If you doubt the cause of global warming, believe the public schools are failing, or label people as liberals because they do not support all far-right conservative Tea Party candidates and issues, then you may be a patsy of the billionaire Koch brothers.
The definition of “patsy”:
1. A person who is easily cheated, victimized, etc.
2. A person who is gullible and easy to take advantage of
3. A person who is tricked or swindled.
Before the 2012 Presidential election, I had never heard of the Koch brothers. A few months ago, as the election heated up, I started to learn who these billionaire brothers were and how dangerous they were to freedom and the quality of life as it exists in America today.
I think that most of the votes that will be cast for Mitt Romney will reveal how many easy to fool patsies there are in the United States. These patsies are the people that are targeted by the Koch brothers and their billionaire allies.
I find it interesting that Koch is pronounced the same as Coke, because Coke (the sugary drink called Coca-Cola) is responsible for many lifestyle diseases today and cocaine, also known as coke, is an addictive drug, a destroyer of lives and a killer. In fact, in 1891, cocaine was part of the formula for Coca Cola. Source: Snopes
Bloomberg reported the details of the billionaire Koch brothers’ crimes mentioned in Part 2.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
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Nate Silver is paid to write for The New York Times, but he doesn’t favor Republicans or Democrats in his predictions, because he predicts both Republican and Democratic winners in each state and in the national elections
– see what conservatives have to say about Nate Silver –
This video was published October 30, 2012.
Nate Silver’s forecast this morning has Obama winning 307 Electoral College votes to Romney’s 231 and this prediction is based on statistics collected from every political poll in America, and there are a lot of them from the local, state and national levels. Silver also has Obama winning the popular vote 50.5% to 48.3%.
In 2008, he correctly predicted the winners of all 35 Senate races and the presidential results in 49 out of 50 states. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by 1%.
In 2008, Silver projected electoral vote totals of 349 (based on a probabilistic projection) or 353 (based on fixed projections of each state).
Obama won with 365 Electoral College votes. Silver’s predictions matched the actual results everywhere except in Indiana and the 2nd congressional district of Nebraska, which awards an electoral vote separately from the rest of the state.
In 2010, Silver predicted 36 of the winners in 37 of the gubernatorial races—97.3% accuracy rate.
For the U.S. Senate Race of 2010, Silver predicted 6 of the 7 Republican winners—85.7% accuracy rate.
For the U.S. House of Representatives, Silver predicted 53 of the 63 wins by Republicans—84.1% accuracy rate.
– broadcast October 24, 2012 –
Silver’s prediction early this morning favors Obama 86.6% to Romney’s 13.4%. Silver bases his predictions on computed mathematical formulas and the results change daily. He does not base his predictions on a hunch or his own feelings. This is not an emotional, gut-driven biased response.
If Silver is close a third time, he will become a legend. By next Wednesday, we will know.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
If you read this blog regularly, you already know about Romney and Ryan and their win in the Malarkey contest during the debates ending with a malarkey score 233% above the Obama-Biden Malarkey score. Source: Ranking Romney and Obama
However, the latest lie told in Ohio is HUGE. It seems that the GOP candidate for president is following the advice of Adolf Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, also known as “The Poison Dwarf”, who said, “If you tell a lie BIG enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. …” Source: The Holocaust Research Project
There are several battleground states where Obama and Romney are so close in the polls that there is no way to predict a possible winner. Those states are: Colorado (9 Electoral Votes), Florida (29), Iowa (6), Michigan (16), Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4), North Carolina (15), Ohio (18), Pennsylvania (20), Virginia (13) and Wisconsin (10).
Together, those states add up to 146 Electoral Votes and Romney now has 191 and needs 79 more to win the election.
To tilt the vote in his favor, he has leaned heavily on telling BIG lies and repeating them to influence people to vote for him. His latest BIG lie is a claim that Chrysler will be moving Jeep production to China, and it will cost thousands of American jobs.
Not only has the Obama campaign been forced to respond in costly ads to counter this lie but the President of Chrysler had his public relations chief release a blistering reply calling Romney’s claims an “unnecessary fantasy.”
Fiat-Chrysler’s CEO Sergio Marchionne rebutted the claim as well, and wrote, “That (the) Jeep’s factory workforce in the United States had grown from 4,700 in 2008 to 9,300” and, “Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China.”
But according to Justin Hyde at Motoramic, that has not stopped Romney’s campaign from repeating this BIG lie in Ohio in a last ditch attempt to influence voters.
I wonder how many BIG lies Romney and Ryan are spreading in the other battleground states.
I think trust must be earned through loyalty and honesty. If Romney is willing to practice Dr. Joseph Goebbels’ advice and spread this much malarkey to win the White House and become the next president of the United States, can anyone in America trust this man?
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
All it takes is nine minutes of your time to watch this video as a way to understand why we need healthcare reform in the US. We cannot return to the way things were in 2007-2008 as Mitt Romney says he will do if elected president. Romney has pledged he will repeal Obamacare if elected. What does that mean?
“The percentage of people without health insurance in America in 2008 was not statistically different from 2007 at 15.4 percent. The number of uninsured increased to 46.3 million in 2008, from 45.7 million in 2007.
“The number of people with health insurance increased to 255.1 million in 2008—up from 253.4 million in 2007. The number of people covered by private health insurance decreased to 201.0 million in 2008—down from 202.0 million in 2007. The number of people covered by government health insurance increased to 87.4 million—up from 83.0 million in 2007
“The percentage of people covered by private health insurance was 66.7 percent in 2008—down from 67.5 percent in 2007 (Figure 7). The percentage of people covered by employment-based health insurance decreased to 58.5 percent in 2008, from 59.3 percent in 2007. The number of people covered by employment-based health insurance decreased to 176.3 million in 2008, from 177.4 million in 2007.” Source: Census.gov
Someone has to pay. For those without health care or those with health care that are denied care that may save a life, some will pay through death. But, if you are one of the top 5% of rich Americans, this is something you do not have to worry about. Mitt Romney’s net worth is estimated at $250 million. He doesn’t need health care reform or even health care insurance. He can pay cash for any health care he or his family needs. What about you?
Health Care.gov says, “As many as 82 million Americans with employer-based coverage have a pre-existing condition, ranging from life-threatening illnesses like cancer to chronic conditions like diabetes, asthma, or heart disease.
“A pre-existing condition is a health condition that exists before someone applies for or enrolls in a new health insurance policy. Insurers generally define what constitutes a pre-existing condition. Some are obvious, like currently having heart disease or cancer. Others are less so – such has having asthma or high blood pressure. While insurers generally determine the presence of a pre-existing condition based on an applicant’s current health status, sometimes a healthy applicant can be deemed to have a pre-existing condition based on a past health problem or evidence of treatment for a particular condition.
“One in Two Americans Has a Pre-Existing Condition … and Up to 86 Percent of Older Americans Have a Pre-Existing Condition.”
As for me, my health care provider is the Veterans Administration (VA), because I served in the US Marines, fought in Vietnam and returned home from the war with a service rated disability. However, less than 7% of all Americans are eligible for health care through the VA.
So, for me it doesn’t matter if America has Obamacare or not, but I am thinking of those I love: my wife and children who have to rely on the private sector and could be denied health care by an insurance company. If that happened, I would have to watch them suffer and maybe die when they didn’t have to. That is one BIG reason why I will not vote for Mitt Romney.
In fact, the VA medical system is a socialist program, and we who served paid for it by risking our lives and health to fight for our country.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
One way to learn more about a candidate is to see how well he or she is doing in the polls for the state where he was born and grew up and/or the state where he served as an elected state and/or US official.
Mitt Romney was born and raised in Michigan where his father served as governor (1963-1969). Because his father was the 43rd governor of Michigan, one would think the state’s voters would favor the son.
However, in Michigan, Obama holds a 4 point lead in the polls and 48.8% of voters say they will vote for him compared to 44.8% that say they will vote for Romney.
Then Mitt Romney was the governor of Massachusetts (2003 – 2007), but Romney is losing the state to Obama. As a newly elected governor in 2003, Romney had a 61% approval rating but by 2007, that approval rating dropped to 34%. In addition, in 1994, when Romney ran for the US Senate in Massachusetts against Edward Kennedy, he had trouble establishing consistent positions. For example, his views on abortion kept shifting—something we have witnessed in the presidential election.
Fifty-six percent of voters in Massachusetts say they will vote for Obama but only 39.7% say they will vote for Romney.
Historically, states tend to favor presidential candidates that served or lived there, so why has Massachusetts abandoned Romney?
Now, how about Obama’s home states of Illinois and Hawaii?
In Illinois, where Obama served as a State Senator (1997-2004), than a US Senator (2005-2008), his average in the polls is 15 points ahead of Romney and 50.5% of voters say they will vote for Obama but only 35.5% say they will vote for Romney.
In Hawaii, where Obama was born and then later raised by his grandparents, his average lead in the polls is 30 points above Romney and 60.5% say they will cast votes for him while only 31% say they will vote for Romney.
If we must choose between two candidates by voting for the lesser of two evils, what is the best way to discover who is the lesser of two evil? I think one answer is knowing who exaggerates and/or uses false statements the least.
Final Malarkey Score from all Four Debates Combined
Romney and Ryan = 37 or 70%
Obama and Biden = 16 or 30%
In the 1st presidential debate, Fact Check.org caught Romney spouting malarkey almost twice the number of times Obama’s made exaggerated and/or false claims. Fact Check.org listed nine for Romney and five for Obama.
In the vice presidential debate, Ryan, Romney’s running mate, was caught by Fact Check.org spouting malarkey eleven times, and I found two more boosting Ryan’s use of malarkey to thirteen. Biden was only called out for three claims that were malarkey.
In the 2nd Presidential debate, Romney was called out by Fact Check.org for eleven examples of malarkey (exaggerations and/or false statements) compared to Obama’s three uses of malarkey.
In the 3rd and last presidential debate, Romney again won the malarkey contest by making six misleading and/or false statements to Obama’s four.
In conclusion, what is it that Romney has going for him to explain why he is running almost equal to Obama in the polls?
Is it the fact that Romney and Ryan have exaggerated and used false statements 233% more than Obama and Biden?
Has it been proven that politicians that exaggerate and lie more always win?
You may be surprised to learn that it worked for Thomas Jefferson in 1800 when he ran for president against John Adams. The key difference between the two politicians was that Jefferson hired a hatchet man named James Callendar to do his smearing for him. Adams, on the other hand, considered himself above such tactics.
To Jefferson’s credit, Callendar proved incredibly effective, convincing many Americans that Adams desperately wanted to attack France. Although the claim was completely untrue, voters bought it, and Jefferson stole the election. Source: Founding Father’s dirty campaign-cnn.com
My final question: Will Romney steal the 2012 election based or malarkey, or will the lesser of two evils win?
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
Once again, I turned to Fact Check.org to compile a score and discover the candidate who spouted the most malarkey and the winner (or should I say loser) was Romney. However, this time it was by a slim margin: Romney’s malarkey score 55.5% to Obama’s 44.4%.
Over the years as GOP candidates have continued to win the political malarkey competition, I’ve often wondered when the Democrats were going to wake up and learn to fight fire with fire. The turning point may have been in the third presidential debate as you will learn.
As always, I urge you to read the cited details on Fact Check.org.
1. It is not technically true that our “Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917″—a repeated claim made by Romney and Ryan during the VP debate.
2. Romney was wrong when he said Obama went on an apology tour of the Middle East and criticized America. The evidence clearly shows that Obama did not do this.
3. Romney claimed responsibility for the success of Massachusetts’ fourth and eighth graders who tested first in the nation in reading and math after he became governor. But that was wrong—Massachusetts students had tested at the top or near it before Romney took office.
4. Romney exaggerated the size of the federal debt held by the public and/or foreign countries such as China that he also mentioned in the second debate.
In fact, on April 10, 2012, foreign holdings of US Treasury Securities as of January 2012 increased to $5.048 Trillion (only 31.55%) with China reducing its share to $1.1595 Trillion (7.24%). The largest holders were the central banks of China, Japan, Brazil, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Switzerland and Russia. In addition, the US government owes itself $4.6 Trillion (28.75%). Source: Statistics Brain.com
5. Romney was wrong when he claimed that in the 2000 presidential debate there was no mention of terrorism, because Al Gore did make one mention of terrorism in the third debate with G. W. Bush on October 17, 2000.
6. I’m going to add number SIX because Fact Check.org missed this example of malarkey that they seem to have missed every time it has been used in every debate.
Even Obama seems to have missed this one. Romney keeps saying that 23 million Americans are unemployed and looking for work. Twenty-three million is a huge exaggeration when the Bureau of Labor Statistic of the U.S. Department of Labor reported on October 5, 2012 that “The number of unemployed persons, at 12.1 million, decreased by 456,000 in September.” In addition, “the unemployment rates for adult men (7.3 percent), adult women (7.0 percent), and whites (7.0 percent) declined over the month.
“The unemployment rates for teenagers (23.7 percent), blacks (13.4 percent), and Hispanics (9.9 percent) were little changed. The jobless rate for Asians, at 4.8 percent (not seasonally adjusted), fell over the year.” Source: bls.org
Even if we add in the 2.5 million persons that are not counted as unemployed because they did not look for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey, we still do not come up with 23 million.
And we could add the 802,000 discouraged workers that gave up because they believe no jobs are available for them and Romney’s continued claim of 23 million looking for work still doesn’t add up. If Romney included this number, he was wrong, because these people are not looking for work.
It is obvious to me that Romney’s repeated claim of 23 million unemployed is to mislead adult voters to believe the economic situation is much worse than it is—almost a hundred percent worse.
Obama:
1. Obama claimed that during the 2008 campaign Romney said “we should ask Pakistan for permission” before going into that country to kill or capture terrorists. That was not true.
2. Obama went too far when he accused Romney of not telling the truth about Obama’s position on leaving a residual force of U.S. troops in Iraq. Obama was partly correct but did not clarify the details of this disagreement.
3. Obama was wrong when he insisted over and over that Romney never advocated “help” or “government assistance” for automakers if they went through bankruptcy.
4. Obama claimed that Romney once called Russia, not al Qaeda, the “biggest geopolitical threat facing America.” This was wrong. Romney said a Nuclear Iran was America’s greatest threat.
Conclusion:The final score, once my #6 was added, was 60% for Romney and 40% for Obama.
See the previous posts about the use of malarkey in the Presidential and VP debates:
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
The word that is the title for this post sums up most of Mitt Romney’s campaign for president of the US. And Vice President Joe Biden, if you didn’t notice, used the term in his debate with Ryan three times.
Chan wrote, “‘Malarkey,’ as Merriam-Webster defines it, is ‘insincere or foolish talk.’ It’s a dismissive word to use, with avuncular overtones, and you’d use it to deem something as silliness, bunkum, hogwash—verging on nonsense, you (and a thesaurus) might even say.”
I read that many viewers of the debate turned to the Internet to discover what ‘malarkey’ meant, but I didn’t have to turn to the Internet thanks to my Irish heritage through my father. Lofthouse is a common name in England and Ireland—not Germany as many may think when first hearing my last name.
After the first use of ‘malarkey,’ Raddatz asked what ‘bunch of stuff’ meant and Biden replied, “We Irish call it malarkey.”
If you are interested, here is a link to a printed transcript of the debate. Why look? Because it is easy to be distracted and miss details when watching TV or listening to radio. And if you don’t want to read it, I have embedded the video of the entire debate with this post so you may watch it as many times as you want to. After all, the same issues (and ‘malarkey’) that were debated between Romney and President Obama were repeated between Biden and Ryan.
But what it is that Ryan claimed (repeating many of the same claims that Romney made in the first Presidential debate) during the only vice-presidential debate that is malarkey?
To discover that answer, I turned to Fact Check.org. Before I go on, I want to mention that the Republican Party has done a ‘bunch of stuff’ on Fact Check.org to cast doubts on the results they report. When your political party, the GOP, lies more than the competition, it stands to reason that the results will skew against you and you will attempt to discredit the source.
However, if you click on the link and read the fact checking of the VP debate at Fact Check.org, scroll to the end and notice the sources used. Each source—I counted thirty-seven—has a link for anyone to back check what is reported on this site. Unlike politicians, Fact Check.org hides nothing and attempts no ‘malarkey’.
Fact Check used such terms as exaggeration, not true, wrong and false to describe each example of ‘malarkey’. The Fact Check.org piece starts with a ‘Summary’, and then a much more detailed ‘Analysis’ of each example of ‘malarkey’ follows.
I do not want to copy and paste what Fact Check.org reported, but I will provide a comparative score from the Summary.
Ryan: wrong, wrong, not true, misquoted, not quite, false claim, off-base, collection of misstatements: not true; no, they haven’t; maybe—and a misleading claim.
Biden: exaggerated, misquoted Romney, and again misrepresented the findings of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
The high score reveals the most ‘malarkey’. Ryan’s score was ELEVEN (actually it is THIRTEEN as you shall see) and Biden’s score was THREE. If you divide three into THIRTEEN, we discover that the GOP’s Romney and Ryan used ‘malarkey’ 433 percent more than the Obama and Biden campaign did in this one debate.
In addition, there is a HUGE difference between Ryan’s USE OF WRONG (twice), NOT TRUE (twice), and a FALSE CLAIM in comparison to Biden’s use of ONE EXAGGERATION, ONE MISQUOTE and ONE MISREPRESENTED FACT.
I left out one of Ryan’s misleading claims of Hillary Clinton calling Assad “a different leader” and “a reformer”. It is true that she did say this in an interview, but she was only reporting what a few congressmen had told her after a congressional visit to Syria to gather facts well before the civil war in Syria broke out. What Ryan did not report was that later Hillary made it clear that President Obama’s administration did not say or agree with what those few congressmen had reported—something Ryan left out of his misleading claim—another use of ‘malarkey’.
Then there is ‘malarkey’ that Fact Check.org did not mention. In an attempt to paint President Obama weak on defense, and I’m sure conservatives will grab this “malarkey” and continue to use it, Ryan said, “If these cuts go through, our Navy will be the smallest—the smallest it has been since before World War I.”
Think about this fact being used to paint Obama weak on defense. In World War I, all military transport to Europe for troops, weapons and supplies was done mostly by the US Navy.
Who moves the most US troops, equipment and supplies today?
Answer: the US Air Force. America is the only country in the world with the capability of moving armies in days to any spot on the planet—not in weeks or months—that is because of an air force that is 663% larger than Russia’s air force and 352% larger than China’s.
In addition, the United States has the largest Navy in the world with twelve aircraft carriers (with two more under construction—sixteen other naval ships are also under construction) and 3,700 operational naval aircraft.
Global Firepower.com lists 2,385 ships in the US Navy (counting ships held in reserve in case of a conventional global war). But, how long has it been since the United States fought a war with another major naval power?
The answer to that question is easy: sixty-seven years—the end of World War II in 1945.
Russia, listed as the second most powerful nation militarily has 233 naval ships with only one aircraft carrier, and China, listed third, has 972 ships in her navy with one used, Russian aircraft carrier that is more than twenty-years old. In fact, there are ten countries with aircraft carriers in service—two countries have two and seven each have one carrier.
The US Air Force has 18,234 total aircraft, Russia has 2,749 and China 5,176 military aircraft. Need I say more about this example of Ryan’s use of malarkey?
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”
Lloyd Lofthouse 