Froth Slosh B'Gosh

The Gyrations of the Silly and the Desperate

Whenever the Democrats win, the right wing will invariably pull out a map like the one on the right to try and illustrate that most of the United States voted for the conservative, even if more people voted for the Democrat.  SEE??? LOOK AT ALL THAT RED!!! LOOK AT IT!!!!!  This is done to try and delegitimize the victor, and somehow "prove" that conservatives are the real majority (much of the "heartland" blather is based on this). 

Just to note before I go on, even though I found this map attached to a posting from yesterday on a conservative website, I'm pretty sure this reflects the 2008 election, instead of 2012, since it shows some counties as blue that I know went for Romney, and some as red that I know went for Obama, but for the purposes of this post it will do.

So where are all those blue counties located?  Generally, they're located where the bulk of the population lives.  Since I live in Pennsylvania, we'll use the Keystone State to dig a little deeper (I made my own color-coded map for PA as a reference, but its a bit messy, although it generally conforms to the above.)

Which counties went for President Obama in Pennsylvania, which as of the last census contained 12,702,379 people?  They would be Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery, Bucks, Lehigh, Northampton, Monroe, Luzerne, Lackawanna, Dauphin, Allegheny, and Erie.  Not surprisingly, these counties also contain the state's biggest cities; Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Erie, Harrisburg, and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.  These counties contain 6,634,551 people, or over 52% of the state's population.  Not coincidentally, the President took Pennsylvania with 52% of the vote.  Those vast swaths of red are for the most part pretty sparsely populated and rural or mountainous.  Romney didn't get much help from the larger suburban counties he won either.  For example, while Chester County, with a population of nearly half a million people and one of Pennsylvania's largest counties was in Romney's column, he beat the President there by a mere 58 votes.  Centre County, another fairly large county (which not oddly at all, is in the center of the state) and home to Penn State University, went for Romney by 20 votes.  The Republicans aren't going make up ground with anemic wins like that, even if they do manage to garner 60% of the vote in Forest County (population 7,716). 

Just a little something to keep in mind when you see a similar map tossed around (and you probably will).

Population data came from the US Census Bureau website.

2012 election data for Pennsylvania came from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's website.

Election Time

We're into the final few days, and Nate Silver's 538 Blog is giving President Obama nearly an 84% chance of winning, and is likely to capture over 300 electoral votes.

That doesn't mean that Romney cannot win, but it does mean that nearly everything has to go right for the Republicans on Tuesday to manage a win, and that seems, to quote Ralph Wiggum, "unpossible."  Frankly, things haven't gone well lately for Mittens.  The President's response to Hurricane Sandy has been positive, while highlighting Romney's pledge to do away with FEMA and privatize disaster relief.  New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the Republican convention's keynote speaker praising Obama, coupled with Romney's bungled "relief" campaign rally didn't help either.  Couple that with the disaster that was the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, and you have encapsulated something that I've been saying for a long time.  Elected officials who believe that government can be a positive good tend to be able to deliver when the chips are down.  Elected officials who have a fundamental belief that government is the "problem" and cannot work, deliver governments that fail to work when a working system is necessary.  The disgraced and disgraceful Michael "heckuvajob Brownie" Brown getting on TV and complaining that Obama responded "too quickly" was the icing on the cake.

Perhaps the last "best" hope for Willard was Friday's jobs report, which turned out to be not bad at all. 

Romney could indeed win, but if the projections hold, an Obama win seems increasingly likely. 

Now, if we wind up with another situation where the winner in the electoral college winds up with fewer popular votes than the loser, regardless of party, can we start having a serious discussion about getting rid of the EC? 

Endorsement

California's Sacramento Bee has endorsed President Obama for reelection.  Papers endorse candidates for a variety of reasons, but the Bee's editorial clearly lays out the President's accomplishments, while highlighting the Republican party's near treasonous obstructionism and Romney's habitiual lying.

Obama not only inherited wars, he inherited a mortgage meltdown and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. He had to act quickly to prevent two automakers from going bankrupt and forestall a larger Wall Street catastrophe, and he did.

While some critics on the left say he should have gone further, by breaking up banks and launching an ambitious New Deal-style jobs program, it should be remembered that even Obama's modest "stimulus" package was fought tooth and nail by Republicans in Congress. As has been well documented, the Republican strategy was to block all of the president's efforts at economic recovery, even if it kept unemployment high for an extended period. As a coldblooded political strategy, it has worked, and millions of Americans have paid the price.

The last four years are instructive, but the next four years could well determine whether the United State repowers its economic engine and rebuilds its middle class, or whether it lapses back to the unequal and deficit-created policies of the Bush era. Although his positions seem to change on a weekly basis, Obama's challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, clearly would pursue tax cuts for the rich, on the discredited theory the wealthy would invest their savings in U.S. jobs. These "trickle down" theories haven't worked before and won't work now. Romney has also pledged to repeal health care reform, a transfer of wealth away from people who would receive subsidies to businesses and the wealthy who would be taxed under Obama-care...

Obama – unruffled by Looney Tunes claims that he is a "socialist" and a "Marxist" – has pursued a consistent, moderate path that has pulled this country back from the brink and put it on a path toward recovery. In a second term, with just a little help from Congress, he could finish the job and pursue other priorities, including upgrading transportation infrastructure, reinvesting in higher education and making the United States a leader in clean energy technologies.

By contrast, Romney has been all over the map on climate change, health care reform and fiscal policy, and he seems determined to lead us into a costly war in Iran, regardless of the consequences.

We've seen this script before. We don't want it again.

The entire thing is worth a read.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/10/14/4907756/barack-obama-for-president.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/10/14/4907756/barack-obama-for-president.html#storylink=cpy

Binders Full Of Women

Could be the title of a porno, but no, that was Willard stumbling all over himself last night.  I didn't watch, these debates are on too late at night for me, but I caught some of the clips today online, and it looked like the President cleaned Mitten's clock.  Hard to believe as well, but Candy Crowley committed an act of actual journalism, rather than the national media's usual lazy stenography.  Oh, and Fox "News" attempted to edit out one of Romney's more embarrassing moments in their transcript and got caught.

Your impressions?

Don't You Dare!

Don't you dare call them racists!

UPDATE:  Just an isolated incident?

Mitt-Flopping

Hilarious.  No matter what your views are, RoboRomney agrees!

Romney Insults The Spanish

No feel at all for diplomacy.

A Summary?

Why a summary?

Mitt Romney paid an effective tax rate of about 14 percent last year, his campaign said Friday while also announcing that the Republican presidential nominee had paid an average annual effective tax rate of about 20.2 percent between 1990 and 2009.

Romney made good on his pledge to release his tax returns from 2011 before the election, and went a step further than was previously anticipated in releasing a certified summary of his tax returns over a two-decade period preceding 2010.

Why release a "certified summary" for the past 20 years, instead of the actual returns?  I doubt there's anything in there showing that Romney committed tax fraud (I'm sure his tax attorneys are capable, and the IRS would be all over that if there was any "there" there.  We all know that he uses tax shelters and squirrels money away in tax havens, so finding confirmation of what we already know wouldn't be that damaging.

But there is something fishy there. Could it have anything to do with this?

Tax returns require taxpayers to state their residence address, and the Romney returns already produced, although partially redacted, state clearly that they lived in "Belmont, MA 02478" in 2012 (tax year 2011) (pdf) and 2011 (tax year 2010) (pdf):

But the Romneys, arbitrarily, refuse to disclose a copy of the returns they filed in 2010 or 2009 (for tax years 2009 and 2008) – which, perhaps not coincidentally, bracket the time period when Romney allegedly committed fraud by voting in Massachusetts when he actually resided in California. So here's the question: did Romney put his son's basement's address on the returns he filed in 2009 and 2010? Or did he truthfully use his real (non-Massachusetts) address, thus implicating himself in voter fraud?

For all the noise Republicans make over voter fraud, it would be absolutely fatal to his campaign if those tax returns showed he was living in California while voting in Massachusetes.  We'd have an actual, verifiable case of deliberate voter fraud, one committed by the Republican nominee.  And I suspect that is the real reason why those returns are not being released.

 

 

That Explains The Smirk

Will the video of Willard's off-the-cuff remarks fatally damage his campaign?  The bloodletting continues.

The man who thinks you should elect him as Commander in Chief is hoping for American deaths for his political gain. That makes the congressional Republicans hoping to tank the economy just to sink President Obama's re-election chances look like such small potatoes.