Blogs For Victory

Here are a few selections from around the blogosphere…

California Yankee catches the Obama campaign in another lie…
Media Lizzy was on a McCain-Palin conference call (which I was unable to participate in) and tells us all about it.
Change? What’s it cost? Who pays?
Barack Obama and William Ayers… It isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation.
Another liberal lie about Sarah Palin debunked.
Interesting stuff to be found at pro-Hillary websites…
Abortions are at record lows.
Obammunists are looking to steal Ohio via voter fraud…
Is Biden trying to lose Western Pennsylvania?

I’ll add more if anything else catches my eye.

Why? ‘Cause only an arrogant, self-centered ass could have thought it was a good idea, though he and his team will never admit that:

…as voter registration is expected to wind down in the next two weeks and the impact of John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, becomes clearer, the Obama campaign is apparently scaling back its outsized electoral ambitions. It has already shifted staff, abandoning some states and putting others on notice. If it once technically played in all 50, it’s now down to 48 — you can cross Alaska and North Dakota off the list — and two other states, Montana and Georgia, are on life support. The choice of Palin not only crushed Obama’s hope of winning the Frontier State — his campaign has withdrawn most of its staff and ceased advertising there — but it also caused repercussions in North Dakota, another hockey-crazed northern state where snow-mobile racing and moose burgers apparently resonate. The Obama campaign announced this week that it is redeploying its North Dakota staff — estimated in some press reports to be more than 50 people.

“We always knew it would be an uphill battle, but because people across the country in red states and blue states are hungry for change, we built a grass-roots movement we are proud of and an infrastructure that will help candidates up and down the ballot,” says Obama spokeswoman Amy Brundage of the decision to pull out. The news isn’t entirely a surprise, as Obama cut advertising in North Dakota by 50% in recent weeks. The move comes as Obama has been forced to mount more serious defenses of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin — states where the campaign spent nearly $1.5 million in television advertisements last week.

Did you catch that? Obama is being forced to defend Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin…and while its not noted, I’ll bet he’s going to have to start defending Pennsylvania and New Jersey pretty quick, with a chance that he’ll have to really pour it on in New York to ensure that State’s electoral votes go his way. Obama can’t win the White House if all he wins is Kerry’s or Gore’s States…he has to win some of Bush’s States, and perhaps a couple that Bush won twice. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s win over Hillary it seemed he was unstoppable, had an unending supply of money and could do no wrong…but he’s being out-hustled on the campaign trail, his fundraising has dropped significantly, he’s been blindsided by the Palin pick, Congressional Democrats are distancing themselves from him, his own VP pick has proven to be a disaster (and will become a Hindenburg sized disaster once the VP debate comes up) and while he’s picked up a little bit due to the financial melt-down, he’s still proving himself unable to pull in middle class and working class voters. Obama will now have to fight – and fight very hard – in order to get to 270 electoral votes and it is a very open question as to whether or not he has the plain grit and stamina to enter that kind of fight with an experience warrior like McCain backed up by the superlative Palin.

Democrats nominated a nobody and it seems that, by so doing, the got a nobody as their nominee…and man who stands for nothing other himself, who does only what he’s told and who can’t step outside the liberal coocoon without slipping up on a regular basis. His only advantage, now, is the fact that the GOP brand (as it were) has been beaten down quite hard over the past couple years. If McCain can keep the debate off the GOP and on just about anything else, then he’ll win this thing – and, I think, if he does win it he’ll end up winning it rather handily.

According to MRG, via NRO’s The Corner:

Michigan is a complex and difficult state to poll in, and one of the few polling firms who seems to “get” Michigan is Marketing Research Group (MRG).

Their latest poll has McCain/Palin up in Michigan by three points. Some interesting tidbits from the press release:

The poll showed that Obama continues to show strong support among women (+2%), young voters (+16%), African Americans (+89%), voters living in the Detroit Metro area (+9%) along with his traditional Democratic base.

John McCain is showing strength among blue-collar voters (+10%), men (+9%), white males (+29%), conservatives (+62%) and voters living in West Michigan (+12%) and the Flint/Saginaw/Bay City Area (+8%)…

…Voters believe the McCain/Palin ticket has more experience (61% – 31%) than the Obama/Biden ticket and they trust their judgment more (48% – 41%). But when it comes to bringing the right kind of change to Washington, the voters are split, giving the Obama/Biden ticket a one-percent edge (44% – 43%).

I find it kinda hard to classify a 2 percentage point advantage among female voters as indicative of “strong” Obama support among women but, be that as it may, if this poll is correct then its horrific bad news for Obama – he can’t be elected President without Michigan’s electoral votes (I was going to say “it is almost certain” Obama can’t win without Michigan, but then I thought about it for a bit and realised that Obama without Michigan victory scenarios would be to put a whole new meaning on “thread the needle”).

While ABC is attempting to boost Democrat morale by putting out an overweighted-for-Democrats poll showing Obama up 9 nationally, the fact that most tracking polls show a toss up and battleground State polls continue to show an advantage for McCain indicates that the shift we saw in the election after the Palin pick is still ongoing, and doesn’t look like it will be undone before the election. Does this mean McCain wins? Not at all – but it does mean that, right now, the battle is evenly drawn with a slight advantage to McCain as the American people tend to root for the underdog and McCain has been that for a year now.

If we win this election I’ll put it down to several factors – McCain, Palin, GOP, American common sense, America’s bedrock conservatism…but I’ll also add that the extreme nastiness of the left (from mere verbal cruelty to outright treason) seems to have turned off a lot of people. In 2008, Democrats should have had this election in a walk over – but they don’t, and their odds of winning are shrinking rapidly (Rasmussen’s market on Obama once had him with about a 65% chance of winning, now its a bit under 52%). Lies (and nastiness) can go from Maine to Florida befor Truth gets it’s boots on, but Truth will out, in the end.

For the Most Unpopular Man in Human History, he sure does seem to be able to whack Democrats at will:

Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.

Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.

“If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices,” said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.

Of course, there was some great work done by the Congressional GOP and the RNC on this issue, and it has worked well for America in that we’ll finally start to get an energy policy which produces, you know?, some energy. In the end, how were Democrats defeated? Simple – they came up against men and women who actually put country first…while a group which puts party first can cause a lot of ruckus, when the chips are down it is those who believe in something sublime who will defeat those who believe in something corrupt and mean.

Come what may this November, I will miss President Bush a lot – and I’m one of the very few people who will admit to this. But it has been endlessly entertaining the past 7+ to watch a man who understands run rings around those who don’t…and adding to the humor of the long-running event is the enormously funny fact that those who don’t understand actually think they are smarter than the man who does. I’ll also miss having a leader of decision and courage – though if the election goes right, that will be less missed than if it goes wrong.

This really hasn’t been a good week for Joe Biden.

Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden says today’s leaders should take a lesson from the history books and follow fellow Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to a financial crisis.

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened,”‘ Barack Obama’s running mate recently told the “CBS Evening News.”

Except, Republican Herbert Hoover was in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929. There also was no television at the time; TV wasn’t introduced to the public until a decade later, at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Also in Biden’s version of American History you will find Thomas Jefferson reading the Gettysburg Address in front of a teleprompter.

And some people think liberal bias doesn’t exist in colleges?

There’s a distrubing story out of my home state of Massachusetts, that the chaplain of UMass-Amherst attempted to offer college credits to students for campaigning for Barack Obama.

My opposition to a young, charismatic African American candidate who campaigned on hope and change was dubbed by that candidate’s supporters as racism.

The candidate I’m referring to is not Barack Obama, it’s Deval Patrick. The parallels betwen the two candidates campaigns are uncanny… even the reactions by their supporters are virtually identical, as Kimberly recounts that her opposition to John McCain was immediately dubbed as being a form of racism.

Just yesterday, I was stopped in the parking lot by a couple of liberals because of my McCain-Palin bumper sticker. One said, “You’re a racist because you’re voting for McCain!” I replied, “No, I’m a Republican and I’m voting for the Republican candidate. I wouldn’t vote for Obama if he was white.” That stopped them in their tracks. Of course, it also gave me a wonderful opportunity to talk with them about Obama and McCain.

Make no mistake about it… Recent stories about the role of racism in the campaign are merely a preemptive strike to explain why Obama will lose in November, as well as an attempt by the media to invoke white guilt amongst undecided voters so that they will vote for Obama to “prove” they aren’t racists.

This attempt by the media to make a vote for Obama a vote against racism is hardly a new thing. When Deval Patrick was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for governor in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe, in their endorsement of Patrick, said,

Patrick doesn’t often explicitly address his race in the campaign. But his positive reception […] has been a good sign that this state can move beyond its reputation as old, cold, and closed.

Deval Patrick, despite his warm rhetoric on the campaign trail about change and hope, has become perhaps the most incompetent governors of Massachusetts since Mike Dukakis (who has also been playing the race card for Obama) and the jury is still out on who will ultimately prove to be the worst.

It’s worth noting that despite Deval Patrick’s overwhelming victory in 2006, his approval ratings are down the toilet, and he’s abandoned many campaign promises, like property tax relief.

Deval Patrick is a prime example that a well-given speech is no substitute for genuine leadership. It was no suprise to me that Hillary defeated Obama in Massachusetts, despite Deval’s endorsement. The Democrat voters of Massachusetts were already duped once — they weren’t about to fall for it again.

Barack Obama would be a horrible president regardless of whether he is black, white, male or female. he is the most inexperienced and unqualified presidential candidates for a major party in history. But his image won over the left-wing base of the party, and he’s the candidate the party as whole has to offer in November. I am very confident the people of America won’t be fooled the same way so many in Massachusetts were back in 2006.

This election shouldn’t be about race. It should about who is ready to lead. The answer to that one is clearly John McCain.

Roger L. Simon thinks they should:

From the days of FDR, the vast majority of American Jews have identified with the Democratic Party almost if it were their religion. This included most especially secular Jews like me whose blasé attitude toward their faith and toward religious observance in general made such a replacement all the more important emotionally. This same Jewish majority also identified with the cause of social justice and, as Barack Obama among many others has noted, were some of the most active participants in the civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties. That was all how it should have been and was a perfectly logical and praiseworthy epoch in the development of our country.

Hello – those days are over! The events leading up to Monday’s anti-Ahmadinejad demonstration by Jewish organizations at the UN put the final nail in an already long-moldering coffin. Jews should no longer align themselves with the Democratic Party any more than they should align with the Republicans. They should act and think for themselves, devoid of ideological or partisan bias. They should first be Americans, not Democratic Party Americans…

…The virtual night of the long knives played out between the Democratic Party and various Jewish organizations surrounding the Iran demonstration, including allegations that party operatives were threatening the loss of tax exempt status over Sarah Palin’s appearance, with more unpleasant revelations undoubtedly to come, is obviously causing people to reconsider this allegiance to the Democratic Party that approaches fealty.

I urge my fellow Jews to keep thinking about this and not to retreat into the cocoon-like safety of an outmoded tradition. Change is difficult. But remember that Hillary Clinton – that paragon of the Democratic Party, a woman who calls herself a “progressive” (oh, desecration of the English language!) – was willing to forego the protest of the man who is arguably the most significant enemy of the Jews since Hitler for partisan and (most likely) personal pique reasons. How morally repellent is that!

Strong stuff, but it needed to be said. Remember, once upon a time to be Catholic in America meant to be a Democrat. As far as I can determine, I may very well have been the first descendent of Thomas Francis Noonan to actually register as a Republican, and that ancestor arrived on these shores in the 1850’s. Catholics had to turn aside from the Democratic party as it became increasingly hostile to what Catholicism teaches – Jews will have to do the same. That is, all Jews who hold to an actually Jewish identity will have to do so – plenty of fallen away Catholics adhere to the Democratic party, but the more rock solid the Catholic, the more likely he is to be non-Democrat (even if he’s also non-Republican). Jews who are concerned with the morality of Judaism and the unique role Jews have played in western civilizaiton – and, of course, the defense of the one absolute refuge for the Jews of the world, Israel – should be (and I believe, are) recoiling from a Democrat party being consumed by a leftwing growing more anti-Semitic as it grows more anti-western in outlook.

When it comes to the really crucial issues – faith, family, morality, patriotism – the Republicans far outpace the Democrats. In the end, there is really no contest – and while there is an understandable wariness on the part of some Jews for Christians, and especially devout Christians, the plain fact of the matter is that when push comes to shove, it will be the Christian who will fight for the Jews while the secularist finds a host of reasons for throwing Jews under the bus. This doesn’t mean that all Jews should register Republican (though, its an idea, ya know?), but it does mean that American Jews should consider things beyond the “D” after the candidate’s name when making a voting decision.

The liberal side of the aisle is wasting no time in casting the CEO’s as the bad guys and then attempting to tie the GOP to the CEO’s. This is clever politics and we can’t complain about the Democrats trying this – even though they are far more connected to said CEO’s than we are. What we GOPers need to do is get out in front of this and get the people on our side. I propose the following, with acknoweldgement to Nevada Pundit, from whom I have ripped off part of the ideas:

Golden Parachutes

There is nothing quite so absurd or aggravating for Joe and Jane Average than to see the CEO of a failed or deeply troubled corporation getting out of Dodge with millions of dollars in bonuses and other compensation. The flimsy-as-all-get-out corporate justification for the huge executive compensation is that if the CEO’s, etc don’t feel ownership for the corporation they won’t ensure it performs at peak efficiency. This is utter BS, but lets take them at their word – and rather than going the Big Government, Democrat route of capping CEO compensation, lets enact a law which allows a corporation to pay its executives whatever it wishes, but such compensation decreases 5 percentage points for each 1 percentage point of stock valuation lost in any given fiscal year beyond a 10% reduction (10% can happen for all sorts of reasons outside the control of the executives – but once you get past that loss, you’re starting to get into CEO Bonehead territory).

Corporate Bankruptcy

Everyone with who’s title includes “chief”, “president”, “senior”, “executive” or “chairman” gets compensated at $25 per hour for each hour worked during the fiscal year the corporation filed bankruptcy. Nothing else.

Corporate Layoffs

For each 10 workers laid off the people with the titles noted in “Corporate Bankruptcy” lose one tenth of one percent of their annual compensation for the fiscal year in which the layoffs occured. A corporate boss can layoff workers all he wants, as long as he feels the pain.

Worker Benefits

Cut them all you want, bosses – as long as you lose them, too and, additionally, lose your bonus for the year in which you make the benefit cut, as well as the two years following it. Have a care when passing out the bennies, ’cause cutting back on them will be painful.

These proposals will retain the free market principle, allow generous compensation to corporate executives who score big profits while keeping workers on the payroll, discourage outsourcing of American jobs and encourage corporate executives to seek other routes than bankruptcy when the going gets rough. In addition to this, there’s the simple justice in ensuring that when a corporation falters, everyone from top to bottom takes a hit, not just the worker bees. And, finally, these are nicely populist proposals which will make the American people stand up and cheer without any appeal to envy or hatred, as the Democrats routinely do with their class warfare nonsense.

The fundamental principle missing in corporate America – and its also missing in government-bureaucrat America – is a connection with the concerns of average Americans; there is a lack of empathy for those who are effected by a corporate downsize or a pettifogging bureaucratic regulation. In addition to what I’ve proposed here, government employees should only get pay increases tied to the growth in personal income, less government transfers, amongst the American people – regulate us into stagflation and you’ll only be hurting yourselves, bureaucrats. Bill Clinton said he felt our pain – which was nonsense as he was insulated from any pain other than the self-inflicted wounds of his immoral actions. I say: lets make everyone feel the pain, and while we won’t eliminate pain, we’ll at least get people who will think carefully before they cause any.