12 Days

Dubious Donations, once more

We looked at donations from nonexistent zip codes in the FEC filings of both Obama and Romney. Any kind of AVS [Address Verification System] worth anything will require an accurate zip code. Some of these donations could be from personal fundraisers, but the Obama numbers are enormously high: he has accepted 20 times the number of donations with nonexistent zip codes as Romney. And he was a clear outlier even in 2008.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/10/dubious-donations-once-more-once.php

U.N. Human Rights Council Calls for Boycott of U.S. Companies

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained a report soon to be released by the United Nations that calls for an international campaign of legal attacks and economic warfare on a group of American companies that do business in Israel, including Hewlett-Packard, Caterpillar Inc., and Motorola Solutions Inc.

The Human Rights Council (HRC), a body dominated by Islamic countries and known for its hostility to, and heavy focus on, the Jewish State, issued the report. The George W. Bush administration refused to participate in the HRC, but President Barack Obama joined it soon after taking office. Members of the HRC include infamous human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Libya, China, and Cuba.

http://freebeacon.com/u-n-human-rights-council-calls-for-boycott-of-u-s-companies/

Kids know the 'other guy' is a 'bullsh-ter,' Obama tells Rolling Stone
President Obama took his derision toward Mitt Romney to a new level in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, reportedly calling his Republican opponent a "bullsh-ter."
"As we left the Oval Office, executive editor Eric Bates told Obama that he had asked his 6-year-old if there was anything she wanted him to say to the president. ... [S]he said, 'Tell him: You can do it.' Obama grinned," Brinkley wrote, according to Politico. "'You know, kids have good instincts,' Obama offered. 'They look at the other guy and say, 'Well, that's a bullsh-ter, I can tell.'"
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/10/25/obama-kids-know-other-guy-is-bullsh-er/

PK's NOTE: How un-presidential. The guy needs to go. Check out the next one, even worse.

The president’s favorability falters

By Ed Rogers

A quick read of the “new” Obama blueprint for the future that the president’s campaign released Tuesday, suggesting this was his bold vision for the future, is little more than silly, stale platitudes. I guess the campaign thought that it would get plenty of coverage from announcing the plan and that very few voters would bother to look at it closely.

Even the most cursory review reveals the plan to be just a bunch of glossy, flattering photos of President Obama, assertions that all is well and reiterations that Obama is for helping everybody. To me, this is another example of the Obama campaign having nothing to say.

All along, its whole strategy has been to vilify Mitt Romney. As I said earlier today, the villain that Obama invested millions of dollars and months of speeches in creating was shattered by Romney’s performance at the debates.

I never understood the so-called “likability” that the president was credited with possessing or the disconnect that Romney was supposed to have with average Americans.

Finally, Romney is being given some credit where credit is due. His likability and his empathy are both beginning to shine. The RealClearPolitics average showed Sunday — for the first time — that Romney’s favorability spread was greater than Obama’s by two full points. Earlier this week, Romney’s favorability ratings climbed above 50 percent; the first time that he has been ahead of Obama in this political indicator.

And a revealing fact inside today’s Washington Post/ABC News tracking poll shows another way that Romney is beating Obama on economic issues, one that is important: Romney is viewed as “more empathetic with ongoing economic woes” among independents, leading Obama 49 percent to 45 percent.

With Obama unable to make voters afraid of Romney, his campaign is on a slippery slope, surrounded by banana peels. Things should get worse before they get better. The president needs something to change the momentum and trajectory of this race. Silly, useless pamphlets won’t do it, and name-calling Romney won’t do it. The president’s campaign has got to be thinking seriously about something bold to underscore to voters they won’t be electing the same old politician they believe Obama has become.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-insiders/post/the-presidents-favorability-falters/2012/10/24/4228b2d4-1e25-11e2-8817-41b9a7aaabc7_blog.html

Obama Doesn’t Have a Jobs Plan

By: David Harsanyi

Fear not, Barack Obama has an economic plan for America, and it’s all in a glossy brochure, called “The New Economic Patriotism: A Plan for Jobs & Middle-Class Security” — an antidote, we’re told, to the vagueness of Mitt Romney’s agenda.

This is what the president, according to a campaign official, believes will ensure that “every voter knows what a second term of an Obama presidency would mean for middle-class Americans.” So, in other words, a shiny substance-free pamphlet is a metaphor for the Obama presidency — because these 11 pages of fluff make Romney’s tax proposal look like an annotated edition of the Talmud.

Even if we accepted that this is a “jobs plan” at all — and one would have to stretch the imagination — there are perhaps two items even tangentially connected to the issue at hand. Members of the middle class will be pleased to learn that their children’s future will feature marginally smaller class sizes and work as a midlevel functionary in a green-energy factory. According to the president, the best way to grow the middle class outward (whatever that means) is to strive for more menial labor work in an unproductive manufacturing sector. Forward.

Obama supported cap-and-trade legislation, the sole purpose of which is to make fossil fuel more expensive, so let’s dismiss his contention that the administration would concern itself with expanding oil and gas work in a second term. Let’s focus instead on the green energy sector, which cannot sustain itself today — just look at the slew of clean-energy bankruptcies we’ve involuntarily invested in — or in the future. As The New York Times recently reported, “stimulus money is almost all gone, leaving many of these projects without a government benefactor and making them orphans in a competitive marketplace dominated by the deep-pocketed fossil fuel industries.” (Deep-pocketed industries will remain deep-pocketed if they continue to offer Americans things we value — you know, like energy.)

Another foundational element of Obama’s wholly unserious proposal is hiring more teachers — even though this isn’t a function of the federal government to begin with and even though, according to Lindsey Burke of The Heritage Foundation, since 1970 the number of students in public schools has increased by 8 percent while the number of teachers has increased 60 percent and even though hiring more teachers would, at best, have a marginal impact on economic growth.

But we love teachers. Check the brochure.

Another component featured in the Obama plan is tax cuts for small business with a side order of fairness. This would impel the wealthiest among us to chip in just a little itty bit more to bring down the deficit. Here we are faced with two problems:

If you believe that Obama would use the extra $80 billion in revenue extracted from the rich to reduce the deficit, I have an 11-page glossy jobs pamphlet for you. And Obama’s tax on the rich would hit more than 1 million small businesses, according to the Internal Revenue Service, which would make his tepid supply-side policy item — the kind of policy he regularly mocks, incidentally — useless.

Still, according to a Bloomberg survey of selected economists, under Obama’s plan, “13,000 jobs would be created in 2013, bringing the total to 288,000 over two years.” That’s hundreds of billion in spending — deficit spending — aimed at creating a few unsustainable jobs without the benefit of any real private-sector growth.

Do the math, as they say.

http://www.humanevents.com/2012/10/24/obama-doesnt-have-a-jobs-plan/

Obama's free ride on killer drones and illegal wars

By Tim Carney
President Obama has killed hundreds of civilians, including women and children, in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia through a drone war aimed at exterminating the suspected terrorists on his unprecedented and ever-expanding "kill list" -- a list that has included U.S. citizens.

In Iraq, Obama tried to perpetuate the U.S. occupation past his promised date for withdrawal, and after Iraqi leaders wanted American troops to leave.

In Libya, Obama illegally intervened in a civil war, sending U.S. fighter jets and missiles to kill a dictator who posed no threat to America. The aftermath of this unauthorized war: a coup in neighboring Mali paired with the rise of al Qaeda in that country, and a terrorist attack in Libya ending in the death of four Americans.

Amid real successes -- such as the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, and ultimately ending the occupation of Iraq -- Obama's foreign policy has been riddled with failures, scandals and mistakes. But if you watched this week's debate or follow this election cycle's media coverage, you would assume Obama has been throwing a perfect game around the planet.

Why does Obama get a free pass on foreign policy? There are three main reasons:

First, there's good old media bias. The major media have given scant attention to Obama's transgressions and have taken his word -- on all sorts of issues.

Second, there's the mysterious disappearance of the U.S. anti-war movement. Liberals are overwhelmingly fine with drone strikes -- 70 percent of self-described "liberal Democrats" supported them in a February Washington Post/ABC News poll.

In 2010, when we had 80,000 troops each in Iraq and Afghanistan, 78 percent of Democrats in one Quinnipiac poll approved of Obama's foreign policy, and you had to look pretty hard to find an anti-war protest. The formerly anti-war Left gave new meaning to that Vietnam-era Phil Ochs song "I Ain't Marching Anymore."

Third, Obama gets a free pass on war matters because the man who would naturally be his main critic -- Republican nominee Mitt Romney -- mostly shares Obama's views.

While some Republican hawks knock Obama for being insufficiently bellicose, Romney has a more nuanced critique. Beneath his occasionally hawkish ideological rhetoric, Romney has laid out a realist course. Monday night, he made it clear he had no interest in war with Iran or Syria.
And Romney certainly won't attack Obama from the dovish side.

So, in the end, Obama gets a free ride on policy because he is a Democrat whose offenses were mostly overreach.

In Monday's foreign-policy debate, Obama got no questions about his kill list. Obama has cultivated a list of suspected terrorists for the United States to target through drone strikes. One U.S. citizen, radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, was on that list -- until a drone killed him. Obama was the judge and jury. Obama's drones were the executioners.

Debate moderator Bob Schieffer asked one question about the broader issue of drones. Romney said he supported the drone war. Obama dodged the question entirely. Schieffer moved on.

Obama regularly crows about "ending the war in Iraq." Never does he admit that he only left Iraq kicking and screaming. Obama spent months pursuing a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq that would have kept U.S. troops there indefinitely. In Monday's debate, Romney said he agreed with Obama that we should have kept our troops there.

Obama has never been called to account, either, for illegally going to war in Libya. "Today, I authorized the armed forces of the United States to begin a limited military action in Libya," Obama said in a recorded statement from Brazil in March 2011.

But constitutionally, the president can't authorize military action - that's Congress' prerogative. The War Powers Act gives temporary exceptions for an "attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."

Candidate Obama knew this. "The President does not have power under the Constitution," he wrote in response to a Boston Globe query in 2007, "to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

The murder of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens should be understood in the context of a regime change Obama led without legal authority. Our involvement in Libya also appears to have bolstered al Qaeda in neighboring Mali, and led to a military coup, as well.
Kill lists, drones taking out hundreds of civilians, failed attempts to prolong the occupation of Iraq, and an illegal war in Libya -- you would think these things would haunt a president running for re-election. But not Obama.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/obamas-free-ride-on-killer-drones-and-illegal-wars/article/2511646