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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Conservatives’ Opening Salvo: Senator Vitter Vows to Block Potential Romney EPA Chief

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photo credit: RETECH Conference and ExhibitionIf Mitt Romney wins the election on Tuesday, he can expect another battle to begin almost immediately: The fight to block his moderate allies from key administration positions.

Conservatives are quietly making preparations to begin lobbying for these posts to be filled by reliable conservatives. Of course, this may also entail opposing some of Romney’s first choices — a fight whose opening salvo has already begun.

Sen. David Vitter is already sending signals he would attempt to block James Connaughton – Romney’s likely choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (This is significant; Vitter is in line to become ranking member in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.)

According to The Hill, Vitter cited “emissions limits, potential restriction of offshore drilling and green energy funding — reflect an increasingly uniform GOP energy platform that Romney also has embraced,” as concerns about Connaughton.

Vitter also said “he could not support Connaughton’s previous backing for cap-and-trade rules for various types of emissions.”

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