Obama's a Radical and Enemy of Israel

David Horowitz comments at Fox News:

Polls Show Big Gains for Romney in Swing States

At The Hill, "Polls show Romney making headway in swing states."

Part of the reason Romney's surging is because he's honest, unlike the president:

PREVIOUSLY: "Mitt Romney Debate Bounce."

Wenzel Strategies Poll Has Romney Up 48-47 in Ohio

Now this is interesting, at Politico, "Citizens United poll claims tight race in Ohio" (via Memeorandum). And at Weasel Zippers, "Poll: Romney Making Big Gains In Ohio After Debate, Now In Statistical Tie With Obama…"

And here's the summary:

In the race for President, the public opinion bounce from his strong debate performance last week in Denver has washed over Ohio – Romney has moved ahead of Obama by a singlepoint, 48% to 47%, with 5% yet undecided. This survey includes a partisan sample of 38% Democrat, 37% Republican, and 25% independent voters.

Romney leads Obama among Ohio men, 50% to 44%. Among women, Obama leads by a 51% to 47% margin over Romney. Unlike Democrat Brown in the Senate race, Obama is winning northeastern Ohio, leading Romney there by a 52% to 44% margin. In central Ohio, including the state capital of Columbus – the largest city in the state – Romney leads by a 51% to 48% margin. Romney’s strongest part of the state is the reliably conservative southwest corner, including Cincinnati, where he leads Obama by a 54% to 39% margin.

I especially like that partisan breakdown.

Romney has to win Ohio or it's pretty much over.

Israel Shoots Down Drone That Entered Airspace (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Fighter jets shoot down drone over Israel":

JERUSALEM — Israel scrambled fighter jets to intercept a drone Saturday that crossed deep into Israeli airspace from the Mediterranean Sea, shooting the aircraft down over the country's southern desert, the military said.

The incident marked the first time in at least six years that a hostile aircraft has penetrated Israel's airspace, and Israeli officials said they were taking the incident seriously, raising the possibility of retaliatory action.

It was not immediately clear who launched the drone, but suspicion quickly fell on the Lebanese Islamic militant group Hezbollah. The Iranian-backed group is known to have sent drones into Israeli airspace on several previous occasions.

Tensions are running high between Iran and Israel over Tehran's nuclear program, which the West believes is cover for the development of atomic weapons. The Islamic Republic denies the allegations, and says its program is for peaceful purposes only. Israel has threatened to carry out a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities to prevent Iran from acquiring such weapons.

Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich said Israeli ground systems detected the drone, which flew over the Gaza Strip but did not originate there, Saturday morning. They alerted the air force, which scrambled the jets to intercept the aircraft. She said Israel was still trying to determine where the drone took off from. Nobody was hurt in the incident.

California Gas Prices May Hit Record

I checked over at my local Chevron station, and gas is still $4.70 a gallon, as I mentioned previously.

But today's front-page at the Los Angeles Times has another report on the skyrocketing prices. See, "State gas prices near record":

California drivers are reeling from days of sharp gasoline price increases that left the state within reach of its record high. Economists warn that a prolonged period of elevated gas costs could harm consumers as the holiday shopping season kicks in.

Analysts attributed the price surge to fuel traders' emotional reaction after a series of refinery outages and other problems, including a Northern California refinery fire, a Southern California refinery blackout, pipeline contamination and other events. Some service stations were charging more than $5 a gallon and others stopped buying new supplies out of fear that if the market turned they'd lose money.

"I haven't seen a series of incidents like this, and it has led to the worst panic-driven rise in gasoline prices that I have seen in 35 years," said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service.

Prices are likely to set records over the weekend, analysts said, but they held out hope that the pain could end soon as fuel production problems subside.

Unhappy motorists said they were caught off guard.

"I went to the Costco station in Pacoima to buy gas on Thursday and was shocked to find it closed," said Max Lang, 45, an engineer who lives in Stevenson Ranch. "I just don't get why it's happening."

Gwen Grace, a 37-year-old homemaker, searched Friday for a price cheaper than the $4.39 a gallon that the USA gas station in Santa Monica was charging. Other nearby stations wanted as much as $5.39, so she bought $20 worth for her Prius and hoped it would last until prices begin to drop.

"It's just depressing," Grace said.

Costco was set to reopen this afternoon, "Closed Costco gas stations to reopen by noon Saturday."

You can't really afford to go anywhere with prices this high. Demand might decline some over the next week,  so perhaps prices will ease. And California's reliably Democrat, so there's not likely to be much political fallout. But things can't keep going like this for too long, or you never know.

If Only He'd Had His Teleprompter!

The left's psychiatric breakdown has been off the charts this last few days (the Mile High altitude got to Obama, don't you know?). And you had to get a kick out of the deranged University of Wisconsin students arguing that O should have been able to use a teleprompter. See, "Obama Supporters Call for Moonbat Messiah to Be Allowed to Use Teleprompter During Debates."

I'm sure we'll have much more epic lulz over the next few weeks, but meanwhile, R.S. McCain's got a great post, "Epistemic Closure Redux: The Campaign, the Debate and the Jobs Report":

The Left’s reaction to Wednesday’s debate and Friday’s job report illustrates why the political conversation in America has become so hopelessly discordant. We are not arguing about two candidates or two parties, but two worldviews. Bad news for President Obama challenges the belief system of the Left; it is not enough for them merely to dispute facts, they must destroy the bearers of bad news — accuse them of deceit and ridicule them as fools.

RTWT.

IMAGE CREDIT: Stoaty Weasel.

Amit Freidman!

That last post on Sam Champion recalled some of my previous Amit Freidman blogging, for example, "Blogger Angry White Dude Announces That He Believes in the Sanctity of Marriage Between One Man and One Hot, Sexy Woman."

And besides, Amit's a lot better looking than Rubem Robierb. So there, you homofascist freaks!

GMA's Sam Champion Comes Out, Announces Engagement to Longtime Brazilian Fine-Arts Photographer Rubem Robierb

How gay.

Shoot, I had no idea Sam Champion was flaming. And that really spoils it! I have a hard enough time watching Good Morning America as it is!

See ABC News, "Sam Champion Engaged to Be Married."

Well, congratulations to the happy couple. And check out that link to ABC News. Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos can't contain themselves, they're so overcome with glee.

Actually, I'm reminded of the big gay marriage debate over the summer, and AWD's post, "HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS ADVOCATES ARE RUDE, CRUDE, IN-YOUR-FACE BRUTES!":

Homosexuals do not face discrimination. They just don’t get everything they want. They have become offensive bullies who have little decency or concern for how offensive their actions are. In this way, they are little different from the terrorists in the Occupy movement. If homosexuals don’t get their way (34 states have rejected gay marriage), they throw little angry, decadent tantrums designed to shock and nauseate decent people.

Homofascists are their own worst enemy. The buycott of Chick fil A by millions of decent Americans was a huge success. The homosexual kiss-in protest was a total failure. The American people are rising up against the bullying tactics of this small, loud groups of perverts. Why? No, it’s not hate and it’s not fear. IT’S BECAUSE NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T ACT LIKE THAT!

Gwen Stefani Steps Out in Sleek Black Jumpsuit as She Celebrates 43rd Birthday

Man, all these women in their 40s looking absolutely gorgeous.

See London's Daily Mail, "Fabulous at 43! Gwen Stefani looks youthful in a black jumpsuit as she celebrates her birthday with family dinner."

2012 Victoria Secret Fashion Show Airs December 4th

It's become a huge cultural event.

The Victoria's Secret homepage is here.

Reality Crashing Down on Obama and the Obama-Cult Media

From Andrew Klavin, at City Journal, "A Fantasy Election, an Imaginary Man":

Even before his inauguration, Barack Obama was an imaginary man, the creation of his admirers. Think back to the 2008 Time magazine cover depicting him as FDR, the Newsweek cover of the same year on which he was shown casting Lincoln’s shadow, or the $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”—this in 2009, less than a year after he had taken office. It was not that Obama had done nothing to deserve these outsized comparisons and honors—it was not just that he had done nothing—it was that he seemed for all the world to be a blank screen on which such hysterical fantasies could too easily be projected, a two-dimensional paper doll just waiting to be dressed in leftist dreams.

This weird quality of emptiness incited the imaginations of his opponents as well. Among the more paranoid on the right, he’s been called several kinds of Manchurian Candidate: a radical disguised as a moderate, a Muslim disguised as a Christian, a foreigner disguised as an American, and so on. The idea was that his hollow identity was his own insidious creation, the result of sealed college records, votes of “present” in the Illinois state senate, and a supra-partisan persona carefully crafted after a scuttled lifetime of revolutionary ferocity.

To be sure, Obama has disowned the depth of his past associations with such fire-breathing America-haters as William Ayers (“A guy who lives in my neighborhood”) and Jeremiah Wright (“He was never my spiritual mentor”) with startling insouciance. And such previous Obamas as the race-baiting, black-talking demagogue of a 2007 video recently covered in full for the first time by The Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson are not at all apparent in the Obama of the Oval Office or the campaign trail—whom he himself describes as a “non-threatening” statesman. But I think the real Obama has been more or less plain to see. Norman Podhoretz described him best in a 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed: a typical product of the anti-American academic left, committed to transforming U.S. capitalism into a social-democratic system like Sweden’s.

The mystery Obama—the hollow receptacle of out-sized fantasies left and right—is not a creation of his own making, political chameleon though he may well be. It emanates instead from a journalistic community that no longer in any way fulfills its designated function, that no longer even attempts the fair presentation of facts and current events aimed at helping the American electorate make up its mind according to its own lights. Rather, left-wing outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and the like have now devoted themselves to fashioning an image of the world they think their audiences ought to believe in—that they may guide us toward voting as they think we should. They have fallen prey to that ideological corruption that sees lies as a kind of virtue, as a noble deception in service to a greater good.

Theirs are largely passive lies and lies of omission. The active frauds—NBC’s dishonest editing of videos to reflect a leftist worldview, ABC’s allowing Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos to masquerade as a newsman, the Los Angeles Times’ suppressing even the transcript of the video in their possession that shows candidate Barack Obama at a meeting with a PLO-supporting sheik—these are only egregious salients of the more consistent, underlying dishonesty. The real steady-state corruption is revealed in the way Obama scandals like Fast and Furious, Benghazi-gate, and the repeated breaking of federal campaign laws have been wildly underplayed, while George W. Bush’s non-scandals, like the naming of Valerie Plame and the firings of several U.S. attorneys at the start of his second term, were blown out of all proportion.

And it is revealed in Obama’s blankness, his make-believe greatness, and the suppression, ridicule, and dismissal of any evidence that he is not the man this powerful media faction once wanted so badly for him to be...

VIDEO CREDIT: iOWNTHEWORLD.

Romney Gets a Post-Debate Jolt

Well, Romney seems to be upsetting the Obama-Media's narrative.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Online Donations, Bigger Crowds Gives Campaign Hope; Team Obama Looks to Mute Any Gains":

ABINGDON, Va. — Mitt Romney's strong debate performance Wednesday night has generated $12 million in online contributions, his campaign said, as well as a surge in volunteers and bigger crowds at his events.

The challenge for Mr. Romney in the weeks ahead will be translating this jolt of energy into votes in a race that saw the Republican nominee enter the first debate trailing President Barack Obama in most of the states that will decide the election.

Republicans and Democrats say Mr. Romney's performance before a television audience of some 67 million people bought the GOP nominee a second look from swing voters and may help him improve an image battered by negative ads and his own missteps. The debate also gave Mr. Romney a chance to do something he couldn't in the primary: trumpet his record of working with Democrats and present himself as a practical deal maker who favors results over ideology.

One former Obama White House official said the debate "has caused people to take a second look at Romney."

It is too early to tell how much Mr. Romney moved the needle Wednesday night, and the early evidence is more anecdotal than empirical: Volunteers in Nevada lined up before campaign staff could open the doors on Thursday morning, the campaign said, and larger-than-usual groups showed up to work at field offices across the country. The campaign said it added more than 300,000 new Facebook friends.

The $12 million the campaign reports raising in less than 48 hours after the debate tops the amount Mr. Romney raised in the days after announcing Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) as his running mate and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold a major plank of the president's health-care law. Sixty percent of the money came from first-time donors, the campaign said.

Mr. Romney's debate performance triggered additional volunteers for the GOP's next national turnout drive on Saturday. The number of people who signed up to volunteer to make calls, knock on doors and sign up supporters for Mr. Romney has shot up by nearly 63% since Wednesday night, campaign officials said. The Republican National Committee, working in conjunction with the Romney campaign and its various state parties, expects to contact nearly two million voters on Saturday and roughly five million for the week.

Mr. Obama and his campaign have moved to diminish any bounce Mr. Romney may have gained from the debate, which produced wide agreement among people in both parties that Mr. Romney had bested a lackluster president. At a rally in Fairfax, Va., on Friday, the president mocked Mr. Romney for threatening in the debate to give a pink slip to Big Bird.

More at the link.

And isn't that amazing, how the left turned the campaign into a referendum on Big Bird. That, and the across-the-board attacks on Romney as a "liar," when the biggest lie at the debate was the Democrats' bogus "5 trillion tax cut"whopper. See, "Oops! Stephanie Cutter admits she and Obama are lying liars with ‘$5 trillion’ attack on Romney."

PREVIOUSLY: "Mitt Romney Debate Bounce."

Smokin' Jennie Garth in People Magazine Cover Shoot

I'm looking at my wife's People Magazine and Jenna Garth looks fabulous. And what do you know? A video from the photo shoot:

Mitt Romney Debate Bounce

This report from Nate Silver is especially good, because it's from Nate Silver.

Must have been hard for him to write: "Oct. 5: Day After Debate, Strong Swing State Polls for Romney" (at Memeorandum). Silver couldn't believe what he was reading:

Another online tracking poll, from Ipsos, suggested a strong trend for Mr. Romney...

The Ipsos polls are confusing because it has released polls covering various time intervals in the past few days, but they tell a potentially interesting story if you work through them carefully.

In a poll of about 500 voters that Ipsos conducted immediately after the debate, late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, Mr. Obama still led by 5 points. However, Mr. Obama’s lead was just 2 points in a poll Ipsos released Friday, which included interviews from Monday night (before the debate) through Friday morning.

The inference I make from these Ipsos polls is that Mr. Romney must have polled very well in the most recent interviews it conducted, late Thursday and early Friday morning, quite possibly leading Mr. Obama, in order to have made up so much ground.

Yeah, he must have polled very well.

It's like the guy's writing a freshman political science term paper.

More at AosHQ, "BREAKING: Before/After Debate Poll Release."

Four Decades After Clashes, Boston Again Debates School Busing

Progressive social engineering run amok.

At the New York Times, "New Boston Busing Debate, 4 Decades After Clashes":

BOSTON — Nearly four decades after this city was convulsed by violence over court-ordered busing to desegregate its public schools, Boston is working to reduce its reliance on busing in a school system that is now made up largely of minority students.

Although court-ordered busing ended more than two decades ago, and only 13 percent of students in the public schools today are white, the school district buses 64 percent of its students in kindergarten through eighth grade to schools outside their immediate neighborhoods. The city tried twice in the last decade to change the system and failed both times.

“Children are being bused now because they have been bused for 40 years and no one has had the political courage to dismantle it,” said Lawrence DiCara, a former Boston city councilor who supported busing in the 1970s and is writing a book about the city in that era. “Now, there are no white kids to be integrated. Everyone is being randomly bused. It doesn’t make sense.”

In January, Mayor Thomas M. Menino asked school officials to come up with “a radically different plan” under which students would be assigned to schools as close to home as possible.

Boston’s 57,000-student school district is divided into three sprawling geographic zones. A racially blind computerized algorithm assigns students to schools anywhere within their zone. Many students go so far that transportation alone costs the city $80.4 million a year — about 9.4 percent of the school system’s operating budget, almost twice the national average.

But expense is not the only concern. Children who live on the same block often go to different schools. In the violence-torn Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood of Dorchester, school officials said, 1,912 students attend 102 schools out of 128 schools in the entire district. These include high school students, who are not limited by zone.

Under such a hodgepodge, the mayor and others argue, fewer people in a neighborhood are invested in the local school. And neither children nor parents develop the bonds that create a strong neighborhood and can improve other aspects of life, like public safety.

More at the link.

Eric Hobsbawm and the Details of History

From Bret Stephens, at the Wall Street Journal:

In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen called the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps "just a detail in the history of World War II." Explaining himself a few years later, the head of France's National Front said: "If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail."

Such remarks cemented Mr. Le Pen's reputation as Europe's leading fascist. So what was one to make of the reception accorded the publication, in 1994, of "The Age of Extremes," by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm?

The book—subtitled "a history of the world, 1914-1991"—was hailed as "bracing and magisterial" by the New York Times. "Facts roll off Hobsbawm's pages like thunderbolts," gushed the New Republic. But search the index, and the words "Holocaust" and "Auschwitz" never appear. Nazi concentration camps get about 10 or 15 lines. As for the Soviet gulags, Hobsbawm devoted exactly two paragraphs to them.

Hobsbawm, who died in London Monday at age 95, was no Holocaust denier. Nor was he ignorant of the human toll imposed by communism, the ideology to which he remained faithful nearly his whole life. He acknowledged that the victims of Stalin's tyranny "must be measured in eight rather than seven digits," adding that the numbers are "shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification."

Yet Hobsbawm did justify them....

None of this should have been surprising coming from a man who, over the years, gave his political assent to everything from the Nazi-Soviet Pact to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Asked by the BBC whether the achievement of a communist utopia would have justified "the loss of fifteen, twenty million people," he answered "Yes."

Yet what are we to make of the warmth with which Hobsbawm is now being eulogized? Only this: That the world is far from recognizing that the crimes of communism were no less monstrous than those of Nazism. In treating the gulag as a detail of his history, Hobsbawm proved himself to be the moral equivalent of Mr. Le Pen. And in treating Hobsbawm as a paragon among historians, his admirers prove they've learned nothing from history itself.

Leopard Kills Impala in Stunning YouTube Video

At London's Daily Mail, "The leopard that was hard to spot: Animal's stunning kill as impala runs straight towards camouflaged cat."

'List of Lies' — Daily Kos Handkerchief Truthers!

This is hilarious, "Did Mitt use crib notes for the debate?", and "Did Romney Cheat? - Vid - You Decide":

3:07 PM PT: Check out ericlewise and middleagedhousewife's screengrabs in the comments. Very interesting.

Via Memeorandum.

BONUS: From NewsBusters, "Ed Schultz on ‘Today’: Obama Thrown Off by ‘So Many Lies’ From ‘Corporate Shark’ Romney."

Man, these people need help.

Eastwood's Last Laugh: New Yorker Mocks President Obama With Empty Chair Cover

Ha!

President Empty Chair gets hammered at the New Yorker, "COVER STORY: THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE."

And at Twitchy, "Brutal: New Yorker cover depicts Obama ‘Eastwooding’ at debate podium."

Image Credit: London's Daily Mail, "Mitt Romney and the empty PODIUM: New Yorker magazine cover pokes fun at Obama's disaster debate (with apologies to Clint Eastwood)."

PREVIOUSLY: "In Debate, Empty Chair Draws a Blank on Second Term Agenda."

Black Teenager Punches, Knocks Out Bus Driver in Kansas City

It's not just a "teen." It's a "black teen." As long as society refuses to acknowledge black social pathology, there'll be increasing social disorganization and anarchy.

At The Blaze, "DISTURBING SURVEILLANCE VIDEO SHOWS TEEN SUCKER-PUNCHING, KNOCKING BUS DRIVER UNCONSCIOUS."