Obama Thinks He Was "Too Polite" at Debate, Joe Biden at 39 Percent, Jack Welch Says He Was Right: P.M. Links

Your afternoon links

• President Obama thinks he was too polite at the presidential debate last week. "It's hard to sometimes just keep on saying and what you're saying isn't true," the president said.  The campaign is now accusing Mitt Romney of hiding his abortion position by saying he wouldn't do anything to restrict abortion rights, while a campaign staffer was caught on tape apparently helping someone register to vote twice.  Joe Biden, meanwhile, is polling at 39 percent ahead of Thursday's vice presidential debate.

• Jack Welch says he was right to question September's jobs number, that its always based on subjective assumptions, and that attacks on him seemed more fit for Soviet Russia or Communist China
• The House hearing on security failures in Benghazi revealed an inept bureaucracy, with questions of who knew what when and the usual measure of partisanship, while Dennis Kucinich pointed to decades of intervention leading up to last year's in Libya as to why there are security failures in Libya, asking how many more Al-Qaeda there were in Libya now than before the intervention and how many surface-to-air missiles remain missing since.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is challenging warrantless wiretapping by the federal government in Massachusetts. The feds argue the state secrets doctrine means their actions are exempt from judicial review. A military appeals court, meanwhile, will decide whether to unseal records related to the ongoing prosecution of Bradley Manning.
• Pakistanis protests against the attempted assassination of a teen activist and held vigils for her while schools shut down. She is expected to be okay after surgery. Five Pakistanis, meanwhile, are dead in a suspected drone strike in the border region a few days after protests in the country against the practice.
• Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, said that Western sanctions have been ongoing on Iran since 1979 and wouldn't stop irrespective of the country's nuclear ambitions. He also said Iran's economic prospects are better than Europe's as the rial drops in value.

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