Never Forget

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.

May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace.

Politico Calls The Election For Barack Obama

President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede.

Naturally, Romney’s top advisors would rush to the Politico to tell them this.

The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama’s lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers — most glaringly in Ohio — are working in the president’s favor.
“Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a top Republican official. Two officials intimately involved in the GOP campaign said Ohio leans clearly in Obama’s favor now, with a high single-digit edge, based on their internal tracking numbers of conservative groups. Romney can still win the presidency if he loses Ohio, but it’s extremely difficult.

Gosh, those anonymous top Romney aides and top Republican officials are handy. They always seem to say just what the news media and the rest of the Obama campaign wants said.

The Obama and Romney campaigns anticipate little movement in national polls before the first debate on Oct. 3, which both see as the most important day of this campaign…

The Obama campaign wants to make the debates ‘the new end all and be all.’ Since they know they not only will control the questions, they will also control the spin on how well the candidates did.

They also see eye to eye on their belief that the election will come down to whether Romney can persuade voters he understands the problems of ordinary people and that his solutions are at least marginally better for turning things around economically…

Yes, it all comes down to whether Romney can trick people into thinking he understands the problems of ordinary people.

A Democratic official said the other big worry for the Obama campaign is that when you dig into the small slice of undecided voters (probably only 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate, according to the campaigns), the demographics are not favorable to Obama: mostly white, many with some college education, economically stressed, largely middle-aged…

So why does the headline of this piece say "Advantage Obama"?

Despite that, Obama officials have maintained for several weeks that there are too few undecided voters for Romney to get the bounce he needs from the debates…

So everyone has already made up their minds and the election is over. Then why is Obama still campaigning? Why is he still begging for money?

For the record, as we have often pointed out, Presidential poll has been notoriously unreliable when we are this far out. In fact, it is unreliable even when election day is close.

If you look at Gallup’s polling for past elections, you will find that after the Democrat convention ended in July 1988, Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by seventeen points. And that Jimmy Carter led Ronald Reagan by four points after the Democrat convention in September 1980.

As you may recall, things did not quite turn out that way for either of those elections. But the news media probably declared both of those races ‘over’ at the time.

What Voter Fraud? Maryland Democrat Quits Amid Revelations That She Voted in Two States

Remember when Eric Holder dismissed video evidence of how easy it was to perpetrate voter fraud by calling it 'manufactured'?

A Maryland Democrat was recently revealed to have manufactured the ability to vote in two separate states - Maryland and Florida.  That is illegal.  It is fraud.  And she should be charged.

The Washington Post reports:

A Maryland Democratic candidate quit her congressional race Monday after her own party told state officials that she had committed fraud by voting in both Maryland and Florida in recent elections.

Wendy Rosen, a small-business owner running against freshman Rep. Andy Harris (R) in the Eastern Shore-based 1st Congressional District, released a statement saying that “with great regret, and much sorrow” she was resigning from the contest.

...

“The Maryland Democratic Party has discovered that Ms. Rosen has been registered to vote in both Florida and Maryland since at least 2006; that she in fact voted in the 2006 general election both in Florida and Maryland; and that she voted in the presidential preference primaries held in both Florida and Maryland in 2008,” wrote Yvette Lewis, the state party chair. “This information is based on an examination of the voter files from both states. We believe that this is a clear violation of Maryland law and urge the appropriate office to conduct a full investigation.”

Bryan Preston of PJ Media writes:

Democrats love to claim that voter fraud does not exist. That voter ID is not necessary. That voter ID is, in fact, voter suppression.

But suddenly Democrats have to admit that voter fraud exists. That’s really going to dent the narrative.

Their narrative has been more than dented, it's non-existent. Voter fraud is real, it is prevalent, and it is a consistent Democrat tactic in elections.

Chicago teacher can't even spell neighborhood right

Check out this sign by a Chicago teacher protesting on Day 1 of the CTU strike:

CTU believes in 'NEIBORHOOD' schools ... but can't even spell 'neighborhood.'
Yet one of their main reasons for striking is because, even though they've just been given a 16% pay increase ... they don't want a condition requiring teacher performance.
As is glaringly obvious, we can all see why.

Two Huge Flaws in the Legend of the Clinton Economy

Two inescapable flaws mar the Clinton economic legend. One is conveniently papered over; the other conveniently forgotten. Even so, a flawed legend is better than the economic reality President Obama’s policies have produced, so it is no surprise the sitting President has outsourced his economic messaging to the former President.

The first flaw is that President Clinton raised taxes and the economy boomed. The flaw in the narrative is it ignores the passage of time—four years, to be exact. The timeline matters. Clinton raised taxes in 1993 just as the economy was set to take off from a recession, and instead job and wage growth sputtered for four years. The famous Clinton era boom started four years after the tax hike, in 1997, and was triggered at least in part by the Republican tax cut of that year. Four years may seem like a detail, but details like this matter.

The second flaw marring the Clinton economic story is recession. President Clinton did not leave his successor a booming economy. He left President George W. Bush a recession. The recession began in March of 2001, two months after Clinton left office. Even the most rabid leftist cannot blame George Bush for the 2001 recession. It was the Clinton recession.

So Bill Clinton came into office and raised taxes on an accelerating economy, and produced a lethargic economy. Republicans pushed through a tax cut in 1997 and thereby launched the famous Clinton boom. Then Clinton left his successor with a nasty recession. And from this is fashioned a legend of economic performance. Damage done on both ends and a prosperity at least shared by Republicans—and yet the legend lives on.

As long as the legend endures, President Obama sensibly would want to set aside past differences and wrap himself in the Clinton flag. Obama’s alternative is to defend his own record, which he simply cannot do, even giving himself a grade of “incomplete” while his wife pleads for “more time.”
Incomplete after four years? More time to press the case for higher spending, higher taxes, and more regulation, all of which have served only to restrain the most prosperity-oriented economy in the world?
President Obama can be given credit for trying to apply his economic philosophy with fervor and conviction. His has been an all-in presidency from the start. He tried his best, but his approach failed anyway, as was inevitable; a fact reinforced yet again with today’s jobs report showing an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent and 12.5 million Americans out of work.

These statistics don’t tell the whole story, however. The workforce itself shrunk dramatically since Obama took office, as many Americans have given up looking for jobs that are nowhere to be found. The failure was not for lack of thought, or of effort. The failure was assured at the start as a failure of conception. Continuing to follow a bad design can only produce more bad outcomes. In the meantime, with neither a record from the past or a program for the future to tout, outsourcing his economic message to Clinton is about all Obama has left.