Month: April 2012
Obama Holds Significant Edge with Female Voters
52% to 43%
President Obama holds a nine-point lead over Mitt Romney, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll finds. The survey indicates female voters back Obama over Romney by 16 points, 55% to 39%, virtually unchanged from an 18-point advantage among women for the president in CNN polling last month.
One of the Bums Says to Fire the Bums
Congress today is a stagnant pond that needs to be drained and refilled with a steady stream of new public servants. I’m a fan of the Jack Welch principle in reverse for Congress … fire 90 percent of members every election and only keep the 10 percent who were productive.
— Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), ripping into his colleagues in a new book out today, The Debt Bomb, noting the U.S. Senate is “heavily sedated.”
Social Media Is Making Us Mentally, Physically Ill
Social media — from Facebook to Twitter — have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic) — and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill.
— Stephen Marche, writing in The Atlantic.
U.S. Tax Code Nears 4 Million Words
3.8 million
Number of words contained in the U.S. tax code; William Shakespeare’s collected works (plays, sonnets, etc.) amount to only around 900,000 words.
Penguin Bites Newt Gingrich
We imagine the penguin was just standing its ground.
Newt was nipped on the finger by a penguin during a private tour of the famous St. Louis zoo on Friday before he spoke to the National Rifle Association convention, zoo officials confirmed on Monday.
Gingrich, who is trailing in the Republican race for the White House and is under pressure to withdraw, passed unscathed through Big Cat Country and avoided contact with the crocodiles in the Herpetarium. But his visit took a turn when a Magellanic penguin pecked at the candidate’s hand.
“He was nipped on the finger by a penguin,” zoo public relations director Susan Gallagher said. “A Band-Aid took care of the injury.”
Romney Advocated Raising Energy Costs in 2010 – Rails Against It in 2012
For the past few weeks, Mitt Romney, his surrogates and primary opponents have been railing against the rise in gas prices and, of course, blaming the surge in crude oil prices in world markets on Pres. Obama. Here is a sampling of their spin from Elizabeth Kolbert writing in the New Yorker:
“Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens.”
– Romney in 2010[Romney] called on President Barack Obama to fire three of his Cabinet members: the Energy Secretary, Steven Chu; the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar; and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson. According to Romney, the three have spent the past few years carrying out a not-so-secret plan to raise the price of gasoline at the pump. Only by firing the “gas-tax trio,” Romney told Fox News, can the President demonstrate that he did not approve of this plan. “Time for them to go,” Romney said.
Romney’s remarks came just days after Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, also on Fox, accused the Administration of driving up the cost of gas in the service of its “radical” agenda. “The reality is, gasoline prices have doubled under this President—highest prices for oil and gasoline in a hundred and fifty years,” Jindal said. “People used to think it was because of incompetence from the Obama Administration on energy. I think it’s because of ideology.” (As far as “reality” goes, Jindal’s characterization of gas prices is inaccurate; they were higher in 2008, under President George W. Bush.) Romney and Jindal, meanwhile, were echoing comments made by Newt Gingrich, who accused the President of adhering to a “radical ideology, which wants to artificially raise the cost of energy.” And Gingrich was following Rick Santorum, who, back in February, declared that Obama’s energy policies are based on a “phony theology” that “elevates the earth above man.
But in Romney’s ironically titled book, “No Apology,” published in 2010, he pushed the opposite approach. “Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens,” he wrote back then. “…It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth.”
Third Poll in a Row Finds Romney Ahead of Obama
Dan Amira at New York Magazine:
One poll showing Mitt Romney leading President Obama could be a fluke. [1] Two polls? [2] A bit less likely to be a fluke. But three polls in a row, especially when one of them is a Gallup survey of 2,265 registered voters, probably deserves some attention. [3] Yes, even as InTrade shows Obama with a 61 percent chance of winning in November, and even as conservative pundits like George Will talk about a second Obama term as if it’s a foregone conclusion, the reality is that Mitt Romney has beaten Obama in the three national polls taken since Rick Santorum dropped out, and is therefore, at least for the moment, winning the (extremely nascent) general election.
Owner of Hollywood Trade Magazine ‘Variety’ Exits Right-Wing Push Group ALEC
Now ten companies have left:
Reed Elsevier — a personal information provider (of services such as Lexis-Nexis) — and American Traffic Solutions — a provider of traffic technology solutions — have become the 9th and 10th companies to drop ALEC.
Reed Elsevier stated that the campaign to highlight ALEC’s promotion of measures that disempower and disenfranchise minorities played a role in its decision. “We made the decision after considering the broad range of criticism being leveled at ALEC,” said a Reed Elsevier spokesman.
American Traffic Solutions spokesman Charles Territo said his group’s decision not to renew its membership with ALEC “was based on how best to allocate our resources.”
To recap, here is the list of companies that have dropped ALEC so far:
Ronald Reagan Supported What His Party Now Calls Class Warfare on the Rich
Pres. Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1985:
We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary, and that’s crazy. […] Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?
Think Progress, Oct. 3, 2011:
