Yet another reason I am predicting a Romney victory

Money.  Per this article on Politico:

Republican super PACs and other outside groups shaped by a loose network of prominent conservatives – including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – plan to spend roughly $1 billion on November’s elections for the White House and control of Congress, according to officials familiar with the groups’ internal operations.

That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections - twice what they had been expected to commitJust the spending linked to the Koch network is more than the $370 million that John McCain raised for his entire presidential campaign four years ago. And the $1 billion total surpasses the $750 million that Barack Obama, one of the most prolific fundraisers ever, collected for his 2008 campaign.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, proved its potency by spending nearly $50 million in the primaries. Now able to entice big donors with a neck-and-neck general election, the group is likely to meet its new goal of spending $100 million more.

The (a) difference between Romney and Obama

Romney, while at Bain, was a private equity investor who often invested his own money.  Obama, while President is a public equity investor who always invests your money.  Oh, and Romney made money on his investments.

Now I am getting worried because the Obama campaign seems to finally be getting a little smarter

They told Biden to sit down and shut up for a week!  No, really!!!  If they can keep everyone else in the Whitehouse  from opening their mouths, we may be in trouble.

What a shock

The smarter the person, the less likely they are worried about global warming.  At least that is what a Yale law professor has concluded based upon his recently published study.

"As respondents’ science literacy scores increased, their concern with climate change decreased," the paper, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, notes.

So let me get this straight, the more a person knows about science, the less concerned they are about AGW.  Sounds right to me.

When I see headlines like this, I am glad I grew up in Maine AFTER the advent of indoor plumbing

"Black Bear Mauls Man In Outhouse"

I always thought this was the case

A Florida man was driving home one day and he saw a Seminole County Sheriff's car parked of the road in a speed trap.  So the man started to flash his lights to oncoming traffic.  Only one of those cars was another deputy, who promptly gave him a ticket.  Well, our hero fought the police action on two grounds.  First he said that the statue they county relied on was not intended for flashing your headlights but rather to prevent average citizens from using flashing emergency lights on their cars while driving down public ways.  Second, he said he was using his headlights to communicate with the on-coming drivers.  Therefore, any attempt to stop him was violative of his First Amendment right to free speech.  Both arguments had great merit.  He could have one on the first grounds that the sheriffs overreached to apply the emergency light statute.  However, the judge took on the Constitutional issues.  And the driver won.  So people, feel free to freely express yourself.  The next ticket that is saved may be your own.

91 year old driver kills man in crosswalk

You read headlines like that and roll your eyes about how people too old to drive should not be allowed to drive.  However, the man he killed was 101 years old.  Maybe he was too old to cross the street.

The liberal cocoon

Michael Barone has written a wonderful opinion piece about how liberals insulate themselves from opposing views and thereby are ill-prepared to argue their positions.  It reminded me of a political argument I got in a long time ago with my (very liberal) brother.  The sands of time have washed away my memories of the specifics of the argument, or even what the general subject was.  However, one thing stuck in my mind all theses years.  Every source he cited in support of his position, I had read.  Every source I cited in support of mine, he had not read.  I welcome opposing views and I love a well reasoned argument.  The same cannot be said for most liberals I meet, however.  They would never be caught dead listening to Rush Limbaugh instead of NPR (which I will from time to time tune in).  They would never think of watching FoxNews instead of MSNBC (which I watch), and Heaven forbid they read the Wall Street Journal instead of the Boston Globe (I just got done with it).  I suppose I should not push them to broaden their horizons, though.  It is too much fun watching their shocked and stupefied expressions when their liberal champions go down in flames at the polls.  After all, everything they read, everything they watched and everyone they spoke with supported their causes.

I am in mouring

Eugene Polley, the inventor of the TV remote control has died.  Working for Zenith, he was the guy who came up with the workable concept of a wireless remote control.  It looked like a ray gun, and you pointed it at the corner of the television screen where it activated photo cells tied to the channel changer, the volume, etc.  That was in 1955.  Mr. Polley was 96.  Think about it, who has affected what we do, every day, more than the late Mr. Polley?  A truly great innovator.  Mark Zuckerberg who?

For the record, I am not a birther

but, OOPS!  Check out this 1991 booklet that Obama's literary agency, Acton & Dystel, put out which Breitbart dog up:

Though I am not a birther, I most definitely agree with Breitbart that the fact that this thing has been just sitting out there with nary a peep out of the MSM shows how little interest they have in actually vetting Obama and his ideas.

What do Elizabeth Warren and I have in common?

We both lay claim to minority status.  Of course, in Her case it would be a lie that has told in order to further her career and curry favor with the right thinking people.  In may case it would be the absolute truth.

Yet another example of Fox News biased and inaccurate coverage of the Obama White House

Fox News has as the lead article on its website one entitled "Horning in on History?"  In it they lambaste Obama for editing the bios on the official White House web page of Presidents going back 100 years so as include something about Obama.  For example, the Reagan bio has the following sentence added to it:

"In a June 28, 1985, speech, Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multimillionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule." 

That is just patently unfair and an example of yellow journalism at its worst.  The truth is that there is no reference to Obama in the Gerald Ford bio.  And they could have very easily slid one in about how much they both played golf, too.

Lest we forget, Presidents are not popularly elected

Each State, through rules it basically sets on its own, selects "electors" who in turn sit in the electoral college.  Those electors then decide who will be the next President.  So certain States take on a magnified importance.  For example, who cares how many votes either party gets in California because they are all going to Obama.  Conversely, little New Hampshire and its lonely four delegates may get quite a bit of attention because those votes are in play.  Last election, based upon the strength of support within the African American community, North Carolina, a normally reliable Republican State, voted for Obama.  It was won of his real keys to victory. Well, the latest Rasmussen tracking poll of likely voters in North Carolina has Mitt up 51% to 43%.  How important do the Democrats believe North Carolina is to Obama's reelection chances?  They picked Charlotte for their convention.

I used to find Chris Mathews half way entertaining

But as his bias became more and more obvious, and his screaming louder and louder as opposed to more thoughtful, I got to the point where I really couldn't stand him.  He turned into a classic wannabe bully.  He loved to lob grenades for which there was no opportunity for the victim to respond.  Like all of the times he would sneeringly and with great superiority say how he would love to see Sarah Palin on Jeopardy.  So how did Mr. Self Important Obviously Smarter MSNBC anchor do when he went on the show?  He embarrassed himself.

Found seventy years later

RAF Flight Sargent Dennis Copping was charged on June 28, 1942 with shuttling a Kittyhawk P-40 to another airbase where they could better work on the front landing gear that would not retract.  At the time Rommel was busily chasing the Brits all over the Sahara and every piece of equipment was important.  Unfortunately Sgt. Copping got turned around and ended up running out of fuel over the Egyptian desert.  Well, the plane, but alas not Sgt. Copping, has been found, and in remarkable shape.

What is your favorite Beach Boys song?

Mine?  Pretty much all of them.  Heh.

I have gotten to the point where I laugh, rather then cry, at the main stream media

Take for example the Op Ed piece in yesterday's LA Times.  It is entitled "Is Barack Obama Too Brainy to be President?"  Oh, I see.  Poor ol' stupid peoples like me just ain't smart enough.  Cuz if'n we was, we'd vote for Barry.  Yeah, OK.  I can see the ivory tower apologists after he gets slammed in the next election.  The only reason he lost was he was SOOOOO much smarter than the average person in the electorate.  We just didn't have the brain cells to understand how smart he was.

Poll update

Rasmussen daily tracker now has Romney up by 7% over Obama.  Maybe more significantly, Romney comes in at 50% and Obama at 43%.  This is the first time Romney has hit the 50% plateau.

Lobster

Growing up in Maine, I have seen (and eaten) my share of lobster.  I have seen (but for the record not eaten) blue lobster and orange lobster.  I even saw one once that was half red and half blue, split right down the middle.  However, I have never seen a calico lobster before.  Until now that is.  I am told that the blue and orange lobster occur at the rate of about 1,000,000 to 1.  A calico lobster occurs at about 30,000,000 to 1.  Wonder how they taste . . .

I'm thinking that Ivy League Journalism schools are not mouth pieces for conservatives

However, even they have noted the obvious journalistic bias in covering the Democratic candidate versus the Republican candidate.  It is real news to me when the Columbia Journalism Review publishes an article noting that the press says Obama "evolves" and Mitt "flip flops."  Good point by them.

To be fair and balanced, I am compelled to report that Obama is up by a healthy margin

In the West Virginia Democratic primary, that is.  With 93 percent of the polls reporting, he has over 59% percent of the vote as compared to only 40% for his challenger.  His challenger is Keith Judd.  Such a strong showing is a little surprising against a sitting President.  It is also surprising since Mr. Judd is currently residing in Texas and not West Virginia.  The Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Texas to be exact.  He goes by Inmate No. 11593-051 as well as his given name.

Irony is a bitch, Ms. Warren

Even the voice of People's Republic of Massachusetts, the Boston Globe, has been having a bit of fun at Elizabeth Warren's expense.  For those of you who have not been following closely, Ms. Warren, Harvard Law professor and member of the Obama administration, is the chosen one to unseat that up-start Scott Brown who dared to take 'Ted Kennedy's seat' back for the people of Massachusetts.  She listed herself for years in law school directories and elsewhere as a "minority" claiming a Native American ancestry.  Harvard in turn listed her as evidence of how forward and correct thinking they were in showing the great diversity of their faculty.  The blond and blue eyed Warren claimed the evidence of her ancestry was family lore and the fact that her grandfather had high cheek bones like Indians do.  (You can't make this stuff up.)  She stepped in it a little deeper when she said that it was not for the advancement of her career that she claimed minority status, but rather to go out to lunch with other similarly situated Native Americans.  Of course, it turns out that she never actually went out to lunch with them or even once attended Harvard's own "pow wow" for Native American members of its academic community.  Needless to say, not only did her political opponents take exception to her false claims, but so did real members of that minority community who were bothered by the fact that she took away opportunities for REAL American Indians.  In a mad attempt to back fill, her camp came up with O.C. Sarah Crawford, Warren's great great great grandmother who according to a supposed application for marriage, but not the official marriage license nor the United States Census, was part Cherokee Indian.  That claim has since been debunked.  Worse still, when she threw the Crawford lineage against the wall, people started to look at it.  Turns out that Ms. Crawford's husband, Warren's great great great grandfather was member of the Tennessee Militia in Ross's Landing, now Chattanooga, Tennessee.  The Tennessee Militia, following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, rounded up the Cherokee (and other) Indians from their homes, interred them and then force marched them to western frontier, leaving the dead and dying along the way.  The infamous Trail of Tears was perhaps the worst government sanctioned atrocity in our history as a nation.  And Jonathan Crawford, Elizabeth Warren's great great great grandfather, was a member of the militia that rode from settlement to settlement and took people whose only sin was to ACTUALLY HAVE Cherokee blood in their veins and incarcerate them for horrific death march so white settlers could take their lands without opposition.  Yes Ms. Warren, you can certainly claim a direct and historic link to the Cherokee people.

Crime in America has really gotten out of hand

A tractor trailer full of Corona beer was stolen, just in time for Cinco de Mayo, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  I mean, I can only take so much about the downward spiral of the moral fabric in our society.  Of course, all they need to do to catch the culprits is to keep watch for the next heist, this time of a thousand pounds of limes.

You know the Whitehouse is in trouble when . . .

The toadies in the Main Stream Media are laughing out loud at the Press Secretary's answers.  I am at heart a libertarian in that I do not want you to tell me what to do and I will not tell you what to do.  However, when it comes to gay marriage, please spare me with the equating it to civil rights.  If you and a consenting person are having fun, then great.  Just don't try to tell me that you need the same constitutional protection as someone whose race is readily apparent by their skin color.  It may be a behavioral choice you want to make, but I am not going to march into Selma demanding that the rest of the world has to recognize that choice.  Having said that, I could not really give a hoot if some States want to sanction certain unions or not.  I do think it is funny that Perpetual Foot In Mouth Biden stirred up a hornets nests with his comments about how he could learn to live with gay marriage.  Which of course made everyone look back at Obama's position on the issue.  He isn't for it.  Nor is he against it.  In fact, his position is "evolving" as we speak.  And as the Washington Post points out, the more his Spokesman tried to explain that one, the more the press had fun with him:

Carney tried to parry the same-sex-marriage questions, gamely at first and then testily as reporters began to laugh at his answers. He grew uncharacteristically flustered. When an unrelated question came about whether Obama would support the reelection of scandal-plagued Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), Carney answered: “I mean — well, yes, sure. I just don’t — I haven’t — I haven’t been asked it before so I. . . . The president — I’ll have to — I’ll have to get back to you.”

Can you say Jimmy Carter?

Don't look now, but the Rasmussen daily tracking poll has Romney up by 5 points over the Great One.  As a reminder, this is a daily tracking poll that averages three nights worth of data.  And since the same poll yesterday showed a one point Romney advantage, that must mean that trend has been far more than five points in Romney's favor.  One more thing to keep in mind, unlike almost all of the individual State polls, the national ones are of likely voters and not just registered voters.

Update: The only other daily tracking to come out today is Gallup which now has Romney up by 3 points over Obama.

Eaglets

By the way, as you may remember, I posted a while back about a webcam on an eagle's nest on the Maine coast.  Well, they mated, laid eggs and the eaglets have now hatched:



Live broadcasting by Ustream

Doing the little things to make sure Obama is not re-elected

For example, do you have a pen and a post-it note?

That didn't take long

According to Gallup Romney is now in the lead over Obama.

Update:


Another poll (Politico-GW University) shows the exact same Romney lead over Obama.  Since we are so far from election day, the most interesting and perhaps important numbers are the split with independents.  Romney is out-polling Obama by double digits.  The very factors that worked against him in the Republican primary are working for him with the general electorate.


Further update:


Rasmussen daily tracking just came out with Romney over Obama, too.  That is the last three polls to be released that show Obama losing against a candidate that just got done having the crap licked out of him by opponents in his own party.

I do not think Leon Panetta is stupid

There are a lot of other things I would probably say about him, but not stupid.  So I figure he does not believe in the whole global warming crap.  I am, therefore, pretty sure he does not believe it when he says:

"The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security," Panetta told the Environmental Defense Fund last night. "Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief."

My only question is how he can say it with a straight face.  Climate change is a danger to our national security, huh?

So let me get this straight.

Obama dated a composite and ate a dog.  OK, then.

Thank you for your service, George Vojnovich

And Godspeed on your final journey.  George is a hero.  He just died at 96 in his home in NY.  George received the Bronze Star for his actions as a member of the OSS during WWII--though sadly and shamefully he did not receive his star until 2010.  He formulated, lobbied for and finally implemented a plan to rescue 500 US Airmen who were downed in Nazi controlled Serbia in 1944.  In an effort to starve Hitler's war machine of a crucial resource, the Allies started sending waves of bombers over the oil fields in Romania.  And a lot of them got shot down.  George convinced his superiors to let him work with the underground Serbian group called the Chetniks, and more specifically with their leader Draza Mihailovich.  That was no small feat in 1944 when the US had formally embraced the Serbian Communists and they considered the Chetniks to be enemy collaborators with the Nazis.  Vujnovich lead clandestine mission after clandestine mission called Operation Halyard into Serbia and brought back the downed fighters.  Once again, thank you for your service George.

Now I am sure what Mother Nature thinks of us

Canada is no longer going to mint the penny

As a kid growing up in Maine, I used to see Canadian coins all of the time.  Coins, but not paper money, were always traded at par in commerce throughout the state.  You may have gotten a ten cent candy for 8 cents if you tendered a dime, but since everybody treated the coinage as par currency, the vendor could just pass the coin along for the same value.  When I got older and started to fly to places like Florida, DC etc., I used to get looks like I was a counterfeiter or something if I pulled change out of my pocket that had been there when I boarded and then tried to buy something with Canadian money.  However, the Maine youth of today will no longer have to endure the curse of Canadian coinage, at least as far as the penny is concerned.  Since it costs 1.6 cents to make a one cent penny, they are going to stop producing and circulating them.

How do you steal a bridge?

I don't know either, but some Czech thieves managed to do it.  A ten ton rail road bridge, to be exact.