Obama Knew Libya Killing was a Terrorist Attack 2 Hours After It Occurred

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Officials at the White House and State Department were advised two hours after attackers assaulted the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit for the attack, official emails show.

The emails, obtained by Reuters from government sources not connected with U.S. spy agencies or the State Department and who requested anonymity, specifically mention that the Libyan group called Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility for the attacks.

The brief emails also show how U.S. diplomats described the attack, even as it was still under way, to Washington.

Administration spokesmen, including White House spokesman Jay Carney, citing an unclassified assessment prepared by the CIA, maintained for days that the attacks likely were a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim film.

Read more from this story HERE.

United Nations-Affiliated Election Monitors Deploying Across US for November Election

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United Nations-affiliated election monitors from Europe and central Asia will be at polling places around the U.S. looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups, a concern raised by civil rights groups during a meeting this week. The intervention has drawn criticism from a prominent conservative-leaning group combating election fraud.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations partner on democratization and human rights projects, will deploy 44 observers around the county on Election Day to monitor an array of activities, including potential disputes at polling places.

Liberal-leaning civil rights groups met with representatives from the OSCE this week to raise their fears about what they say are systematic efforts to suppress minority voters likely to vote for President Obama.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP and the ACLU, among other groups, warned this month in a letter to Daan Everts, a senior official with OSCE, of “a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans — particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities.”

The request for foreign monitoring of election sites drew a strong rebuke from Catherine Engelbrecht, founder and president of True the Vote, a conservative-leaning group seeking to crack down on election fraud.

Read more from this story HERE.

NY Times: Voter Registration Databases Can Easily Be Hacked

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Computer security experts have identified vulnerabilities in the voter registration databases in two states, raising concerns about the ability of hackers and others to disenfranchise voters.

In the last five years, Maryland and Washington State have set up voter registration systems that make it easy for people to register to vote and update their address information online. The problem is that in both states, all the information required from voters to log in to the system is publicly available.

It took The New York Times less than three minutes to track down the information online needed to update the registrations of several prominent executives in Washington State. Complete voter lists, which include a name, birth date, addresses and party affiliation, can be easily bought — and are, right now, in the hands of thousands of campaign volunteers.

Computer security experts and voting rights activists argue that a hacker could use that information to, say, change a person’s address online to ensure that the voter never receives a ballot in Washington, where voting is now done entirely by mail. In Maryland, hackers could ensure that a voter is not listed on the precinct register at a designated polling station. In that case, the voter would be redirected to another precinct, or asked to fill out a provisional ballot. In both cases, the person would not be able to vote in local, or possibly, Congressional races.

But the real concern, critics say, is that large numbers of voters from one political party, or demographic, could have their information changed by automated computer programs. A program that could change tens of thousands of voter records at once, they say, would require only a dozen lines of code.

Read more from this article 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:

$4 Gas: Get Used to It

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President Obama may have a lot more to worry about than bombing the debate this week. Traders are starting to get particularly bullish over gasoline prices – and that is bad news for the average driver, who may also be looking to vent his spleen at the voting booth.

Reports of gas shortages along the high-demand west and east coasts may be fleeting – although deeply concerning – but they highlight a problem that’s expected to persist in the U.S.: our refineries are getting old. Given that a new refinery has not been built since 1976, commodities desks on Wall Street are bracing for more refinery outages and fires just as the nation needs to gear up for the busy winter heating season.

What does that mean? Probably more weeks where we’ll see U.S. crude oil inventories hovering above the upper limit of the average range for this time of year, yet gasoline inventories tunneling into the lower half of their average range, as the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported Wednesday.

Translated in dollars and cents, retail gas prices likely won’t be moving off the $4 needle anytime soon. In fact, some gasoline buyers think this may even usher in a run to $5 a gallon (especially out west where gas stations are shutting down because they cannot buy gas at price levels low enough to turn a profit).

The firmness in gasoline also is giving oil prices a boost, the knock-on effects of which cannot be understated.

Pennsylvania Judge Approves New Voter ID Law – but Blocks it From Going Into Effect Until After Election (+video)

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By Angela Couloumbis. Pennsylvania voters who go to the polls without photo identification will be able to vote in next month’s presidential election after all.

They won’t even have to fill out provisional ballots.

So ruled a Commonwealth Court judge Tuesday in the closely-watched legal battle over Pennsylvania’s controversial voter ID law. Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr. upheld the law – but blocked it from taking full effect until after the Nov. 6 election.

In essence, the rules remain as they were during the law’s so-called “soft roll-out” in the April primary: voters will be asked for the photo ID required by the new law, but if they don’t have it, they can still vote.

Whether Simpson’s ruling is the last word was not yet clear. Corbett administration officials said Tuesday through spokesmen that they had not yet decided whether to mount an appeal. Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s a short clip of the Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai saying that the Voter ID law was going to allow Romney to win his state (he was roundly criticized for this comment):

Michigan Asks Voters if They’re Legal; ACLU Freaks Out (+video)

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By John Hayward. The American Civil Liberties Union teamed up with the SEIU and a few other interested groups to sue the Michigan Secretary of State, Ruth Johnson, over her addition of a check box to ballot applications, asking voters to confirm they are U.S. citizens who legally have the right to vote. ACLU’s Michigan executive director, Kary Moss, described this as a “cynical voter suppression tactic.”

No, this is not a joke or satire. The ACLU actually thinks a check box asking voters to confirm that they’re legally entitled to vote constitutes “suppression.” The mad scramble to protect vote fraud operations had degenerated into this level of absolute lunacy. Devoid of anything approaching a logical argument, vote fraud defenders are down to describing a simple “Yes or No” question on ballot applications as a “roadblock” that will “confuse” and “intimidate” minority voters.

There is an entirely separate issue here about whether or not the Secretary of State had the authority to make this change on her own. A bill requiring voters to check off a citizenship box was vetoed this summery by Governor Rick Snyder (who, like Johnson, is a Republican.) Moss of the ACLU describes this in hyperbolic terms by saying Johnson has “thumbed her nose at the electorate and flouted the very laws she was elected to uphold.”

Johnson and her staff seem confident that she does have “the power to prescribe ballot forms.” At the very least, it sounds like a debatable point of order, but of course it’s buried under layers of hysterical shrieking about “voter suppression,” which is pitched more for the ears of Michigan voters than Michigan judges.

What got this ball rolling was a dramatic performance by a voter named Rich Robinson, who encountered the awful “Are you a U.S. Citizen?” checkbox at the polls during the August primaries. He refused to answer the question, even though he very obviously understood it, and was clearly a U.S. citizen. His ballot was denied because he wouldn’t answer the question, so he commenced howling about “disenfranchisement.” In a completely unrelated coincidence, Robinson just happens to be the Executive Director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, which bills itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit coalition of organizations and individuals concerned about the influence of money in politics and the need for campaign finance reform in Michigan.” Read more from this story HERE.

Read this story on the illegal alien voter fraud in Alaska and then watch this documentary on the massive illegal alien voter fraud discovered in Florida:

GOP to Pass ‘No More Solyndras Act’ when Congress returns

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House Republicans will pass a bill next week that suspends new loans for clean-energy companies under the Department of Energy program that loaned nearly $530 million Solyndra, the failed solar panel producer that Republicans have targeted as an example of government waste.

Under the “No More Solyndras Act,” H.R. 6213, any similar applications for government loans made in 2012 could not be accepted, and any applications submitted before 2012 could only be approved after a Treasury Department review of the proposed financial terms of the loan.

In addition, any loans approved would have to be reported in full detail within 60 days. Any violation of the bill would subject related officials to penalties, including a fine of at least $10,000 and up to $50,000.

The bill finds that the Obama administration pursued a “green jobs” agenda with the use of $90 billion in program funding in the 2009 stimulus bill, in addition to $47 billion in loan guarantees from various appropriations bills that can be used under the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

The stimulus bill also created a new loan program for commercial technology, and Solyndra was one of several companies that benefited from this new program. Solyndra and two other recipients of the same program have since declared bankruptcy.

Read more from this story HERE.

Democrat Federal Judge Rules In Favor of Obama’s Demand to Have More Hours to Bus In Democrat Voters

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United States District Court judge Peter Economus, a registered Democrat appointed by President Clinton, ruled in favor of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign today, instructing Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted to allow early in-person voting the weekend before the November election.

Ohio’s early in-person absentee voting hours begin in less than a month, and all registered voters in Ohio will be mailed absentee ballot applications. The federal court ruling will allow counties to hold weekend in-person voting hours, but only on the weekend immediately prior to Election Day.

Absent Economus’s ruling, the early voting schedule was set to allow military voters to cast early ballots through the day before the election, while non-military voters would be able to cast early ballots until 6:00 PM on Friday, November 2.

“‘In-person early voting’ is a voting term that had included the right to vote in person through the Monday before Election Day, and, now, thousands of voters who would have voted during those three days will not be able to exercise their right to cast a vote in person,” Economus wrote in his decision.

In July, Obama for America, the Ohio Democratic Party, and the Democratic National Committee sued Husted and Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine – who are both Republicans – demanding that all Ohioans have the same weekend voting privileges as military voters. Early in-person voting was a key component of Obama’s 2008 election strategy.

Read more from this story HERE.

30,000 Dead North Carolinians Registered to Vote

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Photo credit: Mr. T in DC

A Raleigh-based group devoted to reducing the potential for voter fraud presented the N.C. Board of Elections on Friday with a list of nearly 30,000 names of dead people statewide who are still registered to vote.

The Voter Integrity Project compiled the list after obtaining death records from the state Department of Public Health from 2002 to March 31 and comparing them to the voter rolls.

“Mainly, what we’re concerned about is the potential [for fraud],” said project director Jay DeLancy. “Since there is no voter ID law in North Carolina, anybody can walk in and claim to be anyone else.”

DeLancy said his group has found evidence to suggest voter fraud in these numbers, but will not quantify how much until he is able to do more analysis. Most cases of what look like a dead person voting are likely just administrative errors, such as a son named Junior voting in his father’s name instead of his own.

The rolls of registered voters are updated every month when the state Department of Health and Human Services gives a list of all death certificates received that month to the state Board of Elections.

Read more from this story HERE.