"Everything he just said isn't true."

Except for everything he said.

Romney's also cut an ad from the debate, in which he lobs the charge. So obviously he thinks he got the worst of this.

Gabe does a fact check of Obama. Obama was... not bursting with accuracy.

Among the things you probably know about (Romney was correct on his bankruptcy argument about GM and the Status of Forces Agreement), he also misled on two other big things:

On the looming defense sequestration cuts, Obama claimed “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” But according to no less than investigative juggernaut Bob Woodward, sequestration was the brainchild of White House chief of staff Jack Lew and White House Legislative Affairs Director Rob Nabors, who talked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid into supporting it. By blaming Congress, Obama is eliding his own role in the failed negotiations that resulted in the U.S. credit rating being downgraded.

...

On Iran, Obama claimed to have implemented crippling sanctions that have "isolated" the country. In fact, Obama had nothing to do with implementing the sanctions regime. Congress wrote and passed the sanctions over Obama's objections and while Obama tried to water them down. After the sanctions passed Congress, Obama then provided 20 "waivers" so Iran's trading partners -- including China and India -- could continue buying oil from the rogue government.

More: Romney cut three ads from last night's debate.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:15 AM | Comments (186)
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A few notable things here beyond that.

Obama's favorable/unfavorable is underwater, 47-49. Romney's is above water and ahead of Obama's: 50/45. With women he's 47/47. Obama's well underwater with men, though, 41-55.

I am a convert to believing favorability might be the single most important number in a poll. I suppose it's not as important as the head-to-head. But it's close.

Obama's job approval is 45/51.

Now, among Independents: Mitt Romney has a fav/unfav 50/45. Obama's fav/unfav among independents is way underwater, at 42/51.

And Romney leads in independents, 50-41.

The only age group Obama leads with is 18-29, and that's not even by 2008 level margins. Just 51-38. So a majority have decided to support him-- barely. Who knows where the 10% undecided will go.

So, it's a pretty good poll for Romney. Not only is he ahead, but he seems to have more upside. If you think your favorability sets your upper bound of support -- people who favor you might support you; if they have an unfavorable impression of you, they almost certainly won't -- then Obama seems to be butting up near his maximum level of support, while Romney could still grow a few points.

PPP holds out hope that the debate, which they think Obama won, will change things. I don't see that happening. Quite the opposite. The big card Biden repeatedly played on Ryan -- often as a buffoonish nonsequitor -- was, "What, so you want to go to war with everyone?"

I'm pretty sure Romney successfully presented himself as a non-Dr. Strangelove candidate.

Posted by: Ace at 06:50 AM | Comments (392)
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So, this morning we awaken to find out that Team Barry's narcissistic obsession with memes that begin with the letter B (Binders, Big Bird) now encompasses "bayonets."

This meme was birthed (another B word, since that's all Barry can seem to remember) during an exchange the soon-to-be-ex-president had with Gov. Romney in last night's debate. As you'll recall, Gov. Romney had just schooled Obama on the fact that under his watch the United States Navy has fewer ships now than it did in 1916.

This fact prompted the man who is about 2 weeks away from planning his presidential library to respond thusly:

Obama snarked that “we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.”

I only know of one place in which this assertion by President Obama is true: Benghazi. We certainly didn't have any bayonets there. Then again, Benghazi is the only B-word that Team Barry seems to have trouble talking about.

Instead, the president's comment was just another platitude: an empty statement made as if meaningful. And, thanks to Jim Morrison, I now have a handy go-to term for the president's statements:

I simply refer to them as being Horse Platitudes. more...

Posted by: Jack M. at 06:09 AM | Comments (157)
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• Obama: The Man With A Plan
  
• Andrew Sullivan Backs Off The Ledge
  
• Obama's Bayonets And Horses Line Fails Fact Check
  
• Obama Ads Boost Enthusiasm For Romney
  
• Looking Closely At The Candidates Statements On Foreign Policy
  
• Krauthammer's Take On The Debate
  
• Media Really Loved That Stupid Horses And Bayonets Line
  
• Will Cocooned Liberals Be Surprised By Romney
  
• FL Republicans Receiving Fake Ineligibility Letters Aimed At Suppressing Their Vote
  
• Mike Made Me A Republican
  
• Even MSNBC Has To Call Out DWS From Time To Time
  
• Earthquake Scientists Jailed In Italy
  
• WalMart Heir Gives Big To Obama
  
• Jerry Brown Goes For Massive Tax Hike
  
• Alabama House Leaders Tries To Block UN Election Observers
  

h/t Vic for a few of those.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:04 AM | Comments (339)
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Happy Tuesday.

Most of the news this morning is debate recap. Maybe Vic'll have something. (Don't fail me now, buddy.)

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:00 AM | Comments (284)
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In CNN's poll, 48% said Obama won, 40% Romney.

But as far as changing votes, 24% said they were more inclined to vote for Obama, 25% for Romney.

On the question of who was qualified to be Commander in Chief: 60% said Romney was.

63% said Obama was.

PPP did a poll. It had Obama winning.

But here's the unkindest cut, from @DKElections (Daily Kos Elections). I've changed the tweet a little to make it more readable.

Weird: Among indies in @PPPPolls, 47% say they're more likely to vote for Romney, 35% less; 32% say they're more likely to vote for Obama, 48% less. But indies thought O won debate 55-40, voting for him 46-36

Not weird. Romney's strategy was correct. He gained some ground. Even though the "independents" skewed strongly to Obama.

Obama's whole campaign -- and his debate strategy -- has been to "win the newscycle" and lob a bunch of small-bore attacks and micro-appeals. He keeps doing that and doing that.

I've been saying this for a while: You can win every newscycle and still lose. Because people don't vote on whatever dumb story you pushed into the newscycle. They're voting the the future, and the country, and their children.

A lot bigger stuff that binders full of Big Bird.

Krauthammer called it an "unequivocal" win for Romney.

Obama had successfully used ads and media allies to paint Romney has a heartless vampire, a soulless robot, a bloodthirsty warmonger.

The story of the debates has been Romney using completely free media to undo all that Narrative, and all that money spent.

I think that Obama was only up because he had gone negative on Romney so hard, as part of the "Kill Romney" strategy they announced 8, 9 months ago.

People do not like the way things are. They do not like the economy and are sick of Obama's excuses.

So Obama poured hundreds of millions of dollars into ads to paint Romney as unnacceptable.

Well, in four debates (including Ryan), the Romney-Ryan team as painted themselves as perfectly acceptable, even appealing.

That means that the election returns to... the economy people don't like, and the endless excuses people are sick to death of hearing.

ABC's Rick Klein... seems to think it's advantage Romney.

In a debate about who should be commander-in-chief, Mitt Romney was just as much in command as the man in the job now.

...

But Romney also had a strong debate, in pursuing different goals than the president. He sought to come across as reasonable rather than confrontational — a candidate comfortable with the campaign’s trajectory.

“Attacking me is not talking about an agenda,” Romney said at one point.

Perhaps oddly for a challenger, Romney singled out areas of agreement with the president — on Egypt, Syria, the use of drone strikes — and then used disagreements to stitch together an argument that looked forward.

...

But Romney had already shown voters that he belongs on the stage with the president. Coming into the debate, heÂ’d fought himself into a virtual tie with the president on key issue areas, according to the new ABC News/Washington Post poll, with little daylight between the two men on trust in handling terrorism, international affairs, or serving as commander-in-chief.

...

There’s no going back, though, to a point where a single debate could change the trajectory of a campaign. Nothing happened tonight to change the race’s direction — and Romney walks away strong after playing on Obama’s turf, competing for his job.

Posted by: Ace at 08:05 PM | Comments (655)
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The Cuban Missile Crisis - 50 Years Later

Here Steven Hayward of Powerline reviews the episode and declares it a defeat of the US rather than the triumph it was made out to be:

To be sure, as Churchill once put it, "talk-talk is better than war-war," but the conventional "lesson" of the Cuban Missile Crisis could not be more incorrect.  The view that that U.S. "won" the Cuban Missile Crisis has more lives than a cat.  In fact, the Cuban episode was an American defeat, and it contributed powerfully to the thinking that led to the Vietnam quagmire.

...In fact Khrushchev had calculated correctly that he could bluff the U.S. into giving a non-intervention guarantee for Cuba and a trade of Soviet missiles in Cuba for NATO missiles in Turkey.  Kennedy and his grandmasters thought they had "won" because they had avoided war, even though the Soviets were never prepared to engage in warfare at the time.  The Crisis ended with Cuba being secured not only as an intact political asset to the Soviet Union, but also potentially as a military asset for the future.  Some "victory."

I'm not sure I would go quite as far as Hayward since in the end the Russians were forced to back down militarily (at some strategic cost to us) and nuclear war was avoided - but it did teach the Kennedy administration all the wrong lessons which they then went on to apply all throughout the rest of the decade.

But the best and brightest of the Kennedy-Johnson administration were so self-deluded with their “success” that they decided to apply the same strategy of “flexible response” in Vietnam. Cyrus Vance, who was a deputy secretary of defense at the Pentagon in 1962 and who later served as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, confirmed this view: “We had seen the gradual application of force applied in the Cuban Missile Crisis and had seen a very successful result. We believed that, if this same gradual and restrained application of force were applied in South Vietnam, that one could expect the same result.”

And if you want to know when the world truly came the closest to a full-scale nuclear war, check out Able Archer in 1983.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:20 PM | Comments (1120)
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This is what I do. I do it for you, dear moron readers. Elbows, with girls attached. Sneaked it in with the live blog on the debate.

If only there were any drama left in the AL, could be Lions and Tigers and Bears oh my. Cardinals, Cardinals and Bears and Lions?

There's no there, there.

Last debate. Rope a dope Mitt, pull him in and hammer away on Benghazi, Iran, the sucky economy and flash a smile for Ohio.

Nate Silver just emailed me to say The Model is picking the Yankees to win it all.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:52 PM | Comments (112)
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Obama 2012: Fore More Years of Smart Diplomacy FTW!

Livestream and liveblogger thingy below the fold.

And we're back to the standard reminder that comments are moderated and very few are insightful or funny enough to make the cut. But give it your best shot anyway. more...

Posted by: andy at 04:45 PM | Comments (1669)
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Senility nods its trembling gray head.

Oh, he also announced that the greatest threat to America is "the birth control Nazi."

Posted by: Ace at 04:35 PM | Comments (95)
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