In response to my Friday Corner piece arguing that Biden won on points, Jim Bennett offers a very interesting and quite powerful qualification. Here it is:

John, let me suggest that the criteria for victory are changing. The debate no longer ends when the debaters walk off stage. And now it no longer ends when the TV spinners have, like cuckoos, laid their eggs and flown away. There is now the long, long reverberation in social media, where the basic debate footage serves as raw material for mash-ups and parodies and treatments for the rest of the election cycle and beyond. And Biden’s performance, which won him some tactical advantage in the debate, has set him up as the target for rich satire and a way that Ryan’s conventional performance didn’t and cannot do. His performance is comic gold, and although within hard-core Dem/left circles he will be celebrated as the warrior, everywhere else, and especially for basically apolitical young YouTube viewers, he will be the jackass supreme. I suspect that by Election Day, the various parodic videos will have had a larger viewership than the debate itself. By this criterion, the tactic was a massive miscalculation.

Of course in my piece (and earlier in the Globe and Mail article) I had offered my own qualification to the conclusion that Biden had won on points. It was that Biden’s eye-rolling, head-shaking, and hand-waving might well annoy viewers, especially women who might think the veep was bring rude to a nice young man. Other commentators made this point too. But Jim’s argument adds some depth to our qualification, and he identifies a new and significant audience likely to be alienated by Biden’s theatrics — namely, the young voters whom Obama won last time and whose apathy he has been hoping to dispel this time. If these voters not only vote but vote in some numbers against Obama — and Jim’s speculation is certainly plausible — then Thursday night, Biden might have contributed to a landslide against the Democrat ticket. 

Baumgartner! Kittinger!

The New York Times reports:

ROSWELL, N.M. — Felix  Baumgartner, the professional daredevil, jumped from a balloon more than 24 miles above the Earth on Sunday, and landed safely on his feet.

Just minutes earlier, Mr. Baumgartner stood on the edge of his capsule completing a final checklist before jumping into a near vacuum at above 127,000 feet, or more than 24 miles. He landed in the eastern New Mexico desert, and lifted his arms in victory. His support team and family cheered…

From the sky above the New Mexico desert he had hoped to make the highest jump in historyand become the first sky diver to break the speed of sound. Before the jump, Mr. Baumgartner went through a checklist with help from Joe Kittinger, 84, the retired Air Force colonel who in 1960 jumped from 102,800 feet, setting records that remained more than half a century later — and that Mr. Baumgartner was hoping to break…

One of the techniques Mr. Baumgartner developed for dealing with claustrophobia [in the ascent capsule] was to stay busy throughout the ascent. Mr. Baumgartner conversed steadily, in Austrian-accented English, with Mr. Kittinger, a former fighter pilot whose deep voice exuded the right stuff as he confidently went through a 40-item checklist rehearsing every move that Mr. Baumgartner would make when it came time to leave the capsule — tasks like sliding his seat forward, checking his parachutes, and carefully opening the hatch.

Mr. Kittinger, a former test pilot, set his records in a 1960 trip to the stratosphere. Early during that ascent, also over New Mexico, in an Air Force balloon, one of his pressurized gloves leaked, but he was so determined to keep going that he did not report the problem, even after his hand swelled to twice its normal size.

Ignoring the pain, he rode the balloon up to 102,800 feet and said a short prayer — “Lord, take care of me now” — before stepping off. He reached a speed of 614 miles an hour and spent 4 minutes, 36 seconds in free fall….

The original stratospheric jump by Mr. Kittinger was part of an Air Force program studying ways to help pilots survive high-altitude bailouts. It experimented with a small parachute, called a drogue, to prevent the jumper’s body from going into a flat spin — a hazard that almost killed Mr. Kittinger in a preliminary jump in 1959. When his drogue chute became entangled around his neck, his body spun at 120 revolutions a minute, causing him to blackout until his emergency parachute automatically deployed. An improved version of that drogue chute is now used by military pilots who have to bail out in the ejection-seats used by pilots.

What a story. That it culminates in a landing near, of all places, Roswell, is just perfect.

Congratulations Mr.Baumgartner — and thank you, Colonel Kittinger.

Shimon Shiffer reports in Yedioth Ahronoth that in secret talks in 2010 with U.S. government mediator Frederic C. Hof, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed in principle to a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights to the June 4, 1967, lines in return for the “expectation” of Bashar al-Assad cutting ties with Iran, and that the nearly-completed negotiations ended because of the anti-Assad uprising that began in January 2011.

How plausible is this claim?

Here is a summary of the report published by Yedioth Ahronoth:

According to American sources, Netanyahu and Barak agreed to withdraw to the 1967 lines in exchange for a comprehensive peace deal that would include an Israeli “expectation” for the severing of ties between Syria and Iran. However, the sources said, the burgeoning deal did not include an explicit commitment by Assad to severe ties with the Islamic Republic.

The report said the sides did not agree on a timeline for the Israeli withdrawal: Syria wanted the agreement to be implemented within one and a half to two years, while Israel asked for more time before pulling out of the region.

Yedioth quoted a senior American official as saying that the negotiations were serious and far-reaching and would have likely ended with an agreement had they not been interrupted by the uprising against Assad. The official estimated that Netanyahu resumed the talks with Assad to justify the stalemate in the negotiations with the Palestinians and because he viewed Syria as the weak link in the so called “axis of evil,” which also includes Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah.

According to the documents written by Hof, the discussions were held at the prime minister’s official residence in Jerusalem. Netanyahu and Barak kept the talks a secret, but in early 2011 a Kuwaiti newspaper reported that special US envoy Dennis Ross met Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem and said that Damascus was willing to resume talks with Israel and that the Jewish state was willing to return the Golan Heights. The Prime Minister’s Office denied the report.

Yedioth said US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were aware of the negotiations, as were Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro and Dennis Ross. Syria’s representative to the talks was FM Moallem, but Hof also met with Assad, the report said.

Netanyahu’s office replied to the Yedioth Ahronoth report that “This was one of many initiatives proposed to Israel over the years. Israel has never accepted that proposal. It is an old and irrelevant proposal.” In contrast, the State Department partially endorsed the report: “Prior to the eruption of all of the violence in Syria, there were efforts to try to support contacts between Israel and Syrian officials. This was part of the mandate of George Mitchell.”

My comments: (1) As the author of the exposé of Netanyahu’s 1998 agreement to hand over the Golan Heights, “The Road to Damascus: What Netanyahu Almost Gave Away,” I find this report very plausible. If the first-time prime minister was ready for a deal, why not the second-time prime minister? (2) Ariel Sharon stopped this mistaken policy the first time and the Syrian people did it the second time. (3) Let’s hope that the upheavals of the past two years close down these misguided ideas of reaching Arab-Israeli treaties before real reform has come to the Arabic-speaking countries.

The president had been underperforming his job-approval number recently, but now his job approval is dipping, too. He’s at 48 percent in both Rasmussen and Gallup tracking polls.

The Daily Telegraph reports:

A key proposal by Tunisia’s ruling Islamist party to outlaw blasphemy in the new constitution, stoking fears of creeping Islamisation, is to be dropped from the final text. The agreement to drop the clause follows negotiations between the three parties in the ruling coalition and must still be approved by the committees drafting the constitution, due to be debated by parliament next month.

It comes after President Moncef Marzouki warned that radical Islamist militants pose a “great danger” to the Maghreb region, and following a wave of violent attacks – blamed on Salafists – on targets ranging from works of art to the US embassy.

“There will certainly be no criminalisation,” said speaker Mustapha Ben Jafaar, the 72-year-old speaker of the National Constituent Assembly, said to AFP.

“That is not because we have agreed to (allow) attacks on the sacred, but because the sacred is something very, very difficult to define. Its boundaries are blurred and one could interpret it in one way or another, in an exaggerated way,” he added.

The plan to criminalise attacks on religious values sparked an outcry when it was first announced by the Islamists in July, with the media and civil society groups warning that it would result in new restrictions on freedom of expression.

 The Economist reports:

WHEN Argentina proposed a brutal 65% haircut to holders of its defaulted sovereign bonds in a 2005 restructuring, one argument the country’s officials used to justify the offer was that the country could not take on more debt than it could reasonably expect to pay. As painful as the loss might be, the argument went, at least the new bonds the government would issue would be creditworthy.

Just seven years later, that claim now looks harder to support. This month the impoverished northern province of Chaco was unable to pay $263,000 of interest, after Argentina’s Central Bank refused to sell it the necessary dollars. That forced the province to announce it would compensate its creditors in pesos, converting the amount owed at the official exchange rate, which is roughly 25% less than the currency’s value on the black market. It was the first time an arm of the Argentine government had failed to deliver a debt payment in full since the country’s massive 2001 default.

On the other hand, the currency switch was a solution only available with bonds issued under Argentine law, and there are not too many of those outstanding.

The vast majority of provincial debt–around $7 billion–is subject to British or New York law. So far, those securities have not been affected by Argentina’s dollar shortage. The Central Bank has $45 billion in reserves, 14 times what the federal government owes to creditors in 2013.

That said, Argentina’s medium-term debt picture looks increasingly cloudy. Including provinces and municipalities, the public sector is in deficit even before counting interest payments. There is virtually no chance of retrenchment under the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose popularity depends on ever-greater public spending. The overall public debt stock is still relatively low. But because investors demand prohibitive interest rates to lend to a government seen as unpredictable and anti-markets, Argentina cannot refinance its obligations as they mature, and must pay the full principal out of tax revenues or central-bank reserves. And although the economy is likely to recover modestly next year after flatlining in 2012, it receives little private-sector investment. That means there is little chance it will expand fast enough for the government’s revenues to outgrow its liabilities.

Tick tock

After David Axelrod’s repeated assurances this morning on Fox News Sunday that “there isn’t anybody on this planet” who feels a greater sense of responsibility for our diplomats than this President, Chris Wallace asked how soon after the Benghazi attacks the President actually met with his national security team.  

Wallace followed up on Axelrod’s non-answer by asking whether the President managed to squeeze in a meeting with the National Security Council before jetting off to Las Vegas for a campaign rally.  Given Axelrod’s inability to produce a straightforward answer to the questions, it’s pretty clear the answer is “no.” 

Amusing in this exchange is Axelrod’s contention that “anybody” would have said what the administration and Ambassador Rice said after the attack.

Just in time for Halloween, Representative Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) accused members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of holding a witch hunt in investigating the Benghazi attacks.

“I think it’s turning into a witch hunt, and we can do better, we really can,” he said on Face the Nation. 

The White House declined to send a spokesperson to the show to weigh in. 

On Meet the Press, Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed defended Biden’s performance in the VP debate, criticizing the critiques of his demeanor. “I think it’s the most manufactured theme for a guy who clearly won the debate among independents.” He added that voters appreciate Biden’s authenticity: “The one thing about Joe Biden is, you believe what he is telling you,” said the mayor.

Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia agreed. But he added that Biden’s believability and authenticity also apply to his recent comments on the middle class being buried for the last four years and the president’s plan to raise taxes. So it remains to be seen just how helpful Biden’s authenticity will be for his ticket. 

In addition to Mark’s account of the State Department briefing further demonstrating that the intelligence community knew, and reported early on, that the Mohammed video had nothing to do with the Benghazi attack, be sure to read Steve Hayes’s superb report in the Weekly Standard. Steve shows how the intelligence community knew in real time, and was reporting within hours, that the September 11 attack was carried out by trained terrorists — there was no spontaneous protest that got out of hand. Yet the election-minded White House, including the president, willfully lied to the American people for days afterward.

As I argue in my column, Obama’s Libya policy is what lies — in every way — at the bottom of this scandal. Of course the architect of the policy would rather you thought it was about a video no one saw.

On ABC News’ This Week, Beau Biden defended his dad’s Joker-esque facial expressions during the vice presidential debate. When host Jake Tapper asked, “Were his facial expressions counterproductive?” Biden responded, “Not at all. I’m happy to defend my dad, I don’t think he needs any defense in this.” He added that criticism from the right just indicated that the vice president was successful, saying that when people like Rove go after him, “you know that’s a victory.” 

The State Department is the latest casualty of the Obama administration’s obfuscation of the events surrounding the Benghazi attack. 

Tearing a few pages out of the old Clinton playbook, David Axelrod carefully defined the word “we” this morning for Fox News’ Chris Wallace: when the Vice President said in Wednesday’s debate that “we” weren’t aware of the Benghazi consulate’s requests for increased security, “we” included only the President and the Vice President – not the Obama administration at large or the State Department.  You got that, right? 

In response to Wallace’s inquiry about whether the President takes personal responsibility for the denial of security requests in Benghazi, Axelrod said, “these were judgments that were made by security folks at the State Department.”

On ABC’s This Week, Senator Rob Portman said he thinks viewers shouldn’t expect a repeat of the first presidential debate. “I think President Obama’s going to come out swinging,” he told Jake Tapper. If Portman’s right, things could get pretty testy. 

News for Sirius subscribers: I’ve got a new show on the Catholic Channel for the next few weeks. It’s called Silent Radio (explanation here), and I’m co-hosting it with Steve Bannon (whose The Hope and the Change will encourage you about our electoral prospects). The show is about the culture and I hope you tune in an let me know what you think. And please send ideas for people and all things culture you’d like to see us discussing and exploring in coming shows. 

It’s Silent Radio, 8-9 AM Eastern time on Saturdays, replayed 8-9 PM on Sundays.

Andy McCarthy and yours truly both devote our weekend columns to the Benghazi debacle. I mention the relevant exchange in the vice-presidential debate, when Joe Biden was asked why the administration had blamed the murderous assault on an obscure YouTube video. He replied:

Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community.

The State Department has now released a background briefing from Tuesday at which an AP reporter put the same question, more or less:

OPERATOR: The next question is from the line of Brad Klapper with AP. Please, go ahead.

QUESTION: Hi, yes. You described several incidents you had with groups of men, armed men. What in all of these events that you’ve described led officials to believe for the first several days that this was prompted by protests against the video?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: That is a question that you would have to ask others. That was not our conclusion. I’m not saying that we had a conclusion, but we outlined what happened. The Ambassador walked guests out around 8:30 or so, there was no one on the street at approximately 9:40, then there was the noise and then we saw on the cameras the – a large number of armed men assaulting the compound.

There was no “intelligence” suggesting a movie protest in Benghazi. All the on-site reports made plain what had happened — and by the following morning. The second highest official in the Government of the United States looked the citizenry in the eye on Thursday and said something he knew to be completely false. If Biden’s statement was agreed with Obama and not just ol’ Joe wingin’ it, they’re gonna need a bus with Truckosaurus-high wheels to get the State Department, the intelligence guys, and everyone else they’re planning on throwing under there.

Surely, even among Obama’s media sycophants, there must be someone who recognizes that all the cushy court eunuch posts are filled and, rather than being the umpteenth extra in the crowd scene, there’s a reputation, a Pulitzer and maybe a movie deal to be made here.

I was a fan of the Harry Potter books and didn’t have much patience for critics who couldn’t just enjoy the stories without pointing out that their author, J. K. Rowling, isn’t exactly a prose stylist. But she’s now written a 500-page novel for adults called The Casual Vacancy, and unfortunately it’s boring and badly written. In certain places, though, it’s so badly written that it ceases to be boring. From my review over on the homepage:

In an interview with Ian Parker for The New Yorker, Rowling revealed that she considers the book “more of a comic tragedy” than a “black comedy.” Actually it is neither. What humor it contains is unintentional. For instance: “He retained a vivid memory of her bare pink vulva; it was as though Father Christmas had popped up in their midst.” And another, perhaps more puzzling, image: “She thought of sex with Miles. . . . His performance was as predictable as a Masonic handshake.” Rowling’s non-sexual similes are similarly confounding: “Through all Tessa’s anxiety and sorrow was threaded the usual worry, like an itchy little worm.”

Read the whole review here.

No time for the Israeli prime minister, but President Obama did manage to squeeze an interview with Miami’s Y100 Michael YO Show into his busy schedule. He took the opportunity to weigh in on one of the world’s pressing disputes — you know, the one between American Idol judges Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey. 

“I think that they are going to be able to sort it out, I am confident,” the president said. “I am all about bringing people together.”

The full interview is below.

Over at EU Referendum, Richard North has some, well, interesting background on the manner in which the Nobel Peace Prize Committee took its curious decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU:

[It] is also customary, according to Wikipedia to seek a unanimous decision if possible. And here we learn from the Norwegian paper Aftenposten that there was one member of the committee who most emphatically would not have voted for the EU.

This was Ågot Valle, former deputy leader of the “No to EU” campaign. Mysteriously, though, it just happened that when that Thorbjørn Jagland decided to call for the final vote on this year’s winner, Valle was off sick, replaced by former Oslo Bishop Gunnar Stålsett, as her deputy.

Valle says she would have welcomed being called to make her vote, and says she would not have supported the EU if she had sat on the committee – but she wasn’t asked to attend. Socialist Left Party leader Audun Lysbakken thus declares that “it is obvious that we now have a politicised peace prize”.

MP Geir Langeland, however, used slightly stronger words. “I think it’s foul and unethical”, he said. It leaves “a bad taste in the mouth” he added, claiming that there had been a “Jagland coup” in the absence of Valle.

Thus in a country where 80 percent of ordinary people are against the EU, we find a committee where everybody is in favour of the EU. And unsurprisingly, many commentators now think that the prize, already damaged, has now been further weakened.

Anti-democratic union awarded prize as a result, it appears, of a “coup”.  Move along. There’s nothing to see here.  

Much has been made of Joe Biden’s false assertion that Catholic institutions aren’t forced to provide employees with free birth control. I noted here that VP Biden lied “through the use of grammar” by using the present tense. The Free Birth Control Rule applies to such institutions beginning in 2013, and hence while they don’t have to provide it today, they soon will.

But forcing religious institutions to violate their faith beliefs isn’t all of it.  Little notice has been taken of HHS Secretary Sebelius’s stated intention to compel churches, not otherwise forced to pay for birth control, to inform employees where they can obtain subsidized access. From my NRO article, “Free Birth Control vs. Freedom of Religion:

In fact, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared that the Obama administration intends not only to force churches to do what the state directs, but even to speak as the state directs. From Sebelius’s official statement about the promulgation of the new rule:

We intend to require employers that do not offer coverage of contraceptive services to provide notice to employees, which will also state that contraceptive services are available at sites such as community health centers, public clinics, and hospitals with income-based support.

Thus, the Obama administration is attacking even freedom of worship by forcing exempt organizations to tell their employees where and how they can violate church teaching.

Not being a subscriber to the Federal Register, I don’t know whether HHS bureaucrats have started to promulgate a forced speech rule, but I think that threat shows the scant regard Obamacarians have for religious liberty.

What a shock. From the Daily Caller: 

With tensions between President Obama and the Clintons at a new high, former President Bill Clinton is moving fast to develop a contingency plan for how his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, should react if Obama attempts to tie the Benghazi fiasco around her neck, according to author Ed Klein.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, Klein said sources close to the Clintons tell him that Bill Clinton has assembled an informal legal team to discuss how the Secretary of State should deal with the issue of being blamed for not preventing the Benghazi terrorist attack last month.

Honestly, between this and Joe Biden’s insistence Thursday night that the intelligence community is also partly to blame for the Benghazi fiasco, it appears that the Obama administration has a death wish. Tangling with one set of venomous snakes is crazy enough — but two? As I wrote in this space just two days ago:

Now, it seems, that Team Obama has decided to try and save U.N. ambassador Susan Rice — whose reputation in the IC could hardly be lower — and perhaps press secretary Jay Carney as well by tossing the nation’s spooks under the bus, in which direction they’re also nudging Hillary Clinton.

But you can’t burn all your friends, and the Obama forces already have a lot fewer allies than they think they do. The disrespectful way they treated former White House chief of staff William Daley is likely to come back to haunt them in the graveyards of Chicago, and the bad blood between them and the Clintons hasn’t gone away, despite Bill’s bonhomie at the convention.

This will not end well.