Is This the Hand of God Again?

We don’t know yet what the outcome of next Tuesday’s election will be, but given the debates, the Benghazi fiasco and Hurricane Sandy, things look good for Romney.

This all makes me wonder: from Washington crossing the Delaware and defeating the British at Trenton … to the Battle of Midway when vastly outnumbered Americans trounced the Japanese and ended their naval superiority, so many times in our nation’s history it has seemed like the Hand of God has reached down and favored our country.

Is this happening again? Libya has revealed for all to see that Obama is a childish narcissist and extreme ideologue. Nothing else explains his priorities, his actions and his non-actions while Ambassador Stevens was under attack. And now the lies about what happened and why are disintegrating along with Obama’s reputation among independents.

Hurricane Sandy will certainly depress the Obama vote from New York and New Jersey up through New England, and Christopher Stevens may not have died entirely in vain.

I Can't Say It Any Better

Thank You for Re-Electing Obama

By Eileen F. Toplansky October 24, 2012 American Thinker

As a soldier, I want to thank you for ensuring that I will have less than adequate protection in a field of military action now that the president has reduced military expenditures. In fact, "Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group, released a study that projected the sector would lose in the neighborhood of 350,000 direct and supplier jobs under [Obama's] automatic cuts." That will certainly help the already burgeoning unemployment rate.

As a senior, I want to thank you for ensuring that as I age, I will have some faceless bureaucrat tell me that I cannot have cataract surgery or hip surgery. The Independent Payment Advisory Board, a board of 15 unelected officials, now has the power to cut Medicare spending without congressional approval. This will result in restrictions to my access to providers, treatments, and services. Thus, my friends and I will experience what our counterparts in Great Britain are facing.

As a hospital director, I want to thank you for ensuring that medical devices and testing equipment that used to be the bulwark of medical care in the U.S. will now be curtailed.

As a Medicare beneficiary, I want to thank you for voting in a man who has determined that as of October 2012, anyone "returning to the hospital within 30 days of discharge will be denied treatment because the hospitals will be denied payment. Furthermore, low income patients will be particularly hard hit with this new regulation.

As an employee of the medical device industry, I want to thank you for reducing my job since next year the industry will see a 2.3-percent excise tax applied to medical devices and as a result will pay for this tax by eliminating my job and passing the increased costs on to the consumer.

As a Catholic, I want to especially thank you for your total lack of empathy as it concerns my religious conscience since my religious charity, hospital, and schools will be forced to pay for contraceptives including abortion-inducing drugs. For that matter, as a person of conscience with no particular religious affiliation, I want to thank you for the draconian trampling of individual conscience which used to be a hallmark of American exceptionalism.

As a citizen, I am delighted by the new 21 additional taxes that I will be mandated to pay as a result of the ObamaCare law.

As an illegal, I am thankful that I will now be eligible for free health care services since Obama pushed opened the door for illegals to become citizens -- yet another example of "executive overreach" on an issue that should have included congressional representation.

As a Jew, I want to thank you for making me uneasy about your support for the only democratic country in the Middle East. I was impressed by Obama's disdain for the prime minister of Israel.

As a jihadist, I really want to thank you for your $1.5-billion support for the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that vows to destroy Israel, exterminate all Jews, and infiltrate the United States and conquer her from within.

As a Coptic Christian, I want to thank you for never speaking out as I and thousands of other Coptic Christians are being murdered in the streets of Egypt. Odd that Obama does not speak up for those Nigerian blacks being slaughtered, either.

As a woman, I want to thank you for your specious claim to care for us, knowing all the while that you support people who support sharia law, that most misogynistic law that countenances honor killing, and second-class citizenship for women.

As a black man, I want to thank you for your low view of me as you continue to pander to and expect less from me. I am capable of doing well academically and socially and do not need special dispensations to succeed. Furthermore, ObamaCare will penalize marriage just when the black community needs to strengthen the family structure, not weaken it.

As a Hispanic man, I want to thank you for continually offending me as you consider that I am incapable of learning English and bettering myself. Instead, by supporting President Obama, you give strength to groups like La Raza who wish to destroy American initiative, the very opportunity for which I came to this country. Gracias! This is covert racism instead of overt racism.

As a citizen, I wish to thank you because by voting Obama in for a second term, you are giving your blessing to a justice system that is riddled with deceit and injustice. Your vote will maintain Eric Holder, the only attorney general to be found in contempt of Congress. He is the man who ignored the very public voter intimidation by the Black Panthers in 2008.

As a mechanic with Boeing in South Carolina, I want to thank you for the heavy-handed tactics that will continue as Obama tells companies where they may set up shop. That surely will decrease the competitive spirit and will remind us that we no longer have the freedom to build businesses wherever we choose.

As a farmer, I especially want to thank you for re-electing a man who enables the EPA to engage in a water war with farmers since 2009, basically putting me out of business.

As an environmentally concerned citizen, I want to thank you for the ongoing money pits that have raided my pocketbook but have only resulted in one failed "green" economy job after another. I know that I will never see a dime of the money that Obama took from my taxes and I truly appreciate it.

As a resident of Arizona, I particularly want to express my gratitude for voting in a man who would have the United Nations -- a group of empathetic, caring nations if ever there were one -- tell me that I must adhere to their notion of rights for mankind. Mr. Obama has nothing but contempt for my state, which is only trying to abide by federal immigration laws.

As a terrorist, I want to thank you for giving President Obama yet another pass as he does nothing about securing the southern border. Why, just the other day, my jihadist brothers, posing as Mexicans, were able to pass through the porous border and set up shop in America.

As a diplomat, I want to thank you, because now I will feel even more insecure when I write to Obama asking for more military reinforcements as threats to my life and other diplomats' lives increase. It will be comforting to know that our messages will be ignored and that specious reasons will be offered when any one of us is sodomized and murdered.

As a beleaguered member of the alternative media, I want to thank you because once Obama has nothing to fear during his second term, he will surely clamp down on the freedom of the press -- you remember that nasty little item that is part of the First Amendment. How do I know this -- this White House never hesitates to browbeat and actually call news media to tell them to cut a story that the White House sees as unfavorable1.

As an intelligence officer, I want to thank you for re-electing a man who has no compunction to leak top security information that puts me and my colleagues at risk. More importantly, it gives the enemy all the ammunition it needs to see a weakened America and act accordingly.

As a Pole, I want to thank you for voting, because I see my birthplace yet again made vulnerable. After all, one of the first things Obama did was eliminate the missile defense system, and Obama's open-microphone reassurance to Putin's henchman did little to quell my fears.

As a student, I want to thank you for Obama's re-election because he is a role model of elegance and eloquence. He goes on the Pimp with the Limp show and hosts Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z, whose lyrics would make my mama cringe. If I used them, I would have my mouth washed out with soap. But hey, man, if the prez can give his blessin', it must be good, right?

As a single woman, I want to thank you for giving Obama a second term, since he seeks to curtail my right to bear arms. That pesky Second Amendment really irks this man.

As a venture capitalist, I want to express my gratitude, since I am totally incapable of making anything on my own. I don't take the financial risks; I don't gamble everything on an idea that might work or might not; I don't tinker in my garage to invent the next electronic gizmo that might prove helpful. Nah, I am a nobody in this administration, which seeks to control my every move and demean my very existence.

As a college graduate, I want to thank you for ensuring that I will only have part-time work, if that, because of Obama's attack on the economy. Does he really think that businesses are not going to adapt to his draconian edicts? They will simply not hire me -- or if they do, it will be part-time. So here I am, in the prime of my earning years, and I have already fallen behind.

As a youngster, I want to thank you for giving Obama a second term so that I will be saddled with even more than the $17 trillion of debt I have already sustained through no fault of my own. I certainly don't want to have the good life that my parents worked so hard to achieve. I don't want to buy my own house or take vacations.

As a plumber, I want to thank you for vindicating Joe, who early on said that Obama's vision was a socialist one.

As an oil man, I want to thank you for re-electing a man who has put a moratorium on oil production. This will surely make us energy-dependent on other countries, even though we have enough oil for a hundred years if we could only drill.

There is so much to be grateful for when you re-elect Obama. To those who cannot see through the unending prevarications and outright lies, I do not understand your denial of the evidence that is there for all to see. To those who innocently believe that Obama can be the messiah, I say you have been hoodwinked.

If you think that you will be safe from the intrusions and totalitarian disposition of this administration, think again. Repeatedly, there have been warnings, and it behooves you to take them seriously. This is the precipice, and there will be no turning back if Barack Hussein Obama gets a second term.

Schieffer Flubs Non-Response on Key Question

Ahmadinejad didn’t miss it. Neither did Syria’s Assad nor did Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt. Jihadist Muslims in Gaza, Bali and Libya didn’t miss it either when Bob Schieffer asked President Obama if he would state unequivalently that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on the United States.

Obama’s answer was that “we stand with Israel”. What does that mean? Does it mean that if Ahmadinejad makes good on his threat “to exterminate the Jews in Israel in fires of Hell” (which he has stated several times) that Obama will send Susan Rice to the UN to lodge a complaint?

Bob Schieffer let it go just like he passed on Obama’s use of drones. The problem is that Israel is now in the same position that Ambassador Stevens was a little over a month ago.

Incidently, I think Romney's strategy for the debate was brilliantly conceived and carried out.  He obviously felt that the Libya fiasco was well-known to every breathing, thinking American, and to push it further would accomplish nothing.  His job was to show that he understood foreign affairs and would reverse the overall disaster that Obama has created.  He accompished that.

A Good Question

With the foreign policy debate coming up tomorrow, both the LA Times and the Washington Post have begun to try to spin the Benghazi fiasco with laughable articles suggesting there was no al Qaeda influence and that it was a "possibly spontaneous" uprising. Both newspapers claim that their information comes from "unnamed" intelligence sources. How stupid they think we are.

Meanwhile President Obama tells John Stewart that our "attack response was not 'optimal'".

Our Ambassador Is Dead, but Obama's Political Guru Is Safe

By Fred J. Eckert October 20, 2012 American Thinker (Excerpt)


"You could see the pained expression on President Obama's face worsen as a 61-year-old undecided voter told the president during the second presidential debate that he and some co-workers "were sitting around talking about Libya, and we were reading and became aware of reports that the State Department refused extra security for our embassy in Benghazi, Libya, prior to the attacks that killed four Americans."

"Who was it that denied enhanced security -- and why?" he asked.

A very good question -- and one an honest news media would have so relentlessly hounded any president to answer five weeks after the Benghazi attack that no voter would need to ask it.

President Obama's answer did not include even so much as a hint about who denied the requested security or why. Instead, he:

• explained that our diplomats "serve all around the world." No kidding.

• explained that sometimes they serve "in a very dangerous situation." Which, of course, is exactly why that voter was questioning why our security was so obviously inadequate in one of the world's most dangerous spots.

• claimed that "[n]obody's more concerned about their safety and security than I am." Which, of course, does not explain why his administration had refused the requested level of security support that our diplomats serving in Libya deemed absolutely necessary for their safety and security.

• said that "[a]s soon as we found out that the Benghazi consulate was being overrun, I was on the phone with my national security team." This is an admission that he did not bother to summon his top intelligence and diplomatic officials to meet with him. This would have helped him determine through face-to-face cross-examination why the intelligence community was supposedly claiming that Benghazi was some spontaneous demonstration that spun out of control while the State Department was supposedly claiming that there was no such demonstration and that this was a well-coordinated terrorist attack.

• said that he ordered that his administration "beef up our security." Too late for our murdered ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi.

• said he ordered his team to "investigate exactly what happened." But State Department officials only blocks away from the White House had witnessed the entire five-hour-plus attack streamed on video in real time. Did no one Obama spoke with on the phone inform him that we already knew that, unlike Cairo, Benghazi was much more than a demonstration -- that it was a full-fledged terrorist attack? Was he told but forgot?

• said he ordered that they "make sure that folks are held accountable." And yet five weeks later he can't -- or won't -- say if anyone has been held accountable.

• attacked Mitt Romney for supposedly not acting "as a commander-in-chief operates" because of what he said on the day of the Cairo and Benghazi 9/11 attacks. Romney had pointed out that in response to the threat of and actual attack against our Cairo, Egypt embassy, the embassy had issued a statement about an internet video that Muslims found objectionable, condemning "the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims" and denouncing it as an "abuse of free speech." Sounding like Ronald Reagan, he said this was "disgraceful." Soon after he said this, the Obama White House asked its media allies to report that the statement that Romney took such exception to "doesn't reflect the views of the U.S. government," which was akin to claiming that the U.S. government does not reflect the views of the U.S. government.

The Obama administration was refusing to provide anything approaching adequate security for a U.S. ambassador and other Americans serving our country in one of the most dangerous postings in the world, but the administration also committed to spending millions of dollars a year to provide a six-person, round-the-clock Secret Service detail to protect the assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs.

What?

Our U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans who served us there are dead because of insufficient security while the assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs, a woman named Valerie Jarrett, has been given an entourage of well-armed, highly trained protectors as she goes to and from work in Washington, goes shopping or out to dinner, and travels to political events and vacations on Martha's Vineyard.

Why is Valerie Jarrett such a high priority when it comes to security, and why are our diplomats in Libya so much less of a priority? In their eagerness to serve and protect the political interests of Barack Obama, the news media do not bother to ask and then inform the American people about this administration's particularly peculiar priorities when it comes to security at a time when security is something very much in the news and of great interest to the public.

Conservative outlets which have made inquiries about why some White House staffer merits better protection than U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was accorded are refused answers on the grounds of "security concerns." Really!

Think you might have seen a major media story -- perhaps even a great many of them -- comparing the contrast in security protection between Valerie Jarrett and Ambassador Stevens if George W. Bush were president and it were Karl Rove rather than Valerie Jarrett?

The media are well aware of what is going on here -- and they know why.

A product of Chicago's Daley political machine, Jarrett has been a political guru to Barack and Michelle Obama for the past 20 years. It is to her that Michelle owed the job she was given with the Daley political machine. The Obamas seem to see themselves as dependent upon Jarrett. When a reporter once asked Obama if he ran every important decision by Valerie Jarrett, Obama without pause answered, "Yep. Absolutely.""

What If Crowley Succeeds?

I hope everyone remembers JournoList. "JournoList was an informal online discussion group involving several hundred left-leaning journalists. In excerpts released Tuesday, some of their discussions appeared to veer toward collusion, from how to protect Barack Obama to how to tar conservative critics."  This quote was taken from a Christian Science Monitor article about this corrupt attempt to provide the day's talking points for left-wing  journalists (so-called) and for the talking heads that daily spew their spin at us from our TV screens.

JounoList is no more; it was taken down after its discovery, but it is obvious to anyone who follows current events that it has merely gone underground.

What If Crowley and Her Accomplices Succeed?

By David Catron 10.19.12 American Spectator

Such an outcome would be worse than a scandal, it would be downright dangerous.

Shortly after Obamacare was passed and signed by the President, Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute noted a sudden plethora of articles that had begun to appear in a wide variety of MSM outlets about the probable ill-effects of "reform." This prompted him to ask, "Where were these reporters before the passage of the health care bill?" The answer to this question is now pretty obvious. They were colluding, via JournoList and other such forums that we don't know about, to make sure that no one screwed up and told the truth before that morass of taxes and regulations became the law of the land. To the nation's cost, their self-censorship succeeded.

Today, we face a similar but much more dangerous situation. The "reporters" of the establishment news media are engaged in a concerted campaign of misinformation to get Barack Obama re-elected. This has been evident for some time, but the breathtaking mendacity of this effort was writ large by Candy Crowley during last Tuesday's presidential debate. Everyone has by now seen the video clip: the President made the preposterous claim that he had identified the attack on our Benghazi consulate as an act of terrorism as early as September 12. Then, when Romney called him on this egregious whopper, Crowley repeated the lie.

This was no misbegotten attempt at instant "fact checking." It was a deliberately disingenuous attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the debate's 65 million viewers. Crowley herself admitted that she had reviewed the transcript of Obama's September 12 Rose Garden remarks in advance of the debate, and she is not dumb enough to believe Obama's characterization of his boilerplate comment about "acts of terror" in general. This tag-team prevarication may well backfire. Jeffrey Lord suggests, in Thursday's American Spectator, that it may turn out to be the "tipping point that makes Mitt Romney the 45th President of the United States."

That would certainly constitute a splendid example of poetic justice. But what if Lord is wrong? What if Obama's MSM pimps succeed in getting him re-elected? As we saw with Obamacare, these people wield a great deal of power and they are obviously willing to abuse it. Moreover, despite the increasing distrust with which the public regards the effusions of the Fourth Estate, nearly half of the nation's adults still believe what they see and hear in the media. Gallup released a survey last month showing that 40 percent of the electorate still has some measure of confidence that the MSM reports the news "fairly, accurately and fully."

This percentage constitutes an all time low, and it also means that 60 percent of the public has a healthy distrust of the media. Another good sign is that the survey showed enormous skepticism among the all important independents, only 31 percent of whom trust the media. Nonetheless 40 percent amounts to tens of millions of Americans, and its implications for last Tuesday's face-off are scary to contemplate. It suggests the possibility that 20 to 25 million of the debate's viewers could well have accepted at face value Crowley's misleading statement about the President's immediate reaction to the Benghazi attack.

If the final debate contains similar misrepresentations of fact, and it probably will, that could well dampen Romney's momentum and even cause him to lose the election. And this is where the media become dangerous. Pat Caddell, a Democrat and former pollster for Jimmy Carter, recently outlined the peril: "The press's job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power. When they desert those ramparts and decide that they will now become active participants … they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy …"

It is no coincidence that Caddell's remarks, which were made on September 27, were largely focused on the Benghazi attack. He was clearly shocked and outraged by the failure of the media to do its job as it relates to that particular "act of terror" and the disgraceful conduct of Obama and his minions in its aftermath. "We've had nine days of lies over what happened because they can't dare say it's a terrorist attack, and the press won't push this. Yesterday there was not a single piece in The New York Times over the question of Libya. Twenty American embassies, yesterday, were under attack. None of that is on the national news."

He went on to say that, during his days in active politics, the media would have been all over any President who behaved as Obama has behaved in reaction to Benghazi: "If a President of either party -- I don't care whether it was Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or George Bush or Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush -- had a terrorist incident, and got on an airplane after saying something, and flown off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas, they would have been crucified!" But this is not your father's press corps. They do, in fact, see themselves as "active participants" in political campaigns. And they always support the Democrats.

The JournoList scandal and several subsequent incidents of journalistic collusion have demonstrated that the media have collectively decided to take up the mantle of the Democrat party as well as its corrupt candidates. They have, as Caddell puts it, "made themselves the enemy of the American people." Thus, much more is riding on the outcome of November's election than who will live in the White House. The voters will be deciding if we still live in a democracy or a nation that has been "fundamentally transformed" into a place where self-appointed elites decide our destinies without regard to what we want or need.

Energetic Statements of Misinformation

In last night’s debate, President Obama was much more energized than in the first debate, but continued to make statements that are just not true. Here are a few of them:

He said Planned Parenthood performs mammograms. It does not.

He claimed that he labeled the disaster in Libya as terrorism. He did not. He blamed the stupid video for the attack in Benghazi, and only made a general reference to terrorism eight paragraphs into his statement. He kept blaming the video for almost two weeks after the attack.  (This is in addition to the question of why requested security was not provided.)

He criticized Romney’s tax rate, comparing the tax rate on investment income to a middle-income, EARNED income tax rate. In fact Romney has already paid an income tax on the income he invested, as have all of us investors.

He took credit for increases in energy production that are the direct result of licenses and decisions made by George Bush. Obama’s administration has actually reduced the number of licenses granted for drilling on public lands.

Obama's mammogram misinformation (updated)

Matt C. Abbott October 17, 2012 American Thinker

It's no secret that President Obama supports abortion-on-demand. And, of course, he wants us taxpayers to help fund abortion via Planned Parenthood. In fact, he'll even be less than truthful (imagine that!) in an attempt to portray the abortion giant as an organization that cares about women's health.

From LifeNews.com:

President Barack Obama has, once again, misled Americans when it comes to the issue of Planned Parenthood and what legitimate health care it does or doesn't provide. During Tuesday night's debate, Obama falsely claimed the abortion company does mammograms. It does not.

'There are millions of women all across the country who rely on Planned Parenthood for mammograms, for cervical cancer screenings,' Obama claimed....

Planned Parenthood itself has admitted that it does not perform mammograms for women-something the Komen for the Cure breast cancer charity confirmed last year....

But, hey, what are a few lies here and there when it comes to protecting the libertine left's "sacrament" of abortion?

Update from Keith Riler:

Catholic women, please take note:

1. In the second debate President Obama was very clear. He supports taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood and highlighted that support four times during the debate.

2. That means he wants you to fund Planned Parenthood.

3. Planned Parenthood performs 330,000 abortions annually. That's more than any other abortion provider and 25-30% of all US abortions.

4. The funds Planned Parenthood receives and the abortions it commits are strongly connected. There is a 99% correlation between Planned Parenthood's taxpayer funding and its abortions.

5. Therefore, the President's policy will cause you to pay for abortions.

6. Catholic teaching is clear. Human life is sacred from conception to natural death. If we are to have other rights, we must first have a right to life.

President Obama was very clear. He is forcing you to choose - Barack Obama or your faith.

Please choose wisely.

What the Country Now Realizes

1. That Obama and Biden are liars

2. That the Obama Administration is incompetent, especially in foreign policy

3. That Romney will be a great president, and Ryan will be a great vice-president

4. That Obama’s UN speech gave credence to those who say he is a closet Muslim (whereas previously he seemed to be an atheist who wanted to appear to be a Christian to Christians and a Muslim to Muslims)

The Reality Principle

Obama and Biden were winning—until they faced actual opponents

BY: Matthew Continetti October 12, 2012 Washington Free Beacon

Hold it, I’m confused. I watched all of the vice presidential debate last night, and someone did not show up. Vice President Joe Biden was there—how could one miss him, with all the grinning, grunting, interrupting, and sneering. But where was the Ayn Rand-worshiping, rape-redefining, fanatically exercising zealot who wants to throw grandmothers off of cliffs and whose budget plan is, according to the president, “thinly veiled Social Darwinism” that is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility”? That Paul Ryan was nowhere to be found.

What America saw instead was a young and likable and knowledgeable conservative worried about the current trajectory of fiscal, monetary, foreign, and social policy. Where Biden harrumphed, Ryan calmly litigated President Obama’s failed record. Twice in eight days, the caricatures against which President Barack Obama and Biden are purporting to run have been exposed as grotesque exaggerations. The liberal attempt to frighten America with the illusory specter of an extremist Republican ticket dissolved on first contact with, well, the actual ticket. The reality principle asserted itself once again. We have an open race.

Perceptions matter. Why did 67 million people watch the first debate? One reason may have been that Americans, open to an alternative to the incumbent, wanted to know who the Republican nominee actually was. They only had vague knowledge of Mitt Romney going into the Denver bout—and their impression was not favorable.

What they knew was largely limited to the messages of $217 million in negative advertising from Obama and his allies: Romney was rich, secretive, out of touch, paying little in taxes, hiding his tax returns, stashing money in the Cayman Islands, singing out of tune, shipping jobs overseas with little thought of the lives he affected, dismissing out of hand 47 percent of the country, in favor of raising middle-class taxes and health-care costs for seniors, and waging a “war on women” with Todd Akin to “turn back the clock” on women’s rights.

The stories told about Romney in the media were no more flattering. Casual consumers of the news would have learned that the former governor of Massachusetts once bullied a child at his prep school; had catered to the most extreme wing of his party in pursuit of the GOP nomination; had insulted the highly sensitive and excitable Brits on the eve of the London Olympics; was gaffe-prone; had jumped the gun in his response to the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo; was either micro-managing or had little control over his campaign; was changing strategy on the fly; and was such a hopeless loser that the election basically was over. Obama had it in the bag. How could he not? Romney was trash—wealthy, radical, belligerent refuse.

Imagine the surprise when Romney took the stage and revealed himself to be nothing like the cartoon that had been shown again and again to the American electorate. This unmediated Romney was approachable, warm, in command of facts and logic, fluent, direct, and appropriate to the office of the presidency. He claimed the mantle of bipartisanship and pledged to reform taxes and entitlements, reduce the deficit, and cut alternative energy handouts instead of education. He seemed eager to tackle the manifold problems of American democracy.

Obama on the other hand was peevish, tired, frustrated, absent. He regurgitated his lines from the campaign trail. His grand plan for a second term is hiring more teachers. He kept casting aspersions on Romney’s ideas and made accusations that Romney simply said were not true. The television split screen showed the president smirking as his challenger spoke, as if Obama found it almost humorous that Romney was so utterly different from the way he, Romney, had been portrayed. Even before the debate was over, though, it was clear that this was no laughing matter.

Seventy million people watched as the Romney mannequin in which the Obama campaign had invested so much money burst apart at the seams. For much of the year Obama and his team had been remarkably successful at creating and maintaining the perception that the Republican ticket was unworthy of power. The conceit was widespread but paper-thin. All that was necessary to puncture it was 35-or-so minutes of Romney addressing the president as an equal.

So committed are liberals to the notion that Romney and Ryan stand at the vanguard of a militant libertarian cabal that they haven’t a clue what to do when confronted by an actual conservative. The difference between Obama during the debate and Obama on the stump the next day was instructive. In contrast to his listless and weak performance against Romney, once on the trail, the New York Times reported, the president “went straight at the challenger, arguing forcefully that Mr. Romney’s moderate words masked extreme conservative policies.”

What explained Obama’s recovered willingness to attack? He was back where he feels secure: alone on the stage, addressing a fevered crowd, performing a soliloquy of his own construction. Freed from the constraint of having to address a living, breathing opponent in real time, Obama could return to setting aflame the Republican straw men he carries around in his head.

In this case an additional piece of hay was added to the president’s battered Romney doll. Obama ascribed his failure on stage to the fact that he had not expected Romney to lie so effectively; he had not anticipated Romney to mask his extremism behind a “moderate” cloak. But here too the president was jousting with an apparition. Romney’s “lies” were nothing more than statements of fact in conflict with and inconvenient to liberals. And the “moderate” Romney is no different from the man who has been “pitching that plan for an entire year.” Romney’s domestic policy message, his “five point plan,” has been remarkably, even frustratingly, consistent over time. What it differs from is the bloodthirsty, avaricious, and ambitious demon with whom Obama has been fictively arguing.

Thus Biden had a heavy burden going into Thursday’s vice presidential debate. The left was outraged at Obama’s failure. It was up to the vice president to calm their fears and regain their enthusiasm. His clownish and angry performance was catnip to the Democratic base. But he also ran the risk of alienating independents and swing voters who are distressed at the economic condition of the country and are looking for specific solutions to the twin crises of jobs and deficits. For Biden’s performance, like Obama’s, was grounded in the idea that Republicans like Romney and Ryan are monsters—an idea that could not withstand examination in the light of Ryan’s strong, reasoned, confident showing.

Romney and Ryan have found a political opportunity in the gulf separating liberal perceptions of conservatives from the lived reality of conservatives. All they needed to do was show independent and undecided voters who they are, demonstrate that they are not so scary after all, and emphasize the administration’s lackluster record. Which is what they did.

Obama and Biden should know better. Spend all your time boxing shadows, and there’s a decent chance that, when faced with a real opponent, you will be knocked out.

The Weird Debate

When I say, “weird”, I am talking about the strange antics and expressions on the face of VP Joe Biden all through his debate with Paul Ryan. Biden’s smug grin and 82 interruptions of Ryan, most made while Ryan was in mid-sentence, were beyond weird. Biden’s expression was so off-putting that several times I left the debate for a moment to get over it.

Not only that, but Biden started the debate by lying about the fiasco in Libya. (Either that, or our entire national security apparatus needs to be chucked out and replaced.) We are way beyond believing the story that the murder of four Americans, including Ambassador Stephens, who suffered a horrible death involving beating, torture and rape, was a spontaneous uprising over an amateur video.

The most disturbing fact about the debate is how the mainstream press is handling it. No-one with an open mind can possibly say that Biden won the debate. The best you can say is that it was a tie. However, in looking at Real Clear Politics this morning I find that the NY Times, the Washington Post and Salon called Biden the clear winner, while Politico published two articles about how Biden bested Ryan.

How Obama Wasted 4000 Soldiers and Billions

This image by Michael G. Reagan shows a detail of a poster featuring dozens of hand-drawn portraits of men and women killed at war. Since starting the Fallen Heroes Project in 2004, Reagan has drawn more than 3,000 portraits of the fallen soldiers and given them, free of charge, to their families. (Michael Reagan, The Associated Press)


Conservatives don’t get angry anymore when the mainstream press ignores 2000 deaths and defeat in Afghanistan under Obama when they crucified Bush for 2000 deaths in Iraq. We have come to expect such biased treatment.

What should make us very angry is how Obama has wasted all we gained in Iraq, and changed the rules in Afghanistan thus causing the 2000 deaths and defeat.

Obama inherited a peaceful and democratic Iraq with 150,000 American combat troops in place and a previous expectation that Iraq would replace Saudi Arabia as the forward base for a sizeable troop presence to protect the oil fields and oil routes and keep a lid on Iran. Instead we now have 100 military instructors there, and an obstructionist Iraq to contend with.

In Afghanistan, Obama changed the policy from a successful counterterrorism strategy to counterinsurgency (nation building), thus repeating the exact error that defeated the Russians there. He went on to change the ROE (Rules of Engagement) so that American soldiers can hardly defend themselves. Obama also put in place a policy regarding captured terrorists that is so complex and impossible to follow in battlefield conditions that practically all useful intelligence efforts have dried up because the only solution for the combat soldier is to kill the enemy and not try to capture him.

Almost to make sure of failure, Obama then announced a pull-out date of 2014, in a country where time is measured in centuries.

No wonder General McChrystal was caught saying Obama is an idiot.

That Unemployment Number

Lots of people, including Jack Welch, former GE CEO, think that the 7.8 rate is fake, and the numbers have been cooked to make Obama look better just before the election. That may be; I don’t know, the Obama people seem to be capable of almost anything to get their man re-elected, however, the explanation discussed below also makes sense to me.

Behind the BLS Unemployment Numbers

Otto Sorenson October 6, 2012 American Thinker

Based upon its most recent Household Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that the unemployment rate in the United States decreased from 8.1% to 7.8% in September. This apparent improvement in our labor markets is deceptive for the following reasons:

1.Two-thirds of the new jobs claimed by the Report (582,000 jobs) are part time jobs.

2.Of the claimed 582,000 new part time jobs, only 268,000 are real. The remaining 314,000 part time jobs are the result of a "seasonal adjustment" by the BLS.

3.The BLS reported dramatic increases in seasonally adjusted part time employment in September of 2011 (483,000 jobs) and September of 2010 (579,000 jobs) only to report significant decreases in such jobs in each of the following Octobers (419,000 jobs in 2010 and 480,000 jobs in 2011) with continuing decreases in November and December. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the increase in part time jobs this year and the resulting improvement in the unemployment rate is also temporary.

4.The U-6 unemployment rate, which is the broadest measure of unemployment, in that it includes among the unemployed those persons who are working part time but would rather be working full time, was unchanged in September at 14.7%.

In conclusion, in the third year of an alleged recovery, the unemployment problem in the United States did not really change in September. This is not good news for the United States or the continued employment prospects of President Obama.

Obama Presidency Exposed, the Debate and More

The following article is the most comprehensive and well-organized, critical review of Obama’s disastrous presidency that I have seen. It has a huge number of examples, but discusses each one in brief, crisp language. Candidate Romney covered a few of these items in his stunning debate performance, but the first debate was limited to certain subjects. More of what is discussed below will follow in future debates. Please send this article to your friends.

Obama's Dangerous and Disastrous Presidency

By Quin Hillyer on 9.19.12 American Spectator

Name a single thing that has improved under his rule.

How can any cogent American citizen possibly even consider voting for Barack Obama now? That's what lots of conservatives and moderates are asking each other, again and again. It's completely baffling, to those who grew up with any sort of sense of what America means and what the American character traditionally has been, that anybody can look at the man's record and want more of the same.

Almost the entirety of the Muslim world is now rioting against an American president who promised that his olive branches to Muslims would secure peace. Like Jimmy Carter, Obama has only shown a weakness that has emboldened the Islamist haters. Meanwhile, our closest ally in the region, Israel, a stable representative democracy led by an American-educated, America-loving prime minister, has repeatedly been insulted, abandoned, and undermined. In short, the United States is in worse position with all sides in the Middle East/northern Africa. We are embarrassed, feckless, wounded... and in four tragic cases, dead.

Allies in Poland and the Czech Republic have been repeatedly let down and sometimes insulted. The "re-set" with Russia earned us only Russian contempt. China and Russia ignore our entreaties around the world, with absolute disdain for our wishes, our olive branches, or Obama's supposedly Nobel-worthy and messianic genius for diplomacy.

Domestically, our debt has increased by 50 percent in just four years, by some $5 trillion, with not a single observable benefit from the spending. Our bond rating already has been downgraded by one agency, and another major agency threatens to downgrade us. Our unemployment rate has never been beneath 8 percent since Obama's first month in office, even though his economic team said his outrageously expensive "stimulus" package would ensure that it would never rise above 8 percent, and indeed that it would drop below 6 percent within four years.

Our politics is more fractured, less civil, than ever -- and as Bob Woodward, of all people, indicates in his new book, this is largely the fault of Obama. He has been the first president in history to push through a major new program without a single vote from the opposing party -- and while refusing to incorporate a single major idea from the other party, while ignoring overwhelming public sentiment to pass it, and while bending the rules in multiple ways to force it through Congress. Meanwhile, on the real business of Congress, his Senate allies have ignored longstanding law by refusing to pass a budget for three years now, while twice rejecting the president's own pitiful budget proposal by unanimous votes.

Obama campaigned with a promise to rein in abuses of executive power, but instead he increasingly rules by executive decrees of dubious constitutionality. Congress won't pass cap-and-trade, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't pass amnesty for illegal immigrants, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't undermine the work requirement in the welfare system, so he guts the work requirements by executive order. And on and on go the abuses.

His Justice Department is flagrantly corrupt and racialist. It told a black majority town in North Carolina that it could not hold nonpartisan elections because voters would fail to elect the black "candidates of choice" if the candidate weren't identified as Democrats. It intervened against the heroic Fire Department of New York to push racial hiring quotas on the department so outrageous that it would force admittance into the fire academy of candidates who missed as many as 70 percent (!!!) of the questions on a simple entrance exam; and, in blocking all applicants expected to be hired under the previous exam, it prohibited a number of black applicants who actually had met standards from being hired. So outrageous was this abuse that even the leftist Village Voice ran a long feature story taking up for the qualified black applicants whose chances for employment were dashed.

And, of course, DoJ ran an idiotic gun-running program on the Mexican border that led to the deaths of two American agents and countless Mexicans while drawing a rebuke from the Mexican ambassador, and then covered up and even lied about its actions. Also, infamously, it dropped already-won cases against New Black Panther thugs for flagrant voter-intimidation outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008 -- dropped the cases, indeed, just in time, meaning four days in advance, for one of those thugs again to serve as an official Democratic Party poll-watcher in municipal elections in 2009.

Gasoline prices are twice what they were when Obama took office -- and rising again. The housing market remains in the doldrums. Food stamp use is by far at the highest level in history, and poverty is markedly up. Food prices are markedly higher. Small businesses are jettisoning the health-insurance benefits they offered employees until Obamacare made it prohibitively expensive. Doctors are retiring in record numbers rather than face Obamacare's scourges -- and most of the law hasn't yet taken effect. Coming soon are new taxes on medical device manufacturers: Patients will pay more for wheelchairs, prosthetics, insulin pumps, asthma inhalers, pacemakers, and other essential fruits of modern medical technology.

Taxpayers are on the hook for huge losses from the auto bailouts, even as most of GM's new jobs have been created overseas rather than here, and even as auto dealerships across the nation were shut down by administration fiat on political bases rather than on the basis of which ones were profitable. Taxpayers are on the hook for politically inspired "investments" to Obama cronies in failing businesses such as Solyndra. Taxpayers are on the hook for higher electricity prices due to a backdoor cap-and-trade scheme imposed by (illegal) administrative fiat.

Religious liberties, meanwhile, are under repeated and sustained attacked from an administration openly hostile to traditional faith. And the president even refuses to defend in federal court laws duly passed by Congress and signed by former President Clinton.

The parade of abuses, incompetencies, extravagances, and illegalities goes on and on. The record of improvements in any sector of American life is… well, nil. Nothing is better, not a single thing, at home or abroad. And Obama has offered no recognizable plans, no new proposals, no substance at all, for making things better in a second term.

This presidency is a disaster. Reasonable people are gobsmacked at the possibility that it could somehow be allowed to continue its degradations of American society.