Blogs For Victory

The Washington Post/ABC poll asked the question: If the eleciton were held today, for whom would you vote?

The result was: Kerry 48%, Bush 42%

in June of 2008 the Washington Post/ABC poll asked the question: If the election were held today, for whom would you vote?

The result is: Obama 48%, McCain 42%

Obama is in big trouble – he’s still the inside favorite, but he’s got to do vastly better than Kerry if he hopes to win in November, and so far he isn’t doing it. He’s gotten a “post wrap up” bounce which, at best, has pushed him nationally about 6 or 7 points ahead of McCain, depending on the poll, but that isn’t good enough, not by a long shot. In this year of 2008, with President Bush’s approval ratings below freezing and with the right/wrong track numbers entirely in the dumpster, Obama should be crushing McCain. I mean, seriously, anything less than a 20 point lead is just bizarre, given the overall political dynamics – and this shows that the American people, in spite of leftwing fantasies to the contrary, did not turn left in 2006 and are unwilling to do so in 2008. Obama is the most leftwing candidate ever nominated by a major American political party, and he’s having a very hard time selling himself outside upper class whites and black voters.

America is a center/right political nation, and if Obama wants to be President, he’d better figure out a way to assure the average American that his policies will not be overtly leftist – all the while fighting off McCain and the GOP, who will bring up every scrap of evidence of Obama’s leftism to tear down the moderate wall Obama is building ’round himself.

Might as well make the name match the socialist reality:

Here are the highlights from briefing

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), member of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the most-ardent opponents of off-shore drilling

1115

We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market.

Given that every nationalised industry everywhere around the world has failed completely, the only explanation for this desire is an ardent belief that socialism is worth economic collapse. That, plus the chances for corrupt patronage which Democrats would love to get their hands on…

The McCain campaign held a conference call earlier today with Rudy Giuliani and senior foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann to respond to Senator Obama’s remarks on terrorism.

In response to the conference, plagiarist Joe Biden made the following comment.

“It’s no surprise that it takes a man with zero national security and foreign policy experience to defend the policies of John McCain and President Bush.”

That’s really funny, because it’s really no surprise that it takes a man with zero national security and foreign policy experience to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

Seems they are having trouble raising all the money they’d like:

Facing a $15 million budget shortfall, organizers of the Democratic National Convention are cutting events while hoping Barack Obama’s emergence as the likely presidential nominee will spur his vast army of donors to pony up.

The convention’s host committee was expected to report on its financial position late Monday in Denver. The committee is under contract to the Democratic National Committee to raise $40.6 million of an overall convention budget of about $70 million. Several people knowledgeable about the committee’s activities projected it would be about $15 million short of its goal.

The convention opens on Aug. 25, giving the committee just 10 weeks to come up with the money. Some faulted the slowing economy and the protracted Democratic primary as the two major reasons the city’s host committee has struggled to raise the cash.

“It’s a significant amount and a big concern,” acknowledged Rick Ridder, a Denver-based Democratic strategist who has helped the city’s convention efforts.

As recent as a week or two ago I was stating my certainty that Democrats would come up with the money – but now they are talking of cutting down the show, which means not only are they short, but they have fading hopes of making up the shortfall. Obama is still generating massive enthusiasm…among upper class whites and black Americans; could it be that these voters, enthused for Obama, don’t really care too much about the Democratic party, as an institution? Also, did Obama and Hillary just drain so much cash out of Democratic donors that they are having trouble pulling more money out of their pockets? Or is it that the varied divisions in the party, masked by Obama-mania, are resulting in a drop off in overall Democratic enthusiasm for November?

Time will tell, but it isn’t good news for the Democrats than in a year where the political stars have all aligned in their favor that they can’t raise enough money to cover their own convention.

Interesting:

More than almost anyone in public life, Joe Lieberman knows from experience how to finesse a vice-presidential question. At the end of an impromptu press conference after a visit to discuss global warming with sixth graders here on Monday, Al Gore’s 2000 veep pick was asked if he would be John McCain’s running mate this time around. “No,” Lieberman says flatly, as if the question were as ludicrous as his joining the antiwar movement. All Lieberman would add when prodded by a follow-up question is, “I think in this, as in so much else, [McCain] has his head screwed on right. I think he’s looking for somebody who shares his priorities and would be capable of being president.”

But in a presidential year filled with firsts (African-American nominee, serious woman candidate, former POW to be his party’s standard-bearer), Lieberman retains the intriguing potential to become the first Jewish, party-crossing, second-time-around vice-presidential nominee in American history. While McCain is keeping his vice-presidential deliberations intensely private, it is not hard to pick up Republican whispers that the wild-card Lieberman speculation is grounded in reality rather than water-cooler fantasy. No McCain campaign sidekick — not South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham nor former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina — does more than Lieberman to burnish the GOP candidate’s reputation as a different-drummer Republican. As top McCain strategist Charlie Black says about Lieberman (talking in general, not as a potential running mate), “Joe, who is nationally known for having run for vice president and being elected [in 2006] as an independent, is the best possible character witness you can have for McCain’s independence and bipartisan approach.”

Only a Shemanesque, “if nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve” denial would put this concept to bed. Still, it appears unlikely – but it also comes down to a careful calculus in an election year which promises a close vote at the end of the race. Conventional wisdom (which I think correct) holds that McCain’s best chance of completely uniting and energising the conservative base is to nominate a VP who is firmly in the conservative camp. On the other hand, would a McCain/Lieberman ticket pull in more disaffected Democrats than might be lost on the conservative side, with the additional prospect of a Lieberman right turn luring conservatives back to the fold? It must be kept in mind that Lieberman is a conservative Jew – and while he trimmed a bit to the left in 2000 for the sake of Gore, I think that he could easily wind up “out conservativing” McCain on some of the social issues crucial to Evangelicals and orthodox Catholics. Nominating Lieberman would likely put Florida completely out of reach for Obama, and might well put New York, Connecticut and New Jersey in play for McCain – a fatal mixture for any Democrat seeking the White House.

Movement conservative or “hand across the aisle”? What should McCain do?

So says Roll Call – and while he is the target of a bribery investigation and the Feds found a $90,000.00 bribe stashed in his ‘fridge, I’ll bet dollars to donuts he wins in a walkover…because his district is safely Democratic and the only thing which will make Democrats get rid of a corrupt person is if that person risks the loss of a seat.

The real “culture of corruption” in DC – it always had a “D” after it’s name.

Just one man left to be cleared:

A military judge on Tuesday dismissed the case against the highest-ranking U.S. Marine charged in the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha, whittling down the list of those who must still face justice for the 2005 incident to just the accused ringleader.

Military Judge Col. Steven Folsom dropped all charges against Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, who was accused of violating a lawful order and dereliction of duty, at a hearing at the Camp Pendleton Marine base in Southern California.

Folsom’s decision means that, out of eight Marines originally charged in December 2006, six have won dismissals of their charges and one has been cleared at court martial.

The accused ringleader, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, still faces court martial. The proceedings against him, however, have been put on hold pending the appeal of a pretrial ruling.

Folsom threw out the charges against Chessani, a 44-year-old Colorado native, after finding that a four-star general who oversaw the case could have been influenced by an investigator who later became his adviser.

The judge ruled that military prosecutors could refile the case but it was not immediately clear if they would do so. The prosecution could also appeal his ruling.

It will be very hard to get a conviction against a “ringleader” who, apparantly, had no ring to lead because no one else is going to be convicted of the alleged crime. Essentially, the whole Haditha case appears to be enemy propaganda cooked up against our troops and sadly taken up by the American left (most prominently by the very ex-Marine Murtha) looking for any club they could to beat President Bush with.

The mean, cruel and spiteful way the left has attacked our effort in Iraq turns my stomach and makes me ashamed to think that such people can be my fellow Americans.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin says it all.

While he didn’t use those exact words that’s pretty much what he means.

“When applying the law, the role of judges is not to impose their own view as to the best policy choices for society but to faithfully and accurately determine the policy choices already made by the people and embodied in the law,” McCain said. “The judicial role is necessarily limited and one that requires restraint and humility.”

The McCain Web site offers the promise that his “judicial appointees will understand that the federal government was intended to have limited scope, and that federal courts must respect the proper role of local and state governments.”

Obama, meanwhile, has said he wants to appoint judges who have “empathy.”

“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom,” Obama told a Planned Parenthood conference in Washington, D.C., in 2007 “The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

Which is just his way of saying he’ll appoint judges who support welfare, abortion, affirmative action quotas and gay marriage.

What’s really sad is that Obama’s desire for judges who follow the Constitution is non existent.

Given that the people he’ll anger (rich liberals) won’t vote for him while is looks to be something which can help everyone else, this might be a winning idea for November:

ARLINGTON, VA. – As John McCain rolls out his energy policy this week, he called for a lifting of the federal moratorium preventing states from exploring for oil off of their coasts. “They have to be lifted so that states can make those decisions,” McCain said. “I’m not dictating to the states that they drill or they engage in oil exploration, I am saying that the moratoria should be lifted so that they have the opportunity to do so. By the way, I would also like to see perhaps additional incentives…in the form of tangible financial rewards if the states decide to lift those moratoria.”

Searching for offshore oil and gas deposits was banned in 1981 by the Outer Continental Shelf moratorium, which prevents the leasing of coastal waters for fossil fuel development. Roughly 85 percent of U.S. coastal areas are currently protected by the moratorium. McCain’s Democratic rival, Barack Obama, voted against a Senate measure last March that would have lifted the ban, and has spoken out against offshore drilling, calling it a “short-term solution.”

McCain admitted offshore drilling would only be helpful in the short term, but would provide a good start in helping the U.S. develop other sources of energy. “We must embark on a national mission to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil and reduce greenhouse gases through the development of alternate energy sources,” McCain said. “Exploration is a step toward the longer term goal.”

It is time we started to shove aside the liberals who’s invariable solution is to make things worse – how much money have we sent overseas, often to hostile people and entities, because a bunch of liberals were determined not to have a shadowy oil platform 10 miles off Malibu? Oil must eventually cease to be our primary source of energy, but while we’re still an oil-powered civilization, we’re worse than fools to deny ourselves what Nature has provided.

In the fall, the race might turn on the “get things done” program of McCain vs Obama’s “perhaps we’ll do something later” platitutdes.

After Al Gore’s embarrassing endorsement of failed Democrat presidential candidate Howard Dean, this year, he took the safe route and endorsed Obama only after he clinched the nomination.

Al Gore announced his endorsement of Barack Obama Monday and promised to help the Democrat achieve what eluded him — the presidency.

“I present to you the next president of the United States junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama!” Gore said in a brief introduction of Obama at a Detroit fundraiser. He planned a later appearance with Obama at a 20,000-person rally at the Joe Louis Arena.
[…]
“Over the past 18 months, Barack Obama has united a movement. He knows change does not come from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or Capitol Hill. It begins when people stand up and take action,” Gore wrote. “With the help of millions of supporters like you, Barack Obama will bring the change we so desperately need in order to solve our country’s most pressing problems.”

Yeah, Barack united a big movement all the while dividing the Democratic Party. D’oh!

But really, Al Gore thinks global warming is a more serious threat than terrorism… If Barack wants that endorsement he can have it.