Scrappy Conservatives

We have heard many people in the MSM hoot and hollar about George Allen for his "Maccacca" comment. Where is the outrage over Robert Byrd's involvement in the KKK? Chris Matthews defended him saying "The guy is 90 give him a break." www.newsbusters.org

Do you think if that was Trent Lott or Strom Thurmond he would have the same standard? I do not. Liberal bias.

It is great that North Korea is returning to the 6 party talks to defuse their nuclear program.
www.foxnews.com

In order to ensure their cooperation we should make China keep the North inline. If they refuse or obstruct our efforts our best policy should be to boycott
all of those products we buy that say "Made in China."

Well, of course not. Not formally, but he's given them a great soundbite to help end his pathetic political career.

"You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t you get stuck in Iraq."

According to the Bill Bennett show this morning, the statement -- made to students at a Democratic rally in California yesterday -- was met by gasps and some laughter.

I don't know what to make of the mentality that would cause something like this to fly out of someone's mouth. I've never met a dumb soldier. Maybe Kerry keeps forgetting that we have an all-volunteer armed services now?

I can't wait to hear what Laura does with this....

I read this story in Foxnews.com about the increasing violence in various Mexican states.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061029/wl_afp/mexicousmediaviolence_061029002941


To me it illustrates a problem with the immigration debate. Even in we get a fully manned wall or open the border up we will not solve the problem. While it is true that people leave Mexico for more money in the US; the reason is increasing violence tends to push people away. It does not matter if they are coming from Mexico, China or Africa. If we do not do something to alleviate this we will not solve the immigration problems. That is why I say we work with the Mexicans by appealing to what is in both of our interests. A secure border is in everyone's interest. We should put troops near Nuevo Laredo as well as offer the Mexicans more arms sales. With this, they can stabilize their country and we can keep our borders secure.

If you go to this link on the Blackwell Blog you can hear Ken's speech from last Wednesday when he was in town with Hugh and Dennis.

Hat tip to Townhall for this Agape Press article. Excerpt:

Although Chabot admits he believes Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion-on-demand in America, should be overturned, he says the partial-birth abortion ban is not -- despite what liberals in Congress claim -- a threat to Roe v. Wade. Rather, his legislation targets a single late-term abortion technique regarded by many pro-life opponents as particularly brutal.

The bill banning that abortion technique overwhelmingly passed both the House and Senate and was signed into law by President Bush, but has nevertheless been overturned by several federal judges. On November 8, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments from opponents of the ban, who claim it is invalid because it lacks a so-called "health exception" for mothers.

Chabot feels the court should defer to Congress's lawmaking ability in the matter. After all, he notes, he and the other members of the legislature "had extensive hearings with medical documentation, and medical testimony," and the Supreme Court generally, "as long as there's sufficient evidence, will defer to the legislative branch on something like this."

And hats off to Steve Chabot! Hey, ho, way to go Ohio!

This is a celebrity response to the deceptively written Constitutional Amendment 2.

This is a statement agreed to by all three Roman Catholic Bishops in the state of Colorado and supposedly read in every Colorado parish on Sunday. Basically it reads like this "Amendment 43 protects traditional marriage and as Catholics you should support it, so vote YES already."

This is some fresh air. I get a little tired of some of our Catholic clergy who err on the side of caution when mentioning voting. I understand and agree that they shouldn't be endorsing candidates from the pulpit. But some basically don't give any guidance on what the most important moral issues are. Can anyone say "abortion"?

Hugh Hewitt read this on his show earlier this evening and asked the question, why hasn't this been in the Colorado media? The answer is obvious -- it's against the media's biased interest in the outcome of this election. Oh -- they also hate the church, too, which makes it easier.

In my Teddy Boy post last Thursday I didn't comment a lot about the veracity of the substance of the entire thing. I mean, it's a matter of record that one of his aides beat off in front of kids(sorry, there's really not a nicer way to say it) and here's the latest on that. But I wondered about the insinuation that Ted Strickland himself bats for the other team. Is it true?

Because if it's true then though people will pretend to be outraged publicly at the Blackwell Campaign for breaking the news, they will probably privately be affected differently regarding what they do at the voting machine.

A friend pointed out that it was all revealed a few months back that Strickland got married to his current wife when he was 46 years of age and furthermore they do not live together, his wife lives in Kentucky. This same article pointed out that when directly asked if he were gay, Strickland opted for an indirect, evasive answer. This is all old news, but I missed it since I was working on Blackwell's primary and not listening to Flannery's jabs at the man.

In the interest of some equal time, here's an article where Mr. Strickland explains why he got married so late in life and never had children. Kind of.

On October 19, 2006 Anderson Cooper aired a video shot by an Iraqi Insurgent sniper of him shooting Americans. This from the same network that refused to show the beheading of Nicholas Berg because it might scapegoat Muslims. When people say their is no Liberal bias in the media, show them this. http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2006/10/why-we-aired-sniper-video.html

The San Diego Tribune has written a piece on that.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/20061021-9999-1n21tape.html

I agree with Duncan Hunter that the DOD should pull out all of CNN's imbedded reporters in Iraq.

Well....



All I can say is Bill Cunningham was having too much fun with Colmes.

I've been doing IT Consulting for manufacturers for the last 18 years, so this is kind of a big deal to me and just one more reason to vote for Ken. Strickland getting elected will be good news for Mexico, China and Singapore to name a few great places to outsource your work to avoid the high cost of taxes and pointless regulations.

---

The Ohio Manufacturers' Association
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oct. 18, 2006

COLUMBUS The Ohio Manufacturers' Association (OMA) today endorsed Ken Blackwell for Governor and issued the following statement:

The Board of the OMA made its endorsement decision based on objective criteria, which include the public statements and the records of both candidates and the Congressional voting record of Ted Strickland. The Board was heavily influenced by a National Association of Manufacturers analysis showing that Mr. Strickland voted with the manufacturers' position on important legislation only 9 percent of the time in 2003-04 and just 17 percent in 2005-06.

Manufacturing, which is the bedrock wealth generator in Ohio's economy, faces unprecedented challenges. The need for continuous investment, innovation and improvement is unrelenting. Competition is global and fierce. More than 200,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in Ohio in the last few years. While many jobs have yielded to productivity improvements that are the result of modern manufacturing, protecting Ohio's ability to make the products the world wants and needs is critical to Ohio's position as a world economic powerhouse.

Our state must have leadership that understands how critical the competitive situation is. Our Board gives more weight to actual record than to campaign rhetoric. In the case of one candidate, that record shows an unfortunate misunderstanding of what is important to the 800,000 manufacturing workers of Ohio.

The OMA Board has taken this action with full understanding that this is a challenging election for our endorsed candidate. The Board's decision to take this step on behalf of OMA member companies and their employees should be seen as a measure of the urgency of the situation we face. We need leadership determined to save industry in Ohio. In the Board's view, Ken Blackwell is the candidate who offers the best promise for such leadership.

The OMA is, of course, ready to work closely with whoever accedes to the Governor's office. With that person, the OMA is determined to keep Ohio's manufacturing core strong by building on recent reforms in areas such as tax policy, lawsuit liability and workers' compensation with focused attention to ongoing challenges in the areas of environmental regulations, energy policy and workforce development in particular.

We are prepared to thank publicly and to support candidates of either party who share our goal of fortifying the industry that is Ohio's economic driver. We are bound by our mission to support the interests of our companies and their employees.

Attachments: Strickland NAM Voting Record

Contact: Randy Leffler, 614-224-5111

Here's a little something for comic relief from "Nihilist in Golf Pants". I agree with every bit of it and it's presented with firmness but also light-heartedness. Make sure you read both "behinds" in number 8 -- I missed one of them the first time. Hilarious!

Michael Medved has a great piece on Townhall.com about what I call the "Media Meta-Message". The MMM is "everything sucks". But what most people are experiencing in their lives is "nothing's perfect, but I'm doing fine, thank you."

So he asks the question: "If our own situation seems so encouraging to most of us, how can we feel so profoundly discouraged about the nation at large?"

The answer, he says, "...involves the impact of mass media, and the news and entertainment which play a disproportionate role in shaping our sense of the world beyond our immediate surroundings."

Michael has been talking about this kind of stuff for that last 26 years and he's spot on. He details a lot of it in his book Hollywood vs. America. He has brought to light many widespread media myths such as Vietnam Vets are mostly mental cases, unmarried people have more sex than married folks, the divorce rate in America is 50% (it's closer to 30%) and the highest positions in corporate America are occupied by Republicans. We hope he continues his "cultural crusade" for the Truth for many more years.

"Keep buggering on!" was the motto of a truly great man. I'm trying to adopt his motto this election year as a Republican volunteer in the Buckeye State.

I'm resigning myself to the cold hard fact that Ken Blackwell is in trouble. He's still got a chance, but the latest poll average is not good. I thought the SurveyUSA must be off, but the latest one from CBS is no better. Another thing that isn't good is that Ohioans don't seem to be locked in to the values aspect of this race. Instead it's the slumping Ohio economy and the beleagured Taft administration. Strickland doesn't seem to have answers, but the vague "time for a change" which helped Clinton against Bush 41 seems to be catching on fro those polled.

That would explain why we're seeing economically-focused ads like this one with Rudy. Not a bad ad....



...and I agree that the man has got the economic chops. When he really shines though is when he gets to talk about moral principles.

But the fat lady hasn't even tuned up yet and this man is one heck of a campaigner. And he's not going to quit until the end. The ground war hasn't begun, and when it does "we'll fight them in the farms and in the cities" of this great state. KBO: Ken Blackwell for Ohio, Keep Buggering On!

As I read Breher Dreher's blog, et. al. I see story after story about how bad the Republicans are. Where is their indignation at the corruption of Senator Harry Reid? This is from cnn.com.

The headline says it all. "Reid used campaign funds for Christmas bonuses." He also said his lawyers approved this. Does this bother anyone? At least the group Citizens United is filing an FEC complaint.

For those of you who do not know me my name is Jonathan Iain William Carpenter. I was born on October 23, 1967 in Colchester, Essex, England. I am second generation Navy. I served from 1991-2000 until I was medically retired from the Navy. I converted to Catholicism on March 16, 1986. I hope to provide you some useful insights of how being Conservative means not being Crunchy but constantly refusing to play the game of compromise solution.

You all know I love Barone's analysis. Hope he's not too far off. Local word on the street is that the Dem's groups are fired up, but they are still jonesin for voters, the football analogy being that they "have no ground game". Here's a clip from the article:

They're more likely to prevail, if they do, by something like the narrow margins by which Republicans have prevailed in the five House elections from 1996 to 2004. By historical standards, there's been strikingly little variation in those five elections. A Democratic victory of this magnitude would represent the kind of small oscillation that was commonplace in eras when one party or the other was dominant. The difference is that, with the electorate so evenly divided, a small shift can produce changes in party control.

Made me think of his WSJ piece on the CT Senate race. There was a faint allusion to a Lieberman (knock on wood) win there; it's subscriber only, but here's a clip:

As an observant Orthodox Jew, he has consistently portrayed himself as a man of religious faith, while one-quarter of John Kerry voters in 2004 described their religion as "other" or "none." He has been a critic of vulgarity and obscenity in television programs and movies, while the Democrats enjoy massive financial and psychic support from Hollywood. He has supported school-choice measures, while one of his party's major organized constituencies is the teachers' unions. And he has been an American exceptionalist -- a believer in the idea that this is a special and specially good country -- while his party's base is increasingly made up of people with attitudes that are, in professor Samuel Huntington's term, transnational. In their view, our country is no better than any other, and in many ways it's a whole lot worse. (M. Barone WSJ, 8/10/06, A8)

...and my favorite...

The Connecticut primary reveals that the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has moved, from the lunch-bucket working class that was the dominant constituency up through the 1960s to the secular transnational professional class that was the dominant constituency in the 2004 presidential cycle. You can see the results on the map. Joe Lieberman carried by and large the same cities and towns that John F. Kennedy carried in the 1960 presidential general election.

Ned Lamont carried most of the cities and towns that were carried by Richard Nixon. (ibid.)

Father Brian Harrison, OS, says that there is no constant Catholic teaching which condemns torture in an absolute sense. An excerpt:

"To switch metaphors, the huge elephant in our Catholic living room that everyone politely refrains from mentioning is the massive, trimillennial Judeo-Christian tradition that legitimized torture right up until Vatican II. True, ancient Catholic tradition of the first millennium (which fell into disastrous oblivion for at least half of the second) denounced as immoral the use of torture to extract confessions of guilt from those accused of crime. Among others, St. Augustine and Pope St. Nicholas I condemn this practice, insofar as it will often punish the innocent and also provoke many false “confessions.” But we will search Scripture, Tradition, and the pre-Vatican II Magisterium in vain for any condemnations of torture (e.g., flogging) as a punishment for duly convicted delinquents, or as a means of extracting life-saving information from terrorists or other known enemies."

It's about halfway down the page in the link.

Guaranteed a laugh! I wish the National Repubs had the backbone to run this.

If you check out the latest RCP on Ken vs. Ted you'll see that their average has Ken Blackwell down 19%. This is being pulled down by the latest poll which is from a polling company, SurveyUSA, which has him down 28%.

I don't think that's a good number. I have good reason to believe that Blackwell has been inching up in recent days.

I missed the last 2, so I'm definitely going to catch this one. The fact is I'm not much of a TV watcher, so thank God (and Al Gore, of course) for the internet.

Update: I watched it and although I think Ken won, it wasn't a blowout. I'm saying this as an attempt at objectively; I don't think Teddy-boy have one original idea. Mainly just bashing TEL which is DOA anyway, FWIK.