Current Political Scene

Charles Krauthammer On Obama's Long March

"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." -- Obama spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 24, 2007

WASHINGTON -- That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now says he'll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom companies blanket immunity for post-9/11 eavesdropping.

Back then, in the yesteryear of primary season, he thoroughly trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement, pledging to force a renegotiation, take "the hammer" to Canada and Mexico, and threaten unilateral abrogation.

Today, the hammer is holstered. Obama calls his previous NAFTA rhetoric "overheated" and essentially endorses what one of his senior economic advisers privately told the Canadians: The anti-trade stuff was nothing more than populist posturing.

Nor is there much left of his primary season pledge to meet "without preconditions" with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There will be "preparations," you see, which are being spun by his aides into the functional equivalent of preconditions.

Obama's long march to the center has begun.

And why not? What's the downside? He won't lose the left, or even mainstream Democrats. They won't stay home on Nov. 4. The anti-Bush, anti-Republican sentiment is simply too strong. Election Day is their day of revenge -- for the Florida recount, for Swift-boating, for all the injuries, real and imagined, dealt out by Republicans over the last eight years.

Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.

Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting, evinced only the mildest of disappointment.

Indeed, The New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama's about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a pre-emptive attack on McCain's 527 independent expenditure groups -- notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes, "there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group" and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.

True, Obama's U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That's where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.

As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama's abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.

The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.

When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.

 

AFTER HILLARY: CAN A WOMAN WIN?

By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN

"Yes. Certainly. Absolutely. Undoubtedly. She can. In fact, Hillary, even in defeat, demonstrated the viability of a female candidate for president.

Hillary lost because she is Hillary and because she was outsmarted by Obama. She lost despite being a woman, not because of it.

In the early going, before Obama began seriously to challenge her, Hillary was winning easily in all the national polls. There was, indeed, a sense of inevitability to her impending triumph. This consensus was not illusory; it was based on solid polling data and very real advantages she had at the time in funding, name recognition, field organization, and political momentum. Hillary lost because of a myriad of factors, none of which had to do with being female:

1. She unwisely predicated her campaign her experience credentials. In a Democratic primary, particularly with its aversion to the dynastic interchange of Bushes and Clintons, change, not experience was the sine qua non. By stressing experience to an electorate that wanted change, Hillary badly misjudged the mood of the electorate.

2. Obama shrewdly realized that, since he might lose some of the contests in big states like New York and California, he needed to raise his money from sources that would not implode as his chances of victory seemed to ebb. So the Illinois Senator exploited his star power and charisma to raise money online from individual donors contributing small amounts. By the end of the primary season, he had amassed more than one million separate donors. Because of the financial independence this afforded him, Hillary could not score a first round knockout after she won the big Super Tuesday states. Obama survived to win eleven straight caucuses and primaries in mid size states.

3. Hillary focused too much on television advertising to develop a mass voter base in the primaries and not enough on the field organization she needed to get the warm bodies essential to carrying caucuses. By cultivating university students, in particular, Obama was able to beat Hillary in caucus after caucus, eroding the lead her primary victories had given her.

4. Faced with the need to substantiate her claims to experience, Hillary blundered and committed a series of gaffes in which she demonstrably overstated her role in events that ranged from th3e Irish peace process to the economic recovery to the resolution of the Bosnian civil war. Already beset by doubts about her integrity, spawned by two decades of scandal, Hillary’s credibility was shredded by these mistakes.

But, despite these shortcomings, Hillary showed that a woman could draw the votes of downscale, often sexist, white men. In the her late primary victories in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indian, West Virginia, and Kentucky, Hillary won, not only by securing the votes of women of all ages, but by getting the backing of high school educated white men, formerly the toughest nut for a woman candidate to crack. Of course, she was helped along by the racism of many of these voters, catalyzed by the ravings of Reverend Wright. But the fact remains that she won these votes over a male opponent, something women candidates were not supposed to be able to do.

And, in the process, Hillary shattered a number of other myths that pundits had once cited to show that women couldn’t win. She raised a prodigious amount of money, a sharp contrast to the enforced parsimony which had afflicted so many female candidates in the past. She was never seriously challenged for not knowing her substance on key issues. Her demonstrably high intelligence and familiarity with the facts made it clear that she was substantively qualified to be president, a far cry from the “airhead” label that had frequently been affixed to women running for office. And she allayed fears that a woman could not be an effective commander-in-chief. Almost all the polls showed that more voters trusted her than Obama on issues of defense, national security, and terrorism.

Of course her campaign demonstrated pitfalls for future female candidates to avoid. Voters were quicker to draw negative conclusions about Hillary’s personality than they likely would have been had she been male. Concerns that she was “cold” or “unemotional” or “robotic” surfaced early in the polling, while candidates like Mitt Romney, who, arguabley, could have been subject to similar criticism, were not.

But most important, Hillary demonstrated the power of women voters to elect a female candidate. Her top heavy margins among upscale women and her strong performance among their downscale sisters, showed that women can get the female vote and use it as a platform from which to win.

After all, if we discount the February primaries and caucuses in which Hillary was caught flat-footed and out of money (because she assumed Obama would be knocked out on Super Tuesday), the New York Senator clearly outdrew Obama and would have captured the nomination easily.

The lesson is clear: Being a woman is not a handicap in running for president. It is, rather, a priceless asset. It is not, however, enough by itself to assure victory."

 

You don't have to be political to realize that the characterization of Barack Obama as a 'Muslim Male Extremist' exemplifies what is wrong with America today. I'm not sure whether it's the education system that failed in the last half of the 20th century, or if there's just a general dumbing down of the population due to an embarassment of riches.

I'm not really a huge Obama fan myself, but to suggest that he has ideological ties to the butchers who perpetrated the mass murders mentioned in that email is to betray a level of stupidity that's difficult to believe.

 

McCain Gaining Support of Conservatives

By: Ronald Kessler

"John McCain is making progress in wooing the center-right coalition, key conservative leaders Dave Keene and Grover Norquist tell Newsmax.

“McCain is gaining more support among conservatives,” says Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “He is generally moving in the right direction. He came and spoke to the National Rifle Association board meeting. Interestingly, President Bush never did that in eight years. McCain came and spoke to the Conservative Political Action Committee conference this year. Bush only did that in his final year in office.”

The McCain campaign regularly sends a representative to the off-the-record Wednesday meeting of about 150 conservative leaders, Norquist says.

“I’ve been working with those guys to put everybody in touch, which will be helpful to organizing,” Norquist says. “Bush had somebody at the Wednesday meeting for two years before he ran. But that person did not participate as well as Bob Heckman of McCain’s campaign does, bringing campaign people in to talk.”

“John McCain has made some progress in his effort to attract conservatives to his cause,” says Keene, president of the 1-million-member American Conservative Union. “But,” he says, “he has yet to win the sort of enthusiastic support he’ll need before the votes are actually cast in November.”

While some conservatives voice doubts about him, “This will change to some degree as the campaign develops and McCain’s operation matures,” Keene says. “But the fact remains that the prime motivator of conservatives is probably going to continue to be not John McCain but a fear of the consequences of a Barack Obama victory.”

In particular, McCain’s “cap and trade” energy proposal, which would set a limit on greenhouse gas emissions and allow entities to buy and sell rights to emit, and his refusal so far to embrace oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Region make it “difficult for conservatives to embrace McCain as their guy, but easy to make them work overtime to defeat Obama,” Keene says.

That’s why Keene and many other conservative leaders are doing “all we can to prevent such an outcome,” says Keene, who is second vice president of the National Rifle Association. He adds, “Whether this is a difference without a distinction remains to be seen, but if history is a guide, a successful candidate has to be more than simply the alternative to someone else.”

If opposition to Obama is the chief reason to support McCain, Norquist sees no problem with it.

“McCain has lined up the I-will-never-raise-your-taxes-period position, which is not where he was when he voted against the Bush tax cuts,” Norquist says. “Now he says those were pro-growth, and they were good. That’s as close as somebody gets to saying, ‘I’m sorry, I was wrong, I’ve changed my mind.’”

In addition, says Norquist, “If you care about the Second Amendment, McCain is a vast improvement over Obama. On national security, Obama is a less serious player than McCain. If you care about taxes, McCain is all the difference in the world. If you care about social conservative issues, the next president could replace one or two Supreme Court judges. That could mean Roe v. Wade could be overturned.”

Moreover, Norquist says, “If you’re a radio talk-show host or aficionado, Obama will shut down Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity by reimposing the Fairness Doctrine. “

If Obama wins, “Talk radio is just beginning to figure out that they’re out of a job,” Norquist says. “Newsmax isn’t out of a job, but Rush Limbaugh’s literally out of a job.”"

 

WHY THE RACE IS TIED
By DICK MORRIS

"After almost six weeks of a constant Obama lead, generally in the five to seven-point range, Scott Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll records two consecutive days of a tie race (July 12-13) and a one-point Obama lead on July 14. What happened to the Democrat’s lead?

Part of the slippage is Obama’s fault and part is McCain’s gain.

Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights. In the space of a month and a half, this candidate - who we don’t really yet know very well - reversed or sharply modified his positions on at least eight key issues:

• After vowing to eschew private fundraising and take public financing, he has now refused public money.

• Once he threatened to filibuster a bill to protect telephone companies from liability for their cooperation with national security wiretaps; now he has voted for the legislation.

• Turning his back on a lifetime of support for gun control, he now recognizes a Second Amendment right to bear arms in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.

• Formerly, he told the Israeli lobby that he favored an undivided Jerusalem. Now he says he didn’t mean it.

• From a 100 percent pro-choice position, he now has migrated to expressing doubts about allowing partial-birth abortions.

• For the first time, he now speaks highly of using church-based institutions to deliver public services to the poor.

• Having based his entire campaign on withdrawal from Iraq, he now pledges to consult with the military first.

• During the primary, he backed merit pay for teachers - but before the union a few weeks ago, he opposed it.

• After specifically saying in the primaries that he disagreed with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) proposal to impose Social Security taxes on income over $200,000 and wanted to tax all income, he has now adopted the Clinton position.

Obama’s breathtaking flips and flops are materially different from McCain’s. While McCain had opposed offshore oil drilling and now supports it, the facts have obviously changed. Obama’s shifts have nothing to do with altered circumstances, just a change in the political calendar.

As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters. One wag even called him the “black Bill Clinton,” a turnaround of the “first black president” moniker that had been pinned on Bill.

Meanwhile, McCain and the Republicans have finally found an issue - oil drilling - exposing how the Democrats oppose drilling virtually anywhere that there might be recoverable oil. Not in Alaska. Not offshore. Not in shale deposits in the West. The Democratic claim that we “cannot drill our way out of the crisis in gas prices” begs the question of whether, had we drilled five years ago, we would be a lot less dependent on foreign market fluctuations.

The truth is that the Democrats put the need to mitigate climate change ahead of the imperative of holding down gasoline prices at the pump. If there was ever a fault line between elitist and populist approaches to a problem, this is it. In fact, liberals basically don’t see much wrong with $5 gas. Many have been urging a tax to achieve precisely this level, just like Europe has done for decades.

Obama said that he was unhappy that there was not a period of “gradual adjustment” to the high prices, but seems to shed few tears over the current levels. After all, if your imperative is climate change, a high gas price is worth 10 times a ratified Kyoto treaty in bringing about change.

Republicans can drive a truck through the gap between this elite opinion and the need for ordinary people to afford the journey to work in the morning. And, with a 16-state media buy, the Republican Party and the McCain campaign are doing precisely that.

If Obama softens his aversion to drilling, it may be the final straw for some of his liberal supporters. Where would they go? Nader is still a possibility. But McCain can attract liberal votes. He doesn’t need to bleed Obama only from the right. His own stands against drilling in Alaska and torture of terror suspects and for immigration reform make him suspect on the right, but quite acceptable to the left. If moderate liberals are disgusted by Obama’s obvious attempts at chicanery and repositioning, they might just cross the aisle."

 

Honey, I Shrunk the Congress!
by Chuck Norris

"I think it's time to let Congress feel our election fury this November. As reflected in the latest Rasmussen Reports, "Just 9 percent (of Americans) say Congress is doing a good or excellent job." It is the first single-digit approval rating for Congress in Rasmussen's history, and it makes Bush's 30 percent approval rating seem like a stat to boast. The study went on to explain: "Just 12 percent 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 percent to 13 percent throughout 2008."

Even The Associated Press reported last week, in the story "Congress mostly going through the motions for now," that "some fights of the 110th Congress have lost their oomph in the waning months before the November elections, with both parties content to run out the clock on messy matters."

If members of Congress are not relevant or improving Americans' lives, why do we elect and re-elect them into office?!

If you ever have heard the saying "too many cooks in the kitchen," then you know how I feel about Congress. We have more representatives than we need and even many more than the Constitution requires. What many might not realize is that there is nothing ultimately sacred about the present number of people we have in the House of Representatives. Actually, the proper number of representatives from each state has been debated since our Founders' time. The Constitution endeavors to assure fairness and equity by requiring each state to have at least one representative, two senators and representation in the Electoral College. (At the other extreme, it states, "The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand.") So why not go with the fewest number allowed? It seems to me that in our day, in both House and Senate, fewer representatives by area would be more reasonable and effective than more representatives by population.

The current numbers in the House are stacked in discriminatory ways. For example, California has a large liberal voice with its 53 representatives. How fair is that for smaller, more conservative states that have between one and five representatives in the House? I believe just as we have one governor per state, we should consider reducing Congress to one representative and two senators per state (the minimum the Constitution requires). If one representative works for Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming, why can't it work for the rest of the states? Here's a movie we all can star in: "Honey, I Shrunk the Congress!"

I agree with the rationale of James Madison, a member of the Continental Congress and our fourth president, who advocated keeping the number of representatives within limits:

"Nothing can be more fallacious, than to found our political calculations on arithmetical principles. Sixty or seventy men, may be more properly trusted with a given degree of power, than six or seven. But it does not follow, that six or seven hundred would be proportionally a better depositary. And if we carry on the supposition to six or seven thousand, the whole reasoning ought to be reversed."

If we follow Madison's advice and have fewer representatives, then they couldn't put the blame for their incompetence upon other members of Congress. There would be less gridlock. They probably would get more done. Plus financially speaking, reducing Congress would save us at least $200 million, if you consider all their staff, overhead, travel, pension plans and other perks. And if we didn't like how the few represented us, we would have an easier time correcting their voices or disposing of them. Just a thought.

Bottom line: It is "we the People" who have power over the government, not them over us. They are called to protect our pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, not vice versa. And if they don't, the Declaration of Independence states, in no uncertain terms, that we are "to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for (our) future Security." It's time to replace most members of Congress with "new Guards" who do the following:

-- Uphold the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

-- Protect Americans' inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

-- Promote less government.

-- Fight for fewer taxes.

-- Demand balanced budgets.

-- Secure our borders.

-- Reduce our national deficit, debts and dependence upon other nations.

Disappointment with modern-day government and the preservation of our Founders' America is exactly why I've just completed my book "Black Belt Patriotism," which you can pre-order now on Amazon.com. It will be released in September through Regnery Publishing. It is my critique of what is destroying our country and how we can rebuild it and restore the American dream. I wrote the book because, as that famous "Network" line goes, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!""

 

Agree, how about

 

Power is of God. Before this world seemed to intervene, you shared power with God as an equal. This world [think: weirld] is built on the idea of not sharing...anything! Is that not weird? The ideas the weird is built on are made into "laws" opposed to God's. If you give power to this world's laws, if you believe in them, you will lose power as you give it, because the laws of this world state that as you give you lose what you give. You still have the power of God, only you have given your power to laws which seem to rob you of it. Now, if you give to God what is God's, and give to Ceasar what is Ceasar's, you will give power to God, and none to Ceasar. As you give power to God, you recieve power, because God shares power according to His laws. As you give power to Ceasar, you lose power, because Ceasar does not share power, according to the laws of this world. The giving of taxes to Ceasar is a symbol of giving power away, according to the laws of this world. Obviously, as you give away your *money*, you no longer have it. You are weakened by this, and Ceasar is strengthened. However, before you find yourself in a position in which it seems you must give taxes to Ceasar, you must have given your power to the laws of this world, which are contrary to God's laws. Fretting about Ceasar is a sure sign you are giving your power to Ceasar, since Ceasar could not have power unless it had been given him "from above". If you fret about Ceasar, you have forgotten that you and your power are *above* Ceasar, having made the concept of Ceasar by squandering away the power God gave you on ideas opposed to Reality. As you give instead your allegience to Reality, and the sharing of unlimited power between you and *our Father*, strength will be given you to solve problems without Ceasar and his costly services. Give your power to Ceasar and you will be "mad as hell". Give it to God and you will be made well. The choice is between imprisonment or freedom. The first point of attack is always against yourSelf. If Ceasar is attacking you, or if you feel you need to fight back against Ceasar, you have already attacked yourSelf and your power, otherwise you would not believe you need to defend yourSelf.

Jesus

 

Nice post Jesus.

 

Thank you! If taxes are an indication of time spent fretting about Ceasar, it would seem that people fret from January to May. "People" are really Sons of God, in denial of their own Identity. By the time the Son of God appears as the *son-of-man*, the damage - if any - is done, and the attack on Self is not remembered. The body is the symbol of loss of power, and vulnerability. It is a sign that the mind is setting itself up for pain. Pain is a sign that illusions reign in place of truth. Pain demonstrates that God is denied, confused with fear, percieved as mad, and seen as traitor to Himself. If pain is real, there is no God. But if God is real, there is no pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression or affect you at all. Nothing in the world has power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. Instead, you have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you percieve the harmlessness in them, they will accept your will as theirs. The world is a game the Son of God plays in which Identity can be denied and alternatives can be experienced. When he accepts his Identity, its "game over". Till then, he will not escape the madness which induces this wierd, unnatural and ghostly thought [think: the Weirld] that mocks creation and that laughs at God. Deny your own Identity, and you assail the universe alone, without a friend, a tiny particle of dust against the legions of your enemies. Deny your own Identity, and look on evil, sin and death, and watch despair snatch from your fingers every scrap of hope, leaving you nothing but the wish to die. Deny your own Identity, and watch Chuck Norris take you down. But what is Chuck Norris? What is a strong body? Strong weakness? Weak strength? These are meaningless oxymorons. Chuck is harmless to a Son of God. He attacks only his own mind. Chuck would be lucky to snatch a pepple from the hand of the Son of God...ect.

Jesus