Chad’s Morning Brief: Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott & the Kountze ISD Cheerleaders, Obama Continues to Hit Romney, & More
Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of October 18, 2012. Give us your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11 am.
1. Abbott Keeps His Word (link)
KFYO News along with others throughout the state have reported that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has intervened on behalf of the Kountze Cheerleaders. According to KFYO News:
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott this morning announced the State of Texas has legally intervened on behalf of the cheerleaders at Kountze High School who are currently entangled in legal action. The Kountze cheerleaders had been the subject of a lawsuit seeking them to cease placing Bible verses and religious message on banners at varsity football games.
Attorney General Abbott is living up to a pledge he made on the October 2nd edition of the Chad Hasty Show on KFYO. He said that the state would act on behalf of the Kountze High School cheerleaders if they faced further legal action.
In his official statement AG Abbott said, “After receiving a menacing letter from an organization with a reputation for bullying school districts, the Kountze ISD improperly prohibited high school cheerleaders from including religious messages on their game day banners. Those banners, which the cheerleaders independently produce on their own time with privately funded supplies, are perfectly constitutional. The State of Texas intervened in this case to defend the cheerleaders’ right to exercise their personal religious beliefs – and to defend the constitutionality of a state law that protects religious liberties for all Texans.”
In its filing the state is defending the Texas Religious Viewpoints Anti-Discrimination Act.
Officially, the State of Texas intervened in the case because the Kountze ISD’s court filing questioned the constitutionality of state laws enacted by the Texas Legislature.
Even Governor Rick Perry weighed in according to the Statesman.
Perry, who often speaks of his strong faith, said Texas will not tolerate the right of the cheerleaders being violated.
“I was very proud of their courage,” the governor said.
Good to see Abbott staying true to his word. I see nothing wrong with what the cheerleaders are doing. It's their own words and the school isn't sponsoring and backing the words cheerleaders write on banners. Those who stand with the Freedom From Religion Organization should get a life and be concerned about real issues in this country.
2. Obama Continues Attacks on Romney (link)
President Obama continued on Wednesday to go after Mitt Romney on the campaign trail. According to FOX News, it may be a new strategy for the President. Less about Obama and his own plans and more anti-Romney talk.
Within seconds, though, Obama was hammering Romney again, indicating that the revamped approach will include a lot more Romney and a lot less Obama.
The president, who later was heading to a campaign stop in Ohio, brought back his knock against Romney's "five point" economic plan.
"It's really a one-point plan," Obama said. "It says folks at the very top play by their own set of rules."
The president also brought back his claim that the lack of specifics in Romney's tax cut plan should send a warning signal to voters.
"Everybody here has heard of the New Deal. .... Mitt Romney's trying to sell you a sketchy deal -- we are not buying it," the president said.
Romney, during Tuesday's debate and going into the final stretch, is trying to match the Obama campaign's intensity. He and Obama both interrupted each other during the New York debate and cut off the moderator repeatedly to finish their thoughts.
But on Wednesday, Romney also accused the president of avoiding his own record with his recent rhetoric.
"I have to be honest with you, I love these debates," Romney said in Chesapeake, Va. "These things are great. I think it's interesting that the president still doesn't have an agenda for a second term. Don't you think that it's time for him to finally put together a vision of what he'd do in the next four years if he were elected? I mean he's got to come up with that over this weekend because there's only one debate left, on Monday," Romney said.
The President has no choice but to go after Romney right now, and that will fire up his base. The only problem with that strategy is that it ignores the undecided voters that are out there. The undecideds want to hear about vision and the future.
Thoughts?
3. Deception Over Libya (link)
Jennifer Rubin has a piece in the Washington Post about President Obama and his administrations continued deception when it comes to Libya. According to the Washington Post:
President Obama’s attempts to wriggle free from his own words and actions on Libya are making things worse.
American Crossroads, taking exception to Obama’s announcement last night that he really had declared Benghazi to be an act of terrorism, has sent out a memo, which reads:
The President clearly misled the American people with this claim, because if Obama’s Rose Garden speech was indeed the White House position, it did not inform any subsequent statement by the White House press office — and was even directly contradicted by his own spokesman several days later.
On September 20 — eight days after Obama claims to have called the Benghazi attack an “act of terror” — Jay Carney affirmed to reporters that the White House had never called it “a terrorist attack.”
From the gaggle on Air Force One, en route to Miami, 9/20/2012:
Q: Can you — have you called it a terrorist attack before? Have you said that?
MR. CARNEY: I haven’t, but — I mean, people attacked our embassy. It’s an act of terror by definition.
Q: Yes, I just hadn’t heard you —
MR. CARNEY: It doesn’t have to do with what date it occurred.
Q: No, I just hadn’t heard the White House say that this was an act of terrorism or a terrorist attack. And I just —
MR. CARNEY: I don’t think the fact that we hadn’t is not — as our NCTC Director testified yesterday, a number of different elements appear to have been involved in the attack, including individuals connected to militant groups that are prevalent in eastern Libya, particularly in the Benghazi area. We are looking at indications that individuals involved in the attack may have had connections to al Qaeda or al Qaeda’s affiliates, in particular al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Here, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney actually affirmed Gov. Romney’s position that the White House did not call the Benghazi attack an act of terrorism. Carney also said the now infamous video “precipitated some of the unrest in Benghazi” the day before.
The memo goes on to argue that Obama’s position on Libya is “untenable.” That’s about the shape of things. Did he call it an act of terror and go around misleading the country for two weeks that it was a spontaneous reaction to the anti-Muslim movie? Or did he not call it terror on Sept. 12 and lie to the voters last night?
There is another problem with Obama’s response. Recall this part of his answer: “So as soon as we found out that the Benghazi Consulate was being overrun, I was on the phone with my national security team, and I gave them three instructions. Number one, beef up our security and — and — and procedures not just in Libya but every embassy and consulate in the region. Number two, investigate exactly what happened, regardless of where the facts lead us, to make sure that folks are held accountable and it doesn’t happen again. And number three, we are going to find out who did this, and we are going to hunt them down, because one of the things that I’ve said throughout my presidency is when folks mess with Americans, we go after them”
So there was no actual meeting of the National Security Council at which everyone could share information and get on the same page? (David Axelrod has refused to say.) It doesn’t sound like it. But you know Obama was busy that day — flying to Las Vegas for a campaign event. So really, why have a meeting? Well, the weeks of confusion and dissembling that followed should answer that.
The President and his administration are full of it. Obama spent more than a week trying to convince the American people that a YouTube video was at fault in Libya. Will Mitt Romney hit Obama on this in the next debate? I wish he would. Though the left would then claim that Romney is being cold and just using the deaths of Americans for political gain.
4. 51-45 (link)
Gallup still has Mitt Romney gaining steam heading into the election. According to Gallup, 51% of likely voters support Romney as of right now.
All registered voters are asked: "Suppose the presidential election were held today, and it included Barack Obama and Joe Biden as the Democratic Party's candidates and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as the Republican Party's candidates. Who would you vote for [ROTATED: Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the Democrats (or) Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the Republicans]?" Those who are undecided are further asked if they lean more toward Obama and Biden or Romney and Ryan and their leanings are incorporated into the results.
These results are for likely voters, who are the respondents Gallup deems most likely to vote based on their responses to a series of questions asking about current voting intentions, thought given to the election, and past voting behavior. Each seven-day rolling average is based on telephone interviews with approximately 2,700 likely voters; margin of error is ±2 percentage points.
These numbers could and probably will change over the next few days though after Tuesday night's debate and then again after Monday's debate on foreign policy.
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These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11 am on NewsTalk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com.
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