It’s Friday, October 26th, 2012….but before we begin, we take a moment to note the passing of another member of the Glorious Few:

Oldest Battle of Britain pilot dies at 99

 

William Walker, whose poem is part of a national monument to his comrades in the Battle of Britain, has died at age 99. Walker, a Spitfire fighter pilot, was shot down and took a bullet in his right ankle on August 26, 1940, as British pilots engaged a German bomber force. His poem “Our Wall” is inscribed on the memorial on the Dover cliffs to the nearly 3,000 men who flew in the battle from June to October 1940.

The Flight Lieutenant had an incredible life, escaping death after plunging into the Channel as well as becoming a celebrated poet and dedicating his time to the memory of his friends and comrades who died in the war. Born in Hampstead, north London, after just five hours pilot training Mr Walker went into action in June 1940 with the 616 Squadron at Leconfield, East Yorkshire.

Active until the very end, despite the aches and pains associated with his advanced years, William had been planning to attend the Trust’s End of the Battle Gala Dinner in the presence of the Patron, HRH Prince Michael of Kent last Thursday but he suffered a stroke and was taken to hospital where he later died.

His absence was made even more poignant by the fact that in recent years it had become traditional for William to raise a toast to his fellow Battle of Britain pilots after reading his poem ‘Absent Friends’:

‘Those unwell and far away, Those who never lived to see, The end of war and victory, And every friend who passed our way, Remembered as of yesterday, It’s absent friends we miss the most, To all, let’s drink a loving toast.”

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, turning from the Glorious Few to the Un-credible One, as the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger reports, when it comes to The Obamao these days, there’s….

Suddenly, a Credibility Gap

Benghazi has damaged voters’ willingness to believe in Barack Obama.

 

Less than 14 days before the vote, Gallup has Mitt Romney leading the president by three points and in Rasmussen he’s up four. This paper’s poll brought Mr. Romney from chronically behind to even. Yes, 270 Electoral College votes will decide the race, but with the whole nation watching the same events, one has to ask whether what we’re seeing is Mitt Romney’s rise or Barack Obama’s decline.

It is conventional wisdom that incumbency breeds advantages. But incumbency also brings burdens, and the Obama candidacy looks like it’s buckling beneath one: Of the two candidates, the president is held to a higher standard of behavior.

There have been only two events that could be said to have caused significant movement by voters in the campaign. One was the Oct. 3 Denver debate in which Mitt Romney disinterred political skills that stunned the incumbent and woke up a sleeping electorate. Race on.

The other is Benghazi. The damage done to the Obama campaign by the Sept. 11 death in Benghazi of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American colleagues has been more gradual than the sensation of the Denver debate, but its effect may have been deeper.

The incumbent president has a credibility gap.

The phenomenon of a credibility gap dates to the Vietnam War and the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The charge then was that LBJ wasn’t leveling with the American people or Congress about Vietnam. The credibility gap was hardly the only thing that caused LBJ to withdraw from the 1968 election, but it eroded support for his presidency.

Credibility gaps can be unfair things. They generally involve difficult foreign affairs in which presidents possess information and realities never revealed to the general public, presumably for its own good. That may be what this White House believes about Benghazi. But it is also true that only this White House knows why it allowed the Benghazi disaster to drip though the news from September into October, with no credible account of the attack, even as reporters for newspapers such as this one got the story out. (Henninger is being VERY charitable!)

In time it was no surprise that people began to ask: Was the White House hiding something about an event of enormous gravity to protect the president’s candidacy? For much of the American electorate, that would be cause to start marking down a presidency.

Joe Biden didn’t help in the Oct. 11 veep debate (a month after the event) when he off-loaded responsibility on the intelligence services. Days later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to take responsibility at a conference in Lima, Peru. That didn’t still the doubts. Rather than hold a traditional press conference like presidents past, Mr. Obama on Oct. 18 talked at length on TV to Jon Stewart, a one-man press pool, who asked the president to clear up discrepancies in the administration’s account—”the perception that State was on a different page than you.”

At this point, the answer hardly mattered. The discomfort over presidential credibility on Benghazi put the Obama candidacy in a six-week downdraft. Barring an October surprise, nothing similar is affecting the Romney campaign.

Even by the standards of our celebrified culture, Barack Obama’s personalization of the American presidency has been outsized. He and his political team sought this aura. Hillary and the rest of the cabinet receded, while he rose. In Monday’s debate, Mr. Obama stumbled into a summation of his status: “This nation, me, my administration.” L’etat, c’est me.

Until now, it worked. Despite an awful economy, the president’s likability numbers held firm. Many wanted to believe in this larger-than-life president. His clumsy handling of Benghazi, however, has opened a gap in the president’s credibility. What else can explain Mitt Romney ascending in polls to equality with the president on foreign policy and terrorism before the last debate?

The discomfiture over Benghazi has spilled into other parts of his campaign. Among my top five events of the 2012 election will be that fellow in the town-hall debate who said, “I’m not that optimistic,” and asked the president to address what he’s doing about “everyday living” in America. He was asking the president he voted for why he should still believe. Mr. Obama diverted into telling him about ending Iraq and killing bin Laden. Instead of presidential assurance, he got talking points.

His weird, persistent vagueness about the shape of a second-term agenda has sown doubt about the economy going forward. Only now is that agenda being revealed, more or less, with a 20-page pamphlet, “The New Economic Patriotism.” A new Obama ad urges viewers to “read it.”

It may be that voters think both candidates have stretched the truth, but credibility is the coin of a presidency. The political cost of devaluing that coin is higher for an incumbent seeking a second term and higher still for this one. Two weeks from Election Day, Barack Obama has been shown in Benghazi to be a president with feet of clay. It may well take him down.

As James Taranto noted long ago, having never been forced to endure the least bit of scrutiny, engage in debate or defend his record, policies or positions….absent of course the comfort and active assistance of a pliant press and trusty teleprompter….it wasn’t a question of whether The Obamao would founder; like the Titanic, it was only a question of when.

And as Kimberly Strassel details, given the magnitude of the holes in The Dear Misleader’s record, the Titanic analogy becomes even more apropos:

A Chronic Case of Obamnesia

The president has left a long trail of flip-flops.

 

With 10 days until the election, Barack Obama’s latest strategy is to claim that his opponent has developed “stage 3 Romnesia.” Mitt Romney, the argument goes, is conveniently forgetting his real agenda, flipping his positions to better appeal to the electorate. Since Mr. Romney’s conservative base would surely disagree, this raises the question of whether the president isn’t himself suffering from a psychological malady that experts call “projection.”

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program”—Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama, June 2003.

“I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter”—President Obama, August 2009.

“Leadership means that the buck stops here. . . . I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit”—Sen. Barack Obama, March 2006.

“It is not acceptable for us not to raise the debt ceiling and to allow the U.S. government to default”—President Obama, July 2011.

“I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages”—Obama questionnaire response, 1996, while running for Illinois state Senate.

“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage”—Sen. Obama, November 2008, while running for president.

“It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married”—President Obama, May 2012.

“We have an idea for the trigger. . . . Sequestration”—Obama Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew in 2011, as reported in Bob Woodward’s “The Price of Politics.”

“First of all, the sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed”—President Obama, October 2012.

“If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election”—Sen. Obama, 2007.

“We’ve made the decision not to participate in the public financing system for the general election”—Sen. Obama, June 2008.

“I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign”—Sen. Obama, June 2008.

“The way Bush has done it over the last eight years is . . . [he] added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back. . . . That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic“—Sen. Obama, July 2008.

“I don’t remember what the number was precisely. . . . We don’t have to worry about it short term”—President Obama, September 2012, on the debt figure when he took office ($10 trillion) and whether to worry about today’s $16 trillion figure.

“[Sen. Hillary Clinton believes] that . . . if the government does not force taxpayers to buy health care, that we will penalize them in some fashion. I disagree with that”—Sen. Obama, Jan 2008, opposing the individual mandate for health insurance.

“I’m open to a system where every American bears responsibility for owning health insurance”—President Obama, June 2009, supporting the individual mandate.

“Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive”—President Obama, April 2009, in France.

“We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms”—President Obama, April 2009, in Trinidad and Tobago.

“Nothing Governor Romney just said is true, starting with this notion of me apologizing”—Barack Obama, October 2012, on whether he went on a global apology tour.

“The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel”—Sen. Obama, September 2008.

“Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years”—President Obama, January 2010.

“So if somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them”—Sen. Obama, January 2008, on his plans to financially penalize coal plants.

“Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution”—Sen. Obama, August 2008.

“Here’s what I’ve done since I’ve been president. We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years. Natural gas production is the highest it’s been in decades. We have seen increases in coal production and coal employment”—President Obama, October 2012.

“If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition”—President Obama, 2009.

“We’ve got a long way to go but . . . we’ve come too far to turn back now. . . . And that’s why I’m running for a second term”—President Obama, October 2012.

Anyone who’s followed our rantings for any length of time knows we mistrusted and disliked B. Hussein from the moment of first contact.  But nothing, absolutely nothing, we’ve seen or experienced thus far compares to the MSM’s outright lies and misstatements regarding The Obamao’s World Apology Tour.

The political cartoons alone confirm it happened:

Yet Obama and his MSM minions would seriously have the public believe it never happened.  Were we running either Romney’s campaign or American Crossroads, this would be already be the substance of an entire ad blitz.

Speaking of being blitzed, we can only hope a drunken stupor is the reason behind the most recent entry in our Idiots at Parade Rest segment:

Powell standing by Obama in 2012 presidential race

 

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a longtime Republican, is sticking with President Barack Obama in this year’s election. He says he respects Mitt Romney but thinks Romney has been too vague on a host of issues.

Speaking of Obama, Powell said the president got the United States out of Iraq and has laid out a plan for leaving Afghanistan “and didn’t get us into any new wars.” He praises Obama’s economic performance, saying that while difficult choices are ahead on taxes, spending and budgetary policies, “steadily, I think we’ve begun to come out of the dive and we’re gaining attitude.” Powell, a retired general, also formerly was a White House chief of staff and chairman of the military’s Joint Chief of Staffs.

Powell says that he’s still a Republican.

Thus Powell joins an ever-expanding list of military “leaders” who sold out their country for a man unfit to clean the boots of the least of these:

That’s “Colon”….with two “O”s!

Next up, Victor Davis Hanson offers the lesson Colon Powell refuses to learn:

What The Debates Taught Us

 

The president of the United States in the last debate chose to go on the attack against his challenger, Mitt Romney — and once again largely failed to convince the American people that he was the more presidential alternative.

But how did the once-messianic incumbent find himself in this fix of playing the catch-up role of a bar-room-brawling challenger rather than a calm and confident president? Despite running ahead in the polls for most of the year, Barack Obama has rarely achieved a 50 percent favorability rating, largely because of four years of dismal economic news. Obama himself had warned us four years ago that if he didn’t restore prosperity, he would be a one-term president — and the debates taught us that he was probably right.

Promises about halving the annual deficit, getting unemployment below 6 percent and increasing middle-class incomes were never met. The recent unrest in the Middle East and the killing of an American ambassador and three other Americans in Libya did not help convince anyone that Obama’s foreign policy was so successful that they could afford to overlook an anemic economy.

Yet the American people always wanted a viable alternative before they admitted their mistake and dumped a president whom they had voted in with such adulation in 2008. Obama sensed that hesitancy, and so he spent nearly $1 billion in a largely negative campaign to convince voters that Romney was insensitive to women, callous to the poor and, in general, a heartless, out-of-touch capitalist. The implicit message was that even if Obama’s first term had not worked out as promised, Romney would nevertheless be even worse. The lesser of two evils, not a successful four years, had replaced hope and change this time around.

But after three debates, voters at last got to know Romney. What they saw and heard was quite different from the villain of the attack ads. In the first encounter, even the pro-Obama media came away shocked that the supposedly aristocratic Romney proved more personable — and more knowledgeable — than the listless Obama. The president showed up as if the entire debate were a tedious chore — as if Romney could not possibly win the debate, and even if he did, it would have no effect on the media or on Obama’s steady lead in the polls. (Given the adulation heaped upon him up until then….for no discernable reason whatsoever other than his skin color and diction….who could blame him?)

Instead, Obama’s terrible 90 minutes set off a chain reaction, eroding the president’s lead in the critical swing states. In the fireworks of the second debate, with its town-hall format, Obama came out fiery and accusatory, and pulled off a tie or narrow victory based on his sheer aggression — or on the fact that he at least had improved upon his first losing debate performance.

The trick for Obama in the second outing was to show Americans that the first debate had been a freakish anomaly — and Romney really was the caricature that had been depicted during months of negative ads. Yet if Obama won tactically, he lost strategically through his combative demeanor and the very fact that Romney was not only still standing after three cumulative hours of head-to-head jousting, but gaining even more ground in the polls.

This week, the third and final debate offered Obama a last opportunity to convince the American people that at least on matters of foreign policy, Romney was either dangerous or ill-informed. That challenge also ensured that Obama would have to crowd into the final 90 minutes near-constant attacks to crack the calm Romney facade. Even or ahead in the polls, all Romney had to do in response was for a third time keep acting presidential and prove that his earlier displays of composure and competence were no flukes — a no-brainer strategy clear to anyone who had followed the first two debates.

That is precisely what Romney pulled off. As in the second debate, Obama might have done well enough to come away with a tie or even a narrow win on points, but he probably didn’t fare well enough to reverse his slide in the polls. If Obama sought to shatter Romney’s image as a compassionate and competent captain of industry, he more likely damaged his own once carefully crafted image as a nice guy.

So what did we learn from nearly five hours of verbal gymnastics? The image of competency and composure that Romney projected in the first debate was not altered by the second and has been confirmed by the third.

Presidential debates really do matter, and a few hours of engagement with Romney may have cost Obama what he had tried to ensure through six months of attack-dog campaigning. And so in the last 10 days of the campaign, Obama will have to return to negative advertising — a last hope to achieve through personal attacks what he couldn’t accomplish through public persuasion.

If voters conclude that Obama is desperate to demonize Romney in a way he could not in the fair match of the public debates, then Obama will probably lose the election.

Put another way….

Michelle, remember when you said you never really like living in Washington?!?

You’ll pardon us if we don’t wish you bon voyage; from where we sit, you’ve already enjoyed far too many trips on the taxpayer’s dime.  About $1.4 billion a year according to the latest estimate.

Meanwhile, way out West in the Land of Fruits & Nuts, Governor Moonbeam is at it again:

With schools as rallying cry, Gov. Brown wants high-taxed Californians to pay more

 

Heads union teachers get more pay; tails union teachers work less.  Either way, California’s children LOSE!

Already among the most taxed in the nation, Californians will have to pay even more if Gov. Jerry Brown gets his way. Faced with a $16 billion deficit, Brown is pushing a ballot measure next month known as Prop 30 that would increase taxes by up to 30 percent on those earning more than $300,000. Brown claims that unless voters pass the measure, dubbed the “millionaires tax,” he’ll cut the school year by three weeks to save money.

“It’s either massive cuts to the schools and colleges or the most blessed, the most well-off paying 1 or 2 or 3 percent more,” Brown told a group of supporters in Oakland. (Yeah, yeah, yeah; and you’ll have to cut policmen, firemen and public employee pension benefits….er,….forget that last one!)

With his proposal, Brown is taking a page from President Obama’s playbook, appealing to middle- and lower-income voters to tax higher-earning residents. But public policy expert Dan Schnur is not convinced it will work.

And it’s NOT because taxes are too low!

“It’s been almost 20 years since Californians went to the ballot and voted to increase their own taxes,” said Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. (Though this time they’ll be voting to raise other peoples’ taxes to maintain public union salaries and benefits!)”The decision for California voters is deciding, do we care enough about these services to pay more money for them? And before they can come to that point, they have to decide, even if we are willing to pay more money, do we trust the state government to spend it effectively?”

Brown said that if Prop 30 is voted down, “I’ll manage the best I can.” But he’s casting it as a simple choice between closing schools and asking the well-off to pay more. “I will tell you and I’m telling you the truth. Everything I’ve seen in my lifetime tells me that the schools need more money and that the people who we’re asking to pay can afford it,” he said.

Brown’s supporters, led by California teacher unions, have spent more than $40 million in advertising for Prop 30. Ads say “the plan asks the wealthiest to pay their fair share.”

Their “fair share” means the top 1 percent will pay up to 13 percent of their salary in state income taxes — or roughly one-half the state’s income tax revenue. Other top earners, even if they’re not in the 1 percent, could still face a slightly smaller tax hike. In all, Prop 30 affects roughly the top 400,000 of California’s 14 million individual income taxpayers — about 2.7 percent of the taxpayer population.

It also slightly raises the sales tax.

Just so we understand this; the top 1% pays 50% of the taxes, everyone, including the poor, pays a higher sales tax….and the public employee unions make out like banditos!  I think we’ve got it.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this instant classics from Shannon Wood:

Next up, another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:

Criminal probe opened over video showing Va. rep’s son discussing vote scheme

 

Local police in Arlington, Va., have opened a criminal investigation after a secretly recorded video showed the son of a Democratic congressman apparently advising someone who claimed to be looking for ways to commit voter fraud. In a brief statement, the Arlington County police department and attorney’s office said they were “aware” of the video “allegedly depicting” Patrick Moran, son of Virginia Rep. Jim Moran, “assisting another to vote illegally.” “The Arlington County Police Department has initiated a criminal investigation of this matter,” the statement said.

Patrick Moran has resigned from his father’s campaign in the wake of the video. Moran was secretly recorded by controversial conservative activist James O’Keefe’s group, Project Veritas. After Moran was approached, and at first resisted the questions, he did eventually give tips on how to forge ID’s — like a utility bill — to illegally cast ballots for 100 people he was told were not going to show up to vote.

This is one apple that didn’t fall far from the tree; directly underneath it to be precise.

And since we’re on the subject of criminals operating right under the noses of law enforcement, we give you speeding, Texas-style!

Car hits 220 MPH on new Texas highway

 

 

A Cadillac CTS-V has become the first car to break 200 mph on Texas’ new 85 mph highway. And the cops approve! But just this one time.

Hennessey Performance, builders of some of the fastest custom cars on the planet, including the 275 mph Venom GT, offered up one of their 1,200 hp Cadillac coupes to test the cameras fitted to the automated toll system on the brand new SH-130 toll road, which boasts the highest speed limit in the nation at 85 mph.

The run took place on Tuesday, the day before the highway opened to the public, on a closed stretch of the road south of Lockhart with safety crews ready at hand. With a professional test driver behind the wheel, the car passed by the cameras at over 180 mph which posed no problem for them getting a photo of its license plate.

Although it doesn’t issue speeding tickets, toll jumpers who don’t have the proper tag affixed to their car get a violation sent to them in the mail. Apparently it’s not just the law you can’t outrun, but also the DOT.

Of course, with all of that open road available the driver wasn’t about to slam on the brakes. Hennessey tells FoxNews.com that his man kept his foot in it for a full 1.75 miles, hitting a top speed of 220.5 mph. At that rate, he could’ve driven the entire length of the highway from San Antonio to Austin in just about 12 minutes.

Which just goes to prove, even at 180 mph, the eyes of Texas are still upon you.

Finally, in the Wide, Wild World of Sports….

UNC player plagiarized from 11-year-olds?

 

North Carolina’s academic scandal has hit a new low — literally. According to a report in the News and Observer, Erik Highsmith was caught plagiarizing from four 11-year-olds for a communications class in the spring 2011 semester.

Chapel Hill authorities evidently concluded Highsmith’s work was far too advanced for any Tar Heel athlete.  Rumors Highsmith has been offered an academic scholarship to USC remain unconfirmed.

Magoo