Video: Liberal Bob Beckel – “It’s Over, it’s Over”; Romney Leads by 7 Points

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On Fox News’ “The Five”, former Democratic strategist Bob Beckel sounded defeated when reflecting on today’s Gallup poll showing Mitt Romney taking a 52-46 percent lead over Barack Obama nationally.

“It’s over. If these numbers are true, it’s over,” Beckel said.

That’s consistent with Karl Rove’s opinion, as well. Rove noted that Romney’s support among likely voters has increased significantly in the race and there’s never been a past US election where a candidate for president has lost while at 50% or above among likely voters in mid-October.

Here’s the Fox News interview with Beckel:

Video: Obama Callously States on Comedy Central, “If Four Americans Get Killed, It’s not OPTIMAL”

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By Toby Harnden. President Barack Obama, during an interview shown on Comedy Central, has responded to a question about his administration’s confused communication after the Benghazi attack, by saying: ‘If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.’

Obama was speaking to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show for a programme that was broadcast last night. Stewart, a liberal whose young audience is full of potential voters prized by the Obama campaign, asked the president about his handling of the aftermath of the Benghazi attack.

But Obama’s response sparked outrage among Republican commentators including the website Breitbart and prompted a vicious backlash from the Twitter community.

Ambassador Chris Stevens, diplomat Sean Smith and security men and former U.S. Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were killed by terrorists on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 – an attack that the White House initially blamed on a spontaneous protest about an anti-Islam movie made in California.

Stewart asked: ‘Is part of the investigation helping the communication between these divisions? ‘Not just what happened in Benghazi, but what happened within.’ Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s the Comedy Central Video with Obama’s unfortunate remarks:

Federal Court Strikes Down Defense of Marriage Act, Says Homosexuals are a Protected Class

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A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled that gay Americans are a class of people who deserve the same kinds of constitutional protections as many other victims of discrimination.

The 2-to-1 ruling, by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, came as the panel struck down the federal law prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriage. It is the first time that a federal appeals court has applied this level of constitutional protection — known as heightened scrutiny — to those unions. The case is now considered by some legal scholars to be the leading candidate for a Supreme Court review of the same-sex marriage issue.

Thursday’s decision was the second by a federal appeals court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. Now the case, Windsor v. United States, could be considered by the Supreme Court, or the court could choose other cases in its pipeline concerning same-sex marriage. Those include an earlier decision on the act by the First Circuit in Boston and one from the Ninth Circuit overturning California’s ban on same-sex marriage. It could also decide to hear all of them.

“It’s an incredible moment in the struggle for gay rights in this country,” said James D. Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s project dealing with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.

The new case was brought on behalf of Edith Windsor of New York City, who married her longtime partner, Thea Clara Spyer, in 2007 in Canada. When Ms. Spyer died in 2009, Ms. Windsor inherited her property. Because the Internal Revenue Service was not allowed, under the Defense of Marriage Act, to consider her a surviving spouse, she faced a tax bill of $363,053 that she would not have had to pay if the marriage had been recognized.

Read more from this story HERE.

House Investigating Obama’s $8.3 Billion Slush Fund Created to Hide Impacts of Obamacare on Medicare Prior to Election

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President Obama had a big political problem: Obamacare destroys the popular Medicare Advantage program, which offers private insurance plans to supplement Medicare. Something like a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries use this program. (It’s funny how free-market competition is both popular and effective when it’s actually tried, isn’t it?)

Obamacare sucks over $200 billion out of Medicare Advantage, something that would have been very noticeable through price increases and benefit reductions during open enrollment… which began in October, right before the election.

If you’re Barack Obama, you solve a problem like that by throwing huge amounts of other peoples’ money at it. So it was that a little “demonstration project” to reward the most effective Medicare Advantage plans was suddenly inflated into a titanic $8.3 billion slush fund – bigger than the 85 previous demonstration projects combined – in order to delay the pain of Medicare Advantage cuts until after the election. The standards for receiving payouts from this “incentive” program were lowered so much that even mediocre plans could receive a “reward.” It wouldn’t do to have seniors opening envelopes that say their premiums have skyrocketed or some of their favorite benefits have been dropped, right before the election!

The House Oversight Committee began investigating this jumbo Slurpee of slush in May, and ran into a Health and Human Services stonewall so obvious that it’s comical. A request for documents on May 23 was ignored by HHS. It was repeated on August 1, and ignored again. House Oversight fired off emails to a couple of HHS staffers, and didn’t get a response for weeks… at which point the HHS Deputy Director for Oversight and Investigation said, “I’m checking on the status and will get back to you,” but never got back to anybody.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jobs Report Corrected: Unemployment Claims Explode

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Obama and his defenders championed the supposed reduction in unemployment to 7.8% this week. Romney attacked the number as not reflecting reality. Some suggested that the Department of Labor was playing games with the unemployment numbers.

Well, not exactly. According to Human Events, there was data left out from the jobs report – because it wasn’t received in time – that just about every media outlet ignored:

Nothing was mischievously “suppressed” in the last report. It was a paperwork glitch, not a dirty trick. Information simply was not received on time. It’s happened before. The strange thing about this particular report was how BLS undersold its incomplete nature, and how virtually every major media outlet simply failed to note that a big fat asterisk belong[ed] next to the number. Instead, it was uncritically presented as proof that after all these years, Obamanomics was finally starting to pump out some jobs.

Well, a new week is upon us, all of the data was evidently received on time, and what do you know? Initial jobless claims are up by 46,000, to a seasonally adjusted 388,000. That would technically make it the biggest one-week percentage increase in jobless claims over the last five years. Of course, a great deal of the percentage increase is due to adjustments correcting last week’s inaccurate numbers.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, even with those adjustments factored in, this week’s claims are well above analyst expectations of 365,000 claims. That’s impossible to square with the utterly delusional September jobs report, and its ostensible reduction of the headline unemployment rate to 7.8 percent. A boatload of people got hired in September, but now they’re all filing for unemployment benefits? There is no “Obama recovery.”

Federal Welfare Spending Up an Amazing 32% Under Obama

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Federal welfare spending has grown by 32 percent over the past four years, fattened by President Obama’s stimulus spending and swelled by a growing number of Americans whose recession-depleted incomes now qualify them for public assistance, according to numbers released Thursday.

Federal spending on more than 80 low-income assistance programs reached $746 billion in 2011, and state spending on those programs brought the total to $1.03 trillion, according to figures from the Congressional Research Service and the Senate Budget Committee.

That makes welfare the single biggest chunk of federal spending — topping Social Security and basic defense spending.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee who requested the Congressional Research Service report, said the numbers underscore a fundamental shift in welfare, which he said has moved from being a Band-Aid and toward a more permanent crutch.

“No longer should we measure compassion by how much money the government spends but by how many people we help to rise out of poverty,” the Alabama conservative said. “Welfare assistance should be seen as temporary whenever possible, and the goal must be to help more of our fellow citizens attain gainful employment and financial independence.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Manager Who Posted Comments Critical of Gay Marriage on Private Facebook Account Demoted (+video)

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By Bob Unruh. A court trial is under way in the United Kingdom to determine if a Christian manager of a housing organization should be compensated for damages because his employer demoted and penalized him for stating his biblical beliefs on his private Facebook page.

Smith lost his managerial position and had his salary cut by 40 percent after his employer, Trafford Housing Trust, told him his private Facebook page posting, to which only he and his friends had access, violated its standards of conduct.

The case developed in February 2011 when Smith saw a news article titled “Gay church marriages get go ahead.”

He linked to the story and wrote, “An equality too far.”

One of his coworkers asked him to explain, and he responded: “I don’t understand why people who have no faith and don’t believe in Christ would want to get hitched in church. The Bible is quite specific that marriage is for men and women. If the state wants to offer civil marriage to the same sex then that is up to the state; but the state shouldn’t impose its rules on places of faith and conscience.” Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s a BBC update on the case:

Perfect Response to Obama’s Claim Regarding Pipeline Encircling Earth: “You Didn’t Build That!”

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Leases and production are down on federal lands, the EPA is waging war on coal, and as for building enough pipelines to encircle the earth, we’d settle for just one from Canada to the Gulf.

When President Obama, in responding Tuesday to Mitt Romney’s chiding about failing to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, claimed that his administration has added enough new oil and gas pipelines to “encircle the Earth and then some,” we felt a perfect response from Romney would have been, “You didn’t build that.”

In fact, energy companies have built some 55,000 miles of pipeline, including one from Canada, mostly requiring only state and local permits, and they have operated with an admirable safety record.

Keystone XL would be just as safe, creating 20,000 jobs up front. But Obama’s blockage has been about catering to his environmentalist base, not reducing gas prices or creating jobs.

Keystone XL is part of Romney’s plan for North American energy independence. As the Institute for Energy Research points out, Energy Information Administration (EIA) figures released last week reveal that the U.S. buys an average of 869,000 barrels a day of oil from the Venezuela of thuggish President Hugo Chavez.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Wrong Again: Tax Cuts Do Increase Government Revenue, Deficits Due to Spending

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By Paul Sperry. The historical tables in the back of the latest “Economic Report of the President” show that the Bush tax cuts generated more, not less, federal revenues — a phenomenon that also held true for Presidents Clinton, Reagan and Kennedy.

All four leaders, two Republicans and two Democrats, slashed taxes for top individual earners or investors. And once these rate reductions took effect and began stimulating economic activity, record individual income-tax receipts poured into the U.S. Treasury. (See the charts above.) Revenues increased even after adjusting for inflation and population growth.

Kennedy’s major tax cut, which included chopping the top marginal rate to 70% from 91%, became law in early 1964, after his untimely death. It promised to grow the economy and close the budget gap.

“Coming at a time of substantial deficit in the federal budget, this was a startling proposal to many observers,” said New York University economist Richard Sylla, co-author of “The Evolution of the American Economy.”

To the shock of many naysaying Democrats, the plan worked. The economy grew at an average 5.5% clip, and unemployment fell to 3.8%. In turn, the annual deficit shrank to $1 billion from $7 billion as individual income-tax receipts nearly doubled. (See the chart.) Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Spending, Not Bush Tax Cuts, Drives Deficit

By John Merline. President Obama often talks about the need for a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, by which he means tax hikes in addition to spending cuts.

At the recent presidential debate, for example, he said, “We’ve got to reduce our deficit, but we’ve got to do it in a balanced way — asking the wealthy to pay a little bit more along with cuts.”

The only problem with this approach is that the massive projected deficits over the next 10 years aren’t the result of too few taxes. They are entirely the result of too much spending.

Here’s the proof: According to the latest budget forecast from the Congressional Budget Office, even if every expiring tax cut were kept in place permanently — including all the Bush tax cuts and various other expiring cuts from last year and this year — and even if the alternative minimum tax were permanently indexed to inflation, federal revenues would still rise to 18.6% of GDP by 2022.

To put that figure in perspective, from 1948 and 2008, federal revenues averaged 18% of GDP. Read more from this story HERE.

Senate Hopeful Todd Akin Gets Another Boost: McCaskill’s Husband Allegedly Cut Business Deals in Senate Dining Room

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Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill’s husband used the U.S. Senate Dining Room to cut business deals selling tax credits tied to stimulus money, a whistle-blowing executive inside his company alleged on an audio recording exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller.

“The thing that irritated me about this was he [McCaskill’s husband Joseph Shepard] entertained these outside investors in the Senate Dining Room,” the whistle-blower said. “That’s where he closed the deal.”

The whistle-blower, Craig Woods, was a longtime high-ranking official within Shepard’s business empire, serving first as chief financial officer and then as vice president and chief underwriter for Missouri Equity Investors LLC and JA Shepard Companies.

His LinkedIn page indicates he left the company in January 2011, a few months before debriefing a Republican operative who made the recording.

According to the McCaskill campaign, Woods pled guilty in the 1990s in two different cases of felony larceny and spent some time in prison after that.

Read more from this story HERE.