As Jonathan Chait pointed out, health care reform is going to be around a long time. The GOP short-term surge will not. - PD#119

Embassy Protests Spread To Other “Arab Spring” Nations. “Yesterday I wrote that this looks like 1979 all over again. Today, we’re seeing the same diplomatic impotence displayed in that awful year, and the inevitable result. Thirty-three years ago, we got pushed out of the Persian Gulf; today, we’re getting pushed out of North Africa. Three years ago, President Obama assured us that his speech in Cairo would change the world, and eighteen months ago gave himself credit for the Arab Spring by citing that very speech. Ever since that speech took place, the American position has eroded in the Middle East, and it’s eroding rapidly now. We may not be able to retain embassies in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt any longer; we certainly can’t fly the flag above them securely at the moment.”

Good thing we don’t have some dumb cowboy in charge of this stuff, isn’t it? - Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit

MITT ROMNEY: No, that’s not what I propose. And, of course, part of my plan is to stimulate economic growth. The biggest source of getting the country to a balanced budget is not by raising taxes or by cutting spending. It’s by encouraging the growth of the economy. So my tax plan is to encourage investment in growth in America, more jobs, that means more people paying taxes. So that’s a big component of what allows us to get to a balanced budget.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But his study, which you’ve cited, says it can only work if you take away those deductions for everyone earning more than $100,000.
MITT ROMNEY: Well, it doesn’t necessarily show the same growth that we’re anticipating. And I haven’t seen his precise study. But I can tell you that we can lower our rates–
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, you cited the study, though.
MITT ROMNEY: Well, I said that there are five different studies that point out that we can get to a balanced budget without raising taxes on middle income people. Let me tell you, George, the fundamentals of my tax policy are these. Number one, reduce tax burdens on middle-income people. So no one can say my plan is going to raise taxes on middle-income people, because principle number one is keep the burden down on middle-income taxpayers.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Is $100,000 middle income?
MITT ROMNEY: No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less. So number one, don’t reduce– or excuse me, don’t raise taxes on middle-income people, lower them. Number two, don’t reduce the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest. The top 5% will still pay the same share of taxes they pay today. That’s principle one, principle two. Principle three is create incentives for growth, make it easier for businesses to start and to add jobs. And finally, simplify the code, make it easier for people to pay their taxes than the way they have to now.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But you and Congressman Ryan, you’re going to hold the line. You’re not going to put out any more detail on what kind of deductions you’re willing or loopholes you’re willing to close in order to pay for these tax cuts?
MITT ROMNEY: You know, I had chance of being a governor and fighting for things I believe in as a governor. And I’ve found that you have to work with the people across the aisle. My legislature was 87 percent Democrat. So if I’d have come out and said, “Here this is my bill. This is the way I want it,” you’d never get it done.
You lay out your principles. Those are my principles, don’t raise taxes on middle-income people, make sure the high-income people pay the same share they’re paying today, encourage growth by bringing down rates, and finally simplify the code. Those are my principles. I’ll stick with them. And I believe that’s going to help get the economy going and grow jobs.

Libya Breached.

Now the Tunisia embassy is breached.

Germany's embassy in Somalia breached and burned.

Walls in Sudan embassy breached.

USA embassy in Egypt walls breached.

USA embassy in Yemen has walls breached

Schoen pointed out that the Pew poll was based on Democrats sampled for having an 11 percent voters registration edge over Republicans. He further added, “saying that America has gotten more Democratic than 2008, which is a questionable assumption.”

In fact, Rasmussen keeps a running monthly poll of party identification. In the latest poll, released September 1, they found:

During August, 37.6% of Americans considered themselves Republicans. That’s up from 34.9% in July and 35.4% in June. It’s also the largest number of Republicans ever recorded by Rasmussen Report since monthly tracking began in November 2002.

To talk with any working Republican political operative these days is to hear the same tale of woe: a grim accounting of the past few weeks, a dash of gallows humor and a measure of hope that President Obama is still beatable. Never in question is that Mitt Romney is trailing — the private surveys these strategists see for their down-ballot clients make that clear. The only question is by how much.

But hanging up the phone or clicking out of e-mail is to find a parallel universe on the right. On TV, talk radio and especially the Internet is a place where the swing-state polls that show Romney losing are not just inaccurate but part of an intentional plot by the heretofore unknown media-pollster axis to depress Republican voters. In this other world, Romney not only isn’t losing — he’s on the verge of a convincing victory.

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There has always been a divide between the Republican consultant class and conservative media figures. Operatives must dwell in the real world because their jobs depend on winning and losing. The likes of Morris and Limbaugh have different incentives. They want to build their email lists and listening audiences and there’s no faster way to conservative hearts than to kick the dreaded mainstream media. And when it’s well after Labor Day of a presidential year and the Republican nominee isn’t faring well, reassuring the home team that there’s just a scoreboard malfunction offers a seeming dose of logic to the situation.

But the Internet has let the alternate campaign reality flower this fall in a way that’s both striking and depressing to political professionals and pollsters. One website, unskewedpolls.com, even readjusts the public polling to include more Republicans in samples. The results: Romney leads in nearly every national poll released in September. Of course arbitrarily reweighting polls is wildly unscientific, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans like Limbaugh and even Texas Gov. Rick Perry from mentioning the site.

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The attempt to debunk polls is in many ways the logical, if absurd, outgrowth of a choose-your-own-adventure political news environment where partisans have outlets that will echo their views.

“It’s ‘you-are-right’ news,” sighed longtime Republican strategist Mike Murphy, adding that if it was Democrats losing liberals would be baying about “Rupert [Murdoch] doing mind control on the numbers.”

But it’s one thing to advocate for a preferred party and portray the other in the worst possible light. Questioning the integrity of professional pollsters is something different: It’s preposterous.

Consider: For the vast polling conspiracy of 2012 to be legitimate would be to presume that longtime GOP pollster Bill McInturff is on the deal. McInturff co-runs the respected Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll with veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart.

McInturff is also business partners with Neil Newhouse, Romney’s own pollster. So, by this standard, Romney’s own campaign could also be part of the conspiracy to … hurt the Romney campaign.

Of course, there’s no such motivation on the part of any pollster hired by mainstream news organizations to gauge public opinion.

“The Prime Directive of pollster survival is to make sure you ‘get it right’ — whether that be good or bad — for your party,” McInturff explained in an e-mail.

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“Party identification is basically an attitudinal variable, not a stable population parameter. It is designed to vary,” wrote Gallup chief Frank Newport last week in a piece titled “The Recurring — and Misleading — Focus on Party Identification.”

Yet some Republicans, seeing some polls with a partisan identification breakdown unlikely to resemble the make-up of a state, believe it’s time to start weighting by party.

Veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres said his preference would be for survey takers to weight their data according to an average of the party ID results they get over the course of an election cycle, in order to minimize variation.

“The poor journalists who get this data are in the position of having to explain why Obama went up by 7 in this month and down by 7 in that month, even though nothing happened and they know in their gut that nothing happened,” said Ayres, who added, “I don’t buy this sinister motivation that some people attribution to polls. I just think it’s the luck of the draw when you’re drawing a sample.”

Ayres argued there’s no reason to avoid reality-based polling, which he said still shows a winnable race: “Are things not going as well as they should for the Romney campaign? Of course, that’s just obvious. But we’re at the start of the fourth quarter and the guy is a field goal behind.”

Poll Shows Obama Getting Lowest Jewish Support Since Carter.

Today’s Rasumssen three day tracking poll now shows Romney over Obama 50% to 46%. - RedState

John, let me suggest that the criteria for victory are changing. The debate no longer ends when the debaters walk off stage. And now it no longer ends when the TV spinners have, like cuckoos, laid their eggs and flown away. There is now the long, long reverberation in social media, where the basic debate footage serves as raw material for mash-ups and parodies and treatments for the rest of the election cycle and beyond. And Biden’s performance, which won him some tactical advantage in the debate, has set him up as the target for rich satire and a way that Ryan’s conventional performance didn’t and cannot do. His performance is comic gold, and although within hard-core Dem/left circles he will be celebrated as the warrior, everywhere else, and especially for basically apolitical young YouTube viewers, he will be the jackass supreme. I suspect that by Election Day, the various parodic videos will have had a larger viewership than the debate itself. By this criterion, the tactic was a massive miscalculation.

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.

Should Romney win by 5 percentage points, it would increase Republican chances of gaining control of the Senate. His coattails would help elect GOP Senate candidates in Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. “Republicans are now certain to hold the House,” Goeas said, “regardless of how the presidential race turns out.”

The poll’s election model takes into account variables including voter intensity, age, and education, and voters who are certain in their vote. The race “remains very close in the surface,” Goeas said, “but the political environment and the composition of the likely electorate favor Governor Romney.”

The projected outcome by the Battleground Poll is close to that of the Gallup Poll. Last week, Gallup said Romney leads Obama 49 percent to 46 percent in its model of the electorate’s composition on November 6.

The Battleground Poll is conducted by Goeas of the Tarrance Group and Celinda Lake of Lake Research Partners. Goeas is a Republican, Lake a Democrat. The survey is affiliated with Politico and George Washington University.