In this Washington Times article, Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli points out something I’ve been saying all along, namely, that issues matter:

“We’d gotten into this mind-set that 2008 would be a good year for the Democrats,” said Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli. “What this shows is that issues still matter.”

Mr. Ciruli isn’t the only pollster to notice a change in attitude:

“The results show increased support for additional drilling, which McCain supports and Obama opposes,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Hamden, CT, which conducted the survey with the Wall Street Journal and Washingtonpost.com. (continue reading post »)

According to WND’s Aaron Klein, Sen. Obama’s camapaign staff plastered the barricades at Jerusalem’s Western Wall with campaign signs:

Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign plastered the entrance to the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, with official campaign posters, WND has learned.

Jerusalem Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld confirmed to WND posters that adorned police barricades erected at the Western Wall plaza for Obama’s visit were distributed by the presidential candidate’s campaign.

“These posters were his campaign and not the doing of the police,” said Rosenfeld, whose police department coordinated security and provided protection for Obama’s visit today to the holy site.

Asked if it was traditional practice for politicians visiting the Western Wall to bring along posters or campaign materials, Rosenfeld replied, “No.”

This is disgusting behavior. Treating one of the world’s holiest sites as a campaign site isn’t acceptable. It’s an exercise in elitism of unprecedented proportions. We’ve known for quite some time that Sen. Obama has a ‘the world revolves around me’ attitude. (continue reading post »)

Several portions of Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin caught my attention. Here’s the first thing he said that caught my attention:

The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold.

But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. “There is only one possibility,” he said. “For us to stand together united until this battle is won…The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty…People of the world, look at Berlin!”

Isn’t it odd to hear Sen. Obama talk about “in the darkest hours”, Berliners “kept the flame of hope burning” just after visiting Iraq, which Sen. Obama voted to abandon in their darkest hour?

The man who talks about hope and change voted to cut off funding for the troops, which would’ve handed Iraq to AQI’s terrorists and Iranian-funded militias. Ironic doesn’t begin to describe it. (continue reading post »)

Note the following exchange that occurred when ABC’s Terry Moran interviewed Sen. Obama :

Moran asked what Iraq would look like now if Obama’s policy of withdrawing in the face of the violence had been implemented.

“That is a hard thing to speculate,” Obama said, “The Sunnis might have made the same decisions at that time. The Shii’as might have made some similar decisions based on political calculation. There was ethnic cleansing in Baghdad that actually took the violence level down. And so, as I said before. Nobody has a crystal ball. If we did you just hire the guy with the crystal ball.”

I haven’t seen the original transcript, so this is coming via Jake Tapper of ABC blogs Political Punch.

Is the senator really going this far out of his way to avoid saying the surge was a success that he wants to credit ethnic cleansing for a 90% reduction in violence?

Cross posted at The Gentle Cricket

Hannity: Senator, I know because everywhere I go, people talk to me about the high price of gasoline and the impact that it’s having on their lives, the economy. Most Americans are angry when they find out that we have more resources here in the United States that we’re not tapping into. I’ve even argued that we have a clear and present danger facing the United States, the possibility of an energy war. Am I overstating the case?
McCain: No. We’re sending $700 billion a year overseas to countries that don’t like us very much. Some of that money ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations. It’s one of the greatest transfers in wealth in history and I think you are exactly right on the mark when you say that Americans are starting to figure things out. Of course we have to drill offshore. Of course we have to exploit every means we have of bridging this gap while we make the transition to energy independence. I viewed a new automobile the other day, the Volt. I pray it succeeds. It could revolutionize the auto industry and I also want to mention that we all love wind, tide, solar, all of that, nuclear power…nuclear power. The French can build a nuclear power plant in five years. We should build 45 nuclear power plants by 2030 and that will create 700,000 new jobs and it’s clean.
Sen. Obama opposes offshore drilling. He opposes nuclear. He opposes a gas tax holiday. He opposes giving an award for a real battery-driven car. So he, uh… (continue reading post »)

Sen. Obama has a hawkishness deficit because of his anti-war positions. Now he’s trying his best to erase that deficit. Whether he succeeds with that remains to be seen. One thing that I’m fairly certain of is that he won’t appear presidential if he insists on raiding Pakistan:

Obama has been careful to fortify these images with words: On Sunday, the Illinois senator urged the Bush administration to move more troops into Afghanistan as soon as possible during an appearance on “Face The Nation.” He also reiterated his willingness to authorize unilateral U.S. action against terrorist targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas if the Pakistani government will not act.

The easiest way to give terrorists control of a nuclear nation is to invade Pakistan. That alone will topple the Pakistani government and put it into the hands of people charitably described as sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qa’ida. I don’t doubt that Sen. Obama thinks that this makes him look macho. The reality is that this attack policy is risky, carrying too little reward and too much potential danger. (continue reading post »)

The notion that the Agenda Media or other branches of the Dead Tree Coalition were outlets of the truth disappeared decades ago. Now there’s proof that they’ve made the final step into being an outlet for the DNC. When Obama wrote a factually inaccurate op-ed on Iraq, the NYT published it without hesitation. When John McCain submitted an op-ed rebutting Obama’s points, former Clinton speechwriter and current NY Times hatchetman David Shipley opted not to publish Sen. McCain’s op-ed.

Shipley’s delivering what he thought was a death blow turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Sen. McCain because the McCain campaign sent the op-ed and Shipley’s email to Drudge. Mr. Drudge was perfectly willing to publish it in its entirety. Here is Sen. McCain’s op-ed verbatim:

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City, actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism. (continue reading post »)

The Obamessiah has frequently mentioned the need for him to repair America’s supposedly damaged image in the world. Now we’re seeing how he plans on doing that. This article provides some insight into the Obamessiah’s healing methods:

Lest there be any illusions about the desired target audience for Obama’s trip, the foreign media, including the BBC, have been left on the Tarmac. Only American reporters are on board “Obama One” as his plane heads from one country to the next.

He will have a 45-minute meeting on Saturday morning with Gordon Brown followed by a press conference, which Obama will conduct on his own outside Downing Street in a blatant departure from the usual protocol.

There will be no Brown at his side to spoil the No 10 backdrop for American voters, even though it would be unthinkable for a British prime minister to appear in the White House Rose Garden without the president. (continue reading post »)

According to Ralph Peters’ latest NY Post column, al Qa’ida’s stock is about to bottom out. Col. Peters doesn’t think it’ll recover, either. Here’s his harshest words, directed at the Democrats, though he doesn’t do it by name:

The partisan hacks who insisted that Iraq was a distraction from fighting al Qaeda have missed the situation’s irony: Things are getting worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan not because our attention was elsewhere, but because al Qaeda has been driven from the Arab world, with nowhere else to go. Al Qaeda isn’t fighting to revive the Caliphate these days. It’s fighting for its life.

I’ll remind everyone that Ralph Peters isn’t a pro-Bush shill. This is simply his honest opinion on the trouble al-Qa’ida is in. That he’s saying that al-Qa’ida is fighting for its life is pretty dramatic. Col. Peters isn’t given to making such statements very often.

Where do Osama & Co. stand today? They’re not welcome in a single Arab country. The Saudi royals not only cut off their funding, but cracked down hard within the kingdom. A few countries, such as Yemen, tolerate radicals out in the boonies but they won’t let al Qaeda in. Osama’s reps couldn’t even get extended-stay rooms in Somalia, beyond the borders of the Arab world. (continue reading post »)

Senator McCain, Words don’t do justice to the admiration I have for your heroism, sacrifice and steadfastness while you were imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton. i can’t even begin to understand what that ordeal was like. I’m impressed by the fact that you not only survived that ordeal but that you then served our nation in such an honorable way.

During your time in the Senate, military officials knew that they could count on you to support them when they told you about their needs, whether that need was about a new jet, a new weapons system or in straightening out turf wars within the Pentagon.

We also know that you haven’t been a yes man for the military. When you saw this war going badly, you spoke out, telling the nation that you didn’t have confidence in Donald Rumsfeld or his plan for victory. Your championing the Surge was instrumental in turning the tide in Iraq.

While we know that you didn’t design the plan, we know that youdefended the plan when your opponent and others were saying the strategy was doomed for failure. Thanks to your steadfastness, the plan was given time to succeed. And succeed it has, possibly beyond our highest expectations.

In short, you’ve led while others adopted a defeatist attitude.

While the war turned around, the economy soured. The biggest hindrance to America’s prosperity are high gas prices. Now is the time to focus like a laser beam on this crisis. Because some politicians refuse to let oil companies explore for oil off our coast or in the Mountain West, our nation faces a Crisis of Choice. (continue reading post »)