The evening edition.
Benghazi-Gate has taken up most of my online time today, but there are some other important stories, too – Oh, who am I kidding – I need to clear some tabs, okay?
Moonbattery: Obama/Allred Attack on Romney Fizzles:
It’s not easy for a guy who worked for ACORN to hit new lows, but Obama managed it by conspiring with the infamously slimy lawyer Gloria Allred on a last minute smear job against Romney. The results were less than impressive:
A Boston area judge shut down Gloria Allred’s request on Thursday to have a gag order lifted on a case presidential candidate Mitt Romney testified in on behalf of his friend’s divorce case.
As was first reported by TMZ, Gloria wanted to unseal Romney’s testimony on the complicated divorce case of his friend and Staples founder, Tom Stemberg. The famed celebrity lawyer also wanted the gag order associated with the case lifted, so that everyone could speak freely about Romney and the case.
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Michelle Malkin asks: What about the Camp Bastion attack?
Three days after the bloody 9/11 siege on our consulate in Benghazi, the Taliban waged an intricately coordinated, brutal attack on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. The murderous jihadists released video exactly one month ago this week showing off their training exercises in preparation for the assault. Where are the questions?
Where’s the accountability? Where’s the Obama administration? Where’s the press? Where’s the outrage?
Two heroic U.S. Marines were killed in the battle. Their names — Lt. Col. Christopher Raible and Sgt. Bradley Atwell – have not been uttered publicly by the commander in chief. Their arrival back in the U.S., in flag-draped coffins, was not broadcast on network TV. But their brothers-in-arms did not and will not forget. And neither must we.
On September 20, John Gresham of the Defense Media Network wrote a scathing detailed breakdown of this little-noticed terrorist attack on our troops. He called it “arguably the worst day in USMC aviation history since the Tet Offensive of 1968.” Eight irreplaceable aircraft were destroyed or put out of action by Taliban warriors dressed in U.S. combat fatigues — amounting to “approximately 7 percent of the total flying USMC Harrier fleet,” Gresham reported.
Keep reading…
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Dangerous: Former FEC Commissioner Brad Smith Demolishes Leftist Hysteria over Company Election Letters:
In today’s Wall Street Journal, my friend Brad Smith at the Center for Competitive Politics defrocks the self-appointed do-gooder intelligentsia and media in the Beltway, all of whom have sounded the alarm bells over a letter Koch Industries sent its employees about the upcoming presidential and congressional elections:
If you’re like most Americans, you probably wouldn’t find these words threatening. But they have many denizens of the anticorporate American left apoplectic. “A slow-motion coup d’état,” says journalist and law professor Garrett Epps, writing in the Atlantic. “A culture of fear” pronounces In These Times, Noam Chomsky’s lowbrow broadsheet. “Ominous,” says the Center for American Progress, a lefty think tank.
The quotes are from a letter sent by Koch Industries President Dave Robertson to the company’s employees. “It is essential that we are all informed and educated voters,” wrote Mr. Robertson. “Our future depends on it.” His employees must be quaking in their boots.
Of course, anything done under the aegis of David and Charles Koch, the owners of Koch Industries and prominent backers of Mitt Romney and conservative causes in general, drives the left crazy. But it isn’t just the Kochs who are letting their political preferences be known. As Reuters notes, “Several companies have sent out letters urging their employees to vote for Romney.”
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But the left seems to think it is somehow illegitimate for management to speak to its own employees about how different candidates, and the policies they espouse, could affect the company. The left has two main fears: First, that corporations will say things it doesn’t like; and second, that employees will listen.
Keep reading…
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Via Pseud O’Nym
Salon, (no linky for them) says conservatives are “flipping out” over the Lena Dunham ad. (Libs just love it when conservatives are offended by their repulsive antics.)
But, Jim Treacher of The Daily Caller says, I think Lena Dunham’s Obama ad is great and she should do a bunch more just like it:
Some people are aghast that Team Obama is so creepy and cultlike that they think this is a good ad. To them I say… What are you complaining about? This is a very promising sign. The Greatest President Ever knows he’s in trouble and is willing to try anything, anything, to squeeze out one more vote. If he thinks his base is so helpless and infantilized that something like this appeals to them, great. If he thinks this will sway “independents” and “undecideds” and other people who won’t admit they’re voting for Romney because their friends will think they’re uncool and/or racist, fantastic. Run with that.
Keep showing us just what a serious guy you are, Mr. President: Big Bird, binders, bayonets, and babbling bubbleheads.
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via @MelissaTweets
Tony Harnden The Daily Mail: Is Obama’s ‘firewall’ crumbling? Romney draws level with President in ‘safe state’ of Wisconsin
Mitt Romney is now tied with Barack Obama in Wisconsin, one of the ‘firewall’ states the president hoped would protect him against defeats in Florida and Virginia, according to a new poll.
Rasmussen found that Romney and Obama were tied on 49 per cent in the state, which Obama won in a 14-point landslide in 2008.
Buoyed by internal polling which shows similar numbers, Romney is to head to Wisconsin next week, as first reported by MailOnline last Tuesday. He will hold a rally in the Milwaukee area on Tuesday morning.
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Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives special agent John Dodson is suing Time, Inc., The Daily Caller has learned, alleging that its Fortune Magazine libeled him in an article it ran this summer. Dodson is the ATF agent who blew the whistle on Fast and Furious, exposing the failures of the operation to the American people.
The article, authored by Katherine Eban, claims that a “Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust.” The article was headlined “The Truth about the Fast and Furious Scandal.”
In his libel lawsuit complaint, obtained by TheDC, Dodson said that “predicate is false and deceptive in that it leads readers to erroneously believe that it is the only accurate account of these events.”
Dodson also alleges “the article is fictitious in the sense that it contains facts that Defendant knew to be false prior to publication. Further, the contentions made in the article have been eviscerated in the public domain.”
Sunshine State Sarah: Obama: Most. Childish. Campaign. Ever.
Fresh off their trivial, demeaning, and completely creepy “ladyparts” and “your first time” ads, the Obama campaign is now seeking inspiration from the kindergarten playground for today’s message.
Please sit down. I know this news will come as a shock.
In a previously off-the-record interview with the Des Moines Register, President Obama argued that the economic recovery he’s overseen isn’t as bad as his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, claims… “In many ways, because of the actions we took early on, we’re actually ahead of pace in the typical recovery out of a recession like this,” Obama said…
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The Blaze: Former Joe Biden Aide Writes Controversial Tell-All Book: ‘Egomaniacal Autocrat’:
A former aide to Vice President Joe Biden has written a tell-all book that describes the VP as an “egomaniacal autocrat” who was “determined to manage his staff through fear” – an October surprise that the Obama campaign probably didn’t see coming.
Author Jeff Connaughton, a former Biden Senate staffer, says Biden originally inspired him to get into politics but the experience working under the former Delaware senator caused him to become disillusioned with the political system in Washington.
The book is called “The Payoff” and it was actually quietly released last month. Connaughton writes, as Politico describes it, “in the fashion of a guilt-racked whistle-blower: he was a party to a corrupt system and now he wants to blow the lid off the game.”
“I came to D.C. a Democrat and left a plutocrat,” writes Connaughton.
Here’s one thing we can be sure of about the Benghazi affair: almost everything we’ve been told since by the mainstream media is a lie, invariably one designed to shore up the creaky and desperate Obama administration.
Consider how quickly the story was spun by Obama’s amen corner in the liberal MSM. It should, according to any objective news sense, have been a shocking tale of how a woefully unprotected ambassador was murdered in cold blood by Al Qaeda affiliates. Instead, it almost immediately became – of all things – an excuse to demonstrate why Mitt Romney was unfit to be president.
Here, for example, was NBC the day after.
Yesterday we noted that Mitt Romney, down in the polls after the convention, was throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama. Little did we know the kitchen sink would include — on the anniversary of 9/11 — one of the most over-the-top and (it turns out) incorrect attacks of the general-election campaign .
And here was CBS the day after. (Sounds to me like they have the same White House press officer dictate their stories for them…)
(CBS News) The conventional wisdom emerged in Washington almost immediately on Wednesday: Mitt Romney’s handling of the violence in Egypt and Libya was a disaster.
“The comments were a big mistake, and the decision to double down on them was an even bigger mistake,” Steve Schmidt, senior campaign strategist to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, told CBS News. “There are legitimate criticisms to be made but you foreclose on your ability to make them when you try to score easy political points. And the American people, when the country is attacked, whether they’re a Republican or Democrat or independent, want to see leaders who have measured responses, not leaders whose first instinct is to try to score political points.”
Barack Obama’s prospects for re-election have been fading for some time now. As Mitt Romney surges, Obama flails, embarrassing himself with silly trivialities that are often summed up as Big Bird, binders and bayonets. That’s what happens when your record is so bad that you can’t talk about it; not truthfully, anyway. So it has been clear for a while that Obama’s re-election hopes can’t absorb another blow. Which the Benghazi story, to the extent the facts get out, surely is.
That is why Obama made a decision early on to stop referring to the Benghazi debacle as a successful terrorist attack. Acknowledging what really happened would have utterly destroyed one of Obama’s main campaign themes, that through his own personal heroism he had al Qaeda on the run. Instead, Obama chose to pretend that Benghazi was an unfortunate but essentially meaningless mob uprising, prompted by a YouTube video. So we got the nauseating spectacle of Hillary Clinton hugging the father of one of the murdered SEALS and assuring him not to worry, the Obama administration would prosecute the guy who made the video to the fullest extent of the law.
But, with a little over a week to go until the election, the lid was blown off the administration’s cover-up by Fox’s story yesterday, alleging that the administration turned down repeated pleas for help over the course of the seven-hour Benghazi battle, and by the white-hot anger of Charles Woods, who has repeatedly called Barack Obama and his White House “cowards” for failing to come to his son’s aid.
So far, no decision appears forthcoming from the Obama campaign or the DNC about following the lead of Washington’s Democrats to dump Knight’s hate-earned cash.
According to the report in The Seattle Times:
After resisting calls to return the cash when some of the videos surfaced earlier this week, a party spokesperson Friday evening said the Democrats have decided to donate half the Knight money to the campaign for Referendum 74 to legalize gay marriage, and half to the Anti-Defamation League.
“Recently, we’ve been made aware of comments made by a contributor to the Democratic Party that do not reflect our party’s values. While we did not solicit any contributions from JZ Knight, it is important that we make it clear that we view her comments as offensive and do not condone this kind of vitriol,” said state Democratic Party [Chairman] Dwight Pelz in a statement through a spokesperson.
The Times story did not indicate whether individual state candidates who have received monies from Knight and the Ramtha School of Enlightenment – $3,600 by 2nd legislative district state Senate candidate Bruce Lachney, $3,600 by Thurston County Commissioner Sandra Romero, $1,800 by State Supreme Court Justice Susan Owens – have joined with Pelz in ditching the toxic cash.
Still, Pelz & Company have not exactly donned the hairshirt to walk a penitent path to repair the damage done by five days of vacillation on whether to act ethically or to keep sitting on tainted funds. Delivering a $35,000 bag of cash to Approve Referendum 74 campaign headquarters – vaunted by the Democrat’s progressive base as a Normandy Invasion of sorts against conservative values – can hardly be considered a painful act of contrition.
Here is the up to date itinerary of Trevor Loudon’s US tour.
So far he will be speaking in Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, Massachusetts, Florida, California, New Jersey, Colorado, Georgia, Philadelphia, Montana, Wisconsin and Ohio.
There are still several open days to fill, so if you’d like Mr. Loudon to speak at your event or to interview him, please contact him at trevor.newzeal@gmail.com
Klavan on the Culture: Rape and Abortion: Dilemma or Demagoguery:
As everyone knows (since the media has covered it more often than Fast and Furious and Benghazi-gate put together), Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock recently answered a debate question about abortion and rape: “I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” Mourdock later clarified the comment and apologized for his poor phrasing — as was proper — but come on, we all know what he was trying to say. He doesn’t think rape is intended by God. He thinks a baby conceived by rape remains a baby with a right to life.
It doesn’t bother me that many people disagree with this. As I said, I myself think the question is so difficult it is beyond the scope of law and only the individual conscience should be trusted to decide it. But what does bother me is that leftists — by which I mean Democrats and their mainstream journalist Renfields — have tried to demagogue this into some kind of gotcha moment, akin to Todd Akin’s ignorant remark about women’s magic bodies containing a sparkly stopgap that prevents the whole problem. Read the articles: filled with wishful msm thinking about how Mourdock’s remarks put the entire GOP on the defensive.
Nice Deb 