If I said I was surprised to read this, I would be lying.  

A medical report compiled by the family physician of accused Trayvon Martin murderer George Zimmerman and obtained exclusively by ABC News found that Zimmerman was diagnosed with a "closed fracture" of his nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury the day after he fatally shot Martin during an alleged altercation....

The morning after the shooting, on Feb. 27, Zimmerman sought treatment at the offices of a general physician at a family practice near Sanford, Fla. The doctor notes Zimmerman sought an appointment to get legal clearance to return to work.

The record shows that Zimmerman also suffered bruising in the upper lip and cheek and lower back pain. The two lacerations on the back of his head, one of them nearly an inch long, the other about a quarter-inch long, were first revealed in photos obtained exclusively by ABC News last month.

I seem to recall saying that there was more than was initially reported.

I got the following from a non-political friend (yes I do have more than a few of them).

A controversial anti-obesity “slush fund” under Obamacare was used in Nashville, Tennessee to promote spaying dogs and cats. The reasoning: stray dogs scare people from exercising outdoors.

The Nashville health department issued a press release last year that told residents in one neighborhood that they could get free pet spaying, neutering, rabies shots and other services as part of $7.5 million grant from the Communities Putting Prevention to Work, which is part of the Public Health and Prevention Fund that will soar to $2 billion in 2015 under Obamacare. The program was initially funded by the Obama stimulus initiative.

In the release, the city said, “This targeted effort aims to address residents’ concerns that identify stray dogs as a barrier to outdoor physical activity.” It concluded, “the Nashville Public Health Department Communities Putting Prevention To Work campaign is funded fully by the Department of Health and Human Services, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.”

A recent Nashville Tennessean story said that the funding might not be continued, but that the city’s Humane Association would fund the vet services. A Humane Association official said the funding has been cut off.

Explaining the federally-funded program, the paper said, “it wasn’t fair to ask residents to get outside and walk for fitness when they had to worry about stray dogs nipping at their heels.”

Now the article has been corrected with the following...

Correction: The Nashville Health Department said that the funding did not pay for the spaying, but instead was used to promote the anti-obesity effort that included the neutering campaign. Also it funded the hiring of two animal control officers "for the purpose of increasing animal control presence and enforcement in neighborhoods where we knew there was a loose dog problem."

The correction does not really clarify or correct....it says that funds weren't used for spaying, but they were used in an effort that INCLUDED the neutering campaign.  How is that not paying for it?  But the other thing that I find unreal is that Affordable Care dollars were not used to provide health care for anyone...it was used to hire more government employees!

A recent Nashville Tennessean story said that the funding might not be continued, but that the city’s Humane Association would fund the vet services. A Humane Association official said the funding has been cut off.

Explaining the federally-funded program, the paper said, “it wasn’t fair to ask residents to get outside and walk for fitness when they had to worry about stray dogs nipping at their heels.”

The fund has been threatened by the GOP. Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s health subcommittee voted to repeal the program. The Republican House budget would also kill the program. And Speaker John Boehner wants to use some of the money from the program to pay for lowering student loan interest rates, a plan President Obama has threatened with a veto.

Democrats have praised the fund for covering expenses such as cancer screenings for women. But Republicans say the money is being used as a slush fund to prop up support for Obamacare.

Congressional investigators and outside groups are scouring the grant program for embarrassing uses, and the Nashville spay and neuter program is just the latest. The federal website touting the Nashville program adds that it is also spending cash on bike sharing programs and to provide corner markets with fresh veggies.

As was stated repeatedly by many on the right, the Affordable Care Act was never about providing health care to anyone....it's about control...control and growing the government.

The President's first official week of campaigning for re-election started off a little shaky. Yahoo News Political Correspondent Jeff Greenfield is normally not one to fall prey to the knee jerk reaction to individual events.

If you don’t believe rigid mathematical formulas can tell you who will win a presidential election—and I don’t—you should be even more dubious about hunches divined from a stray incident or two.

and yet....

So why do I have the feeling that just such an incident—OK, make it four—made last week a very bad one for President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects?

Because they connect to much bigger problems that go to the heart of the Obama campaign’s arguments for a second term. Moreover, the time to repair these problems is rapidly running out.

The incidents in question?

Let’s take the first event, which on the surface may seem ludicrous: the Empty Seats in Columbus.

Obama semiofficially launched his re-election campaign—as opposed to the hundreds of “nonpolitical” appearances he has made over the past three years—at a rally Saturday at Ohio State University. Some 14,000 supporters filled the arena—or rather, did not fill the arena. Coverage of the event focused heavily on the 4,000 empty seats, and Obama’s senior campaign adviser David Axelrod was pressed by ABC’s Jake Tapper about whether the turnout demonstrated a lack of “enthusiasm” for the president.

The President's defenders claim that the pictures of the event (that were shown on Drudge and Breitbart) were taken before the event started and that more people showed up later and I don't doubt that for a minute.  However, the fact of the matter is, the campaign staged their kick off event in a venue designed to hold roughly 20,000 people and only 14,000 (approximately) showed up.  That IS a gaffe as Greenfield explains.

If that were the beginning and the end of the story, I’d be ashamed to be writing about it. Yes, advance teams try to fill halls. The founding father of such work, Jerry Bruno, always booked smaller halls so that the press would have to write that a candidate spoke to “an overflow crowd.” And yes, the press blow logistical mistakes out of all proportion. In 1988, ABC’s Sam Donaldson reported that a faulty sound system “called into question the competence of the Dukakis campaign.” (On the other hand, given that campaign, he may have been onto something.) By itself, the turnout for Obama was no big deal.

Oh those violent whack jobs in the Tea Party....they are at it again....

What a lucky, lucky week this has been for Greater Cleveland -- especially for whichever unsuspecting souls were driving across the Ohio 82 bridge across the Cuyahoga Valley while five petty criminals associated with Occupy Cleveland were trying to community organize it.

Oh wait...what?????

The Occupiers, authorities tell us, thought they had rigged the span with plastic explosives that would detonate when they punched a code into a cellphone.

Occupiers???  Plotting violence against honest hard-working middle class commuters that PAY for all the crap that the Occupiers are demanding?  NOOOOOOOOOOOO - that would NEVEEEEEEERRRRRRR happen...

Sorry to have been absent this past week.  Family issues have kept me mostly offline.  That has now been resolved and I am back in the blogging saddle again.

Logical Lady Salena Zito is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Her specialty is politics in Western Pennsylvania/eastern Ohio.  So this column is coming right from her wheelhouse....

Knocked off message for a second week by messy Secret Service and GSA scandals, President Obama on Wednesday tried to salvage things with a jobs rally among handpicked supporters in this Northeast Ohio town.

Standing behind him onstage were unemployed workers, ages 33 to 60, who went back to school to learn trades that might help them land jobs.

He began and ended his speech with now-familiar populist rhetoric about fairness and fair shakes. Sandwiched in between were out-of-place lines about free markets, personal responsibility and government not solving all of our problems.

At times the words felt awkward, forced. Six tepid applause lines in a 24-minute speech reflected a candidate testing out a new message that fell flat.

And fell flat it did...with a resounding thud...

You've heard of Soccer Moms and Security Moms and the like.  Well ABC News has the latest media focus group.....WalMart Moms and the WalMart Moms are not buying what the Obama Administration is selling.

If you want to know why Americans are frustrated and fed up with Washington, I present exhibit A: the debate between Democrats and Republicans over Osama Bin Laden.

Democrats suggest that Mitt Romney may not have had the guts to take out the Al Qaeda leader while Republicans sniff that the President’s public preening over the successful operation is unseemly.

Americans, meanwhile, have been very clear that they want the candidates to fix the economy, not one-up each other on their anti-terrorism credentials.

It's the economy, stupid...to channel a certain Democratic Presidential advisor....

In January of 2012, 51 percent of Americans polled by ABC/Washington Post said that the economy was the single most important issue in their choice for President. A paltry 2 percent picked the issue of terrorism/national security.

Eight years ago, in the first presidential campaign after the 9/11 attacks, 22 percent of Americans said terrorism was their top concern. And, while the economy was important to their vote, just 26 percent said it was their top issue in the 2004 campaign.

Today, it is the GDP, not OBL that is driving this election.

And, many Americans feel that Washington doesn’t understand or appreciate just how tough this economy has been on them.

Emphasis mine.  This is where the "WalMart Moms" come in.

Nowhere is this frustration more evident than among a group of 29 moms brought together by Walmart for an online discussion about the economy and the upcoming election.

These “Walmart moms” – defined as a voter with kids under 18 living at home who shops at Walmart at least once a month – are a sought-after demographic. Even more important, the women engaged in this online discussion were from the key battleground states of Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The discussion was moderated by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, and Momentum Analysis, a Democratic firm. What they found was that these women are hurting financially. Almost every one of them had a story about how she and her family had to cut back, go without, or sacrifice.

When asked to pick their most important issue, all picked the economy or “domestic issues”. Not one picked “foreign policy issues like Iraq, Afghanistan or the war on terrorism.”

Moreover, these women expressed a deep frustration with the disconnect between what they experience in their day-to-day lives and what they see going on in Washington

“I do not think elected officials and running candidates understand my life and what matters most to me,” said Jamie from Pennsylvania. “They make too much money to understand what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and for someone to be on disability. All they care about is their personal agendas.”

So while the President puts together ads attacking Governor Romney about not pulling the trigger on OBL or his Swiss Bank account, the Romney campaign is putting out ads like this one running in North Carolina, where unemployment is currently above the national average. 

President Obama's team knows that they do not have any economic successes to campaign on -hence their reliance on "shiny" object campaigning.  Their hope is if they keep the American people focused on the distractions, that they will ignore the dismal economic record that this President has accumulated.  The problem with that theory is that they President and his staff really do have no clue how bad things are outside of Chicago or DC or New York.  They do not understand the struggles that a working mom in Wichita is going through....

....and just like it was for Bush 41 and Carter before him, that will be the undoing of the Obama Presidency.

I noticed this email in the inbox when I was at work and I almost deleted it.  Now I am glad I didn't. 

Oh boy someone's campaign is desperate.  I say desperate because only a campaign that is so far down in the polls that there is no other option would engage in this form of anonymous slime.

As a concerned Minnesota voter here is something about U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hegseth that should concern you:

In Pete Hegseth's announcement for U.S. Senate he addressed his divorce in 2009 by telling everyone it was public record in his Star Tribune article to get it out into the open, hoping that nobody would actually look into the actual reasons for it.
 
Well, I went to go see what that public record said - see attached document (especially page 3 under "Irretrievable Breakdown")
 
Pete neglected to tell us that the divorce was due to his infidelity to his first wife.
 
That is huge, especially here in Minnesota. We have a marriage ammendment (ed sic) on the Ballot (sic) this fall and we cannot be touting cheaters and immoral individuals as our best option for the GOP nomination and expect our voters to support a bill calling for the sanctity of marriage. We especially can't afford to blow a golden opportunity for the party in a year where Amy is beatable due to the economy and Obama's agenda.
 
I want the truth to be told so that we can elect a viable conservative without this type of baggage as the GOP opponent to Amy rather than make a further mockery of our state's GOP party leadership and the Marriage Amendment.
 
JGaltMN

The Junior Logician graduates this year and is not too thrilled about his job prospects at this time.  This study by Pew (reported by the Associated Press) shows that he has good reason not to be too thrilled.  And the report does not bode well for a President going into a re-election cycle.

The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.

Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.

While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

The only way the timing for this study could have been worse for the President would have been for it to come out in July or August.  However, young adults facing a June graduation, are looking at it and wondering "Is this the change we really wanted?"

Among some of the key take-away points in the survey...

Well I never would have expected this.....

To be “close-minded” is, according to the dictionary, to be “intolerant of the beliefs and opinions of others; stubbornly unreceptive to new ideas.” To be conservative and close-minded, according to popular portrayal, is a redundancy—a package deal that liberals can and do take for granted.

But University of Virginia Professor Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Righteous Mind doesn’t simply suggest that conservatives may not be as close-minded as they are portrayed. It proves that the opposite is the case, that conservatives understand their ideological opposite numbers far better than do liberals.

Haidt’s research asks individuals to answer questionnaires regarding their core moral beliefs—what sorts of values they consider sacred, which they would compromise on, and how much it would take to get them to make those compromises. By themselves, these exercises are interesting.

But Haidt’s research went one step further, asking self-indentified conservatives to answer those questionnaires as if they were liberals and for liberals to do the opposite. What Haidt found is that conservatives understand liberals’ moral values better than liberals understand where conservatives are coming from. Worse yet, liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is. If anyone is close-minded here it’s not conservatives.

Get ready for the "Great Distractions Election of 2012".  At least that is what many on the right are referring this campaign season to.  We have already had Hilary Rosen's attack on Ann Romney, Seamus "Gate", the breathless reportage on the pecadillos of the Secret Service....the list goes on and on.  All of these distractions are, according to Jonah Goldberg, the "faux outrage" is being used to bash the GOP.  Now that it has been turned against them though.....

t's going to be bait and switch for as far as the eye can see.

That's how it looks now that the smoke has cleared after the recent "Mommy War" skirmish over Democratic operative Hilary Rosen's comment that mother of five Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life."...

...And besides, the whole episode was a "distraction." That was the quasi-official line almost the moment Rosen's comments caught fire. It was a "manufactured controversy." NBC's Chuck Todd, easily one of the best political analysts in the mainstream media, responded to the spat by proclaiming: "Welcome to the world of the shiny metal object. A person no one agrees with has ignited a manufactured controversy."

So state convention was Saturday. I was not there (had family obligations) but I was following it from the kitchen table thanks to the joys of the internet. However, by the time the 2nd and 4th Congressional Districts nominations rolled around I was logged off for the day so I completely missed this story.

Saratoga Springs Mayor Mia Love is the Republican nominee in Utah's 4th Congressional District. But her victory came after some serious controversy. After the first round of balloting at Utah's Republican convention Saturday, the GOP 4th district field was narrowed down to two – Love and former legislator Carl Wimmer. However, when Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff appeared on the convention stage to offer his support to Wimmer, Shurtleff referred to Love as a, “novelty.”

To the delegates credit, the response to such a stupid statement was appropriate.

Shurtleff's characterization of Love was met by boos from several delegates.... Pastor Greg Johnson criticized Shurtleff for his comment. Later, Johnson told ABC 4, "The insinuation that she is a novelty is what? What did the attorney general mean when he called her a novelty or that we shouldn't elect a novelty?"

Apparently, State GOP leadership was not too thrilled with the AG's remarks either.

ABC 4 News has learned that Shurtleff also got an earful from one of the leaders of Utah's Republican Party.

And of course, after Shurtleff's comments like cost his guy a chance at being in a competative race.....

Just moments later, we caught up with a tearful and regretful Mark Shurtleff. He told us,"My attitude was she's brand new to this process, we need someone who is proven. Terrible choice of words.”

Ah the old "poor choice of words" excuse.  Sorry you didn't like my utterly stupid statement....I didn't really mean to say it that way. 

Seriously - if you rise to the position of elected office (or communications spokesperson for a campaign <cough Hillary Rosen>) you had better not fall prey to the "poor choice of words" syndrome - especially when you are elected as the states TOP ATTORNEY and are expected to argue legal briefs before the court!  That excuse won't fly Mr. AG

No politics today.  Today, a musical legend died...Levon Helm of "The Band" died after a long battle with cancer. 

 The Band rose to prominence as Bob Dylan's back up band for his 1965 tour but hit it big on their own with a little help from Dylan.  Most people know them solely from Martin Scorscese's film "The Last Waltz" which was the Band's farewell concert. 

Levon's death leaves only 2 surviving members of the Band - Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson.

RIP Levon.  You will be missed.

I have not done one of these in a while but given yesterday was tax day I thought this was fitting....

"Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, 1784

Predictably, the Democratically controlled US Senate killed the "Buffett Rule".  The Democrats lost 2 of their members(Mark Pryor and Independent Joe Lieberman) while the GOP lost 1 (Susan Collins).  Expect much moaning, wailing and garment rending from the President and his supporters over this defeat.  Then while you are listening to it, remember the words of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on the subject.

"The Senate Republican Leader has described the bill as yet another proposal from the White House that won't create a single job or lower the price at the pump by a penny. Well, the Minority Leader is absolutely right that the aim of this bill is not to lower the unemployment rate or the price of gasoline."

It is also not about deficit reduction as the Democrats claim.  According to government estimates, the so-called Buffett Rule would net the government roughly $30-$40 billion dollars over ten years.  The impact on the deficit....MINISCULE.   Cutting the federal budget 1% across the board meanwhile would net the government $33 billion dollars A YEAR in deficit reduction.