“I will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4q6msGgECQ

Who do want to face off with Putin

‘Putin Has Given Us An Order That Everyone Must Leave Or Be Shot’

http://patdollard.com/2008/08/putin-has-given-us-an-order-that-everyone-must-leave-or-be-shot/

Nashi and the Young Guard: two paths toward building support for Putin

Nashi and the Young Guard: two paths toward

building support for Putin

The groups engage in social programs and political events, but their approaches differ markedly.

By Christa Case Bryant

from the February 26, 2008 edition

Pavel Elizarov is just the kind of teen President Vladimir Putin’s government started worrying about a few years ago.

“I was never political until I was 18. But in 2004, I was in Ukraine on a tourist trip with my friends, and I saw happy people who were protesting,” says Mr. Elizarov, referring to the Orange Revolution, which brought hundreds of thousands into the streets to protest fraudulent elections. “They were all together, and I thought that they were capable of changing something in their country.”

Indeed, Ukraine’s new pro-Russia president was forced to hold fresh elections, which his West-leaning opponent won. Such revolutions buffeted other post-Soviet states – Georgia in 2003 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005.

Keen to avoid such upheavals, political forces close to Mr. Putin quickly backed two pro-Kremlin youth groups: Nashi and the Young Guard. Today, both claim roughly 100,000 members each, who engage in social programs as well as political events. But their approaches are decidedly different.

Nashi’s federal headquarters lurks beneath dim streetlights in northwest Moscow. Its windows are barred, its door unmarked. Inside, youths with nose piercings and tousled hair mingle in hallways plastered with vibrant magazine photos of Nashi activists. Here, they plan their “actions” – anything from picketing stores that sell tobacco to underage teens to massive pre-election demonstrations to encourage citizens to vote – for Putin’s party, of course.

“My grandfather was a state official, my father was a state official; I want to be useful for my state,” says Maria Drokova. An 18-year-old commissar, she speaks excellent English and credits Putin with stopping the war in Chechnya, raising salaries, and paying off Russia’s Soviet-era debt.

The Young Guard, meanwhile, is sheltered within the massive headquarters of Putin’s United Russia party. At a recent strategy meeting, Kirill Shchitov (see story, left), who manages public relations, sat in the middle of a large modern office at the head of a wooden table, surrounded by stylish colleagues who listened attentively. His party recently introduced a 20 percent youth quota and has a candidate running for municipal office in every one of Moscow’s 125 districts on March 2.

“We are meant to prepare our young people to become young, professional politicians,” says Ivan Demidov, a former TV producer recruited in 2005 to turn the Young Guard into a political movement.

Ms. Drokova describes Nashi’s ideology as “freedom and justice”; Mr. Demidov says United Russia is “for all things good against all things bad,” adding that the unifying theme is support for Putin’s policies. The Young Guard focuses on getting people in office, while Nashi emphasizes upward mobility, holding out government and business posts as carrots for promising members.

Not everyone is impressed with the groups. “Nashi is organized by people whose only religion is success and mimicry,” argues Andrei Zolotov, editor of the state-funded Russia Profile magazine. “There has to be a kind of moral foundation in a real youth movement.”

Others harp on the government’s support of Nashi, the most well-known of Russia’s numerous youth groups, which counts state-run energy giant Gazprom among its donors.

But Demidov rebuffs such criticism. “In the ’90s, the only public institutions were bandits – they taught [young people], selected them, gave them jobs. Of course, young people paid for all that with their lives…. It’s good that the state is at least doing something.”

 

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell Under Fire For Working For Hussein

http://patdollard.com/2008/08/nbcs-andrea-mitchell-under-fire-for-working-for-hussein/

Barack Among the Evangelicals

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDg2ZWUwZGFkZWY4NDE1ZGY3ZmZjNzQzOGU0NjQ0YTA=

McCain protests NBC coverage

McCain protests NBC coverage By: Mike Allen August 18, 2008 09:04 AM EST

Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) campaign manager Rick Davis asked Sunday for a meeting with Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, to protest what the campaign called signs that the network is “abandoning non-partisan coverage of the presidential race.” Davis made the request Sunday in a letter that is part of an aggressive effort by McCain to counter news coverage he considers critical. In this case, the campaign is objecting to a statement by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on “Meet the Press” questioning whether McCain might have gotten a heads-up on some of the questions that were asked of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who was the first candidate to be interviewed Saturday night by Pastor Rick Warren at a presidential forum on faith. Warren told the audience that McCain was being held in “a cone of silence” so he wouldn’t hear the questions, which were similar for both candidates. Warren referred again to “the cone of silence” when McCain came onstage, and the senator joked: “I was trying to hear through the wall.” Mitchell reported that some “Obama people” were suggesting “that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared.” A McCain aide said that is not the case: “Senator McCain was in a motorcade led by the United States Secret Service and held in a green room with no broadcast feed.” Mitchell made the comment in the context of saying McCain did better, and that the Obama camp was defensive. In response to the campaign’s letter, she pointed out that journalists get criticism from both sides. “I wasn’t expressing an opinion,” Mitchell said. “I was reporting what they were saying.” Here is the text of the letter: August 17, 2008 Mr. Steve Capus President, NBC News 30 Rockefeller Plaza New York, NY 10112 Steve: We are extremely disappointed to see that the level of objectivity at NBC News has fallen so low that reporters are now giving voice to unsubstantiated, partisan claims in order to undercut John McCain. See also Obama likely to announce VP this week Dear 44: Climate change Debate prelude: 6 moments that mattered Nowhere was this more evident than with NBC chief correspondent Andrea Mitchell’s comments on “Meet the Press” this morning. In analyzing last night’s presidential forum at Saddleback Church, Mitchell expressed the Obama campaign spin that John McCain could only have done so well last night because he “may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.” Here are Andrea Mitchell’s comments in full: Mitchell: “The Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared.” (NBC’s “Meet The Press,” 8/17/08) Make no mistake: This is a serious charge. Andrea Mitchell is repeating, uncritically, a completely unsubstantiated Obama campaign claim that John McCain somehow cheated in last night’s forum at Saddleback Church. Instead of trying to substantiate this blatant falsehood in any way, Andrea Mitchell felt that she needed to repeat it on air to millions of “Meet the Press” viewers with no indication that 1.) There’s not one shred of evidence that it’s true; 2.) In his official correspondence to both campaigns, Pastor Rick Warren provided both candidates with information regarding the topic areas to be covered, which Barack Obama acknowledged during the forum when asked about Pastor Warren’s idea of an emergency plan for orphans and Obama said, “I cheated a little bit. I actually looked at this idea ahead of time, and I think it is a great idea;” 3.) John McCain actually requested that he and Barack Obama do the forum together on stage at the same time, making these kinds of after-the-fact complaints moot. Indeed, instead of taking a critical journalistic approach to this spin, Andrea Mitchell did what has become a pattern for her of simply repeating Obama campaign talking points. This is irresponsible journalism and sadly, indicative of the level of objectivity we have witnessed at NBC News this election cycle. Instead of examining the Obama campaign’s spin for truth before reporting it to more than 3 million NBC News viewers, Andrea Mitchell simply passed along Obama campaign conspiracy theories. The fact is that during Senator Obama’s segment at Saddleback last night, Senator McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed. In the forum, John McCain clearly demonstrated to the American people that he is prepared to be our next President…..   We are concerned that your News Division is following MSNBC’s lead in abandoning non-partisan coverage of the Presidential race. We would like to request a meeting with you as soon as possible to discuss our deep concerns about the news standards and level of objectivity at NBC. Sincerely, Rick Davis Campaign Manager John McCain 2008

Sore loser: Obama and Obamedia accuse McCain of “cheating”

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/08/18/sore-loser-obama-and-obamedia-accuse-mccain-of-cheating/

Obama’s infanticide problem

Thomas Lifson
You can tell Barack Obama knows he has a problem when he starts lying about his record, and the lie is readily disprovable. Such is the case with his 2002 vote against the Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act (covered today by Kyle-Anne Shiver’s AT article,  and by Ed Lasky’s AT article last week). A nearly identical federal bill passed the Senate unanimously, supported even by the likes of Barbara Boxer.

Guy Benson of Townhall.com explains the context:

 

What made the federal bill so much better, he explained, was its inclusion of an additional clause that expressly (and redundantly) stated the law would have zero effect whatsoever on abortion policy or the legal status of the unborn. This language convinced the Senate’s most reliable pro-abortion members to support the measure unanimously. Even NARAL gave it the green light, and Obama claimed he would have, too. [....]

Setting aside the meaninglessness of Obama’s distinction between the state and federal bills, he seemed to believe this explanation would satisfy voters’ concerns about the issue. The media swallowed his story without skepticism, thus discarding Obama’s potential political problem in the proverbial linen closet. But truth has resilient streak, and years later, Obama’s tale is unraveling.

The National Right to Life Committee last week uncovered documents proving that Obama’s “I-totally-would’ve-supported-the-Senate-bill-because-I’m-a-moderate!” clarification is an outright falsehood. According to NRLC spokesman Douglas Johnson, the records “prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an Illinois state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion – even after the panel had amended the bill to contain verbatim language, copied from a federal bill passed by Congress without objection in 2002, explicitly foreclosing any impact on abortion.”

 

Jill Stanek, the Illinois labor and delivery nurse whose exposure of the practice of treating abortion survivors as medical waste, sparking the state bill, and the later federal legislation, exposes the lie Obama told last night after the Saddleback Forum, in the Illinois Review.

 

Barack Obama’s stood by his lie that he did not vote against an identical bill as IL state senator to the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act when responding to that pointed question to CBN’s David Brody last night after the Saddleback Showdown :

 

Here is the video of Obama lying:

 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skq5M1Ksp_c&eurl=http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/08/obamas_infanticide_problem.htm

And here is the document from the state senate archives that proves the lie:

Stanek explains:

 

“DP#1″ means “Do Pass Amendment #1.” “DPA” means “Do Pass as Amended.”

Here is the original bill. Here is Amendment #1. Here is the federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act.

Obama first voted in favor of Amendment #1 and then voted against the Born Alive bill as amended. It couldn’t be more clear. Furthermore, here is the Republican Senate Staff Analysis from that day, expressing the same understanding of the chain of events:

 

Benson speculates about why Obama took the ultra radical position he embraced with his vote:

 

Americans must ask themselves why Barack Obama really opposed this legislation. It’s already been established that his standard explanation isn’t the truth, so what’s the genuine reason? One possible answer is that Obama’s commitment to legalized abortion runs so deep that he believes the Constitution guarantees that “right,” even if the initial abortion procedure fails. Put crudely, once a woman chooses to abort, she’s entitled to a dead baby. That position is so far out of the mainstream, it’s no wonder Obama may have decided to use misdirection and deception to explain away his vote.

Another possibility is that Obama’s a hyper-partisan ideologue. The driving forces behind the Born Alive Infant Protection Act were pro-life groups that generally support Republicans. Perhaps Obama’s fierce partisanship and leftist ideology were simply too strong for him to stomach handing any conservative group a political victory.

 

The liberal media are just going to shrug their shoulders and move on. But the pro-life community is large enough and organized well enough to make this lie an issue. The failure of the same liberal media to cover the John Edwards scandal ensures that the public is aware of how selective and biased they are, heightening their receptiveness to news from alternative sources.

This lie isn’t going to go away quietly. The undecided voters have one more reason to distrust the fine-sounding smooth rhetoric dished out by Obama.

Posted at 12:02 PM | Email | Permalink

Who Was That? Mac Goes Right at Saddleback!

C. Edmund Wright
Months ago a Frank Luntz focus group charted independent voter’s responses to some of John McCain’s comments.  As a shocker to Luntz, some Fox News analysts and likely the McCain camapaign, the responses went off the charts positive in direct proportion to how hard core conservative Mac’s answers were.

Conservative principles explained with conviction have far more power to sway the “undecided” than the pundit favored strategy of slinking towards a middle ground “don’t offend anyone” type of answer. Ronald Reagan showed this to the world in the 70’s and 80’s. Talk radio has demonstrated this daily since the 80’s. This Luntz focus group demonstrated it yet again that evening.

 

The problem is, nobody paid particular attention to it. Certainly not Senator McCain nor his campaign manager, Steve Schmidt. It is not a belief helf by folks like Dick Morris or Fred Barnes or many of the so-called conservative punditstocracy in Washington.

 

Well, perhaps because it was in a church, or perhaps because the campaign has recoiled from the vicous outcry over the chance that Joe Lieberman might be the Veep pick, but for whatever reason, Big Mac shed most of his Maverick stripes last night at the Saddleback Civil Forum.  He sounded almost Reaganesque, including strong elements of a movement conservative in many answers. He even poked fun at the Governator, and the result was a decisively clear win over Obama in the first head to head competition. It was the most conservative moment in the campaign since Mitt Romney’s exit speech at the C-PAC convention.

 

Even Pat Buchanan, who has shed most of his movement conservative credentials over the years (to keep his gig at MSNBC?), stated,

 

“John McCain just had the best hour of his campaign…he was crisp, he was funny, ..his answers were abbreviated and on the mark . He was enormously well prepared …made one point after another and in a better way than I’ve seen John McCain do it.”

 

And Buchanan was right as McCain snapped off one classic Reagan type principle after another, in constrast to Obama, who was “tortured and almost tentative” according to Buchanan and who added that he “seemed like a college sophore who had not studied and was facing his orals.”

 

On the same panel was Michelle Bernard, who gushed,

 

“…with McCain, everything was black and white. He got to prove his conservative bona fides to the base….this was his best performance in this entire election cycle.”

 

Now this is interesting, since the pundits have been telling us since, oh, about 1995, that seeing things in black and white is a problem. We’ve been told that this is why the Bush approval ratings are in the mid twenties. We’ve been told that this is why “the Republican brand is in trouble.”

 

Movement conservatives have never bought into this, and thus the problem most conservatives have with the McCain nomination to begin with. But at Saddleback Church, with questions posed by a preacher who has bought into way too many of the “can’t we all just get along” thought processes, Mac rolled to victory by stamping out most of the grey that had obstensibly carried him to this position to begin with.

 

“Clarity and certitude” stated Buchanan “was what you got from McCain tonight. It was clear . It was brief. Meanwhile, Obama was working around a couple sides of all the issues. John McCain won this night hands down.”

 

And even anchor David Schuster, no conservative he, joined in the chorus with Bernard and Buchanan by stating “the contrast was clear” and agreeing it was Mac’s evening. (we are not sure where Schuster will work next.)

 

Which makes the night both fascinating and agonizing simultaneously. The problem with this weekend’s performance is that McCain will be out saying something to somebody on Monday, .and you have to cringe in case Steve Schmidt and other advisors tell him he now has to swing back to the center to balance the Saddleback performance. There is no guarantee that he will remain as on message as he was Saturday evening.

 

There is no guarantee that the sycophantic Lindsay Graham, who was in attendance, paid any attention when McCain stated emphatically that he was wrong on “offshore drilling” and that “we gotta drill now and we gotta drill here. I know there are some folks here in ‘KAHLI-fornya’ who disagree with that position…but this is a national security issue.” I think that means no compromise with the libs, in case Graham is confused.

 

And I wonder if McCain will now support the Bush administrations efforts on terror, since Mac admitted that his core belief on the way to fight evil is simply to “Defeat it.” He didn’t stop there, he added,  “If I have to follow him to the gates of hell, I will get Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice….” One can only wonder if the path to the gates of hell might well go by the water boarding room in the near future…a step Mac was not able to make in months past, angering many conservatives.

 

But for Saturday evening, Big Mac was on a Rush-esque roll. When asked which Supreme Court Justices he would not appoint, he quickly snapped “with all due respect, Justice Ginsberg, Justice Breyer, Justice Souter, Justice Stevens.” McCain added that he would appoint jurists with a “proven record of strictly adhering to the Constituion…and not legislating from the bench. Some of the worst damage has been done by legislating from the bench.” Which is true, but one has to ask about the damage McCain and Graham caused on this very issue with the “Gang of 14″ shenanigans.

 

He went on with the judge issue, stating that life begins “at conception” in stark contrast to Obama, who mumbled the famous “above my pay grade” answer. In an attempt to appear overly spiritual, Obama simply appeared overly liberal.

 

He even stopped Pastor Rick Warren from going off on a touchy feely tangent on education and teacher pay by instantly saying merit pay is a “yes” and that bad teachers should “find another line of work.” He went on to give a great dissertation on the merits of school choice, homeschooling and hammered that home choice and competition (repeatedly) are the guiding principles to education reform.

 

He sounded like the Gipper’s economic team on taxes, even mentioning that increasing taxes will not increase revenues. He tied taxes and other economic issues together with healthcare, and in obvious contrast with Obama (and much of McCain’s career) stressed opportunity over government solutions.  He seemd to pick up conservative momentum as he rolled through the questions on education, taxes and healthcare. He also picked up his energy. It’s as if he found his voice, and hold onto your shirt…it is a conservative voice.

 

I wonder how Dick Morris, who insists that the Democrats own taxes, education and healthcare as issues, will react?. But more importantly, I wonder how the McCain Campaign will react to this. I haven’t seen McCain have this much fun since the last time he submarined a conservative in front of the cameras.

 

He finished the evening by quoting Reagan and the “shining city on a hill” speech as it applied to the Russian-Georgian conflict and touching on the evils of the Russian re-emergence. He tied energy independence and the Georgian conflict together and mentioned that this is a big problem for Europe. I mean, quite simply, for one evening at least…McCain GOT IT.

 

In the end, McCain stated that “our nation was founded on Judeo Christian principles.” He added that while we “have our flaws….we remain the most unusual experiment in history.”

 

To which I say…”Amen and pass the plate!”  And Saturday night remains the most unusual McCain Campaign experiment in history too. I hope he and his staff have the courage to analyze the results properly. The election could well ride on it.

Posted at 07:32 PM | Email | Permalink