Obama Election Chances

Will Obama retain the Presidency in 2012?  The chart below shows a rolling 90-day closing price from the political prediction market, Intrade.  Note that this graph is continually updated.

Each number on the price scale represents the market-based probability in percentage terms for the event occurring (in this case, the event is that President Obama will be re-elected).

TruthTeam2012

Some Facts about Obama's performance:

• 23 million unemployed 
• 8.1% Unemployment
• 14.7% U6 Unemployment (this is closer to the real unemployment rate)
• $16 Trillion National Debt (the clock is ticking; we are adding $3 billion per day)
• 1.7% GDP Growth (weakest recession recovery since the Great Depression)
• 104 Rounds of Golf (and counting)
• $3.76 Average price of GAS in US
• 1,238+Days since Democrats passed a budget (last budget passed by the majority Democratic party in the Senate was 4/29/2009. Obama's budget was defeated 99-0.)
• US Median Income Lowest since 1995 
• Record 46mm Americans on Food Stamps (15% of Population, or more than 1 in 7 Americans. Sad.)
• 63.5%: Work force participation of those 16 and older (lowest since 1984; why work when jobs are so scarce and Obama money so plentiful)

Sources
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
Total Work Force (from which Unemployment numbers are calculated): http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/laus/us/usadj.htm
National Debt: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Work Force Participation: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000/

Food Stamps: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/record-46-million-americans-food-200000079.html
Various Economic Series: http://www.measuringworth.com/index.php
Obama's Budget Embarrassment: http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/16/99-0-senate-votes-down-obamas-budget-unanimously-again/
Average Gas Prices: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ap
 

Paul Ryan Handles Lap Dog Media

Newly announced GOP VP Candidate Paul Ryan shows how to handle the Democratic Media Complex, as so few in the GOP can. Here Ryan points out to Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Socialist "The Nation" magazine and MSNBC guest co-host, that she is using Capitalist rhetoric to defend a Socialist health care system. 

Paul Ryan Takes Apart ObamaCare

Newly announced VP Paul Ryan may be both the smartest and most courageous man in Washington. Here he takes apart ObamaCare.

 

Morality of the Market

Leave it to Milton Friedman to explain the goodness of capitalism better any of today’s economists.  If only today's "elites" devoted as much time to studying Friedman as they do Marx and Alinsky...

“Not a single person in the world could make this pencil…Literally thousands of people cooperated to make it. People who don't speak the same language or practice the same religion... No central planning create this pencil. It was the magic of the price system that brought people together and induced them to cooperate so that you could have it for a trifling sum...The operation of the free market is so essential not only to promote product efficiency but to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.” 

Truth is the Greatest Enemy of the State

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
-- Joseph Goebbels

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”
-- Joseph Goebbels