Smoky Mountains Sunrise
Showing posts with label John McCain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John McCain. Show all posts

Thursday, February 4, 2010

McCain Feeling Primary Heat From His Right Flank


Old sailors never die; they just lose primaries. Anchors aweigh and good riddance, There'll be no "moaning of the bar" when this old has been is set adrift.
From The Wall Street Journal

A
rizona Sen. John McCain,
the Republicans' standard-bearer in 2008, is facing a surprisingly strong primary challenge from the right, evidence that even party leaders aren't safe from the swell of conservative activism heading into the 2010 midterm elections.


Read the rest of this entry >>

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Chris Simcox for the United States Senate!


In the midst of a political nightmare and national despair, there is great news from Arizona today. Chris Simcox, a successful businessman, educator, and patriot founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps has announced that he will challenge the second worst Republican Senator, John McCain, for the Republican Senate nomination.

We strongly endorse Chris Simcox and hope that anyone who can, will sign up on his website to help. His election will send a powerful message to the Republican Party, and will be a great step toward saving our republic, securing our national borders, defending national sovereignty, and restoring a government under the Constitution, guided by the unchanging laws of God.




Saturday, April 18, 2009

McCain Strategist Warns GOP Risks Becoming 'Religious Party'


Isn't it remarkable that the very sort of Republicans who insisted in 1979/1980 that Ronald Reagan was too extreme to be electable, are the very sort telling us now that the key to Republican revival is to embrace sodomite-friendly candidates, like the one that was just soundly defeated by a Marxist, street thug from the nation's most corrupt political machine. And these people are paid for their political advice!

Steve Schmidt, the political "genius" behind the McCain for President campaign.

From Fox News/Politics

John McCain's top adviser from the presidential campaign urged fellow Republicans on Friday to warm up to gay rights and warned that the GOP risks becoming the "religious party" with its opposition to same-sex marriage.

Steve Schmidt, in his first political appearance since the election, spoke at the Washington, D.C., convention for the Log Cabin Republicans -- a grassroots group for gay and lesbian Republicans.

He urged Republicans, in the near-term, to endorse civil unions and stop using the Bible as rationale for gay-marriage opposition.

"If you put public policy issues to a religious test, you risk becoming a religious party," he said. "And in a free country a political party cannot be viable in the long-term if it is seen as a sectarian party."

Schmidt, whose sister is a lesbian and who supports same-sex marriage, said he understands the Republican Party probably won't reverse its resistance to same-sex marriage anytime soon.

But he suggested that the party will be increasingly marginalized if it sustains that opposition long-term.

"If the party is seen as anti-gay, then that is injurious to its candidates" in Democrat-leaning and competitive states, he said.

President Obama also stops short of supporting gay marriage -- he supports civil unions -- but states across the country are moving toward extending such rights to gay couples.

Schmidt predicted gay marriage will create a bigger and bigger divide between the GOP and the electorate in the years ahead. He said that as young voters age, they may adopt conservative views on the economy and national security -- but they will not abandon liberal, social beliefs.

This would put the Republican Party at odds with a swath of voters, Schmidt said.

"I believe Republicans should re-examine the extent that we are being defined by positions on issues that I don't believe are among our core values," he said, while still calling social conservatives an "indispensable part of the conservative coalition."

Schmidt's position is not new. Schmidt recently asserted his support for same-sex marriage rights in March during an interview with the Washington Blade, a newspaper that covers gay and lesbian issues.

But Schmidt's advice to his party took a different tone than the social platform trumpeted Thursday by McCain running mate Sarah Palin -- the Alaska governor gave an out-of-state political speech for the first time in months Thursday, to an anti-abortion group in Indiana.

There she chastised Obama for supporting abortion rights and defended her abortion opposition.

Schmidt also said Friday that Republicans need to reach out, not only to gay voters, but young voters and Hispanics.

"The rapid growth of the Hispanic-American population for instance could soon cost Republicans the entire southwest if we don't recover our previous share of the vote," he said.


FOX News' Mosheh Oinounou contributed to this report.




Saturday, March 14, 2009

Graham and McCain Vote to Confirm Child Porn Lawyer as Deputy Attorney General


From LifeSiteNews
By Kathleen Gilbert

The U.S. Senate yesterday confirmed David Ogden as the next deputy attorney general, ignoring a flood of protest against Ogden's extensive record in defending pornography. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) joined the senators in voting in favor of Ogden, despite having been chief sponsor of the Children's Internet Protection Act, an act designed to keep porn off public library computers that Ogden opposed.

In 2003, Ogden wrote a brief on behalf of fifteen library directors objecting to the Protection Act, claiming that, "By demanding that libraries be censors and devote resources - not to facilitating - but to interfering with patrons' pursuit of information and ideas, Congress has subverted the role of librarians and public libraries and violated the First Amendment rights of library patrons."

The vote was split down party lines, except for eleven Republicans who voted in favor: Senators Alexander (TN), Bond (MO), Collins (ME), Graham (SC), Gregg (NH), Kyl (AZ), Lugar (IN), McCain (AZ), Snowe (ME), Specter (PA), and Voinovich (OH). One Democrat, Sen. Casey of Pennsylvania, voted against the nomination. Ogden was sworn in today by Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.


Pro-family voices issued a volley of opposition to prevent the confirmation after Ogden was nominated by
President Obama earlier this year. Ogden's record, they pointed out, shows a steady predilection for defending the pornography industry. He has represented clients including Playboy, Penthouse, ACLU, and the Consenting Adults Telephone Rights Association in numerous cases.

In his private practice, the 55-year-old lawyer has also established himself as completely opposed to legal protections both for the unborn and for traditional marriage.

"David Ogden is a hired gun from Playboy and ACLU. He can't run from his long record of opposing common sense laws protecting families, women, and children," said Brian Burch, President of Fidelis, a pro-family watchdog group that assembled a dossier on Ogden's porn background.

The Senate Judiciary Committee's top Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter, reportedly told National Public Radio that he had never seen so much opposition from voters against a nominee. According to Specter 11,000 phone calls, letters and other contacts poured in to the committee by the beginning of March protesting the Ogden pick.


Ogden insisted to the Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing last month that "child pornography is abhorrent," and otherwise downplayed his extreme record. Burch described Ogden's words as "a textbook example of an ambitious nominee saying whatever he needs to say to get the votes for confirmation."

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, dismissed pro-family advocates' alarm over Ogden as "a scurrilous attack on him."

However, according to Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., Ogden "is more than just a lawyer who has had a few unsavory clients. He has devoted a substantial part of his career, case after case, for 20 years, in defense of pornography."


Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said he was "alarmed that President Obama has nominated a candidate to serve in the No. 2 post at the Department of Justice who has repeatedly represented the pornography industry and its interests," calling Ogden's record "shocking."


Thursday, February 26, 2009

No One Trusts John McCain's Shoe Shine Boy



It would seem from the comments reported in the following column that Lindsey Graham's Democrat colleagues don't know him very well. They are suspicious that he might harbor some ulterior motives in advocating nationalization of the banks and socialism for the American economy. We wish he had some conservative instincts and loyalty to Republican principles, hidden or otherwise. Haven't they noticed that he's John McCain's shoe shine boy?


What is Lindsey Graham Up To?

From The New Republic
By Noam Scheiber

You may recall that Lindsey Graham has been strongly intimating we should nationalize our banks. Not only that, but he says several other Republican senators are open to it.

So why won't Democrats, many of whom feel the same way, at least discuss it with him? Obviously one issue is the enormous complexity, which everyone would like to avoid. But the bigger hold-up is that Democrats just don't trust Graham. The same senior Senate aide I spoke with yesterday told me, "I think they’re betting on failure. I don’t know what his angle is. I’m hesitant to give him credit given my severe loathing for the guy."

Then today, another senior Democratic source elaborated, suggesting Democrats think Graham's nationalization comments are designed to talk down the banks' stock, making it impossible (as opposed to just extremely difficult) to attract private capital and making nationalization more likely. That is, the fear is that Graham wants to force the Democrats' hands. “These people say ‘free markets,’ ‘leave everything alone,’ ‘let them fail,’” says the source. “Now all of a sudden they’re saying ‘nationalize the banks?'” The cynicism is just incredible.”

For what it's worth, I'm personally torn. There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of Graham and the Republican caucus. But he did sound genuinely exercised about the situation when he spoke to the Financial Times last week. (Graham’s office didn't return a call seeking comment.) And even Democratic senators like Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer have inadvertently talked the markets down with comments about nationalization.


Monday, January 19, 2009

Obama Selects New White House Pets



The decision has been made and the new White House pets are a trio of poodles that are submissive and eager to please their new master. The New York Times has the story.

Obama Reaches Out for McCain’s Counsel

Monday, November 17, 2008

Jim DeMint on John McCain: “He Betrayed Republican Principles”


John McCain met with Barack Hussein Obama today and announced that he will work closely with the in-coming administration. As Rush Limbaugh put it: "That scares the hell out of me!"

One Senator who will not be working to facilitate big government, socialist solutions to every problem facing the nation is South Carolina's valiant, conservative US Senator, Jim DeMint. In speaking to GOP officials gathered in Myrtle Beach on Friday, Senator DeMint made clear that it was the McCain campaign's failure to offer principled, conservative alternatives to those advanced by the socialists that led to his defeat.

Peter Hamby:
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (CNN) — South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint on Friday became one of the first high-profile Republicans to publicly criticize John McCain following his electoral defeat, blaming the Arizona senator for betraying conservative principles in his quest for the White House.

The conservative senator, speaking to a group of GOP officials gathered in Myrtle Beach at a conference on the future of the Republican Party, described how the party had strayed from its own "brand," which, according to DeMint, should represent freedom, religious-based values and limited government.

"We have to be honest, and there's a lot of blame to go around, but I have to mention George Bush, and I have to mention Ted Stevens, and I'm afraid I even have to mention John McCain," he said.

DeMint offered a long list of complaints about McCain's record in the Senate and on the campaign trail.

"McCain, who is proponent of campaign finance reform that weakened party organizations and basically put George Soros in the driver's seat," DeMint said. "His proposal for amnesty for illegals. His support of global warming, cap-and-trade programs that will put another burden on our economy. And of course, his embrace of the bailout right before the election was probably the nail in our coffin this last election. And he has been an opponent of drilling in ANWR, at a time when energy is so important. It really didn't fit the label, but he was our package."


Tuesday, November 4, 2008

If You Can Keep It

From the Western Standard (Canada)
By Adam T. Yoshida

Certain friends (and, naturally, enemies as well) of mine are eager for the “fall of the American Empire.” They chortle with glee at the present economic troubles of the United States. They delight in the basically declinist views of Senator Obama and imagine an end to American exceptionalism – an America that “rejoins the world” after the Bush years. Well, to borrow from George Bernard Shaw, they may be about to learn that there are two tragedies in this life – one is not getting your heart’s desire, the other is getting it.

Yes, America is down. Yes, the United States has troubles. But what my friends fail to understand is that the present situation is not at all analogous to the fall of the Roman Empire. (Indeed, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire was not even the end of all of that – Byzantium endured for another thousand years). The very real prospect with which we are faced is not the fall of the American Empire but rather of the American Republic.

Monday, November 3, 2008

The Moment To Decide














Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.


Saturday, November 1, 2008

Spreading the Wealth Around


GOP Internal Polls (NJ, CA, MI, PA) Show Possible Landslide for McCain


Hat Tip to The Patriot Room blog for some astounding news that I pray is true. They and a number of other blogs are reporting on a discussion that was broadcast by the Quinn and Rose Show, a radio program on which GOP internal polling was discussed. The gist of the discussion is that an historic movement away from Barack Obama and to John McCain is underway. The audio file is very slow to download but well worth the wait. The link is here.

The polling is focused on 15 to 20 states. The polling shows "undecideds breaking for McCain by 4 to 1.
  • New Jersey: McCain leads 48 to 43, with 7% undecided.
  • Michigan: McCain leads 44 to 42, with 10% undecided.
  • California: Obama leads 44 to 43, with 9/% undecided, 3% for Barr.
  • Pennsylvania: McCain leads 55 to 33, with 10% undecided. In Pennsylvania Obama only leads among Democrats by 47 to 37, with 14% undecided.
The two reasons Democrats are citing for voting for McCain are because Obama is "cheating" and "attempting to buy the election."

If this proves to be true, it will be one of the greatest testaments to the goodness, wisdom and decency of the American people ever manifested in our history. Despite all the concerted efforts of the media and political elites, and the millions spent to move America to an agenda we have always rejected, Americans, in the quiet of their hearts, have seen what the Obama campaign is really about. Should we be shocked that even Democrats see their party's nominee as an American-hating liar, fraud and cheat, who will say or do anything to hide his core beliefs, his closest friends and associates, his radical, Marxist ideology, and his commitment to undermine the Constitution, the freedoms and institutions of our country?

If these extraordinary numbers are true, God has heard the fervent prayers of millions, and not the hate-filled injunction of Obama's pastor that America be damned.


Obama's Core: The West, For Him, Is Not The Best


From National Review
By Michael Knox Beran

LEON TROTSKY's The Russian Revolution does not occupy a high place in the literature of conservatism. But the old Bolshevik could on occasion be perceptive. Analyzing the improbable rise of Rasputin, he noted how frequently shamanism flourishes in the bowels of a decaying oligarchy, when the languishing elites crave the stimulus that only a certain kind of messianic figure can give. The commissar had a point. In the fourth Eclogue, Virgil beguiled the patricians of the collapsing Roman republic with a vision of a miraculous child who would inaugurate a golden age. Eighteen centuries later such charlatans as Mesmer and Cagliostro practiced their mystic arts in the salons of the ancien regime.

True to the morphology of exhausted elites, it is the privileged element in the American polity that has proved most susceptible to Barack Obama's appeal. Historians of the future, seeking to understand this enthusiasm, may well conclude that it was a kind of despair, the despair of those who, having lost their faith in the traditional remedial institutions of their culture, embraced a mirage.

T. S. Eliot put his finger on the problem when he compared the poetry of Dante to that of the modern age. Dante's poetry, Eliot said, stood for a "principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe." Eliot suggested that the old poetic culture of the West, with its emphasis on harmony, proportion, and order, brought coherence to the world and did much to reconcile men and women to the larger rhythms of life. The roots of this culture, Werner Jaeger showed in his classic study, Paideia, grew out of the Greek belief that poetry and music, together with rhythm and harmony, powerfully influence the mind and are therefore one of the bases of civilization. Fletcher of Saltoun expressed the Greek view when he said that "if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation."

Already in the 19th century, Nietzsche detected in Europe a "brutalization and decay of rhythm." Generalizations are over-simple, but the culture that has to a great extent replaced the old poetic culture values cacophony rather than harmony, brokenness rather than wholeness, and ungraceful forms of order rather than those grounded in poetic rhythm. The new culture--a significant force in education, popular entertainment and the arts, and modern architecture and town planning--has much less unifying power than the old culture; its perfection lies not in the organic whole but in the isolated fragment. Eliot, indeed, formed The Waste Land out of poetic fragments in part because he was attempting to render, in verse, the effect on the mind of the desolate and fragmented waste land he found modern life to be.

Whatever its merits, the new culture has failed to give people the tools they need to amalgamate disparate experience and perceive what the Greeks called the "wholeness of life." Dissatisfied and profoundly isolated, confined, in Tocqueville's image, "within the solitude of his own heart," the modern man, and in particular the modern man who comes from the well-to-do and predominantly agnostic classes, seeks consolation in the various and always inadequate intellectual and spiritual opiums on sale in the philosophical markets--Marxism, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, Weatherman-style radicalism, the pharmaceutical eucharist of the anti-depressant tablet.

Obama is, if not quite the messiah of this new culture, certainly an artifact of it. He discovered early that what he calls his "story," that of a multi-racial prophet equally at home at Harvard and in the slums, struck the profoundest chords in desolate upper-caste hearts. Middle America, by contrast, has mixed feelings about the new culture. It has embraced television and adjusted to a new set of musical rhythms, but it remains suspicious of other elements of the modernist and progressive sensibility. Obama's healer-redeemer qualities, which find so warm a reception in the hearts of the elites, make Joe Six-Pack uneasy. Were it not for the coincidence of his candidacy with a stock-market panic, the Democratic nominee's campaign for the White House would almost certainly end in failure. But the stock market crashed, and as a result Obama is, at this writing, the front-runner.

The conservative case against Obama goes beyond both questions of policy and questions about his record and background. Obama is widely regarded, by his supporters, as a visionary statesman, yet nowhere in his rhetoric does he bring this visionary power to bear on the most pressing problem of the age, the vulnerability of the old culture of the West, which is the ultimate source of its freedoms.

The omission is disconcerting. Like Obama, I am a graduate of Columbia College. I arrived on the campus in the fall of 1984, a little more than a year after he took his degree. I understand that he almost never speaks of Columbia, and to do him justice, there was much that was grim in pre-Giuliani Morningside Heights. But Columbia nevertheless had (and still has) its Core Curriculum, a group of obligatory courses in literature, art, and music that force the student to come to terms with the miracle of Western civilization--with the Greeks, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare; with Montaigne, Locke, Hume, Smith, Marx, and Mill; with Bach and Beethoven and Mozart. Of course you don't take it all in at 18 or 19, but even so the Core is bound to be one of the memorable intellectual experiences of a thoughtful person's life.

Yet the Core seems to have made little impression on Barack Obama. Its themes find no echo in his reflection on politics, The Audacity of Hope. Thucydides, describing the plague at Athens, showed that the virtues which characterize Western civilization at its best--freedom, a sense of fair play, a consciousness of the dignity of human life--cannot be taken for granted. Obama is much less attentive to the fragility of the West's peculiar culture. In Berlin he spoke of tearing down the walls that separate Western nations from the rest of the world: "People of the world--this is our moment. This is our time.... There is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.... The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand." This wall-wrecking sentiment is in some ways admirable, but those with a heritage as unique as ours can consent to such a demolition only if we are certain that the culture that has made us what we are will afterwards be safe.

Barack Obama is not the right leader to preside over this moment of crisis in the West, when the old civilization is dying in Europe and has lost its hold on the greater part of this country's ruling classes. John McCain is the better choice: His experience has given him a keener sense of history and of the world. Some people are skilled in talking about the defense of freedom and civilization; McCain has actually defended them. He is not so stirring an orator as the senator from Illinois. But he has only to walk into the room, and his presence sounds the theme.


Mr. Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861-1871.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Bishop Compares Election To Battle of Lepanto


From Catholic World News

Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph compared the upcoming presidential election to the Battle of Lepanto, in which Christian forces against overwhelming odds defeated Ottoman Turkish invaders bent on the conquest of Europe. ‘Together with the other Bishops of Missouri I am calling on all the faithful to make this last week before the election a week of prayer for our nation-- a week of prayer for the protection of Human Life,’ Bishop Finn wrote in an October 24 diocesan newspaper column. ‘Join me in calling upon Mary in this month of the rosary. In In 1571, in the midst of the Battle of Lepanto, when the future of Christian Europe was in the balance and the odds against them were overwhelming, prayer to Our Lady of the Rosary brought the decisive victory. We ask her now to watch over our country and bring us the victory of life.’

‘Our Catholic moral principles teach that a candidate’s promise of economic prosperity is insufficient to justify their constant support of abortion laws, including partial-birth abortion, and infanticide for born-alive infants,’ Bishop Finn noted. ‘Promotion of the Freedom of Choice Act is a pledge to eliminate every single limit on abortions achieved over the last thirty-five years … I ask you to join me in invoking the Guardian Angels of 47 million babies lost through abortion in our country in the last thirty-five years. This horrendous loss of life remains one of the greatest threats to human civilization we have ever faced.’

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.



Thursday, October 23, 2008

Video Released of POW John McCain


"There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you in places where winning means survival and defeat means death - and that man is John McCain."



Wednesday, October 15, 2008

The "New McCain" is a Big Improvement


Who was that man and what has he done with John McCain?

Tonight's debate was unquestionably John McCain's finest performance. He put away the hackneyed "reaching across the aisle" rhetoric and replaced it with a vigorous defense of principle. At long last we heard "straight talk" -- truth -- about the character and judgment of his opponent. It was the kind of offense for which McCain-Palin crowds have been literally begging, and it was refreshing.

He was on top of the issues -- his health care plan and that of his opponent. He showed passion when speaking about the life issues and education. And the Freudian slip, when he called Obama "Senator Government," was the most memorable line and the icing on the cake.

Whether it was too little-too late remains to be seen, but my guess is that McCain will get a bounce from tonight's debate.

This, finally, was a McCain that Republican conservatives can enthusiastically support. Let's see and hear much more of this "new McCain."