Month: April 2012

Democrats More Anti-Mormon Than Republicans

Buck Banks

One reason Democrats may be more anti-Mormon than Republicans is that Democrats, on average, are more secular. Devout Protestants, Catholics, and Jews may be more tolerant of Mormonism because they understand from firsthand experience the comfort and strength that religious commitment brings. Many secular Democrats, by contrast, may start with the assumption that religious orthodoxy produces irrationality and intolerance… Democrats may exhibit greater suspicion of Mormonism, in other words, because they exhibit greater suspicion of all organized religion. It’s just that anti-Mormonism is still socially acceptable enough to confess to a pollster.

Peter Beinhart, writing in the Daily Beast in the wake of a recent Gallup poll that found that 27% of Democrats would not vote for a Mormon under any circumstances, versus 18% of Republicans.

Issa Claims Obama’s the Most Corrupt Administration Ever

Buck Banks

We are busy in Washington with a corrupt government, with a government that I said perhaps because of the money, the amount of TARP and stimulus funds, was going to be the most corrupt government history and it is proving to be just exactly that. This money going though the hands of political leaders is corrupting the process, whether it is Solyndra, GSA or a number of other scandals.

— Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), to Bloomberg TV, asserting that the Obama government is “proving to be” the “most corrupt in history.”

You, Too, Can Predict the Election Outcome

Buck Banks

Political scientists believe you can get a pretty good prediction for a presidential candidate’s election chances based on just three pieces of data.

According to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:

The final model uses just three pieces of information that have been found to be particularly predictive: economic growth in the year of the election, as measured by the change in gross domestic product during the first three quarters; the president’s approval rating in June; and whether one of the candidates is the incumbent.

That may seem a bit thin. But it calls 12 of the past 16 elections right. The average error in its prediction of the two-party vote share is less than three percentage points.

I used the new economic figures released yesterday (2.3%) and Obama’s latest approval rating from Gallup (50%), and the thing calculated that the incumbent wins 89.5 percent of the time when the economy is growing a 2.2 percent and his approval rating is 50 percent.

So go here, fiddle around with the data and start predicting.

GOP Hate Group Leader: Romney Spokesman Is Gay, Therefore a Slut, Which Makes Him a Security Risk

Jon Ponder

Bryan Fisher, the Republican Party-aligned hate group leader who is an influential voice among members of Mitt Romney’s teavangelical base continued his attacks yesterday on Richard Grenell, the openly gay Republican whom Romney named as his spokesman on international relations:

“Homosexuals are about short-lived relationships and frequent anonymous sexual encounters,” he said on his radio program. “This is very common in the homosexual community. Now whether Grenell indulges in that, I don’t know.”

Fischer said that although Grenell had been in a long-term relationship, he suspected that the relationship was not monogamous.

“There are some homosexuals who will admit — this is not coming from the right-wing, this is homosexuals themselves in surveys — that they have had 500 to as many as 1000 sexual partners over the course of a lifetime,” he continued.

“This is endemic the homosexual community, these random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters and that becomes a significant issue when we’re talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy.”

Reasons Not to Choose Jeb

Buck Banks

If Jeb Bush is to be Romney’s running mate, it would mean that in seven of nine presidential elections there would be a Bush on the Republican ticket. And it gets hard to argue that we’re not a tribal society at that point.

— George Will, saying there’s no way Mitt Romney will pick former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) as his running mate.

By Hiring Gay Spox, Romney Told Us to ‘Drop Dead,’ Says Hate Group Rep

Jon Ponder

Well, this was predictable. The hate-group wing of Mitt Romney’s teavangelical base is not happy that Romney has hired Richard Grenell, who is openly gay, as his campaign spokesman on international relations. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, which is on the list of hate groups maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, responded on Twitter:

Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman. If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.

Shake, shake, shake.

Dogs Against Romney Founder: ‘If Obama Said the Dog Enjoyed Being Eaten, Romney Would Have an Argument’

Jon Ponder

I viewed the push-back as a desperate move to try to blunt the impact the dog-on-roof story is having on Romney. No one holds Obama accountable for what was fed to him by his parents as a 6-year-old in Indonesia. If Obama had chosen to eat dog as an adult, in America, and told everyone the dog enjoyed being eaten, Romney would have an argument.

– Scott Crider, founder of Dogs Against Romney, when asked why he thought Romney supporters were pushing the story that Obama was fed dog meat as a child.