Blogs For Victory

It’s kind of ironic that at the same time Obama tries to moderate his position on abortion, he gets endorsed by Planned Parenthood, a group as far to the left on abortion as one can get:

The Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the advocacy and political arm of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), saying his 100 rating by the fund for consistently backing pro-abortion legislation makes him the best choice for president.

“Sen. Obama supports a woman’s right to choose and is a co-sponsor of the Freedom of Choice Act, which would codify and protect a woman’s right to choose,” Anne Brewer, Women for Obama coordinator for the Obama campaign, said in her blog on the Democratic hopeful’s official Web site.

Meanwhile, Obama’s public rightward shift on abortion enrages the left, but doesn’t fool everyone else.

Larry Kudlow notes the Reaganite rapidly emerging in John McCain:

Sen. John McCain gave two economics speeches in the last 48 hours. They were very strong, pro-growth, and pro-energy production. McCain also is finally slamming Obama on taxes and energy. Yesterday in Denver, the senator said, “If you believe you should pay more taxes, I am the wrong candidate for you. Sen. Obama is your man. The choice in this election is stark and simple. Sen. Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t.”

This is good. Strong. I hope it’s the beginning of a Big Mac resurgence under the new management of Steve Schmidt, who is effectively running the campaign as of this past weekend.

McCain also slammed Obama on energy, essentially labeling him Doctor No. In the Denver speech McCain said, “My opponent’s answer is no to more drilling; no to more nuclear power; no to research prizes that help solve the problem of affordable electric cars. For a guy whose ‘official seal’ carried the motto, ‘Yes, We Can,’ Sen. Obama’s agenda sure has a whole lot of ‘No, We Can’t.’” This also is good.

Increasingly McCain is shifting his positions towards the supply-side: across-the-board tax cuts, keeping the Bush tax rates on investment, slashing the corporate tax rate, doubling the child deduction for family dependents, cutting pork-barrel spending, and producing more energy.

As I’ve said very often, Obama’s policies are right out of Jimmy Carter’s playbook – they’ve hardly been modified since Carter proposed them back in the 1970’s, when Carterism was orchestrating “stagflation” in our economy and American surrender around the world. If we’ll just sweat a bit more in summer, freeze a bit more in winter, ride the bus and turn our wallets over to Obama and his Democrats, all will be well…and please pay no attention to the fact that Obama and his Democrats won’t be joining you in the new era of limits…they need their proligate ways because, well, they are important – and smarter than you, anyways. Meanwhile, John McCain is issuing a bold challenge to the American people which, boiled down, says “I will clear your path if you are willing to work hard for yourselves and your families”. We’ll find out in November if we’re still strong Americans, or whether we’ve taken a sharp turn towards Euro-socialist despair and decline.

Even though Barack Obama has pledged to not run negative ads, he’s now running a negative ad.. This ad attacks McCain for supporting the Bush-Cheney energy plan… which Obama himself voted for!

This make Obama’s recent ad campaigns 0-3 on accuracy.

Having been raked over the coals for half-truths in his first two ads, Obama tries to avoid too many specifics in his third. But he still runs afoul of those inconvenient truths, hitting McCain for supporting a bill that Obama voted for. For those keeping score, Obama has now touted his support of a bill he didn’t vote for, and denounced a bill he did vote for.

Sad

Nancy Pelosi’s House and Harry Reid’s Senate have hit an historic low approval rating of single digits,

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008.

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.

Voters not affiliated with either party are the most critical of Congressional performance. Just 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings, down from 6% last month. Sixty-three percent (63%) believe Congress is doing a poor job, up from 57% last month.

Just 12% of voters think Congress has passed any legislation to improve life in this country over the past six months. That number has ranged from 11% to 13% throughout 2008. The majority of voters (62%) say Congress has not passed any legislation to improve life in America.

These numbers demonstrate the failure of the Democrats to lead Congress. They came into power promising results and a new era of bipartisanship. Instead, they delivered incompetence and increased partisan bickering, and higher gas prices.

While many are quick to predict increased Democrat majorities in both Houses of Congress, it’s clear that the American people are rejecting the so-called leadership of elected Democrats.

Once again showing why all conservatives should rally ’round McCain:

At its core, the economy isn’t the sum of an array of bewildering statistics. It’s about where Americans work, how they live, how they pay their bills today and save for tomorrow. It’s about small businesses opening their doors, hiring employees and growing. It’s about giving workers the education and training to find a good job and prosper in it. It’s about the aspirations of the American people to build a better life for their families; dreams that begin with a job.

So how are we going to create good jobs? Let’s start with small businesses, which create the majority of all jobs. A recent report says small businesses have created 233,000 jobs so far this year while other sectors are losing jobs. Small businesses are the job engine of America, and I will make it easier for them to grow and create more jobs. My opponent wants to make it harder by imposing a “pay or play” health mandate on small business. This adds $12,000 to the cost of employing anyone with a family. That means new jobs will not be created. It means existing employees will have their wages cut to pay for this mandate. My plan attacks the real problems of healthcare — cost, availability and portability.

Some economists don’t think much of my gas tax holiday. But the American people like it, and so do small business owners. Just ask Andrew Emmett who runs Air-Tite insulation in Michigan. He has had to stop hiring new workers because of the cost of fuel for his trucks.

We need to keep the IRS from taking more of your income and making life harder for small business. If you believe you should pay more taxes, I am the wrong candidate for you. Senator Obama is your man. The choice in this election is stark and simple. Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won’t. I will cut them where I can. Jobs are the most important thing our economy creates. When you raise taxes in a bad economy you eliminate jobs. I’m not going to let that happen.

Senator Obama’s tax increases will hurt the economy even more, and destroy jobs across this country. If you are one of the 23 million small business owners in America who files as an individual rate payer, Senator Obama is going to raise your tax rates. If you have an investment for your child’s education or own a mutual fund or a stock in a retirement plan, he is going to raise your taxes. He will raise estate taxes to 45 percent. I propose to cut them to 15 percent. His plan will hurt the American worker and family. It will hurt the economy and cost us jobs. For those of you with children, I will double the child deduction from $3,500 to $7,000 for every dependent, in every family in America. At a time of increasing gas and food prices, American families need tax relief and I, not my opponent, will deliver it.

Obama’s entire economic plan is just warmed-over Carterism…as was said of the Bourbons of old, the liberal Democrats have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Obama’s blast-from-the-past concepts like a “windfall profits” tax shows that he hasn’t thought about economics, but has swallowed whole the liberal concept that the government knows best. McCain, however, is a longstanding Reaganite on the economy – the man who understands that as far as economic growth is concerned, the best thing the government can do is get the heck out of the way. You can’t manage an economy from the center because you can’t know what people want, nor what people are willing to do. Only the free interplay of the market can make such determinations – still imperfectly, but far more effectively than even the wisest and most knoweldgable government bureaucrat.

But McCain is also no booster of mere business for the sake of business – he seems to instinctively understand that the very large corporations can be just as ineffective as the very large government bureaucracies and this is why McCain’s emphasis is on the smaller corporations and family businesses. It is the man or woman who is building up something of their own who is doing the real work of America – not the man working on becoming CEO of a Fortune 500 company, no more than the empire-building bureaucrat is. Large corporations and large bureaucracies will remain, at least for a while; but the less said about them, the better – and lets certainly not go about encouraging them. Unleash the average American, and you’ll get prosperity. McCain is for such unleashing, while Obama is for fastening yet more chains about us…nice chains, to be sure; chains which are intended to help us, it goes without saying…but chains nonetheless, and chains which will ruin us and, for the 1,000th time, dash liberal hopes and dreams.

We’ve hit a rocky patch at the junction of stupid loans (made, it must be noted, mostly by larger corporations with the connivance of Big Government) and high oil prices. The economy is in fundamentally good shape, but in order to weather this storm and emerge stronger on the other side of it we’ll need a free marketing Reaganite like McCain, not a quasi-socialist Carterite like Obama.

So says one expert, at least:

Security in Iraq continues to improve even after the withdrawal of nearly 25% of U.S. combat brigades, increasing the prospects of further cuts in American forces.

Although U.S. commanders are cautious about predicting further withdrawals, interviews with military experts and recent official statements indicate growing optimism about the potential to pull out more forces.

“I believe the momentum we have is not reversible,” said Jack Keane, a retired Army vice chief of staff who helped develop the Iraq strategy adopted by President Bush in January 2007.

There will be “significant reductions in 2009 whoever becomes president,” said Keane, who regularly consults with Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki echoed Keane’s optimism Saturday by declaring that “we defeated” the terrorists in Iraq. U.S. commanders remain cautious.

The official word remains that its fragile – which is a laudable sense of caution on the part of our military commanders in Iraq. By and large, though, I believe we’re firmly in the saddle in Iraq and only a US scuttle of the whole effort could change the result – and now even Obama is starting to change his tune on Iraq; the rest of the kook left still seems wedded to defeat, but that is because they are, well, kooks.

What we need, now, is to start planning some way of thanking our troops for their sacrifices in this campaign – we can’t gather them all together in one place, but I think we should find some public way to crown their efforts. The traditional means is a ticker tape parade in New York City, and I think that this would be appropriate, especially given that NYC is where the war began – of course, the war isn’t over, but one must pause from time to time to pay tribute to those who having been making the real efforts.

Just how does Obama figure out what to believe on a day to day basis? Nevada Pundit has some keen insights into Obama’s serial flip flopping.

The Associated Press reports that the McCain campaign is opening campaign offices in California…

Meanwhile, Ed Cox, the head of McCain’s New York campaign team, says that with Obama as the Democrats’ nominee, McCain has a shot in New York state…

In spite of what you might have heard from the left, under President Bush’s leadership, we have vastly improved our ability to track terrorists and keep America safe:

In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.

There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.

The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.

“I found the number stunning,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security. “It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States.”

The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world’s largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond “known or suspected” terrorists.

Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency.

Couple points:

1. The “dirt farmer” in Tikrit who turned out to be wanted in the US: all through this post-liberation battle in Iraq we’ve heard endlessly from the left that those fighting us are just Iraqis who want us out…and how do they know this? Because it was reported in the news…as if a western MSMer who spends most of his time in the Green Zone can tell the difference between an Arab from Tikrit and an Arab from Damascus. Certainly, plenty of Iraqis – for a while – joined the fight against us and the Iraqi government, but the vital leaven in the enemy forces, the thing which kept the fight hot, was the foreigners who came in with money, expertise (its not like Saddam actually trained his people to defend themselves, ya know?) and the will to fight. One wonders how many “Iraqis” in the news voicing opposition to the US were really Iraqis…

2. The fact that many of these people have turned out to be wanted in the US for various crimes gives one pause about claims of innocent people winding up in Gitmo – once again, how would an MSMer really be able to find out that the “innocent detainee” he’s interviewing is really someone innocent? Obviously, if someone is wanted in the US but is out and about in, say Somalia, then he’s already tangled with the law and got out of it by one means or another. Unless one wants to subscribe to the theory that our soldiers and intelligence agents are stupid thugs, one must give the benefit of the doubt to our side and discount media stories about allegedly innocent detainees. Not that an innocent person cannot have been picked up, but that the chances of a completely innocent person winding up in Gitmo are very small and would be the exception proving the rule.

3. What a good idea, huh? Everyone who is detained by us is fingerprinted and we gather forensic data from terrorist attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and slowly build up a picture of who is doing what to whom. Over time this would give us a very good picture of what we’re up against (in terms of numbers, skills, effectiveness, etc) and allow us to subvert the terrorist groups from the outside and derail their efforts through misdirection.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his Democrats are saying that we have to get out of Iraq – at least, they’re saying it “pre-refinement”; we’ll probably see a changed tune soon, however – because Iraq has distracted us from the “real” war on terrorism…thing is, under President Bush we’ve managed to win in Iraq, win in Afghanistan, kill or capture many thousands of terrorists, build up a data base on global terrorism, de-fang Libya, end Pakistan’s “Nukes R Us” market, secure a growing alliance with India, Eritrea, Djibouti, Georgia and Poland, watch as France, Germany and other European States figure out that we’re doing the right thing in the War on Terrorism, increase the size of our military, re-equip our forces with the most modern weapons and materiel available, beef up our intelligence agencies, start to secure the border…and this is just the stuff we know about; there’s probably a lot which is still classified and we might not find out about for 50 years. Not a bad job for the man the left considers to be an evil idiot.

HAT TIP: NRO’s The Corner

Never heard of the guy or the website before this evening, but here’s a website encouraging Obama delegates to ditch him over his policy shifts since wrapping up the nomination:

Richard Nixon famously said: When you are seeking the nomination for president of the Republican Party, you run to the far right; once you’ve secured the nomination, you run to right of center during the election campaign; once you’ve won the presidency, you govern from the center.

Barack Obama has embraced The Nixon Strategy lock, stock and barrel, adapting its mirror-opposite to the Left. He suckered the hard-working base of the party — the Left-wing — into voting for him during the primaries by appealing to the issues dearest to their hearts. These are the very people responsible for getting him to where he is today! Yet once Obama felt he secured the nomination, he has tripped over himself running to the center (some would argue the center-right). Oh, Barack, we thought we knew ye!

How wrong we were.

But Obama made a mistake; he started his move rightwards before securing the nomination. And what he didn’t realize was that…

What the Left giveth, the Left can taketh away!

Question: For you leftwing supporters of Obama, is the desire to beat Bush via McCain worth putting someone as ambitious and dishonest as Obama into the White House?