Last Call

So Mitt Romney's plan to use his conservative credentials for rallying the base to come back against the President and all that?

You're doing it wrong, Mitt.

Mitt Romney pointed to the health care law he signed as governor of Massachusetts one of his signature achievements Wednesday, a move that has drawn swift and strong rebuke from conservatives in the past.

Romney pointed to the Massachusetts health care law — the foundation for the national healthcare reform law Romney promises to dismantle if elected — as a key highlight of his record in an interview with NBC News.

“[D]on’t forget — I got everybody in my state insured,” Romney told NBC. “One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don’t think there’s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record.”

Two things:  One, Mitt's touting Romneycare.  I'm sure conservatives are thrilled.  Two, he's vowing to repeal health care coverage for kids if he's President.  I'm sure everyone else is thrilled.  In fact, I'm pretty sure Mitt managed to piss off every single voter somehow with that statement.

Awesome.

Worst campaigner ever.

Robot/Zombie '12 Gets That Poll-Asked Look

That faint, thin, near-Biblical keening you were hearing all day at the upper registers of your detection?  The Romney campaign reading today's swing state numbers from a new OH/PA/FL poll from Quinnipiac University, commissioned by CBS News and the NY Times.  It's not just bad news for Robot/Zombie, it's pretty much a death blow.

President Barack Obama is over the magic 50 percent mark and tops Gov. Mitt Romney among likely voters by 9 to 12 percentage points in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to a Quinnipiac University/ CBS News/New York Times Swing State Poll released today.

Voters in each state see President Obama as better than Gov. Romney to handle the economy, health care, Medicare, national security, an international crisis and immigration. Romney ties or inches ahead of the president on handling the budget deficit. 

Yeah.  That's how bad it got after the 47% remarks.  President Obama is up 9 in Florida, 10 in Ohio, and 12 in Pennsylvania.  And the crosstabs are unrelentingly brutal for Romney.

Obama leads 60 - 35 percent among Ohio women likely voters, while men support Romney 52 - 44 percent. White voters back Romney by a narrow 49 - 46 percent, while 98 percent of black voters back the president. Independent voters are split with 47 percent for Romney and 46 percent for Obama. 

POTUS up 25 points among women, and Romney's lead among white voters is down to 3?  Night, folks.   It's just as bad in Florida...

Women likely voters back Obama 58 - 39 percent while men are divided with 50 percent for Romney and 47 percent for Obama. Hispanic voters go Democratic 55 - 41 percent while independent voters are split with 49 percent for Romney and 46 percent for Obama.

The economy is the most important issue for 47 percent of Florida voters, while 20 percent list health care; 10 percent list the budget deficit and 8 percent list national security.

The president would do a better job on health care, voters say 54 - 41 percent and do a better job on Medicare, voters say 55 - 40 percent. Voters over 55 say Obama would do a better job on Medicare 52 - 42 percent and back the president 53 - 45 percent.

So Romney's done in Ohio without a big advantage among white voters, and he's absolutely done in Florida if he's losing the Senior vote.  And in Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania women likely voters back Obama 58 - 37 percent, while men split with 49 percent for Romney and 48 percent for the president. Independent voters are split 48 - 48 percent.

The economy is the most important issue for 48 percent of Pennsylvania voters, while 20 percent list health care; 11 percent list the budget deficit and 7 percent list national security.

The president would do a better job on health care, voters say 54 - 41 percent and do a better job on Medicare, voters say 55 - 39 percent. Voters over 55 say Obama would do a better job on Medicare 52 - 43 percent and back the president 50 - 46 percent.

Romney can only manage a split among men and independents, he's losing seniors, and Obama is winning women by 21.  Done.

Romney is done.   Now all we have to do is vote.

We'll be covering this in tonight's Podcast Vs the Stupid.

Coulter (Zeit)geist, Part 2

Ann Coulter has now gone completely off the rails and straight into pure racism.

During an interview on Fox News, Coulter told host Sean Hannity that her new book “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama” proved that “everyone — blacks especially — are better off when the white guilt bank is shut down as it was for more than a decade after the O.J. verdict.”

“Liberals kept trying to push the racial narrative in their newspapers and on TV, but Americans just weren’t buying it,” she explained. “After Oct. 3, 1994 when they heard the verdict and saw black law students at Howard University cheering it, that was it.”

“And for a dozen years, we had paradise. Suddenly, people weren’t walking on eggshells, you could have [then-New York City Mayor Rudy] Giuliani enforcing sane criminal laws in New York and not caring that we was constantly being called a racist by liberals and Al Sharpton, the Clinton administration. And look what it did, it transformed the city and it saved — because the policies were continued — tens of thousands of black lives.”

Awesome.  I have no idea what's worse, that Ann Coulter thinks this overt racist Bell Curve garbage makes her more desirable as a pundit, that Coulter's opinion of black people (that we're unruly, barely sentient troglodytes who need white people like Bwana Giuliani to uplift us into polite society) is still acceptable in this country, or that Coulter actually believes that the first Simpson verdict absolves white America of hundreds of years of assumption of privilege.  Take your pick.

At this point, Ann Coulter simply needs to be excused from the non-FOX networks.  Oh, and her employers.

This Is What A Hero Looks Like

A veteran awarded two Purple Hearts was struck and killed while pushing his wife away from an oncoming car. 80-year-old Rubin Baum, who served as a medic in the Korean War, was standing with his wife, 62-year-old Denise Baum, trying to hail a cab in New York City.

The New York Daily News spoke with the newly widowed Baum about her late husband. According to Denise Baum, a sedan crashed into a minivan, causing the sedan to lose control and go into a spin. It hit the couple. Denise was thrown into a parked car. Her husband was pinned under the sedan.

Two Purple Hearts says a lot about a person and their commitment to doing the right thing while facing mortal risk.  This man knew what he was doing, and in the process he saved the life of someone he loved very much.

Reading this right after the University of Maryland article where students are flipping out about how their sandwiches are wrapped put it into even sharper focus.  In this screaming background noise we have in the world, these are the stories that should get our attention.  Do good, be good, make good.

Women Fail From Global Viewpoint

(CNN) -- Women have finally arrived.

From Washington to Wall Street to Twitter, writers, academics, and business leaders are pointing to the empowerment of women as key to many of the world's greatest challenges. They're publicizing the research and amplifying hard facts, like the fact that when women have equal access to agricultural resources, 100 million to 150 million fewer people will go hungry.

Or that when women participate equally in the workforce, the GDP in the U.S. the eurozone, and Japan will experience a double-digit spike. And while there's no perfect metric for the popular perception of "girl power," a 2010 Pew study found widespread public support for women's equality in virtually every nation.

The excitement over women's potential and progress is warranted. But there's still a large and disappointing disconnect between research and reality. Girls and women do indeed perform 66% of the work and produce 50% of the world's food. But they earn only 10% of the world's income and own a dismal 1% of its property.

So tell me again, where have we arrived?  How is it that half the world is second class?  While women can accomplish quite a bit in the United States, there is still a glass ceiling firmly in place.  Women are nowhere near claiming their half, even in one of the friendlier countries in the world.

If women ever unite, a whole lot of stupidity would cease.  That isn't to say new stupidity wouldn't spring up to take its place, but even that much of a break would be refreshing.  The bottom line is until we treat people equally and give them equal value, we cannot succeed.

 

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

If you want to know what the last six weeks of the campaign are going to be like, here you go.

 

Any questions?

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

National Review's Peter Kirsanow asks:

Why Isn’t Romney Up by Ten Points?

Because he's a douchebag.  Americans don't like the economy.  They dislike Romney more.  Period.  Here's my favorite part:

But here’s the thing: The most recent Rasmussen party identification poll has Republicans with a 4.3 percentage point advantage over Democrats nationally. At the same point in the 2008 election cycle Democrats had a 5.7 percent advantage. That’s a 10 point swing, a swing that began to manifest itself in the 2010 midterms, when the Democrats’ advantage fell to just 1.2 points — and they suffered an epic blowout.

The polls may be provide a fairly accurate snapshot of where the race is today. But there’s reason to believe Obama’s appreciably weaker than four years ago, and Republicans should be more optimistic than the timid souls that populate our TV screens seem to be.

You see, THE POLLS ARE ALWAYS WRONG if they show Obama ahead.  And comparing a midterm contest to a Presidential year is always a lesson for heartbreak, given the massive turnout difference.

Make no mistake, we'll be hearing how Obama "stole the election" if it's anything closer than it was in 2008, and that will be the battle cry heading into the impeachment trials.

StupidiNews

• The second day of UN General Assembly meetings finds speeches by the presidents of Iran, Egypt, and Yemen.
• Hong Kong real estate tycoon Cecil Chao has reportedly offered $65 million to any man who can "win the heart" of his married lesbian daughter, Gigi.
• The US Supreme Court will hear arguments on how much of a share the state of North Carolina should get of a multimillion dollar malpractice award.
• Spainish PM Mariano Rajoy may be delaying a bailout request for the country in order to see what kind of terms Italy may be receiving from European Union officials.
• California Dem Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a measure that legalizes robot-driven cars, at a ceremony at Google's Mountain View HQ.

Last Call

The mask slips, and Republicans accidentally tell the truth about what they will do to the 99% once they get back into complete power.  Today's contestant:  Wisconsin GOP Senate candidate Tommy Thompson as we find another secret video unearthed from the May primary season.

Declaring that he wants to “change Medicare and Medicaid like I did welfare,” Thompson asked a May gathering of the Lake Country Area Defenders Of Liberty in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin: “Who better to and who better than me, who’s already finished one of the entitlement programs, to come up with programs to do away with Medicaid and Medicare?”

The video has only now surfaced and its a blockbuster—especially in the aftermath of the release last week of a similar video that saw Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney dismissing 47 percent of Americans as a "dependent" class unworthy of Republican consideration.

Just to repeat: a top Republican Senate candidate has been caught on video talking about how he would “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”

Just to repeat: “DO AWAY WITH MEDICAID, AND MEDICARE.”

As it was, Democratic candidate Tammy Baldwin has a pretty healthy lead right now, but this is Tommy Thompson's game over moment.  Let's not forget however that Thompson is considered a moderate and a bi-partisan diplomat, being the former governor of a swing state like Wisconsin.

Republican moderates wanting to do away with Medicaid and Medicare.  G'night, folks.

Ebb And Flow, You Know

President Obama is losing veterans, he's doomed, it's over!  Veterans don't like Pentagon cuts, kids.

President Barack Obama is trying hard to win veterans, but it looks like they’d prefer a new commander in chief.

The Obama campaign had been hoping that veterans and their families — especially among the post-Sept. 11 generation that served in Iraq and Afghanistan — would be part of their path to victory: They’re a high turn-out demographic and concentrated in battleground states, with nearly 1 million each in North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, and 1.6 million in Florida.

But recent polls make clear that the president’s campaign is losing the battle. Even as Obama leads in Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Virginia, Mitt Romney is up by double digits among veterans in those states. Nationwide, he’s got a commanding 20-percentage-point lead over Obama and has even overtaken the president with younger veterans.

DOOOOOOOOOM...except for the fact that Mitt Romney is losing the far more numerous and far more likely to vote senior citizens crowd.

A poll released Monday by Reuters and Ipsos proves the obvious: if a candidate talks tough on Medicare and other social welfare programs of use to senior citizens, the elderly will return the favor by deserting his campaign in droves.

The latest unfortunate politician to learn this lesson is Republican nominee for president Mitt Romney, who has seen his support collapse by 20 percent among men and women over the age of 60 in the few weeks since the Democratic National Convention.

If you wonder where President Obama's lead is coming from, ask your grandmother.   Seniors don't like Vouchercare and Medicaid cuts, kids.  In the long run, Romney's in way more trouble here.

Three Out Of Four Ain't Good

A new Sunlight Foundation study on money in politics finds that so far through the 2012 election cycle, some 78% of the money spent though 9/21 on election ads has come from the "Citizens United effect", meaning that three out of four ad dollars this year are new thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling that outside groups can contribute unlimited dollars to super PACs.

But it's where that money is going that should worry you.  Sure, a lot of it is going to help Mitt Romney.  But far more is going to bury Democrats in Congress.

The money spent by Super Pacs, unions, corporations and non-profit groups is more than double what those groups spent in 2010, the first campaign in which the supreme court judgment had taken effect. Although Super Pacs are usually thought of being aligned with presidential candidates, the Sunlight Foundation found that much of these groups' recent spending has been focussed on more localised electoral battles.

"A deeper dive into the data shows that the latest uptick in outside spending is focused on congressional races: even in presidential battleground states, almost all the spending by outside groups is focused on House and Senate candidates," [Sunlight Foundation managing editor Kathy] Kiely wrote.

Recent expenditure includes Crossroads GPS spending $400,000 in Nevada against Democratic Senate candidate Shelley Berkley; Workers Voice, an AFL-CIO Super Pac, logged hundreds of expenditures in the $25-60 range in Florida, indicating a get-out-the-vote effort for senator Bill Nelson, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

Of $465m of outside money spent so far in 2012 $460.8m comes from Super Pacs, corporations and other groups which do not have to register as political groups. An additional $4.1m comes from "electioneering communications": advertisements or political activities that focus on issues and policies – the oil industry, for example – and encourage voters to support a candidate without mentioning any politicians by name.

The big GOP PACs are putting those unlimited hundreds of millions where they can do the most damage, by buying Congressional races.   It's the single reason I think the GOP will actually gain seats in the House, and I think even Nate Silver is badly underestimating their chances of taking the Senate.  These last six weeks will see unprecedented spending on political ads all but locking up the airwaves.  Negative ads work, and endless streams of negative ads work very well.  I wouldn't be surprised if all these ads depressed turnout in battleground states, which is exactly what the GOP wants, too.

We'll see how much damage they will end up doing.

Jackassenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger says his estranged wife Maria Shriver confronted him about his secret love child during a couple's therapy session and that she'd suspected for years ... according to his new book ... but the good news -- Arnold assured Maria he was still "turned on" by her.

In the book, obtained by the New York Daily News, Arnold says Maria took him to couple's therapy in 2011 -- the day after her left the California governorship.   He believed he was there for routine marriage counseling -- instead, Maria asked him point blank if he slept with the maid and spawned a love child years before. 

What a jerk.  What an absolute rotten, clueless son of a bitch.

"So yeah, you caught me, I'm sorry I devastated you and broke your heart, and embarrassed you again in front of the entire nation.  But hey, I still think you're hot so that makes us cool, right?"

Women Growing In Government

More women are running for Congress this year than ever before. The 18 women running for the Senate break the previous record of 14, set two years ago. Also, there are 163 female candidates for House seats, more than the 141 who ran in 2004.

That gives this election season a Year-of-the-Woman ring to it, says The Center for American Women and Politics. The center's director, Debbie Walsh, offered some reasons in a press release:

"... The crucial first election after reapportionment and redistricting, news events underscoring the need for women's voices in policymaking, and a presidential election year generating political excitement."

Great news to hear.  Women make up half the population, yet don't get nearly what they deserve in compensation or representation.

First, we need the year of the woman candidate, but we also need to coincide with the year of the woman voter.

Ladies, get off your rumps and use your voice.  If not for you, for the women who need fairness in government.

Just Plane Ignorant

Rachel Maddow notes just how bad Mitt Romney rambles on when he's nervous, and that his filters tend to turn off and he says whatever pops into his head.  The latest example, Romney's comments on his wife Ann's recent airplane incident with smoke filling the cabin forcing the craft to make an emergency landing.

At a fundraising event in Beverly Hills over the weekend, Romney noted that a plane carrying his wife, Ann, was forced to land because of a small fire.

“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” the Republican presidential nominee said. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go exactly. And you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. But it’s a real problem.”

Well, yeah, OK.  His wife was never in any real danger, but even Mitt the robot cares about her and was glad no one was harmed.  But you don't know why windows don't open in an airplane?  Even given as much time as Mitt Romney has spent in aircraft, he's never asked?  Hoboy.  Rachel was pretty ruthless:

“It’s a real problem that windows don’t roll down on airplanes?” she asked. “Is it also a problem that guns don’t shoot backwards through the barrel? Or that diving boards are only mounted over very deep water? Why don’t the windows roll down?”

“I don’t think he was joking because he couldn’t possibly be joking about his wife almost being in a plane crash,” Maddow added. “You can’t joke about that, especially with her standing right there.”

Do watch.

 

Number Crunching, September Edition

With 6 weeks to go until Election Day, Nate Silver runs the numbers on September poll leads and finds with the exceptions of "Dewey beats Truman!" and the Supremes screwing over Al Gore, the poll average leader at the 45 day mark went on to win 17 of the last 19 Presidential races.

Our polling database contains surveys going back to 1936. The data is quite thin (essentially just the Gallup national poll and nothing else) through about 1968, but it’s nevertheless worth a look.

In the table below, I’ve averaged the polls that were conducted 40 to 50 days before the election in each year — the time period that we find ourselves in now. (In years when there were no polls in this precise time window, I used the nearest available survey.)

The table considers the race from the standpoint of the incumbent party (designated with the color purple) and the challenging party (wearing the orange jerseys), without worrying about whether they were Democrats or Republicans. Mr. Obama’s position, for instance, is probably more analogous to that of the Republican incumbent George W. Bush in 2004 than it is to the candidate from his own party that year, John Kerry.


 

As you can see, President Obama's nearly 4 point lead is a larger one than he had in 2008.  It is however the smallest of the incumbent leads of a winner since FDR in 1944.  Six weeks is still enough to win, but by this point, the race appears to be very much decided.

At this point serious attention needs to be paid to shoring up the down ballot races as motivation to get people to the polls.  We'll see what happens.