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Poll: Romney 52, Obama 47; GOP holds House
The Weekly Standard
Monday, October 29, 2012
Blogs
Poll: Romney 52, Obama 47; GOP holds House
The bipartisan Battleground Poll, in its “vote election model,” is projecting that Mitt Romney will defeat President Obama 52 percent to 47 percent. While Obama can close the gap with a strong voter turnout effort, “reports from the field would indicate that not to be the case, and Mitt Romney may well be heading to a decisive victory,” says pollster Ed Goeas. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2Ah64r1Fo
Panetta protecting Obama on Benghazi
National Review Online
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Commentary
It seems obvious that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is trying protect President Obama from responsibility for the administration’s Benghazi response. The decision to outsource the call is still a presidential decision. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2Ah6U6Oe2
Terrorism 101 class asks students to plan attack
New York Post
Monday, October 29, 2012
News
It’s Terrorism 101. A New York University class on transnational terrorism is requiring students to “hypothetically plan a terrorist attack” — and shocked cops say the outrageous lesson plan is an insult to the officers killed on Sept. 11. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2Ah6iBHes

http://news.yahoo.com/us-seeks-algerias-support-possible-mali-move-124113234.html

ALGIERS: Algeria (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is seeking Algeria’s assistance for any future military intervention in Mali.

Algeria, North Africa’s most stable nation, is seen as a key and necessary contributor of intelligence — if not boots on the ground — to any effort to rout the al-Qaida-linked militants across its southern border.

With Algeria warming to the idea of a possible intervention, Clinton met Monday with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika (ahb-DUL’-ah-ZEEZ’ boot-uh-FLEE’-kuh) in Algiers. U.S. officials said Mali would be a key component of the talks.

The intervention plan right now would see Mali’s embattled government in the south and its West African neighbors taking the military lead against northern rebels, with the United States and European countries in support.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/why-our-forces-were-told-to-stand-down-in-benghazi/print/ To understand what went wrong in the Benghazi mission, it’s important to begin by looking at what was so unique about it. When the Islamist mobs began their September 11 rampage, they found embassies with high walls, heavy security and police protection. Even in Tunis and Cairo, where the Arab Spring Islamist regimes have […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/anti-wilders-mob-goes-mad/ The other day I wrote here about a Norwegian TV documentary – to use the term very loosely – in which Robert Spencer, the consummate Islam critic and expert, was expertly demonized. The program showed him in Stockholm last summer, addressing an outdoor audience from a platform. While he stood there in suit and […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/arming-jihadists-backfires-in-benghazi/print/ Over the weekend, the newest, and by far the most disturbing, revelations surrounding the Benghazi attack were revealed. Several sources have pointed to the possibility that a major CIA gun-running operation aimed at arming anti-Assad Al-Qaeda-affiliated forces was in danger of being exposed. If true, the information casts an even more devastating pall over […]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9639192/Europe-left-behind-as-shale-shock-drives-Americas-industrial-resurgence.html
Europe left behind as shale shock drives America’s industrial resurgence
The wonders of US shale gas continue to amaze. We receive fresh evidence by the day that swathes of American industry have acquired a massive and lasting advantage in energy costs over global rivals, demolishing assumptions about US economic decline.

Royal Dutch Shell is planning an ethane plant in the once-decaying steel valley of Beaver County, near Pittsburg. Dow Chemical is shutting operations in Belgium, Holland, Spain, the UK, and Japan, but pouring money into a propylene venture in Texas where natural gas prices are a fraction of world levels and likely to remain so for the life-cycle of Dow’s investments.

Some fifty new projects have been unveiled in the US petrochemical industry. A $30bn investment blitz in underway in ethelyne and fetilizer plants alone.

A study by the American Chemistry Council said the shale gas bonanza has reversed the fortunes of the chemical, plastics, aluminium, iron and steel, rubber, coated metals, and glass industries. “This was virtually unthinkable five years ago,” said the body’s president, Cal Dooley.

This is happening just as other clusters of manufacturing – machinery, electrical products, transport equipment, furniture, etc – are “re-shoring” back from from China to the US. A 16pc annual rise in Chinese wages over the last decade has changed the game. PricewaterhouseCoopers calls it the “Homecoming”.

The revival of the chemical industry is a spin-off from the greater drama of America’s energy rebound, though a very big one. As many readers will have seen, the US energy department said last week that the country will produce 11.4m barrels a day (b/d) of oil, biofuels, and liquid hydrocarbons next year, almost as much as Saudi Arabia.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203630604578070810408721722.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop The estate levy will rise to 55% in 2013 if Congress does nothing. For all the worry in Washington and Wall Street about the January tax cliff, almost no one is paying attention to the impending reincarnation of the death tax. This is one more tax increase that will live or die depending on […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443675404578056953261004898.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

‘American generals were managed very differently in World War Two than they were in subsequent wars,” writes Thomas E. Ricks, the former Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post. “During World War Two, senior American commanders were given a few months in which to succeed, be killed or wounded, or be replaced.”

Mr. Ricks rightly puts this policy down to Gen. George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1939 to 1945 and one of the chief architects of the defeat of the Axis. During World War II, 16 generals were relieved of their command out of the 155 who commanded divisions, as well as no fewer than five corps commanders. By contrast, the most senior soldier to be relieved during the eight years that the United States fought in Iraq after 2003 was a colonel, Joe Dowdy. “As matters stand now,” Mr. Ricks quotes another colonel saying, “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses his part in a war.”

It is Mr. Ricks’s contention—this is a highly contentious book—that American postwar generalship has been severely substandard not just in recent years but for much of the six decades separating Dwight Eisenhower from David Petraeus. The author writes in an engaging, informed way, but what he says amounts to a caustic assault on American postwar military leadership. He argues that, without the possibility of generals being relieved of command, “the Marshallian approach to leadership”—emphasizing a relentless expectation of success and unwillingness to accept anything less—”did not work nearly as well, as we were to see in Vietnam and Iraq.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/doctor-teen-mom-charged-premarital-sex-virgin-article-1.1192627 She was 29 weeks pregnant and still a virgin. That dubious diagnosis from a doctor in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, was presented at the trial of a 15-year-old girl who was accused of violating the country’s harsh Sharia laws against sex outside of marriage. The girl, identified only by the initials MM, was examined […]

http://news.yahoo.com/report-iran-drone-pictures-israeli-bases-093717698.html TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran has images of sensitive Israeli military bases taken by a drone that was launched by Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and downed by Israel earlier this month, a senior Iranian lawmaker claimed Monday in the latest boast from Tehran about purported advances in the capabilities of its unmanned aircraft. The announcement […]