Romney Wins the Three-Way Debate at Hofstra

Published October 17, 2012 | By Iowadawg

From Janice Shaw Crouse at American Thinker:

Not only did President Obama come into the second presidential debate more aggressive and prepared, but he brought a secret weapon — the moderator, Candy Crowley. At two pivotal moments, Ms. Crowley, typically a relatively fair reporter, showed her bias and changed the course of the debate.

First, she backed up Mr. Obama’s assertion that he had called the attacks at Benghazi a “terrorist attack” in a Rose Garden event on the day after the tragedy. (After the debate, she reversed her assessment and stated that she was in error.) Second, she consistently let Obama stay two minutes ahead of Mr. Romney in terms of time, and at the end of the debate, Obama had a full three-minute advantage. In addition, at the end of the debate, Crowley gave Obama the last two minutes for a peroration where he gave new arguments (including the “47 percent”) without fear of rebuttal.

Further, throughout the debate, Crowley thanked Obama for his remarks with a very deferential “Thank you, Mr. President”; she merely turned away from Romney at the end of his time. Thus, the town hall-style format ended up being a three-way debate, with Romney facing two opponents.

Even against those odds, Romney came away the winner. Obama improved his performance and clearly was more engaged in the second debate, but at best, he tied Romney on content and lost significantly on delivery and style.

In the debate training sessions prior to the second debate, Obama’s team worked to make him more aggressive and willing to confront Romney, while the Romney team worked to get their candidate to be empathetic, to show the dramatic differences between the two men, and to clarify the critical choice facing voters in just three weeks. Obviously, Obama learned his lessons well: he was aggressive and confrontational. Likewise, Romney presented the choice facing voters in clear and unequivocal terms and with an empathetic manner toward the audience and a respectful tone toward the president — even though he pointed out their differences quite aggressively. Romney spoke in a low-pitched tone of voice, seemed in control, and appeared level-headed as he hammered home the president’s dismal record over and over again and constantly brought the focus back to unemployment, the unprecedented accumulation of debt, the frightening increases in the deficit, and the need for job-creation and a simplified tax code.

As the two candidates for president entered the debate, Romney had the wind at his back; Romney’s poll numbers are surging, and he is the man with momentum, while Obama is struggling.

Pundits agreed that it was a make-or-break event for the president. In that sense, Obama did well; he did not turn in another abysmal performance. He was prepared and seemed confident; he had his usual rapport with the audience and seemed energetic and focused. His high-pitched voice, though, revealed his tension, anger, and lack of control; he came across as whiny and touchy. His constant refrain accusing Romney of lying was annoying, especially when accompanied by his air of superiority and condescension. In contrast, Romney pointed out several areas where the two candidates agreed, and even when they passionately disagreed, Romney was respectful of the president.

The media kept talking in the run-up to the debate about the necessity for the president to “bring women home” from their defection to Romney after the first debate. So the two men spent an inordinate amount of time talking about women. The tone and confrontational manner of the second debate, though, was not female-friendly and defeated any attempt to draw women to anyone’s side. Romney did score points, however, by pointing out that in the past four years, over 580,000 women have lost jobs, and 3.5 million more women are in poverty. The two candidates physically invaded each other’s space and directly contradicted each other to the point of discomforting the immediate audience as well as those viewing on television.

Obama continued his hackneyed attacks on Romney, calling him a hypocrite and a liar over and over again. He repeatedly echoed the phrase “What Mr. Romney just said isn’t true.” He also continued the race and class warfare that has characterized his campaign — and indeed, his administration — to the effect that Romney favors the rich over the middle class and disdains the poor. Romney, for his part, continued to focus on the fact that Obama’s policies have “crushed the middle class” and that his experience throughout his business and political career has proven that he knows how to turn bad economic circumstances around.

Obama was never able to adequately defend his record, nor did he present a vision or plan for his second term that would reverse the dismal litany of failures that Romney cited in a long monologue that detailed specific ways in which Obama’s policies have led to crushing the middle class.

Terrorist attempts to blow up Federal Reserve Bank

From the NY Post:

A terrorist tried to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan with a 1,000-pound bomb this morning, authorities said.

Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, parked a van filled with what he thought were real explosives outside of the Liberty Street building, sources said, then tried to set them off using a cell phone detonator.

Nafis obtained 20 50-pound bags of explosives from an undercover FBI agent that he met on the Internet, authorities said.

In a statement meant to take responsibility for the attack, Nafis said he wanted to “destroy America,” by targeting its economy.

He quoted “our beloved Sheikh Osama bin Laden,” to justify the fact that he expected to killed women and children, the Department of Justice said.

Nafis is a Bangladeshi national who is here on a student visa, a law-enforcement source said.

He came to the US to carry out a terror attack, authorities said, and claimed to have connections to al-Qaeda overseas.

He tried to recruit more terrorists to carry out an attack — in the process, he unwittingly enlisted the help of an undercover FBI agent.

The agent made contact with the jihadist about three months ago. The suspect told him that he wanted to blow up the bank, the sources said.

More here.

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Anderson Cooper: GOP shill!

Oh NO!! A reporter walked off the liberal reservation! EVERYONE PANIC!

Over at the Democratic Underground, where liberals get together to scowl about the success of their socio-economic betters, pandemonium erupted when CNN’s Anderson Cooper saying Candy Crowley wasn’t being honest about her mid-debate fact-checking. Of course, they inherently understand that their stranglehold on their dim-witted base depends on a complicit media reporting only what is pleasing to their Master Obama, so naturally, panic ensued:

Read all this HERE.

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ACA: The More You Know, the More You Hate

(known as obamacare)

Everyone remembers Nancy Pelosi’s famous words about the Affordable Care Act (ACA): “We have to pass the health care bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Since January 2010, when the ACA was signed into law, we have gradually discovered what’s in it. What we are finding is not what we want and certainly not what was advertised.

Every expansive promise made by the president for his signature legislation has been shown to be smoke and mirrors. Though touted as healthcare reform (change for the better), the ACA is more accurately described as Obama’s Act of Healthcare Exacerbation (change that makes things worse).

A new study by the Pioneer Policy Institute in Massachusetts adds number 10 to the list (below) of reasons why Americans hate the ACA.

1. First, there was the way ACA was rammed down our throats. Arm-twisting, phony statistics, bribery, for-show executive orders, deferred implementation, and outright lies were all used to get the ACA passed against the will of We The People, even with a Democrat-controlled Congress.

2. Then there is a mandate that absolutely wasn’t a tax until SCOTUS said it wasn’t commerce. Therefore, it had to be a tax — on the middle class, no less.

3. The ACA would cover all Americans who had no health insurance — i.e., 45 million…until the president discovered that 12-15 million of those uninsured Americans were illegal residents. Presto! Forty-five million instantly became 30 million.

4. Illegal residents weren’t covered, then maybe they were, and now they are exempt, for sure. Illegals are the leading users of ERs, where they receive mandated-but-uncompensated care: free to them but costing roughly $2,500 per year per tax-paying family.

5. The ACA will save money, promised Nancy Pelosi with a broad smile. In fact, the ACA will cost one to 2.7 trillion dollars. That is more than has been spent so far on the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That is money — dollars we don’t have — which the ACA will spend on bureaucracy, not on patient services.

6. “Health exchanges will save money through the use of free market forces.” Yet the government (ACA) controls both supply and demand, making the market in healthcare totally controlled — the opposite of “free.”

7. “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” promised President Obama over and over. Not true. Under the ACA, doctors cannot afford to care for Medicare- and Medicaid-covered patients. So even though your doctor wants to care for you, if you have government insurance coverage, your doctor cannot “keep” you.

8. Exemptions: if the ACA is good for us, why are there over 1,400 exemptions granted, including foro Congress and the White House, various unions and selected businesses, 40% of the uninsured (per J. Gruber of MIT), and Muslims? Why is one religious group exempt? Aren’t all Americans equal under the law regardless of “race, religion, or country of national origin”?

9. The IPAB (Independent Payment Advisory Board) is in fact the “death panel” that Sarah Palin was lampooned over. By establishing what it won’t pay for, the IPAB makes those treatments unavailable. If you need a therapy deemed “not cost-effective,” you die…by government decision.

10. Now we have an addition to this list: another disingenuously titled component of the ACA called the “Cadillac Tax,” which is a con, a scam in savior’s clothing.

The Cadillac Tax is an excise tax: one levied on the amount of business done. The ACA penalizes (taxes) insurance plans where health benefits exceed $10,200 for an individual and $27,500 for a family. If you think these are benefits needed only by billionaires and members of Congress, you haven’t seen hospital bills for having a baby or removing a gallbladder, much less for heart surgery.

The Cadillac Tax level of coverage applies to any profession that has robust healthcare benefits, like construction workers, teachers, police, and most public workers. Indeed, it is estimated that over half of all individuals having private, employer-provided insurance plans will be subject to this tax rather than only the “super, gold-plated Cadillac” top one percent, as asserted by the president.

The Pioneer Policy Institute has calculated the average cost of the excise tax on a middle school teacher ($2,081 per year), a police patrol officer ($5,391 per year), and a small business owner ($8,690 per employee per year). Nationally, business leaders say this last is a huge damper on economic growth. The ACA excise tax is quite clearly a middle-class tax, not “Cadillac” at all, and a job-killer to boot.

Romney Wins the Three-Way Debate at Hofstra

Terrorist attempts to blow up Federal Reserve Bank

ACA: The More You Know, the More You Hate

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