Just saw this on a car parked in Hollywood:

It ain’t 2008 any more.

“The inaugural results of a new Gallup question — posed to more than 120,000 U.S. adults thus far” report Gary J. Gates and Frank Newport, “shows that 3.4% say “yes” when asked if they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.”  4.4% refused to answer (or didn’t know).

This suggests that gay people make up about 4% of the population:

These results are based on responses to the question, “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?” included in 121,290 Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted between June 1 and Sept. 30, 2012. This is the largest single study of the distribution of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population in the U.S. on record. (more…)

In a column today in the New York Post, the National Review‘s Jim Geraghty doesn’t use the idiom that many incorrectly used to describe Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claim to take “responsibility for the failure to secure our facilities and personnel in Libya”, but he does address why that idiom just doesn’t work in those circumstances.

For it to work, as I have argued, Mrs. Clinton would have had to suffer consequences for her acknowledgement.  And in her case, there was, Geraghty writes, “no word on any actual consequence of” her failure.  Indeed, few in this administration face any consequences when they verbally take responsibility:,

Tim Geithner, who failed to pay more than $40,000 in taxes over a four-year period is still Treasury secretary, and earlier this year we learned that 36 Obama aides owe $833,000 in back taxes.

* After a loud public outcry, Obama said he “took responsibility” for themillions in bonuses paid to AIG executives as part of the bailout. Of course, the bonuses remained.

* Discussing the national debtin Virginia on Aug. 6, 2009, Obamasaid, “I don’t mind being responsible. I expect to be held responsible for these issues, because I’m the president.” We’ve added $4.4 trillion in new debt since he said those words.

Read the whole thing.

Yesterday, I asked, if in the second debate, President Obama addressed “the specifics of his second-term agenda“.  Not one of our readers wrote in to delineate the Democrat’s plans.

That did seem to be the campaign theme of the day.  As I noted in an update to that post, 2008 Obama supporter Megan McArdle asked that very question in a piece at the Daily Beast, pointing out in the subtitle that “The president has done shockingly little to lay out his second term agenda.”

He is attempting, as we noted before, to make this election a “referendum on the challenger” (to borrow Ramesh Ponnuru’s expression). McArdle points out that his entire campaign is “not [to] be Mitt Romney”:

This is really fairly remarkable. Lots of presidential candidates have run on a platform of Not The Incumbent, but Obama may be the first to define himself entirely as Not the Challenger. One of Romney’s pollsters suggested to USA Today that this has been a costly decision, as the Mitt Romney people are seeing in the debates doesn’t look much like the horrific, granny-killing, woman-hating GOP monster that Obama has been running against.

Karl Rove, to a certain degree, echoes McCardle, saying that the “essential flaw in Team Obama’s strategy” is that the “president and his advisers have been so intent on disqualifying Mr. Romney that they have done a miserable job defending the president’s record and virtually nothing to frame a second-term agenda.” (more…)

Twice in the past twenty-four hours, I have linked Ace’s post on the internals of the CBS and CNN post-debate polls.  And these results have intrigued me.  How could a plurality of participants in each survey have found Romney to be better on most key issues (sometimes by double-digit margins).

Moreover in the CNN poll of registered voters, where 46% thought Obama won the debate, only 38% thought “Obama offer[ed] a clear vision for solving the country’s problems”.  61% did not.

Maybe they thought ht won because they wanted to like the guy — or maybe all those who support the president decided that he won because he was their guy.  So, maybe asking whether or not a candidate “won” the encounter is not the best metric.

Ace says that if we ask, ”Who actually persuaded you?,” and they might answer a completely different way.”

ADDENDUM:  Karl Rove notes that the CNN poll showed Romney doing better on the economy after the second debate than after the first: (more…)

Of all the things from the second debate my liberal friends have focused on in their (post-debate) Facebook posts, Mitt Romney’s supposed binder blunder gets the most amount of commentary. As I write this (about 10:53 PST on Wednesday night), one of Yahoo!’s top “News” headlines links to an opinion piece on that very topic:

Democrats, it seems, were looking for a gaffe and came up with this, most likely to blunt Mitt Romney’s momentum with women. Michael Barone observes, that since the first debate, “it appears” that Romney has “made greater gains among women than men.” He cites Democratic pollster Celinda Lake who said that after October 3, women “came out thinking he might understand their lives and might be able to get something done for them.”

And yet the response they cited shows how Romney went out of his way to hire more women to his administration.

Jennifer Rubin thought Romney’s answer to the question about hiring women (where he made the binder reference)

was one of the strongest of the night, and judging from the Obama team’s reaction, his record in hiring women may have gone over quite well.   In the Obama team’s telling, however, the awkward phrasing of “binders full of women” is somehow insulting.

. . . .

As Mark Halperin tweeted, “Dem attempts to make this binder thing into a deal is . . . freakshow (and Ds know it). And/but they will find willing accomplices in much of MSM.”

Indeed, blogs another woman, Leslie Loftis, “the binder meme says the opposite” of what Obama supporters claim: (more…)