Blogs For Victory

And without a massive charge to the taxpayers or media hoopla about a messianic speech in Berlin:

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will meet with foreign leaders next week at the United Nations, a move to boost her foreign-policy credentials, a Republican strategist said.

Republican candidate John McCain plans to introduce the Alaska governor to heads of state at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, although specific names weren’t yet firmed up. “The meetings will give her some exposure and experience with foreign leaders,” the strategist said. “It’s a great idea.”

McCain and Palin are expected to visit the U.N. on Tuesday, when President George W. Bush will address the international body.

Since her nomination, Palin has energized the Republican base, drawn huge crowds and propelled fund-raising. However, Democrats have attacked her as weak on foreign policy experience. Even on last week’s “Saturday Night Live,” actress Tina Fey spoofed Palin’s assertion that she is familiar with issues involving Russia, noting that Alaska is nearby. “I can see Russia from my house!” Fey-as-Palin said.

But McCain advisers hope her U.N. visit will show how quickly Palin can make key connections and become well-versed in foreign-policy issues.

In my view, meeting foreign leaders is over-rated – once upon a time, a US President simply wouldn’t leave the United States during his term; diplomacy was handled by diplomats. Treaties were worked out in consultation between diplomats and the President and once agreed to they were submitted to the Senate for ratification. It all worked pretty well – and as varied meetings, at varied times, between Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hilter, Josef Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman produced pretty much nothing but disaster, I can assert with some strength that direct meetings between leaders cause more problems than they solve. In counter balance to this, we have the meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev….but the chances that the level of wisdom in those two men would be duplicated elsewhere by others is rather slim, even with the best of intentions.

But Governor Palin will meet some – and it will at least give her a grounding in the sort people she’ll have to deal with in global affairs. It will also give her at least as much foreign policy experience as Obama, who has nothing but the aforementioned trip to Europe a couple months ago on his foreign policy resume’.

Oddly enough, the headline here is, “Watchdogs Gird for Election Day Troubles” – which means that the author is either amazingly ignorant of voter fraud in the United States, or a mere shill for the left:

Election Protection, a nonpartisan voting-rights coalition, plans to launch on Wednesday an expanded voter-services program, including a hotline and Web site for citizens to report voting problems and get information about election procedures.

In 2004, Election Protection received more than 200,000 phone calls. It’s expecting more this year and has set up 25 call centers to respond. For this year’s elections, it subscribed to a private database that can answer questions such as whether hotline callers are registered to vote, what times their polling places are open and whether they need to bring identification. In the weeks leading up to Election Day and on it — Nov. 4 — its volunteers will report trends in complaints to local election officials.

The group revamped its Web site so that voters can report problems and chat online with volunteers. Election Protection also will have footage on its Web site from a group called Video the Vote, which documents snafus at polling places.

On Nov. 4, Election Protection will send about 10,000 lawyers and law students to polling places around the country, in swing states such as Ohio and Florida as well as in states such as Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, where there are many minority and Spanish-language voters.

“This year we have so many new voters, who are more likely to be disenfranchised,” says Jonah Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington. The lawyers’ committee is the lead legal partner for Election Protection, whose members include law firms and organizations such as the NAACP, Rock the Vote and the Asian American Justice Center.

These people will be around to gather bogus stories of disenfranchisement and, as necessary, file suits to keep polls open long enough for Democrats to find out how many more votes they need to tip a State’s electoral votes to Obama. They’ll probably also make themselves useful as intimidators of any pettifogging precinct worker who dares to in any way, shape or form question the bona fides of someone showing up to vote. You think I’m kidding? Then I remind you that Democrats, themselves, pulled this sort of stunt in Missouri in 2000, only to run afoul of the fact that their alleged plaintiff had been dead for some time by election day. Better to have allegedly independent groups file the complaints – they can make certain the plaintiffs are alive and, also, provide the MSM with the ability to straight-faced megaphone whatever the group decides to accuse the GOP of on election day.

As has been truly said, they can’t cheat if we don’t allow it to be close – in 2004, we managed to wrack up several million more votes than the Democrats and that made it impossible for them to manufacture enough votes to take the election. If the 2008 result boils down to a few thousand votes in one or more States, then this effort will go gangbusters to muddy the waters and manufacture votes for Obama. So, our task is to help McCain win pretty big – by at least more than a million votes nationwide and preferrably by a comfortable margin in each crucial battleground State. If we do win on November 4th, we can expect the Democrats to be as ungracious as they were on election day 2004, but we can take their petulance a lot better if we know that we’ve preserved honesty in American elections.

Here are a few interesting blog posts was reading last night:

Is Obama abandoning Virginia?
Even the Liberals recognize the power of the Palin!
Feeling Minnesota
Did Senator Obama Suddenly Fall Out of Love with Commissions?
Dear Mr. Obama
McCain Criticizes Obama For Lavish Hollywood Fundraiser
A few Presidential Monday Scoops

I’ll add more if anything catches my eye.

The weird world of liberal politics:

The Obama campaign and Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit in federal court today, alleging that the Michigan Republican Party is engaging an illegal effort to disenfranchise voters.

Speaking to reporters on a conference call, Obama general counsel Bob Bauer said they filed the injunction after evidence surfaced that the Michigan GOP planned to use home foreclosure lists to keep voters still using the address of their foreclosed home from voting. Such voters could be challenged at voting precincts and forced to answer questions or risk being denied voting rights…

…One piece of evidence the plaintiffs will cite is an article published by Michigan Messenger, a reportedly left-leaning, political news website, which interviewed Macomb County GOP chairman James Carabelli and quoted him saying: “We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses.”

In an interview with the Detroit News the day after that quote was published, Carabelli denied the accuracy of the quote. “I never said anything even close to that,” he told the newspaper. “We won’t be doing voter challenges on foreclosures, and we’ve never had a plan to do it.”…

This is probably a pre-emptive move to prevent the GOP from fighting voter fraud in Michigan – with polls showing a tight race for Michigan’s electoral votes, the Democrats will need to score a huge number of Obama votes in the Detroit area…and given past Democratic pratice, we can reasonably assume that voter fraud is part of the Democratic plan. And so – find something (even if you have to make it up) to file a lawsuit against the GOP about, and then find a friendly judge who will bar or otherwise hamper GOP efforts to prevent voter fraud. Par for the course in modern Democratic/leftwing politics.

As for the source of the story – from what I’ve been able to determine, Michigan Messenger is an effort of a group called the Center for Independent Media, which adheres to the very absurd leftwing meme that the MSM has a conservative bias. Its a pinko group, of that we can be sure, and thus anything they say about the GOP has to be taken which a few metric tons of salt.

And it doesn’t matter if McCain or Obama is in the White House, we’ll still go at this hammer and tongs:

n the Holy See Press Office this morning, the presentation took place of an upcoming international conference entitled: “Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A Critical Appraisal 150 years after ‘The Origin of Species'”. The conference is due to be held in Rome from 3 to 7 March 2009.

The congress has been jointly organised by the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, U.S.A., under the patronage of the Pontifical Council for Culture and as part of the STOQ Project (Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest).

That will be a lot of fun.

From NRO’s The Corner:

My favorite part of the clip linked below, by the way, of Obama speaking to Planned Parenthood last year, is not about the kindergarten issue but this little gem from Obama, as the audience giggles:

The one thing that I want to insist on is that, as I travel around the country, the American people are a decent people. Now they get confused sometimes. You know, they listen to the wrong talk radio shows or watch the wrong TV networks, um, but they’re, they’re basically decent, they’re basically sound.

Gee thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Senator – I was thinking that I and all I know and love were rather creepy. Thanks for the vote of confidence.

We’ve already pointed out that the McCain ad accusing Barack Obama of supporting sex education for kindergarteners was in fact true…

But, you don’t have to take our word for it, you can just ask Obama back in 2007:

ABC News’ Teddy Davis and Lindsey Ellerson Report: Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Planned Parenthood Tuesday that sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is “age-appropriate,” is “the right thing to do.”

“I remember Alan Keyes . . . I remember him using this in his campaign against me,” Obama said in reference to the conservative firebrand who ran against him for the U.S. Senate in 2004. Sex education for kindergarteners had become an issue in his race against Keyes because of Obama’s work on the issue as chairman of the health committee in the Illinois state Senate.

“‘Barack Obama supports teaching sex education to kindergarteners,'” said Obama mimicking Keyes’ distinctive style of speech. “Which — I didn’t know what to tell him (laughter).”

“But it’s the right thing to do,” Obama continued, “to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in schools.”

Oh, and there’s video too.

…unless you’re Barack Obama.

The other day Obama said, “Change isn’t about slogans, it’s about substance.”

And believe it or not, today he’s changed his change slogan.

Obama, whose slogan has long been “Change We Can Believe In,” has since the end of the Democratic National Convention in late August altered his rallying cry — and not because it ends in a preposition.

Obama now speaks at a podium that bears the words “Change We Need.”

Of course, Obama saying “change ins’t about slogans, it’s about substance” is pretty funny in itself since he has run a campaign completely devoid of substance.

It’s been only a few short days since Barack Obama accused the McCain campaign of taking his words out of context in order to use them against him.. It was an amusing claim from Barack Obama, since he has been guilty of such tactics for quite a while now.

But, one would think that in light of their criticism of John McCain, Obama’s campaign wouldn’t resort to the same tactics…

Wrong.

Today, the Obama campaign deliberately took the words of McCain advisor Carly Fiorina out of context in order to attack John McCain.

Barack Obama’s campaign was “deceitful” when it clipped part of an interview in which Republican Victory 2008 Chairwoman Carly Fiorina said John McCain was not qualified to be the head of a corporation, Fiorina said Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, appeared on MSNBC, where she said none of the candidates is qualified to run a major corporation, but that should not prevent them from running the country.

“I don’t think John McCain could run a major corporation. I don’t think Barack Obama could run a major corporation. I don’t think Joe Biden could run a major corporation. But on the other hand a major corporation is not the same as being the president or vice president of the United States,” Fiorina said.

“It is a fallacy to suggest that the country is like a company. So of course to run a business you have to have a lifetime of experience in business, but that’s not what Sarah Palin, John McCain, Joe Biden or Barack Obama are doing,” she said.

But the Obama campaign, pointing to a version of Fiorina’s statement that was clipped after the first sentence, berated McCain for not winning the trust of even his own supporters.

“When John McCain’s top economic adviser doesn’t think that he’s qualified to run a corporation — how on Earth can he run the largest economy in the world in the midst of a financial crisis?” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement accompanying the shortened clip.

But, this isn’t the only recent example from the Obama campaign.

Karl Rove recently said that both the McCain campaign and the Obama have run ads that “don’t pass the 100% truth test,” but the Obama campaign latched onto the part where Rove had mentioned McCain first and distorted the criticism as solely against McCain.

So, really, I’m tired of Obama’s blatant lies and hypocrisy. That’s hardly change we can believe in.

Byron York over at NRO gives a great run-down on the whole issue of the “sex ed” bill and Obama’s claims that it was merely about preventing sexual abuse of children. The whole thing is a must read, but this part here – in and of itself – demonstrates that McCain is telling the truth, and Obama is incorrect about what was in the bill:

The second purpose was to increase the number of children receiving sex education. Illinois’ existing law required the teaching of sex education and AIDS prevention in grades six through twelve. The old law read:

Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades 6 through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention, transmission and spread of AIDS.

Senate Bill 99 struck out grade six, changing it to kindergarten, in addition to making a few other changes in wording. It read:

Each class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV. (emphasis added)

On can try to spin this as much as one likes, but the bill clearly provided for sex education for kindergarten – including instruction in how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. You can’t have even the most basic instruction on how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases unless you familiarize your audience with the varied sex acts. Period. End of story.

Now, as to why I say McCain is telling the truth while Obama is mistaken – I’m giving Obama the benefit of the doubt. My bet is that Obama didn’t even read the bill – it was backed by various leftwing groups with a lead role for Planned Parenthood and one thing we know about Planned Parenthood is that when it says “jump”, liberal Democrats say “how high?”. Liberals, you see, genuinely believe that Planned Parenthood is a good organization – that it was founded by a racist eugenicist and is America’s largest abortion provider (and thus has a vested interest in as much sexual activity as possible) is not something that they think unimportant but is, instead, very likely something they don’t know – and are uninterested in knowing.

For all I know, Obama really believes that the bill he supported was about preventing child abuse – it might be what Planned Parenthood told him in order to get him to sign on to the bill. Given Obama’s well known wariness about putting his name on anything controversial, the best way to get him to back such a bill was to tell him it was about something as non-controversial as preventing child abuse – had the bill’s sponsors told him it was about extending sex ed to kindergarten, Obama would have likely voted “present”, as he did when so many other controversial bills came up for a vote.

The end result of all this is yet another reason to keep Obama out of the White House – it is clear that he’s not interested in being well informed on what is going on and, furthermore, this is a strong indicator that any liberal group which comes along will be able to get him to sign off on just about anything, no matter how absurd and/or destructive.