John McCain and Sarah Palin: The Maverick White House

Before Hurricane Gustav blew into the U.S. late this weekend, a storm had already swept across the country: Sarah Palin for VP. Yes, John McCain showed us all that he is still his own man, and could pull a few Maverick rabbits out of his hat. Sure..he could have gone with Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. They were logical choices. Pretty popular within the party and could possibly pull in a state or two. But they weren't very exciting and may not attract independents. Then again, McCain could have taken Joe Lieberman. That would have satisfied moderates, but he surely would have lost part of his base.

Little did most of the country know, that there was a perfect choice right under our noses: Sarah Palin. Yes, Sarah Palin. Woman? check. Conservative? check. Reformer? check. Young but still experienced? check. Knowledgable on oil/energy issues? check. A popular Governor? check.

Sarah Palin is the game-changing pick the McCain ticket needed. Suddenly, the attention is off of Obama and on the McCain ticket. Suddenly, McCain looks like the one bringing something new to the table. Obama chose a Washington insider to serve as his attack dog in Joe Biden. Someone who has been a Senator since 1972 to do his dirty work for him. Obama passed over the logical choice in Hillary Clinton because his own ego would not allow him to share the spotlight.

McCain realized something very important: woman are ready to have their voice heard in the election. They saw in Hillary Clinton what could be the first woman President. Not every woman was for Hillary, but even those who weren't were enamored at having a woman so close to being President. Obama should have realized this, and perhaps he does, and put Hillary on the ticket. Instead, he chose someone who received 9,000 votes in the primaries, as opposed to Hillary's 18 millions.

McCain now picks a woman who hunts, fishes, governs, rides a motorcycle, and is a mother of five. Did I mention she is easy on the eyes? McCain found the warmness in Palin, to balance out his often perceived "tough" mentality. He chose Palin to be his ultimate successor. He chose someone who is seen as a female version of himself. Someone who challenges the status quo. Someone who bucks the system when she needs to.

This is definitely a historical election. Obama's charges of McCain being "more of the same" should be laughed at now. A McCain/Palin ticket is far more game changing than the Obama/Biden ticket. Obama is now the one side stepping questions and changing policies daily. He is also the one who made the traditional safe VP pick.

McCain was true to his Maverick moniker, and rolled the dice on the most shocking VP choice in my lifetime. This November, America can have Change and Experience at the same time, and it's under the McCain/Palin banner.

Obama and Abortion, Infanticide

Fighting on the fringe with a handful of liberals is one thing, but consider his position on an issue that passed both houses of Congress unanimously in 2002. That bill was the Born Alive Infants Protection Act.

During the partial-birth abortion debate, Congress heard testimony about babies that had survived attempted late-term abortions. Nurses testified that these preterm living, breathing babies were being thrown into medical waste bins to die or being "terminated" outside the womb.

With the baby now completely separated from the mother, it was impossible to argue that the health or life of the mother was in jeopardy by giving her baby appropriate medical treatment. The act simply prohibited the killing of a baby born alive.

To address the concerns of pro-choice lawmakers, the bill included language that said nothing "shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand or contract any legal status or legal right" of the baby. In other words, the bill wasn't intruding on Roe v. Wade.

Who would oppose a bill that said you couldn't kill a baby who was born? Not Kennedy, Boxer or Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not even the hard-core National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

Obama, however, is another story. The year after the Born Alive Infants Protection Act became federal law in 2002, identical language was considered in a committee of the Illinois Senate. It was defeated with the committee's chairman, Obama, leading the opposition.

Let's be clear about what Obama did, once in 2003 and twice before that. He effectively voted for infanticide. He voted to allow doctors to deny medically appropriate treatment or, worse yet, actively kill a completely delivered living baby.

How could someone possibly justify such a vote? In March 2001, Obama was the sole speaker in opposition to the bill on the floor of the Illinois Senate. He said: "We're saying they are persons entitled to the kinds of protections provided to a child, a 9-month child delivered to term. I mean, it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal-protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child."

So according to Obama, "they," babies who survive abortions or any other preterm newborns, should be permitted to be killed because giving legal protection to preterm newborns would have the effect of banning all abortions.

Justifying the killing of newborn babies is deeply troubling, but just as striking is his rigid adherence to doctrinaire liberalism. Apparently, the "audacity of hope" is limited only to those babies born at full term and beyond.

Worse, given his support for late-term partial-birth abortions that supporters argued were necessary to end the life of genetically imperfect children, it may be more accurate to say the audacity of hope applies only to those babies born healthy at full term.



INFANTICIDE: Is this the kind of CHANGE you believe in?

The Latest McCain Ads

Ready to Tax...not ready to lead.


The Taxman Cometh:

Quote of the Day

John McCain on Barack Obama:

"Government is too big, he wants to grow it. Taxes are too high, he wants to raise them," McCain said. "Congress spends too much and he proposes more. We need more energy and he's against producing it. We're finally winning in Iraq, and he wants to forfeit."

Exxon and Obama-The REAL Power Couple

Once again Obama is trying to mislead the American people. Read this article from ABC News:

Exxon [Hearts] Obama
August 07, 2008 4:02 PM

As we close up a week wherein Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, on the stump and in a TV ad accused rival Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., of being "in the pocket of big oil," and doing the industry's bidding -- not to mention a week during which the Democratic National Committee launched an Exxon-McCain '08 website to drive home this Democratic talking point -- the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics points out that the issue is a bit more complicated than it first would appear.

McCain has received three times more money from the oil industry in general -- $1.3 million for McCain compared to approximately $394,000 for Obama. But that said, Obama has received more campaign cash than McCain has from the employees of some of the biggest oil companies -- Exxon, Chevron and BP.

This might seem to complicate Obama's continual use of Exxon-Mobil on the stump.


Based on data downloaded electronically from the Federal Election Commission on July 29, 2008, reports CRP: "Through June, Exxon employees have given Obama $42,100 to McCain's $35,166. Chevron favors Obama $35,157 to $28,500, and Obama edges out McCain with BP $16,046 vs. $11,500."

McCain himself has tried to push back against the Obama charge, telling votes at a town hall in Lima, Ohio, today, that he "spoke up against the Administration and Congress and Senator Obama when they gave us an energy bill with more giveaways to Big Oil and really no solution to our energy problems," and Obama did not.

Discussing the 2005 energy bill, which passed the Senate overwhelmingly, McCain said "I think Senator Obama might be a little bit confused. Yesterday, he accused me of having President Bush's policies on energy. That's odd because he voted for the President's energy bill and I voted against it. I voted against it, had $2.8 billion in corporate welfare to Big Oil companies, and they're already making record profits, as you know. Senator Obama voted for that bill and its Big Oil giveaways. I know he hasn't been in the Senate that long, but even in the real world, voting for something means you support it and voting against something means you oppose it."

The Obama campaign disputes that the bill was "the president's" energy bill, and in Lansing told voters that McCain voted "against an energy bill that – while far from perfect – represented the largest investment in renewable sources of energy in the history of this country."


POLITICAL POINTS NOTE:
Obama in the pocket of the big oil companies. THAT'S the REAL Obama.

Obama Flip Flops....AGAIN

Emergency now, but not then?

Sen. Barack Obama’s new energy plan released on Aug. 4, 2008, includes a curious short-term attempt to relieve high gas prices by tapping into the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

It’s curious because a month ago Obama balked at just such a proposal.

“I do not believe that we should use the strategic oil reserves at this point,” Obama said in a press conference in St. Louis on July 7. “...The strategic oil reserve, I think, has to be reserved for a genuine emergency. You have a situation, let’s say, where there was a major oil facility in Saudi Arabia that was destroyed as a consequence of terrorist acts, and you suddenly had huge amounts of oil taken out of the world market. We wouldn’t just be seeing $4-a-gallon oil. We could see a situation where entire sectors of the country had no oil to function at all. And that’s what the strategic oil reserve has to be for.”

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was created in response to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74. According to the Department of Energy Web site, the SPR’s stockpile of 707-million barrels of oil — kept in subterranean caverns in Texas and Louisiana — “provides the president with a powerful response option should a disruption in commercial oil supplies threaten the U.S. economy.” It was last tapped after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In his “New Energy for America” speech at Michigan State University on Aug. 4, Obama talked at length about his long-term plan to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, but as one of his short-term solutions, he said, “We should sell 70-million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve for less expensive crude, which in the past has lowered gas prices within two weeks.”

In the eight-page written platform that accompanied his speech, the plan is described as “releasing light oil from the SPR now and replacing it later with heavier crude more suited to our long-term needs.”

“This is similar to the approach that President Clinton and Secretary Richardson took in 2000, when their swap helped bring down the price of oil by 18.7 percent,” said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor. “It is distinct from a straight sale of oil from the SPR, which is limited under current law to a 5-million barrel test sale and emergency or ‘anticipatory’ emergency instances of supply disruption.”

Vietor told PolitiFact that Obama’s belief has always been “that the president should retain his discretionary authority to conduct exchanges or swaps from the SPR as warranted by circumstances.”

So what are those circumstances? According to the campaign, “Barack Obama believes the doubling of oil prices in the past year is a crisis for millions of Americans and the transfer of wealth to oil producing countries, many of them hostile to our interests, is a threat to our national security.”

The McCain campaign quickly accused Obama of election-year pandering, saying nothing had changed since Obama rejected the idea a month earlier.

Indeed, the McCain campaign is correct that there is a hole in Obama's logic that gas prices have recently caused such an emergency. The price of gas was actually substantially higher on July 7 when Obama dismissed the idea of tapping the reserve. Then, the national average for a gallon of gas was $4.108, less than a penny off the all-time high of $4.114 on July 14.

Back on July 7, Obama set the bar at “genuine emergency,” and then cited an example of a catastrophic disruption in supply. Obama is now describing the high price of gas as a crisis and a threat to national security. But we fail to see how that’s any different than was the case a month ago — when the price of gas was 24 cents a gallon higher — when Obama dismissed it.

We rate Obama’s proposal a Full Flop.

VA Congressman Strong Candidate for VP

Eric Cantor, Republican Congressman for Virginia, is being considered by the McCain Camp for Vice President. Cantor, who is Jewish, is a well liked leader in VA, as well as with conservatives and people in the Jewish community. At 45 years of age, he is also a young pick (two years younger than Obama) but is still experienced as a 4 term Congressman for a large population sector in the state.

Cantor is also a fundraising machine for the GOP and could help McCain with the Jewish community in Florida. With Cantor and Lieberman at his side, McCain could bring in huge numbers within the Jewish community.

Cantor may not be selected, but he is still an interesting option. VP or not, expect to see Cantor out and about with McCain as much as possible from this day foward.

written by
Lee Vogler

McCain and Obama Dead Even in New Polls

The short-lived bounce of Barack Obama's European tour is gone, and the presidential contest between Obama and John McCain has settled back down to a dead-heat, in the measure of the daily tracking surveys of the Gallup Poll.

The three-day average of surveys run Wednesday through Friday found 44 percent of those surveyed supporting Obama, the Democratic junior senator from Illinois, and 44 percent supporting McCain, the Republican senior senator from Arizona.

The Gallup track, which has portrayed a virtual tie between the two at many junctures since March, had found a 9-point advantage for Obama in the days following all of the attention that he received with his march across Western Europe.

"But that bounce disappeared almost as quickly as it emerged,'' Gallup's Jeff Jones reports.

"More broadly, Obama has enjoyed an average 3-point advantage since clinching the Democratic nomination in early June,'' Jones notes. But "for the moment, McCain has erased that small advantage.'' Take a look at the longer-range tracking of McCain and Obama here.)

McCain also aired a series of attacks against Obama after that trip - with television ads potaaying Obama as an empty "celebrity'' and accusing Obama of playing basketball instead of visiting wounded American soldiers (Obama has called the McCain campaigns comparison of him with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton a "cynical'' distraction from the real issues of the contest, and Obama did visit troops in Kuwait, where he also played basketball, but refrained from visiting a military hospital in Germany when the military objected to the potential for politicizing it - McCain, for his part, maintained that if the Pentagon had attempted to stop him from visiting the soldiers, there would have been "a seismic event.'')

So the two may have accomplished at least this: Confirming the old Newtonian science of political dynamics --- for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, for every European tour, perhaps, a bounce in the polls, for every run of attack ads, for sure, a slide in the polls. In the weeks ahead, McCain and Obama will find yet more opportunity to influence their own standing: The running- mate picks.