Of course, criminals do not register guns. Canada has admitted that their gun registration program has been a waste of time and money as it was not helpful in deterring crime so the laws are being changed.
That didn’t take too long. Within hours of securing his second term as President, Obama moved forward to support renewing the debate over the UN Arms Trade Treaty. By “renew debate” i mean that the only reason it had stalled in the first place was because Obama didn’t want to back it during an election year and now that the little hurdle of being re-elected has been cleared he doesn’t have to hedge his gun grabbing bets any more.
An official at the US mission says all the right things to the press:
“We will not accept any treaty that infringes on the constitutional rights of our citizens to bear arms.”
Now, they can say that but it doesn’t make it true. The Arms Act as it stands does the following:
“The most recent draft treaty includes export/import controls that would require officials in an importing country to collect information on the ‘end user’ of a firearm, keep the information for 20 years, and provide the information to the country from which the gun was exported. In other words, if you bought a Beretta shotgun, you would be an ‘end user’ and the U.S. government would have to keep a record of you and notify the Italian government about your purchase. That is gun registration. If the U.S. refuses to implement this data collection on law-abiding American gun owners, other nations might be required to ban the export of firearms to the U.S.”
In short this is a gun registration that wouldn’t have to pass into law by both houses of Congress but is implemented by treaty. A treaty that, while it would need a 2/3 majority in the Senate, could be accomplished by misdirection and out right lies to the people, who in turn could pressure enough on the fence Senators to foolishly vote for this treaty.
This act also allows for a foreign body, the United Nations, to control and dictate how US firearm manufacturers operate and as such runs the risk of crippling if not outright eliminating the industry in its entirety.
If there is no company to make new guns for private citizens then eventually citizens will run out of guns to buy. Another end around to eroding the Second Amendment.
In short, America would lose its own sovereignty with regards to how it handles its industry and civil rights.
When Barack Obama talks about “under the radar” THIS IS WHAT HE MEANS!
A number of people have kept telling me how good Obama was on the Second Amendment. How we have National Park Carry now. They ignored me when I told them that he had to sign it since it was an add on to a bill he needed to sign for his own credibility (Credit Card reform). But now we see, and unfortunately we will continue to see for the next four years just how wrong you were.
The curtain has been pulled back and Obama has no fear of treading softly for re-election. The attack began even before all the votes were counted.
Christians, veterans, church goers, and people who are pro-life are dangerous militants according to Obama’s Department of Homeland Security. Radicalized Muslims are not even mentioned.
UPDATE – Former KGB Agent Yuri Bezmonov on how the KGB targeted public education:
Most parents have no idea how well marxists, communists and similar far left radicals have infiltrated our public education system. We have been covering this story for a long time and we encourage readers to go through our coverage and see for yourself.
This is coverage that you will never see in the elite media, which is ironic because the marxism conference is held at NWU’s school of journalism.
This Saturday, the Midwest Marxist Conference was held at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond between the radical socialists and their Teachers Union. The all-day event, which collected money to support Chicago Socialists and featured a communist bookstore, provided students on-campus along with the radical left community to plan the next phase in their activism.
Becca Barnes, a Chicago Teachers Union teacher and organizer with Chicago Socialists, proclaimed at the beginning of the conference that “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike.”
After the opening plenary, breakout sessions addressed more specific topics like the history of the Democratic party, education, and case studies in Russia. In these sessions, speakers continued to celebrate the use of education as a mechanism to insert Marxism into public institutions. In one session, the idea of targeting their message to students, even over “the working class,” was debated.
One teacher, who spoke in an afternoon session, described his tactics to overcome the problem of teachers’ unwillingness to take part in the strike, while Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey underscored Barnes’s earlier point when he spoke about the “struggle” of Chicago teachers and the need for additional support from other revolutionary movements. Through a renewed focus on the “strike weapon,” Socialist organizers remarked that they felt their movement had rediscovered its vigor—and the path forward ought to include “mass strikes,” they said.
Eric Ruder of the ISO spoke about the Socialists’ partnership with the Chicago Teachers Union during “The Meaning of Marxism” breakout session:
There are big moments in the sort of chain of historical development that we have to be able to intervene… And in order to that, you need an organization. That’s really the sort of thing you saw in the Chicago teachers strike. In a situation where there was a huge struggle, our organization threw itself in the middle of that and had a demonstrable impact on it.
Because we’ve been rooted, experienced activists who worked together in a collaborative way to try to build up that influence over the long haul… I think when you get in revolutionary moment where your ability to quickly assess what’s happening and make strategic and tactical shifts on the fly, that is essential.
Working class revolutions have never succeeded without the existence of a revolutionary party that’s capable of making those sorts of decisions and providing that kind of leadership. And that’s what we’re asking you, the members of this group, to join and help in that process. We need you to be able to have enough size and influence to matter, but you need us to be able to be part of a force that could intervene in that sort of chain in historical development.
The reporter who covered the event had this to say about the treatment he received while trying to cover the event:
After attending the all-day event, which began at 11 a.m., I was singled out as “not in solidarity” by International Socialist Organization (ISO) organizer Dennis Kosuth around 4 p.m, and removed from the premises for “not being a Communist.”
Despite registering for the event, the group of socialists that removed me, including pre-school teacher Kirstin Roberts, social worker Alison McKenna, printer Eric Kerl, Socialist organizer Shaun Harkin, and others. They surrounded me at the edge of a staircase, proceeded to push their way closer to me to force me down the stairs, and hurled insults at me as I attempted to find a way to leave safely. Even after leaving the conference, the group continued to bully me, with one larger man saying under his breath that “you know what would happen at Teamsters meeting” inferring a more violent solution to my presence:
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recoups $702 in taxes for every hour it spends auditing small businesses, versus $9,173 an hour for auditing large corporations. But under Barack Obama, audits of small and medium-sized businesses have skyrocketed.
So says Peter Schweizer, President of the Government Accountability Institute:
According to IRS statistics, from 2009 to 2011, the coverage rate (number of audits as a percentage of total returns filed) for corporations with assets between $10 million and $50 million has increased 32 percent. The coverage rate for corporations with assets between $50 million and $100 million has increased at the same rate. Some businesspeople file individual returns, and those with incomes higher than $1 million have experience a 94 percent increase in their coverage rate, and a 29 percent increase in the actual number of exams since 2009. Those with incomes $200,000 and higher have seen a 36 percent increase in their coverage rate.
We are not surprised. As we have reported many times before the leadership of the Democratic Party has no interest in taxing the mega-corporations and super rich, rather they are targeting small to medium sized domestic businesses and upper middle class wage earners.
Political Arena:
Democrats want to tax the rich?
This is perhaps the biggest false narrative of all. The Democratic Party leadership has never been interested in taxing the very rich. They have been “taxing the rich” for 50 years. Is it just a coincidence that they just happened to keep missing the target? President Obama gave the speech at Google, which paid 2.4% federal tax on 3.1 billion in income. In that speech he trashed the Chamber of Commerce for fighting against raising the tax on most small businesses which actually employ people from 35.5% to 39.9% . In the 2008 elections President Obama railed against Wall Street, but not only did he take more money from Wall Street and “the big banks” and such, but as if to add insult, their executives became the who’s who of those running his administration (LINK – LINK). Keep in mind that CNN once said Obama attacks private equity at 6am and is fundraising with private equity at 6pm. Wall Street and the big banks made more under three years of Obama than they did under eight years of Bush. His Treasury Secretary says that taxes on small businesses must rise so that government doesn’t shrink, and Obama’s new health care taxes target you, not just the rich. All of the stimulus and spending and so forth all in the name of the poor sounded nice, but look who got rich. Odds are that people who buy into the false narrative know none of this.
This has been a mean-spirited campaign, and the meanest, most destructive people won.
So be it.
In the last two Democratic administrations we have seen a sleazier, angrier and more selfish part of America rising up more and more in our political class. The Founders told us that ultimately our elected politicians are a mirror of ourselves. Just like you, before November 7, 2012, I lived in the fervent hope that the degradation of the Clinton and Obama years might be an exception to the long trend of American history. But two times eight years of radical leftists in high office can’t be an accident. We can’t just blame our sleazy media, or just the leftist political class, as corrupt and malevolent as they truly are.
No — the balance of decency in America has changed. Every society has normal, decent people and the other kind. The America we grew up in was fundamentally decent. Decency was the expected standard.
Now the balance has changed.
The evidence for our sleazified culture can be seen all around. It is in our pop music, which has lost melody and now just has rhythm. We have a President who won on revenge against middle class values. That’s what he meant by telling his people to vote for revenge. And they did — showing us exactly who they are.
We are now a society divided between the makers and the takers, and the takers are on a campaign of theft and revenge.
We have a President who takes dangerous pride in his hatred for “middleclassness” as Jeremiah Wright taught him to believe. We have a President who culminated his campaign with a ghetto singer rapping about hoes and bitches, about drug-ridden and broken families, as if all those cruelties were good.
This is not normal, decent America.
It is not.
We need to face that.
Morality and values are not small things. The new tide in the affairs of America also means that we can no longer be trusted to defend civilized values around the world, as we have done for the last hundred years.
It’s a sea change. Fools around the world will applaud Obama as a savior, but wise people will see us crumbling. They know they will be the worse for it.
Today the world is far more dangerous place than four years ago. If you doubt that, keep an eye on the rise of barbarisms around the world. Obama constantly facilitates barbarism, and the barbarians understand that much better than decent people do.
History buffs will remember that we’ve had decades of sleaze before. The Founders were followed by Jacksonian corruption. Abraham Lincoln was followed by Reconstruction. Yet we somehow found our way back. Come-backs can happen, but probably not soon.
So this is an elegiac moment, a moment of mourning for what has passed. From Truman and Eisenhower to Bush 43 we have had leaders of character.
No longer.
Republicans by and large still look, act, and speak like normal, decent people. But they have a hard time even understanding a thoroughly sleazified America. Normal, decent people do not know how to live in this new, barbaric society. We live in protected communities, we drive around in SUVs, like armored cars.
The left knows exactly how to act in this Brave New World. They’ve made it. We are now ruled by sleazy demagogues who take bribes from foreign nations that do not wish us well. Obama is the worst example so far. Even the Clintons, both selfish narcissists, were somewhat better.
With the decline of American decency, the civilized world has lost its foremost defender. America wasn’t a world power in earlier times of corruption. We could afford to make mistakes. Today, our national decay endangers the world. The left has purposely attacked our self-respect, our pride in our morality and decency, and our crucial role in the defense of civilized values. We are no longer the Leader of the Free World, because we have lost — for now — the values that guided us. America can no longer be trusted, as we saw so clearly in Benghazi and the fraudulent Arab Spring. Any nation that places any trust in our promises today is run by fools. Our allies must arm up to protect themselves, or they must find new, trustworthy allies.
For sixty years Europe has lived off our willingness to come to its defense. The southern rim of Europe is now going bankrupt, and even France looks ready to crumble. Without our leadership Europe has to rely on itself, or on Russia, or on the spreading Muslim empires. But Europe has shown no capacity to defend itself. Maybe they will learn. Or maybe they will be swamped. We can no longer be trusted.
From June 2009 to September 2012, America gained some 2.59 million jobs. That weak recovery was the basis for the Obama re-election campaign. But as it turns out, virtually all of that job creation happened in states that are right-to-work – states in which no industry can force people to join a union in order to work. There are 22 right-to-work states. During that period, those states saw an increase in employment of 1.86 million. That means, according to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, that “Right to Work states … were responsible for 72% of all net household job growth across the US from June 2009 through September 2012.”
That 72% statistic is all the more stunning when you realize that according to 2010 census numbers, the right-to-work states included in this calculation — which does not include Indiana, since it just went right-to-work — represent just under 40% of the population of the country. Right-to-work states disproportionately create jobs.
President Obama has been a violent opponent of right to work laws. He sees them as an attempt to quash his union buddies – which, of course, is right, since the unions bankrupt states (see Illinois, California). But Obama won re-election on the backs of those who rejected his policies.
Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi headlined a high-dollar fundraiser in May that was attended by U.S.-based Islamist groups and individuals linked by the U.S. government to the Hamas jihad group and to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood movement.
The donors at the undisclosed May 16 event included Nihad Awad, the co-founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations, according to data provided by the nonpartisan Investigative Project on Terrorism.
The CAIR group was named an unindicted conspirator in a 2007 trial of a Hamas money-smuggling group.
A covertly-taken photograph provided by the IPT shows Pelosi standing near Awad at the fundraiser. Roughly 30 people attended the fundraiser, according to the IPT.
The cheapest tickets cost $5,000, and the most expensive were $30,800 per couple, according to the event invite from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which used the cash to fund Democratic candidates. (View the invite here)
The hosts of the event were DCCC chairman Rep. Steve Israel and two Muslim representatives, Rep. Keith Ellison and Rep. Andre Carson.
Ellison is the DCCC’s “national community outreach chair” and the co-chair of the House progressive caucus.
On Oct. 29, The Daily Caller asked Ellison’s press aide if the congressman would decline donations from Islamist groups. The aide replied that Ellison was not available to comment.
We are not huge fans of Ron Paul, but numbers are numbers and facts are facts. What is also a fact is that political payback has always been a factor in politics.
There are several mistakes that cost Mitt Romney, as well as several Republicans down the ticket, the election. The election was so close that a change in any one of these mistakes very well could have reversed the results.
The Republican National Committee’s (RNC) expulsion of legitimate Ron Paul delegates from the convention is likely one of those factors.
It is up to the candidate and the party to WIN the votes of the people, no one is entitled to them.
Gary Johnson and Ron Paul got up to six percent of the vote in several states, including enough in Ohio and Florida to win it for Romney? Libertarians also cast enough votes to hand the Indiana Senate race to Joe Donnelly. IF you ever wondered why Marxists from Code Pink work Ron Paul’s booths at CPAC, well now you know why.
At the convention the RNC passed a new rule over the objections of the floor to give the RNC Chairman the power to eject and replace any delegate he wished. Then they took the credentials of Ron Paul delegates who were elected fair and square and escorted them out of the convention and replaced them with hand picked cronies. Would you vote for the party that did that to you? It was totally against the democratic process.
You can be sure that almost every Ron Paul supporter in the country knew very well what happened; if there is one thing that Ron Paul supporters are the undisputed masters of, it is networking.
Note to the RNC: Addition by subtraction usually messes up the math.
How bad is this rule? Under the rule they crammed down the throats of the convention, Ronald Reagan could have never mounted the floor fight against Ford in 1976 which set Reagan up for 1980. Remember the “establishment” GOP hated Reagan.
Later the RNC agreed to modify the rule to make it less severe, but this is absolutely irrelevant. Why? Because they can come out to the floor and over the objections of the floor deem a rule passed at the next convention and do it again and later just apologize for it…again.
Mark Levin has more details on the rule change HERE.
UPDATE – WND’s resident Mensan thinks so as well – LINK.
Not standing up the elite media corruption and lies
Not fighting the “Mitt Romney killed a man’s wife” lie
Not fighting the “Republicans want to ban birth control lie”
Not taking advantage of half a dozen opportunities to land hay-makers in the debates
Not having a bold enough economic plan, thus not having a bold policy for people to vote for
Not having enough contrast with the incumbent resulted in a lot of conservative and disillusioned voters staying home
Going “scorched earth” in the primary to cram Romney down the voters throats which most of the base opposed at one time or another; resulting in a lot of conservatives staying home
[Editor’s Note – Flashback 2010: Who is the TEA Party?
While Democrats and establishment liberal Republicans say that Romney lost because the TEA Party is too conservative, they are forgetting information just like this. They are also forgetting that in 2010 more women voted GOP/TEA Party candidates, in nine of the top ten swing states, since the 1984 Reagan 49 state landslide.]
The Hill: Four in 10 Tea Party members are Democrats or independents
Wait, you mean these folks are people just like you and me? Looks like the elite media lied again….
The Winston Group found nothing extreme or racist about the Tea Party at all:
Behind the Headlines: What’s driving the Tea Party Movement?
New polling data examines the demographics and political philosophy behind the Tea Party Movement
In one of the most extensive looks to date at just who Tea Party activists are, how they think, and the ideas that matter to them, the report found that 17% of the people polled considered themselves “part of the Tea Party movement” and more than four in ten Tea Party members said they were either Independents or Democrats.
In three national surveys, done for New Models from December 2009 through February 2010, 57% of Tea Party members called themselves Republicans, another 28% said they were Independents, and 13% were Democrats. Two-thirds of Tea Party members identify as conservatives but 26% say they are moderate and 8% described themselves as liberal.
Tea Party members prioritize job creation over deficit, spending, and tax issues. However, they view these items as critical precisely because they are seen as a means to reducing unemployment and improving the economy. Tea Party members are very dissatisfied with the current direction of the country, the policies of the administration, and those currently in office, and as a result the Tea Party movement is breaking heavily in favor of the Republican Party. This is a movement defined by its focus not just on the policies of economic conservatism but on the desired economic outcomes.
We informed readers previously that Democrat Party ID (voter self identification) is at an all time low, but now we move to something even more interesting.
The Tea Party leads both Democrats and Republicans on the generic congressional ballot among independents. This means that generic tea Party candidate vs generic Democrat candidate vs generic Republican candidate the Tea Party candidate wins.
Rasmussen polls have called elections often within a tenth of a point of the actual result.
It is difficult to understate the impact of this news.
Keep in mind that Ross Perot received about 19% of the vote and the last successful third-party sweep of election was Abraham Lincoln’s new Republican Party which formed to oppose the Democrats and the Whigs.
Expect Democrats to try and demonize the Tea Party people with smears and lies, such as what MSNBC has been doing by taking pictures and information from LaRouchie’s and attributing them to the Tea Party participants LINK.
Among voters not affiliated with either major party, the Tea Party comes out on top. Thirty-three percent (33%) prefer the Tea Party candidate, and 30% are undecided. Twenty-five percent (25%) would vote for a Democrat, and just 12% prefer the GOP.
Among Republican voters, 39% say they’d vote for the GOP candidate, but 33% favor the Tea Party option.
One reason why people are so upset, and either not voting or protest voting for Libertarians is because they are sick and tired of politicians promising the world and delivering more suffering.
We have never witnessed polls like this, Americans are showing a clear contempt for both political parties and after seeing this it becomes clear why Tea Party is polling ahead of both Democrats and Republicans. Also note the massive disconnect between the political class the the governed.
Speaking as a political scientist, these numbers show that the government is losing its legitimacy (please be sure you know what that word means in poli-sci terms before you comment). This can only mean big changes are ahead.
There is also an indicator that independents may be more conservative than Republicans now, if this trend continues it changes everything.
The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 61% disagree and say the government does not have the necessary consent. Eighteen percent (18%) of voters are not sure.
However, 63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.
The simple fact is that reporters do not seek out random “experts” to see what their opinion is; rather they pick pundits and know full well what their opinion is and it usually matches the editorial point of view.
At least a half-dozen professors who gave political donations to President Obama have been quoted in news articles opining about his administration and the 2012 race for the White House.
The findings of The Hill’s months-long investigation come as Republicans have been crying foul, alleging a media bias for Obama and against Mitt Romney.
The Hill cross-checked academics who have been quoted in news articles with Obama’s donor list and eliminated those who worked in prior Democratic administrations. The half-dozen professors detailed in this article do not mention their political affiliations in their bios online. A similar search for Romney donors did not yield any results.
This is ‘Elinor Joseph’, a female Arab combat soldier in the IDF…remember her face next time you hear the term “Israel is an apartheid state” because she is living proof that Israel is the only shining beacon in the Middle East !!!
This post is stickied top the top of the page! So be sure to scroll down to see new posts and updates!
There are new links and stories coming out by the hour and the list is already a LONG one.
It seems likely that the combination of systematic military ballot suppression and other vote fraud swung this election. We will keep posting links so be sure to stop back by….
For some reason the establishment GOP will not learn the lesson of George Bush 41, Bob Dole, the 2006 mid terms, John McCain, and now Mitt Romney. How many times will they push the same failed strategy and tell people that it is the only way to win? How many times will we be told that Dole, McCain and Romney must be chosen because they are the only “electable ones” only to watch them lose?
UPDATE– Zo: We ran a dull example of conservatism vs the shining star of leftism (video) – LINK
Editor’s Note – Romney lost the “cultural charisma” and the “popularity contest” voters – We put up a guy who is a dullard against the shining star of leftism. Think about this for as moment:
Nixon had more charisma than McGovern Carter had more charisma than Ford Reagan had more charisma than anybody Clinton had more charisma than Bush41 Clinton had more charisma than Dole No one has less charisma than Gore – Bush wins
Kerry and Bush have about equal charisma but Kerry was a stuffed shirt flip flopping (sound familiar) joke and everyone knew it.
McCain vs Obama – are you kidding me (but wow look at those Sarah Palin crowds)?
Romney vs Obama on likability Romney loses to the low knowledge voter.
One of the greatest Mass media theorists of all time Marshall McLuhan said “The medium is the message” and that is what so many Republicans are missing.
Doubt me??? – Marco Rubio vs Joe Biden. Allen West vs Joe Biden. Mike Pence vs Joe Biden.
Bottom line on the cultural charisma factor: who would make a better president, Captain Kangaroo or rapper JZ? The answer is obvious, but who would low knowledge voters pull the lever for?
Bush got over 62 million votes in 2004 when people were not all that excited about him. Mitt Romney got just under 57 million.
Mitt Romney got fewer votes than John McCain and everyone acknowledged that many conservatives stayed at home because they did not trust McCain’s inconsistent leadership and his bad habit of trashing conservatives on the Sunday morning talk shows. Conservatives also stayed home in 2006.
Stop right there and let those numbers sink in. We are a nation where the people self identify as conservatives more than liberals almost two to one. Yet look at the exit polling of those who actually voted: 35% identified as conservative, 25% as liberal and 41% as moderate.
The math does not lie. More conservative men stayed home, evangelicals turned out but in lesser numbers than in previous elections. Even in bastions of conservatism such as Elkhart County Indiana, and counties in North Florida had more conservative voters stay home.
My establishment Republican friends are not going to like this, but the math is what the math is. In 2010 Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Marco Rubio and Allen West were the top of the political narrative. Women, who are to be swing voters, voted in heavier numbers for GOP/TEA Party candidates in nine of the top ten swing states than in any election since the 1984 Reagan landslide. This time women broke for the Democrats.
Just to give an example of what went wrong, look at the moral clarity of the messaging in 2010 vs 2012.
This was the prevailing political message in 2010:
Watch as Allen West sets the record straight on the war on terror where the other politicians are afraid to just tell it like it is:
By contrast Mitt Romney was pro-abortion before he was pro-life, against the Second Amendment before he was for it, was for Obama’s stimulus before he was against it, changed his stand on global warming alarmism depending on who was in front of him, was against the wildly successful Contract for America, and while campaigning went along with the Democrats in their disrespectful words against Ronald Reagan. Quite a difference.
So before we explain what went wrong it is very important to explain what the problem is not.
The problem is not that Republicans need to abandon conservatism and behave more like liberals as evidenced by the exit polling where almost every policy question favored Republicans:
Is the country moving in the right direction? – No
Should the government cut spending? – Yes
Should the government raise taxes? – No
Should Obamacare be repealed? – Yes
Should America use more of it’s own energy resources? – Yes
This demonstrates that on policy, those who voted, even engaged moderates, support conservative policy.
The problem is not that conservatism alienates independent voters, in fact every indication is that exactly the opposite is true. America’s Republican Governors are arch conservatives on policy, from taking on the government unions to school choice and fiscal responsibility. Independent voters vote for these governors and this election day such governors are in 30 states.
The elite media and some in the GOP establishment are blaming the TEA Party, but what they aren’t telling you is that establishment GOP “moderates” took a real beating this election including states such as Hawaii, North and South Dakota, Connecticut, and Virginia. Senator Scott Brown also lost his seat. The elite media may focus on Todd Akin in Missouri and Dick Mourdock in Indiana each losing their Senate races when they should have been an easy win. They self destructed because they engaged in some very undisciplined communication and turned enough voters off to cause some to split their ticket. Their loss had nothing to do with being conservative or traditional. Mike Pence won the Indiana Governor’s seat and he is as conservative as it gets.
Moderates also voted for Michelle Bachmann in Minnesota and for Jackie Walorski in Indiana’s Second District who again are both as conservative as they come and TEA Party favorites. Both won in swing districts.
About messaging: Jackie Walorski went after her Democrat opponent as the liberal fraud that he is, as he is nothing like he presented himself. She took off the gloves AND WON in spite of the fact that there was a 10% drop in turnout in Elkhart, the “conservative county” in her five county district. Walorski was willing to blast her opponent hard with the truth and was unafraid. If she had done so in 2010 she would have beaten Joe Donnelly back then. Michelle Bachmann did the same thing.
The problem is not solely because America is turning more brown. New Hampshire is as white as it gets and the same problems appeared there as in the rest of the country.
The problem is not that Republicans are willing to talk about about “social issues”. In fact quite the opposite. Why? It is Democrats who went nuts on social issues to paint Republicans as people who want to ban birth control. So we have no choice but to engage and fight back and our reluctance to do so in a smart, disciplined manner cost us lots of women’s votes. We surrendered on this issue because we didn’t fight back at the Democrats dishonesty hard enough.
To run on only economics is to expect that people really understand economics. Excuse me Mr. Voter could you please explain to me what the debt to GDP ratio is and why it is a threat to your standard of living?
The problem is not because of the power of incumbency…you know because beating the incumbent in the White House is so rare…unless of course we remember that Carter beat Ford, Reagan Beat Carter, and Clinton Beat Bush, and Obama, who was a sitting duck and ripe for defeat, only squeaked by.
UPDATE II – Ronald Reagan dealt with liberals in the Republican Party who said the exact same things –
The “GOP establishment” has to come to terms with some uncomfortable facts
The evidence shows that we had the wrong man at the top of the ticket whose campaign made some major mistakes.
Mitt Romney had high negatives in several swing states including Ohio and Florida after the primary. Why? This is what happens when you have, as Newt Gingrich said, “A Massachusetts moderate who passed Romneycare” who runs a dishonest scorched earth primary and has adjusted his views every election year. The GOP establishment crammed him down our throat with massive amounts of corporate and PAC money.
Remember this guy?
In Florida, where Romney played those brutal ads against Newt it seems many stayed home on November 6th. Romney also ran dishonest ads against Rick Santorum so more evangelicals stayed home. This explains why we did good in polling and poor on election day. The disillusioned participated in the polls, got pegged as likely voters and stayed home on election day. How can you trash conservatives again and again and then expect them to show up for you? And to ad insult to injury say that “we should not be too strident in our criticisms” of Obama’s failures.
Weekly polling for two years tells us 61% of the people want Obamacare repealed, but too many voters simply didn’t believe that Romney was serious. Newt Gingrich warned that this very thing would happen. This very writer knows plenty of people who are conservatively minded who have said, “there is no difference between the two parties” and they essentially believe they are all big government big spenders. More and more blue collar Republicans no longer feel like they have a political party to call home.
Speaker of the House John Boehner’s lack of effectiveness in cutting any spending at all also served to undermine 2010 Republican freshman who tried to cut at least some spending were unable to largely because of Speaker Beohner. Libertarians in Indiana got 6% of the vote in some races, which is another indicator of this reasoning.
Another indicator is that traditionally the GOP has received about 80% of it’s donations from individuals in amounts of less than $200.00. This was not the case with Mitt Romney, although in the last weeks small contributors did donate more heavily, but none the less this indicates a problem with the base.
Below is a video of a disillusioned white male voter who I am told is a former Army Officer who worked in psychological operations (psych-ops). Granted the man in the video is a bit on the paranoid tip, but his sentiment that it no longer matters who you vote for is not uncommon among the millions of conservatives who stayed home, especially when one considers how many times the GOP “establishment” has failed to deliver it’s “limited government” campaign rhetoric:
[There is a way to tap into this sentiment and turn it into energy for votes without alienating moderates, but someone will have to hire me to get that information. Gotta make a living – Editor]
The Republican primary was so long because the people were on a search for the “Not-Romney” candidate. In fact, you probably once favored voting one of the other candidates precisely because of the problems mentioned above. Odds are you who sit here reading this very page was against the idea of Mitt Romney being your nominee so how could it be a surprise that so many Americans never warmed to him?
One reason why people are so upset, and either not voting or protest voting for Libertarians is because they are sick and tired of politicians promising the world and delivering more suffering.
We have never witnessed polls like this, Americans are showing a clear contempt for both political parties and after seeing this it becomes clear why Tea Party is polling ahead of both Democrats and Republicans. Also note the massive disconnect between the political class the the governed.
Speaking as a political scientist, these numbers show that the government is losing its legitimacy (please be sure you know what that word means in poli-sci terms before you comment). This can only mean big changes are ahead.
There is also an indicator that independents may be more conservative than Republicans now, if this trend continues it changes everything.
The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 61% disagree and say the government does not have the necessary consent. Eighteen percent (18%) of voters are not sure.
However, 63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters now view the federal government as a special interest group, and 70% believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.
The bottom line is that much of the blue collar in this country used to be solidly in the Republican Corner, but they feel like they have been lied to and taken for granted. Since the 2003 Bush tax cuts there have been ZERO domestic policy victories for this group of voters. That is why they are disillusioned and believe that no matter who they vote for government will just gets bigger and the economy will just get smaller. They feel squeezed and while they know that the Democrats are bad, they no longer have confidence in the Republican party. That is why these voters are staying home.
Messaging and policy must be bold, simple and provide a stark contrast
The question that many of these politicos have not answered is this: how could we possibly be more moderate than we already are? We ran with Dole in 1996, and we lost; we ran with McCain in 2008, and we lost; we ran with Romney, and we lost. Romney took the issue of Obamacare off the table and barely attacked Obama directly for much of anything. There was no potent conservative philosophy that was offered to provide voters with a sharp distinction between the parties. The Republican convention was a pathetic Oprah show and the entire campaign was basically an advocacy of Obama’s policies, albeit with less enthusiasm. And let’s not blame the loss on Paul Ryan and Medicare reform; he outperformed Bush and McCain with seniors.
For all the talk of the need to moderate in order to win, Obama ran the most divisive, radical, and negative campaign, while Romney ran a relentlessly positive campaign with incessant promises to work with the other side. People are attracted to a show of strength, not a promise of bipartisanship, which smacks of insecurity in one’s own virtues and ideas.
For those of you who may not remember, this is how to set a bold contrast with vision – LINK. When one does not run on big ideas they run on small things and that is what both Obama and Romney did.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz gets it as well and comments on why so many blue collar Republicans stayed home again:
All of the money in the world won’t help if you keep using the same failed strategy
Obama was a sitting duck, ripe for defeat and after all of the money spent they still couldn’t win in this ripe of an environment.
The Republican strategist who created the model for the outside money groups that raised and spent more than $1 billion on the Nov. 6 elections saw almost no return for their money.
Rove, through his two political groups, American Crossroads and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, backed unsuccessful Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney with $127 million on more than 82,000 television spots, according to Kantar Media’s CMAG, an ad tracker based in New York. Ten of the 12 Senate candidates and four of the nine House candidates they supported also lost their races.
The results have angered some Republicans who blame Rove for “sidelining conservatives” and diverting money from them.
“Right now there is stunned disbelief that Republicans fared so poorly after all the money they invested,” said Brent Bozell, president of For America, an Alexandria-based nonprofit that advocates for Christian values in politics. “If I had 1/100th of Karl Rove’s money, I would have been more productive than he was.”
The Rove group also spent $622,400 on ads attacking Nelson in Florida, $513,000 on McCaskill in Missouri, $486,000 on Kaine in Virginia, and $466,000 on Jon Tester in Montana. Those Democrats all won.
American’s for Prosperity (AFP), a group that used a more traditional bold, conservative, contrast communications strategy, and is willing to back some TEA Party candidates, made $754,000 in ad buys in Nebraska and Nevada and saw its preferred Republican candidates win those races.
The GOP must get media savvy and learn & understand that when the other side gives you an opportunity to land a hay-maker, take it
Seize the day. In the third debate Mitt didn’t capitalize on the disaster of Benghazi, and instead spent too much time trying to appear unoffensive in some type of attempt to appeal to female voters. We saw what that got us.
In 2004 women voted for President Bush because he made them feel safe and when you feel safe why make a change? Remember those “security moms”? Time after time Obama left himself open for a hay-maker punch where he was vulnerable and Romney wouldn’t seize the day. If Romney would have went after Obama on Benghazi the elite media would have been forced to talk about it, but instead the elite media has clammed up and has been trying to keep this huge scandal under the rug until after the election.
How can they pay all of these “communications strategists” and not a one of them understands that a president or a presidential candidate can set the media agenda. He can essentially make them talk about what he is talking about and get his message out even against an unwilling press.
In the debate, Obama hit Mitt Romney on equal pay for women, but Obama has paid women less in both his campaign staff and his White House staff. Romney should have delivered a knock out punch with that kind of opening, and followed it up with the fact that the Obama Administration is once again targeting women’s health care screenings for rationing while fully acknowledging that the result will be more dead women.
Even though the government response to Hurricane Sandy has been slower than Katrina and essentially a disaster, President Obama went and used Governor Christie as a campaign prop and it worked. While Obama was seizing the day, Mitt Romney was suspending his campaign and running a small food drive. Here is an idea, how about Mitt Romney returns to his home of Massachusetts to offer his services to Governor Patrick or to work as a government liaison with the Red Cross to help flood victims. That just may have helped Scott Brown win his Senate Race.
Speaking of the elite media…
The GOP must learn that the elite media is out to destroy you and is in the tank for the Democrats to a level that is truly astonishing. CBS News had in their possession classified emails that showed that the order to stand down and essentially let our people get slaughtered in Benghazi while Obama watched in the situation room came from the White House. CBS sat on those emails and only released the story on their web site when Glenn Beck threatened to out the network and those involved for covering it up.
The time for trying to make the media like you is over, dealing with dishonest reporters individually and embarrassing them into doing their job is the best you can hope for. The approval rating of the elite media is right up there with syphilis so embarrassing them Newt Gingrich style is a win.
Elite Media bias counts for up to five points in the election, which is more than enough to to swing most races towards a Republican win, we cannot afford to simply surrender those five points any longer.
Newt Gingrich vs CBS’ Scott Pelly:
Newt Gingrich Blasts the Elite Media for Bias and Anti-Christian Bigotry:
Newt takes NBC’s David Gregory to school:
Newt vs. NPR’s Juan Williams on the “race card”
Newt vs Piers Morgan on Class Warfare
You will notice that every time Newt took on the elite media who did the people believe? Did they Believe Scott Pelly and George Stuffingenvelopes or did they believe Newt Gingrich. The answer is obvious as demonstrated by the North Carolina Exit Poll where Newt dominated the numbers including independents, evangelicals, and women. As Ron Paul has demonstrated, the young graduate to those with a big vision and big ideas.
When one is not afraid of the elite media in the slightest and simply refuses to take any of their crap you can engage them and use them to get your message out, just as Newt Gingrich did in his lengthy interview on foreign policy on CNN.
If the nominee had dealt with the elite media as effectively as Newt Gingrich much of that five points from media bias would have been averted and that alone would have reversed this election.
The GOP must not let the elite media pick their nominee, or millions in the base will not show up. Remember in 2008 when the elite media sung the praises of John McCain until the day after he secured the nomination and then went after him scurrilously. The elite media did the same with Mitt Romney. They trashed everyone but Mitt, until he secured the nomination. Which brings us to the next lesson.
Define yourself early and WIN the battle of the narratives
Remember those ads that accused Mitt Romney of causing the death of the wife of a steel worker, when in fact it was an Obama fund raiser who was in charge of Bain Capital at the time because Romney had already left to run the Olympics?
Obama started running those ads in swing states such as Ohio and Florida before Romney even secured the nomination. The elite media knew it was a lie but the reporting of it was essentially to say how brilliant the lie was and what a brilliant campaign Obama was running. Mitt Romney did not engage the media or run ads to fight back. Romney’s negatives were already high because of the scorched earth primary he and his allies had run and the “dead wife”adds from Obama drove those negatives up even further.
Romney didn’t start campaigning in Ohio in earnest until just about the time of the debates. Too late, many people had already made up their minds.
This was why the first debate was such a shock to the country, as Romney showed that he was not the evil, bloodthirsty, knuckle-dragging bastard that the Obama Campaign portrayed him as, but by then it was too little too late.
There were so many narratives to hit Obama on. One example is an EPA that has become truly imperious and tyrannical. One EPA official even said that they like to crucify companies like the Romans did to people, just to set an example. Take the countless horror stories and jobless from his outrageous eco-extremism and take that suffering and pin it on Obama as he so well deserved. Obama’s policies are truly cold and heartless and his corruption in the green sector to enrich his friends is well documented. The fast and furious scandal, which resulted in the brutal murders of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American federal agent should have been used to turn Hispanics away from Obama. A scandal is a gimme to the opposition but yet once again, Romney would not seize the day.
The biggest narrative of all that was not even challenged, is that the economic collapse was Bush’s fault. Well facts matter and someone needs to stand for the truth.
1 – The Bush Administration lobbied congress almost 20 times for mortgage reform since 2001
2 – Republicans tried to pass mortgage reform multiple times and when Barney Frank couldn’t stop it in the House Chris Dodd and the filibuster threat did in the Senate.
4 – When Obama was a lawyer for ACORN he participated in one of those bogus CRA lawsuits to force banks to give bad loans. The people he represented of course could not afford the payments and most lost their homes.
5 – Clinton Administration officials such as Janet Reno and Andrew Cuomo said on video that they wanted to use (read abuse) the CRA law to act as an affirmative action program for home loans, whether they qualified for the loan or not wasn’t important.
Voters have a limited attention span
Why would Mia Love and other fantastic candidates lose? The answer is coat tails. The top of the ticket sets the narrative and unless something unusual happens such as the Todd Akin or Dick Mourdock situation that gets huge press that catches the voter’s attention. If we are milquetoast at the top even the best of candidates pay the price down the ticket and we saw this happen in spades in this election. For most voters their time and attention only allow them to pay some attention to one or two races on the ticket. The rest are at the mercy of those at the top.
Walk the walk, don’t just talk the talk
Remember that ridiculous job killing light bulb ban that Republicans blamed Democrats for? Well the bill was co-authored by “conservative republican” and self proclaimed guardian of small business Fred Upton. Upton was primaried and as a result he is now behaving himself. Upton sponsored the bill to reverse the ban, but it should never have been an issue to begin with. It is NOT the job of Congress to micromanage the lives of the people.
Vote Fraud
There were so many problems with ballot counts that favored Democrats that I could fill the page with the links. Other blogs are doing that so I suggest that lawmakers read up and citizens make them listen. We control most of the countries governorships and state legislatures so the time to put teeth in our election laws and procedures is now.
George Soros is using his empire to rig state vote counting the other way so for the integrity of the vote we need to push back hard.
Florida and Ohio were so close that if vote fraud could have been nailed down and military ballots counted we would have a President Elect Romney today.
[Editor’s Note – I was pretty tough on Karl Rove in this piece. For the record I like Karl and we have chatted a little, but Karl, for your own good you should listen to this piece.]
Bush got over 62 million votes in 2004. Romney got just under 57 million.
Stop right there and let that number sink in. We are a nation where conservatives self identify more than liberals two to one.
Romney led the ticket in votes in every state he won meaning that he appealed to those moderates who are willing to lean conservative just fine, but evangelicals stayed home and so did traditional conservatives in North Florida.
Some people are saying “It is because this time more Hispanics went for Democrats instead of Republicans. This is true, but it is still dwarfed by the fact that five million conservatives stayed home.
This is what happens when you have a perceived “Massachusetts moderate who passed Romneycare” who runs a scorched earth primary as Romney did. The GOP establishment crammed him down our throat. In Florida, where Romney played those horribly dishonest ads against Newt it seems many stayed home. Romney also ran dishonest ads against Rick Santorum. Many evangelicals stayed home. This explains why we did good in polling and poor on election day. They participated in the polls, got pegged as likely voters and stayed home.
Weekly polling for two years tells us 61% of the people want Obamacare repealed, but too many voters simply didn’t believe that Romney and the Republicans were serious. Newt Gingrich warned that this very thing would happen. I know plenty of people who are conservatively minded who have said, “there is no difference between the two parties” and they essentially believe they are all socialist big spenders. Look at how ineffective John Boehner has been in the House. Libertarians in Indiana got 6% of the vote in some races, which is another indicator of this reasoning.
Another indicator is that traditionally the GOP has received about 80% of it’s donations from individuals in amounts of less than $200.00. This was not the case with Mitt Romney, although in the last eight weeks small contributors did donate more heavily, but none the less this indicates a problem with the base.
Another indication that the American voter believes that voting this time was futile is that 118 million people had voted in this White House race, far below 2004, and 2008 numbers.
The Republican Party needs to regain credibility with it’s base, who is so disgusted that three out of four of the last elections (2006, 2008 and 2012) the traditional conservative wing of the Republican Party has stayed home. In 2010 we had a clear message, this time we had “Obamacare vs Romneycare”. Lessons: Messaging and contrast matter; “electability theory” should now be put to bed as Dole, McCain and Romney were the “only electable ones”.
UPDATE – Our friends at Red State also had a similar take:
The question that many of these politicos have not answered is this: how could we possibly be more moderate than we already are? We ran with Dole in 1996, and we lost; we ran with McCain in 2008, and we lost; we ran with Romney, and we lost. Romney took the issue of Obamacare off the table and barely attacked Obama directly for much of anything. There was no potent conservative philosophy that was offered to provide voters with a sharp distinction between the parties. The Republican convention was a pathetic Oprah show and the entire campaign was basically an advocacy of Obama’s policies, albeit with less enthusiasm. And let’s not blame the loss on Paul Ryan and Medicare reform; he outperformed Bush and McCain with seniors.
For all the talk of the need to moderate in order to win, Obama ran the most divisive, radical, and negative campaign, while Romney ran a relentlessly positive campaign with incessant promises to work with the other side. People are attracted to a show of strength, not a promise of bipartisanship, which smacks of insecurity in one’s own virtues and ideas.
According to conventional progressive wisdom, regulation is the means by which a compassionate government protects the weak and innocent from the strong and malevolent.
Try telling that to Brad Jones.
Jones is one of the owners of Buckingham Slate, a Virginia business a little over an hour’s drive west of Richmond. The company is distinguished by the quality of the highly valued Arvonia slate it produces. And by the fact that its roots trace back almost to the Civil War. And by the fact that federal regulators smacked it with a $4,000 fine.
Over a trash can.
The offending can — or “waste receptacle,” in the words of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s official citation — was “not covered.” What’s more, “the receptacle was full.” It “could be smelled.” There were — brace yourself — “flies fl[y]ing in and around the receptacle.” And to crown all, “management engaged in aggravated conduct constituting more than ordinary negligence” by allowing this “condition to exist.” The horror.
Buckingham Slate has racked up other fines, too — such as a $70,000 fine imposed because one of its trucks had an inoperable horn. Perhaps regulators were following the approach advocated by Al Armendariz, the former EPA official who said enforcers should “crucify” offenders to “make an example” of them, which would then make others “easy to manage.”
According to President Obama’s campaign rhetoric, Republicans have nothing to offer but “the same prescription they’ve had for the last 30 years. . . : ‘Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning!’ ”
Funny stuff. But Martha Boneta isn’t laughing.
Boneta, a Fauquier County farmer, hosted a birthday party for eight 10-year-old girls — an occasion for which she lacked the proper “events permit.” For this, the county slammed her with a $5,000 fine. She also got in hot water for selling items, such as yarn and birdhouses, that she had not made herself.
Outraged over how the county was treating her, local farmers showed up at a zoning-board meeting a couple of months ago with pitchforks in hand. But the demonstration was only so useful. She ended up closing her shop anyway.
Americans should place more trust in “the guiding hand of government,” according to the president and his supporters.
But try telling that to Nathan Hammock and his family. The Hammocks own a dairy farm in Museville. Because of drought, they wanted to put an irrigation pond on their property. They eventually managed to — after three years trying to get permission from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers. “I think we’ve spent close to $30,000” in the process, Hammock says.
Hammock made the comment in a video you can find on the website of Rep. Robert Hurt (go tohttp://hurt.house.gov/ and click on “Videos”). Hurt, who represents Virginia’s Fifth District, has introduced legislation to let farmers farm without having to navigate a “tremendous bureaucratic maze.” It is moving through Congress — slowly.
A looming increase in the capital-gains tax rate next year is fueling sales of some privately-held businesses.
Many business owners—mostly founders who could gain a lot from a sale—are looking to close deals before next year, when the maximum tax on investment income is scheduled to rise from 15% currently to at least 23.8% on most capital gains, at least for higher-income households. Many sellers intend to convert their equity into retirement funds or just start anew.
“It just made more sense for me to take my chips off the table and go do something else,” said Bert Wolf, 60 years old, who has an agreement to sell his compressed-gas business, Acetylene Oxygen Co. of Harlingen, Tex., before year-end.
Mr. Wolf added that if he waited until after the tax increase to sell, he would have to expand the business at the current rate “for at least 3 or 4 more years to achieve the same after-tax sales dollar.” He is profiting on the sale of his business to PraxairInc., a public company.
“There’s a kind of a panic on to get things done,” said Beatrice Mitchell, co-founder of Sperry, Mitchell & Co. Inc., a New York investment bank that is advising Mr. Wolf on the sale.
The top tax rate will go up at year-end by at least 3.8 percentage points because of a provision in President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul law. But that will be added onto a top rate that will depend on negotiations between Mr. Obama and Congress after the November election, when they are expected to seek a deal on numerous tax and spending measures.
Mr. Obama and Congress agreed in late 2010 to extend the current 15% capital-gains tax rate through this year. Absent further action, the top capital gains tax rate will rise to 20% on Jan. 1. After adding the extra charge from the health-care law for higher-income households, the maximum tax on investment income would be 23.8%. When combined with the scheduled expiration of some other tax breaks for high earners, the maximum tax on investment income would be as high as 25%.
Many Republican lawmakers want to extend the 15% rate. If they prevail, the maximum tax likely would rise to at least 18.8% because of the health-care charge.
Mr. Obama proposes to let the top capital gains tax rate rise to 20% on income above $250,000 for couples, but hold it to 15% on income below that threshold.
But here is the rub, most “couples” that make 250k aren’t the one’s who pay these taxes, small businesses and investors do. It directly chases jobs and investment out of the country.
Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate Director tells Politico:
For most of my life, I’ve been an active Democrat. I am proud to have worked for President Bill Clinton and then-Senator Hillary Clinton, and, during that time, I saw firsthand what can be accomplished by strong, bipartisan leadership. I know what it means to work across the aisle on issues that are important to the American people. And that’s why I am supporting Mitt Romney. Governor Romney has a plan to restore the prosperity this country deserves and expects. He will work with people of good will no matter what their party, and he will pursue the policies that are in the best interest of our country, no matter who proposes them. That’s what President Obama promised to do four years ago. But like so many of his promises, bipartisan cooperation is just another one he has broken. We can’t have four more years of failed policies and two parties that can’t work together. We need the change Mitt Romney is offering.
It is just a fact of journalism today that most polls are designed to make news, create drama, conflict and partisan bias. They are not designed to reflect the mood of the nation properly and not designed to be honest.
If they reported that the race is going to be a blowout are you going to stay glued to the 24 hour news channels?
So let me ask you, how is the poll a “dead heat” when Romney is winning independents by a whopping 22 points?
Washington (CNN) – It’s all tied up, according to a new national poll released two days before the presidential election.
And the CNN/ORC International survey not only indicates a dead heat in the race for the White House, but also on almost every major indicator of President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney that was tested in the poll.
A total of 1,010 adults were interviewed by telephone nationwide by live interviewers calling both landline and cell phones. All respondents were asked questions concerning basic demographics, and the entire sample was weighted to reflect national Census figures for gender, race, age, education, region of country, telephone usage and whether respondents own or rent their homes.
Registered voters were asked questions about their likelihood of voting, past voting behavior, and interest in the campaign; based on answers to those questions, 693 respondents were classified as likely voters. Respondents who reported that they had already cast an absentee ballot or voted early were automatically classified as likely voters. Among those likely voters, 41% described themselves as Democrats, 29% described themselves as Independents, and 30% described themselves as Republicans.
They over-sampled Democrats by 11%. Keep in mind that in this country self described conservatives outnumber self described liberals by almost two to one. There is no way that this was an accident. If I had turned this poll in as a classroom assignment in a political science or communications class it would be rejected and I would be told to do it right if I wanted a decent grade.
Perrysburg police today issued misdemeanor citations to four men for allegedly being in possession of stolen political signs.
Those charged with receiving stolen property included John Russell, 39, of Toledo, and Chris Monaghan 41, of Rossford, who are both listed on the Sheet Metal Workers Local 33 Web site as business agents for the union’s Toledo district.
The men were in a pickup truck registered to Local 33 in Parma, Ohio, police said.
Also cited were Corey J. Beaubien, 37, and Sean Bresler, 33, both of Toledo.
A Tea Party Web site reported Friday the truck was loaded with the campaign signs of GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan. Perrysburg police did not confirm that, but a police incident report said that the summonses were issued about 12:30 a.m. in the 11100 block of Fremont Pike “after several reports were taken of political signs being stolen in the city of Perrysburg.”
This is a disaster and this is not partisanship, it is a cold reality.
The federal response in New York and parts of New Jersey is not going well. After 72 hours FEMA and the military should be engaged full speed ahead. It isn’t. Main roads still have boats sitting on them.
Mayor Bloomberg is keeping out the National Guard because they have guns… no kidding. Obama should assert FEMA emergency powers since this is a multi-state disaster and over rule the Mayor. Bush did the same thing after Louisiana Governor Blanco refused to cooperate during Katrina. Bloomberg may know how to make money, but that is all he knows how to do. His failure as mayor is truly epic.
There is a shortage of water. So what you do is call in the Navy as the ships have large desalination machines to make fresh water which could be sent inland.
After Katrina Bush sent in the Navy, the Coast Guard and Army General Honore into New Orleans and the General got it under control and had choppers and trucks moving debris just after 72 hours. Bush also parked the US Navy a hospital ship just off the coast. By the way, federal guidelines say that FEMA’s and the federal response time should be 48-72 hours.
Honestly I was expecting the disaster response for this hurricane to go well like it did in Mississippi for Katrina. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour had asked for the military and national guard to come in before Katrina even hit. The damage to the Mississippi Gulf Coast was FAR worse than the damage in New Orleans, but they got things going in a hurry, got relief delivered well. This is what happens when Governors and local authorities cooperate with and coordinate with FEMA like they are supposed to. The reason the press didn’t tell you this was because what news is there report when the news is good?
Staten Island resident John Tabacco told Neil Cavuto this morning that Staten Island is still alone. ** There is no federal help. ** The feds just drive by with their clipboards. **We just found three more dead people in the pile this morning.
Robert Wolf, a member of Barack Obama’s Jobs Council and a top campaign donor, admitted this morning that Barack Obama does not even join in on the regularly scheduled calls. The calls are held every two weeks.
Rush Limbaugh made a joke that wasn’t even serious and Brian Williams spun it on the NBC News to make it appear something really ugly. Rush Limbaugh than not only defends himself, but points out the constant journalistic failures of Brian Williams and NBC is news story after news story that they either ignore or get obvious facts wrong.
As a trained journalist myself, I ask you to set whatever feeling you have about Limbaugh aside, because in this he is spot on.
When you are done reading be sure to see Benghazigate Part I and the following link has all of our coverage on this emerging scandal.
In a nutshell what is new:
More evidence on the timeline and what the White House knew and when they knew it.
New documents discovered show that Chris Stevens told the State Department that Al-Qaeda forces were gathering in Benghazi and that he believes the consulate was next. His warning was ignored.
Ambassador Chris Stevens called and spoke with Gregory Hicks, The Deputy Chief of Mission in Tripoli, begging for help as the attack began. We had TWO drones overhead. Hicks notified Washington.
Ed Klein reports that Hillary Clinton also asked President Obama to send in help and he said no.
CBS News releases information form confidential emails showing that Obama would not even assemble the counter terrorism group and reports that they were told to stand down.
Ambassador Stevens’ emails to State Department: Al-Qaeda forces are gathering in Benghazi and this consulate is the next target.
His warnings, which were classified by the Obama Administration but leaked, came in the weeks and even hours before the attacks so why were his security teams taken away, even under protest? Previous requests for more security were not only denied, but they were told to stop making the requests.
Catherine Herridge in the video below: The State Department has culpability in the deaths of these four Americans. The warnings were specific, they were direct, they named the enemy and they said that this consulate needed more support. Stevens said that the Consulate should move long term into the CIA Annex. [Diana West has a transcript of Heridge’s remarks in the video below as well as more details on the terror groups mention. Nice work Diana – Editor.]
Also in this video Intelligence Committee member Jason Chaffetz: Ambassador Chris Stevens called and spoke with Gregory Hicks, The Deputy Chief of Mission in Tripoli, begging for help as the attack began. Hicks notified Washington.
Chaffetz says that he spoke with (former as of a few days ago) AFRICOM commander Gen. Carter Ham personally. Chaffetz says Ham told him, “he did not get a directive from the White House, from the president of the United States to engage in the fire fight to help protect those people.”
“Mr. President, you can’t have it both ways,” Chaffetz added. “You can’t say that you are doing everything you can to protect the people in Benghazi when we are under attack — a fire fight that starts at 9:40 at night and goes to the wee hours of the morning — and say you did everything when the military did not engage.” Says Cheffetz, we had proximity, we had capability, and we had opportunity and the President would not pull the trigger.
Emails from the embassy staff to the State Department, local military commands such as AFRICOM, the CIA, DoD, DNI, and the White House Situation Room were sent DURING the attack. They watched the attack in real time via the drones flying overhead.
Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer along with Col. David Hunt said that his sources say that Obama was one of the people in the room watching the Benghazi attack. Col. Hunt explains how and who was watching the live feed from the two drones overhead. Says Col. Hunt, “This was also the fourth embassy in 24 hours to come under attack so the entire U.S. Government was paying attention”.
[Editor’s Note – Col. Hunt says that the President or the Secretary of Defense could have ordered the military to intervene, but it didn’t happen. President Obama said that he ordered the military to do all that they could to help, did the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta disobey that order or is Obama lying again? Remember that after the “it was the video” lie was busted the next lie was “it was the fog of war, we had no communication, then we had too much communication” then after that the story was that we didn’t know what was going on and we didn’t want to send our guys into an ambush. But what better data is there than contact with people on the ground and two drones giving a live feed?
There are standing orders to preserve American life when such a call comes in. Why were those orders not followed or were commands ordered to stand down?
Local CIA teams were told to stand down multiple times during the attack while in contact with Washington. The AC-130 gunship was certainly overhead because one of our people on the ground was painting the mortar target with a handheld laser designator that works with the fire control system of an AC-130. You do not waste batteries on the laser designator and make yourself a target in the process if you are not in direct contact with close air support.]
Two U.S. officials tell Eli Lake at The Daily Beast that the State Department never requested military backup the night of the attack.
Arab TV is reporting that documents found at the site confirm that Stevens was sending emails about the security situation HOURS before the attack. Foreign Policy Magazine also has the story:
BENGHAZI, Libya — More than six weeks after the shocking assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi — and nearly a month after an FBI team arrived to collect evidence about the attack – the battle-scarred, fire-damaged compound where Ambassador Chris Stevens and another Foreign Service officer lost their lives on Sept. 11 still holds sensitive documents and other relics of that traumatic final day, including drafts of two letters worrying that the compound was under “troubling” surveillance and complaining that the Libyan government failed to fulfill requests for additional security.
When we visited on Oct. 26 to prepare a story for Dubai based Al Aan TV, we found not only Stevens’s personal copy of the Aug. 6 New Yorker, lying on remnants of the bed in the safe room where Stevens spent his final hours, but several ash-strewn documents beneath rubble in the looted Tactical Operations Center, one of the four main buildings of the partially destroyed compound. Some of the documents — such as an email from Stevens to his political officer in Benghazi and a flight itinerary sent to Sean Smith, a U.S. diplomat slain in the attack — are clearly marked as State Department correspondence.Others are unsigned printouts of messages to local and national Libyan authorities. The two unsigned draft letters are both dated Sept. 11 and express strong fears about the security situation at the compound on what would turn out to be a tragic day. They also indicate that Stevens and his team had officially requested additional security at the Benghazi compound for his visit — and that they apparently did not feel it was being provided.
One letter, written on Sept. 11 and addressed to Mohamed Obeidi, the head of the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ office in Benghazi, reads:
“Finally, early this morning at 0643, September 11, 2012, one of our diligent guards made a troubling report. Near our main gate, a member of the police force was seen in the upper level of a building across from our compound. It is reported that this person was photographing the inside of the U.S. special mission and furthermore that this person was part of the police unit sent to protect the mission. The police car stationed where this event occurred was number 322.”
The account accords with a message written by Smith, the IT officer who was killed in the assault, on a gaming forum on Sept. 11. “Assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures,” he wrote hours before the assault.
White House has disclosed that President Obama was informed about the attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi at roughly 5pm by his National Security Adviser Tom Donilon as he was in a pre-scheduled meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. At that meeting, senior administration officials say, the President ordered that the U.S. begin moving military assets into the region to prepare for a range of contingencies.
We believe this is misinformation. We know that there was a previously scheduled meeting with President Obama at 5pm, which is an hour and twenty minutes into the attack. What we do not believe was that this was the first that the President knew about the attack. As Col. Hunt said, this was September 11th and three of our embassies had already been attacked that day. The entire US Government was watching. Everyone was on a heightened state of readiness.
Remember when we said that the Obama administration may be in denial of terrorism because they were caught up in a “mission accomplished” mentality? Today there are reports that President Obama said in a speech in Ohio that bin Laden is dead and Al-Qaeda is finished. After Al-Qaeda killed our people in Libya they flew the Al-Qaeda flag over our consulate.
Did Barack Obama have a “Mission Accomplished” moment with dreadful consequences in Libya? Libya’s former Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril believes he did.
Perhaps you’ll recall when George W. Bush stood on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and a banner positioned behind him read “Mission Accomplished” regarding Iraq on May 1, 2003. It was a moment that haunted him throughout the rest of his presidency and beyond, as the Iraq War continued on for eight and a half more years.
And just as many Democrats say Bush made a premature call after the sacking of Baghdad and the toppling of the Hussein regime, so too the former Libyan PM says Obama counted his eggs before they hatched.
Jibril has “accused the United States and its NATO allies of high-tailing it out of [Libya] as soon as dictator Moammar Gadhafi was disposed a year ago.” He says the quick departure created “a power vacuum” that has allowed radicals, like those who attacked the Benghazi consulate, to strengthen their numbers and flourish.
According to Jibril:
After the collapse of the regime, the immediate task of our friends was to help us rebuild the government before they withdrew from Libya. [But] the moment the regime fell down, they felt that their mission [had] been accomplished. I think it was a premature decision.
Ed Klein, a confidant of Bill Clinton (known as one of the Clintonista’s) tells Andrew Wilkow that Hillary Clinton asked President Obama to respond as the attack happened and Obama refused. See the video interview HERE.
CBS News: Counterterrorism Security Group told to stand down
CBS News has learned that during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Obama Administration did not convene its top interagency counterterrorism resource: the Counterterrorism Security Group, (CSG).
“The CSG is the one group that’s supposed to know what resources every agency has. They know of multiple options and have the ability to coordinate counterterrorism assets across all the agencies,” a high-ranking government official told CBS News. “They were not allowed to do their job. They were not called upon.”
Information shared with CBS News from top counterterrorism sources in the government and military reveal keen frustration over the U.S. response on Sept. 11, the night ambassador Chris Stevens and 3 other Americans were killed in a coordinated attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.
The circumstances of the attack, including the intelligence and security situation there, will be the subject of a Senate Intelligence Committee closed hearing on Nov. 15, with additional hearings to follow.
Counterterrorism sources and internal emails reviewed by CBS News express frustration that key responders were ready to deploy, but were not called upon to help in the attack.
Now read carefully – from CBS:
Another senior counter terrorism official says a hostage rescue team was alternately asked to get ready and then stand down throughout the night, as officials seemed unable to make up their minds.
“The response process was isolated at the most senior level,” says an official referring to top officials in the executive branch. “My fellow counterterrorism professionals and I (were) not consulted.”
This of course is a bomb shell. What is interesting is that Speaker Newt Gingrich said that he knows of two major news agencies that have these emails, including the story about the stand down order, and that a Senator told him of this [probably the same Senator who leaked it to CBS and Glenn Beck in the first place who is almost certainly an Intelligence Committee member – Editor].
What is even more interesting is that Glen Beck not only said the same thing but he threatened that if said major news network waited until after the election to release these emails that he would out them, name names, etc. Hours later CBS released the story above.
Greg Davis, a retired DIA and State Department official tells Political Arena, “I think this is the first time in modern history where we can absolutely NOT trust our President to protect our troops; in this case, we need to protect them from him”. Davis has a light hearted blog where he talks about deadly serious things and offers up some of his speculation and what information he is still able to glean. He is not happy that our people were allowed to die while the White House situation room watched.
UPDATE – Followup report from Jennifer Griffon: More on the ground sources confirm they asked for help and were ordered to stand down – LINK:
So we have the biggest storms to hit New York and New Jersey in decades, there are mass power outages and granny is going to whip out her Samsung Galaxy and pull up FEMA.gov to find out what to do?
Local TV stations didn’t even broadcast emergency phone numbers before the storm hit. So what is the FCC/FEMA emergency broadcast system good for again?
UPDATE – Hey buddy you ain’t in da union! I don’t care if those people are stranded and starving YOU ain’t helpin’!
On Sunday’s political talk shows, several Republicans criticized the Obama administration’s response to the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. Here’s Senator John McCain of Arizona on CBS’s Face the Nation:
You know, this administration is very good at touting and giving all the details like when they got Bin Laden. But now, we know that there were tapes, recordings inside the consulate during this fight, and they’ve gotten—they came—the F.B.I. finally got in and took those, and now they’re classified as “top secret.” Why would they be top secret? So the president went on various shows, despite what he said he said in the Rose Garden, about terrorist acts, he went on several programs, including “The View” including “Letterman” including before the U.N., where he continued to refer, days later, many days later, to this as a spontaneous demonstration because of a hateful video. We know that is patently false. What did the president know? When did he know it? And what did he do about it?
McCain said for “literally days and days” the White House “told the American people something that had no basis in fact whatsoever.”
Newt Gingrich, on ABC’s This Week:
But the bigger issue is, whether it’s unemployment or it is what happened in Benghazi, where we’ve had this strange situation over the weekend that the Secretary of Defense apparently refused to obey the President’s order, if the president is telling the truth and he actually instructed his assistants to get aid to Benghazi, we’re now being told that the Secretary of Defense canceled that. And I think these kinds of things all drag down the Obama campaign.
Ohio senator Rob Portman talked on Fox News Sunday about a “shocking breakdown” with regard to the Obama administration’s response:
This is not about politics. This is about a huge national security issue that affects all of us and there was a shocking breakdown, operationally, not to have the security there in the first place. And then not to respond to these guys, in their pleas for help for 7 hours, during a firefight. It’s unbelievable and now, we are hearing that the president of the United States, based on his own words, issued a directive immediately after he found out about the firefight, saying that he wanted to be sure those people on the ground were safe and they were getting what they needed. It didn’t happen. This means either that the president’s order was not followed, which would be a breakdown in terms of the White House procedure, or, it means the order wasn’t issued. We need to find out about this, it is not about politics, it is a very serious situation. After the fact, of course, there’s also been a lot of confusion about what happened and why it happened.
Here’s Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, also on Fox News Sunday:
Chris, the American people have the right to know. And that is what they are demanding here in Wisconsin. I mean, let’s face it. What was the president doing during those 7 hours? Did he give that directive? Or didn’t he? Did Leon Panetta directly defy his directive? I mean, what happened? Who sent out, who sent Ambassador Rice out five days later when they knew it was a terrorist attack, that it was pre-planned, sent her out on the Sunday talk shows to say that in fact this was a spontaneous reaction to of course the video?
Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, on CNN’s State of the Union:
The mishandling of the situation in Benghazi. No answers, no transparency, 45 days after the fact is a great concern. Either the president gave an order that was disobeyed by the Secretary of Defense to provide support in Benghazi or he didn’t, and I think people want answers before this election on that, so that’s what’s going to determine the outcome.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
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