The reason was always obvious, but hearing Rachel Maddow explain why Republicans hate unions put a level of simplicity to the topic that anyone and everyone should get… even Republicans.
Month: May 2012
Voters classified as professionals and service workers support President Obama, while Republican challenger Mitt Romney leads among executives and managers, reports the Gallup Poll.
Overall, among all workers, Romney leads 47%-45%, a statistical tie when the margin of error is factored in.
Obama leads 51%-43% among those classified as “professionals,” including lawyers, doctors, scientists, teachers, engineers, nurses, and accountants. Of the entire sample, 24 percent as classified as professionals.
The president has a 13-point lead among the 13% of the sample described as “service workers,” including police officers, firefighters, waiters, fast-food workers, and janitorial workers.
Romney leads the president 49%-42% among managers and executives, and 53%-40% among sales workers.
Categories
The Truth Behind the Florida Poll
The headline number was Romney 47% Obama 41% in the Quinnipiac poll of Florida voters released today. It’s too bad that the media can’t read a poll effectively or analyze its results.
The search for the relevant numbers requires that you scroll all the way to the bottom of the poll and click on the Demographic Summary link. A Word document will open (and open your mind) and reveal that the pollsters seriously oversampled Independents, and undersampled Democrats. From the survey:
PARTY IDENTIFICATION – Generally speaking, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?
PARTY IDENTIFICATION
Republican 34% 640
Democrat 31 493
Independent 29 507
Other/DK/NA 6 82
First of all, I love the “or what” part of the question. Can’t Quinnipiac come up with other language, such as “or other political party?”
Second, the actual voter registration split in Florida is:
R=36%
D=40%
I=24%
As you can see, Democrats were underpolled to the tune of 9%. True, Republicans were also undersampled, but relative to their actual numbers, not by much. If anything, the oversampling of Independents should be of some concern for Obama, since they are probably the difference in the poll.
Usually Quinnipiac is a solid pollster, but on this one they missed the boat.
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What’s the major difference between Democrats and Republicans? No, it’s not that Republicans think the solution to our economic woes is giving more money to very rich people while Democrats think the rich aren’t paying their fair share. And no, it’s not that Democrats appear to represent the needs of the middle class people while Republicans definitely go to bat for Corporations. The major difference between the two is one group will go to the grave defending their beliefs, no matter how wrong those beliefs are, while the other group have proven time and time again that they have no backbone.
The unfortunate and early passing of Andrew Breitbart is a perfect example of how Republicans are. Andrew was a hero among his fellow conservatives especially when he was wrong. We all remember how the conservative bloggers, news agencies like Fox News and even some Republican politicians jumped to Breitbart’s defense when it was proven that he falsified a video of Shirley Sherrod, wrongly claiming that she was racially biased against a white farmer. And although the facts later showed that Breitbart was wrong, he refused to apologize. On March 1st. 2012, Andrew Breitbart died and while many expressed happiness in his passing, I was only able to issue the following tweet:
What’s sad about Andrew Breitbart’s death, is that he didn’t get the chance to apologize for misleading millions. #p2 #tcot
— Ezra Grant (@EzKool) March 1, 2012
But on the Democratic side, things are totally different. Democrats it seems are on a mission to throw each other under the bus especially when they are on the right side of an issue, and this week, we’ve seen multiple examples of this.
It started with Cory Booker on Meet The Press. Although Mr. Booker is considered a surrogate of the Obama administration, Booker went against the administration and sided with Mitt Romney on an issue Democrats should easily be winning. The issue that caused Booker to abandon the Democratic ship has to do with Mitt Romney’s claims of being a better “Jobs Creator” than President Obama. Romney cites his “business experiences” as his primary qualifier for being president and regularly tells his audience how beneficial this experience would be in “fixing the economy.”
As it turns out, Romney’s business experience has nothing to do with “creating jobs.” Over the course of his work at Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s primary objective was making a profit for himself and his partners by any means necessary. Often times, thousands of hardworking middle class Americans lost their jobs, pensions and health care so that Mitt Romney could achieve his primary objective. The profit-making goal of what Romney did at Bain was often called “Destructive Capitalism,” and that description came from Mitt Romney himself.
So it would seem that an examination of Romney’s record at Bain is not only warranted, but necessary. And the Obama re-election team are putting out web ads almost daily, detailing how Romney was more of a job destroyer than a job creator. Seems like the right thing to do, right? Not if you’re Cory Booker. Sunday on Meet The Press, Booker – the Obama surrogate – said this;
I have to say from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. It’s to me, we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they have done a lot to support businesses to grow businesses and this to me, I’m very comfortable.
The last point I’ll make is, this kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides. It’s nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough, stop attacking private equity, stop attacking Jeremiah Wright. This stuff has got to stop.
Realizing the huge political mistake he made, Booker later explained that he is for Obama and would do all he can to help the President win re-election. But the damage was already done as the Romney campaign took Booker’s words and made their own ad in support of Romney’s Bain activities.
Cory Booker however, was not the only Democrat to throw the President under the bus on this issue. Ed Randell, a former Governor of Pennsylvania told Buzzfeed that he too was “very disappointed” in the Obama ads questioning Romney’s business accolades.
“I think they’re very disappointing,” Rendell said of the ads attacking Bain. “I think Bain is fair game, because Romney has made it fair game. But I think how you examine it, the tone, what you say, is important as well.”
As for Booker, “I admire him,” Rendell said. “People in politics should tell the truth. He could have qualified it better, he could have framed it better, but if you’re in this business, none of us like negative ads.
The Hill is reporting at least a half-dozen high profile Democrats joining the chorus against the President including “Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a widely respected member of Congress, who stopped short of criticizing the president, but made it clear that the campaign should pivot.
“It’s done,” she said. “Go on to other things now.”
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) told The Hill, “I think the average American … hopes that this campaign will focus on competing visions for how to strengthen our economy, help create jobs and move the country forward.”
It is still young in the 2012 Presidential campaign season. With the huge donations flowing to Congress from Wall Street and private equity firms like Bain Capital, expect more Democrats to agree with Romney and come out against the President. We all know that Republicans cater to the rich and their big donors, and now we can safely say that Democrats do the same thing too.
And that’s one thing the two parties have in common – kissing the ring of the rich for more donations.
“I figured a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers,” he says.
“Build a great, big, large fence — 150- or 100-mile long — put all the lesbians in there . . . do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals, and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out.
“Feed ’em, and you know what?” Worley continues. “In a few years they’ll die. Do you know why? They can’t reproduce.”
Those comments were made by a pastor… in the church… on the pulpit… where preaching about the everlasting love of Christ was supposed to be done. His name is Pastor Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, N.C, and his sermon on May 13th about killing gays and lesbians was apparently his way of saving them.
President Obama was asked about the whole Cory Booker situation today and below is his response. I sense a little hint of someone who is fired up and ready to go… with a little annoyance mixed in. A great combination.Can you tell?
So on Sunday’s Meet The Press, Cory Booker made some news. He criticized the Obama administration for running ads questioning Mitt Romney’s connection to Bain and Romney’s claims of being a job creator. Booker called the ads “nauseating.”
Needless to say Booker – a Democratic Mayor from Newark New Jersey – received a huge amount of backlash from the social media and other prominent Democrats, causing him to later release a web video praising President Obama and expressing his everlasting love and support of the President.
But it was too late, the damage was already done.
And now we’re starting to see why this very popular Democratic Mayor spoke up against the Obama administration and in defense to the Romney campaign. Thanks to some investigative work by Think Progress, it seems that Romney’s Bain was a huge donor to the Booker 2002 campaign.
A ThinkProgress examination of New Jersey campaign finance records for Booker’s first run for Mayor — back in 2002 — suggests a possible reason for his unease with attacks on Bain Capital and venture capital. They were among his earliest and most generous backers.
Contributions to his 2002 campaign from venture capitalists, investors, and big Wall Street bankers brought him more than $115,000 for his 2002 campaign. Among those contributing to his campaign were John Connaughton ($2,000), Steve Pagliuca ($2,200), Jonathan Lavine ($1,000) — all of Bain Capital. While the forms are not totally clear, it appears the campaign raised less than $800,000 total, making this a significant percentage.
He and his slate also jointly raised funds for the “Booker Team for Newark” joint committee. They received more than $450,000 for the 2002 campaign from the sector — including a pair of $15,400 contributions from Bain Capital Managing Directors Joshua Bekenstein and Mark Nunnelly. It appears that for the initial campaign and runoff, the slate raised less than $4 million — again making this a sizable chunk.
My wife has given me permission to gloat a bit after I said this about Facebook, and Wal-Mart, by-the-by, yesterday on this very same blog. The reason? Wall Street had a nice day today, but the ‘book fell on its Face, dropping to $34.03, almost $4 from its opening last week. Meanwhile, a real company that makes real products that are really, really popular and, by-the-by, expensive relative to their competition, Apple, climbed 5.8% (%!) to $561.28.
This spells short-term trouble for Facebook and other social networking sites considering going public. Perhaps it’s just the leftover blahs from the past few weeks. Perhaps it’s the lingering blah form the remnants of Recession George. Perhaps this is a blip and the stock will rise commensurate with the hype as the economy improves.
Perhaps, but I don’t think so.
Facebook will never be like Apple or Google until they actually have something to sell that doesn’t involve people checking the box on a privacy policy that prints out at Moby Dick-like length and, by-the-by doesn’t really protect your privacy. They have loads of information, but now have to find a way to sell it in a responsible, green, diversity-friendly way.
I wish them every good luck with that.
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Appearing on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Show today, Mitt Romney’s senior campaign adviser said that Mitt Romney created more jobs during his time as Massachusetts Governor, than President Obama created nationwide. Said Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s adviser;
“With respect to Mitt Romney’s period of time as the governor of Massachusetts — in that four years as governor he created between 30k and 40k jobs. That is more than President Obama has created for the entire nation. And at Bain Capital, of course the mission was to create value, that’s how the free enterprise system works, but when you create value, when you add value as they did in trying to improve companies, you also add employment, and a rough back-of-the-envelope estimate of how many jobs they created is well in excess of 100,000.”
The Hill is reporting that “Romney made a similar claim early in the Republican primary season, but seemed to walk the number down after it was challenged by his GOP presidential rivals. At later points during the cycle, Romney has said he created “tens of thousands” or “thousands” of jobs.
The Romney campaign has not detailed the method it’s using to come to these estimates, but critics say Romney is taking credit for jobs created after his tenure, not subtracting out jobs that were eliminated after his tenure, or taking credit for business deals that he had little to do with.”
But here are some figures everyone can understand, everyone that is, except Mitt Romney and his coons. CNN took a look at just one of President Obama’s policy initiative – the original Stimulus. The report found that:
The stimulus bill passed by Democrats in 2009 with almost universal Republican criticism was split into three parts: Just over $200 billion in tax cuts, about $300 billion in direct spending on projects and other aid to states, and just under $300 billion in social safety-net spending through items such as extended unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the parts of the program that got the most criticism — actual spending on projects and aid packages — was the most effective in creating jobs.
Tax cuts for middle income workers were less effective while tax cuts for the wealthy were deemed the least effective.
Still, the CBO estimates that at least 1.4 million jobs were created and saved by the direct spending alone, and that as many as 3.6 million jobs were produced while stimulus funds were being spent.
And that’s just on the Stimulus. Not being counted in this 3.6 million figure are the jobs created or saved from the auto bailout, or the jobs gained from the 17 different tax cuts the president signed for small businesses. Compare 3.6 million jobs created by the Obama Administration to the “30 to 40 thousand” created by Romney. Anyone with common sense and the most basic knowledge of Math knows which figure is higher. Romney and his surrogates however, are content in preaching to their base.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday said House Speaker John Boehner was right to focus attention on a possible hike in the nation’s debt ceiling, saying it was a “perfect time” to address the nation’s fiscal health, but placing the burden for moving forward with President Obama.
“At some point here, this president needs to become the adult, because the Speaker and I have been the adults in the room, arguing that we need to do something about the nation’s most serious long-term problem,” said McConnell on CBS’s Face the Nation.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) restarted the debate over a possible debt-ceiling hike last week when he called for dollar-for-dollar cuts in exchange for any raise in the limit. Boehner said he feared that without early negotiations on a long-term fiscal plan, lawmakers post-election would only have a few weeks to avoid what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called a “fiscal cliff” with looming cuts to spending and expiring Bush-era tax rates.
[The Hill]
This man is now the leader of the Republican party and fittingly so. For Republicans have slowly became a group of people who are hellbent on doing everything they possible can to lower the education level of Americans. They are actually trying to end the Education Department. So hearing Mitt Romney make this statement earlier this week was not only practical, it was very appropriate.
Oh, and the Obama Re-Election Team created this ad below showing some other things Romney has said. The purpose of the video is to question if Romney remembers these statements, and whether he stands by them too.
Big business has been in the news recently, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. JPMorganChase lost upwards of $3 billion dollars on hedge trades that should not be legal, but that the bank actively lobbied to protect. Hewlett-Packard is laying off 30,000 employees in an attempt to become more competitive, and in a blow to television networks everywhere, Dish Network has developed a DVR that will automatically skip over commercials. Yes, what you just heard was the spinal shiver of a thousand communications executives. From the article:
Ted Harbert, the chairman of NBC Broadcasting, struck a similar note at his network’s presentation on Monday, calling the Dish feature an insult to the television industry. “Just because technology gives you the ability to do something, does that mean you should? Not always,” he said.
An insult? Hardly. Aren’t we supposed to honor creativity and problem solving? That’s what Mitt Romney says. And he’s destroyed leveraged lots of companies.
Two companies stand out at present: Wal-Mart is in the news for nefarious activities (again) and Facebook just went public. But the stock price, which was supposed to soar, didn’t even get as high as your average Michigan tree (they are the right height, you know). Mark Zuckerberg made a bundle. You probably made $1.28. Though to be fair, a problem at Nasdaq might have had something to do with the price, according to this article. We’ll have to wait until Monday for confirmation.
It’s simply not OK for a company to act as Wal-Mart has acted over the years and expect that simple apologies would wipe away the tainted profits. Wal-Mart denied its employees medical insurance coverage by manipulating hours and schedules. It fought against unionization and continued to pay low wages until protests uncovered its hypocrisy. Some managers even locked in the cleaning staff overnight in an attempt to make sure they squeezed every penny from their labor. Now Wal-Mart is accused of bribery and covering up potential crimes in Mexico (and possible the United States, if this story is correct).
These activities are unacceptable. They were unacceptable when Wal-Mart first practiced them and they are unacceptable now, and any 10-year-old would tell you that people should not treat their employees this way. There is no apology that will sway me otherwise. Yes, Wal-Mart’s prices are low, but the store near me in New Jersey is dirty and I get a dirty feeling just walking into its front door. It’s as if I’m giving up some of my self-respect just by shopping there. So I don’t. I know others who feel the same way.
Facebook is another matter. Now that it’s made some people very, very wealthy, it’s going to be more of a prime target than it already has been. I won’t buy anything from Facebook, I don’t take its recommendations when they pop up on my page, and I really don’t like the new layout I’ve been forced to accept. I love my friends, but I don’t respond to their requests for birthdays or games or school pages because I find the Facebook notice that comes with these invitations, the one that says “this application will have access to all of my information” much too intrusive. Perhaps I wasn’t built for social networking. Perhaps I’m too old to appreciate the ease at which Facebook can improve my life. No matter. Facebook will not see a penny from me.
And that’s the real danger isn’t it? Haven’t we been told that Facebook’s value lies in its collected data? Our likes and dislikes, entertainment preferences and group memberships? We have become a world of sharers, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, I can see the backlash. Facebook will go too far (if they haven’t already) and use our information for purposes that will go beyond the pale. The reaction will be swift and intense. Public pressure will force Facebook and/or Congress to scale back its data mining. Facebook will lose the ability to track our movements, and thus its ability to make money. It will have billions of users, but its stock price will be stuck at $16.
When I think of all the advertising and public relations these companies pay for, you’d think they would pay closer attention to their actions. Perhaps they will adjust and thrive. They’ll just have to do it without my money.
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