North Carolina senator Kay Hagan’s admission that she skipped a hearing about the Islamic State to attend a campaign fundraiser threatens to waste the $42 million that Democrats have spent in this race to protect her candidacy and their Senate majority.

Two new polls show Republican state-house speaker Thom Tillis tied or leading Hagan, breaking a streak of 13 surveys that showed her with a small but steady lead.

Tillis leads 46 to 45, according to SurveyUSA, which showed Hagan leading 47–46 in September. High Point University shows the two candidates tied at 40, with libertarian Sean Haugh (whom voters saw during a debate with Hagan and Tillis last week) drawing 7 percent of the vote.

The polling data comes one week after Hagan admitted that she skipped a hearing on the threat of the Islamic State to attend a fundraiser. Tillis hammered her for that during their last debate. Local press has also focused on how the Hagan family has benefited from government spending programs that the senator supported, such as the 2009 stimulus.

“Our internals show that undecided voters are starting to break toward Thom Tillis, in large part because of Senator Hagan’s misplaced priorities and the negativity of her campaign,” NRSC spokesman Brad Dayspring tells National Review Online. “Polls show North Carolinians are deeply concerned that as national security threats like ISIS emerged, Kay Hagan was asleep at the wheel. Thom Tillis is the only candidate in the race with a proven record of getting things done, unlike Senator Hagan who simply voted whichever way that Harry Reid and Barack Obama wanted her to.”

Republicans moved to capitalize on Hagan’s apparent weakness by spending $6 million on the race, bringing their total to $10 million. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has spent $16 million on the race. Including outside groups on both sides, Democrats enjoy an $18 million to $16 million advantage in spending in the last month of the election

Many have described the Obama departure from the 70-year-old bipartisan postwar foreign policy of the

United States as reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s failed 1977–81 tenure. There is certainly the same messianic sense of self, the same naïveté, and the same boasts of changing the nature of America, as each of these presidents was defining himself as against supposedly unpopular predecessors. But the proper Obama comparison is not Carter, but rather Warren G. Harding. By that I mean not that Obama’s scandals have matched Harding’s, but rather that by any fair standard they have now far exceeded them and done far more lasting damage — and without Obama’s offering achievements commensurate with those that occasionally characterized Harding’s brief, failed presidency.

The lasting legacy of Obama will be that he has largely discredited the idea of big government, of which he was so passionate an advocate. Almost every major agency of the federal government, many of them with a hallowed tradition of bipartisan competence, have now been rendered either dysfunctional or politicized — or both — largely because of politically driven appointments of unqualified people, or ideological agendas that were incompatible with the agency’s mission.

The list of scandals is quite staggering. In aggregate, it makes Harding’s Teapot Dome mess seem minor in comparison.

There is now no Border Patrol, at least as Americans have understood the agency whose job was enforcing federal immigration statutes. It died as an enforcement bureau sometime in 2013, not long after the reelection of Barack Obama, in a way that it could not have before the election. Instead, in Orwellian fashion, at a time of plague and terrorism abroad, it is now the Border-Crossing Enabling Service, whose chief task is facilitating the illegal entry of thousands from Latin America and Mexico, largely to further the political agenda of the Obama administration, contrary to the law, the will of Congress, and the wishes of the majority of the American people. Mention the phrase “immigration law” or “Border Patrol,” and Americans sigh that neither any longer exists. Yet such a perversion of the mission of a federal agency for political purposes has become thematic of this administration. Perhaps the end of border enforcement is emblemized best by Obama’s own uncle and late aunt, who in open defiance broke federal immigration law and did so with impunity, resided illegally in the United States, broke various state laws, and ended up either on public assistance or mired in the U.S. judicial system.

No one quite knows how to deal with the deadly threat of the Ebola virus. We can assume, however, that the Obama administration’s policy will be predicated foremost on some sort of predetermined ideological concern. Unlike many European countries, the United States still allows foreign nationals from countries with pandemics of Ebola to enter the country freely. What the administration has so far told us about Ebola — that a case here was unlikely, and then, after it happened, that probably only a handful of people had been exposed — was almost immediately proven false. (more…)

AP

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
October 6, 2014 12:19 pm

North Carolina Republicans are asking the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Sen. Kay Hagan (D., N.C.), who has come under fire after revelations that her husband’s company, JDC Manufacturing, received nearly $400,000 in tax credits as part of the controversial 2009 stimulus package, which Hagan supported.

“The Committee needs to investigate whether Senator Hagan used her office to steer taxpayer dollars to her husband’s company and/or whether she provided him with insider knowledge obtained through her office as a United States Senator that allowed his company to receive almost $400,000 in taxpayer funds,” NC GOP chairman Claude Pope wrote in an official letter to the committee.

In a statement accompanying the letter, Pope said he hoped the committee would “determine whether Senator Hagan and her family used the influence of her high office, or access to inside information to profit herself and her family.”

According to financial disclosure forms, the Hagans’ income from JDC Manufacturing increased from essentially nothing in 2008 to almost $134,000 in 2013. Hagan’s son is also the CEO of a company that received more than half a million dollars in stimulus funding to install solar panels.