Taking the final leap and predictions. Sooo much fun. Enjoy tomorrow everyone… and remember, as much as we agree and disagree — this is the best system on the planet to choose our next elected officials.
★ Our American government has lasted over 200 years. Having a government, in any form, lasting this long is unheard of. For example, in the last 200 years France has had seven forms of government and Italy has had forty-eight.
(click pic to zoom over to the Blaze to watch the video)
Via Breitbart:
CBS News held onto this footage for more than six weeks, failing to release it even when questions were raised during the Second Presidential Debate as to whether Obama had, in fact, referred to the Benghazi attack as an act of terror before blaming it falsely on demonstrations against an anti-Islamic video. The moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley, intervened on Obama’s behalf, falsely declaring he had indeed called the attack an act of terror in his Rose Garden statement, and creating the impression that Romney was wrong.
That exchange turned what would have been an outright win for Romney in the debate into a narrow win or possibly a loss–and it discouraged him from bringing up the issue again in the next debate or on the campaign trail. CBS News could have set the record straight, but held onto this footage, releasing it just before the election–perhaps to avoid the later charge of having suppressed it altogether.
Fox News’ Bret Baier, who has been following the timeline of events closely, noted in his analysis this morning:
These are two crucial answers in the big picture. Right after getting out of the Rose Garden, where, according to the second debate and other accounts he definitively called the attack terrorism, Obama is asked point blank about not calling it terrorism. He blinks and does not push back.
Understand that this interview is just hours after he gets out of the Rose Garden.
How after this exchange and the CIA explanation of what was being put up the chain in the intel channels does the Ambassador to the United Nations go on the Sunday shows and say what she says about a spontaneous demonstration sparked by that anti-Islam video? And how does the president deliver a speech to the United Nations 13 days later where he references that anti-Islam video six times when referring to the attack in Benghazi?
There are many questions, and here are a few more.
Why did CBS release a clip that appeared to back up Obama’s claim in the second debate on Oct. 19, a few days before the foreign policy debate, and not release the rest of that interview at the beginning?
Why on the Sunday before the election, almost six weeks after the attack, at 6 p.m. does an obscure online timeline posted on CBS.com contain the additional “60 Minutes” interview material from Sept. 12?
Why wasn’t it news after the president said what he said in the second debate, knowing what they had in that “60 Minutes” tape — why didn’t they use it then? And why is it taking Fox News to spur other media organizations to take the Benghazi story seriously?
Whatever your politics, there are a lot of loose ends here, a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of strange political maneuvers that don’t add up.
HotAir nails it!
Since it’s not a web ad featuring a super cool, hipster-celebrity making suggestive analogies about President Obama’s oh-so-dreamy and glamorous political qualities, I doubt it will get nearly the same traffic as Team Obama’s recent Lena Dunham ad — which is most unfortunate, because rather than a cotton-candy, war-on-women appeal to the youths, we actually see the real-world effect that Obama’s policies have had on hardworking, middle-class Americans.
President Obama’s policies have been brutal to the business world, and small businesses in particular. An onslaught of red-tape regulations, ObamaCare, the threat of higher taxes, generally poor economic growth — none of these have been kind to entrepreneurs or owners trying to grow their outfits. Despite the Obama administration’s several showy moves to come to the aid of small business, their vital signs just haven’t picked up, via Bloomberg Businessweek:
The measure estimates employment at independent companies with fewer than 20 employees that use Intuit’s online payroll product. Companies with fewer than 20 workers make up nearly 90 percent private employers in the U.S. …
Companies with fewer than 20 employees have actually shed jobs during the economic recovery; the Intuit Small Business Employment Index was 0.9 percent lower in October 2012 than in July 2009. Moreover, since May, the index has moved in the opposite direction from BLS estimates of overall employment, with Intuit reporting a loss of 10,000 small business jobs in each of the last two months alone. …
Compensation and hours are similarly weak. Adjusting for inflation and seasonality, monthly compensation for all employees (including the owners) at businesses with fewer than 20 employees is 10.2 percent lower than when the president took office.
California is in a worse boat that Virginia, for instance, we [California] have ranked dead last 8-years in a row as far as a business friendly environment goes:
Editorial (OC Register): CEOs rate California dead last for business, again
It was alarming the first three or four times California was ranked last among 50 states for business environment. Now, Chief Executive magazine’s annual ranking, based on a survey of 650 chief executives on taxation, regulation, workforce quality and living environment, again places California dead last, 50th of 50 – for the eighth year in a row.
Eight years in a row ceases to be alarming. It now is a defining status.
[….]
Gov. Jerry Brown insists those who say California is unfriendly to business are wrong. But Mr. Brown, of course, is not the chief executive officer of a private business. He is the top executive of a deficit-burdened, intrusive, bloated government bureaucracy that has perfected squandering other peoples’ money while botching delivery of services such as education and lavishing public employees with unaffordable pay and benefits.
California public school teachers are the nation’s highest-paid, while their students’ performance ranks among the worst. The state’s various unfunded pension and retirement health care benefits promise to bankrupt the already overextended government.
As chief executive opinions go, Mr. Brown’s are considerably less credible than CEO magazines’ private-sector leaders.
“California’s enduring place of perpetual decline continues in this year’s ranking,” the magazine said. “Once the most attractive business environment, the Golden State appears to slip deeper into the ninth circle of business hell.”
The CEOs aren’t alone in their harsh critique. The state got an “F” grade in January from Thumbtack.com and the Kauffman Foundation in a survey of 6,000 small businesses across the nation, and the Tax Foundation ranked California 48th worst on business taxes.
There is little prospect of improvement. Despite finding itself in a hole, state government keeps digging. This week the state Senate Judiciary Committee killed a California Chamber of Commerce-sponsored job-creator bill to protect employers from inappropriate litigation.
Mr. Brown’s Air Resources Board is ratcheting up costly new regulations and preparing an ill-advised cap-and-trade carbon-emissions auction to coerce private energy providers to do things the government’s way. The governor and other Big Government champions also are advancing proposals for the November ballot to extract upwards of another $20 billion per year in taxes.
As CEO magazine’s poll shows, the state’s failings are obvious to business people. But Mr. Brown and California’s other governmental leaders just don’t get it.
Obama gets fleeting applause from troops at Ft. Bliss
President Barack Obama was greeted with fleeting applause and extended periods of silence as he offered profuse praise to soldiers and their families during an Aug. 31 speech in Fort Bliss, Texas.
His praise for the soldiers — and for his own national-security policies — won cheers from only a small proportion of the soldiers and families in the cavernous aircraft-hanger.
The audience remains quiet even when the commander-in-chief thanked the soldiers’ families, and cited the 198 deaths of their comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The audience’s reaction was so flat that the president tried twice to elicit a reaction from the crowd.
“Hey, I hear you,” he said amid silence.
The selected soldiers who were arrayed behind the president sat quietly throughout the speech.
CNN and MSNBC ended their coverage of the speech before it was half-over….
The troops’ silence continued through several obvious applause-lines.
There was isolated cheers when Obama said his withdrawal policy would ensure “fewer deployments … more time to prepare for the future, and it means more time on the home front, with your families, your home and kids.”
The silence deepened when the president lauded his strategy of withdrawal from the war. “Make no mistake, ending the wars responsibly makes us safer and our military even stronger, and ending these wars is letting us do something else; restoring American leadership,” he said amid complete silence.
When he said demobilized soldiers would find jobs because “all of you have the skills America needs,” he got little reaction.
There was no reaction when he promised stepped-up recruitment of soldiers for police jobs.
Via Gateway Pundit:
Obama Fiddled While Benghazi Burned–
Earlier today Barack Obama told Denver’s WUSA TV this in regard to the Benghazi 9-11 terror attack,
“I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to. Number two, we’re going to investigate exactly what happened to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Number three, find out who did this so we can bring them to justice.”
Tonight however, Bing West, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, told Greta Van Susteren,
“If that actually happened the way President Obama said it happened, there’s a paper trail and I think people reasonably enough can say, “Can we see the order?” because hundreds of others supposedly saw this order.
Obama just got caught. He lied about his securing our personnel in Benghazi. And now the world will know about it. There was no order to protect our men on the ground.
…the United States is actually more dependent on rich people to pay taxes than even many of the more socialized economies of Europe. According to the Tax Foundation, the United States gets 45 percent of its total taxes from the top 10 percent of tax filers, whereas the international average in industrialized nations is 32 percent. America’s rich carry a larger share of the tax burden than do the rich in Belgium (25 percent), Germany (31 percent), France (28 percent), and even Sweden (27 percent). ~ Washington Times
To set the stage for lowering taxes and Mitt Romney’s tax plan — the rich… the American rich specifically, pay the most taxes when compared to the rest of the world
This lack of understanding by the left leads to how they fight and lie and misrepresent what Mitt Romney says and will even twist other peoples work to win the day:
Here is the Weekly Standard’s “blurb” of the Obama Campaign lie:
Last night, the Obama campaign blasted out another email claiming that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would either require raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the deficit. “Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes,” said the Obama campaign press release. “In fact, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for Romney’s tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000.”
But that’s not true. Princeton professor Harvey Rosen tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting his paper on Romney’s tax plan:
I can’t tell exactly how the Obama campaign reached that characterization of my work. It might be that they assume that Governor Romney wants to keep the taxes from the Affordable Care Act in place, despite the fact that the Governor has called for its complete repeal. The main conclusion of my study is that under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 about the same. That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral.
Dennis Prager touched on the “wonderful eulogy” the New York Times gave the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and how the left loves killers, dictators, and Communists. Here is the Wall Street Journals take on all this:
In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen called the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps “just a detail in the history of World War II.” Explaining himself a few years later, the head of France’s National Front said: “If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail.”
Such remarks cemented Mr. Le Pen’s reputation as Europe’s leading fascist. So what was one to make of the reception accorded the publication, in 1994, of “The Age of Extremes,” by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm?
The book—subtitled “a history of the world, 1914-1991″—was hailed as “bracing and magisterial” by the New York Times. “Facts roll off Hobsbawm’s pages like thunderbolts,” gushed the New Republic. But search the index, and the words “Holocaust” and “Auschwitz” never appear. Nazi concentration camps get about 10 or 15 lines. As for the Soviet gulags, Hobsbawm devoted exactly two paragraphs to them.
Hobsbawm, who died in London Monday at age 95, was no Holocaust denier. Nor was he ignorant of the human toll imposed by communism, the ideology to which he remained faithful nearly his whole life. He acknowledged that the victims of Stalin’s tyranny “must be measured in eight rather than seven digits,” adding that the numbers are “shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification.”
Yet Hobsbawm did justify them. “Like military enterprises which have genuine popular moral legitimacy, the breakneck industrialization of [Stalin’s] first Five-Year Plans (1929-41) generated support by the very ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ it imposed on the people,” he wrote. “Difficult though it may be to believe, the Stalinist system . . . almost certainly enjoyed substantial support.”
The rest of the book is shot through with similar rationalizations. That included the observation that “for most Soviet citizens the Brezhnev era spelled not ‘stagnation’ but the best times they and their parents, or even grandparents, had ever known.” As for Soviet dissidents, they were “anti-plebeian” elitists who “found themselves up against Soviet humanity as well as Soviet bureaucracy.”
None of this should have been surprising coming from a man who, over the years, gave his political assent to everything from the Nazi-Soviet Pact to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Asked by the BBC whether the achievement of a communist utopia would have justified “the loss of fifteen, twenty million people,” he answered “Yes.”
Yet what are we to make of the warmth with which Hobsbawm is now being eulogized? Only this: That the world is far from recognizing that the crimes of communism were no less monstrous than those of Nazism. In treating the gulag as a detail of his history, Hobsbawm proved himself to be the moral equivalent of Mr. Le Pen. And in treating Hobsbawm as a paragon among historians, his admirers prove they’ve learned nothing from history itself.
Here are 5 faux Indians listed by Reason, I add one at the end #6:
1. Chief Jay Strongbow
2. F-Troop‘s Hekawi Tribe
3. Ward Churchill
4. Chief Seattle’s Phony Speech
5. Iron Eyes Cody, a.k.a. The Crying Indian
6. Obama
Breitbart has the genealogical crime scene of Elizabeth Warren’s family line:
Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes has discovered an August 17, 1906 article from the Muskogee (Oklahama) Times Democrat which states that John H. Crawford, the great-grandfather Elizabeth Warren claims was part Cherokee, shot and probably mortally wounded an Indian who had attacked his son.
The 1906 article, which can be seen here, clearly states that Crawford is white. As Barnes describes it:
Elizabeth Warren is the granddaughter of Hannie Crawford, daughter of John H. Crawford. Warren says the Crawfords were Cherokee.
According to the Boston Globe,
“Rosco Crawford, Hannie Crawford’s brother, told (his granddaughter) that as a young boy living in the Creek Nation of Indian Territory, the Indians were “pretty mean.” Once, when a Creek was hitting Crawford’s younger brother, their father shot and wounded the Indian, according to her biography, on file at California State University at Fullerton.”
The story Hannie’s brother, Rosco, told his granddaughter is true.
William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection elaborates: “This clipping also helps further debunk the elopement story, as Warren’s mother’s family was identified as white even in the local paper.”
From video description:
A new, 18-minute mini-documentary follows the journey of Irina, a 23-year-old liberal, Jewish New Yorker who voted for Obama in 2008. Yet as her connection to Israel has grown, and she has learned more about the President’s policies across the Middle East and towards Israel in particular, Irina has come to realize that “when the chips are down,” the President may not “have Israel’s back” as he says.
The short film features:
Exclusive interviews with leading journalists and politicians in Israel
(Bloomberg, London Times, Jerusalem Post, etc.)
Mainstream news reports (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, BBC, etc.),
Clips from longtime Democratic supporters including: Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY)