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Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is wading into the nation's most incendiary Senate race this week, with the launch of a new statewide, six-figure ad campaign to help Missouri Republican Todd Akin. Business Insider has learned that Paul's political action committee, RANDPAC, will go on air Wednesday with a new ad attacking Akin's opponent, Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, for her vote against Paul's amendment to block U.S. aid to Pakistan, Egypt, and Libya. "Claire McCaskill works with Barack Obama to send our money overseas to radicals who attack our embassies, burn our flag, and kill our diplomats," the narrator says. "What...

It’s likely President Obama will be in combat mode, ready to assume alpha male status on Tuesday evening when he faces Mitt Romney in the second presidential debate. But alas. The debate is town hall style, which demands folksy likability from the combatants, and conversation studded with talking points. It is not an ideal forum for the president to shore up his status as grand elocutionist following a tepid appearance in the first debate. A generous pool of undecided voters will question the two hopefuls, the process moderated by CNN chief political correspondent Candy Crowley. But there’s melodrama. Both campaigns...

On Friday, Politico reported that the Obama campaign was planning to revisit the issue of Romney's tax returns. For ten days, since the first debate, the Obama campaign had been shedding its poll advantage. Revisiting this old issue was their response? I took the story as confirmation that the Obama campaign had no new attack lines to blunt Romney's gaining momentum. The media, clearly, took the news as a time for panic. Obama wasn't able to save himself, so they would have to do it for him. Almost as if on cue, the media this morning went wall-to-wall with explanations...

A Republican polling firm has GOP Rep. Todd Akin up by four points over Democratic incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill in their hard-fought Missouri Senate race. Mr. Akin led his opponent 49 percent to 45 percent in a survey conducted for the Citizens United Victory Fund by Wenzel Strategies, one of just two polls to give him the upper hand after his party all but abandoned him in August for his widely condemned comments that victims of "legitimate" rape are unlikely to become pregnant. That's because Mr. Akin led among independents by a 50 percent to 41 percent margin, according to...

After enduring three days of outlandish claims and grievances about American life at the Charlotte convention, I wrote that “something shocking is happening to the Democratic Party.” Five weeks later, I must amend the observation. The soul-sapping transformation is no longer “happening.” It is complete. The Democratic Party has lost its mind and its way. Its political philosophy of inclusion and progress has been consumed by virulent strains of anger, dishonesty and intolerance. Its leaders don’t just want to win an election; they want to silence any American who disagrees with them. Consider the latest evidence. The White House, on...

The heat generated by Joe Biden at Thursday night’s vice presidential debate cooled into object lessons in the danger of bombast by a top United States government official. Biden’s smirking theatricality while facing Republican Paul Ryan included exasperated putdowns and, at times, broad factual assertions whose grounding in truth was tenuous. So it goes in skewering an opponent’s record. Have a merry, if you like. But the vice president went beyond the bounds where there is license to play fast and loose. He did a disservice by extending his bluster into real-time issues of security and international relations. First, there...

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Every week after Labor Day is touted as a critical week in presidential politics. The coming week may actually live up to that characterization. During the next eight days, President Obama and Mitt Romney will meet for their final two debates — Tuesday night at Hofstra University on Long Island and the following Monday in Florida. At that point, it should be clear whether the momentum that Romney picked up from the first debate in Denver has stalled or whether he continues to gain ground against the president. In the meantime, the front-page headline in Saturday’s Columbus...

Associated Press Link Only

Associated Press Link Only

They’re calling it the Michele Bachmann effect. And no, it’s not the Minnesota congresswoman’s crusade to ban falafel from public schools. It refers to the relationship between a woman’s politics and her face. Allison Yarrow hit the Highline to see if people could tell a difference between Democratic and Republican female politicians. Women politicians with “stereotypical feminine facial features” are more often Republicans, found researchers at UCLA]. And the more feminine their features, the more conservative their voting records. They also found the reverse—that women with more masculine facial features tended to be Democrats. Less gender-typical visages tracked with more...

The media polls showing Obama with a solid and consistent lead over Mitt Romney are only accurate IF the democrats equal or improve the turnout they had in 2008. That year, the Democrats had a 7 point advantage over the GOP at the voting booth. It was the Democrats biggest advantage over the GOP in the modern political age. I have long argued that the Democrats were unlikely to repeat their turnout advantage this year. Preliminary data from some key swing states suggests I'm right. In 2008, in the critical battleground of OH, Democrats had a 14-point advantage over the...

With just about a month until Election Day, Vice President Joe Biden is in the middle of taking nearly a week off the campaign trail. He will return to doing campaign events on Thursday, when he will debate Rep. Paul Ryan in the vice presidential debate. On Friday, October 5, according to the White House, Biden spent the day working. In the morning, he was scheduled to attend the presidential daily briefing in the Oval Office, with President Obama. That afternoon Biden was to "meet with senior advisors," according to the White House. For this weekend, the White House provided...

Our Founding Fathers spoke much about the importance of “freedom of conscience” and its underpinning of all other freedoms. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson said, “We are bound, you, I, and every one to make common cause even with error itself, to maintain the common right of freedom of conscience.” Recent decisions by the Obama administration and Pentagon leaders threaten this common right, and their assault on freedom of conscience raises new and serious concerns — especially for our servicemen and women. Our armed services were created with an apolitical framework, and this unique platform has helped maintain Americans’ trust and...

The U.S. Navy's newest destroyer class warship, the 510-foot USS Michael Murphy, recently laid anchor at New York City's Pier 88 for its commissioning ceremony. On Saturday, the ship will participate in a long standing naval tradition, the commissioning ceremony, which marks the moment a new ship is formally placed in active service. Of course, we will be there tomorrow to cover the action. The US Navy will also be live streaming the event. The new ship consists of a crew of 290 well-trained Navy service-men and -women led by Commander Thomas E. Shultz. The ship is named after Navy...

Today, a Defense Department official confirmed to Breitbart News that there is advance planning for a “substantial air package” against targets in Libya. Military sources suggest that this means that flight missions against Libyan targets will include manned flights, not merely drones. The New York Times reported yesterday that the Obama administration is preparing an operation to “kill or capture militants” involved in the Benghazi attack resulting in the murder of our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. According to the Times, the Joint Special Operations Command is putting together “so-called target packages of detailed information about the suspects.”...

Did you know that one-third of children in Ohio are enrolled in Medicaid? Neither did I, until last week when I picked up a copy of the Bucyrus (Ohio) Telegraph-Forum and read down to the seventh paragraph of a story headlined, "Study says more children have health insurance." The positive spin in the headline was undercut by the statistical facts of the story: "The increase in children on insurance comes as median incomes across the state were relatively flat, and the percentage of families in poverty -- especially those with children -- rose slightly." An increase in poverty, in other...

A new poll finds that Mitt Romney's secretly recorded comments about the "47 percent" of Americans who do not pay taxes did more to turn voters off than President Obama's "You didn't build that" remark at a campaign rally in Virginia. According to a survey released Tuesday night by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, 45 percent of voters said Romney's comments at a private fundraiser gave them a negative impression of the candidate. Alternatively, 23 percent said the comment gave them a more positive review of the candidate. “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote...

MOSCOW - The Russian space program's Mission Control Center says it will move the International Space Station into a different orbit to avoid possible collision with a fragment of debris.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: People are sending me e-mails, folks. I got a note from a guy who was just in Washington. He said he couldn't find any evidence that there's a presidential campaign there. He didn't find any Obama signs. He didn't find any Obama bumper stickers. (Not much on Romney, either.) I got a story here from the Raleigh News & Observer: "At UNC-Chapel Hill, Finding Volunteers for Obama Campaign is Harder This Time." Four years ago here in south Florida where we live, there were college kids all over the place carrying Obama signs and passing out Obama...

One of the tragedies of the Obama Administration is the historic political accident that it had 60 Senate Democratic votes in 2009. The ability to break a filibuster without Republican votes empowered the left to think it could pass anything, and so it steamrolled ahead with ObamaCare, which needed every one of those 60 votes to pass. Now a couple of those Senators are expressing regrets about those votes after the fact. In our pages last week, former Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh rehearsed the looming economic damage from ObamaCare's medical-device tax. He described, as some of us predicted in 2009...