How to read a Poll. (No, seriously, I got help from a Math Prof. and everything!)

It’s a truth of American Political Life that a lot of Americans just don’t trust polls, or polling for that matter.

Usually, it has to do with feelings. There’s a gut level feeling a lot of Americans have, and when a poll doesn’t match their gut they tend to discount not just the poll, but polling in general.

It’s not really fair if you think about it. Polling, as well as Statistics itself, are actual provable science. Polling does work…when it’s allowed to work.

Let’s take an example from a poll that was released on August 21st, 2012 from the firm of Foster McCollum White Baydoun, which, according to Nate Silver of the New York Times’ respected FiveThirtyEight Blog, conducts polls for Democratic candidates as well as independently.

They have Mitt Romney with a lead in Florida.

Okay.  Not too weird. Mitt and the President have been flipping Florida back and forth in recent polls. Most of the last polls give Obama the lead.

Foster, McCollum, White and Baydoun gave Mitt Romney…a 14.6 point lead.

Huh?

Excuse me??

If I have one tremendous advantage in life, it's that if I have any kind of mathematical question, I can pick up the phone and call an actual Professor of Mathematics and get my questions answered.

Of course, the fact that this Math Professor is also my Father, kinda guarantees he'll take my calls, at least every once in a while.

By way of background, Dad is a former Professor of Mathematics at the University of Maryland-College Park, former Chair of the Math Department at the University of Maryland-College Park, and currently a Visiting Professor of Mathematics at his Alma Mater, Rice University in Houston, Texas.

(Side note: While Dad has a fairly impressive Mathematical resume, but he’d want me to emphasize that he’s not a Statistician).

“Dad,” I asked. “What the @#$’s up with this poll??”

“Read me the internals,” he replied.

Now, what are the internals? Internals are shorthand term of for all these concepts we’re going to be talking about: Sample size, margin of error, etc.

I cracked open the document from Foster, McCollum, White and Baydoun, and read him what I could find…

…and then, he started laughing. Out loud. On the phone.

Unfortunately, Dad tends to speak in precise Mathematical terminology, only some of which I can understand without the aid of a dictionary. Fortunately, peering further down into Nate’s column, I got a good easy-to-understand reason why Dad was laughing so hard:

Once in a great while, a poll comes along with methodology that is so implausible that it deserves some further comment. The Foster McCollum White Baydoun poll of Florida is one such survey. 

The poll was weighted to a demographic estimate that predicts that just 2 percent of Florida voters will be 30 or younger. It’s a decent bet that turnout will be down some among younger voters this year, but that isn’t a realistic estimate. In 2008, according to exit polls, 15 percent of voters in Florida were between 18 and 30. 

The poll also assumed that 10 percent of voters will be between the ages of 31 and 50. In 2008, the actual percentage was 36 percent, according to the exit survey. 

The poll projected Latinos to be 7 percent of the turnout in Florida, against 14 percent in 2008. And it has African-American turnout at 10 percent, down from 13 percent. 

If the turnout numbers look something like that in November, then Mr. Obama will lose Florida badly. He’ll also lose almost every other state; his electoral map might look a lot like Walter Mondale’s. 

But the share of voters 50 and younger in Florida is not going to drop all the way from half the electorate to roughly one-tenth of it, as the poll assumed. That is far beyond the range you can get from reasonable disagreement about methods, or from sampling error. It looks like the result from a badly-designed statistical model that never got a sanity check.

See? Right at the end there, he said it plain as day. It was a badly designed poll from the outset, all but guaranteeing a result no one should believe.

But what’s worse? Nate Silver still uses this data in his Polling Aggregator Site.

Everyone is.

All of the sudden, we’re looking at a closer election from the Polling because of what one Poll did to Florida, even though the results are more than suspect.

Unlike me, you may not have a PhD in Mathematics on speed dial. You just read the results of these polls, and react to the consequences.

But what if you could look at a polls so-called “Internals”, and decide for yourself out if they’re worth anything?

What if you could read a poll, and not have to depend on anyone on CNN or MSNBC to do it for you?

Here are a few helpful hints:

First, you need to understand how statistics work. And I’m bringing this up because this is the image I’ll go back to again and again.

I want you to imagine a bowl of Vegetable Soup, filled with tomatoes, beans, onions, what have you. It’s a big bowl, and you want to get good taste of what it’s like. So you dip your spoon in.

Well, that spoonful of soup? That’s pretty much what a poll is. When you went in, you hopefully got a representative sampling of tomatoes, beans, onions, and what have you. Odds are, though…you didn’t. It’s a tiny spoon, and it’s a big bowl. Maybe you get more broth than beans. Maybe you get more onions than tomatoes. Mathematically this is the concept behind margin of error, another thing you see referenced in polls all the time.

Of course, if you used a bigger spoon, you’d get a better sampling of what’s in the soup, and thus a lower margin of error.

Which brings us to our next concept…


The first thing a Pollster does before taking a poll is create a model.

Model, you hear that all the time. What does it mean? In our Vegetable Soup scenario, it means the Pollster is going to guess in advance how many beans are in your bowl, how many tomatoes, onions, etc.

In Politics, the Pollster is going to guess in advance who’s going to show up at the polls: how many old people, how many young, how many blacks, whites, Latinos, etc. Sometimes, they use data based on previous elections. Sometimes, they’ll stretch outward and try to guess the future.

But the key word is…guess. It may be a guess backed by a lot of empirical data, in the end, it’s still a guess.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. If the Pollster is guessing what’s in the bowl before he’s even taken a bit, what’s the point of the poll?

And thus, you discover one of the dangers of watching a lot of polls. You are dependent on the models they use, which, nine times out of ten, you’re not going to see. (And that tenth time, you may not understand without a PhD in Mathematics on speed dial).

You saw this a lot in the 2008 Election. It was a wave election, a change election, one that President Obama won, but one in which he had been trailing in a lot of early polling, especially during the primaries. Why? Because a lot of the early modeling was based on a false assumption. It was based on who showed up in 2004, not who was going to show up in 2008.

For the purposes of this election, as in the example above, if the Pollster decides a lot more old folks than young are going to show up at the polls in Florida, then guess what…President Obama is going to get swamped. Of course, guess what happens in the reverse is true?

So long story short, before you go panicking about any one poll, knowing a little about the Pollster’s model matters. If you don’t trust the model, you can’t trust the poll.


Next, you have to look at the sample size.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a Poll that showed Mitt Romney with a healthy lead in a National poll. The lead made no kind of sense to me at the time (or ever). I mentioned it to my Dad, and as always, asked me to crack open those internals.

I told my Father that this poll was conducted with a sample size of a thousand respondents, with a margin of error of plus or minus four points.

A half hour later, when Dad stopped laughing out loud, he was able to tell me that the poll was a joke.

Sample Size is just how many people answered all the pollster’s questions. The Pollster will start out calling 6,000-7,000 people. Most of them won’t be home. You call 6,000-7,000 people to get 1,000-1,500 respondents.

The poll Dad and I were laughing about had a sample of 1,000 people...nationally.  It was a decent size for a State poll (the Foster, McCollum, White and Baydoun survey, for example had 1,503 respondents, but they were only polling Florida).  But this poll wasn't in one state, but all 50. Hence Dad’s laughter. It was too frighteningly small of a sample to give you an impression of anything. It’d be like, instead of using a spoon to sample the soup, you used the end of a toothpick instead.

For something like a State Poll, a thousand respondents is a good sized sample. For a National one, you want something a bit larger. Problem is, most Pollsters work for news organizations, and they have things called deadlines. You can probably put a poll into the field, calling 6,000 people and getting a 1,000 respondents, and you could probably do it in a overnight (at most a two or three days). But of course, the quicker the turnaround, the worse a poll is going to be, the lower the sample, and the higher the margin of error.

So remember, your average Newspaper Poll isn’t interested in the quality of the poll, they’re interested in beating the other guy with the results.  Speed  is all that matters, even if it ruins the poll.


How the Poll is gathered matters.

This is another area that allows Pollsters to play games with the results. Calling people on the Telephone and asking them stuff is the traditional way of putting a poll in the field. That’s all well, and good, but the problem is what kind of phones people use has changed over the last 5 years or so. Young people are more likely to be on cell phones instead of land lines. Older folks (not all, but a lot) tend to be on land lines, not cell phones.

So what do you think happens if a Pollster calls nothing but landlines?

Yeah, your sample will skew older, and affect the result.

The same thing happens with Registered Voters versus Likely Voters. One group will give you a Poll answer one way, another the other. Every one of these choices will affect the outcome of the poll, and these decisions are made in advance of the poll being taken.


State Polls are more important to you than National Polls.

This is something Nate Silver harps on over and over and over again…and he’s right. Why? It’s simple 9th Grade Civics.

Despite everything you may have heard, we the people do not decide the results of Presidential elections. We only indirectly decide them.

The winner will not be determined by the number of votes cast. They are decided by Electors, as in Electoral College. Electors are chosen by the winners of individual states on November 6th. It is mathematically possible for a Presidential candidate to lose the Popular Vote, and still win. It has happened three times in our history, the last being a particularly nasty event in December of 2000.

In the end, the State Polls matter more because it is by winning our individual States that we choose the Electors. National Polls are interesting in a general “taking your temperature” kind of a way. But what really matters is the States.


How the questions are asked matters.

This is trickier to explain, because it’s hard to quantify. Simply put, how you phrase the questions, and in exchange, explain the answers matters. The simplest turn of phrase in a question can affect how the respondent answers. The most extreme example of this is so-called “Push Polling” where the question is phrased in such a way as to guarantee an answer for example.

“Did you know Candidate X favors the kicking of puppies?”

Who’s NOT going to react negatively to that?

Questions can be asked in far more subtle ways that can pull answers one way or the other. Pollsters know this. They’ve been doing this for years, and the hucksters of the world (Rasmussen, anyone?) can potentially skew things anyway they want.


The individual ups and downs of poll don’t matter, all that matters is the trendline.

You’ve seen it yourself. If you look at a polling graph it looks as though its made of broken glass with hundreds of little jags and shards.

Polls blip up and polls blip down, and much hay (i.e., panic) is made over those individual blips.

My father calls those blips “squiggles.”

He has one bit of Political advice that doesn’t vary from year to year:

Stop looking at the squiggles.

Don’t tell me who went up a point and who went down a point day to day, that’s useless. Yet, Media outlets do it all the time. A poll comes out Monday, showing Obama up by 5. Pundit strum and drang begins. What is Mitt Romney doing wrong, blah-blah-blah. 24 hours later, another poll comes out (from a different polling company with a different sample, questionnaire and margin of error, mind you) showing Obama only up by 4. All of the sudden, it’s where did that point go? Why did Obama lose a point? What has he done wrong?

Are you kidding me?

This is the functional equivalent of weighing yourself every day, and freaking over gaining 3/10ths of a pound.

Worse, it’s the equivalent of weighing yourself everyday on your scale at home, then weighing yourself on some other scale, and freaking over the difference. Please, don’t do it.


Finally, remember the main thing, only one poll matters, the one on November 6th, 2012.

We’ve showed them once in 2008, and we’ll show ‘em again in 2012. If our people show up at the polls, if we rush the barricades, if we vote in overwhelming numbers, we can’t lose. Period.


So, that's it. This article won’t make you an expert on polling, but it should give you a clearer understanding of how it works.

If you want to look a the sites my Dad really likes as far as the Math goes (and God help you if you do), he loves the Princeton Election Consortium and Dr. Sam Wang. Dad loves what he’s doing with Neuro-science and mathematics.   Right now, Dr. Wang is predicting a 89% chance of an Obama win. Dr. Wang has refined his formula, and he’s been right for the last twenty years.

Dad also likes Nate Silver and Fivethirtyeight.com at the New York Times. The only reservation he and I both have is that Nate has decided to use the State of the Economy in his data, and we’re both not sure what Econ data he’s using, and how much of it, and what quality. Basically, we thought what he did in 2008 wasn’t broke, so why fix it?

Funny. Weren't we just talking about "Son of Boss" yesterday? (VIDEO)

Newt Gingrich, the very model of bull@#$%, racist consistency. (VIDEO)

So lemme get this straight...

The Romney Campaign has no proof...apparently whatsoever...that the President has removed the Work Requirement for Welfare reform.

But they're going to keep saying it anyway?

Well, when Richard Trumka's happy, I'm happy...

Via TPM:

Labor and President Obama haven’t always seen to eye. But AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says he couldn’t be happier with the way the campaign is shaping up.

“I think the president’s making the case right now that he should be making — that this is about two different types of economy,” Trumka told reporters Thursday at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

It wasn’t always this way. After Republicans took over the House in 2010, the White House pivoted to deficit reduction, agreeing to major spending cuts as the GOP threatened to shut down the government — or worse. Trumka and other labor officials were put off by the new emphasis on trimming government and warned it was a political as well as economically dangerous.

But last year, with the recovery unexpectedly slowing down and Democrats convinced there was no overcoming the Republican Party’s anti-tax fervor, Obama launched a new legislative push for the American Jobs Act, a bill designed to stimulate the economy with tax cuts, relief for state government and infrastructure investments.

“I don’t want to say ‘I told you so,’ but last Labor Day he started talking about jobs and the economy and creating jobs and a different vision, and he’s not let up since then,” Trumka said.

Robert Samuelson...stopped clock.

It should come as no surprise that I can't stand the Washington Post's (cough-cough) Economics Columnist, Robert Samuelson...mostly because I don't think he knows much about Economics.

Let's see here's me blasting him (however briefly) for saying the Stimulus wouldn't work. Here's me saying outright Krugman's smarter than he is (no surprise, only one of them has a Nobel Prize).  Here's me saying that as long as Samuelson continues to work there, the Washington Post will remain a substandard newspaper.

But you know what they say, a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Thus, I present to you...Robert Samuelson...stopped clock:

There seems to be a Democratic mole inside Mitt Romney’s campaign. Could it be Romney himself? Well, of course not. But considering the campaign’s behavior, it might just as well be. President Obama and his allies have cast Romney as a wealthy fat cat who’s out of touch with everyday Americans and who would use his presidency to enrich the already rich. To counter this damning image, the last thing you’d expect Romney to do is embrace a tax plan favoring the super-rich.

Which is exactly what he has done.

After examining Romney’s proposal, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center concluded that households with incomes exceeding $200,000 would receive tax cuts; meanwhile, taxes would rise for the other 95 percent of the population. Taxpayers making more than $1 million would receive an average cut of $87,000; those making less than $200,000 would pay an average of $500 more. Romney denies that he would raise taxes on the middle class but has provided no evidence that the Tax Policy Center’s analysis is wrong.

What can he be thinking?

Let's get one thing straight, I still think Samuelson's an idiot, and I'd still fire him yesterday for being fundamentally antithetical to his job description (a writer about the Economy who knows nothing about the economy)...

...but when someone as idiotic, biased and right-winged as Samuelson thinks Mitt Romney is out of touch, boy o' boy...Mitt Romney is out of touch.

Wow. Did Mitt Romney really run a Mafia-style Tax Scheme while at Marriott Corp.? (VIDEO)

It's a little complicated...but it's kinda devastating.

"Son of Boss" is the name of a Tax Scheme used by people understand all 7,300 pages of the U.S. Tax code to get out of paying as much taxes as they can.

Even John McCain was critical of this Tax Shelter...and in his words, that's exactly what it was...a Tax Shelter.

CNN has reported (and the video is right there below), that the IRS has collected $3.2 billion from 18,000 people who have used "Son of Boss", including $29 Million from the Marriott Corporation.

And would anyone care to guess who was head of the audit committee of the Marriott Board of Directors from 1993 to 1998?

C'mon, have you been paying attention to this blog?




In case you're wondering, Edward D. Kleinbard and Peter C. Canellos's original editorial can be found here.  Their new Editorial, talking about Marriott Corp. (as referenced in the video above), can be found here.

What happens when Mitt Romney is called out for lying? (VIDEO)

Nothing. He doesn't answer the question.

President Obama's full remarks in Denver, CO...co-starring Sandra Fluke! (VIDEO)

What is President Obama going to do for Small business? (VIDEO)

We just sold $5 Billion of AIG Stock, and why that's a good thing (VIDEO)

Mitt Romney of 2004 thinks Mitt Romney of 2012 is full of @#$% (VIDEO)

Boehner's quiet admission that he knows his Caucus is NUTS!

Congress did something halfway sensible today:

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid have reached a short-term spending deal that would remove the possibility of a government shutdown from the politically sensitive fall campaign season, the two announced Tuesday.

Under the agreement, Congress would agree to fund the government for six months when the fiscal year expires Sept. 30, setting agency spending for the year at $1.047 trillion.

A shutdown, believe it or not, would've been bad for all sides.  While I think it would have finished off the GOP once and for all, do we really want who knows how many Federal Employees out on the street just as Halloween is rolling around, with Thanksgiving and the Pre-Christmas Shopping Season to follow?

Rooting for the bad to give you something good is what Republicans do.

Added to that, have you even known Boehner's caucus to negotiate in good faith?  Yeah, me neither.

Still remains to be seen if Uncle Johnny can wrangle up the votes from his side of the aisle. All I know is Harry will deliver his, as will Nancy.

Remembering Thelma Glass (VIDEO)

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President Obama Speaks at the National Urban League Convention (VIDEO)

This is the speech where the President talks about sensible Gun Control. Because guess what? He's going to lose the Gun Lobby vote.

For some reason, Mitt Romney always assumes he's the smartest guy in the room.

Like...clockwork. Mitttens goes to England. Mittens offends the English.

Mitt Romney’s big international tour got off to a rocky start Thursday morning, as British officials including Prime Minister David Cameron took offense at the Republican candidate’s criticisms over London’s preparedness for the Olympics.

Romney expressed wariness over England’s ability to pull off the Olympics without a hitch, as well as reservations over security.

“You know, it’s hard to know just how well it were turn out — will turn out,” said Romney, who ran the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. “There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the — private security firm not having enough people — the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging.”

The comments did not go over well in Britain. Cameron rebuffed Romney’s criticism during a visit to the Olympic Park in Stratford Thursday morning, according to The Telegraph. “You’re going to see beyond doubt that Britain can deliver,” Cameron said.

I've originally been saying that Mittens thing was "say anything you need to say to close the deal". That's a salesman's mentality, and its worked well for him (and him alone) in the business world. But there's another tick to Mitten's personality that we need to pay attention to, and it could spell disaster for the country should, God forbid, he get elected.

He really thinks that where ever we goes, he's the smartest person in the room. Automatically. It's a near-Newt Gingrich level of myopia.

Worse, he automatically thinks that where ever he goes, he's the best person in the room, morally, spiritually, what have you.

Look at this incident. Mitt ran an Olympics, and thinks he did brilliantly at it. In actuality, it was you and I who did brilliantly at it since it was our Tax money who bailed out the Salt Lake Games.

I mean, seriously, how smart to do you have to be if you're facing a multi-billion dollar hole in your bank account to ask for money?

So, Mittens triumphs, in his mind. Years later, he goes to London, and feels that he should add his two cents to what's going wrong with the London games, since after all, he knows best.

Well, Londoners, having gotten to know him all of 24 hours, figure out that he doesn't know best, and they tell him, right down to Prime Minister Cameron, tell him to stuff it.

This is what terrifies me about a Mitt Romney Presidency. A guy who won't share budgets when it suits his purposes. A guy who doesn't think its any of our business what's in his taxes, when he's applying for a job to be our President, and asking for our votes to do it. This is a guy who just thinks, frankly, he's better than you. Worse, he assumes its the natural order of things, and you should sit back and accept the fact that he's better than you.

There's a distinct possibility that should he win, he might be worse than Bush. Admittedly, that's a very low bar, but if he's in the White House, we might be looking on that 47th in Job Creation Number (that he had as Governor of Massachusetts) with longing fondness.

There's "no active role, whatsoever", and there's what Mitt actually did...

Seriously, at this point, I'm just glad to see Journalism actually happening in this campaign:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has said he had no active role in Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, after he exited in February 1999 to take over Salt Lake City's Winter Olympics bid. But according to Bain associates and others familiar with Romney's actions at the time, he stayed in regular contact with his partners over the following months, tending to his partnership interests and negotiating his separation from the company.

Those familiar with Romney's discussions with his Bain partners said the contacts included several meetings in Boston, the company's home base, but were limited to matters that did not affect the firm's investments or other management decisions. Yet Romney continued to oversee his partnership stakes even as he disengaged from the firm, personally signing or approving a series of corporate and legal documents through the spring of 2001, according to financial reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

"Always" - Obama for America TV Ad (VIDEO)

I do believe this is Sec. Timothy Geithner calling out the Huffington Post... (VIDEO)

Because I know of no Media organization more dedicated to this lie, that HuffPo:

"Tampered"

Back to business as normal...and what do you know? Mittens came out with another ad...and he lied in it...

...again.

President Obama Speaks to the 113th Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VIDEO)

"The Choice" - Obama For America TV Ad (VIDEO)

"Over the next four months you have a choice to make. Not just between two political parties or even two people. It's a choice between two very different plans for our country.

Governor Romney's plan would cut taxes for the folks at the very top, roll back regulations on big banks, and he says that if we do our economy will grow and everyone will benefit.

But you know what? We tried that top-down approach. It's what caused the mess in the first place.

I believe the only way to create an economy built to last is to strengthen the middle class. Asking the wealthy to pay a little more so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way. So that we can afford to invest in education, manufacturing, and homegrown American energy for good middle class jobs. Sometimes politics can seem very small. But the choice you face, it couldn't be bigger."

Charles Blow: Putting the hay down where the goats can get it... (VIDEO)

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Funny you should mention "Blind Trusts" Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin (VIDEO)

So Paul Ryan (he of the Paul Ryan budget which destroys Medicare) goes on Face The Nation, and says this:

“People are not worried about the details as to when Mitt Romney left Bain Capital to save the Olympics or the details about his assets, which are managed by a blind trust for Pete’s sake,” Ryan said on “Face the Nation.” “They’re worried about their jobs and their family’s future.

Funny thing that:

Uhhh, Romney submitted a disclosure form to the Government last month, and may have lied on it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Uhhh, Professor Carmel...you want proof? David Corn of Mother Jones may have found you some proof:

Like all presidential candidates, Romney has to submit a financial disclosure statement to the Office of Government Ethics. He filed his most recent one last month, and the disclosure contains a very clearly stated footnote:

Mr. Romney retired from Bain Capital on February 11, 1999 to head the Salt Lake [Olympics] Organizing Committee. Since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way.

There's no ambiguity there: not involved in Bain operations in any way. But that's not true. 

As I reported, in November 1999, Romney signed a SEC filing that noted he was the "sole shareholder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President" of several Bain entities that had acquired 22 percent of medical-waste firm Stericycle. The form also stated that Romney shared "voting and dispositive power with respect to" 2,116,588 shares of common stock in Stericycle "in his capacity as sole shareholder" of the Bain entities that were part of this $75 million investment. 

To repeat: Romney signed a Bain document pursuant to a $75 million deal. That would appear to qualify as involvement in Bain activity. And according to a Bain spokeswoman, Romney signed such documents more than once. She told me that after February 1999 Romney was a "signatory on certain documents" until his separation agreement with Bain was finalized in 2002.

President Obama's Interview with Scott Thurman of WJLA (VIDEO)

Oh, boy...does this bring back memories.


If, like me, you grew up in the 70s, then the sight of Gordon Petersen leading your evening news coverage was de rigeur. I don't remember a night when me, Mom and Dad weren't sitting around the Dinner Table, and he wasn't on the screen, followed shortly thereafter by Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. And of course, for most of those years, he was paired by Maureen Bunyah...

Of course, that was WUSA (formerly WTOP) Channel 9, the DC CBS Affiliate. Now, they're on Channel 7, the ABC affiliate, because WUSA (run by Gannett) are cheap bastards.

The face and voice of a total weasel (VIDEO)

Mitt Romney, 0

Ethics, 0

Everybody loses.

Vice President Biden's complete speech before the NAACP Convention in Houston, Texas (VIDEO)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Story behind the Bain Story...or how depending on @factcheckdotorg or @GlennKesslerWP for facts can burn you.

Okay, so it turns out Mitt Romney lied (to a possibly criminal degree) about when he left Bain. No surprise there, these are his core ethics at work: do whatever you have to do, say whatever you have to say to close the deal, i.e: win the Presidency.

But the story behind the story is equally as interesting, if not more disturbing, and continues to call into question the quality of so-called "Factchecker" websites like Factcheck.org and Glenn Kessler's column at the Washington Post.

Okay, basically the story is this. The President's Campaign team put out an ad saying that Mitt Romney was responsible for the layoffs perpetrated by Bain Capital. The Annenberg Center's Factcheck.org labeled the attack unfair. The President's team pushed back, putting out a six page letter doubling down on the claim. Factcheck remained unconvinced.

Then, David Corn, he of Mother Jones and MSNBC (soon to be NBC News), picked up the ball and ripped out a really strong piece on his investment in Stericycle, a company that made money disposing of medical waste and aborted fetuses. Here's the key bit from that piece:

In 2001 and 2002, Romney filed Massachusetts state disclosure forms noting he was the 100 percent owner of Bain Capital NY, Inc.—a Bain outfit that was incorporated in Delaware on April 13, 1999—two months after Romney's supposed retirement from the firm. A May 2001 filing with the SEC identified Romney as "a member of the Management Committee" of two Bain entities. And in 2007, the Washington Post reported that R. Bradford Malt, a Bain lawyer, said Romney took a "leave of absence" when he assumed the Olympics post and retained sole ownership of the firm for two more years.

Okay, do we get that? Even though Romney has been saying over and over again that he left Bain in 1999, and has nothing to do, whatsoever with whatever bad stuff they did after that...a Massachusetts state disclosure form and a SEC Filing say otherwise.

And Factcheck and Glenn Kessler's reaction? To stand by their previous, lazy ass reporting.

Thus, David Corn decided to punch back...again:

Romney's actual departure date is significant. If he did fully leave Bain in February 1999, he is better able to argue that he cannot be held responsible for the firm's actions afterward—though he maintained his ownership interest in Bain and its various entities for years and, consequently, benefited from these deals. This past week, the Obama campaign has been tussling over this issue with FactCheck.org, the independent fact-checking organization created by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. After the Obama campaign launched an ad blasting Romney as a "corporate raider" who "shipped jobs to China and Mexico," FactCheck.org called the ad false, partly because Romney had exited Bain in February 1999, prior to the deals in question. In reply, the Obama campaign sent a six-page letter to the group, challenging its determination regarding Romney's departure. But FactCheck.org reaffirmed its initial conclusion and told the Obama-ites their complaint was "all wet." Meanwhile, Dan Primack, a senior editor at Fortune, took issue with my article for noting that the SEC documents undercut the claim that Romney had no participation in any Bain decisions after February 1999.

Both Primack and FactCheck.org were unimpressed by the fact that the Boston Herald reported on February 12, 1999, that Romney was not resigning but taking a leave, during which he would provide Bain "input on investment and key personnel decisions." FactCheck.org pointed out that this story also noted Romney would "leave running day-to-day operations to Bain's executive committee," and the group cited an April 4, 1999, Associated Press story reporting that Romney was overwhelmed by his Olympian task and had no time for Bain. Primack insisted that the Herald story and a July 19, 1999, Bain press release referring to Romney as "currently on a part-time leave of absence" and quoting him speaking for Bain Capital were not all that telling, because when Romney left for Salt Lake City he probably "assumed that he'd still be involved in [Bain] decision-making, albeit from a distance," but ended up not doing that, due to his workload in Utah. Primack said he has "numerous sources," including many who were with Bain, who have told him that Romney did not make any investment-related decisions after February 1999.

What about the various SEC documents—some of which Romney signed—that identify him as controlling assorted Bain entities and large blocs of shares in firms in which Bain invested after February 1999? The Obama campaign letter cited at least 63 SEC filings after March 1, 1999, that describe Bain entities as "wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney." Both Primack and FactCheck.org contended that these documents prove only that Romney continued on as an owner of Bain, not as a decision maker.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo also jumped on the bandwagon.

The gist of the disagreement comes down to this: There’s no question that numerous public filings and some contemporaneous press references say Romney was still running things at Bain after 1999. But his campaign insists that whatever securities filings may have said, in practice, he was so busy running the 2002 Winter Olympics that he actually had no role at Bain after early 1999. That’s possible in theory. But there’s no evidence for it besides self-interested claims by Romney. And there’s plenty of documentary evidence to the contrary. After all, what you tell the SEC is really supposed to be true.

But here’s the thing. I’ve found yet more instances where Romney made declarations to the SEC that he was still involved in running Bain after February 1999. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet noted these.

The documents go into different aspects of Romney’s ownership of various Bain and Bain related assets. But in both Romney had to say what he currently did for a living.

And finally, one of my faves, Steve Benen worked it (providing, by the way, a lot of the timeline for this piece):

What Josh highlighted were two SEC filings from July 2000 and February 2001 in which Romney listed his "principal occupation" as "Managing Director of Bain Capital, Inc." At the risk of putting too fine a point on this, one cannot be gone from Bain in February 1999 and also be the managing director of Bain in February 2001.

Now, you might be thinking, "Does this really matter? What difference does it make exactly when Romney left Bain?" It matters quite a bit, actually.

For one thing, call me old fashioned, but Romney is supposed to tell the truth, both to the public and to the Securities and Exchange Commission. At this point, Romney's claims don't add up, and it's not unreasonable to ask for an explanation.

On a related note, it also matters whether or not Romney told the truth on his official financial disclosure forms.

And then, of course, there's the whole point of why Romney wants people to believe he left Bain earlier than the apparent date. The Republican candidate probably doesn't want to be on the hook for a series of controversial Bain investments -- again, see Corn's reporting -- and layoffs, which would help explain his competing explanations.

FactCheck.org's editors appear to have accepted Romney's claims at face value, but the documentary evidence now appears to point in the opposite direction. Here's hoping they, and others in media, give this another look.

I guess its easy for Factcheck.org and Glenn Kessler to take on Liberal Writers for a Liberal Magazine and Blogs. After all, let's call this game what it is: Factcheck and Kessler are more interested in their reputations as "impartial artibers of truth" rather than doing...you know...their job in getting the truth out there.

So what do they got to say now that the Boston Globe has gotten involved?

Government documents filed by Mitt Romney and Bain Capital say Romney remained chief executive and chairman of the firm three years beyond the date he said he ceded control, even creating five new investment partnerships during that time.

Romney has said he left Bain in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company. But public Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed later by Bain Capital state he remained the firm’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.”

Also, a Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.

The timing of Romney’s departure from Bain is a key point of contention because he has said his resignation in February 1999 meant he was not responsible for Bain Capital companies that went bankrupt or laid off workers after that date.

Contradictions concerning the length of Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital add to the uncertainty and questions about his finances. Bain is the primary source of Romney’s wealth, which is estimated to be more than $250 million. But how his wealth has been invested, especially in a variety of Bain partnerships and other investment vehicles, remains difficult to decipher because of a lack of transparency.

Whoops.

Also, it should be noted (as it was by Talking Point Memo's Josh Marshall), that The Boston Globe totally skunked David Corn and didn't mention his work at all the story. Stay classy, Boston Globe!

Meanwhile, Kessler and Factcheck.org? Staying with their original line.

Josh Marshall's reaction? (just as a highlight):

Meanwhile, Glenn Kessler seems to be sticking with his earlier claims that Romney actually did end his roll at Bain in 1999, hanging his hat on the fact that the former SEC official the Globe asked about documents had given money to Democrats. This strikes me as the feeblest crutch of contemporary journalism. The issue is the filings — not the person you found to give a quote about them.

Yeah, no hope of them staying classy there.

Folks, putting your total trust in any single one of these yahoos is asking for trouble. You cannot rely on a single arbiter to be your judge and jury over what is and isn't the truth. If you want to get the facts, then like Democracy itself, it's going to make you work at it. You've got to read multiple stories, and you've got to form that picture for yourself. Don't let the folks who claim to have "Fact" in their name do that work for you. As this an other instances have proven, you can't trust 'em.

What proof? Here's another instance.  (Granted this one's about Politifact, but the the claim remains the same):

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Meanwhile, what has David Corn done now? He's done what a good Reporter should do. He's moved on:

EXCLUSIVE: Romney Invested Millions in Chinese Firm That Profited on US Outsourcing

The GOP candidate decries China poaching US jobs. But at Bain he held a large stake in a Chinese company that did just that. 

Last month, Mitt Romney's campaign got into a dustup with the Washington Post after the newspaper reported that Bain Capital, the private equity firm the GOP presidential candidate founded, invested in several US companies that outsourced jobs to China and India. The campaign indignantly demanded a retraction, claiming that these businesses did not send jobs overseas while Romney was running Bain, and the Post stood by its investigation. Yet there is another aspect to the Romney-as-outsourcer controversy. According to government documents reviewed by Mother Jones, Romney, when he was in charge of Bain, invested heavily in a Chinese manufacturing company that depended on US outsourcing for its profits—and that explicitly stated that such outsourcing was crucial to its success.

Lemme quote Josh one more time:

Read [David's new story] now before it appears as someone else’s exclusive.

Seriously, Mitt? Seriously??

From TPM:

Mitt Romney told Fox News Wednesday that black leaders support him, but are afraid to say so publicly.

After his speech to the NAACP national convention Wednesday, Romney said he connected with black leaders in private and was assured that the loud and sustained booing he got for promising to repeal the health care reform law didn’t represent the feelings of all African American voters, even if they can’t say so in public.

“I spoke with a number of African-American leaders after the event and they said, you know, a lot of folks do not want to say they will not vote for President Obama but they are disappointed in his lack of policies to improve the schools,” Romney told Fox, according to a rush transcript. “The president has not been able to get the job done and people want to see someone would can get the economy going so I expect to get the African American votes, and at the end of my speech having a standing ovation was generous and hospitable and I believe we disagree on some issues like ‘Obamacare’ on a lot of issues people see eye to eye, they want someone getting the economy going.”

Polls show Romney has made no inroads with the African American electorate. He’s pulling single-digit support among black voters in the PollTracker Average. But by Romney’s account, it’s possible black voters are simply afraid to tell pollsters their real feelings.

When people say Americans are taxed more than any other country on earth...

Ehhh, not so much...

Just so you know...

It's game time.

This blog will be active for the 2012 Election (duh!), but a majority of my blogging will be done at the Pasadena Democratic Blog, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Tumblr accounts, which I will hopefully figure out a way to feed here.

So in the meantime, particularly if you're in Pasadena/Southern California Area, follow @pasadenadems on Twitter, and the Pasadena United Democrats on Tumblr and Facebook.

We're going to do this. We're going to win in November, re-electing President Obama.

But the only way this is going to be easy, is if we make it look easy. How do we make it look easy? By working very hard.

Mitt Romney's Career of Shipping American Jobs All Over the World (VIDEO)

Your everything-you-need-to-know-complete guide to Fast & Furious...

Lordy, this is gonna be a long one.

I’m getting a little tired of supposedly smart people like Jon Stewart screwing up the Fast and Furious story, so I decided to do a little research on my own. My starting point was the rather well-laid out timeline Randi Rhodes started with on her June 20, 2012 Broadcast. She used the Wikipedia listing for ATF Gun Walking which itself used a Washington Post Story from July 25, 2011 about Fast and Furious to get its facts. But even she missed some things that need to be highlighted. Lord knows, Stewart screwed this thing up in his last two appearances with an appalling Fox News level of accuracy.

So, after the jump, I’m going to open with the Wikipedia page before some NRA doucebag steps in and makes bullshit changes to it. It also happens to be the piece Randi Rhodes read pretty much word for word opening up her June 20, 2012 Broadcast.

Click here to see the whole thing.

How Jon Stewart and the fine folks at @TheDailyShow @#$%ed up Fast and Furious (VIDEO)

It started on June 20th:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Again, Jon's version of events demands you being stupid enough to believe Darrell Issa's version of events. Up until now, I never thought Jon was that stupid, but stranger things have happened.

Here's the thing, to believe Issa's version of events, you have to believe that the Acting Head of the ATF, by his own admission, knew nothing about what the ATF Phoenix Field Office was doing, but somehow the U.S. Attorney General did.

Oh, and did I mention that the Acting Head of the ATF is Issa's Star Witness, and thought he was going to get fired by the Administration, which is why he went running to Issa in the first place? Purely a coincidence, I'm sure.

And then, Jon doubled-down the next day, June 21st:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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First off, it actually began with an Operation called Wide Receiver in the Bush Administration before being killed and record as Fast and Furious, and the stated purpose actually made some sense. The ATF wanted to allow these purchases to track the firearms as they were transferred to higher-level traffickers and key figures in Mexican cartels, in theory leading to their arrests and the dismantling of the cartels.

Problem was, ATF let the purchases happen, they tracked the guns to the people who were using them, who were hired thugs, not the major players in the Cartel.  Since the purchases didn't go high enough up the chain of command, ATF let the purchases keep happening, hoping they'd get someone better so they could make an arrest. In fact, indictments didn't start happening until Obama became President.

And, to be clear, we lost 1400 guns, still an appalling figure, but...c'mon, Jon, that's the kind of Bullshit Fox News engages in.

Then there's the letter. That was my major problem with the bit. Jon kinda left out the part where the Head of the Phoenix Field Office, may have...you know...lied to the Justice Department about the existence of the program.  That could be because Justice told him in 2009 not to engage in Gunwalking (but didn't do it clearly enough), and he went ahead and engaged in it anyway.

I know, details, details.

I would like to know why the hell did Stephen Colbert have a better grip on the damn story than Stewart did?

The Colbert Report
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A complete, unadulterated guide to my problems with what Jon Stewart said will be published in about 30 minutes.

Issa gets his information from a break-your-windows paranoid blogger. (VIDEO)

Darrell Issa, once a liar, always a liar.

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To be sure, Congress has a legitimate interest in investigating Operation Fast and Furious, but Chairman Issa and Republican majority on the Committee appear to be more interested in scoring political points than in getting to the bottom of what happened," argued Keegan, who added that, “The hoops the Committee is demanding the Attorney General jump through illustrate that these contempt hearings are as partisan as they are extreme. Over the course of this ‘investigation,’ the Committee has ordered the A.G. to produce documents whose confidentiality is protected by federal law, has refused to subpoena Bush Administration officials to testify about their knowledge of the operation during their time in office, has refused to allow public testimony from officials whose testimony counters Issa’s partisan narrative, and has repeatedly rejected the A.G.’s efforts to accommodate the committee, making compliance all but impossible.

People for the American Way president Michael Keegan.

Losing the Individual Mandate may mean absolutely nothing? (VIDEO) #TheLastWord

Maybe.

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Mitt Romney in 2002: "I'm going to reduce taxes." (VIDEO)

Is the GOP about to spend the next couple of Election Cycles in the wilderness?

Possibly.

Let's start off with Andrew Sullivan:

After Obama's end-run around Romney on deferring deportations of young native-born Americans who have broken no law apart from being born, the Latina Oprah, Cristina Saralegui, puts her invaluable imprimatur on the president. It's getting more and more necessary for Mitt to max out his percentage of the Caucasian vote:

Most polls this spring show Obama running near the 52 percent he won among those upscale white women in 2008, and also remaining very close to his 80 percent showing among all minorities. If Obama can hold that level of support from those two groups, Romney could amass a national majority only by winning nearly two-thirds of all other whites—the men with college degrees, and the men and women without them. To put that challenge in perspective, Reagan, while winning his historic landslide, carried a combined 66.5 percent of those three groups. To defeat Obama, in other words, Romney may need to equal Reagan.

So, Romney may be forced to turn to White voters in an unprecedented fashion (i.e., run a more racist-slash-racial campaign than he's used to) in order to compete. Yet, if the Senate, specifically the Republican Senate hadn't bowed down and caved to George W. Bush 43 at every possible turn:

“The importance of the Hispanic vote to President Barack Obama’s reelection chances is practically impossible to overstate,” writes Frank Wilkinson over at Bloomberg View. He’s almost certainly right.

So here’s my question: If President George W. Bush, working with Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, had passed comprehensive immigration reform in 2005, would Democrats have a chance this year? I see how they could have won in 2008, amidst a financial crisis and Bush fatigue. But it’s harder to see how they’d win in 2012 if the Hispanic vote was split.

"An impact on Latinos for generations to come..." (VIDEO)

There's a sad state of affairs in this country when this is the first I've ever heard of the "Hispanic Oprah" as Greg Sargent put it this morning. The fault's with me. I've got to get to know Latino culture more and more in the coming years.

So, this is Cristina Saralegui's endorsement of the President. And just to be fair, I'll put up the Spanish version as well.

The "Two Choices" Speech in Cleveland for June 14, 2012 (VIDEO)

The part when even Frank Rich (@frankrichny) is telling you to chill...

Jeez louise, people.  Me and Frank don't always agree, but we're in 100% alignment on this one:

“Is it time for Democrats to panic?” was the lead of a front-page Washington Post story Wednesday morning. Is it?

Not in June. The proximate source of this alarm is a memo written by James Carville and the pollster Stanley Greenberg, and seconded by another old Clinton hand, Douglas Schoen, a persistent Obama basher who months ago called for the president to abdicate after one term and let Hillary run in his place. The point of their angst is that Obama needs a new economic message, more like Clinton’s. Perhaps. More effective might be a stronger anti-Romney message. The Republican candidate avoids the press (Fox News aside), largely ducks the public, and offers only standard issue party boilerplate as his own “jobs” plan. The question is when and how the Obama campaign will knock this brittle opponent off his anodyne memorized talking points, out of his bubble and into interaction with the real world. The new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that among “swing-voting independents” the economic plans of both candidates are more or less equally despised, with a 38 percent favorable rating for Obama’s and 35 percent for Romney’s. That’s a serious opening for Obama.

Broken Promises: Romney's Massachusetts Record (VIDEO)

Okay, back from Vacation...such as it was...what did I miss?

Oh.

How racist Joe Ricketts managed screwed over his own family.

No, seriously.

Okay, so the Ricketts family owns a little enterprise known as the Chicago Cubs.  And they want to renovate Wrigley Field (originally built, by the way with private money) with public funds.  They're asking the City of Chicago for $150 million bucks to help with a $300 million dollar renovation.

Guess...who the @#$%@ Mayor of Chicago is, and would have to approve said money?

In October 2009, a trust that Joe and Marlene Ricketts established on behalf of their family acquired a 95-percent controlling interest in the Cubs and the team’s home park, Wrigley Field. Tom Ricketts, a son, is team chairman, and Pete Ricketts, Laura Ricketts, and Todd Ricketts (another son) all serve on the board. Dad’s place in the headlines this week actually comes at a bad time for the Cubs: the team is trying to work out a deal with the city “that would involve using $150 million in city amusement taxes for a $300 million renovation of Wrigley Field,” The Chicago Tribune reports. An aide to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told The Washington Post that the former White House Chief of Staff was “livid” over the Times story.

“The Ricketts have tried to contact the mayor, but he’s said that he does not want to talk with them today, tomorrow or anytime soon,” the aide said.

In local news: Glendale settles with ex-employee who says he was fired for union stance

There goes $29,000 of my tax dollars because someone in my stinkin' city tried to pull a Scott Walker:

A Glendale employee who claims he was wrongfully fired for promoting a new union has settled with the city for $29,000.

After being terminated in May 2010, Anthony Carbajal filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, claiming he was fired because of his strong support of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18, a Los Angeles group that at the time was pushing to represent Glendale Water & Power workers.

The IBEW and the city have since clashed over a new labor contract, with Glendale electrical workers and their Los Angeles counterparts protesting outside City Hall. The IBEW recently rejected a proposed city contract.

Carbajal’s attorney, David Klehm, said his client was a vocal leader in the movement as he tried to drum up support for the IBEW — making him a political target at City Hall.

But the city maintains Carbajal was terminated “based on legitimate business reasons and that there was no discrimination or retaliation,” City Atty. Mike Garcia said in an email.

Right, that settlement you dropped waaaay convinces me of that.

@NickHanauer reminds the Super Rich that it is the Middle Class who are the real Job Creators (VIDEO)

And Nick Hanauer's interview with Lawrence O'Donnell:

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And now Priorities USA gets in on the Romney The-Layoff-King (VIDEO)

C'mon, Scalito, Roberts, do it. DO IT! I dare ya...

I hope they spend more intellectual firepower on Obamacare, than they did on Citizens United:

Next month, America’s health insurance plans may lose $1 trillion in revenue.

It won’t have anything to do with a business deal gone awry, or Americans dropping health coverage during the recession. Instead, $1 trillion is the amount of revenue that health insurance plans can expect to lose if the Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act. The Court is expected to issue its opinion in late June.

The figure comes from Bloomberg Government, where number crunchers have taken a look at what happens if the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act and its expected expansion of health care coverage to 32 million Americans. They find that, should the Affordable Care Act be found unconstititional, insurance companies will lose $1 trillion in revenue between 2013 and 2020.

To put that in perspective, $1 trillion accounts for about 9 percent of all revenue that health insurers are expected to earn in the same period. It’s one-half of a percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. Add up the annual revenues of America’s five largest banks - Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, Wachovia and U.S. Bancorp- and you’re still about $500 billion short of what health plans can expect to lose if the Supreme Court decides against Obamacare.

“It’s the sheer size of the number that was startling,” says Bloomberg Government health care analyst Matt Barry. “I don’t know if people fully appreciate the stakes involved here. It’s not just politics - there’s a lot of money, and a lot to lose.”

Kansas City's GST Steel [Extended Dance Mix] (VIDEO)

Kansas City's GST Steel and what happened...when Mitt Romney came to town (VIDEO)

By the, you can get the full story here at RomneyEconomics.com.

ICYMI: @MichaelEDyson ripping the skin off Anti-Gay Black Preachers (VIDEO)

Metaphorically speaking, of course. But if anyone's deserved a rhetorical thrashing, it's been black preachers.

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For the record, @msnbc, you're not paying @tamronhall NEARLY enough (VIDEO)

Give her a raise, now.  Just for this:

So basically, Mitt Romney was pretty much a dick in prep school. (VIDEO)

So is this is who you want for your President?

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”

“He was just easy pickins,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

Or this?

"Reverse" - Obama for America 2012 Television Ad (VIDEO)

"Succeed" Obama for America Ad (VIDEO)

West Virginia is so racist, that they'd rather vote for the Mine Owner instead of the Mine Worker.

Even the Washington Post gets it:

Keith Judd, who is serving a 17 1/2-year prison sentence for extortion at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas, took 41 percent of the vote in West Virginia’s Democratic primary Tuesday night — 72,000 votes to Obama’s 106,000. He would qualify for convention delegates, if anyone had signed up to be a Judd delegate. (No one did.)

How did Judd get so many votes?

It’s likely not his past careers as a superhero and religious leader. Or his passionate FEC report ramblings. Simply put, West Virginia does not like Obama.

Keith Judd got 4 in 10 votes in West Virginia, despite living in a Texas prison.

“I voted against Obama,” a 43-year-old electrician named Ronnie Brown told the AP. His daughter planned to vote for Judd too, until she found out he was in prison. “I just want to vote against Barack Obama,” she said. 

Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state. West Virginia regularly votes in Democratic officials at the state level (its governor and all of its statewide elected officials are Democrats) and narrowly supported Bill Clinton in 1996. But the very rural state has never warmed to the current White House occupant.

“President Obama has no strong political allies in this state. A couple leading Democrats grudgingly support Obama, but say that only when they are asked,” said West Virginia radio host Hoppy Kercheval. “Several are openly hostile to him.”

Obama, not surprisingly, rarely visits the state.

The president angered voters with new Environmental Protection Agency policies, which some see as a “war on coal” and have stalled mining permits for the state’s coal mining industry. Both Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and Sen. Joe Manchin, both Democrats, have clashed with Obama on the issue, and neither has committed to supporting him in the fall.

“In talking to many West Virginians, they do recognize and realize that the president is working very hard to help working families across the country and in this state,” said state Democratic Party Chairman Larry Puccio. “It’s just that coal plays such a major role in West Virginia and folks are frustated with this administration’s position.”

In the latest state-by-state Gallup poll, Obama’s approval rating in West Virginia was 32.7 percent. A recent poll gave former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney a 17-point lead over Obama in the state.

But Obama was unpopular in West Virginia before he took office.

In the 2008 Democratic primary, Obama lost West Virginia to Hillary Clinton by 41 points — even though her campaign was all but over.

In the fall, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) beat Obama in the state by 13 points.

Race likely plays some role here. In the 2008 primary, 2 in 10 white West Virginia voters said race was an important factor in their votes, second only to Mississippi. Those voters went for Clinton 8 in 10 times.

Hmmm...

When West Virginia wonders why it's perpetually in the ninth circle of Economic Hell it ALWAYS finds itself in (like for example the fact that it's...dead last in K-12 Education) they can look back on decisions like this.

You have a Democratic State that votes Democratic, but because of its slavish devotion to coal, and the fact that the President's a black man, they'd rather vote Republican and thus vote to screw themselves over.

The President has no Political Allies in the States? That may be true, but that's also two way street.  And people like Joe Manchin don't work for the people of West Virginia.  They work for Massey Energy, which managed to kill how many of its employees again in 2010?

I would say if West Virginia were drowning, I wouldn't bother to throw them a life preserver.  But they are drowning.  They need a life preserver.  Still, they'd rather be racist, and thus of vote for the party of the Mine Owner, instead of the Mine Worker.

They deserve what they get.  @#$% 'em.

Mitt Romney Versus Reality: Auto Recovery Edition (VIDEO)

Oh, and did I mention?? (via Bloomberg):

During an election-year clash over which U.S. political party has the best prescription for curing unemployment, Democrats can argue that almost two-thirds of private-sector job growth in the past five decades came with them in the White House.

The BGOV Barometer shows that since Democrat John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961, non-government payrolls in the U.S. swelled by almost 42 million jobs under Democrats, compared with 24 million for Republican presidents, according to Labor Department figures.

Democrats hold the edge though they occupied the Oval Office for 23 years since Kennedy’s inauguration, compared with 28 for the Republicans. Through April, Democratic presidents accounted for an average of 150,000 additional private-sector paychecks per month over that period, more than double the 71,000 average for Republicans.

KICKOFF!! Columbus, Ohio (VIDEO)

Go -- aka, President Obama's new Ad (VIDEO)

Twenty-five million...what again?

President Obama’s campaign spent the Republican primaries quietly amassing a war chest of over $100 million while his rivals dominated the airwaves in swing states around the country. But they’re done watching from the sidelines.

The president’s re-election team is out with a new ad, “Go,” running in nine swing states, as part of a whopping $25 million ad buy this month. To put the amount in perspective, Romney finished March with only $10 million cash on hand.

The ad, which focuses on how the economy has improved from the initial 2008 crisis that Obama inherited, is part of an aggressive effort from the president to remind voters of the dire circumstances the president faced in January 2009. The hope is that by putting his achievements in that context, Obama can overcome Romney’s message to voters still hurting among weak job growth that the White House has fallen short of its goals.

“The president has faced a combination of crises few others have ever had to deal with, all at the same time,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a conference call with reporters Monday. “Starting on Day One, he’s made bold and brave decisions to hep our economy get back on its feet and bring our troops back.”

I think Romney is about kaput money-wise until the Convention, when he accepts the nomination. Then he can start soliciting money for the campaign again. And here is the President just swamping him with money.

Remember, between now and Tampa...Romney's campaign can't say or do jack because he's basically out of money.  He's down to $10 million cash on hand, and he's still got campaigning to do. That means until Tampa, the President pretty much can bombard the Airwaves at will.

Mind you, Romney's not broke, he's just hamstrung by a technicality of Campaign Finance Law.  He's got a huge war chest waiting for him...but he can't use it until after Tampa.  That will minimize the Romney Campaign's presence on the airwaves.

...but not the SuperPacs associated with him.

And believe it or not, that may also be a good thing...for Democrats.

The Republican SuperPacs, they are the unrestrained Id of the Party. They can't be coordinated with the Campaign, and...at the same time, they don't get any of the campaign's professional polish.

Basically, there's no one there at the SuperPac going: "You know that idea of yours is totally batshit insane right? Don't do it...you'll hurt the candidate."

But no, money trumps everything...even common sense at times.

There is just as much chance these SuperPacs will do harm to Mittens as well as good.  We've seen what they've done in the Primaries.