GOP Senators: Thousands of Ballots Unlikely to Reach Military Voters in Time

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photo credit: Reserve AffairsA group of Republican senators said Monday that thousands of voter ballots are unlikely to reach military service members until after Nov. 6.

One day ahead of the election, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to express their concern over delays in ballots reaching military voters overseas.

“We write to express concerns over another serious failure by the Department of Defense (DoD) to safeguard the voting rights of our overseas military service members, which we believe could result in the imminent disenfranchisement of thousands,” the letter stated.

Mail redirection in the military can take between 14 to 50 days, meaning a ballot could reach the voter possibly more than a month after ballots have to be mailed back in order to be counted. The Military Postal Service Agency (MPSA) identified problems with the system after the 2010 election, but hasn’t implemented changes.

“DoD’s failure to fix this longstanding problem means that the blank ballots of thousands of overseas service members, as well as some who have recently returned from overseas, could be currently trapped in an archaic and inefficient mail forwarding system,” the senators wrote. “These ballots are unlikely to reach these service members until after Election Day has passed.”

Read more from this story HERE.

British Prime Minister Fears Iran Nuclear-Weapons Bid Might Trigger Arms Race

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photo credit: James ArnoldU.K. Prime Minister David Cameron warned that an Iranian development of nuclear weapons might “trigger a nuclear arms race” across the Middle East.

Iran obtaining nuclear arms would not only be a “desperately bad development for our world,” it could make the region “a more unstable and more dangerous place,” Cameron told students at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi today at the start of a three-day visit to the Middle East.

Cameron has been discussing future cooperation with the United Arab Emirates on strategic defense issues as contingency plans are examined for any escalation of Iran’s nuclear ambitions — including the possibility of blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil-supply route.

Three weeks ago, Cameron called on Israel to refrain from a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program, saying time was needed for sanctions to work. The U.S. and European nations say Iran’s program is aimed at developing atomic weapons. Iran says it’s intended for civilian purposes.

Cameron is seeking to boost defense sales in the region and to arrange the sale of more than 100 Typhoon jets in the coming year in a deal that would be worth more than 6 billion pounds ($9.5 billion) to British companies, the premier’s office said in an e-mailed statement. He moves on from the UAE to Saudi Arabia tomorrow.

Read more from this story HERE.

Governor Christie Denied Romney Request To Appear At Campaign Event Just Days Ahead Of Election

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photo credit: sandyreliefBOSTON — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was effusive in his praise of President Barack Obama when the two leaders toured damage from Hurricane Sandy last week, turned down a request by Mitt Romney to appear with him at a rally on Sunday night in Pennsylvania, The Huffington Post has learned.

Christie’s decision will only add to questions among Republicans about what the governor — who is up for reelection a year from now — is thinking, and why he went out of his way to heap praise on the president, and then refused to appear with Romney.

The Romney rally was held at a farm in Morrisville, Pa., not more than 20 minutes from Trenton, the New Jersey capital. The physical proximity of the event to New Jersey only added to questions in the Romney campaign about why Christie chose not to come.

“You can’t tell me he couldn’t have gone over there for a night rally,” a Romney campaign source told HuffPost.

Read more about this story HERE.

Little Girl’s Video: “President Obama, Making My Generation Pay the Price”

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With Election Day nearly here, the conservative 527 group RightChange is dropping $1.5 million in digital advertising in the presidential race, the group announced.

The latest ad will appear today on sites including Facebook, Google and Youtube and features a young girl who asks voters to think about what kind of country they’ll be leaving her generation.

“Will President Obama continue to divide us? President Obama, he’s making my generation pay the price. What America are you leaving me?” asks the girl in the one-minute-forty-four-second-long spot.

Read more from this story HERE.

Gary Johnson: Obama Will Win

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Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson said Monday he thinks President Barack Obama will defeat Mitt Romney to win a second term.

“I think Obama’s going to win, that’s what I think,” Johnson told POLITICO in an interview. “[My vote is] really spread out, meaning I don’t think there’s any state that I’m going to do better than another.”

Johnson, who’s on the ballot in 48 states and the District of Columbia, hovers in single digits in the polls. The former two-term New Mexico governor declined to single out any state where he expected to do particularly well but said he had no regrets about how he ran his campaign.

“There’s nothing,” Johnson said. “I would ask that everybody look at it and maybe recognize that this is phenomenal that we spent $2 million and may get 5 percent of the general – now maybe it doesn’t turn out that way at all – but that we spent $2 million bucks and here we are playing in a game that by all accounts we should not be playing in, so no. Yeah, you make mistakes every single day, but the reality is: Holy cow.”

A CNN Ohio poll released Nov. 2 had Obama at 47 percent, Republican nominee Mitt Romney at 44 percent and Johnson at 5 percent. He has raised about $2.3 million, has about $35,000 on hand and is about $227,000 in debt, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Read more from this story HERE.

Woman Angered by Not Having to Show ID Tries to Vote Twice

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Roxanne Rubin was upset poll workers did not check her ID, so she tried to vote twice to prove a point, according to the Nevada secretary of state’s office.

Rubin, 56, was arrested Friday by the state’s multijurisdictional Elections Integrity Task Force and charged with trying to vote more than once in the same election, a felony.

When reached Monday, Rubin said she wants to share her side of the story. “I can’t talk, and I’m dying to,” Rubin said. “I’m talkative by nature.”

In a sworn affidavit, criminal investigator Shelley Neiman wrote that Rubin was “willing to risk the penalty in order to expose what she perceived as a weakness in the voting process” and that Rubin “was unhappy with the process; specifically in that her identification was not checked.”

Neiman wrote that Rubin “wanted to make a point” by testing the system and trying to cast another vote.

Read more from this story HERE.

Restoring Liberty’s Viral “Witty Otter” Video: The Rest of the Story and New Footage

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The “Alaska Killer Whales vs. Witty Otter” video that Restoring Liberty broke two weeks ago has now gone viral, getting almost 1,000,000 views at the time of this writing. When we posted the video – put together by my son Jacob – we included a short but incomplete narrative of what happened.

Many major news outlets have picked up the story including Yahoo.com, The Blaze, the Daily Mail, and other sites. We’ve received a number of inquiries seeking more details on what happened with the otter, her baby and the killer whales in Tutka Bay last month. Interview requests are pouring in from Anderson Cooper, the Today Show, Fox affiliates, and other stations.

Here’s the original video:

So, this evening, I called my friend, Dusty Harpole, the Alaskan who filmed the sea otter/killer whale encounter, and he filled me in on the “rest of the story.”

Dusty told me that he and his friend were out black bear hunting in early October. They had borrowed a boat from Charlie Largent (another good friend and a major 2010 US Senate campaign volunteer) for the trip and were cruising from Jakolof Bay into Tutka Bay, Alaska. Although Dusty is an accomplished Alaskan hunter, having taken a number of trophy bears – including a ten foot plus brown bear just this past spring – he and his friend hadn’t had much excitement on this outing. In fact, they had only sighted one bear the entire trip. But as they entered Tutka Bay, things got exciting real fast.

First, they saw a bunch of killer whales – also known as orcas – splashing around the entrance of the bay. As Dusty maneuvered his boat further into the bay, the killer whales actually began to approach the boat. Dusty slowed and then stopped the boat, and the orcas continued to play nearby. Each time that Dusty attempted to leave, the orcas would follow the boat.

So, enjoying the playful killer whales, Dusty eventually just let the boat drift. After thirty minutes or so, the boat, with the orcas still alongside, drifted into the mother otter that is the subject of the viral video.

The mother otter was floating on her back with her baby on her stomach about twenty-five yards from the boat. The killer whales began to circle the mother and her baby. They did this for some time. The mother otter, with the baby clinging to her stomach, would place her head under water to watch the orcas.

Click HERE for the rest of the story and the new footage of the killer whale hitting the mother and baby otters with its tail.

Is the Secret Service Ignoring Threats Against Mitt Romney?

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The Secret Service appears to be playing politics by ignoring threats of riots and violence against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made by leftist filmmaker Michael Moore and the liberal group MoveOn.

The threat was made via a web ad video released earlier this week in which Moore and MoveOn hide behind elderly women who make scripted terrorist threats against Romney and the nation over the presidential election.

One woman is shown inciting riots if Romney defeats Democratic party President Barack Obama, “I want the Republican party to know, if your voter suppression throughout this beautiful country enables Romney to oust Barack Obama, we will burn this mother****** down!” (Expletive edited from original.)

Another woman says she’ll attack Romney in his genitals, “If the Republicans steal this election, I am going to track down Mitt Romney and give him the world’s biggest ****-punch. What’s the matter sonny, you never heard that phrase, ****-punch? Right in the *******.” (Expletives deleted from original.)

Several phone calls to the Secret Service public affairs office about the threat to Romney, who is under their protection, over the past few days have not been returned. Detailed messages of inquiry were left with the voicemail of spokesman George Ogilvie.A search of news sites shows no articles reporting a Secret Service investigation in to the threat.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Blaze Reports Obama Listed As Indonesian Citizen On School Registration

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Enrollment documents viewed by TheBlaze confirm that a young Barack Obama was listed as an Indonesian citizen and a Muslim on school registration in the 1960s. And while the document has been reported on before, albeit lightly, TheBlaze has compiled the most complete view thus far of the document and the circumstances surrounding it – including an interview with the president’s first-ever principal while he was in Indonesia.

TheBlaze repeatedly photographed the document in the office of the current headmaster of Santo Fransiskus Assisis, a Catholic school that Obama attended from January 1968 to December 1970 in Jakarta. The record shows that Obama (or his parents) – at least for the period of his life – claimed to be an Indonesian citizen, that he took the last name Soetoro (the last name of his step-father, Lolo), that his religion was listed as Islam, and that he was born in Honolulu.

While Obama’s time at Santo Fransiskus is important (and we’ll explore it in more detail shortly), it’s just as crucial to fastforward to when Obama left the school.

According to records at Santo Fransiskus Assisis, Obama left after 1970 because his family moved. That move was due to Lolo leaving Dinas Topografi, a mapmaking survey company that contracted with the Indonesian army—which is listed in the document we viewed—to join Union Oil where he became a well-connected government liaison officer.

That job came with perks, among them access to some of the best schools for young Barry Soetoro. That’s evident by the young Obama attending Besuki School, one of the three best public schools in Indonesia, after leaving St. Fransiskus. Besuki School is the sort of place the connected send their children when they are not already sending them to the pricy international school. (This is an important detail because once Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, got a job working for the Ford Foundation in 1980, and after she had divorced Lolo Soetoro, she began sending her daughter, Maya, to Jakarta International School.)

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: One Day Before Election, Biden Forgets Obama’s Name

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By Toby Harnden. Vice President Joe Biden, who has previously misremembered what state and what century he was in, now seems to have forgotten that Barack Obama is the president.

Speaking to a crowd of 1,200 people at a high school in Lakewood, Ohio, Biden was slamming a ‘pernicious’ Mitt Romney ad claiming that Jeep will move jobs out of Ohio to China.

The vice-president said that the ad claimed that ‘President Clinton bankrupted Chrysler so that Italians could buy it to ship jobs overseas to China.’

Bill Clinton was the 42nd president of the U.S. and left office in January 2001. Barack Obama became the 44th president in January 2009 and for the past nearly four years Biden has served as his vice-president.

In Biden’s defense, there was perhaps a Freudian element to the slip. Clinton, who previously enjoyed testy relations with Obama, has been mobilised by the current president to be his most prominent campaigner and the two men made joint appearances in Virginia on Saturday and New Hampshire on Sunday. Read more from this story HERE.