PrairiePundit

NY Times: U.S. May Have Put Mistaken Faith in Libya Site’s Security Defenses at the American mission in Benghazi have become a major issue as the Obama administration struggles to explain what happened there and how Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens ended up alone. They really went out on a limb with this analysis.  The evidence suggest there was no site security and the people hired to protect our consulate and staff were to be charitable, not up to the job.  The person responsible for seeing that we had adequate security for our facility and staff is yet to be identified in any headline anyway.  Congress may have to demand that name and call the person as a witness in order to find the depth of the screw up.

Bill Gertz: Hackers linked to China’s government broke into one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident. One official said the cyber breach was one of Beijing’s most brazen cyber attacks against the United States and highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks. Disclosure of the cyber attack also comes amid heightened tensions in Asia, as the Pentagon moved two U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups and Marine amphibious units near waters by Japan’s Senkaku islands. China and Japan—the United States’ closest ally in Asia and a defense treaty partner—are locked in a heated maritime dispute over the Senkakus, which China claims as its territory. U.S. officials familiar with reports of the White House hacking incident said it took place earlier this month and involve...

Palm Beach Post: Not long after Democratic National Committee ChairwomanDebbie Wasserman Schultz told seniors at Century Village of Boca Raton they could be socked with $6,300 a year in higher Medicare costs under Mitt Romney, Vice President Joe Bidenacknowledged the figure is based on an analysis of an outdated plan. But Biden argued it’s fair for Democrats to keep using the number, anyway. U.S. Rep. Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, was one of the speakers who took the stage before Biden on Friday at the heavily Democratic condo community. “We know that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan unapologetically support an extreme budget plan that would end Medicare as we know it and turn it into a voucher program, shred the health care safety net that exists for our seniors and increase their premiums, your premiums, by more than $6,300 a year. That is unacceptable,” Wasserman Schultz told the senior-dominated crowd of about 800. The $6,300 figure Wasserman Schultz cited is based on an old vers...

Daily Mail: 'It's for your own good': Muslim girl, 19, 'brutally stabbed in neck by mother for staying out too late' This seems to be significant evidence of a clutural inferiority that seems to afflict some Muslim parents.

Mitt Romney: Disturbing developments are sweeping across the greater Middle East. In Syria, tens of thousands of innocent people have been slaughtered. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has come to power, and the country's peace treaty with Israel hangs in the balance. In Libya, our ambassador was murdered in a terrorist attack. U.S. embassies throughout the region have been stormed in violent protests. And in Iran, the ayatollahs continue to move full tilt toward nuclear-weapons capability, all the while promising to annihilate Israel. These developments are not, as President Obama says, mere "bumps in the road." They are major issues that put our security at risk. Yet amid this upheaval, our country seems to be at the mercy of events rather than shaping them. We're not moving them in a direction that protects our people or our allies. And that's dangerous. If the Middle East descends into chaos, if Iran moves toward nuclear breakout, or if Israel's security...

Joseph Curl: In a debate sure to sway millions of voters and quite possibly change the course of mankind if not the very orbit of the heavenly bodies in the Milky Way, President Obama last night crushed Mitt Romney like a bug, displaying an agile and fecund intellect rivaled only by Albert Einstein and possibly Socrates. Already the smartest man ever to hold the office of president, the one-time constitutional law professor lectured his pathetic opponent on the profound ramifications of Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, held court on the pros and cons of the Austrian School versus Hydraulic Macroeconomics, and delivered a 14-minute recitation of Federalist Paper No. 51 from memory, justifying big government as “the greatest of all reflections on human nature.” Jim Lehrer , the clearly unbiased moderator employed by the government-funded Public Broadcasting Service , opened the debate with clearly unbiased questions for the two contenders. “What,” he asked Mr. Obama, “is your favorite color...

Washington Examiner: Hugo Chavez says he'd vote for Obama

Walter Russell Mead: As everybody knows, there is no such thing as a global war on terror anymore. Instead we live in a harmonious world of interfaith comity with only the occasional criminal act that is quickly and competently handled by law enforcement officials. As a result we can cut our defense budgets and get on with the real business of life, which is to say watching TV, going to the mall and voting to re-elect the strategic geniuses whose wise decisions and firm but thoughtful leadership gave us this tranquil world order. As we celebrate this new age of peace, understanding and joy, here are a few stories that might matter if we didn’t have such a wise and level-headed government in Washington that was bent on soothing and quieting what might otherwise be an aroused and worried public opinion. The office of the Director of National Intelligence is both confirming that the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi was deliberately planned in advance and excusing the White House ...

Washington Post: In Libya, security was lax before attack that killed U.S. ambassador, officials say I normally just use the "Who Knew?"  headline for the obvious, which does fit this one, but there is a larger question of who in the State Department was responsible for making sure this facility was defensible.

The Hill: Even lawmakers who support engaging with Pakistan were left shaking their heads this week after that country’s leader demanded that the United Nations make blasphemy illegal. The disconnect between how the U.S. and Pakistan view the world won on full display in speeches by the two countries leaders, and it wasn’t lost on U.S. lawmakers who have long called for defunding aid to Pakistan. As a result, it could become tougher for the administration to justify support for the strategically vital country.  “The foreign aid we give to Pakistan should be dependent upon their actions as a U.S. ally, not based on a speech,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Mike Lee (R-Utah) told The Hill in a statement. “That said, freedom of speech is a fundamental value upon which our nation is based and not one that is in danger of being altered anytime soon.”  The State Department for its part downplays any notion of a clash of values between the two countries. U.S. offici...

The Colorado Observer: Real Unemployment Reaches 20% In 7 Colorado Counties Sometimes Obama forgets how deep this recession of his is.

Town Hall: Algeria at UN: Limit Free Speech, Protect Islam There is something weird about all these special pleadings for Islam because it is too fragile to survive free speech.  What does that say about the religion?

Katie Hicks: Managing Expectations: Team Obama Paints Romney as Best Debater in History Is Obama having some performance anxiety?

Gregory asked some of the right questions.  It is too bad he did not get into the attempts to mislead him and others by the administration.

This ad has a series of women who no longer are supporting Obama.  That is change we can all appreciate.

Thomas Friedman: Obama Understands Complex World We Live In   I have noted before that Obama may have the most overrated intellect in history and this is an example of someone push the myth that he is somehow smarter than a guy who managed to get an MBA and a law degree at the same time from Harvard and then start a very successful business.  Obama,s grades are not available and that suggest they were probably pretty mediocre. Certainly his understanding of history is below average for Presidents. He has also been inept in economics.  It used to be that he talked a good game, but even that is failing him now. As for understanding complexity, his handling of the security of our mission in Libya, belies an understanding of even the fundamentals of the problem, and his handling of the aftermath of the debacle is even worse. Why would anyone other than a liberal think he has a grasp of the problem, much less a solution?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: ... Also, the Tea Party -- which wasn't around back in 2008 -- is adding grassroots muscle that the GOP lacked last time around. All over the country, Tea Partiers are doing the unglamorous work of knocking on doors, compiling voter lists, arranging Election Day car pools and so on. And in some places, they're going further.  One project -- Volunteers for Virginia -- aims to take people from red states like Tennessee and Texas and get them to Virginia, a swing state, to do grassroots work between now and Nov. 6. Another group, NobamaNevada, is taking Tea Partiers from deep-blue California to work in swing-state Nevada. In both cases, the idea is to move resources from where they won't help to places where they will.  That's the sort of thing that big-bucks professional campaigns do all the time. But this time, the Tea Party movement is doing it on its own. Self-organizing, rather than being organized. ... In 2010, the Tea Party movement ...

Pat Caddell: I think we’re at the most dangerous time in our political history in terms of the balance of power in the role that the media plays in whether or not we maintain a free democracy or not. You know, when I first started in politics — it had been for a long time, and for many years — everyone on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, despised the press commonly, because they were SOBs to everybody, which is exactly what they should be. They were unrelenting. Whatever the biases were, they were essentially — they were equal-opportunity people. That changed in 1980. There’s a lot of reasons for it. It began to change in the ’80s. It changed — an important point in the Michael Dukakis election, when the press literally was trying to get Dukakis elected by ignoring what was happening in Massachusetts, with a candidate who was running on the platform of “He will do for America what he did for Massachusetts” — and they were on the verge of bankruptcy. Also, the change from eveni...

Michael Goodwin: In Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 3 a.m. television ad in the 2008 primary campaign, we heard the sound of a ringing phone and saw sleeping children. In ominous tones, a narrator warned that “something is happening in the world” and asked, “Who do you want answering the phone?” Well, it’s 2012, and — the phone is still ringing. Please, somebody answer the damn thing! The story of the terror attack in Benghazi is that neither Clinton nor the president who made her secretary of state responded to the real emergency when it came. The biggest foreign-policy crisis of the last four years is revealing an astonishing lack of competence and character at the center of the Obama administration. That’s not to say the Democratic duo did nothing in response to the worst terror attack on American civilians since 9/11. After eulogizing our dead ambassador and three others, Obama and Clinton got to work spinning a web of deceit that would make Richard Nixon blush. They sent out a wave...

Jennifer Rubin: The presidential contest is a race to 270 electoral votes. The national vote is irrelevant. The solid blue and red states are irrelevant. If we look at  RealClearPolitics  (RCP), Mitt Romney comfortably has 191 electoral votes on his side. He needs 79 more electoral votes to win outright, 78 to send it to the House. The RCP toss-up states are Colorado (9), Iowa (6), Florida (29), Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4), North Carolina (15) and Virginia (13). Are there polls showing Romney ahead or within the margin of error in all these? Yes. Are Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan longer shots but still within reach? Yes. This is why this race remains highly competitive. A  few days ago  I posited that five factors could significantly impact the race: further economic deterioration; a lousy debate performance or two from President Obama; widespread doubts about the president’s honesty on Libya; another foreign policy incident; and rising gas prices. Do some of t...

NY Times: The New Stars in Republican Commercials Attacking Obama: Babies Attack ads from Republicans are using babies to target politically independent women with an emphasis on what effect the deficit will have on their children. It is a smart move.  The Democrats have offered no realistic plan to deal with the debt crisis they have created.  These ads put the consequences of that failure in context and in the conversation.

NY Times: Romney Shifted Right on Energy as Presidential Politics Beckoned   Mitt Romney is more apt today to talk about his support for oil drilling than about the environmental policies that he advocated while governor of Massachusetts. ...  Well, Massachusetts is not blessed with much oil to drill or even shale gas.  Romney is a smart guy and he recognized that domestic drilling is a way to boost our economy and create jobs.  He is smart enough to see the problem with the Democrat policy of outsourcing our energy needs to sometimes hostile regimes.  Even if the world price of oil stays high, we are better off paying ourselves and if we opened the federal sites we have the opportunity to pick up significant royalty revenue that can be used to pay down the debt that Obama has amassed.

Austin American-Statesman: In the 10 full months since Robert Pitman took over as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, the number of immigrants prosecuted for illegal re-entry of a deported alien in Austin has dropped 46 percent compared with the same time frame a year earlier, according to an American-Statesman analysis of federal court data. The decrease in the number of immigrants charged with the felony crime began two years ago but has accelerated under Pitman, who was sworn in Oct. 3 as the top federal prosecutor in the district that includes Austin. Pitman said the drop in illegal re-entry prosecutions followed the loss of funding for an assistant U.S. attorney who had been designated to work solely on immigration cases. He noted that those identified as being in the country illegally but not prosecuted for illegal re-entry are still being deported and are among the record numbers of undocumented immigrants in Austin and other areas of Central and South Texas who h...

It will be hard to disagree with him factually on any point.  I have been wondering when someone in the black community would stand up and tell the truth about the Democrat Party. Good for him.  Hat tip to Breitbart.

Dayton Daily News: A program that provides subsidized phone service to low-income individuals has nearly doubled in size in Ohio in the past year — now covering more than a million people. At the same time, federal officials say they’re reining in waste, fraud and abuse in the program.  The Federal Communications Commission announced recently that reforms have saved $43 million since January and are expected to save $200 million by year’s end. In Ohio, savings are expected to be $2.9 million a year.  The savings were realized in part because the government gave out fewer cellphones to ineligible people and took steps to avoid issuing duplicate phones.  But the size of the program in the state — and profits to the increasing number of cellphone companies involved — has exploded in recent months, according to a Dayton Daily News analysis of program data. ... They are paying for this by jacking up the cost of cell phones for everyone else.  We should stop hand...

Unfortunately your browser does not support IFrames.   Univison does a bang up job of showing the death and destruction wrought by this program.  No wonder they were the only ones to ask Obama why Holder has not been fired.

Christopher Booker: Fast approaching, if largely unnoticed, is yet another massive shock the Government has in store for us with its weirdly distorted energy policy. It is surprising to see what an abnormally high proportion of the electricity needed to keep our lights on has lately been coming from coal-fired power stations. Last Wednesday evening, for instance, this was over 50 per cent, with only 1.3 per cent coming from wind power. Yet by next March, we learn, five of our largest coal-fired plants, capable of supplying a fifth of our average power needs, are to be shut down, much earlier than expected, under an EU anti-pollution directive. One reason why these plants are being hammered through their remaining quota of hours allowed by the EU is that a new UK tax comes into force next April, which aims to make fossil-fuel power significantly more expensive. In 2010, George Osborne announced his intention to impose, from April 2013, a “carbon floor price” of £16 on every tonne of ...

Christian Science Monitor: As the presidential debates and the election approach, questions about how the Obama administration has handled the attack in Libya that killed the US ambassador on Sept. 11 have taken a harder political edge. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says it’s a scandal worse than Watergate – that the American people “have flat-out been lied too,” as he put it on Fox News Friday. Eric Fehrenstrom, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney ’s campaign (also speaking on Fox News), says, “President Obama needs to be held accountable for his administration's attempts to mislead the American people about what happened in Benghazi .” Rep. Peter King , chairman of the Homeland Security Committee , has called for the resignation of United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice . The broader theme here (and in many other partisan and conservative blog comments) is that President Obama wasn’t just unaware of the threat in Libya and its violent outcome, but that he and his administ...

ABC News: Biden blames Bush administration for deficit   These guys never take responsibility for their 6 trillion dollars in deficits, so why should be expect them to do anything other than blame Bush for the deficits they run up in their second term if we are so unfortunate to let them have one.

The Hill: U.S. and coalition commanders are no closer to knowing how deep the Taliban has penetrated Afghanistan’s security forces despite increased efforts to flush out infiltrators who are carrying out attacks against Americans. "As for what percentage of the insider threat is related to infiltration or radicalization, I mean, it's really difficult to determine," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said Thursday. "I'm sure a certain percentage of it is. And we're treating it … as a threat," he told reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon. Taliban double agents, posing as members of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), are responsible for executing some of the deadly "insider" attacks that have killed 51 coalition troops, mostly from the United States. In the most recent incident, two U.S. Marines were killed and six U.S. Harrier fighter jets were lost during a brazen raid against Camp Bastion, the United Kin...

Observer/Guardian: Biden: I don't recognise Mitt Romney's America That is what happens when you work all your life in Washington.  You have no idea what it is like in the real world.  Keep talking Joe.

David Leonhardt: ... Mr. Obama’s biggest mistake as president has not been the story he told the country about the economy. It’s the story he and his advisers told themselves. ... That is about the only part of this piece I really agree with.  Leonhardt argues that they should have known that things would be difficult to turn around and that those mean Republicans would not go a long with them. He acts as if these Republicans were the first ones to ever want to limit a President to one term.  I am not sure where liberal Democrats get their sense of entitlement, but they seem to have too much of it. The fact is, that Leonhardt does not discuss, Republicans made suggestions for stimulating the economy that Obama did not even consider adding to the stimulus package, so it should be no surprise that he did not get many Republican votes. The real problem is that Democrats don't know much about what really stimulates an economy.  The...

USA Today: ... Republicans have opened a big enthusiasm gap: 64% say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting, compared to 48% of Democrats. In general, though, the results show an electorate that is less excited and less engaged than in recent presidential elections. ... This is from a Gallop poll of "adults."  It was buried near the bottom of one of those chin pulling polls about who would be better off depending on who won.  On that question, my own view is that everyone would be better off if Romney wins. Because this was a poll of adults as opposed to registered votes or likely voters, the enthusiasm gap is probably important in determining who is going to show up.  It tells me that those saying Democrats will out number Republican voters are misguided as are their polls.

Sunday Telegraph: A large number of Americans whose existence was unknown to Libyan leaders were evacuated from Benghazi even as fighting around the compound continued. The new briefings admit they were involved in CIA or other intelligence operations targeting Islamist activity in the east of the country, as well as securing some of the more dangerous weapons with which the country is infested. ... “Of course it would be different if it had the agreement of the Libyan government and was declared – but we don’t want these agreements to be under the table.” As the attack on the consulate was under way, around 30 Americans were driven at high speed to an accommodation block – sometimes referred to as a “safe house” though it was no better protected than the consulate itself – but came under renewed attack there. They were then taken to the airport and flown directly to Tripoli and out of the country. According to the New York Times, they included at least 12 CIA agents who are now “sca...

Bookworm: Reading my friend Laer Pearce’s book Crazifornia: Tales from the Tarnished State – How California is Destroying Itself and Why it Matters to America made me crazy. Laer is a wonderful writer with straightforward, prose, a witty sense of humor that doesn’t overwhelm the narrative, and a commanding mastery of facts about California’s politics, business, education, and public policy. In theory, I should have galloped through Crazifornia in three hours. In fact, it took me three days to read. Why did I have a problem with this fascinating book? Because, when I started I did not know how deep theCrazifornia rot ran in the state, nor was I aware quite how infectious the insanity is when it comes to the rest of America. To keep up with the deluge of evidence proving that California is indeed crazy, I repeatedly stopped reading so that I could scratch out little notes to myself: “California’s all-powerful bureaucrats are an army of Leftist Rube Goldberg’s with guns.” “This is a pe...

San Antonio Express-News: A few years ago, this was a cotton field distinguishable only for its location along a railroad track and a bucolic view of the Hill Country in the distance. This year, an estimated 15,000 railcars will move through Hondo Railway LLC's 175-acre property — many of them carrying fracking sand bound for drilling operations in the Eagle Ford Shale formation. All across South Texas, rail yards are adding track to service the shale drilling boom that's happening in a 20-county swath of the state, stretching from the border toward East Texas. “We didn't know the Eagle Ford Shale was coming,” said Miles Lee , chief operating officer of Hondo Railway. “It just kind of fell in our lap.” The company started as the South Texas Liquid Terminal in San Antonio in the late 1970s, specializing in transporting about 1,500 railcars a year filled with high fructose corn sweetener from the Midwest for soft drink bottlers throughout South Texas. But about six years ...

The Hill: The Obama administration issued new guidance intended for defense contractors Friday afternoon, reiterating the administration’s position that the companies should not be issuing layoff notices over sequestration. The Labor Department issued guidance in July saying it would be “inappropriate” for contractors to issue notices of potential layoffs tied to sequestration cuts. But a few contractors, most notably Lockheed Martin, said they still were considering whether to issue the notices — which would be sent out just days before the November election. But the Friday guidance from the Office of Management and Budget raised the stakes in the dispute, telling contractors that they would be compensated for legal costs if layoffs occur due to contract cancellations under sequestration — but only if the contractors follow the Labor guidance. The guidance said that if plant closings or mass layoffs occur under sequestration, then “employee compensation costs for [Worker Adjustment...

CNN: U.S. warns Iran: Stop arming Syria Do we have any credibility with Iran in making such a demand?  Does anyone think Obama will do anything to Iran?  What I would tell Iran is that we will shoot down their planes flying over Iraq to Syria and we will attack their land based logistic efforts, but I just do not see Obama being this bold.

Hugh Hewitt: After a few weeks spent tracking down and questioning pollsters and the reporters of polls, I can assure the reader that pollsters are the modern-day alchemists. They promise to turn numbers into predictive gold. We'd all like to believe these magical powers exist, but we shouldn't. The pollsters of 2012 just don't know who is going to win in November any more than did the pollsters of 1980 know that Ronald Reagan was headed towards a landslide in that late-breaking year. I'd like to believe Scott Rasmussen that the race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama is tied. Democrats would like to believe Quinnipiac (used by the New York Times and CBS) or Marist (used by the Wall Street Journal and NBC) that Obama has surged to a lead in Ohio and other key battleground states. They'd also like to believe that Gallup's finding that the president has a six-point lead among registered voters means a six point win in five weeks. But none of these beliefs are...

Greg Gutfeld ask where is the outrage over the arrest of the film maker millions of critics hate.

David Ignatius: It’s embarrassing when President Obama’s risk-averse refusal to engage on foreign policy issues becomes so obvious that it’s a laugh line for the president of Iran. “I do believe that some conversations and key issues must be talked about again once we come out of the other end of the political election atmosphere in the United States,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said cheekily in an interview last Sunday. I hate to say it, but on this matter the often-annoying Iranian leader is right. Less than six weeks before the election, the Obama campaign’s theme song might as well be the old country-music favorite “Make the World Go Away.” This may be smart politics, but it’s not good governing: The way this campaign is going, the president will have a foreign affairs mandate for . . . nothing. The “come back after Nov. 6” sign is most obvious with Iran. The other members of the “P5+1” negotiating group understand that the United States doesn’t want serious bargaining unti...

NY Times: Shifts on Libya Attack Could Cost Obama Politically Changing accounts of the attack on the diplomatic compound in Libya have left President Obama exposed on foreign policy and national security, issues where he has an advantage among voters. Actually, Obama's problem began with his attempt to mislead the country about the cause of the attacks on our people in Benghazi.  But his problem is also the complete collapse of the facade of success on foreign policy with Muslim countries where we are more hatred now than we were when bush was in office. At least then there were respect for this country even if they did not like our policies, now they don't like us and they don't respect us either. The media fell for Clinton's media body guard's false narrative about Romney's criticism of the groveling attitude of our Cairo embassy, and missed one of the larger points about the failure of Obama policy.  It has been and continues to groveling when...

Roger L. Simon: For over forty years now, the Watergate scandal — the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the subsequent cover-up by the Nixon administration — has been the sine qua non of American political malfeasance. It has been followed by myriad other “gates” affecting both parties but has never been superseded. Until now. Benghazi or Benghazigate, as some call it, is worse. Far worse. Incomparably worse. Watergate caught numerous public officials lying, including the president of the United States, but Benghazigate has all that and more. It involves the terrorist murder (not an electorally irrelevant burglary) of government officials, their reckless endangerment, the undermining of the Bill of Rights and free speech by our own administration in response to Islamist threats, and, ultimately, the complicity of that same administration, consciously or unconsciously, in the downfall of Western civilization. Meanwhile, the mainstream m...

Washington Times: A leading public employees' union spent $1 million on radio, television and online ads opposing GOP nominee Mitt Romney Thursday, records show. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has spent close to $1 million on several Senate races, but yesterday's purchase marks the union's biggest foray into presidential advertising.  AFSCME, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has made 80 ad buys in the nation's top 50 broadcasting markets in the last month, including one this week in the swing state of Nevada, according to The Washington Times' exclusive ad tracker (http://www.washingtontimes.com/campaign-2012/adwatch/). ... There is an inherent conflict of interest where unions use money collected from paychecks to try to elect corrupt Democrats who will be responsible for determining their future pay.  There is no way that union members in teh private sector can select their boss or the pers...

Houston Chronicle: Cops in porn raid find firefighter in bed with boy A famous Louisiana politician said he could survive anything but being found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy.  This Louisiana firefighter has put himself in a difficult situation.  I hope the boy is OK.

It shows Obama still pushing the video scam long after he should have known that it was a terrorist attack unrelated to the video.

Breitbart: PLANNED PARENTHOOD BUYS $3.5M IN ANTI-ROMNEY TV ADS This is another example of an inherent conflict of interest where they make donations and buy ads to get people elected who will give them more money.   If Democrats are elected there is no one looking out for the interest of the taxpayer.  If these people have this much money to waste on an ad campaign they don t need public funding.

BBC: Google maps recently recognised "Tehrangeles" as a neighbourhood of central Los Angeles. How did this upmarket part of LA become home to the largest community of Iranians outside Iran? "We're on the map, I mean why shouldn't we be on the map?" says a girl at a hip Los Angeles cafe where young Iranians hang out. "There's Koreatown, and Chinatown. Why shouldn't we have an area?" Now they do. Estimates show anywhere from 300,000 to over half a million Iranians in Southern California, with many living in Tehrangeles. "Do not engage in any Iranian gossiping if you're not prepared to defend it," says Mahdis Keshavarz, who runs an LA PR agency. "Because everyone here speaks Farsi." "The first time I came to LA as a student I was on campus and I heard Persian and I turned with that knee-jerk reaction, of 'Wow, cool, another Iranian,'" says Amy Malek, a PhD graduate at UCLA, who studies the Iranian...

McClatchy:   Extremists from groups linked to al Qaida struck the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in a “deliberate and organized terrorist attack,” the top U.S. intelligence agency said Friday, as it took responsibility for the Obama administration’s initial claims that the deadly assault grew from a spontaneous protest against an anti-Islam video. The unusual statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence appeared to have two goals: updating the public on the latest findings of the investigation into the assault, and shielding the White House from a political backlash over its original accounts. “In the immediate aftermath (of the assault), there was information that led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo,” spokesman Sean Turner said in the statement. “We provided that initial assessment to executive branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss t...

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com John Sununu also throws in incompetent in describing Obama's reaction to events in Libya.

Obama lies effortlessly, but will those stories work against sentient voters in Virginia and other states that will suffer under the defense cuts.

Robert Knight: ... Many polls seem to defy common sense. A Washington Post telephone survey released this week claims more registered voters in Florida (49 percent) trust Mr. Obama “to do a better job of dealing with the federal budget deficit” than Mr. Romney (45 percent).  Under Mr. Obama , federal debt has soared by an astounding $6 trillion. If and when Obamacare fully blooms, it will be trillions more. Do these voters really think Mr. Obama is the fiscal hawk in this race?  Sixty-one percent in Ohio say Mr. Obama would do a better job “dealing with social issues like abortion and gay marriage.” In 2004, 62 percent of Ohio voters approved a marriage amendment. Ohio has a large Catholic population, many of whom are appalled by Mr. Obama ’s unconstitutional order to Catholic hospitals to provide abortifacients, contraceptives and sterilizations. Who’s answering the phone?  All 32 states that have voted on marriage — including ultraliberal Oregon and Califo...