Tuesday, November 6, 2012

List of Pundits Predicting Romney to be the Next President


  • Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.
    For a long time I have been predicting that Mitt Romney would get the Republican nomination, and that he would then win the general election.
    Tonight, Romney seems as fully capable as—probably more capable than—Barack Obama of being the next president. He probably will be
    I’m predicting a 5 to 7 point popular vote victory. Electorally it won’t even be that close. Romney will win many states that went to Obama in 2008. I’m predicting Romney victories in Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Indiana. I predict a Romney victory by 100 to 120 electoral votes.
    A University of Colorado analysis of state-by-state factors leading to the Electoral College selection of every U.S. president since 1980 forecasts that the 2012 winner will be Mitt Romney.
  •  Steve Forbes
    • Voters will “fire” President Barack Obama, Forbes said, because “the economy resembles a car on the open highway that should be going 70 mph, but instead is puttering along at 20-25 mph and shows signs of going at an even slower pace. 
  • Dick Morris: Romney 325, Obama 213
    • In an appearance on Fox News, conservative commentator Dick Morris predicted a massive Romney win with 325 Electoral College votes. To get there, Romney would have to win all of the swing states but Nevada and turn Minnesota, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania red.
  • George F. Will: Romney 321, Obama 217
    • Conservative commentator George F. Will predicted a huge Romney win, with 321 Electoral College votes. His map is essentially the same as Morris' scenario above, but he would keep Wisconsin in Obama's column and give Nevada to Romney instead.
  • Dean Chambers: Romney 311, Obama 227
    • Conservative activist Dean Chambers runs the website UnSkewed Polls, where he recalibrates polls to offset what he believes are misjudgments about sampling. His prediction calls for Romney to win the South and the Midwest, including Michigan, a state on few other lists.
  • Andrew Beyer: Romney 284, Obama 254
  • Karl Rove: Romney 279, Obama 259
    • Republican strategist and former Bush adviser Karl Rove predicted in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that Romney would win with at least 279 Electoral College votes. Though he didn't specify which states, a likely route would be for Romney to clean up in the South plus win Colorado, Ohio and New Hampshire.
  • Ben Domenech: Romney 278, Obama 260
    • In a post on Real Clear Politics, Red State blog co-founder Ben Domenech predicted a narrow Romney win with 278 Electoral College votes. His map includes Romney sweeping the South and picking up Colorado, Wisconsin and New Hampshire plus one of Maine's Congressional districts. 
  • Leslie Sanchez: Romney 275, Obama 263
    • Also as part of the "Crystal Ball" contest in the Washington Post, Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez, a former adviser to George W. Bush, predicted a narrow Romney win. Again, the actual states aren't known, but the most likely scenario would be for Romney to clean up in the South, plus win Ohio and Colorado.
Source: Mercury News

Friday, November 2, 2012

The Scope of Obamas Achievements

Who Gets Credit for the Recovery? — www.nytimes.com — Readability: The final factor, one that Mr. Obama’s base often overlooks, is that his presidency has produced a more significant set of policies than any Democratic presidency in a half-century. And an assertive Republican Party has promised to undo many of those policies if it wins.

The scope of Mr. Obama’s changes is easy to miss in part because he has used incremental, even moderate, means to achieve liberal ends. The health care law he and his Congressional allies passed relies less on government-provided care than either Richard M. Nixon’s or Mr. Clinton’s plans. But it is nonetheless the largest expansion of the safety net since Medicare and the most aggressive attack on inequality since inequality began rising in the 1980s.

In education, the Democrats expanded college financial aid, partly by eliminating bank subsidies, and pushed dozens of states to make K-12 schools more accountable. The 2009 stimulus bill also expanded and revamped infrastructure, antipoverty and research programs, as Michael Grunwald documents in his recent book, “The New New Deal.”

Even Mr. Obama’s and his allies’ biggest domestic failure (aside from misjudging the depth of the economic downturn) was not complete. Although Washington never passed a sweeping climate bill, it sharply raised fuel-mileage standards and spurred a wind and solar boomwith subsidies — subsidies scheduled to expire on Jan. 1.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Republicans and Racism

From TNR's Timothy Noah's article, some highlights:
  • The Republican party's small-government philosophy has limited federal interference with discriminatory practices at the state and local level, and with racial bigotry generally. 
  • The Republican majority on the Supreme Court will likely soon abolish affirmative action altogether. 
  • The Republican party's tax policies favor rich "job creators," who tend disproportionately to be white, and its opposition to the welfare state--initially to cash transfers, then to non-cash assistance like food stamps, and finally even to unemployment benefits--tends to harm lower-income people, who tend disproportionately to be black. 
  • The Republican party's criminal justice policies have put an appallingly high proportion of black men in jail, often for petty drug offenses. 
  • Republicans tend to favor the death penalty, which leads to execution of a disproportionate number of blacks.

Monday, January 2, 2012

What Obama is doing Wrong

Glenn Greewald lists all the things Obama is doing that are against Progressive/Liberal world view
The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations withdronescluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of aCongressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremelyracist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation”, all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

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