Who’s Going to Win in November? The Experts Say It’s Anybody’s Guess

/1 Comment/in , /by

If the presidential race seems like it’s hard to get a grip on, that’s because it is — the contest has gone through at least three distinct phases at this point, and where it might go over the final three weeks seems to be anyone’s guess.

In the lead-up to the conventions, President Obama appeared to hold a small lead on Mitt Romney. The national polls would vary slightly, but the president generally held an edge of a few percentage points. This narrowed to an exact tie in the RealClearPolitics average on Sept. 5 — the second day of the Democratic convention — indicating at least something of a post-convention bounce for Romney.

After Obama’s convention, the president got his lead back, and he eventually expanded his national polling edge to 4.3 percentage points in late September. While this was not Obama’s biggest lead of the cycle — he was up 4.7 points as recently as mid-August — it was enough to signal that, barring some big outside development or gaffe at a debate, the president was in a strong position to win reelection.

Obama’s lead was down to 3.1 points by Oct. 3, the day of the Denver debate — and we all know what happened then. Over the course of just a handful of days following Romney’s Mile High rout, Romney took his first national polling lead of the calendar year in the RCP average, reaching a high of 1.5 points on Oct. 10, a week after the debate. And then, over the past week, the race settled into effectively a national tie — as of midday Wednesday, Romney held a tiny 0.4% lead; that includes Gallup’s seven-day tracker, which showed Romney up 51%-45% Wednesday (that does not include any polling following Tuesday night’s debate).

While it has been a topsy-turvy race, it’s also been one without particularly commanding heights or punishing valleys. Since April 10 — when Romney effectively clinched the nomination — he has never topped 48% in the RCP average and never dipped below 43%; Obama has never exceeded 49.5% and never gone below 45.4%. That points to a pretty stable and polarized electorate.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Latest Debate: Presidential?

/12 Comments/in , /by

Besides CNN Candy Crowley’s biased performance tonight, perhaps the most memorable aspect of the Romney-Obama debate was its confrontational style. This certainly wasn’t what many expected from the town hall format.

Both candidates repeatedly pushed against each other, interrupting and talking over one another. And both, on occasion, went after the moderator and spoke over her as well.

Perhaps the most combative exchange of the night arose over whether or not Obama cut permitting for onshore and offshore drilling. Both candidates got into each other’s face, and Romney wouldn’t let up.

Turns out that Obama was on the wrong side of this issue: Romney’s assertion that the President had significantly cut permitting was accurate, contrary to Obama’s protests.

The candidates also clashed on whether oil and gas production had increased or decreased during Obama’s presidency. See an article that fact-checks the production question HERE.

As to the moderator’s bias, Obama ended up with about three more minutes than Romney, not a big deal in a forty minute plus debate. But Crowley’s intervention after a question about Benghazi and whether Obama had initially attributed the attacks to terror was particularly memorable. Crowley actually backed up Obama’s false statement that he called Benghazi’s attack terror from the outset. That caused Obama to dig in even deeper.

Reince Priebus, the chair of the RNC, flatly called the President’s statement on whether he called the Benghazi attacks terror, “a lie.”

Some pundits have said that the rough and tumble approach used by both candidates turned off women and entertained men. If so, Obama and Romney were pretty much equal offenders.

On the facts, Romney comes out on top. But each base has something it can point to in championing its cause. Although there was not a flat-out winner, my take is that undecided voters who watched the debate will break strongly for Romney.

Heritage Releases Top 10 Examples of Wasteful Government Spending in 2012

/7 Comments/in , /by

The Heritage Foundation along with Senator Tom Coburn, who just slammed his Senate colleagues for being part of the waste problem, created the following list of the top ten examples of government waste in 2012:

• A reality TV show in India. The Department of Agriculture’s Market Access Program spends $200 million a year to help U.S. agricultural trade associations and cooperatives advertise their products in foreign markets. In 2011, it funded a reality TV show in India that advertised U.S. cotton.

• Studying pig poop. The Environmental Protection Agency awarded a $141,450 grant under the Clean Air Act to fund a Chinese study on swine manure and a $1.2 million grant to the United Nations for clean fuel promotion.

• Amtrak snacks. Federally subsidized Amtrak lost $84.5 million on its food and beverage services in 2011 and $833.8 million over the past 10 years. It has never broken even on these services.

• Using military exercises to boost biofuels. The U.S. Navy bought 450,000 gallons of biofuels for $12 million—or almost $27 per gallon—to conduct exercises to showcase the fuel and bring it closer toward commercialization. It is the largest biofuel purchase ever made by the government.

• Conferences for government employees. In 2008 and 2009 alone, the Department of Justice spent $121 million to host or participate in 1,832 conferences.

• “RoboSquirrel.” $325,000 was spent on a robotic squirrel named “RoboSquirrel.” This National Science Foundation grant was used to create a realistic-looking robotic squirrel for the purpose of studying how a rattlesnake would react to it.

• Cupcakes. In Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across the country, cupcake shops are trending. The 10 cupcake shop owners who received $2 million in Small Business Administration loan guarantees, however, can only boast so much of their entrepreneurial ingenuity, since taxpayers are backing them up.

• Food stamps for alcohol and junk food. Though they were intended to ensure hungry children received healthy meals, taxpayer-funded food stamps were instead spent on fast food at Taco Bell and Burger King; on non-nutritious foods such as candy, ice cream, and soft drinks; and on some 2,000 deceased persons in New York and Massachusetts. Food stamp recipients spent $2 billion on sugary drinks alone. Improper SNAP payments accounted for $2.5 billion in waste, including to one exotic dancer who was making $85,000 per year.

• Beer brewing in New Hampshire. Despite Smuttynose brewery’s financial success and popularity, it is still getting a $750,970 Community Development Block Grant to build a new brewery and restaurant facilities.

• A covered bridge to nowhere. What list of government waste would be complete without a notorious “bridge to nowhere”? In this case, it’s $520,000 to fix the Stevenson Road Covered Bridge in Green County, Ohio, which was last used in 2003.

Read more from this story HERE.

Another Obama Debate Falsehood: Planned Parenthood Does Not Provide Mammograms

/5 Comments/in , /by

President Barack Obama has, once again, misled Americans when it comes to the issue of Planned Parenthood and what legitimate health care it does or doesn’t provide. During Tuesday night’s debate, Obama falsely claimed the abortion company does mammograms. It does not.

“There are millions of women all across the country who rely on Planned Parenthood for mammograms, for cervical cancer screenings,” Obama claimed.

When the Komen Foundation announced in February that it would no longer provide grants to Planned Parenthood—partly due to the fact that Planned Parenthood does not directly provide mammograms – its ideological and political supporters sprang into action. They decried Komen’s decision to eliminate funding for this imagined provider of mammograms. Planned Parenthood’s Executive Director, Cecile Richards, made the claim. So did President Obama. And an unsuspecting public was led to believe that such bold claims, by people who should know, must be true.

Planned Parenthood itself has admitted that it does not perform mammograms for women — something the Komen for the Cure breast cancer charity confirmed last year.

LifeNews.com and pro-life blogger Jill Stanek followed up with phone calls to various Planned Parenthood centers and confirmed they do not do mammograms.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: KISS’s Gene Simmons Endorses Romney, Says Obama is a “Piss-Poor President”

/5 Comments/in , /by

Rock and roll star Gene Simmons lays into Obama in this AOL interview.

He states that “the country is so divided” and that he’s been “very disappointed” in Obama.

On the other hand, Simmons believes that Romney is much more qualified to be president because he knows how to run a business, create jobs, and rescued the Olympics.

Simmons concludes by saying that Obama is “a wonderful family man” but that’s “where his resume stops.”

The political discussion begins at about 1:15 in the below video clip:

Coburn Calls Out Senate Colleagues For Being Lazy, Biggest Waste in Government

/2 Comments/in , /by

The Senate’s top waste-watcher says the federal government is bloated with extra spending — including in the halls of Congress itself, where he says senators and staffers are collecting salaries while failing to do very much work.

Twenty senators haven’t had a single amendment considered on the chamber floor this year, and some of the most powerful committees have all but taken the year off, said Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican.

The damning critique of his colleagues is part of Mr. Coburn’s “Wastebook 2012,” the latest installment in what has become an annual list of 100 curious federal spending decisions that Congress and federal agencies make each year. The book will be released Tuesday.

Making the 2012 list are a $1.5 million grant to the University of Utah to study building a better computer gaming joystick, $100,000 to send a three-member American comedy troupe on a tour of India, and part of a $325,000 grant used to build a robotic squirrel, all to test whether it could scare a real snake.

The National Institutes of Health spent $939,771 on a study to discover that a male fruit fly, given the choice between a young female and an older female fly, chose the younger.

Read more from this story HERE.

Fact Checking Romney’s Claim that Production of Oil on Public Lands is Down (+video)

/7 Comments/in , , /by

One of the most intense exchanges of the night arose over the question of permitting and oil production on public lands.

In the segment below, Romney claimed that hydrocarbon production on government land is down. He stated that oil production is down 14% and gas production is down 9%.

Although Obama vigorously denied this, the Washington Post states that “Romney’s telling the truth when he says, ‘Production of oil on public land is down 14 percent and production of gas on public land is down 9 percent.’ That’s because energy production on federal lands is down compared to 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration.” However, the Post adds that production is “still higher than where production stood under President George W. Bush.”

The National Journal has a different take because it evaluated three years of production (2008 to 2011) rather than comparing just the last two years. By reviewing production over the longer range, it found both candidates were right and wrong: “Oil production on public lands is up 12 percent from 2008 to 2011, according to a March report by the Energy Information Administration…Natural-gas production on public lands is down 16.5 percent between 2008 and 2011, according to the same EIA report…Coal production on public lands is down 7.8 percent from 2008 to 2011.”

Video: CNN’s Candy Crowley’s Outrageous Tagteam Hit on Romney Over Libya

/11 Comments/in , /by

CNN correspondent and second presidential debate moderator Candy Crowley disgraced herself tonight, repeatedly intervening to save a floundering President Obama and showing why many Americans were rightfully suspicious of her ability to moderate a presidential debate fairly.

Her most outrageous act tonight was her incorrect seconding of Obama’s statement that he declared the Libya terrorist attacks to be “terror.” While Obama did indeed use the word, this is not what he meant by it. Instead, he was simply referring to “acts of terror.” There was no mention of Al Qaeda or any of its affiliates with respect to the actual attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi.

Crowley bungled the facts in attempting to save Obama from his administration’s dreadful bungling of the Libya situation. She owes the American people an apology for inserting herself into the debate in such an inappropriate and embarrassing fashion.

Obama deliberately quoted himself out of context and Crowley not only allowed him to do so, she validated his intentionally narrow reading of the facts even before he pleaded for her to come to his rescue.

Here is the full Obama statement in reference to “terror” in Libya. As you can see, this was purely a generic discussion of violence:

“No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Fact Checking Romney’s Permits Claim: Under Obama Permits Declined Over a Third (+video)

/1 Comment/in , /by

During the Presidential Debate this evening, Romney asserted that permitting for oil and gas on federal lands decreased by 50% under Obama.

Although Obama denied this, the Los Angeles Times states that there was a significant drop from 2008 forward:

Mitt Romney said “the president cut in half the number of licenses and permits for drilling on federal lands and in federal waters.”

According to the Bureau of Land Management, in fiscal year 2011, 2,188 leases were issued for energy development on federal lands. Four years earlier, in fiscal year 2007, 3499 leases were issued. So, not quite a 50% drop, but a drop nonetheless.

Here’s a clip from the debate where Romney went after Obama on the permits issue:

CNN Reaches a New Low With Vile Video: 2012 “Obama Boy” Replaces 2008 “Obama Girl”

/5 Comments/in , /by

You have to see it to believe it. In this video, a “Obama boy” sings of his love for Obama, similar to the 2008 “Obama girl” video that went viral.

But this video is much, much worse. Inserted midway throughout the video is a woman who looks suspiciously like Michele Bachmann. And there are several scenes that seem intended to suggest fellatio.

CNN’s broadcast of this trashy video really is a new low for the network. John King’s involvement in it makes it all the worse.

If you care to watch it, here’s the video: