I just finished reading this John Podhoretz article titled ‘Coming Home’, focusing on the polling that’s now showing Republicans “coming home” this fall. What’s amazing to me is that JPod still worries that President Bush’s approval ratings rise might not be that helpful. I strongly disagree with that opinion. Here’s a JPod observation:

The key indicator that Republican voters may be returning to the fold is the change in President Bush’s approval rating. He was scoring in the low to mid-30s in early August according to all polls. Now he appears to have stabilized at a higher level, somewhere in the low 40s, a marked if not colossal shift. The primary reason for the change? An increase in support for Bush from Republicans. Late last week, pollster Scott Rasmussen noted: “Eighty-five percent of Republicans now offer their approval. At its low point earlier in the year, just 66 percent of the GOP faithful approved of his job performance.”

You’d think that a 20 point jump would bring a smile to the GOP faithfuls’ faces. Mr. Podhoretz sees a dark cloud in that sky:

“The improvement in Bush’s ratings appears to result from a more positive evaluation of him from all party groups, rather than a short-term shift in more basic party loyalties,” writes Joseph Carroll of Gallup. That may be nice for him, but when it comes to the new structure of American politics, Bush doesn’t need support from voters “of all party groups.”

I’d agree with Mr. Podhoretz in any other year but I won’t this year because I think the realignment we saw in 2004 is continuing this year. The reality is that Democrats just aren’t taken seriously on national security issues. (continue reading post »)

When I read this article, I had to ask myself if we’re seeing the start of a turnaround. Here’s what I’m talking about:

Days after President Bush flew into the state and complimented U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, the congresswoman got some more love, this time from GOP activists at a rally Saturday. It was one of the bright spots for Harris, whom party leaders had previously tried to force out of the U.S. Senate race before she won the GOP primary. She will face Democrat incumbent Bill Nelson in the November election.
State party Chair Carole Jean Jordan called Harris a hero, a term many Republicans used after Harris, as secretary of state in 2000, oversaw Bush’s disputed 537-vote victory. “Katherine has overcome tough times. She’s a gutsy lady and we love her,” said Jordan, who tried to get Harris out of the race before the primary. The women hugged before Harris spoke.

Make no mistake about this: Florida is almost as solid a red state as Texas is. If Republicans decide that they can’t let Bill Nelson return to Washington, then this race can turn. Polls showing Nelson leading Katherine Harris by 30 points likely were accurate. There’s no doubt that Republicans prefered another option. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the GOP faithful pulled together and said that they’d prefer Katherine Harris over Bill Nelson. If the GOP machine gets behind Harris’ campaign, this race can tighten up in a hurry.

Technorati Tags: Election 2006, Katherine Harris, Bill Nelson, Florida

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

There aren’t many press releases sent out on weekends as a rule. This Sunday was different, with the ‘Three-headed Democratic Monster’ each, issuing, statements. Here’s a taste of Harry Reid’s statement:

“Once again, the American people have learned that the Bush Administration has not been honest with them about the war in Iraq. Press reports say our nation’s intelligence services have confirmed that President Bush’s repeated missteps in Iraq and his stubborn refusal to change course have made America less safe. No election-year White House PR campaign can hide this truth. It is crystal clear that America’s security demands we change course in Iraq. The war in Iraq is now in its fourth year and Congress has yet to ask the tough questions and get the honest answers our nation’s security demands. Tomorrow, that will change. With the Democratic Policy Committee’s hearings into the conduct of the war in Iraq, we will finally take America in a new direction.”

Democrats insist that this NIE proves their case that the Bush administration’s policies have made us less safe than we should be but how credible is this information? Let’s consider that the NIE is a classified document, meaning that someone with an anti-Bush agenda leaked this information. It’s worth remembering another leak of NIE information claiming that the Bush administration cherry-picked intelligence to lie us into war. When that NIE was declassified, it was clear that the leaker was the one who cherry-picked the information.

Let’s next look at Reid’s statement that “It is crystal clear that America’s security demands we change course in Iraq.” Why is it “crystal clear” that present Bush administration policy must be changed to protect America? The fact that we’ve gone 5 years without getting attacked again by terrorists? Or has America’s being in Iraq prevented us from aggressively interrogating AQ terrorists which thwarted other terrorist attacks? (continue reading post »)

I just saw an NY Times article on RCP talking about MN-6, my home district. The author, Charlie Baxter, titled the article A Campaign in Crisis Mode. The article would be blank if not for the hyperventillating progressivism found in the article. Here’s a taste of Mr. Baxter’s liberalism:

Compared to Ms. Bachmann, a suburban radical of an increasingly familiar sort, Patty Wetterling seems rather tame and pleasant and sensible, conservative, that is. In the view of Ms. Wetterling (who came into local prominence when her son was abducted at gunpoint and disappeared in 1989) we are not in the end times but in a stable world shaped by well-financed public education, Social Security, benefits for veterans, a decent respect for the opinions of others, a reluctance to engage in foreign adventures, and balanced budgets.

I can’t believe that people get paid for writing this type of trash. Mr. Baxter spins Patty Wetterling’s radical anti-war views into her being reluctant “to engage in foreign adventures.” That isn’t sensible policy; it’s stupid policy. As Sen. Bachmann said in Monday’s debate, the “terrorists have declared their intentions and they haven’t changed.” What’s so virtuous about being reluctant to kill terrorists? What’s so virtuous about ignoring Ahmadinejad or Chavez?

Somewhat predictably, she draws her support largely from evangelicals. The centrist Republicans I know, those few who are still around, tend to regard her as superficial. President Bush visited Wayzata, Minneapolis’s most affluent suburb (though not in the Sixth District) to speak on her behalf. The two are quite in sync.

I hate breaking this to Mr. Baxter but Central Minnesota folks are centered enough to know that people whose views are shaped by religion are quite sane. It’s raging secularists like himself that we worry about. (continue reading post »)

The Washington Times’s Don Lambro wrote that the Gallup generic ballot question shows Democrats and Republicans tied at 48%. Simply put, that usually means that Republicans are in a strong position. Based on what I’ve seen, I’d say that this year is no different than other years. Since the polling group was of 1,003 adults, that usually means it favors Republicans.

Democratic strategists dismiss Gallup’s survey and other polls showing a similar tightening of the election, but some acknowledge that Republicans’ numbers were helped by President Bush’s higher job-approval scores, now at 44 percent, and his recent speeches highlighting the war on terrorism and its connection to the ongoing conflict in Iraq. “Nobody believes those numbers. I don’t think anybody in the country believes the generic party preference is even right now,” said Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network.

I agree with Mr. Rosenberg that nobody believes “those numbers” but I will tell him that I’ve been seeing telltale signs that this election has reached a tipping point and it isn’t in the Democrats’ favor. Let me explain.

Boston is all abuzz over Chavez’s UN speech and his connections to Bill Delahunt and global terrorism. What’s the likelihood that will help Delahunt this November? Even the Boston Herald chastised Delahunt. (continue reading post »)

As they say in New York, that’s chutzpah.

AP reports: “Mexican President Vicente Fox said Friday that violence was a problem on both sides of the border and that U.S. officials need to work on their own rising crime rates.”

Thanks for the advice, Vinny. At least we don’t have pueblos controlled by druglords, existing as so-called “no man’s lands,” which Mexico’s police seem helpless to deal with. But he’s right: America can do better, and the best thing to do is strictly enforce our borders and stop the flood of illegal aliens pouring in from Mexico, many of which end up adding to the crime on our streets or taking space in our jails. Just the facts.

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Mucho mas on crime and immigration: Click here and scroll

“I have recently been very critical of Governor Schwarzenegger’s veer to the left, most specifically his deals with Democrats on hiking the minimum wage, putting price controls on pharmaceuticals and punishing California businesses in the name of reducing ‘greenhouse’ gases. These are all awful policies which in both the short and long run hurt California’s economy, its businesses and its citizens. The Governor was just flat out wrong to embrace any of them, and got terrible guidance from his staff on these matters.”

This is crunch time — 45 days to the election. The GOP nominee for Governor, is playing with the Democrats to get re-elected. No one, maybe not even Arnold, knows how he will govern over the next four years. We do know that Angelides is a MoveOn.org radical, having no redeeming values to the families and businesses of California. It is not enough for Arnold to win, we need real Republicans as Lt. Governor, Controller, Secretary of State, Attorney General and Insurance Commissioner. We need to pick up at least two Assembly and one State Senate seat. This can happen, with an Arnold landslide. We already know there will be a low voter turnout. Our folks need to turn out. The unions are spending $25 million for TV ads and turn out–we need to match them.

An Arnold victory north of 10 points will bring in a couple of our nominees–20 points like Davis over Lungren in 1998, will bring in the whole group. If we want to rebuild the California Republican Party, we need Chuck, Tom, Tony, Steve and Bruce…they will be the base of a new GOP. Bill Saracino and I have been friends for more than 40 years, I trust him. This piece is one of his most penetrating and inspiring.

—

Steve Frank is the publisher of California Political News and Views and a Senior Contributor to CaliforniaConservative.org. He is also a consultant currently working on gambling issues and advising other consultants on policy and coalition building.

Read more of his work here or at his blog.

Full article by Saracino follows (continue reading post »)

RCP just posted a rough transcript of Bill Clinton’s interview on FNS. It isn’t pretty. Let’s take a peek at the most noteworthy exchanges:

CLINTON: “OK, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this…arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 911 commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden.”

As LFR’s owner, I’m offering the first person to tell me when a Republican accused President Clinton of being obsessed with bin Laden a mystery prize of incredible worth. I’ve paid a fair amount of attention to Clinton and I’ve never heard anyone say he was obsessed with bin Laden while he was president. There isn’t a Republican that didn’t accuse him of having an obsession but it wasn’t about bin Laden.

“They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in Black Hawk Down and I refused to do it and stayed 6 months and had an orderly transfer to the UN.”

As I’ve talked about before, the ‘they’ he’s refering to is John Murtha. (continue reading post »)

Pick your issue, from the environment to “sexual harassment,” to the treatment of captured terrorists, and the liberal take on it is guaranteed to be wrong on every front. First, the concerns expressed by the left are invariably only a facade, intended to exploit the situation in an effort to advance the cause of liberalism. Secondly, and more significantly, liberal involvement will almost exclusively worsen the problem about which the left claims to be concerned.

On the topic of “sexual harassment,” the left incessantly lauded itself as a champion of the plight of women at the hands of brutish men, until the brutish “man” in question was the sniveling philandering Democrat President whom they believed to be their secular messiah.

Suddenly, “sex” was no longer sex, and “harassment,” even to the point of criminal assault and intimidation, was no longer any indictment of the perpetrator. In essence, liberals were proving that these issues were of concern to them only insofar as they could be used to bludgeon their political opposition into compliance and retreat.

Otherwise, whether the issue is that of an innocent receptionist who is affronted by the then governor of Arkansas exposing himself to her and thereafter seeking to bully her into silence, or the genocide of hundreds of thousands of helpless refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, liberals are absolutely indifferent to it. Yet such indifference may be the far lesser of two evils.

Consider all of their recent caterwauling over the “plight” of the Islamist monsters being detained at Guantanamo, and how liberal Democrats from both parties contend that the present controversy might ostensibly yield an adverse effect on the Geneva Convention.

Just as with every other issue they embrace, the actual result promises to be incalculable damage to the significance of that treaty. (continue reading post »)

That’s the conclusion I got from this story. His defenselessness became apparent when Clinton supposedly went ballistic on the issue of capturing bin Laden. Here’s what’s being reported on his diatribe:

In a heated interview to be aired on Sunday on “Fox News Sunday,” the former Democratic president defended the steps he took after al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and faulted “right-wingers” for their criticism of his efforts to capture Osama bin Laden.

“But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now,” Clinton said when asked whether he had failed to fully anticipate bin Laden’s danger. “They had eight months to try, they did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed.”

The September 11 attacks occurred almost eight months after President George W. Bush succeeded Clinton in January 2001. “I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him,” Clinton said.

Mr. Clinton, They had 8 months, you had 8 years to get him. This diatribe is Clinton showing that he’s worried about being seen as ineffective in his efforts dealing with terrorists. He’s justified in being worried because he was ineffective in dealing with terrorists. (Hint to the Clintons: Reality shapes perception more than spin.) Let me refer to a Steve Emerson article from Sept. 1996:

And what has the Clinton administration done to combat radical Islamic groups operating in the U.S.? Very little. In January 1995 Mr. Clinton issued an executive order to freeze the assets of 12 terrorist groups. Investigators found terrorist front groups operating in more than a dozen states, with assets worth tens of millions of dollars. But the Treasury Department has seized only $800,000, from those with the most blatant links to terrorist activity: WISE; Musa Marzuk, the Hamas leader arrested last year by alert field agents at New York’s JFK Airport; and Mohammad Salah, a Palestinian-American convicted by an Israeli court of receiving U.S. funds to attack Israelis. These funds were seized, according to one official, because “their existence had notoriously come to the government’s attention and thus it was forced to seize the money. We didn’t go out and look for it, that’s for sure.It was shoved in our faces.”

(continue reading post »)