Choosing The Right Lane To Travel

These messages build on the foundation that asks all of us to set aside our differences and unite behind a message of constitutionally limited government, personal responsibility, and fiscal sanity. I appreciate that your time is valuable and for that reason I try to keep segments concise. Please Scroll through the headings below and read the segments that strike you as important or informative.

Become active - energize your family and friends to engage in the election of our lifetime!

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Battleground Poll: Romney Up 16 with Independents, Up 13 In Enthusiasm

In 2008, President Barack Obama won the independent vote over John McCain by a margin of eight points, 52-44. This morning, a new Battleground Poll has Mitt Romney massacring Obama among indies by a whopping 16 points, 51-35.  That's a 24-point swing among independents since 2008, a group that makes up anywhere from a quarter to a third of voters, and yet Battleground still has Obama in the lead 49-48…?  The Battleground Poll also shows an 13 point enthusiasm gap in Romney's favor. Only 73% of Obama's supporters are "extremely likely" to vote, compared to 86% of Romney's supporters. Though the media hasn't yet decided it's time for a Romney Comeback Narrative, and probably never will, even if he wins -- there's no question Romney is rebounding in every national and swing state poll. Nationally, Gallup has it all tied up among registered voters -- with the president dangerously below 50 at 47%. Rasmussen uses the more reliable likely voter screen and has Romney up 49-47%. In the Real Clear Politics poll of polls,  nationally Romney is only down .09%. A week ago he was down over 4 points. In Ohio, according to RCP's poll of polls, Obama's Ohio lead has shrunk to three --  Virginia has Obama only up by 0.3. Florida and Colorado are tied.  

~~~~~~

Election 2012: Colorado President Colorado: Obama 49%, Romney 48% - by Rasmussen

~~~~~~

Obama Kicks Up Character Attacks After Debate Drubbing

After President Obama’s sour showing in last week’s debate, he and his team adopted a curious seeming response. Team Obama said Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a man Democrats (and Republicans) have long been saying is a stiff, awkward, un-relatable bore, was a slick and artful politician. Huh? Obama’s senior political adviser, David Axelrod, even told CBS News on Sunday that Romney’s performance was “Gantry-esque.” That was a reference to Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis’ con artist evangelist whom Burt Lancaster played in spellbinding fashion in the movie version. Gantry was a fraud -- a hard-drinking womanizer whose fire and brimstone sermons were just a means to con rubes out of their money. He was an undoubtedly evil character. So Romney, previously jeered as a gaffe-prone, bumbling blueblood who couldn’t connect with voters, suddenly turned into an evil, mesmerizing, tent-revival hustler?

~~~~~~

Foreign Aid Skyrockets Under Obama as Border Security Takes Back Seat

According to the U.S. Treasury, U.S. spending on foreign aid has not only skyrocketed, it also trumps the amount spent on U.S. border security. CNS News has the details: From fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2011, according to the U.S. Treasury, the federal government increased spending on foreign aid by 80 percent and, in fiscal 2011, spent 76 percent more on foreign aid than it did securing the borders of the United States. In fiscal 2008, the government spent a total of $11.427 billion in international assistance programs, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement. In fiscal 2011, according to the statement, it spent $20.599 billion—an increase of $9.172 billion, or 80 percent, from 2008.

~~~~~~

WH Cutter: Okay Fine, We've Been Lying About Romney's Tax Plan

One of the strongest elements of Mitt Romney's spectacular debate performance was his decisive rejoinder to the president's oft-repeated allegation that the Republican plans to raise taxes on middle class families.  Obama said Romney has designs on an unpaid-for $5 trillion tax cut that would eventually necessitate higher tax bills for average Americans.  Romney flatly rejected the claim by calling it false, then explained what he actually has in mind.  But the president returned to the "$5 trillion" well on several subsequent occasions, prompting more rebuttals from his challenger.  FactCheck.org and CNN reviewed Obama's accusation, and found it wanting.  "Not true," declared the former organization.  BURNETT: Stephanie, let me ask you about that. Because here at CNN, we fact checked that, that $5 trillion in tax cuts and we’ve come and said that’s not true. Mitt Romney has not promised that. because he’s also going to be closing loopholes and deductions. So his tax cut wouldn’t be anywhere near that size.
CUTTER: So you’re disputing the size of the tax cut? Or are you disputing also how he’s going to pay for it?

BURNETT: We’re disputing the size.

CUTTER: Erin, he has campaigned on lowering tax rates by 20% for everybody, including those in the top 1%. that was one of the main selling points in the Republican primary.

BURNETT: So you’re saying if you lower them by 20% you get a $5 trillion tab, right?

CUTTER: It’s a $5 trillion tab.

BURNETT: But when he closes deductions he won’t be anywhere near $5 trillion. That’s our analysis.

CUTTER: Well with, okay, stipulated, it won’t be near $5 trillion, but it’s also not going to be the sum of $5 trillion in the loopholes that he’s going to close.

~~~~~~

Princeton Economist: Obama Campaign Is Misrepresenting My Study on Romney's Tax Plan John McCormack

The Obama campaign blasted out another email claiming that Mitt Romney's tax plan would either require raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the deficit. "Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes," said the Obama campaign press release. "In fact, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for Romney’s tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000." But that's not true. Princeton professor Harvey Rosen tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting his paper on Romney's tax plan: I can’t tell exactly how the Obama campaign reached that characterization of my work.  It might be that they assume that Governor Romney wants to keep the taxes from the Affordable Care Act in place, despite the fact that the Governor has called for its complete repeal.  The main conclusion of my study is that  under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 about the same.  That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral.  You can check the math that shows Romney's plan is mathematically possible here.

~~~~~~

White House Tells Defense Contractors to Break the Law

By law, defense contractors must warn employees 60 days in advance of a layoff. The law is called WARN: Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. Because of the “fiscal cliff,” there will be major cutbacks in the Defense Department’s budget, beginning January 1, 2013. So, Lockheed Martin was planning to inform workers of possible firings. The letter was scheduled to go out on November 1.

Lockheed Martin is a major employers in Virginia, which is a key swing state. This comes into conflict with the White House’s goal of getting voters to the polls and voting for Obama. So, the White House has sent out a letter to Lockheed Martin asking management not to send out the notification. It has promised to pay legal fees if the workers are fired, as scheduled. What’s this? The White House will pay legal fees? On what legal basis? Who will pay the White House’s legal fees for paying the Defense industry’s legal fees?

~~~~~~

Obama To Designate Chavez Home As National Monument  by Tim Brown

The White House announced this week that Barack Obama will be stopping amidst his campaigning at the home of former labor leader Cesar Chavez in Keene, California, in order to establish the estate as a national monument, something that is clearly designed to shore up Hispanic voters. La Paz, served as the planning and coordination center of the UFW starting in 1971. It’s where Chavez and many organizers lived, trained and strategized before heading into the fields and cities of California and beyond. Chavez taught farm workers how to write contracts and negotiate with growers.  What you need to know is that in the midst of a failing economy, deficit spending and increased national debt, Obama, for the sake of politics, will go and anoint this site as a national monument at taxpayers' expense to ensure he gets Hispanic votes. That is all this is about.

~~~~~~

More on the phony jobs numbers... --Breitbart's Joel B. Pollak

"Suspicion about the federal government's September jobs report has fallen on Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who appeared on CNBC [Friday] morning and defended the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), claiming -- falsely -- that upward revisions of 86,000 jobs were from the private sector. In fact, the new number is entirely accounted for by upward revisions to state and federal government payrolls. The BLS reported that while only 114,000 jobs were created in September -- which would have translated into a rise in unemployment from 8.1% to 8.2% -- the unemployment rate fell dramatically to 7.8%. That unusual drop is the fastest in nearly three decades, and was unexpected even in the rosiest predictions. One reason for the rise was an upward revision of 86,000 to the July and August jobs numbers -- all of which came from a 91,000 increase in the estimate of public sector jobs. Private sector job estimates were actually revised downward by 5,000. In addition, the BLS reported a large rise in the number of part-time jobs, adding 600,000 jobs to the total -- a dramatic increase of 7.5%, not explained by any other economic indicators -- and raising questions about whether the government had changed the way it counted part-time workers. ... [S]olis describes the 86,000 upward revision as if it were an increase in private sector jobs, though in fact the increase came entirely from revisions to public sector payrolls by cash-strapped federal and state governments. Instead of shedding jobs, as previously claimed, governments have been adding jobs."

~~~~~~

From the King of [ Democrat's] Camelot

"It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now." --President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

~~~~~~

Obama's Re-Election Case Rests On 5 Phony Claims  By JOHN MERLINE, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

In making his case for re-election in the face of historically high unemployment and sluggish growth, President Obama has a simple and straightforward argument. Things were terrible when I arrived, he says, thanks to Bush-era policies of tax cuts and deregulation. We stopped the decline, but the ditch was so deep that it will take time to get out. Still, we are making progress, even if it isn't as fast as everyone would like. But each part of Obama's argument is based on claims that are not accurate:

• Bush tax cuts and deregulation caused the recession.

At a campaign rally, Obama said Romney is "just churning out the same ideas that we saw in the decade before I took office . . . the same tax cuts and deregulation agenda that helped get us into this mess in the first place."

It's a standard Obama talking point. But it's not true. Bush's tax cuts did not cause the last recession. In fact, once they were fully in effect in 2003, they sparked stronger growth — generating more than 8 million new jobs over the next four years, and GDP growth averaging close to 3%.

• I stopped a second Great Depression.

Another frequent Obama claim is that "we did all the right things to prevent a Great Depression." But this, too, is false. The economy had pretty much hit bottom by the time Obama took office, and long before his policies were in place. The worst declines in monthly GDP and employment, in fact, occurred before he was even sworn in. When economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi tried to determine what ended the so-called Great Recession, they said President Bush's TARP program and actions by the Federal Reserve were "substantially more effective" than anything Obama had done.

• My policies are working.

In his recent two-minute campaign ad, Obama claimed that "as a nation we are moving forward again." But while the overall economy has grown somewhat since Obama's recovery started more than three years ago, several other important indicators have actually gone backward. Median household incomes, for example, have dropped $3,000 — a 5.7% decline — since the Obama recovery started. Income inequality has reached new heights.

• A slow recovery was inevitable.

Obama dismisses the slow and painful recovery by saying that he knew the road would be long. "I always believed that this was a long-term project (and) that it was going to take more than a year," he has said. "It was going to take more than two years. It was going to take more than one term." The reason, Obama argues, is that recoveries from financial crises are always slow. "After a financial crisis, typically there's a bigger drag on the economy for a longer period of time," he said. But Obama didn't trot out this excuse until his own economic policies failed to produce the growth he had promised.

• Nobody could have done any better.

One of Bill Clinton's biggest applause lines at the Democratic convention was when he said that "no president — not me or any of my predecessors — could have repaired all the damage in just four years."

But historically, deeper recessions have been followed by faster recoveries. To get a sense of how dismal Obama's recovery has been, consider this: Since World War II, there have been 10 recoveries before Obama's. Had Obama's merely performed as well the average of all those recoveries, the nation's GDP would be a staggering $1.2 trillion bigger than it is today, and 7.9 million more people would have jobs.

~~~~~~

Welfare Recipients Help Obama Break Fundraising Records

Some people argue that welfare and food stamp recipients shouldn’t be allowed to vote. The logic of their argument rings through as it suggests those receiving government assistance are more likely to vote for candidates who provide them with an income over those that support hard working taxpayers. This sounds reasonable to me but depriving an American citizen of a fundamental right to vote is not consistent with my conservative ideology. However allowing “those who can’t take care of themselves” to contribute “free government money” to the candidate of their choice is a slap in the face that requires change.

~~~~~~

Coal Miner's Wife: 'EPA has Absolutely Destroyed our Way of Life'

Coal country is hurting, and the people who live there want the whole nation to know it. Thousands of miners have been laid off this year across Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, many with little hope of getting their jobs back as power plants and the coal mines that once fed them shut down. Now the families, friends and business operators who depend on those miners are planning a multi-state show of solidarity they hope will be heard in Washington, D.C., and beyond. "No one really hears our voices down here and knows what's going on," says 28-year-old coal miner's wife Tracy Miller of Keokee, Va.

If all goes as planned, huge crowds wearing miners' stripes and fluorescent "United for Coal" T-shirts will line up Oct. 13 along U.S. Highway 23 from Big Stone Gap, Va., through Paintsville, Ky., and toward Chillicothe, Ohio. They will stretch north on U.S. 119 from Pikeville, Ky., toward Williamson, W.Va. "I'm not a very political person," says Miller, who's planning to take her 5- and 10-year-old children to the demonstration. "I don't want this prayer chain to turn into politics. But the EPA has absolutely destroyed our way of life."  So, another demonstration how Obama is for poor people?

~~~~~~~

Achmed the Dead Terrorist  Watch

~~~~~~

In Virginia, Mitt Romney calls for change of course in Middle East By Jerry Markon and Anne Gearan

LEXINGTON, Va. — In what was billed as a major foreign policy address, Mitt Romney blasted President Obama’s leadership in the Middle East on Monday, saying that a withering of American resolve in the region had made it a more dangerous place where the United States has less leverage.  “Hope is not a strategy,’’ Romney said.  Romney said he knows “the president hopes for a safer, freer, and a more prosperous Middle East allied with the United States. I share this hope.” But he added: “We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds.”  “I believe that if America does not lead, others will,” Romney said, “others who do not share our interests and our values.”  Romney, speaking in confident and crisp tones before an audience of more than 400 cadets and invited guests at Virginia Military Institute, said it is Obama’s “responsibility to use America’s great power to shape history—not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at the mercy of events.”

~~~~~~

Terrorism and the New American Republic
In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson met with Arab diplomats from Tunis, who were conducting terror raids and piracy against American ships.
History records them as the Barbary Pirates. In fact, they were blackmailing terrorists, hiding behind a self-serving interpretation of their Islamic faith by embracing select tracts and ignoring others.  Borrowing from the Christian Crusades of centuries past, they used history as a mandate for doing the western world one better.  The quisling European powers had been buying them off for years.
On March 28, 1786 Jefferson and Adams detailed what they saw as the main issue:
 “We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the Grounds of their pretensions to make war upon a Nation who had done them no Injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our Friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.  The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Thomas Jefferson wanted a military solution, but decades of blackmailing the American Republic and enslaving its citizens would continue until the new American nation realized that the only answer to terrorism was force.
"There's a temptation to view all of our problems as unprecedented and all of our threats as new and novel," says George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. Shortly after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, Turley advised some members of Congress who were considering a formal declaration of war against the suspected perpetrators. He invoked the precedent of the Barbary pirates, saying America had every right to attack and destroy the terrorist leadership without declaring war.

"Congress did not actually declare war on the pirates," Turley wrote in a memo, "but 'authorized' the use of force against the regencies after our bribes and ransoms were having no effect. This may have been due to an appreciation that a declaration of war on such petty tyrants would have elevated their status. Accordingly, they were treated as pirates and, after a disgraceful period of accommodation, we hunted them down as pirates."

Because of their outlaw conduct, pirates -- and modern-day terrorists -- put themselves outside protection of the law, according to military strategy expert Dave McIntyre, a former dean at the National War College. "On the high seas if you saw a pirate, you sank the bastard," he says. "You assault pirates, you don't arrest pirates."

Shoot first, ask questions later. Wanted: Dead or alive. Such is our official policy regarding Osama bin Laden, the most infamous outlaw of the era.

One of the enduring lessons of the Barbary campaigns was to never give in to outlaws, whether you call them pirates or terrorists. In the late 1700s, America paid significant blackmail for peace -- shelling out $990,000 to the Algerians alone at a time when national revenues totaled just $7 million.

"Too many concessions have been made to Algiers," U.S. consul William Eaton wrote to the Secretary of State in 1799. "There is but one language which can be held to these people, and this is terror."

Michael G. Leventhal

Editor & Publisher DOJgov.net