The Londoner

The recent fiasco in Libya and the manner in which President Obama’s media minions have abetted his deception provides an epitaph for the soon to be demised Obama administration: Four Americans died. Obama lied. The press complied. Republicans have been trying to highlight the terrorist attack on our Libyan embassy for weeks, but recognizing how damaging this episode was to Obama’s credibility, media coverage has been subdued. Who requested what security and when is important, but these things always appear obvious in hindsight.   Much more telling is the way our hyper-partisan press ignored how the administration initially attributed Benghazi to some YouTube video nobody watched. This was a fiction the press corps condoned. It took Team Obama two weeks before acknowledging that it was a well orchestrated terrorist attack. Blaming “The Innocence of Muslims,” yielded O

Moammar Gadhafi, left, arrives for an Arab Summit Conference in Rabat, Morocco, with Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser in December 1969, months after taking control of Libya in a bloodless coup. A year ago, Libyans celebrated the death of dictator Moammar Gadhafi . I wrote then that despite enormous challenges, the country's prospects were actually pretty good. Its small, relatively well-educated population and abundant oil wealth certainly gave it a leg up on neighboring Egypt, which has to make its transition under dire economic circumstances. Libya's path was never going to be easy, but its trajectory since Gadhafi's death has defied the worst predictions of chaos and civil war. The Transitional National Council, headed by Mahmoud Jibril, oversaw the first phase of transition. It managed to bring all of Libya's factions to the bargaining table, crafted an electoral law and hel

  Big Wall Street banks caused a financial crisis and brought the nation to the brink of economic collapse; President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act to punish those banks and end government bailouts of too-big-to-fail financial institutions. Gary Locke That’s what President Obama believes, at least. He said so when he signed Dodd-Frank into law on July 21, 2010: Wall Street banks long had tricked Americans with fine-print traps, opaque investment pitches, and “abusive practices in the mortgage industry,” but Dodd-Frank would foster transparency and competition, and “make sure that everybody follows the same set of rules.” Wall Street banks had used the threat of systemic financial collapse to extort bailouts from the public, but Dodd-Frank would ensure that “the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes.” Above all else, there would be “no dividing line

Jason Reed/Reuters (left); Evan Vucci/Associated Press President Obama addressed a crowd Friday at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan shared a laugh at an airport in Daytona Beach, Fla. WASHINGTON — With just over two weeks before voters head to the polls, the presidential campaigns are bearing down on the same swing states that have been the focus for the past year, but they are using different prescriptions for several battlegrounds. Mitt Romney hasn’t been to Wisconsin in the last 30 days, for example. But over about the same period his campaign has been outspending Obama there, $3.9 million to $2.9 million. In Virginia, the opposite is true. Romney has been there 11 times over the past 30 days — four for Obama — but is being outspent on the airwaves. Such moving pieces and differing strategies — along with a dizzying amount of information on matters such as early voting that

Our latest Pennsylvania poll conducted 10/11-10/13 and released by the Washington Examiner October 18 th shows Mitt Romney has taken the lead over President Obama by a 49-45 margin.  This automated poll, conducted with 1,376 likely voters, was conducted on behalf of the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania, and released publicly by the Pa GOP shortly thereafter.  This poll validates our last three publicly released polls showing the Keystone State as a tossup – including a pair of polls taken before the first televised presidential debate in Denver both showing the Keystone State was already in play even when other firms continued to suggest Obama would win by huge margins.  The fact of the matter is that Mitt Romney is winning Pennsylvania because he is winning the “jobs” argument.   Every statewide poll we have done the past three years shows Pennsylvanians want the economy fixed.  According to our latest polls, the economy continues to be cited as the most

MANCHESTER, N.H. — President Obama can make all the jokes he want about Mitt Romney ’s “binders,” but Obama’s the one in the bind. He’s tossed everything and the kitchen sink at Romney. He’s even thrown in Big Bird. Now he’s calling Mitt “sketchy” — a term women use to describe men who give them the willies. But scare tactics and one-liners won’t work anymore. Romney’s impressive performance in the first debate, and mostly solid showing in the second, has rendered Obama’s attacks mostly ineffectual. Even Obama’s perceived gift in this week’s debate — moderator Candy Crowley “fact-checking” Romney over his claim that the president never said the attacks in Libya were due to an “act of terror” — hasn’t had much impact. All the exchange did was ensure that the terror attacks would dominate the next few days of the campaign. The final debate Monday night is on forei

With only a few weeks remaining until the election, it’s still not clear how Mitt Romney would manage our jobs crisis. There aren’t many lessons from his term as the governor of Massachusetts — the economy was comparatively healthy back then, and the unemployment rate was fairly low. His current economic platform lays out broad principles (Principle No. 1: Don’t be Barack Obama) but is light on specifics. All that’s certain is that Romney has promised to use decades of business savvy to create jobs, which raises the question: how do you apply business strategy to a jobs crisis? No business views hiring as an objective. When a crisis hits, the response of many executives is to let workers go. When I put this question to business analysts, several pointed me in the direction of Louisiana, which has applied a number of Romney’s principles. Its governor, Bobby Jindal, is a former McKinsey & Company consultant who has focused on making his