From Rasmussen:

Republican candidates now hold a nine-point lead over Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot for the week ending Sunday, July 18, the widest gap between the two parties in several weeks.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 45% of Likely Voters would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate, while 36% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent…

Meanwhile, after weeks of being slandered by Reid, Angle clings to a slight lead and over in Connecticut the ain’t-got-a-chance Republican candidate seems to be gaining some support.

All in all, still a very good year to be a Republican.

Here is the full video. The passage which was at issue yesterday is still disturbing in the clear approval of racist sentiments by the crowd at the event – but on viewing the whole video, it can only be said that Ms. Sherrod has been the victim of an injustice – and an injustice which I played a part in. I make no excuses, I was wrong and I will never make a judgment based upon a partial video ever again.

The problem of race in America is gravely exacerbated by the current trends in our politics. It is not at all helped by the way the NAACP is spreading lies about racism in the TEA Party movement – this is horrible, and continues to put the NAACP outside the pale of decent society. Until that group utterly retracts all claims of racism on the part of the TEA Party and apologizes to the millions of Americans they insulted, there can be association between decent people and the NAACP.

But none of that is Ms. Sherrod’s responsibility – and, indeed, she was not only treated unjustly by the editor of the video, but by the NAACP which had the full video and yet threw Ms. Sherrod to the wolves, apparently so they can better preserve their slander of racism in the TEA Party movement. There is shame enough for all involved in this, and only Ms. Sherrod is coming out of it with her dignity unimpaired.

UPDATE: Gateway pundit finds this very disturbing fact:

Mary Frances Berry admitted this at the Politico:

Professor of American Social Thought and History, U. Penn. :

Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.

Breitbart claimed yesterday that he has more – we’ll see what he comes up with. It would not at all surprise me to find some iron-clad evidence of overt racism at the NAACP, given the way the crowd approved of racist sentiments in the video above. This doesn’t change the fact of the injustice to Ms. Sherrod, but we’re clearly on to something here.

Ed Driscoll notes how the media attempted to control the Jeremiah Wright story during the 2008 campaign:

At the Daily Caller, Jonathan Strong rummages through the JournoList and describes how documents from mid-2008 “show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright:”

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign…

…Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage...

The Jeremiah Wright story should have finished Obama’s campaign. There was no way around the fact that Wright is a racist and an anti-American and that Obama was exceptionally close to him for 20 years. To turn it about, had a Republican been discovered in as close accord with a white, racist pastor, that would be all she wrote…the MSM would have been all over it, and Republicans would have turned in fury on the miscreant. But that is not what happens when a liberal Democrat is involved.

As soon as Obama emerged out of the morass of the early primaries and caucuses, it became a firm desire on the part of the MSM that Obama be elected President. Who he was or what he was actually about was irrelevant – he’s black and has impeccable liberal credentials. That is all that mattered – and, indeed, all that still matters in the MSM. In their view, it was a requirement that America elect Obama, and nothing was going to be allowed to stand in the way of this consummation. Certainly not something as minor as the truth.

When the Wright story could no longer be entirely suppressed, it became necessary to control the damage, and that is just what the MSM did. Obama’s speech on race – was used a pivot; once that was done, the MSM just relentlessly hit upon the theme that the story was over; Wright was done and was no longer relevant.

And this is what the MSM will always do with a threatened liberal. They don’t care about truth; they don’t care about America; they don’t care about the people…all they care about is that their world view be validated by liberal politicians running the show. Keep that in mind as you watch their coverage of any story – at the back of it will always be the coordinated message to protect the left.

Obama is up on his class-warfare soap box, trying to make some political hay and maybe save a Democrat or two in November:

President Barack Obama will call on Republican lawmakers to stop blocking an extension of unemployment benefits as the Senate prepares to take up the issue again this week…

He condemns us for running up deficits for years but now not being willing to run up a little more for unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, his side was complaining about not paying as you go for 8 years, but now that its time for Democrats to actually set a priority, they are all in a huff that we’re calling them on their own campaign rhetoric. In other words, Obama and his Democrats are just doing the usual, dishonest thing and attempting to sow hatred and division, as that provide their slight hope for staving off electoral catastrophe.

It won’t work as planned – the people are on to this scam and while I’ll bet that a very large majority want unemployment benefits extended, no one who has even half a brain (this would exclude liberals) realizes that its simple common sense to take the money out of current accounts rather than just piling up more debt. If Obama and his Democrats press this issue in public debate, it will backfire on them as badly as ObamaCare, Cap and Trade and border security have.

Buy what should we – meaning, we Republicans – do? After all, at the end of the day we don’t want people without any money at all. On the other hand, who among us hasn’t mentally figured out that if the only jobs available pay less than, as much as or even 10 or 20% more than unemployment, then it would be wiser to remain on unemployment rather than taking the new job?

Remember, if unemployment pays me $250 a week, it would probably take a job paying $350 a week just to make it worth the bother and expense. And with unemployment at 14% here in Nevada, there aren’t a lot of jobs out there paying $8.75 an hour or more. Extend those benefits for two years (as they have been for some people), and you can see the pickle we’re in – where does it end? Or do we just steel ourselves to paying unemployment benefits until a person hits retirement age?

My solution is this – taking money from TARP, stimulus, Department of Energy or some equally worthless and counter-productive government entity, we should extend unemployment benefits. But for anyone who has been unemployed for 6 months or longer, continued benefits require them to present themselves for work with their local government, 5 hours a day, 5 days a week (they do need time to job hunt, so not 8 hours a day). The local governments are free to employ them as they see fit – picking up trash, cleaning graffiti, what have you. Don’t show up, unemployment benefits are terminated.

The concept here is to incentivize the taking of new employment, even if it doesn’t pay all that much. Better to be at work in a regular job than be forever cleaning up trash or doing other grunt work for the city or county. And if there really is just no work at all (as is the case in some localities), then at least some useful work gets done for the area, and the people on unemployment retain their self respect – they are not just taking hand outs, but working hard for the community which is helping them during hard times.

People with a sense of honor and dignity would gladly show up for such work; lay abouts who just want to sit there collecting unemployment would be out of luck. Its a good thing for all concerned, as far as I can see.

Still going after the Electoral College:

The state Legislature is poised to give final approval this week to a new law intended to bypass the Electoral College system and ensure that the winner of the presidential election is determined by the national popular vote…

…Under the proposed law, all 12 of the state’s electoral votes would be awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes nationally…

Which means that if Massachusetts votes to re-elect President Obama by a thumping majority in 2012, but the nation narrowly elects Sarah Palin, then Massachuetts’ votes will go to Palin. Can you imagine anything quite so stupid?

Of course you can. We’re dealing with liberals here.

This is just the long-running, liberal sore over Florida, 2000. Gore’s failure to steal Florida’s electoral votes while officially securing a larger number of popular votes nation-wide just burns liberals up. They can’t get over it – it didn’t come out the way they wanted, and its just not fair!

So, they are determined to fix the problem – take away the electoral college and make it so that the popular vote winner always gets in the White House. They are simply not thinking clearly on this – not realizing, that is, that they may be shooting themselves in the foot and denying themselves a victory at some future date. And, trust me on this, if it works out that Obama would have got 270 electoral votes but fell short in the total popular vote tally, they’ll be accusing Diebold of having hypnotized the people of Massachusetts in to going along with this clear effort on the part of the Vast, Right Wing Conspiracy to destroy Obama.

They do this sort of thing because they don’t think but, also, because they don’t like the United States of America. They hate our Constitutional rules – hate the way the Founders set up a system which makes it hard for a liberal government to just do whatever it pleases (to liberals, “freedom” means “the ability to get an abortion at will” while “constitution” means “validation for whatever we want to do today, even if we change our mind tomorrow”).

Some times I wonder – as a nation ages, does it just naturally get stuck with people who are too stupid to understand where they came from? People so purblind that they’ll cut their own throats in the name of a hair-brained ideology? It seems like it – seriously.

Pointed out by J. Christian Adams:

Since my testimony before the Civil Rights Commission under oath on July 6 about various corrupt policies relating to enforcement of election law at the Department of Justice, the left-wing soldiers on the internet have marched into action. They have made personal attacks and made multiple factual errors in defending the dismissal. This is unfortunate, because they are harming a cause they profess to support — the right to vote. In their reflexive personal attacks and amateurish legal arguments, they fail to see they are undermining their own long-term goals, namely vigorous enforcement of voter intimidation and civil rights laws. Perhaps it is not too late for the more reasonable among them to understand their approach to the New Black Panther dismissal is suicidal…

Suicidal, indeed. The left’s defense of NBPP and attacks on Adams is un-American. To defend the NBPP is to defend criminality; to defend fascism; to defend racism. I realize that the left has a knee-jerk mentality about these things – but if you let this thing go on then there will be no defense of voter rights, at all.

The problem with left wing tactics is that they are turning elections from contests of parties and ideas in to contests of who can cheat the most. This undermines democracy and once that is completed, we will fall to tyranny – if the electoral process is muddied to the point where the people don’t accept the results as legitimate, then the government has no authority to rule. Period.

You on the left really need to think about this – and join the right in demanding that the NBPP be prosecuted.

Picked out by Michael Ledeen over at Pajamas Media:

Note to Secretary Gates, General Petraeus, and Admiral Mullen:

Our refusal to see the big war that we are actually fighting is making your commanders in the field very nervous. In another one of those little stories that appear just once and then vanish into the pit of Newspeak, General Odierno pointed out that the Iranians are still after our guys in Iraq, and we are making things easier for them.

The U.S. military is beefing up security around its bases in Iraq in anticipation of Iranian-backed militants looking to score propaganda points by attacking American soldiers leaving the country, the U.S. commander said Tuesday.

Gen. Ray Odierno said the Iranian threat to U.S. forces has increased as Tehran looks to boost its political and economic influence in Iraq in the face of a decreasing U.S. military presence…

So much for engagement.

Iran is governed by a wicked regime lead by evil men. They desire power and wealth for themselves and are absolutely ruthless in their pursuit of same. This is not some new, never-seen-before thing – it is what some men have chosen to do ever since a man found out that he could kill, wound and oppress his way to being on top. It will continue to be the way some men behave until the Last Day, when all will be set right and we won’t have to deal with such men again for all eternity. Until that time, we have to look at the world through realistic eyes.

In other words, not through the eyes of liberal ideologues who don’t think that evil even exists, let alone that there are men who delight in doing evil.

The leaders of Iran are determined to take advantage of our flabby response to their nuclear program as well as our clear desire to cut out of the middle east militarily. They have taken the measure of the man, Obama, and realize that killing Americans is a low-risk activity, while doing so can increase their political leverage in Iraq and throughout the middle east. A couple dozen dead Americans on the way out of Iraq can and would be spun in the Islamist world as Iran kicking us out of Iraq.

The biggest mistake President Bush made was to not take military action against Iran when he not only had the chance, but had the justification for it. It was known fairly early on in the Iraq anti-insurgency campaign that Iran was a primary sponsor of the Iraqi terrorists. Once again, American arms were pitting against a cruel foe who had a safe haven. On a smaller scale, it was Vietnam and Korea all over again – once again, American leaders were adverse to applying America’s full power against armed enemies. Obama is just worse in that not only is he unwilling to apply full force, but he seems all too willing to give up even the minimal force we have been applying.

A serious policy regarding Iran must include the prospect of war with Iran. And I’m not talking merely bombing attacks – if pressed to it we must be willing to declare war on Iran, invade the country, conquer it and impose unconditional surrender upon the Iranian leaders. This is not to say that it must come out that way, but it is to say that we must be willing to do – and let everyone know that we are willing to do it, with deeds and not just words.

Obama’s policies are now storing up blood to be spilled in the future. An emboldened Iran will increase its efforts to strike at us – one day, we’ll have to get serious about Iran, and I hope its not after they have nuclear weapons and the ability to strike us here at home.

They don’t like dissent and don’t want us watching what they do. This is the left – they’ve always been like this, and they’ll never change. The difference, now, is that cameras are everywhere…unlike the time when our Matt was roughed up by leftist thugs.

The truth is coming out about the left, and that is the key to our complete victory.

You might recall me saying last year that there was zero chance for the Republican party to win a Senate majority in 2010. It just wasn’t in the cards. There weren’t enough competitive Democrat seats, while there were several competitive GOP seats which opened up opportunities for Democrats to counter GOP victories over Democrats.

Now? Now, it has shifted from impossible, to possible – from the Wall Street Journal:

…Republicans would have to win virtually every competitive race to retake the Senate, without losing any seats of their own—clearly an uphill climb. The trouble for Democrats is that many trends are against them. Surveys show that Republicans are more motivated than Democrats to go to the polls, and that voters are looking for new leadership in Congress.

“I think there is definitely a chance” of losing the Senate, said Democratic strategist Gary Nordlinger, a Washington-based media consultant. “I wouldn’t call it a probability, but there is certainly a chance.”

“Republicans still have to [win] all the competitive races in order to get to a majority, but at least there are enough seats on the table to pull it off,” said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report…

It would be, without a doubt, very difficult for Republicans to win the ten seats necessary for a majority (9 wouldn’t do it, as that would put the Senate at 50/50 with VP Biden breaking the tie). But the thing is, there are a total of 11 Democrat seats the GOP has a reasonable prospect of winning – there are two GOP seats which are rated as a bit vulnerable, but not nearly as vulnerable as most of the Democrats’ are. It would take rolling sixes several times in a row, but it could happen.

The really bad news for the Democrats: the GOP is likely to really clean up in 2012 and 2014 as all those first term Senate Democrats from 2006 and 2008 have their first re-election bids, often in GOP-leaning States. A bit of hard work, a bit of luck, and we could wind up with the power to force through whatever reforms we desire.

Sorry, boys and girls, just couldn’t get anything together for the AM. Have at it.