Back to Basics

Many millions of people are still scratching their heads over how Obama won the 2012 presidential election in the face of so many contrary polls.  To those who credit his victory to simple witchcraft there are many who would agree.  But it may have been much simpler than voodoo and witchcraft; it appears to be just a case of numbers.

And yes, I am counting those numbers where the polls show more recorded votes for Obama than there were total registered voters, which I gather are “still being investigated.”  But the numbers I’m talking about are those such as the ones shown by FoxNews.com online as reported by the Associated Press (huge friends of Obama) where they showed in an article titled, “In a first, black voters turnout rate passes whites”.

That is a little more significant than just a “first”; it is an overwhelming feat based on nothing more than skin color and it, as AP states, “surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.”

But how is that possible given the realistic breakdown of simple population numbers which as reported by Wikipedia, “Whites constitute a majority with 72.4% of the population in the 2010 United States Census, while blacks make up 12 percent of the share of eligible voters, they represented 13 percent of the total 2012 votes cast, according to exit polling.”

Huh?  Maybe there was some witchcraft when they got 13 percent of the total 2012 votes cast but they are only 12 percent of the eligible voters.  That could be how they can get more votes than there are registered voters.  But I keep hearing Democrats say that those things are all Republican lies.  Gee, even when AP and Wikipedia say them?

These numbers games that are played by people who live in the political arena 24-7-365 sure can spin and twist a tale or two with a straight face, but the Clintons have been caught with their noses growing even as they spoke, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman – Miss Lewinsky.”  Or Hillary re the Benghazi arms statement, “What difference does it make?”  Oh, only some dead American bodies, Hillary.  The Clintons are great role models and teachers for all Democrats.

The numbers game being played by Democrats reflects one very important item in the elections game—total votes.  The process of buying votes has been one of Obama’s strongest activities since he took over remodeling our government from a Constitutionally strong world center of manufacturing and invention to one of sky-high loss of jobs and long lines for unemployment checks.  But even there Obama has found the secret to getting more votes in this jobless atmosphere—food stamps, not at campaign expense but at taxpayer expense.

Some of this Obama learned from George Bush who, stated that “Participation in the U.S. food-stamp program grew from approximately 17.1 million people in 2000 to approximately 23 million in 2004,” a jump of six million in Bush’s first 4 years.

A recent online article at, dayofrepentance.org, written by a New Jersey Rabbi is one of the most ‘dead-on’ eye-openers that I have seen for many moons.  It not only says what I have been thinking and also what I’ve been saying online myself, but from others whom I consider to be very knowledgeable on the subject.

The author is Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, the leader of a Jewish congregation in Teaneck, New Jersey and his message was relayed as stated above by the online organization ‘day of repentance’ who titled it, “Realities of the State of our Union.  The irresponsible among us are now the majority.” According to the cited website, the article appeared in The Israel National News, and is directed to Jewish readership. According to that source, 70% of American Jews vote as Democrats.

The majority mentioned there is not defined, but the manner in which Obama and Senator Harry Reid, D-NV, Majority Leader of the U. S. Senate are attempting to run roughshod over the rest of the citizens of the country leaves little doubt that those are the culprits on the front lines of the onslaught against the people.

The brazen arrogance of Harry Reid is second only to the bully in the White House who has all sorts of control plans for Americans and is slowly and sneakily putting them into affirmative actions through their internal connections with the dark side of the corrupt and morally bankrupt United Nations.

The Rabbi stated that the most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo—for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility.

At this point,  I would like to also add that some very unacceptable stories have appeared since the election polls have closed stating some very unacceptable procedures and actions during the voting processes.  Actions that have not appeared to be followed up with thorough investigations, particularly by the Republicans or by any significant parties or authorities.

I have to wonder if they consider it too much bother?

If that last question is true then the Tea Party people are right in saying the GOP is in need of a huge overhaul.

Rabbi Pruzansky also states as another reason for the 2012 election results was that fewer people voted.  Which is true but considering the overall atmosphere and some serious doubts that prevailed during the obscenely long campaigning by both major political parties, much interest had dissipated.

The Rabbi also had this to say about the results; Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle. Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win.

The Rabbi continued to say: That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard work, free enterprise enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness—no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate.

On talk radio, in internet commentary and at right wing conferences, worried analysts and activists obsess over the dire electoral consequence of “three million missing Republicans” who doomed conservative chances in 2012.

This lament for the lost legions of conservatism has been relentlessly recycled in right-leaning media to prove that Mitt Romney failed to mobilize his base with his inept, uninspired campaign. The commonly cited proof for this conclusion is that Mitt Romney received even fewer votes than did the hapless McCain-Palin ticket. If only the GOP had run with a “true conservative” instead of another flip-flopping RINO, the true-believers affirm, millions of dispirited conservatives would have rallied to save the day.

It all sounds perfectly plausible except for the fact that it’s also perfectly untrue.

First, Romney did NOT get a lower popular vote total than did McCain: He polled almost a million votes more (983,000 more, to be precise) and earned 33 additional electoral votes. It was Obama whose vote totals went down sharply, with 3,592,000 fewer votes than the first time.

The mistaken talking point about the “missing Republicans” came from the slow nature of the counting process. In the first few days after the election, millions of votes remained untallied, but even after the completed numbers came in, showing more GOP voters than 2008, few of the conclusion jumpers bothered to correct, or even adjust their post-election remarks.

Moreover, exit polls show that the electorate featured an unusually high percentage of both Republicans and conservatives, rather than offering any scrap of evidence for complaints over a disengaged base. In 2012, self-identified Republicans comprised precisely the same percentage of the electorate as in 2008, and gave even more overwhelming support (93% compared to 90%) to their party’s nominee. What’s more, conservatives not only made up a slightly higher percentage of the voters in 2012 than four years earlier, but even turned out more strongly as a percentage of electorate than they did for the victorious George W. Bush in 2004.

And what about the obsessive media mantra about Evangelical rejection of the GOP ticket because of distrust of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith? Actually, white “Evangelical” or “Born Again” Christians showed up in proportionately higher numbers for Romney than for McCain or, for that matter, for their fellow-Evangelical George W. Bush. This segment of the electorate amounted to 23% of all voters in 2004, but 25% in 2012, with Romney scoring the same overwhelming level of support as did the outspokenly born-again Bush (78%).

Finally, another false narrative suggests that the real story of Republican catastrophe in 2012 amounted to a wholesale rejection by younger voters who hated the party and its candidate because of antediluvian positions on social issues.

Oh, really? Then how could one explain that GOP support among 18-29 year old voters actually went up sharply from 2008—from 32% to 37%?

Even more startling, young people who happened to be white still comprised a big majority (61%) of all voters below the age of 30 and delivered a shocking, counter-intuitive verdict on the choice between the ineffably cool Barack and the hopelessly square Mitt: going for the Mormon grandfather of 18 by a decisive, near-landslide margin of 7 points.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections intends to prosecute five suspects who allegedly voted in both Florida and North Carolina during the November 2012 election cycle, according the leader from the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Eric Shawn on Sunday morning.

Lt. Col. Jay DeLancy (U.S. Air Force-Ret.) noted that his group investigated and identified the voters to both states’ election offices earlier last month.

“Thanks to the relatively accessible election records in both Florida and North Carolina, this research was possible,” said Col. Jay DeLancy, who serves as executive director of VIP-NC, “but we have every reason to believe this is only the tip of the iceberg.”

The group thoroughly examined Florida’s election records to identify November 2012 voters who listed an alternate address in North Carolina and then compared that list with the N.C. voter history files. They found over 300 who appeared to be registered in both states and 33 who appeared to have voted in both state’s elections, which is a felony, DeLancy told FNC’s Shawn.

“We turned our list of 33 suspects over to both the Florida Secretary of State’s office and the North Carolina Board of Elections office and asked them to investigate,” said Delancy. “Don Wright, the chief counsel for N.C. State Board of Elections gave us the news that five of our suspects had matching signatures in both states and that his office would refer them [to the state's attorney general] for prosecution.”

Under N.C. law, the State Board of Elections can prosecute election finance crimes but not election fraud laws and the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina has asked the State Legislature to change that condition, according to the Fox interview.

“It is up [to] the respective District Attorneys if they intend to prosecute the cases,” wrote Don Wright in an email to the VIP-NC, dated March 5, 2013. The agency is yet to release the names or counties of the suspected felons.

Col. DeLancy attributes lack of prosecution authority at the state’s election as a key factor in the public claims by many groups that “no vote fraud happens in NC” and that “voter ID is a solution in search of a problem,” as many voter ID opponents have often repeated.

“Vote fraud deniers make nice poetry and they give good sound bites,” said DeLancy, “but the idea is as absurd as claiming that no speeding happens on I-40 unless the Highway Patrol writes tickets.”

The group also used their findings to press for NC to join a multi-state voter history database that was established by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

“The multi-state data base would bring transparency to cases of college students and snowbirds that live in two states and vote in both of them,” said DeLancy. “Except in open-information states like Florida and NC, this type crime has been very difficult if not impossible to detect.”

The group believes the data base would help bring “driver license type controls” to the public’s voter registrations.

Earlier this month we talked about an Ohio woman — a poll worker no less — who admits to voting for President Obama twice in the November election.

As an update to that story, when Melowese Richardson admitted to voting twice for Obama, it’s possible she was just being humble:

Authorities also are investigating if she voted in the names of four other people, too, for a total of six votes in the 2012 presidential election.

“I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States,” Richardson vowed when asked about the voter fraud investigation that is now under way.

Richardson is one of 19 people suspected of illegal voting by the Hamilton County Board of Elections in the last election.
[...]
“It appears she not only attempted to vote more than once, but was actually successful at it and having those additional votes counted,” Ohio Secretary of State John Husted, who is in charge of the state’s elections, told Fox News.

“She appears to have used her position as a poll worker to cover her tracks. That would be someone who is an official in the elections process, using that position to commit a fraud. That is especially troubling to me, as the chief elections officer of the state, because it is my responsibility to make sure the system runs effectively, that it has integrity. When I find issues like this, I know that it undermines voter confidence in our elections, and we must pursue it.”

Three other absentee ballots in the names of different people were submitted to the Board of Elections from Richardson’s address on Nov. 1. Officials say the handwriting on those ballots is similar and that they were all received together, on the same day that Richardson’s absentee ballot arrived at the office. Richardson maintains that some of the other voters live at her house.

The Hamilton County Board of Elections will hold Richardson’s hearing this Friday.

Out of sheer curiosity I searched the websites of CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC, and there was no mention of this story — something that would no doubt be different if the candidate Richardson voted for multiple times had an R after his name instead of a D.

by Burt Prelutsky

In recent months, there were two presidential elections of historical importance. In Egypt, they had their first ever democratic election for president. It was won by Mohammed Morsi over Ahmed Shafiq.

Here in the United States, we had our 55th presidential election, and re-elected a man who had inherited a bad economy and made it worse; insulted our friends and coddled our enemies; and spent most of his time golfing, throwing parties and taking vacations. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he compounds his sins by insulting Republican congressmen for no better reason than that they’re Republicans and refuse to rubberstamp his fiats.

The reason I bring all this up is to point out the irony that in spite of the fact that Morsi defeated his opponent by 3.4%, whereas Obama only had a 2.8% advantage over Romney, and in spite of the fact that Egyptians are novices at this, when Morsi started behaving like a Pharaoh, the voters stormed the streets of Cairo and reminded him he was just another politician.

Here, Obama wins a squeaker, and immediately starts talking about having a mandate to raise taxes and pass another stimulus bill. And not only is he not talking about cutting spending, but wants to increase it by over a trillion dollars. Playing to his base of college freshmen, welfare recipients and New York Times columnists, he even tries to get away with vilifying those earning over $250,000-a-year as the super-rich. Not since the glory days of Joe Stalin has any national leader played the class card as blatantly as Barack Obama.

The way that Obama incessantly goes about dividing Americans along race, gender, religion, income and political lines, it’s as if he’s trying to incite a second Civil War. It merely highlights how naïve people were when they heard the candidate talk in 2008 about a future in which there would not be a blue America or a red America, but a united America, and believed he actually meant it.

Speaking of the earlier Civil War, I can’t help noticing that there seems to be a renewal of interest in Abe Lincoln lately. He is suddenly the subject of movies, books and TV specials. What confounds me is that he is invariably depicted as a saint. While it’s true that he talked a good game, and it always helps burnish a politician’s reputation to be assassinated, I frankly don’t get it.

For openers, he didn’t wage the war in order to end slavery, but to preserve the Union. And we’ve all lived to see how well that worked out. These days, we’re about as united as the two Koreas.

Not only was Lincoln not out to free the slaves, but he disciplined those generals who tried to liberate them in the four states that did not take part of the rebellion. They were Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland and Missouri.

I have no way of proving it, but I have never believed that the Founding Fathers would have approved of a war that pitted Americans against one another, even in order to preserve the Union they created.

by Burt Prelutsky

In the old days, I don’t recall a lot of things surprising me. I’m not saying I could predict Kentucky Derby winners, but I don’t remember saying things like “Who would have guessed?” or “Imagine that!” or even “I never saw that coming.” Now that I’m an old guy, hardly a day goes by that I’m not surprised by something. And rarely, I hasten to add, in a good way.

I’m not just referring to Obama’s re-election, either, although that certainly knocked me for a loop. In spite of the pollsters predicting his victory, I refused to accept their conclusions. It seemed to me those guys weren’t reading tea leaves; they were smoking them.

To this day, I’m still asking myself what happened. In fact, if someone had assured me that Obama was going to receive some ten million fewer votes than he had scored in 2008, I not only would have been convinced that Romney was going to win, but that it would be a landslide. But who would have guessed that Romney would receive two million fewer votes than John McCain, who ran a campaign that reminded most people of the one waged by Michael (“Hey look at me, I’m sitting in a tank and looking like a major doofus”) Dukakis?

In the aftermath, a lot of people have suggested things that Romney could have done differently. But that’s typical of those folks known as Monday morning quarterbacks; you know, the guys who put on the team jersey and hoist a few brewskies, but who are never intercepted or sacked because they never leave the Barcalounger.

In my opinion, Romney ran a perfectly fine campaign. The fact that he did worse than McCain, even after Obama spent four years destroying the economy, gutting the military, antagonizing our allies and emboldening our enemies, has convinced me that the two main reasons he lost were because a large number of Republicans are religious bigots who couldn’t get past his Mormonism in spite of his getting endorsements from Mike Huckabee and Billy Graham, and because more Republicans than we’d like to believe are among the 15 million additional recipients of Obama’s food stamps.

Something else that surprises me is that at this late date, abortions continue to be an issue. The other day I found myself wondering how we can possibly expect our young people to actually learn math, science, English and civics, when after all the sex education classes that seemingly begin in kindergarten, they’re still knocking each other up.

I mean, with all the birth control pills and devices readily available for the sole purpose of preventing pregnancy, how is it that Planned Parenthood, all by its lonesome, performs over 300,000 abortions a year? And even that is only the tip of the bloody iceberg. Since 1973, it’s estimated that at least 50 million have been performed in this country. For the mathematically-challenged, that works out to roughly 1.3 million a year. Speaking of which, it’s no surprise that American kids score so badly on standardized math tests when they can’t add, subtract or do long division. It seems the only thing they can do is multiply, but they’d rather not.

The Warren campaign brought in $42 million in donations, the most of any House or Senate candidate in the country, but Fauxcahontas wouldn’t have proven herself fully qualified to join Congress the if she hadn’t spent more than she brought in. Mission accomplished… with extra cheese:

In an e-mail to supporters, the senator-elect from Massachusetts revealed that her campaign is in debt and asked for donations to help her out of the hole. Though she did not disclose the sum in her e-mail, a campaign official said Warren owes $400,000.

So how did a record fund-raiser end up in red ink?

Warren’s academic research has demonstrated that personal bankruptcy often stems from job loss, divorce, and catastrophic illness. In the case of her campaign, she is blaming pepperoni and mushrooms.

“Thousands more volunteers showed up — and that meant even more last-minute coffee and pizza,” Warren wrote, listing only that food and that beverage as the cause of the shortfall.

An inability to properly budget for coffee and pizza will make Dances With Campaign Debt the perfect Senator-elect to take a seat on the Banking Committee.

In reality, printing, mail, legal and accounting were the bulk of Warren’s debt, but “pizza” is much easier to convince people to chip in for than ink cartridges and stamps.

But if Warren wanted to retire that “pizza” debt effectively, why didn’t she just email supporters and claim she didn’t order that?

Liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s latest offering is confusing. Milbank is critical of Mitt Romney for returning to private business after losing the election instead of sticking around to help sort out the mess in DC:

Romney’s post-election behavior has been, in a word, small. Never again, likely, will his voice and influence be as powerful as they are now. Yet rather than stepping forward to help find a way out of the fiscal standoff, or to help his party rebuild itself, he delivered a perfunctory concession speech, told wealthy donors that President Obama won by giving “gifts” to minorities, then avoided the press at a private lunch with the president.

If Milbank wanted Romney to stick around and help find a way out of the fiscal mess, maybe Dana should have voted for him… ya think?

(h/t AoS)

Jeremy Bird, the National Field Director of Obama for America (OFA), said on Tuesday that Obama’s winning coalition on November 6 was the result of “the strongest grassroots organization in the history of American presidential politics.” OFA had more than twice as many local offices as Republican Mitt Romney in the targeted swing states, he said.

In those targeted states, Bird said, OFA had 631 offices, compared to only 282 for Romney.

While Republican strategist Karl Rove was raising $300 million for television ads depicting Republican candidate Mitt Romney as a would-be efficient manager of the U.S economy, Bird said the Obama for America operation assembled a network comprised of more than two million volunteers, backed by neighborhood political teams and 2,700 field organizers. The local offices were critical to mobilizing the volunteers, he said.

The title of Bird’s presentation was “Brick-by-brick: The nitty-gritty organizing work that turned out Obama’s winning coalition.” Although he is now the National Field Director for Obama for America, Jeremy Bird is a former community organizer with a history of working in Democratic Party politics.

Some conservatives are still insisting that Obama was elected through vote fraud, even though Romney has conceded the election and Republican consultants are acknowledging the flaws in the “ground game” of turning out the vote. The Bird presentation makes it plain that the Obama campaign simply out-organized the Romney campaign and used money where it was most effective—on the streets.

Bird’s remarks and a slide presentation dramatizing the Democratic Party advantages in the election were delivered at a Center for American Progress (CAP) event called “The Obama Coalition in 2012 and Beyond.”

As panelists openly talked about the success of the “Obama coalition” and what it could accomplish in the future, including in the 2014 congressional elections, they quickly dismissed a concern that the political nature of the conversation could jeopardize CAP’s status as a “non-partisan” and tax-exempt entity.

Funded by hedge-fund billionaire George Soros and other prominent liberals, CAP is considered a virtual front of the Obama Administration and claims to have played a “key role” in passing Obamacare.

CAP’s 2010 annual report, which reports almost $30 million in revenue, notes appearances by CAP figures on CNN as well as MSNBC host Ed Schultz’s taping of his radio show at the CAP radio studio.

The November 6 election came as a shock to many Republicans and conservatives, who believed the polls forecasting a Romney win. On Fox News, Karl Rove and Dick Morris were among those predicting a Romney victory.

The CAP event went behind the headlines of the Obama victory to demonstrate how they did it. Jeremy Bird said that OFA volunteers made 146 million “door knocks and phone calls” for Obama in order to try to get them out to the polls, and conducted a voter registration program that “changed the electorate” by increasing the turnout of minorities and others favorable to Obama. Bird noted that the Obama campaign had another program, Operation Vote, which focused on getting “core constituencies” to the polls.

Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, senior vice president of Greenberg Quinlan, Rosner Research, mocked the pollsters who had predicted a Romney win and said that the GOP’s most “reliable voters” did not turn out on Election Day.