Obama team tries to lower expectations for debates

President Barack Obama's re-election campaign doesn't want to talk about what the Democrat is doing to prepare for the fall debates with Republican Mitt Romney. But aides are readily setting expectations - and not surprisingly, they want to keep them low for Obama while raising the stakes for Romney.
"While Mitt Romney has done 20 debates in the last year, he has not done one in four years, so there certainly is a challenge in that regard," Jennifer Psaki, Obama's campaign spokeswoman, said of the president on Monday.

With Obama edging slightly ahead of Romney in public polling seven weeks from Election Day, the three October debates could be one of the Republicans' best opportunities to break through with voters. But the high-profile events are just as crucial for Obama, who was an uneven debater during the 2008 Democratic primaries.

In that way, some of the Obama campaign's tactical lowering of expectations is also rooted in the truth. Aides say the structured - and time-limited - nature of the debates isn't a natural fit for Obama, who often is long-winded when answering questions during news conferences or town hall-style meetings.
Obama's campaign purposely has been vague about how he is getting ready for the debates and aides refused to discuss details of his preparations publicly.

But those preparations are well under way. Obama has held multiple practice sessions, some with Massachusetts Democrat Sen. John Kerry, who is playing the role of Romney. One of the president's practice spots is at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters a short drive from the White House.
Romney, on the other hand, has not hidden that he's been in the midst of intense debate preparation since early September. That's when aides announced that the GOP nominee would spend much of the week of the Democratic National Convention off the campaign trail huddling with advisers in private debate sessions.
Romney got started early in part to help him get accustomed to the one-on-one format he'll face next month. Most of his numerous debates during the GOP primary featured several other candidates.
The Republican nominee is doing timed, mock debates with Ohio's Republican Sen. Rob Portman playing Obama. Longtime adviser Peter Flaherty is standing in as the moderator, asking questions about both domestic and foreign policy.

Top Romney advisers, including strategist Stuart Stevens, longtime aides Eric Fehrnstrom and Beth Myers, and senior adviser Ed Gillespie, then dissect the sessions.
Among the locales Romney has picked for debate preps are a friend's home in rural Vermont and a Marriott hotel in Burlington, Mass. Obama may also practice at the presidential retreat at Camp David, besides using DNC headquarters.

Obama's campaign has tried to use Romney's intense public preparations to ramp up expectations for the Republican.
"We know that Mitt Romney and his team have seemed to prepare more than any candidate in modern history," Psaki told reporters traveling with Obama in Ohio on Monday. "They've made clear that his performing well is a make-or-break piece for their campaign."
Romney's campaign countered Monday by noting that the president will be the only one on the debate stage in November with experience in three general election debates.
But the Republican nominee, a former Massachusetts governor, has tried to tamp down expectations, too.

During a Friday night flight to Boston, Romney and Portman walked to the back of the airplane to offer birthday greetings to two reporters covering his campaign. "Can you tell us a little bit about debate prep? How's he doing?" a reporter asked Portman. The senator replied, "He's doing great."
Romney, laughing, quickly interjected. Turning to Portman, he said: "Say nothing more."

The candidates will meet for three debates: a domestic policy debate in Denver on Oct. 3; a town hall-style debate in Hempstead, N.Y., on Oct. 16, and a foreign policy debate in Boca Raton, Fla., on Oct. 22.

Vice President Joe Biden and GOP running mate Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will meet for one debate in Danville, Ky., on Oct. 11 that will touch on both domestic and foreign policy issues.

Humor alert, “M.C. Obama’s ‘U Didn’t Build That’” edition

 Stop…Obama time!

Separated at Birth?

As the Chicago teachers strike enters its second week, another lookalike has been found for the personification of greedy, lazy, utterly unreasonable teacher’s unions, Karen Lewis:

                                                    

Another graphic,  — note which teachers work the fewest hours:

Chicago teachers also get the highest pay. Plus their state is going bankrupt. But none of that will put the brakes on the runaway greed of public sector unions, which are devouring the country from within like a monstrous tapeworm. Even while sending their own children to private schools at a rate of 39% due to the inferior quality of their own instruction, Chicago teachers will not settle for anything less than a 30% increase on their already grotesquely extravagant salaries.
For anyone who thinks they are only being greedy on behalf of the 400,000 children they are walking out on, this graphic shows where the money goes; it’s an Illinois State Board of Education pension chart:

This shows a pension liability of almost $1 billion for the top 100 overpaid educrats in Illinois. But so long as someone else can be forced to pay for it, it will never be enough.

  

For Barack Obama, 'Defending Islam' Now Supersedes Our Constitution

Some pictures really are worth a thousand words.

The man above being taken in by Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies for an 'interview' in the dead of night from his Cerritos, California home is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the Egyptian Coptic Christian allegedly behind the film 'The Innocence of Muslims' that the Obama Administration is seizing on as the spontaneous cause of the riots in the Muslim World that resulted in the death of four Americans at the U.S. consulate. And never mind that even the perpetrators are denying it, and that the coordinated attacks were obviously planned in advance.

In pursuit of selling this White House narrative, something insidious has happened.

The Muslim Brotherhood governments in Tunisia and Egypt as well as Islamist voices elsewhere have been calling for legal prosecution in America of those behind making this execrable film, which consists of little more than a few amateurish YouTube segments.

In the world they live in, the police showing up on someone's doorstep in the middle of the night to take them in for questioning has an entirely different meaning and context then it does to us. To the eyes of the Muslim world, the U.S. is beginning to enforce the blasphemy laws to exempt Islam from criticism that they have been so pushing hard for in the United Nations and other international forums.

President Obama famously said both in his 2009 interview with al-Arabiya and in his speech in Cairo in front of the Muslim Brotherhood that he regarded it as one of his chief duties as president to defend Islam and "to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear."

This president has now gone beyond merely appeasing Islam to prosecuting its blasphemy laws for it against the infidels as a craven response to violence and murder. And that's exactly how the Muslim world will see it.

As an added bit of lagniappe, you might remember that just two months ago, Thomas Perez, the Obama Department of Justice's Assistant Attorney general refused to deny that the Obama Administration would seek to criminalize any criticism of Islam, a highly relevant question in view of some of his own remarks on the subject:



Does anyone seriously doubt that there will be an attempt to legalize enforcement of the Islamic world's blasphemy laws here in America in President Obama's second term, should he be re-elected?

Whatever the virtues or faults of this shoddily produced film, it is definitely constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment. Over the years, the Supreme Court has only defined limits on free speech where it contains a direct call for violence against others ( the Qu'ran, by the way, fails this test) or when it constitutes an immediate and clear danger to others ( the famed 'shouting fire in a crowded theater' argument so loved by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes).

The Last Temptation of Christ was a mainstream movie that was far more blasphemous and angering to Christians than this collection of YouTube skits is for Muslims, yet no one even suggested having law enforcement arrest the film maker and take him in for an 'interview'. This is about appeasement and fear. And it will only up the ante next time.

President Obama has been notable in his cavalier disregard for our Constitution, but this is something new and very dangerous.

Will the American people allow it to stand? We'll see.