Quick Hits - August 10, 2012

‘We have an administration where the Secretary of Health and Human Services believes she is fighting a war and the Secretary of Defense does not.’       Jim Gergahty, Campaign Spot, National Review Online

Why should the taxpayer pay for someones (Sandra Fluke) birth control?

Obama supporters can't answer that question - as this video highlighted on Hot Air demonstrates...

Again, why then should taxpayers fund this - and why do we need to violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?

The incompetent head of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, who's first comment after hearing that a Christmas Day suicide bomber's bomb on board a jetliner approaching Detroit failed because of a 'fizzle' remarked, 'The system worked', is in new trouble.  She's under fire accused of overseeing a female 'frat house' environment at DHS and favoring close female friends with no law enforcement or security experience over qualified law enforcement professionals who happen to be male for senior positions.  In addition, these close female friends placed by Sec. Napolitano, then treated their male staffers like 'lapdogs'.

One of the least remarked examples of the incompetence and inability to lead that is characteristic of Barack Obama is the poor quality of those that he has appointed to run key elements of the executive branch.  Rather than seeking those who are best trained and positioned to do the specific jobs they are asked to do, Barack Obama appears to value ideological and personal loyalty far above one's capability.

Ranging from the above mentioned Janet Napolitano, to SecTreas Tim Geithner (Wall Street connections, tax cheat, Delphi / UAW scandal), to Attorney General Eric Holder (Politicize DoJ, contest Voter ID / Immigration, support ExecBranch excesses), to SecInterior Ken Salazar (oppose domestic drilling, excessive environmentalism), to SecAg Tom Vilsack, to SecLabor Hilda Solis (promote unions, cook the employment books), to SecHHS Kathleen Sebelius (Obamacare, Religious mandate, promote abortion, gut welfare reform), to SecTrans Ray LaHood, to SecEnergy Steven Chu (Solyndra / Green Energy, oppose fossil fuels), to SecEducation Arne Duncan (gut No Child, promote gay studies, promote teacher's unions), to SecState Hilary Clinton (apology tours, lead from behind), to SecDef Leon Panetta (gut the DoD) - these are all selected for their willingness to promote the hard left progressive agenda and their personal loyalty to the President than being those with real skills in the real world to run the Executive Branch of the US government.

Most come from academia - not business and have little real experience in the real world or management.  Then consider most of the direct reports of these officials - they are the rabid partisan progressives who donated heavily to the Obama campaign and got rewarded with either cushy DC jobs - or being the recipient of the Administration's embrace of crony capitalism.

Is it any wonder we're in the dismal shape we are in?

Look at Goldman Sachs.  This Wall Street powerhouse is very closely tied to the 2008 financial crisis - starting in the housing / mortgage collapse that came from the progressive vision of mortgages to anyone and the greed in Wall Street to partner with Fannie / Freddie to lie about the quality of hundreds of billions of securitized mortgages, combined with extremely close ties to the Obama Administration that go well beyond just a source of tens of millions of campaign cash (Treasury, Fed Reserve), just learned that they will not be prosecuted by the Department of Justice for their role in the financial crisis despite major allegations of illegal actions being brought to light by a Senate panel investigating the 2008 financial crisis.

“The department and investigative agencies ultimately concluded that the burden of proof to bring a criminal case could not be met based on the law and facts as they exist at this time,” the department said.

… The Justice Department’s decision capped a good day for Goldman as the Securities and Exchange Commission decided not to file charges against the firm over a $1.3 billion subprime mortgage portfolio. At the same time, the Justice Department’s decision ensured that the Obama administration will continue to feel political heat, particularly from the liberal wing of the president’s own party, for not having brought more prosecutions in the financial crisis.

Goldman Sachs doesn't fare so well in 'Reckless Endangerment' - a superb book that takes an objective and factually support look into the key players and causes of the 2008 financial crisis in housing and banking.

Speaking of the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CNBC is wondering if the posting of Thursday's first time unemployment claims information on the BLS website the day before is the sign of anything...fishy.

With the history of the DoL and the BLS actively working to 'cook the books' regarding the continued dismal Obama economy - it's hard to believe that something 'fishy' is not going on.

Lost within the background noise of the dishonest and repulsive personal attacks by the Obama campaign and it's surrogates on Mitt Romney, is something that should be a major campaign issue - the active role of SecTreas Tim Geithner and key Treasury Department officials during the auto bailout to wipe out the pensions of non-union Delphi employees in order to protect the pensions of union members at that company.

A bipartisan group of legislators is demanding a stronger probe in this pension scandal.

The bipartisan support for this renewed investigation call — Kaptur is a Democrat — undercuts the Obama campaign’s accusations that his GOP rival, Mitt Romney, and Turner are trying to “politicize” this scandal.

Portman, who’s widely considered to be on Romney’s short list of potential vice presidential candidates, said in a statement that he has “met with these hard-working Ohioans who lost a significant portion of their pension benefits while other retirees from the same company received far better treatment.”

“The idea that the administration played politics with their pensions is beyond disappointing, and it deserves answers,” Portman said. “The administration’s decisions have caused pain and loss to thousands of workers and their families as a result of their reduced benefits. This matter deserves continued scrutiny from Congress, and the administration must be called upon to account for its decisions.”

This renewed investigation call comes in the wake of emails The Daily Caller obtained and first published on Tuesday showing that senior White House and Treasury officials were behind the termination of pensions for 20,000 non-union Delphi salaried retirees.

An aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has been dishonestly accusing, without substantiation, GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney of not paying any taxes for 10 years, is backtracking quickly from his information on the supposed source for the accusation.

After days of silence on Harry Reid's disputed claim that Mitt Romney hasn't paid taxes for a decade, a top aide finally spilled details on the supposed source of the allegation -- only to issue a wholesale retraction of those details by Thursday evening.

Reid aide Jose Parra first made the claims in an interview on Los Angeles' KTLK radio , defending his boss' decision to trumpet the tax charge last week on the Senate floor and explaining a bit about the source.

"This person is an investor in Bain Capital, a Republican also, and somebody ... who has been dealing with Romney's company for a long, long time and he has direct knowledge on this," Parra said.

Parra's statement comes after Romney, in an interview with Fox News, challenged Reid to identify his source.

However, after some media attention on Parra's radio interview, Parra issued a statement taking those remarks back.

Speaking of the staggering failure that is Harry Reid - and his leadership of the Democrat majority controlled Senate...

... it's 1200 days since the Senate has passed a budget.  Nearly $5 trillion in new U.S. sovereign debt has been added to the books - and the federal government has increased spending by nearly 30% - to spending $11.2 trillion over that time frame.

With too many excellent images, charts, and graphs to post, click HERE to go to ZeroHedge's 'Complete Guide to the Coming Fiscal Cliff'.  This is a one-stop location that will show you exactly what will happen on January 1, 2013 and beyond if we continue down the path advocated by President Barack Obama and his progressive allies.

Charles Krauthammer's weekly column makes a strong case AGAINST the reelection of Barack Obama...

Ideas matter. The 2010 election, the most ideological since 1980, saw the voters resoundingly reject a Democratic party that was relentlessly expanding the power, spending, scope, and reach of government.

It’s worse now. Those who have struggled to create a family business, a corner restaurant, a medical practice won’t take kindly to being told that their success is a result of government-built roads and bridges.

In 1988, Michael Dukakis famously said, “This election is not about ideology; it’s about competence.” He lost. If Republicans want to win, Obama’s deeply revealing, teleprompter-free you-didn’t-build-that confession of faith needs to be hung around his neck until Election Day. The third consecutive summer-of-recovery-that-never-came is attributable not just to Obama being in over his head but to what’s in his head: a government-centered vision of the economy and society, and the policies that flow from it.

Four years of that and this is what you get.

Make the case and you win the White House.

However, the struggling newspaper that is the host of Krauthammer's column, the WaPoo, continues to shill for Barack Obama on it's front page.  Today, it's trying to make the case that yesterday's slight drop in new unemployment claims (after seasonal adjustments) is a sign of an improving economy - despite the obvious evidence that DoL and BLS are cooking the labor books and consumer confidence has just hit a 2012 low.

Coincidentally, Barack Obama's Job Approval rating has also just hit a new low for 2012...only 43% approve of the job the President is doing, 51% disapprove - with less than 85 days remaining before Election Day.

Outrage over the Priorities USA / Obama Campaign advertising campaign that accuses Mitt Romney of being complicit in the cancer death of a woman continues - with prominent and leading Democrats joining in the demands for a repudiation of the advertisement...

“Bill Burton needs to go back to ethics school,” Davis said of the group’s senior strategist, who is a former Obama White House spokesman. “He knows perfectly well that the ad is misleading and disgusting and he needs to apologize for it.” …

Davis said the president shouldn’t allow his supporters to suggest that Romney is in any way to blame for the woman’s death.

“President Obama owes it to the American people to repudiate this ad,” he said. Obama campaign officials have refused to disavow the ad, claiming independence from the outside group and no knowledge of the woman’s story. Priorities USA strategists insist the ad is factually correct and will air as scheduled later this week.

Stephanie Cutter, the Obama Deputy Campaign Manager, who was caught in a series of lies over Joe Soptic and the controversial Priorities USA advertisement, has suddenly pulled out from appearing on ABC News 'This Week' program on Sunday morning - to be replaced by Obama Campaign spin-meister David Axelrod.

The decision appears to be damage control for the Obama campaign to prevent Cutter from being asked questions about the advertisement, her now proven dishonest claims that the Obama campaign had no knowledge of Soptic, and the strong circumstantial evidence of illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and a Super-PAC.

Mitt Romney's campaign wasted little time hitting back at the Obama campaign and Barack Obama's lack of character with this hard hitting advertisement... American Deserves Better

The pro-GOP Super-PAC, American Crossroads, also fires back at the Obama campaign and Priorities USA with their new advert - Cancer...

On Breitbart.com's Big Government site, there is a very good article that highlights that the latest meme, that Mitt Romney is struggling in the polls - as evidenced by the RealClearPolitics average (which is intended to 'balance out poll results) - is suffering from the same problem as so many of the polls on the race by PPP, Quinnipiac, CBS, NBC, WaPoo, NYT, WSJ, Fox News, Pew, and CNN are victims of - a skewed by design or accident sampling that projects a race that is like or better than 2008 for the Democrats...

To smooth out the noise from individual polls it is best to look at an average of them. RealClearPolitics has the most cited average of recent polls and forms the basis of most pundits and reporters assessment of the presidential race. But, as the old saying goes, "Trash in, trash out." The near-epidemic of skewed media polls is warping the RCP average in a way that is very favorable to Obama.

Today's RCP average shows Obama with a 4.4 point lead nationally. The average is based on nine recently released polls. Five of these, four of which show outsized leads for Obama, have serious partisan skews favoring Democrats. The Pew "poll," which shows Obama up 10, has a D+19 skew. FoxNews Poll is D+9, NBC is D+9 and CBS is D+7. The CNN poll, which I discussed today, seems to have a D+10 skew. None of these partisan breakdowns is an accurate prediction of what the electorate will look like in November, yet they do impact the current RCP Average.

The four polls with more reasonable assumptions of partisan breakdown show a much closer race. Still, only two of these poll "likely voters"--Rasmussen and Democracy Corps. Registered voter polls inherently give Democrats a 2-3 point edge in results. Factor all these variables in and the race is probably a wash, with the probability of a slight Romney edge.

I call it, at this point a 4-5 point Romney edge - with the prospects of that expanding as we go forward.  The only reason it's close now is because of all the efforts made to make it appear close by pollsters and the mainstream media.  Think back to what Charles Krauthammer wrote above....that's far closer to the real case today.

I'm going to wrap up today with a nice little palate cleanser from talk radio host and comedian Dennis Miller - who hosted Dave from Ohio on a call on yesterday's program....before launching on what will be a classic radio rant against an idiotarian...

Today in History

1776 - News reaches London, England that the American colonists had drafted the Declaration of Independence.

1945 - Tokyo passes a message to the Allies via its ambassadors in Switzerland and Sweden that it would accept the Potsdam Declaration of unconditional surrender with the proviso that 'said Declaration does not compromise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as sovereign ruler'.  President Truman orders a halt to atomic bombing and asked advisers if the proviso was a deal breaker.  Negotiations between the US and Japan takes place while savage fighting continues between the USSR and Japan in Manchuria.

1949 - President Harry Truman signs the National Security Bill - legislation which streamlined some changes made in the 1947 National Security Act.  Among the changes, making the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force subordinate to the Secretary of Defense as opposed to full cabinet members and creating the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

1977 - David Berkowitz is arrested and charged by the NYPD of being the 'Son of Sam' serial killer who terrorized New York City for more than one year.  During his killing spree, he murdered 6 and wounded 7 others.

1988 - President Ronald Reagan signs a measure that provided $20,000 in payments to Japanese-Americans who were interned by the U.S. government during World War Two.