Blogs For Victory

And 69% (correctly) state she helped the McCain ticket:

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Republican voters say Alaska Governor Sarah Palin helped John McCain’s bid for the presidency, even as news reports surface that some McCain staffers think she was a liability.

Only 20% of GOP voters say Palin hurt the party’s ticket, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Six percent (6%) say she had no impact, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

Ninety-one percent (91%) of Republicans have a favorable view of Palin, including 65% who say their view is Very Favorable. Only eight percent (8%) have an unfavorable view of her, including three percent (3%) Very Unfavorable.

When asked to choose among some of the GOP’s top names for their choice for the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, 64% say Palin. The next closest contenders are two former governors and unsuccessful challengers for the presidential nomination this year — Mike Huckabee of Arkansas with 12% support and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts with 11%.

Three other sitting governors – Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Charlie Crist of Florida and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota – all pull low single-digit support.

As readers know, I’m a Jindal fan – but Palin is my very, very close second choice for 2012…and Palin/Jindal, Jindal/Palin is pretty much “same/same” for me. We’ve got the best of the best for our future prospects, while the Democrats have Obama and absolutely nothing else. We might lose in 2012, but that will be the last time for a while that we lose. Unless the Democrats clone Obama and Obama is an entirely unexpected success (meaning that for the first time in human history, liberalism works).

We’re expecting snow in Las Vegas tonight and tomorrow morning…

From Joe Klein over at Time:

The war in Afghanistan — the war that President-elect Barack Obama pledged to fight and win — has become an aimless absurdity. It began with a specific target. Afghanistan was where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda lived, harbored by the Islamic extremist Taliban government. But the enemy escaped into Pakistan, and for the past seven years, Afghanistan has been a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces that we continue to call the “Taliban.” These ragtag bands are funded by opium profits and led by assorted religious extremists and druglords, many of whom have safe havens in Pakistan.

Subtext: Its the wrong war against the wrong enemy at the wrong time and the sooner we’re out of it, the better.

Get ready, President-elect Obama, for the MSM and the larger left to turn heavily against you vis a vis Afghanistan. Any basis of support you had for your hawkish stance on Afghanistan and Pakistan was mere campaign rhetoric – something designed to take national security off the table and/or denigrate McCain’s sponsorship of the victory in Iraq. The MSM and the left will now revert to their default position – the enemy is always better than we are, our troops are always incompetent when not criminal, we’re making things worse and our sins make it in our best interest to lose.

Now, Obama could just turn on a dime and endorse defeat in Afghanistan with a swift withdrawal of US forces and then start writing up the diplomatic notes deploring the rising violence in an Afghanistan swirling down into chaos. But will he do so? I’m not so sure – in fact, I don’t think he will, at least not initially. There is a huge downside to losing even an inherited war – especially when your military is flush with recent victory elsewhere and is willing and able to take on the task you have set it in Afghanistan. The only upside of cutting and running in Afghanistan is that it will please kook leftists, whom Obama need never please again as long as he lives.

The upside of staying in Afghanistan and allowing our superb military to win is that Obama will then become a victorious war President and that issue is taken away from the GOP at least as long as Obama is in office, and perhaps longer. Additionally, we’d be helping to, ya know?, liberate people and make a better world – that sort of thing which doesn’t appeal to the left, but does appeal to everyone with a bit of sense. As I stated on election night, in regard to our military actions overseas, Obama will have my tireless support and any criticism I make will be designed to help win the war faster. So, count me as an Obamaniac regarding Afghanistan – and I pray that he will tell the MSM and the left to go jump in a lake when the going gets tough, as it certainly will.

The longer this goes on, the worse it gets for Democrats in general and Obama in particular – and thus the Illinois Attorney General’s attempt to short-circuit the impeachment process by trying to get a judge to declare Blagojevich “disabled” and thus unable to exercise the office of Governor. This is absurd, but typical of Democrats who don’t know the difference between legislative, executive and judicial branches – Beldar takes a look at this:

Prof. Ann Althouse is having fun ridiculing Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s efforts both before the press and before the Illinois Supreme Court. Madigan is trying to persuade that court to effectively remove Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office based on an argument that he’s “disabled” due to the allegations that have been made against him in the pending federal indictment being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Earlier, Prof. Althouse wrote: “Given that ‘conviction on impeachment’ is one of the specified reasons for inability to serve, using this procedure as an alternative to the impeachment process looks like an abusive power grab.” Prof. Glenn Reynolds adds: “I agree with Ann Althouse. The way you get rid of a crooked governor is via impeachment. Why play games here? If the case is so obvious, that shouldn’t take long.”

I agree with both Prof. Althouse and Prof. Reynolds. Even though it would remove the reins of power from the hands of a crook, using the “disability” provision of the Illinois constitution in lieu of impeachment would be legally, politically, and intellectually illegitimate.

But picking up on Prof. Reynold’s point about impeachment, the question about whether Blagojevich is “obviously crooked” becomes “obvious to whom?” and “under what standard of obviousness?”

That Blagojevich is a banal, petty crook has been “obvious” to anyone who cared to see such things long before he was indicted and arrested. Under a practical, common-sense standard, that should have been obvious to the voters of Illinois who nevertheless elected him.(emphasis in original)

In the strange world of politics, we can’t assume that Madigan won’t be able to find a judge to rule in her favor, but believe she’ll be unsuccessful. Blagojevich is a crook and anyone paying attention since before he took office as Governor knows he’s a crook – but he’s also innocent until proven guilty and he’s as yet only been indicted, not convicted. Crook or no, he was both elected and re-elected – and thus he has a reason for desperately trying to cling on to power in the hopes that something will turn up to get him off the hook, at least as far as a long prison term is concerned. The fact that Blagojevich has acted as he has shows us that the most important thing in his life is himself, we can’t rely upon a basic decency and desire to spare others to motivate him to do the right thing – only if resigning works in what Blagojevich thinks is his best interest will he do it.

The rumor is that he’ll quit as early as Monday morning – and lets hope he does…but given the culture of corruption prevalent amongst Democrats, the fact that the people of Illinois have a high tolerance of corruption and the fact that Blagojevich has nothing to lose by fighting it out, we may see the Democrats forced to do something they never want to do – call one of their own to account for his misdeeds.

But they may be forced to it – Obama needs this thing to go away and go away quickly. Aside from the fact that each day distracts from things he’d rather be doing, there always the continual chance that something will come up tying him and/or senior aides to Blagojevich. We’ll soon see how this all plays out.

And, apparently, someone from Daily Kos got in there as well:

President George W. Bush flew to Iraq on Sunday, his fourth and final trip to highlight the recently completed security agreement between the United States and the country that has occupied the bulk of his presidency and will to a large extent define his legacy.

But his appearance at a news conference here was interrupted by an Iraqi journalist who shouted in Arabic — “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog” — and threw one of his shoes at the president, who ducked and narrowly avoided being struck.

As chaos ensued, he threw his other shoe, shouting, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” The second shoe also narrowly missed Bush as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki stuck out a hand in front of the president’s face to help shield him.

A scrum of security agents descended on the man, who was about 12 feet from the lectern, and wrestled him to the floor and then out of the ornate room where the news conference was taking place. The president was uninjured and brushed off the incident. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said jokingly before continuing his news conference and noting the apologies of Iraqi journalists in the front row.

Shortly before 10 p.m., Bush departed the Green Zone by helicopter to Camp Victory, where he was greeted with cheers and whoops from hundreds of troops inside the enormous rotunda of the Al Faw palace. Speaking at a lectern beneath an enormous American flag that nearly reached the domed ceiling, he praised this generation of soldiers and reflected on the sacrifice of those who had died.

He called the surge “one of the greatest successes in the history of the United States military.”

“Thanks to you,” he told the soldiers, “the Iraq we’re standing in today is dramatically freer, dramatically safer and dramatically better than the Iraq we found eight years ago.”

On the flipside of that kook with the shoe, other Iraqi journalists offered their apologies to President Bush, who made light of the incident with a joke about the size of the shoe. And thus democracy to Iraq – and, in fact, perhaps better democracy than we have, as I doubt any of us would get away with tossing a shoe at the President, this one or the next. I mean, come on, which of us hasn’t wanted to chuck something at a President from time to time?

At any rate, God bless President Bush, our magnificent troops and the brave Iraqi people – including the screwball with the shoe. We’ve done well and the world is a better place for what we’ve done.

And so far, Humanity isn’t winning this battle:

Overpopulation hysteria has real world consequences. One of these is a United Nations population control agency that goes by the name of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

Started in 1969 following a massive lobbying effort by billionaire John D. Rockefeller III, the UNFPA claims to work to “reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.” In fact, the UNFPA, like its founder, believes that the way to reduce poverty is to reduce the numbers of the poor through sterilization, contraception, and abortion campaigns.

We know.We have conducted repeated investigations of UNFPA operations around the world. We have found that, despite its soothing rhetoric about improving “reproductive health,” and “safe motherhood”—the UNFPA spends a huge chunk of its budget on soporific propaganda–the agency continues to be fixated on the numbers. We have documented its involvement in coercive population control policies in countries like China, Vietnam, Peru, and North Korea, as well as in refugee camps around the world.

Its intimate connection to China’s brutal one-child policy merits special attention. For three long decades, the Chinese government has aborted and sterilized millions of women each year. For three long decades, the UNFPA has provided financial aid, ideological encouragement, and international sanction to these abuses through its offices in Beijing and around the Chinese countryside. This shameless pattern of complicity in some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet is the chief reason why the Bush Administration, for seven years running, has refused to fund the UN agency.

We at PRI have hard evidence on the UNFPA’s involvement in coercion—videotapes, cassette tapes, written and spoken testimony from dozens of witnesses. Our information was verified by the U.S. State Department, and is accessible on our web site, as well as in our new video series: Exposure: Investigative Realism from PRI. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, who in the past has been friendly towards the UNFPA, declared the UNFPA ineligible for U.S. funding because of its complicity in forced abortion and forced sterilization.

And now Obama, Hillary and the pro-abortion crowd will get the United States firmly behind the process of reducing the number of people in the world. Forty years after the population hysteria and with abundant evidence that the whole concept of “over-population” was non-existent and with birth rates declining towards catastrophic levels in many places, we’re still following the model of killing the unborn and discouraging parenthood. Why?

It could just be the enforced, leftwing stupidity so prevalent in our society. Once the left latches on to an idea and calls it dogma, to dissent from it in any way, shape or form means ostracism from the left and a campaign of slanders against you – so, most lefties just keep at it, no matter how far leftist theory diverges from obvious reality. The fact that if the United States were as densely populated as Japan it would have half the world’s population in it doesn’t seem to impress itself upon the mind of the left – we’re “overpopulated” and there’s an end on it. And China is, too – for crying out loud, they’ve got a billion people, so they must be overpopulated…and as Leon Trotsky once said, “we have to get over this Papistical-Quaker nonsense about the sanctity of human life”. Can’t everyone see that China is poor and it must be because of overpopulation? And except for the fact that China has far less than half the population density of Japan – which is rich, while China is poor – also doesn’t seem to break into leftwing population thinking.

There are about 57.5 million square miles of land area in the world – lets take 25% of that as absolutely uninhabitable by humans and call it 43 million square miles of land human beings could be on at any given time. If the whole world became as densely populated as Japan – where people live well and there is countryside and farmland, etc – then the population of the world would be 35,948,000,000. We’re a long way from that – and, in fact, there is no rational argument to be made that human population would ever rise that high. In other word’s, there never has been and never will be a problem with the number of human beings on the planet – there has been, on the other hand, a problem with how human beings are governed, and how they govern themselves. Had China been governed on the Japanese model there is every reason to expect that China would be as prosperous as Japan, and probably more prosperous as China has vastly more natural resources and arable land than Japan.

Greed, servility, selfishness, cowardice, tyranny – this explains poverty. But our leftists aren’t buying it. To them, its just us and if there were less of us then we’d all have more. Its either this sort of idiocy or we’ll have to fall back on the original reason for population control – getting rid of the “lesser” breeds of people via abortion and euthanasia, as Sanger’s Planned Parenthood wanted at the start (and given that PP takes donations from people saying they want black kids aborted, its not too farfetched to think that PP is still on the eugenics track). What all of this means is that those of us on the side of life have quite a battle on our hands over the next four to eight years.

A man of great faith and great intellect has gone home to Our Lord:

The death of Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, “brings home to God a great theologian and a totally dedicated servant of the Church,” Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said of the cardinal who died December 12 at Fordham University at the age of 90.

“His wise counsel will be missed; his personal witness to the pursuit of holiness of life as a priest, a Jesuit and a Cardinal of the Church will be remembered and will encourage the Church to remain ever faithful to her Lord and his mission,” Cardinal George said.

“I am deeply saddened at the loss of a personal friend; but I rejoice in the hope that now he sees clearly what he explored so well in his studies on revelation, on grace and on the nature of the Church and the papal office. May he rest in peace.”

Cardinal Dulles, who served as a professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America and later as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham, assisted the USCCB as a key contributor to the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue and to the committee on doctrine.

“For a generation of priests, scholars and faithful, Cardinal Avery Dulles has been a reliable and faithful interpreter of the Second Vatican Council. A number of his books have become classics in theological education, such as Models of the Church,” said Father James Massa, executive director of the Secretariat of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the USCCB and a student of Cardinal Dulles. “In some ways, his life bears comparison with another great cardinal-theologian, John Henry Newman, on whose birthday, 200 years later, Avery Dulles was created a cardinal of the Catholic Church.” The first U.S. theologian and U.S. Jesuit to be elevated to the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Dulles was, at his own request, not consecrated a bishop, a rare distinction for a cardinal.

I’ve read a bit of Cardinal Dulles’ work, and I stand amazed that he was 90 – as recently as February of this year he was writing this:

Nothing is more striking in the New Testament than the confidence with which it proclaims the saving power of belief in Christ. Almost every page confronts us with a decision of eternal consequence: Will we follow Christ or the rulers of this world? The gospel is, according to Paul, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith” (Rom. 1:16). The apostles and their associates are convinced that in Jesus they have encountered the Lord of Life and that he has brought them into the way that leads to everlasting blessedness. By personal faith in him and by baptism in his name, Christians have passed from darkness to light, from error to truth, and from sin to holiness.

That is the faith of a man fresh to Christianity, and Cardinal Dulles kept it right up to the end, it would seem. No worries about Cardinal Dulles – if faith in Christ brings one to salvation, then I know precisely where he is.

From Britain:

A school choir was forced to withdraw from a Christmas event because organisers branded its carols ‘too religious’.

Around 60 children aged between seven and 11 had spent six weeks practising favourites including Once In Royal David’s City and Silent Night for the Corringham Winter Festival.

But they were let down at the last minute when their headteacher was informed their programme did not ‘dovetail’ with the festival’s theme.

Nothing to see here, just move along…no war on Christmas.

What will hurt Obama more, Blago or Rangel? Time will tell:

It certainly didn’t take long for scandal to rear its ugly head in the new era of Democratic control. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich saw to that, and in spectacular fashion.

But while most attention is fixed on the Blagojevich scandal — coming as it does in President-elect Barack Obama’s home state and replete as it is with enough tape-recorded talk of peddling a Senate seat, shaking down contributors and blackmailing journalists to make even FBI agents blush — it may not be the most troublesome one for the new president.

His more vexing problem could turn out to be that other, quieter scandal dogging Democrats. That’s the one involving Rep. Charles Rangel, head of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Rep. Rangel is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for failing to pay taxes on $75,000 in income on a vacation home in the Dominican Republic, for controlling multiple rent-controlled apartments in a Harlem apartment building, for using congressional stationery to raise money for a center named in his honor and, most recently and seriously, for helping a donor to his center win a tax loophole in return for a contribution.

Rep. Rangel has repeatedly and vociferously denied any wrongdoing, and he actually sought the Ethics Committee inquiry initially to clear his name.

Without doubt, the Blagojevich scandal is more audacious, and, because it involves the filling of Mr. Obama’s own Senate seat, might seem more potentially damaging to the new president. More broadly, it’s possibly a sign that Illinois could become to President Obama what Arkansas was to President Bill Clinton: a source of continuing political headaches back home.

Yet in many ways, the very fact that Gov. Blagojevich’s behavior seems so over the top makes it easier for Mr. Obama to deal with it. He can simply ask, as he has, that the governor quit and go away. It helps the Obama cause enormously, of course, that Gov. Blagojevich is on tape cursing the president-elect’s team for failing to go along with his pay-to-play scheme for filling the Senate seat, and that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald virtually cleared the Obama team in his public remarks on the case.

More than that, whatever ties Gov. Blagojevich and his cohorts may have had to Mr. Obama in the past, they will have little to do with his future in Washington.

Not so Rep. Rangel. For Mr. Obama, the Blagojevich investigation and prosecution soon will be something going on back home. The Rangel drama will play out right in the president-elect’s new front yard.

This is the result of years of Democrats covering for their own. Now, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Rangel…sure, he’s a pinko and a pain in the you-know-what, but he’s a Marine and a genuine political character. But he’s also never been called to account by his own side, and now it appears that decades of un-watched power has slowly moved Rangel from a hard-fighting man of the people into yet another money-grubbing political hack.

We’ve always had corruption in government, but I don’t think America has ever seen the breathtaking scale of corruption the Democrats have engaged in over the past couple decades. Sure, there have been plenty of corrupt GOPers, too, but those GOPers – even one of relatively minor sins like Foley – are out or isolated…corrupt Democrats tend to either go on as if nothing ever happened, or are found safe havens by the party after surrendering their seat to avoid losing it to the GOP. Several decades of hardly ever getting caught and special favors for those who get caught have bred in Democratic leaders the presumption that they can do whatever they please. Rangel has fallen victim to this mindset.

But not just Rangel – one only has to consider the fact that Blagojevich (as of this writing) still hasn’t resigned to understand that, for Democrats, corruption is something which can be worked out. Blago seems to be holding out in the expectation that the Democrat party will fix things up for him, as it has in the past. Alas, he doesn’t understand that he’s committing the one sin recognized in the Democratic party – he’s placing Democrat control of the Illinois governorship at risk. Such a thing cannot be tolerated – and so Blago is going to shorty find out a life times worth of effort on behalf of Democratic party is good for. Nothing.

For Obama, the problem is that he will be the head of this party of corruption – this Caucus of Corruption, as it were – and the people are expecting Obama to clean house…but giving somone a shovel and actually getting a hole dug are two different things. Obama has to go after corruption, but this will largely entail going after Democrats as the GOP has been repeatedly purged of corruption over the past four years or so. Will Obama show the courage of his convictions, or will he roll over to the Democrat powers that be?

If we are to have real change we can beleive in, then the best place to stop is on Barack Obama – all corrupt and corrupting elements have to be removed from positions of authority, and Obama must lead the charge, or be shown to be a mere political hack with a slick speaking style.