Mostly noted just so everyone understands that even if the left wins, its not necessarily the end of the world for good and all…the right can stage a comeback:

Voters are increasingly writing off Labour as fewer people believe that a change of leader or policy would help the party to win the next general election.

A Populus poll for The Times, undertaken over the weekend after Labour’s defeat in Glasgow East, suggests that its dramatic slide in popularity is being driven by a collapse in economic confidence.

Labour is on 27 per cent, down one point on the last Populus poll three weeks ago, and about the level it has been for the past three months. This is the lowest since the early 1980s.

The Conservatives are on 43 per cent — up two points — with the Liberal Democrats down one point at 18 per cent. Other parties are unchanged on 12 per cent.

While 43% for the Conservatives doesn’t seem like a lot, the way British elections work this would result in a crushing conservative majority in the House of Commons, were the election held today. The good news for Labour is that they don’t have to call an election for some time yet (their elections aren’t rigidly scheduled as ours are), and so there’s a chance Labour will pull it together and at least avert destruction, if not a loss.

It has been a long road back for the Conservatives in Britain, and one wonders whether the past decade plus of Labour rule has entirely wrecked the chances of Britian remaining the nation we know – with the Archibishop of Canterbury suggesting that sharia law is ok with him (while traditionalist Anglicans warm up to reunion with Rome) and falling native birth rates plus heavy Moslem immigration threatening to overturn British life, things look a little bleak for the long term…but where there’s life, there’s hope and as the left is the left, it is inevitible that eventually the people will reject it. The Conservatives in Britian look like they’re going to get another shot at cleaning up Labour’s mess; lets hope they do it right, just as we hope the Republican Party gets its act together and does it right here at home.

We were wondering just how we were going to get some traction for the House races this fall:

Do-Nothing Democrats Vote to Adjourn House of Representatives Without Taking Action to Lower Gas Prices

Putnam: “It’s Time Democrats Put Their Boarding Passes Back in Their Pockets”

WASHINGTON – Rep. Adam Putnam (R-FL), Chairman of the House Republican Conference, issued the following statement shortly after the House of Representatives voted 213-212 – with no Republicans voting in the affirmative – to adjourn for five weeks in August and September without taking action to lower gas prices and break our dependence on foreign oil:

“The Democratic Congress should be held in contempt for voting to skip town without dealing with America’s energy crisis.

“Democrats are out of touch, out of excuses, out of support and out of time. Americans are hurting. Independent polls show they overwhelmingly support House Republicans’ all-of-the-above energy solutions.

“It’s time Democrats put their boarding passes back in their pockets and get to work by voting on the American Energy Act.”

As NRO points out, this is a Godsend to the GOP – its the perfect “kitchen table” issue and the GOP is entirely on the side of Joe and Jane Average on this issue. As with the Obama campaign, the only thing I can figure is that Pelosi and Co figure they’ve got their House majority sewn up and there’s no worry about what might happen in November. Of course, just as with the Obama campaign, we have to rate the Democrats as having the advantage in keeping their majority in November’s election…but there’s nothing for sure, and the GOP only needs a net of 19 to take an absolute majority…but even a GOP gain of 10 would give the GOP de-facto control over the House (with the remaining conservative and centrist Democrats scared to death of crossing the GOP). Meanwhile, if there was ever a year for Democrats to expand a majority, 2008 is it…so even a one seat gain by the GOP would be a crushing loss for the Democrats, given the political circumstances at the dawn of Campaign ’08.

I’ve been observing politics for a long time now, and I’ve never seen a party so sure of themselves as the Democrats are. We’ll find out in November if its well-founded, or whether hubris and arrogance turned likely victory into defeat.

Personally, I think it is – the way he’s acting like he’s already President started grating on my conservative, Republican nerves about a month ago…and now I perceive it is grating on the nerves of independents as well. Rich Lowry over at NRO’s The Corner gets some insight on this:

Musings from a shrewd friend on the latest turn in the race (quoting roughly): “The Berlin speech was overreach. This is the moment we were waiting for Obama—to over-step. No candidate has ever acted in this fashion. No one has ever campaigned in front of foreigners. He’s showing hubris and contempt for the rest of us in how he considers America fundamentally broken and he’s the solution. Messianism is usually a quality you don’t want in a president. This was always the soft underbelly of his candidacy. They’ve gotten too caught up in their own story. What always does in a celebrity? Overexposure. The question now is whether Dana Milbank is the bird leaving the wire and every other bird in the press follows him or not. If this narrative sets in, Obama might have to move up his VP announcement to change the story.”

That Milbank piece, by the way, is devastating towards Obama:

President Obama Continues Hectic Victory Tour

Barack Obama has long been his party’s presumptive nominee. Now he’s becoming its presumptuous nominee.

Fresh from his presidential-style world tour, during which foreign leaders and American generals lined up to show him affection, Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington yesterday. He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president’s) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally.

Along the way, he traveled in a bubble more insulating than the actual president’s. Traffic was shut down for him as he zoomed about town in a long, presidential-style motorcade, while the public and most of the press were kept in the dark about his activities, which included a fundraiser at the Mayflower where donors paid $10,000 or more to have photos taken with him.

Later in the piece Milbank notes how an Obama press release stated that Obama looks forward to working with the Pakistani Prime Minister…the only trouble with that, of course, is that there is that tiresome detail of an actual election to go through. The only thing I can figure is that Obama feels himself a man of destiny and that its all sewn up. Obama and his people are starting to believe their own PR.

Now, don’t get me wrong – as of today, July 31st, 2008, Obama still has the inside track to the White House. If the election were held today, we’d probably find ourselves with a President-elect Obama…but Obama’s support hasn’t grown since he wrapped up the Democratic nomination, and there are indicators that it has actually shrunk. His various triangulations towards the center have been mechanical and very pro-forma…and Obama seems to believe that a few words of centrism and conservatism is enough to allay all concerns about his liberal extremism…meanwhile, he counts on a fawning MSM and GOP fear of being called racist to carry him effortlessly over the finish line. Hubris has ever been the undoing of men in public affairs – and Obama has an overabundance of it.

As I said the other day, this election is a pure toss up – and if Obama thinks he can coast to an easy victory in November, then he’ll end up getting thumped. Hard fought, the election can go either way with Obama holding the edge…but if Obama figures he’s already won, then he’ll lose, and lose rather badly.

UPDATE: John Kass notes that he’s addicted to Hopium.

You know, so that we can, for once, tackle a non-controversial subject here at Blogs for Victory? Well, then, lets have at it with Michael Novak’s piece over at First Things:

Let’s suppose there is no God. The same evils still exist. Are atheists suggesting that the nonexistence of God and the existence of evil fit neatly together in a logical argument? That, if little children, beaten into submission, sob in the night, it is somehow a telling argument for atheism?

Christopher Hitchens has argued that before our time human beings suffered 98,000 years of disease, cataclysm, bloodshed, and famine without intervention by any Creator. If a human creator had deliberately chosen to put hundreds of millions of his fellow humans in such a parlous state, he would be regarded as a monster. It follows that if God willed that long, bleak, agonizing history, God in his omniscience and omnipotence is an even greater monster.

Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance…

…St. Thomas Aquinas posited the striking thought that for this world to be as good as it is, the existence of evil is necessary. Evil is not a “thing”—no substantial thing at all. Against the Muslims, Aquinas flatly rejected the centuries of Eastern philosophy that divided the world into good and evil, as if they were equal contestants, equally substantial and active and potent.

Not so, Aquinas reasoned. Everything that the Greatest of all Goods has created is suffused with good up to the brim of its capacity. But for the world as a whole to be good, it must be populated by the most beautiful and god-like creatures of all—creatures capable of insight and deliberate choice. It requires the liberty of human minds and wills. Only at this peak of nature can human creation be considered made in the “image of God.”

The Jewish Creator offered every woman and man in his creation his friendship, and in this way treated each as a free person, not as a slave. Such human liberty required God to create a world in which human beings can of their own deliberate choice turn away from the good. This is how Aquinas defined human sin: a considered and willful deviation from the good, an absence of the good, a deficiency.

“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. The leaders of the Anglo-American Enlightenment believed that liberty was God’s underlying purpose in creating human beings, and in shaping the rest of creation accordingly. They believed that in the war between the Americans and the British in 1776, though both worshiped the same God, the God of liberty would favor those who fought for freedom, not against it.

A world in which liberty can flower must be a world of laws, regularities, and probabilities, but also a world of contingency, happenstance, serendipity, surprise, and suspense. All the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and “blooming, buzzing profusion.”

Even the “angelic” light of advanced mathematics (so highly abstract and removed from corporeality) must in a world of liberty be constituted not only by arithmetic, geometry, and deductive reasoning, but also by the statistically random.

In such a world, there cannot be human freedom without the possibility of falling away from the good.

C.S. Lewis observed that God made a world in which the wood from a tree could be used to build a house – or to make a club. Now, God could have set things up so that as soon as someone made a club the material would transform into something which could do no harm…but that, of course, would be to deny us our choice. If we can’t choose to do wrong, then we have no choice at all, and God wants our choice to be voluntary. He’ll take us in if we choose him, and he’ll ratify our choice if we reject him. To say that because there is evil in the world there must be no God is to presume that the only good world is a world in which we’re all automatons doing what we’re programmed to do. As to why God made us this way rather than another way – well, he says it is good, and I’m not going to gainsay God.

To me, the logic of there being a God (outside of the unanswerable argument of there necessarily being a First Cause) rests upon the fact that I can think – that I can reason. No amount of materialist evolution would ever come up with an evolutionary product which could refuse its office. We can choose – we can decide to this, or decide to do that. And while we know what our brain is and a great deal of how it works, we haven’t the foggiest notion or what our mind is or how a thought is generated. You can tell what parts of my brain are working when I think of, say, the football game – but you can’t in the trial of a thousand years figure out why I think the Chargers are better than the Patriots, last year’s records be darned. Itis mind which doesn’t fit into the natural world – and so, in my view, mind must come from outside the natural world (as a side note, I recently read an interesting question: The Universe is expanding. What is it expanding in to?…if the universe is complete and yet growing larger, there must be something outside the universe, greater than it, which allows the universe to grow larger).

Take a First Cause and add a Mind, and what you get is a God who not only creates, but who can act in his creation..alter it and move it towards the goals he designed from the start. While such a belief does not, in and of itself, verify my Christian faith, it does leave aside any thought that we are either the result of random chance, or the result of an uncaring Creator.

Via NRO’s The Corner:

…Senator Obama says he’s going to change Washington, but his solution is to simply make government bigger, and raise your taxes to pay for it. We’ve been doing that for years, and it hasn’t worked. In the few years he’s been in the Senate, he has requested nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel spending. That’s nearly a million dollars for every day he’s been in office.

I’ve never asked for a single pork barrel project for my state of Arizona, and as President, I will veto every bill that wastes your money, and make the authors famous. I will order a top to bottom review of every government program before I give them one additional dollar of funding. Those programs that are doing important work for the American people have nothing to fear from me. Those that can be modernized and made more effective will find me a willing partner. And those that have outlived their usefulness to you, and waste your money on things you neither want nor need, are going out of business whether they like it or not.

Senator Obama says he will only raise taxes on the rich. But in the Senate, he voted for tax hikes that would have impacted those making just $32,000 per year. He has proposed tax increases on income taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, Social Security taxes – pretty much anything that you can tax, he wants to tax more. Raising taxes in a bad economy is about the worst thing you could do because they would kill more jobs in an economy that‘s already losing too many. I‘m going to keep current tax rates low, and cut others, not because I want to make the rich richer, but because it keeps jobs in America and creates new ones, and gets our economy moving again by making sure you have more money to spend and save as you see fit.

Senator Obama says he wants energy independence, but he is opposed to new drilling at home; he is opposed to nuclear power; he is opposed to encouraging the invention of an affordable electric car that can run a hundred miles or more before it needs to be re-charged. He has even criticized wind and hydropower. He has said the high cost of gasoline doesn’t bother him, only that it rose too quickly. He believes every domestic energy source has a problem. I believe every energy source needs to be part of the solution. We need to develop new advanced alternative energies like wind, solar, tide and biofuels, but we also need to develop more existing energies like nuclear power and clean coal. And we need to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don‘t like us very much or care that Americans are suffering, start drilling and producing more oil at home, and bring down the cost of gasoline that is killing our economy.

On Iraq, Barack Obama says he wants peace, but even today he opposes the strategy of the surge that succeeded in Iraq and will succeed in Afghanistan. No rational person could see the progress we’ve made in the last year and a half, and not recognize that the surge, and the brave Americans who made it work, rescued us from a terribly dangerous defeat and put us on the road to victory. I don’t question his patriotism. This country has been as good to Senator Obama as it has been to me, and I’m sure he loves it. He just doesn’t understand how our defeat in Iraq would have left al Qaeda with a base to prepare attacks against us; increased Iranian power in the region; and threatened to draw other countries in the Middle East into a wider war that would have demanded even greater sacrifices from us. He didn’t see the danger in his policy, and so he thinks Iraq was just another issue to play politics with. Just like he doesn’t see that his policy of unconditional withdrawal before we are certain Iraqis can protect the gains we have achieved at the cost of American blood and treasure could result in in renewed violence and a third Iraq war. I hate war, and I know its costs better than many. When I bring our troops home, I intend to keep them home, leaving Iraq secured, and a democratic ally in the Arab heartland.

The bottom line is that Senator Obama’s words, for all their eloquence and passion, don’t mean all that much. And that’s the problem with Washington. It is not just the Bush Administration, and it’s not just the Democratic Congress. It’s that everyone in Washington says whatever it takes get elected or to score the political point of the day. If Senator Obama doesn’t have the strength to speak openly and directly about how he will address the serious challenges confronting America? How will he be strong enough to really change Washington? We don’t need another politician in Washington who puts self-interest and political expediency ahead of problem solving. We need to start putting the country’s interests first, and come together to keep American families safe and help them realize their dreams for a better life.

In war and peace, I have been an imperfect servant of my country. But I have been her servant first, last and always. Whenever I faced an important choice between my country’s interests or my own interests, party politics or any special interest, I chose my country. Nothing has ever mattered more to me than the honor of serving America, and nothing ever will. If you elect me President, I will always put our country first. I will put its greatness; its prosperity and peace; and the hopes and concerns of the people who make it great before any personal or partisan interest. We are going to start making this government work for you and not for the ambitions of the powerful. And I will keep that promise every hour of every day I am in office, so help me God.

This is the unanswerable argument and if Senator McCain can just hammer this message home again and again and again from now until Election Day, then he’ll win. This is what the campaign has to be about in order for McCain to short-circuit Obama’s bogus change and make the race about who really wants to work for a great America.

McCain, as President, will alternately infuriate and delight us on the right – but whether we fighting for him or fussing with him, we can be certain that what he’s doing is what he honestly believes is best for America. With Obama, on the other hand, the clear indication is that the beneficiaries of an Obama Administration would be the same corrupt unions, corrupt lobbyists, large corporations and varied leftwing special interest groups who have profited off Democratic power for the past 60 years. It is, indeed, time for a change – but not a change backwards to Carter and LBJ; we need a change which will turn our government back over to we, the people. A change which will end the asinine liberal idea that Washington can spend our money better than we can. A change which will end the arrogant, condescending idea that we poor, little folk down here can’t make it unless someone like Obama comes along to organize us and show us how its done. A change to an America where government protects us where necessary and leaves us alone as we live our lawful lives respectful of our fellow citizens.

As for me, I want to live in John McCain’s America where I’m free to strive as I see fit, not in Obama’s America where I’ll get to cue up for government doled-out welfare and health care.

Some have said that life issues won’t be important in Campaign ’08 – that all we care about is how audaciously hopeful Obama makes us. Don’t count on it:

Colorado for Equal Rights, an organization backing a measure on the Colorado ballot that would define a person in the state’s Constitution as “any human being from the moment of fertilization,” has released a list of over 70 physicians and pharmacists from around the United States who agree that a person includes any human from the moment of conception.

“We are honored to have received these endorsements from such respected physicians,” stated Kristi Burton, head of Colorado for Equal Rights. “Science clearly proves that life begins at the time of fertilization. We are secure in the fact that we have science and reason on our side, and we are pleased to have the medical community supporting our efforts.”

“As support for Amendment 48 accumulates, we are very encouraged as we get closer to November’s election,” Burton said. “Every human life should be protected, and the endorsements we continue to receive prove that our easy to understand amendment is one that all Coloradans can support.”

The group needed to collect 76,000 signatures to put the amendment on the ballot in November and succeeded in doing so on May 31 with 103,000 signatures.

The defense of human life from the moment of conception to the natural end of life – that is what pro-life is all about; we’re all human beings here, good people, and if we can’t respect those who are entirely at our mercy, how are we then to really respect anyone, including our selves?

I know all the pro-choice arguments – some of my closets friends adhere to them, including some of my fellow Catholics (we’re working on that). But all of them ring hollow because, in the end, an abortion is the permanent disposition of a temporary condition. Pregnancy lasts for 9 months, while the agony of abortion – for the mother – lasts a lifetime. It is a false promise – a work of Hell, if there ever was one – to say that an abortion solves anything. To think that killing an unborn child is equal or even superior to giving birth to a child is anti-human in the extreme. It is a point of view which I might have understood at one time, but only because I was too ignorant to understand how monstrous a crime abortion is – these days, I just can’t fathom the pro-choice position…this bizarre idea that killing is a solution. It might have been a Final Solution, once upon a time, but one hopes we pass by such barbarities and move forward.

The credit for this one goes to Nevada Pundit – it has to be seen to believed.

So says Obama:

Sen. Barack Obama, speaking to a gathering of minority journalists yesterday, stopped short of endorsing an official U.S. apology to American Indians but said the country should acknowledge its history of poor treatment of certain ethnic groups.

“There’s no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as well as other persons of color in this country, we’ve got some very sad and difficult things to account for,” Obama told hundreds of attendees of UNITY ’08, a convention of four minority journalism associations.

The Hawaii-born senator, who has told local reporters that he supports the federal recognition bill for native Hawaiians drafted by U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka, noted other ethnic groups but did not mention native Hawaiians when answering a question about his thoughts on a formal U.S. apology to American Indians.

“I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said.

“I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it’s Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds.”

That, by the way, comes pretty close to Obama endorsing the monunentally unjust idea of reparations for slavery. Outside of that, I’d like to find a day over the past 30 years when we weren’t noting the tragic elements of our past…and counter that its time we started concentrating on the glorious aspects of our past. To be forever digging up the ghosts of slavery, Jim Crow and Wounded Knee does no one any good – it doesn’t help those who were treated unjustly (they are all dead), it doesn’t harm those who carried out the injustices (they are, also, all dead) and it makes it harder for us to reconcile in the modern world and, like the Seneca at Appomattox, say “we are all Americans here.”

Have at it boys and girls, just didn’t have time to write a good post for the AM shift.

UPDATE, by Matt Margolis: Looks like John Kerry was partying late this weekend…

According to Real Clear Politics show the race varying from an 8 point Obama lead, to a 4 point McCain lead. What does this mean?

That no one really has a clue what is going on out there.

I look at it like this – there are just too many variables out there. Will the youth vote show up? Will blue collar Democrats vote for Obama or McCain? Will movement conservatives show up for McCain? Will President Bush’s unpopularity drag down GOP participation? Will the Democrat Congress’ unpopularity drag down Democratic participation? Will victory in Iraq help/harm McCain/Obama? Will oil/gasoline prices help/harm Obama/McCain? Will liberal women show up for Obama? Will hispanics keep on track for the Democrats, or will McCain have appeal to them due to his immigration stance? The only thing we can say with any certainty is that African Americans will turn out in high numbers and will give a super-overwhelming majority of their votes to Obama (if McCain cracks 5% of the black vote it’ll be a bit of a shocker). With so many variables out there I’m not surprised that a respected pollster like Ramussen comes up with a three point Obama lead while respected pollster USA Today/Gallup comes up with a four point McCain lead. I really don’t suspect any bias in the pollsters (except any Newsweek poll – they are universally and amazingly biased in favor of the Democrats – I’ll trust a Carville poll before I’ll trust a Newsweek poll) – they just don’t know and are doing the best they can.

Its also July and while this election seems to have been going on forever, it really doesn’t kick into gear until after Labor Day…and the high test doesn’t come until after the World Series is over. Between now and then, there is just so much which can and will happen, that all I can do at this point is rate the election a complete toss up and thoroughly enjoy the most interesting political year I’ve ever seen.