689 Reasons to Defeat Barack Obama

Published October 20, 2012 | By Iowadawg

1. Because he was not the one we were waiting for.

2. “Forward.”

3. Because Julia needs to get off her lazy, federally subsidized butt, get a real job, and pay for her own damned birth-control pills.

4. Because lots of people fail at their first real job.

5. Because “Winning the Future” was not a very good slogan back in 2005 when it was Newt’s.

6. Because the country is ready for its first African-American former president.

7. To give him the free time to write his third memoir.

8. Because he’ll have even more “flexibility” after November if he’s back in Chicago.

9. Joe Biden.

10. So that dissent will once again be the highest form of patriotism.

11. Because he didn’t quite get the message in 2010.

12. For claiming that he would cut the deficit in half.

13. And then adding more than $5 trillion in new debt.

14. To remind him that debt used to be, in his own words, “unpatriotic.”

15. Because the buck never stops.

16. For blaming President Bush.

17. For blaming headwinds.

18. For blaming Japanese earthquakes.

19. For blaming ATMs.

20. He can’t get the vice president to stop calling him “Barack” in public.

21. Gabby Giffords shooting commemorative T-shirts and pep rally.

22. Because he listened to the Reverend Wright’s crackpot racist diatribes for years and then gave us a lecture on racism.

23. For ignoring his own deficit commission.

24. Because of an $800 billion stimulus bill.

25. “Shovel-ready” projects.

26. The non-existence of shovel-ready projects.

27. For joking about the non-existence of shovel-ready projects.

28. Because “jobs created or saved” is Enron accounting.

29. Because there were stimulus grants in imaginary ZIP codes.

30. For proposing a $53 billion high-speed-rail project while Amtrak is still losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

31. For repeatedly citing the 2007 Minnesota bridge collapse as evidence of the need for expanded infrastructure spending when federal investigators ruled that bad design, not disrepair, caused the collapse.

32. For 613 new federal regulations in the first 33 months of his presidency.

33. And because 129 of those regulations will each cost the economy more than $100 million a year.

34. Because the Small Business Administration estimates the price of current regulations at $1.75 trillion annually — a bigger burden than the corporate income tax.

35. Because his neck must be hurting from keeping his chin up in the air for nearly four years.

Read all the rest here. Yes, there are really 689 of them. I think they had to stop there because they ran out of space.

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From HERE.

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ichthyologist:

Coconut Octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus)

The coconut octopus has been observed to carry shells as camouflage.

Every couple of meters, the octopus hides itself between the two shells and assesses its safety, before going on. While moving, it carries the shell with its inner suction cups and walks across the seafloor on the tips of its tentacles.

Some scientists consider this the use of tools.

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Yahoo: Finance “At Yahoo Finance, you get free stock quotes, up to date news, portfolio management resources, international market data, message boards, and mortgage rates that help you manage your financial life.”

Chemical Bank in New York City placed its first ATM machine in operation at Rockville Center, Long Island, in January 1969. – Provided by Reference.com

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Really, this chart is for liberals to get excited about and try to convince themselves that really gasoline is damn cheap! Oh, this morning in Des Moines, filled our van at $3.33 per gallon.

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“Frankentree” Fiasco Cuts Cocoa Supply

A cloning technique aimed at increasing cocoa output by hastening seed production has led instead to sickly, misshapen trees, dubbed “Frankentrees,” that topple under their own weight and yield poor-quality beans. Typical cocoa trees produce seed pods after four years, but the cloned trees take just three. Thus, to boost cocoa production, the Indonesian government began a campaign in 2009 to get farmers to plant the modified saplings. Unfortunately, three years into the $350-million campaign, output continues to fall and discouraged cocoa farmers are increasingly turning to the more lucrative palm oil industry.

More

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Obama under pressure to spell out his agenda for a second term

President Obama is taking heat from his Republican rivals and some members of his own party for being vague about his agenda for a second term.

On Thursday, Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan told a crowd at a campaign event in Florida that Obama “is not telling you what his second-term plan would be.”

“He’s not saying that he is offering anything new,” the Wisconsin lawmaker said during a town hall. “All he is offering is four more years of the same.”

Republicans are using the critique to parry Democratic attacks against Romney’s tax-reform plan, but they aren’t the only ones questioning what Obama’s priorities would be on Day One of term two.

“What would make my heart leap is to see him offer a forward-looking speech that encompasses all the things that he’s been talking about in little bits into a big thematic package, and one, big, second-term-agenda speech,” said Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons.

The president, meanwhile, has repeatedly made the case that Romney has no real plan to govern the country, and has taken to calling his rival’s platform a “sketchy deal.”

Campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher disputed the charge that Obama isn’t talking details, noting he has promised to double exports, cut oil imports in half and hire 100,000 new math and science teachers, among other second-term priorities.

“If Mitt Romney wants to talk about plans, he might want to start with coming up with some of his own,” Fetcher said.

Neither candidate’s platform is without concrete promises. Romney often speaks about his five-point plan for spurring economic growth, saying it would create 12 million jobs in four years.

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Interesting. Could you come up with $500?

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — A survey of about 1,100 Americans finds that more than 4-in-10 respondents admit they don’t have more than $500 in readily accessible savings.
The survey is a kind of departure for CreditDonkey.com, a website that compares credit card deals. Not respondents all were poor. Some had big houses, big mortgages or 401(k)s, but still no more than five Benjamins to rub together right now.
MORE

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When obamacare kicks in….

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Iacocca: America needs a turnaround, which is why I’m voting Romney

I’ve seen a lot of situations that needed a turnaround in my time, and I know one when I see one. Trust me, America needs a turnaround.

America is in deep trouble. After four years, economic growth is still anemic, our annual deficits were not cut in half as promised, and our staggering $16 trillion federal debt hangs over us and our kids like the plague. Our people are hurting, they can’t find jobs, they have lost a major part of their net worth, the number of Americans living in poverty is at unacceptable levels, and we just aren’t doing the things that would get our country back on the right track.

Like any turnaround it must begin by honestly facing our problems; hope and speeches won’t get our people back to work. It will require experienced leadership that can create and lead policy change that will enable a more robust and competitive America. We need leadership that understands that government, just like American families, can’t continue to spend beyond its means. We must find leadership that won’t pander to the people, but rather will speak honestly to them about our situation, explaining in simple terms what we have to do to get back on the right track. And we need leadership that can bring us together in a sense of shared responsibility so that we can move forward as a team. All of us. As Americans.

America needs new leadership

Mitt Romney has successfully led both public and private sector turnarounds. He is a bright and successful man; he is a good man, a caring man, a man of integrity, family and faith. Importantly, he recognizes we are in a tough situation. With dozens of years of real world experience in the public and private sectors, he knows what he’s talking about. His policies will enable a stronger America, one in which all Americans can share. He was groomed and trained for this moment.

The future of our country is at stake

If you are out of work or worried about your job, having trouble making ends meet, are worried about your kids’ future or your own, or if you just have a nagging sense that as Americans we can do better than this, it’s time to wake up and stop just hoping it will all work out in a few more years. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it won’t!

It’s time for straight talk.

I’m asking you to vote for change that will get us moving in the right direction, and to be ready to be part of the solution. Everything depends on it. We don’t have time to waste. It’s time to make America great again.

Vote for Mitt Romney for president.

From The Detroit News.

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The Great Binder Blunder

So the other morning a reader e-mails me a picture of a handful of women demonstrating outside the headquarters of the Ohio Republican party — in what we expert analysts round about this point in the quadrennial election cycle like to call the critical battleground of the Buckeye State. The women each wore two giant pieces of cardboard, front and back. Ah, I thought, a timely protest. These activists understand that, with Obama’s flatline economy drifting inexorably to a $20 trillion federal debt, we’ll soon be living in cardboard shacks in shantytowns in the parking lot of the bankrupt Solyndra factory. Or it’s what they’ll be using for the x-ray plates at your local hospital once the Obamacare rationing kicks in. Or maybe it’s the perfect visual metaphor for the flimsiness of U.S.-government security at its Middle Eastern embassies before the “Death to the Great Satan!” crowd punched through the compound like so much soggy cardboard.

But no. The women were chanting “Equal rights, not binders,” and they were protesting the following remarks by Mitt Romney at the presidential debate:

“And so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Yes!!!!!!! With one bound, Obama was unbound! Romney had just made the worst presidential-debate gaffe since Gerald Ford declared there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. In the previous weeks, Obama had attempted to have a serious conversation with the citizenry, as befits the electoral process of a mature republic. He had raised the critical questions of our time — free contraceptives for middle-aged coeds, the outrageous right-wing Muppophobic assault on Big Bird — but the public had failed to bite. Now, in one fatal error, Romney had handed him the winning issue: binders!

On the stump, Obama is a man reborn. At a campaign stop outside Cedar Rapids — in what we expert analysts like to call the critical battleground of the Hawkeye State — the president declared: “I’ve got to tell you, we don’t have to collect a bunch of binders to find qualified, talented, driven young women.” No, sir! In the Democratic party, driven young women are dropping into your lap. At the Island Grove Regional Park Exhibition Hall in Greeley, Colo., Joe Biden told the crowd: “When Governor Romney was asked a direct question about equal pay, he started talking about binders. Whoa! The idea that he had to go and ask where a qualified woman was, he just should have come to my house. He didn’t need a binder.” The crowd roared its approval. “What I can’t understand,” continued the vice president, “is how he has gotten in this sort of 1950s time warp in terms of women.”

Yes, indeed. Romney wants to return us to the 1950s, when a woman’s place was in the binder, when every predatory male had his little black binder, and condescending misogynists would interview applicants for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and smirk, “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful without your binder . . . ” It was the age of patriarchal sitcoms when the little lady would greet her man at the front door with his pipe and binders, where girls were told they could aspire no further than to ace Home Ec and thereby persuade some eligible young man to put a ring file on their finger. We all remember the careless sexist assumptions of the so-called family shows of those days — Leave It to Binder, Ozzie and Binder, Binder Knows Best, My Three Binders, Gilligan’s Binder, The Binder Bunch — until eventually the mold was broken by The Mary Binder Moore Show in the early Seventies. By then, feminists across the land were burning their binders, and Erica Jong had popularized the “zipless file.” As Gloria Steinem famously said, a woman needs a binder like a fish needs a three-tab manila hanging folder. Soon American wives were filing for divorce.

But now, after four decades of movement on women’s rights, Romney wants to go back to when they were stationary. What sort of man looks to fill his cabinet with binders? As I write, Joe Biden is winding up a barnstormer of a speech before the National Organization of Women: “I wanna tell y’all they’re gonna put y’all back in binders. Yaaaaaaalllll,” he added, helpfully. “What part of ‘y’all’ don’t y’all understand?”

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz deplored Romney’s descent into chauvinist “code words.” “To the sexist Republican base,” said Chris, “‘binders’ is a dog whistle.”

“A wolf whistle,” said Ed.

“Exactly,” said Chris. “It’s like asking for watermelon at the NAACP luncheon, not that I ever did that and it was a long time ago.”

“Or addressing the LGBT group and asking the guy if he’s got the new Judy Garland box set,” said Ed.

“That was you, not me,” said Chris.

“But underneath the code language we all know what’s really being said here,” argued Ed. “Send in the women, and I’ll get out my E-Z one-touch hole punch.”

“Okay, moving on,” said Chris, “here’s a leaked video of Romney addressing the board at Bain Capital while he was closing factories throughout the Midwest. It’s a bit muffled, but if you listen carefully you can hear Romney arguing that it would make more economic sense for him to give every American woman cancer and outsource matrimony to a binder full of mail-order brides from the Philippines.”

“Why do you think they call them Manila folders?” added Ed. “We all know the code words.”

“Why do you think he founded Staples in the first place?” demanded Chris. “What kind of a deal do you figure he’s getting on the binders?”

More here.

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Obama’s Binder Full of Muslims

In their second debate, Mitt Romney tried to appeal to women by saying he actively sought them out. Though Barack Obama is criticizing him for saying that, Obama has his own binder.

Here is a snippet from the Chicago Tribune: (3/29/09)

In a bid to get more Muslim Americans working in the Obama administration, a book with resumes of 45 of the nation’s most qualified — Ivy League grads, Fortune 500 executives and public servants, all carefully vetted — has been submitted to the White House.

The effort, driven by community leaders and others, including Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), was bumped up two weeks ahead of schedule because White House officials heard about the venture, said J. Saleh Williams, program coordinator for the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association who sifted through more than 300 names.

“It was mostly under the radar,” Williams said. “We thought it would put [the president] in a precarious position. We didn’t know how closely he wanted to appear to be working with the Muslim American community.”

The effort aims to get the administration focused on Muslim Americans, a group that has at times felt like a pariah. During the campaign, Obama’s staff prevented Muslim women wearing head scarves from being photographed behind him, in one of many incidents that left Muslim Americans feeling slighted by the candidate.

Fire destroys Big Tex at State Fair of Texas

First things first, the big guy will be back, says Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings
Dallas is about Big Things and #BigTex was symbolic of that. We will rebuild Big Tex bigger and better for the 21st Century.