Citing confidentiality agreement, MindShift declines...

Run that past me again: "But a MindShift spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company's data center was used to support Project Orca, citing a confidentiality agreement with the Romney campaign." In other words, MindShift did sign a confidentiality agreement with the Romney campaign. This agreement bars them from disclosing the services they provided to the Romney campaign. Wow!

How did the rich people vote?

The Wall Street Journal has posted the charts I wanted to see. My question, "How many people earning $250,000 or more voted for Obama?" Of course, these are the people who are looking at a income tax increase if Obama has his way. Guess what? A full 43% of these rich people voted for Obama. Hmmm...

Update Nov. 10: An analysis of the 10 richest counties in the United States shows that eight of them went for Obama.

Did Romney's ground game cost him the election?

The Presidential campaign was primarily waged by a person with no business experience (President Barack Obama) against a highly experienced business person (Governor Mitt Romney). But, according to Mark Cuban, Obama was the one with the better ground game. Cuban thinks it was a deciding factor in Obama's victory.


Reinforcing Cuban's comments, Breitbart ran a story yesterday about the failure of the Romney campaign's analytics platform, Project Orca (Huffington Post, Nov. 1). It was supposed to tell the Romney campaign which supporters had voted and which should be called to encourage them to vote. Its failure on election day left the Romney campaign in the dark as to what was happening in the field.

Some of Breitbart's information came from this blog entry from the Aces of Spades HQ blog, which appears to be written by a Romney volunteer who was planning on using Orca on election day.

Note to my readers: Usually, only one news source or blogger breaks a story. Once a great story breaks, other news sites and blogs run their own versions, some of which are just rewrites from the original story, others with additional information. I try to track down the original source. In this case, Breitbart claimed to be first ("exclusive") but I'm not sure I believe them. Still, I don't have any proof that Breitbart wasn't first.

Others that ran versions of this story after Breitbart, in alphabetic order:

• Ars Technica
• Human Events
• New York magazine
• Politico
• The Verge

My election prediction today

Before 10 a.m. EST this morning, while all the polling places were open, I bet a Republican friend that not only would Barack Obama win the Presidency but that he would win at least 300 electoral votes. Will I get a free lunch at Skyline Chili? Stay tuned!

I also predicted that we would have an announced winner before midnight Eastern Time.

Update: I was correct on both counts (based on ABC News projecting Virginia going for Obama). Obviously, the vote counts need to be finalized and the provisional and overseas votes counted, but if Fox News can say that Obama is the winner, it must be accurate enough as is.

Do you really think Romney has changed?

To my women, gay and lesbian friends,

If you think Mitt Romney has changed his stripes and think you could vote for him now, think again. Here's what a Romney administration would do:

● Work to overturn Roe vs. Wade and make all abortion, including cases of rape, incest and the possibility of the mother dying, illegal. Remember, if the mother has problems during birth, her life is expendable but the fetus's is not.

● Work to make contraception harder for women to obtain. Employers will be able to craft their healthcare plans so that contraception is not covered. However, Viagra will still be covered in full.

● Reduce or eliminate free and reduced fee healthcare to women. Planned Parenthood will be defunded; will another organization step up to provide the healthcare that PP does now?

● If a couple can't have a child naturally, the Roman Catholic church will push to have certain successful fertility treatments, such as in-vitro fertilization, banned. Also, surrogate parenthood will be banned.

● Gays and lesbians will not be allowed to adopt, either as single parents or as couples. Gay marriage? Forget about it.

Don't be fooled by the new, centrist Romney. He is now at odds with his own campaign and the Republican Party. If he is elected, will he go back to "hard conservative" Romney? Can you take that chance?

Sincerely,

Bruce Hobbs

Mitt Romney doesn't understand emergency care

The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch interviewed Mitt Romney recently for a possible endorsement and ran the story on Oct. 11, 2012. They quoted Romney as saying, “We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack.’ No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”

What he just described is socialized medicine. But we don't have socialized medicine in this country as the Republicans would never allow it.

Wendell Potter explains what really happens at the Huffington Post: "Romney is absolutely right, people who are uninsured don't have to die in their apartments. They can indeed be rushed to a hospital, and the hospital is obligated to treat them. … Many of the uninsured die in the hospital, in the emergency room, because they could not afford to get care earlier when it might have saved their lives. Instead of going back home to their apartments, many of them, unfortunately, go to the morgue."

I'm surprised that Romney's lack of knowledge of health care in this country hasn't gotten more traction. Perhaps it's because his lack of knowledge in so many other areas is competing for our time in the news cycle.

Do you want to know how many Americans die each year because they are uninsured compared to the same types of people who are insured? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated the number of additional deaths at 44,789 in 2009. That's more people than were killed in car crashes in the United States that year.

(Sorry about the delay in posting; I was having trouble finding the original story on the Dispatch's Web site.)

Details of the Romney-Ryan tax plan

"For a detailed explanation of how the Romney-Ryan tax plan is able to cut taxes by $5 trillion without raising taxes on the middle class or exploding the deficit, simply click" on this link.

At the risk of piling on, Brian J. Antal, president of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society, was not happy that Paul Ryan showed up at the Society and pretended to wash dishes that were already clean. More details from The Washington Post.