Michael Kaery

Obama & Romney Grow More Reliant on Big-Money Contributors

Government of the people, by the elected officials, and appointed bureaucrats, for the elected officials, appointed bureaucrats and special interest groups that helped them get into power.

Michael Kaery

Obama Grows More Reliant on Big-Money Contributors

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

Published: September 12, 2012

Kirk Wagar, a Florida lawyer who has raised more than $1 million for President Obama’s re-election bid, had his choice of rooms for the Democratic convention at Charlotte’s Ritz-Carlton or Westin hotels and nightly access to hospitality suites off the convention floor.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood producer, and his fund-raising partner have brought at least $6.6 million combined for the ’08 and ’12 bids.

Jay Snyder, a New York financier who has raised at least $560,000 for Mr. Obama, was entitled to get his picture taken on the podium at the Time Warner Cable Arena.

And Azita Raji, a retired investment banker who has raised over $3 million for Mr. Obama — more than almost anyone else during the last two years — could get pretty much anything that she wanted last week in Charlotte: briefings with senior Obama officials, invitations to post-speech parties, along with “priority booking” at the city’s finest hotels.

In the race for cash, Mr. Obama often praises his millions of grass-roots donors, those die-hards whose $3 or $10 or $75 contributions are as much a symbol of the president’s political identity as they are a source of ready cash. But his campaign’s big-dollar fund-raising has become more dependent than it was four years ago on a smaller number of large-dollar donors and fund-raisers.

All told, Mr. Obama’s top “bundlers” — people who gather checks from friends and business associates — raised or gave at least $200 million for Mr. Obama’s re-election bid and the Democratic National Committee through the end of May, close to half of the total up to that point, according to internal campaign documents obtained by The New York Times.

The documents provide a detailed look into the intricate world of presidential fund-raising, which Mr. Obama and his team have mastered, and donor-stroking, which some supporters complain they have not. The campaign closely monitors its top bundlers, rating them by how much each individual or couple has raised and donated each year going back to 2007.

Officials used that amount, in turn, to offer donor packages of access and entertainment for the convention last week, themed to the location in North Carolina: “OBX” (bumper-sticker shorthand for the Outer Banks) for those raising at least $1 million, down to “Carolina on My Mind” for those who have donated merely $75,800 to Mr. Obama and the Democratic National Committee, the maximum allowed under federal law.

“It confirms everything we’ve always believed about the role of big money in politics,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog group that tracks political fund-raising. “The more you give, the more you gather, the more you get.”

Each individual or couple is also assigned a lifetime Obama total. Topping the list is Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood producer, who, along with his fund-raising partner, Andy Spahn, has brought in at least $6.6 million combined for the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, according to the documents.

The top fund-raiser for 2011 and 2012 is Andrew Tobias, a Miami-based author who is treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and a major bundler for Mr. Obama among gay donors. Terry McAuliffe, a former party chairman and Bill Clinton loyalist, shot into Mr. Obama’s top bundler ranks this year after he and Mr. Clinton agreed to hold a Virginia fund-raiser for Mr. Obama. He has raised about $2.2 million for Mr. Obama, according to the documents, more than all but a few supporters.

Because not all of Mr. Obama’s bundlers are represented through the end of May, the documents may understate the total that top supporters have raised for Mr. Obama. But even so, they reveal how dependent even Mr. Obama — whose grass-roots fund-raising machine is unrivaled in political history — is on a relative handful of wealthy individuals raising millions of dollars on his behalf, often while having significant business or legal interests before the Obama administration.

Among the top 10 fund-raisers on the list for 2012, for example, are Steve Spinner, a former Department of Energy official who pushed the White House to approve a $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, the failed solar power company.

DreamWorks Animation, the studio Mr. Katzenberg leads, is among several in Hollywood that earlier this year were notified of an investigation into whether entertainment companies had made illegal payments to officials in China in connection with their dealings there.

Mitt Romney has fielded an equally formidable high-dollar fund-raising machine this year and could raise as much or more than Mr. Obama during the election cycle. Like the Democrats, Republicans offered big donors an array of perks at their convention, held in Tampa, Fla., last month, including choice hotel access, boat trips and access to Mr. Romney himself.

Mr. Obama already makes public the names of his bundlers, along with ranges for how much they have raised, a practice not required by law. Mr. Romney has declined to release such information, though monthly disclosures filed by his campaign suggest that he is even more dependent than Mr. Obama on big bundlers and donors who have given the legal maximum.

“Our major volunteer fund-raisers, as well as the ranges of contributions they raised, were previously made public because unlike Governor Romney, we disclose them on our Web site,” said Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama’s publicly disclosed categories stop at the $500,000-and-up level, however. The internal documents show that at least 60 individuals and couples reside in an even more elite club, having raised more than $1 million for Mr. Obama and the party.

They include Frank White Jr., a technology entrepreneur who has raised $2.3 million for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign; Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, who has raised $2.7 million; Robert Wolf, a former executive at UBS Americas, the banking company, who has raised about $1.3 million; and Reshma Saujani, a lawyer who is running for New York City public advocate next year and is active among young larger donors, who has raised about $1 million.

About 260 of the bundlers did not raise any money for Mr. Obama during his 2008 campaign, according to the document. That reflects the extraordinary effort Mr. Obama made to recruit new fund-raisers for his re-election effort, as former supporters lost enthusiasm or moved on to other pursuits.

But it also reflects the number of former fund-raisers whom Mr. Obama appointed to ambassadorial and other posts, leaving them barred from political activities.

Administration warns of 'destructive' budget cuts

Source

Administration warns of 'destructive' budget cuts

Associated Press

September 14, 2012, 12:29 p.m.

A new White House report issued Friday warns that $110 billion in across-the-board spending cuts at the start of the new year would be "deeply destructive" to the military and core government responsibilities like patrolling U.S. borders and air traffic control.

The report says the automatic cuts, mandated by the failure of last year's congressional deficit "supercommittee" to strike a budget deal, would require an across-the-board cut of 9 percent to most Pentagon programs and an 8 percent cut in many domestic programs. The process of automatic cuts is called sequestration, and the administration has no flexibility in how to distribute the cuts, other than to exempt military personnel and war-fighting accounts.

"Sequestration would be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions," the report says.

The cuts, combined with the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts at the end of the year, have been dubbed the "fiscal cliff." Economists warn that the one-two punch could drive the economy back into recession.

The across-the-board cuts were devised as part of last summer's budget and debt deal between President Barack Obama and Capitol Hill Republicans. They were intended to drive the supercommittee — evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans — to strike a compromise. But the panel deadlocked and the warring combatants have spent more time since then blaming each other for the looming cuts than seeking ways to avoid them.

The White House report continues in that vein, blasting House Republicans for an approach to avoiding the sequester that relies on further cuts to domestic programs while protecting upper-bracket taxpayers from higher rates proposed by the president.

In advance of the report's release, White House press secretary Jay Carney went on the offensive, blasting "the adamant refusal of Republicans to accept the fundamental principle that we ought to deal with our fiscal challenges in a balanced way."

In advance of the election, rival Democratic and GOP sides are dug in, unwilling to make the required compromises and unable to trust the other side. It's commonly assumed that there will be more serious efforts to forestall the cuts in a postelection lame duck session, though it may only be for a short time, to give the next Congress and whoever occupies the White House a chance to work out a longer-term solution.

If not, sharp cuts are on the way.

The report warns that the Pentagon faces cuts that "would result in a reduction in readiness of many nondeployed units, delays in investments in new equipment and facilities, cutbacks in equipment repairs, declines in military research and development efforts and reductions in base services for military families." [What rubbish! American spends more on it's military then all of the other countries of the world combined!!!]

On the domestic front, the White House warns of dire effects as well.

"The number of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, Customs and Border Patrol agents, correctional officers and federal prosecutors would be slashed. [Sounds like a great time to end the drug war and fire all the cops, prosecutors, and prison guards that are used to arrest and imprison people for the victimless crime of pot smoking] The Federal Aviation Administration's ability to oversee and manage the nation's airspace and air traffic control would be reduced," the report says. "The Department of Agriculture's efforts to inspect food processing plants and prevent foodborne illnesses would be curtailed."

Many big programs, like Social Security, Medicaid, federal employee pensions and veterans' benefits and health care would be exempted. Medicare would be limited to an $11 billion, 2 percent cut in provider payments.

Also cut would be $14 million to treat emergency responders and others made ill as a result of the 9/11 attacks; $33 million for federal prosecution of violent crimes against women; and $2.5 billion for medical research and other work by the National Institutes of Health.

Other cuts would include $5 million from Obama's own office at the White House; $140 million from financial aid for college students; $216 million from efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons; $471 million from highway construction and $1 billion from aid for handicapped and children with other special needs.

The 394-page report, however, simply lists the dollar amount of the cuts but fails to address their real-world impact. For instance, it would cut the number of food inspectors and air traffic controllers on the job. But when asked on a conference call, a top White House official wouldn't say whether such cuts would require closing meatpacking plants or shutting down smaller airports.

"The report makes clear that sequestration would cause great disruptions across many vital services, from cancer research at NIH to food safety efforts at the Department of Agriculture, and public safety at the FBI to lowered military readiness," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the Budget Committee's top Democrat. "It's time to stop the political games and start working together to prevent the sequester, protect the economic recovery and get our fiscal house in order."

U.S. scrambles to rush spies, drones to Libya

Source

U.S. scrambles to rush spies, drones to Libya

Sept. 15, 2012 12:31 AM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. is sending more spies, Marines and drones to Libya, trying to speed the search for those who killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, but the investigation is complicated by a chaotic security picture in the post-revolutionary country, and limited American and Libyan intelligence resources.

The CIA has fewer people available to send, stretched thin from tracking conflicts across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

And the Libyans have barely re-established full control of their country, much less rebuilt their intelligence service, less than a year after the overthrow of dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The U.S. has already deployed an FBI investigation team, trying to track al-Qaida sympathizers thought to be responsible for turning a demonstration over an anti-Islamic video into a violent, coordinated militant attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

Ambassador Chris Stevens, and three other embassy employees were killed after a barrage of small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars tore into the consulate buildings in Benghazi on Tuesday, the 11th anniversary of 9/11, setting the buildings on fire.

President Barack Obama said in a Rose Garden statement the morning after the attack that those responsible would be brought to justice. That may not be swift. Building a clearer picture of what happened will take more time, and possibly more people, U.S. officials said Friday.

Intelligence officials are reviewing telephone intercepts, computer traffic and other clues gathered in the days before the attacks, and Libyan law enforcement has made some arrests. But investigators have found no evidence pointing conclusively to a particular group or to indicate the attack was planned, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, adding, "This is obviously under investigation."

Early indications suggest the attack was carried out not by the main al-Qaida terror group but "al-Qaida sympathizers," said a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

One of the leading suspects is the Libyan-based Islamic militant group Ansar al-Shariah, led by former Guantanamo detainee Sufyan bin Qumu. The group denied responsibility in a video Friday but did acknowledge its fighters were in the area during what it called a "popular protest" at the consulate, according to Ben Venzke of the IntelCenter, a private analysis firm that monitors Jihadist media for the U.S. intelligence community.

The U.S. had been watching threat assessments from Libya for months but none offered warnings of the Benghazi attack, according to another intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about U.S. intelligence matters.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, questioned whether the consulate had taken sufficient security measures, given an attempt to attack the consulate in Benghazi a few months ago.

Carney said that given the 9/11 anniversary, security had been heightened.

"It was, unfortunately, not enough," he said.

That paucity of resources also applies to the intelligence officers available to monitor Libya on the ground.

With ongoing counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, as well as the civil war in Syria, the CIA's clandestine and paramilitary officer corps is simply running out of trained officers to send, U.S. officials say, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the deployment of intelligence personnel publicly. The clandestine service is roughly 5,000 officers strong, and the paramilitary corps sent to war zones is only in the hundreds, the officials said.

Most of the CIA's paramilitary team dispatched to Libya during the revolution had been sent onward to the Syrian border, the officials said.

The CIA normally hires extra people to make up for such shortfalls, often retired special operators with the requisite security clearance, military training and language ability. But the government mandate to slash contractor use has meant cutting contracts, according to two former officials familiar with the agency's current hiring practices.

To fill in the gaps in spies on the ground, the U.S. intelligence community has kept up surveillance over Libya with unmanned and largely unarmed Predator and Reaper drones, increasing the area they cover, and the frequency of their flights since the attack on the consulate, as well as sending more surveillance equipment to the region, one official said.

But intelligence gathered from the air still needs corroboration from sources on the ground, as well as someone to act on the intelligence to go after the targets.

The Libyan government, though it claims it is eager to help, has limited tools at its disposal. The post-revolution government has been slow to rebuild both its intelligence capability and its security services, fearful of empowering the very institutions they had to fight to overthrow Gadhafi. They have made a start, but they lack a sophisticated cadre of trained spies and a large network of informants.

"The Libyans in just about every endeavor are just learning to walk, let alone run," said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA official and author of the book "Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy."

"There is confusion and competing elements within the new provisional government which complicates the task of creating new institutions, including the intelligence service," he said.

"There are still some aspects of the intelligence services that still work," says Barak Barfi of the New America Foundation think tank, including eavesdropping on cellphone calls and spying on computer traffic using equipment from the Gadhafi era. Barfi spent months with members of Libya's transitional government as they tried to rebuild the nation's services and infrastructure.

But the Libyans have not yet even taken full command their own security services almost a year after Gadhafi's fall, Barfi said. That's given the tens of thousands of militiamen who helped overthrow Gadhafi the time they needed to organize and seek new targets, especially Western ones, he said.

Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan and Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

Get ready for Obamacare, bend over and open your wallet!!!!

Sadly the Republican guy is just as much of a crook as the Democratic guy.

If you really want change vote for the Libertarian guy. We have been screwed by the Repubicans and Democrats for the last 60 years.

Give change a chance. Vote Libertarian. The Libertarians have not screwed us yet. [Well expect in my case I was screwed by the Arizona Libertarian Party, in which a few of it's members have been spreading around vicious lies saying I am a government snitch. Even with those creeps in mind I urge you to vote Libertarian]

Source

Tax penalty to hit nearly 6M uninsured people

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 6 million Americans — significantly more than first estimated— will face a tax penalty under President Barack Obama's health overhaul for not getting insurance, congressional analysts said Wednesday. Most would be in the middle class.

The new estimate amounts to an inconvenient fact for the administration, a reminder of what critics see as broken promises.

The numbers from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office are 50 percent higher than a previous projection by the same office in 2010, shortly after the law passed. The earlier estimate found 4 million people would be affected in 2016, when the penalty is fully in effect.

That's still only a sliver of the population, given that more than 150 million people currently are covered by employer plans. Nonetheless, in his first campaign for the White House, Obama pledged not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 a year and couples making less than $250,000.

And the budget office analysis found that nearly 80 percent of those who'll face the penalty would be making up to or less than five times the federal poverty level. Currently that would work out to $55,850 or less for an individual and $115,250 or less for a family of four.

Average penalty: about $1,200 in 2016.

"The bad news and broken promises from Obamacare just keep piling up," said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who wants to repeal the law.

Starting in 2014, virtually every legal resident of the U.S. will be required to carry health insurance or face a tax penalty, with exemptions for financial hardship, religious objections and certain other circumstances. Most people will not have to worry about the requirement since they already have coverage through employers, government programs like Medicare or by buying their own policies.

A spokeswoman for the Obama administration said 98 percent of Americans will not be affected by the tax penalty — and suggested that those who will be should face up to their civic responsibilities.

"This (analysis) doesn't change the basic fact that the individual responsibility policy will only affect people who can afford health care but choose not to buy it," said Erin Shields Britt of the Health and Human Services Department. "We're no longer going to subsidize the care of those who can afford to buy insurance but make a choice not to buy it."

The budget office said most of the increase in its estimate is due to changes in underlying projections about the economy, incorporating the effects of new federal legislation, as well as higher unemployment and lower wages.

The Supreme Court upheld Obama's law as constitutional in a 5-4 decision this summer, finding that the insurance mandate and the tax penalty enforcing it fall within the power of Congress to impose taxes. The penalty will be collected by the IRS, just like taxes.

The budget office said the penalty will raise $6.9 billion in 2016.

The new law will also provide government aid to help middle-class and low-income households afford coverage, the financial carrot that balances out the penalty.

Nonetheless, some people might still decide to remain uninsured because they object to government mandates or because they feel they would come out ahead financially even if they have to pay the penalty. Health insurance is expensive, with employer-provided family coverage averaging nearly $15,800 a year for a family and $4,300 for a single plan. Indeed, insurance industry experts say the federal penalty may be too low.

The Supreme Court also allowed individual states to opt out of a major Medicaid expansion under the law. The Obama administration says it will exempt low-income people in states that opt out from having to comply with the insurance requirement.

Many Republicans still regard the insurance mandate as unconstitutional and rue the day the Supreme Court upheld it.

However, the idea for an individual insurance requirement comes from Republican health care plans in the 1990s.

It's also a central element of the 2006 Massachusetts health care law signed by then-GOP Gov. Mitt Romney, now running against Obama and promising to repeal the federal law.

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said Wednesday the new report is more evidence that Obama's law is a "costly disaster."

"Even more of the middle-class families who President Obama promised would see no tax increase will in fact see a massive tax increase thanks to Obamacare," she said.

Romney says insurance mandates should be up to each state. The approach seems to have worked well in Massachusetts, with virtually all residents covered and dwindling numbers opting to pay the penalty instead.

Libertarian lawsuit highlights difficulty of third-party involvement in Presidential debates

2) I certainly agree that the Democrats, Republicans have a double standard with one rules set of rules for themselves and a second set of rules for third parties like the Libertarians and Greens and that is wrong.

3) I suspect that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act is unconstitutional and I also suspect that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act is not "Libertarian", although I have not read it. So I am confused on why a Libertarian candidate would file a lawsuit demanding that it be enforced.

Source

Lawsuit highlights difficulty of third-party involvement in debates

By Morgan Little

September 27, 2012, 11:54 a.m.

The participants if this year’s presidential debates are set – Republican nominee Mitt Romney will face off against President Obama in a matchup that’s been obvious for months. But there are still other presidential candidates, and one in particular is keen on elbowing his way into the debates.

Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson earlier this month filed a lawsuit against the Commission on Presidential Debates, claiming that the organization’s practices violate antitrust laws and alleging collusion between the commission and the country’s two dominant political parties.

In the suit, Johnson and his campaign accuse the commission, along with the Republican and Democratic national committees, of a “conspiracy” to meet in secret and create the rules for the debates, excluding third-party candidates and participating in what the lawsuit contends is a “restraint of trade” violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

The CPD has been attacked before for its stance toward lesser-known nominees, most prominently in 2000 for its decision to exclude third-party candidates from even being members of the audience at the debates. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader sued the commission for allegedly violating the Federal Election Campaign Act. Nader’s contention that the CPD violated the law’s stipulation that it not “endorse, support or oppose political candidates or political parties,” was eventually shot down by a D.C. Circuit Court in 2005.

DEBATE QUIZ: Who said it?

Johnson has been approved to appear on the ballot for 47 states and Washington, D.C., with pending efforts in Oklahoma, Michigan and Pennsylvania, giving him a pool of 495 potential electoral votes, well above the commission’s requirement of 270 for admission into the debates.

But where Johnson falls short of the debate prerequisites is in national polling. The commission, drawing from five undisclosed polling sources, mandates that candidates reach at least 15% of the prospective vote nationwide in order to appear onstage. Johnson, in a recent CNN/ORC poll, is the preferred candidate of 3% of likely voters and 4% of registered voters. Gallup doesn’t include Johnson or other third-party candidates in its regular questionnaires, though a separate poll conducted between Sept. 6-9 placed just 1% of voters behind his campaign.

Joe Hunter, communications director for Johnson’s campaign, said the decision is ultimately “up to the court; we certainly expect them to move quickly. If a debate occurs without resolution, then the harm will have been done.”

And without being able to count on the debates to raise his profile, Johnson is instead relying on social media (the candidate held a second “Ask Me Anything” event on the popular site Reddit earlier Wednesday), radio advertisements and a series of tours, most recently of campuses ranging from New York University, Duke and UC Berkeley. Johnson also plans a response to the debates in lieu of on-stage participation.

When asked during the question-and-answer event what individuals can do to aid him with his debate efforts, Johnson emphasized the necessity of grass-roots promotion.

“The most effective thing that anyone can do is to go out and sell your immediate family, friends, and coworkers to the fact that there is a legitimate third choice. Perhaps the only choice,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s lawsuit isn’t the only ongoing challenge to the current debate structure. An online petition calling for independent fact-checkers to be present at all debates providing “real-time review” of the candidates’ exchanges has quickly gathered nearly 230,000 signatures, amid a campaign that has seen increased attention paid to organizations like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.

Given the short amount of time before the first debate on Wednesday, it’s unlikely that Johnson’s lawsuit will result in his inclusion, though it does serve as an example of one of the many hurdles set before candidates aiming for the presidency without the backing of either the Republican or Democratic establishment.

The CPD has yet to reply to a request to comment.

White House widens covert war in N. Africa

White House widens covert war in N. Africa

by Kimberly Dozier - Oct. 2, 2012 10:26 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Small teams of special operations forces arrived at American embassies throughout North Africa in the months before militants launched the fiery attack that killed the U.S. ambassador in Libya.

The soldiers' mission: Set up a network that could quickly strike a terrorist target or rescue a hostage.

The White House signed off a year ago on the plan to build the new military counterterror task force in the region, and the advance teams have been there for six months, according to three U.S. counterterror officials and a former intelligence official.

The effort indicates that the administration has been worried about a growing threat posed by al-Qaida and its offshoots in North Africa.

Too new for Benghazi

But officials say the military organization was too new to respond to the attack in Benghazi, where the administration now believes armed al-Qaida-linked militants surrounded the lightly guarded U.S. compound, set it on fire and killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Republicans have questioned whether the Obama administration has been hiding key information or hasn't known what happened in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

On Tuesday, leaders of a congressional committee said requests for added security at the consulate in Benghazi were repeatedly denied, despite a string of less deadly terror attacks on the consulate in recent months. Those included an explosion that blew a hole in the security perimeter and another incident in which an explosive device was tossed over the consulate fence.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Congress in a letter responding to the accusations that she has set up a group to investigate the Benghazi attack, and it is to begin work this week.

As of early September, the special operations teams still consisted only of liaison officers who were assigned to establish relationships with local governments and U.S. officials in the region. Only limited counterterrorism operations have been conducted in Africa so far.

The White House, the CIA and U.S. Africa Command all declined to comment.

"There are no plans at this stage for unilateral U.S. military operations" in the region, Pentagon spokesman George Little said Tuesday, adding that the focus was on helping African countries build their own forces. Proceeding with caution

The go-slow approach with the unit run by Delta Force -- the Army's top clandestine counterterrorist unit -- is an effort by the White House to counter criticism from some U.S. lawmakers, human rights activists and others that the anti-terror fight is shifting largely to a secret war using special operations raids and drone strikes, with little public accountability.

The administration gets buy-in from all players who might be affected, such as the ambassadors, the CIA station chiefs, regional U.S. military commanders and local leaders.

Eventually, the Delta Force group is to form the backbone of a military task force responsible for combatting al-Qaida and other terrorist groups across the region with an arsenal that includes drones. But first, it will work to win acceptance by helping North African nations build their own special operations and counterterror units.

And nothing precludes the administration from using other military or intelligence units to retaliate against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 consulate attack in Benghazi. 'Haven't moved fast enough'

But some congressional leaders say the administration is not reacting quickly enough.

"Clearly, they haven't moved fast enough to battle the threat," said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich.

While Rogers would not comment on the special operations counterterrorism network, he said, "You actually have to hunt them (terrorists) down. No swift action, and we will be the recipient of something equally bad happening to another diplomat."

Only Yemeni al-Qaida attempted attack so far

The Obama administration has been concerned about the growing power and influence of al-Qaida offshoots in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and North Africa.

Only the Yemeni branch has tried to attack American territory directly so far, with a series of thwarted bomb plots aimed at U.S.-bound aircraft.

A Navy SEAL task force set up in 2009 has used a combination of raids and drone strikes to fight militants in Yemen and Somalia, working together with the CIA and local forces.

October 3 Presidential Debate

Romney comes out forcefully vs. Obama

Presidential debate: Romney comes out forcefully vs. Obama

by Dan Nowicki and Rebekah L. Sanders - Oct. 3, 2012 10:28 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

An energetic and aggressive Mitt Romney took on a subdued President Barack Obama Wednesday over jobs, taxes, Medicare, health care and even Big Bird in the first high-stakes debate of the 2012 White House campaign.

The Republican Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, hit Obama hard on a key legislative accomplishment of his administration, the 2010 health-care overhaul law. Romney attacked the law, which he and other critics refer to as "Obamacare," as a job killer while the president defended it as a crucial safety net for millions of American families.

The stakes at the University of Denver in Colorado could not have been higher for Romney. The first of three presidential debates came at a point when national polls indicate a tight race but usually show Obama with a modest lead. In key swing states, polls have suggested that Romney has an even more daunting challenge to change the trajectory of the race with just five weeks left until Election Day.

Romney has been dogged in recent weeks by campaign missteps, and needed a strong performance to help regain his equilibrium. He may have cleared that goal, aided in part by Obama's lackluster showing during the 90-minute showdown on domestic issues. A post-debate CNN poll indicated that Romney was the runaway winner.

Romney, who was calm, easily rattled off information on a variety of topics and managed to work a number of personal stories into his remarks, succeeded in appearing presidential, the main task of the night, said Earl de Berge, research director for the Rocky Mountain Poll.

"He came off well-disciplined and on top of his facts," de Berge, a nonpartisan pollster, said. The goal for any challenger is to "give off the aura of a strong, principled, visionary type of leader. Romney did that."

The two candidates presented their competing ideological visions for creating jobs and improving the still-sluggish economy.

Obama said the economy has been getting better, but called for improving public education, which would include hiring 100,000 more science and math teachers, creating 2 million slots in community colleges for job training and keeping tuition low. He said he wanted to lower the corporate tax rate and provide tax breaks for companies that invest in the United States, as well as boost domestic energy production and invest in future energy sources such as wind, solar and biofuels. He said Romney's plan would include $5 trillion in tax cuts that would hamper the nation's ability to make those key investments.

"Ultimately, it's going to be up to the voters -- to you -- which path we should take," he said. "Are we going to double-down on the top-down economic policies that helped to get us into this mess, or do we embrace a new economic patriotism that says America does best when the middle-class does best."

Rejecting what he called Obama's "trickle-down government" approach, Romney promised to push for North American energy independence; open up more trade, particularly in Latin America, and crack down on China if it cheats; make sure America's schools are the world's best; pursue a balanced federal budget and champion small businesses. He repeatedly denied having a $5 trillion tax cut, but did promise tax relief for the middle-income Americans. He said wealthy Americans will do well under either president.

But "under the president's policies, middle-income Americans have been buried -- they're just being crushed," Romney said. "Middle-income Americans have seen their income come down by $4,300. This is a tax in and of itself."

Romney and Obama's clash over the president's signature health-care reform was a centerpiece of the debate.

"I just don't know how the president could have come into office facing 23 million people out of work, rising unemployment, an economic crisis at the kitchen table and spend his energy and passion for two years fighting for Obamacare instead of fighting for jobs for the American people," Romney said. "It has killed jobs. And the best course for health care is to do what we did in my state: craft a plan at the state level that fits the needs of the state and then lets focus on getting the costs down for people, rather than raising it with a $2,500 additional premium."

Obama pushed back by stressing that the health-care law helped millions of families that were worrying about going bankrupt if they got sick or getting health coverage with a pre-existing condition. The law doesn't constitute a government takeover of the health-care industry, he said, "but it does say insurance companies can't jerk you around" with arbitrary lifetime limits and other conditions.

"We did work on this alongside working on jobs because this is part of making sure middle-class families are secure in this country," Obama said.

Obama also noted that the national law was based on a Republican idea and a health-care-reform law implemented in Massachusetts while Romney was governor.

"The irony is that we've seen this model work really well in Massachusetts because Governor Romney did a good thing, working with Democrats in the state, to set up what is essentially the identical model," Obama said. "As a consequence, people are covered there. It hasn't destroyed jobs. And as a consequence, we know have a system in which we have the opportunity to start bringing down costs as opposed to just leaving millions of people out in the cold."

Romney countered that he worked with a Democrat-dominated Legislature and didn't raise taxes or cut Medicare and let people keep their own insurance plans.

"I agree that the Democratic legislators in Massachusetts might have given some advice to Republicans in Congress about how to cooperate," Obama said. "The fact of the matter is we used the same advisers, and they say it's the same plan."

De Berge, the Phoenix pollster, was surprised Obama didn't deploy attacks on Romney that have become a big part of the campaign, such as referencing Romney's secretly recorded comments that 47 percent of Americans "believe that they are victims."

"Maybe (Obama is) holding them in his holster for the next debate," de Berge said.

De Berge said Romney did a good job of repeatedly saying he didn't want to kill jobs.

Other debate watchers on both sides of the political aisle took note of Obama's dull performance.

One Democratic observer speculated that Obama may not have wanted to go on the attack Wednesday.

"Governor Romney was much more aggressive," said Ron Ober, who was chief of staff to former Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., and is the founder of the Phoenix consulting firm Policy Development Group. "There weren't any knockouts tonight, and I think the campaign goes on and it's going to be a race through Nov. 6."

Phoenix City Councilman Sal DiCiccio, a Republican, predicted that Romney connected with voters during the debate.

"You really didn't feel like President Obama was even in the debate," DiCiccio said.

Jim Lehrer thinks best moderator is no moderator at all

Analysis: Jim Lehrer thinks best moderator is no moderator at all

by Robert Bianco - Oct. 3, 2012 08:12 PM

USA Today

Apparently, Jim Lehrer thinks the best moderator is no moderator at all.

Of course, considering Wednesday night's first presidential debate was the 12th presidential or vice presidential debate Lehrer has moderated since 1988, it's likely that he knew most of his efforts to move the candidates off their talking points were going to fail. Which might be why, fairly quickly in, he seemed to give up.

He asked President Obama and Gov. Romney to stick to the questions asked. They didn't. He asked Gov. Romney, after the first statement, to ask President Obama a direct question. He didn't. He objected to Gov. Romney taking the last word on the first question. He took it anyway. He told President Obama his time was up. He took more time.

He asked them both, at the start, to stick to the limits set. And then he, and they, acted as if the limits didn't exist.

Clearly, Lehrer lost control, early and often. But just as clearly, he had a goal beyond presiding over a tightly structured debate -- which was to stay out of the way as much as possible and make the candidates run the debate themselves. And for better or worse, that goal he largely achieved.

"We're way over our first 15 minutes," Lehrer said at around the 20-minute mark, as the men continued to talk around the first question -- which was supposed to be about jobs and moved on to taxes and the budget before cycling back, sort of, to jobs. That was all right, Lehrer said, because the discussion was still about the economy. It just wasn't about that part of the economy he had asked them to discuss.

Of course, you could forgive the candidates and viewers alike for forgetting exactly what Lehrer's vague, open-ended question was from segment to segment -- which is what happens when the moderator seems to float with the tide. As a drinking game, you could count how many times one of the candidates talked over Lehrer, or how often Lehrer was reduced to sputtering "but" or "OK." or "no, no, no." Or you could just count how many times Lehrer asked Gov. Romney if he supported vouchers for Medicare before he seemed to just give up on getting an answer.

To be fair, the format put Lehrer in an almost impossible situation. If you give the candidates free rein, as he pretty much did, you end up with a debate that wanders, sometimes incomprehensibly, from surface point to surface point. If you step in too often, you risk grabbing the focus at an event that is supposed to be centered on the two candidates -- and you get slammed as biased by whichever candidate suffers under your tighter control.

Still, some control might have been nice. Perhaps Lehrer can keep that in mind if a 13th debate comes his way.

Romney's 'Big Bird' comment stirs social media

Romney's 'Big Bird' comment stirs social media

by Melanie Eversley - Oct. 3, 2012 07:39 PM

USA Today

Who knew Sesame Street's Big Bird would play a role in tonight's presidential debate in Denver?

About 30 minutes into the verbal contest between President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the former governor explained that he would cut what he considers non-essential items in the budget, including cuts to PBS, which employs debate moderator Jim Lehrer.

"I'm sorry Jim. I'm gonna stop the subsidy to PBS. I'm gonna stop other things," Romney said. "I like PBS, I like Big Bird, I actually like you too."

At that point, someone in the Twitterverse responded by creating a @FiredBigBird account, which, as of this writing shortly after 10 p.m. ET, had almost 9,900 followers.

Tweets followed.

"I worked with Big Bird. I served with Big Bird. You, sir, are no Big Bird," The Lance Arthur, @thelancearthur, of San Francisco tweeted.

"Why is there no Muppet-vision way to watch the #debate?" tweeted Ryan Penagos of New York City, also known as, @Agent.M, executive editorial director of Marvel Digital Media Group and Marvel.com.

"Big Bird, you have two minutes for rebuttal," tweeted Ina Fried, @inafried, of San Francisco, the senior editor for a website called All Things Digital.

Facebook users chimed in too, with someone creating a page called "Big Bird for President." As of 10:20 p.m. ET, the page had about 460 "Likes."

"I am in," commented Facebook user Matthew H. Johnson.

"Go Big Bird!," commented Facebook user Brent Rochford.

Fact check: Claims on job gains need a second look

Fact check: Claims on job gains need a second look

Oct. 3, 2012 10:50 PM

USA Today

In the first presidential debate Wednesday night, President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney packed their responses with accusations about each other's policies and defenses of their own.

Here are a few claims that deserve a deeper look:

Private-sector job gains

The claim: Obama said the U.S. economy has created 5 million private-sector jobs the past 30 months.

The facts: After the economy plummeted in late 2007 and throughout 2009, the United States has gained 4.6 million private-sector jobs since the labor market bottomed in February 2010 -- or 5.1million under preliminary revisions released last week that are not part of the official tally by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Still, that's weak by historical standards. Under President George W. Bush, the private sector also added 5 million jobs in the 30 months after employment hit bottom following the 2001 downturn, and the pace of private-sector gains in the previous two recoveries was far stronger.

Tax cuts

Claim: Obama says Romney's tax plan would cut taxes by $5 trillion over 10 years, inflating the deficit.

Facts: Romney has proposed cutting tax rates by 20 percent in each bracket, which the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says would cost $4.9trillion over 10 years.

Romney said his plan will be paid for by curtailing tax deductions, so middle-class people pay less overall and upper-income people don't see lower taxes. Last month in Ohio, Romney said middle-class people would see little change in their taxes under his plan.

Romney has declined to say what tax deductions he would end. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has contended that middle-class families would see taxes rise about $2,000 a year under Romney's plan if he keeps his promise to make the tax reform revenue-neutral, arguing that it can't be done without ending popular middle-class deductions on mortgage interest and charitable contributions.

The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, has said the gap can be closed by ending tax breaks targeting the wealthy, including tax exemptions for interest on municipal bonds.

Romney said he would not raise taxes and would not approve any tax cut that would expand the deficit. He argued that tax cuts will increase investment, putting more people to work and increasing the taxpaying population.

The middle class

Claim: Romney said middle-class families' income is down $4,300 since Obama took office.

Facts: According to a March analysis by Maryland-based economic consulting firm Sentier Research, Romney was correct. According to their analysis, based on February's Current Population Data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income was $50,065 in February, compared with $54,481 in December 2007 -- right as the recession was starting -- and about 11 months before Obama was elected. The current median household income is $50,678.

What Romney didn't say is that the decline in real median household income has been occurring over the course of the past decade, well before Obama took office. The trend has continued under the Obama administration, but it did not start there.

Obama, Romney clash on economy in first debate

Obama, Romney clash on economy in first debate

Posted: Wednesday, October 3, 2012 7:34 pm | Updated: 7:39 pm, Wed Oct 3, 2012.

Associated Press

DENVER — In a showdown at close quarters, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney sparred aggressively in their first campaign debate Wednesday night over taxes, deficits and strong steps needed to create jobs in a sputtering national economy. "The status quo is not going to cut it," declared the challenger.

Obama in turn accused his rival of seeking to "double down" on economic policies that actually led to the devastating national downturn four years ago.

Both men made frequent references to the weak economy and high national unemployment, by far the dominant issue in the race for the White House. Public opinion polls show Obama with a slight advantage in key battleground states and nationally, and Romney was particularly aggressive, like a man looking to shake up the campaign with a little less than five weeks to run.

Polite but pointed, the two men agreed about little if anything.

Obama said his opponent's plan to reduce all tax rates by 20 percent would cost $5 trillion and benefit the wealthy at the expense of middle income taxpayers.

Shot back Romney: "Virtually everything he just said about my tax plan is inaccurate."

The former Massachusetts governor and businessman added that Obama's proposal to allow the expiration of tax cuts on upper-level income would mean tax increases on small businesses that create jobs by the hundreds of thousands.

The two campaign rivals clasped hands and smiled as they strode onto the debate stage at the University of Denver, then waved to the audience before taking their places behind identical lecterns.

There was a quick moment of laughter, when Obama referred to first lady Michelle Obama as "sweetie" and noted it was their 20th anniversary.

Romney added best wishes, and said to the first couple, "I'm sure this is the most romantic place you could imagine, here with me."

Both candidates' wives were in the audience.

The two men debated before a television audience likely to be counted in the tens of millions. They will meet twice more this month, and their running mates once, but in past election years, viewership has sometimes fallen off after the first encounter.

Without saying so, the two rivals quickly got to the crux of their race — Romney's eagerness to turn the contest into a referendum on the past four years while the incumbent desires for voters to choose between his plan for the next four years and the one his rival backs.

Romney ticked off the dreary economic facts of life — a sharp spike in food stamps, economic growth "lower this year than last" and "23 million people out of work or stropped looking for work."

But Obama criticized Romney's prescriptions and his refusal to raise taxes and said, "if you take such an unbalanced approach then that means you are going to be gutting our investment in schools and education ... health care for seniors in nursing homes (and) for kids with disabilities."

Not surprisingly, the two men disagreed over Medicare, a flash point since Romney placed Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan on his ticket.

The president repeatedly described Romney's plan as a "voucher program" that would raise out-of-pocket costs on seniors.

He continued, directly addressing the voters at home: "If you're 54 or 55 you might want to listen because this will affect you."

Romney said he doesn't support any changes for current retirees or those close to retirement.

"If you're 60 or 60 and older you don't need to listen further," he said, but he contended that fundamental changes are needed to prevent the system from becoming insolvent as millions of baby boom generation Americans become eligible.

Romney also made a detailed case for repealing Obamacare, the name attached to the health care plan that Obama pushed through Congress in 2010. "It has killed jobs," he said, and argued that the best approach is to "do what we did in my state."

Though he didn't say so, when he was governor Massachusetts passed legislation that required residents to purchase coverage — the so-called individual mandate that conservatives and he oppose on a national level.

Romney also said that Obamacare would cut $716 billion from Medicare over the next decade.

The president said the changes were part of a plan to lengthen the program's life, and he added that AARP, the seniors lobby, supports it.

Jim Lehrer of PBS drew moderator's duties, with Obama getting the first question and Romney the last word.

Five weeks before Election Day, early voting is under way in scattered states and beginning in more every day. Opinion polls show Obama with an advantage nationally and in most if not all of the battleground states where the race is most likely to be decided.

That put particular pressure on Romney to come up with a showing strong enough to alter the course of the campaign.

The sputtering economy served as the debate backdrop, as it has for virtually everything else in the 2012 campaign for the White House. Obama took office in the shadow of an economic crisis but promised a turnaround that hasn't materialized. Economic growth has been sluggish throughout his term, with unemployment above 8 percent since before he took office.

The customary security blended with a festival-like atmosphere in the surrounding area on a warm and sunny day. The Lumineers performed for free, and Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am delivered a pep talk of sorts to Obama's supporters. School officials arranged to show the debate on monitors outside the hall for those without tickets.

There was local political theater, too, including female Romney supporters wearing short shorts and holding signs that said, "What War On Women?" — a rebuttal to claims by Obama and the Democrats.

Both campaigns engaged in a vigorous pre-debate competition to set expectations, each side suggesting the other had built-in advantages.

Romney took part in 19 debates during the campaign for the Republican primary early in the year. The president has not been onstage with a political opponent since his last face-to-face encounter with Arizona Sen. John McCain, his Republican rival in 2008.

Obama and Romney prepared for the evening with lengthy practice sessions. Romney selected Ohio Sen. Rob Portman as a stand-in for the president; Obama turned to Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry to play the Republican role.

The two presidential rivals also are scheduled to debate on Oct. 16 in Hempstead, N.Y., and Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla.

Vice President Joe Biden and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin have one debate, Oct. 11 in Danville, Ky. Both men have already begun holding practice sessions.

Romney finds his voice on economy

Analysis: Romney finds his voice on economy

By Karen Tumulty, Published: October 3

Mitt Romney finally found his voice Wednesday night.

After many months of awkward moments and shifting campaign messages, he forcefully and confidently stood alongside President Obama and offered an alternative economic vision to what he called Obama’s “trickle-down government approach.”

The two contenders seemed to swap roles Wednesday. Obama was the one who struggled for his footing, scowling on the split screens of millions of television viewers across the nation and often looking like a man who wished he were elsewhere.

Romney came to the debate at the University of Denver with a heavy set of goals, chief of which was to regain ground on the economy. That issue is uppermost among voter concerns and the one that Romney believes provides his greatest advantage.

Romney pressed his case against Obama’s stewardship of a disappointingly weak recovery. He sought to sharpen his own proposals and to soften the perception among voters that he favors the interests of the wealthy over those who are struggling.

“The people who are having the hard time right now are middle-income Americans. Under the president’s policies, middle-income Americans have been buried,” Romney said, echoing a damaging phrase that Vice President Biden used the day before to describe the status of average Americans over the past four years.

Obama, meanwhile, did not make many of the arguments that he and his campaign have used most effectively against Romney. He did not recount the former governor’s career in private equity, during which Romney laid off workers, or the secretly taped video in which the Republican nominee told wealthy donors that the 47 percent of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes are dependent on government and see themselves as victims.

The president also left many of Romney’s claims unchallenged. Romney asserted eight times that Obama plans to cut $716 billion from Medicare without noting that the Republican vice presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), shepherded a budget through the House that would do the same thing.

In talking about the economy, which was the primary focus of the debate, Romney delivered none of the “zingers” that his team had boasted they were preparing. Each candidate instead dug into the details of his proposals and sharply criticized his opponent’s.

And in some areas, they ceded ground to the other, primarily to stress their differences.

Obama said he agreed with Romney that “our corporate tax rate is too high, so I want to lower it, particularly for manufacturing, taking it down to 25 percent. But I also want to close those loopholes that are giving incentives for companies that are shipping jobs overseas. I want to provide tax breaks for companies that are investing here in the United States.”

And Romney insisted that he does not want to reduce the share of taxes paid by the wealthy.

“High-income people are doing just fine in this economy,” he said. “They’ll do fine whether you’re president or I am.”

Romney also tried to draw a clearer link between his tax proposal, which heavily benefits the wealthy, and the economic benefit he insists it would provide for everyone else.

“The problem with raising taxes is that it slows down the rate of growth. And you could never quite get the job done,” he said. “I want to lower spending and encourage economic growth at the same time.”

The closest Romney came to matching his reputation as an unsentimental, bottom-line-driven executive was when he discussed the budget cuts he would make. The one he singled out was ending the government subsidy for the Public Broadcasting System, which airs the iconic children’s program “Sesame Street.”

“I love Big Bird,” Romney said. “But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.”

The central premise of the Republican nominee’s campaign has been that voters, disillusioned with Obama’s performance in reviving economic growth, would turn to Romney, who promotes the expertise and experience he gained in the corporate world.

But with less than five weeks to go before Election Day, Romney has been struggling to make a convincing case for himself on that score — and is running about even with Obama on who would better handle the economy.

Where Romney held a seven-point edge over the president on that question among registered voters in an August Washington Post-ABC News poll, the latest survey shows them tied, with 47 percent saying Romney would do a better job and the same proportion opting for Obama.

Meanwhile, the president continues to hold a double-digit advantage when voters are asked which of the two candidates better understands the economic problems people in this country are having. In the most recent poll, 52 percent said it was Obama, while only 39 percent named Romney.

The first debate, which history suggests will draw the biggest audience, amounted to Romney’s best opportunity to change a political dynamic that has been moving against him.

As a result, he was getting an avalanche of advice — some of it conflicting — from the conservative commentariat and from his allies on the sidelines: Be more aggressive, be more personable, attack Obama’s record, offer more details about his plans, stay out of the weeds and stick to big themes.

For Obama, who went into the debates with a slight lead in nearly every poll, the biggest challenge was to avoid a stumble. In past debates, his worst flaws were ones of style, in which he came off as arrogant and aloof, or long-winded and professorial.

Whether the debate did much to win over undecided voters or change anyone’s mind is not likely to become clear for at least a few days. In that time, news organization fact checkers will pick over the assertions that were made, pundits will award style points, and social media will amplify — and perhaps amend — the overall impressions that were left.

In this deeply polarized country, the number of people who are truly wavering in their choice is relatively small. And those who are probably were not among the tens of millions who tuned into the debate, said AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer.

By and large, “they are undecided because those people are not checked into the election,” Podhorzer said. “They’re paying attention to the coverage of the debate and they’re paying attention to what their friends are saying.”

And in an era when so much of the national dialogue takes place on social media, “inevitably some moments will live on in YouTube,” he added.

Winners and losers from the first presidential debate

Winners and losers from the first presidential debate

Posted by Chris Cillizza on October 3, 2012 at 11:42 pm

The bad news: The first presidential debate is over.

The good news: The vice presidential debate is a week from tomorrow.

The Fix flooded the zone for tonight’s presidential debate — with live-tweeting, some video back and forth with Ezra Klein and our first thoughts from the event. But, what’s a big political event without a little sifting through of the winners and losers from the debate that was?

Our take is below. Enjoy!

WINNERS

* Mitt Romney: Romney needed a strong performance after roughly a month of unrelenting bad news — and even worse polling in swing states. And, he got it. Romney was extremely well-prepared and came across as someone more than ready to do the job for which he is running. He also, smartly, injected people he had met along the campaign trail to illustrate his policy points and drive home his connection to average people. A star turn for Romney at a time when he badly needed one.

* Bill Clinton: Obama’s answers in the first 30 minutes of the debate were either a) a paraphrasing of the last Democratic president or b) a comparison between himself and the former president. Somewhere, Bubba was smiling. Big time.

* Studies: The first 45 minutes of the debate felt like a conversation between the heads of two opposing think tanks. Obama cited a study, Romney responded with a study of his own. The point? You can find a study that says almost anything.

* Split screen: How the candidates react to one another — and what they do when the other is speaking — is fascinating. (Cue critics who insist we pay too much attention to the theatrics of politics and not enough to the substance.) A little bit more innovation/integration of technology might be welcome too; we continue to believe showing some relevant tweets on screen during the debates might be a worthwhile endeavor.

* Donald Trump: It pains us to write this but The Donald got a mention from both Obama and Romney. And, in the “all publicity is good publicity” world that Trump occupies this is a good thing for him — and a terrible one for the society at large.

LOSERS

* President Obama: The incumbent just seemed something short of engaged in tonight’s proceedings. Like his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama’s debate performance seemed purposely restrained — striving for a workmanlike competence but achieving something well short of that. Obama’s facial expressions seemed to alternate between grimly looking down at his podium and smirking when Romney said something with which he disagreed. Snapping at debate moderator Jim Lehrer — more on that later — didn’t help Obama either.

* The format: The attempt to structure the debate around a series of 15-minute segments discussing different aspects of the economy and other domestic policy matters failed almost before it started. Both candidates — what a surprise! — ignored time cues and the specific questions they were asked. And, Lehrer struggled to wrangle them into the allotted time/topic, which left the debate feeling almost entirely format-less. In fact, the candidates were so windy that Lehrer had to essentially jettison the last segment on governing. Why not embrace the fact that these debates are always going to be rollicking policy discussions and not even attempt to put sure-to-be ignored formatting on them?

* Zingers: For all the focus on the one-liners that Romney was allegedly preparing, the debate was almost entirely devoid of the sort of “no he didn’t!” lines that are often the most-remembered moments of these sorts of things. To the extent there were zingers, they came from Romney. His “you pick the losers” and “you’re entitled to your own plane and house” lines were cutting enough to be effective without appearing entirely rehearsed (although, of course, they were.)

* Big Bird: Mitt Romney may love the big yellow bird but he told America he would get rid of funding for PBS if he was president. Whither Elmo?

Factchecking the first presidential debate of 2012

Factchecking the first presidential debate of 2012

Posted by Glenn Kessler at 06:02 AM ET, 10/04/2012

There they go again.

Both President Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney tossed out a blizzard of statistics and facts, often of dubious origin. Here are some highlights from the first presidential debate of 2012, with thanks to the readers who tweeted suggestions to #FactCheckThis

“Governor Romney’s central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut -- on top of the extension of the Bush tax cuts -- that’s another trillion dollars”

--President Obama

“I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut”

--Governor Romney

But Romney also has said he will make his plan “revenue neutral” by eliminating tax loopholes and deductions, although he has not provided the details.

The Tax Policy Center has analyzed the specifics of Romney’s plan thus far released and concluded the numbers aren’t there to make it revenue neutral.

In the debate, Romney countered that “six other studies” have found that not to be the case, but he’s wrong about that. Those studies actually do not provide much evidence that Romney’s proposal--as sketchy as it is--would be revenue neutral without making unrealistic assumptions.

Given the uncertainty, the Obama campaign has assumed the worst about Romney’s plan—that it would mean higher taxes for middle-class Americans—even though, as Romney stated, there is no chance he would try to implement such a plan as president.

“I’ve put forward a specific $4 trillion deficit reduction plan…. And the way we do it is $2.50 for every cut, we ask for $1 of additional revenue… That’s how the bipartisan commission that talked about how we should move forward suggested.”

--Obama

For instance, Simpson-Bowles envisioned $4 trillion in debt reduction over nine years; the president’s plan would spread the cuts over 10 years. A good chunk of the savings from deficit reduction piles up in that last year. When the two plans are compared apples to apples, Simpson-Bowles yields about $6.6 trillion in deficit reduction--50 percent more than Obama’s plan.

By Obama’s math, you have nearly $3.8 trillion in spending cuts, compared to $1.5 trillion in tax increases (letting the Bush tax cuts expire for high-income Americans). That’s how he claims $1 of tax increases for every $2.50 of spending cuts.

But virtually no serious budget analyst agreed with this accounting. Obama’s $4 trillion figure, for instance, includes counting some $1 trillion in cuts reached a year ago in budget negotiations with Congress. So no matter who is the president, the savings are already in the bank. (The Obama campaign notes that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the president’s budget would reduce the deficit by $3.5 trillion over ten years. The national debt, as percentage of the gross domestic product, would rise for 73 percent to 76 percent in that period, however.)

“It’s important for us...that we take some of the money that we’re saving as we wind down two wars to rebuild America.”

--Obama

In other words, by projecting war spending far in the future, the administration is able to claim credit for saving money it never intended to spend. And Obama would still be borowing the money to “rebuild America” (Imagine someone borrowing $50,000 a year for college—and then declaring that they have an extra $500,000 to spend over the next decade once they graduate.)

This budget trick actually works both ways. The Bush administration never properly accounted for war spending, refusing to project costs in the future, which kept its deficit projections artificially low. Now that the wars are winding down, the Obama administration is happy to project costs far into the future, because it artificially inflates the potential deficit reduction. Funny how that works.

“On Medicare, for current retirees, he’s cutting $716 billion from the program….the idea of cutting $716 billion from Medicare to be able to balance the additional cost of Obamacare is, in my opinion, a mistake.”

--Romney

Under the health-care law, spending does not decrease in Medicare year after year; the reduction is from anticipated levels of spending in future years. In fact, the savings mostly are wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries — who, as a result of the health-care law, ended up with new benefits for preventive care and prescription drugs. But Romney argued that was a “bad trade” and the Medicare actuary also has raised concerns about whether the cuts to providers were sustainable.

While it is correct that anticipated savings from Medicare were used to help offset some of the anticipated costs of expanding health care for all Americans, it does not affect the Medicare trust fund. In fact, the Obama health-care law also raised Medicare payroll taxes by $318 billion over the new 10-year time frame, further strengthening the program’s financial condition.

Moreover, under the concept of the unified budget, money that is collected by the federal government for whatever purpose (such as Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes) is spent on whatever bills are coming due at that time. Social Security and Medicare will get a credit for taxes collected that are not immediately spent on Social Security, but those taxes are quickly devoted to other federal spending.

Indeed, the House Republican budget plan crafted by Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, retains virtually all of the Medicare “cuts” contained in the health-care law, but diverts them instead to his Medicare overhaul. Republicans argue that that is a more effective use of the savings.

“I also want to close those loopholes that are giving incentives for companies that are shipping jobs overseas.”

--Obama

“You said you get a deduction for taking a plant overseas. Look, I’ve been in business for 25 years. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I maybe need to get a new accountant.”

--Romney

Yet it is pretty small potatoes given the attention Democrats pay to it. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that ending the deduction for moving operations overseas would raise just $168 million over a decade.

In the federal government with an annual budget deficit of more than $1 trillion, that’s what you call a rounding error.

“And over the last two years, health care premiums have gone up -- it’s true -- but they’ve gone up slower than any time in the last 50 years.”

--Obama

“It’s tempting to think that provider initiatives are truly denting costs, but it’s hard for changes in provider behavior to influence costs before they occur,” said a recent article in Modern Healthcare magazine. “Instead, the drop in healthcare cost growth is primarily attributable to the Great Recession’s impact on employment, private health insurance, government revenues and budgets.”

Meanwhile, Romney blamed a rise in insurance premiums on the health care law. This is also overstated, since much of the health care law has not been implemented yet.

“If I’m president I will help create 12 million new jobs in this country with rising incomes.”

--Romney

But, in fact, the number is even less impressive than it sounds. This pledge amounts to an average of 250,000 jobs a month, a far cry from the 500,000 jobs a month that Romney once claimed would be created in a “normal recovery.” In recent months, the economy has averaged about 150,000 jobs a month.

The Congressional Budget Office is required to consider the effects of the so-called “fiscal cliff” if a year-end budget deal is not reached, which many experts believe would push the country into a recession. But even with that caveat, the nonpartisan agency assumes 9.06 million jobs will be created between 2013 and 2017. (This is a revision downward; CBO had estimated 11 million in January.)

But Moody’s Analytics, in an August forecast, predicts 12 million jobs will be created by 2016, no matter who is president. And Macroeconomic Advisors in April also predicted a gain of 12.3 million jobs.

In other words, this is a fairly safe bet by Romney, even if he has a somewhat fuzzy plan for action. We have often noted that presidents are often at the mercy — or are the beneficiary — of broad economic trends, and Romney’s pledge appears to be an effort to take advantage of that.

“The problem is that because the voucher wouldn’t necessarily keep up with health care inflation, it was estimated that this would cost the average senior about $6,000 a year. Now, in fairness, what Governor Romney has now said is he’ll maintain traditional Medicare alongside it .”

--Obama

The problem is this dollar figure—usually expressed as $6,400--is an estimate for an earlier version of Ryan’s plan. He’s since changed it significantly to address some of the loudest complaints. The new version of the plan includes the option for traditional Medicare, as well as a commitment that at least one health-care option would be fully covered by the government.

Indeed, the new plan is much more generous than the original version. The old plan had capped growth at the rate of inflation. Many experts believed that was too low and pushed more costs on beneficiaries.

In the updated Ryan plan, Medicare spending would be permitted to grow slightly faster than the nation’s economy — in fact, at the same growth rate as Obama’s budget for Medicare.

“I like the way we did it [health care] in Massachusetts…What were some differences? We didn’t raise taxes.”

--Romney

A June 2011 Boston Globe article said this about the cost of RomneyCare and how the state has paid for it:

“Over the five-year life of the new law, total cost has been $9 billion, with the federal government picking up nearly 64 percent of the cost, the state’s share is more than 18 percent, and the remaining 18 percent split by hospitals and insurers, who pass it along to their customers, to pay into the Health Safety Net fund, which reimburses providers for treating the uninsured. The federal share consists of the usual 50 percent reimbursement for Medicaid, supplemented by stimulus money and additional funds awarded the state for its innovative program to subsidize insurance of the working poor.”

So the federal government pays more for the Bay State’s healthcare program than the state itself does.

The Globe piece also noted that “there is no certainty the state can afford the program’s cost indefinitely if the underlying costs of health care continue to soar.”

The state has increased taxes to pay for its healthcare plan since Romney left office. For instance, it raised taxes on cigarettes and implemented a one-time assessment totalling $50 million on hospitals and insurers. --Josh Hicks

“In one year, you provided $90 billion in breaks to the green energy world. Now, I like green energy as well, but that’s about 50 years’ worth of what oil and gas receives.”

--Romney

The president’s 2013 budget called for elimination of tax breaks for oil subsidies, which the White House estimated at $4 billion per year. Dividing $90 billion -- the federal money that Romney claims went toward clean energy -- by $4 billion in breaks for the oil industry amounts to 22.5 years, not 50 years.

It’s also worth noting that the $90 billion was not “breaks,” but a combination of loans, loan guarantees and grants through the stimulus program, and they were spread out over several years rather than one, as Romney claimed.

Furthermore, not all of the money went to the “green energy world.” About $23 billion went toward “clean coal,” energy-efficiency upgrades, updating the electricity grid and environmental clean-up, largely for old nuclear weapons sites. -- Josh Hicks and Steven Mufson

“The president’s reelected you’ll see dramatic cuts to our military.”

--Romney

“Security” spending included not just the Defense Department but also the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Veterans Affairs, foreign aid spending, intelligence and other areas. The goal was to allow some flexibility to avoid being locked into a specific number for defense spending.

The law also tasked a “supercommittee” with finding ways to reduce the deficit by an additional $1.2 trillion over 10 years. If the committee failed — which it did — then automatic cuts totaling $1.2 trillion also would be ordered in “security” and “nonsecurity” spending.

Now there is an impasse. An alternative plan passed the House in May on a party-line vote, with not a single Democrat voting for it. The bill would have halted the automatic cuts in defense spending for one year, while cutting in other areas. The Democratic-controlled Senate did not accept the bill. Democrats, by contrast, have proposed ending Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy as a way to meet the deficit targets in the Budget Control Act, though no vote has been taken on a sequestration replacement plan.

Romney has not explained how he would end this stalemate.

“It puts in place an unelected board that’s going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have. I don’t like that idea.”

--Romney

Beginning in 2014, the 15-member Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, (made up of experts subject to Senate confirmation) is designed to help reduce the rate of growth in Medicare spending if it exceeds a certain target rate. The board would make recommendations to reduce costs.

Eventually, if the targets are not met, the board will submit a plan to the White House and Congress to achieve the necessary cuts. Congress could pass a different set of cuts or reject the IPAB recommendations with a three-fifths vote in the Senate.

In effect, the IPAB appears designed to mimic the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which was designed in the late 1980s by then Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.) with the backing of the Reagan administration. That commission was empowered to make politically difficult decisions of closing military bases, thus limiting the influence of lobbyists and in effect letting Congress off the hook of making the tough decisions themselves.

The health-care law explicitly says that the recommendations cannot lead to rationing of health care. Of course, “rationing” is in the eye of beholder, and one common complaint is that rationing is not defined. The law also limits recommendations that would change benefits, modify eligibility or increase Medicare beneficiary cost-sharing, such as deductibles, coinsurance and co-payments.

On the surface, the IPAB appears aimed at doing the same thing as the House Republican Medicare plan— reducing the runaway costs of Medicare, except on a faster track. (The GOP plan would not kick in until 2021, just a few years before the Medicare hospital fund begins to run dry.)

The dispute really centers on a philosophical divide between the parties. Democrats would rely on independent experts (such as doctors and consumer advocates) to recommend the cuts; Republicans would rely on the insurance marketplace to control costs.

“The approach that Governor Romney’s talking about is the same sales pitch that was made in 2001 and 2003, and we ended up with the slowest job growth in 50 years, we ended up moving from surplus to deficits, and it all culminated in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

--Obama

With such careful pruning and adjusting of language, a politician can easily shed one or two Pinocchios.

But another part of Obama’s statement is misleading. There’s no doubt that George W. Bush owns an unimpressive record on job creation. But as we have previously demonstrated, Obama comes in either last, second-to-last or in the bottom half among presidents since the Great Depression, depending on which way you look at the numbers.

Text of Presidential Debates

If you really love punishment, or you enjoy listening to lies and BS, you can find the full text of the Presidential debates here.

Presidential debate draws tweets for Big Bird

Source

Presidential debate draws tweets for Big Bird

by Michael Clancy - Oct. 4, 2012 04:59 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

Arizona's PBS station Channel 8 (KAET) lately has been running a spot that shows Big Bird picking up a child, then touring the world Forrest Gump-style.

In sort of the same vein, Big Bird walked into the presidential debate Wednesday evening, and on Thursday, it was the talk of the town.

Republican candidate Mitt Romney, noting that he would cut any government program that requires borrowing from China, said he likes Big Bird and moderator Jim Lehrer, longtime PBS news anchor, but he would cut funding to their employer anyway.

Twitter and Facebook lit up, as they did only a few other times during the debate.

Eight times during the debate, the number of tweets passed the 120,000-per-hour mark. Three of them marked squabbles that President Barack Obama and Romney had with Lehrer. The Big Bird remark resulted in 135,000 tweets per minute, according to the social-media website.

Many of them were along the lines of "Save Big Bird."

Kelly McCullough, general manager of Channel 8 in Phoenix, the PBS station, noted that Republican attacks on public broadcasting happen occasionally.

"Every decade or so, someone tries to go after our meager but vital subsidy," McCullough said.

It's a relatively tiny amount of the federal budget, just 0.01 percent, and it is popular with the public, he said

Channel 8 gets 16 percent of its budget from the subsidy, he said.

Robbie Sherwood, a Democratic political analyst who blogged about the debate on Wednesday on azcentral.com, said conservatives believe public broadcasting, especially National Public Radio, is too liberal.

"When asked how he would make massive budget cuts, it was the only detail (Romney) gave," Sherwood said.

Generally, Sherwood said, Romney steered away from the conservative line he took during the primary to take a more centrist position in the debate.

"The more he talked, the more he alienated the base, so the PBS thing was like throwing a bone to them," he said.

Republican consultant Chuck Coughlin said the public-broadcasting line is "red meat" to the most conservative members of the party.

"It grabs the attention of a certain portion of the electorate," he said. "The most highly partisan Republicans already distrust the media, and when you throw in public funding, they dislike it even more."

At least, Coughlin said, Romney did not trash Sesame Street's most iconic figure.

"He delivered the line with at least some reverence for Big Bird."

Obama asks businesses to break law so he can get reelected!!!!

Look I think it's a silly law that should be repealed, if it's not unconstitutional.

But Obama is asking employees to break the law to help him get reelected.

"The Obama administration has told defense contractors anticipating possible layoffs ... not to issue 60-day notices as is usually required by law"

"Political analysts have speculated that White House officials did not want warnings of mass layoffs by defense contractors being issued just before the Nov. 6 general election"

Source

Massive defense layoffs in limbo

Employers told not to give 60-day notice

by J. Craig Anderson - Oct. 6, 2012 02:31 PM

The Republic | azcentral.com

The looming threat of automatic defense-spending cuts in January has sparked a political battle over a law that requires large employers in Arizona and elsewhere to notify workers in most cases at least 60 days before instituting massive layoffs.

The Obama administration has told defense contractors anticipating possible layoffs as a result of the scheduled budget cuts, known as sequestrations, not to issue 60-day notices as is usually required by law.

Republicans, including Sen. John McCain, R.-Ariz., are calling the White House Office of Management and Budget's instructions a violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN Act, a law passed by a veto-proof majority of Democrats during the Reagan administration.

They say the lack of proper notification could place the financial burden of additional severance pay and legal costs on taxpayers if widespread layoffs occur.

"It's totally illegal. And they're saying that the taxpayers will pick up the tab for any legal problems that they have," McCain told The Republic. "I mean, that's the most outrageous thing I've ever seen."

Last week, several defense contractors, including BAE Systems, a British company with operations in Arizona, backed off threats to issue layoff notices to employees in the coming weeks, a move they had said might be needed given the threat of federal budget cuts mandated by 2011 legislation related to raising the national debt ceiling.

The change in direction was prompted by a White House memo issued in late September that directs contractors to follow the guidance of the Labor Department. In a July letter, the department said the WARN Act does not require contractors facing sequestration to send notices to workers that they could be let go.

In its new guidance, the White House said that if sequestration occurs and an agency terminates or changes a contract that results in a plant closing or mass layoff, the contractors' liability and litigation costs under the WARN Act would be "allowable costs" covered by the contracting agency.

Political analysts have speculated that White House officials did not want warnings of mass layoffs by defense contractors being issued just before the Nov. 6 general election.

Other contractors, including the Boeing Co., which also has significant operations in Arizona, said they never had planned to issue WARN Act notices prior to the automatic cuts actually taking effect.

Dan Beck, director of international business development and strategy communications for Boeing, said it has been the company's position all along not to issue WARN notices until after it receives detailed information from government customers about specific programs that would be cut.

That probably would not happen until after automatic cuts go into effect, if they go into effect at all, which many defense-industry insiders believe will not happen.

"It was never our intent to issue sequestration-related WARN notices prior to the general election," Beck said.

As one of the nation's top employers of defense and aerospace workers, Arizona faces a serious economic threat if Congress fails to meet its self-imposed January budget deadline to avert billions of dollars in automatic federal-spending cuts.

To accomplish that, Congress must pass a budget that reduces the deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next decade, either through spending cuts, revenue increases or both. Political analysts say it's likely Congress will take up the issue in its lame-duck session after the November elections.

If lawmakers fail to reach a compromise by the end of the year, they also could vote to extend the deadline for sequestrations by six months, a year or even longer.

Many political observers and economic experts, and some lawmakers, are confident there will at least be a short-term solution. But no one in the defense industry is taking it for granted.

If Congress fails to reach a deal to avoid the required $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts over the coming decade, including $500 billion in defense-spending cuts, the fallout could lead to more than 49,000 layoffs in Arizona and a $4.95 billion loss to the gross state product based on proposed spending cuts over nine years and their continuing ripple effect, according to a report by George Mason University in Virginia.

Robert J. Samuelson nails Obama for his $5 trillion dollar lie.

Romney is just as guilty of lying as Obama is.

Source

The $5 trillion tax cut that isn’t

By Robert J. Samuelson, Published: October 10

Let’s review again the math of Mitt Romney’s proposed tax cuts to show why — contrary to the rhetoric from President Obama’s campaign — they do not amount to a $5 trillion tax cut for the rich. We all understand that campaigns involve self-serving exaggerations, simplifications and partial truths. But if politics is to retain any integrity, a line must be drawn at statements and innuendoes that are demonstrably false.

That’s happened here. The Obama campaign has distorted the results of a study by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group, and created a fictitious $5 trillion tax cut. Some news organizations have embraced the distortion. The TPC should issue a statement saying its results have been twisted, leaving no doubt. News organizations that bought into the fabrication should retract their previous reporting. Topping the list is NBC News, which is in the awkward position of having one of its broadcasts inserted in an Obama TV spot.

Let me emphasize that my criticism of Obama’s campaign is not an endorsement of Romney’s tax plan, many of whose features I oppose. Among other items, I dislike his proposals (a) to continue taxing “capital income” (dividends and capital gains) at lower rates than labor income; (b) to abolish taxes on capital income for taxpayers with incomes less than $200,000; (c) to eliminate the estate tax. Ditching these proposals might make it possible to achieve a simpler income tax system with a top rate of 30 percent.

The Tax Policy Center report concluded that Romney can’t cut tax rates 20 percent while raising the same amount of tax revenue and not increasing taxes on the middle class. Something would have to give, the TPC said, because Romney has put too many loopholes for the rich off-limits. But even if the TPC is broadly correct — as I think it is — it does not follow that Romney plans a $5 trillion tax cut for the rich.

The $5 trillion figure never appears in the report. Rather, the report estimates the cost of Romney’s plan for 2015. Altogether in 2015, his proposed rate cuts would reduce tax revenues by $456 billion, the TPC reckons. Multiplying that by 10, and assuming some inflation and economic growth, gives a roughly $5 trillion estimate for a decade.

Here’s why this isn’t a $5 trillion cut for the rich. Start with the $456 billion in 2015. Only $360 billion of that reflects reductions in individual tax rates. The rest involves the corporate tax and isn’t analyzed by the TPC. The study assumes — perhaps implausibly — that any lost revenues from lower corporate rates would be offset by fewer corporate tax breaks. Over a decade, that’s slightly more than $1 trillion of the $5 trillion off the table.

It’s true that most individual rate reductions would go to wealthier taxpayers, because the wealthy pay most federal taxes. (In 2012, the 4 percent of taxpayers with incomes exceeding $200,000 paid nearly 45 percent of federal taxes, the TPC says.) Still, Romney’s proposed rate cuts also benefit those with incomes of $200,000 or less; that’s one dividing line between upper-middle class and wealthy. The TPC estimates that these rate cuts are worth $109 billion for 2015. Over a decade, that’s slightly more than another $1 trillion not going to the rich.

The remaining rate cuts for the wealthy equal about 60 percent of the $5 trillion over a decade, or $3 trillion. Romney contends that closing existing tax breaks would recoup lost revenues. Not so, says the TPC. There aren’t enough. Still, the TPC estimates that two-thirds of the lost revenues might be offset by fewer tax breaks. If so, this eliminates another $2 trillion over a decade available for tax cuts for the rich.

The remaining $1 trillion is still a lot of money, and Romney can be harshly criticized for making more promises than he can keep. Which ones would he break? In the first debate, he was emphatic. He wouldn’t propose any tax cut that increased the deficit or the middle class’s tax burden. One way to keep these pledges is to pare back rate cuts for the rich or attack some tax preferences put off-limits by Romney. Then, the net tax cut for the rich would be zero.

The TPC never claimed to find a $5 trillion giveaway to the rich. News organizations peddling this line have unwittingly enlisted in the Obama campaign.

Will Obama bomb Libya to get reelected???

From this article it sounds like Emperor Obama is considering drone strikes against Libya, thinking they may help him get reelected in 2012 by being "tough on terrorists".

Of course drone strikes on Libya would be an illegal act of war by the President violating both the U.S. Constitution and International law.

But don't count on the President obeying the law. American Presidents have routinely violated both the U.S. Constitution and International Law many times since World War II, when the American Empire has invaded or bomb countries through out the world.

Source

White House mulls how to strike over Libya attack

Oct. 15, 2012 03:45 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The White House has put special operations strike forces on standby and moved drones into the skies above Africa, ready to strike militant targets from Libya to Mali -- if investigators can find the al-Qaida-linked group responsible for the death of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya.

But officials say the administration, with weeks until the presidential election, is weighing whether the short-term payoff of exacting retribution on al-Qaida is worth the risk that such strikes could elevate the group's profile in the region, alienate governments the U.S. needs to fight it in the future and do little to slow the growing terror threat in North Africa.

Details on the administration's position and on its search for a possible target were provided by three current and one former administration official, as well as an analyst who was approached by the White House for help. All four spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the high-level debates publicly.

The dilemma shows the tension of the White House's need to demonstrate it is responding forcefully to al-Qaida, balanced against its long-term plans to develop relationships and trust with local governments and build a permanent U.S. counterterrorist network in the region.

Vice President Joe Biden pledged in his debate last week with Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan to find those responsible for the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others.

"We will find and bring to justice the men who did this," Biden said in response to a question about whether intelligence failures led to lax security around Stevens and the consulate. Referring back to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year, Biden said American counterterror policy should be, "if you do harm to America, we will track you to the gates of hell if need be."

The White House declined to comment on the debate over how best to respond to the Benghazi attack.

The attack has become an issue in the U.S. election season, with Republicans accusing the Obama administration of being slow to label the assault an act of terrorism early on, and slow to strike back at those responsible.

"They are aiming for a small pop, a flash in the pan, so as to be able to say, 'Hey, we're doing something about it,'" said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rudy Attalah, the former Africa counterterrorism director for the Department of Defense under President George W. Bush.

Attalah noted that in 1998, after the embassy bombing in Nairobi, the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles to take out a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that may have been producing chemical weapons for al-Qaida.

"It was a way to say, 'Look, we did something,'" he said.

A Washington-based analyst with extensive experience in Africa said that administration officials have approached him asking for help in connecting the dots to Mali, whose northern half fell to al-Qaida-linked rebels this spring. They wanted to know if he could suggest potential targets, which he says he was not able to do.

"The civilian side is looking into doing something, and is running into a lot of pushback from the military side," the analyst said. "The resistance that is coming from the military side is because the military has both worked in the region and trained in the region. So they are more realistic."

Islamists in the region are preparing for a reaction from the U.S.

"If America hits us, I promise you that we will multiply the Sept. 11 attack by 10," said Oumar Ould Hamaha, a spokesman for the Islamists in northern Mali, while denying that his group or al-Qaida fighters based in Mali played a role in the Benghazi attack.

Finding the militants who overwhelmed a small security force at the consulate isn't going to be easy.

The key suspects are members of the Libyan militia group Ansar al-Shariah. The group has denied responsibility, but eyewitnesses saw Ansar fighters at the consulate, and U.S. intelligence intercepted phone calls after the attack from Ansar fighters to leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, bragging about it. The affiliate's leaders are known to be mostly in northern Mali, where they have seized a territory as large as Texas following a coup in the country's capital.

But U.S. investigators have only loosely linked "one or two names" to the attack, and they lack proof that it was planned ahead of time, or that the local fighters had any help from the larger al-Qaida affiliate, officials say.

If that proof is found, the White House must decide whether to ask Libyan security forces to arrest the suspects with an eye to extraditing them to the U.S. for trial, or to simply target the suspects with U.S. covert action.

U.S. officials say covert action is more likely. The FBI couldn't gain access to the consulate until weeks after the attack, so it is unlikely it will be able to build a strong criminal case. The U.S. is also leery of trusting the arrest and questioning of the suspects to the fledgling Libyan security forces and legal system still building after the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

The burden of proof for U.S. covert action is far lower, but action by the CIA or special operations forces still requires a body of evidence that shows the suspect either took part in the violence or presents a "continuing and persistent, imminent threat" to U.S. targets, current and former officials said.

"If the people who were targeted were themselves directly complicit in this attack or directly affiliated with a group strongly implicated in the attack, then you can make an argument of imminence of threat," said Robert Grenier, former director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center.

But if the U.S. acts alone to target them in Africa, " it raises all kinds of sovereignty issues ... and makes people very uncomfortable," said Grenier, who has criticized the CIA's heavy use of drones in Pakistan without that government's support.

Even a strike that happens with permission could prove problematic, especially in Libya or Mali where al-Qaida supporters are currently based. Both countries have fragile, interim governments that could lose popular support if they are seen allowing the U.S. unfettered access to hunt al-Qaida.

The Libyan government is so wary of the U.S. investigation expanding into unilateral action that it refused requests to arm the drones now being flown over Libya. Libyan officials have complained publicly that they were unaware of how large the U.S. intelligence presence was in Benghazi until a couple of dozen U.S. officials showed up at the airport after the attack, waiting to be evacuated -- roughly twice the number of U.S. staff the Libyans thought were there. A number of those waiting to be evacuated worked for U.S. intelligence, according to two American officials.

In Mali, U.S. officials have urged the government to allow special operations trainers to return, to work with Mali's forces to push al-Qaida out of that country's northern area. AQIM is among the groups that filled the power vacuum after a coup by rebellious Malian forces in March. U.S. special operations forces trainers left Mali just days after the coup. While such trainers have not been invited to return, the U.S. has expanded its intelligence effort on Mali, focusing satellite and spy flights over the contested northern region to track and map the militant groups vying for control of the territory, officials say.

In northern Mali, residents in the three largest cities say they hear the sound of airplanes overhead but can't spot them. That's standard for drones, which are often invisible to the naked eye, flying several thousand feet above ground.

Residents say the plane sounds have increased sharply in recent weeks, following both the attack in Benghazi and the growing calls for a military intervention in Mali.

Chabane Arby, a 23-year-old student from Timbuktu, said the planes make a growling sound overhead. "When they hear them, the Islamists come out and start shooting into the sky," he said.

Aboubacrine Aidarra, another resident of Timbuktu, said the planes circle overhead both day and night. "I have a friend who said he recently saw six at one time, circling overhead. ... They are planes that fly at high altitudes. But they make a big sound. "

Battery maker's bankruptcy gives Obama critics more ammunition

Battery maker's bankruptcy gives Obama critics more ammunition

By Don Lee

October 16, 2012, 1:09 p.m.

WASHINGTON -- Exposing President Obama to further criticisms of his administration's economic policies, a leading electric-car battery maker that received a large federal grant filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday and said it was selling its auto-business assets.

A123 Systems Inc., a company built with innovative MIT-developed technology and a $249-million grant under Obama's 2009 economic stimulus program, said it signed a deal to sell its two Michigan manufacturing plants and some other assets to Johnson Controls Inc. in a deal valued at $125 million.

The announcement by A123, coming on the day of the second presidential debate, could be seized by Republican challenger Mitt Romney to further his attacks on the administration's stimulus and in particular its use of federal dollars to help certain companies as a boost to the nation's green technology.

Another advanced-battery maker that received a federal grant, Ener1, filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year. And Obama took considerable heat after the demise of Solyndra, a solar company that lost $527 million in government money.

Two Republican senators immediately pounced on the news Tuesday.

"A123 is yet another example of President Obama gambling with taxpayer dollars and picking winners and losers in the green energy world," said John Thune of South Dakota, who joined with Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa in issuing statements questioning whether the Energy Department had done adequate due diligence before making the grant.

The Energy Department, in a memo Tuesday that seemed to anticipate renewed criticisms, said the advanced-battery market was continuing to expand significantly in the U.S. and around the world, and that A123's sale will allow it to remain a vital part of the industry in America.

"Four years ago, virtually all advanced vehicle batteries were built overseas, and it looked like the United States might miss out on this enormously important, rapidly expanding market," the memo said in explaining why the Energy Department began making investments to jump-start the industry.

The memo said the department, with bipartisan support, awarded $2 billion in grants to 29 companies to build or retool manufacturing facilities for advanced-battery manufacturers and other companies making parts for electric cars. As for A123 and its promising lithium-ion technology, the memo said, the company has a long history of having garnered bipartisan support.

The Chapter 11 filing by A123, which is based in Waltham, Mass., came a day after it said it couldn't make a $2.8-million interest payment to bondholders due Monday. In August, the company struck a deal for a $75-million loan with an American subsidiary of Chinese auto-parts giant Wanxiang Group, but A123’s chief executive, David Vieau, said in a statement Tuesday that there were "unanticipated and significant challenges to its completion."

Government pay vs private pay - The report will soon be out!!!

Hey, it's an election year! What do you think he will do. If this report is as factually accurate as what either of them are saying in the debates it will certainly be full of BS to support Obama's reelection.

While many years ago government bureaucrats were paid less then folks in the private sector I think that has change in modern times and some of the folks in this article agree with that.

Source

Posted at 04:39 AM ET, 10/19/2012

Report on pay comparison between federal and other workers to be released

By Eric Yoder

The government Friday will release its latest assessment of how federal employee salaries compare with pay for other workers, potentially putting federal pay once again in the election year debate over the cost of the government.

The Federal Salary Council will receive data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that annually is used to determine the official “pay gap” in some 30 metropolitan zones plus other areas. While by law the figures are supposed to be used in setting federal pay, in practice the raise is determined in the congressional budget process. It already has been decided that pay rates will not increase at least until April 2013.

The new figures almost certainly will repeat long-standing conclusions that the government substantially underpays its workers. Last year’s data indicated that federal workers are behind by 26.3 percent on average, and federal pay rates have been frozen since then, although individual employees still can receive raises for performance, promotion or successfully completing the waiting periods used in some federal salary systems.

While federal pay has been a long-running issue, the cost of the federal workforce has drawn heightened scrutiny in the last several years, and especially during this year’s presidential campaign. In addition to proposing a 10 percent workforce cut through attrition, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney argues that federal workers are overcompensated by 30 to 40 percent on average.

That assertion is based on a study by the conservative Heritage Foundation that included the value of benefits; based on salary alone, that study found an average advantage to federal workers of 22 percent. The government’s own data do not reflect the value of benefits.

Other studies using different methods and different sets of data have found federal employees ahead on average by varying amounts, with differences by education and other factors. Federal employee organizations favor the BLS method, which focuses on attributes of the job rather than of the person. However, the Government Accountability Office recently said that none of the comparison approaches is definitive.

The salary council is an advisory group consisting of union and agency officials and outside pay experts. Its annual recommendations go to a higher-level group which in turn reports to the president.

President Obama has proposed, and Congress has agreed, to freeze federal salary rates since they last were increased in January 2010. He has recommended paying a 0.5 percent increase in April after a temporary government funding measure expires.

Uniformed military personnel have continued receiving raises during that time and will get a 1.7 percent raise, plus increases to various allowances, in January.

Obama piles the BS as deep as he can pile it.

Re-elect me and I will fix the deficit problem and border problem overnight - Honest!

Of course I don't think Mitt Romney is any better. He probably shovels the BS just as good as Emperor Obama.

I'm voting for the Libertarian guy, Gary Johnson for President.

Source

Obama vows swift results on deficit, border if he wins

By Peter Wallsten Washington Post Wed Oct 24, 2012 10:41 PM

President Barack Obama, facing criticism that he has failed to offer a vision for a potential second term, has begun sketching out his agenda with greater specificity in recent days, including a pledge to solve the nation’s intractable budget problems within “the first six months.”

In an interview made public Wednesday, Obama said he would pursue a “grand bargain” with Republicans to tame the national debt and would quickly follow that with a push to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws.

With less than two weeks until Election Day, Obama chose to highlight two issues that have bedeviled him during his presidency: the debt, which has soared past $16 trillion on his watch, and immigration legislation, which never got off the launching pad over the past three years. Both are politically significant, with the debt a concern among independent voters and immigration important to the Hispanics who could decide whether Obama carries swing states such as Colorado and Nevada.

The interview, conducted Tuesday with the editor and publisher of the Des Moines Register, the largest newspaper in Iowa, also marked an unusual moment in the president’s dealings with the news media.

Obama had initially insisted that the exchange, which he conducted by phone from a stop in Florida, be off the record. Then on Wednesday, his campaign abruptly decided to release a transcript after the newspaper’s editor, Rick Green, wrote a blog post calling the interview terms a “disservice” to voters. Obama is seeking the influential paper’s endorsement.

The transcript gave a surprising glimpse of Obama as political pundit, gaming out timetables and calculations for his dealings with Capitol Hill Republicans. He predicted, for instance, that an expectedly poor showing by challenger Mitt Romney among Hispanics would put pressure on GOP lawmakers to ease their opposition to an immigration overhaul that offers a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

“Since this is off the record, I will just be very blunt,” Obama said at one point. “Should I win a second term, a big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.”

With polls in swing states showing the race tightening, Obama appears to be shifting away from a strategy dominated by attacks on his opponent to one that includes a rationale for skeptical voters to re-elect him.

The Obama campaign is distributing brochures that repackage his proposals to hire more teachers, promote manufacturing and raise taxes on the wealthy.

Aides said the push to define the president’s second term also includes direct mail and a new 60-second TV ad featuring Obama looking into the camera and laying out his views on manufacturing, energy and other issues. “Read my plan,” he says.

At the top of the priority list: a promise to forge a bipartisan compromise that reduces rampant government borrowing and makes long-postponed decisions about taxes and spending. In the interview, Obama called a budget deal “one of the best things we can do for the economy.”

“We’re going to be in a position where, I believe, in the first six months, we are going to solve that big piece of business,” Obama said. “It will probably be messy. It won’t be pleasant. But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in taxes, and work to reduce the costs of our health-care programs.”

Obama offered no details of how he would approach negotiations with congressional Republicans. But with Washington facing a January deadline to undo more than $500 billion in automatic tax hikes and spending cuts next year, Obama said, “There’s going to be a forcing mechanism to deal with what is the central ideological argument in Washington right now, and that is: How much government do we have, and how do we pay for it?”

Republicans reacted with a yawn to the news that Obama is ready to reengage on a grand bargain if he wins the election.

They noted that his proposal for a cuts-to-taxes ratio of $2.50 to $1, embodied in his most recent budget request, was roundly rejected in both the House and Senate.

Spending $2 billion for a job that pays a lousy $400,000

If you ask me it's not about the lousy pay, or for patriotism, but because they can use the job to rob the American people blind.

I'm sure you can say the same thing about the jobs in the US House and Senate. Those guys get paid a measly $174,000, but routinely spend millions to get elected to office.

Again it ain't about the lousy $174,000 a year pay, but because you can use the job to rob the American public blind.

Source

Presidential race most expensive campaign ever

By Jack Gillum Associated Press Fri Oct 26, 2012 1:15 AM

WASHINGTON -- The 2012 presidential campaign was expected Thursday to pass the $2 billion mark in fundraising, according to accounting statements submitted to the government, thanks to an outpouring of cash from both ordinary citizens and the wealthiest Americans hoping to influence the selection of the country’s next leader.

The eye-popping figure puts this election on track to be the costliest in history, fueled by a campaign finance system vastly altered by the proliferation of “super” political committees that are bankrolling a barrage of TV ads in battleground states.

President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney had brought in more than $1.5 billion through the end of September, according to previous fundraising reports submitted before the final pre-election accounting statements were due Thursday night.

Obama hadn’t yet disclosed his fundraising for early October, but Romney’s campaign said it raised $111.8 million in the first two weeks. Added to that: more than $230 million in donations involving super PACs since 2011.

The largest of those were two pro-Romney groups. American Crossroads, a Republican-leaning super PAC with ties to former President George W. Bush’s longtime political counselor Karl Rove, reported raising at least $68 million through September.

Restore Our Future, founded by former Romney aides, reported raising $110 million so far. Priorities USA, a pro-Obama group founded by two former aides to the president, reported raising $50 million through last month.

The $2 billion fundraising figure doesn’t include nearly $130 million spent on political ads by non-profit groups that aren’t required to file campaign finance reports or disclose their donors.

Such so-called social welfare organizations are governed by tax laws, not election laws, although they are often affiliated with established super PACs.

No limits

Presidential candidates in 2008 raised more than $1.8 billion in inflation-adjusted figures. This time, new factors have contributed to the sharp escalation in the campaign money chase.

This year marked the first time that both major party candidates opted out from the public financing system established to set limits on how much a presidential candidate can raise and spend.

Both Obama and Romney would have been eligible for about $100 million in taxpayer money to support their campaigns through the general election, but both gambled — correctly — that they could raise and spend far more.

In 2008, Obama became the first presidential contender to refuse all public financing while his Republican rival, Arizona Sen. John McCain, accepted the government funds.

The lopsided result — Obama outspent McCain by more than 2-to-1 in the general election — effectively ended public funding as an option for serious candidates.

With the 2012 election so tight, both Obama and Romney have spent considerable time at high-dollar fundraising events courting wealthy donors.

Both Obama and Romney have raised considerable cash from small donors, too, especially the president. His campaign reported that more than 2 million donors have contributed at least $427 million to his campaign.

Federal election regulators have raised the limit on individual contributions to candidates, which means campaigns can solicit more money from donors than they have in the past. Individual donors can now give a total of $5,000 in the primary and general elections to a candidate, compared to just $2,000 in 2000.

Close race drives donations

But the emergence of super PACs and other outside groups, unleashed partly by the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010, has done more than anything else to reshape the contours of presidential campaign fundraising.

A handful of federal court cases have broadly eased campaign finance regulations, allowing corporations and wealthy individuals to spend unlimited sums. Most of the money has been funneled to super PACs, which can raise and spend money on behalf of candidates as long as they don’t coordinate expenditures or strategy with the campaign.

“The distinctive factor in this election is the outside money being spent and the corrupting money financing it,” said Fred Wertheimer, a longtime campaign finance reform advocate. “It’s a symbol of the disastrous campaign finance system we have and the undue influence relatively few well-financed individuals and interest groups now have over government decisions.”

Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is the top super PAC donor this year. Adelson has contributed more than $40 million to Republican super PACs, including those backing Romney. the IRS in some ways reflects that similar discomfort.”

Secular Coalition for American selects Gary Johnson as best choice for President

In this comparison of Presidential candidates by the Secular Coalition for American, Libertarian Gary Johnson came in first with a B, followed by President Obama who got a C and Romney came in last with an F.

Jill Stein who is the Green Party candidate didn't get a grade because they were not able to identify her position on separation of church and state based on the answers she gave.

It's too bad the NRA and other gun groups don't include the Libertarian candidates in their surveys. Libertarians who believe in the Libertarian Party's NIFF party positions would always beat or tie Democrats and Republicans.

Here is the survey.

Obama gets Latino vote, despite screwing them!!!

Obama pretty much broke all of the promises he made to the Latinos when he was elected to his first term.

But that didn't prevent the Latinos he screwed over from voting for Obama a second time.

Obama also screwed over the gays, marijuana users and anti-war folks by not keeping the promises he made to them when he was elected in 2008. I wonder if they also voted for him a second time?

Source

Latino votes key to Obama’s victory

A Latino Decisions/America’s voice poll of 5,600 voters in 11 states, including Arizona, found that 66 percent of Latino voters said they felt like President Barack Obama cared about the Latino community while 74 percent of Latinos thought Republican candidate Mitt Romney didn’t care about the Latino community or considered him hostile to Latinos.

While the poll showed that Latinos overwhelming supported Obama over Romney in Arizona, efforts to dramatically increase the number of Latino voters in Arizona appear to have fallen short.

Before the election, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials projected that 359,000 Latinos would vote in Arizona’s general election, up from 291,000 in 2008.

Early estimates based on exit polls show that about 300,000 Latinos voted in Arizona this year out of a total of about 1.6 million votes cast, said Evan Bacalao, senior director of civic engagement at NALEO.

Petra Falcon, director of Promise Arizona, an organization that worked to increase the number of Latino voters in Arizona, said it is too early to tell how many Latinos voted in Arizona because of the thousands of provisional ballots that haven’t been counted.

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., won election to the Senate with 17 percent of the Latino vote in Arizona, according to the Latino Decisions/America’s Voice poll. His Democratic opponent, former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, who is a Latino of Puerto Rican descent, received 83percent of the Latino vote in Arizona. Flake defeated Carmona by less than 5percentage points, according to unofficial results. By Daniel González and Dan Nowicki The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Nov 7, 2012 11:17 PM

Despite failing to deliver immigration reform as promised in his first term and deporting a record number of immigrants, President Barack Obama received 75 percent of the Latino vote in Tuesday’s national election, exceeding the 67 percent he received in 2008.

The support likely played a major role in Obama’s re-election — and, conversely, in Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s defeat, analysts say.

It could also serve as a catalyst to jump-start bipartisan talks on comprehensive immigration reform, which have stalled in Congress for more than a decade, analysts say.

For Obama and Democrats, the push makes sense: Their successes at the ballot box in recent years have been buoyed by Latino voters, and they have campaigned on the promise of immigration reform. For Republicans, many of whom have taken a hard-line anti-immigration stance in recent years that many Hispanic voters perceive to be anti-Latino, a push for reform could be politically advantageous.

“The Republican Party, the new guard, is going to be coming after those Latino voters because they know they need them to win an election,” said Joe Garcia, director of the Latino Center at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy. “I still think this is going to be the decade of the Latino because both parties are going to be courting the Latino vote.”

Statistics show how critical the Latino vote was in Tuesday’s presidential election. For the first time in history, the Latino vote can plausibly be credited with playing the decisive role in a presidential election, said Gary Segura, a political-science professor at Stanford University and a principal at the polling firm Latino Decisions.

If the estimated 11.8 million Latinos who voted nationally on Tuesday had split their votes evenly between the two parties, Obama would not have won, Segura said Wednesday in a computer conference call.

Latinos played a pivotal roll in several battleground states, including Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and Ohio, that went for Obama, helping him gain the electoral votes needed to defeat Romney, Segura said.

Garcia said Latinos’ overwhelming support for Obama showed they were willing to “forgive him” for failing to pass immigration reform and for deporting a record number of illegal immigrants. What helped, Garcia said, was Obama’s announcement in June that he would allow young undocumented immigrants to receive work permits and remain in the country temporarily without the fear of deportation under a program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

“I think they gave him a little bit of a benefit of the doubt and said, ‘OK, we are going to forgive you for not keeping your promise on that first term but fully we expect something happening early in this second term,’ and I think Obama will push for immigration reform in this term,” Garcia said.

A Latino Decisions/America’s Voice poll of 5,600 voters in 11 states, including Arizona, found that Obama’s stance on immigration helped him win support among Latino voters who were turned off by Romney’s stance.

Romney opposed allowing illegal immigrants to gain legal status and opposed the Dream Act, a bill that would allow young undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship by attending college or serving in the military. Romney also supported Arizona’s employer-sanctions law, which requires all employers to use a federal database to check whether new hires are authorized to work in the U.S.

In Arizona, Obama’s support among Latino voters skyrocketed from 56 percent in 2008, when Arizona Sen. John McCain was the Republican nominee, to 79 percent this year, according to the Latino Decisions/America’s Voice poll.

But he still lost Arizona to Romney by 11 percentage points, unofficial results show. That margin could narrow when all 602,000 uncounted provisional and early ballots in the state are tabulated in the coming days.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant-advocacy group in Washington, D.C., that pushes comprehensive immigration reform, said he believed some Republicans in the Democrat-controlled Senate would likely be willing to work with Obama and Senate Democrats to pass bipartisan immigration reform.

“They know their chances of wining the White House in 2016 will be lower without the support of Latino voters,” Sharry said.

In 2006, McCain helped lead a bipartisan attempt to pass immigration reform, followed by an attempt in 2007 led by Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl. Both failed.

Rep. Jeff Flake, a six-term GOP congressman who on Tuesday was elected to replace the retiring Kyl, once was a strong advocate for comprehensive immigration reform. In 2012, he pivoted to a position that would require border-security upgrades to the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.

While he still wants any solution to include enhanced border-security measures, Flake told The Arizona Republic on Wednesday that an effort “to effectively deal with the Dream Act issue” likely could pass easily with strong bipartisan support.

“I remain convinced that as Republicans we’ve got to do more on this issue, not just because it’s good policy, but because it’s obviously necessary politics as well,” he said. “When you look at demographics, we cannot continue as Republicans to alienate such a significant portion of the electorate.”

Kareem Crayton, a political scientist and associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said Democrats and Republicans both have something to gain from revisiting immigration reform.

“If the Democrats intend to extend their level of support from the Latino community, they’re going to have to make good on this,” Crayton said. “They can’t fail at this.”

For their part, Republicans need to come to terms with demographic challenges, he said.

“I thought they would have recognized this four years ago, but ginning up the White vote just won’t do the trick,” Crayton said. “They’re not going to be a successful national party if they are simply going to try to compete between the lines of the Old Confederacy. It’s just not going to work. … The numbers just aren’t there for them, and the largest and fastest-growing population among the non-White groups are Latinos.”

Dow loses 313 in post-election sell-off

Dow loses 313 in post-election sell-off

AP

By Daniel Wagner Associated Press Wed Nov 7, 2012 3:44 PM

NEW YORK - Wall Street greeted a second Obama term the way it greeted the first.

Investors dumped stocks Wednesday in the sharpest sell-off of the year. With the election only hours behind them, they focused on big problems ahead in Washington and across the Atlantic Ocean.

Frantic selling recalled the days after Obama’s first victory, as the financial crisis raged and stocks spiraled downward.

Four years later, American voters returned a divided government to power and left investors fretting about a package of tax increases and government spending cuts that could stall the economic recovery unless Congress acts to stop it by Jan. 1.

In Europe, leaders warned that unemployment could remain high for years, and cut their forecasts for economic growth for this year and 2013. The head of the European Central Bank said not even powerhouse Germany is immune.

The Dow Jones industrial average plummeted as much as 369 points, or 2.8 percent, in the first two hours of trading. It recovered steadily in the afternoon, but slid into the close and ended down 313, its biggest point drop since this time last year.

“It does look ugly,” said Robert Pavlik, chief market strategist at Banyan Partners LLC. He said it was hard to untangle the impact of Europe-related selling from nerves about the nation’s fiscal uncertainty.

“It’s a combination of all that, quite honestly,” Pavlik said.

It was the worst day for stocks this year, but not the worst after an election. That distinction belongs to 2008, when Barack Obama was elected at the depths of the financial crisis. The Dow fell 486 points the next day.

This time, energy companies and bank stocks took some of the biggest losses. Both industries would have faced lighter, less costly regulation if Mitt Romney had won the election.

Stocks seen as benefiting from Obama’s decisive re-election rose. They included hospitals, suddenly free of the threat that Romney would roll back Obama’s health care law.

Obama was elected Nov. 4, 2008.

The Dow plunged more than 400 points on each of the next two trading days.

The blue-chip average hit bottom at 6,547 in March 2009, less than two months after Obama took office.

Then it doubled over the next three-plus years as the crisis eased and a fragile economic recovery took root.

Things were looking so good that until recently, some analysts were betting on when the market might hit an all-time high.

Of course, the market today is far less precarious than it was in 2008. The financial system has stabilized. Europe appears to be serious about tackling its debt crisis, despite frequent setbacks.

The housing market appears to be coming back, and the economy has added jobs for more than two and a half years.

On the day after the 28 other presidential elections since 1900, the stock market has gone up 13 times and down 15 times, according to research by Bespoke Investment Group, a market research company.

The best day-after performance was in 1900, another re-election. The Dow jumped more than 3 percent on the day after William McKinley won a second term, according to Bespoke.

With the 2012 election over, traders turned to Europe’s increasingly sickly economy, dragged down by a debt crisis for more than three years. The 27-country European Union said unemployment there could remain high for years.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, said that it expects the region’s economic output to shrink 0.3 percent this year. In the spring, the group predicted no change.

For next year, the commission predicted 0.4 percent growth, barely above recession territory. It predicted 1.3 percent last spring.

Renewed focus on European economic problems also pushed the price of oil down $4.27 per barrel, its biggest decline of the year, to finish at $84.44, the lowest since July 10.

The Dow closed down 312.95 points, or 2.4 percent, at 12,932.73 — its first close below 13,000 since Aug. 2.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 33.86 points, or 2.4 percent, to 1,394. That was the broader index’s first close below 1,400 since Aug. 30.

The Nasdaq composite index lost 74.64 points, or 2.5 percent, to 2.937.29.

U.S. stock futures had risen overnight after Obama cruised to victory. They turned sharply lower after the European forecasts and discouraging comments from Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank.

Now that the U.S. election has been resolved, it’s natural for traders to focus on Europe’s problems, said Peter Tchir, who manages the hedge fund TF Market Advisors.

What they’re tuning in to, he said, is the failure of a major European summit last week and minimal progress on the issues that are holding the region back.

“People can only digest one or two stories at a time, and people had put Europe on the back burner” before the election, he said.

Obama’s win followed a costly campaign that blanketed markets with uncertainty about possible changes to tax rates, government spending and other issues seen as crucial to the prospects of some industries and the broader economy.

As jitters about the election subsided, traders confronted an ugly reality: The so-called fiscal cliff, which will impose automatic tax increases and deep cuts to government spending at the end of the year unless the president and Congress reach a deal.

That’s no easy task for a deadlocked government whose overall composition has barely changed — a Democratic president and Senate and a Republican House.

If Congress and the White House don’t reach a deal, the spending cuts and tax increases could total $800 billion next year. Some economists say that could push the economy back into recession.

“Obama’s re-election does not change the bigger economic or fiscal picture,” Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics, an economic research company, said in a note to clients.

Fitch Ratings offered a warning Wednesday about the perils facing the U.S. If Obama does not quickly forge agreement with Congress to avert the fiscal cliff, the credit rating agency said, it may strip the U.S. of its sterling AAA credit rating.

The government’s failure to come up with a plan to reduce the deficit led Standard & Poor’s to cut its rating of long-term U.S. Treasury securities last year from a sterling AAA to AA+. It was the first-ever downgrade of U.S. government debt.

Tobias Levkovich, a financial analyst at Citi Research, told clients Wednesday that a compromise on taxes and spending was likely in mid- to late January, but that stocks will probably fall in the meantime.

A deal early next year is much more likely “once the political class begins to negotiate realistically and as the consequences … are too costly for either party to ignore,” he wrote.

European markets closed sharply lower, with benchmark indexes in France and Germany losing 2 percent. Italy lost 2.5 percent; Spain lost 2.3 percent.

As traders streamed into lower-risk investments, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note plunged to 1.64 percent from 1.75 percent late Tuesday. A bond’s yield declines as demand for it increases.

Most industries reacted to the election much as analysts had expected.

Big, publicly traded hospital companies soared because of expectations that they will gain business under the health care law, known as ObamaCare. HCA Holdings leapt 9.4 percent, Tenet Healthcare 9.6 percent, Community Health Systems 6 percent and Universal Health Services 4.3 percent.

Not all hospital companies are expected to benefit. Many serve patients who will be covered by Medicaid plans that generally do not cover the full cost of care provided by hospitals.

Health insurance stocks sank, defying many analysts’ expectations. ObamaCare will expand coverage of the uninsured in 2014, giving insurers millions of new customers. But the overhaul also imposes fees and restrictions on the companies, potentially threatening their profitability. Humana slid 7.9 percent, UnitedHealth Group 3.8 percent, Aetna 4.2 percent and Wellpoint 5.5 percent.

With Obama seeking to restrain the growth of military spending, defense companies could struggle to win government contracts. Their stocks fell sharply: Lockheed Martin lost 3.9 percent, Northrop Grumman 4.6 percent and General Dynamics 3.9 percent.

Among the 10 industry groups in the S&P 500 index, financial stocks and energy companies fell the most.

Banks figure to face tougher regulation in a second Obama term than they would have under Romney. JPMorgan Chase fell 5.6 percent, Citigroup 6.3 percent, Bank of America 7.1 percent, Goldman Sachs 6.6 percent and Morgan Stanley 8.6 percent.

The biggest losers were coal companies, which had hoped that a Romney administration would loosen mine safety and pollution rules that make it more costly for them to operate. Peabody Energy dived 9.6 percent, Consol Energy 6.1 percent, Alpha Natural Resources 12.2 percent and Arch Coal 12.5 percent.

Oil companies fell less steeply.

Trading also reflected the outcome of ballot measures decided in Tuesday’s election. After two states approved the recreational use of marijuana for the first time, Medical Marijuana Inc., a company too small to be listed on major exchanges, surged 22 percent.

Other notable moves included Apple, the world’s most valuable company. It fell 3.8 percent to $558.00 and has dropped 20 percent from its all-time high of $705.07, reached Sept. 21.

Stocks turn lower on Wall Street

Stocks turn lower on Wall Street

By Steve Rothwell Associated Press Thu Nov 8, 2012 10:09 AM

NEW YORK — Stocks slid on Wall Street Thursday, a day after the Dow Jones industrial average logged its biggest one-day drop of the year, as investors fretted about the potential for gridlock in Washington.

The Dow was down 20 points to 12,910 as of 11:30 a.m. The Standard and Poor’s 500 index fell three points to 1,392 and the Nasdaq composite slipped six to 2,931.

The Dow plunged 313 points Wednesday, its fifth worst one-day drop following a U.S. presidential election. The biggest, in 2008, came in the midst of the financial crisis on the day after President Barack Obama won his first term.

The sell-off came the day after Obama was elected for a second four-year term as investors turned their focus back to Europe’s problems and the so-called fiscal cliff, a package of tax increases and government spending cuts in the U.S. that could stall the economic recovery unless Congress acts by Jan. 1.

“The thinking before the election was that it would remove some of the uncertainty, but it seems to have done the opposite,” said Tyler Vernon, chief investment officer at Biltmore Capital Advisors in Princeton, New Jersey.

Investors were encouraged by two reports on the U.S. economy that came out before the market opened. The Dow climbed as much as 48 points but started to sink after the first hour of trading.

The Labor Department reported that the number of people seeking unemployment benefits fell 8,000 last week to 355,000, a possible sign that the job market is healing. Officials cautioned that the figures were distorted by Superstorm Sandy.

A separate report showed that the U.S. trade deficit narrowed to its lowest level in almost two years as exports rose to a record high.

There was also encouraging news from Europe, where leaders shocked markets a day earlier with a dire forecast for economic growth next year.

European Central Bank head Mario Draghi said financial market confidence “has visibly improved” as the 17-country group that uses the euro struggles with its debt crisis. But he said the outlook for the economy remains “weak.” Draghi spoke after the bank’s governing council left its key interest rate unchanged at 0.75 percent.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, on Wednesday slashed its outlook for growth for this year and 2013. The report helped set off a sharp decline in stocks in the U.S and Europe.

Among stocks making big moves:

— Energy drink maker Monster Beverage sank $2.41 to $42.56 after the company said its revenue growth slowed in the third quarter.

— Dean Foods rose 88 cents to $16.96 after the company reported a third quarter profit of $36 million for the third quarter, compared with a $1.5 billion loss in the same period a year earlier.

— Burger chain Wendy’s rose 25 cents to $4.51 after the company said that a key sales figure rose. Revenue at restaurants open at least 15 months rose 2.7 percent, the sixth straight quarter of growth.

Using statistics to win elections??

Obama campaign's investment in data crunching paid off

In effect who wins the election is NOT the so called "will of the people", but the special interest group that gets the most people to vote for their cause.

I suspect that if the Libertarian party got two percent of the registered voters to become hard core Libertarians who voted in every election we could consistently win elections.

And I am sure the same statistical techniques could be used in an election to legalize marijuana.

Source

Obama campaign's investment in data crunching paid off

By Christi Parsons and Kathleen Hennessey, Washington Bureau

November 13, 2012, 4:00 a.m.

CHICAGO — Early on election day, in two tightly tucked-away rooms at Obama headquarters known as the Cave and the Alley, the campaign's data-crunching team awaited the nation's first results, from Dixville Notch, a New Hampshire hamlet that traditionally votes at midnight.

Dixville Notch split 5-5. It did not seem an auspicious outcome for the president.

But for the math geeks and data wizards who spent more than a year devising sophisticated models to predict which voters would back the president, Dixville Notch was a victory. Their model had gotten it right, predicting that about 50% of the village's voters were likely to support President Obama.

Daniel Wagner, the 29-year-old chief analytics officer, erupted in joy. The model was also projecting that Obama would be reelected. And as the night wore on, swing state after swing state came in with results that were very close to the model's prediction.

For the nation, last Tuesday was election day. For Wagner's crew, it's now known as Model Validation Day.

"We're kind of a weird bunch of kids," he said, standing near the Cave, where one wall was covered with a large canvas of a Martian landscape. "I haven't seen the sun in a while. We worked brutally inhuman hours this cycle. Twenty-hour days, often. But they bet a lot on us being right. And it was good to be right."

For years, campaigns have used reams of information to predict voter behavior, relying on a science known as analytics. But Obama's advisors elevated the practice to new heights, very likely changing the way presidential campaigns will be conducted in the future.

No other presidential campaign has so completely embraced this science. The campaign hired a team that topped out at 54 people and invested undisclosed millions in the effort. Analytics helped the campaign efficiently recruit volunteers, buy ads, tailor emails and mailers, raise money, dispatch surrogates — and, most importantly, scour the swing states for hard-to-find voters most likely to support the president.

Political guru David Plouffe and campaign manager Jim Messina made key decisions based on real-time reports from the geek squad, according to many people on the campaign's staff.

"Our entire goal is to make the maximum use of our time and our volunteers' time. And that means using analytics across the campaign spectrum," Messina said after the election. "We invested unprecedented resources to do this because our entire theory was to get as micro-targeted — to get as close to the ground — as we could."

Another campaign official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the campaign, put it this way: "It's about turning over control to some nerds. And more than any other year, campaign leadership really took that leap of faith."

For campaign professionals, that is a major leap. Politics long has been ruled by truisms, conventional wisdom and intuition, with millions spent based on a murky mix of polling and focus groups. The shift to data-driven decision-making has been gradual and steady — becoming increasingly sophisticated as political parties amass more information about individual voters through traditional means, such as polls, and new ones, such as data mining.

The Obama campaign has made the transition over two elections. In this one, it employed analytics in a far more systematic and thorough way, officials said. But the work was a closely guarded secret. Officials denied requests for interviews with the analytics experts, and when journalists visited Obama headquarters, the team was ordered to shut the Cave door.

Victory opened that door — a crack.

At its most basic, Messina, Wagner and others explained, the goal was to rank individual voters in the swing states based on their likelihood of voting for the president or of being persuaded to vote for him, to volunteer for his campaign and to vote early. The Obama campaign developed separate models for each.

To build the "support model," the campaign in 2011 made thousands of calls to voters — 5,000 to 10,000 in individual states, tens of thousands nationwide — to find out whether they backed the president. Then it analyzed what those voters had in common. More than 80 different pieces of information were factored in — including age, gender, voting history, home ownership and magazine subscriptions.

Much has been made of the last type of data — the tastes or trends that divide Democrats and Republicans. But Obama officials downplayed the impact of consumer habits, claiming the more important information is the most basic and publicly available.

It's not about subscriptions to "Cat Fancy" magazine, Wagner joked as he scribbled on a white board, blinking through his rectangular glasses. The most important data, he said, was the Democratic National Committee's database, containing voting history and demographic information, as well as feedback from contacts with individual voters going back to 1992, such as whether a voter warmly received a door-to-door canvasser or shut the door curtly.

The campaign compared the data on individual voters with the "support model" and ranked voters from 1 to 100, which told the campaign where to focus its turnout efforts.

The notion of a campaign looking for groups such as "soccer moms" or "waitress moms" to convert is outdated. Campaigns can now pinpoint individual swing voters. "White suburban women? They're not all the same. The Latino community is very diverse with very different interests," Wagner said. "What the data permits you to do is to figure out that diversity."

One of the campaign's most powerful tools was its "persuasion model," which sifted through millions of voters that the DNC had labeled as not very partisan to find those most likely to be won over to Obama's side.

In Obama's 2008 campaign, as in most campaigns, these "middle partisans" were assumed to be swing voters and were heavily targeted. But in reality, many are partisan conservatives, and many more don't vote.

So early this year, the Obama campaign called more than 10,000 voters in the category and talked to them about the president's views on healthcare and taxes, the official said. Then it called those voters back a few days later to find out if their opinions had shifted. The campaign analyzed those who had moved toward Obama to find out what they had in common and, from those results, created a separate model of persuadable voters for each swing state.

A data director applied the model to the voter databases and generated lists of voters to be contacted. Those were put in the hands of canvassers who were also armed with a script tailored to an individual voter's pet issues.

The Obama campaign even found voters to target in ruby-red precincts, a break from earlier campaigns when solidly partisan precincts were simply written off.

Among its many decisions driven by data, the campaign chose to stick it out in Florida, even though polls and conventional wisdom raised doubts about Obama's odds in the GOP-tilted battleground.

Just weeks before the election, the analytics team's assessment suggested a 30% to 40% chance of winning the state, Wagner said. But after the team added information about roughly 250,000 new voter registrations, the projection shifted, showing that 80% of the new registrants would vote and they would heavily support Obama.

When the computers spat out this data, indicating that Obama was likely to win in Florida, a howl went up from the Cave. A mathematician from the University of Alabama started it off with the 'Bama fighting words, "Roll Tide!"

Two days before the election, the president went to Florida to bolster that turnout — and ended up narrowly winning the state.

Days after election day, Obama campaign workers were packing up, pulling flags off the ceiling and pictures off the wall.

But the Cave still hummed with computers. The decor was still up, including the landscape of Mars, its presence explained by a printout taped next to it. In a July 2011 Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan, a conservative author who wrote speeches for President Reagan, mocked an Obama campaign hiring notice for specialists in "predictive modeling/data mining."

"It read like politics as done by Martians," she wrote.

With the Martian scene behind him, Andrew Claster, an economist and deputy chief, pored over exit polls and early vote data. Nearby, Rayid Ghani, the team's chief data scientist, tried to discern more about how to motivate people online. It's part of an ongoing effort to mine the data for future Democratic campaigns and causes.

"What we've had since '06 and especially since '08," Wagner said, "is a change in how people think about this information and how they use it."

In other words, the Martians have landed.

christi.parsons@tribune.com

kathleen.hennessey@tribune.com

More on using math and statistics to win elections

I suspect if we could get 1 percent of the population to become hard core Libertarian that vote in every election the Libertarian party could easily start winning lots of elections. Again that is base on the fact that when so few people vote, the groups that get their voters to the polls will win the election even thought they usually don't represent the total population. Cops and teachers do it all the time to get their bonds passed.

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Beware the Smart Campaign

By ZEYNEP TUFEKCI

Published: November 16, 2012 110 Comments

“I AM not a number. I am a free man!” was the famous cry of prisoner Number Six, who could never escape his Kafkaesque village on the 1960s television show “The Prisoner.” This is a prescient cry for an era when numbers follow us everywhere. Jim Messina, the victorious Obama campaign manager, probably agrees that you are not a number. That’s because you are four numbers.

The Obama campaign assigned all potential swing-state voters one number, on a scale of 1 to 100, that represented the likelihood that they would support Mr. Obama, and another number for the prospect that they would show up at the polls. A third metric evaluated the odds that an Obama supporter who was an inconsistent voter could be nudged to the polls, and a fourth score estimated how persuadable someone was by a conversation on a particular issue (which was, of course, also determined by crunching more numbers).

Mr. Messina is understandably proud of his team, which included an unprecedented number of data analysts and social scientists. As a social scientist and a former computer programmer, I enjoy the recognition my kind are getting. But I am nervous about what these powerful tools may mean for the health of our democracy, especially since we know so little about it all.

For all the bragging on the winning side — and an explicit coveting of these methods on the losing side — there are many unanswered questions. What data, exactly, do campaigns have on voters? How exactly do they use it? What rights, if any, do voters have over this data, which may detail their online browsing habits, consumer purchases and social media footprints?

How did Mr. Obama win? The message and the candidate matter, of course; it’s easier to persuade voters if your policies are more popular and your candidate more appealing. But a modern winning campaign requires more. As Mr. Messina explained, his campaign made an “unparalleled” $100 million investment in technology, demanded “data on everything,” “measured everything” and ran 66,000 computer simulations every day. In contrast, Mitt Romney’s campaign’s data operations were lagging, buggy and nowhere as sophisticated. A senior Romney aide described the shock he experienced in seeing the Obama campaign turn out “voters they never even knew existed.” And that kind of ability matters: while Mr. Obama did win decisively, the size of his lead in four states that determined the outcome, Florida, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado, was about 400,000 votes — or about 1.2 percent of the eligible voters.

The confluence of marketing and politics goes back a long way. A blizzard of direct mail engineered by political consultants is credited with defeating President Harry S. Truman’s national health care proposal after World War II. The new methods, however, are not just better direct mail. Noxious TV ads and slick mailers are like machetes compared with the scalpels of social-science-based big-data. The crude methods may still work to soften the ground and drown out other voices, but in the end they are still very big sticks. Sometimes they kill the patient — just ask swing-state voters about the TV ads they were bombarded with.

The scalpels, on the other hand, can be precise and effective in a quiet, un-public way. They take persuasion into a private, invisible realm. Misleading TV ads can be countered and fact-checked. A misleading message sent in just the kind of e-mail you will open or ad you will click on remains hidden from challenge by the other campaign or the media. Or someone who visits evangelical Web sites might be carefully shielded from messages about gay rights, and someone who has hostile views toward environmentalism may receive messages stroking that sentiment even if the broader campaign woos the green vote elsewhere.

What I really worry about, though, is that these new methods are more effective in manipulating people. Social scientists increasingly understand that much of our decision making is irrational and emotional. For example, the Obama campaign used pictures of the president’s family at every opportunity. This was no accident. The campaign field-tested this as early as 2007 through a rigorous randomized experiment, the kind used in clinical trials for medical drugs, and settled on the winning combination of image, message and button placement. I agree that his family is wonderful and his daughters are cute. But an increasing role of “likability” factors, which we now understand better how to manipulate, is not good for democracy.

These methods will also end up empowering better-financed campaigns. The databases are expensive, the algorithms are proprietary, the results of experiments by campaigns are secret, and the analytics require special expertise. The Democrats have an early advantage partly because academics and data analysts tend to be Democrats. Money will solve that problem. This will shift power in both parties even more toward the richer campaigns and may well be the final nail in the coffin of public financing for presidential campaigns.

What is to be done? Campaigns should make public every outreach message so we at least know what they are saying. These messages can be placed in a public database like campaign contributions so the other side can be aware of, and have the right to respond to, false claims. Political access to proprietary databases should be regulated to provide an even playing field.

I’m not claiming that the Obama campaign used these methods to mislead. However, the fact that the winning campaign’s “chief data scientist” was previously employed to “maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions” does not thrill me. You should be worried even if your candidate is — for the moment — better at these methods. Democracy should not just be about how to persuade people to vote for one candidate over another by any means necessary.

Zeynep Tufekci is a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.

Mitt Romney was using the same math & statistics - but it didn't work as well

Insiders Explain How Mitt Romney's Campaign Completely Fell Apart On Election Day

Business Insider

By Grace Wyler

As conservatives search for an explanation for Mitt Romney's loss, much of the blame has been directed at the collapse of his campaign's Election Day get out the vote efforts, a massive organizational failure that resulted in lower Republican turnout than even John McCain got in 2008.

A major source of Romney's GOTV problems appears to have been the disastrous Project ORCA, an expensive technological undertaking that was supposed to provide the campaign with real-time poll monitoring that would allow Republicans to target GOTV efforts on Election Day.

In the week leading up to the election, Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul told Business Insider that ORCA was "the Republican Party’s newest, most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 election," touting it as the game-changer that would blow even the Obama campaign's sophisticated GOTV system out of the water.

But on almost all counts, ORCA failed miserably. In a fascinating piece for Ace of Spades, Romney poll-watcher John Ekdahl describes a perfect storm of technology problems that made the ORCA app unusable and left scores of Republican volunteers " wandering around confused and frustrated" on Election Day.

Worse still, Ekdahl told Business Insider that the Romney campaign failed to provide poll-watching volunteers in his region — Jacksonville, Florida, a key Republican city in a major swing state — with proper credentials and accurate voter strike lists, rendering them unable to perform their duties even if the ORCA app had worked.

In interviews with Business Insider last week, sources close to the Romney campaign confirmed Ekdahl's account, and described a technological undertaking that failed at every level. According to several of these sources, ORCA was developed by a small, isolated tech team working under Romney's political team. These sources told Business Insider that the product was never properly beta-tested, and wasn't revealed to the rest of the campaign — including the digital team — until the week of the election.

Most people on the campaign "weren't that surprised" by ORCA's failure, said one Republican communications strategist close to the Romney campaign.

"They wouldn't let anyone outside of Romney political circle in on it until basically November 6," the strategist said. "The digital strategy was so incomprehensible — they were playing Super Nintendo while Obama's people had PS3."

"Their priorities were so screwed up — [they were] hypersensitive about information security, but also wanted to use the best technology they could," the strategist continued. "In the end they got neither. They put out a laughable GOTV product."

And the Romney campaign's Election Day problems weren't limited to ORCA.

Another Republican activist, an attorney in Hamilton County, Ohio who declined to be named for fear of "burning bridges," told Business Insider that the campaign's GOTV organization in that crucial swing county completely collapsed in the weeks leading up to the election.

In an interview last week, the attorney, one of the "Lawyers for Romney" who volunteered to help the campaign's legal team by watching the polls on Election Day, described how the Romney campaign sent its legal volunteers the wrong training information, failed to provide volunteers with information about where they were supposed to be on Election Day, and stopped responding to phone calls and emails in the final two weeks of the campaign.

"It was basically a disaster," the attorney said. "They never explained what we were supposed to be doing — where we were supposed to start, where we were supposed to end, what I was supposed to do at the end of the night — they didn't explain any of it.... A month before, you couldn't get a phone call or an email answered."

"Four out of eight of my polling places didn't have a poll observer," the attorney continued. "How you don't even get people credentialed properly is beyond my comprehension."

The Romney campaign did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment on the campaign's Election Day issues.

While we may never know what really happened inside the Romney campaign's Election Day collapse, the Ohio attorney's story, taken with the accounts from Ekdahl and people close to the Romney campaign, paint a picture of a campaign in disarray.

It appears that in its singular focus on competing technologically with the Obama campaign, the Romney team neglected to adequately account for and organize the essential human element necessary to any grassroots undertaking. Thus when its technological efforts failed, the campaign was left without a Plan B, and its volunteers were forced to fly blind at the moment the campaign needed them most.

"I think sometimes people get enamored of technology and they take people out of the mixture because its easier," Republican strategist Dave Carney told Business Insider. "I think there'll be a lot of soul-searching and review of those processes and see what really makes a difference."

Romney: Obama won election because of 'gifts'

In fact the Founders talked about this in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers.

Source

Romney: Obama won election because of 'gifts'

By Dan Berman POLITICO.com Wed Nov 14, 2012 5:12 PM

Mitt Romney told donors Wednesday he blamed last week’s loss to President Barack Obama in part to “gifts” the Obama administration gave to key voter blocs, including African Americans, Hispanics and young women, according to media reports.

“The president’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big gift — so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars,” Romney said on a conference call with donors, the Los Angeles Times first reported.

The “gifts,” according to Romney, included forgiving college loan interest, free contraceptive coverage and the part of Obamacare that allows people 26 and younger to be covered under their parents’ health care plans.

“You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free healthcare, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free healthcare worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity. I mean, this is huge,” Romney said, the New York Times reported.

“Likewise with Hispanic voters, free healthcare was a big plus,” Romney added. “But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

Romney told the donors he was “sorry” about the results.

“I’m very sorry that we didn’t win,” he said. “I know that you expected to win, we expected to win, we were disappointed with the result, we hadn’t anticipated it, and it was very close but close doesn’t count in this business.”

Ron Paul calls for 'love,' 'free market economics' in final address

Ron Paul didn't say that, but I think that is pretty much his final message.

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Ron Paul calls for 'love,' 'free market economics' in final address

By Morgan Little

November 15, 2012, 10:18 a.m.

Libertarian icon and three-time presidential hopeful Ron Paul delivered his final address on the House floor Wednesday, admitting that while he sees little progress in favor of his defined cause of freedom, he sees a chance the tide can turn as he steps away from Congress.

Paul, a Republican who leans heavily toward libertarianism and has served Texas’ 22nd District intermittently since 1976, admitted that “according to conventional wisdom,” his tenure on Capitol Hill has “accomplished very little.”

“No named legislation, no named federal buildings or highways – thank goodness. In spite of my efforts, the government has grown exponentially, taxes remain excessive and the prolific increase of incomprehensible regulations continues,” Paul said. “Wars are constant and pursued without congressional declaration, deficits rise to the sky, poverty is rampant and dependency on the federal government is now worse than any time in our history.”

Paul painted a portrait of a country with “no loot left to divvy up,” approaching a fiscal cliff “much bigger” than the one looming Jan. 1 and impending authoritarianism. Doom accompanied gloom in spades, with Paul’s frustration with his inability to stem what he sees as the constriction of freedom evident as he spoke.

It’s rare to find a member of Congress speaking from the floor and condemning the nation’s trajectory over the last century, accusing the populace of becoming beguiled by “endless” wealth, but there Paul was.

“As long as most people believed the material abundance would last forever, worrying about protecting a competitive productive economy and individual liberty seemed unnecessary,” he said.

The only solution Paul sees, as he makes a transition from lawmaker to figurehead, is “an intellectual awakening,” one that hearkens back to the founders’ views on civil liberties and eschews what Paul sees as the collusion between Democrats and Republicans.

“Everyone claims support for freedom. But too often it’s for one’s own freedom and not for others. Too many believe that there must be limits to freedom,” Paul said. “They argue that freedom must be directed and managed to achieve fairness and equality, thus making it acceptable to curtail, through force, certain liberties.”

“The best chance for achieving peace and prosperity, for the maximum number of people worldwide, is to pursue the cause of liberty,” he concluded.

Paul’s speech was met with some applause, but was ultimately overshadowed by President Obama’s post-election news conference, which was already halfway over, and relegated to C-SPAN’s online streams. Which, ultimately, seems appropriate for a man whose underdog status has drawn increasingly large numbers to his cause, and whose supporters frequently clash with the Republican Party establishment.

In the end, perhaps nothing better summarizes Paul than a plea he made toward the end of his speech, in which he asked the nation to forego envy, greed and intolerance and supplant them with “love, compassion, tolerance and free-market economics.”

Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy

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Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: November 24, 2012 162 Comments

WASHINGTON — Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more than 300 drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military since Mr. Obama first took office, the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.

Though publicly the administration presents a united front on the use of drones, behind the scenes there is longstanding tension. The Defense Department and the C.I.A. continue to press for greater latitude to carry out strikes; Justice Department and State Department officials, and the president’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, have argued for restraint, officials involved in the discussions say.

More broadly, the administration’s legal reasoning has not persuaded many other countries that the strikes are acceptable under international law. For years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States routinely condemned targeted killings of suspected terrorists by Israel, and most countries still object to such measures.

But since the first targeted killing by the United States in 2002, two administrations have taken the position that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies and can legally defend itself by striking its enemies wherever they are found.

Partly because United Nations officials know that the United States is setting a legal and ethical precedent for other countries developing armed drones, the U.N. plans to open a unit in Geneva early next year to investigate American drone strikes.

The attempt to write a formal rule book for targeted killing began last summer after news reports on the drone program, started under President George W. Bush and expanded by Mr. Obama, revealed some details of the president’s role in the shifting procedures for compiling “kill lists” and approving strikes. Though national security officials insist that the process is meticulous and lawful, the president and top aides believe it should be institutionalized, a course of action that seemed particularly urgent when it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the presidency.

“There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

Mr. Obama himself, in little-noticed remarks, has acknowledged that the legal governance of drone strikes is still a work in progress.

“One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making,” Mr. Obama told Jon Stewart in an appearance on “The Daily Show” on Oct. 18.

In an interview with Mark Bowden for a new book on the killing of Osama bin Laden, “The Finish,” Mr. Obama said that “creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons, is going to be a challenge for me and my successors for some time to come.”

The president expressed wariness of the powerful temptation drones pose to policy makers. “There’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems,” he said.

Despite public remarks by Mr. Obama and his aides on the legal basis for targeted killing, the program remains officially classified. In court, fighting lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times seeking secret legal opinions on targeted killings, the government has refused even to acknowledge the existence of the drone program in Pakistan.

But by many accounts, there has been a significant shift in the nature of the targets. In the early years, most strikes were aimed at ranking leaders of Al Qaeda thought to be plotting to attack the United States. That is the purpose Mr. Obama has emphasized, saying in a CNN interview in September that drones were used to prevent “an operational plot against the United States” and counter “terrorist networks that target the United States.”

But for at least two years in Pakistan, partly because of the C.I.A.’s success in decimating Al Qaeda’s top ranks, most strikes have been directed at militants whose main battle is with the Pakistani authorities or who fight with the Taliban against American troops in Afghanistan.

In Yemen, some strikes apparently launched by the United States killed militants who were preparing to attack Yemeni military forces. Some of those killed were wearing suicide vests, according to Yemeni news reports.

“Unless they were about to get on a flight to New York to conduct an attack, they were not an imminent threat to the United States,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is a critic of the strikes. “We don’t say that we’re the counterinsurgency air force of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, but we are.”

Then there is the matter of strikes against people whose identities are unknown. In an online video chat in January, Mr. Obama spoke of the strikes in Pakistan as “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists.” But for several years, first in Pakistan and later in Yemen, in addition to “personality strikes” against named terrorists, the C.I.A. and the military have carried out “signature strikes” against groups of suspected, unknown militants.

Originally that term was used to suggest the specific “signature” of a known high-level terrorist, such as his vehicle parked at a meeting place. But the word evolved to mean the “signature” of militants in general — for instance, young men toting arms in an area controlled by extremist groups. Such strikes have prompted the greatest conflict inside the Obama administration, with some officials questioning whether killing unidentified fighters is legally justified or worth the local backlash.

Many people inside and outside the government have argued for far greater candor about all of the strikes, saying excessive secrecy has prevented public debate in Congress or a full explanation of their rationale. Experts say the strikes are deeply unpopular both in Pakistan and Yemen, in part because of allegations of large numbers of civilian casualties, which American officials say are exaggerated.

Gregory D. Johnsen, author of “The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al Qaeda and America’s War in Arabia,” argues that the strike strategy is backfiring in Yemen. “In Yemen, Al Qaeda is actually expanding,” Mr. Johnsen said in a recent talk at the Brookings Institution, in part because of the backlash against the strikes.

Shuja Nawaz, a Pakistan-born analyst now at the Atlantic Council in Washington, said the United States should start making public a detailed account of the results of each strike, including any collateral deaths, in part to counter propaganda from jihadist groups. “This is a grand opportunity for the Obama administration to take the drones out of the shadows and to be open about their objectives,” he said.

But the administration appears to be a long way from embracing such openness. The draft rule book for drone strikes that has been passed among agencies over the last several months is so highly classified, officials said, that it is hand-carried from office to office rather than sent by e-mail.

Felipe Calderon is now at Harvard University

Source

Outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderon heading to Harvard

By Daniel Hernandez

November 28, 2012, 10:10 a.m.

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican President Felipe Calderon will head to Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., after his six-year term ends Saturday. He will be a teaching and research fellow in 2013, the university and the president's office said in statements Wednesday.

The announcement put to rest one of the most pressing questions in Mexico's political chatterbox: What's the next post or destination for Calderon, who declared a military-led campaign against drug cartels that left scores of civilians dead or missing across the country?

For his next move, the politically conservative Calderon will be named Inaugural Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School for next year, allowing him to lecture, teach and conduct research as he pleases, the school said.

Calderon received a mid-career master's degree in public administration at the Kennedy School in 2000. He also holds a law degree and a master's degree in economics from institutions in Mexico.

In inviting him to Harvard, the school emphasized Calderon's "pro-business" economic policies and his government's reforms in areas such as climate change and healthcare.

"President Calderon is a vivid example of a dynamic and committed public servant, who took on major challenges in Mexico," David T. Ellwood, dean of the school, said in the statement. "I am thrilled he will be returning."

Earlier this year, Calderon was in negotiations to take a post at the University of Texas at Austin, sparking protests among students and faculty there. One organizer of a petition against inviting Calderon to the University of Texas told a local news outlet in September that his presence there would be "like saying, 'We don’t care about your pain ... We don't care that your country has been ravaged.' "

Elite private universities in the United States are friendly ground for Mexican presidents. Calderon gave the commencement speech at Stanford University in 2011. Ernesto Zedillo, president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000, is currently a professor at Yale University.

On Saturday, Calderon hands over Mexico's presidential sash to Enrique Peña Nieto in a ceremony at the lower house of Congress to launch the country's next six-year presidential term.

Source

Exiting Mexican Leader to Go to Harvard

By KARLA ZABLUDOVSKY

Published: November 29, 2012

MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderón, who unleashed the military to take on drug traffickers and saw violence spiral out of control during his tenure, will move out of Mexico shortly after leaving office on Saturday.

In January, Mr. Calderón will join the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard as the first Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders fellow, a one-year position created to give high-profile leaders leaving office time to write, lecture and generally share their experiences.

Mr. Calderón, 50, who earned a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School in 2000, will focus on “the many policy challenges he encountered while serving as president,” the school said in a news release that did not mention his biggest challenge: confronting the drug-trafficking organizations that have terrorized the country and fueled a war that left tens of thousands of people dead during his six years in office.

The school’s statement praised other achievements, including his stewardship of the economy, which stabilized after a recession and is now growing faster than the United States’.

Mr. Calderón, who has a wife who has dabbled in politics and three young children, was long expected to leave Mexico, either because of safety considerations or to follow a custom of departing Mexican presidents, who generally do not stay.

“It’s a tradition,” said Shannon K. O’Neil, senior fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, “to give your successor a little bit of space.”

Shortly after leaving the presidency in 1994 under a cloud, Carlos Salinas de Gortari went into self-imposed exile, traveling to New York, Montreal and Havana and finally settling in Dublin. He sought to be named the head of the World Trade Organization, but withdrew after his brother was arrested on charges of ordering the assassination of a Mexican politician.

His successor, Ernesto Zedillo, joined Yale University, his alma mater, as director of the Center for the Study of Globalization.

Vicente Fox, Mr. Calderón’s immediate predecessor and a fellow member of the National Action Party, remained in Mexico in recent years.

He started a research group and kept his hand in politics, causing a stir last summer when he all but endorsed Enrique Peña Nieto of the rival Institutional Revolutionary Party for president. Mr. Peña Nieto won and takes office on Saturday.

Some analysts contend that security problems in Mexico would make it difficult for Mr. Calderón to stay, despite the government’s provision of an extensive security detail for former presidents.

“Calderón is going to pay a high personal cost for having had the courage to take on the cartels, and part of it entails having to be away with his family for some time,” said Gabriel Guerra, a political analyst and consultant.

Mr. Calderón’s job hunt has brought some controversy.

After The Dallas Morning News reported in August that he was in talks with the University of Texas about a teaching position, students and faculty members started circulating a petition across the country blaming him for the deaths of young people in the drug war and calling on campuses to bar him.

Felipe Calderón irá a Harvard en 2013

For the last 6 years Felipe Calderon has terrorized Mexico with his American funded war on drugs which has resulted in the murders of 50,000+ Mexicans. The 50,000+ murders is a conservative figure. Some people guess that more then 100,000 people have been murdered in Felipe Calderon insane war on drugs.

Source

Felipe Calderón irá a Harvard en 2013

Publicado: Miércoles, 28 de noviembre de 2012 a las 08:42

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO (CNNExpansión) — El presidente Felipe Calderón irá a la Universidad de Harvard como académico al terminar su mandato.

"El Primer Mandatario se convertirá en el primer participante invitado al Programa Angelopoulos de Líderes Públicos Globales en la Escuela de Gobierno John F. Kennedy de la Universidad de Harvard", informó la Presidencia en un comunicado este miércoles.

Detalló que el programa busca dar un espacio académico donde los líderes globales puedan dictar conferencias, interactuar con futuros líderes, académicos e investigadores, así como reflexionar sobre sus experiencias.

Agregó que Calderón colaborará con el Programa de Estudios de Caso de la Escuela de Gobierno durante 2013.

El programa en el que participará fue creado con el respaldo de la servidora pública griega Giana Angelopoulos, quien es miembro de la Iniciativa Global Clinton y Vicepresidenta del Consejo del Decano de la Escuela de Gobierno John F. Kennedy.

Source

Será Felipe Calderón academico en Harvard

Noviembre 28 de 2012

Por Yadira Rodriguez

México.- La Presidencia de la República informó que Calderón aceptó la invitación que le hizo la Universidad de Harvard, en los Estados Unidos, para participar como académico durante el 2013 en la Escuela John F. Kennedy.

Calderón se integrará al Programa Angelopoulos de Líderes Públicos Globales, que tiene como objetivo formar a los líderes del futuro.

Entre las actividades que tendrá Calderón en Harvard destacan: colaborar con académicos, investigadores y estudiantes, dictar conferencias y colaborar con el Programa de Estudios de Caso de la Escuela John F. Kennedy.

En el comunicado se detalla que Calderón se convertirá en el primer mexicano que participe como invitado en el Programa de Líderes Públicos Globales de la Universidad de Harvard.

El Programa Angelopoulos de Líderes Públicos Globales fue creado con el respaldo de la servidora pública griega Gianna Angelopoulos, quien es Miembro de la Iniciativa Global Clinton y Vicepresidenta del Consejo del Decano de la Escuela de Gobierno John F. Kennedy.

Source

Felipe Calderón fue designado investigador de Harvard

Reflexionará sobre su sexenio en México

El presidente mexicano Felipe Calderón fungirá a partir de enero como investigador de la Escuela Kennedy de la Universidad de Harvard, anunció el decano de la institución David Ellwood.

"El presidente Calderón es un ejemplo vivo de un servidor público dinámico y comprometido, que confrontó los mayores desafíos de México", dijo Ellwod, citado por la agencia mexicana Notimex.

¿Qué opinas del futuro del presidente mexicano Felipe Calderón? Participa en nuestros Foros.

"Aportará su experiencia y conocimiento que ayudará a informar e inspirar a los estudiantes y a la facultad", añadió.

Calderón, quien entregará el sábado el poder a Enrique Peña Nieto, será el primer invitado del programa Angelopoulos para líderes globales establecido en 2011 con el apoyo de la ex legisladora griega Gianna Angelopoulos con el objetivo de brindarle a líderes que abandonan puestos públicos la oportunidad de enseñar, aprender e investigar.

Calderón estará desde enero hasta diciembre de 2013 en Harvard, donde ya había obtenido una maestría en administración pública, recordó The Associated Press.

Entre sus funciones se reunirá con estudiantes, hará colaboraciones con profesores e investigadores y ofrecerá discursos.

Calderón afirmó estar emocionado

"Estoy emocionado por la oportunidad de regresar a la Escuela Kennedy de Harvard una vez que termine mi presidencia. Será una tremenda oportunidad para reflexionar sobre mis seis años de gobierno", afirmó Calderón en una declaración a la universidad.

Igualmente destacó la oportunidad de "empezar a trabajar en importantes investigaciones que documentarán los muchos desafíos que enfrentamos, y las posiciones políticas que asumimos durante mi gobierno".

Calderón estará asimismo afiliado con el Centro de Negocios y Gobierno Mossavar-Rahmani.

El programa de Lideres Públicos Globales Angelopoulos fue diseñado para personas que ejercieron un liderazgo de alto nivel que se encuentran en etapa de transición de la vida pública y ofrece una residencia para enseñar, aprender e investigar, señaló la universidad.

Fue establecido con el apoyo de Gianna Angelopoulos, una organizadora olímpica y embajadora, además de abogada y ex miembro del Parlamento.

"Estoy emocionada que el presidente Calderón regresará a Harvard para servir como el primer investigador del programa", dijo la embajadora.

La universidad señaló que la residencia de Calderón se extenderá hasta diciembre del 2013.

Calderón, del Partido de Acción Nacional, lanzó desde su llegada al poder en 2006 una ofensiva militarizada a los carteles del narcotráfico que ha dejado hasta septiembre de 2011 al menos 47,500 muertes, según cifras oficiales.

Peña Nieto asumirá el 1 de diciembre la presidencia para los próximos seis años, lo cual marcará el regreso al poder del Partido Revolucionario Institucional que ya gobernó el país de manera ininterrumpida entre 1929 y 2000.

Will Enrique Peña Nieto continue the insane drug war???

Will Enrique Peña Nieto continue Felipe Calderon's insane drug war???

I hope not, but from articles like this it sounds like Enrique Peña Nieto will continue the American financed Mexican drug war, which is really a war on the people of Mexico, like the American drug war is a war on the citizens of the USA.

Source

Incoming President Enrique Peña Nieto inherits a bruised Mexico

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

November 30, 2012, 5:58 p.m.

MEXICO CITY — When Enrique Peña Nieto assumes the Mexican presidency on Saturday, returning to power a once-autocratic party that ruled for seven decades, he will immediately confront a sluggish economy and a bloody war against drug gangs.

How he will handle those two problems is the biggest question surrounding the incoming government.

Peña Nieto, 46, and his Institutional Revolutionary Party want to shift the focus away from the battle against drug cartels that consumed and ultimately haunted outgoing President Felipe Calderon.

But Peña Nieto is inheriting a bruised, terrified and polarized nation that has lived through its most violent period since its revolution a century ago. Tens of thousands of people — mayors, police, journalists, lawyers, officials, businessmen as well as criminals — have been killed. Thousands are missing, and human rights abuses by authorities have skyrocketed in the six-year campaign against the drug gangs.

Despite the elimination of several top drug lords, the flow of narcotics has not slowed. The gangs have only extended their influence from the border with the U.S. deep into southern Mexico and beyond.

Calderon, meanwhile, will take on a teaching position at Harvard University, swiftly leaving the country he ruled since 2006. Presidents are limited to one term in Mexico, and Calderon's National Action Party came in a poor third in last summer's election.

The PRI finished first, but with only about 38% of the vote, limiting the mandate that Peña Nieto will enjoy and complicating his ability to push through ambitious reforms he promised. He will have to struggle to balance competing forces within his party: the so-called dinosaurs who evoke old-school, heavy-handed politics versus the U.S.- or Europe-educated modernizing younger members. His Cabinet, announced Friday, contains both.

"The most serious problem for Peña Nieto is his desire to draw a line between those traditional PRI practices … and the image of modernity that is incompatible with the old way of doing politics," commentator Ezra Shabot said in an El Universal news column this month.

Instead of the drug war, Peña Nieto would like to talk about the economy, foreign investment and jobs. But security issues will be unavoidable from Day 1.

The new president has pledged, rather vaguely, to "reduce violence" and cut the homicide rate as a way to return to besieged Mexicans a sense of safety and tranquillity. Critics fear that means pulling punches when it comes to persecution of drug gangs.

In the past, the PRI was known to enter into pactos, or deals, with cartel leaders to keep the peace and share the profits.

Peña Nieto has angrily denied that he plans to cut deals with drug gangs, something that would be more complicated today because of their fragmented nature and the acute viciousness of one of the newer and now-dominant groups, the Zetas.

He has said he will keep the army deployed throughout the country, as Calderon did, at least initially. In addition, he will demote the U.S.-backed federal police while building up a national gendarmerie that in theory would eventually replace the military in the drug offensive.

Despite the PRI's long nationalistic streak, Peña Nieto says he intends to maintain and would like to expand Mexico's close cooperation with the United States in security matters. Currently, the U.S. supplies intelligence data to Mexican authorities for the tracking of traffickers and is training thousands of police officers, judges, prosecutors and others as part of a $2-billion aid program.

He has already hired Gen. Oscar Naranjo, retired head of the Colombian national police, as a special security advisor. Naranjo is beloved by the Americans and is expected to bring on board U.S.-promoted tactics from the Colombian conflict, including the increased use of small, vetted police or military units for raids.

Calderon's strategy was faulted for concentrating on military force and underestimating cartel strength while failing to go after the money, much of it laundered through Mexican businesses and banks.

Peña Nieto is promising a new, reformed PRI, one that will not revert to its old habits of election-rigging, paying off supporters, co-opting the opposition and occasionally beating them up.

The Mexico of today is very different from that of nearly two decades ago, when the last PRI president was elected. Some, but certainly not all, of its institutions are stronger, such as the Supreme Court and the news media, and can provide a counterbalance to the presidency.

Yet six years of bloodshed have left a dispirited society that may be willing to give ground to organized-crime kingpins if it at least means being left alone.

Polling data released this week show roughly equivalent portions of Mexicans saying the drug war was Calderon's most important achievement and his biggest failure. And about two-thirds of those surveyed said they believed the cartels were winning the war.

Serious systemic problems, like impunity and corruption — perfected under the long PRI reign — will continue to hinder any progress Peña Nieto hopes to make.

On the economy, Peña Nieto has stressed his plan to open up the state-run oil giant Pemex to private and foreign investment, long a taboo here. To do so means challenging the Pemex unions that have long allied themselves with the PRI.

Already, another key reform, on labor workplace rules, passed the Legislature only after the PRI gutted measures that would have forced powerful unions to be more accountable and transparent.

wilkinson@latimes.com

Spending $2.38 billion for a job that pays a lousy $400,000!!!

I suspect that means the system is corrupt to the core and the winner, along with the special interest groups that helped the winner get elected will easily get back the money they spent thru kickbacks and government pork contracts.

The $2.38 billion Obama and Romney spent is almost 1,500 times what the job of President pays for the 4 year term.

Source

E.J. Montini | Arizona Republic Columnist

Our obscene election

By EJ MONTINI

Fri, Dec 07 2012 3:46 PM

The Washington Post has produced a chart showing how President Barack Obama spent $1.2 billion and Mitt Romney spent $1.18 billion on the last election.

That’s right.

A combined $2.38 billion.

With a “B.”

If the two of them had agreed to use $1 billion from their combined war chests for something other than smearing the other guy can you imagine the good they could have done?

Cancer research. College scholarships. Housing. Food. Who knows what else?

I read that if you estimate the average home price in the United States at around $270,000 you could buy 3,703 houses with a billion dollars. Think how far that could go in hurricane ravaged New York.

A billion dollars represents something close to the annual income of 25,000 hardworking, middle class Americans.

And these two men spend $2.38 billion.

On an election.

Many years ago U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in trying to describe obscenity, said, "I know it when I see it.”

Well, we’ve just seen it.

Obama sold out the Mexican and Latino community

Of course that is probably something expected of politicians who will lie and say anything to get elected.

Obama also lied to and sold out the the gays, pot smokers and anti-war folks to get their votes, so it's not earth shaking news that he also lied to and sold out the Latino voters.

Source

Obama administration sets deportation record: 409,849

By Alan Gomez Associated Press Fri Dec 21, 2012 9:02 PM

For the fourth year in a row, the Obama administration set a record for the number of people it deported. In 2012, the total reached 409,849.

President Obama has received a lot of support from Hispanic voters, who voted for him 71-27 percent over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the November elections. But his deportation record has remained a major disappointment to immigrant rights groups throughout his first term.

The number of people deported under Obama has risen in each of his four years in office, culminating in the record set in fiscal year 2012.

“That’s a dubious accomplishment,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which supports a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 11million illegal immigrants. “In reality, these numbers reflect the urgency with which our government needs to create a better immigration process. Instead of spending our limited resources on deportations, we need laws that strengthen our families, our communities and our economy.”

Department of Homeland Security officials say the criticism is misguided, since they are not just increasing the number of people they deport. Over Obama’s first term, the department has increased the percentage of deportees who are convicted criminals or fall into other high-priority categories.

During President George W. Bush’s last year in office, 33 percent of the people deported by the U.S. were convicted criminals. The Obama administration has increased that percentage each year, reaching 55 percent in 2012.

In all, 96 percent of the people deported fall into Homeland Security’s priority categories, including recent border-crossers, repeat immigration violators and fugitives from immigration court.

“While the FY 2012 removals indicate that we continue to make progress in focusing resources on criminal and priority aliens, with more convicted criminals being removed from the country than ever before, we are constantly looking for ways to ensure that we are doing everything we can to utilize our resources in a way that maximizes public safety,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton said in a statement.

Obama: Gun control ‘not something I will be putting off’

Obama: Gun control ‘not something I will be putting off’

Posted by Sean Sullivan on December 30, 2012 at 9:01 am

President Obama reiterated his commitment to passing new gun control measures in an interview broadcast on Sunday morning, saying he would like to get such legislation done in the first year of his second term. He also expressed skepticism about a proposal to put more armed guards in schools across the country.

“The question is are we going to be able to have a national conversation and move something through Congress,” Obama said on NBC News’s “Meet The Press.” “I’d like to get it done in the first year. I will put forward a very specific proposal based on the recommendations that Joe Biden’s task force is putting together as we speak. And so this is not something that I will be putting off.”

Obama, who recently established a task force led by Vice President Biden to offer recommendations for how to best curb gun violence, also pushed back against an idea the National Rifle Association put forth following the mass shooting earlier this month at a school in Newtown, Conn. As gun control advocates called for tighter restrictions, the NRA urged that armed guards be placed in schools to deter and defend against future acts of violence.

“I am skeptical that the only answer is putting more guns in schools. And I think the vast majority of the American people are skeptical that that somehow is going to solve our problem,” Obama said.

Obama reiterated his support for a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines that gun control advocates in Congress have said they will be pushing for.

“Here’s the bottom line. We’re not going to get this done unless the American people decide it’s important,” Obama added.