Romney won the presidential debate – according to left-wing MSNBC hosts

From the left-wing Politico, no less.

Excerpt: (links removed)

Left-leaning commentators hit President Barack Obama hard on TV and the Internet after the first presidential debate in Denver on Wednesday night, saying GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney handily defeated his more experienced opponent.

MSNBC hosts were “stunned” by Obama’s performance, suggesting the president was rusty for not having debated in four years.

“I don’t think he explained himself very well on the economy. I think he was off his game. I was absolutely stunned tonight,” Ed Schultz said.

“Where was Obama tonight?” Chris Matthews asked.

Matthews said Romney addressed Obama “like the prey. He did it just right. I’m coming at an incumbent. I’ve got to beat him. You gotta beat the champ, and I’m gonna beat him tonight. And I don’t care what this guy moderator, whatever he thinks he is, because I’m going to ignore him. What was Romney doing? He was winning.”

“It does remind you that the last debate Mitt Romney had was seven months ago and the last debate that Barack Obama had was four years ago,” said Maddow.

The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan called Obama “tired,” “bored” and wrote that he might have even lost the election.

“He choked. He lost. He may even have lost the election tonight,” Sullivan wrote, later adding, “Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn’t there. He was entirely defensive, which may have been the strategy. But it was the wrong strategy. At the wrong moment.”

Sullivan, an Obama supporter, was even more vicious on Twitter, calling Obama’s performance “terrible” and “political malpractice.”

“This is a rolling calamity for Obama. He’s boring, abstract, and less human-seeming than Romney!” he wrote. “He’s throwing the debate away.”

Another Obama supporter, liberal comedian Bill Maher, went on a similar Twitter rant, firing off such comments as, “Obama made a lot of great points tonight. Unfortunately, most of them were for Romney.”

A post-debate CNN poll found that:

According to a CNN/ORC International survey conducted right after the debate, 67% of debate watchers questioned said that the Republican nominee won the faceoff, with one in four saying that President Barack Obama was victorious.

“No presidential candidate has topped 60% in that question since it was first asked in 1984,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

While nearly half of debate watchers said the showdown didn’t make them more likely to vote for either candidate, 35% said the debate made them more likely to vote for Romney while only 18% said the faceoff made them more likely to vote to re-elect the president.

More than six in ten said that president did worse than expected, with one in five saying that Obama performed better than expected. Compare that to the 82% who said that Romney performed better than expected. Only one in ten felt that the former Massachusetts governor performed worse than expected.

[...]The sample of debate-watchers in the poll was 37% Democratic and 33% Republican.

[...]Debate watchers thought Romney was more aggressive. Fifty-three percent said Romney spent more time attacking his opponent. Only three in ten thought Obama spent more time taking it to Romney. By a 58%-37% margin, debate watchers thought Romney appeared to be the stronger leader.

The problem with Obama is that he had four years to run the economy, and he ran it into the ground. You can’t defend failure like that by shifting blame and pointing fingers. He failed because his ideas are wrong. We need new ideas – a different approach. But that doesn’t explain why Obama performed so poorly. Obama performed poorly because he has been totally isolated from any disagreement or critical evaluation for the last 4 years. In his mind, it’s not just the private sector that’s fine. The unemployment rate is fine, the national debt is fine, the budget deficit is fine, the terrorist attack in Libya is fine, socialized health care is fine, poor education outcomes is fine, taxpayer-funded abortion is fine, Iran having nuclear weapons is fine, and gay marriage is fine. He just has complete and utter contempt for anyone who disagrees with him – he has been indoctrinated to think that anyone who disagrees with him is not just wrong, but evil. And maybe even that all disagreement with him is motivated by racism. He came across as a whiny, petulant child, because of his ideological rigidity and lack of humility.

The mask came off Wednesday night, and it was all Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers underneath. The media and the teleprompter could not protect him from his real self.

Filed under: News, Andrew Sullivan, Arrogance, Barack Obama, Chris Matthews, Debate, Denver, Echo Chamber, Ed Schultz, Election 2012, Failure, Mainstream Media, Media, Media Bias, Mitt Romney, MSNBC, Rachel Maddow

New study: Children exposed to sex in films have sex earlier and have more partners

Dina sent me this story from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Children who watch films with a high sexual content tend to lose their virginity earlier and have more partners, a study has found.

Not only are they more promiscuous, they are also more likely to engage in risky sex by not using condoms.

The six-year study of more than 1,200 teens refers to sexual content in films.

[...]The study on the effect on younger teenagers of sex in films was published in Psychological Science, the peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Researchers from Dartmouth College, an Ivy League university in the US, surveyed 684 top-grossing movies from 1998 to 2004, and then coded them for sexual content.

A film such as Eyes Wide Shut would be coded highly, while Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King would get a low coding. Although some of the films had 18-ratings, they could have been seen by younger children on DVDs at home.

The researchers then recruited 1,228 youngsters aged between 12 and 14, and each was asked which films on the list they had seen from a number of different collections of 50 that were randomly selected.

Six years later the same participants were surveyed to find out how old they were when they became sexually active and how risky their sexual behaviour might have been.

The results indicated that exposure to sexual content in movies at an early age is likely to influence adolescents’ sexual behaviour.

Previously, I have argued that early premarital sex and a high number of premarital sex partners are independent risk factors for marital instability. Parents should therefore be careful about what their children are exposed to in films, if they want their children to have a happy marriage.

Filed under: News, Children, Films, Hollywood, Leftism, Media, Movies, Parents, Premarital Sex, Sex

Obamacare requires virtually all health care plans to cover free sterilizations

From CNS News.

Excerpt:

The “preventive services” guidelines issued by the HHS, say that new health insurance plans in the United States must “provide coverage without cost-sharing” that includes: “All Food and Drug Administration approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.”

On Friday, the department of HHS announced a regulation making clear that this mandate extends to the student health care plans offered at American colleges and universities.

[...]As CNSNews.com has reported, the HHS regulation was announced on Friday, Mar. 16, and will be published in the Federal Register on Mar. 21.

“Under the final rule, students will gain the same protections other people with individual market insurance have, like a prohibition on lifetime limits and coverage of preventive services without cost sharing,” HHS said in a press release put out late Friday afternoon.

In a request for comments on how the student-health-plan mandate will be implemented, HHS spelt out that its “proventive services” included the same items as the overall mandate–including sterilizations.

“As relevant here, the HRSA Guidelines require coverage, without cost sharing, for ‘[a]all Food and Drug Administration [(FDA)] approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity,’ as prescribed by a provider,” said the HHS request for comments.

In announcing the rule for college-based health plans, HHS said it would follow the same system for enforcing the rule on religious colleges and universities that object to purchasing sterilizations, contraceptives and abortifacients for its students that President Barack Obama has proposed for enforcing the regulation on religious non-profit organizations in the coverage for their employees: The insurer will be forced to provide the sterilizations, contraceptives and abortifacients to the students free of charge.

Do you want to know why you never heard about this requirement that Christian colleges and schools provide free sterilizations to women? Because the mainstream media was not neutral in reporting on Obamacare – they were trying to sway public opinion towards supporting Obamacare. Here is a nice post from Newsbusters that goes over some of the worst examples of pro-Obamacare media bias. Read that post, and think about whether you should be trusting the media to tell you who to vote for in the Republican primary. They like Romney, and that means that Mitt Romney is the weakest candidate.

Filed under: News, Barack Obama, Car, Democrats, Energy, Gas, Gas Prices, Mainstream Media, Media, Media Bias, News Media

SEIU union thugs go on trial for racist attack on black conservative

Tea Party conservative Kenneth Gladney

Gateway Pundit has the background on the attack.

Excerpt:

After a health care town hall meeting in August 2009 St. Louis native Kenneth Gladney was beaten, kicked and called racist names by Rep. Russ Carnahan’s SEIU supporters. Gladney was beaten so badly that he was hospitalized for the night.

Gladney, a cancer survivor, was selected by the Carnahan supporters for the beatdown because he was handing out “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and because he was black.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported at the time:

Kenneth Gladney, a 38-year-old conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with “Don’t tread on me” printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room of the St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was waiting to be treated for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face that he suffered in the attack. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack started.

The national media and NAACP ignored the hate crime.
Gladney didn’t fit the mold.

And here’s the latest update from liberal CBS News.

Excerpt:

Twenty-months after he claims he was beaten by two union activists, while he tried to sell conservative buttons outside a Congressman Russ Carnahan town hall forum on health care reform, Kenneth Gladney now has a court date.

The case against two Service Employees International Union members accused of attacking Gladney is scheduled for July 11th, according to St. Louis County Counselor Patricia Reddington.

SEIU members Elston McCowan and Perry Molens are charged with misdemeanor assault . Both men pleaded not guilty and requested a jury trial.

Earlier, Gladney had complained that the delay in scheduling a trial was “political” and he pointed the blame at Reddington and fellow Democrat, County Executive Charlie Dooley.

Reddington countered that the delay was caused soley by the defendant’s request for a jury trial. Her municipal court system has no jurors, so she had to work with he state courts to set up a court room and a jury, Reddington said.

I think this an important story because it shows the true colors of the SEIU.

Filed under: News, Assault, Black Conservative, Brown Shirts, Democrat, Labor Union, Media, Media Bias, Missouri, Patricia Reddington, Race, Racism, Racist, Russ Carnahan, SEIU, Socialism, Socialist, St. Louis, Thuggery, Thugs, Union, Union Violence, Violence

How should Michele Bachmann answer the evolution vs intelligent design question?

From ID proponents Jay Richards and David Klinghoffer. (H/T Stephen C. Meyer)

Excerpt:

Rep. Michele Bachmann is the latest to get pulled to the side of the road, lights flashing in her rear-view mirror. Talking with reporters in New Orleans following last week’s Republican Leadership Conference, she said “I support intelligent design,” referring to the theory that nature gives scientific evidence of purpose and design.

She continued: “What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of a scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.”

Government neutrality would be welcome, as Bachmann rightly notes. But unfortunately the candidate’s statement generated headlines (“Bachmann: Schools should teach intelligent design,” as CNN.com summarized) that made her sound like she was ready to go a lot further than the intelligent design (ID) movement, which merely advocates that Darwinian theory’s weaknesses be taught along with its strengths. Allowing teachers to discuss ID in class would be much more appropriate and advisable than requiring them to do so.

[...]Fortunately, there’s an easy way to answer that takes account of the dilemma. Asked about evolution, here’s what Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, or Chris Christie could have said:

“Life has a very long history and things change over time. However, I don’t think living creatures are nothing but the product of a purposeless Darwinian process. I support teaching all about evolution, including the scientific evidence offered against it.”

Dogmatic neo-Darwinians won’t like that answer (they admit of no scientific arguments against their theory, unlike in any other area of scientific inquiry). But some other scientists will be fine with it, and, according to  Zogby polling data, so will the 80 percent of Americans who favor allowing students and teachers to discuss evolutionary theory’s strengths and weaknesses.

Such a formulation, true to the scientific evidence and to the Constitution, would also be devilishly hard for rival candidates to disagree with. Campaign staff and advisors would do well to commit something like it to memory.

I actually thought Michele’s answer was fine, but the suggested answer is better. If Michele Bachmann is picking a science adviser, either Stephen C. Meyer or Jay Richards would be a good choice. Pick someone with experience.

Filed under: News, ANSWER, Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Left-Wing Media, Mainstream Media, Media, Media Bias, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Bachman, Question