Rasmussen Poll: Romney 48, Obama 43

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Daniel Doherty - I know it’s only June, but still…

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows Mitt Romney attracting 48% of the vote, while President Obama earns 43%. Six percent (6%) prefer some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided. The president picks up support from just 35% of white voters overall. That’s eight points below the 43% of the white vote he won in 2008. The gender gap is now at 11 points. That’s little changed from the 12-point gap in 2008. Romney leads by 11 among men, and the candidates are even among women.

This is good news all around. President Obama is losing support among white voters, Mitt Romney leads by double digits among men and, most important, they split the women’s vote. What else could we ask for? Best of all, the survey suggests that the phony “war on women” meme invented by Democrats has failed to significantly hurt Romney (despite their best efforts). Sure, Leftists will continue to argue Rasmussen polls are deeply skewed (and overtly partisan!) even though they accurately predicted the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. Go figure. And, yes, while Gallup’s latest survey does show the two candidates locked in a dead heat -- 46 to 46 -- the Rasmussen graph below should still brighten your weekend.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Forward!

Chief Justice Roberts Bullied By President Obama

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As legal scholars study the Supreme Court's decision in the Obamacare case, more and more are concluding that Justice Anthony Kennedy's dissenting opinion, striking down the law in its entirety, was once the majority opinion--and that Chief Justice John Roberts switched his vote at a late stage. If so, it would appear that the Chief Justice may have succumbed to the bullying meted out by President Barack Obama, who attacked the Court in the aftermath of oral arguments in March, when Obamacare seemed headed for certain defeat.

Joel B. Pollak - As National Review's Ed Whelan, the Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein, and others are pointing out, the dissent refers to another opinion as "the dissent" and uses the pronoun "we," as if speaking for the Court, as majority opinions typically do. In addition, the dissent focuses on the government's arguments, rather than tackling the majority head-on. That suggests that a switch--most likely by the Chief Justice himself--may have come very late in the game, too late to offer more than the most cursory revisions of the opinions in the case.
The fact that the Chief Justice's reasoning is so flimsy is yet another piece of evidence that he may have made a late switch--and under pressure. Congress did not intend the individual mandate to be a tax--neither in the text of the legislation, nor in its public deliberations inside and outside the Capitol. (If it had chosen to go that route, the left might have put forward a far stronger argument for universal government-run health care.) It is correct that Chief Justice Roberts has tended to defer to Congress, as conservatives do--but while this opinion has the form of deference, in substance it is the opposite of deferential, rewriting Obamacare by judicial fiat.
One final point is worth noting: that President Obama was enthusiastically joined in his attacks on the Court by the mainstream media, not just after oral arguments but right up to the eve of the decision. Roger Simon of Politico penned one of the most notorious attacks, but he was not alone--and if Anthony Weiner had not removed himself from the scene, we would have seen Democrats carry out their strategy of trashing the Court as a "corporate dominated arm of the Republican party." The truth may, in fact be that the Court is dominated easily--not by corporate interests, but by Obama's imperial presidency and an intolerant mainstream media.
If Chief Justice Roberts thought he was preserving public trust in the Supreme Court today, he will quickly learn he has done the opposite--not least because Democrats define bipartisanship as complete capitulation. Liberals--still smarting over Bush v. Gore--and conservatives now both have reason to distrust the court and its motives. If that "bipartisanship" is the legacy of the Chief Justice's apparent switch, it is a bitter bequest.

Justice Dept: Fast And Furious Secret Wiretaps Revealed

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The following was posted on the Roll Call website today. However, as of this writing, the site is unresponsive and appears to be down. In the public interest, we are posting the text from the Roll Call article. It was cross posted on Martinez Report:

In the midst of a fiery floor debate over contempt proceedings for Attorney General Eric Holder, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) quietly dropped a bombshell letter into the Congressional Record.
The May 24 letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member on the panel, quotes from and describes in detail a secret wiretap application that has become a point of debate in the GOP’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking probe.
The wiretap applications are under court seal, and releasing such information to the public would ordinarily be illegal. But Issa appears to be protected by the Speech or Debate Clause in the Constitution, which offers immunity for Congressional speech, especially on a chamber’s floor.
According to the letter, the wiretap applications contained a startling amount of detail about the operation, which would have tipped off anyone who read them closely about what tactics were being used. [...]
“The wiretap affidavit details that agents were well aware that large sums of money were being used to purchase a large number of firearms, many of which were flowing across the border,” the letter says.
The application included details such as how many guns specific suspects had purchased via straw purchasers and how many of those guns had been recovered in Mexico.
It also described how ATF officials watched guns bought by suspected straw purchasers but then ended their surveillance without interdicting the guns.
In at least one instance, the guns were recovered at a police stop at the U.S.-Mexico border the next day.
The application included financial details for four suspected straw purchasers showing they had purchased $373,000 worth of guns in cash but reported almost no income for the previous year, the letter says.
“Although ATF was aware of these facts, no one was arrested, and ATF failed to even approach the straw purchasers. Upon learning these details through its review of this wiretap affidavit, senior Justice Department officials had a duty to stop this operation. Further, failure to do so was a violation of Justice Department policy,” the letter says.

Likley Voters. Carter Better President Than Obama

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Harry H.Anderson -  According to a Newsweek/Daily Beast poll of likely voters, Barack Obama now rates behind Jimmy Carter in the pantheon of great presidents.  The poll asked likely voters to list the two best and the two worst presidents the history of the United States.  Here are the tallies, based on net results:
Voters’ list of the 10 best presidents: 1. Abraham Lincoln, +27 points (28 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)
2. Ronald Reagan, +25 points (31 percent place in top-2, 6 percent place in bottom-2)
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt, +22 points (23 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)
4. John F. Kennedy, +19 points (19 percent place in top-2, 0 percent place in bottom-2)
5. (tie) George Washington, +15 points (16 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)
5. (tie) Bill Clinton, +15 points (28 percent place in top-2, 13 percent place in bottom-2)
7. Thomas Jefferson, +6 points (6 percent place in top-2, 0 percent place in bottom-2)
8. (tie) Teddy Roosevelt, +5 points (5 percent place in top-2, 0 percent place in bottom-2)
8. (tie) Harry S. Truman, +5 points (5 percent place in top-2, 0 percent place in bottom-2)
10. Dwight D. Eisenhower, +4 points (5 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)

Masssachusettes Losers: Dukakis, Kerry And Romney ?

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Bill Kristol - Remember Michael Dukakis (1988) and John Kerry (2004)? It's possible to lose a winnable presidential election to a vulnerable incumbent in the White House (or in the case of 1988, a sitting vice president). So, speaking of losing candidates from Massachusetts: Is it too much to ask Mitt Romney to get off autopilot and actually think about the race he's running?

Image Credit: Nate BeelerAdopting a prevent defense when it's only the second quarter and you're not even ahead is dubious enough as a strategy. But his campaign's monomaniacal belief that it's about the economy and only the economy, and that they need to keep telling us stupid voters that it's only about the economy, has gone from being an annoying tick to a dangerous self-delusion.As Frank Cannon and Jeff Bell, among others, have pointed out, the economy is not an automatic path to victory. It does provide a favorable backdrop for this year's campaign. But what are voters to think when they hear the GOP nominee say, as he did yesterday to CBS’s Jan Crawford, "As long as I continue to speak about the economy, I'm going to win"? That they're dopes who don't know the economy's bad, but as long as the Romney campaign keeps instructing them that it is bad, they'll react correctly and vote the incumbent out of office? 
The economy is of course important. But voters want to hear what Romney is going to do about the economy. He can "speak about" how bad the economy is all he wants—though Americans are already well aware of the economy's problems—but doesn't the content of what Romney has to say matter? What is his economic growth agenda? His deficit reform agenda? His health care reform agenda? His tax reform agenda? His replacement for Dodd-Frank? No need for any of that, I suppose the Romney campaign believes. Just need to keep on "speaking about the economy."  The Romney campaign will answer that they're imitating Bill Clinton in 1992, who famously focused on "the economy, stupid." But Bill Clinton was a full spectrum presidential candidate, with detailed policy proposals on welfare reform, health care, education, and foreign policy. He also made real efforts to convince the voters he was different from the losing Democratic candidates who preceded him ("a new kind of Democrat," "ending welfare as we know it," a hawkish-sounding foreign policy, Sister Souljah, etc.). So far, the Romney campaign doesn't resemble the Clinton campaign. It seems to be following more comfortably in the tradition of the five post-Cold War Republican presidential candidates who preceded Romney. They received 37.5 percent, 40.7 percent, 47.9 percent, 50.7 percent, and 45.7 percent of the vote, respectively. The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to (narrow) defeat.By the way, Romney made his comment about speaking about the economy on July 4^th—a date that might suggest there's more to the American experiment than the economy.

2012 Progress

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As 2012 has started off with a boom, assuming that it is leading up to the end of the world, we have also boomed economically. Our economic stance from only six months ago has greatly improved, in fact we are doing better than what was assumed we would be at currently. Our unemployment rate has dropped more than expected and manufacturing has picked up greatly affecting jobs and production. While our economy has experienced some big improvements it is still hard to say exactly how long they are expected to last. With the rapid unemployment drop it would appear good things are to come ,but we really can never truly tell. The economy is one of the seemingly impossible to predict, but with many good signs it is only right to assume our economy is going into a positive direction. We can only hope that more people are able to find jobs and more money will be injected in our ever changing economy. With businesses picking up and unemployment dropping, we can only hope for the best.

Woo Pig Sooie!

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I visited University of Arkansas a few weekends ago. As we did the college tour, two students were showing us around on campus. As we got to the business building, they started to explain some cool things about the department. The guy told that there is an investing class that every business major/minor has to take. The school donates $1,000,000 for the students to invest in the class so they can really get a hands on experience on the real stock market, rather than just learning through simulators for practice. I think using real money would put more pressure on the students to take it more seriously, in the chances of actually making/loosing real money. I thought this was pretty cool. This gives students the tools and knowledge to invest money early on. Especially being a business major, it is important to invest your money to make a good living. The earlier you start the more you will make. This is becoming more and more important because we need to start planning to save for retirement earlier on because our generations will not be able to plan for social security. Its cool that the university is investing money into their students, which will not only make the school money, but will overall drive the economy because those students will more than likely invest on their own, putting more money into the economy. I don’t know how common these classes are, but I think its an awesome idea that will spread if it hasn’t already. A lot of people, especially young adults, are scared to invest their money. By taking this class, more young adults will begin to put back money and start retirement funds early on and be smarter with their money.