24 Days

Hungarian-born billionaire makes anti-socialism case in TV ad

... no presidential campaign or super PAC is behind it. Rather, a new TV ad and Web video that warns of the ills of socialism while urging America to vote Republican next month is financed by Hungarian-born billionaire Thomas Peterffy

Peterffy recalls his childhood under socialism in Hungary, and says, "The nation became poorer and poorer. And that's what I see happening here." He warns that the United States, his adopted country, is embarking on a "slippery slope."

He continues: "America's wealth comes from the efforts of people striving for success. Take away their incentive with badmouthing success and you take away the wealth that helps us take care of the needy. Yes, in socialism the rich will be poorer -- but the poor will also be poorer. People will lose interest in really working hard and creating jobs."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/10/12/hungarian-born-billionaire-makes-anti-socialism-case-in-tv-ad/

School Lets Dems Register Students to Vote, But Not GOP

Florida Republicans are outraged after a school district allowed a pro-Obama organization to conduct student voter registration drives and deliver speeches to classes – but denied the Romney campaign similar opportunities.

Pasco County Schools confirmed to Fox News that volunteers from Organizing For America were given access to as many as a half dozen high school and middle school campuses.

“They did register students to vote,” spokesman John Mann told Fox News. “We don’t know how many children were registered – (but) we have an ongoing investigation.”

According to email correspondence obtained by Fox News, volunteers tried to infiltrate at least three other school campuses – but on-campus officials rebuffed those efforts.

In addition to voter registration, a former teacher was allowed to deliver Obama speeches to a number of senior high school students.

“She got into six classrooms and gave pro-Obama speeches – like way off to the left,” said James Mathieu, general counsel for the Pasco County Republican Party. “That got out to parents and parents complained.”

So why did school officials allow a partisan organization to mingle with students?

“That will come out in our final investigation,” Mann said.

Another significant issue was the former teacher’s pro-Obama address. Local Republicans asked for equal
access. At first, school officials agreed – but later reversed their decision.

http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/school-lets-dems-register-students-to-vote-but-not-gop.html

Another Obama green-subsidy recipient under criminal investigation

Will Abound Solar be the next Solyndra? The Obama administration gave the Colorado solar panel manufacturer $68 million in subsidies — a down payment on almost $370 million approved by the Department of Energy – before the company suddenly closed its doors and went bankrupt. The district attorney in Weld County has now opened a criminal investigation into Abound, as its business practices and its products look more and more suspicious:

7NEWS obtained internal documents from 2012 that show orders for tens of thousands of replacement solar panels. The orders cite different reasons for the replacements including, “low performance,” “under performance” and “catastrophic failures.”

The orders are for replacements requested after the Department of Energy stopped stimulus money payments to Abound.

“These are solar panels we are now seeing reports that said they worked as long as you didn’t put them in the sun,” said Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo. “Now the question is did the (Department of Energy) — did they know something that the rest of should have known? Did Abound not tell the DOE something? These are questions that need to be answered.”

That’s not the only investigation for the defunct solar maker. Apparently, even after getting $68 million from the Obama administration for its poor-quality solar panels, they couldn’t pay their local property tax bill, either. That may or may not be part of the Weld County probe at the moment, but if it’s not, there will probably be another one to find the missing tax payments.

In other words, Abound was pretty good about taking tax dollars, but lousy at paying the taxes it owed.

This probe will definitely raise more questions about the vetting done at DoE, who were entrusted to invest their funds carefully. As events at Solyndra proved, those concerns got subordinated — along with taxpayer dollars — to politics.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/10/08/another-obama-green-subsidy-recipient-under-criminal-investigation/

Intelligence products published on September 12, sources tell us, included detailed evidence that al Qaeda-linked jihadists were involved in the Benghazi attacks.

* As first reported by Newsweek’s Eli Lake, within hours of the attack, “U.S. intelligence agencies monitored communications from jihadists affiliated with the group that led the attack and members of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the group’s North African affiliate.” Lake reported that the intelligence was so detailed, U.S. officials “had even pinpointed the location of one of those attackers.”

* Senior State Department officials were in contact with security agents on the ground in Benghazi, in real time, as the attacks unfolded. In conversations that evening and the next day U.S. officials in Libya gave no indication that there had been any protest of any kind.

* On September 12, the New York Times reported: “American and European officials said that while many details about the attack remained unclear, the assailants seemed organized, well trained and heavily armed, and they appeared to have at least some level of advance planning.”

* That same day, Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he had no doubt the attacks were planned. “It was a coordinated, military-style, commando-type raid.”

* Democrats said the same thing. Representative Adam Smith, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said: “This was not just a mob that got out of hand. Mobs don’t come in and attack, guns blazing. I think that there is a growing consensus it was preplanned.”

* Senator Carl Levin, leaving a briefing with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, was asked if the attack was planned: “There’s been evidence of that. . . . The attack looked like it was planned and premeditated, sure.”

* On September 14, a U.S. official told Reuters that while the question of planning was an open one, “Everything I have seen says this was a highly armed, organized attack. Not a mob reacting to a movie.”

The officials who gave these assessments—elected and unelected, Democrat and Republican—were in a position to do so for one reason: the intelligence. Most important: There is no intelligence whatsoever linking the Benghazi attack to the anti-Muslim video.

Notice that all of those assessments came before U.N. ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five political talk shows September 16 and linked the Libya attack to the video. And they came well before Barack Obama appeared on David Letterman on September 18 and did the same.

There are two possibilities. Either the intelligence community had a detailed picture of what happened in Benghazi that night and failed to share it with other administration officials and the White House. Or the intelligence community provided that detailed intelligence picture to others in the administration, and Obama, Biden, Clinton, Susan Rice, and others ignored and manipulated the intelligence to tell a politically convenient—but highly inaccurate—story.

If it’s the former, DNI James Clapper should be fired. If it’s the latter, what happened in Benghazi—and what happened afterwards—will go down as one of the worst scandals in recent memory.

It seems far more likely that it’s the latter. After all, is it conceivable that White House officials at the highest levels were not actively engaged in interagency meetings to determine what happened in Benghazi? Is it conceivable that intelligence officials, knowing there was no evidence at all of a link between the film and Benghazi, would fail to tell the president and his colleagues that their claims were unfounded? Is it conceivable that somehow the latest intelligence on the 9/11 attacks was left out of Obama’s intelligence briefings in the days after 9/11? It would have been a priority for every professional at the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council to discover exactly what happened in Benghazi as soon as possible. Is it conceivable that the information wasn’t passed to the most senior figures in the administration?

No, it’s really not. And therefore, the fact that these senior figures misled us—and still mislead us—is a scandal of the first order.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/benghazi-scandal_654410.html?nopager=1