On Election Eve, Catholics Unite to Protect Religious Freedom

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[The] last Sunday before Election Day [found] Catholics across the nation, and beyond, uniting in both prayer and advocacy to protect freedom of religion as provided in the Constitution. Interestingly, the emphasis on Catholic values and teachings, as a result of the recent defense of freedom of religion, may also end up strengthening religious faith among Catholics in general.

Since the announcement of what is now familiarly termed, “the HHS mandate,” Catholics and Christians of other denominations have denounced the ObamaCare provision that demands that most employers, including those associated with churches, grant free contraception, sterilization procedures, and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees through their health insurance plans.

This coercion to violate faith beliefs in order to satisfy government requirements has led to a veritable onslaught of litigation by Catholic dioceses and institutions, the institutions of other Christian denominations, and individual business owners. As Barack Obama attempts to be elected to a second term, he is faced with 38 lawsuits and over 110 individuals from around the country who represent those whose religious liberty is being challenged by the mandate.

In the swing state of Colorado, a group of lay Catholics has placed a full-page ad in the Sunday edition of the Denver Post to drive home the significance of religious liberty in Tuesday’s election. Regarding the ad, J.D. Flynn, chancellor of the Denver archdiocese, said, “I think the folks who organized getting the ad together want to ensure everybody understands what’s at stake not only for the Church, but for the country, when religious liberty is compromised.”

The ad features the full text of a letter written by Denver Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila about religious freedom and the election. “I just think it speaks to the quality and commitment of the lay people in the Archdiocese of Denver that they want to support the archbishop in this way,” Flynn commented. “Our country is the product of religious liberty. When we undermine that for something as short-sighted as free contraception, everybody is in serious trouble.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Soros-Backed Think Tank Pushing Draconian Cuts to Military Benefits

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photo credit: Center for American ProgressA new report by a liberal-leaning think tank recommends a dramatic overhaul of military pay, retirement and health care benefits as part of a $1 trillion cut in defense spending over 10 years.

The Center for American Progress calls for capping pay raises, eliminating military health benefits for many retirees who are covered by an employer-provided plan, and reducing the value of military retired pay as well as making retirees wait until age 60 to start receiving it.

Recommendations are included in a report, Rebalancing Our National Security, released Oct. 31 by the progressive think tank and advocacy group. The report opposes across-the-board cuts in defense spending that could occur beginning in January under sequestration but still calls for major reductions in defense spending.

Capping pay raises, the report says, could save $16.5 billion over the next five years. Reducing retiree health care benefits, through a combination of restricting care and raising fees, could save $15 billion a year. Reforming military retired pay could save, in the short term, up to $13 billion a year, and over time could save up to $70 billion a year off the current plan.

In addition to cutting compensation and benefits, the report also recommends cutting the number of active-duty troops permanently based in Europe and Asia, saving $10 billion a year. It recommends withdrawing 33,000 troops from Europe and about 17,000 from Asia.

Read more from this story HERE.

Win or Lose, Obama’s Regulators Scrambling to Enact $700 Billion Hit on US Economy

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photo credit: c_nilsenPresident Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has devoted an unprecedented number of bureaucrats to finalizing new anti-coal regulations that are set to be released at the end of November, according to a source inside the EPA.

More than 50 EPA staff are now crashing to finish greenhouse gas emission standards that would essentially ban all construction of new coal-fired power plants. Never before have so many EPA resources been devoted to a single regulation. The independent and non-partisan Manhattan Institute estimates that the EPA’s greenhouse gas coal regulation will cost the U.S. economy $700 billion.

The rush is a major sign of panic by environmentalists inside the Obama administration. If Obama wins, the EPA would have another four full years to implement their anti-fossil fuel agenda. But if Romney wins, regulators will have a very narrow window to enact a select few costly regulations that would then be very hard for a President Romney to undo.

Read more from this story HERE.

Acting US Ambassador to Pakistan Met with Code Pink, Discussed ‘Classified’ Drone Casualty Count (+video)

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photo credit: Stephen P.D.Richard Hoagland, the acting U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, discussed with Code Pink and anti-Israel activists what he said was classified information, during an October 3 meeting with the groups in Islamabad.

Code Pink, a liberal anti-war organization known for disrupting Republican and conservative public events, uploaded a video of the meeting to an Internet video sharing website on Oct. 5.

“I looked at the numbers today before I came here, and I saw a number of civilian casualties — officially U.S. government classified information,” Hoagland said at the meeting. “Since July 2008 it is in the two-figures. I can’t vouch for you that that’s accurate, in any way, so I can’t talk about the numbers. Alright. I wanted to see what we have on the internal record. [It’s] quite low.”

Realizing what he had said, Hoagland told the activist gathering: “I probably just, you know, got into big trouble with what I just said.”

The left-wing delegation to Pakistan included Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of Code Pink, and Robert Naiman, the policy director of a left-wing group called Just Foreign Policy, whose board members include Julian Bond, the former NAACP chairman, and Tom Hayden, the 1960s radical and former California politician.

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Former Gov. Barbour/RNC Chair: Hurricane Sandy Broke Romney’s Momentum

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photo credit: Leading AuthoritiesFormer Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss.) said Sunday that Hurricane Sandy stopped Mitt Romney’s momentum in the presidential race after the candidates temporarily left the trail and the media focused on the superstorm.

“The hurricane is what broke Romney’s momentum,” Barbour said on CNN’s “State of the Union.

“I don’t think there’s any question about it,” he added. “Any day that the news media is not talking about jobs and the economy, taxes and spending, deficit and debt, ‘ObamaCare’ and energy, is a good day for Barack Obama.”

Other Republican lawmakers and pundits were less forceful in their assessments of Sandy’s impact on the presidential race, but several said it likely would have some impact.

President Obama has received a favorable reception from the public for his response to Sandy. Obama also received high praise from Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.), a prominent Romney surrogate, for his handling of the storm, and the two toured the New Jersey coastline together on Wednesday.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mother of SEAL: ‘I Believe that Obama Murdered My Son’

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photo credit: roberthuffstutterA father and a mother used the word “murder.” A brother said he won’t second-guess decisions made in the heat of battle.

The families of three Americans killed in the Sept. 11 U.S. consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya, are offering widely different reactions to recent reports that U.S. personnel issued several requests for help that were turned down.

Patricia Smith, the mother of slain State Department employee Sean Patrick Smith, is now blaming President Barack Obama for her son’s death.

“I believe that Obama murdered my son,” she said Thursday from the living room of her Clairemont home. “I firmly believe this.”

Patricia Smith, who voted for Obama in 2008 at the insistence of her son, said reporting by Fox News is the basis for much of her belief that Obama is ultimately responsible for her son’s death. She said Sean, who went to Mission Bay High School but lived abroad, was a fervent supporter of the president.

Read more from this story HERE.

Democrats’ Drive to Retake House Falters

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Nancy Pelosi has spent much of the past two years proclaiming that Democrats had a great shot at reclaiming the House and returning the speaker’s gavel to her hands.

But her drive to regain the majority for Democrats is on the verge of a complete collapse. Democrats are expected to pick up five seats at best — a fraction of the 25 they need. On the eve of the election, some party officials are privately worried that Democrats might even lose ground and drop one or two seats to the Republican majority.

It would mark an epic failure for a party that has a legitimate shot at keeping the presidency and the Senate on Tuesday. The inability of House Democrats to pick off a good number of seats from one of the most unpopular House majorities in modern history will cause a lot of soul-searching in the party come Wednesday.

So Democrats are already doing their postmortems on a House election cycle gone awry. What they’ll find in the political autopsy is Republican dominance in redistricting that created a GOP friendly map, a Medicare argument that didn’t totally pan out and an incumbent president who just wasn’t as popular as when he ran four years ago. They’ll also have to come to terms with the fact that they still can’t overcome the Republican advantage in campaign spending.

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If Romney Supporters Don’t Vote in Record Numbers, Obama Will Win

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It’s all a matter of perspective.

All along most of my fellow conservative pundits have been framing the 2012 election as a replay of 1980, with a former Republican governor earning a landslide mandate from an American people languishing under the failures of an unprepared liberal incumbent. While my ideology may put the fun in fundamentalist, all along I have disagreed with that narrative.

While Obama’s amateurish escapades may resemble Carter’s futility, Romney is not another Reagan. In fact, until the first debate in Denver when he routed Obama, Romney was on pace to be the most disliked major party challenger for president in the history of modern polling.

In addition, an entire generation that still believed in rugged individualism and Judeo-Christian morality has left us since Reagan’s era. They have been replaced by a generation far more conditioned to see government as the solution to our problems rather than an impediment to them.

For example, my home state of Iowa is a socially conservative state but since Reagan it’s only gone Republican in a presidential election once, and that was by fewer than 10,000 votes. Why? Because my home state is one of the oldest in the country (which means lots of folks on entitlement programs), and its biggest industry is agriculture (which is essentially a complete subsidy of the welfare state). Thus, Iowa has been voting Democrat out of personal financial vested interest for decades.

Furthermore, the nation is far more Balkanized culturally than it was in 1980. No Republican presidential candidate – let alone a conservative – could still win California. Now the Electoral College is essentially down to just a handful of states every four years, with most of the country entrenched as red or blue no matter whom the nominee of each party is or where the country is at. That makes obtaining the kind of national mandate Reagan twice received more difficult. Nowadays a Democrat has 200 Electoral College votes in the bank just by showing up on the ballot come Election Day, and that wasn’t true in Reagan’s time.

Because of this, since January I have been analyzing this election with 2004 as its predecessor for three reasons:

1. Obama’s approval ratings are roughly where Bush’s were then. Though the Obama economy is worse than Bush’s (and not as bad as Carter’s), Bush was also saddled with an unpopular war in Iraq that makes that a wash.

2. As a challenger Romney was saddled with many of the same negatives as Kerry. He didn’t excite his base, which is why Kerry and Romney each set the record for earliest to name a running mate, and each selected a younger more charismatic vice presidential nominee. Also the attempt by Obama to make the election a referendum on Romney instead of himself, by characterizing Romney as a wealthy socialite elitist out-of-touch with mainstream values, is exactly what Karl Rove successfully did to Kerry for Bush in 2004. And do you remember the flip-flops on display at the 2004 Republican Convention to remind voters of Kerry’s penchant for taking each side of each issue? Apparently there’s something in the water in Massachusetts because that has been a problem for Romney as well. Romney’s own campaign confidant perpetuated the label with his infamous “etch-a-sketch” remarks.

3. The framework of the Electoral College is virtually the same as it was in 2004, except for GOP states Indiana and North Carolina that were surprise pick-ups for Obama in 2008.

The metric of this race, with Obama getting a big post-convention bounce just like Bush did, Romney then getting a big post-debate bounce just like Kerry did, and the election essentially coming down to Ohio, is eerily similar to 2004 as well.

Polling

For the purpose of my analysis, I’m going to rely on the Real Clear Politics polling average for my polling information because it’s been proven to be the most accurate tool for public consumption out there. The final RCP polling average flat out nailed the last two presidential elections (and I urge you to go back and read this link to find out why it did so).

That doesn’t mean RCP is right this time. In fact, we won’t know who is right until after the people (or the lawyers) have their ultimate say. But in the past two election cycles no one has been more accurate than RCP.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Official Obama Ad – “President is a Man of Deep Christian Faith”

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By Fox News. A new video released by the Obama campaign claims the president has been leading the nation with faith values. Several religious minsters and scholars said Obama is a “man of deep Christian faith.”

The video fails to mention that the Democratic Party booed God at their national convention in Charlotte — and at one point voted to remove the Almighty from the party platform. God was eventually reinserted into the platform in a controversial vote with strong opposition and jeers coming from the audience.

Obama’s video, which was posted Saturday morning, implies that Obamacare and his automobile industry bailout are moral policies based on religion. Read more from this story HERE.

Video: You Can’t Vote for Obama After Seeing This

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This is one of the exceptional videos of this election season, with hundreds of thousands of views over the last week.

The first half of the clip very effectively uses Obama’s own 2008 campaign rhetoric against him, something that would have been very effective in the debates.

It then describes the nations’s debt crisis, providing definition to the enormous numbers burdening our nation.

Finally, it gives a brief history on conservatism and conservative ideals.

It’s a catchy, fast-paced, and otherwise well done video. If you don’t have time for the whole clip, you should watch at least the first half.