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From Today’s Drudge Report…
NEEDS A MIRACLE…
RASMUSSEN: R 50% O 46%…
GALLUP: R 51% O 46%…
Donald Trump is to claim that he has unearthed divorce papers of Michelle Obama and the President, according to a respected financial pundit with links to the tycoon.
It is alleged that the eccentric real estate mogul will claim that the documents show the First Lady and the President were at one point in their two decades of marriage seriously considering splitting up.
Trump set the hare running on Monday by claiming that he was set to make an announcement on Wednesday that would be ‘bordering on gigantic’ and that it would ‘possibly’ change the Presidential race.
Famed civil rights attorney Gloria Allred will be in a Boston area courtroom Wednesday in an attempt to unseal the sworn testimony given by Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, in a prior court case, RadarOnline.com is exclusively reporting.
“The Boston Globe is headed to court tomorrow morning for an emergency hearing in an attempt to obtain a court order to unseal the sworn testimony given by Mitt Romney in a prior court case and to lift a gag order so that the parties can speak about Romney. Gloria Allred will be in court representing one of the parties in the case,” a source close to the situation tells RadarOnline.com.
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To all intents and purposes, the UK is already out. We stayed still. Europe galloped away without us.
No doubt we can find some elegant formula to paper over the split. As my friend Daniel Hannan puts it, we could devise a Swiss arrangement while pretending that we are still EU members. No point frightening the horses.
For those readers who missed it, the UK is preparing to pull out of almost all areas of “Justice and Home Affairs”, the so-called Pillar III of EU jurisdiction. (Pillar I is the single market, and Pillar II is foreign affairs)
This is revolutionary. We are withdrawing from 130 directives, covering everything from the European Arrest Warrant, the European Public Prosecutor, to the European justice department (Eurojust).
Luckily, Tony Blair negotiated the right to a mass opt-out on this Pillar III corpus to be exercised before it all becomes justiciable at the European Court (ECJ) in 2014, a move that would transform the ECJ into Britain’s supreme court. (The same ECJ that rubber-stamped the rights violations of Connolly, Andreasen and Tillack, and against which there is no further appeal.)
We did so on the grounds that the UK’s Common Law foundation requires special treatment, but nobody really thought at the time that we would use the opt-out. It was a sop to placate people like us at The Daily Telegraph until the Lisbon storm had passed.
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Mitt Romney went into last night’s debate with one objective in mind and he nailed it. According to a post-debate CNN poll of registered voters, 60 percent of those who watched said they could see Romney as commander in chief. An almost identical 63 percent said the exact same thing about President Obama. That same CNN poll also found that while a plurality of respondents thought Obama won the debate 48 percent to 40 percent, slightly more people (25 percent) said the debate made them more likely to vote for Romney than said the same thing about Obama (24 percent).
That makes three debate performances in a row where Romney did what he had to do. In the first debate, Romney completely dismantled the cartoon villain image that Obama spent millions on negative advertising to create. In the second debate, Romney clearly established himself as the only candidate with a believable plan to fix the economy. Then last night, Romney comfortably established himself as a confident and competent commander in chief — a reasonable, viable alternative to Obama.
Obama, meanwhile, has never been able to fully recover from his debacle in Denver. Bored and distracted during the first debate, Obama over-compensated in the next two, attacking Romney at every turn. “On the question of likeability, the two candidates are essentially tied on a trait that has generally been an advantage for Obama,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “That’s probably due to the fact that two-thirds of debate watchers felt that Obama spent more time than Mitt Romney on the attack.”
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Nobody knows how the election will come out, pollsters least of all. But we know one thing. Liberals are in retreat. I have a liberal friend, a member of the Greatest Generation, who says simply that we are coming to the end of an age.
Well, yes. You could even dip down into cycle theorists like Mircea Eliade and say that it’s the Eternal Return, baby. A century ago, when liberals came in, the poor were suffering, and now, after a century of liberal governance, we are back where we started, with the poor and minorities hardest hit by the Great Recession.
But those of us hoping to live for a couple of decades or more can’t afford to be quite as unworried as my liberal friend. We will actually have to live through the end of the age, and on into the next one.
Are liberals thinking that, wow, we could be Greece in a few years, meaning that women and minorities would be hardest hit? And that liberals, the most evolved, most educated ruling class since the dawn of time, could be thrown out of power?
Short answer: they are not thinking at all. They are distracting their base with silly laugh lines about binders and the 47 percent and dogs on the roof while the average female voter is worrying about what life will be like for her children and grandchildren. You could say that the soccer moms and the security moms now turning into deficit moms.
Worst of all, the liberals seem to think that they can secure the future by telling their base that the benefits can keep coming if only the rich will pay a little more. Maybe they are right; maybe they can distract their base long enough to get through the election. Or maybe not.
You can understand why liberals have been so angry for the last decade. Listen to President Obama: first Republicans cut taxes, then they put a couple of wars on the national credit card. All that drove the economy into the ditch and led to the worst recession since the 1930s.
Exactly. Whaddaya mean by cutting taxes? What about the money we need for health care? Whaddaya mean by starting a couple of wars? What about the money for teachers and training?
The third presidential debate covered foreign policy
Romney won the third presidential debate – and how he did it was encapsulated in a single exchange. The candidates were discussing military spending and Romney had just accused Obama of making harmful cutbacks. The President wheeled out what must have seemed like a great, pre-planned zinger: “I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military’s changed.” The audience laughed, Obama laughed, I laughed. It was funny.
But here’s why it was also a vote loser. For a start, Twitter immediately lit up with examples of how the US Army does still use horses and bayonets (horses were used during the invasion of Afghanistan). More importantly, this was one example of many in which the President insulted, patronised and mocked his opponent rather than put across a constructive argument. His performance was rude and unpresidential. Obama seemed to have a touch of the Bidens, wriggling about in his chair, waving his hands dismissively and always – always – smirking in Romney’s direction. By contrast, Romney sucked up the abuse and retained a rigid poker face all night. He looked like a Commander in Chief; Obama looked like a lawyer. Who would you rather vote for?
Aside from the horses and bayonets moment, this was essentially a debate without incident. Part of the fault was the format. It’s interesting to note that Romney won the first debate while standing up and Obama did better in the second when walking around. But when both men were forced to sit for 90 minutes, the energy was inevitably reduced and neither broke through the fourth wall convincingly. Romney had a slight edge because he didn’t use his hands so much: Obama blew his closing statements by developing ultra-energetic conjurer’s hands (“Look at the hands, not at the cards, look at the hands…”)
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MORE SNARKY, CONDESCENDING, PEEVISH & SMALL: Obama’s arrogant, small ball behavior continues. As I stated in an earlier post, this ain’t a law firm name, it’s the theme of Obama’s entire campaign. If you can’t go big, go small and distract, I suppose. Here are examples from tonight’s 3d presidential debate:
Snarky:
OBAMA: “Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia, in the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
Romney’s full remark was, as he pointed out: “Well, I’m saying in terms of a geopolitical opponent, the nation [Russia] that lines up with the world’s worst actors. Of course, the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran.”
Condescending:
ROMNEY: “Our Navy is old — excuse me, our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now at under 285. We’re headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me.”
OBAMA: “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. ”
Translated: Mitt, you’re an idiot for counting ships. You apparently don’t realize that technology doesn’t require ships anymore (even though the Navy says they require 313, apparently Obama knows better).
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