Elections

Former Republican Presidential candidate and Patriot Voices Chairman Rick Santorum will travel to Ohio, Iowa and Virginia this weekend for events in support of the Romney-Ryan ticket and other Republican candidates. All of the events are open to the press, and details are as follows:

Friday, November 2:
7:30 PM ET - Rick Santorum will join dozens of other elected officials, surrogates and Romney-Ryan supporters at a Victory Rally in West Chester, OH.

Location:
The Square at Union Centre
9285 Centre Point Drive
West Chester, OH

Vice president Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, will be making a campaign stop in Lakewood on Sunday as they tour Ohio in the final days leading up to the November 6th election. The Bidens will also be joined by multi-platinum Grammy winner, singer/songwriter and avid Obama/Biden supporter Jason Mraz.

The Bidens will speak at Lakewood High School on Sunday, with doors slated to open at 8:45am. The event is open to the public, but tickets are required to gain entrance. Tickets are available from 10am to 9pm on Friday, and if tickets are still available on Saturday they may be picked up between 9am to 9pm. Tickets can be obtained at the Lakewood Field Office located at 11822 Detroit Ave., or at the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party Headquarter at 1466 St. Clair Ave. in Cleveland.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama's re-election campaign announced plans for the last few days remaining of campaigning before Election Day next week. Obama will travel to Madison, Wisconsin where he'll make a stop with rocker Bruce Springsteen, and then he'll head to Columbus, Ohio, for an appearance with rapper Jay-Z before bringing both Springsteen and Jay-Z to finish it all up in Iowa.

According to the latest Washington Post/ABC Poll, the first poll taken after the Hurricane Sandy disaster, eight out of ten likely voters believe that President Barack Obama has done an "excellent" or "good" job dealing with the effects of the superstorm.

This poll is believed to be the first tangible evidence that President Obama has received a significant boost from his response to Sandy, despite being forced to cancel his campaign events in the crucial final week leading up to Election Day.

The poll was conducted on Tuesday evening prior to his visit to the scenes of devastation in New Jersey, where he was photographed comforting victims of the storm.

Two-thirds of those who plan to support Mitt Romney in the election said that Obama has done well in handling Sandy.

Rev. Joseph Lowery, the reverend who delivered the benediction at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration said last weekend that he believes all white people are going to hell, according to a Georgia newspaper.

According to the Monroe County Reporter, Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said during a rally at St. James Baptist Church in Forsyth, Ga. that he has arrived back at the same view he held as a "young militant".

Lowery said that when he was a young militant, he used to say that all white folks were going to hell. Then he says he mellowed out and just said that some of them were going to hell, not all. Now, the newspaper reports that he said he is back to where he was.

The Monroe County Reporter paraphrased the reverend's comments and failed to provide a direct quote relating to the remarks.

Lowery, 91, was speaking at the church to encourage others to vote for President Obama. Stating that Obama lost Georgia by 200,000 votes in 2008, with 390,000 black people not voting. The Reporter says that Lowery said that he could not imagine why any black person wouldn't support him for re-election. He was quoted as saying:

“I don’t know what kind of a n—er wouldn’t vote with a black man running. All that he did with the stimulus was genius. Nobody intelligent would risk this country with Romney.”

President Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were due to participate in a campaign event in Youngstown on Monday, but the president had to pull out of the event at the last minute and send in vice president Joe Biden to take his place as Hurricane Sandy came barreling towards the East Coast. Obama also cancelled other campaign events in Florida and Ohio in the aftermath of the destructive storm. With less than a week left until Election Day, it looks like Obama is ready to get back on the campaign trail and do his best to win in the Buckeye State. President Obama's campaign announced today that he and former president Bill Clinton will be making additional Ohio appearances this week in Mentor, Akron, and Cincinnati.

Obama will attend a grassroots event at Mentor High School on Saturday, and will head to Cincinnati on Sunday. Doors open at 9am for the Mentor event. As always, the event is free and open to the public, but tickets are required to gain entrance. One ticket per person will be distributed at the following locations beginning Thursday at 10am:

According to the latest survey by Public Policy Polling that was conducted for the client Health Care for America Now, President Barack Obama has 50 percent of the vote with Mitt Romney trailing with 45 percent in Ohio.

The poll also found Obama's approval rating to be at the key 50% mark, with 47% of voters disapproving of him. Romney finds himself with 46% viewing him positively, while 48% have a negative opinion.

33 percent of voters said that they've already cast their ballots, and among those who've already voted, Obama leads 62 to 35. Romney has a 50-45 advantage with those who have yet to vote.

The poll also found that Obama leads with women, 53 to 44, and men 48 to 47. Romney leads with white voters, 50 to 46. Obama also leads with every age group except seniors.

Mitt Romney accepts "donations" that his campaign purchased and had people pretend to donate for photos.

While President Obama made the decision to cancel scheduled campaign appearances this week in light of the disaster that Hurricane Sandy has brought to New York City, New Jersey, and a number of other states, including the key battleground state of Ohio, Mitt Romney just couldn't pull the plug. Instead of doing the respectful thing and canceling his campaign appearance on Tuesday, just after Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, the Republican presidential candidate decided to re-brand his "Victory Rally" and call it "Relief Rally" instead.

The campaign decided that it would stage a photo op of Romney accepting food donations from supporters and loading up a truck with food after the event. But campaign staffers soon began to worry about the last minute nature of the call for donations, and worried that people wouldn't show up with anything. To ensure that Romney wasn't left without any donations and an empty truck, BuzzFeed reports that the campaign went out the night before the event and spent $5,000 at a local Wal-Mart. They bought up supplies like granola bars, canned food, and diapers. These items were then used as props to put on display while they waited for the real donations to show up.

Mitt Romney is said to have profited by more than $15 million from the auto industry bailout, and a coalition of community, labor and good-government organizations is now calling on the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate the Republican Party presidential candidate for non-compliance with the Ethics in Government Act and compel him to either disclose his investments or divest them.

The groups sending the complaint letter include UAW, SEIU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Public Citizen, Public Campaign, People for the American Way, and the Social Equity Group.

UAW President Bob King says:

"The American people have a right to know about Governor Romney's potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue. It's time for Governor Romney to disclose or divest."

King added:

"While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation's most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others."

The groups filing the complaint believe that Romney's undisclosed stock holdings create serious conflicts of interest, and point to the auto

It shouldn’t take the return of Howard Beale, The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves from the apocalyptic 1970s movie “Network,” to tell us that if Mitt Romney wins the election, America is in a lot of trouble.

That’s why the task of laying out what the landscape of RomneyWorld would be like falls to your humble servant: Oh, what a plutocratic paradise it would be, one with just enough theocratic lunacy mixed in to give the embattled masses, at best, a terminal case of the willies, and at worst, a one-way ticket to Dickensian squalor via the town square of 17th Century Salem.

For those unfamiliar with the litany of potential dangers of a Romney presidency, here’s a short list that should make lower- and middle-class folks as nervous as, well, a Mormon in a Black Liberation church: more tax cuts for the rich and more deregulation of corporations and Wall Street; a death sentence for unions and workers’ rights in general; the criminalizing of abortion and certain types of contraception; “papers please” and self-deportation of immigrants; the gutting of Medicare, Medicaid and the so-called safety net; the privatization of Social Security; at least one or two reactionary Supreme Court appointments eager to don powdered periwigs; the defunding of public education and the slashing of Pell Grants for college students; the debunking of science, replacing it with disjointed ruminations on what role God’s will plays in rapes and how the female body can actually stop conception with some kind of magic juice; upscale downsizing and a pipeline of American jobs to China; the return of neocon foreign policy with its blind support of the Israeli hawks; health care reform replaced by a dependence on the kindness of strangers; less consumer protection and more laissez-faire; and – maybe just maybe – in line with LDS teaching, administrative mandates declaring magic underwear must be worn and Missouri must be recognized as the site of the Garden of Eden.