize with people's fears and
concerns, but "what we do know is a little bit, and what we don't know is
a lot" about breast cancer and the environment.
Yet Fox tells viewers in an ominous voice that "In
Texas, as throughout the United States, cancer rates fell — except in one
place— in the Barnett Shale."…
It’s one thing to interpret facts differently. It’s another thing to simply make up the
facts you want.
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