President Obama: Don't Blame "Both Sides" for Fiscal Cliff

source: RawStory
Here's the President on Meet the Press today schooling David Gregory on why the press needs to give up the false equivalency meme. And I really loved that Obama used the phrase "country first" to describe his plans, since that was the McCain/Palin slogan in 2008. Ha.

The only thing I would caution against, David, is I think this notion of, "Well, both sides are just kind of unwilling to cooperate." And that's just not true. I mean if you look at the facts, what you have is a situation here where the Democratic Party, warts and all, and certainly me, warts and all, have consistently done our best to try to put country first.

And to try to work with everybody involved to make sure that we've got an economy [that] grows. Make sure that it works for everybody. Make sure that we're keeping the country safe. And does the Democratic Party still have some knee-jerk ideological positions and are there some folks in the Democratic Party who sometimes aren't reasonable? Of course. That's true of every political party.

But generally if you look at how I've tried to govern over the last four years and how I'll continue to try to govern, I'm not driven by some ideological agenda. I am a pretty practical guy. And I just want to make sure that things work. And one of the nice things about never having another election again, I will never campaign again, is I think you can rest assured that all I care about is making sure that I leave behind an America that is stronger, more prosperous, more stable, more secure than it was when I came into office.

More of the Transcript Here on PolicyMic

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Tina Fey Speaks for All Women About Guys like Akin, Ryan and Mourdock

gifsfln.tumblr.com
Tina Fey spoke at the Inaugural Gala at the Center for Reproductive Rights this week:

Via WSJ

“I wish we could have an honest and respectful dialogue about these complicated issues,” Fey said. “But it seems like we can’t right now. And if I have to listen to one more gray-faced man with a two-dollar haircut explain to me what rape is, I’m gonna lose my mind.”

“I watch these guys and I’m like what is happening? Am I a secretary on ‘Mad Men’?” Fey joked.

Fey then tried to summarize Akin’s views on pregnancy and rape, concluding “It’s making me dumber when I say it. But it’s something about the body not being able to get pregnant when it’s under physical stress. Mr. Akin I think you are confusing the phrase ‘legitimate rape’ with the phrase ‘competitive gymnastics.’”

Romney Skewered by SNL Snark!!!

gif by moonxyiptsz tumblr

This is laugh-out-loud funny, so enjoy and Happy Friday! The guy who plays Romney, Jason Sudeikis is perfect, LOL. Also, I added the list of the "corrections" that Fox and Friends had to make just for one morning, LOL. It scrolls by too fast to see on the video.



The Bible was not a movie first.

Stalactites is not a childhood disease.

Iowa City never elected Mayor McCheese.

Allegra is not a religion.

Jeremy Lin was traded, not deported.

The sun and the moon do not high-five as they pass each other.

Vaginas don’t look like that.

A dead person’s skull does not contain their memories.

Ron Paul is one person.

Not all cats are gay.

The Atlanta Hawks are a team, not an infestation.

Ellen DeGeneres never married a car.

Benedict Arnold was not a character on Diff’rent Strokes.

A wind turbine has never cut off the head of a pretty girl in a convertible.

The Tasmanian Devil is not the president of Tasmania.

Star Wars is essentially a work of fiction.

Al Gore never claimed to invent Nintendo.

Hawaii does not rotate every six months.

Neil Armstrong was not the first person to moon someone.

The Keystone Pipeline is not filled with Keystone Light.

Swiss banks are not “full of holes.”

Camp David doesn’t have a sister camp called Camp Denise.

Oogielove is not a sexually transmitted disease.

They did not name Mars after the Mars Rover.

Monica Lewinsky was never in an internment camp.

Six comes after five.

Kim Jong-Un is not the CEO of Yahoo.

Left-handed people cannot read your thoughts.

Lobsters are not “ocean spiders.”

Cat Fancy is a magazine, not a man/cat dating website.

The U.S. Postal Service never released a Kesha stamp.

“F” is not a blood type.

Parsley is not one of the Spice Girls.

Bolt is not a new action movie starring John C. Reilly.

LIBOR is not a giant praying mantis.

Old Navy is not one of the armed forces.

The letters in “Massachusetts” cannot be rearranged to spell “same sex marriage.”

Crabs don’t breastfeed.

Animal Planet is not an acceptable nickname for Telemundo.

Marco Rubio does not play for the Timberwolves.

Al-Jazeera is not the co-host of “Tool Time.”

Babies never “skip ahead” to being 10.

Angela Merkel is not a palindrome.

You can’t outrun polio.

The Negro League is not “back and better than ever.”

Latin Inches is not the Mexican metric system.

The Russian national anthem is not the U.S. national anthem played backwards.

Rocky never fought Lassie.

Obama Leading in Polls as Clock Ticks

The NBC/WSJ/Marist Poll that came out on September 13 gives Obama the lead in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia:

From NBC's First Read

In both Florida and Virginia, Obama is ahead of Romney by five points among likely voters (including those leaning toward a particular candidate), 49 percent to 44 percent.

In Ohio, the president’s lead is seven points, 50 percent to 43 percent.

Among a larger pool of registered voters, Obama’s advantage over Romney slightly increases to 7 points in Virginia, 8 in Florida and 9 in Ohio.

. . . Romney likely needs to capture at least two of these states, if not all three, to secure the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency.

By comparison, Obama can reach 270 by winning just one or two of these battlegrounds – on top of the other states already considered to be in his column.

(Obama also has an additional path to victory without any of these three states if he wins the toss-up contests of Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.)

Public Policy Polling reports that Obama has a five point lead in Virginia over Romney:

PPP's newest Virginia poll finds Barack Obama leading by 5 points, 51-46. Obama's lead is unchanged from a month ago when we found him leading 50-45 in the state. He may not be seeing a bump from the convention in the state at this point, but he was in a pretty good position to begin with.

Virginia continues to look like it may be something of a firewall state for Obama. PPP has now polled it 9 times this cycle, and President Obama has led by at least 4 points on all 9 of the polls. He's been ahead by 5 points, 5 points, 8 points, and 8 points over the course of the four surveys we've conducted in 2012.

However, we must be cautious in our reading of such polls, lest we jinx the results with too much idealistic hope. I plead guilty of being optimistic, along with Nancy Pelosi who said this weekend: "If the far right thought that Romney could win, they might be more enthusiastic about him. . . He’s not going to be president."

And then there's the story from Politico that the Romney camp is imploding and throwing senior adviser Stuart Stevens under the bus as the scapegoat. More about that here:
Snark Amendment: Romney Camp Chaos

Conversely there are the Romney-side Republican naysayers who dismiss all polls as inaccurate or untrue because in their state of denial they can't accept a scenario in which Obama might be chosen by the people for a second term. For them, Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo had this message:

I’ve been watching elections professionally for going on two decades.
From a fair amount of experience I’ll say one thing: if your theory is based on some sort of systematic error on the part of most pollsters, you’re almost certainly in for a really long election night.

Indeed!

Nate Silver on on NYT 538 blog writes in "Watching the Clock and Awaiting the Unknown" that we should just watch the polls day by day, and in time all would be revealed.

Each day that Mr. Romney fails to make gains in the polls will count as an opportunity lost for him. And with each passing day, the model will become slightly more confident that a small lead in the polls will translate into an Electoral College victory for Mr. Obama, since the error in the polls becomes smaller as we get closer to Nov. 6.

It’s also worth tracking the number of undecided voters remaining in the race. The model assumes that overall uncertainty in the forecast is a function of the number of undecideds, in addition to the time left until Election Day.

. . . The average bookmaker now makes Mr. Obama about a 75 percent favorite to win re-election, almost exactly as the FiveThirtyEight forecast now does.

Silver does warn about believing all the comparisons to past races, making "if...then" statements about what will happen. For example, Republicans are trying to compare Obama to Dukakis, as reported by David Weigel of Slate at the Values Voter Summit in Washington:

. . . conservatives are talking themselves into optimism. “Before you decide the election is over based on September polls,” writes Mike Huckabee in an email to supporters, “remember that coming out of the 1988 Democratic convention, Gallup showed an insurmountable 17-point lead for that great former president, Michael Dukakis.”

Walking around the conference, I heard the Tale of Dukakis again and again. But the story leaves out how George H.W. Bush’s convention came after Dukakis, and he made the most of the opportunity to erase that lead. Like every “maybe this time will be like that time” analysis, it leaves out the demographic and culture shifts that have made it easier for a Democrat to put together 270 electoral votes.

Nate Silver says to take all such analysis, both pro-Romney or anti-Romney, with a grain of salt. As he explains it:

I would urge some caution if you come across analyses that take the form: “No candidate has won when trailing in the polls by X amount as of Y date, subject to conditions P and Q”.

These analyses may convey something of the right spirit, in that they emphasize that the polls have a history of being pretty accurate after Labor Day and the conventions. But they do it with much more specificity than is warranted. There is no magic date when polls go from being inaccurate to accurate, and no exact threshold at which a lead in the polls goes from being surmountable to insurmountable.

Rather, it all exists along a probabilistic spectrum, with a candidate’s chance of winning primarily a function of the size of his lead, the time remaining until Election Day and the number of undecideds left in the electorate.

So I guess he is trying to give the Republicans some hope that Obama's lead isn't insurmountable, but we do know that most voters have made up their minds, and I don't lean towards the "undecideds" being relevant the way Silver does.

Snarkfest: Paul Ryan is Gabe from the Office

So today Mitt Romney announced that Paul Ryan is his running mate, and I've had a strange sense of deja vu. You see, back in 2008 on the day that John McCain announced he was choosing Sarah Palin as VP, I looked at her and thought - "Oh my God, she looks like Tina Fey - this will be great for Saturday Night Live!!!" And the rest is television history.

So today, I saw Paul Ryan up on the warship with Romney in Norfolk Harbor and all I could think of was that he looks just like Gabe Lewis from The Office. And since that actor works for NBC, just as Tina Fey did, my heart swelled with happiness for Saturday Night Live.

You would think Romney's handlers would have thought about this but . . . oh never mind.

And since there's plenty of time to analyze all the serious things about Paul Ryan that should scare everyone, such as his draconian view of Medicare and Pell Grants and the message of the Warship in the first place (Bomb Iran? Armageddon?), today I just want to indulge myself in his absolute "Gabe-Ness." He even wore this big black coat that reminded me of Gabe as "Honest Gabe" in the episode "Gettysburg." I couldn't be happier.