Pew Research: Romney Received Greater Percentage of Evangelical Vote than Mormon Vote

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photo credit: tim pearce, los gatosStatistics from a report released this week by the Pew Research Center indicate that Romney’s “Evangelical problem” never materialized. In fact, the numbers bear out that if the Republican nominee had a problem with religious conservatives, it was with voters who shared his Mormon faith. Though that really wasn’t the case either.

The Pew Report reflects that Romney received 79% of the Evangelical vote and 78% of the Mormon vote.

The report also revealed that Romney bested John McCain’s showing among Evangelicals coming in six points better than the 2008 nominee. Also of note, fewer Mormons voted for Romney than did for George W. Bush eight years ago.

Far from the message projected by establishment political pundits and mainstream media commentators, the facts bear out that Evangelicals and people of Mormon faith vote their values, not their denomination. It’s time to call the politicos and pundits out for religious profiling. Convicting folks in the court of public opinion based upon their religious affiliation is a form of bigotry. It needs to stop.

Thousands of Banks May Disappear; 50% of U.S. Banks Need To Be Recapitalized

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photo credit: leader nancy pelosiFORTUNE — Do we need to worry about Too Small to Survive?

Now that President Obama has been re-elected, analysts, consultants and dealmakers have turned from whether Dodd-Frank will be repealed to what it means for banks now that it’s likely here to stay. The overwhelming conclusion: Thousands of small banks will soon disappear.

Emmett Daly, a Sandler O’Neill dealmaker who specializes in small banks, predicted at an industry conference put on by Mergermarket on Thursday that the number of banks in the U.S. would shrink to a few hundred. There are currently more than 7,000. Bill Egan, head of financial institutions investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, agreed, but said the weeding out process was likely to take more than a decade.

Indeed, the deal this week to buy bank adviser KBW by larger rival Stifel Financial appeared to be motivated by the belief that more banks would have to make deals. Says Rochdale Securities bank analyst Dick Bove, “It’s fairly clear that 50% of the banks in the U.S. need to be recapitalized.”

Kamal Mustafa, who heads up bank consulting firm Invictus and is a former Wall Street M&A banker, says it’s not just Dodd-Frank. Low interest rates and the Fed’s annual stress tests are making it tough for small banks to survive as well. His firm looked at bank profits and capital rules and came to this conclusion: Nearly 2,000 banks need to sell. “There are a large number of banks that are limping toward oblivion,” says Mustafa. “Capital requirements have gone up too fast, and rates have gone too low. There’s no way out.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: “If We Stay Together They Cannot Defeat Us”

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Have conservatives failed because we have not been compassionate enough, we’ve been too hard core? On abortion and the traditional family, too uncompromising? On the fiscal side, too stingy? This is a growing theme among the RINO establishment.

Absolutely not! We didn’t fail because weren’t compassionate or soft enough. We failed because we offered no real choice to the US electorate.

So how do you motivate the base with a candidate who fails to fight and offer sufficient contrast to the electorate? Obviously, when there’s not enough difference, they stay home just as I predicted earlier this year during an interview with John King. Turn out is not just a function of GOTV, it’s a natural response to an inspiring, principled leader. And a leader who has solutions sufficiently different from the status quo.

So what kind of differences? How about getting back to the constitutional role of states:

This is not an easy fight; it will take extraordinary sacrifice and servant leadership. But if you love your country and wish a secure future for your children, you can’t give up.

And keep faith – there are millions of Americans whose first allegiance is to the Constitution. If we stay together, they cannot defeat us.

6,125 Proposed Regulations and Notifications Posted in Last 90 Days–Average 68 per Day

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photo credit: infomofo[On] Friday morning the Obama administration posted 165 new regulations and notifications on its reguations.gov website.

In the past 90 days, it has posted 6,125 regulations and notices – an average of 68 a day.

The website allows visitors to find and comment on proposed regulations and related documents published by the U.S. federal government. “Help improve Federal regulations by submitting your comments,” the website says.

The thousands of entries run the gamut from meeting notifications to fee schedules to actual rules and proposed rule changes.

In recent days, for example, the EPA posted a proposed rule involving volatile organic compound emissions from architectural coatings: “We are approving a local rule that regulates these emission sources under the Clean Air Act (CAA or the Act),” the proposed rule states. “We are taking comments on this proposal and plan to follow with a final action.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Boehner Faces Backlash On Immigration Overture

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photo credit: Fibonacci blue House Speaker John A. Boehner’s overture to Democrats and President Obama on immigration reform is already drawing fire from within the GOP, where lawmakers say he’s writing checks that his fellow House Republicans won’t cash for him.

“I’m concerned that Speaker Boehner is getting ahead of House Republicans when he commits to getting a ‘comprehensive approach’ to immigration taken care of ‘once and for all,’” Rep. John Fleming, Louisiana Republican, said in a statement late Thursday, telling Mr. Boehner to “pull back” on his comments.

In an interview with ABC on Thursday, two days after his party saw Hispanics vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, Mr. Boehner said the time had come to address immigration.

“This issue has been around far too long and while I believe it’s important for us to secure our borders and to enforce our laws, I think a comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I’m confident that the president, myself, others, can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all,” he said.

His use of the word “comprehensive” set off alarm bells within the GOP, since that is the term immigrant-rights advocates use for legislation that would legalize most of the 11 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S., as well as rewrite the legal immigration system.

Read more from this story HERE.

Eric Holder Failed to Disclose Wife’s Abortion Clinic

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photo credit: donkeyhoteyThe revelations about Attorney General Eric Holder and his connection to an abortion clinic are becoming worse as new information has come to light showing he failed to disclose his wife’s co-owning of an abortion business.

Just before the election, Human Events broke the news that Holder’s wife and sister-in-law co-own, through a family trust, own the building where a controversial abortion practitioner operates. The Holder family transferred ownership to a family trust in 2009, eight months after President Barack Obama’s inauguration and a deed names Holder’s wife and sister-in-law as trustees.

Fulton County tax records show Holder’s wife and sister-in-law own the building, located at 6210 Old National Highway, College Park, Ga. A statement from the Georgia Department of Law shows the building was home to Old National Gynecology, the practice of abortion practitioner Tyrone Cecil Malloy.

Now, Human Events has an update, revealing that Holder failed to disclose his wife’s ownership of the building. The attorney general’s financial disclosure reports for 2008 through 2011 show Holder neglected to report his wife’s co-ownership.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch in Washington, D.C., said he was “surprised there is this trust out there and (Holder) hasn’t reported it.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Communist Party Leader: Obama Victory “Dawn of a New Era”

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photo credit: anosmiaCommunist Party USA leader Sam Webb, has hailed the election of Party “friend” Barack Obama, as the “dawn of a new era.”

The Party is cock-a-hoop over Obama’s victory, seeing it as both a repudiation of the conservative agenda and an opportunity to move the United States further towards socialism.

From the People’s World: “After a long and bitterly contested battle, the forces of inclusive democracy came out on top yesterday…

An African-American president was re-elected to the office of the Presidency, the Democrats unexpectedly strengthened their hand in the Senate and House, and victories, including big ones for marriage equality, were registered at the state level.

Moreover, the balance of forces – that is, the ground on which people fight going forward – has shifted in a progressive direction. And thanks in large measure goes to what might be the most notable development in this election – the emergence of a multi-racial, male-female, working-class-based electoral coalition that has the potential to transform America in the years and decades ahead.

Read more from this story HERE.

Did the Obama “Genuises” Steal the Data?

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photo credit: RichardThere was an interesting article out of Time Magazine (https://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/) in which they interviewed the tech geniuses behind the Obama victory. Like so much of the exposure of anything pertaining to the President, this piece only raises more questions than the answers it purports to deliver.

For one, if you were in fact the man who successfully elected and then re-elected the leader of the Free World, why would you preferred to remain anonymous?

The narrative of both elections is that Obama twice used the smartest technological campaign teams on his ride from community organizer to leader of the free world. We all know that there were a myriad of campaign irregularities from Black Panthers turning people away to foreign donations using untraceable single use credit cards, and George Soros paying un unprecedented FEC fine for illegally funneling cash to the Obama campaign. Yet we are told, to just stand in awe that the smartest self-professed lazy student with grades he will not share, is so smart and so tech savvy that he just out thunk us.

In his book Megatrends, John Naisbitt discusses how people can accomplish extraordinary outcomes and success by aligning with these trends. Certainly, among the biggest megatrends of this generation is the rise of social media and search engines. While a few privacy advocates have beaten the drum of warning that we were giving away all our most personal data to Facebook and Google, we were so enthralled with the technology and the capabilities that we unwittingly became part of this story line as we were lured to the kill by the notion we could have all that technology for “free.”

Of course we all know that nothing comes for free. We were betting on free stuff, and now we know what we bartered away in the deal—our liberty.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s America? Ripped Apart by Financial Crisis, Greek Society in Free-fall

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photo credit: endiaferonATHENS, Greece – A sign taped to a wall in an Athens hospital appealed for civility from patients. “The doctors on duty have been unpaid since May,” it read, “Please respect their work.”

Patients and their relatives glanced up briefly and moved on, hardened to such messages of gloom. In a country where about 1,000 people lose their jobs each day, legions more are still employed but haven’t seen a paycheck in months. What used to be an anomaly has become commonplace, and those who have jobs that pay on time consider themselves the exception to the rule.

To the casual observer, all might appear well in Athens. Traffic still hums by, restaurants and bars are open, people sip iced coffees at sunny sidewalk cafes. But scratch the surface and you find a society in free-fall, ripped apart by the most vicious financial crisis the country has seen in half a century.

It has been three years since Greece’s government informed its fellow members in the 17-country group that uses the euro that its deficit was far higher than originally reported. It was the fuse that sparked financial turmoil still weighing heavily on eurozone countries. Countless rounds of negotiations ensued as European countries and the International Monetary Fund struggled to determine how best to put a lid on the crisis and stop it spreading.

The result: Greece had to introduce stringent austerity measures in return for two international rescue loan packages worth a total of €240 billion ($313 billion), slashing salaries and pensions and hiking taxes.

Read more from this story HERE.

Supreme Court Weighing Genetic Privacy

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Supreme Court justices are to [met] privately Friday to weigh whether they will hear a major genetic-privacy case testing whether authorities may take DNA samples from anybody arrested for a serious crime.

The case has wide-ranging implications, as at least 21 states and the federal government have regulations requiring suspects to give a DNA sample upon arrest. In all the states with such laws, DNA saliva samples are cataloged in state and federal crime-fighting databases.

The issue confronts the government’s interest in solving crime, balanced against the constitutional rights of those arrested to be free from government intrusion.

The case before the justices concerns a decision in April of Maryland’s top court, which said it was a breach of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure to take DNA samples from suspects who have not been convicted.

The Maryland Court of Appeals, that state’s highest court, said that arrestees have a “weighty and reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless, suspicionless searches” and that expectation is not outweighed by the state’s “purported interest in assuring proper identification” of a suspect.

Read more about this story HERE.