Iran Feature: Fars News and The Onion Agree --- "Rural American Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama"

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UPDATE 1745 GMT: Looks like Fars English has realised that its scoop might not be real --- the story has been withdrawn from the website.

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Iran's Fars News Agency has a surprise revelation, "According to the results of a Gallup poll released Monday, the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than US President Barack Obama."

Fars has ventured where no US media outlet seems to have gone in breaking this news. Mitt Romney has not trumpeted this as proof of his ascendancy. Fox News has not yet proclaimed the evidence that the Great Liberal Menace has been defeated.

Indeed, Gallup does not seem to have the poll on its website.

So where did Fars' reporters make this discovery?

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US Politics Analysis: Why Obama Has the Edge So Far --- Campaign Finance and the State of the Election

Samuel L. Jackson's pro-Obama "Wake the F*** Up, America"

The latest pro-Romney "attack ad" by the SuperPAC American Crossroads

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Next Wednesday, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will meet in the first of three campaign debates.

Opinion varies as to how critical the debates are in persuading undecided voters to support a candidate, but the cold fact is that in this campaign they are the last chance for Romney to turn around Obama's momentum. The President is currently leading by margins, especially in the battleground states, that have him as a 4-1 favourite –-- 80% probability --- to retain the White House.

The reasons for Romney's disappointing performance are many, but one that is not receiving the attention that it deserves is that conservatives have not yet been able --- as many feared after the Supreme Court decision of 2010 --- to swamp the Obama campaign with a series of negative ads drowning out the voice of the Democratic incumbent. There is time for that change, especially if big donors are encouraged by Romney's performance in the first debate to pour in last-minute millions, but money has not yet shifted the fundamentals in this race.

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Video and Transcript: President Obama's Speech to the UN

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The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims. It is time to heed the words of Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.” Together, we must work towards a world where we are strengthened by our differences, and not defined by them. That is what America embodies, and that is the vision we will support.

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EA Audio: World Leaders Take Over New York --- Scott Lucas with the BBC

United Nations General AssemblyLater today we will post the video of President Obama's speech to the United Nations General Assembly, but this morning I took a lighter look with BBC Radio 5 at the PR and politics in New York. The conversation started with British Prime Minister David Cameron's moment of glory this evening on the David Letterman Show, but then moved to the question of which world leaders President Obama and his Republican challenge Mitt Romney should be seeing this week.

That in turn brought a twist in the story: if the Jewish vote in America is so important, why isn't Obama giving the time of day to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week?

The discussion starts at the 1:52:27 mark.

US Politics Feature: "Who was the Worst Foreign Policy President?" --- Scott Lucas with CNN

April 2004: George W. Bush struggles to remember any mistake he ever made

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The worst foreign policy president is easy: George W. Bush. A man of limited intelligence, vision, and knowledge of life beyond the United States, but a man of street-fighting political skills and a determination to persist, whatever the circumstances. A man working with advisors dedicated to the achievement of U.S. power as a perpetual state of dominance – the “unipolar era.”

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US Politics Analysis: How Occupy Wall Street Tilted This Presidential Election Towards Obama

Video streaming by Ustream

Tim Pool describes Monday's protests by Occupy Wall Street on its one-year anniversary

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What has happened since 2010 that means voters are prepared to re-elect a President whose economic record is so unpopular?

Occupy Wall Street is what happened.

Occupy is not the only reason why Romney's economic narrative has faltered. Indeed, in the larger electoral picture, it is only a small contribution to the GOP's poor campaign, but Occupy did something that observers have failed to appreciate in their rush to dismiss the movement as a fad or failure. The protesters changed the background, even as they failed to build a mass of participation, against which the contending economic visions of Obama and Romney are now framed.

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US Politics Analysis: Why Romney's Statement on Libya and Egypt is a Political Failure

Mitt Romney's follow-up statement on Wednesday morning on the attacks in Libya and American deaths

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The story of what happened in Libya is just beginning, but viewed through the prism of the domestic presidential campaign, Romney's haste to use the ongoing events in Libya as a political weapon appears to be a major error --- one that suggests he does not have the temperament to lead the nation through a foreign policy crisis –-- not so much because of what he said, but when and why he said it.

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Libya Analysis: Questions --- and Fears --- After the Attacks in Benghazi

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Most importantly, we do not know --- but I fear --- what comes next. In his White House statement on Wednesday, President Obama was careful to point to the majority of Libyans --- Libyans who had fought alongside the besieged Americans, Libyans who had rescued Stevens and took him to hospital, Libyans who tried to save his life --- as people who had overthrown a dictatoral regime and were trying to build their country. 

But this, as well as the emphasis of Obama and Clinton on respect for all religions --- religions tarnished and undermined in the name of religion by extremists and schemers in the US and in Libya --- appears to have been put on the margins this morning. Instead, the headline is "Obama Vows Justice for Libya Killers".

That way, a year after Libyans gathered to celebrate the fall of Muammar Qaddafi and to hope for a country beyond violence and the authoritarian, does not lead to reconciliation and progress. That way leads to force to meet force, to death to counter death. That way does not lead to security but to insecurity.

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US Politics Video: President Obama's Speech at the Democratic National Convention

the first time I addressed this convention in 2004, I was a younger man; a Senate candidate from Illinois who spoke about hope, not blind optimism or wishful thinking, but hope in the face of difficulty; hope in the face of uncertainty; that dogged faith in the future which has pushed this nation forward, even when the odds are great; even when the road is long.

Eight years later, that hope has been tested, by the cost of war; by one of the worst economic crises in history; and by political gridlock that’s left us wondering whether it’s still even possible to tackle the challenges of our time.

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US Politics Analysis: Why Obama Has to Get Specific and Get Positive at the Convention

Obama has been considered defensive about his achievements during his first term and has appeared too eager to criticise opponents instead of casting positive light on those four years.

President Obama has the chance to redress that in his speech Thursday. If he does not and adopts a negative tone, one can see Mitt Romney --- who is doing a substantial amount of debate preparation this week --- deliver his own Reagan-esque "here we go again" in October.

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