CU-Boulder Analysis That Has Accurately Predicted EVERY Presidential Race Since 1980 Says Romney Wins, 52.9% To 47.1%, By 320 To 270 Electoral Votes

The Colorado University analysis is based primarily on economic data.  So it ought to be a highly relevant fact that Gallup just released a poll that says Americans disapprove of Obama’s economic performance by a measure of 60 to 36.

Obviously, there will probably eventually be a first time for CU-Boulder’s analysis to be wrong, but this is sure good news for Romney (and America!) and bad news for Obama and liberals:

CU-Boulder analysis of election factors points to Romney win
Wednesday, 22 August 2012 18:23 staff

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.
 
The key is the economy, say political science professors Kenneth Bickers of CU-Boulder and Michael Berry of CU Denver. Their prediction model stresses economic data from the 50 states and the District of Columbia, including both state and national unemployment figures as well as changes in real per capita income, among other factors.
 
“Based on our forecasting model, it becomes clear that the president is in electoral trouble,” said Bickers, also director of the CU in DC Internship Program.
 
According to their analysis, President Barack Obama will win 218 votes in the Electoral College, short of the 270 he needs. And though they chiefly focus on the Electoral College, the political scientists predict Romney will win 52.9 percent of the popular vote to Obama’s 47.1 percent, when considering only the two major political parties.
 
“For the last eight presidential elections, this model has correctly predicted the winner,” said Berry. “The economy has seen some improvement since President Obama took office. What remains to be seen is whether voters will consider the economy in relative or absolute terms. If it’s the former, the president may receive credit for the economy’s trajectory and win a second term. In the latter case, Romney should pick up a number of states Obama won in 2008.”
 
Their model correctly predicted all elections since 1980, including two years when independent candidates ran strongly, 1980 and 1992. It also correctly predicted the outcome in 2000, when Al Gore received the most popular vote but George W. Bush won the election.
 
The study will be published this month in PS: Political Science & Politics, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Political Science Association. It will be among about a dozen election prediction models, but one of only two to focus on the Electoral College.
 
While many forecast models are based on the popular vote, the Electoral College model developed by Bickers and Berry is the only one of its type to include more than one state-level measure of economic conditions.
 
In addition to state and national unemployment rates, the authors looked at per capita income, which indicates the extent to which people have more or less disposable income. Research shows that these two factors affect the major parties differently: Voters hold Democrats more responsible for unemployment rates while Republicans are held more responsible for per capita income.
 
Accordingly — and depending largely on which party is in the White House at the time — each factor can either help or hurt the major parties disproportionately.
 
Their results show that “the apparent advantage of being a Democratic candidate and holding the White House disappears when the national unemployment rate hits 5.6 percent,” Berry said. The results indicate, according to Bickers, “that the incumbency advantage enjoyed by President Obama, though statistically significant, is not great enough to offset high rates of unemployment currently experienced in many of the states.”
 
In an examination of other factors, the authors found that none of the following had any statistically significant effect on whether a state ultimately went for a particular candidate: The location of a party’s national convention; the home state of the vice president; or the partisanship of state governors.
 
In 2012, “What is striking about our state-level economic indicator forecast is the expectation that Obama will lose almost all of the states currently considered as swing states, including North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida,” Bickers said.
 
In Colorado, which went for Obama in 2008, the model predicts that Romney will receive 51.9 percent of the vote to Obama’s 48.1 percent, again with only the two major parties considered.
 
The authors also provided caveats. Factors they said may affect their prediction include the timeframe of the economic data used in the study and close tallies in certain states. The current data was taken five months in advance of the Nov. 6 election and they plan to update it with more current economic data in September. A second factor is that states very close to a 50-50 split may fall an unexpected direction.
 
“As scholars and pundits well know, each election has unique elements that could lead one or more states to behave in ways in a particular election that the model is unable to correctly predict,” Berry said.
 
Election prediction models “suggest that presidential elections are about big things and the stewardship of the national economy,” Bickers said. “It’s not about gaffes, political commercials or day-to-day campaign tactics. I find that heartening for our democracy.”

There are, for the record, 538 electoral college votes.  If Obama wins 218, that means that Romney will win 320.  And this analysis has Romney winning virtually ALL the critical swing states.

Personally, for the sake of America, I hope the margin is even greater.  I hope that Romney has an overwhelming mandate to restore America and undo Obama’s failed attempt to “fundamentally transform” it.

Does this mean Republicans should ease off the throttle?  HELL NO!  It means that we ought to be like General Patton and determine to drive right through and right over the enemy.

Give money donations, knowing that unlike Obama supporters you won’t be pissing your money away in a failed cause to top off a failed presidency.

Give time donations, knowing that if you volunteer for the Romney campaign, you’ll be serving the next president of the United States rather than wasting your time like Obama supporters.

And give your vote, knowing that if you vote for Romney, you’ll be voting for the winner rather than wasting your vote on the loser.

[Update, 8/23/12]: It is being reported today that new polling shows in the Real Clear Politics average that Mitt Romney is gaining momentum in eight of the nine key swing states while Obama is either flat or losing ground.

Obama’s Katrina in Gulf Just Got Twice As Awful

What is it, day 54 of the fool-in-chief’s disastrous inability to do anything about that damn hole he can’t plug?

Well, the damn hold problem is officially bigger than ever.

June 10, 2010
Government doubles previous oil flow estimate for BP well
By Mark Seibel and Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Thursday doubled its minimum estimate of how much crude oil was gushing from the Deepwater Horizon oil well, saying a panel of scientists had concluded that 20,000 to 50,000 barrels, or as much as 2.1 million gallons, were pouring into the Gulf of Mexico every day before BP sheared the well’s riser pipe on June 3.

That action, which BP engineers undertook to fit a “top hat” containment dome over the well, almost certainly increased the flow, and Dr. Marcia McNutt, the head of the U.S. Geological Survey, said an estimate of the flow since June 3 would be available in a few days.

“Our scientific analysis is still a work in progress,” McNutt said.

The announcement that tens of thousands more barrels of oil than previously estimated have been spewing into the Gulf for weeks added to a growing sense that neither the federal government nor BP correctly assessed the size of the unfolding disaster or marshaled enough resources to meet it.

McClatchy gives us a picture of the constantly changing estimate:

The Los Angeles Times offers more on the sheer scope of the disaster Obama is doing such a terrible job presiding over:

The new figures could mean 42 million to 84 million gallons of oil have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on the night of April 20 — with the lowest estimate nearly four times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

The flow estimates were released by Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and do not count any increases that may have occurred since the cutting of the well’s riser pipe, a step that was expected to boost the flow.

And was it the heroic Obama administration that determined that the official estimates were wrong yet again?

No.  It was a bunch of scientists who had been arguing that the official estimates – from both BP and the federal government – were complete bullpucky:

The official government estimate of the flow rate is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, which means the new device should be capturing the bulk of the oil. But some scientists have said those flow numbers could represent just the lower range and that the rate could be multiple times higher.

Worst-case scenario?
Leifer said based on the data he’s seen so far, the rate of flow from the broken well has increased since the initial April 20 explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers. He believes BP’s decision last week to sever the well’s damaged riser pipe in order to install the containment cap has increased the flow by far more than the 20 percent BP and government officials had predicted.

In fact, Leifer says, the well may be spewing what BP had called before the spill its worst-case scenario — as much as 100,000 barrels a day from a freely flowing pipe.He said he’s seen no evidence from BP to date that would be inconsistent from that dire scenario.

Judging by live undersea videos, “it looks like a freely flowing pipe,” Leifer said. “From what it looks like right now it suggests to me they’re capturing a negligible fraction.”

It’s unclear how much oil is still escaping because scientists don’t have access to enough data and the video feeds show a “disorganized cloud” of oil shooting out of open vents in the containment cap and between the riser and the cap, Wereley said.

Obama assured us prior to the top hat attempt which not only failed but made the crisis much, much worse that he was in charge, and that BP was answering to him.

Which means that it’s OBAMA’S FAULT that BP even attempted the top hat procedure in the first place.  Everyone knew there was a risk that it could make the problem much worse by at least 20%.  Obama gambled big and failed huge.

And it is readily apparent that Obama has literally assisted BP in a continual giant cover-up as to the actual extent of the damage, either by omission or comission:

From the New York Times:

Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope. […]

And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well. […]

Oceanographers have also criticized the Obama administration over its reluctance to force BP, the oil company responsible for the spill, to permit an accurate calculation of the flow rate from the undersea well. The company has refused to permit scientists to send equipment to the ocean floor that would establish the rate with high accuracy.

Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, an oceanographer who was among the first to question the official estimate of 210,000 gallons a day, said he had come to the conclusion that the oil company was bent on obstructing any accurate calculation. “They want to hide the body,” he said.

You want chilling?

Contacts in Louisiana have given me numerous, unconfirmed reports of cameras and cell phones being confiscated, scientists with monitoring equipment being turned away, and local reporters blocked from access to public lands impacted by the oil spill. But today CBS News got it on video, along with a bone-chilling statement by a Coast Guard official: “These are BP’s rules. These are not our rules.”

Fifty days into the disaster, Barack Obama had still never bothered to make any contact with the CEO of British Petroleum to lay out the way things will happen, to find out what is going on, or to hold BP accountable in any way for anything.  Or, I don’t know, to politely ask BP to please allow some actual measurements of the flow rate so the nation can know the extent of the disaster they are going to have to deal with.

And now it is becoming increasingly obvious that BP – not Barack – has been ruling the roost all along.

Obama is responsible?  He doesn’t even have a clue what is going on.

Well, now, after 54 days – and weeks’ worth of inexcusable delay and weeks’ worth of criticism – Obama is finally “summoning” the BP CEO to mitigate the damage being done to his political hide.  But it’s rather obvious that Obama isn’t meeting the BP chief to do the right thing, but rather to appear to do the right thing to avoid further legitimate criticism over why he’s taken so damn long to do the right thing.

Obama should have at least been on the phone with the BP head within the first three days of this disaster.  Instead, he’s ignored his responsibilities and allowed BP to repeatedly lie, obfuscate, conceal, and even fabricate and done nothing about any of it.

What we have here is a complete failure of leadership.  And the result of that failure has just officially become twice as awful as it had been.

Sotomayor’s ‘Empathy’ For Extreme Green Groups Would Have Cost Americans Billions

Empathy.  Who doesn’t want some?

I mean, I suppose that some part of me, as a conservative, would love for some judge to come along and say, “There, there.  I’ll make sure those mean Democrats don’t do stuff you don’t want.  I’ll overturn the election.”

Only that isn’t the direction the “empathy river” flows, is it?  It’s a manure river that springs and flows from the radical left and routinely runs its banks to flood over conservatives.

In the case of Sonia Sotomayor, that crap river has run pretty deep and pretty wide.  It has run over white firefighters who made the mistake of playing by the rules against a racially-biased system increasingly geared to flood over them.  And in the case of Sotomayor, it is a river that would have flooded over every single American to the tune of billions of dollars had the Supreme Court not reversed her decision.

If Sotomayor gets appointed to the Supreme Court, you can bet that THIS crap river will be flowing over you soon:

Sotomayor Ruling Could Have Cost Consumers Billions

Tuesday, May 26, 2009
By: Phil Brennan

A decision rendered by Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, fortunately reversed by the Supreme Court on April 1, 2009, could have been extravagantly costly to American consumers, according to the Steve Milloy’s authoritative Junkscience.Com.

Charging that her nomination represents a potential threat to U.S. Consumers and to the economy in terms of energy and the environment, Milloy reported on her 2007 Second Circuit decision in Riverkeeper, Inc. V. EPA 475 F. 3d 83′

Milloy wrote that in her ruling Judge Sotomayor sided with “extreme green groups” who had sued the Environmental Protection Agency because the agency permitted cost-benefit analysis to be used in the determination of environmental protection technology for power plant cooling water intake structures.

Cost benefit analysis involves the balancing of the total expected costs of a proposal or project against its total expected benefits in order to determine its economic feasibility. Do the benefits outweigh or justify the cost?

According to Milloy, had the EPA been required to abide by Judge Sotomayor’s decision, U.S. Consumers would have been forced to pay billions of dollars more in energy costs every year as power plants producing more than one-half of the nation’s electricity would have had to undertake expensive retrofits.”

Noting that President Obama said he wanted somebody “who has the intellectual firepower but also a little bit of a common touch and a practical sense of how the world works,” Milloy said that in the Riverkeeper case Sotomayor didn’t display too much of a “common touch” and “practical sense” when it came to the cost-benefit analysis.

Senators, Milloy advised, should probe whether Judge Sotomayor “lacks the common-sense realization that the benefits of environmental regulation ought to outweigh its costs — a worldview with ominous implications given the nation’s present rush toward cap-and-tax global warming regulation and other green mindlessness.”

What is truly sad, truly pathetic, and truly laughable (in a hysterical-laughing-into-a-crying-jag-whilest-curled-up-in-a-fetal-position sort of way) is that Americans have already said, “Please, sir, may we have some more” when it comes to massive energy taxes that will do to our economy what a German U-boat did to the Lusitania.

Judge Sotomayor clearly doesn’t have a whole lot of that “common touch” or “practical sense.”  Indeed, writing for the majority decision that overturned Sotomayor’s ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia:

noted that forcing compliance under Sotomayor’s reasoning would make companies spend nine times the amount necessary to accomplish “nearly the same benefit to the environment that cheaper technologies would achieve.”

Spend nine times more for very nearly the same benefit.  And liberals wonder why conservatives call them “insane.”

Now, it just so happens that “common touch” and “practical sense” didn’t matter very much when we voted for our president, either.  So why should it matter to us when we put yet another black-robed master over us for the rest of her life?

Let’s hear what Obama said he wanted:

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

The guy we voted for as our president said he planned to bankrupt fully half of our source of electricity.

“Empathy” means millions of Americans freezing to death in the dark.

Get ready for it.  Because Obama’s and Sotomayor’s crap river is going to flood right down your family’s throat.