Values: The president’s coming out in favor of gay marriage shows he’s to the left of most black Americans — and willing to throw his most loyal backers under the gay pride float.

Under pressure to assuage the gay lobby and young voters ahead of November, Obama on Wednesday told ABC News “it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

By finally taking the controversial stance, which won’t go over well in the black community, he’s clearly counting on African-American voters remaining loyal to him this election out of racial pride and a habit of voting Democrat.

But he may have miscalculated.

Gay marriage is highly unpopular among black voters — and he’ll need every one of them to beat presumptive GOP foe Mitt Romney.

Read More at investors.com

Panic leads to mistakes.

Barack Obama’s announcement of support for gay “marriage” was not the result of a “heartfelt” search for “what is right for America.” It was the result of full blown panic and a search for what is best for Barack Obama that will be devastating in November.  The huge 61/39 landslide loss gay “marriage” took in North Carolina apparently set off a panic in Obama’s camp that “demanded” action.

This brought about Obama’s tense “declaration” of support for Gay “marriage,” something that directly contradicts what he said about the issue in 2008.

More than this, it has made raising enthusiasm to vote among African Americans harder by a wide margin. For Obama, the low energy level among his natural base was troublesome until 3 PM Wednesday. Three minutes later, that “troublesome” problem exploded into a raging fire that will require time and energy to put out – time and energy he must spend elsewhere if he is to win. Working to pump up black enthusiasm is not what Obama thought he would have to be doing with less than six months to Election Day.

With African American enthusiasm to vote already at 48% (down 30 points since 2008), this was a lethal mistake for Obama.

Read More at Western Journalism By Kevin “Coach”Collins

 

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Just how unpopular is President Barack Obama in some parts of the country? Enough that a man in prison in Texas got 4 out of 10 votes in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary.

The inmate, Keith Judd, is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas for making threats at the University of New Mexico in 1999. Obama received 59 percent of the vote to Judd’s 41 percent.

For some West Virginia Democrats, simply running against Obama is enough to get Judd votes.

“I voted against Obama,” said Ronnie Brown, a 43-year-old electrician from Cross Lanes who called himself a conservative Democrat. “I don’t like him. He didn‘t carry the state before and I’m not going to let him carry it again.”

When asked which presidential candidate he voted for, Brown said, “That guy out of Texas.”

Read More at The Blaze. By Jonathon M. Seidl.

Sovereignty: Even if he’s not re-elected, the president hopes to leave behind a treaty giving a U.N. body veto power over the use of our territorial waters and to which we’d be required to give half of our offshore oil revenue.

The Law Of The Sea Treaty (LOST) has been lurking in the shadows for decades. Like the Kyoto Protocol that pretended to be an effort to save the earth from the poisoned fruit of the Industrial Revolution, LOST pretends to be an effort to protect the world’s oceans from environmental damage and remove it as a cause of potential conflicts between nations.

Like its Kyoto cousin, LOST is an attempt at the global redistribution of power and wealth, the embodiment of the progressive dream of the end of the nation state as we know it and the end of political freedom by giving veto over all of mankind’s activities to a global body — in this case something called the International Seabed Authority, located in Kingston, Jamaica.

The ISA would have the power to regulate 70% of the earth’s surface, placing seabed mining, fishing rights, deep-sea oil exploration and even the activities of the U.S. Navy under control of a global bureaucracy. It even provides for a global tax that would be paid directly to the ISA by companies seeking to develop the resources in and under the world’s oceans.

As Heritage Foundation senior fellow Peter Brookes notes, the U.S. government now can collect royalty revenues from oil and gas companies that wish to drill on our extended continental shelf — the undersea areas beyond 200 miles of our coast. But if we ratify LOST, we’d have to fork over as much as 7% of that revenue to the ISA for redistribution to poorer, landlocked countries.

Read More at investors.com

Chief Executive’s eighth annual survey of best states to do business shows Another Triumph for Texas
In Chief Executive’s eighth annual survey of CEO opinion of Best and Worst States in which to do business, Texas easily clinched the No. 1 rank, the eighth successive time it has done so. California earns the dubious honor of being ranked dead last for the eighth consecutive year.

This year, 650 business leaders responded to our annual survey, up from 550 in 2011. CEOs were asked to grade states in which they do business among a variety of areas, including tax and regulation, quality of workforce and living environment. The Lone Star State was given high marks foremost for its business-friendly tax and regulatory environment. But its workforce quality, second only to Utah’s, is also highly regarded.

Florida moved up from number three last year to number two.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Texas and Florida have the highest net migration of people to their states from 2001 to 2009. (By contrast, New York and California lost over 1.6 million and 1.5 million in net migration out of the states, respectively, over the same period.)

Read More at globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com. By Mike Shedlock.