Police: ‘War-Like’ Detroit Is Unsafe For Visitors, ‘Enter at Your Own Risk’

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The men and women of the Detroit Police Department believe the city is too dangerous to enter, and they want citizens to know it.

Detroit Police Officer Association (DPOA) Attorney Donato Iorio said officers are holding the “Enter At Your Own Risk” rally at 3:30 p.m. Saturday in front of Comerica Park to remind the public that the officers are overworked, understaffed, and at times, fearful for their lives.

“Detroit is America’s most violent city, its homicide rate is the highest in the country and yet the Detroit Police Department is grossly understaffed,” Iorio told WWJ’s Kathryn Larson. “The DPOA believes that there is a war in Detroit, but there should be a war on crime, not a war on its officers.”

Iorio says the once 2,000 strong force is shrinking rapidly; since the start of summer, hundreds of officers have left the department.

“These are the men and women who we look to protect us… and police officers can’t protect you if they’re not there. Officers are leaving simply because they can’t afford to stay in Detroit and work 12 hour shifts for what they are getting paid… These police officers are beyond demoralized, these officers are leaving hand over fist because they can no longer afford to stay on the department and protect the public,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Tea Party Turncoat Embraces Obama in NY Congressional Fight

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Representative Nan Hayworth of New York, first elected with support from the anti-government spending Tea Party movement in 2010, is aiming for the political center in this year’s campaign against a Democrat trying to dredge up her past.

Hayworth, 52, vowed two years ago to “slash federal spending” and attacked “King Barack and his out-of-control Congress,” referring to President Barack Obama and the Democrats who then controlled the Senate and House. Now she boasts of bringing federal money to her district, tells a local television interviewer that she has been “eager to work with Democratic colleagues and with the president all along,” and touts co-founding the Common Ground Caucus with Democratic Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island.

Though she voted twice for House Republican budgets that would replace traditional Medicare, in her literature and commercials she promises to “fight to keep Medicare safe and reliable,” as images of her elderly parents are shown.

“She was elected on a Tea Party tsunami,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, referring to the electoral wave that swept Republicans into the House majority. “Now the tide has receded and she is left high and dry with her voting record.”

For Hayworth to win re-election, she has to persuade voters to cross party lines because enrolled Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district that covers much of the lower Hudson Valley.

Read more from this story HERE.

University of Colorado Election Forecast Model Continues to Predict Solid Romney Win

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An update to an election forecasting model announced by two University of Colorado professors in August continues to project that Mitt Romney will win the 2012 presidential election.

According to their updated analysis, Romney is projected to receive 330 of the total 538 Electoral College votes. President Barack Obama is expected to receive 208 votes — down five votes from their initial prediction — and short of the 270 needed to win.

The new forecast by political science professors Kenneth Bickers of CU-Boulder and Michael Berry of CU Denver is based on more recent economic data than their original Aug. 22 prediction. The model itself did not change.

“We continue to show that the economic conditions favor Romney even though many polls show the president in the lead,” Bickers said. “Other published models point to the same result, but they looked at the national popular vote, while we stress state-level economic data.”

While many election forecast models are based on the popular vote, the model developed by Bickers and Berry is based on the Electoral College and is the only one of its type to include more than one state-level measure of economic conditions. They included economic data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Steyn: I Hate Big Bird For What He’s Done to the USA

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Apparently, Frank Sinatra served as Mitt Romney’s debate coach. As he put it about halfway through “That’s Life”: “I’d jump right on a big bird and then I’d fly . . . ”

That’s what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off — and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that’s what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn’t going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself — in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes.

Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy’s performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt’s assault on Sesame Street was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be made. “WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress’s stuff leave big bird alone,” tweeted Whoopi Goldberg. Even the president mocked Romney for “finally getting tough on Big Bird” — not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere 24 hours later, once the rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out to a campaign rally, and load it into the prompter, he did deliver it without mishap.

Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood — the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum and it’s no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their “safe house” in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president’s special envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes . . . ” The butchers of Darfur aren’t blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven’t given enough cookies. I’m not saying there’s a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary . . . well, actually I am.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Ex-Democratic Pollster Says Media Has Become “Enemy of the American People”

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In this video from last week, former Democratic Pollster Pat Caddell lambasts the mainstream media for not only telling the American people who to vote for but, more problematically, not telling the American people about things that they have the right to know about.

Caddell discusses several stories. The first involves Obama Senior Adviser David Plouffe who received $100,000 from an Iranian front group to give two speeches in Nigeria. Caddell notes that “no one” gives that kind of money away without expectation of something in return. Nevertheless, the MSM has said virtually nothing about the $100,000 Iranian payment to Obama’s adviser.

Next, Caddell, talks about what has happened in Libya and the complete breakdown of true journalism. He calls the media’s failure to report on what really happened as well as its coddling of the Obama administration, a “threat to the very future of the country.”

Here’s a video of the highlights of his speech:

House Intel Committee: China’s Largest Phone Equipment Maker Could Imperil US Telecommunications Infrastructure

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U.S. companies should avoid business with Huawei Technologies Co., China’s largest phone-equipment maker, to guard against intellectual-property theft and spying, the U.S. House Intelligence Committee chairman said.

U.S. companies considering purchases from Huawei should “find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property, if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care about the national security of the United States of America,” Representative Mike Rogers told CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” according to a CBS release about an interview set to air tomorrow.

Rogers, a Michigan Republican, and the committee’s top Democrat, Maryland Representative C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, are preparing to issue a report Oct. 8 on their yearlong investigation of Huawei and ZTE Corp. (763), another Chinese phone- equipment maker. The lawmakers have been looking at whether the companies’ expansion in the U.S. market enables Chinese government espionage and imperils the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

“Huawei is a globally trusted and respected company doing business in almost 150 markets with over 500 operator customers, including nationwide carriers across every continent save Antarctica,” William Plummer, a Washington-based spokesman for Huawei, said in an e-mail. “The security and integrity of our products are world proven. Those are the facts today. Those will still be the facts next week, political agendas aside.”

Susan Phalen, a spokeswoman for the committee, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read more from this story HERE.

Vote Fraud Future: Most States Permit Some Form of Internet, Fax and/or Paperless Voting (+video)

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By Andrew Zajac. The Nov. 6 presidential election is the first in which almost half the states will permit Americans in the military or overseas to cast ballots via e-mail or online, raising concerns that voting may be vulnerable to hacking or cyber attacks.

The BGOV Barometer shows that 23 states and the District of Columbia will permit some degree of Internet-enabled voting for armed forces personnel and U.S. citizens living abroad, according to data compiled by the Overseas Vote Foundation. Among contested states in the presidential race, Nevada, Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina will allow e-mailed ballots, raising the possibility that the winner of a state’s electoral votes might depend on a few thousand electronic ballots.

“From a security point of view, it’s the riskiest form of voting ever invented,” said David Jefferson, a director of the Verified Voting Foundation, a Carlsbad, California-based non- profit that works to improve the security of online and electronic balloting.

While the probability of an organized hacker attack may be low, “the potential damage is so large that we have to treat it as a threat to U.S. national security,” said Jefferson, a computer scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, California.

Jefferson called for banning the e-mailing of voted ballots. He said cyber attacks can alter ballots or make them disappear and can compromise voter secrecy. Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s an excellent video by a computer science expert who suggests we may have a “major meltdown” this November due to electronic voting:

Romney Slams Obama’s New Unemployment Numbers

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Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney moved to undercut the latest U.S. jobs report showing unemployment at its lowest rate since President Barack Obama assumed office, saying the true number is much worse.

Romney’s comments to more than 6,000 people in Apopka, Florida, came the day after new Labor Department data showed an unexpected drop in the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent in September, the lowest since Obama took office in January 2009.

“If we calculated, by the way, our unemployment rate in a way that was consistent with the way it was calculated when he came into office, it would be a different number,” Romney said tonight. “You see, if the number of people — if the percentage of the American population who were in the workforce were the same today as the day he was elected, our unemployment rate would be above 11 percent. This is inexcusable.”

Romney appeared to be referring to the workforce- participation rate, which was 63.6 percent last month, compared with 65.7 percent in January 2009. That figure isn’t incorporated into the monthly unemployment number released by the government, and wasn’t before Obama took office.

The penultimate jobs report before the Nov. 6 election took on outsized significance in the presidential race, in which Obama’s economic record and Romney’s claim to have the business experience to do better at creating jobs are central themes.

Read more from this story HERE.

Woman Who Hospital Said Wanted to Die Decides to Stay on Life Support

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A day after a state appeals court said a terminally ill woman is capable of making her own medical decisions, Grace Sungeun Lee has decided to remain on life support.

The court cleared the way on Friday for North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., to remove the breathing tube from the 28-year-old woman – against the wishes of her parents – after doctors and hospital staff insisted that she clearly expressed her desire to be taken off life support. But on Saturday, Lee’s court appointed attorney said she wants to stay on the ventilator.

According to ABC News, Lee, who has brain cancer, signed a health care proxy that allows her father to make medical decisions for her.

Lee, who is paralyzed from the neck down, told the attorney that she wanted to make peace with her family and God.

Read more from this story HERE.

Report: Obama Campaign Trying to Block “Bombshell” Story on Campaign Finance Fraud

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President Obama’s reelection campaign, rattled by his Wednesday night debate performance, could be in for even worse news. According to knowledgeable sources, a national magazine and a national web site are preparing a blockbuster donor scandal story.

Sources told Secrets that the Obama campaign has been trying to block the story. But a key source said it plans to publish the story Friday or, more likely, Monday.

According to the sources, a taxpayer watchdog group conducted a nine-month investigation into presidential and congressional fundraising and has uncovered thousands of cases of credit card solicitations and donations to Obama and Capitol Hill, allegedly from unsecure accounts, and many from overseas. That might be a violation of federal election laws.

The Obama campaign has received hundreds of millions in small dollar donations, many via credit card donations through their website. On Thursday, the campaign announced a record September donor haul of $150 million. Read more from this story HERE.