Quick Hits - August 2, 2012

Chick-fil-A breaks all of their sales records during a massive turnout during Wednesday's Support Chick-fil-A efforts.  Katie Pavlich of Townhall.com, writes:

Not only did customers wait for hours in line to "eat more chikin" but many Chick-Fil-A locations ran out of food. Rick Santorum, Rep. Louie Gohmert, newly victorious Ted Cruz, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Pat Boone and others tweeted about supporting the company. Santa also decided to show up..in August! It's fair to say the boycott failed miserably and that the buycott overwhelmingly succeeded. If this many people show up to vote in November, President Obama is in trouble.

Friday brings the counter-demonstration - gay rights activists promise 'Kiss-in's' at Chick-fil-A locations to demonstrate their support for same-sex marriage which the owner / CEO of Chick-fil-A opposes.

A couple of President Obama's loudest media sycophants at The Hill (Amie Parnes and Niall Stanage) have a prominent article on the paper's website touting the heavily skewed Quinnipiac / CBS News / New York Times poll of three of the most critical battleground states - Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania as 'proof' that the Obama bailout of the auto industry is driving his 'consistent lead' in Ohio.  Unsurprisingly, they downplay 'conservative pollster' Scott Rasmussen's data. Left unsaid from the cheerleading duo, the heavy pro-Democrat skew in the polls - ranging from D+7 to D+9 - far exceeding even the 2008 Democrat turnout in those states.

But they don't stop at just highlighting skewed polls, they also rush to credit Barack Obama for Ohio's current 7.2% unemployment rate which is far more the work of current Ohio Governor John Kasich (a Republican - which is why he doesn't get credit from the biased duo) - all based on the statements of long-time Democrat operatives in Ohio.

While the Lamestream media celebrates the Quinnipiac / CBS / NYT's skewed poll, conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt interviews Quinnipiac's Peter Brown who helped conduct the poll about the poll's skew.  As evidenced by the full transcript (here), Brown is unable to answer basic questions about his poll posed to him by Hugh Hewitt....

HH: Now what I don’t understand this, so educate me on it, if Democrats only had a three point advantage in Florida in the final turnout measurement in 2008, but in your poll they have a nine point turnout advantage, why is that not a source of skepticism for people?


PB: Well, I mean, clearly there will be some people who are skeptics. This is how we’ve always done our polls. Our record is very good in terms of accuracy. Again, remember, we’re asking people what they consider themselves at the time we call them.


HH: But I don’t know how that goes to the issue, Peter, so help me. I’m not being argumentative, I really want to know. Why would guys run a poll with nine percent more Democrats than Republicans when that percentage advantage, I mean, if you’re trying to tell people how the state is going to go, I don’t think this is particularly helpful, because you’ve oversampled Democrats, right?


PB: But we didn’t set out to oversample Democrats. We did our normal, random digit dial way of calling people. And there were, these are likely voters. They had to pass a screen. Because it’s a presidential year, it’s not a particularly heavy screen.


HH: And so if, in fact, you had gotten a hundred Democrats out of a hundred respondents that answered, would you think that poll was reliable?


PB: Probably not at 100 out of 100.


HH: Okay, so if it was 75 out of 100…


PB: Well, I mean…


HH: I mean, when does it become unreliable? You know you’ve just put your foot on the slope, so I’m going to push you down it. When does it become unreliable?


PB: Like the Supreme Court and pornography, you know it when you see it.


…


HH: As we say, that might be the case, but I don’t know it’s responsive to my question. My question is, should we trust this as an accurate predictor of what will happen? You’ve already told me there…


PB: It’s an accurate predictor of what would happen is the election were today. HH: But that’s, again, I don’t believe that, because today, Democrats wouldn’t turn out by a nine point advantage. I don’t think anyone believes today, if you held the election today, do you think Democrats would turn out nine percentage points higher than Republicans?


PB: If the election were today, yeah. What we found is obviously a large Democratic advantage.


HH: I mean, you really think that’s true? I mean, as a professional, you believe that Democrats have a nine point turnout advantage in Florida?


PB: Our record has been very good. You know, Hugh, I…


HH: That’s not responsive. It’s just a question. Do you personally, Peter, believe that Democrats enjoy a nine point turnout advantage right now?


PB: What I believe is what we found.


HH: Geez, I just, and an eight point in Ohio? I’m from Ohio. Democrats haven’t had an eight point advantage in Ohio since before the Civil War. I mean, that just never happens, but Peter, I appreciate your coming on. I’m not persuaded that Quinnipiac Polls haven’t hurt themselves today, but I appreciate your willingness to come on and talk about it.

Again, the case that Peter Brown tries to make, is that the enthusiasm and turnout for Democrats in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will be far greater than the enthusiastic turnout they had in 2008.  The current view combined with historical precedent just does not support that claim.

Even worse than the skewed Quinnipiac / SeeBS / NYT poll is a Pew Research poll that touts President Obama with a 10 point lead over Mitt Romney!  What's not being touted, however, is the D+19 partisan sample that is needed to produce a 10 point Obama lead!  Guy Benson at Townhall.com takes a clue-by-four to this poll....

Romney's losing by ten nationally! Panic! The partisan sample of this poll is *D+19.* This is fantasyland. The 2008 electorate was D+7; Pew tacks on an additional 12 percentage points, and concocts a large Obama lead. There's no point in breaking down this poll any further. Pew is churning out results that make them feel good at this point, which doesn't merit serious scrutiny. Two questions. (1) How is Obama only leading by 4 points in swing states with such a mind-blowing sample in his favor? (2) Isn't it interesting that this poll shows Romney leading with independents? I'll leave you with another new national poll from The Economist and YouGov. It also features an absurd sample (D+10 / D+8 with leaners), and it surveys adults -- not registered or likely voters -- which tends to benefit Democrats. And yet...

15) Who will you vote for in the 2012 Presidential election? Asked of registered voters. Respondents who initially answered 'not sure' were then asked whom they would support if they had to choose. Those who answered ’Probably Obama’ or 'Probably Romney' to the follow-up question are considered 'leaners.' Leaners Included:


Barack Obama 44%


Mitt Romney 46%


Other 6%


Not sure 4%

The sympathetic and sycophantic are using these skewed polls to boost the President's numbers.  They know that once the slide starts - it will soon become unstoppable - just as it did in 1980.  So the meme now is to embrace their inner Baghdad Bob and try to convince people that the President's reelection is 'inevitable' and it's time to be on the winning side.

The fact that the polls have to be skewed to show an Obama 'win' or even make it close does not mean that Mitt Romney can coast.  He still needs to work very very hard to articulate a compelling vision and plan to turn around the course that Obama has placed the country on.  He needs to fight back hard against the class warfare environment that Obama is using to appeal to the nearly 50% who not only pay no federal incomes taxes, but are collecting from the federal government that their 'easy train' will end if Romney is elected.  He also needs to fight back against the hordes of so-called professional journalists who use their positions to propagandize their progressive ideological viewpoints.

The biased NBC News trio (Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Domenico Montanaro) spin furiously in their analysis of the Presidential campaign - pushing the meme that Team Obama is being outspent by the Romney campaign and pro-Romney Super-Pacs by a 2 to 1 margin.

They do this by employing another standard progressive variation of the 20/80 fallacy - focusing on an extremely narrow argument targeting just 'outside groups' and a limited timeframe - and then presenting this as 'proof' of the larger claim, the 2 to 1 margin that the President is being 'outspent' based on just 1 week of advertising - this week.

But if one looks at the overall picture, as political analyst Karl Rove does in his weekly Wall Street Journal column, one finds that numbers are far different from the picture that NBC News attempts to paint.  Furthermore, it also demonstrates that the massive spending blitz / burn rate of the President's campaign is doing little to move the non-heavily skewed polls as Rove shows that 3 months and $131 million in campaign spending hasn't made a big difference for the President...

These ads have not moved him up in the polls. The race is tied in the July 30 Gallup poll at 46%. Neither have the ads strengthened public approval of Mr. Obama's handling of the economy, which is stuck at 44% in the July 22 NBC/WSJ poll, nor have they erased Mr. Romney's seven-point lead in that poll regarding who has "good ideas for how to improve the economy."


Roughly $111 million of Mr. Obama's ad blitz was paid for by his campaign; outside groups chipped in just over $20 million. The Romney campaign spent only $42 million over the same period in response, with $107.4 million more in ads attacking Mr. Obama's policies or boosting Mr. Romney coming from outside groups (with Crossroads GPS, a group I helped found, providing over half).


Mr. Obama's strategists know they won in 2008 in large part by outspending their opponents in the primaries and general election. They've tried that with Mr. Romney the last three months, and so far it isn't working. Still, just this week, according to public records, Team Obama has bought an additional $32 million in ads in nine battleground states for August.


Unanswered television ads do move poll numbers, as was the case in 2008. But these Obama ads won't go unanswered.


The response by the Romney campaign and Romney supporters will be amplified by the reality of a painfully weak economy, growing debt and unpopular ObamaCare. More fundraisers will not solve that problem, but they will create opportunities for a weary candidate to make more revealing and damaging statements.

Here's the other things about the advertisements....what's their primary focus?  On the pages of QH, we see many of the RNC, Romney, and leading outside group adverts - the majority of them targeting the President's policies - with a focus on the economic policies of the President which have us in this dismal recovery.  What are the focus from the President, DNC, and his outside groups?  False memes about Mitt Romney being a serial outsourcer while at Bain or the failure of the GOP candidate to release more than just a single year's tax return.  They may think those topics are substantive - but I doubt independents in swing states do.

Also pushing the negative are the campaign contributions 'in-kind' that come from the lamestream media.  The Media Research Center (MRC) took a look at the alphabet network news programs....

MRC analysts examined all 21 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories about Romney's trip to London, Israel and Poland between July 25 and July 31. Virtually all of these stories (18, or 86%) emphasized Romney's "diplomatic blunders," from his "golden gaffe" at the Olympic games to "missteps" that offended the Palestinians.


The first of these "gaffes" was the former GOP governor asserting that security problems in London are not "encouraging." (This unsurprising point had previously been made by many in the media.) …


At the conclusion of Romney's tour, Brian Williams summed up the week as concluding "with controversy, some hurt feelings, and some raw tempers." NBC reporter Peter Alexander highlighted a Romney aide who swore at journalists for screaming questions just after the candidate left the Polish Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.


Alexander lectured that the trip was "at times marred by missteps" and that "Romney offend[ed] his Olympic hosts and Palestinian leaders."


While Romney's trip resulted in his most substantial coverage since wrapping up the Republican primary, the stories were overwhelmingly negative. Contrasted with the fawning coverage Barack Obama received four years ago, the network's rough coverage of Romney's trip stands as yet another reminder of the media's double standard when it comes to Barack Obama and any conservative candidate who might get in his way.

National Public Radio (NPR) apparently has decided to abandon its news format and fully embrace itself as a SuperPAC for the Obama campaign while collecting hundreds of millions in taxpayers funds...

National Public Radio (NPR) is apparently moving from news to full-time, taxpayer-funded Super PAC-style advertising for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. That is apparent from today’s report by Ari Shapiro on Obama’s campaign appearances in Ohio, where the president--who maintains that Republican rival Mitt Romney may be a “felon”--launched a series of new and false attacks on Romney’s proposed tax cuts. Shapiro repeated three of the Obama campaign's lies about taxes and the General Motors bailout.

What's the real value of these 'in-kind' campaign contributions?  Or those of the Ford Foundation - which is making huge grants to major elements of the Obama sycophants in the lamestream media to keep them afloat as their customers abandon them....giving $1 million to the LA Times and most recently, $500,000 to help prop up the WaPoo.

The grants come as newspapers continue to struggle with print revenues declining much faster than digital revenues are growing, forcing closures and job cuts throughout the industry. The Washington Post’s newsroom, for instance, has shrunk to around 600 people today from about 1,000 at its peak in 2000.


The one-year grant to the Post, which is owned by Washington Post Co., will fund four reporters to work on “special projects related to money, politics and government,” under the paper’s investigative unit, according to a memo from Post editors.

The crony capitalism scandal centered around the failed solar company, Solyndra, is returning to vex the President and his campaign.  New email records obtained highlight that the company took it's sales pitch for getting hundreds of millions of taxpayer's funds directly to President Obama.  The company's CEO referred to the Obama Administration as the 'Bank of Washington'.  The founder of the now bankrupt company was reported to have appealed directly to President Obama about the company getting government business and contracts in order to stay afloat, while OMB analysts in the WH raised concerns about the financial viability of the company prior to getting $537 million in taxpayer funds from the Department of Energy.

In private equity, people know enough to not toss half a billion dollars towards an organization that is already in major trouble and has to depend on pressuring the President for government contracts needed to keep the organization afloat.  And if they still do toss that half billion - they would lose their jobs when the company fails.

Have you heard of President Obama's favorite 'independent, non-partisan' economic study group, the Tax Policy Center?  This is the one that the President is touting as having delivered a devastatingly negative review of the Romney economic and tax plan.  The problem is, it's neither independent or non-partisan.  The study group is run by a former staffer for President Obama - and the report was co-authored by another long time progressive Democrat / Keynesian activist (William Gale - who is nearly as rabid as Paul Krugman).  But there is one interesting aspect of this study group that the Obama Administration is not referencing....the claim by the Tax Policy Center that the President's budget plan will raise taxes on 1 in 4 Americans - including members of the middle class.  Not that this would be a problem for the Tax Policy Center as they are loyal tax and spend acolytes.

I often highlight California as an example of the fecklessness of the progressive economic model.  After examples like looking at one of the newly declared bankrupt California cities and seeing a perfect example as to why they are bankrupt - like paying $204,000 a year in retirement to it's police chief - who served a grand total of 8 months before retiring.

Then there are the cases of the state mismanagement when it comes to their fiscal challenges - and the current $16 billion deficit before we spend $100 billion on a high speed rail network we don't need and consumers will not use.

California was counting on $1.5 billion in tax revenue through June because of Facebook’s (FB: 20.18, -0.70, -3.35%) initial public offering. It’s also counting on another $400 million in new sales tax revenue and new tax hikes on the rich.


But the state is now scrambling because it got hypnotized and overstated by a factor of nearly 50% the amount of capital gains tax revenue that it thought was coming in from the Facebook IPO. Based on Facebook’s latest share price, the state is on track to get just $707 million, 47% less than what it projected.


And now, California says expected funds for its $91.3 billion budget are at risk. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office admitted Wednesday that "if the company's stock price remains depressed, hundreds of millions of income tax dollars assumed in the 2012-13 state budget plan are at risk."

Left unsaid is the nearly $1 trillion in state underfunding on pensions - which is made worse because in the world where one has to fight for a 5% investment return, CALPers still is basing their calculations on the 'hope and dream' of 8-10% investment returns to cover their obligations.

Is Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, the absolute best that the Democrats can find or produce to lead the Senate?  Well, OK, perhaps when he's flanked by those like Chuckie Schumer, Patty Murray, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Claire McCaskill, John Kerry (who, I hear, once served in Vietnam), Pat Leahy, Carl Levin, and Dick Durbin - maybe he is in the front seat of the short bus.  But Dingy Harry's new rant against Mitt Romney, based on an imaginary friend and 'guilty until proven innocent' replacing due process (was Harry sick that day in Law School?) is reaching a new low.

Citing an unknown anonymous source, Harry claims that Romney hadn't paid income taxes for nearly a decade - and it's up to Romney to produce his tax records to prove that the accusation is untrue.

If Harry is a model of leadership for this country - then we are totally *******.

Blowhard bully, Bob Beckel, a contributor on Fox News Channel's 'The Five', has only a few real claims to fame.  There's his mouth and history of being a substance abuser, and his political expertise from being Walter Mondale's campaign manager during the 1984 asswhooping by Ronald Reagan.  In this clip, Beckel goes scorched earth on his own network for airing a Scott Brown for Senate advertisement that we highlighted earlier this week in QH....accusing the advertisement of taking Obama's words 'out of context' and, 'Once again we put something on the air that's a flat out lie!'

It's just more proof on how effective the adverts highlighting Barack Obama's 'you didn't build that' gaffe are resonating.

Former UN Secretary General and now serving as the UN Special Envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, has announced his resignation as special envoy effective August 31.  Annan utterly failed in his efforts to negotiate a viable peace / transition plan to end the violence in Syria.  In fact, since his program failed, the carnage in Syria has escalated significantly.  The NY Times is reporting that the specific reason for Annan's resignation is because he is upset his peace plan was 'ignored'.  Didn't work also counts as a valid description of the plan.  Good riddance to another example of the 'Peter Principle'.

The President of Iran, Ahmahwhackjob, is once again calling for the annihilation of the state of Israel...

In a speech published on his website Thursday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the ultimate goal of world forces must be the annihilation of Israel.


Speaking to ambassadors from Islamic countries ahead of 'Qods Day' ('Jerusalem Day'), an annual Iranian anti-Zionist event established in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and which falls this year on August 17, Ahmadinejad said that a "horrible Zionist current" had been managing world affairs for "about 400 years."


Repeating traditional antisemitic slurs, the Iranian president accused "Zionists" of controlling the world's media and financial systems.


It was Zionists, he said, who were “behind the scene of the world’s main powers, media, monetary and banking centers.”


"They are the decision makers, to the extent that the presidential election hopefuls [of the USA] must go and kiss the feet of the Zionists to ensure their election victory,” he added.


Ahmadinejad added that "liberating Palestine" would solve all the world's problems, although he did not elaborate on exactly how that might work.

And Obama wants to negotiate with this moron?

Today in History

1776 - Members of Congress affix their signatures to an enlarged copy of the Declaration of Independence.

1876 - 'Wild Bill' Hickok, one of the greatest gunfighters of the American West, is murdered in Deadwood, South Dakota while playing poker.  He was shot in the back of the head, never seeing his murderer.  The hand he was holding, a pair of black aces and black eights, has become known as the 'Dead Man's Hand'.

1934 - With the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg on this day, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler becomes the absolute dictator of Germany, taking the title 'Fuhrer'.

1945 - The last wartime conference of the 'Big Three' - the USSR, USA, and Britain concludes in Potsdam, Germany.  The conference attempted to address the most pressing issue, the postwar fate of Germany, but deep suspicions and mistrust between the USSR and USA over the Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe defined the conference.  The conference was also marked by the replacement of Winston Churchill by new Prime Minister Clement Attlee midway through the conference after Churchill's party lost control of the British government in national elections.

1964 - North Vietnamese torpedo boats attack the US destroyer USS Maddox in international waters in the Tonkin Gulf.

1985 - Wind shear, caused by a sudden 'supercell' thunderstorm in Dallas, causes Delta Flight 191, a Lockheed L-1011 jetliner to crash 6,000 feet short of the runway.  135 out of 191 on board the aircraft were killed.

1990 - Iraq invades Kuwait, overrunning the country in hours.  Iraq then annexes Kuwait to gain control of 20% of the world's known oil reserves.