From Rasmussen:

With just three weeks to go until Election Day, Republicans hold an eight-point lead on the Generic Congressional Ballot.

Polling for the week ending Sunday, October 10, shows that 47% of Likely Voters would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate, while 39% prefer the Democrat…

Rasmussen figures the November 2nd electorate will be 35% GOP, 33% Dem, the rest Independents (with, as polling has found all year, a strong GOP tilt among this group). Personally, I think that underestimates the GOP total, but it is better to be cautious. I’ll just say I expect the GOP to do well on November 2nd, without making any public predictions as to who wins what.

My goodness, has Carl Paladino stirred up a firestorm. Tremendously useful, I’d have to say – nothing like forcing Catholics to do their thing. At the center of the matter is this – from Allahpundit:

“‘I unequivocally support gay rights. Unequivocally,’ said Paladino, clutching an American flag and marching up Fifth Avenue in New York’s annual Columbus Day Parade. But Paladino repeated his view, expressed earlier Monday on ABC and NBC, that children should be shielded from gay activities, especially their parades.

“‘Those guys in the gay pride parade who like to wear the little Speedos and do their grinding motion up there — children should not see that,’ Paladino said, wagging his finger for emphasis and calling his opponent, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, ‘wrong’ for taking part in New York City’s gay pride march and letting his children watch it.

“He denied that his comments Sunday night to Orthodox Jewish leaders — saying children should not be “brainwashed” to believe the gay lifestyle is ‘valid’ — amounted to homophobia or insensitivity toward gays. They simply mirror the teachings of the Catholic Church, the Catholic candidate said, adding that if Cuomo disagreed, ‘he should go see a priest.’”

And if Andrew is too busy to check with his parish priest (love to see a reporter ask him the name of his parish priest, but we’ll leave that aside), the Catechism of the Catholic Church has been handily placed on line:

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

While Paladino’s use of the word “brainwash” was ill-considered, what he was saying was just the plain and simple truth. He was, moreover, adhering to the teachings of the faith he belongs to. If Carl Paladino’s statements are homophobic, then Christianity and the Catholic Church are homophobic. But such is not the case.

Homosexual sex is objectively disordered. It is not a kind of sex people should engage in – no more than a heterosexual person should engage in adulterous sex. If you want to really cut down to the bone here, you should understand that a married man who has sex with another woman has actually done something worse in degree than a homosexual man who has sex with another homosexual – because the married man has not only engaged in objectively disordered sex, but has also broken solemn vow. Such a married man has not, however, done anything different in kind. While there are different degrees, wrong is always wrong – sex outside of the bounds of matrimony is wrong. Always and everywhere.

You can attempt to argue the point, but you’re never going to get around the truth here. “But Paladino can’t be in favor of gay rights – he’s opposed to gay marriage”. Well, marriage isn’t a right – nothing is a right if it takes more than one person to do it. “But I can’t be happy unless I express my sexuality as a homosexual”. If you really believe that, then I pity you for a fool – sex is not that important in the life of a man in full possession of his faculties and thus able to differentiate between true happiness and transient, physical pleasure. “But I want to love whom I choose”. Then love – indeed, you are commanded to do so; but love and sex are not the same thing.

Tolerance means I won’t go butting in where I’m not wanted. It is no office of mine – or of any Christian’s – to dictate to anyone what they shall or shall not do in the privacy of their own home. But tolerance is not the same as moral approval – and no Christian can approve of homosexual relations. We cannot, ever, agree to any action which would tend to instruct society that homosexual relations are morally the same as heterosexual relations. A “gay pride” parade does just that sort of thing – and more and more in our public schools there is pressure to instruct the children that homosexuality and heterosexuality are morally the same. This sort of thing isn’t a demand for tolerance, but an attempt to enforce a world view we reject.

Now, perhaps this world view will be enforced in spite of us. Maybe the solid majority of our fellow citizens will reject Christian teaching and we’ll continue to run riot in a morass of sexual excess…and then, eventually, our civilization will go senile and die. Like the ancient, pr-Christian world, we’ll attempt to stab ourselves out of stupor by getting more and more depraved; but death will the lot of that civilization, and after it dies, it will be found that we Christians are still there, and we’ll rebuild civilization again, just as we did before.

Meanwhile, we’re just going to keep right on going. We’ll continue to speak the truth. We’ll attempt to do so with love and mercy in our hearts (and thus Paladino really should regret the word “brainwash”), but we will speak it – now and forever. It is our duty – we can’t escape it.

UPDATE: Newsbusters notes the MSM is trying to tie Paladino’s comments to an entirely un-related attack on some gay men. Typical of the MSM: don’t think, just lob whatever anti-GOP bomb the DNC tells you to throw…

UPDATE II: Politics on the Hudson has this:

“I unequivocally have no other reservations about homosexuality and I abhor discrimination in any form. I enjoy a close relationship with my nephew who is gay and I certainly consider him to be a functional child of God,” said Paladino, whose nephew is working on his campaign.

Time for people to start to understand that failure to agree with the gay rights agenda does not equal hatred or fear of homosexuals.

UPDATE III: Michael Gaynor wonders if Cuomo will either back Paladino’s Catholic views, or cease to call himself Catholic? It is an important point…

UPDATE IV: Ace of Spades comments:

The gay community has to understand that, contra their desires, they will not likely be wholeheartedly embraced by traditionalists, and should stop insisting that that be the goal or the bar for “tolerance.” Unless they gay community thinks that 70% of the country is “anti-gay” (and a lot of the gay community does think that, of course), this goal has to be considered perhaps one to shoot for one day, but it can’t be made the standard for determining who’s “anti-gay” or not.

UPDATE V: Gay Patriot figures this dooms Paladino –

In various “red” states, most (but alas not all) Republican candidates are pretty much ignoring gay issues (save to say they support traditional marriage), so what purpose does it serve for a candidate in a “blue” state to talk about it on the campaign trail? Well, it does antagonize those fiscally conservative voters in the suburbs who, last fall, voted Republican in local elections.

I’m not so sure – it was always, of course, a very uphill fight for Paladino, especially as he is not a professional politician and thus is going to be gaffe-prone. But that, again, is part of Paladino’s appeal…and a bit of honesty, even if considered outrageous in some quarters, might come in handy.

Another election year, another crop of military voters being kept from the polls:

Despite a federal law requiring military ballots to mail by 9/18, military ballots across New York have not mailed as of today. The Justice Department has done nothing but talk about it…

And there in lies the problem – the Department of Justice is doing nothing about it. Given how entirely politicized the Obama Justice Department is, we can rely upon it that the inaction is based upon the understanding that a very large majority of these suppressed voters would be casting a Republican ballot. “Count every vote” only applies when a Democrat needs to find enough bogus votes to steal an election – when its real voters in an undecided contest, then its best if every vote doesn’t count.

If we do win on November 2nd, then we simply must get to the bottom of voter fraud in this country. A ruthless and fearless investigation must be launched and all facts brought to light. Our way of government depends upon the people believing in the operation of the democratic process – only those who can vote should vote; everyone must only vote once; all no one should be denied a vote because one side fears they’ll vote the wrong way.

It is to be hoped that post-November 2nd even some liberals of character will realize its time to set aside race-baiting and hate-mongering and clean up our voting process. In the long run, we can’t endure as a free people without clean voting – we must clean this up.

From James Taranto:

‘I don’t consider myself a tea party candidate,” Sean Bielat tells me over dinner. “I don’t know what it means.” But an hour later Mr. Bielat, Rep. Barney Frank’s Republican challenger, receives a hero’s welcome at the Spindle City Tea Party, a gathering of nearly 200 citizen- activists in this economically depressed mill town. As he approaches the stage, they stand, applauding and chanting “Go, Sean, go!”

What he tells them is consistent with this reporter’s view of the tea party: “I’m starting to think that people want to take this country back—that people no longer believe that the government has the answers for our betterment, that the government can tell them how they should use their money. People believe that they have the power to create their own opportunity, if only they are given the chance. . . . There is so much wrong in Washington, I almost don’t know where to start.”…

Two things are clear with recent events – even Democrats in supposedly safe seats are worried, and the Republican party is finding challengers who are brim full of both new ideas and a willingness to just listen and learn as they go along. The people are talking and candidates like Bielat are listening. This is a potent force to bring against someone as entrenched in the Ruling Class as Barney Frank.

To be sure, Bielat has an uphill fight – but as a Marine, he was trained to overcome just such obstacles. I don’t know if he’ll win on November 2nd, but I’m betting he’ll at least make it very close…and, who knows?, he just might pull it off.

It is the success that people like Bielat – and O’Donnell in Delaware – are having which makes me think that we’ve been too gun shy on the right. We’ve resigned parts of the nation to the left simply because the left has represented the area for a long time. But Bielat points out that Frank hasn’t had a real challenger since 1982 – Frank’s strength could well prove illusory, as can the strength of other entrenched liberals.

Win or lose against Frank here in 2010, we need to learn this lesson and apply it in 2012 and beyond. Challenge everywhere. In the GOP primaries, and in all general election battles. Our goal should be to never let any politician run unopposed. If we want our government to be under our control, the first step is to exercise that control the only way possible – in election contests.

We can save our nation – all we need to is put in the effort.

UPDATE: Moe Lane reports that Charlie Cook has shifted Frank’s seat from “Safe” to “Likely”, as well as four other entrenched Democrat seats. This is a political tsunami building, my friends…

We still love him:

Close to10,000 people crowded into the Bakersfield Business Conference’s main tent to see former Vice President Dick Cheney be “interviewed” by Lynne Cheney, his wife of 46 years.

Collecting that many people all under one tent roof is a sight to see, and Mrs. Cheney commented on what a great crowd the conference had brought together.

“It’s almost enough to make you want to run for office again,” the former vice president quipped. “Almost.”…

It seems that our former VP is ailing, and taking a look at recent pictures, I have to say I’m concerned he might not be with us too much longer. But it is heartwarming to see that 10,000 of my fellow Americans are willing to go hear him speak – it is testimony to the great service he has rendered our nation in a long life of politics.

Is Dick Cheney without sin? No man is. He’s made his mistakes as all of us have. But he’s a good man who has tried to do what he thought was right, and he helped us through two major crisis (end of the Vietnam War, 9/11).

I wish the former Vice President the best, and I express my thanks for his service to our nation.

From Townhall:

Forty three years ago this week, Ernesto “Che” Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying “What goes around comes around” ever fit, it’s here.

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez, to your humble servant here, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.” As commander of the La Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che’s second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work…

The only difference between Che and Stalin is that Stalin preferred to let others do his dirty work – Che seemed to have a zest for the work of murder and oppression.

He is an icon on the left simply because a romantic photo was taken of him and turned in to a pop-culture staple. This is one of the best examples of the shallowness of liberal thinking – what Che did, what he was like, doesn’t matter…the photo is cool, and so liberals have loved him for decades, and will continue to do so for as long as liberalism has adherents.

It is disgusting, but no more disgusting than seeing any communist symbol, anywhere. We are justly horrified at any display of Nazi symbols, but not so for communist emblems…under which far more people were done to death than under the Nazi banner. What has happened regarding this is that a lie has been deeply implanted in to our society – that while Nazism is unrelieved evil, communism is some how not. That there was no functional difference between the two systems doesn’t seem to matter – people have been told, endlessly, that communist ideology is for the people, so even if it has glaring errors, it is ok.

What is important here is to recognize the lie. Each time a lie is seen for what it is, it becomes less potent…and gets further along towards being discarded, altogether. There will come a day when people will look at Red and Brown and see the same evil – and that will be good, because it will then be less likely anyone will ever fall for them, again.

From CNN:

Rep. Chris Van Hollen –- the Democrat tasked with maintaining control of the House -– says it is a sign of his party’s strength that several Democrats are touting their opposition to President Obama ahead of the midterm elections.

“We’re proud of the fact that we have an ideologically diverse caucus. We have a whole range of different political viewers. What they’re talking about is their independence on certain issues,” Van Hollen, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told CNN’s Candy Crowley on State of The Union…

Translation: sauve qui peut – every man for himself. Go ahead, run against Obama and the House Leadership…just save as many D’s as you can!

They are losing and they know it – we’ve got them on the run.

As usual, it will be conservative Republicans coming in to clear up the mess made by liberal Democrats…but this time with an extra twist of the knife for our liberals – from the Telegraph:

…Barring a cataclysmic upset, Scott will be elected to Congress on November 2nd. There, he will be a ferocious opponent of Obama, to whom he gives a withering “failing grade” for his presidency.

“Obamacare’s an atrocity around the necks of average Americans,” he told me. “His intentions might be good but he’s leading us towards the brink of bankruptcy. Right now, the American people are simply saying they’ve had enough.”

Scott will be the first black Republican congressman from the Deep South in more than a century…

…Ironically, opposition to the policies of the first black President on a whole range of economic and social issues are a key motivating factor for this new wave of black conservatives…

And it will be these black Republicans – with plenty more to come as the racial barriers erected by liberalism are torn down – who will do what Obama was supposed to do: make race a moot issue in America. Obama promised us racial healing, he gave us racial animosity – he’s played the liberal race card from the bottom of the deck. Now he and his liberals are going to get the best answer from the American people – Americans who happen to be black telling Obama and his liberals where to get off.

Longer term, the most important effect of these black Republicans is that they will be living, breathing answers to the liberal idea that black people can’t make it in “white” America. This, in and of itself, will be a grand service to our great nation. The times are, indeed, a-changing…and liberalism is about to be buried.

Hal Lewis’ resignation from the American Physical Society:

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010…

…It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist…

Do read the entire linked letter – a stunning rebuke to the politicization of science over the past few decades. And just in case you liberals out there think this guy hasn’t got any credentials:

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making).

Certainly a man who knows what science is. This issue of science being subordinated to politics is very alarming – aside from global warming, what other issues are being skewed because the scientists we rely upon for facts are being twisted by desires for grants, or worries about reputations if they dissent from reigning orthodoxy?

In my view, all of this ultimately stems from the way we allowed the hard left to infect our institutions of higher education. For a long while, the hard sciences were immune from the lies – after all, science is science and you can either prove your theory, or you can’t. But as time went on, the leftwing worldview gained hold, and anyone who wanted to advance in an academic career, regardless of their particular discipline, had to toe the liberal line. In large measure, we can’t rely upon anything coming out of a major university…it may or may not be true, and we can’t rely upon it until we’re sure that a genuinely independent group of scientists had a look at it.

The truth shall set you free – and so truth is not popular on the left. One of the tasks we’ll have to set ourselves it to revive the standards of truth in higher education. Science must be something which goes where ever facts and human reason lead – not something subordinated to whatever political fads are agitating the left at the moment.

And that seems to be the rosy scenario:

The U.S. economy lost 95,000 jobs in September, far worse than expectations for no change in employment. More Census-related temp jobs ended, as expected, but state and local governments slashed staff far more than predicted.

So far in 2010, the U.S. has added just 613,000 jobs — for a monthly average of 68,111.

Employment bottomed in December 2009 at 129.588 million — two years after peaking at 137.951 million. At this year’s pace, the U.S. won’t recoup all those 8.36 million lost jobs until March 2020 — 147 months after the December 2007 high…

And that supposes we actually added private sector jobs – I don’t think we have for several months now. Essentially, when you get the reported number of jobs created, its a guess by BLS…the real numbers don’t come in until about a year later. The BLS, basing itself upon the concept that the recession is over, figures that X number of jobs must have been created and so we get the jobs created number…a year later, when the actual data is available, they are adjusted to reflect what really happened. My bet is for heavy downward revisions.

We can’t spend our way out of this – we must work our way out of this. Our problem (outside of our crushing debt) is lack of production: we don’t make, mine or grow enough things in the United States. Until we balance the budget and set in place policies to encourage production, we’ll get nowhere.