Tonight’s Foreign Policy Debate: Obama Likely to Play bin Laden Card Because That’s All He Has

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The final presidential debate will focus on foreign policy – a traditional Republican strength that should be an advantage for Obama this time around because of the demise of Osama bin laden last May and the end of the Iraq war.

Indeed, Obama has served notice that he will play the bin Laden card to full advantage, saying in his speech at the Al Smith dinner in New York last week: ‘Spoiler alert: We got bin Laden.’

At the vice-presidential debate in Kentucky, it took Vice President Joe Biden one minute and seven seconds into the first answer of the debate – to a question about Libya – to bring up bin Laden.

Libya, however, presents Obama with some problems.

Although Romney got tangled up in the weeds of whether Obama had referred to the Benghazi attack as a ‘terrorist act,’ the death of the first U.S. ambassador to be murdered in the line of duty since 1979 and the intelligence and security failures that led to it make the president very vulnerable.

In addition, it has become clear that the White House’s initial insistence that the attack was a result of protests about an anti-Islam video made in California were flat wrong – and possibly part of an official cover-up.

Read more from this story HERE.

Electoral College Tie Could Result in President Romney & Vice President Biden

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Though far-fetched, technically it could happen that votes by the House and Senate to break an Electoral College tie would pair the Republican presidential nominee with the Democratic vice president.

For the first time in 135 years, the presidential race might depend upon Congress. With three weeks to go before the election, a 269-269 Electoral College tie is unlikely but possible, experts said. It could result, for example, if Romney wins all the swing states except Ohio, Wisconsin and New Hampshire.

In four U.S. elections, including 2000, the person who finished second in the popular vote won the presidency. The House decided two elections, including one with an Electoral College tie, and a bipartisan commission of House, Senate and Supreme Court members decided a third, according to the House historian.

“In a rather archaic tradition,” says Kyle Kondik, a tie throws the presidential decision to the House — which has a current GOP majority. Each of the 50 state delegations casts a single vote and the candidate who wins the most votes wins the White House, said Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia.

“Republicans appear to be heading to comfortably holding their majority” in the 113th Congress, said Jeff Brauer, a Keystone College political scientist, “which means the advantage would go to Mitt Romney.”

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Gloria Allred’s October Romney Surprise Revealed?

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The online publication Alternet has revealed that Gloria Allred’s potential “October Surprise” may be a woman named Carrel Sheldon in 1983 who was counseled by her young Mormon Bishop, Mitt Romney, to not have an abortion even though her doctor said it was medically necessary:

Sheldon, a mother of four at the time (a fifth child had died as an infant), was then a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), outside of Boston. The LDS leader in Massachusetts at that time, called the “stake president,” was a Harvard-trained physician, Dr. Gordon Williams, and he counseled Sheldon to follow her doctor’s advice to terminate the pregnancy and protect her own life, so that she could continue caring for her four living children.

“Of course, you should have the abortion,” she recalled him saying.

According to an account later written anonymously by Sheldon for the LDS women’s journal,Exponent II, it was after receiving this counsel from her [stake president Doctor] Williams supporting the potentially life-saving procedure that she experienced an uninvited visit in her hospital from her Mormon bishop at the time, 36-year-old Mitt Romney, who adamantly opposed the abortion.

“He regaled me with stories of his sister and her retarded child and what a blessing the child had been to the family,” Sheldon wrote of the incident. “He told me that ‘as your bishop, my concern is with the child.'”

Read more from the story HERE. Ms. Sheldon had the abortion anyway but became disenchanted with LDS. Ultimately, she left Mormonism, claiming that Mitt Romney’s response to her situation convinced her to do so.

Unfortunately for Allred, Obama and their allies, this “revelation” is unlikely to have the desired effect on the outcome of the November election.

Desperate Straights: Obama Working With Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Boost Black Vote

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According to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Obama is speaking to his disgraced former minister, Jeremiah Wright, in an effort to create excitement among black Americans for his reelection. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle this weekend, Brown stated that

the polls show a very tight race. One thing they don’t show, however, is how race is a factor in the election.

By my estimate, you have to build in a three- to five-point slip from the poll numbers for any black candidate on election day. To overcome the slip, you need to pump up the black vote by equal measure.

And that’s not easy, because brothers and sisters aren’t among the top turnout groups.

In 2008, Barack Obama was able to compensate for the slip and then some. You would have thought it was Nelson Mandela coming out of jail. This time it’s not going to be that easy.

If Obama looks as if he’s going black, he could turn off white people. So he’s largely been lying low on the race issues – visibly pushing for the Latino vote, the gay vote, the women’s vote, but not the black vote.

But last weekend, he held a conference call with a collection of black preachers that included his old pastor, Jeremiah Wright. He wanted to talk to them about getting out the vote.

Huffington Post & DailyKos Pundit Disrupts ‘Hating Breibart’ Movie, Gets Booted

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Gateway Pundit blog and Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy site both reported on Saturday how Ryan Clayton, a far left contributor to DailyKos and Huffington Post, was escorted out a Friday night showing of the documentary, Hating Breitbart, in Arlington, Virginia, for his outbursts during the opening minutes of the film. Clayton actually makes an appearance in the movie, where he shouted bogus allegations of cocaine use and soliciting male prostitutes at Breitbart in 2011.

I actually played a part in getting the leftist booted out of the theater. I went to the 10:20 pm showing at the invitation of Jason Jones of Movie to Movement, who is a good friend and a former boss. I sat towards the back of the theater, as many of the seats were filled by the time I entered. When the documentary started, Clayton somehow thought it was appropriate to add his own commentary track and laughed like a hyena at various points. I spoke up and told him to stop talking. But he didn’t stop.

After putting up with his antics for about 10 to 15 minutes, I got fed up, and quickly made my way out of the theater to track down the management of the theater complex. I discovered that a young Hispanic woman, who also had enough of Clayton’s outbursts, had already left to do the same thing, and the two of us waited for the managers to come up to where we were.

When I reentered the darkened theater, instead of going back to where I had been sitting, I decided to sit in an empty seat near the front and next to the aisle. The managers came in not long after I did, and removed Clayton. As he was leaving, he walked right past where I was sitting and stopped in front of me, thus blocking my view. I told him to get lost, but he kept up his asinine behavior, pretended to have trouble hearing me, and moved closer to me. I repeatedly told him to get out of my face, and after a moment, he finally left.

After his departure, I moved to the back of the theater. But at some point, Clayton actually returned, having somehow convinced the managers to let him back in. This time, he was with a second person, and for the reminder of the movie, he was largely quiet. When the credits started rollings, most of the viewers, who had paid $12 to see the documentary and not Clayton’s clown act, left. But the DailyKos writer added insult to injury by conducting mock interviews of the patrons, before being booted completely from the premises by a security guard.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ex-President Bush Says He’s Skeptical of Romney’s Chances of Winning

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Former president George W. Bush is keeping up with the presidential race, and isn’t crazy about what he sees from Republican candidate Mitt Romney, says a new report.

In a long profile of brother Jeb Bush, New York magazine reports that George W. “gets a regular drip feed of political news from (former aide) Karl Rove and others — he’s been critical of Romney’s campaign and skeptical of his chances.”

There is no elaboration.

The former president — who is an issue in the campaign; President Obama often cites the bad economy and two wars he inherited from Bush — is also “living as invisibly as possible,” reports Joe Hagan in New York magazine.

In addition to golf and Texas Rangers baseball games, Bush also has a new hobby, the article says: Painting, “making portraits of dogs and arid Texas landscapes. ‘I find it stunning that he has the patience to sit and take instruction and paint,’ says a former aide.”

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.

Media Elite Now Blasting President: Obama’s Campaign “Snarky, Belittling”

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Winners act like winners. Losers act like losers. And according to members of the same media elite who have spent months protecting him, Barack Obama is now looking like a loser in the closing days of his reelection campaign. This morning, a few members of the elite “Gang of 500,” including Time’s Mark Halperin, The National Journal’s Ron Fournier, ABC’s Terry Moran, and Politico’s Roger Simon, publicly voiced their disapproval of a campaign they describe as “belittling,” “not confident,” “peevish” and worse.

In 1984, President Reagan ran on “Morning In America.” In 1996, President Clinton ran on a “Bridge to the 21st Century.” In the final days of successful reelection campaigns, both Reagan and Clinton offered a unifying message meant to bring the country together. Their closing arguments were uplifting, forward-looking, and optimistic.

Flash-forward to 2012 and all we’ve seen from the man who promised us hope, change, and a new kind of politics is a nakedly cynical divide and conquer crusade that’s only gotten worse in its closing days. While Romney focuses his closing argument on the future, his agenda, and the realities of governing, our president is literally going all in on Big Bird, contraception, Binder-gate, “Romnesia,” and aids flanking him at rallies holding signs that read: “Women’s Health Security.”

This smallness and naked desperation is not only apparent, it’s familiar. I don’t mean to pick at an old scab, but in the closing days of the ’08 campaign, we saw the same kind of behavior from John McCain. He knew he was losing and in a desperate bid to gain traction, his message became erratic (suspending the campaign) and small (Joe the Plumber).

Read more from this story HERE.

What Romney Must Do to Win on Monday

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Photo Credit: Cain & Todd BensonDuring Tuesday’s second presidential debate, we held a live focus group with the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) on my nationally-syndicated radio program. After the debate was over, the business owners expressed disappointment in both candidates’ performance. They were disappointed that President Obama again disappointed them with his answers, and they were disappointed that Mitt Romney didn’t excite them with his.

“(Romney) missed a chance to show us he truly knows why we’re in the situation we’re in and how we can get out of it,” they told me. When I pressed them on what exactly they meant by that, I realized that these small business owners were saying Obama hasn’t just failed because of his amateurish leadership, but also because his philosophy itself is a failure no matter how capably he attempts to implement it.

This is the argument they want the Republican presidential nominee to make.

Romney’s exhaustive itemization of Obama’s failures is unfortunately correct, but the mistake he keeps making is leaving it up to the American people to then draw the right conclusion based on that information. Romney needs to go for the close, and explain exactly why Obama has failed. Better yet, Romney needs to point out that no matter how well intentioned the American people may feel Obama is, his policies can’t work—which is why they have never worked anywhere they’ve ever been tried in the real world.

Of course, a president who was a subsidized college student, then a subsidized college professor, then a community organizer looking for more subsidies, then a state legislator who became a U.S. Senator who became a president handing out even more subsidies, can’t understand this because he’s never been in the real world.

Read more from this story HERE.

How Many Times Did Obama Say “Thank you” During the 2nd Debate?

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There’s been lots of huffing and puffing about how rough and tumble the debate was Tuesday night. But what if we scored the second Presidential debate using a simple metric of civility: who said “thanks” the most?

Here’s how it would turn out:

Romney: 14

Crowley: 11

Obama: Zero

According to the official transcript of the Commission on Presidential Debates, that’s how many times the two candidates and debate moderator Candy Crowley said either “thank you” or “thanks.”

The glaring contrast between President Obama and Mr. Romney was evident with the first question. It was directed at Governor Romney and before he answered the question he took a portion of his time to thank, well, everyone:

ROMNEY: Thank you, Jeremy. I appreciate your — your question, and thank you for being here this evening and to all of those from Nassau County that have come, thank you for your time. Thank you to Hofstra University and to Candy Crowley for organizing and leading this — this event.

Thank you, Mr. President, also for being part of this — this debate.

President Obama, on the other hand, never once uttered a “thank you” to anyone. Check for yourself here.

Read more from this story HERE.