Friday, September 21, 2012

Election 2012 State Polls


Thursday, September 20
Race/Topic   (Click to Sort)PollResultsSpread
ColoradoNBC/WSJ/MaristObama 50, Romney 45Obama +5
IowaNBC/WSJ/MaristObama 50, Romney 42Obama +8
IowaRasmussen ReportsObama 44, Romney 47Romney +3
NevadaCNN/Opinion ResearchObama 49, Romney 46Obama +3
NevadaRasmussen ReportsObama 47, Romney 45Obama +2
FloridaWeAskAmerica*Obama 49, Romney 46Obama +3
WisconsinNBC/WSJ/MaristObama 50, Romney 45Obama +5
WisconsinPPP (D)Obama 52, Romney 45Obama +7
WisconsinRasmussen ReportsObama 49, Romney 46Obama +3
MichiganDetroit NewsObama 52, Romney 38Obama +14
PennsylvaniaWeAskAmerica*Obama 48, Romney 42Obama +6
ConnecticutUConn/Hartford CourantObama 53, Romney 32Obama +21
MassachusettsUMass/Boston HeraldObama 59, Romney 36Obama +23
Wednesday, September 19
Race/Topic   (Click to Sort)PollResultsSpread
OhioFOX NewsObama 49, Romney 42Obama +7
FloridaFOX NewsObama 49, Romney 44Obama +5
VirginiaFOX NewsObama 50, Romney 43Obama +7
ColoradoCBS/NYT/QuinnipiacObama 48, Romney 47Obama +1
VirginiaCBS/NYT/QuinnipiacObama 50, Romney 46Obama +4
WisconsinCBS/NYT/QuinnipiacObama 51, Romney 45Obama +6
New HampshireRasmussen ReportsObama 45, Romney 48Romney +3
MichiganCNN/Opinion ResearchObama 52, Romney 44Obama +8
VirginiaWeAskAmerica*Obama 49, Romney 46Obama +3
WisconsinMarquette UniversityObama 54, Romney 40Obama +14
MainePPP (D)Obama 55, Romney 39Obama +16
MaineMPRC (D)*Obama 54, Romney 37Obama +17
CaliforniaFieldObama 58, Romney 34Obama +24
MassachusettsWBUR/MassINCObama 59, Romney 31Obama +28

Median income in Ohio hits 27-year low


ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF OBAMA POLICIES WORKING THEIR MAGIC.  
Ohio households were poorer last year than they’ve been in more than 25 years, and the number of people living in poverty is higher than it’s been in more than 30 years, according to a census report released yesterday.
“People are getting squeezed from every direction,” said James Newton, chief economic adviser to Commerce National Bank.
When adjusted for inflation, the 2010 annual median household income in Ohio of $46,093 was down by $543 from the previous year, and down 15.3 percent from the peak of $54,395 in 2000, according to the census’s Current Population Survey, which was released yesterday.
The inflation-adjusted figure hasn’t been lower for Ohio since officials began keeping that record in 1984, census officials said.
Ohio’s level of poverty — 15.3 percent — was worse than the nation’s, which was at 15.1 percent. Ohio’s level jumped 2 percentage points from 2009; it has never been this high since those records were first kept in 1980.
The worst year before 2010 was 1994, when 14.1 percent of Ohioans were in poverty.

Last of US Surge Troops Leave Afghanistan


AP
Last of US Surge Troops Leave Afghanistan, Officials Say
U.S. officials say that nearly two years after President Barack Obama ordered 33,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to tamp down escalating Taliban violence, the last of those surge troops have left the country.
The withdrawal leaves 68,000 American forces in the warzone. It comes as the security transition to Afghan forces is in trouble, threatened by a spike in so-called insider attacks in which Afghan Army and police troops, or insurgents dressed in their uniforms, have been attacking and killing U.S. and NATO forces.
And it's called into question the core strategy that relies on NATO troops working closely with Afghans, training them to take over the security of their own country so the U.S. and its allies can leave at the end of 2014 as planned.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

The Fall of the House of Obama


"Madman!" screeched Roderick Usher to the narrator as they both recoiled in terror at the wraithlike apparition that faced them at the door in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher."
"Madman!" he screamed again at the narrator of this tale of horror, who by this time had "perceived ... a full consciousness on the part of Usher of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne."
A sound conclusion this was, for Roderick Usher was insane.  His fevered imagination conjured images of fantastic dimensions, such as the living, breathing nature of the house his family had inhabited, as well as the room he painted -- ghoulish, subterranean, frightful, one in which "no outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor."  
It was, in short, a cavern inside a bubble concocted by one who has lost his connection to reality.  This was one who also accused his exalted visitor, the narrator of this story, of a condition from which he alone suffered -- madness.
Which of course brings to mind President Obama's re-election campaign themes, as well as those seen at the Democratic National Convention.  Take for instance accusations made against Mitt Romney for being somehow responsible for the death of a woman whose husband worked for a company for which Mr. Romney's responsibilities had ended seven years earlier.  Or consider the groundless accusation that Mr. Romney did not pay taxes for a decade or so, which generated further the charge that he is a felon and a liar.  Or take further the maniacal frothings of Democratic partisans who essentially accuse Republicans of being Nazis -- this from a party that constitutes the poster boy for the most statist, anti-free enterprise, and arrogant regime in American history.


Via: The American Thinker

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New Ad Implies Obama Is Cozy With Muslim Brotherhood


The conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring released an ad Thursday to run in key swing states depicting President Barack Obama as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer.
The group was planning on airing the ads next month, but shifted course after Muslims attacked the Egyptian embassy and killed four Americans in Libya, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Egypt's new president, Mohammed Morsi, belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, considered a terrorist organization by some. The Brotherhood denies such claims.
Let Freedom Ring President Colin Hanna says Obama's response to the incidents illustrated his naïvete´ on foreign affairs.
"After our embassies were stormed, President Obama's administration offered apologies while the Muslim Brotherhood stood by as we were attacked," Hanna says. "Instead of confronting our enemies such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama kowtows to them." [Bachmann Sticks to Accusations about Muslim Brotherhood.]
The one-minute ad is part of a $7 million online campaign, which is being launched in Wisconsin, Virginia, and Pennsylvania with less than 50 days until the election.
The online ad doggedly attacks Obama for inviting the Muslim Brotherhood to the White House and supporting it financially. It blames Obama for the rise of anti-American riots across the Middle East, and also blasts the Obama administration for giving Egypt $1.5 billion in foreign aid.
The ad, which is filled with images of rioters, questions why Obama would reach out to Egypt's leaders when they "sought to renew long-severed ties with Iran" and destroy Israel.

Obama now Openly Destroying the USA and he’s rising in the polls?

Barrack Hussein Obama and his syndicate have been caught in yet another huge lie that is designed to destroy what’s left of our country. The Obama Tyranny Project is now—finally—saying that the Libyan/Egyptian/Tunisian and dozens more Islamist-run countries’ rioting and wanton murdering hordes actions were not due to any obscure anti-Islam film.


They are, however, refusing to admit the truth…that all of the Muslim Mayhem is due to Obama’s Middle East appeasement policies. We show weakness…we get hit. Simple stuff for the even the moderately aware. We know that tortured and murdered US Ambassador Chris Stevens knew he had been placed on a hit-list and still he did not have an assigned security detail. That’s Obama’s fault.

So, now, the Obama syndicate is considering releasing the “Blind Sheik” (who engineered the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993) from US custody in order to appease his real friends and colleagues (the ones he has appointed to top security positions in the USA)—the Muslim Brotherhood—who is instigating the new Middle Eastern violence and barbarism.

Note: For those who still don’t know, Al-Qaeda, Hamas and multiple other terrorist organizations are the offspring of Obama’s pals the Muslim Brotherhood.

By the way, did you know that the Obama syndicate’s EPA is planning to issue ration cards with a four-gallon limit mandate…thus, effectively, immobilizing a great deal of the population? Stalinist tactics. As is a smaller one, a less mobile population is easier to control. And, recently, videos have been unearthed (from 1995 and 1998) in which Obama states he wants to redistribute OUR country’s wealth (take from the producers [you and me]), give it to the non-productive and transfer much of it to poorer and less-to-non-productive countries overseas. Obama also discusses his belief in establishing a [Communist] “collective.” In other words, we work for it and the non-working ObamaBuds are allowed to take it from us. That’s how totalitarians justify stealing everything from countries and totally decimating them. They begin by lying that “it’s for the poor” or “it’s for the children” and then they end up keeping the lion’s share for themselves.



Gasparino: GM’s Devil’s Bargain


GM’s devil’s bargain - Still stuck with Uncle Sam

The Obama campaign raves about how it “saved the auto industry” — that is, the government’s bailout mainly of General Motors — and so preserved millions of jobs.
But if it was such a success, why is the bailout losing so much money — and why do current GM managers want nothing to do with Washington as they try to save the company?

The answer: They know that with the lefties in the Obama administration breathing down their necks, their chances of ever restoring GM to its past glory are anywhere from slim to none.
Of course, it’s hard to feel sorry for GM’s management, which news reports and my own sources say has been prodding the administration to sell off its remaining 26.5 percent stake in the company. GM’s bosses invited Uncle Sam in — tough luck for them that he doesn’t want to leave.

For way too long, the Big Three — GM, Ford and Chrysler — kept on cutting generous wage and benefit deals with their unionized workforce as if it was still the 1950s and ’60s, when foreign competition didn’t exist. By 2009, that heyday was long, long past — and the Great Recession brought their highly flawed business model crashing down.

The $17 billion in loans from the Bush administration in its waning days wasn’t enough. GM and Chrysler came hat in hand to the President Obama for a little more hope and change.
An easy solution would have been to let the companies reorganize under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code. They’d have had a good chance to survive; plenty of other companies have restructured under bankruptcy protection and emerged later as viable businesses. American Airlines is doing it right now, and without major disruptions in service, or mass layoffs.

As it turned out, Chrysler and then GM did declare banktuptcy — but the resolution wasn’t the normal court-overseen reorganization. Under Obama, the feds dumped in tens of billions more into the companies and took controlling stakes in an industry that was once a bedrock of free-market capitalism.

In the administration-overseen restructuring, bondholders got hit hard in what many legal experts say was a violation of bankruptcy laws, and dealerships around the nation got slammed
.
But the president’s buddies in the United Auto Workers largely feasted. Sure, the absurd “jobs bank” — Detroit’s version of a “no show job,” where the auto companies basically handed fired workers free money — got shut down. And new hires lost out on the old guaranteed pensions for the market-driven 401-k plan that most of the rest of us rely on for retirement.

Via: New York Post



OBAMA LEGACY: CANADA HAS FREEST ECONOMY IN NORTH AMERICA


The foundational stone of American Exceptionalism has always been our economic freedom. The ability of individuals, regardless of background or circumstances, to freely engage in the marketplace to lift their own fortunes has been our nation's greatest strength. With economic freedom, none of the "isms" that keep the left up at night matter. We are all truly, regardless of race, gender, class or anything else, "captains of our fate and masters of our souls." A decade ago, we were the second most economically free country in the world. Today, under Obama, we are 18th

Every year, The Fraser Institute, a free-market think tank in Canada, compiles a highly respected index of economic freedom in countries around the world. Broadly speaking, it looks at five critical components to freedom: size of government, rule of law, sound money, free trade and regulation. Historically, the US has been near the top of the table in economic freedom, surpassed only by the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore. This year, we are 18th in the world, while our northern neighbor, Canada, has become the 5th most economically free nation in the world. 
Let us pause here and list the countries that are more economically free than ours. 
Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Bahrain, Mauritius, Finland, Chile, United Arab Emirates, Ireland, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Estonia, Taiwan, Denmark and Qatar. 
We are just barely ahead of Kuwait and Cyprus. 

UNITED STATES OF O-MERICA: PRESIDENT RELIES ON CULT OF PERSONALITY IN TIGHT ELECTION


It’s difficult to understand how a president with the most failure-ridden foreign and domestic policy in modern history still stands to win some 47 percent of the American vote, according to the latest polls. But the answer is simple. Since 2007, Barack Obama has been building a cult of personality reminiscent of fascist leaders. That doesn’t mean he’s a fascist; it doesn’t mean that he’s Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin. But his semiotics and iconography are far more suited for a fascist country than a vibrant republic.

Yesterday, the Obama campaign tweeted about a brand new set of products on its website: “A poster to say there are no red states or blue states, only the United States.” Only the poster wasn’t of our flag. It was of a United States dominated by the Obama symbol:
The poster was labeled, “OUR STRIPES: FLAG PRINT.” Those are not our stripes. Those are Obama’s stripes. And we are all his subjects.
This, of course, was not the first time that the Obama campaign had expressed the view that the United States are truly the Obama States. Back in May, Obama’s campaign tweeted out this delightful picture, with the exact same slogan: “There are no red or blue states, just the United States”:

The Delphi Debacle Union members were made whole at the expense of non-union employees in auto bankruptcy


Fred Arndt and his brother Dave came to General Motors straight out of high school.
They spent their entire careers building the engine cooling systems that increase the lifespan of Cadillacs and other vehicles. Dave worked in assembly; Fred, one year younger, qualified for GM University, which propelled him to work as a draftsman and engineer. They worked the line side-by-side. Dave built the parts Fred had designed.
The brothers made their way to Delphi, an auto supplier spun off from GM that builds components—seats, instrument panels, steering and suspension systems—for cars.
After more than 30 years with the company, the brothers retired in their native Michigan. They watched as Delphi’s growing labor costs dragged it into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2005. It would not emerge until 2009 when the government stepped in with $50 billion for GM.
And then the Arndt brothers’ paths diverged. Fred, 64, lost his health, dental, and life insurance, along with 70 percent of his pension. Dave lost five percent of his health insurance and some dental coverage.
His pension, however, was made whole.
The difference: union membership. Dave is a member of United Auto Workers—the labor group that financially backs the Democratic Party. Fred was considered management.
“I worked for GM and Delphi because I thought I had security; I worked my buns off to be a ‘company guy,’ and to be treated this way in retirement is incredible,” he said. “I knew there would be a price to pay, but I expected everyone to take a cut—not just the salaried guys.”
When GM separated from Delphi in 1999, Fred travelled far from Michigan. He worked all over Ohio and in company plants in upstate New York. As he neared retirement, he returned to Saginaw, Mich., and commuted 100 miles each day to Delphi headquarters in Troy. He retired a bit earlier than he had expected—the daily drive took its toll. He never had children, so he had plenty of savings to supplement his pension. Now he has been forced to use the money to pay for his home, groceries, and gas.

STUDY: 15% OF COUNTRY ON FOOD STAMPS

The country’s unemployment rate has been above eight percent for 43 months, which is longer than during any recession since 1980, and a Manhattan Institute study found that 15 percent of the country is now on food stamps, which is a record non-emergency high. 
The study found that three years after the Great Recession began in December of 2007 and was declared over in June of 2009, 47 million people each month are using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the program, “fewer than one in 10 Americans” were on food stamps before the Great Recession. Currently, more than one in seven Americans are on food stamps.
“There is much concern surrounding this unprecedented increase in America's SNAP program, which began in 2008,” the authors of the study wrote. “Our results demonstrate that levels seen since the end of this recession are far higher than in prior recoveries.”
According to the study, food stamp usage “has been far higher both during the 2007–09 recession and thereafter than following prior recessions.” For instance, when the Great Recession began, 9.3 percent of Americans were on food stamps. In June of 2009, when the Great Recession was deemed to have ended, 11.4 percent were on food stamps. In June of 2012, 14.9 percent of Americans were on food stamps, which accounts for a 3.5 percentage point increase since the recession was declared over. 
In some states, over twenty percent of the population is on food stamps. These states include Oregon, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Tennessee. 
In Washington, D.C., 23% of the population is on food stamps. 

Ouch: 6 Million Uninsured Americans Will Pay 'Obamatax'


Months out from the Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act, and Americans bombarded by mile-a-minute election coverage, it's easy to forget that ACA implementation is creeping up on us. But today, in a great reminder of the real struggles that we'll still face after November 6th, the Congressional Budget Office released a new estimate of how many will be paying taxes for going without insurance. And, fitting the holding pattern, the number is higher than previously expected.
Overall, 6 million Americans will pay "Obamatax," as some have called it. These are middle class individuals, without insurance because their employer may dropped it owing to expenses, and they're unable to afford it themselves. Furthermore, they're just a sliver of the 30 million Americans who will still have zero health insurance to speak of, affordable or otherwise. The remainder of the uninsured, to whom the tax doesn't apply, either are illegal aliens (so the ACA doesn't apply to them), or they don't make enough to pay income taxes.
The agency said the government will collect about $7 billion from the tax in 2016, and $8 billion a year thereafter.
The projections apply to 2016, the point at which most of President Obama’s health care law will be implemented and the penalty for failing to buy coverage will have risen to its full amount of $695 per person or 2.5 percent of household income, whichever is greater.
The agency gave several reasons for revising its projections. For one thing, Congress has passed legislation requiring Americans to pay back more health insurance subsidies if they’re overpaid, making buying coverage less attractive.
And some low-income Americans may have less access to expanded Medicaid programs than originally expected. Several states are expected to opt out of expanding Medicaid, after the Supreme Court ruled in June that the government can’t respond by stripping away all their funding for the program.
The economy is also improving more slowly than expected, leading to lower wages and salaries that could make it harder to buy coverage.
Since 10% of the country still won't be insured, and a number of those people will be paying the government billions a year in taxes -- thereby costing them more money they don't have -- it's safe to say this law hasn't actually made "care" any more affordable. (Scare quotes employed because, of course, the law's premise was widely flawed in conflating "care" with the very different concept of "insurance," the issue it actually addresses.) It's just another broken promise, which does almost nothing to fix the country's still-broken healthcare system.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Mort Zuckerman: Welcome to the Modern-Day Depression We need to recover from the Obama economic recovery


How do you recover from a recovery? Just how bust the nation's "recovery" has been is painfully documented in the latest news, just two months before the election. The Census Bureau validated what middle-class Americans know all too well from their week to week, month to month struggle to make ends meet. The typical family is back to where it was in 1995. The analysis of annual data collected by the bureau indicates that median income in 2011 had fallen to $50,054, the fourth straight year of decline in well-being, and that's adjusted for inflation. In political terms, the Obama administration can truthfully say that the erosion had begun before the president took office, while Mitt Romney can point out that the administration spent four years of fumbling and quite failed to stop the rot.
At the same time we were clobbered by the Census numbers, the latest unemployment report landed with a dull thud: The advance figure for unemployment claims for the week ending September 8 was 382,000, up from the previous week's revised figure of 367,000. The four-week moving average was 375,000, up 3,250 from the prior week's average of 371,750.
These are marginal negative movements, but they underline that the recovery touted by the administration has been the weakest in modern history. Nobody is entitled to blow a trumpet because the unemployment rate for August can be headlined at 8.1 percent, down two digits from July's 8.3 percent. That's a drop brought about not by more jobs but because 360,000 people left the workforce. It muffles the fact that 5 million people have now been out of work for 27 weeks or more. That's roughly 40 percent of the unemployed. Another 2.6 million people were marginally attached to the labor force, and over eight million people have given up looking for a job, so they are not counted because they had not searched for work in the prior month.

ObamaCare Faces Possible Illegality Ruling Again

In one of the most uplifting and inspiring statements made by an individual American citizen, Iowa small business owner Matt Sissel, said to the Pacific Law Foundation (PLF), concerning having to pay for the government ObamaCare plan, “It’s dispiriting to see our lawmakers treat the rules set out in the Constitution with disrespect, as if they’re just suggestions, or as if members of Congress are too important to follow them.”


This newly minted case against the Obama health care Act was published online in The New American on September 17, 2012, as a result of the information furnished the PLF by Sissel, a small businessman and former combat medic who wears the Bronze Star, and believes the ObamaCare law trespasses the Constitution by forcing him to buy something he neither wants nor believes he needs. He pays for his health care out of pocket.

That statement from Mr. Sissel should be read again by itself to absorb the powerful message it imparts to every law-abiding citizen of this country: 
“It’s dispiriting to see our lawmakers treat the rules set out in the Constitution with disrespect, as if they’re just suggestions, or as if members of Congress are too important to follow them.”
I rank those 33 words as among the great classics of all time concerning government quotations.  Note how they apply, not only to the crisis now in public contention, but to oh so many things evident and preeminent concerning our governing officials at all levels, including nearly all of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches today. 

The PLF stated in the New American referenced above, “If the charge for not buying insurance is seen as a federal tax, then a new question must be asked,” said PLF Principal Attorney Paul J. Beard II. “When lawmakers passed the ACA, with all of its taxes, did they follow the Constitution’s procedures for revenue increases? The Supreme Court wasn’t asked and didn’t address this question in the NFIB case. The question of whether the Constitution was obeyed needs to be litigated, and PLF is determined to see this important issue all the way through the courts.” 

Via: Canada Free Press

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CBS POLL: GOP HAS HUGE TURNOUT EDGE OVER DEMS


One of the chief reasons the media is so mistaken in their zeal to proclaim Obama the election winner is that most of the polls they're basing their predictions on are wildly inflating Democrat turnout. The overwhelming majority of media polls are an assuming an electorate that is at least as Democrat as the one in 2008, with many polls assuming ahigher Democrat turnout. This is just daft. The latest CBS poll of 3 swing states is the most recent to show that GOP has a huge turnout advantage over Democrats. 

Yesterday, CBS/NYT released its latest Quinnipiac poll of Colorado, Virginia and Wisconsin. With the exception of CO, the polls had heavy Democrat skews, so the head-to-head match-ups aren't particularly informative. What was telling though was the differences in enthusiasm between the two parties. 
In all three states, a majority of Republicans say they are more enthusiastic about voting this year, compared to about a third of Democrats who are. In Colorado and Virginia, GOP voters are more enthusiastic than Democrats by a 15 point margin. In Wisconsin, GOP enthusiasm outpaces Democrats by 16 points. 
Particularly interesting is that GOP voters have become more enthusiastic about voting in the past month. GOP enthusiasm has increased 9 points in CO, 10 points in WI and 12 points in VA. Democrat enthusiasm, meanwhile has increased only modestly; 5 points in VA, 4 in WI and 10 in CO (from a very low 28% of Democrats who were more enthusiastic about voting). 

CRS report: number of able-bodied adults on food stamps doubled after Obama suspended work requirement


Obama administration officials have insisted that their decision to grant states waivers to redefine work requirements for welfare recipients would not “gut” the landmark 1996 welfare reform law. But a new report from the Congressional Research Service obtained by the Washington Examiner suggests that the administration’s suspension of a separate welfare work requirement has already helped explode the number of able-bodied Americans on food stamps.
In addition to the broader work requirement that has become a contentious issue in the presidential race, the 1996 welfare reform law included a separate rule encouraging able-bodied adults without dependents to work by limiting the amount of time they could receive food stamps. President Obama suspended that rule when he signed his economic stimulus legislation into law, and the number of these adults on food stamps doubled, from 1.9 million in 2008 to 3.9 million in 2010, according to the CRS report, issued in the form of a memo to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.
“This report once again confirms that President Obama has severely gutted the welfare work requirements that Americans have overwhelmingly supported since President Clinton signed them into law,” Cantor said in an emailed statement. “It’s time to reinstate these common-sense measures, and focus on creating job growth for those in need.”

Report: Jihadist Who Led Benghazi Attack Was A Former Gitmo Detainee, Released By U.S. In 2007…



On tonight’s Special Report, Bret Baier reported on an exclusive breaking news alert: intelligence sources are convinced the Mideast attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya was directly tied to Al Qaeda.

Catherine Herridge reported that they believe that Sufyan Ben Qumu (whose name has also been transliterated as Sofiane Ibrahim Gammu) was likely involved in the attack, and even may have led the attack on the consulate.

Qumu – a Libyan – was released from the US prison atGuantanamo Bay in 2007 and transferred to Libyan custody under the condition that he would be kept in jail. He wasn’t.
According to his Gitmo files, he was also tied to 9/11 financiers, and his alias is “found on a list of probable Al Qaeda personnel receiving monthly stipends and family support.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE ACTUAL DOCUMENT: Gitmo Transfer Papers for Al Qaeda Employee Who May Have Led Libya Attack


US drops to 18th most economically free country


At its pinnacle in 2000, the United States ranked second in the world for economic freedom. In the latest report on world economic freedom from the Fraser Institute, the U.S. has now dropped all the way down to 18th, falling behind countries like Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Estonia, Taiwan and Qatar.
The decline did not happen overnight. “This entire decade we’ve been sliding towards this 18th ranking,” report author Joshua Hall explained to The Daily Caller News Foundation.
By 2005, the United States had already dropped to eighth in economic freedom. In 2009, the U.S. fell behind welfare state countries like Denmark, Finland and Canada.
“When people think of Canada, they think of socialized medicine, but in many facets of life, Canada is a lot more economically free than the United States,” said Hall.
The annual report uses 42 different variables that can be categorized into five distinct categories: size of government, legal system and property rights, sound money, freedom of trade internationally and regulation.
The growth of government and less secure property rights have the most to do with the United States’ drop.
“I think we think of the underlying causes of our decline in legal system and property rights, the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision [over eminent domain], the war on terror, and things related to the rule of law, things like TARP and the bail outs, have all contributed to the decline of scores in areas one and two,” Hall explained.


US Drops In Ranking Of Free Economies


The United States’ reputation as home to one of the world’s freest economies continues to decline, according to an international report released Tuesday.

The U.S. dropped to 18th worldwide, compared to 10th in 2008 and third from 1980 to 2000, the 2012 Economic Freedom of the World report found. The findings are based on information through 2010.

“The U.S. is on the wrong track,” said co-author James Gwartney, a Florida State University economics professor.He says the 48-page report shows countries with the freest economies grew more rapidly and achieved higher income levels for citizens, while the United States' decade-plus course of government expansion, increased debt and regulation and other moves created a “system of crony capitalism.”

“The declining economic freedom rating of the U.S. provides confirmation of this trend,” Gwartney concludes.

The report, published in the United States by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute think tank, again ranks Hong Kong first among 144 countries, followed by Singapore, New Zealand and Switzerland.  

The U.S. also ranked behind Finland and Denmark – “two European welfare states,” the study authors also pointed out.
The authors said the report is intended to measure the degree to which the policies and institutions of countries are supportive of economic freedom -- with cornerstones including the size of government, personal choice, the freedom to trade internationally and the security of private property.

The report is the most recent to suggest the United States is falling behind as a world economic power.

Via Fox News


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No Interest by the Media in Kathleen Sebelius’s Unlawful Campaign Activity


The media isn’t very interested in the illegal campaign activity by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. She pretty much admitted she broke the law, but all we get from the media is silence.
Reporters covering the White House don’t seem to have many questions about Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who was last week found in violation of federal law against engaging in political activity while on the job.
review of transcripts by The Daily Caller indicate that no questions have been asked by the reporters who cover the president about Sebelius during official White House briefings or gaggles since Sept. 12, when the U.S. Office of Special Counsel said in a report that the cabinet secretary violated the Hatch Act earlier this year.
It’s still up to President Obama whether Sebelius should keep her job or face some sort of punishment after being found in violation of the Hatch Act. (Read More)
This evening ABC News spent about 10 minutes on the video of remarks Mitt Romney made at a private fundraiser. They didn’t mention this.


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