We are one week out now and I am making my final predictions for what I believe the result of next Tuesday’s Senate elections will be. Let’s see how close I come:

Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter (news, bio, voting record), the House Armed Services Committee chairman who coauthored legislation to build a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, announced plans on Monday for a longshot presidential bid in 2008.

Hunter, who said support for a strong military and the fight against illegal immigration would be two of his top issues, is the first established Republican to say he would form an exploration com

Reuters

This came out of nowhere today. I definitely like his two top issues, that’s for sure. I would like to know where he stands on taxes and private accounts for S.S.

One thing for sure, he is definitely the best candidate to come forward so far, in my opinion.

I think we can now officially say that it’s done, finished, kaput. It’s over.

The reports showed Rendell with a balance of $5.7 million, while Swann had only $318,777 on hand for the last two weeks of the race.http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/15870822.htm

A lot of us knew from day one that Swann’s candidacy was doomed. He was chosen, not elected, to be our Republican candidate for this year’s governor’s race by the corrupt Republican political machine here in Pennsylvania. The party leaders under the guidance of National Republican Committeeman and convicted felon, Bob Asher, saw it fit to deny Pennsylvania Republicans our spring primary by annointing Swann on their own and muscling out the other candidates. He stood behind our equally corrupt Legislative leaders who lost their primaries in landslides to actual conservative candidates. Furthermore, he allowed his campaign to be run by a guy who completely blundered what was supposed to be a definite Republican State Senate seat pickup early last year.

Don’t get me wrong. Lynn Swann is a nice guy, but this was not his cup of tea. This isn’t California. It takes more than celebrity status to become Governor of Pennsylvania. It takes actual ideas and knowledge of the issues and a campaign with a strong grassroots effort, not butchered by a bunch of establishment hacks.

So, Pennsylvania can look forward to four more years of tax raising, nanny stater Ed Rendell. Thank God I’m moving out of the state next year. Pennsylvania is going to have a long road to recover from the coming mess that man will leave the state with.

Peggy Noonan has a great essay in the WSJ. Here’s a good pull quote:

But there’s unease in the base too, again for many reasons. One is that it’s clear now to everyone in the Republican Party that Mr. Bush has changed the modern governing definition of “conservative.”

He did this without asking. He did it even without explaining. He didn’t go to the people whose loyalty and support raised him high and say, “This is what I’m doing, this is why I’m changing things, here’s my thinking, here are the implications.” The cynics around him likely thought this a good thing. To explain is to make things clearer, or at least to try, and they probably didn’t want it clear. They had the best of both worlds, a conservative reputation and a liberal reality.

Anyone heard of this book, “Conservatives Betrayed” by Richard Viguerie? Looks to me like he is espousing the same talking points that you see repeatedly here and elsewhere such as the Club For Growth.

The Political Pit Bull has a review.

H/T to Politics1.

Apparently, Jim Webb, Democrat Senate candidate running against George Allen, writes novels that describe in quite a bit of detail sexual acts involving underage children.

[EDIT: Not appropriate for the front page, you can view the rest of the post by clicking below - Alex]

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There is something that bothers me about the Stem Cell Research Debate. Proponents of “Embryonic” Stem Cell Research rarely use the word “Embryonic”. Instead they spread false information and purposely mislead.

Take the recent campaign adds done by Michael J. Fox for Missouri Democratic Senate Challenger Claire McCatskill. In the add the visibly shaken Fox accuses Senator Jim Talent and President Bush of not wanting to expand Stem Cell Research. Nothing is further from the truth. What Senator Talent, President Bush and many other Republicans oppose is the expansion of Government funded “Embryonic” Stem Cell Research (ESCR). As for “Adult” Stem Cell Research (ASCR), under this administration government funding has expanded and increased more than any previous administration.

Understand where the line is drawn here. ESCR involves the fertilization of an egg in vitro, and then destroyed to remove the stem cells. Life is destroyed. This is where conservatives and many Republicans draw the line and refuse to allow government funded research. Any private firm is still allowed to research ESCR, but interesting few have chosen too. Either for lack of funding as the left claims or because some scientists believe ASCR is more promising and poses less moral quandaries.

Honestly I don’t know if ASCR is more promising than ESCR. I am not a doctor or a scientist. But for me if ESCR destroys life we as a culture should not support it.

Courtesy of the Barone Blog the entire one hour interview with President Bush can now be heard as they have archived it as an MP3.

The columnists in attendance were Tony Blankley of the Washington Times, Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, Lawrence Kudlow of CNBC, Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel, Mark Steyn of the Chicago Sun-Times, Byron York of National Review and of course Michael Barone of US. News & World Report.

That is a very impressive list.

Actually let clarify something, we can only lose in Iraq if we leave with the job undone. We might not win while we are there, but we can’t lose. So to say we are losing is inaccurate and unfair. It might be better to say: why we are not winning in Iraq.

So what is the answer, why aren’t we winning? I’ll allow President Bush himself to explain:

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Stanley Kurtz, writing for NRO has written a thoughtful article on what is wrong with Republicans not voting for their own come Nov. 7th. He seems pretty fired up about the idea that the Democrats might win the House and/or Senate and blames conservatives who can’t see the big picture.

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The Corner at NRO has a video up of Santorum’s great interview with Chris Mathews. It seems to me like he is trying to appeal to the pro-war base with the legislation he mentions passing. He is also clearly one of the most well spoken politicians in DC.

This isn’t a race that has been on the radar really at all because I think everyone really underestimated the challenger. Republican Ron Saxton is challenging incumbent Ted Kulongoski to be Governor of Oregon. For most of the campaign season the polls looked pretty dismal for Saxton as he consistently trailed by double digits, but suddenly for the past month his popularity seems to be spreading like wildfire. The latest Zogby had him down by only 3 and a Riley Research poll from the end of September had him up by 2.

Like everyone else, I really didn’t pay attention to this race until now so I don’t know much about Saxton. I checked out his Web site and he looks pretty good.

This race is now a toss up. Good luck, Ron!

Here’s an early story.

Resist embryonic stem cell research:

Let’s get this man into the Senate:

George Allen’s candidacy may be saved by faulty machines?!?!? This is going to give the Diebold Conspiracy people coniptions or something.

As Japan (presumably) and Germany (already) will be significant military powers again in the 21st century, it’s incredible to reflect on the last half of the 20th.

Joseph T. McCarthy says:

I remember a time when Save The GOP stood for something better than “I hope Republicans lose so that we can get payback over the ‘04 primary.”

First of all, it all goes way beyond Pat Toomey in 2004. I can think of four other Senate races off-hand where the establishment actively worked to undermine reform oriented conservatives. Think about it this way, if the White House had its way in ‘04 then Tom Coburn would still be delivering babies in Tulsa. He’s a man of integrity, and would probably be even happier to be back at his day job, but our republic would be far worse for it. At least we can count on Sen. Bob Shaffer to take on the Department of Education the way he did in the House, right? Oh wait, the administration crammed Pete Coors down our throats and now Ken Salazar is going to be in the Senate for thirty years. The list just goes on and on, and I haven’t even touched on House or Gubernatorial races. Every year it’s the same thing: First step, movement conservatives work their asses off to get our agenda moving by electing strong, committed candidates. Second, the establishment freaks out because the natives are getting restless, so they turn the twin maxim guns of the NRSC and NRCC on us. Third, hacks within the conservative movement sell-out and take the Hugh Hewitt/Stockholm Syndrom approach of assuming that this time the administration has our best interests in mind. Finally, the establishment prevails and we all lose.

I don’t really want Republicans to lose. I’m probably too nice of a guy to actually want the Democrats to lose. I just think there are a lot of good reasons to not care if the GOP does lose. First of all, we can slough off the fat. The Lincoln Chafees that are just along to be members of the most exclusive country club on the face of the earth, and even the idiots like George Allen that might be conservative but end up doing irreperable harm to the movement. Secondly, people like Bob Corker won’t be in a position to do any harm to the conservative movement if they never get there in the first place. If he did win then it would be our moral obligation to primary him in 2012, so it’s better this way. Lastly, the movement is stalled. The Bush administration has been a failure in conservative terms, and anyone who believes otherwise had better be prepared to give a good reason, and to explain away (issue chosen almost at random) the President’s inability to find a pen and veto at least one spending bill.

I don’t really want the GOP to lose, but amputees don’t want to lose their limbs either, I don’t think, and it has to happen in order for actual healing and restoration to take place. The Republican Party and the conservative movement have become mere wraiths of their former selves, and something has to be done about it.

The brilliant Thomas Sowell writing at NRO explains to the RNC why no one is interested in helping them send more RINOs to DC:

How did the Republicans manage to bring themselves to this dire condition, just two years after winning both Houses of Congress, the White House, and most of the state governorships?

It wasn’t easy — and it wasn’t new. It was the same thing that caused the first President Bush to lose his bid for reelection in 1992, after having had sky-high approval ratings in 1991. It was betraying the trust of supporters.

Back then it was the betrayal of the “No new taxes” pledge. More recently, it was the even worse betrayal of trying to legislate amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, combined with insulting our intelligence by saying that it was not amnesty.

Add to this the Republicans’ runaway spending and the fact that the war in Iraq has been going badly, and you have all the ingredients of a political debacle.

He does conclude with this advice however:

If this election were about the fate of one political party rather than another, it would hardly be worth thinking about.

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It would be worse than obscene for some voters to cut off their nose to spite their face by either staying home on election day or actually voting a blank check from America for a party with a decades-long history of irresponsibility on national defense.

Even though I disagree with him this is good food for thought. The last time defense wasn’t a vital issue on election day was in the 1920s. I don’t see an election in the next 50 years that doesn’t include national defense as the number one issue. So does that basically mean that we will never, ever return to following the Constitution? That is not acceptable, I would rather bring the nation to its collective knees with a strong dose of Democratic mayhem than tolerate being misled and lied to for another minute.

The fact that Senator Santorum is losing to Bob Casey Jr. speaks volumes about how badly he has angered the base in PA. Here is a hilarious exchange between the Philly Inquirer and Jr. courtesy of Powerline:

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