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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (668572)	8/22/2012 3:01:25 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580253

The Tax Returns are Hurting Romney, Badly Jamelle Bouie August 22, 2012 Another finding from the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll I didn’t mention this in my previous post, but in addition to the aforementioned questions, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal asked respondents about the recent controversies over Bain Capital and Mitt Romney’s tax returns to gage whether they affected support for the Republican nominee. Neither result was good. Here’s the first question: Has what you have seen, read, or heard about Mitt Romney’s previous business experience managing a firm that specializes in buying, restructuring, and selling companies made you feel … more positive or more negative about him, not made much difference in your opinion or do you not know enough about this to have an opinion at this time? Twenty-five percent said it made them feel more positive, 28 percent more negative, and 27 percent said it made no difference. When you remember that Romney has made this his chief qualification for the presidency, it speaks to the failure of his campaign to effectively rebut the charges. At best, Bain Capital is a non-factor for Romney, and for a significant number of people, it’s a detriment. The ongoing fight over his tax returns has done even more damage to the former Massachusetts governor. Here’s the question: Has what you have seen, read, or heard about Mitt Romney’s tax returns and the percent he has paid in federal income taxes made you feel … more positive or more negative about him, not made much difference in your opinion or do you not know enough about this to have an opinion at this time? Only 6 percent of respondents say that it has made a positive difference in their opinion of Romney. Thirty-six percent say that it has made a negative difference, and 41 percent say that it hasn’t made much difference at all. Seventeen percent don’t know either way. Romney’s anger over the Obama campaign’s decision to go after his tax returns makes more sense in this light; the controversy is doing real damage to his campaign, and more important, it has the potential to do more if Team Obama can return it to the forefront of the discussion. I wouldn’t bet against that possibility. As long as Romney refuses to release his returns, Obama can continue to hit him on the issue. Death by a thousand cuts is an exaggeration, but it’s not far off from what might happen; Romney could become defined by the things he won’t reveal, and gradually loses the trust of the public. His low favorability becomes a burden he can’t lift, keeping him behind Obama through the fall, and into the election. prospect.org

To: i-node who wrote (668572)	8/22/2012 3:10:35 PM
From: HPilot	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1580253

Obama clearly had more raw knowledge of the world Don't confuse Obamas telepropter's knowledge with his own. Without it Obama is almost as bad as Biden. When they meet together they probably need a staffer to explain what they said was stupid.

To: i-node who wrote (668572)	8/22/2012 10:30:52 PM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1580253

I don't agree with the "raw knowledge" part. Obama's understanding of basic economics is abysmal to non-existent. He has made some gaffes on historical knowledge as well. He thinks Austrian is a language. Etc, etc... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps," Obama said, slowly and methodically. "And the story in my family is that when he came home, he just went into the attic, and he didn't leave the house for six months. Alright? Now, obviously something had affected him deeply, but at the time, there just weren't the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain." That may be a fact, the RNC noted gleefully -- but only if Obama's uncle served in the Red Army of Joseph Stalin, which liberated Auschwitz Jan. 27, 1945. voices.washingtonpost.com

To: i-node who wrote (668572)	9/1/2012 10:05:44 AM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 1580253

Obama's 'Confident Ignorance' At Root Of His Failure By THOMAS SOWELL from hopepraytochange After reading Barack Obama's book "Dreams from My Father," it became painfully clear that he has not been searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth — and now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change things. Obama did not simply happen to encounter a lot of people on the far-left fringe during his life. As he spells out in his book, he actively sought out such people. There is no hint of the slightest curiosity on his part about other visions of the world that might be weighed against the vision he had seized upon. As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was teaching a law course there. What would be the point, if he already knew the truth and knew that they were wrong? This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a learned scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already doctrinaire at a very early age — and ill-informed or misinformed on both history and economics. His statement in "Dreams from My Father" about how white men went to Africa to "drag away the conquered in chains" betrays his ignorance of African history. The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of European conquests across the continent of Africa were different eras. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was ruled by Africans, who sold some of their slaves to white men. European conquests in Africa had to wait until Europeans found some way to survive lethal African diseases, to which they lacked resistance. Only after medical science learned to deal with these diseases could the era of European conquests spread across sub-Saharan Africa. But the Atlantic slave trade was over by then. There was no reason why Barack Obama had to know this. But there was also no reason for him to be shooting off his mouth without knowing what he was talking about. Denial Isn't Just A River This is similar to Obama's characterization of the Nile as "the world's greatest river." The Nile is less than 10% longer than the Amazon, but the Amazon delivers more than 50 times as much water into the Atlantic as the Nile delivers into the Mediterranean. The Nile could not accommodate the largest ships, even back in Roman times, much less the aircraft carriers of today that can sail up the Hudson River and dock in Midtown Manhattan. When Obama wrote that many people "had been enslaved only because of the color of their skin," he was repeating a common piece of gross misinformation. For thousands of years, people enslaved other people of the same race as themselves, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Western Hemisphere. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere. The very word "slave" is derived from the name of a European people once widely held in bondage, the Slavs. Economic Errors As for economics, Obama thought that Indonesians would be worse off after Europeans came in, used up their natural resources and then left them too poor to continue the modern way of life to which they had become accustomed, or to resume their previous way of life, after their previous skills had atrophied. This fear of European "exploitation" prevailed widely in the Third World in the middle of the 20th century. But, by the late 20th century, the falseness of that view had been demonstrated so plainly and so often, in countries around the world, that even socialist and communist governments began opening their economies to foreign investments. This often led to rising economic growth rates that lifted millions of people out of poverty. Barack Obama is one of those people who is often wrong but never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his confidence. But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire the same confidence in himself by others, then you have the ingredients for national disaster