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Pastor Calls Out Coward Churches for Avoiding “Hot Button” Issues

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Pastor Shane Idleman is all too aware of the moral decline he sees in the United States and he’s speaking out about it. But what irritates him is the cowardice he finds in many churches when it comes to tackling “hot button” issues.

“I’m sick and tired of the passive, lukewarm, coward church doing nothing and saying nothing because it offends people. Yeah, it’s a hot button, absolutely. But if the truth doesn’t come from here (church), where does it come from?” he posed during his Sunday sermon at Westside Christian Fellowship in Lancaster, Calif.

Idleman wasn’t afraid to be blunt as he joined hundreds of other pastors throughout the country in preaching on politics just ahead of the November presidential election as part of Pulpit Freedom Sunday.

“If I were to be honest, there’s cowards in our pulpits in our nation,” he stated. “I’m going to come up here and preach about being nice to your neighbor … as limbs are being pulled from uteruses? Vacuumed out because you don’t want it (the baby)? Let’s support that, let’s fund that. It’s ridiculous!”

During his hour-long sermon, Idleman didn’t specifically speak about the presidential candidates – President Barack Obama and GOP candidate Mitt Romney – and their positions, other than to say that one calls himself a Christian when he’s “clearly not” and the other is not a Christian “because he’s in a cult.” Obama is a self-professed Christian while Romney is a Mormon.

Read more from this story HERE.

A View from the Left: Did Obama Just Throw the Entire Election Away?

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The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 – 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 – 45 lead. That’s a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama’s performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

Romney’s favorables are above Obama’s now. Yes, you read that right. Romney’s favorables are higher than Obama’s right now. That gender gap that was Obama’s firewall? Over in one night:

Currently, women are evenly divided (47% Obama, 47% Romney). Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points (56% to 38%) among women likely voters.

Seriously: has that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign? Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That’s terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion. He still has some personal advantages over Romney – even though they are all much diminished. Obama still has an edge on Medicare, scores much higher on relating to ordinary people, is ahead on foreign policy, and on being moderate, consistent and honest (only 14 percent of swing voters believe Romney is honest). But on the core issues of the economy and the deficit, Romney is now kicking the president’s a**:

By a 37% to 24% margin, more swing voters say Romney would improve the job situation. Swing voters favor Romney on the deficit by a two-to-one (41% vs. 20%) margin…. Romney has gained ground on several of these measures since earlier in the campaign. Most notably, Obama and Romney now run even (44% each) in terms of which candidate is the stronger leader. Obama held a 13-point advantage on this a month ago. And Obama’s 14-point edge as the more honest and truthful candidate has narrowed to just five points. In June, Obama held a 17-point lead as the candidate voters thought was more willing to work with leaders from the other party. Today, the candidates run about even on this (45% say Obama, 42% Romney).

Read more from this story HERE.

Gallup: Romney’s Win Over Obama in Last Week’s Debate Was Unprecedented, Now Leading in Polls

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Gallup: Romney’s Win Over Obama in Last Week’s Debate Was Unprecedented

By Jeffrey M. Jones. An Oct. 4-5 Gallup poll finds roughly two in three Americans reporting that they watched the Oct. 3 debate, similar to what Gallup measured for each of the three 2008 presidential debates. Those who viewed the debate overwhelmingly believe Romney did a better job than Obama, 72% to 20%. Republicans were nearly unanimous in judging Romney the winner. But even Democrats rated Romney as doing a better job than Obama, 49% to 39%.

These assessments are based on interviewing conducted Thursday and Friday after the Wednesday night debate, and may reflect the impact of news stories and media commentary — which mostly declared Romney as the debate winner — as well as personal reactions to the debates as they unfolded.

Gallup has assessed opinion on who did better in most past presidential debates; some of these polls were conducted the night of the debate with pre-recruited samples of debate watchers immediately after it concluded, and some were conducted with more general samples of Americans in the days that followed the debate. Across all of the various debate-reaction polls Gallup has conducted, Romney’s 52-point win is the largest Gallup has measured. The prior largest margin was 42 points for Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 town hall debate.

Romney’s debate performance is also notable from the standpoint that U.S. debate watchers judged Obama the winner of all three 2008 debates with John McCain. Read more from this story HERE.

Romney Now Leads Obama by Four Points in National Polling

By Steven Ertelt. A new CNN poll conducted by the Pew Research Center finds Mitt Romney now enjoys a four percentage point lead among likely voters, topping pro-abortion President Barack Obama 49-45 percent.

The debate played a huge roll in providing the bounce for Romney in the Pew poll, where he trailed during the month of September.

“Mitt Romney no longer trails Barack Obama in the Pew Research Center’s presidential election polling. By about three-to-one, voters say Romney did a better job than Obama in the Oct. 3 debate, and the Republican is now better regarded on most personal dimensions and on most issues than he was in September. Romney is seen as the candidate who has new ideas and is viewed as better able than Obama to improve the jobs situation and reduce the budget deficit,” Pew reported. Read more from this story HERE.

Kid Rock Endorses Romney-Ryan, Speaks at Campaign Event

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Rep. Paul Ryan had a rock star introduction at a campaign rally in front of thousands this evening when Michigan native and Mitt Romney supporter musician Kid Rock addressed the crowd before the GOP vice presidential nominee.

Rock, whose real name is Robert Ritchie, struck a tone of togetherness during his brief speech, saying, “I really believe strongly that it’s OK to disagree on politics and the direction of our country without hating one another.”

Rock, 41, said it can be hard being a Republican in the entertainment industry and he knows his position “may alienate a few fans.”

“I mean it’s no secret that I am embedded in an industry that leans very left and I’ve listened to all the arguments and visions for our country. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a recap or stand up here and preach politics like some of my friends in Hollywood,” Kid Rock, dressed in his signature fedora hat, told the audience at Oakland University here.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama “Bombshell” Story Revealed: Foreign Donations Being Solicited For President’s Reelection

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President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has been soliciting foreigners for donations, an explosive report from the conservative Government Accountability Institute (GAI) shows.

Those foreign donors are allegedly visiting the Obama campaign’s donation solicitation Web pages through a social media website the campaign controls, and through an outside website that serves mostly Internet users from outside the United States.

About 20 percent of visitors to the “my.barackobama.com” social media website “originated from foreign locations,” the report found. That Web address is owned and controlled by the Obama re-election campaign.

“At no point during the [website’s] subscription process is a visitor asked whether he or she can legally donate to a U.S. election,” GAI notes.

“Once a visitor signs up, he or she immediately begins receiving solicitations for donations. In fact, numerous foreign nationals report receiving solicitation letters and thank you emails from the campaign for their support. Some of these emails have been reposted on blog sites to encourage friends to click on the donate link or get their names on the email list.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Videos: New, “Brilliant” Anti-Obama Ads Launched

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Three new anti-Obama ads have launched over the last several days.

Characterized by some as “brilliant,” the first ad below was produced by Americans for Prosperity and does not include a spoken word, but its impact cannot be denied:

The next ad was developed by the Romney campaign and is targeted toward women who voted for Obama in 2008 but are now considering Romney because they are concerned about their children’s futures:

This final ad was produced using highlights from last week’s Presidential Debate:

Unemployment Rate: Happy Days Are Not Here Again

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By The Wall Street Journal. The jobless rate fell in September to 7.8% from 8.1%, though the economy created only 114,000 new jobs, and some of our conservative friends smell a bureaucratic rat so close to Election Day. We doubt the Labor gnomes are manipulating the numbers, and in any case chasing conspiracies detracts from the real news, which is that the job market still stinks.

Democrats are celebrating the decline in the jobless rate, which only shows how their standards have changed since President Obama entered the White House. In 2004, they were lambasting George W. Bush for a September jobless rate that was 5.4%. Only last month they were begging the Federal Reserve to print more money indefinitely because the job market was so weak. Now they say happy days are almost here again.

The reality is that more than three years into this weakest of economic recoveries, 12.1 million Americans are still out of work—nearly 23 million by the broader definition that includes those who have stopped looking or can’t find full time work—and the labor participation rate is still down to 1981 levels at 63.6%. Hooray!

Of the 114,000 new jobs, 104,000 were in the private economy, and all of the 86,000 in upward revisions for July and August came in government jobs. Job growth for 2012 has averaged 146,000 a month, which is down from 153,000 in 2011.

Manufacturing employment fell again (down 38,000 in the last two months) further dampening one of the few bright spots in this recovery. A still abysmal 40.1% of the unemployed in America have been jobless for six months or more. Such a job market is anemic by any historic measure for this stage in an expansion and reflects continuing slow GDP growth in the 1%-2% range. Read more from this story HERE.

Recommended Story: Although Allen West likely does not disagree with the overall jobs assessment above, he specifically alleged this past weekend that Obama is manipulating and covering up the jobs data.

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.

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:

Video: A View from Overseas – Here’s What the Taiwanese Thought of the Debate

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American politics are followed closely overseas, especially in countries with close relationships to the U.S.

Taiwan is no exception. In this animated clip, the Taiwanese show Obama taking a real beating. Unlike most US commentators, the creators of the video point out that Obama received more time than Romney and, contrary to a recent Democratic political ad, suggest that Obama was more of a bully to the moderator than his opponent.

Like other animations from Taiwan, this video is not designed for kids. There’s a pretty graphic portrayal of a Romney attack on Sesame Street’s Big Bird – due to his proposed cuts to PBS. Additionally, both candidates engage in animated combat, similar to the portrayal of Romney and his GOP competitors in the Moral Kombat video posted several days ago.

In short, the Taiwanese who created this video considered Romney the overwhelming victor in the first 2012 Presidential Debate: