Free Republic

Good news for Big Guy: Based on the newest household survey, unemployment dropped below 8% for the first time in 44 months!!! The answer of course lies with “mathamagicals.” Mathamagicals let you take a bad news day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile: Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? Well it's you girl, and you should know it With each glance and every little movement you show it.(snip)This month for example, we focused on encouraging people who have been out of work for...

Republican challenger Mitt Romney has shot ahead of President Barack Obama in polls taken since Wednesday night's debate. In the debate, Mr. Romney won handily over Mr. Obama, who looked irritated and confused at times... In Colorado, both Gravis Marketing and McLaughlin & Associates, Mr. Romney now leads. Gravis's poll shows the GOP candidate with a 49.4-45.9% lead. McLaughlin shows a 50-46% lead for Mr. Romney. In Florida, WeAskAmerica and Rasmussen Reports show Mr. Romney with a multiple-point lead. According to Rasmussen, Romney leads 49-47%. WeAskAmerica has the numbers at 49-46%. In Virginia, again, WeAskAmerica and Rasmussen Reports show Mr....

Forgive me for rehashing Wednesday night’s debate yet again, but some of the postmortems impel me to do so. I’m not talking about the comical excuses for Obama’s failure like the poor fellow who thought Mitt Romney was carrying a crib sheet and then had to admit it was a handkerchief. Or the well-known massage enthusiast who argued the difference between the candidates was due to the Denver altitude as if this were not a presidential debate but an abruptly scheduled NBA doubleheader. No, I’m talking about the more serious explanations for the president’s incompetence – that Obama was either...

Continued modernization of the Mexican criminal justice system purportedly will help stem "the drug-fueled violence that has threatened citizens on both sides of the border," according to the Obama Administration. Obama through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) consequently has launched a new program called the Mexico Promoting Justice Project, also known as PROJUST, which will attempt system reform in several Mexican states. PROJUST will infuse an unspecified level of additional taxpayer dollars to "support comprehensive criminal justice reform that adheres to Mexican and international human rights standards implemented at state and federal levels." USAID/Mexico seeks to enhance broader...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhTof708DeHWdFJFUm1KSTAzMFZaeGJoal9Ob1EwV0E This is probably the most detailed simulation I’ve ran, since I was easily able to find the latest voter data at the OH Secretary of State site. Basically, what I’ve done is run a simulation for all of OH’s 88 counties and the percentages Romney and Obama need for each county to have a shot at the state. Romney: 2,781,909 / 50.11% Obama: 2,769,785 / 49.89% Total Votes: 5,551,694

Three weeks after the attacks on the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya the FBI finally arrived on the scene under the protection of the U.S. Military, most likely Marines. The crime scene was pretty much looted before the team arrived. The three week delay is being spun as American and Libyans officials declared the area unsafe and that the FBI was in fear of its own safety, which begs the question, do they have an office in Detroit? The visit was conducted in secret, with a military escort as not to alert terrorist to their presence. In the meantime Libyan...

The first debate is over. Obama had his hat handed to him by Mitt. James Taranto, in an excellent piece in the WSJ this week, suggests that Obama's failure was inevitable, because he's been coddled, pampered by the MSM for more than 4 years, and thus the first time he faced an articulate, prepared, challenger, Obama wasn't ready. The problem with this argument is that it suggests that next time Obama will be much better prepared, bring his A-game. What if that's just plain wrong? What if what we saw Wednesday night is the best that Obama has to offer?

"Dreams From My Real Father" is one giant hoax continues... (Title and graphic inspired by Joel Gilbert) At the end of my last post, I mentioned that I had two developments in my research on Joel Gilbert that came too late to be included in my initial series on him and his movie, and so I would be following up with those two. This is the first of those developments. In Part 5 of my series, "Joel Gilbert's Phantom Evidence", I discussed a number of claims that don't actually appear in Dreams From My Real Father, but which Joel Gilbert...

In a heated debate with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch doubled-down on his claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey released Friday, which showed a spike in employment and a drop in the unemployment metric from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent, is bogus. Welch explained his rationale to the MSNBC host: “We had 600,000 government jobs added in the last two months. We had 873,00 jobs by a household survey — which is a total estimate — from 50,000 phone calls. Of those, 600,000 were temporary workers. Chris, these numbers are all a series of...

With the Supreme Court due to consider Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin this coming week, cases for and against affirmative action have been dominating the education news cycle. The progressive Century Foundation recently issued a report arguing that the Supreme Court will likely greatly restrict racial preferences in college admissions. Instead, argue the liberal authors, it’s time to use class-based admissions policies and other indirect ways to create “diversity” on campus. You can read my recent blog entry, “Racial Preferences Under Review,” for more details on this Supreme Court case and The Century Foundation’s proposals. A recent poll...

Actor and comedian Steve Martin is a wild and crazy guy so it is no surprise that he would make a bizarre political endorsement. In this case the endorsement was for Bob Kerrey who is running for the senate seat from Nebraska. However, Steve Martin does not once mention Bob Kerrey or anything political in the "endorsement." Instead, Martin in the guise of a home crafts expert shows us how to make a wad of paper. Your humble correspondent found the advice on how to make a wad of paper quite useful. In fact, for years I have struggled to...

Romney needs to craft a commercial asking this question to rebut the phony employment numbers being released by The Dumb's Bureau of Lies and Spin. You may be unemployed because of The Won, or you might be working two or three jobs because of The Won. The question gets to the heart of the debate.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF The Yalta Conference briefing book stated that the United States did not favor any Chinese political faction, but only “a broadly representative government which will bring about internal unity, including reconcilement of Kuomintang-Communist differences.” In an echo familiar from countless modern-day speeches about American allies in the Middle East, political reform was touted as the best defense against Communism. And by political reform, Truman meant bringing the Communists into the government for a peaceful and unified China. American aid to the Nationalists was explicitly conditioned on their acceptance of that form of peace and unity. Political...

Electric cars might cause as much or more pollution than conventional gas vehicles, according to researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. According to a study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, “the production phase of electric vehicles proved substantially more environmentally intensive” than the production process for traditional gas-powered cars. Specifically, the study found that electric car factories can emit more toxic waste than gas-burning car factories. And greenhouse gas emissions rise exponentially if coal is used to produce the electricity necessary to charge “green” vehicles, according to the study. The researchers compared the overall life-cycle...

Whoomp there it is: polling results just up at the National Journal, comparing samples taken on Tuesday vs Thursday, book-ending the debate night: Tues Oct 2: Obama 49   Romney 45    Obama +4  Thurs Oct 4: Obama 46  Romney 47   Romney +1  (Clarus Research/590 Likely Voters/4% margin-for-error) Anxiously awaiting more of the same... Another interesting development is absentee ballot requests: as noted at Ace of Spades, Iowa is running a D+77,000 margin at this point in time. Yet while the media keeps telling us this is gonna be 2008-The-Sequel, ballot requests were at D+100k just a week ago, and the trend ain't their friend  Democrats enjoyed a +150k...

The media will no doubt trumpet the new 7.8% unemployment rate as evidence that Obama’s policies are working. Unfortunately the new 7.8% figure is a political fraud. The numbers don’t add up. The government claims 114,000 jobs were added last month, which isn’t all that great of a number. This resulted in a 0.3% drop in unemployment? That isn’t believable in the least. The ranks of the unemployed decreased by 456,000 last month. Well wait a minute, how does that figure decrease by so much when only 114,000 new jobs were created? The government is tossing 340,000+ people out of...

There is a talk show host where I come from that likes to warn his listeners not to get caught up in the thick of thin things. By this, he means, don't get sucked into a debate about insignificant but sexy issues and then lose sight of the really important ones. This is especially good advice in the political campaign season because politicians and their handlers love to find a sexy molehill and then spin it into a mountain. A case in point is Mitt Romney's wealth (Breaking: Mitt Romney Still Filthy Rich) or Ann Romney's horseback riding (MS and...

(Associated Posers) – SEOUL, South Korea – A suspected North Korean soldier who killed his platoon and company commanders before crossing the border into South Korea has been identified as Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. South Korean authorities now say that Kim Jong-un was a puppet all along for a small cabal of military leaders. The defection of Kim Jong-un from North Korea is a serious blow to that hermit kingdom, leaving the survival of the communist state in serious doubt. Kim Jong-un has reportedly told Seoul authorities that the real political power in the country are...

Going into this week's first presidential debate Democrats were confident that the most brilliant man to ever hold the office would easily trounce his challenger. However, 67% of voters who saw the debate judged Romney to have won. Only 25% saw Obama as the winner. Obama campaign strategist, David Axelrod blamed debate moderator Jim Lehrer for allowing Romney “too much leeway. Time after time the President was left to fend for himself against repeated attacks on his policies. Lehrer failed to come to the President's aid despite numerous opportunities to do so.” Axelrod expressed the hope that “our other friends...