The Colonel's Forum

1 = number of focus groups the GOP held to determine which (anti Obama) conspiracy films they should send to voters 3 = number of conspiracy films they had to choose from. 0 = number of anti-Romney conspiracy films produced to date. Conservatives tested which anti-Obama conspiracy films to send to voters http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/27/1150168/-Conservatives-tested-which-anti-Obama-conspiracy-films-to-send-to-voters

51 = the percentage of Americans who now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell. This from a recent AP story. How sad that more than half the country is pre-disposed to vote for Romney just because he's white.  http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/1027/Racial-attitudes-have-not-improved-in-the-four-years-since-Obama-took-office

Business Insider article with good candidate comparison on economic issues.

3 - the number of large groups you'd expect to support the Romney/Ryan ticket who are not doing so. 1) The state of Massachusetts - no former governor has ever lost the state where he was governor. If Mitt did such a bang up job "serving" the people of Massachusetts, why are they so firmly Obama? So much so that Mitt has abandoned all campaign efforts there? Sure, Massachusetts is a blue state, but the fact that Mitt won the governorship there is not irrelevant. 2) Wisconsin - the state where Paul Ryan is a Congressman is listed by almost every major media outlet as a "toss-up." 3) Salt Lake City - remember those Olympics that Romney so famously saved with his super powers, I mean business savvy?  They just endorsed Obama, because there are " too many Mitts ."  He's shape-shifted so much since the man who saved the Olympics, they don't trust him.

1 - the number of voting machine companies that Mitt Romney owns. No kidding. The machines in Texas, Colorado, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Washington state come from Hart Intercivic, which is owned by HIG Capital, which received over $10,000,000 in "seed money" from Solamere Capital, which is Mitt Romney's personal holding company. Here's a poorly written, yet factually accurate article on the topic from Forbes. If you can't win fairly, change the voter registration and ID laws, the early voting periods, and "fix" the voting machines.  Impossible? It's already happened.  In 2004, in the dead of election night, an electronic swing of more than 300,000 votes switched Ohio from the John Kerry column to George W. Bush, giving him a second term. A virtual statistical impossibility, the 6-plus% shift occurred between 12:20 and 2am election night as votes were being tallied by a GOP-controlled information technology firm on servers in a basement in Chattanooga,...

Several statistics to review for this installment. CNN had this info-graphic in an article on unemployment  last week. The article is a poorly written attempt to convince people that the unemployment situation is far worse than the 7.8% number that is officially reported. It worked on at least one of my friends - he bought it hook, line & sinker. The irony is that if you read the article with an open mind, and you look at what they "suggest" rather than "prove," they actually demonstrate that the official 7.8% number is too high! If you add the top 2 numbers here you get 92%, meaning that 92 out of 100 Americans either "have a job" or "don't have a job AND don't want one." This is a simple concept. So is the definition of unemployed - it means someone who doesn't have a job but is actively looking for one. If you're out of work and not looking for a job, you're not unemployed. It doesn't even matter WHY you'r...

86,859 - number of coal miners employed in the US the day Obama took office 89,423 - number of coal miners in America today. If Obama is waging a war on coal, he's doing a terrible job of it. Coal mining in Appalachia is at a 14 year high .  Kentucky has seen a net loss of roughly 1,000 jobs during Obama's 1st term, but West Virginia and Virginia have seen net gains of roughly 4,000. I am reminded of James Baker III's famous quote when asked if he was worried about alienating Jewish voters by talking to the Palistinians about peace when he said "@#$% 'em, they didn't vote for us."  Well, coal miners didn't vote for Obama any more than Jewish people voted for Reagan. The coal industry likes to talk about a war on coal being waged by the EPA and the President. That's a nice sound bite, but they're only lying to themselves (and their union members). The reality is that the free market economy is putting coal out of business. It's harder t...

30% - the percentage of Americans who Paul Ryan believes are "takers," the other 70% are "makers." Interesting that he disagrees with Romney on the low side of that number.  What's more interesting is that both of them firmly believe that at least 1/3 of our country is a bunch of freeloading losers. How does one arrive at this mentality? What could make someone so bitter? Here's the video , so you can see it in his own words. Of course there are freeloaders in this country, so what? It's not 30%. There are freeloaders at work, freeloaders when you go out to dinner in a big group, but to suggest that 30%, basically 1/3 of the entire country are freeloaders?! Think of your family - which 30% of them are freeloading losers milking the welfare state?  What about your friends?  Think of your 9 best friends, and now pick which three are societal leeches. These people are criticizing Obama for being "divisive" and failing to unite the country, yet...

40% - that's the amount of value that Iran's currency lost, in one week, which happens to be last week.  At tonight's VP debate, Paul Ryan seemed to suggest that these sanctions against Iran have been watered down too much and are ineffective. I think a 40% loss in currency value is, relevant, perhaps even significant. " Protesters shouted slogans like “Mahmoud the traitor – you’ve ruined the country!” and “Don’t fear, don’t fear, we are all together!” stated the website. Mr Ahmadinejad has blamed the crisis on the US-led economic sanctions on Iran and insisted the country could ride out the crisis. "

$2.6 Billion - amount of funding the Bush administration awarded to Amtrak, or 0.0006% of the Federal budget.  Number of dedicated high speed rail lines in America? Zero. 6 Billion passenger miles traveled and only 33% of Americans have ever ridden Amtrak. $41 Billion - amoung of funding the French government spends on the national rail service, or 3.15% of the total French budget. Number of dedicated high speed lines = 10. 61 Billion passenger miles traveled, 83 % of French people have taken a train. I present this along with #35 (the PBS/Big Bird/NPR stats) to ask a fundamental question that distinguishes the candidates. Both admit that the deficit is a problem over the long term. Neither candidate has laid out a detailed plan to address the issue.  But in general, Romney thinks Big Bird & trains are the problem, and more spending on fighter planes is what we need. Defense spending is our biggest single discretionary line item BY FAR, and Romney wants to increase i...

0.00014 = % of the Federal budget that goes to the Corporation for public broadcasting, which funds 40% of PBS (which airs Sesame Street) and a bunch of NPR stations, among other things.  Basically if you're mad about how much of our tax dollars go to Big Bird and NPR, you're going to be really pissed when you see Romney defense budget. 0.0003 = % of the British budget that funds the BBC, a proper news service. 100% of right wing nuts and 50% of independents complain that NPR news sucks. Perhaps if we give them 3 times the relative funding, like the Brits do, they won't suck as much.

Stealing this one from Foreign Policy magazine - picked up a copy in the Sky Club on the way home today. $300 billion = the amount of tax cuts in the stimulus.  That's in addition to extending the Bush tax cuts, a campaign promise that Obama kept. " To Republicans, the "failed" stimulus is a classic Obama exercise in big-government liberalism, fiscal irresponsibility, and incompetence. But those are all bum raps. The Recovery Act included $300 billion in tax cuts, just as Republicans had requested; ARPA-E was its only new government agency, and most of its spending went to priorities (from highways to electric vehicles to unemployment insurance) that had always been bipartisan until they were associated with Obama. The stimulus did increase the deficit -- that's the whole point of Keynesian stimulus -- but its impact on the long-term debt was negligible compared with the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and collapsing revenues during the Great R...

Mr. 3.75 Percent Paul Ryan wants to cut federal discretionary spending to the level of Equatorial Guinea. Yes, that's as crazy as it sounds .

Autumn of Discontent: Turmoil over Austerity Hits Spain and Greece - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International If you're not sure what austerity is, look it up. In economics, austerity refers to a policy of deficit-cutting by lowering spending via a reduction in the amount of benefits and public services provided.[1] Austerity policies are often used by governments to try to reduce their deficit spending[2] It's what Mitt Romney's plan is for America. And he's right, it's dramatically different from Obama's approach. Today's statistic is 2, the number of countries in Europe that are currently learning the hard way how austerity works in practice. You get riots in the streets and it doesn't fix your economy. But if you think the US is different, vote Mitt.

Romney Offers an Economic Stimulus Plan - New York Times Decided to take a look back at Mitt's 2008 economic views. He proposed a stimulus that was twice as large as his Democratic rivals. He pointed out that McCain's approach of "spending cuts only" is not a good way to stimulate the economy. And he pointed out that getting the economy back on track is more important than fixing the budget deficit. Well, since the economy still sucks, let's keep focused on it! "In early 2008, every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate proposed a stimulus plan -- in fact, Romney's was the largest. And Republicans still use Keynesian pump-priming arguments to push tax cuts, military spending, and other stimulus they happen to support. Of course, the most powerful argument for aggressive stimulus has been the experience of European countries like Britain and Spain that have turned back toward austerity and stumbled back into recession."

Energy lies from Romney http://grist.org/politics/debate-debrief-no-mention-of-climate-energy-lies-from-romney/ Also, see my 60/60 #11 on how government subsidies for new energy technology is a 200 year old American tradition that has consistently yielded positive returns.

Top 5 Obama contributors - University of California, Microsoft, Google Harvard, the Federal government. Top 5 Romney contributors - Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley.  You can't make this stuff up. Obama is supported by higher education, IT, and government employees who want to keep their jobs.  Romney is supported by Wall Street, who has done SO MANY AMAZING things for America lately! http://www.opensecrets.org/

A few events over the last weeks and months have received little news attention but are noteworthy for anyone looking to truly evaluate these candidates.  Here are a few examples Obama went around Congress to grant "amnesty" to certain children of illegal immigrants . Now, immigration is a whole mess, the Feds haven't done their job on it since Ellis island closed, but that's not my point here. My point is this - it's a classic example of a meaningless, temporary political gesture to get votes. It's stupid, because Obama already has the Hispanic vote. Some other examples from Obama's side include his sudden "tough" stance on China - what the hell was he waiting for?  They've been a shady trading partner for at least 50 years, but he waits until a month before the debates to take a stand?  A stand that's probably a stupid idea anyway?  As long as we Americans demand to get anything and everything we need from Target or Wal-Mart for $2...

$0 - total dollars Obama has received from political action committees $901,524 - total dollars Romney has received from political action committees Relative to the obscene amount of money that is flowing into this election cycle, $900K is a drop in the bucket.  And Obama definitely benefits from PACs, they're just advertising on his behalf rather than directly contributing to his campaign.  It is interesting as a matter of principle though. Obama was the first candidate (in 2008) to reject PAC money because of the obvious influence it has once you're elected.   You don't need to look any further than Kentucky's own Mitch McConnell to see that.  His biggest contributors are investment bankers and coal miners, and guess what two industries he's gone out of his way to support? Here's the problem though - those companies aren't based in Kentucky, the state he was sent to the Senate to represent.  http://www.opensecrets.org/  is a great site tha...

A couple friends have asked me what I think is going to happen in the debates, so I decided to write a post on it here. I have no experience predicting Presidential debates, so don't bet on any of this. Obama strengths: He's the current President, he's leading in the polls and he flew to the debate on Air Force One. Don't underestimate the power of incumbency when it comes to building up your confidence. If he's wise, he'll keep that in check. Mitt Romney is no idiot, as much as I'd like him to be one. Obama's biggest accomplishment is Obamacare, and America likes it. If you ask people about individual elements of Obamacare, the entire country supports it. It's only when you say "do you like the President's health care overhaul?" that people say "no way!," and that's typically because they hate the President anyway. "Should we deny health coverage to kids because they're sick?" "Should we allow open m...

How did Romney get $100 million in his IRA, a middle class retirement vehicle with a $6k maximum annual contribution? He lied, because that's what rich people do to dodge taxes.  In order to get that much money in there legally, he'd have to have given the max contribution for 16,666 years.  Read more here . Let me be clear - I have no problem with rich people, or the fact that they dodge taxes. Dodging taxes, legally or otherwise, is an American tradition that goes back to the founding of our country, literally. What bothers me is when they dodge taxes and then claim they need a tax cut.  They say this in the same breath that they complain about our budget deficit, and justify it by suggesting that the rest of us are all dumb enough to believe that "if you give rich people a tax cut, they'll go out tomorrow and create jobs." That's horse shit, and every tax cut since Carter confirms it.