Blogs For Victory

Usually, candidates are open to having as many debates as possible. Unlike being on the campaign trail, it allows you to go head-to-head with your opponent and give voters a chance to weigh the differences between the candidates. For some reason (and we can all offer our guesses for the real reason) Barack Obama doesn’t want another debate before the potentially crucial Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Sunday he would not hold another debate with rival Hillary Clinton until after the May 6 nominating contests in North Carolina and Indiana.

Clinton had challenged the Illinois senator and front-runner for the Democratic White House nomination to a 90-minute debate in Indiana without a moderator, but Obama turned her down.

“We’ve got nine days to try to campaign and reach as many voters as possible, and so rather than being in a studio, I want to make sure that we’re reaching out to folks where they live, answering their questions,” Obama told reporters.

After his subpar performance at the previous debate, it’s not surprising that he doesn’t want another debate until after the next batch of primary contests. He obviously feels he has more to lose than to gain from another debate at this point. Recent blunders combined with the ongoing Rezko and Wright stories have been chipping away at Obama’s so-called squeaky clean image.

But, this is a contest where both Democrats admit that when it comes to policy, that there’s not much difference between the two of them. With that in mind, another debate is extremely important so undecideds can potentially make their decision by seeing them debate. Obama’s refusal for another debate just makes him appear cowardly, not strategically smart. And it only gives Hillary more fodder for claiming he’s not been properly vetted.

I have an announcement for everyone here at Blogs For Victory. About a month ago I moved from Boston, MA to Buffalo, NY. I have traded Ted Kennedy and John Kerry for Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. I only had to suffer one day with Eliot Spitzer as my governor.

Anyway, so, that’s my news. I am now a resident of New York State. As you may know, aside from this and other nationally oriented blogs, I also have a local Massachusetts politics blog, Hub Politics, which is still operating. I co-founded Hub Politics with my brother back in 2005, and it became the biggest conservative blog in the state. It will still go on, with my role gradually decreasing as I have now started a new conservative local politics blog for Western New York called The Buffalo Bean. So, for any of you out there from New York state, particularly Western New York, I encourage you to check out my new blog project.

As I’m sure you are all aware, John McCain has proposed a 3-month gas tax holiday from Memorial Day to Labor Day… and Senator Obama has come out opposing the idea.

But, as the Wall Street Journal reported today, as a state senator in Illinois Obama supported a gas tax holiday.

Sen. Obama, who voted for a temporary gas-tax break when he was a state senator in Illinois, rejected a federal tax holiday as bad fiscal policy. The federal gas tax raises money to repair and expand the highway system.

In Illinois in 2000, Sen. Obama voted for a six-month, five-percentage point break on the state’s 6.25% gas sales tax. The reduction of the tax, which goes into a general revenue fund, passed on a 55-1 vote and included measures designed to ensure that the benefits of the tax break reached consumers. At one point, Sen. Obama jokingly asked on the Senate floor whether it would be possible to install placards on gas-station pumps telling motorists he had helped win temporary price relief.

Now that it’s John McCain making the proposal for temporary relief at the gas pump, Obama has flip-flopped.

The ironic thing about the whole issue of high gas prices is that Democrats and the special interests that support them are the ones to blame. Because of the environmental lobby, we don’t drill for oil in our country. They also oppose building more refineries. The end result: our continued (and not increased) dependence on foreign oil.

But maybe that’s what Barack Obama wants, afterall, he’s gets a lot of money from big oil:

Sen. Barack Obama continued accepting donations from oil company executives and employees last month even as he aired ads in which he stated he took no oil company money, his campaign finance reports show.

Obama has taken at least $263,000 from oil company executives, family members and employees since entering the presidential race last year, including $46,000 last month. At least $140,000 has come in chunks of between $1,000 and $2,300, the maximum permitted under federal law.

Texas oil executive Robert L. Cavnar of Milagro Exploration and his wife, Gracie, have helped the Illinois Democrat raise at least another $50,000 by helping host a fundraiser earlier in the campaign.

Higher prices means more profit for big oil right? If you ask Obama that’s how things are… But when he gets big money from Big Oil, how do you think he cares about how much you’re paying at the pump when they’re pumping up his campaign coffers?

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: More on Obama’s Big Oil connections.

Not a normal task for a GOP Presidential candidate, nor an easy task – but a task well worth doing, and long overdue:

John McCain plans to spend next week reaching out to African-Americans, displaced factory workers and people living in poverty – voters not usually associated with the Republican Party.

Starting Monday, the presumptive GOP nominee for president will stop in Alabama’s “Black Belt,” then move on to the struggling steel town of Youngstown, Ohio, and the Appalachian region of Kentucky. The Arizona senator is also trying to make it to New Orleans, which is still recovering from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

“I want to tell people living there that there must not be any forgotten parts of America, any forgotten Americans,” McCain told newspaper editors this week.

“A lot of moderate white voters want a president who can reach out to the disadvantaged,” said John Pitney, a former House GOP aide and government professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. “So McCain has to show he’s making the effort.”

McCain “is sending the signal that he’s a different kind of Republican,” which he must do to attract independent voters unaligned with either party, Republican pollster Whit Ayres said.

“Independents voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in 2006,” Ayres said, when Republicans lost control of Congress. McCain can win, Ayres said, only if independents vote for him in 2008.

For far too long, the GOP has written off these areas of the country – and the worst part about this neglect isn’t in electoral politics, but in the fact that the cure for what ails them is to be found in conservative policy. These places are locked in poverty not because of some failure inherent to America, but because they are hamstrung by a corrupt Democratic machine which wants the poor kept down, and on the liberal plantation. The best way to utterly crush liberalism is to, step by step, take these poor voters away from them by providing them with real help – and real hope for genuine change.

Naturally, Democrats are mostly denigrating the effort – if we GOPers have been writing them off, Democrats have been taking them for granted, and they expect to be able to do so again in November…but even if McCain only switches one in a thousand of these voters, it is still a thing worth doing, because it will start a process rolling which can eventually lead to the end of liberalism in America. But I think he’ll do better than that: No, he won’t win 25% of the black vote, nor will he carry any of the Congressional districts Kerry won by 10 percentage points or more back in 2004 – but he’ll win some, and any poaching in Democratic territory makes the Democrats’ task harder – but more important than that is the political shift of a GOP aggresively courting America’s poor.

Believe it… details over at Hub Politics….

Time Magazine cheapens the sacrifices made by WWII vets:

Comparing what amounts to tilting at windmills (literally) to the threat once posed by imperial Japan and Nazi Germany shows a blatant level of ignorance.

But mind you, this is the same magazine that took the jihadists’ word that there was a “massacre” at Haditha, and ran with it.

Then again, could anyone expect any more from the bunch of self-centered liberal ingrates that make up the editorial board at Time?

Listening to Hillary and Obama on the campaign, there have been plenty of debate over who will be ready in the general election campaign to not only face McCain, but to handle everything “the Republican throw at them.” They act all high and mighty, claiming to care about the issues and not attacks against their opponents. Well, according to this story from The Hill, it appears the Democrats are much interested in digging up dirt for ammunition than they are in debating the issues.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed a number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with Cabinet-level agencies and inter-agency departments looking for opposition research to use against presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

In early February, there was a sharp uptick in the number of FOIA requests from the DNC with McCain as a specific target. February was about the same time McCain emerged as the front-runner and likely nominee.

A review of FOIA requests and independent confirmations obtained by The Hill turned up requests from the DNC at at least three agencies – the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of the Interior (DOI), the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Commerce Department.

According to one filing, Alicia McClintock, a DNC operative, wrote DOI asking for “any and all records of communication (including but not limited to letters, written requests, reports, telephone records, electronic communication) between your agency and John McCain or his offices/staff from 1999 to present during which period he has been a United States Senator.”

Despite their posturing, it is obvious the Democrats have a win-at-all-costs attitude about elections, and smearing their opponents is undoubtedly the biggest and most important part of their game plan. In public, they’ll say that the voters don’t fall for such attacks, but behind closed doors they work hard to engineer the worst of the worst attacks against anyone who stands in their way.

I wouldn’t call it a good thing when your candidacy is endorsed by a terrorist organization… but it’s even worse that Obama’s campaign is apparently flattered by the endorsement.

In the spin room following the debate, I asked Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, to respond to a report that a top Hamas official had endorsed Obama.

“I have no idea about that, I have not heard that,” Axelrod replied.

I told him that the words were spoken by Ahmed Yousef, and offered to read him the quote, which I I proceeded to do from my Blackberry: “we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle…”

Axelrod focused on the Kennedy portion of the quote, and was “flattered” by the comparison.

“I like John Kennedy too,” Axelrod said. “That’s about the only thing we have in common with this gentleman from Hamas. We all agree that John Kennedy was a great president, and it’s flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in his footsteps.”

Michael Goldfarb says it all:

Note the slipperiness. Axelrod first distances himself from the “gentleman from Hamas,” but in the next breath he embraces the gentleman/terrorists’ comparison to Kennedy, pronouncing it “flattering.” Only recently Obama declared that “nobody has spoken out more fiercely on the issue of anti-Semitism than I have.” Apparently there’s an exception for when anti-Semites compare Obama to Kennedy. Then all bets are off!

Perhaps the Obama campaign would be equally flattered by an endorsement from Osama bin Laden if the endorsement compared Obama to MLK.

John McCain condemned Jimmy’s Carter’s plan to meet with the terrorist organization Hamas on Monday… He made the following statement:

“It is a grave and dangerous mistake for an American leader to meet with a terrorist organization like Hamas. Engaged in a campaign that deliberately targets innocent Israeli civilians, Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. President Carter is wrong to meet with Hamas, a terrorist group that has also killed innocent Americans.

“The very idea that a former President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief would meet with a terrorist organization demands a clear stance from all presidential candidates. Refusing to take a stand, as Senator Obama has done, is not the strong leadership we need today. If Senator Obama is not decisive enough to condemn former President Carter, how can he be strong enough to deal with the threat they pose to America and to our allies?”

Obama finally commented on Carter’s trip today… but fell short of an actual condemnation.

We’ll have to see if this comes up in the debate tonight…

The Hill reports on the possibility…

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the Democratic Party’s 2000 vice presidential nominee, is leaving open the possibility of giving a keynote address on behalf of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) at the Republican National Convention in September.

Republicans close to the McCain campaign say Lieberman’s appearance at the convention, possibly before a national primetime audience, could help make the case that the presumptive GOP nominee has a record of crossing the aisle. That could appeal to much-needed independent voters.

McCain has yet to ask Lieberman to speak, either in primetime or elsewhere, at the convention. But if McCain thinks it will help make his case for the White House, as some of his allies suspect, Lieberman would be willing to speak on his behalf.

“If Sen. McCain, who I support so strongly, asked me to do it, if he thinks it will help him, I will,” Lieberman said in a brief interview.

If Lieberman does speak at the GOP Convention, that would be devastating for the Democrats. In the past eight years, Joe Lieberman has sought the Democratic nomination for President, and has been the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee. As the Democratic Party shifts further and further to the far left, Lieberman’s appearance would highlight how out-of-the-mainstream today’s Democratic Party has become.

You know, it’s funny, Barack Obama claims to be a uniter, yet in recent weeks, he’s referred to his grandmother as “a typical white person,” and insulted small town Americans. Those aren’t the words of a uniter. A uniter is someone who could bring the former vice-presidential nominee of his opposing party to speak on his behalf at his party’s convention.

It’ll be interesting to see not only what Lieberman does, but what Democrats do to prevent him from speaking for McCain at the GOP Convention.