Canada's Left-Wing Liberal & New Democratic Parties on the 'Wrong Side of History'?
Face Veil Controversy Rocks Canada's National Elections.
Camille Paglia writes: Why has the U.S., the cradle of modern democracy, never had a woman president?
Incredulous young feminists, watching female heads of state multiply from Brazil and Norway to Namibia and Bangladesh, denounce this glaring omission as blatant sexism. But there are systemic factors, arising from the Constitution, popular tradition, and our electoral process, that have inhibited American women from attaining the highest office in the land.
The U.S. president is not just chief executive but commander-in-chief of the armed forces, an anomaly that requires manifest personal authority, particularly during periods of global instability. Women politicians, routinely focused on social welfare needs, must demonstrate greater involvement with international and military affairs.
Second, the president has a ceremonial function, like that of the British royal family, in symbolically representing the history and prestige of the nation. Hence voters subliminally look for gravitas, an ancient term describing the laconic dignity of Roman senators. The president must project steadiness, sober reserve, and deliberative judgment. Many women, who tend to talk faster and smile more than men, have trouble with gravitas as performance art.
Third, the complex, coast-to-coast primary system in the U.S. forces presidential candidates into well over a year of brutal competition for funding and grass-roots support. Their lives are usurped by family-disrupting travel, stroking of rich donors, and tutelage by professional consultants and p.r. flacks. This exhausting, venal marathon requires enormous physical stamina and perhaps ethical desensitization to survive it.
John Hayward writes: The 2016 presidential race has only just begun, and we already have an unforgettable image for the history books: a pack of salivating reporters racing after Hillary Clinton's taxpayer-funded "Mystery Machine" van, like a flock of pigeons chasing after scattered birdseed.
Conservative humorist Iowahawk dubbed it "the stampede of the majestic North American Throne-Sniffers." The Washington Free Beacon spliced in the theme music from the old Benny Hill comedy show to create the perfect viewing experience.
There's another image I would submit for the history books: Hillary's campaign gearing up to use an old publicity still of then-SecState Clinton using a Blackberry.
Here's the thing, Media – it's your job to remind Americans that Hillary's under a thick cloud of scandal, and may end up under indictment, for running the off-the-books email server she was plugged into with that BlackBerry. It's your job to remind American voters, over and over again, that Clinton jeopardized national security and deliberately violated transparency laws by doing this, and when she got caught, she looked the American people right in the eye and lied extravagantly and demonstrably about setting up her shadow server because she didn't want to carry two portable electronic devices to check her mail.
That's not a Republican "talking point" – it's crucial to who Hillary Clinton is, and how she views herself in relation to the Little People. It says more about her arrogant view of the proletariat and disdain for accountability than a hundred speeches. She hasn't "addressed" or "dealt with" the email scandal, and it's not "old news." In fact, we're just learning today that Clinton was directly asked if she was running a private mail server by Congress in 2012, and both she and her Department blew off the question.
That's not okay, no matter which party the Secretary of State belongs to, and which party is running either or both houses of Congress. And it's highly relevant to the question of whether such an individual can be trusted with any important government job, let alone the presidency.
YES! YES! YES! RUN, LIZ, RUN!
Democrats are dead in the land of Dixie.
With the fall of three-term Sen. Mary Landrieu Saturday, Louisiana will not have a Democratic statewide elected official for the first time since 1876. And the Republican Party will control, as the Associated Press noted, every Senate seat, governor's mansion and legislative chamber from the Carolinas to Texas.
Congress' last white Democrat in the Deep South didn't lose because of a superior opponent, but because of her association with a deeply unpopular President and a health-care law that destroyed the chances to extend other Democratic dynasties this cycle, including Georgia's Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn.
UNROCK The VOTE: Celebrities Are Less Likely to Vote in Midterms, Just Like Us!
At least five who appeared in the PSA — "Girls" actress Lena Dunham, comedian Whoopi Goldberg, "Orange is the New Black" actress Natasha Lyonne, "Rich Kids of Beverly Hills" star E.J. Johnson, and actor Darren Criss — did not vote in the last midterm, records from Los Angeles County and New York City show.
Republicans are turning the Democrats' own playbook against them.
Two years after Democrats held the White House by painting Mitt Romney as a callous plutocrat, the GOP is borrowing a page from the same populist playbook. In close contests around the country, Republicans are hoping to gain an edge in the battle for control of the Senate by hammering Democrats as the party of the rich.
Guy Benson reports: For the fifth time in six years, Barack Obama missed his budget deadline — and for the sixth time in six years, the spending blueprint he eventually produced never comes close to balancing. The Washington Post previewed Obama's budget last month, noting that the White House would peddle it as an end to America's "era of austerity." That's rich. Under this president, the federal government has spent more money annually than at any other time in US history.
Annual deficits have ranged between $500 billion and $1.4 trillion. Prior to Barack Obama's presidency, the United States had never racked up a single trillion-dollar annual shortfall. On his watch, Washington has done so four times. The Congressional Budget Office projects that on our current trajectory, we'll hit $1 trillion again within eight years. Various fact-checkers have confirmed that among his many predecessors, President Obama is the "undisputed debt king," having added more than $6 trillion to the nation's red ink since taking office in 2009. In his first campaign, Obama called President Bush "unpatriotic" for amassing more than $4 trillion in gross national debt over two full terms in office.
DEMOCRATIC BASE THRILLED, ELECTION-YEAR SHOWBOATING AT IT'S FINEST. FIVE STARS!
Aaron Blake writes: For Mitt Romney, the 2012 election was held about a year too early.
Romney would hold a slight lead on President Obama if the 2012 election were replayed today, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The poll of registered voters shows Romney at 49 percent and Obama at 45 percent in the rematch, a mirror image of Romney's four-point (51-47) popular-vote loss in 2012.
Obama's shifting fortunes, of course, come as his signature health-care is increasingly embattled — both thanks to a glitchy Web site and a broken promise by Obama to allow people who like their insurance to keep it.
October 24, 2012 9:24 P.M.
Let the pre-criminations begin! Clive Crook asks why on earth Obama ceded the center to Mitt Romney by running a class-warfare-based campaign. Crook sees Obama as a centrist mysteriously cowed by his party's leftist base. I think we can clear this mystery up. Obama ran a leftist class-warfare campaign because…well, he's a leftist class-warrior.
I've been struck by commentators on both right and left treating Obama's leftist campaign as a matter of strict necessity. For a couple of years, conventional wisdom has held that the weak economy left Obama little choice but to turn this into a base election. Then conventional wisdom was upended by the conventions. Bill Clinton's questionable but effective attempts to exonerate Obama from economic blame could easily have been combined with a centrist campaign–and presidency. Obama's class-warfare campaign was a choice, not a necessity. But to see that is to suggest that Obama is a leftist by conviction, and many have been reluctant to do that.
An Ohio county's director of elections has resigned because he says work on the coming presidential election was too stressful.
The Dayton Daily News reports ( http://bit.ly/QwGPJb) that Miami County elections director Steve Quillen cited "the stress of the upcoming presidential election" in his decision.
The county election board accepted Quillen's resignation Friday, just weeks before the election. He is a Republican so the county Republican Party in the key presidential battleground state will recommend his successor.
The county had experienced delays in getting absentee ballots to voters, but the board chairman says that played no part in Quillen's departure.
A Republican on the board said the shuffle won't affect the integrity of the election.
The board asked Quillen's deputy to contact the state elections chief for help.
On October 2, the day before the first debate, Mitt Romney trailed Barack Obama in the Real Clear Politics poll average by 3.3 percentage points. Today, just before the second debate, Romney led by 0.4 points—almost a 4-point swing in two weeks. What now?
Probably, not much for the next few days. Obama may have stopped Romney's momentum, but its hard to believe he reversed it. So were likely to have a dead-even race going into the third and final debate Monday night. That potentially decisive debate is on foreign policy. So, after all the talk about how this election was inevitably and only going to be about the economy, foreign policy could well be the tie breaker.
Foreign policy isnt Romneys natural subject. Its not his comfort zone. And its always more difficult for the challenger. Good. Romney will have to rise to the occasion. He should be able to make the case against Obamas foreign policy, and for his alternative. It isn't unreasonable that he be asked to. After all, within months after being sworn in Romney or Obama will have to make important decisions on Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran.
So if Romney cant win the foreign policy debate, he probably wont win. If he can, if he rises to the challenge, hell deserve victory, and hell probably achieve it.
I expected "table-pounding atmospherics" from Biden but I didn't expect him to act like a total jackhole for fully 90 minutes. Give him credit for knowing his target audience, though: His task tonight was to get the left excited again after Obama fell into a semi-coma in Denver, and evincing utter disdain for Ryan — grimacing, shouting, laughing inappropriately, and constant, constant interruptions, the total jackhole experience — is just what the doctor ordered. He might have irritated independents and undecideds, but probably not so much that it'll change people's votes. The Democrats needed someone to go out there and clown for liberals, and if there's one thing this guy knows, it's clowning.
Here's a taste of what I mean via Mediaite, centered around one of Ryan's more cutting lines of the evening. For what it's worth, the media lost patience with Biden's shtick too, but I doubt that'll cost him anything tomorrow.
Update 10:50 p.m.: According to the Associated Press, Venezuela's electoral council has declared that Hugo Chavez beat Henriques Capriles in Sunday's presidential election with about 54 percent of the vote, despite exit polls showing otherwise.
Venezuela Twitter users have claimed Chavez's victory was wrought with election fraud, and that the socialist incumbent president sent tanks into the streets of his country as those exit poll reports showed him losing. A picture of the tanks surfaced on Twitter Sunday evening.