MORE GOOD NUMBERS

When I think of all the smears told by conservative talk radio gasbags, it's amazing that Pres. Obama isn't trialing by 20 points.

Obama expands lead in three tracking polls
By David Jackson, USA TODAY
Sep 08, 2012

The Gallup tracking poll has Obama up 49%-45%.

Reuters/Ipsos gives the president a 47%-43% lead.

And Scott Rasmussen has Obama ahead of Romney, 46%-44%.

YOU KNOW THE GOP IS IN BIG TROUBLE WHEN...

Republicans won't talk about abortion or war. 

A NEW "MORANS" PIC

(h/t Robert Rowley)

ACCORDING TO NIELSEN, DEM > GOP

Nielsen has released ratings for the DNC and RNC and the DNC won!

Closing Night of Democratic National Convention Draws 35.7 million Viewers
September 7, 2012

An estimated 35.7 million people watched the third and final night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention on Thursday, September 6. The closing night of the DNC was carried live from Charlotte, North Carolina across thirteen networks and featured a speech by President Barack Obama.

Final Night of Republican National Convention Draws 30.3 million Viewers
August 31, 2012

An estimated 30.3 million people watched the fourth and final night of the 2012 Republican National Convention on Thursday, August 30.

MORE CONSERVATIVE WHINING

Glenda Beck complains that some people really don't like his divisive bullshit (here & here) and some talk radio gasbags complain that they didn't get enough interviews at the DNC.

Beck and the radio gasbags deserve to be shunned.

MORE BLATHER FROM GEORGE WILL

In this piece, Will seems to be copying Glenda Beck's obsession with Progressivism.  Will claims that Pres. Obama is "determined to complete the progressive project of emancipating government from the Founders’ constraining premises, a project Woodrow Wilson embarked on 100 Novembers ago." This is almost exactly what rodeo clown Beck has been saying since 2009.

Will doesn't have the courage to directly cite Glenda so he drags out a right-wing hack professor from Claremont, Charles Kesler.  Here are a few of Kesler's publications:

Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought, Harper and Row,
1988, co-editor with William F. Buckley, Jr.

“Responsibility in The Federalist,” in Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of
Harvey Mansfield, Mark Blitz and William Kristol, eds., Rowman and Littlefield,
2000, pp. 219-232.

"Introduction" to Harry V. Jaffa, American Conservatism and the American
Founding, Carolina Academic Press, 1985, pp. 1-17. A shorter version of this
essay appeared originally in National Review, July 6, 1979.

Mansfield has hatched a number of conservative wackos from his perch at Harvard and Harry Jaffa has been an inspiration for neo-cons.

BILL CLINTON SHOOTS...AND SCORES!!!

3 points, nothing but net!

I posted some time ago a factoid about how since WW II  the stock market does better under Democratic presidents and last night Clinton pointed out that since 1961, employment gains are also much better under a Democratic president:

And plenty of other Clinton statistics checked out as accurate. For example, he said that since 1961, when John F. Kennedy took office, 42 million private-sector jobs had been added while Democrats held the White House, compared with 24 million while Republicans were in office. And that’s exactly what Bloomberg News reported in a May 8 story.

The result isn't because the Democrats held the office for more years because the GOP did:

Democrats hold the edge though they occupied the Oval Office for 23 years since Kennedy’s inauguration, compared with 28 for the Republicans.

THE LAST TIME I READ ABOUT MEDICARE FRAUD...

the total amount was estimated to be about $50-60 Billion.    A new study raises that to $75 Billion and includes several other areas where the program could be improved:

Report: US health care system wastes $750B a year
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR | Associated Press – 58 mins ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. health care system squanders $750 billion a year — roughly 30 cents of every medical dollar — through unneeded care, byzantine paperwork, fraud and other waste, the influential Institute of Medicine said Thursday in a report that ties directly into the presidential campaign.

More than 18 months in the making, the report identified six major areas of waste: unnecessary services ($210 billion annually); inefficient delivery of care ($130 billion); excess administrative costs ($190 billion); inflated prices ($105 billion); prevention failures ($55 billion), and fraud ($75 billion). Adjusting for some overlap among the categories, the panel settled on an estimate of $750 billion.

JEEBUS & JERUSALEM

I've heard the motion to cave in to the Fundies and Neo-cons at the DNC a few times and it seems clear that the motion did NOT have the necessary approval of 2/3rds of the delegates.

ONE REASON WHY IT'S CALLED "SILLY SEASON"

The wingnuts are going to make an issue out of whatever factoid or fictoid they can come up with to claim that Pres. Obama isn't as popular as Mitten$ but they will look foolish as usual.

FATS LIMBAUGH HAS BEEN LYING AGAIN

Over the past couple of weeks, he's been saying that GM is about to go bankrupt BUT THAT IS A LIE:

Four years later, car industry rebounds from brink
By Dean Reynolds
September 4, 2012 6:51 PM

(CBS News) President Obama is making the health of the car industry a big issue, claiming credit for saving General Motors. On Tuesday, GM reported its sales rose 10 percent in August compared to a year ago. Additionally, Ford's sales were up 13 percent while Chrysler's rose by 14 percent.

Industry analyst Joe Wiesenfelder of Cars.com, said car makers have recovered from the recession. "There is no doubt the U.S. industry is in better shape," he said. "Actually the entire industry's in better shape than it was four years ago. It's really returning more to the way things were before 2008."

SOCIALISM CAN'T BE ALL THAT BAD

I've noted before that Singapore, the country ranked 2nd in the world for economic freedom by the Heritage Foundation, does have a good deal of socialism.

The World Economic Forum also ranks Singapore 2nd in the world for economic competitiveness which is determined by how countries rank on "12 key indicators including infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, labor market efficiency and innovation."

Here are the top 10:

  The Global Competitiveness Index 2012–2013

Country	2012-2013	2011-2012
Switzerland	1	1
Singapore	2	2
Finland	3	4
Sweden	4	3
Netherlands	5	7
Germany	6	6
United States	7	5
United Kingdom	8	10
Hong Kong	9	11
Japan	10	9

Notice that 5 of the dreaded socialist European countries are also in the top 10.

THE NEO-CONS STILL THINK IT'S 2002

War Whore Victor Davis Hanson has a new agit-prop piece entitled "Goodbye, Middle East" and seems to think both of these are bad things:

1) "The United States is backing off from the Middle East — and the Middle East from the United States."

2) "With $5 trillion in new American borrowing in just the last four years, and talk of slashing $1 trillion from the defense budget over the next 10 years, America’s options abroad may be narrowing."

ANOTHER SHOT FIRED IN THE WAR ON WOMEN

Erick Erickson of Redstate and CNN published this tweet:

INCOMING!!!

The radio gasbags will be ranting about the lack of Jeebus in the Democratic Party Platform in a lame attempt to drown out the success of the 1st night of the convention.

ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE 4 YEARS AGO?

Nate Silver and Think Progress demonstrate that Americans are indeed better off now than they were in September 2008, so this GOP argument will only fly with those who either can't remember or have fallen for the doom and gloom scenarios offered by FAUX News and the radio gasbags.

ANOTHER GOP "BOY GENIUS"

As I listen to Michael Medved heap praise on union-buster Ronald Reagan, I came across this little gem:

Rep. Cantor: Labor Day celebrates business owners
By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, September 3, 2012 17:11 EDT
THE RAW STORY

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) on Monday mistakenly described Labor Day as a celebration of entrepreneurs and business owners, rather than workers.

“Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success,” the conservative congressman said in a statement. ” I am committed to keeping taxes low and reducing red tape to make it easier for Virginia’s small business owners to start hiring again, create more jobs and ensure a thriving economy for the future so more people can achieve the American dream.”

ANOTHER MITTEN$ FAIL

Even wingnuts realize that Mitten$ isn't very likable and now we have a little more evidence:

Gallup: Romney’s RNC Speech Polled Worse Than Any Since 1996
by Noah Rothman | 12:33 pm, September 3rd, 2012
MEDIAITE

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech before last week’s Republican National Convention generated the lowest approval rating among surveyed adults since Gallup began polling this question in 1996.

38 percent of respondents in Gallup’s poll rated Romney’s speech as “excellent” or “good.” 10 percent of respondents rated Romney’s speech as being “terrible.”

In contrast, 47 percent said the same of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his 2008 GOP convention acceptance speech. Only 5 percent said McCain’s speech was “terrible.”

President Barack Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech in Denver, Colorado, was the most well received of all speeches since 1996. 58 percent of respondents rated his speech as “excellent” or “good” while only 7 percent found it to be “poor” or “terrible.”

NO, PRES. OBAMA DID NOT HAVE 60 VOTES FOR 2 YEARS

The wackos love to claim that the Democrats had a 60-seat filibuster proof majority in the Senate for the 1st 2 years of the Obama Administration but that is simply not true.

First of all, Sen. Al Franken wasn't seated until July 7, 2009. Second, after Franken was sworn in, Sen. Edward Kennedy was being treated for brain cancer and was rarely voting. Third, Sen. Robert Byrd also spent time in the hospital.

Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune looked into the records and found that the Democrats had a functioning super-majority for about 4 months (h/t David at Crooks & Liars):

Congressional records reflect that the Senate was in session for 72 days during the four months and one week (of the nearly 41 months Obama has so far been in office) that the Democrats actually had a filibuster-proof majority — not a particularly long time in the deliberately pokey upper chamber.

SOME REPUBLICANS WON'T EAT ROMNEY'S SHIT

In this case, the shit is the Big Lie that Pres. Obama has eliminated the work requirement in welfare programs.

First, GOP Governor Brownback of Kansas:

ANCHOR: "But you agree that these claims that the work requirement has been abolished are false?"

GOV BROWNBACK: "As far as I have seen, but I don’t know all of the basis to it. I do know the basis to this dependency on the government and how big the government is and how big the entitlement state is and how much of a debt we’re leaving to our kids."

Second, GOP Governor Herbert of Utah:

...Utah Gov. Gary Herbert declined to endorse Mitt Romney's claim that the initiative guts the 1996 welfare reform.

"The idea of flexibility is something that all states want to have," Herbert told The Huffington Post.

Indeed, the Utah Department of Workforce Services wrote two letters to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services seeking "waiver authority" so that the state's welfare officials could focus more on outcomes -- such as getting people jobs -- than on assembling data to meet narrow prescriptions in the law.

Third, former deputy press secretary for George W. Bush, Bill Burton:

During a panel segment on ABC's This Week, senior Romney campaign adviser Kerry Healey noted that the false claim that Obama gutted the work requirement in welfare reform had "become so central to this race."

Former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton shot back that Healey's assertion had been "widely debunked."

ANOTHER NUT FROM HARVARD

Some time ago, I noted that a decent number of conservative wackos attended Harvard University and thanx to Billy Cunningham, I have a new entry:

George Gilder, class of 1962

UPDATE: PZ Myers has a good summary of this WPOS.

THE LIAR WAYNE ALLYN ROOT IS ON CUNNINGHAM AGAIN

I noted below (here, here and here) that I was unable to find ANY evidence for Root's incendiary claim about how some Columbia students reacted to the assassination attempt on Pres. Reagan but Billy Cunningham remains unconcerned, so Root was on his radio show again tonight.

THIS SHOULD BE ILLEGAL

Fundie textbooks are full of crap like this:

Here's something a little closer to reality:
Mesopotamia, 8000–2000 b.c.

YES, THE CHINESE WERE DIFFERENT

I decided to read Jacques Gernet's one-volume history of China long before Mitten$ started babbling about Anglo-Saxon culture  and I noted below some of the "firsts" the Chinese can claim.

China also differed in its long-standing political culture:

No doubt there existed in the Chinese world independent forms of religious life, military circles with their own traditions, a very active mercantile sector which escaped the hold of the state, but no clergy, no military caste, no merchant class ever succeeded in gaining political power. This is certainly one of the constants and one of the great original aspects of the Chinese world, one that distinguishes it from all others.

We find in China neither that subordination of the human order to the divine order nor that vision of the world as a creation born of ritual and maintained by ritual which are part of the mental universe of India.  (Gernet, p. 28)

To make this a little clearer, there never was anything like the West's "Prince-Bishops" in China.

CLUELESS AT MEDIAITE

Andrew Kirell thinks that because the Meet the Press panel has two "journalists" pitted against two conservatives, the press must be liberal.  I suppose Kirell's post is good Drudge bait but it is also clearly comes from someone ignorant of the real relation between liberals and the press.

We liberals (e.g., Atrios, Glenn Greenwald) have been complaining for at least a decade that the MSM press rarely invites real liberals on these talk shows. 

THIS IS CREEPY

I was reading this post by Charles Pierce about Mitten$ acceptance speech and came across this:

Now is the moment when we can stand up and say, "I'm an American. I make my destiny. And we deserve better! My children deserve better! My family deserves better. My country deserves better!"

That brought to mind Timothy McVeigh and the horror he perpetrated:

For his last words, McVeigh chose the poem "Invictus," which ends in these lines:

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.