Back to Basics

In the midst of the heated gun-control debate in the nation’s capital, a leading Internet web site exclusively for federal state and local law enforcement, on Monday released the surprising results of a survey of police professionals from across the U.S. The survey provides revealing insights into the opinions of American law enforcement regarding gun control policies and the root causes of, and potential solutions, to gun crime in the U.S.

The organization that released the survey — PoliceOne.com — conducted the study in early March 2013.

PoliceOne.com officials stated that their research team received 15,000 responses from law enforcement professionals in agencies and departments throughout the nation.

The survey answers revealed that the overall attitude of law enforcement is strongly anti-gun legislation and pro-gun rights, with the belief that an armed citizenry is effective in stopping crime.

Among the results:

• 86 percent feel the currently proposed legislation would have no effect or a negative effect on improving officer safety.
• Similarly, 92 percent feel that banning semi-automatic firearms, or “assault weapons,” would have no effect or a negative effect on reducing violent crime.
• Demonstrating the opinion that the best way to combat gun crime is through harsher punishment, 91 percent said the use of a firearm while perpetrating a crime should lead to a stiff, mandatory sentence with no plea bargains. Likewise, 59 percent believe increasing punishment severity for unlicensed dealers would reduce crime.
• Respondents were more split on background checks, with 31 percent agreeing that mental health background checks in all gun sales would help reduce mass shootings, while 45 percent disagreed.
• 71 percent support law enforcement leaders who have publicly refused to enforce more restrictive gun laws within their jurisdictions.
• 82 percent believe gun buyback or turn-in programs are ineffective in reducing the level of gun violence.
• 91 percent support the concealed carry of firearms by civilians who have not been convicted of a felony and/or have not been deemed psychologically incapable.
• Likewise, 80 percent feel that legally-armed citizens would likely have reduced the number of casualties in recent mass shooting incidents.
• 38 percent believe the biggest cause of gun violence in the United States is the “decline in parenting and family values”. This was trailed by “overly lax parole and short sentencing standards” at 15 percent and “pop culture influence” (eg. violent movies and video games) at 14 percent.

The survey was promoted by PoliceOne.com exclusively to its 400,000 registered members, comprised of individually-verified law enforcement professionals. Only current, former or retired law enforcement personnel were eligible to participate in the survey.

Respondents comprised a variety of ranks from departments of all sizes, with the majority representing departments of greater than 500 officers. Of those who took the survey, 80 percent were current law enforcement officers and 20 percent were former/retired law enforcement.

The demonization of private property is the signature feature of Marxist economics, and this president is the master of vicious anti-capitalist attacks in the name of “fairness.” It’s completely un-American, but as the Obama regime tightens its grip on the culture, more and more Americans are abandoning our founding principles. Conn Carroll reported on Gallup’s recent survey findings to that effect, “Obama voters love socialism.”

And Sean Hannity discussed Obama’s socialist surge with Sarah Palin last night:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP40SfxtATo

See also,”Rachel Maddow and the Left’s Depraved Agenda of Unchecked Power Over the Individual.”

Also, “Campaign for America’s Future, Top Democrat Activist Group, Launches Class-Warfare Website,” and “Communist Party USA Pulls Out the Stops for Democrat Class Warfare.”

Tuesday I spent almost an hour waiting in line with a bunch of racists. Previously I would have described the experience as I waiting in line to vote, but thanks to the Associated Press, I now know different.

A recent AP poll on racial attitudes proves conclusively that should Obama lose the election, journalists will blame his defeat on white Republican racists.

According AP, “Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not.” (emphasis added). How’s that for white America being bad to the bone?

The survey also confirms the vast majority of mainstream journalists still suffer from chronic liberal guilt, a pre–existing malady Obamacare will actively promote.

The Thought Police at AP explained, “The Associated Press polls were designed to dig into one of the most sensitive subjects in American Politics: racial attitudes and their effect on how people will vote in an election in which the nation’s first black president could be re–elected.

Overall the survey found that by virtue of racial prejudice, [Obama could lose] an estimated net loss of 2 percentage points due to anti–black attitudes…”

The Obama defeat story practically writes itself, particularly when Monday’s Rasmussen Reports tracking poll has the race at 49 Romney and 48 Obama.

The AP survey was not conducted over the phone. Instead the respondents were invited to complete the questionnaire on a computer because: “Studies have shown people are more willing to reveal potentially unpopular attitudes on a computer than in questioning by a live interviewer.” They certainly watch a lot more porn and use bad language online, so why not express unpopular attitudes, too.

But since AP researchers know white supremacists are devious and will try to mislead earnest scientists by doing something like electing a black president; they also tested “implicit” racism by means of an “affect misattribution” test. They claim this is accurate because social scientists say so.

What they don’t tell you is the research sample is often composed of a handful of university graduate students that need the credit for participating or simply need the money. The test is taken in an artificial environment where the subjects know they are being tested (see Heisenberg Effect for details). Then ‘mirabile dictu’ the test confirms what the “scientists” already knew.

The “affect misattribution” test —America Found Guilty — involves flashing photos of people of different races (ugly, fierce, plain, beautiful, the number of variables beggars description) for a nanosecond or two. Followed by a neutral image — in this case a Chinese character — and asking whether the logo for egg foo young is a pleasant or unpleasant symbol.

In an earlier time this technique was called “subliminal advertising” and it was found unpersuasive when used to try to convince movie goers to buy more Coke; but AP is convinced this technique will root out those who still think Rodney King should have gotten his behind kicked.

Exit polls show that Obama got 71 percent of the Hispanic vote.  But there is a big potential problem with that claim.  Namely a very conservative state with a Republican Hispanic running for the US Senate not being included in the exit polling.

Although there was a clear budgetary rationale for omitting Texas from exit polling, it is a far more serious omission. Texas has one of the nation’s largest Hispanic populations. It is one of the few states where Republicans have had some success in courting Hispanics, winning as much as 49 percent of their votes in 2004. Have all of those efforts fallen apart in the Obama era? Were Texas Hispanics as sour on Mitt Romney this time as Hispanics in other states? Did they swing further in Obama’s direction, as they did in Colorado, or a bit away from him, as they did in Nevada and California? And how did these voters — mostly Mexican by ancestry — feel about Cruz, a Cuban-American who speaks with a Texas twang? . . .

Let me give you an example of the problem here.  The 19 states that were left out of the exit polling were states that tended to very strong Republican states, not just Texas.  One of the questions included in these exit polls every eight years is whether people own guns (1988, 1996, 2004 and now it should have been in there for 2012).  If you tend to leave out heavily Republican states, do you think that it might bias you poll on the rate that people own guns?  Sure, Democrats do own guns, but at a lower rate than Republicans and where Democrats own guns at the highest rates tend to be in heavily Republican states.

As we go to press polls show America’s largest swing state in a dead head between Romney and Obama. Florida has 29 electoral votes and the third largest “Hispanic” population in America. Normally this means a cakewalk for any Democrat.

But whoops! Turns out that about a third of these Florida Hispanics (Cuban-Americans) are actually so—as in Americans whose ancestors hail almost exclusively from Europe’s Iberian Peninsula known as Hispania by the Romans. So as a broken clock is right twice a day, the term “Hispanic” as used by the mainstream media can actually be correct about 1/1000 of the time. (i.e. when it refers to Cuban-Americans.)

A poll last week of voters in Florida’s Miami-Dade county by the Miami Herald county found the following breakdown:

 

Obama     Romney    Undecided

White:    64%             30%             6%

Black:    95%               2%              3%

Hispanic 33%            62%              5%

Hey wait a minute! liberals wail. “But every poll on the planet shows Obama with at least 70% of the U.S. Hispanic vote”?! So what’s going on here?!”

Americans of Cuban heritage as usual, that’s what’s going on. The Miami Herald poll broke it down further:

 

Obama     Romney  Undecided

Cuban-American   19%              76%                5%

In brief: no ethnic group in the U.S. comes even close to matching Cuban-Americans in their level of disdain for President Barack Obama in particular and the Democratic Party in general.

Such is their nonconformity, that these insufferable Cuban-Americans drove an exasperated pollster to stop polling in areas they are known to infest, as in south Florida. “Eduardo Gamarra, a registered Democrat of Bolivian descent,” reports the Miami Herald about a pollster from Florida International University last week, “actually had to scale back the number of Cuban-American respondents in the poll, a process known as “weighting,”….Gamarra stopped polling in South Florida all together when he concluded the three-day survey last week in order to reach other Hispanics.”

“The difference (with polling) in Florida,” reads the Miami Herald story, “are Cuban voters. Without them, the FIU poll shows, Obama would handily win likely Florida Hispanic voters 65-32 percent. Not only are Cubans reliable Republican voters — they’re about 70 percent of Miami-Dade’s registered Republicans”

“You keep hearing about a liberalization of the vote with younger, second-generation Cubans.” wailed Democratic pollster Gamarra. “But the polls are not showing it. Young Cubans are starting to look more Republican than their parents.”

Which is saying a lot.

These insufferable political mavericks have often goaded the Democratic/Media axis to enraged sputterings against them. “Truly disgusting!” was how Bryant Gumbel characterized the Cuban-American demonstrating against shanghaiing Elian Gonzalez back to Castro. Five years ago Georgetown professor Norman Birnbaum, an advisor to three Democratic presidential candidates and today a columnist for The Daily Beast, labeled “Miami-Cubans” a “truly reprehensible!” group. In 2008 one of America’s most influential newspapers, the Washington Post, ran a cartoon celebrating Cuban-Americans’ expulsion from the U.S. en masse.

Study the cartoon and imagine the fire (literal, perhaps) if instead of fedoras (which are rarely worn by Cuban-Americans, BTW) the group had worn kuffiyehs, burkhas and chadors. What if the boat’s passengers had been labeled “nappy-headed” and were headed for Africa? Imagine the rallies in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago if they’d worn sombreros!

by Burt Prelutsky

After you’ve read this article, Burt hopes you’ll enjoy Pravda, Isvestia & The New York Times.

Recently, Bill O’Reilly conducted one of his unscientific polls. The question put to his conservative viewers was whether they were able to maintain friendships with liberals. Apparently, 79% of the respondents boasted that they were able to do so. I’m with the 21% who can’t.

Keeping in mind that the question only asked about friends and not relatives, those people one can’t avoid no matter how hard you try, I have to ask myself what sort of friendships the 79% had in mind. Clearly it’s not a relationship that places any importance on values and character. Perhaps these “friendships” imply nothing more than a word we use to describe a group of guys getting together to bowl, play poker or shoot a round of golf. It certainly doesn’t involve a mature concern over America’s economy, security or future.

Otherwise, if conversation is involved, how do you avoid arguing about differences that involve everything from abortions on demand and voting laws to religious beliefs and America’s foreign policy? What common ground is to be found between those who believe that all power should reside with politicians and Washington bureaucrats and those who believe, as the Founding Fathers made clear in the Constitution, that the government that governed least governed best?

Speaking of which, every American, whatever his political leanings, should read the Constitution every once in a while simply to be reminded how few powers are actually granted to the federal government and how many more are left in the hands of the states and the individual.

Of all the truly awful things the Obama administration has been guilty of, perhaps none were as vile as its refusal to grant Ambassador Stevens the additional security he begged for, and to then engage in a cover-up that dwarfed Watergate in its moral depravity. After all, the earlier scandal merely led to a president being disgraced and driven from office; it did not lead to the brutal and preventable murders of four Americans.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta explained that it would have been dangerous to have sent the military in to Benghazi to attempt a rescue of the Americans who were under attack from Islamic terrorists during a seven hour siege. However, if the State Department’s response to Ambassador Steven’s request for additional security forces hadn’t been to deplete the small number he had to begin with, there’s a good chance the attacks would never have taken place. Granted, it would have been dangerous to have sent in operatives on 9/11. But does anyone really doubt that Israel would have made the attempt if those under attack had been Israelis?

My own belief is that Obama’s court advisor Valerie Jarrett, who apparently twice prevented Obama from giving the order to take out Osama bin Laden, recalled how Jimmy Carter’s bungled attempt to rescue the American hostages from Iran in 1979 helped lead to his defeat the following year. And, frankly, anyone who believes that Barack Obama would risk his re-election over something as trivial as American lives is a nincompoop.

When three weeks before the election, Colin Powell once again endorsed Obama, not even Big Bird was surprised.

A new Gallup survey found that among people who have cast early ballots, Mitt Romney leads 52-46 in a poll with a margin of error of three points. Politico calls that a draw so far. Okay, whatever. But comparing the early vote advantage this year to a similar point in time in 2008 as a way to measure enthusiasm unearths a finding that will nonetheless be troubling to Team Obama.

President and Michelle Obama have been encouraging voters to cast their ballots early. The good news for the president and first lady is that people appear to be heeding that call. John Nolte at Big Government has the bad news for them:

My pal Guy Benson found a juicy nugget that helps to bring more clarity to the news from Gallup yesterday that shows Romney leading Obama in the early vote by a full seven points, 52-45%. Almost exactly four years ago (October 28, 2008), according to Gallup, Obama was massacring John McCain among early voters with a fifteen-point lead, 55-40%. That means, at least according to Gallup, that Obama’s early vote advantage has dropped 22 points when compared to ’08.

Benson also notes that the percentage of voters who have or intend to vote early was 33% in 2008 and remains at 33% today. As Don Surber said in this tweet, “People don’t wait in line to vote for the status quo[.]”

In his email to me, Benson makes The Point: “Obama had a 55/40 lead on McCain with early voters in ’08, but only led by 3 pts with the election day crowd. He ended up winning by 7 overall.”

It has more to do with enthusiasm and less to do with fears of overflowing toilets on November 6th.

Meanwhile, a new poll from NPR — yes, NPR — shows Romney taking a slim overall lead and taking more independents aboard:

A new National Public Radio poll, which had President Obama leading Mitt Romney 51 percent to 44 percent four weeks ago, now has Mitt Romney on top, 48 percent to 47 percent, with the Republican benefiting from his debate performances.

The poll found that among likely voters, 34 percent said Romney’s debate performances made them more likely to vote for the challenger while 28 percent said they now are more likely to vote for the president. Among critical independent voters, though, Romney won big, with 37 percent saying they are now more likely to chose him compared to 21 percent for Obama.

But Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg and Republican pollster Whit Ayres found that Obama leads by 4 points in the 12 battleground states that appear ready to pick the winner for the rest of the country next Tuesday. And they suggest that Romney’s post-debate surge has “stalled.”

The battleground state sample, according to Paul Bedard, was 35 percent Dem and 31 percent Republican as many pollsters to continue to insist on assuming turnout levels will be the same this year as they were in 2008.

According to the Pew Research Center: The Percent of Americans who have a favorable view of the US

2012 80%
2011 79%
2010 85%
2009 88%
2008 84%

American’s opinion of Americans has also fallen by two percentage points over the same period.  Foreigners are also less likely to like the way that Americans do business.  Down from 44% in 2007 to 41% in 2012 (survey not done in all years).

What is most striking is how so many more people in the Middle East and Southern Asia dislike the US.  These are the percent who have an “unfavorable” view.

Pakistan
2012 80%
2008 63%

Egypt
2012 79%
2008 75%

Jordan
2012 86%
2008 79%

Lebanon
2012 49%
2008 48%

Strangely Israel is only included in the polls on America’s role in reducing terrorism, and their opinion of the US has fallen considerable.  Falling from 78% in 2007 to 72% in 2011 (Israel not included in all years).

It’s been a week since the Hoftra debate — the “how dare you imply that my administration lied” debate — and President Eye Candy’s numbers are going in the wrong direction. Mitt Romney regained a point in the daily tracking, again up 52 to 45 percent in the presidential horse race. Somewhere Nate Silver is cowering in shame.

See: “Election 2012 Likely Voters Trial Heat: Obama vs. Romney – Among likely voters.”

RELATED: At Politico, “Battleground Tracking Poll: Mitt Romney takes lead” (at Memeorandum):

DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — Mitt Romney has taken a narrow national lead, tightened the gender gap and expanded his edge over President Barack Obama on who would best grow the economy.

A new POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Tracking Poll of 1,000 likely voters — taken from Sunday through Thursday of last week — shows Romney ahead of Obama by two points, 49 to 47 percent. That represents a three-point swing in the GOP nominee’s direction from a week ago but is still within the margin of error. Obama led 49 percent to 48 percent the week before.

Romney has not led in the poll since the beginning of May.

Across the 10 states identified by POLITICO as competitive, Romney leads 50 to 48 percent.

See also Ed Morrissey, “Romney edges into 49/47 lead in Politico/GWU Battleground poll.”

More later…