Blogs For Victory

Here’s the news story:

Investor’s Business Daily and the TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (IBD/TIPP) has just released a tracking poll that shows that John McCain has dramatically shortened the his deficit with Barack Obama, taking a significant lead among Catholics.

In the midst of the polling confusion, this poll has been regarded as relevant, since an analysis of Final Certified Results showed IBD’s polling partner, TIPP to be the most accurate pollster for the 2004 election.

IBD/TIPP reported late on Thursday that McCain has cut into Obama’s lead for a second day in a row and is now just 1.1 points behind. The spread was 3.7 on Wednesday and 6.0 on Tuesday.

“The Republican is making headway with middle and working class voters, and has surged 10 points in two days among those earning between $30,000 and $75,000,” the report says.

McCain has also gone from an 11-point deficit to a 9-point lead among Catholics, with only days remaining before the November 4 election.

The heated debate around abortion and the stepping up of bishops’ statements on the incompatibility of pro-choice positions with Catholic doctrine is believed to be one of the possible reasons for the Republican candidate’s surge among Catholics.

The message from the Bishops has been rather relentless – the centrality of the life issue is being emphasized again and again. Heck, by an odd set of circumstances I even got into my hands a copy of Novena for Faithful Citizenship – a nine day devotional prayer for the benefit of the American political process (which, by the way, I’m going to start today). The Novena is stuffed full of Catholic social teaching, especially as it relates to the life issue and the inherent dignity of mankind. No two ways about it – the marker for Catholics (and, indeed, for all Christians) has been laid down: failure to vote with a consciousness about how the election will effect the pro-life cause is a failure of Christian understanding.

Catholics – especially in Pennsylvania – may very well decide who becomes President. One of the largest demographic groups in America and also one of the few demographic groups “up for grabs”, it may all boil down to a contest between the ability of the Bishops to instruct the faithful and the ability of Obama and minions to disguise their radical, pro-abortion views.

As for me, I never really believed that Obama had a large lead among Catholics – certainly not among Catholics who go to Mass on any semblance of a regular basis. It could have been, of course, that Obama was doing well because – for Catholics – there is a built-in desire for social justice, which honorable intention has been routinely hijacked by liberals and leftists. But as the truth about Obama has slowly seeped past the high walls of MSM bias, so has Obama’s support collapsed among non-liberal, non-leftist groups. It still remains to be seen if this will be enough to put McCain over the top, but I’m greatly encouraged that more and more of my fellow Catholics are making the right choice in 2008.

…but Sarah Palin’s wardrobe is a legitimate issue?

HAT TIP: Domestic Divapalooza

UPDATE: My friend S.E. Cupp discusses this in a piece in the New York Daily News:

But all the makeup in the world can’t cover over this fact: The gleeful, personal attacks being waged by Democrats and pundits against Palin on this front are just the latest in a relentless and unprincipled season-long smear campaign against the Republican candidate for vice president. They are proof positive that because she is a conservative woman, Sarah Palin simply cannot win.

For months Palin has been mocked by the liberal elite as a hick from Alaska. Because she can’t explain the Bush Doctrine to Charlie Gibson’s satisfaction or otherwise gives less than perfectly crafted answers to questions, she’s an idiot. Her opponents have spent unparalleled amounts of time and energy trying to convince voters that she is not “just like you.” She’s even dumber.

But now, because the McCain campaign has budgeted some money for new clothes, questions about her intellect are shelved for another discussion, and her image takes center stage. Never mind that Republicans aren’t supposed to bring up William Ayers, Tony Rezko, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright or any other non “Issues” with a capital “I.” Now Democrats are hoping to make a serious issue out of Palin’s high heels, her glasses and her new suits.

Check out this interview with Joe Biden… he was asked questions about Obama’s ties to ACORN (he denied any connection between Obama of his campaign – despite evidence to the contrary) Obama’s desire to “spread the wealth” (despite Obama saying so to Joe the Plumber) … 

Now it appears that the Obama campaign is not happy that they got some tough questions or that Biden’s responses contradict known facts… they cancelled an interview with Biden’s wife:

Why did Barack Obama’s campaign cancel a WFTV-Channel 9 interview with Jill Biden, wife of Sen. Joe Biden? The campaign cited “an unprofessional interview” WFTV’s Barbara West did Thursday with Joe Biden. In a statement Friday, Adrianne Marsh, Florida spokeswoman for Obama’s campaign, said the station, in talking with Sen. Biden, was “both combative and woefully uninformed about simple facts.” Marsh said West’s insistence that Obama was an organizer for ACORN was “100 percent false.” “In a line of questioning that would make Rush Limbaugh proud, West even went as far as to quote Karl Marx, a Communist icon, in a disturbing attempt to associate Barack Obama with socialism,” Marsh wrote. West said, “I think I asked him some pointed questions. . . . I don’t think I was rude or inconsiderate to him.”

UPDATE: The video stream has strangely been removed from the TV station’s website… so here’s the video on YouTube…

This is getting freakish:

After releasing this morning’s numbers showing McCain ahead in Ohio and Florida, the Strategic Vision polling company received several death threats through the contact e-mail on the company’s web site.

David Johnson, the CEO of Strategic Vision, shared the messages with National Review Online.

One of the messages stated:

My goodness, your polls stinks. There are 3 polls that have Obama by double digits and only yours has Obama down. WOW!. How come your poll is the only one giving Palin high favor ratings? I think you nee dto be careful tonight when you get in your car and might want to check underneath your car. SCRAP YOUR IDIOTIC POLLS OR ELSE!

Another stated:

A poll that gave Sarah Palin and Barack Obama the same favorability rating is wrong off the bat. Be careful going outside tonight because you might not see tomorrow.

A third message stated:

Why would your presidential election poll results be so drastically different from every other reputable poll taken over the same time period? Are they that dumb or are you guys that smart? Smart guys wind up dead.

The company has contacted the FBI and appropriate authorities, Johnson said. There was, thankfully, nothing in the messages that indicated that the sender had actually sought out the location of the company or its employees. Johnson noted that while the messages came from different addresses, they all came within a short period of time, and that it was possible they were from the same person.

Johnson said he’s not fearful, but taking appropriate measures.

The insanity on the left grows apace – from guns fired at a GOPer’s house, to tire slashings at a Palin rally here in Las Vegas, to this story of people issuing death threats over an unfavorable poll result. Get a grip, lefties – When we say things like “Obamessiah”, we’re just making a joke…we didn’t think you’d start to believe he’s a real messiah for whom you will kill the infidels over! Whatever else Obama might be, he’s just a man – no great shakes and in a thousand years he’ll be forgotten by all save people who collect obscure knowledge of trivial events.

You know, he might lose on November 4th – and in the normal course of events, you’d just be a bit upset over that for a day or two and then move on to other things…but I’m beginning to worry of a massive nervous breakdown on your part. Calm down. See a shrink. Take a pill. For Pete’s sake, its just an election!

Obama is still working on his acceptance speech, but more and more information is coming in indicating that Democrats shouldn’t be all that confident:

The presidential race in New Hampshire has grown closer, with Barack Obama now leading John McCain 50% to 46%, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state…

…Voters in New Hampshire are divided on who they trust more on the top issue of the economy, with Obama holding the edge, 46% to 45%. While 43% agree with Obama’s idea that spreading the wealth around would be good for everybody, 44% disagree.

Voters trust McCain more on national security and the War on Terror by a 53% to 43% margin.(emphasis added)

This is the “Joe the Plumber Effect” – our liberals are saying that ol’ Joe is meaningless, but as they are also trying to convince themselves that the selection of Palin was a mistake, we should take what the liberal say with a few pounds of salt. The fact of the matter is that “Joe the Plumber” is eating away at Obama – as more and more people think over what Joe asked and how Obama answered, more and more doubts are raised not just about Obama’s proposals, but about his judgment in advocating such hairbrained, Euro-trash socialistic ideas.

Whether or not this will eat away at Obama’s support sufficiently by election day to tip, say, Pennsylvania and Colorado into the McCain column remains to be seen – but no matter how you slice it, the mask is off Obama, and his socialist roots are there for all to see.

In answer to those “conservatives” and RINOs who have thrown all honor aside and decided to back Obama:

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the past year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis — indeed a crisis “generated” precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he’s been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today’s economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

Indeed – to try to find an excuse for supporting Obama, one has to reach into a very large sack of bull feces. One can decide to support Obama, but the reasons those few turncoats have used are stupid, and reveal that their larger worry is not what will happen to the United States, as a whole, but what might happen to their fellow elitists if McCain and Palin start to call people to account for what they have done with the public trust. The elite hates John McCain, because he is not one of them; never has been, never will be. The elite hates and fears Sarah Palin because not only will she never be one of them, she’ll also be a person who will wage relentless war against the elite. The last thing our governing class wants – regardless of whether they call themselves liberals or conservatives – is to have a hard-hitting, articulate “woman of the people” deciding what to investigate.

As I’ve said before, no matter what happens on November 4th, the conservative movement wins. The liberals will saddled with Obama and his pied pipers of failed socialism, while we conservatives will still have Sarah Palin, and rising up fast behind her, Bobby Jindal. It is my view that both the present and the future are ours – but even if we take a temporary hit in the here and now, tomorrow is still ours, because we have leaders of tomorrow, while the Democrats have only the worn-out retreads of the liberal yesteryear.

In John McCain and Sarah Palin we have what the Founders envisioned we should have – citizen leaders who will adhere to the stern, republican virtues and never see politics as a means of advancing one’s self, or one’s party. I pray God to protect them both and impart to them the sense of love, the desire to serve and the good sense necessary to win on November 4th, and govern well starting on January 20th.

Unless he stages it, this will never happen to Obama:

At John McCain’s rallies these days, the talk is of taxes and Joe the Plumber and the financial crisis and mortgage relief and an end to wasteful federal spending. Those are all perfectly fine things for a campaign to emphasize; polls show voters of all stripes are overwhelmingly concerned about the economy. But at McCain’s events, you’ll also find people who’ve come for another reason, one that is slipping in the polls of voters’ concerns but is deeply personal to them: the war in Iraq.

“I just gave John McCain my Purple Heart,” Marine Sgt. Jack Eubanks told me a few minutes after McCain finished a speech at a campaign rally in Woodbridge, Virginia Saturday. “I said, ‘I want to give this to you, sir, as a reminder that we want you to keep your promise to bring us home in victory and honor, so it will mean something.’“

“We fought over there, and we want it to mean something,” Eubanks continued. “We don’t want to come back and it just be all for nothing.”

Eubanks, 22 years old, knows as much about the war as anyone. On October 3, 2005, he was in a Humvee on patrol near the Syrian border when an IED went off. “I was thrown from the vehicle, took some shrapnel, landed on my spine and mashed it up a little bit,” Eubanks told me in a remarkably good-humored way. He was injured much more than just a little; it took him eleven months to recover. And then — then he volunteered to go back. In August 2007, he was hurt again in a strangely similar way. “Hit by a mortar, thrown from a vehicle — the same situation,” Eubanks told me. Now, he’s teaching recruits at Marine Corps Base Quantico — and walking with a cane.

These days, as he ponders the war and the meaning it has for him — he says he saw remarkable progress in Iraq between his 2005 and 2007 tours — Eubanks’s overwhelming fear is that it might all be for naught. “I think Obama’s just going to pull everyone home as soon as he can, despite what’s going on over there,” he told me. “I just don’t want it to turn into another Vietnam or worse where everything we fought for, and all my buddies who died over there, it was just for nothing.” Eubanks believes McCain — he called McCain “so inspiring” and said he was in awe of the senator during their brief meeting — will prevent that from happening.

“Hope and Change” just can’t match up to this – all Obama is just a bunch of hokum; McCain is for real, and those unknown, unpretentious heroes and hard working people sense this, and gravitate towards McCain. To be sure, Obama has suckered a few decent people into his ranks – following Lincoln’s dictum that you can fool some of the people all of the time – but for the most part it is elitists coupled with grievance-mongers joined up to African-Americans who are, understandably, solidly behind one of their own potentially rising to the top.

Never before in American history – and perhaps in the history of the world – has such a substantial man as McCain had to square off at a disadvantage against a lightweight like Obama. In a normal world – not crushed by lies as our modern world is – this never would have been a contest. And not because McCain would beat Obama easy in a fair fight, but because in a normal world Obama wouldn’t have won the Democratic nomination and would now have his hopes set on becoming Secretary of Housing and Urban Development should Hillary pull off the win. Its not that Obama doesn’t have many gifts – its that he doesn’t have anything in his background which indicates an ability to take on the awesome, global responsibility of being President of the United States.

McCain has it – from day one, we can all rest assured that the hand at the tiller knows the ways of the world and the possibilities and limitations of American power in all its forms. The soldier in the field, the business owner struggling to make ends meet, the mother wondering what sort of society her children will grow up in; all of them can count on McCain not necessarily to deliver the goods (no one can assure that), but that he’ll fight for them and keep fighting for them no matter what. And so a soldier hands McCain his Purple Heart, the gesture of a hero to a hero – of a man to a man. And I think that on November 4th, the people of America will choose the real man John McCain over the con job known as Barak Obama.

Democrats are, well, getting more and more creepy all the time:

The patchwork problem of federal and state election regulations strikes again.

Military ballots are being tossed in Fairfax Co, VA because of a “technicality.” Not a lot of them compared to the size of the electorate, but more than a few.

The registrar of voters in a Democrat. He thinks it “stinks,” but the law is the law.

Fairfax general registrar Rokey Suleman said Thursday that he has had to reject some of the ballots because of a Virginia law passed in 2002. That law — then called Senate Bill 113, sponsored by then state Sen. Bill Bolling — requires that when an overseas citizen wants to request an absentee ballot and cast a vote with the same paperwork, it requires not only a witness signature but also the current address of the witness.

The McCain campaign said there’s not even a space for the witness to list an address. Suleman agreed; he said the federal document was changed in recent years and the space for the witness address was removed. But the Virginia law hasn’t changed.

Democrats insist they’re biased towards access… so will they try to intervene on behalf of these voters?

Someone can show up on election day and get a provisional ballot from a Democrat, but let a military member being shot at on our behalf fail to dot an “i” or cross a “t”, and some Donk son of a b**** out there will find an excuse for tossing his likely-GOP ballot. Makes ya sick, doesn’t it?

Look, Democrats, there’s this thing called “morality”, you should look it up – its rather important to adhere to it, or at least attempt to do so. Among the many aspects of this morality thingy is a bit about fair play – about honesty and a sense of justice. You’re taking a big, nasty dump on America in this year of 2008, and you really need to cut it out. There really, really is a limit beyond which we won’t put up with this nonsense anymore.

Pretty confident:

Near the hometown of Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin guaranteed a come-from-behind victory for the McCain-Palin ticket in Pennsylvania.

“This morning we were in Ohio, we were in the home of Joe the Plumber,” Palin said to a crowd of supporters packed onto the football field of Beaver Area High School near Pittsburgh, Pa., this evening. “And now, we are here in Beaver County, Pa., home of Joe the Quarterback.”

Palin was referring to former New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath, who was born and raised in nearby Beaver Falls, and led the underdog Jets to an upset win in Super Bowl III over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts, after Namath had guaranteed a win three days before the game.

“Now, Joe Namath is probably a little bit before your time,” Palin said to the high school students in the crowd. “But do you remember, though, in the biggest game of his life, all the experts had Joe Namath and the Jets written off to defeat? They were up against the elite team that had all the money, and they were held in awe by the media. And Broadway Joe replied, ‘we’re gonna win the game, I guarantee it.’ And they won.

“And I hope Joe won’t mind if I paraphrase him some in this state, his home state, Pennsylvania, with your help, we’re going to win this state. I guarantee it,” Palin said to wild applause.

Somebody’s internal polling must be looking pretty good – but, also, this is needed; with the MSM relentlessly driving home the “its all over so why don’t you GOP losers give up” meme, the GOP and GOP-leaning independents needs to keep up a high level of intensity. Turnout will be the name of the game on November 4th, and as long as the conservative and centrist majority of the United States hangs together we can stop Barack Obama in his tracks.

Given the amount of variables in this race at this point in time, it really could result in anything from Obama landslide all the way over to McCain landslide – I don’t trust anything coming out of the MSM, am mighty concerned about the accuracy of the polls and believe that Obama for America is a 24/7 Lie Machine. I’m just going to keep battling it out, commend my party and my country to God, and see how things come out on November 4th.

Patrick Ruffini has the story:

I just contributed $5 to Barack Obama.

I didn’t want to. Ideally, I could have contributed $0.01 and cost them money. But it was the only way to confirm the root cause of the fraudulent micro-donations to the Obama campaign (“Doodad Pro” for $17,300 and “Good Will” for $11,000).

The Obama campaign has turned its security settings for accepting online contributions down to the bare minimum — possibly to juice the numbers, and turning a blind eye towards the potential for fraud not just against the FEC, but against unsuspecting victims of credit card fraud.

The issue centers around the Address Verification Service (or AVS) that credit card processors use to sniff out phony transactions. I was able to contribute money using an address other than the one on file with my bank account (I used an address I control, just not the one on my account), showing that the Obama campaign deliberately disabled AVS for its online donors…

There is much more, and I recommend reading all of Ruffini’s piece, but it seems clear to me that whatever else Obama might be, his fundraising operation has descended to a “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization” (and there’s a law for that, too). There is simply no doubt in a rational mind that people at the Obama campaign have deliberately and with malice aforethought broken our campaign finance laws – whether or not Obama knew about it beforehand is the unanswered question, but we really should press for an answer to it.

Outside of that, we are starting to see that Barack Obama might be a bit of a con job altogether. It seems that our Obamessiah is more of a “St. Styrofoam” – puffed up to a grand thing, but easily crushed and tossed aside. Right now, I doubt the whole show – the amount of money Obama has allegedly raised (it could be remarkably less than reported, and what has been collected could be in large part illegal donations), the amount of enthusiasm he’s generating among the American population (ACORN’s bogus registrations cast doubt upon all of the alleged Democratic gains in voter registration over the past two years) and the polls alleging he’s cruising to a slam dunk victory (too many of them have massive over samples of Democrats). If Obama winds up with a landslide victory on November 4th, then it will be obvious that I’m wrong on this – but if Obama does anything from win narrowly to lose in a landslide, then I’ll be proven correct.