If the republicans think focusing on redistribution is going to get them in the white house, they are either high or retarded. First off Redistribution Obama style is giving more money to the poor and middle class, and less to the rich. AKA he is giving from the few to the many, which is an excellent campaign tactic. By reinforcing this tactic your only helping his cause. Romney's campaign strategy is horrible right now, even his attacks are backwards.
Within 24 hours of the news reporting a massacre of the ambassador and three other Americans at our consulate in Benghazi, Tripoli, the commander in chief was on board Air Force One winging his way to Las Vegas, looking to hustle a few more bucks. A city, incidentally, he once advised us all to stay away from. If it had been a Republican president abandoning his post at such a critical moment, he would have been excoriated by the mainstream media. They chose to ignore it. They were there, however, to cover Mitt Romney’s press conference, where seven of them representing liberal outlets — National Public Radio and CBS — were overheard colluding with each other in order to zero in on one “gotcha” question they would all ask. These people have been carrying Obama’s water since he was nominated. I harken back to the 2008 primaries where [Vice President] Joe Biden stated flatly, referring to Obama: “We cannot afford on the job training.” The late Democratic congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro added back then, if Obama were a white man, he wouldn’t be in that position. It should have been obvious from the beginning that a community agitator from a corrupt Chicago with a total of 18 months in the U.S. Senate was completely unqualified for such a critical job.
Two percentage points separate President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney in a state poll conducted for the Tribune-Review, even though the campaigns largely are ignoring Pennsylvania and concentrating on other battlegrounds.
Obama polled 47 percent to Romney's 45 percent among likely Pennsylvania voters, with 6 percent of voters undecided and 44 days until Election Day, according to the survey by Susquehanna Polling & Research. The survey of 800 voters, conducted Sept. 18-20, has a margin of error of 3.46 percentage points.
The poll showed most voters are disappointed with the country’s direction, evenly split on whether Obama deserves another term and hesitant to back Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. Fifty-one percent of the state’s voters approve of Obama’s job performance.
Other recent polls showed a larger margin for Obama, leading some to speculate that Pennsylvania — which hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate since 1988 — no longer is a swing state. Two of those last four polls gave Obama a lead larger than his margin of victory in 2008, when he defeated Sen. John McCain of Arizona by 10 percentage points.
“All the evidence points to a much closer margin,” said Jim Lee, Susquehanna president. “Nothing suggests we’re looking at anything like 2008.”
Voters continue to put the economy at the top of their list of concerns. Only one in three believes the country is headed in the right direction.
Yet, a deeper look at the numbers shows a more nuanced picture. Romney leads Obama, 48 percent to 44 percent, on the question of who would create jobs to speed up the recovery. Ask who looks out for the interests of the middle class and Obama leads, 56 percent to 38 percent.
“People run with the numbers without really paying attention to what’s behind them,” said Dilip Namjoshi, 66, of Abington, a Philadelphia suburb. “Somebody says, ‘I created 2 million jobs.’ Well, yes, but 600,000 of them are in China.”
Obama gained his lead on gut-level issues like that with his campaign’s early attempts to define Romney, the former head of a private-equity firm, as wealthy and out of touch, Lee said. Although Romney fought off primary challengers, Democrats developed his public persona.
“The Romney folks failed to develop a positive image in this state,” Lee said.
Leah Brooks, 63, a Republican in New Wilmington, Lawrence County, said she has a hard time reading Romney.
“He seems to mean well, but I’m not sure he always sees the whole picture. I’m not sure he can get down to where we are,” Brooks said. “I don’t blame him for it. But I’m not sure he really can see what it’s like.”
Brooks said she’s troubled by recent events in Arab countries where protesters stormed U.S. embassies and, in an apparent terrorist strike, killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
“It is important how we’re seen and how we handle ourselves,” she said.
Obama leads, 49 percent to 41 percent, among likely voters on the question of who would better defend the homeland. But voters who peg foreign affairs and international events as their top concern prefer Romney, 53 percent to 46 percent, the poll found.
“We seem to get ourselves stuck in the mud and can’t get out. I’m not sure anybody knows how to get out of the messes we’re in,” Brooks said. “It seems that what (Obama) does best is campaign. I just wish he’d get down to business.”
Politicians and government operation tie with voters’ concern about the deficit as the second-biggest problem facing the federal government, according to the poll. Thomas Hohler, 67, of Scott and other Democrats point to Republicans in Congress as the problem.
“You can’t get anything accomplished if their goal is to say no to anything Obama wants,” Hohler said. The way to solve the country’s problems “is to get members of Congress, elected officials, that are willing to work together to achieve something. I’m not sure how you can do that, or how soon that’s going to happen.”
Hohler volunteers for Obama’s campaign, though he says the past four years included disappointments.
“Obviously, Obama hasn’t done as well as I would’ve liked. On health care, I would’ve liked to see him go for single-payer or Medicare for everyone,” Hohler said. Overall, the former high school teacher gives Obama a B grade.
Joseph Mozaleski said he used to vote for Democrats before the party embraced legalized abortions. Decades later, the Republican sees increasing reliance on government assistance and rules in Obama’s health care law that require coverage of contraceptives as the consequences of a moral drift.
“Something is wrong with the moral fabric, and I think Romney has a better chance of bringing back my ideals in this country,” said Mozaleski, 62, of Sterling, Wayne County.
In Abington, Namjoshi registered to vote as a Republican in 1988 but changed his registration to independent last month, saying he’s fed up with both parties. He said he liked Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s small-government libertarian message during the GOP primaries and will watch the presidential debates to see whether either candidate says something convincing about stabilizing the country’s financial situation.
“You’ve got to be fiscally responsible. Whoever does that is probably going to get my vote,” Namjoshi said.
The debates, the first scheduled for Oct. 3, might change the dynamic of the Pennsylvania race, Lee said.
“Three in four (undecided voters) say the country’s going in the wrong direction,” Lee said. If they believe that, they’re unlikely to back the incumbent, he said. “They’re either staying home or they’re voting for Romney.”
Time magazine gushed in 2008 about Barack Obama's 12-year tenure as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, saying, "Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with hordes of devoted students."
That may have been true during his first two years, when he ranked first among the law school's 40 instructors, with students giving him a rating of 9.7 out of a possible 10.
But law student evaluations made available to The Washington Examiner by the university showed that his popularity then fell steadily.
In 1999, only 23 percent of the students said they would repeat Obama's racism class. He was the third-lowest-ranked lecturer at the law school that year. And in 2003, only a third of the student evaluators recommended his classes.
His classes were small. A spring 1994 class attracted 14 out of a student body of 600; a spring 1996 class drew 13. In 1997, he had the largest class of his tenure with 49 students. But by then, his student rating had fallen to 7.75. Twenty-two of 40 faculty members ranked higher than Obama.
Some former faculty colleagues today describe Obama as disengaged, doing only what was minimally required and almost never participating in faculty activities.
And, unlike others on the Chicago Law School faculty who published numerous articles in legal journals, Obama's byline did not appear in a single legal journal while he taught there.
By comparison, more prominent legal scholars on the Chicago faculty wrote frequently. Federal Judge Richard Posner published 132 legal articles from 1993 to 2004, and federal Judge Frank Easterbrook published 32 legal articles from 1992 to 2004.
Obama has often cited his days at the law school as an important part of his preparation for the presidency. At a March 30, 2007, fundraiser, for example, he said, "I was a constitutional law professor, which means, unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution."
From 1992 until 2004, Obama taught three courses: "Current Issues in Racism and the Law," "Voting Rights and the Democratic Process," and "Equal Protection and Substantive Due Process."
Obama wasn't a professor; he was a lecturer, a position that the Chicago Law School said in 2008 "signifies adjunct status." He was elevated to a "senior lecturer" in 1996, the year he was first elected to the Illinois Senate in Springfield.
The new faculty status put him on par with Posner, Easterbrook and a third federal judge, Diane Wood. As the Chicago Law School explained, senior lecturers "have high-demand careers in politics or public service which prevent full time teaching."
Senior lecturers were, however, still expected to participate in university activities. University of Chicago Law School Senior Lecturer Richard Epstein told The Washington Examiner that Obama did not do so.
Obama, Epstein said, "did the minimal amount of work to get through. No one remembers him. He was not a participant in luncheons or workshops. He was here and gone."
Robert Alt, a former Obama student, echoes Epstein, telling the Examiner that "I think it's fair to say he wasn't engaged in the intellectual life of Chicago outside of the classroom."
Alt is director of the conservative Heritage Foundation's Rule of Law Programs and a senior legal fellow.
Alt said, "When you have faculty giving faculty lectures, you'd literally have packed rooms in which it's not unusual to have just all the big names of the university. It wasn't unusual to see Easterbrook and Posner, and it wasn't unusual to see the Nobel laureates attending as well."
Even so, Alt said, "I never remember ever seeing Obama in the audience."
Obama was also a no-show for the faculty workshops, nonclassroom lectures and moot court cases judged by sitting members of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals of the U.S. Current Chicago Law School professor Lisa Bernstein said faculty lecturers are still encouraged to participate in as many such events as possible.
The pattern of minimal performance at the Chicago campus was not an exception to the rule for Obama. In the state Senate during the same years he was lecturing, Obama voted "present" nearly 130 times, the most of any legislator in the chamber.
When then-Sen. Hillary Clinton made Obama's state Senate voting record an issue in their Democratic presidential primary contest in 2007, the New York Times said it found at least 36 instances when Obama was the lone "present" vote or was one of six or fewer lawmakers casting that vote.
And during his lone term as a U.S. senator, according to Gov Track.us: "From Jan 2005 to Oct 2008, Obama missed 314 of 1300 recorded or roll call votes, which is 24.0%. This is worse than the median of 2.4%."
First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that "Barack and I were both raised by families who didn't have much in the way of money or material possessions."
It is a claim the president has repeated in his books, on the speech-making circuit and in countless media interviews. By his account, he grew up in a broken home with a single mom, struggled for years as a child in an impoverished Third World country and then was raised by his grandparents in difficult circumstances.
The facts aren't nearly so clear-cut.
Ann Dunham was just 18 years old when she gave birth to Obama. She was a freshman at the University of Hawaii. His Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., was a few years older than Ann. They were married against family wishes.
Obama Sr. does not appear to have been welcoming or compassionate toward his new wife or son. It later turned out that he was secretly married to a Kenyan woman back home at the same time he fathered the young Obama.
He abandoned Obama Jr.'s mother when the boy was 1. In 1964, Dunham filed for a divorce that was not contested. Her parents helped to raise the young Obama.
Obama's mother met her second husband, an Indonesian named Lolo Soetoro, while working at the East-West Center in Hawaii. They married, and in 1967, the young Obama, then known as Barry Soetoro, traveled to Indonesia with his mother when the Indonesian government recalled his stepfather.
In Indonesia, the family's circumstances improved dramatically. According to Obama in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father," Lolo's brother-in-law was "making millions as a high official in the national oil company." It was through this brother-in-law that Obama's stepfather got a coveted job as a government relations officer with the Union Oil Co.
The family then moved to Menteng, then and now the most exclusive neighborhood of Jakarta, where bureaucrats, diplomats and economic elites reside.
A popular Indonesia travel site describes Menteng: "Designed by the Dutch Colonial Government in 1920s, Menteng still retains its graceful existence with its beautiful parks, cozy street cafes and luxurious housing complexes."
In 1971, his mother sent young Obama back to Hawaii, where his grandmother, Madelyn, known as Toots, would become one of the first female vice presidents of a Honolulu bank. His grandfather was in sales.
Obama's grandparents moved the same year into Punahou Circle Apartments, a sleek new 10-story apartment building just five blocks from the private Punahou School, which Obama would attend from 1971 to 1979.
Obama explains in "Dreams from My Father" that his admission to Punahou began "the start of something grand, an elevation in the family status that they took great pains to let everyone know."
To his credit, Obama did not downplay Punahou's upscale status, noting in his autobiography that it "had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites. Its reputation had helped sway my mother in her decision to send me back to the States."
Obama also admitted in the book that his grandfather pulled strings to get him into the school. "There was a long waiting list, and I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps's boss, who was an alumnus."
The school still features a lush hillside campus overlooking the Waikiki skyline and the Pacific Ocean. It was one of the most expensive schools on the island, and both Obama and his half sister Maya Soetoro-Ng received scholarships.
While the Dunhams were not among the wealthiest families on the island, he nevertheless studied and socialized with the children of the social and financial elite. Obama has said he didn't fit in at the school. But that's not how other Hawaiians remember it.
Associated Press writer Sudhin Thanawala reported from Honolulu in 2008 that "classmates and teachers say Obama blended in well. He served on the editorial board of the school's literary magazine, played varsity basketball and sang in the choir. He went on the occasional date."
In his recent book "Barack Obama: The Story," Washington Post reporter David Maraniss said the future chief executive often smoked marijuana with prep school friends, rolling up the car windows to seek "total absorption," or "TA." They called themselves the "Choom Gang."
Edward Shanahan, a retired newspaper journalist who now edits downstreet.net and makes no effort to conceal his admiration for Obama, retraced his Hawaii years shortly after the president was elected.
Shanahan wrote that Obama lived in a "well-off neighborhood near the University of Hawaii where Barry, as he was known, resided in a comfortable home with his mother and her parents before she took him to Indonesia."
Sanahan said "our tour ended up on the lush, exquisitely maintained and altogether inviting campus of Punahou School, which we can imagine was a place of great comfort for Obama."
Tellingly, Obama has never lived in a black neighborhood. Maraniss reported in his book that when leftist activist Jerry Kellman interviewed Obama for a community organizing job in Chicago, he asked Obama how he felt about living and working in the black community for the first time in his life.
Obama accepted the job but chose not to live among those he would be organizing. Instead, he commuted 90 minutes each way daily from his apartment in Chicago's famous Hyde Park to the Altgeld Gardens housing project where he worked.
It was an early instance of Obama presenting himself one way while acting in quite a different way.
These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read: Unfortunately, most voters don't know this. 1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by legislating the wealth out of prosperity. 2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. 3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. 4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. 5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them; and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work, because somebody else is going to get what they work for,
The 19 presidential candidates who led at this stage of the race since 1936, 18 won the popular vote (Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 is the exception), and 17 won the Electoral College (Al Gore lost it in 2000, along with Mr. Dewey)."
"There has not been any tendency, at least at this stage of the race, for the contest to break toward the challenging candidate. Instead, it's actually the incumbent-party candidate who has gained ground on average since 1936. On average, the incumbent candidate added 4.6 percentage points between the late September polls and his actual Election Day result, whereas the challenger gained 2.5 percentage points."
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read: Unfortunately, most voters don't know this. 1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by legislating the wealth out of prosperity. 2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. 3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. 4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. 5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them; and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work, because somebody else is going to get what they work for,
THAT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF ANY NATION.
Only those that work to survive and support themselves will be able to relate to the above 5 sentences.
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
The 19 presidential candidates who led at this stage of the race since 1936, 18 won the popular vote (Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 is the exception), and 17 won the Electoral College (Al Gore lost it in 2000, along with Mr. Dewey)."
"There has not been any tendency, at least at this stage of the race, for the contest to break toward the challenging candidate. Instead, it's actually the incumbent-party candidate who has gained ground on average since 1936. On average, the incumbent candidate added 4.6 percentage points between the late September polls and his actual Election Day result, whereas the challenger gained 2.5 percentage points."
Well, some precedent is about to be broken. No President since FDR has won re-election with an unemployment rate at 8% or higher.
"Arguing with liberals is like playing chess with a pigeon; no matter how good I am at chess, the pigeon is just going to knock out the pieces, crap on the board, and strut around like it is victorious." - Author Unknown
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
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