I have learned that Florida election officials are set to announce that the secretary of state has discovered and purged up to 53,000 dead voters from the voter rolls in Florida.

How could 53,000 dead voters have sat on the polls for so long?

Simple. Because Florida hadn’t been using the best available data revealing which voters have died.  Florida is now using the nationwide Social Security Death Index for determining which voters should be purged because they have died.

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama’s phony claim to Kenyan birth:

…we have the role of irony and nemesis in both cons — the fringe birthers were trying to find documents to “prove” that Obama was lying about his Kenyan birth and claiming a Hawaiian one, when in fact he had been untruthful about his Hawaiian birth while promulgating a Kenyan one.

How odd that the birthers might have been of some advantage to Obama earlier in his career.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee will rename a street after former-Speaker Nancy Pelosi today in Golden Gate Park.

“Middle Drive East” which connects Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and John F Kennedy Drive in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park will now be renamed in honor of Pelosi and her 25 years of service in Congress.

A curious thing about San Francisco: it’s nearly impossible to make a left turn in the city.

The editors at the Washington Post are so transparent it’s comical.

Religion is supposed to be off limits in presidential campaigns. And God knows, don’t dare bring up Jeremiah Wright in polite company.

Yet, they manage to write this:

Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith tangles with a quirk of Arkansas history

On Sept. 11, 1857, a wagon train from this part of Arkansas met with a gruesome fate in Utah, where most of the travelers were slaughtered by a Mormon militia in an episode known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hundreds of the victims’ descendants still populate these hills and commemorate the killings, which they have come to call “the first 9/11.”

Many of the locals grew up hearing denunciations of Mormonism from the pulpit on Sundays, and tales of the massacre from older relatives who considered Mormons “evil.”

“There have been Fancher family reunions for 150 years, and the massacre comes up at every one of them,” said Scott Fancher, 58, who traces his lineage back to 26 members of the wagon train, which was known as the Fancher-Baker party. “The more whiskey we drunk, the more resentful we got.”

There aren’t many places in America more likely to be suspicious of Mormonism — and potentially more problematic for Mitt Romney, who is seeking to become the country’s first Mormon president. Not only do many here retain a personal antipathy toward the religion and its followers, but they also tend to be Christian evangelicals, many of whom view Mormonism as a cult.

And yet, there is scant evidence that Romney’s religion is making much difference in how voters here are thinking about the presidential election and whether they are willing to back the former Massachusetts governor.

“I think the situation right now is more anti-Obama than any other situation,” said Dave Hoover, chairman of the Carroll County Republicans.

It is impossible to know how Romney’s faith will play out in the November election. Polls point to a persistent skepticism about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and not just among evangelical Christians. Thirty-five percent of Americans in a Bloomberg News poll in March said they had an unfavorable view of the church, while 29 percent had a favorable view…

What I know about Mormons is that they are very organized.

From PBS:

The efficiency of the Mormon welfare apparatus is really legendary. As early as the beginnings of the 20th century, an American writer said, “The Mormon Church operates with the efficiency of the German Weirmacht.” This efficiency is seen at its best in moments of natural disasters such as the Teton Dam disaster of 1976 when over a billion dollars’ worth of damage occurred, and almost overnight almost 35,000, 45,000 Latter-day Saints were marshaled into forces and deployed to make order out of chaos and provide emergency relief.

When Hurricane Andrew struck [in Miami-Dade County] in 2002, the stories went around that the Mormon relief trucks were on the way to Florida before the hurricane had even made landfall. In the Hurricane Katrina of 2005 we know that once again the trucks were there before the National Guard was even allowing relief through. So the response is incredibly fast, incredibly efficient.

In recent years especially, those relief efforts have been extended to not just members of the church, but anybody who’s in the midst of a disaster or crisis. In the past 20 years alone, the church has responded to over 150 major humanitarian crises around the world. They have provided relief and funds in locations as disparate as Kosovo, North Korea, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. There’s hardly a place on the earth where they haven’t been seen, providing relief and assistance, and it’s often through other, more established channels, like the Red Cross or the Salvation Army, but very often, as was the case in Africa, renting their own helicopters to speed relief to areas that were remote and hard to reach…

Isn’t being organized a good feature in a President?

Hamid Karzai:

“I’m bringing to you and to the people of the United States the gratitude of the Afghan people for the support that your taxpayers’ money has provided Afghanistan over the past decade and for the difference that it has made to the well-being of the Afghan people,” he told Obama.

Getting out of the opium poppy business would be a more sincere thank you.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an astonishing column written by Hannes Swoboda, a member of the European Parliament.

Europe Can Spend Its Way to Growth

…The Merkel dogma “Yes to growth, but no to debt” can only be understood as a polemic, an ideological statement. Because it makes no sense for the economy or for society.

Should companies that seek to grow not be allowed to take out loans anymore? Should states, in order to fight recession and unemployment, not assume debt? If that is the line of argumentation, what can possibly be the result of Wednesday’s informal summit on European growth?

I’m no economist, but I can distinguish between a private company borrowing in order to grow and a government borrowing to spend.

Private enterprise creates wealth. Government spends wealth created by private enterprise.

When the government borrows to fund its deficits, it sucks up capital that could have created wealth.

(Yes, government spending can help business by becoming its customer, but long-term this is a perpetual motion machine — an unsustainable fantasy.)

Hannes continues:

In view of the rising levels of debt compared with gross domestic product in most European countries, we must take stock of the disastrous effects of the one-sided austerity politics and also recognize their antisocial character, proven by record unemployment figures. The collapse of some governments—notably in France and Greece—and the increasing strength of extremist parties further demonstrate the political danger. How many more facts does it take to end these austerity policies?

Austerity in France was defined by some as raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. Greece is another story altogether.

Here is Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side, Moneyball and other good books, on the Greeks.

..As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it.

In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.”

The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses.

The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.

by Burt Prelutsky

I’m sure I’m not the only person who periodically finds himself wondering if it’s all just a dream or if he’s found himself starring in one of the more bizarre episodes of ‘The Twilight Zone.”

For instance, Bret Baier reported that Joe Biden recently had the following to say about Republicans: “Those guys don’t have a sense of the average folks out there. They don’t know what it means to be middle class.”

At the time, he was addressing a group of average folks who were attending a $10,000-a-couple Obama fund raiser at the Georgetown mansion of Senator John and Teresa Heinz Kerry. They dined on organic steaks and white truffle mashed potatoes, purchased, no doubt, with federal food stamps.

I am willing to bet that these are the only regular folks in America who aren’t concerned about the price of gas. It’s funny how that works, though. When George Bush was in the White House, Democrats and the media insisted that he had more to do with soaring costs at the gas pump than OPEC, Exxon and Wall Street speculators, put together. It’s only now, with Obama perched in the Oval Office, that we’re hearing that the president has less influence on the price of gas than I do.

And for those of us who love nothing better than to see federal bureaucrats squirm, there was Secretary of Energy Chu telling a congressional committee that the last thing he wanted was soaring energy costs just a few days after saying that’s exactly what he wanted. This is the same Stephen Chu who, in 2008, insisted that he wanted Americans to pay the same $10-a-gallon Europeans pay because it would hasten the day when wind and solar energy would power America.

Obama sprang to Secretary Chu’s defense by pointing out that he had made that remark before he joined the Cabinet. But of course Obama had admitted in 2008, before he had a Cabinet Mr. Chu could join, that his energy policy would inevitably send gas prices skyrocketing. The telling points are, one, that Obama has waged constant warfare against the coal and oil industries, even though he now likes to boast that we are drilling for more oil than ever, even though it’s thanks to Bush’s policies and in spite of Obama’s; and, two, even though Mr. Chu longed for $10-a-gallon gas before he joined the administration, it’s because he voiced such lunacies that he was invited aboard.

Speaking of Obama’s green energy program, you may have heard that Chevrolet has stopped production of the $40,000 Volt. Apparently, people weren’t buying it, but whether it was the price tag or the fact that the batteries had a nasty habit of igniting, I suppose we’ll never really know. I did think they could at least have tried a last ditch hard sell approach. “Buy the Volt! It’s Explosive!”

On the subject of advertising, I laugh each time I hear the promos for “Fox and Friends.” In case you’ve missed it, a voice asks, “Why waste your time anywhere else?” In my head, at least, that’s only the start of a sentence that logically concludes, “When you can waste it with ‘Fox and Friends’.”

Although we are all justifiably suspicious of the left-wing claptrap professors are spouting to their young charges, once in a while a little good news seeps out. Not too long ago, Jack Chambless, a professor of economics at Florida’s Valencia College, asked a class of sophomores what they felt they were entitled to expect from the federal government. The list included free tuition, jobs, money for a house and a financially secure retirement.

Prof. Chambless then proceeded to ask a few of his students to place their wallets on their desks. When they did so, Chambless snatched them up and pulled out the cash. He explained that it was his dream to have a retirement cabin in the woods, and this money would help pay for it.

Some object lessons are more graphic than others. I’m sure the victims squealed like pigs and I assume he gave them back their money, but if that demonstration didn’t drive home the lesson of individual responsibility, I’d have flunked the entire class.

Finally, I would normally take comfort from a poll that reported that Obama’s approval numbers among women fell in one month from 53% to 41%. What it tells me, however, is that 12% of women must live in a cave. Where else could they have been? How is it that in spite of over three years of ObamaCare; a trillion dollar Stimulus; Cash for Clunkers; kowtowing to our enemies; insulting our allies; pussyfooting with Iran; banning the Keystone pipeline; increasing our national debt by six trillion dollars; and waging class, race and religious, warfare, 53% of American women thought he was doing a bang-up job until it was suddenly costing them $4-a-gallon to fill their SUV gas tanks?

Mothers, fathers and grandparents, listen up. Inasmuch as most of Obama’s female groupies tend to be of the unmarried variety, it’s time you started talking to your daughters, nieces and granddaughters, about something other than their grades and if they’re coming home for the holidays. The fact is, Obama won in 2008 because unmarried female voters went for him in huge numbers, and if we’re not careful, it could easily happen again.

We conservatives have seen the enemy and, Pogo to the contrary, it is them!