Even though Barack Obama has pledged to not run negative ads, he’s now running a negative ad.. This ad attacks McCain for supporting the Bush-Cheney energy plan… which Obama himself voted for!

This make Obama’s recent ad campaigns 0-3 on accuracy.

Having been raked over the coals for half-truths in his first two ads, Obama tries to avoid too many specifics in his third. But he still runs afoul of those inconvenient truths, hitting McCain for supporting a bill that Obama voted for. For those keeping score, Obama has now touted his support of a bill he didn’t vote for, and denounced a bill he did vote for.

Sad

Nancy Pelosi’s House and Harry Reid’s Senate have hit an historic low approval rating of single digits,

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008.

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.

Voters not affiliated with either party are the most critical of Congressional performance. Just 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings, down from 6% last month. Sixty-three percent (63%) believe Congress is doing a poor job, up from 57% last month.

Just 12% of voters think Congress has passed any legislation to improve life in this country over the past six months. That number has ranged from 11% to 13% throughout 2008. The majority of voters (62%) say Congress has not passed any legislation to improve life in America.

These numbers demonstrate the failure of the Democrats to lead Congress. They came into power promising results and a new era of bipartisanship. Instead, they delivered incompetence and increased partisan bickering, and higher gas prices.

While many are quick to predict increased Democrat majorities in both Houses of Congress, it’s clear that the American people are rejecting the so-called leadership of elected Democrats.

Once again showing why all conservatives should rally ’round McCain:

At its core, the economy isn’t the sum of an array of bewildering statistics. It’s about where Americans work, how they live, how they pay their bills today and save for tomorrow. It’s about small businesses opening their doors, hiring employees and growing. It’s about giving workers the education and training to find a good job and prosper in it. It’s about the aspirations of the American people to build a better life for their families; dreams that begin with a job.

So how are we going to create good jobs? Let’s start with small businesses, which create the majority of all jobs. A recent report says small businesses have created 233,000 jobs so far this year while other sectors are losing jobs. Small businesses are the job engine of America, and I will make it easier for them to grow and create more jobs. My opponent wants to make it harder by imposing a “pay or play” health mandate on small business. This adds $12,000 to the cost of employing anyone with a family. That means new jobs will not be created. It means existing employees will have their wages cut to pay for this mandate. My plan attacks the real problems of healthcare — cost, availability and portability.

Some economists don’t think much of my gas tax holiday. But the American people like it, and so do small business owners. Just ask Andrew Emmett who runs Air-Tite insulation in Michigan. He has had to stop hiring new workers because of the cost of fuel for his trucks.

We need to keep the IRS from taking more of your income and making life harder for small business. If you believe you should pay more taxes, I am the wrong candidate for you. Senator Obama is your man. The choice in this election is stark and simple. Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t. I will cut them where I can. Jobs are the most important thing our economy creates. When you raise taxes in a bad economy you eliminate jobs. I’m not going to let that happen.

Senator Obama’s tax increases will hurt the economy even more, and destroy jobs across this country. If you are one of the 23 million small business owners in America who files as an individual rate payer, Senator Obama is going to raise your tax rates. If you have an investment for your child’s education or own a mutual fund or a stock in a retirement plan, he is going to raise your taxes. He will raise estate taxes to 45 percent. I propose to cut them to 15 percent. His plan will hurt the American worker and family. It will hurt the economy and cost us jobs. For those of you with children, I will double the child deduction from $3,500 to $7,000 for every dependent, in every family in America. At a time of increasing gas and food prices, American families need tax relief and I, not my opponent, will deliver it.

Obama’s entire economic plan is just warmed-over Carterism…as was said of the Bourbons of old, the liberal Democrats have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Obama’s blast-from-the-past concepts like a “windfall profits” tax shows that he hasn’t thought about economics, but has swallowed whole the liberal concept that the government knows best. McCain, however, is a longstanding Reaganite on the economy – the man who understands that as far as economic growth is concerned, the best thing the government can do is get the heck out of the way. You can’t manage an economy from the center because you can’t know what people want, nor what people are willing to do. Only the free interplay of the market can make such determinations – still imperfectly, but far more effectively than even the wisest and most knoweldgable government bureaucrat.

But McCain is also no booster of mere business for the sake of business – he seems to instinctively understand that the very large corporations can be just as ineffective as the very large government bureaucracies and this is why McCain’s emphasis is on the smaller corporations and family businesses. It is the man or woman who is building up something of their own who is doing the real work of America – not the man working on becoming CEO of a Fortune 500 company, no more than the empire-building bureaucrat is. Large corporations and large bureaucracies will remain, at least for a while; but the less said about them, the better – and lets certainly not go about encouraging them. Unleash the average American, and you’ll get prosperity. McCain is for such unleashing, while Obama is for fastening yet more chains about us…nice chains, to be sure; chains which are intended to help us, it goes without saying…but chains nonetheless, and chains which will ruin us and, for the 1,000th time, dash liberal hopes and dreams.

We’ve hit a rocky patch at the junction of stupid loans (made, it must be noted, mostly by larger corporations with the connivance of Big Government) and high oil prices. The economy is in fundamentally good shape, but in order to weather this storm and emerge stronger on the other side of it we’ll need a free marketing Reaganite like McCain, not a quasi-socialist Carterite like Obama.

So says one expert, at least:

Security in Iraq continues to improve even after the withdrawal of nearly 25% of U.S. combat brigades, increasing the prospects of further cuts in American forces.

Although U.S. commanders are cautious about predicting further withdrawals, interviews with military experts and recent official statements indicate growing optimism about the potential to pull out more forces.

“I believe the momentum we have is not reversible,” said Jack Keane, a retired Army vice chief of staff who helped develop the Iraq strategy adopted by President Bush in January 2007.

There will be “significant reductions in 2009 whoever becomes president,” said Keane, who regularly consults with Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki echoed Keane’s optimism Saturday by declaring that “we defeated” the terrorists in Iraq. U.S. commanders remain cautious.

The official word remains that its fragile – which is a laudable sense of caution on the part of our military commanders in Iraq. By and large, though, I believe we’re firmly in the saddle in Iraq and only a US scuttle of the whole effort could change the result – and now even Obama is starting to change his tune on Iraq; the rest of the kook left still seems wedded to defeat, but that is because they are, well, kooks.

What we need, now, is to start planning some way of thanking our troops for their sacrifices in this campaign – we can’t gather them all together in one place, but I think we should find some public way to crown their efforts. The traditional means is a ticker tape parade in New York City, and I think that this would be appropriate, especially given that NYC is where the war began – of course, the war isn’t over, but one must pause from time to time to pay tribute to those who having been making the real efforts.

Just how does Obama figure out what to believe on a day to day basis? Nevada Pundit has some keen insights into Obama’s serial flip flopping.

The Associated Press reports that the McCain campaign is opening campaign offices in California…

Meanwhile, Ed Cox, the head of McCain’s New York campaign team, says that with Obama as the Democrats’ nominee, McCain has a shot in New York state…

In spite of what you might have heard from the left, under President Bush’s leadership, we have vastly improved our ability to track terrorists and keep America safe:

In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.

There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.

The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.

“I found the number stunning,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security. “It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States.”

The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world’s largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond “known or suspected” terrorists.

Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency.

Couple points:

1. The “dirt farmer” in Tikrit who turned out to be wanted in the US: all through this post-liberation battle in Iraq we’ve heard endlessly from the left that those fighting us are just Iraqis who want us out…and how do they know this? Because it was reported in the news…as if a western MSMer who spends most of his time in the Green Zone can tell the difference between an Arab from Tikrit and an Arab from Damascus. Certainly, plenty of Iraqis – for a while – joined the fight against us and the Iraqi government, but the vital leaven in the enemy forces, the thing which kept the fight hot, was the foreigners who came in with money, expertise (its not like Saddam actually trained his people to defend themselves, ya know?) and the will to fight. One wonders how many “Iraqis” in the news voicing opposition to the US were really Iraqis…

2. The fact that many of these people have turned out to be wanted in the US for various crimes gives one pause about claims of innocent people winding up in Gitmo – once again, how would an MSMer really be able to find out that the “innocent detainee” he’s interviewing is really someone innocent? Obviously, if someone is wanted in the US but is out and about in, say Somalia, then he’s already tangled with the law and got out of it by one means or another. Unless one wants to subscribe to the theory that our soldiers and intelligence agents are stupid thugs, one must give the benefit of the doubt to our side and discount media stories about allegedly innocent detainees. Not that an innocent person cannot have been picked up, but that the chances of a completely innocent person winding up in Gitmo are very small and would be the exception proving the rule.

3. What a good idea, huh? Everyone who is detained by us is fingerprinted and we gather forensic data from terrorist attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and slowly build up a picture of who is doing what to whom. Over time this would give us a very good picture of what we’re up against (in terms of numbers, skills, effectiveness, etc) and allow us to subvert the terrorist groups from the outside and derail their efforts through misdirection.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his Democrats are saying that we have to get out of Iraq – at least, they’re saying it “pre-refinement”; we’ll probably see a changed tune soon, however – because Iraq has distracted us from the “real” war on terrorism…thing is, under President Bush we’ve managed to win in Iraq, win in Afghanistan, kill or capture many thousands of terrorists, build up a data base on global terrorism, de-fang Libya, end Pakistan’s “Nukes R Us” market, secure a growing alliance with India, Eritrea, Djibouti, Georgia and Poland, watch as France, Germany and other European States figure out that we’re doing the right thing in the War on Terrorism, increase the size of our military, re-equip our forces with the most modern weapons and materiel available, beef up our intelligence agencies, start to secure the border…and this is just the stuff we know about; there’s probably a lot which is still classified and we might not find out about for 50 years. Not a bad job for the man the left considers to be an evil idiot.

HAT TIP: NRO’s The Corner

Never heard of the guy or the website before this evening, but here’s a website encouraging Obama delegates to ditch him over his policy shifts since wrapping up the nomination:

Richard Nixon famously said: When you are seeking the nomination for president of the Republican Party, you run to the far right; once you’ve secured the nomination, you run to right of center during the election campaign; once you’ve won the presidency, you govern from the center.

Barack Obama has embraced The Nixon Strategy lock, stock and barrel, adapting its mirror-opposite to the Left. He suckered the hard-working base of the party — the Left-wing — into voting for him during the primaries by appealing to the issues dearest to their hearts. These are the very people responsible for getting him to where he is today! Yet once Obama felt he secured the nomination, he has tripped over himself running to the center (some would argue the center-right). Oh, Barack, we thought we knew ye!

How wrong we were.

But Obama made a mistake; he started his move rightwards before securing the nomination. And what he didn’t realize was that…

What the Left giveth, the Left can taketh away!

Question: For you leftwing supporters of Obama, is the desire to beat Bush via McCain worth putting someone as ambitious and dishonest as Obama into the White House?

Which was totally harmless and, naturally, Saddam and his peaceful, secularist country would never, ever have dreamed of using the stuff for a WMD:

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

What’s now left is the final and complicated push to clean up the remaining radioactive debris at the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad — using teams that include Iraqi experts recently trained in the Chernobyl fallout zone in Ukraine.

“Everyone is very happy to have this safely out of Iraq,” said a senior U.S. official who outlined the nearly three-month operation to The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called “dirty bomb” — a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material — it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment.

Prior to the left deciding that the whole WMD argument was a lie (and part of the larger BUSH LIED!!! meme), there was this 2003 news report:

In the suburbs about 18 miles south of the capital’s suburbs, this city comprises nearly 100 buildings — workshops, laboratories, cooling towers, nuclear reactors, libraries and barracks — that belong to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.

Investigators Tuesday discovered that Al-Tuwaitha hides another city. This underground nexus of labs, warehouses, and bomb-proof offices was hidden from the public and, perhaps, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors who combed the site just two months ago, until the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Engineers discovered it three days ago…

…Yesterday, Hamza expressed great surprise that the underground site could even exist. The ground there is muddy and composed of clay, he said. The water table is barely a foot and a half below the surface of the ground. During construction of one of the former nuclear reactors there, French engineers spent a fortune pumping water from the foundation area, only to see buildings crumble when the water was removed.

Hamza said the French built a reactor at Al-Tuwaitha that Israel destroyed in 1981. The Russians built a reactor that was destroyed during the Gulf War. Both had the muddy ground to contend with.

So the Marine’s discovery makes the former atomic inspector wonder if the Iraqis went to the colossal expense of pumping enough water to build the underground city because no reasonable inspector would think anything might be built underground there.

Nobody would expect it,” Hamza said. “Nobody would think twice about going back there.”

Despite being destroyed twice by bombings, Al-Tuwaitha nevertheless grew to become headquarters of the Iraqi nuclear program, with several research reactors, plutonium processors and uranium enrichment facilities bustling, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

“The plutonium processing was dispersed on-site by the bombing in 1991,” said Michael Levi, the Federation’s director. “But the Iraqis started to rebuild it. And they continued building there after 1998, when the Iraqis ended the inspections.

Lots of people have lied about Iraq. Saddam lied. The French, German, Russian and UN bureaucrats who were bribed by Saddam lied. Plame lied. Wilson lied. The anti-war movement lied. President Bush, though, didn’t lie – not even once, and not even slightly. Remember: Saddam wasn’t supposed to have anything which could be used as part of a WMD program…but, amongst other banned things, he had 550 tons of yellowcake and post-Gulf War nuclear facilities undetected by the agencies charged with keeping tabs on him. Unless you want to assert – against all evidence – that Saddam was hiding entirely innocent and peaceful programs, the only logical conclusion is that he was, indeed, violating the 1991 cease fire vis a vis WMDs. Added to all the other justifications for liberating Iraq what we have here is that back in 2003 the only logical course of events for us once Saddam had re-thumbed his nose at the UN inspectors was to remove him from power.

The anti-Bush effort vis a vis Iraq has been a sick combination of stupidity, deception and cowardice…all of it done for purely political reasons by people on the left (joined by a few on the right) who wish to harm the United States in general and President Bush in particular. That millions of people have fallen for it just shows that Lincoln’s adage is correct – you can fool some of the people all of the time. There is, unfortunately, no way for us to immediately repair the damage – President Bush will leave office with millions of people having the conviction that he lied about Iraq and Saddam’s WMD programs. Only as this generation dies away and those personally identified with creating the lies are gone will an entirely unbiased treatment of this issue be possible.

Well, some times it is an outsider who can really distill what its all about:

The Founding Fathers of the United States asserted their claim to freedom and independence on the basis of certain “self-evident” truths about the human person: truths which could be discerned in human nature, built into it by “nature’s God.” Thus they meant to bring into being, not just an independent territory, but a great experiment in what George Washington called “ordered liberty”: an experiment in which men and women would enjoy equality of rights and opportunities in the pursuit of happiness and in service to the common good. Reading the founding documents of the United States, one has to be impressed by the concept of freedom they enshrine: a freedom designed to enable people to fulfill their duties and responsibilities toward the family and toward the common good of the community. Their authors clearly understood that there could be no true freedom without moral responsibility and accountability, and no happiness without respect and support for the natural units or groupings through which people exist, develop, and seek the higher purposes of life in concert with others.

The American democratic experiment has been successful in many ways. Millions of people around the world look to the United States as a model in their search for freedom, dignity, and prosperity. But the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation, native-born and immigrant, makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of your Republic. Their commitment to build a free society with liberty and justice for all must be constantly renewed if the United States is to fulfill the destiny to which the Founders pledged their “lives . . . fortunes . . . and sacred honor.”

I am happy to take note of your words confirming the importance that your government attaches, in its relations with countries around the world, to the promotion of human rights and particularly to the fundamental human right of religious freedom, which is the guarantee of every other human right. Respect for religious conviction played no small part in the birth and early development of the United States. Thus John Dickinson, Chairman of the Committee for the Declaration of Independence, said in 1776: “Our liberties do not come from charters; for these are only the declaration of preexisting rights. They do not depend on parchments or seals; but come from the King of Kings and the Lord of all the earth.” Indeed it may be asked whether the American democratic experiment would have been possible, or how well it will succeed in the future, without a deeply rooted vision of divine providence over the individual and over the fate of nations. – Pope John Paul II, December 16, 1997