He looked stupid then....

...and he looks dangerously incompetent now.

Those crazy Republicans, always complaining about nothing...

...such as the cooked unemployment statistics...or the move of the Census to the White House.

Instapundit writes:

//WELL, NOW, THIS SEEMS LIKE A BIG STORY: Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report.

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.

The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.

So with this and the IRS intimidation of the opposition, the asterisk on Obama’s re-election gets bigger. . . .

UPDATE: Reminder: Obama Moved Census Control To White House Early In First Term.//

Democrats can't set up a website, but they sure can steal an election.

We need to protect the right of the apathetic to be apathetic.

And the best way to do that is to shrink the power of government to mess with our lives.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

It should surprise no one who's read this column for the past eight years that I hope Romney defeats Obama decisively when the votes are tallied. But the truth is that from a conservative perspective, a Romney victory would simply be making the best of a bad situation.

The mere fact that presidential elections matter this much is not a sign of national health but of national dysfunction. The more the federal government gets involved in every aspect of our lives — for good or ill — the more people will feel that their livelihoods, lifestyles, even their actual lives are at stake in a presidential election. If the federal government didn't have so much leverage over your life, politicians wouldn't be able to scare you into the voting booths.

The Scent of Desparation - President Narcissus tells his supporters it's OK to vote Reublican for Congress or Senate as long as they vote for him.

President Obama Tells Voters to Vote for Democratic, Republican or Independent Congressional Candidates — As Long As He or She Wants to Break DC Gridlock

In other news, Harry Reid is already saying that there is no way that he will work with Romney.

Democrats go after the critical swing groups...

...Biden: Transgender Discrimination Is the ‘Civil Rights Issue of Our Time’

*Sheesh*

Another instalment of the Left's "War on the Normal."

MSNBC criticizes Romney for Red Cross donations.

Instapundit observes:

“HANNAH ARENDT HAD IT RIGHT,” Pat Moynihan once said. “She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

Obama's "go small" strategy is based on governing from the left...

...and neutering the center.

Obama’s strategy, says Heileman, is built around the idea that he can win with a coalition of the “demographically ascendent,” African Americans, Hispanics, women, and young people. To a degree, the bad economy has pushed Obama toward this approach. The obvious hope is that economic weakness can be countered by appeals to socially liberal women and young people on cultural issues. But don’t underestimate the extent to which this strategy is a deliberate decision that could have gone otherwise, as the behind-the-scenes opposition of some Democrats indicates. Obama is clearly willing to abandon centrist voters and place his own likeability at risk for the sake of creating a socially and economically liberal Democratic coalition that would allow him to govern securely from the left.

In the final two weeks, Obama pins his hope on turning out the "moron" vote.

Jonah Goldberg explains why Obama only visits comedy shows and low-information venues.

Four Dead in Libya, not able to meet the Israeli Prime Minister, the Economy in the Pits....

...but Obama gives an interview to MTV's "Sway" to discuss Hip-Hop.

This guy is a joke.

Great Moments in Public Discourse - How sarcasm and insult took over the Democrat Party.

This is very worthwhile essay on the rise of the "juvenile insult" culture within the Democrat Party:

Here are some good points:

Read The Obamians by James Mann and you discover that the Obama team came in thinking United States foreign policy could be fixed simply by doing the opposite of whatever Bush had done. What they found instead is that Bush’s policies are difficult to overturn because they are not as unreasonable or as superfluous as his opponents had thought. There is a resurgent global jihadist movement bent on killing Americans. Russia is belligerent not because Bush was rude but because Putin’s interests are not our own. The rise of China requires international balancing regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. American soldiers have left Iraq, but that does not mean Iraq or the world is safer. Iran is on track to obtain a nuclear weapon. Opening space between the U.S. and Israel did nothing to advance the cause of Middle East peace.

And:

Even a narrow win for Obama, though, would not reestablish anything like the mandate and amity the president enjoyed on his Inauguration Day. The reason is that, as the Obama coalition diminished, Obama no longer disguised the prejudices, inflections, outlook, and approach of the progressive movement. A confessed reader of Andrew Sullivan’s hysterical web site, the president has taken on the maximalist characteristics of the liberal blogosphere. He is scornful and contemptuous of Romney, as could be seen in his patronizing lecture on aircraft carriers and submarines during the third debate. His campaign seizes on the most trivial comments—“I like Big Bird”; “Binders full of women”—to engage in juvenile jibes that would not make the first cut at the Late Show writers’ meeting. His rallies have become self-congratulatory comedy hours in which the assembled Democrats laugh heartily at the insults and zingers the president throws Romney’s way. Obama has been on a seemingly nonstop tour of television shows hosted by late-night comics. His new attack line that the Republican nominee has “Romnesia” was, as the vice president might say, literally taken from liberal blogs. The vice president even asked his audience at a recent rally whether it had watched The Daily Show the night before. The men who hold the highest offices in the most powerful country in the history of the world have been debased to the point where they look like fill-in guests on Up with Chris Hayes.

The Democrats allowed the progressive movement’s hatred of Bush to take over their old and storied political party. That party and movement found a champion and a path to power in Obama, but the electoral forces on which his power relied were unstable. In 2008, he satisfied the left and won the middle. Once in power, though, he kept the left satisfied and lost the middle and right.

In 2012, there is just the left. The Democrats are back where they started eight years ago. And this time, Barack Obama cannot save them.

Obama's Apartheid Regime.

If you want to sit behind the president at his campaign speeches, then you better not be a white man.

If Letterman is slowly getting the message, then so are the voters.

Letterman asks Rachel Maddow, "say, Obama’s kind of lying about this GM bankruptcy thing, huh?"

What's funny is how Obama's low-information, softball format may backfire on him.

Here's the relevant portion of the Letterman show:

DAVID LETTERMAN, HOST: Here’s what upset me last night, this playing fast and loose with facts. And the President Obama cites the op-ed piece that Romney wrote about Detroit, “Let them go bankrupt, let them go bankrupt,” and last night he brings it up again. “Oh, no, Governor, you said let them go bankrupt, blah blah blah, let them go bankrupt.” And Mitt said, “No, no, check the thing, check the thing, check the thing.”

Now, I don’t care whether you’re Republican or Democrat, you want your president to be telling the truth; you want the contender to be lying. And so what we found out today or soon thereafter that, in fact, the President Obama was not telling the truth about what was excerpted from that op-ed piece. I felt discouraged.

RACHEL MADDOW: Because the “Let Detroit go bankrupt” headline you feel like was inappropriate?

LETTERMAN: Well, the fact the President is invoking it and swearing that he was right and that Romney was wrong and I thought, well, he’s the president of course he’s right. Well, it turned out no, he was taking liberties with that.

The issue is not dogs, binders, Big Bird or bayonets.

This is the issue:

This is bad on so many levels.

Liberal American activist groups obtain UN observers for American election:

United Nations-affiliated election monitors from Europe and central Asia will be at polling places around the U.S. looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups, a concern raised by civil rights groups during a meeting this week. The intervention has drawn criticism from a prominent conservative-leaning group combating election fraud

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations partner on democratization and human rights projects, will deploy 44 observers around the country on Election Day to monitor an array of activities, including potential disputes at polling places.

Liberal-leaning civil rights groups met with representatives from the OSCE this week to raise their fears about what they say are systematic efforts to suppress minority voters likely to vote for President Obama.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP and the ACLU, among other groups, warned this month in a letter to Daan Everts, a senior official with OSCE, of “a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans — particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities.”

The request for foreign monitoring of election sites drew a strong rebuke from Catherine Engelbrecht, founder and president of True the Vote, a conservative-leaning group seeking to crack down on election fraud.

“These activist groups sought assistance not from American sources, but from the United Nations,” she said in a statement to The Hill. “The United Nations has no jurisdiction over American elections.”

The observers, from countries such as Germany, France, Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, will observe voting at polling places and other political activity.

Because, you know, since a Black American President couldn't possibly guarantee free and equal access to the polls, the obvious anwer is to bring someone in from Kazakhstan.

This is theater, but it is a theater that devalues American democracy and injects just a little bit more nastiness into the American system. Moreover, it pretends that Americans can't be trusted with their own democracy, but that we should turn it all over to the Europeans.

These people are nuts.

The End of Obama's Negative Campaign Ads?

James Geraghty writes:

Jim Hoft provides a quick look at two fascinating bits of analysis from Karl Rove.

The Obama campaign has pulled down all of its negative advertising. And is now running virtually all positive ads in the battleground states heralding all the success of the last four years. This is very unusual because they have been constantly beating up on Romney. In recent weeks the president's negatives have risen and Romney particularly after this debate has moved into a lead. You saw it in the Gallup poll you talked about. Six point lead, 51-45. Yesterday it was 50-46. This is the first time that Romney has hit 50 percent in the Gallup likely voter poll and the president has never hit 50 percent in the likely voter poll. And no candidate who has led in mid-October with 50 percent or more in the likely voter poll has ever gone on to lose.

The disappearance of the negative ads offers two fascinating conclusions.

1. Think about all of those negative ads run by the Obama campaign and Priorities USA all summer long — millions upon millions of dollars' worth — and Romney undid them with one debate performance. One debate performance! Political consultants for years to come will study this, and the conventional wisdom that negative advertising works may get reexamined by the professionals.

2. Can you run as brutal and bare-knuckle a campaign as Obama and his allies have and suddenly go positive in the final three weeks? If Obama had any kind of a compelling, positive message, why hasn't he been running on it from the beginning? (There are 2 million early votes cast already.) What better way to reveal that the campaign has no faith in its over-arching strategy than to make a sudden total shift in a crisis?

Romney takes lead in Real Clear Politics average.

Read it here.

Here is an interesting essay on Obama's strategy of "defying gravity." The theory of the article is that Obama has naturally trended down under his own weight for the last six months and has been bumping himself back up with well-timed "shiny objects" because the Obama campaign is well-aware that losing the appearance of inevitability may mean losing the election.

From the Sean Trende RCP essay:

One theory I’ve had about this election is particularly relevant right now. I call it “Barack Obama vs. gravity.” The basic idea is this: Team Obama has had one overriding goal this cycle -- to keep the president ahead of Mitt Romney in the polls.

The reason is simple: Obama is, and always has been, something of a bandwagon candidate. A major theme in 2008 was always that supporting Obama enabled the voter to be a part of history, encouraging others to join in the process. But for that theme to work, the perception had to be that Obama was, in fact, going to win.

So every time there was a real or potential setback, Team Obama was ready to change the subject. I don't mean this as an insult. Rather, I simply mean it as descriptive of some smart moves by the Obama campaign during the last campaign and, I think, this campaign.

And:

Why is it so important to the Obama camp that he stay ahead this time? After all, the “make history” argument is less compelling this time than it was in 2008. Also, remember that political science tells us that individual events don’t matter that much in the long run -- it’s the fundamentals that dictate the result to a much larger degree.

I don’t really disagree with any of this -- indeed the insight from political science that fundamentals take over is the key assumption behind my theory. But I do think there is a degree to which Team Obama has successfully (and quite frankly brilliantly) created a “virtuous cycle” this election. There are three ways in which this is the case. First, the bandwagon effect affects fundraising. Once you move outside the partisan core, people like to back winners. This is especially true of the business community. By assiduously cultivating its front-runner status, the Obama campaign has aided its ability to press future arguments. Second, maintaining a lead allows greater leeway in the arguments it can make. Something like the “cancer ad” from August looks hard-hitting from a campaign that is leading (and I certainly include candidate super PACs as part of the “campaign”), but would probably be described as “desperate” from one that is losing.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it affects press portrayals of the candidates and party enthusiasm. This is the most important thing here: I still think the default expectation here has been that Obama should be losing. “Defying gravity” is hardly an original motif for this election, after all.

So the view that Obama is going to lose can -- or at least could have -- quickly become the conventional wisdom. If that happens, we would end up with a vicious cycle that looks something like this: The Democratic base becomes downtrodden, its enthusiasm falls, the right’s enthusiasm skyrockets, the likely-voter screens skew more Republican, and Obama falls even further behind in the polls. Instead, we have a campaign where everyone marvels at Obama's constant lead, further adding to the mythos surrounding his supposed inability to lose.

This is why the Oct. 3 debate really might have marked an important, structural change point in the campaign. Now, I’m emphatically not arguing that Obama can’t win the election after his poor performance (and Romney's strong performance) at that face-off. In fact, I still regard him as the slight favorite. But we’ve seen exactly the combination Team Obama worked assiduously to avoid: Romney re-consolidating his base, Republican enthusiasm skyrocketing, and the president’s aura of invulnerability pierced.

So, if history is a guide, and this theory is accurate, expect the next big shiny object to drop anytime.

Our country is in the best of hands.

The important issue to Obama is Big Bird, dogs on the top of cars and Romney taxes, it is not murder of Americans or the unemployment rate.

Via Breitbart:

At the same time Team Obama released a childish ad hitting Mitt Romney for daring to consider removing multimillionaire, one-percenter Big Bird from the federal government welfare rolls, the Romney campaign released a devastating graphic that shows that since his debate debacle, Barack Obama has mention Big Bird and Elmo 13 times but has not mentioned Libya or his plan to fix the economy even once.

Here is an apt metaphor for American politics.

In San Francisco face off between Tea Party and Obama supporters, the Tea Party ends up cleaning up the mess that the liberals left behind.

For people nominally concerned about the "environment," liberals generate a surprising amount of trash. As Obama supporters moved along in the line to get into the fundraiser, they left behind an impressive amount of trash, such as shown below:

Tea Partiers shouted "pick up your garbage" and "this is San Francisco, what about recycling?" There was no response. They chanted "Obama leaves a mess." Still no response. Eventually, a tea partier (wearing the black cowboy hat) crosses over and starts to pick up the trash on his own:

Other tea partiers join him. Another manages to find a trash bag. Soon the trash is being collected:

Not everyone was pleased with this, though. An Obama official came over and objected, shouting "stop, stop, stop." Then several more Obama officials arrived, including the man in the foreground below, to bully the people picking up the trash:

Check out the photos.

Liberals - acting like spoiled children since 1965.

Obama is playing a commercial in Virginia touting Romney's gaffes in England...

...Romney ought to play this in response:

Romney ahead in Electoral College.

Via Gateway Pundit.