No. Sorry. Uh-uh. Not having it.
Is this Mitt Romney saying he believes in Birtherism? No.
Is this Mitt Romney declaring he's a racist? No. Not only that, he really hasn't said anything racist at all during this or any previous campaign. I don't think he's got a racist bone in his body.
But...
Is this Mitt Romney feeding his base, and providing cover for the racists and race-baiters in his Party, who's support he needs going into November??
Yes, YES...a THOUSAND TIMES YES!!!
Listen, it boils down to this...no one cares about Mitt Romney's Birth Certificate, or Ann's. At the same time, no one cares about the President's Birth Certificate either, except for the racists and race-baiters in Mitt's own party.
But for you to make a joke, about the President's Birth Certificate, implying that he's got something to hide (and yes, Governor Romney implied exactly that in his cough-cough "joke"), and then for him to turn around and deny access to the Tax Returns that every candidate for President, Republican or Democrat combined have given over since the time of your esteemed, and apparently, infinitely smarter Father, ranks you, Mitt Romney, as a hypopcrite of the first order.
Oh GOD, I can't wait to kick this guys ass in November. Let's get this done.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Change of blog design.
Something infected my previous blog layout with a ShopWiki.com bot, which I didn't appreciate. To get rid of it, I picked another layout from Blogger.com, and that veeeery annoying problem has gone away.
Just fills me with reams of confidence in Blogger.com.
Just fills me with reams of confidence in Blogger.com.
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:
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?
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?
Thursday, August 9, 2012
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:
...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.
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.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)...
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?
...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.
"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.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Monday, August 6, 2012
Friday, August 3, 2012
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Boehner's quiet admission that he knows his Caucus is NUTS!
Congress did something halfway sensible today:
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.
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)
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Thursday, July 26, 2012
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
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.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
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:
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