Blogs For Victory

One thing we can be sure of, President McCain will be unafraid to touch the live wires in defense of what he believes:

QUESTIONER: Senator, you have been a leader on immigration reform in the Senate but unfortunately Congress has failed to make progress on this very critical issue. As the next President of the Unites States of America will comprehensive immigration reform, and not just enforcement, be one of your top policy priorities in you’re first 100 days in office?

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: It will be my top priority yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And my friends, thank you for the question, and let me just review for you again, we tried. I reached across the aisle to Senator Ted Kennedy, and by the way I know that he’s in your prayers, and we worked in bipartisan fashion. And we were defeated. And by the way, it wasn’t very popular, let’s have some straight talk, with some in my party, and so I did that and worked together so we could carry out a federal responsibility. We have to secure our borders, that’s the message. But we also must proceed with a temporary worker program that is verifiable and truly temporary, we must also understand that there are 12 million people who are here and they are here illegally and they are God’s children, they are God’s children and they will be treated in a humane fashion based on the principle obviously that someone who comes here {illegally} cannot have priority over someone who comes here {legally}. Could I mention to you, last Fourth of July I was in Baghdad, I was invited by General Petraeus to attend a ceremony where 688 brave young Americans decide to reenlist and stay and fight for America. There was also a group of people, 166 of them, that decided that they wanted to accelerate their path to citizenship. They were not citizens of this country but they chose to serve in harm’s way in defense of freedom in the military of the Unites States, I was deeply moves by this, that’s what America is all about.

QUESTIONER: Thank you Senator

SEN. MCCAIN: Immigration reform will be my top priority because we have the obligation to address a federal issue from a federal stand point. I will reach across the aisle once again and work in a bipartisan fashion. We will resolve the immigration issue in American and we will secure our borders.

I do believe that McCain learned his lesson and that any immigration reform will have as its knife edge secure borders – fortunately for McCain, a lot of the heavy lifting on border security is already being done, so by the time he is up there making his immigration reform proposals he should be able to point to a very large improvement in border security as the predicate for guest worker programs, etc.

Additionally, as long time readers know, I was one of the three or four people who actually backed the McCain immigraiton reform but McCain is right – these are God’s children and we must treat them well, even though they have broken our laws in coming across the border. In my view, at any rate, its not like we’re the innocent victims here – all sorts of Americans gave positive encouragement to illegal immigration by not inquiring too deeply into those who were doing the gardening, the maid work, the sheet rock installation, etc, etc, etc. I will never, ever advocate a program which rounds these people up as if they were common criminals – strengthened border security and greater enforcement of employment laws against hiring illegals will greatly attrit the number of illegals in country. For those which remain, we’ll have a pool of mostly long-term residents who have integrated into the society of the United States, and I want them to have the opportunity to become legal residents. I believe that I’m 100% with McCain on this, and I’ll defend it against all comers.

You’d think that with Obama’s success at obtaining a low-cost mansion for himself that he’d have been more effective on housing for the poor:

The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can’t afford to live anywhere else.

But it’s not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale – a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing – an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies – including several hundred in Obama’s former district – deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.

When we first started building public housing it became a complete disaster – the government ponied up the money to have them built and then managed the housing with a maze of bureaucratic rules which made it impossible to get rid of bad elements and dead certain that the housing would become blighted in short order. The phrase “public housing” by the early 1980’s immediately brought to mind images of crime and filth. And so reforms were proposed – the crowning effort to actually fix the problem was initiated by “bleeding heart” conservative Jack Kemp who initiated the Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) program while he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Elder Bush Administration…unfortunately, budget battles in cabinet and unwillingness of the Democratic Congress to spend money on a GOP-inspired anti-poverty scheme which would disempower Democratic-donating bureaucrats essentially killed the very promising program – it does linger on to this day, but it never was able to accomplish its primary purpose of making poor people into home owners so that they would be empowered and have the incentive to keep their neighborhoods up to snuff.

What has happened since then has mostly been a boondoggle, as we can see from the quoted article – favored contractors getting government swag to build low-cost housing and as these contractors are protected by their bought-and-paid-for political patrons, there isn’t much incentive for the contractors to actually build something useful. The problem isn’t just in Chicago, to be completely fair to Obama here – we have a low cost housing development here in Las Vegas which was built on toxic soil and was useless from the get-go. But the problem for Obama is that with a rather thin resume’, he can’t afford to have any of this corrupt business-as-usual political backscratching going on – and it appears that he was very happy to be hip deep in it. Now the connections to the corrupt Rezko and his shady mansion deal become more stark…coupled with the revelations that Obama’s supporters profited off Obama-backed slum construction, it shows that Obama is deeply involved – indeed, owes his rise to – the hopelessly corrupt Chicago-area Democratic politics.

So, good people, if you want a President who will ensure that well-connected contractors make money by building unlivable slums for the poor, Obama is your man…if you want something different that warmed-over liberal politics of the past, then McCain would have to by your choice.

Can be read here, Torture is a Moral Issue, A Catholic Study Guide (PDF). While I have not considered the document in its entirety, nor spent any long time in contemplation of what it teaches, I’d like to put out a few observations of my own.

In what will surely please the critics of the Bush Adminisration, the document says we must stop using euphemisms in our discussion – no more “enhanced interrorogation” when we really mean something quite harsh. This will please the left – but only up to such time as they actually start thinking about it and realise that this means we’ll also have to stop using “pro-choice” as a euphemism to cover up “pro-abortion”. This is an important thing to keep in mind, because at bottom the issue of torture is a life issue, and thus intrinsic to the whole debate on whether or not human beings have an inherent dignity which must be respected at all times, no matter what the particular human being has done. If we have an inherent dignity then we can’t torture – but we also can’t kill the unborn or, indeed, allow such things as the degradation of pornography to continue unabated (side note: when you start getting into Catholic teaching, dear readers, you’re going to get a lot of things like this: “narrowly focused” is not something which applies to Catholic teaching…the Church isn’t universal for nothin’, ya know?). As a very strong pro-lifer, I have to put myself down, then, as opposed to torture – and this would include the sort of torture which might be used to elicit information on a bomb set to go off.

As we carry on this war against a cruel and wicked foe, we must always conduct ourselves as best we can. Realising that we are fallible humans and, especially, that it is a tricky business to second-guess a soldier in the field, we still must ever strive for the highest standards possible in our conduct. But there are some things to keep in mind:

Irregular combatants are not covered by the Genevea Convention – unless an armed enemy is part of a clearly and immediately identifiable military organization, such a person is liable for a quick court martial and swift execution, all fully in accordance with the Convention. Given this, the fact that we take prisoners at all – and then almost invariably treat them very well while in captivity – is already a sign of our respect for the inherent dignity of those human beings who have chosen terrorism as their means to an end.

While a regular soldier can only be required to state his name, rank and serial number if captured and a civilian law enforcement official is carefully bound by the provisions of the Constitution and long-held US law, an irregular soldier doesn’t really even have a rank or serial number to provide, and to provide lawyers and the full panalopy of US law to captured terrorists is actually unworkable if our goal is to eliminate the terrorist threat. A captures enemy combatant is at our mercy, in a very literal sense.

A captured enemy is still a human and still has an absolute and non-negotiable right to insist that we treat him with the dignity inherent to man and endowed by God – on the other hand, a captured terrorist must not be given a right to remain silent. Once captured, they must tell us all we need to know, or we must in some way compel them to do so. And here we get into that grey area – not really covered in the linked document – of just what is torture. I cannot hold that an act by the interrogator which does no physical harm can be considered torture. Feeling bad about it afterwards isn’t good enough – there has to be a bruise, a broken bone…something, anything to indicate that someone applied brute force to the body of the terrorist. Keeping a terrorist up all night would make him quite exhausted, but it doesn’t actually rise to the level of torture.

The balancing act is to figure out how far we can go, and then work out systems to ensure that we never go any further. Most Democrats are worse than fools in their demands for closure of Gitmo based on flimsy evidence of torture. In the end, we need a prison like Gitmo and we need the ability to ensure that the terrorists give us all the information we require. Providing a statute for the military to work from would be the best idea, but one step at a time – and that first step must be in keeping Gitmo open, and rather unpleasant to be in. But however harsh we might make it and however painful (in a mental sense) interrogations might prove, the dignity of the people incarcerated must be maintained, even for those who accord us no dignity at all.

The news story:

A coalition of African-American pastors and other pro-lifers marched on the headquarters of both major American political parties in Washington on Thursday to demand that the party committees and party candidates for office refuse the $10 million that Planned Parenthood has said it will spend to influence the 2008 elections.

Decrying what they called its “philosophy of prenatal murder in the black community,” the marchers also demanded that Planned Parenthood be stripped of its $350 million in taxpayer funding it receives each year.

The marchers visited the headquarters of both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. They were led by Day Gardner of the National Black Pro-Life Union and Dr. Alveda King, who is a niece of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pastor Stephen Broden of Fair Park Bible Fellowship, speaking at a press conference, described the goal of the march:

“We find it a conflict of interest that Planned Parenthood receives federal funding and with that funding it contributes to Republican and Democratic candidates who support their philosophy of prenatal murder in the black community. Congress gives money to Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood in return gives the money to pro-abortion candidates. There’s something rotten in the halls of Congress.”

And just which party do you think will give a more open-minded hearing to these demonstrators? Given that since 1990 pro-abortion donations to politics have never been less than 61% to the Democrats and are so far 91% to Democrats in 2008, methinks this protest against pro-abortion donors will fall on deaf ears over at the Democratic National Committee.

I bring this particular news story up because it highlights two things:

1. The African-American community in large measure shares the social values of conservatism, especially Christian conservatism.

2. There are a lot of cross-currents going on out there, some of which may not be showing up in polling.

Now, don’t get me wrong – with Obama as the nominee, I can’t see him getting less than 95% of the black vote in November; even a lot of conservative blacks are considering Obama because, lets face it, just like with Catholics and Kennedy in 1960 and Jews and Lieberman in 2000, there is something deeply satisfying in one of your own making it to the heights…especially if your people are or have been a despised minority (and Catholics, Jews and blacks all have a legacy of bigotry against them – though, of course, black Americans had it by far the worst). But the fact that these voices are being raised in direct contravention of core Democratic principles shows that there is a means for the GOP to eventually make inroads into the black vote. Not in 2008 – but in 2012 and beyond. It goes on issue after issue – black Americans favor school choice; black Americans favor restrictions on abortion; black Americans oppose gay marriage. All we need do is break down the wall of distrust between black Americans and the conservative movement and we’ll be on to great things. That wall was partially created by the conservative movement (when we largely wrote off the once strongly GOP black vote), partially created by a careful and very cynical policy of the Democratic leadership to heighten fear of the GOP in the black community by slanderous attacks on the GOP over race issues – breaking down this wall won’t be easy, but it must be done.

While we have many goals as a movement, the primary purpose of conservatism must be the destruction of the left. We know that the left’s entire worldview is based on a lie backed by a series of subsequent lies. It is a baleful influence on any activity it tries to involve itself in – and the sincerity of its adherents must not blind us to the necessity of destroying the left, as a political force, for good and all. We can’t do it as long as the left is able to reach outside of its urban fever swamps and get the votes of, say, union workers and black Americans who have absolutely nothing in common with left other than a shared fear of the GOP. Take away the fear, and union voters (other than public employee unions) and black Americans will stream into the GOP in ever rising numbers. Reduced to a few kooky places on the map, the left will then be marginalised and we can procede with the certainty that even under a liberal government the people running the show will be animated by a love of America rather than, as the left is today, animated for a hatred of America, and especially its Christian elements.

Some on the left – including here on this little blog – have tried to tell us that the abortion issue doesn’t matter. Actually, it matters more than people imagine. Not because it will, in and of itself, change the election results but because it puts such a stark contrast between left and right, now divided into the Culture of Death and the Culture of Life. Abortion is a piece of the puzzle on how to destroy the left, and we’d be worse than fools to refuse to avail ourselves of the strength the pro-life movement brings to conservatism and the GOP.

That is the number of days since Obama visited Iraq…and by my reckoning it has been 514 days since Obama called, on the floor of the United States Senate, for us to quit and have our last soldier out by 89 days ago…

You know, Senator, things do change and when change does happen, don’t you think a person’s views should be modified by the changed conditions?

Waaay back when, this was your story:

Obama’s First Day In Iraq Was January 7, 2006. “Anti-war U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s first day in Iraq did nothing to change his view that if the country’s various factions can’t achieve political peace, no amount of U.S. involvement will bring stability… [O]bama told reporters in a Saturday [January 7, 2006] conference call.” (Eric Krol, “Obama: ‘Everything’s Up For Grabs’ In Iraq ,” Chicago Daily Herald, 1/8/06)

But now its been some time and some things have happened, and this is the story:

“There Has, However, Been Major Progress This Spring On Two Fronts. Together They Give Reason For Hope That The Major Improvement In Security Resulting From The Surge Of American Forces May Endure Even As The Surge Itself Ends This July.” (Jason Campbell, Michael O’Hanlon and Amy Unikewicz, “The State of Iraq : An Update,” The New York Times, 6/22/08)

Geesh, what is a leftist Senator who has been pandering for leftwing votes to do?

As I write this, Lieberman Must Go has 35,000+ signatures on this petition:

We CANNOT tolerate a leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus who supports George Bush and McCain’s War in Iraq. We CANNOT tolerate a Democratic chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee who endorses and stumps for McCain. We call on the Senate Democratic Steering Committee to strip Joe Lieberman of his chairmanship and his leadership role.

Which action, of course, would also probably strip the Democrats of their Senate majority, at least until January – either the petitioners don’t realise this, or they are supremely confident in picking up a net of at least one Senate seat in November. Still, it is a bit arrogant for them to make that presumption – the time to strip Lieberman, if that is to be done, would be in January, and then only if the Democrats have 51 seats without him. I’ll bet they get to 350,000 signatures in short order, so great is the leftwing hatred of President Bush and of anyone who doesn’t hate him as the left does.

Please note that they are calling it “George Bush and McCain’s War in Iraq” – it is, of course, America’s campaign in Iraq, part of America’s fight in the War on Terrorism, but so hatefilled is the left these days that they are not animated by a desire of what is best for America, but by a desire of what is most harmful to President Bush and his possible GOP successor, John McCain. There is also the rank moral cowardice of making such a statement – it is the left saying, “its not me!”; as if one can be a true and loyal American citizen and not be morally responsible for all of the acts of the United States of America. Only a traitor can really say of Iraq that it is not his campaign – but it remains America’s campaign, even if a traitor eschews it; a traitor, or someone so hate filled that they don’t understand what they are actually doing.

And before anyone out there says I’m exaggerating about the hate, herewith some samples from the signatures:

Awful person…He is among the biggest scumbags on the planet…He’s is worsre than a traitor…Lieberman has set the reality of self serving, despicable politicians at a new plateau…His country is Israel not the USA.

How many of our young men and women must die to defend Israel and the powerful AIPAC?…Are peoplle like him mindless idiots or hellbent on destroying America?…A totally classless jerk…Joe Liberman’s position is more in line with Israel’s than US’s…AIPAC is his allegiance. He takes his orders from them…He is a traiter, but more than that, he is such a non human…Not only must he go, strip him of his citizenship…This man is a menace to society…Joe belongs in the GOP-aipac section…Joe go live in Israel now. You are a war monger supreme…more loyal to Israel than to our country…

I think that pretty much says it all – fanatic hatred destroying the souls of those on the left to the point where they don’t even realise they’re slipping into anti-Semitism…

John McCain’s new ad, Purpose.

Can’t win for losing with these nuts:

Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

But the decision to freeze new solar proposals temporarily, reached late last month, has caused widespread concern in the alternative-energy industry, as fledgling solar companies must wait to see if they can realize their hopes of harnessing power from swaths of sun-baked public land, just as the demand for viable alternative energy is accelerating.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, Calif. “The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry”…

…Alex Daue, an outreach coordinator for the Wilderness Society, an environmental conservation group, praised the government for assessing the implications of large-scale solar development.

Some enviros say “go solar” and then other say “halt construction because there’s a squirrel out there”(and yes, the fate of a rat with a fluffy tail – ie, a squirrel – is one of the concerns). Pick one, already. Life ain’t perfect and there’s always a trade-off – in order to go solor we are going to have to actually build stuff, which will mean that part of that natural environment you whackos are always on about will have to be modified for human use…but the payoff will be less greenhouse emissions and thus we’ll be “fixing” that global warming nonsense you’ve been having a heart attack about lately.

Been an interesting week – stocks drop, oil rockets up, Iraq improves massively, Obama caught short again and again…and while we can’t execute a child molestor, it appears that we can keep our guns, so shooting a child molestor is not entirely out of the question.

Discuss these and anything else you’d like.

Excellently illustrated recently in a debate between Donna Brazile (who is actually a very smart woman, but she’s got little to work with these days) and Bill Bennett on CNN’s Situation Room, as noted by Catholics in the Public Square:

WOLF BLITZER: If you had been at that news conference, Bill, and you had a chance to ask one question, today, what would you have asked, if you were a reporter?

BILL BENNETT: I think when he brought up Chicago I would have said “why are you to the left of NARAL, Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein when it comes to abortion? Are you really there?” Not that it’s the only issue in the campaign, but I gotta question the guy’s moral judgment, who doesn’t see a problem with killing a baby after it’s been born after eight months.

DONNA BRAZILE: But he’s had an opportunity in several debates to talk about his position on abortion —

BENNETT: What is the answer to that question?

BRAZILE: Bill, look —

BENNETT: What is the answer?!

BRAZILE: You want to have a conversation about narrow issues —

BENNETT: That is not: that is fundamental!

BRAZILE: It is a fundamental issue, but the American people want to talk about gas prices …

More accurately, the American people are concerned with gas prices; it is Democrats who want to talk about it, because Obama and his Democrats have no actual plan for energy, but do feel they can score cheap points off the issue, as well as keep people off the subject of Obama’s manifest incapacity to be President of the United States. That aside, this also shows the very smallness of modern Democrats. Leave foreign affairs to the UN; use the military as a social services agency and please lets talk about gas prices as if the price of a gallon of gas is the largest issue in the whole, wide world. Truth is, it only modestly annoys me once per week when I fill up the tank – but even then I can pat myself on the back for not purchasing an SUV, as so many liberals do (one of the larger problems I noted in getting around Santa Monica, CA is the massive number of SUVs clogging the roads in that oh, so liberal city). Most of the time, the price of gas doesn’t come up – what with worries over the old man’s health, the purchase of a new dog and, you know, that life thingy that we’re supposed to be doing instead of worrying about gas prices.

Meanwhile, a very large number of my fellow human beings will be murdered this year, mostly because some people have been suckered into thinking that its no big deal to kill the unborn. Somehow, the death of a human being looms a little larger in the grand scheme of things than the difference between $3.25 and $4.25 a gallon…