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Sunday, August 31, 2008

Election Poll Roundup

Zogby Poll: Equilibrium in the POTUS Race!
UTICA, New York - Republican John McCain's surprise announcement Friday of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate - some 16 hours after Democrat Barack Obama's historic speech accepting his party’s presidential nomination - has possibly stunted any Obama convention bump, the latest Zogby Interactive flash poll of the race shows.

The latest nationwide survey, begun Friday afternoon after the McCain announcement of Palin as running mate and completed mid-afternoon today, shows McCain/Palin at 47%, compared to 45% support for Obama/Biden.

The interactive online Zogby survey shows that both Obama and McCain have solidified the support among their own parties - Obama won 86% support of Democrats and McCain 89% of Republicans in a two-way head-to-head poll question not including the running mates. When Biden and Palin are added to the mix, Obama's Democratic support remains at 86%, while McCain's increases to 92%.



Gallup Daily: Obama Continues to Lead 49% to 41%
PRINCETON, NJ -- Barack Obama maintains an eight percentage point lead over John McCain when registered voters nationwide are asked whom they would vote for in the presidential election if it were held today, according to the latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking figures.

Based on a 3 day rolling average of registered voters.

Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday—the day before the Republican National Convention is scheduled to begin—shows Barack Obama ahead of John McCain by three percentage points both with and without leaners. That’s exactly the same edge Obama enjoyed a week ago on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

Today’s numbers show a one-point improvement for McCain, but Obama still leads 47% to 44%. When "leaners" are included, it’s Obama 49%, McCain 46% (see recent daily results). Obama is now viewed favorably by 57% of the nation’s voters, McCain by 56%.

There have been significant changes in perception of John McCain in the two days of polling since he named Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Since then, 49% of Republicans voice a Very Favorable opinion of McCain. That’s up six percentage points from 43% just before the announcement. Also, 64% of unaffiliated voters now give positive reviews to McCain, up ten points since naming his running mate.

There has been little change in perceptions of Obama since his Thursday night speech and the Palin announcement (see trends and other recent demographic observations).


NOTE: For the month of August, the targets are 40.6% Democrat, 31.6% Republican, and 27.8% unaffiliated. For July, the targets were 41.4% Democrat, 31.5% Republican, and 27.1% unaffiliated (see party trends and analysis).

McCain Palin. The Team You Can Trust.

Sarah Palin Naked

UPDATE: The most viewed pictures of Sarah Palin in a bikini holding a gun is a fake. It's a photoshopped composite with Palin's head placed on the picture of a young girl.
_________________________

What does Obama do with those gerbils? I'm asking that Michelle Obama take a DNA test to put to rest that Barack is not the father.

Michelle Malkin psychoanalyzes the people who gather around Hussein. No, they are not just your typical race hustlers like Jeremiah Wright, your typical domestic terrorist like Bill Ayers or your typical slum landlord and convicted crook Tony Rezko. It also includes the prurient and the sticky handed who are looking for pictures of overnight sensation Sarah Palin.

So I’m furthering the little experiment that Expat Texan started and see if I can track and trap some of these perverts.

Ace of Spades is getting into the act:


Persistent Ain't They? Another google hit, now for "Sarah Palin bikini."

Internet detectives or just horndogs?

And More and More: Sarah Palin swimsuit; Sarah Palin wore a bikini.

I have to point out these are all different searches, conducted at different times. The same idiot can't keep clicking on my site thinking suddenly I'm going to have the bikini pics I didn't have the other three times.

So, I guess I'm going to keep getting hits for Sarah Palin swimsuit competition searches, with people searching for hot pictures of Sarah Palin in a bikini, or even totally hot gubernatorial action.

It's ridiculous. It's not like Governor Sarah Palin once posed for Victoria's Secret wearing nothing but high heels and a clown nose or something.

I'm just saying, whatever you do, if you want to avoid unwanted Google interlopers, don't post anything about Sarah Palin and her secret bikini pictures, Sarah Palin and the "Air Force Two," or homoerotic pillowfights between Governor Sarah Palin and Smurfette.


UPDATE: It's fascinating to watch the Left in action. Keep in mind that Hussein has a history of eliminating his competition before the actual election. Sometimes by invalidating their petitions. Sometimes by getting salacious sexual stuff out there. His fingerprints are never on the dirty stuff, he has his Chicago Mob do it for him. The number of hits this blog is getting from people searching for dirty pictures is absolutely incredible. For your reading pleasure, here are the locations of some of his trolls:

Purdue, West Lafayette, IN; Woodburn, OR; Toronto, Ontario; Buffalo, NY; Norman, OK; Naperville, IL; Chicago, IL; Carson, CA; Addison, IL; Chattanooga, TN; Pittsburgh, IL; Bend, OR; Portland, ME; Uniontown, KY; US Government Treasury; Scottsbluff, NE; Reading, PA; Los Angeles, CA; … and the list goes on. Over 500 just this morning.

And now, read this from Townhall: Lefty Bloggers Go After Palin's Daughter.

They are accusing Palin of pretending that her Downs Syndrome child is not really hers, but her daughter’s. These people have a problem with their literary allusions. There is a scene in the mini-series “Rome” in which a woman whose husband returns from war pretends that the child she bore while he was away was her daughter’s. Reminds me a little of the other lie about McCain telling a story about a guard making the sign of the cross that the nutroots attributed to Solzhenitsyn. Except that Solzhenitsyn never told the story.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Experience? Balderdash!

This talk about who has more experience, Palin or Obama is really rather sophomoric. If time in office is the criterion, a resurrected Stalin or a healthy Castro has it all over any of the candidates. The issue is who do you favor in terms of policies. If you favor a strong national defense, free enterprise and believe that America is exceptional you vote the Republican ticket. If you believe that America should subsume its policies to some sort of global order, that America is the biggest threat to world peace, that free enterprise is suspect, that incomes should be leveled and that our use of the world’s resources is excessive and may even be immoral, you vote for the Democrat ticket.

Individualism – vote Republican; mass movements – vote Democrat.

Since only about 50% of the eligible voters actually vote, the key to success is turnout and attracting the uncommitted. That “uncommitted” number is actually surprisingly small. Up until now, McCain has had problems with his base.

As I said HERE,
McCain’s problem has been his impulse to burnish his “maverick” image by sticking his thumb in the eye of the Right. But for any Republican, that’s his base. He can’t win without it. And it’s not just the base turning out on Election Day. It’s the base going door-to-door before the election. It’s the thousands of women in hundreds of Republican Women’s Clubs who were going to give pro-forma lip service to McCain but will now work their hearts out for Palin’s election. In one stroke, McCain created an army of volunteers that rivals in numbers, overwhelms in ability and surpasses in wealth the “youth” that Hussein has drafted.

You don’t have to take my word for it; just ask my wife and her friends.

McCain didn’t choose Palin to get the vote of the professoriate. Obama has that locked down. He chose Palin to energize the base and he did that with a vengeance.
The other thing he did was attract a lot of the uncommitted, especially the uncommitted women. And a good number of PUMAs who, as I said HERE
And finally, Hussein’s troops have all the discipline of the drunken Russian army. Attacking Palin for lack of experience when that is the last issue they should be raising. Attacking her for her good looks, a tactic that will assure that undecided women either vote for McCain or don’t vote at all.

Don’t believe me? Check out the feminist blogs. They hate Hussein with a bright burning passion, and the bile thrown at his partisans is beyond belief.
I should add that attacking her for campaigning while she has small children at home is equally counterproductive. All of a sudden a woman with children should not pursue a career? When did that become a Liberal talking point?

In my opinion, anyone who thinks McCain got it wrong has spent too much time in DC or in the faculty lounge. Here in flyover country, all the “Bitter Clingers” love her.

A BRILLIANT TRAP MAKES DEMS THE MALE CHAUVINISTS

Kirsten Powers in the NY Post comments on the strategy involved in choosing Palin as VP.

The "experience" trap:
The other potential trap is luring the Obama campaign onto the "experience" field. The early conventional wisdom says McCain's pick was boneheaded because it takes the experience issue off the table. But it seems that it has done the opposite: The importance of experience is the topic of the day.

The more Democrats complain about this, the more Republicans can turn it on them and say, "If you are so concerned about the amount of experience of the vice president, what about the top of your ticket?"

Obama's argument thus far has been that experience isn't what counts; it's judgment. By attacking the Republican woman relentlessly on this issue, Democrats are undermining their own man.


When discussing experience, the Hussein supporters are simply bringing up an issue that Hussein himself tries to take off the table. As a fallback, they simply assume that McCain will die soon and we’ll be faced with a Palin presidency.

I have only one word: Hoorah!

Then there’s the misogyny issue:
One Obama supporter and political operative blogged, "In picking an unknown, untested half-a-term governor from Alaska . . . John McCain is following in a long line of reckless men who have rolled the dice for a beauty queen."

Do we really have to do this again?

No sooner was Hillary Rodham Clinton out of the race, and a new woman is in the cross hairs.

On CNN, during a discussion about whether it was appropriate for Palin to accept this job when she has a baby, Dana Bash pointed out it's unlikely anyone would ask this of a male candidate.

I can't help wondering if this is a trap. The McCain camp watched and learned as Obama supporters offended Hillary supporters by their treatment of her. The McCainiacs had to know that this group is incapable of behaving, that Palin would bring out their worst instincts.

One top Republican said to me: "Just wait until she is debating Joe Biden and he starts attacking or condescending to her. Hillary voters are going to say, 'Oh yeah, I remember this.' "

One of the biggest problems with the Hussein campaign is its supporters. They are the far Left lunatic fringe who has forced its way into the hall. They define the Hussein candidacy as nothing else does. They are the faces and voices Americans see in their nightmares as they try to imagine a Hussein presidency.

The drive-by-media will do its best to airbrush them out of the picture, but the loss of control of the means of communication has made the gatekeepers much less effective. It’s no longer possible to limit what we can see and hear.

And the women are jazzed.

How's this for the Democrat's nightmare: McCain wins, serves two terms to be followed by two terms of Palin.

The hostess with the moosest

I wish I had said that (Mark Steyn):
Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am - for several reasons.

First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

Second, it can't be in Senator Obama's interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans' vice-presidential pick is "even more" inexperienced than the Democrats' presidential one.

Third, real people don't define "experience" as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign's thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).

Fourth, Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a "hinterland" - a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn't just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won't need the usual stage-managed "hunting" trip to reassure gun owners: she's lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we're often told it's easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child? Been there, done that.

Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she's been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.

Sixth (see Kathleen's link to Craig Ferguson below), I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.

Friday, August 29, 2008

PALIN AS VICE PRESIDENT



I first learned that Sarah Palin received McCain’s nod to be Vice President from Rush Limbaugh and listened to her speech. She’s good. And the Conservative base is ecstatic over the choice.

Here is the point: Palin is the long ball. But at the same time, she brings everything to the ticket that McCain needs.

McCain needs the Conservative base. He has now sewn that up. Palin is pro-life, she’s pro-gun, she’s pro-family (5 children), she’s small town, her son’s in the Army, she’s small government, she’s throw-the –rascals-out, she’s lower taxes, she’s giving money back to the people, she’s against the bridge to nowhere.

As one feminist said:
My impression is that her reputation as a reformer and an honest-government type is solid. People will love her.
THAT is what the Republicans need to return from the political wilderness.

And here’s what she brings to the election. McCain’s problem has been his impulse to burnish his “maverick” image by sticking his thumb in the eye of the Right. But for any Republican, that’s his base. He can’t win without it. And it’s not just the base turning out on Election Day. It’s the base going door-to-door before the election. It’s the thousands of women in hundreds of Republican Women’s Clubs who were going to give pro-forma lip service to McCain but will now work their hearts out for Palin’s election. In one stroke, McCain created an army of volunteers that rivals in numbers, overwhelms in ability and surpasses in wealth the “youth” that Hussein has drafted.

You don’t have to take my word for it; just ask my wife and her friends.

The second thing I would note is that the Palin pick kicked Hussein off the front pages and the 24/7 news right after the Democrat’s convention. He is practically invisible. So was the discussion of his speech. That is going to hurt because there was no after-glow from that little episode. Right now Hussein is riding around on a bus in the hinterlands unable to get attention. The events in Denver are a poorly remembered dream; something to do with Hussein and Bill and Hillary and what’s-his-name the Senator who rides the train.

On the other hand, the Republicans can hardly wait to get to Minneapolis to cheer on their “Dream Team.”

And finally, Hussein’s troops have all the discipline of the drunken Russian army. Attacking Palin for lack of experience when that is the last issue they should be raising. Attacking her for her good looks, a tactic that will assure that undecided women either vote for McCain or don’t vote at all.

Don’t believe me? Check out the feminist blogs. They hate Hussein with a bright burning passion, and the bile thrown at his partisans is beyond belief.

I have to admire McCain. He seems to have put together an able, vigorous campaign team that is technology savvy, proactive and very smart. And he is showing a mastery of generalship that I thought was beyond him. I underestimated him. But I’m not alone; so did the rest of the punditocracy.

Hussein's Speech

I defer to Glenn Reynolds for the roundup.

Ann Althouse
live blogged the speech:

The best speech of the convention -- it's no contest -- was given by Bill Clinton. No one else came close for me. Second best: Joe Biden. At the next level, I would put Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Barack Obama.


Stephen Green: Drunkblogging Obama’s Historic Speech
8:58PM I’m sorry I didn’t practice my George Costanza, because this was the speech about nothing.

8:59PM I stand corrected: It was the speech about Bush McCain. But where was Barack Obama? I don’t know. The suit was empty.


On the other hand, the folks at The Corner seen to think it was a good, even great, speech.

Jonah Goldberg:
But, I think he'll get his bump. He's a compelling personality. He's telling a lot of Americans, particularly a lot of Democrats, what they want to hear. He's making himself into a conventional Democrat when a conventional Democrat should be running away with things. He'll get his bump.


Jay Nordlinger:
There were several strong speeches at this convention — Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Kerry, Biden, and Gore. All quite strong. The Dem party has some speakers. I wasn’t sure that Obama could best them, or equal them. But he bested them all — with flying colors.


Mickey Kaus (a Liberal) writes about
Mile High Letdown
Obama's non-memorable speech.

That hurts because these are the people that Hussein needs to win this fall.
Obama Speech React: 1) A little flat, and not just because of it's now-required State-of-the Union laundry-list passages; 2) Background off, color-wise;
...
MLK grafs also good. But not enough like those; 4) Gave voters little sense that he understands and can master the pressures--bureaucratic imperatives, unions, civil service rules-- that have often caused previous idealistic liberal presidents to fall short while sucking up taxpayer dollars.

At this point I think back to a very wise and insightful point that Rush Limbaugh made a few days ago: we are swimming around in a “theme soup” (my words) that is being cooked by the ideas of those around us, by our culture and – still to a large extent – by the drive-by-media. And those themes are that this is the Democrats’ year and that Hussein is the greatest orator of our time. So we are set-up to hear what we expect to hear when we listen to him speak.

Having these thoughts firmly planted in our heads, we believe that the Right is facing an electoral tsunami and that when Hussein gives a speech it can only be described in superlatives. As Rush said, this attitude infects everybody, even people who believe themselves to be cynical or on the Right.

So the objective measurement of both propositions will be in the election. I maintain that Hussein’s inexperience in an actual contested election will doom his campaign and that he will have negative coattails.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Hussein: I'M NOT READY FOR THE PRESIDENCY


You know, I am a believer in … in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job. Uh, and I think that … if I were seriously to consider running on a national ticket, I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now there may be some people who are comfortable doing that, but I am not one of those people. — Barack Obama, 2004


This underscores what I and others have said, that Hussein is an accidental candidate nominated by the party of affirmative action.

Things like that don't work out too well, sort of like the mayor of Detroit.

Latest McCain Ad: JOB WELL DONE SENATOR

REASON TV: Jobs Americans Won't Do. Heh.



via Glenn Reynolds

Joe Biden: Hair We Can Believe In

Ann Coulter provides a devastating explanation of just how badly Biden plagiarized his speech and lied about his roots.

A must read, especially for those who have only a vague idea of what Biden was accused of doing.

Everyone acts as though Biden's outrageous plagiarism of British Labor Leader Neil Kinnock's speech during the 1988 presidential campaign was just a mistake, a slip of the tongue. Biden, his defenders say, had credited Kinnock in other speeches, but simply forgot to add the attribution one time.

First, Biden had failed to mention Kinnock more than once. Second, it was not just a matter of adding an attribution. On the occasions when Biden failed to credit Kinnock, he also had to alter Kinnock's speech to act as if he were describing the Biden family.

Kinnock said: "Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is (my wife) Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?"

Biden said: "I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright?"

Kinnock's speech continued: "Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry? Those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why didn't they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak?"

Biden's speech continued: "Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn't work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?" Biden's Welsh accent was as phony as Madonna's British accent.

If this were merely a failure to cite Kinnock, why was Labor Leader Neil Kinnock talking about the Biden family and the coal mines of Pennsylvania?

Biden not only lifted -- as The New York Times reported -- Kinnock's "phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact," but also his entire life story.

Dismissing his theft of Kinnock's speech, Biden said at the time: "So what if I didn't attribute it to Kinnock? I can't quite understand this. If I was making up who I was, then that's one thing."

But Biden was making up who he was. And he was making up what kind of country this is.

The whole point of Kinnock's speech was to denounce the English class structure, where his grandfather couldn't get ahead, despite his talents. Thus, Kinnock concluded by saying his parents and grandparents couldn't advance "because there was no platform upon which they could stand."

That has never been true in this country. We have no class structure. People do get ahead by being smart and working hard.

The other side of the coin is that those born well are perfectly capable of falling from their perch of privilege, as expressed in the peculiarly American expression: "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." Which is precisely what happened to the Biden family.

According to Vice Plagiarist Biden's own autobiography, his father was to the manor born. Biden's grandfather was an executive with the American Oil Co., and his father had all the advantages in life. "My dad," Biden writes in "Promises to Keep," "grew up well polished by gentlemanly pursuits. He would ride to the hounds, drive fast, fly airplanes. He knew good clothes, fine horses, the newest dance steps."

But, in the blunt language of the Vanity Fair election blog, "he pissed away his fortune and Joe and his siblings grew up in a decidedly, and proudly, working-class Catholic home."

So why was Biden concluding his Kinnock-"inspired" speech with clenched fist, claiming that his family "didn't have a platform upon which to stand." The executive offices at the American Oil Co. sound like a pretty good platform.

The problem wasn't that Biden's father didn't have a platform, but that he fell off the platform. Far from sharing Kinnock's life story, the Biden family would have benefited from a strict British class system that holds up talentless aristocrats while keeping down the talented low-born.

I had no idea.

The Messiah Will Henceforth Be Known By the Single Name “Hussein.”

Billions of pixels have been devoted to the denunciation of those who refer to Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name. Perhaps it’s time for Obama general counsel Bob Bauer to send a sharp letter to the Justice Department, demanding the prosecution of anyone who refers to the Anointed One’s middle name, as he did regarding Harold Simmons.


It seems that there is a "Obama Freikorps" out there who are out to silence critics, not debate them. It's even disturbing to thoughtful Liberals.

But before the dark night of Liberal Fascism falls on America we will now institute a policy here at the Virginian. Henceforth the rock star who was nominated to be the Democrats candidate for President will have one name: Hussein.

Sort of like another rock star – Madonna (anyone remember her last name?)

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Is America Ready To Send Its Political Opponents to Jail?

You can expect hardball in a presidential campaign, especially one in a country as divided as ours seems to be. But the kind of hardballs being pitched is an indication of the people and policies that an incoming administration will be employing.

That is why it’s particularly troubling that the Obama campaign has filed a criminal complaint against the people behind an ad being run that links Obama to avowed terrorist William Ayers.

Per Ben Smith's Blog at Politico:


It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Bauer has called for criminal investigations and prosecutions into the donors to independent groups critical of Obama, including one supporting John Edwards and another supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton. His words did have the effect of scaring their donors and consultants, but haven't yet appeared to result in any prosecution.

So it appears to be a standard strategy of the Obama team to threaten their political enemies with prison for being disrespectful of Obama. This is a tactic that is reminiscent of third world countries like the ones the Obama relatives are involved with in Africa.


The ad tying Ayers to Obama is found at the American Issues Project and appears to be factually true.



What is very troubling is that the Obama campaign has decided not just to denounce the ad and run a counter ad, but that they are attempting to criminalize the ad itself. They want the people who sponsored the ad to go to jail. Many people are troubled by this.

John Hinderaker at Powerline asks:
Obama's suggestion that it is illegal for a 501(c)(4) entity to fund issue ads that are negative toward him appears ludicrous. Here's the real question, though: if Obama is elected President, will he appoint an Attorney General who will carry out politically-motivated prosecutions like the one he is now demanding? I suppose we can't know for sure, but why wouldn't he? If he demands criminal prosecution of free speech that opposes his political interests when he's a candidate, why wouldn't he order it as President?



Many Republicans are unhappy with John McCain for his the blatant suppression of free speech in McCain Feingold. Now the Obama camp is raising the ante by trying to jail people who dare to speak out against the Messiah.

It is a very troubling perspective of what an Obama Justice Department could do to his political opponents.

Yes We Can



Vanderleun:
"YES WE CAN is the bestselling new life success tool by Barack Obama - Biden 2008. Learn the success principles that took an introverted young child from Hawaii to the precipice of the White House. Glean the wisdom of the sages in such chapters as "Divorced Opponents are the Best Opponents," "Throw Grandma Under the Train," "I am Not my Brother's Keeper," and "Articulate, Bright and Clean." Foreward by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Oprah Book Club, 2008."

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Is America Ready for an Affirmative Action President?

The question is often asked “Is America ready for a Black President?” It is most often asked by Liberals like Jacob Weisberg who proclaims that If Obama Loses Racism is the only reason McCain might beat him.

In Weisberg’s mind the only reason people would not vote for Barack Obama is because they are racists.

Citing President Bush’s unpopularity (keep in mind that Bush is not running), he maintains that


“Barack Obama, with every natural and structural advantage in the presidential race, is running only neck-and-neck against John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?”
Let’s parse that paragraph: Obama has a
· “crack political organization”
· Raised lots of money
· Gives a good speech
So based on these attributes he deserves to be our next president. If he is not, why not?

His answer is racism. He cites the result of a NY Times poll which refers to, in his words:


“…white America's curious sense of racial grievance. In the poll, 26 percent of whites say they have been victims of discrimination.”
Note the word "curious." Your mind’s ear can hear the incredulity in Weisberg’s voice. Whites cannot be the victims of discrimination in Weisberg’s universe. By Liberal definition, whites are the oppressors, never the oppressed.

This ties together with the reason why Barack Obama is the Democrat’s choice for President: he’s Black.

Note that nowhere in Weisberg’s article is there any reference to Obama’s accomplishments. To ask the question is to answer it: he has none. In Chicago, his leadership of a $50 million dollar program to improve public schools left the schools there in arguably worse condition. The housing for the poor in Obama’s district is abominable, in part due to Tony Rezko. Poor Black people are being forced out of Michelle Obama’s hospital in an initiative spearheaded by the candidate’s wife.

Obama’s associates are a disreputable bunch of race hustlers like Jeremiah Wright; unrepentant terrorists like William Ayers, and convicted grafters like Tony Rezko.

So his singular accomplishments include the ability to give a good speech that sends a thrill down the legs of Chris Matthews, the fact that his last name is not Clinton (The Accidental Candidate), and the fact that he’s Black. That, my friends is the very definition of an affirmative action candidate.

We have had forty years of affirmative action in all walks of life. Not enough women or minorities in management? Hire and promote more, and white men waiting for the job or promotion can just wait until the quota is filled. Not enough minority police officers or firemen in the upper ranks? Promote more and whites can wait their turn.

To the Weisbergs of this world, these decisions are not the subject of legitimate grievance. The white males who see themselves passed over should just suck it up and realize that they are paying for the sins of their race. In fact, to even resent this shows just how racist they are. Affirmative action is good, and those who would question its “collateral damage” are themselves racists of the worst kind: racist who do not acknowledge their racism. But Jacob Weisberg has found you out.

To question the fitness of Obama for the presidency is, according to Weisberg,

“.. prejudice usually … coded in distortions about Obama and his background.”
Objections to Obama’s lack of experience, programs, associates and failures are illegitimate; because he’s Black. We don't ask if an affirmative action hire is the most qualified, we only note the race or gender.

Let’s not dismiss out of hand the goals of affirmative action. People have been kept out of jobs because of the color of their skin or their gender. So it’s time to ask if America should now elect an affirmative action candidate to the highest office in the land.

Weisberg believes that
“the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change.”
If you believe that these are really the biggest issues facing America, you too may want to vote for Obama. These are "his" issues.

If, on the other hand you believe that some other issues are bigger: issues like a newly energized Russia re-creating its empire, Islamofacism as a world-wide terrorist movement that has not been defeated, high fuels costs, and a global financial crisis. If these issues are senior to Weisberg’s list you may just want to elect a president with a few more years of experience and a more realistic view of the world.

Weisberg’s entire screed is a paean to affirmative action. He demands that we make Barack Obama our first affirmative action President. Old white men need not apply.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Is David Brooks trying to sabotage Barack Obama?

Mickey Kaus
I think so. Discussing Obama on NPR Friday:

He's gotta tie himself to a theme that runs through everything. And the theme that's authentic to him is: He is the future. He is the kind of person who emerges in a global world. And that's what I'm looking for at the convention, whether he can do that. [E.A.]


Suggested slogan: "America is Over! Deal With It." ... Brooks must know this is incredibly bad advice. Even Gore Vidal would recognize that this is incredibly bad advice. Heck, even Susan Estrich

Michelle Obama, David Axelrod Depriving Poor People of Healthcare?

From the Chicago Sun-Times
Sen. Barack Obama's wife and three close advisers have been involved with a program at the University of Chicago Medical Center that steers patients who don't have private insurance -- primarily poor, black people -- to other health care facilities.

Michelle Obama -- currently on unpaid leave from her $317,000-a-year job as a vice president of the prestigious hospital -- helped create the program, which aims to find neighborhood doctors for low-income people who were flooding the emergency room for basic treatment. Hospital officials say such patients hinder their ability to focus on more critically ill patients in need of specialized care, such as cancer treatment and organ transplants.

Obama's top political strategist, David Axelrod, co-owns the firm, ASK Public Strategies, that was hired by the hospital last year to sell the program -- called the Urban Health Initiative -- to the community as a better alternative for poor patients. Obama's wife and Valerie Jarrett, an Obama friend and adviser who chairs the medical center's board, backed the Axelrod firm's hiring, hospital officials said.


Don't know if this is going to go anywhere. I am told that poor people go to emergency rooms for the sort of things we go to see our doctors, because emergency rooms of many hospitals are required to treat people who can't afford to pay.

But a little way down, you get an idea about how Chicago politics works, one hand washes the other...

Another Obama adviser and close friend, Dr. Eric Whitaker, took over the Urban Health Initiative when he was hired at U. of C. in October 2007. Whitaker previously had been director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. Obama has said he recommended Whitaker for the state job, giving his name to Tony Rezko, who helped Gov. Blagojevich assemble his Cabinet. Rezko, a former fund-raiser for Obama and Blagojevich, was convicted in June on federal corruption charges tied to state deals.
It's all a close knit club of pols who "do" for each other and make money off the public.

Elect Obama and America will become one big Chicago, where the question is "who sent you?" If you don't get that reference, here it is:

In Chicago politics a key question has always been, who "sent" you? The classic phrase is ... from an anecdote of Abner Mikva's, the former White House Counsel (Pres. Clinton) ... As a young student ... he walked into the local committeman's office ... and was immediately asked: "Who sent you?" Mikva replied, "nobody sent me." And the retort came back from the cigar chomping pol: "Well, we don't want nobody that nobody sent."

Sunday, August 24, 2008

"I Think I Have a Much Higher IQ Than You do."

Hot Air has the video:



Beldar comments on Ann Althouse's blog:

Unfortunately, what's shown and discussed in that video clip is not all, or even the the best part -- "best" meaning, in this context, "most damning to Biden" -- of the original C-SPAN clip from 1987.

The whole story appears in an NYT article by none other than E.J. Dionne. In addition to claiming he has a higher IQ than the questioner (unprovable either way without getting test scores for them both), Biden insisted that he had three degrees from college (when in fact he had only one, albeit that with a double-major.) He claimed to have been recognized as the "outstanding student" in his college political science department, when in fact he had only been nominated for an award (which he didn't win). Biden claimed to have had a full academic scholarship to law school, when he actually had only a half-scholarship based on financial need.

And most incredibly, at least to me, Biden also claimed to have graduated in the top half of his law school class. That was an incredible whopper, since he actually graduated 76th out of a class of 85 -- a class rank that reflected, but was not by any means the result solely of, the F he got in a first-year course after he was caught having plagiarized five times from a law review article in a class paper he submitted.

That plagiarism, of course, was dramatic foreshadowing to his plagiarizing from speeches of Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, Hubert Humphrey, and Robert F. Kennedy during his aborted bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.

I'm very, very glad that Obama selected Biden (speaking as an Obama opponent

Dave Barry on the Democrat Convention

This year there is high drama in the Mile High City as the Democrats gather under their official 2008 convention slogan: ``A Unified Party, United in Unity Together As One, Undivided.''

Already there has been sporadic gunfire between the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton delegates. Political observers see this as indication that there is still some underlying tension between the two sides.
...
It's hard to blame Sen. Clinton for being bitter. Here she is, the smartest human ever, PLUS she spent all those years standing loyally behind Bill Clinton wearing uncomfortable pantyhose (I mean Hillary was, not Bill) (although there are rumors), PLUS she went to the trouble and expense of acquiring a legal residence in New York State so she could be a senator from there, PLUS she assembled a team of nuclear-physicist-grade genius political advisors, PLUS she spent years going around to every dirtbag community in America explaining in detail her 23-point policy solutions for every single problem facing the nation including soybean blight. And after all that, she loses the nomination to a guy who has roughly the same amount of executive governmental experience as Hannah Montana. Hillary is like: ``Are you KIDDING me?''

Sen. Clinton is scheduled to address the convention Tuesday night, when she will either call on her supporters to unite behind Obama, or attempt to snatch the nomination and escape with it by helicopter to a secret mountain fortress. ''We are fully confident that Sen. Clinton will do the right thing,'' stated a Democratic party official, adding, ``but we have a net.''
...
But in the end, the focus of this convention will be on Barack Obama, who on Thursday night will receive the nomination in long-overdue recognition of a distinguished career of seeking the nomination. His goal, in his acceptance speech, will be to win over the undecided voters -- the people who are unsure of what he really stands for, or who have received emailed rumors that he is a Muslim, or a socialist, or a vampire, or a lesbian. His goal will be to show, with no disrespect to the Muslim socialist vampire lesbian community, that he is a regular person just like you, except he has Vision and Leadership. After that, he will lay out his specific policies for building a brighter future. Then he will turn into a bat.

U.S. Warships Run the Gauntlet with Georgia Aid

From Wired:
The U.S. Air Force flew its first planeful of medical supplies to Georgia more than a week ago. Now the U.S. Navy is getting in on the humanitarian action, sending a flotilla of at least three American ships plus some friends via the Black Sea to deliver more aid to Georgia. What's interesting is the mix of ships involved.





The US destoyer McFaul (pictured)

The Arrogance of Obama

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit linked to Talkleft.

There is "trouble in river City" among the Democrats with the Hillary supporters calling the Obama supporters arrogant and fault them for not reaching out.

A sample of the comments:

I honestly can say that I am not nearly as upset with Senator Obama as I am with the Obama supporters, especially online though some of the real life ones here could use a few lessons in humility, respect and fair play.


I have my issues with Obama, but his "supporters" are 100x worse.



And you know what, I hear it from people I know in real life--friends.
I don't know why Obama inspires this arrogance in people. Maybe it was always there.

Whenever I hear or read "why are X voters so stupid?" I just blink. That doesn't work as an electoral strategy.




At one time I thought that McCain would be the candidate in the most trouble with the "base" of the party. It looks like I was wrong.

And for sheer verbosity and vitriol (and fun writing) how's this from Once Upon a Time:
I humbly offer a word of advice to Mr. Obama and/or his campaign strategists: it might be best if you took some time to study dramaturgy in addition to...well, everything else. One of the keys to a certain kind of dramatic structure is that the climax occurs at the moment of maximum suspense. The arrival and duration of that particular moment are determined by the ways in which the preceding conflicts have been developed until the opposing forces have reached the point where the conflicts must be resolved, at least in significant part. The climactic moment cannot be prolonged beyond what the accumulated weight of the dramatic structure will bear. If it is prolonged too much, drama and suspense begin to ebb. When it is prolonged far too much, then what had been rigid goes slack; what had been stiff hopes, if you will, begin to droop.

In such lamentable circumstances (which all of us have experienced; yes, you have too, don't deny it), instead of an ecstatic explosion, we are sometimes left with only a pathetic dribble. In this case, the pathetic dribble goes by the name Joseph Biden.

A Biden dribble just before the Democratic convention is a shocking failure of dramatic imagination. This exercise in digital manipulation was certainly not good for me, and I can't imagine it was good for anyone, probably including Obama. I very much doubt that even Barack wants a cigarette after this failure to achieve satisfactory completion.

Read the rest.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Obama Compares the US and China and Prefers China

I this post I commented that Obama compares America unfavorably to China. It's common for Obama to criticize the US for what he perceives to be its failings.

Dan Riehl expands on that.

It's lost in the Veep hype for now. Down the stretch that won't be the case. After he is softened up and a growing number of Americans are given reasons for concern over Obama's Leftism - there's this and some pertinent facts on China below.




Obama is either incredibly naive, terribly misinformed, a communist, just flat out dumb or all of the above to be caught on tape making a statement like that.

I can just imagine the voice over now. It wouldn't even require half of this:

In all this activity it greatly helps to have a secretive planning bureaucracy and a government that brooks little dissent. In Britain it took as long to conduct a public inquiry into the proposed construction of Heathrow's Terminal Five as it took to build Beijing's new airport terminal from scratch.

There was no consultation with the public on the terminal. Nor was there any public debate about the construction of Beijing's third runway, notwithstanding the noise pollution already suffered by thousands of nearby residents.

Chinese official Xu Li said, Once a plan is made, it is executed. “Democracy”, she says, “sacrifices efficiency.”

For Beijing's airport expansion, 15 villages were flattened and 10,000 residents resettled. They were barred from unemployment benefits and other welfare privileges though their farmland had been grabbed. Officials threatened them with violence if they refused to leave.

The World Bank says that roads are sometimes built only to convert countryside into revenue-generating urban land. Combined with a lack of adequate public transport, Beijing's polluted air and congested streets, to which 1,000 cars are added daily, are evidence of the problem.

Chinese official Xu Li said, Once a plan is made, it is executed. “Democracy”, she says, “sacrifices efficiency.”

The government wants to build a new mag Lev train line. Residents along the route are fearful of noise and radiation from the trains.

Complaints still abound about the way things work. Highways—both expressways and other intercity roads—are studded with traffic-slowing toll booths. China reportedly has 70% of the world's tolled roads and its tolls are the highest in the world (using exchange rates adjusted according to currencies' purchasing power). To cut costs, lorries routinely overload. This helps to make the roads among the most dangerous in the world (89,000 deaths in 2006 by official reckoning; the actual number may be much higher). And it pushes up the cost of maintaining them.

Chinese official Xu Li said, Once a plan is made, it is executed. “Democracy”, she says, “sacrifices efficiency.”


In China, many laborers are lucky to make the equivalent of $8,000 a year. And for that they often work 16 hour days, seven days a week.

And Barack Obama wants America to be more like China? You are kidding me, right?


America has its faults. It is, after all, populated by human beings. We are less than angels. But to be compared to China and found wanting is the sort of thing that gets you votes from the Harvard faculty but nowhere else. Especially not from the "bitter clingers."

Dan Riehl asks:
Did Obama Just Lose The Election?


He's so far out of his depth that he could drown.

Media Working Over Time for Obama

It's only been a few hours since Obama named Biden to his ticket, but apparently making racist comments is a "strength" if you are Biden.

MSNBC guest: Biden’s racial gaffes are rather refreshingly politically incorrect, aren’t they?

Golly, maybe this has been McCain’s problem all along. When the dumbest hacks in the lefty blogosphere attacked him for coded messages in the Britney ad, I thought they were objecting to the alleged message. Turns out they were probably just objecting to the fact that it was coded. If only Maverick had been forthright and thrown in a bon mot about Barry O being “clean,” the freshness of his candor would have charmed us all and been celebrated as a political strength.



Newsbusters has the video.

You know the old software programmer's excuse: "that's not a bug. That's a feature!" John Harwood of CNBC/NYT came up with a political variation on the theme this morning to buff up Joe Biden. Biden's gaffes, including the racially-insensitive ones, are actually . . . "a strength."

Harwood was chatting with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on a special Morning Joe edition today, and the topic of Biden's famous "clean and articulate" comment about Obama arose. Biden also made headlines of course with his crack about 7-11s being populated by people with Indian accents.


JOHN HARWOOD: He is not somebody who is infused with political correctness, the verbal equivalent of putting his pinky up when he opens his mouth. So this is what, the way ordinary voters are as well. They're not always worried about sort of calibrating every single word by "ooh, is this racially insensitive?" That's something that Joe Biden brings as an asset to the ticket. The gaffes actually show one of his strengths.


And Jacob Weisberg tells us:
If Obama Loses
Racism is the only reason McCain might beat him.

There is more than a whiff of desperation about the Left and the Obama campaign.

Obama and Ayers

This ad is running in Virginia



UPDATE:
Beldar has a very good post on the subject.

If Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dorn are what pass for respectable members of liberal Chicago society now, that's among the most shameful indictments I've ever heard of the honesty and integrity of that city's citizens.

Barack Obama continues to profess that it's perfectly okay for him to be friends with this man, to have served on a corporate board with him, to have exchanged back-scratching and doled out millions of dollars in grant money to his pet radical education projects, and to have even used Ayers' home to beg him and his radical friends for political contributions. Obama says that the fact that Ayers' self-admitted terrorism occurred in the 1960s and 1970s — crimes for which Ayers is not still in prison now only because of law enforcement blunders — makes it perfectly okay for Obama to associate with Ayers in the 1990s and 2000s. The Obama campaign is even running a TV ad to make that argument.
Read the whole thing.

The Accidental Candidate

Can you remember? It was only a year ago that Hillary Clinton’s ascension to be the Democrat Party candidate and the next President was as sure a thing as you could get in politics?

From the November 16, 2007 Gallup poll:


PRINCETON , NJ -- In the national standings of the Democratic presidential candidates seeking their party's nomination next year, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton continues to hold a strong 27-point lead over second-place rival Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, according to a new Gallup Poll. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards remains further behind in third place.
According to the Nov. 11-14, 2007, poll, 48% of Democrats say they are most likely to support Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination in 2008, followed by Obama
at 21% and Edwards at 12%.

August 17, 2007 California Progress Report by Frank D. Russo:


The California Field Poll, long considered the "gold standard" in the measuring the attitudes of voters in the Golden State, has today released a poll showing that Hillary Clinton has increased her lead here amongst likely voters for the Democratic nomination and that she has sizeable double digit leads when matched up against Republican candidates for President in the general election.
From Real Clear Politics March 28, 2007 by Tony Blankley


With every passing week it becomes more likely that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party nominee for president. This thought, alone, should provide the strongest possible motivation to the Bush administration and the Washington Republicans to get their acts together so that the eventual Republican nominee for president doesn't start the general election campaign in too deep a hole.


So what happened?

You begin to see the cloud on the horizon that presaged the political storm in this further quote from Blankley


The polls that show half the country saying they won't vote for Hillary should be discounted.


The polls showed that half the country did not want Hillary as president. Because that meant another four (or perhaps eight) years of the “Bill and Hillary” show, and the last few episodes did not demand a re-run.

Blankley on Obama:


His media-driven launch immediately captured much of the substantial anti-Hillary sentiment in the Democratic Party.

Barack Obama’s ascendency was as much about Hillary as it was about Obama. Barack the candidate had all the attributes Democrats were looking for: he was young, handsome, well dressed, a good orator and he was an affirmative action candidate.

In the words of Joe Biden, Obama's pick for his VP:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

He had rock star qualities that had women fainting in the aisles and creating soft-porn YouTube videos for him. Plus he had that other not-talked-about feature: he was not Hillary Clinton.

When Barack began his run, he was an unknown. Groomed by the Chicago Democrat machine for national office, this run was supposed to be a warm-up for the real thing a few years down the road, or perhaps a shot at the Vice Presidency.

But the adulation he received plus the “not Hillary” factor combined to push him into the lead in the early caucuses and primaries. This was the time that all the world was exposed to the candidate of “Change, Hope and the Future.” This was the kind of campaign that Obama liked to run: filled with lofty but essentially empty rhetoric.

What, after all, is someone promising who offers change, hope and the future?

But Obama has always used his ability to, as he said it:
“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

That is the key to Obama's past success in all his relationships. People never see him, they always see their own desires and hopes reflected back to them.

And in his political life, it helps that all of his real opponents never seemed to make it on the ballot or to the date of the election.

There is no more effective way to maintain that blank screen than to offer your audience change, hope and the future and let them use their imagination to define what those things mean.

But there was a problem brewing for Obama on the way to his anointing.

Like the ghosts of Christmas past, the skeletons kept tumbling out of his closet. First there was his association with Tony Rezko and the purchase of his Chicago mansion.

Then the Reverend Wright showed up, not just on YouTube, but on the networks and finally in a National Press Club speech and the man who was his pastor for 20 years, his spiritual mentor and who he could no more disown that his racist grandmother, had to be disowned for calling him a politician.

And now the ongoing saga of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn . Click here for what Ayers and Dohrn think about America today.

As an orator before a teleprompter mouthing the word he has been given, he is one of the best speakers in politics. It’s in his unscripted utterances that he shows the man behind the blank screen.

I contend that his hesitancy when peaking extemporaneously is due to the fact that he is afraid of revealing himself; afraid of showing the “Reverend Wright” within. Yet it does come out in his comparing America unfavorably to China. Comparing Russia’s invasion of Georgia to our invasion of Iraq; putting us on the same moral plane.

The way he criticizes McCain’s houses reminds me of nothing so much as “wise ass” comments; sophomoric.

Like Icarus, Barack was giddy from his high flight. But the more people got to know him, the more he comes into focus, the less attractive he becomes.

And as he was taking his regal ride to the nomination he began to believe his own hype. When one is being hailed as a modern day Messiah, a little humility is in order. But the rock-star performance reached a peak as the German public hailed the leader whose physical perfection was only matched by his ability to transform the world and right America’s wrongs. Reaching too far into rockstardom, he was setting himself up for parody.

At this point, the electorate a beginning to wonder: “what’s behind the screen?” Is it the friend of felon Tony Rezko, Reverend “God damn America” Wright, unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bomber William Ayers? Is he just the front man for Chicago machine politics?

And what of the “change” that Barack and Michelle Obama promise? Is he promising to restructure America’s culture because it has way too many faults? With the exception of the far Left, which is overly represented in Democrat party politics at this time, most Americans are fairly satisfied with our culture. It’s the $4 per gallon gasoline they don’t like. It’s schools that don’t educate they don’t like. It’s taxes that take too much of their pay they don’t like. It’s illegal aliens pouring across our borders they don’t like. It’s a decline in the value of their retirement accounts they don’t like. It’s concern about the coarsening of our culture they don’t like.

Unfortunately for Obama, most people don’t see him as the change agent for fixing the things they don’t like.

They may not be enthusiastic for John McCain, but the old wrinkled white haired guy will keep things on an even keel. He’s a war hero, he’s ethical, and he’s as non-partisan as you can get in a partisan world.

He’s firmly opposed to abortion in a country that’s divided on the issue. But what people are not divided on is partial birth abortion and infanticide; issues that bedevil Obama.

McCain may have his endorsement from controversial religious figures on the Right, but he did not choose as his spiritual mentor and long time pastor Reverend “God Damn America” Wright.

The campaign went on too long for Barack Obama. The blank screen is shredding, the man behind it is being revealed, and the image is not pretty.

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan agrees: They're Paying Attention Now
Why is it a real race now, with John McCain rising in the polls and Barack Obama falling? There are many answers, but here I think is an essential one: The American people have begun paying attention.

Obama Picks Biden

Not much to be said. Jonah Goldberg has a prediction. Let’s see if it come true.
All that said, I think Biden will give a phenomenal speech at the convention and for a week or two people will think it was a great pick.


Glenn Reynolds gives a roundup (links at Instapundit).

OBAMA PICKS BIDEN: So Much for Change? That's unfair. He's at least as fresh a face as Madeleine Albright.

Plus, an epic text message failure? Micah Sifry: "From a tech point of view, the mass txt message seems to have failed." On the other hand, while people who signed up may not have gotten their text messages, Obama got their names for his mailing list.

UPDATE: Not winning over Katie Granju: "'I'm not excited by Obama's choice of Biden. He's got a long record of aggressively supporting the consumer debt machines that have created so much of the subprime lending mess we find ourselves in today.And in a campaign that has succeeded in large part on the idea of change and progress, he's simply a throwback."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Miniter: "Biden is almost a 'neocon' in his foreign policy views. He voted for the Iraq War in 2002. . . . Does his elevation by Obama signal that that the Obama campaign is backing away from its timetable to withdraw from Iraq? Does Biden’s position differ significantly from McCain’s? Isn’t he, in fact, closer to McCain’s view on Iraq than Obama is?"

Meanwhile, since it's bound to come up, here my defense of Biden over the plagiarism thing, from The Appearance of Impropriety.

MORE: The Senator from MBNA? "Barack Obama's choice of Joseph Biden as his running mate is likely to bring up lots of old stories about the long-time senator from Delaware. In 1998, someone called me to talk about the sale of Biden's house, which had been a minor issue in his re-election campaign two years earlier. But when I traveled to Delaware, I found there was more to it than met the eye, and it was just part of Biden's close, intertwined relationship with MBNA, the giant credit-card company based in his home state." The lousy bankruptcy "reform" bill, which MBNA and many of its "friends" pushed hard, was very unpopular on both the left and right sides of the blogosphere. I wonder how the leftosphere will respond on this issue now? On the other hand, I don't think McCain was any better.

No Terrorism Ties Here -- Move Along

What should be the reaction to finding Muslim men designing and testing a drone aircraft capable of carrying 600 pounds … which could be explosive?

If you are the FBI, it’s “never mind.”

Andy McCarthy:

WNBC News in New York City reports that the NYPD, working with Suffolk Country police and the FBI, have concluded there are no terrorism ties to be concerned about in connection with their discovery that a man, described only as an Egyptian engineer who entered the U.S. on a Sudanese passport, has designed an unmanned aerial vehicle capable of carrying more than 600 pounds of explosives.

The engineer was assisted by a small group of men whom investigators surveilled as they drove a white van onto a tarmac, jumped out, and ground-tested the drone. There was no observation of the UAV ever getting into the air.

The testing of the drone was done in the dead of night on a little used airstrip in Calverton, Long Island.

I find this more than a little alarming, notwithstanding the assurances of police that "no ties to terror" have been found...
Do law enforcement agencies have a habit of dropping the ball on this sort of thing? Why, yes, they do. Wishing to avoid the charge of racial profiling.

McCarthy again:
...as I recount in Willful Blindness, the first known activities of the jihadist cell that eventually killed Meir Kahane in 1990, plotted to kill Hosni Mubarak in 1992, bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and was stopped a few months later in the midst of plotting to bomb other New York City landmarks, was the FBI's investigation of paramilitary training over several weekends in July 1989. The Muslim men in question — who at the time were not known to have ties to any established terrorist organizatoin but went on to carry out the aforementioned plots — piled into vans at a radical mosque in Brooklyn and traveled to a shooting range where they conducted shooting practice with a variety of weapons, including AK-47s. The FBI closed the investigation when the men discovered they were under surveillance and complained that they were being harrassed.

The shooting range they chose for the training was in Calverton, Long Island.
I'm rather glad they chose the NY Metro area.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Obama: Nothing New Here?

Jonah Goldberg in Townhall:

The Democrats are having their flop-sweat moment. Barack Obama should be way out in front. The Republicans are in terrible shape. There hasn't been a more battered brand name since Bart Simpson swallowed a jagged metal "O" from his box of Krusty-O's cereal. The GOP has nominated an old white-haired dude, in Paris Hilton's words, who makes Dick Cheney look like a lambada champion. He'll be the kind of president who will yell from the Oval Office window, "You kids get off my lawn!" The economy isn't roadkill quite yet; it's sort of like wounded roadkill, flopping around, unable to get going but unwilling to lay down and die.

And yet, John McCain is pulling ahead of Obama. The latest Reuters poll has Grandpa Munster up five percentage points over our secular messiah. The Real Clear Politics average of polls has Obama and McCain in a virtual tie. And, according to RCP, if the race were held today and McCain took the toss-up states where he's currently ahead, he'd be the next president.
...

Ask the typical Obama supporter why this should be so and you'll get a range of answers. Some just stare at the poll numbers the way my late basset hound would look at me when I tried to feed him a grape: with pure unblinking incomprehension. Others act like the guy who sits alone with his shopping bags at the public library, muttering about Fox News conspiracies and how Karl Rove-like aliens are doing terrible things with probes of proctological exactitude. Still others just shake their heads at the racism of anyone who could possibly have a problem with a very left-wing politician with almost no experience, who often sounds like his campaign slogan is: "People of Earth! Stop Your Bickering. I Am From Harvard, And I'm Here To Help."

Perhaps therein lies the answer to this supposed mystery. Indeed, perhaps there's no mystery at all, and Obama's problems are the same problems Democrats always have at the presidential level: He's an elitist.


And the McCain campaign is doing everything it can to underscore that impression.

New McCain Ad: "The One ... Road To Denver."



McCain is getting a lot of mileage over Obama being treated as the Messiah.

Obama enabled infanticide

David Limbaugh uses the right words:
Obama enabled infanticide while in the Illinois legislature and has been dissembling about it.

David Fredosso, author of the excellent new book "The Case Against Barack Obama," points out that Obama has repeatedly made the false claim that he only spoke out against an Illinois bill that would have recognized premature abortion survivors as "persons" because it would have negatively affected Roe v. Wade. Yet "every single version of the bill was neutral on Roe. Each one affected only babies already born, not ones in the womb."
Obama's own words, circulating in transcript form and on YouTube, are even more incriminating, as he articulates his opposition to the bill seeking to protect a baby born alive as a result of a botched abortion. "Essentially, adding an additional doctor who then has to be called in an emergency situation to come in and make these assessments is really designed simply to burden the original decision of the woman and the physician to induce labor and perform an abortion."
Translation: Obama will not theoretically burden a woman's right to abort her child, but he will actually burden an already-born infant's chances of surviving.




As was demonstrated in my previous post, the only defense that the Obama camp has is to deny, deny, deny and say “trust me on this, my opponents are lying.” That may be good enough for the hard core Left. In fact they know - but can’t admit - that they agree with Obama on this that infants destined to be aborted but born alive should be allowed to die. But like partial birth abortion, for most people it’s simply wrong. And that’s what this election is about.

Kathleen Parker, also writing in National Review Online, is willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt.
Based on his comments at the time, he apparently reasoned that granting personhood to an aborted fetus, albeit one with a heartbeat, was a subterfuge tactic aimed at granting personhood to a fetus.
…When asked to explain his position as a state legislator, Obama said he would have voted for the law had it included a neutrality clause -- similar to one added to the federal law -- affirming that the bill would not impact Roe v. Wade.
But the Illinois legislation in final form did include such a neutrality clause, prompting charges that Obama deliberately lied. Or did he merely misremember, as often happens in politics?
… The most revealing answer may have come when pastor Rick Warren asked the Illinois senator when a baby gets human rights.
"Well, uh, you know, I think that whether you're looking at it from a theological perspective or, uh, a scientific perspective, uh, answering that question with specificity, uh, you know, is, is, uh, above my pay grade."
Well, uh, not really. …Obama's born-alive problem ultimately could prove fatal to the man who thought too hard and lost his sense.

Parker falls into the trap of believing that Obama is about “nuance;” that he is so cerebral that simple answers simply won’t do for him. But as you learn more about Obama you realize that is not the reason for the long, rambling, stuttering answers Obama gives when he’s unscripted.

Obama is about avoiding responsibility, that’s why he has so many “present” votes. He’s about mirroring his audience, he acknowledged that in his book when he described himself
"I serve as a blank screen," Obama writes, "on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."
He’s about disguising his instincts which are revealed by the people around him: his wife, Michelle, Wright, Ayers, Rezko, and the entire crooked Chicago political machine.

Barack Hussein Obama is a man desperately trying to remain a blank screen, mouthing empty platitudes, denying his core beliefs, just long enough to skate into the White House. The “Born Alive” bill is another rip in that screen showing the man behind it.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Obama and Americans Generosity

In the DC Examiner,Jay Ambrose writes

Obama flat wrong on Americans’ generosity


Barack Obama, in a discussion with evangelist Rick Warren about his Christian faith, said he had been guilty of a “fundamental selfishness” that had contributed to regrettable youthful behavior.

Then he confessed for the rest of us.

“Americans’ greatest moral failure in my lifetime,” he said, “has been that we still don’t abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.”

Sorry, but he can hang that one up. Whatever the case is with his own selfishness, the evidence of an internationally superior American generosity is impressive, beginning with the numbers on our charitable giving. We give twice as much as the British per capita, and according to The American magazine, seven times as much as the Germans and 14 times as much as the Italians.


Shortly after accusing Americans of lacking generosity for their brothers (quoting St. Matthew)


Whatever you did for the least of My brothers and sisters, you did for Me.

Matthew 25:40

...it was revealed in Vanity Fair that at least one of Obama’s brothers lives in abject poverty in Kenya.

This raises questions on so many levels.

Is it an obligation of a brother to alleviate the poverty and misery of his sibling? How about if one brother is a multi-millionaire and the other is living on a dollar a day?

Is it appropriate for someone to lecture others on lack of generosity in these words?

“I think America’s greatest moral failure in my lifetime has been that we still don’t abide by that basic [p]recept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me. And notion of — that basic principle applies to poverty.
...and allow his own brother to live in a cardboard hut?

I don’t believe that Barack Obama thinks that helping others is an individual responsibility. I believe that he – along with most Liberals - believes that helping others is a corporate or secondary activity. By that I mean that the help that the Left is focused on is actually delivered by government agencies or other organizations. It is focused on harnessing the efforts of masses of people rather than working as individuals helping “…the least of these.”

Even the leaders of the mainline churches are focused on lobbying for government programs rather than motivating individuals to help those directly in front of them. That may be done on the local level, and in local churches and civic leagues, but the heads of these groups have their eyes fixed on Washington and their lust is for tax dollars.

The thought of sending his brother $100 a month never even crossed his mind, or if it did, St. Matthew did not inspire Obama to act. A government program to send money to Kenya, maybe. Helping his brother personally, no way.

Ann Althouse on Obama and the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

First a little background:

From a commenter on the Althouse blog named David Walser:
A nurse working at a suburban Chicago hospital observed a late-term abortion being performed. The procedure was to induce delivery. The assumption was, given the development of the fetus, the delivery would result in a "still born" child/fetus. The fetus was a little more developed than assumed and the child/fetus was not still born; it was alive. It tried to breathe. It struggled and writhed. It was placed in a utility closet and allowed to die.

The nurse, went to the hospital administration. The administration refused to do anything about the practice. (Between 10% - 15% of late-term abortions of this type result in a "live" birth.) The nurse went to the Il Attorney General who investigated as said that no laws were broken, so he could not get involved. The nurse went to the state legislature, which where then State Senator Obama comes into the picture.

At about the same time, Congress got involved. Congress first considered a bill that would "clarify" that any "child" that showed signs of life and was entirely outside its mother was a "person" and had legal rights. Some objected that the bill, as worded, might give some credence to the notion that an unborn fetus might also have legal rights. A "neutrality clause" was added to the address this question and the bill passed without a single nay vote in either house of Congress.

In Illinois, the same things happened in the same order, but with a different end result. A bill was introduced. Some objected that the bill could be used to restrict abortion rights. A neutrality clause was added. Obama, who was chair of the committee overseeing the bill, killed the bill.


With this explanation of the bill, people who are pro-life are accusing Obama of favoring infanticide if a botched abortion delivers a live baby. Very few “pro-choice” advocates would commit to the position that it is OK to kill a baby that is accidentally delivered after it leaves the mother’s womb. After all, the “choice” part was always about “my body, my choice.” When the baby is no longer part of “your body” that argument no longer applies.

Here is a video shwoing Obama's response.


So what's the truth?

Here's more from the Althouse blog...

Here's a recent news article from the Catholic News Agency that, I think a lot of pro-lifers would find and read with trust:

Sen. Barack Obama has repeatedly insisted that he opposed the passage of an Illinois law that would protect infants who survive an abortion on the grounds that it lacked a “neutrality clause.” However, Obama’s explanation was undermined when the National Right to Life Committee revealed “smoking gun” evidence showing that a neutrality clause had in fact been added to the Illinois bill by the same Obama-chaired state Senate committee which quickly voted down the amended bill.
Click on the link for the rest.

Althouse makes the point that Obama does not offer specifics about the bill and his reasons for voting against it, he tells us to take him at his word:

Now, I think his anger is not helpful to his case. He's been asked a civil question by Rick Warren — this is just after the Saddleback Forum — and has an opportunity to reach the very people who are being stirred up by those who are going around saying he voted in favor of infanticide. He should have explained clearly why the Born Alive Infant Protection Act was not what his opponents say it was. I can understand why he's angry at those who present it in a form that makes him look monstrous, but the only workable remedy is to convince us to believe his interpretation of the law — and at least to teach us exactly what it was. He was a law professor. He should be able to bring us along so we can all understand.

In this video clip, all he does is vouch for his own interpretation and demand that we accept it. This is like the way he insists that we not "question his patriotism" when what we're doing — some of us — is trying to learn about and process some things we have questions about. It's delusional to think that millions of people will obey a command to put this behind us. We want to know the details of his relationship with former terrorist Bill Ayers. We want to know the details of the text of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act and the politics that surrounded it. The campaign season, for many Americans, is just getting started. It won't do to get pissed off and say that you've already explained this and we need to move on. Move on to what? These are the questions that concern us! And you won't deign to answer.


Why is a law like this necessary? Would not medical ethics require the baby to be cared for? Apparently not, because that's not what happened. And then there's the legal aspect...


Sloanasaurus said...


If you have a million abortions a year, there has to be situations that occur where the doctor screws up and the baby is actually born alive (maybe the doctor didn't properly kill the baby in the womb). Statistically this is going to happen. So if it happens, what do you do about it. The key to the NY Times respose is that any "ethical" doctor would attempt to save the baby's life. Don't be so sure. What if the doctor doesn't beleive that a 22 month [correction 22 week. ed.] fetus is a baby?

Moreover, if there were no set rules, the doctor could get sued for letting the fetus live, because the procedure was supposed to be an abortion of a non person not a birth of a baby. Moreover, who pays for trying to take care of a 23 week non-person that wasn't wanted? Certainly the woman's insurance company could claim they won't pay for it and argue that its not a person. A doctor on the hook could be motivated to "finish the job."

This is why we need a clear law to tell people what to do. The ethics are unclear because people disagree on whether a 22 month [week] fetus is a person. Thus, we can have a law telling people to care for the 22 month [week] fetus, without defining the fetus as a person.

That is the law Obama voted against.


And here's still another explantion by Obama: saving born alive babies is the wrong thing to do when the decision has been made to kill them.
.