Okay, fine, NBC News/Marist poll, you can lead with the news that you find Democrat Terry McAuliffe ahead of Republican Ken Cuccinelli, 43 percent to 41 percent, among registered voters. Yes, it’s probably early to apply a likely-voter screen, as we just don’t know how well each campaign will energize its base voters. When Marist does apply the likely-voter screen, Cuccinelli leads, 45 percent to 42 percent.

But we probably ought to spotlight that 19 percent of registered-voter respondents say they have never voted in a gubernatorial election before.

Cuccinelli’s got a 51 percent approval rating for his performance as state attorney general, with 24 percent disapproval, among registered voters.

Asked about the impact of the sequester on themselves, the poll finds that 54 percent of registered voters say the sequester has had “not much at all” and 21 percent say “just some.”

The margin in last night’s special House election was nine percentage points, more than a 12,000-vote margin. It wasn’t that close. And yet very little of the coverage suggested that was in the cards. Why?

For starters, if you followed the national coverage and mainstream-press narrative, you would be stunned at the results, believing that Colbert Busch was a great candidate, only enhanced by having a famous brother.

A few points from Politico’s coverage:

While the former governor barnstormed the district, Colbert Busch seemed to be in hiding. She rarely held public events — and when she did, she was sometimes in a hurry to leave.

The flaws of Colbert Busch were visible to anyone who cared to look. She flopped in her first national interview, back in late February, offering a barely coherent word salad on pretty basic issues like reducing the debt and entitlement reform. She refused to say whether she would vote for Nancy Pelosi to be Speaker of the House. She didn’t take questions at most of her events; Sanford was eager to do as many debates as possible and she agreed to only one.

It’s as if she didn’t really want to talk about much of anything during this campaign, believing that the media’s incantation “Appalachian Trail” would be enough to persuade the voters of the district that by default, she had to be the better choice, no matter what policies she preferred.

As Politico notes:

After months of relentless focus on his personal life — his upcoming marriage to his Argentine fiancée, the charges that he trespassed at his ex-wife’s house and more — the theatrics helped Sanford turn the race into a debate about issues.

A House race focusing on issues! What a concept!

What we see here is another refutation of what I’ve called a “beautiful little fairy tale that liberals tell themselves,” that the American public is broadly supportive of their worldview, and they only lose because Republicans manage to Jedi-Mind-Trick the electorate into caring about distractions, silliness, and those irrelevant “wedge issues.”

Joe Klein offered a good example of the fairy tale in his novel, Primary Colors:

“The point is — EAGLETON,” Libby said. “You remember, Jack? I must have known you — what, two days, then? We hear about the electroshock, and it’s weird: That’s the first time I actually considered the possibility that we might lose to that [bad word] Nixon. Before that, I was absolutely convinced we would win. I mean, who would ever vote for Tricky? No one I knew, ‘cept the idiots I escaped from back in Partridge, Texas. Can you imagine, Henry? We were so [badwording] YOUNG. And this one, this one” — she nodded over toward Stanton — “he takes me out, we go to this little open-air Cuban joint, and I’ve got my head in my hands. Life has ended . And THEY did it — the CIA. It had to be the CIA. I couldn’t believe that Tom Eagleton would really be a nutcase. They had to have dragged him off and drugged him and made him crazy. It couldn’t have been that McGovern was just a COMPLETE [BADWORDING] AMATEUR. No, they did dirty tricks. And I said to Jack, ‘We gotta get the capability.’ You remember Jack? ‘We gotta be able to do that, too.’ And you said, ‘No. Our job is to END all that. Our job is to make it clean. Because if it’s clean, we win — because our ideas are better.’ You remember that, Jack?”

The fairy tale is that Americans, deep down, really agree with liberals on all of these issues and would heartily embrace their agenda if only these side issues, scandals, and manufactured distractions would just get out of the way.

But the electorate doesn’t always think liberal ideas are better, and we may argue that they rarely do. Certainly they didn’t in this district, which is why Elizabeth Colbert Busch had to run from the word “Democrat,” and had to cite a childhood sighting of John F. Kennedy for the reason she’s in the party. Her issue-free campaign was noted in the local press, but the national press seemed blinded by the glamour of being associated with one of their favorite comedians.

It’s bad enough for the press to not know the district, but national Democrats don’t have that excuse. Today you’re hearing a lot of talk along the lines of, “Oh, everyone knew this was a really conservative district and that Sanford would probably win.” Well, you don’t spend more than $2 million ($1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford) for a race you know you can’t win. Maybe this race really was unwinnable for Democrats, but that means that the DCCC and its allies have serious problems in assessing the terrain and determining which races ought to be prioritized.

Finally, Public Policy Polling painted an astonishingly different portrait of this race 15 days ago — even with the difficulty of polling in a special election, an 18-point swing in two weeks is pretty remarkable. Most likely, Colbert Busch never enjoyed a nine-point lead (Democratic representative Jim Clyburn said her internal polls never had her ahead by more than three) and the sample of two weeks ago just wasn’t a likely representation of which voters would show up on Election Day.

Today’s Morning Jolt features a preview of the Benghazi hearings, praise for an NR colleague, and then last night’s big news . . . 

This Just In from South Carolina: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Hey, Democrats. You just spent a bundle and lost . . . to Mark Sanford.

The argument that we can’t learn anything about 2014 from an individual special House race is generally true. But Alex Roarty of National Journal — a.k.a. that insider, non-conservative publication that National Review staffers are often mixed up with — repeats my point from yesterday: Democrats put a lot of money and effort into this race, against a Republican candidate they thought was uniquely beatable. (And in fact, he was. But “uniquely beatable” doesn’t always mean you will beat him.)

Now we see all of that Democratic spending gained nothing: $1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford . . . FLUSH!

And there is a lesson for 2014: Mark Sanford managed to overcome the electorate’s wariness about him by emphasizing that a vote for his opponent was a vote for Nancy Pelosi and the Obama agenda. Red-state and red-district Democrats have always had a tough balancing act, emphasizing how they’re not like those other Democrats; Elizabeth Colbert Busch in the end just wasn’t a talented enough candidate to pull that off. (In short, she wasn’t that talented a candidate at all. “The Solyndra of the South,” as Nathan Wurtzel summarized.)

Any remaining red-district Democrats really have to run hard from Pelosi from now until November 2014.

Moe Lane:

This should have gone to the Democrats; but, well, there’s that pesky albatross. May Nancy Pelosi stay House Minority Leader, well, forever. . . . If they can’t win House seats in R districts under these circumstances, they won’t win ‘em under more even ones.

Betsy Woodruff was at the victory party:

There will be lots of analysis in the days to come about what this election means, but one thing isn’t up for debate: Mark Sanford knows how to campaign, and his win here is due at least in part to his tireless canvassing and cheerful willingness to ask for the vote of anyone who would listen to him.

When he arrived at the victory party, Sanford was in full-on retail-politics mode. I followed the former governor on the campaign trail the day before the election and wrote about his perpetual handshaking and small-talking. Winning the election doesn’t seem to have tempered his pace. When he arrives at the party, he laps around the front of the building (which, a server tells me, is more crowded than it’s ever been), posing for pictures and hugging supporters.

Two things are different from the day before, though: First, he’s wearing a suit instead of stained khakis and busted-up shoes, and actually looks like someone who might belong in the halls of the Capitol. And second, he’s got his oldest son, Marshall, in tow. He looks around for his son every minute or two — when he loses sight of him, he asks the nearest staffer, “Where’d Marshall go?” and whenever he gets a chance, he introduces the 20-year-old to supporters who haven’t met him.

Mark Sanford’s sister, Sarah Sanford Rauch, isn’t far behind. She’s one of his veteran campaign volunteers, and she’s outspoken about her support for her embattled brother. I ask her how she feels.

“Exhausted,” she tells me. “It’s the toughest race I’ve ever been in. I’ve helped out on a bunch of races, but this is the toughest, by far.”

“You wake up every morning and you look at the newspaper and you wait to see what anvil is getting dropped on your head each day,” she adds.

Somebody else is feeling the headache this morning.

In other words, while Pelosi has always had a handful of members who were likely to stray, she can expect even less agreement from members like Jim Matheson of Utah (R+16), Nick Rahall of West Virginia (R+14), Mike McIntyre of North Carolina (R+12), John Barrow of Georgia (R+9), and Collin Peterson of Minnesota (R+6) — and perhaps Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona (R+4), Patrick Murphy of Florida (R+3), Pete Gallego of Texas (R+3), and Ron Barber of Arizona (R+3). Because if invoking Pelosi was key to Sanford overcoming the well-funded Colbert Busch, imagine how it will play in districts where the Republican doesn’t have Sanford’s baggage?

Here is the short version of Ken Cuccinelli’s economic plan, unveiled today:

• Reduce the individual income tax rate from 5.75 percent to 5 percent over four years;
• Establish a Small Business Tax Relief Commission (to be launched in December 2013) with the following strategic goals:
  • Eliminate or reduce the harmful effects of the Business Professional Occupational License (BPOL) Tax, the Machine and Tool (M&T) Tax, and the Merchants Capital (MC) Tax, while maintaining local government revenue;
  • Reduce the Personal Income Tax and the Corporate Income Tax;
  • Identify and eliminate outdated exemptions and loopholes that promote crony capitalism;
  • Ensure state government growth does not exceed inflation plus population growth;
  • Reduce the corporate income tax from 6 percent to 4 percent

Cuccinelli unveiled his Economic Growth & Virginia Jobs Plan at SweetFrog Frozen Yogurt, a Richmond based frozen-yogurt shop established in 2009 and now franchised throughout the United States. SweetFrog makes community outreach and involvement a top priority. The plan can be found online here.

Virginia had been enjoying monthly tax revenue that exceeded its budgetary requirements for a while — but they’ve hit a rough patch recently:

For 22 months, from August 2010 until last May, every month but one brought revenues exceeding those collected in the same month the year before. Seven of them showed double-digit growth . . . Virginia’s revenue numbers are sputtering again in a recovery that’s never really caught fire. Six of the past 12 months have been downers; the worst was March’s 6.1 percent general revenue drop.

Defense cuts and federal worker furloughs could end up hitting the state’s income and sales tax revenue hard.

On the other hand, Virginia voters are in a pretty good mood at the moment. The state’s unemployment rate is only 5.3 percent, the tenth-lowest in the country. Incumbent GOP governor Bob McDonnell, who cannot run again, has an approval rating of 64 percent in the most recent Washington Post poll, and 52 percent think the state is headed in the right direction, while only 36 percent believe it’s on the “wrong track.” What’s more, 5 percent say the state’s economy is “excellent” while 56 percent say it’s “good.”

The Pentagon accused China of cyber-espionage; the conflict in Syria is now “a brutal campaign of sectarian cleansing,” with death toll around 80,000; sectarian violence is spreading to Iraq and Lebanon; North Korea is issuing new threats; more bombings in Pakistan; our overseas consulates have indicated possible terror attacks this summer; the suicide rate is up 28 percent in the past ten years; millions of part-time U.S. workers may see their hours cut because of the Obamacare rules; wages have been virtually flat since 2009 and, as Bloomberg puts it, “long-term unemployment is turning the jobless into pariahs”; only 57 percent of Americans are doing any saving for retirement at all (down from 65 percent in 2009); and the rate of single parenthood has increased more dramatically as the Great Recession drags on.

So, what’s the president doing tonight, Mark Knoller? “This evening, Pres Obama attends a DNC fundraiser at a local hotel. His 5th fundraiser this year. But no press coverage.”

He golfed yesterday, of course, his twelfth round in his second term.

Hmmm:

“We want somebody who wakes up thinking about jobs, thinking about the economy, thinking about finding a great deal, thinking about training the workforce,” [Democratic Sen. and former Gov.] Tim Kaine said. “That’s why I’m supporting Terry McAuliffe to be the next governor of the Commonwealth.”

Oh, I have no doubt McAuliffe is quite skilled at finding a great deal. The question is, “a great deal for whom?”

Elsewhere in the Washington Post’s coverage, they note, “Beyond education, McAuliffe’s policy blueprint calls for targeted business incentive programs and diversifying the state’s economic base.”

“Targeted business incentive programs.” Oh, I have no doubt that economic assistance under a Governor McAuliffe would be targeted.

As he said in his autobiography:

Let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to raise money for a governor. They have all kinds of business to hand out, road contracts, construction jobs, you name it.

You may scoff: Surely the risk of humilation would prevent him from directing “incentives” to his friends and donors! But as he proudly boasts when discussing the time a casino owner demanded he go up and sing on a stage for a donation, “For $500,000 I don’t mind humiliating myself for five minutes.”

Would a Governor McAuliffe mix politics and business? Heck, he brags about how he does it:

McAuliffe has said that his work in politics has bolstered his business career. “I’ve met all of my business contacts through politics. It’s all interrelated,” he told the New York Times in 1999.

As he summarized it to the Washington Post in 2009:

I’ve done business with people I’ve met in politics, who I went to law school with, who I grew up with . . . Who do you do business with? People you meet in life.

From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:

The Benghazi Hearings: No Showboating, Please

Dear Republicans on the House Oversight Committee:

Please do not grandstand. Please do not take the time before the television cameras to tell us how outraged you are, even though what you are investigating is, indeed, outrageous. There will be plenty of time for that after the hearing. All day Wednesday, give us the facts, and then more facts, and then more facts.

Just ask the questions of the witnesses. Let them speak and don’t cut them off. Do not give the Obama administration any cover to claim that this is a partisan witch hunt from unhinged political opponents. Don’t waste time complaining about the media’s lack of interest or coverage so far. Just give them — and us — the facts to tell the story, a story that will leave all of us demanding accountability.

Sheryl Attkisson’s excellent reporting for CBS gives us a sense of what to expect, with three big issues.

First: Leading up to September 11, why did the State Department keep reducing the amount of security protecting diplomatic staff in Libya, in light of the increasingly dire requests from those in country?

The former deputy chief of mission for the U.S. in Libya, Gregory Hicks was interviewed by congressional investigators on the House Oversight Committee in April. He told them, “We had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability to the bare minimum.”

Second: Precisely what happened that night? Was there a time when a rescue could have been authorized, but wasn’t? Were any forces told to “stand down” and not attempt a rescue?

From Hicks’s interview:

A: So Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, who is the SOCAFRICA commander, his team, you know, they were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C-130 when he got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, you can’t go now, you don’t have authority to go now. And so they missed the flight. And, of course, this meant that one of the . . . 

Q : They didn’t miss the flight. They were told not to board the flight.

A: They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it. So, anyway, and yeah. I still remember Colonel Gibson, he said, “I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.” A nice compliment.

Wait, there’s more from another witness:

On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department’s own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a “whistle-blower” witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Third, what happened afterwards, and was there an effort to lie to the American people about what happened?

Hicks, again:

Greg Hicks: . . . The net impact of what has transpired is the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world has basically said that the President of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The impact of that is immeasurable. Magariaf has just lost face in front of not only his own people, but the world . . . my jaw hit the floor as I watched this . . . I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career as on that day . . . I never reported a demonstration; I reported an attack on the consulate. Chris’s last report, if you want to say his final report, is, “Greg, we are under attack.” . . . It is jaw-dropping that — to me that — how that came to be.

Finally, did the previous efforts to investigate this amount to a cover-up?

Jed Babbin:

Last week, we learned that the State Department’s Inspector General is investigating the Pickering-Mullen “Accountability Review Board” for, among other things, its failure to investigate and get statements from the Benghazi survivors. Before there were whistleblowers there were survivors, yet the comprehensively misnamed “Accountability Review Board” didn’t question them.

Which isn’t a surprise. The ARB did what it was paid to do: limit the damage and blame people under Hillary Clinton for the failures of leadership and management. It was, simply, a whitewash. We’ll probably wait a long time for the IG to report the facts — 2017 sounds like the right time frame.

In the press conference announcing the report, Adm. Mullen said something that’s been bothering me ever since. He said that no military assets could have been deployed in time. In time to do what?

Jed makes a good point here: Just how did the U.S. military and diplomatic folks outside of Benghazi know how long they had to rescue anyone? How did they know how long our guys would be able to hold out, or how long the attack would go on? After the fact, you can calculate that not enough forces could have reached the site in time, but how did they know that as the events were ongoing?

If that means, in Clintonian terms, that they wouldn’t have been in time to save Ambassador Chris Stevens, that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have been in time to save the SEALs.

If you parse Mullen’s words — as we learned we must when Hillary’s hubby was president — he almost certainly meant that the ambassador was killed in the early moments of the attack.

In short, what we don’t need is a bold, expectation-setting, agenda-hinting prediction like this:

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said on his radio show Monday that President Obama “will not fill out his full term” because he was complicit in a “cover-up” surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.

“I believe that before it’s all over, this president will not fill out his full term,” Huckabee said. “I know that puts me on a limb, but this is not minor.”

If Mark Sanford succeeds in his improbable comeback tomorrow, a lot of people will be asking, “How did he do it?” A serious answer will be: “He just outworked his opponent.”

Earlier today, Dave Weigel tweeted, “Sanford has 5 campaign stops today — one avail already — before Colbert Busch’s first event.” Sanford has eleven public events scheduled today; Colbert Busch has five.

The week of April 22, he did 15 public events. She did six in those five days, according to her campaign’s web site. He did three public events Wednesday; she did one. He did three public events Thursday; she did none. He did ten events public Saturday, she did five.

He did take Sunday off; she did three events that day.

Sanford’s campaign just announced he’s doing 10 events tomorrow, before his Election Night party:

7:45 AM — Pages Okra Grill, 302 Coleman Blvd, Mt. Pleasant

8:30 AM — Huddle House, 261 Johnnie Dodds Blvd., Mt. Pleasant

9:15 AM — Brown’s Court Bakery, 199 St. Philip Street, Charleston

10 AM — Vote — 75 Calhoun Street, Charleston

11 AM — Pep Boys, 1550 Savannah Highway, West Ashley, Charleston

11:45 AM — Moe’s Southwest Grill, 1812 Sam Rittenberg Blvd., West Ashley, Charleston

12:45 PM — Cookout Restaurant, 8968 University Blvd., North Charleston 29406

1:30PM — Alex’s Restaurant, 309 St. James Avenue, Goose Creek

2:30 PM — Piggly Wiggly, 9616 Highway 78, Suite 1, Ladson

4 PM — Farmer’s Market Mt. Pleasant, Moultrie Middle School, 645 Coleman Boulevard, Mt. Pleasant

7:30 PM — Watch Party — Liberty Tap Room & Grill, 1028 Johnnie Dodds Blvd., Mt. Pleasant

A busy campaign schedule can’t completely change the dynamics of a race, but it certainly can’t hurt, as long as the candidate can keep the energy and enthusiasm up.

The editorial board of the Hilton Head, S.C., Island Packet asked Elizabeth Colbert Busch why she ran as a Democrat.

She answered for several minutes, beginning with seeing an “incredible-looking” John Kennedy drive by in a black Lincoln Continental with the top down in 1960 when she was six years old, and how Jackie Kennedy was “such a fierce mother, protecting her children.”

“I’ve always just felt that I was a Democrat — although a fiscally conservative Democrat.”

Her answer didn’t mention President Obama, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, assistant House minority leader and South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, or any other modern Democratic leader.

Some might argue that today’s Democratic party has a quite different worldview and agenda than the 1960-era John F. Kennedy version.

Asked whether she would vote for Nancy Pelosi to be speaker, Colbert Busch responds, ”I wouldn’t even be able to vote until 2015. I don’t know who’s going to be on that ballot. Nobody knows who’s going to be on that ballot. But who I will vote for is the person who will be on the ballot. It’s not until 2015 anyway, so it’s kind of a hypothetical question.”

Terry McAuliffe strongly believes that Ronald Reagan’s campaign conspired with the Iranian ayatollahs to prevent the release of the hostages in 1980:

Reagan’s Inauguration hit us all like a kick in the gut, and not just for the obvious reasons. President Carter was racing the clock trying to free the hostages before Reagan was inaugurated, and it didn’t look as if he would make it. Then Inauguration Day came and exactly five minutes after Reagan was sworn in, the U.S. hostages were finally released after 444 days in captivity. A former National Security Council (NSC) staffer named Gary Sick spent years investigating and put together a strong case that a deal had occurred between Reagan’s people and the Iranians to sway the elections by delaying the release of the hostages — and in return for helping Reagan, the Iranians would be rewarded with weapons shipments from Israel.

Let me tell you why I’m sure the Reagan people had a hand in this. First of all, the arms transfers from Israel to Iran began almost immediately after Reagan became president. Second, the main defense of the Reagan people was that it would have been too terrible a crime for Reagan to cook up secret deals with the Iranians in violation of U.S. law, but that is just what the Reagan administration did when it sold arms to the Iranians and used the profits to illegally fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Finally, the key to Reagan’s deal on the Iranian hostages was Bill Casey, a swashbuckling Cold War spy master who served Reagan as campaign manager and CIA Director. Sick’s sources told him that Casey met with the Iranians in a Madrid hotel in July 1980 and again several months later, and made the deal.

— What a Party! pp. 35–36

The first advocate of the “October Surprise” theory was Lyndon LaRouche.

The Israeli-arms-to-Iran deal beginning in 1981 described by McAuliffe was Operation Seashell, an Israeli operation designed to prevent Iran from losing to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, not an American operation. French and Portuguese arms dealers were the intermediaries, not American ones.

Daniel Pipes pointed out that Sick used the “I refused to believe this theory until recently” line in 1991, while publicly espousing it in 1988.

The House of Representatives formed a special task force to invesigate the “October Surprise,” spending $1.3 million and looking at the issue for ten months, looking at tens of thousands of documents, conducting more than 230 formal interviews in ten countries. Indiana representative Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, chaired the task force and concluded that it “found no truth to the accusations that members of the Reagan presidential campaign conspired in 1980 to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran until after the November election.”

Hamilton:

The overall conclusion of the task force is that there is no credible evidence to support the central October Surprise allegations. We found, first, wholly insufficient evidence that officials of the Reagan presidential campaign secretly met with Iranian officials in 1980; no credible evidence that members of the Reagan presidential campaign conspired to delay the release of the hostages;a and no credible evidence that the Reagan administration provided directly, or indirectly through Israel, arms in exchange for a delay in the release of the hostages.

The task force concluded that “nearly all of the individuals claiming firsthand knowledge of the October Surprise allegations were either wholesale fabricators or were impeached by documentary evidence.”

Finally, Newsweek back in 1991:

NEWSWEEK has found, after a long investigation including interviews with government officials and other knowledgeable sources around the world, that the key claims of the purported eyewitnesses and accusers simply do not hold up. What the evidence does show is the murky history of a conspiracy theory run wild.

Casey’s whereabouts during the July “window” are convincingly established by contemporary records at the Imperial War Museum in London. Casey, it turns out, took a three-day breather from the campaign to participate in the Anglo-American Conference on the History of the Second World War. As a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services — the forerunner of the CIA — Casey delivered a paper on OSS operations in Europe during the war. He went to a reception for conference participants on the evening of July 28, and he was photographed there. He delivered his paper on the morning of July 29.

ABC News acknowledged these facts in an update later in June — but still maintained that Casey had enough time on July 27 and 28 to fly to Madrid to meet with the Iranians. A close examination of the conference records by NEWSWEEK, however, demonstrates that Casey in fact was present at the conference sessions in London on July 28. Historian Jonathan Chadwick, who organized the conference, kept a precise, day-by-day and session-by-session record of who was present and who was not. According to Chadwick’s records, Casey was present at 9:30 a.m on the 28th, stayed for the second morning session, leaving after lunch and returning at 4 p.m.

The truth is out there, Terry. Maybe the cigarette-smoking man got to everyone else!

Oh, look who’s in the news again:

Bill Ayers says people can’t equate the bombings that he and others in the Weather Underground did 40 or so years ago with the April 15 twin bombings in Boston that killed three people.

There is no relationship at all between what Weather Underground members did and the bombings that two brothers allegedly committed on April 15 in Massachusetts, Ayers said in response to a reporter’s question. No one died in the Weather Underground bombings.

Wrong.

Three Weathermen are killed when bomb manufacturing goes awry. The organization becomes the Weather Underground as key players including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Kathy Boudin go into hiding .  . Kathy Boudin resurfaces to participate in an armed robbery in Nanuet, New York, which results in the shooting deaths of three men.

Ayers goes on to say . . .

“How different is the shooting in Connecticut from shooting at a hunting range?” Ayers said. “Just because they use the same thing, there’s no relationship at all.”

First, it’s good to see that Ayers sees the futility of cracking down on lawful, responsible gun owners because of the actions of the Newtown shooter. Secondly, show me the safe, responsible use of a pipe bomb.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., committed daily war crimes in Vietnam “and I get asked about violence when what I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said. “Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question . . . I’m against violence.”

“I’m against violence,” said the bomb-builder. Finally, the reporter covering the event feels the need to point out the glaring gaps in Ayers’s story of himself as a misunderstood hero:

In his talk to the crowd, Ayers mentioned that in 1970, he lost three friends in the Weather Underground, including his lover, Diana Oughton. He did not explain in his talk how they died — they were killed when nail bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse blew up.

Telling the crowd the circumstances of those deaths would have been “inappropriate,” Ayers said afterward. “Everybody here knows,” he said.

Authorities said the bombs were intended to be used at a dance at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey.

But remember, Bill Ayers is totally, totally different from the Boston bombers, honest!

Ayers recently elaborated on his relationship with Barack Obama and his political allies earlier in life:

David Axelrod said we were friendly, that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was “a guy around the neighborhood,” that was true.

As Ben Smith summarized:

Ayers and Dohrn, who have been semi-officially rehabilitated in Chicago but still inspire a wide range of feelings, played a modest but real part in launching Obama’s political career.

This is not what Democrats wanted to or expected to see, the day before South Carolina’s special House election:

PPP’s final poll of the special election in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District finds a race that’s too close to call, with Republican Mark Sanford leading Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch 47–46. The 1 point lead for Sanford represents a 10 point reversal from PPP’s poll of the race two weeks ago, when Colbert Busch led by 9 points at 50–41.

Sanford has gotten back into the race by nationalizing it and painting Colbert Busch as a liberal. A plurality of voters in the district — 47% — say they think Colbert Busch is a liberal compared to 43% who characterize her as ideologically ‘about right.’ Colbert Busch’s favorability rating has dropped a net 19 points compared to 2 weeks ago, from +25 then at 56/31 to +6 now at 50/44.

While Colbert Busch is seen as too liberal, 48% of voters think that Sanford’s views are “about right” on the issues compared to just 38% who see him as too conservative. Sanford’s also seen some repair to his image over the course of the campaign. Although he’s still unpopular, sporting a –11 net favorability rating at 43/54, that’s up a net 13 points from our first poll in March when he was at 34/58.

A ten-point shift!

Either the Sanford campaign is a bunch of messaging geniuses . . . or perhaps Colbert Busch’s lead was never that high. As our Betsy Woodruff notes, “Representative James Clyburn (D., S.C.) told reporters at the press conference today that internal polling data never gave Colbert Busch more than a 3-point lead.”

Do PPP polls often show the Democrat performing six points better than their internal polling?

The pollster further explains:

The other key development in this race over the last two weeks is that Republicans are returning to the electorate. On our last poll, conducted right after the trespassing charges against Sanford became public, we found that the likely electorate had voted for Mitt Romney by only 5 points in a district that he actually won by 18. That suggested many Republican voters were depressed and planning to stay home. On our final poll we find an electorate that’s Romney +13 — that’s still more Democratic than the turnout from last fall, but it’s a lot better for Sanford than it was a couple weeks ago.

Or perhaps the previous sample just wasn’t a realistic portrait of the likely turnout in this district, even in a special election, and even with these unusually high-profile candidates?

For what it is worth, last week a poll commissioned by Red Racing Horses showed the race tied. So Sanford may have the momentum, but it’s not over until the votes are counted tomorrow night.

So, other than Israel intervening in Syria — with no heads-up to the United States — and unnamed administration officials telling the New York Times that the “red line” policy was a giant accident, and the fact that the Benghazi hearings appear set to have the deputy chief of mission contradicting all kinds of administration statements about the attacks, and bad news for Democrats in South Carolina and Virginia . . . well, other than all that, President Obama had a good weekend.

From the first Morning Jolt of the week:

The New White House Line: Maybe We Don’t Care About Chemical-Weapons Use After All

Ladies and gentlemen, some unidentified White House official, within our government:

“How can we attack another country unless it’s in self-defense and with no Security Council resolution?” another official said, referring to United Nations authorization. “If he drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

I realize that we’re all tired of war, that we’re tired of being asked to intervene in Arab countries, with their tribal loyalties and factionalism and blood feuds and cycles of revenge and seemingly endless reserves of cruelty and capacity for bloodshed. But if we don’t see any purpose or value in attempting to prevent, deter, or punish the use of chemical weapons against civilians, we might as well close up shop. Every two-bit dictator and ruthless regime is watching the international response to Syria or lack thereof, and we’ve already sent the signal that you can probably escape serious consequence if your use of chemical weapons is hard to prove and on a small scale.

Elliott Abrams:

How soon they forget. According to the Times that line was uttered last August, not quite four months after Mr. Obama established his “Atrocities Prevention Board.” In a speech on April 23, 2012 he said this at the Holocaust Museum:

And finally, “never again” is a challenge to nations. It’s a bitter truth — too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of innocents on a massive scale. And we are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not save.

We may feel like the use of chemical weapons isn’t enough to justify airstrikes, a no-fly-zone, a “safe zone” for refugees, or any other steps beyond a sternly worded United Nations resolution, but other countries see their own interests in what happens in Syria, and they’re acting.  Also this weekend:

Israel launched airstrikes into Syria for the second time in three days, said Syria and its allies, targeting what it believes are stores of advanced missiles that could be transferred to the militant group Hezbollah, amid new concerns that the Syrian civil war could widen into broader regional conflict.

Surely a lot of factors go into the decision to use military force, but it’s tough to ignore that that the Israeli Defense Force suddenly got a lot more active in Syria just a couple of days after Obama said that crossing the red line meant . . . well, that we would “rethink the range of options that are available to us.”

The Benghazi Hearings: This Week’s Must-See TV

Jake Tapper offers a preview of what we can expect from this week’s hearings on Benghazi, and everyone crying “oh, this is a partisan witch hunt” can go sit in the corner.

Greg Hicks, former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, told congressional investigators that the State Department internal review of the catastrophe at the mission in Benghazi “let people off the hook,” CNN has learned.

The Accountability Review Board “report itself doesn’t really ascribe blame to any individual at all. The public report anyway,” Hicks told investigators, according to transcript excerpts obtained by CNN. “It does let people off the hook.”

The board’s report on the Benghazi attack, in which Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in September, is being reviewed by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General.

Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Sunday on CBS that Hicks will testify Wednesday in a congressional hearing on the deadly attack in Benghazi.

“In our system, people who make decisions have been confirmed by the Senate to make decisions,” Hicks told investigators. “The three people in the State Department who are on administrative leave pending disciplinary action are below Senate confirmation level. Now, the DS (Diplomatic Security) assistant secretary resigned, and he is at Senate confirmation level. Yet the paper trail is pretty clear that decisions were being made above his level.

Whom might Hicks be referring to? He specifically mentions Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy.

“Certainly the fact that Under Secretary Kennedy required a daily report of the personnel in country and who personally approved every official American who went to Tripoli or Benghazi, either on assignment or TDY (temporary duty), would suggest some responsibility about security levels within the country lies on his desk,” Hicks said.

In the interview, conducted on April 11, Hicks also makes clear that he immediately believed the September 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi had been conducted by terrorists, though the White House and other officials in the Obama administration initially suggested that the attack was the result of an out-of-control demonstration against an anti-Muslim YouTube video.

“I thought it was a terrorist attack from the get-go,” said Hicks, who was in Tripoli during the attack. “I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning.”

Looks like a rough week ahead, Mr. President.

Hey, remember how you heard that Republican senator Kelly Ayotte was running into hostile crowds at her town-hall meetings up in New Hampshire, allegedly as a result of her vote on the Toomey-Manchin background-check proposal? Well, take a look at this exchange from Thursday’s town-hall meeting:

Boy, that crowd was so hostile, they tried to hurt her eardrums by clapping and cheering loudly when an audience member called her “presidential.”

And now, perhaps the most intriguing section of today’s Morning Jolt:

Suddenly, Three Big Developments in the Investigation Into the Benghazi Attack

This news cycle has three new developments related to the Benghazi attack you must see and keep handy for the next time you hear a White House press secretary say it was “a long time ago” or a Secretary of State ask “what difference does it make?” whether it was a preplanned terrorist attack or a spontaneous demonstration.

DEVELOPMENT ONE, courtesy CNN’s Paul Cruickshank, Tim Lister, Nic Robertson, and Fran Townsend:

Several Yemeni men belonging to al Qaeda took part in the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi last September, according to several sources who have spoken with CNN.

One senior U.S. law enforcement official told CNN that “three or four members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” or AQAP, took part in the attack.

Another source briefed on the Benghazi investigation said Western intelligence services suspect the men may have been sent by the group specifically to carry out the attack. But it’s not been ruled out that they were already in the city and participated as the opportunity arose.

So, unless these multiple sources are wrong, this can accurately be described as an al-Qaeda attack, either preplanned or a target of opportunity.

DEVELOPMENT TWO, from Adam Housley of Fox News:

On the night of the Benghazi terror attack, special operations put out multiple calls for all available military and other assets to be moved into position to help — but the State Department and White House never gave the military permission to cross into Libya, sources told Fox News. 

The disconnect was one example of what sources described as a communication breakdown that left those on the ground without outside help.

“When you are on the ground, you depend on each other — we’re gonna get through this situation. But when you look up and then nothing outside of the stratosphere is coming to help you or rescue you, that’s a bad feeling,” one source said.

Multiple sources spoke to Fox News about what they described as a lack of action in Benghazi on Sept. 11 last year, when four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed.

“They had no plan. They had no contingency plan for if this happens, and that’s the problem this is going to face in the future,” one source said. “They’re dealing with more hostile regions, hostile countries. This attack’s going to happen again.”

Under normal circumstances, authorities in Benghazi would have fallen under the chief of mission, one source said — the person in charge of security in the country who in this case was Stevens. But once Stevens was cornered and members of his security detail pushed his distress button, that authority would have been transferred to his deputy. However, that deputy was out of the country.

That meant the authority then reverted directly to the U.S.. State Department, and oversight of the response to the attack that night fell to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, who were calling the shots.

It would be very useful to know more about this source. Perhaps it’s someone with an agenda, or someone whose recollection of that night is inaccurate. But if it was someone within the special-operations community, someone with firsthand knowledge of what happened that night, well . . . then this is explosive; there was a call for help, and IF there were actions that could be taken, and the State Department decided against it. If it really did lead all the way back to Hillary Clinton, this would end her 2016 chances. “She left Americans to die horrible deaths” is pretty much the worst charge a presidential candidate could possibly face.

And while we don’t know it absolute certainty that what this source is saying is true . . . if it is true, it would explain a lot about the third big development:

DEVELOPMENT THREE, courtesy Fox News’ James Rosen:

The State Department’s Office of Inspector General is investigating the special internal panel that probed the Benghazi terror attack for the State Department, Fox News has confirmed.

The IG’s office is said by well-placed sources to be seeking to determine whether the Accountability Review Board, or ARB — led by former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen — failed to interview key witnesses who had asked to provide their accounts of the Benghazi attacks to the panel.

The IG’s office notified the department of the “special review” on March 28, according to Doug Welty, the congressional and public affairs officer of the IG’s office.

This disclosure marks a significant turn in the ongoing Benghazi case, as it calls into question the reliability of the blue-ribbon panel that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton convened to review the entire matter. Until the report was concluded, she and all other senior Obama administration officials regularly refused to answer questions about what happened in Benghazi.

Since the ARB report was issued in December — finding that “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels” well below Clinton were to blame for the “inadequate” security at Benghazi — Clinton and other top officials have routinely referred questioners to the conclusions of the board report. Now the methodology and final product of the ARB are themselves coming under the scrutiny of the department’s own top auditor.

Let me offer two sections from the Morning Jolt newsletter to begin Friday morning. First . . .

Opposition Research, in Fun Graphic Style

The good folks at the America Rising PAC — Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager and the research director for George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, and former RNC research director Joe Pounder and spokesman Tim Miller — launched a Tumblr site; declaring, “This will be our home until we launch the full website.”

Some notable launch material: 

1. Three Sleaziest Terry McAuliffe Political $ Moments (On Video)

#1 - 1988: “I Will Stop At Nothing To Try And Get A Check From You.”

#2 - 2001: “If The Worst Thing You Say About Me Is ‘Terry McAuliffe Has Done Business With People He’s Met Through Politics,’ So Be It. I Plead Guilty.”

#3 - 2007: “It’s A Lot Easier To Raise Money For A Governor. They Have All Kinds Of Business To Hand Out, Road Contracts, Construction Jobs.”

2. America Rising Prepping for Hillary Clinton 2016

3. McAuliffe Flip Flops on Abandoning Wife & Kids For Political Fundraisers

That last bit of video, featuring Terry McAuliffe on “Meet the Press” in 2001, is pretty funny in light of the story of McAuliffe stopping at a fundraiser on the way home from the hospital with his wife and newborn child:

So, UMass-Dartmouth, you have a campus where one student decided to place a bomb next to a child and blow up marathoners, and several of his friends, also students, learned of his actions, and then turned around and tried to help him by destroying evidence.

This is on a college campus, a place where “tolerance” is considered the supreme value. Yet somehow, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev never learned to tolerate the existence of American children watching a marathon. Somehow his friends managed to find blowing up Americans tolerable. However, they couldn’t quite tolerate a successful FBI investigation leading to the capture or arrest of Tsarnaev.

Just what were these students learning, seeing, and experiencing on that campus? What made Tsarnaev believe that blowing people up was okay? Why didn’t he encounter any person or group or place that would stir a sense of moral objection in him, if indeed it was his brother who first proposed the attack? Why didn’t he encounter anything that would make him think, “wait a minute, no, hating Americans and trying kill them is wrong”?

Why didn’t these other students react with horror at the thought that their friend could be a terrorist? Why didn’t they call the cops or FBI? Why was their first instinct to help their friend, instead of helping the authorities take a dangerous bomb-maker off the streets?

How did all of these young man fail to encounter one professor, one mentor, one role model, one person around them who would lead them to conclude that mass murder is wrong, and those who do it ought to be punished?

The culture on the campus of UMass-Dartmouth didn’t create the monster that Tsarnaev became, nor did it make his friends into moral pygmies. But that campus atmosphere sure failed to mitigate any of this, didn’t it?

For what it’s worth:

Less than a week before the contentious special election between Mark Sanford (R) and Elizabeth Colbert-Busch (D), a RRH/PMI automated survey of 650 likely voters in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District finds the race as close as can be, with both candidates taking 46 percent of the vote and 7 percent undecided. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 5 percent. . . .

2012 presidential results in the survey were 54% Romney, 41% Obama. This result shows a turnout marginally more Democratic than the turnout in the 2012 presidential election, in which Romney won the seat 58-40. The relatively Democratic electorate suggests somewhat high enthusiasm among Democrats and liberals, and somewhat decreased enthusiasm among conservatives.

The electorate we found was 60% Female and 40% Male. The electorate was weighted to the following racial balance: 79% White, 15% African American, 2% Hispanic, 1% Asian, and 3% Other races.

Polling and forecasting turnout in a special election is particularly difficult; the usual low turnout of special elections is likely to be mitigated in this case with two candidates with higher-than-normal profiles, a former governor known for an infamous scandal and the sister of a television comedian. Normally, one could conclude that a currently undecided voter would be unlikely to vote on Tuesday, but this race seems to be anything but normal.

Having said that, it will be interesting if turnout Tuesday really splits 60–40 along gender lines.

The Democratic firm Public Policy Polling will survey the district again this weekend.

The Heritage Foundation offers a comparison that articulates why so many Republicans are so wary about the Gang of Eight immigration bill:

After Obamacare, I don’t think you’ll see the conservative grassroots feeling confident about any 800-page bill for a long time.

As noted on Twitter, most Democrats’ view on immigration reform begins and ends with, “yeah, yeah, yeah, enough with the boring stuff about respect for the rule of law, economic impact on unskilled workers, assimilation, or border security, tell me how soon my party can get 11 million new voters.”

Most folks on the Right don’t trust the motives of the congressional Democrats pushing it or trust the Obama administration to enforce the law; we see immigration laws currently on the books ignored and ineffectively enforced all the time (hello, Boston bomber friends); we’re not convinced of any significant political benefit; we believe that any aspect of the law that proves inconvenient for the Democratic party’s allies will face immediate pressure to be repealed or altered;  and we believe it rewards those who have broken the law. But other than that, it looks great.

Coming soon to an attack ad near you: Terry McAuliffe describes stopping on the way home from the hospital to attend a political fundraiser, leaving his wife, Dorothy, and their newborn child in the car. The event raised $1 million for the Democratic party.

“Nobody ever said life with me was going to be easy.” Now there is a winning slogan for a gubernatorial campaign.