This entire article (link provided) is a must read - it includes an interesting overview of both candidates at the Hispanic forum:

Tense moments as the campaign demands to bus in supporters and to retape an introduction. “A little bit of disrespect,” complains Univision's Salinas.

By Marc Lynch, ForeignPolicy.com, September 21, 2012

[....] a funny thing happened on the way to the apocalypse: almost nothing. There were a few tiny demonstrations, but most Arab countries (in contrast to Pakistan and Lebanon) saw no mass rallies, no burning embassies, no screaming for the television cameras.   

The fizzling of the protests against that awful YouTube film was obvious before today, of course.  As has been widely noted, the protests last week were actually quite small -- vastly inferior in size and popular inclusion to the Arab uprisings protests last year, and small even in comparison to the ongoing pro-democracy or other political demonstrations which occur on a weekly basis in many Arab countries. The killing of Chris Stevens and his colleagues, and the dramatic images of broached embassy walls and al Qaeda flags, radically inflated Western perceptions about the magnitude of the protests. [....]

The fizzling of the protest wave and the Benghazi counter-demonstration suggests better questions than the popular choices such as "why do they hate us" or "why are Muslims so angry" or "how badly has Obama failed." For instance, why were these demonstrations so small? Why did they peter out so quickly when the Danish Cartoons crisis went on for months? Why did they fail to attract broad-based support outside of their core constituencies? And why have so many leaders of Arab countries in transition, Islamists included, rushed to apologize and to reassure the United States? I don't have all the answers, but here's a few possibilities [....]

By David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, New York Review of Books, Oct. 11, 2012 issue

Review & summary of two Dept of Justice reports and one Bureau of Justice Statistics report.  Excerpt:

[....] Overall (but accounting only for prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities), the Justice Department estimates that more than 209,400 people are sexually abused in US detention every year. This is a national disgrace—especially because prisoner rape is an eminently preventable problem.¹

In 2003, however, both chambers of Congress unanimously passed and President Bush signed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which called both for extensive study of sexual abuse in detention and national standards to prevent, detect, and respond to it. The Obama administration has now issued those standards. If they are successful—and we believe they will be, to an extent many people may find surprising—not only will they reduce the incidence of prisoner rape dramatically, they will make American detention facilities better run, more humane, and safer places in general.

The standards have to do with how detention facilities are staffed, and how inmates are supervised and monitored; with how inmates are classified and housed within a facility; with the ways they can report sexual abuse, and how staff must investigate and respond to such reports. Among many other things, they will also affect the ways detention facilities must be monitored to ensure that they comply with these regulations [....]

Author bios from the NY Review of Books website:

David Kaiser is Chair of the Board of Just Detention International, a health and human rights organization; Lovisa Stannow is the Executive Director of Just Detention International.


It does make a difference whether the US invades a nation to impose democracy, or supports the revolt of a nation's people against a dictator. You will never see this in Iraq or Afghanistan.

New York Times, By SULIMAN ALI ZWAY and RICK GLADSTONE

Published: September 21, 2012

BENGHAZI, Libya — Thousands of Libyans sympathetic to the United States marched to the gates of a powerful Libyan militia suspected of killing four Americans including the ambassador last week and demanded that the government disband it, as well as the other armed militant groups that have increasingly behaved with impunity since the government was toppled last year........For many Libyans, the death of Ambassador Stevens represented an unacceptable excess on the part of the militants. Ansar al-Shariah, is the group suspected in the killings.

About 30,000 Libyans in Benghazi poured into a square in front of the main encampment of the group, unfurled a Libyan flag and shouted “with our lives and souls, we redeem you, Benghazi!,” Al Jazeera and other news services reported. Some held signs reading “The ambassador was Libya’s friend,” and “Libya lost a friend.”

By Benjy Sarlin, Talking Points Memo, September 21, 2012

Mitt Romney will release a copy of his 2011 tax returns at 3 p.m. Friday as well as a summary of his tax rates -- but not, as requested by Democrats, copies of his actual returns -- for the years 1990-2009 [....]

The campaign's description of Romney's taxes are below, from Romney's trustee R. Bradford Malt: [....]

My comment: From reading the portion of Mr. Malt's letter that TPM quotes there, looks to me like Romney has always had running for office in mind when filing 1990-2009, making sure he paid a certain amount on average, to the point of letting deductions slide when they might make what he paid on average lower.  Seems as if he doesn't want those returns public for some other reason than the amount of taxes he paid. Also doesn't seem that his wanting to keep them private has anything to do with the amount of charitable giving (though names of charities might still be one of the problems.)

Wow. We’ve seen horribly racist anti-choice ads targeting African American and Latina women in recent years, but this might take the cake. Native American students at the University of New Mexico organized a protest after graphic anti-abortion posters popped up on campus that read “Abortion Extinction. Today, an Indian boy was killed the Indian way. Hey ya hey!”

By Chris Cook, Asia Times Online, September 21, 2012

Home page lede:

The players behind this week's sharp tumble in oil prices remains a mystery. The trigger for the sell-off less so - that is, the willingness of Catherine Ashton, lead negotiator in talks with Tehran over its nuclear policy, literally to step over the Iranian diplomatic threshold implies a deal in the offing that could slash US pump prices before Barack Obama's last re-election drive. Insider dealing? Of course not.

As the financial system melted down in the fall of 2008, the Treasury Department gave the nation's biggest banks billions in new capital. Was it all necessary? No, says the former FDIC chief in her new book.

The rise in Democratic enthusiasm among swing-state voters is notable from the perspective that the party's supporters are more energized after that party's convention than before it, and that Democratic enthusiasm for voting now exceeds that of Republicans.

This may also in part explain Obama's leads now in those swing states.

Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News, The Ticket, about an hour ago

Tim Pawlenty quit as co-chair of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign on Thursday to become one of Wall Street's top lobbyists in Washington. Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota, will lead the Financial Services Roundtable.

.........

"While I regret he cannot continue as co-chair of my campaign, his new position advancing the integrity of our financial system is vital to the future of our country," Romney said. "I congratulate him."

.........

This is bizarre to say the least?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pew_polls

I have been reading polls daily at TPM & HUFFPO and a number of other sites and I always see PEW Poll.

I do not understand this poll since it has a last date of 9/16/12.

So this poll does not even take into consideration the recent 'video' of death.

Anyway the MSNBC/WJ poll was giving us a five percent margin with the same date?

That is 9/16/12!

I think this is newsworthy whether you believe it or not.

I bring this up because over the last ten days the 'poll average' as far as electoral votes is larger with HUFFPO than TPM.

I have never seen this before.

I mean HUFFPO has been giving Obama like 316 electoral votes vs. TPM which gives him around 280?

Anyway, I thought this was newsworthy.

By Clarke Canfield, Associated Press, September 19, 2012

PORTLAND, Maine  — The U.S. seafood catch reached a 17-year high last year, with all fishing regions of the country showing increases in both the volume and value of their harvests.

Commercial fishermen last year caught 10.1 billion pounds of fish and shellfish valued at a record $5.3 billion, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That's a 23 percent increase in catch by weight and a 17 percent increase in value over 2010 [....]

Still, a number of fisheries are in trouble. The Department of Commerce has declared disasters for cod and other so-called groundfish in New England, oyster and blue crab fisheries in Mississippi, and chinook salmon in Alaska's Yukon and Kuskokwin rivers.

"Overall nationally, the numbers are very good news," Rauch said. "But we don't want to miss the fact that there are parts of the industry that are or soon will be suffering economic pain [....]