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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.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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.

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.”

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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.

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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.

Biden is wrong: The Romney/Ryan ticket is Kennedy-esque

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During last week’s vice-presidential debate, Vice President Joe Biden inadvertently raised an interesting question when he dismissed comparisons between Paul Ryan and John F. Kennedy: Which presidential ticket is demonstrating more political courage?

Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy’s 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, honored eight U.S. senators who risked their political careers by putting principle above politics. Kennedy wrote in Profiles that courage is “the most admirable of human virtues.” His brother Robert added in a forward to a later edition that President Kennedy was “fond of quoting Dante, who wrote, ‘the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.’”

The Obama-Biden ticket is maintaining its neutrality in the face of a great moral crisis that will have a profoundly negative impact on Americans for decades to come if not faced squarely and very soon. President Obama and his vice president continue to act as if the federal government has not run trillion-dollar-plus deficits the past four years. “We just need to get the wealthy to pay their fair share and along with war savings everything will be okay.”

Supposed war savings can be dismissed out of hand as a means of ending the massive deficits of the last four years. The war in Iraq is over (and has been), and the nation still had a $1.1 trillion deficit in FY 2012. The war in Afghanistan is winding down, but it costs a relatively modest $120 billion per year.

Paul Ryan rightly pointed out during the vice-presidential debate that there are not enough rich people and small businesses to pay for the current $3.8 trillion federal spending level (up $700 billion since Bush left office) much less Obama’s proposed “investments.” Romney noted at this week’s debate that the top five percent of taxpayers already contribute nearly 60 percent of all federal income tax revenue (and the top 10 percent of taxpayers pay higher taxes than their peers in most other industrialized nations). So Obama’s fair-share argument does not hold water. Raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to levels the president has proposed (from 35% to 39.6%) may raise an additional $50 billion and the new Obamacare taxes on investment income may raise a few billion more, but not if raising taxes on job creators — and the businesses they own and invest in — causes the overall economy to slow even more.

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.

Video: NBC News Now Using Halloween Mask Sales to Predict Obama Win

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Now that all of the polling nationwide is showing Republican Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney in the lead, NBC has turned to the scientific “Halloween mask sales” statistic to predict a President Barrack Obama reelection. Seriously.

The only problem is, the NBC Today Show relied on statistics that are at least three weeks old.

Hear the NBC discussion on this “scientific” approach to predicting November’s victor:

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.

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Report: Obama Ally Gloria Allred Preparing Damaging “Romney Revelation”?

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Republicans are bracing themselves for Gloria Allred to make a potentially damaging revelation about Mitt Romney, just weeks before the election.

The pro-President Obama lawyer is rumoured to be preparing for her so-called ‘October surprise’ in which she will strike the Republican presidential hopeful’s chances by unearthing some sort of secret or scandal.

Ms Allred has refused to comment on the rumours, which first surfaced in a tweet by the Drudge Report’s Matt Drudge on Thursday.

‘Here she comes. Hearing Gloria Allred out there again, about to make a move. After all, it’s her time of the campaign. Team O at the ready!!’ Mr Drudge wrote on Twitter.

According to RadarOnline.com, Ms Allred launched a last minute strike on GOP Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor of California by representing a disgruntled former housekeeper.

Read more from this story HERE.