Politics of the United States

Barack Obama has done more than any other person in the world to rescue US arms manufacturers. Good on ya Barack, NRA membership is surging.

Leaders of the National Rifle Association announced that its membership has surged to a record five million, a figure they aim to double in the “long war” to preserve gun ownership in America.

The organisation’s executive vice president and public face Wayne LaPierre told its annual convention that proposed legislation to introduce expanded background checks had “got the defeat it deserved” last month.

Mr LaPierre told members the fight over background checks had been “but one skirmish in what can only be defined as one long war against our Constitutional rights,” and that the NRA was in a “once in a generation fight for everything we care about.”  Read more »

There is something hugely ironic that it is Rasmussen that delivers the bad news about the demise of the Tea party. The very polling company that Tea Party fanatics were saying were the most accurate, the only one true indicator of actual voting in the election has some very vert bad news for them..and it must be right…it is Rasmussen:

Views of the Tea Party movement are at their lowest point ever, with voters for the first time evenly divided when asked to match the views of the average Tea Party member against those of the average member of Congress.  Only eight percent (8%) now say they are members of the Tea Party, down from a high of 24% in April 2010 just after passage of the national health care law.   Read more »

Having given the GOP a good hiding in the last election, Obama is using his organisation to promote his solutions to the Fiscal Cliff. Unfortunately this has put the Republicans noses out of joint.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker John A. Boehner  ripped into President Barack Obama on Tuesday for planning to take his fiscal cliff message on the road.

The White House announced early Tuesday a schedule of events for Obama this week aimed at bolstering his position on averting an income tax hike on the middle class. He’ll meet with small-business owners Tuesday and middle-class Americans and business leaders Wednesday. On Friday, Obama will head to Pennsylvania to for an event at a manufacturing facility that could be affected by the cliff.

The showmanship didn’t go over well with GOP leaders.

“Rather than sitting down with lawmakers of both parties and working out an agreement, he’s back on the campaign trail, presumably with the same old talking points that we’re all quite familiar with,” McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said on the Senate floor, a day after declaring the fiscal cliff talks at an “impasse.”

The GOP may have failed to notice but blocking anything and everything Obama tried to do means he probably cant see much point in talking to them. Political negotiations require concessions on both sides, not just saying No new taxes and refusing to negotiate.

Hard to argue with Rand Paul on this:

The Kentucky senator also said he’d be one of the few conservatives willing to compromise on military cuts but remained firm against raising taxes. To make his case, Paul cited examples of what he considers wasteful spending and argued an increase in tax rates would be futile while the government spends “$300,000 a year on robotic squirrels” and $2 million “on how we can convince Chinese prostitutes not to drink so much on the job.”

Nate Silver was a legend before the US elections, now he a super legend and so people are re-writing the Chuck Norris meme. Nate Silver was also prepared to back himself with a bet against a journalist from the NY Times.

Adored or despised during the campaign, depending on how you felt about his robust certainty that President Obama would serve a second term; fingered as an Obama-loving ideologue who fudged the data by stacking the algorithmic scales; and then derided by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough as a joke for failing to call the election a toss-up when it was—clearly! —a toss-up, Silver ended up kicking sand in the eyes of all the political jocks rooting against a political future where bloodless number crunching would replace bloody partisan opining.

And while his very public $2,000 bet on Twitter with Scarborough that math would beat intuition struck the Times as indecorous (and viewed by some in the media as reckless), it may well be the easiest money Silver ever made. You always bet on the math, especially when you know the other guy doesn’t really know math the way you know math.

Nate Silver’s approach has been vindicated and he is a one man traffic machine for the New York Times, watch this video as he explains the polls:

Every one knows that I have a bet with Leighton Smith about the outcome of next weeks US presidential Election. We have only an expensive boozy lunch at stake, imagine if we bet our moustaches if we had such things:

President Barack Obama’s campaign claimed today that Mitt Romney’s campaign is “flailing” in the final days, with senior strategist David Axelrod betting his mustache that Obama will win the newly minted battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota.

Axelrod and Obama campaign manager Jim Messina on a conference call with reporters dismissed the Romney campaign’s late charge into those states, despite persistent polling leads for Obama, as a sign that it is losing in the existing battlegrounds and is increasingly desperate to expand the map.

“It’s break glass time in Boston,” Axelrod said. “I’ve put my mustache on the line.”

Messina said Democrats are piling up big leads among early voters in key battleground states including Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, Colorado and Florida.
Axelrod dismissed a question about Obama consistently trailing significantly among independents in polling.

Another quote from Rick Santorum.

On keeping mothers at home:

“In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don’t both need to. … What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else — or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon — find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.” (Santorum’s 2005 book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good)

Mitt Romney has had a really bad day at the office losing two and possibly three primaries.

Santorum has been declared the winner in Missouri and Minnesota. In Minnesota, Romney is currently trailing Santorum by almost 30 points and Ron Paul (!) is ahead of Romney by 10. Santorum is also ahead in Colorado, but very few votes have come in thus far. Josh Marshall finds no silver lining for Mitt.

Rick Santorum won Missouri and Minnesota convincingly, in Missouri he won every county. The turn out is low though and so Santorum cannot claim much other than a moral victory.

Newt Gingrich overcame a last minute attack on him to win the South Carolina primary:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stormed to an upset victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday night, dealing a sharp setback to former front-runner Mitt Romney and suddenly scrambling the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Thank you, South Carolina!” a jubilant Gingrich tweeted to his supporters. He appealed for a flood of donations for the next-up Jan. 31primary. “Help me deliver the knockout punch in Florida. Join our Moneybomb and donate now,” said his tweet.

Exit polls showed he led among voters who said their top priority was picking a candidate who could beat President Barack Obama — a group that had preferred Romney in earlier contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

What probably got him over the line was this stunning on the media in a live debate where the CNN host, John King, opened the debate with questions over Newt’s long term affairs. He absolutely smashed up the host, the media and attacked Obama as well…to loud applause.

In the US they take a dimmer view of people who cheat on their taxes than those who cheat on their wives.