What’s New Today
Story #1 looks
at lemonade stands realizing the kid didn’t build it on their own. #2 looks at Romney’s fundamental flaw. #3 is another look at polls and their
demographics. #4 talks about Obama’s
uphill battle. If he wins a close one he will be the first
incumbent to do so getting fewer votes than he did in his first election. #5
discusses Obama’s negative campaigning and asks how it is going. Not too well.
#6 finds that the left is anti-science if it violates their political
beliefs.
Today’s
Thoughts
Barack Obama
said: “we tried our plan — and it worked.” He said that in Oakland California where the unemployment rate is 13.7%. I think Obama’s new strategy is the one
used in the movie Guide for a Married
Man. Simply deny reality.
In 1991, murder peaked in the United States when there were 9.8 deaths per
100,000 people. That rate has declined over the last 20 years so
that in 2010, the last year for which
statistics are available, there were 4.8 deaths per 100,000. In other
words, the rate has been cut in half.
Wisconsin’s
Democratic Party no longer has the Majority.
Having just won the majority last month in a recall election, they lost
it when Senator Jim Cullen left the
Democratic party. The Republicans
are expected to win it back in November.
On
Tuesday, UPS reduced its forecast for
2012, saying it expected GDP growth to be 1 percent in the second half of the
year.
1. Lemonade Stands: You didn’t build it on your own
Here we have a number of cases of how President
Obama was correct. These kids had a
lemonade stand and let’s face it they “DID NOT” build their businesses on their
own. Parents helped, a lot. But guess who stopped them from being
successful? That’s right, Obama’s savior
(government) is saving us all from lemonade of unknown origin possibly hurting
the general public.
7 Year old shut down http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKiOPzdyfmk&feature=related
2. Romney’s fundamental flaw
One was the divorced son of an
alcoholic shoe salesman; another, the stepson of an alcoholic car salesman;
still another, the self-proclaimed "black sheep" of his family.
The history of the American presidency is a history of men
who have suffered -- and largely overcome -- humble beginnings, immense family
hardships, profound personal tragedies,
and humiliating public failures.
To put it another way, when
considering whom they want to lead them, Americans
naturally gravitate toward flawed characters – people whose success is
rooted in failure, and whose lives contain the familiar arc of a redemption
narrative.
But Mitt Romney doesn't fit this mold. In fact, he may be the least flawed presidential candidate in recent American
history. His main flaw, it seems, is that he
doesn't really have one….
This doesn’t keep Obama from trying to pin one on him. From how he treated his dog to when he left
Bain Capital, BHO is trying to find a fatal flaw for Romney. So far no luck.
3. Polls and Party Affiliation
In its
2012 American Values Survey, the Pew Research Center identified a new and
profound dividing line in American politics. “Americans’ values and basic
beliefs,” Pew concluded, “are more polarized
along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years.” Partisan
identification, Pew added, “has now become the single largest fissure in
American society, with the values gap
between Republicans and Democrats greater than gender, age, race or class
divides.”
Pollsters should bend over backwards
to make sure their sampling methodology reflects this insight. Oversample the
adherents of one party or the other, Pew’s research tells us, and you might as
well toss the entire poll onto the trash heap.
Perhaps this is why President
Obama’s standing in the polls is higher than one might expect, given the steady
stream of negative economic news. Pollsters may be getting this all-important
criterion of valid polling — the correct ratio of Republicans to Democrats —
wrong…
…The Post poll found the two candidates in a dead heat — 47
percent to 47 percent. Obama’s job-approval rating remained stuck at 47
percent, and his disapproval checked in at a disappointing, but politically
manageable, 49 percent. Slightly more than half of Americans disapproved of his
handling of the major policy issues.
But lost in all the analysis is that
the poll may have included far too many
Democrats and too few Republicans in its sample; 33 percent of those surveyed
were Democrats, and only 24 percent were Republicans. That cuts against the
voluminous data on partisan affiliation collected by the Gallup Organization.
According to Gallup, Democrats outnumbered Republicans
nationally by up to nine percentage points for a considerable spell. But over the past few years, the GOP has erased that advantage. In the most recent Gallup data,
from June, the two parties are at absolute parity, with 30 percent of Americans
identifying themselves as Democrats, 30 percent as Republicans, and 39 percent
as independents. This partisan parity remains largely in place even when Gallup
adds “leaners” (independents who lean toward one party or the other) to the GOP
and Democratic numbers.
Reconfiguring the Post poll
to reflect Gallup’s findings would dramatically alter the top-line numbers. Romney’s strength would rise significantly
as Obama’s fell. Romney, it turns out, may actually be ahead by as much as four
or five points….
Always check the polls demographics. It will tell you the true state of the
race. Then with the uncommitted, give
75% to Romney.
4. Obama’s uphill battle
Quick, now. Try
to name big segments of the electorate, or even prominent individuals, who
opposed Barack Obama in 2008 but have joined his campaign for re-election.
Difficulty in answering that question caused even the president, in a fleeting
moment of candor, to suggest that he could easily lose the White House.
On May 10, Obama soured the mood of enthusiastic donors at
a Seattle fundraiser by telling them that "this
election is actually going to be even closer than the last." In other
words, he knows that he has lost supporters, rather than gaining them, during
his three-and-a-half years of leadership.
A "closer
election" means that one of the few iron rules of U.S. politics indicates
he'll lose his bid for a second term. History
offers not one example of a chief
executive whose popular appeal declined during his first term of office but
nonetheless managed to eke out a re-election victory, as Obama proposes to
do. Among the 24 elected presidents who sought second terms, all 15 who earned
back-to-back victories drew more support in bids for re-election than they did
in their previous campaigns…
This isn’t rocket
science. If a president runs for
reelection and loses support, it most likely means he’s not be successful. Regardless of Obama’s comment “we tried our plan — and it worked,” it didn’t
work and he knows it.
5. Is Obama getting a bang for his buck
President Barack Obama's re-election campaign spent millions
of dollars over the past few weeks in an advertising blitz aimed at negatively
defining GOP challenger Mitt Romney
-- an effort that, according to several national polls and political experts,
has met with tepid results.
Those ads include a spot in heavy
rotation with Romney singing "America the Beautiful" at a campaign
event as out-of-context phrases from news reports such as "outsourced jobs
to India" and "had millions in a Swiss bank account" appear on
the screen. According to Vanderbilt
University's Ad Rating Project, which polled 600 Democrats, Republicans and
independents, 73% said the ad was "negative."
More than half of independents polled said they disliked the
ad.
The Obama campaign is "trying
to build a personality frame around Romney. 'Here's Richie Rich. He's out of touch
with the public ...," said Paul Brewer, a professor and assistant director
for research at the University of Delaware's Center for Political
Communication.
The blitz is all about the Obama
campaign's attempt to introduce Romney to the American people before the GOP
candidate has a chance to introduce himself, said Kenneth Goldstein, president
of Kantar Media/Campaign Media Analysis Group, a Washington-based firm that
analyzes advertising spending on political and policy issues.
"There's lots of people saying
it didn't move the needle at all, and there's lots of people who say the
(negative campaign ads) in June had a big influence in battleground states ...,"
Goldstein said. "What we do know is
that there was not this huge shift."
The needle isn’t moving but it appears the pollsters have to
stack the deck even further in Obama’s favor.
We are now getting polls with a 12% Democratic plurality. When the actual election happens it is likely
the Republicans will outnumber the democrats and Obama will lose big.
6. Are Liberals anti-science?
Whoever said inquisitions and witch
hunts were things of the past? A big one is going on now. The sociologist Mark Regnerus, at the University of Texas
at Austin, is being smeared in the media and subjected to an inquiry by his
university over allegations of scientific misconduct.
Regnerus's offense? His article in the July 2012 issue of Social
Science Research reported that adult children of parents who had same-sex
romantic relationships, including same-sex couples as parents, have more
emotional and social problems than do adult children of heterosexual parents
with intact marriages. That's it. Regnerus published ideologically unpopular
research results on the contentious matter of same-sex relationships. And now
he is being made to pay.
In today's political climate, and
particularly in the discipline of sociology—dominated as it is by a progressive
orthodoxy—what Regnerus did is unacceptable.
It makes him a heretic, a traitor—and so he must be thrown under the bus.
Regnerus's study was based on a
nationally representative sample of adult Americans, including an adequate
number of respondents who had parents with same-sex relationships to make valid
statistical comparisons. His data were collected by a survey firm that conducts
top studies, such as the American National Election Survey, which is supported
by the National Science Foundation. His sample was a clear improvement over
those used by most previous studies on this topic.
Regnerus was trained in one of the
best graduate programs in the country and was a postdoctoral fellow under an
internationally renowned scholar of family, Glen Elder, of the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Full disclosure: I was on the faculty in
Regnerus's department and advised him for some years, but was not his
dissertation chair.) His article
underwent peer review, and the journal's editor stands behind it. Regnerus also
acknowledges the limitations of his study in his article, as he has done in
subsequent interviews. And another recent study relying on a nationally
representative sample also suggests that children of same-sex parents differ
from children from intact, heterosexual marriages.
But never mind that. None of it matters. Advocacy groups and academics who support gay marriage view
Regnerus's findings as threatening. (As an aside, that is unnecessary, since
his findings can be interpreted to support legal same-sex marriage, as a
way to counter the family instability that helps produce the emotional and
social problems Regnerus and others have found.)
Regnerus has been attacked by
sociologists all around the country, including some from his own department. He
has been vilified by journalists who obviously (based on what they write)
understand little about social-science research. And the journal in which
Regnerus published his article has been the target of a pressure campaign…
Remind you of anything?
If you follow global warming at all, you have similar things going on.
It appears the left believes in science unless it goes against their other
beliefs.
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