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August 1, 2008

Obama's Top 10 Flaws That Will Cost Him In November

In an election cycle where Republicans are reviled and the GOP candidate, John McCain, seems to inspire less excitement than a Droopy marathon on the Cartoon Network, it's hard for some people to understand how the race is still close. After all, Barack Obama is drawing record crowds and generating the sort of wild-eyed loyalty from the press that hasn't been seen since Guyana, right before they broke out the Kool-Aid -- and yet, on paper, this race is a coin flip.
Why is that? Because this race is turning into a referendum on Barack Obama and quite frankly, he has absolutely nothing going for him besides the fact that he's young, good looking, black, and does a great job of reading the speeches his handlers have prepared for him. Once you get beyond those paper-thin qualifications for office, Obama is nothing but a mass of flaws, bad character traits, and left-wing agitprop. While the press lauds Obama as if he just cured cancer and invented a car that runs on lawn clippings in the same day, everyone else can't help but notice...

The Snobbery: If little girls are made up of sugar, spice, and everything nice, then Obama is made up of arugula, personal presidential seals, and hubris. Never before has a candidate with so few accomplishments to his name looked so far down his nose at the American people.

The Phony Idealism: Silently, there must be a lot of liberal Democrats kicking themselves today because all during the primaries, the race was portrayed as a battle between Barack Obama, the idealist and Hillary Clinton, the pragmatic, say-anything-to-win candidate. Then, the moment Obama captured the nomination, all of those precious ideals flew out the window and Obama started shifting his positions farther and faster than Hillary Clinton ever did. So much for the candidate who was supposed to be a "new kind of politician."

The Anti-White Racism: Obama spent 20 years going to a virulently anti-white, anti-American church while he used Jeremiah Wright -- who's the moral equivalent of David Duke -- as a spiritual mentor and a sounding board. This is not a man who looks kindly upon what he refers to as "typical white people."

The Lack of Patriotism: Rather famously, Obama refused to hold his hand over his heart for the national anthem and publicly made a point of not wearing a flag pin -- and then had the "audacity" to complain when people quite naturally questioned his patriotism. Since then, Obama replaced the American flag on his plane with his own symbol and made a point of running down his country and calling himself a "citizen of the world" while he was overseas. Is having a President who loves his own country too much to ask? In Obama's case, apparently so.

His Liberalism: Although Obama has attempted to shift to the center since he captured the Democratic nomination, his record is one of radical liberalism. In fact, he was ranked as the single most liberal senator in 2007 by National Journal, actually supported a complete ban on handgun sales, and wants to hand out 845 billion dollars to foreign nations as part of an effort to "elimin(ate) extreme poverty." If you would be thrilled to have a President who is as liberal as Michael Moore or Keith Olbermann, then Barack Obama is your man.

His Changing Position On The War in Iraq: In one of the most ironic twists of the campaign, Obama beat Hillary Clinton by being so stridently anti-war in Iraq, but his latest ever-shifting position essentially mirrors that of John McCain. Although Obama is still promising a timeline, he is saying he could leave 50,000 troops in Iraq and that the withdrawal is "entirely conditions-based." Although the lefties are biting their tongues, you know they must be seething that they've been sold down the river on their biggest issue -- or maybe they just assume he's lying, which is entirely possible.

His Inexperience: Obama has never served in the military, the House, or as a governor, was first elected to the Senate in 2004, and his battle with Hillary was the only tough campaign he has ever been in. In other words, if he's elected, he would be one of the least worthy candidates ever to make it to the White House. If we had another 9/11 on his watch or even if one of those infamous 3 AM emergency calls that Hillary campaigned on were to come in, would you rather have Obama or McCain handling it? For that matter, would you rather have Obama or a random person picked out of the phone book handling it? Neither Obama nor the random person from the phone book would have much relevant experience, but at least the random person would probably be humble enough to realize it and ask for help, unlike Obama.
The Poor Judgment: This is a guy who stayed in a racist church and stuck by a bigoted reverend for 20 years, grotesquely leaked his Western Wall prayer to the press, and blew off a visit to see wounded troops while the whole world was watching him overseas. In other words, even when it comes to matters of mere politics, this is not a man who can be trusted to make wise decisions. So, how can we trust him to make good policy decisions for the country?

He's Gaffe Prone: When John McCain makes mistakes, the media tries to portray him as senile. But Obama makes dumber mistakes than George Bush, more mistakes than Dan Quayle, and that's despite the fact that he spends far less time talking to the press than McCain. So, what's his excuse for thinking that we have more than 57 states, claiming America's "fallen heroes" were in the audience listening to him, and his claim that "'10,000 people died' in the Kansas tornadoes when the death toll was really only 12?" Dan Quayle's notorious potato(e) error, which was used to forever portray him as a drooling moron, wouldn't even qualify as one of Obama's top five mistakes.

His Fuzzy Platform: Obama's positions on guns, the war in Iraq, taxes, FISA, and public financing, among other issues, have shifted faster than a cheetah chasing a greyhound through an obstacle course. Since he doesn't have much of a record to go on, seems to have very poor judgment, and he doesn't have a solid platform to stand on, how are people supposed to know what he will do when he gets in the White House?

Conservative Grapevine Promo

Make sure to check out Conservative Grapevine today, where you'll find links like:

Webupon: 10 immense internet phenomena that people ended up hating

The Other McCain: The MSM is getting angry and peevish because John McCain and the GOP won't roll over and play dead

Karl Rove: Obama's Iraq fumble

Egotatic!: Mischa Barton bikini pictures

You can check out all those links and more by clicking here. Don't forget to bookmark RWN's companion page, CG! Remember, if you're not reading RWN and CG every day, you're not getting the full story!

PS: If you'd like to submit articles to be linked to Conservative Grapevine, register at CG, and then shoot me an email.

The Best Ad Of The Presidential Campaign So Far: "Celebrity"

This is the now infamous "Celebrity" ad...

...and this is Lindsey Graham's explanation of the ad. Incidentally, this may be the only semi-brilliant thing I've ever heard Lindsey Graham say,

"The whole (Celebrity) ad is about the idea of fame without portfolio. Paris Hilton is famous for being famous. She draws a crowd for no apparent reason. Well, I think he has, you know -- in Senator Obama's case, is the effort to be commander in chief and the leader of the free world about portfolio?

He is a celebrity, no question about it. Somebody asked me about Germany. I said, "There goes Germany. We're going to have to get to 270 without Germany." (LAUGHTER)

But this is a hysteria around a personality that's attractive, but when you look under the hood, there's not a whole lot there. So fame without portfolio is, sort of, fashionable. But leadership without experience is dangerous." -- Lindsey Graham

Incidentally, despite the criticism that has been leveled at McCain over this ad, it is the best ad of the 2008 presidential campaign so far. Why? Because it is...

* Drawing a lot of attention and getting millions of dollars worth of free air time.
* Nails Obama for being against offshore drilling and for higher taxes.
* Points out that Obama is famous for being famous like Paris Hilton, not someone who has shown he is competent to be President.

Some people are saying that McCain needs to be careful about going negative and that it looks unpresidential. There is some truth to that. But, the greater danger with Obama is not being aggressive enough. Not only does Obama have a slew of horrific weaknesses as a candidate, he's completely unqualified to be President in the first place -- but, the mainstream media is acting like an 8 year old kid with a crush, so they're going to seldom talk about those things. Sure, those of us in the conservative media can point them out, but the reality is that McCain, as the nominee, has a much bigger microphone than we do. He can make the same criticisms we're making and get them out to the general public. That's what he did with the "Celebrity" ad and it was a smart decision.

PS: Over at YouTube, this video, which was added July 30, has already received 1,227,604 views and has collected the following honors,

#1 - Most Discussed (Today)
#1 - Most Discussed (Today) - News & Politics
#11 - Most Discussed (This Week)
#1 - Most Discussed (This Week) - News & Politics
#52 - Most Discussed (This Month)
#4 - Most Discussed (This Month) - News & Politics
#1 - Most Responded (Today)
#1 - Most Responded (Today) - News & Politics
#3 - Most Responded (This Week)
#1 - Most Responded (This Week) - News & Politics
#50 - Most Responded (This Month)
#7 - Most Responded (This Month) - News & Politics
#15 - Most Responded (All Time) - News & Politics
#8 - Most Viewed (Today) - Germany
#7 - Most Viewed (Today) - Australia
#4 - Most Viewed (Today) - Canada
#14 - Most Viewed (Today) - United Kingdom
#9 - Most Viewed (Today) - Ireland
#63 - Most Viewed (Today) - India
#15 - Most Viewed (Today) - New Zealand
#1 - Most Viewed (Today)
#52 - Most Viewed (Today) - Spain
#27 - Most Viewed (Today) - Mexico
#14 - Most Viewed (Today) - France
#37 - Most Viewed (Today) - Italy
#19 - Most Viewed (Today) - South Korea
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - Netherlands
#80 - Most Viewed (Today) - Poland
#24 - Most Viewed (Today) - Brazil
#16 - Most Viewed (Today) - Russia
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Germany
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Australia
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Canada
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - United Kingdom
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Ireland
#5 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - India
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - New Zealand
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics
#2 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Spain
#2 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Mexico
#2 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - France
#4 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Italy
#9 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Japan
#2 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - South Korea
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Netherlands
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Poland
#2 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Brazil
#3 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Russia
#4 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Hong Kong
#29 - Most Viewed (Today) - News & Politics - Taiwan
#46 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Canada
#9 - Most Viewed (This Week)
#20 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Netherlands
#16 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Germany
#7 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Australia
#2 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Canada
#11 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - United Kingdom
#5 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Ireland
#32 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - India
#7 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - New Zealand
#1 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics
#9 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Spain
#12 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Mexico
#10 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - France
#42 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Italy
#57 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Japan
#10 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - South Korea
#6 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Netherlands
#14 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Poland
#10 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Brazil
#18 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Russia
#63 - Most Viewed (This Week) - News & Politics - Hong Kong
#82 - Most Viewed (This Month)
#2 - Most Viewed (This Month) - News & Politics
#19 - Top Favorites (Today)
#1 - Top Favorites (Today) - News & Politics
#16 - Top Favorites (This Week) - News & Politics
#81 - Top Favorites (This Month) - News & Politics

* Keep in mind that the video has undoubtedly been viewed by millions of people on video sites other than YouTube and by people watching the video on TV.

Poll Results: The 4 Best Looking Women On The Hill

Yesterday, I put up what I considered to be the 10 best looking women from the yearly Hill's 50 Most Beautiful 2008 list and let RWN's readers vote on their faves. Here are the big winners.

Honorable Mention: Rana Abtar -- 11% of the vote

Rana Abtar

3rd Place: Erica Price -- 12% of the vote

Erica Price

2nd Place: Elizabeth Kucinich -- 13% of the vote

Elizabeth Kucinich

1st Place: Ivy Larsen -- 22% of the vote

Ivy Larsen

The Election Issue Of All Election Issues: Drilling Ban Expires Oct 1

Yesterday, the fine folks over at Americans for Prosperity alerted me to the fact that the election issue of all election issues has been dumped into the GOP's lap.

You see, on October 1st, 2008, "the existing bans on Outer Continental Shelf drilling and oil shale leasing expire -- unless Congress specifically votes to extend the bans."

What will likely happen, according to AFP is that "Congressional leaders will likely try to sneak an extension into supposedly 'must-pass' last-minute spending legislation."

Republicans, including most importantly, John McCain, should refuse to support ANY legislation that extends the drilling ban. That means they should speak out against it, they should vote against it, and George Bush should veto it if it comes across his desk.

This should not be a issue in the 2008 election, the GOP should make it THE ISSUE of the 2008 elections.

Even with gas prices as high as they are, the Democrats want to keep a drilling ban in place while Republicans want to take action that will help reduce prices, in the short and long term. What do you think the American people are going to think about that news if the GOP has the guts to make it a centerpiece of their electoral strategy?

The GOP, John McCain included, is already talking the talk on this issue and if they walk the walk and the Democrats predictably, yet foolishly, fight to keep us from drilling, this issue alone could literally make the difference in the presidential race and save multiple seats for the GOP in the House and Senate.

So, take a look at what I have written and take a look at the letter the AFP has been sending around to Congress that follows and call your senators and congressmen, call your favorite talk radio host and get them talking about this, write your favorite bloggers, and email your friends. If the Republican pols on the Hill see that this is taking off, they will get on board, too, and it can change the face of the political landscape in 2008.

Now, here's the letter from AFP that I mentioned,

On behalf of our millions of members and all American consumers suffering from high energy prices, we urge you to allow the current restrictions on much-needed American energy resources to expire as scheduled under current law. Unless Congress acts affirmatively to prevent it, October 1st, 2008 will be a day fittingly described as "American Energy Freedom Day" as those restrictions expire.

According to estimates from the Department of the Interior, the Outer Continental Shelf contains 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and there is an additional 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil locked in oil shale in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

Now that President Bush has lifted the executive branch moratorium, the only thing prohibiting development of these energy resources is a temporary ban that is set to expire at the end of this fiscal year. On October 1, 2008, domestic energy resources will no longer be held off-limits by the federal government.

We urge you to oppose the creation of any new moratorium for fiscal 2009, even if it is attached to what some people in Washington consider "must-pass" legislation. We further urge you to sustain a presidential veto of any measure to impose a new moratorium.

A strong majority of the American public sees drilling expansion as necessary to reduce fuel prices now and in the long run. Creating new restrictions on domestic energy development would fly in the face of public opinion and exacerbate the pain every American citizen feels at the pump.

PS: Here's Jim DeMint on American Energy Freedom Day,

More Proof That We Can Get Rid Of Illegals Using Enforcement By Attrition

One of the canards that the open borders and amnesty crowd has pushed the hardest is that the only way to get rid of the illegal immigrants in the US is to hunt all 12 million of them down individually and deport them. Since this is impossible, they argue that we might as well not even bother to try.

However, as those of us who are serious about dealing with illegal immigration have been pointing out for years, if we cut off the supply of jobs for illegals and make life here tougher on illegals, most illegals will self-deport. In other words, you don't have to catch them one by one because if the environment here is inhospitable enough, they'll just go home on their own.

Well, guess what? The Center for Immigration studies has put out a report showing that enforcement by attrition is already occurring in the United States, which is rather notable given the Bush Administration's half-hearted approach to enforcing our nation's immigration laws,

The report by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank, says that the number of illegal immigrants fell about 11% between last August and May, from 12.5 million to 11.2 million.

The study was based on an analysis of census data and concludes that if that rate of decline is sustained, the number of illegal immigrants will be halved in five years.

Steve A. Camarota, the center's research director, acknowledged that the economy played a role in the decline but said that several factors pointed to enforcement as key. For instance, the legal immigrant population continues to grow, while the fall-off in illegal immigrants began even before unemployment began rising.

"It seems that increased enforcement has played a significant role," Camarota said.

Camarota also said the data suggested that many illegal immigrants were leaving of their own accord. The decline in their number is much larger than the tally of those removed by the government, the report says.

"It challenges the idea that there is no way to deal with the problem but for creating some kind of legal status [for illegal immigrants]," Camarota said. "And it seems you don't have to deport everyone."

Independent demographers said they also had seen a drop in the illegal immigrant population. But some questioned the study's methodology, decline figures and underlying assumptions.

"Our data aren't inconsistent with the idea that people are leaving," said Jeffrey S. Passel, a senior demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

But he added: "I don't see in my numbers anywhere near the decline he's talking about."

Now we can quibble about how big the numbers really are, but everyone seems to be acknowledging the number of illegals is dropping. Furthermore, if the CIS is right and "the number of illegal immigrants will be halved in five years," that would be an enormous step in the right direction.

Whatever the case may ultimately be, what we are finding out here is that enforcement by attrition does work in the real world and that we don't have to simply acquiesce to allowing illegals to stay in this country because it would be too difficult to do otherwise.

The Website Of The Day Is A Big Victory

The website of the day is A Big Victory.

 


 

AQ, Obama and Kissinger - time to change those premises

On the day combat tours in Iraq were cut from 15 to 12 months we hear this:

The leader of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq and several of his top lieutenants have recently left Iraq for Afghanistan, according to group leaders and Iraqi intelligence officials, a possible further sign of what Iraqi and U.S. officials call growing disarray and weakness in the organization.

U.S. officials say there are indications that al-Qaeda is diverting new recruits from going to Iraq, where its fighters have suffered dramatic setbacks, to going to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they appear to be making gains.

So tell me again how Iraq was a 'diversion' from the main fight against AQ in Afghanistan?

And tell me again how Iraq wasn't, in fact, the "central front" in the fight against AQ?

AQ obviously thought it was, committed vastly more terrorists to its effort there than Afghanistan, openly called it the "central front" in its war against the US and is now diverting its assets from that effort because it has become an unmitigated disaster for them.

On a related subject, Dr. Henry Kissinger makes a stab at diplomatically pointing the out the obvious to the Obama campaign and the Democrats:

The U.S. presidential campaign has been so long and so intense that it seems to operate in a cocoon, oblivious to changes that should alter its premises. A striking example is the debate over withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

Over the past year, many have proposed setting a deadline for withdrawal. Proponents have argued that a date certain would compel the Iraqi government to accelerate the policy of reconciliation; would speed the end of the war; and would enable the United States to concentrate its efforts on more strategically important regions, such as Afghanistan. Above all, they argued, the war was lost, and withdrawal would represent the least costly way to deal with the debacle.

These premises have been overtaken by events. Almost all objective observers agree that major progress has been made on all three fronts of the Iraq war: Al-Qaeda, the Sunni jihadist force recruited largely from outside the country, seems on the run in Iraq; the indigenous Sunni insurrection attempting to restore Sunni predominance has largely died down; and the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad has, at least temporarily, mastered the Shiite militias that were challenging its authority. After years of disappointment, we face the need to shift gears mentally to consider emerging prospects of success.

[...]

Establishing a deadline is the surest way to undermine the hopeful prospects. It will encourage largely defeated internal groups to go underground until a world more congenial to their survival arises with the departure of American forces. Al-Qaeda will have a deadline against which to plan a full-scale resumption of operations. And it will give Iran an incentive to strengthen its supporters in the Shiite community for the period after the American withdrawal. Establishing a fixed deadline would also dissipate assets needed for the diplomatic endgame.

Shorter version - "The facts have changed but your position hasn't. It makes you look stubborn and unwilling to admit your mistakes. Isn't that your criticism of George Bush?"

Kissinger goes on to point out that he is a friend of McCain's and occasionally advises him. But his point is valid regardless of any relationship. Timelines have no business being considered in what is emerging as a success for the reasons Kissinger outlines.

Keith Olbermann Explains the Second Amendment

The two primary pillars of freedom in America are the First and Second Amendments. The Orwellian "Fairness Doctrine" will take out the former; the amazing Keith Olbermann has already dispensed with the latter. He's revealed that the right to bear arms "obviously" only applies to muskets:

Despite years of fog created by the NRA and right-wing organizations, that isn't very complicated: For the purposes of forming a state militia, you're entitled to keep and bear arms. Obviously, those would have to be the kind of arms in use in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was passed — the musket, the wheel-lock, the flint lock, the 13th century Chinese hand canon.

Where would we be without the great legal scholars at MSNBC to clear away the fog and explain away our rights?

Olbermann further revealed that in addition to being the "Worst Person in the World" for upholding our right to defend ourselves, Justice Antonin Scalia is a "clown" — which has got to hurt, coming from a circus act like Olbie. Also revealed was the NRA's secret agenda: "to increase deaths by gun in this country."

Lunatics like Keith Olbermann could soon have their candidate of choice in the White House.

Keith_Olbermann_shh.jpg
Olbermann wants Scalia and the NRA to shut up about our rights.

On a tip from Wiggins. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Obama Promises Free Money Looted from Paralyzed Oil Companies

This should clear up any lingering doubts about whether Obama actually shares the Marxist views of the deranged radicals he's spent his whole life surrounded by:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Friday called for a $1,000 "emergency" rebate to consumers to offset soaring energy costs amid fresh signs of a struggling economy with the nation's unemployment rate climbing to a four-year high.

Obama told a town-hall meeting the rebate would be financed with a windfall profits tax on the oil industry.

Ingenious. He wants to give everyone free money to buy oil that he won't let energy companies extract. These same companies will be looted to provide the funds, thereby forcing them to raise prices or go bankrupt. The inevitable next step step: nationalization, à la Hugo Chavez.

His plan to solve the energy crisis by inflating tires was more constructive.

obamache.jpg

On a tip from Jay Guevara. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Video Of The Day: McCain Takes Direct Aim At The ObamaMessiah

This may be the single, most snarky video in the history of presidential politics and I love it,

McCain will undoubtedly receive a lot of criticism for this video, much of which will come from the Right. It's not presidential, it has too much attitude, yada, yada, yada. Let me tell you why this video is great: it captures exactly what real people are saying about Barack Obama (He's arrogant and acts more like the leader of a cult than a political candidate) in a funny way that fits into the key theme the McCain people are trying to hit: McCain is ready to lead and Obama isn't. That's why this political video is a home run in my book.

The Republicans Make 'Em Think It's Hell On The House Floor Over Gas Prices

"I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell." -- Harry Truman

The most incompetent Speaker of the House in American history, Nancy Pelosi, packed up her 22% approval rating and went on vacation with the rest of the Democratic Party in tow.

Meanwhile, the plucky Republicans stayed on the House floor to protest Congress going on vacation without taking action on gas prices. The Democrats, being closet fascists at heart whose first impulse is always to try to prevent the other side from being heard, have gone to great lengths to try to keep the GOP from telling the country the truth about how the Democrats' actions are leading to higher gas prices at the pump,

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the Democrats adjourned the House and turned off the lights and killed the microphones, but Republicans are still on the floor talking gas prices.

Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders opposed the motion to adjourn the House, arguing that Pelosi's refusal to schedule a vote allowing offshore drilling is hurting the American economy. They have refused to leave the floor after the adjournment motion passed at 11:23 a.m., and they are busy bashing Pelosi and her fellow Democrats for leaving town for the August recess.

At one point, the lights went off in the House and the microphones were turned off in the chamber, meaning Republicans were talking in the dark. But as Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz..) was speaking, the lights went back on and the microphones were turned on shortly afterward.

But C-SPAN, which has no control over the cameras in the chamber, has stopped broadcasting the House floor, meaning no one was witnessing this except the assembled Republicans, their aides, and one Democrat, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who has now left.

Only about a half-dozen Republicans were on the floor when this began, but the crowd has grown to about 20, according to Patrick O'Connor.

"This is the people's House," said Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.). "This is not Pelosi's politiburo."

Democratic aides were furious at the GOP stunt, and reporters were kicked out of the Speaker's Lobby, the space next to the House floor where they normally interview lawmakers.

"You're not covering this, are you?" complained one senior Democratic aide. Another called the Republicans "morons" for staying on the floor.

Oh gee, hope the word doesn't get out about this story somehow!

Drudge Revolution

Ooopsie! Too late!

Update #1:

"I just heard that the House G.O.P. wrapped up their protest session at 5:05 by singing "God Bless America" and left the chamber with the crowd chanting, "USA! USA!" Unbelievable." -- The Corner

This has been the first day it has been fun to be a Republican in months...

August 2, 2008

Obama - Have the Political Winds Shifted?

Well of course they have. And look who is shifting with them:

"My interest is in making sure we've got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices," Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post.

"If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage - I don't want to be so rigid that we can't get something done," Obama said.

In other words, his opposition isn't rooted in principle, it's just a representation of party dogma. And if adhering to the dogma is going to cost him votes, why then he's not to "rigid" about his supposed beliefs.

"New" politics, eh?

And on a related subject, see if you can follow the logic here - Suddenly Obama is for an energy policy, to include drilling, that can bring gas prices down, but right after that, he talks about a second 'stimulus' package of 50 billion dollars (half in $1,000 checks and half in "infrastructure" repairs) taken from "windfall taxes" on oil companies.

Can anyone see the inherent problem in that plan? Once more for the record - corporations don't pay taxes, people do.

So who will pay those windfall taxes and where is the most likely place that will happen?

Yes - at the pump. And how will they do that? By raising prices there.

Brilliant.

Crossposted at QandO.

Another author charged with "Islamophobia" fights back

A few years back, Howard Rotberg was launching his new novel, The Second Catastrophe at a local bookstore.

Some Muslim hecklers brought the event to a premature halt.

Rotberg says a bookstore employee wearing a hijab did nothing to stop their outbursts.

Then the bookstore chain issued a press release to the Toronto Star and other dailies, claiming that the Muslims AND Rotberg had uttered racist remarks during the incident.

Rotberg produced affadavits to the contrary, sworn out by local professors and other audience members, stating that the only racist (actually, anti-semitic) remarks had been uttered by the Muslim beligerents in the crowd. The bookstore chain shrugged.

So Howard Rotberg did something almost unheard of in the recent annals of Canadian authors vs. Muslim beligerents and their apologists, who hurl "racism" charges and disrupt their lives and business...

(Keep reading here)

Week-End Bloggers

Here's the Right Wing News guest blogger line-up this week-end.

Saturday
--------
Cassy Fiano
Kathy Shaidle Five Feet Of Fury
Gina Cobb
John Stephenson from Stop The ACLU
Little Miss Attila

Sunday
-------
Ron Coleman from Likelihood of Success
Sister Toldjah
William Teach from Pirate's Cove
Michael Illions from Polipundit
MCQ from QandO

Make sure to give all of them a warm welcome and check out their blogs!

"Obama the Thinker"

Richard Reeves writes today that Barack Obama is a thinker, while John McCain is a "feeler." Indeed, Reeves writes, Obama may be "too thoughtful."

Oh please.

My first reaction to the premise itself is that Reeves has it backwards. Obama is, like most dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, 65% feelings and 5% common sense on matters of public policy. (The other 30% is blind opposition to whatever Republicans want.)

Obama's idea of a profound thought: "We are the ones we'be been waiting for."

It depends on your perspective. If you assume that Obama is deep, his every utterance is profound, with the possible exception of the obvious flubs such as his claim to have visited all 57 states.

On the other hand, if you start from the premise that Obama is an ordinary man who isn't much smarter than anyone else, he fits that description to a "T."

I know smart people. I am smart. And Obama may be reasonably smart, but he's not particularly gifted in the area based on what I've seen, and he is certainly not a "thinker."

What struck me when I read Reeves' column was how thin is the "evidence" that Obama is a thinker. Here is is:

In comments that will be little noted nor long remembered, Barack Obama and John McCain each talked recently about what it was like running for president -- and, thus, about what kind of president each would be.

Obama was in London on Saturday, July 27, making small talk with David Cameron, the leader of Britain's Conservative Party. Neither man knew a television microphone could pick up what they were saying, which was:

Cameron: "You should be on the beach. You need a break ..."

Obama: "You've got to refresh yourself ... I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who -- not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process -- said that, should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be ..."

Cameron: "These guys just chalk your diary up."

Obama: "Right. In 15-minute increments. ... And, well, and you start making mistakes, or you lose the big picture."

Obama isn't actually thinking in quoted statement. Nor is he demonstrating that he has thought about anything in the past. He is talking about thinking!

And I can talk about going to the moon, but I'm no astronaut.

But give Obama credit; the man wants time to think. Based on that statement, and with no other evidence offered, Reeves concludes that it's possible that Obama, who has been an amazingly effective candidate, may be "too thoughtful to be an effective president."

Give me a break.

Just because Obama says it's important to take time to think every day doesn't mean he actually does it. If he does spend lots of time thinking every day, how is does he explain the numerous gaffes, bad policy ideas and intellectual misfires that have come out of his mouth?

And, by the way, assuming that Obama personally takes lots of time to think every day -- and I doubt it -- is it possible that Obama NEEDS to take lots of time to think everyday to make up for not having a lot of accumulated knowledge, wisdom, experience and, yes, raw smarts?

It reminds me of Rush Limbaugh's joking claim that he does his work with half his brain tied behind his back, just to make it fair.

I believe he does.

There are some people who are literally more brilliant after having worked 36 hours straight than some people are when they start their day.

And I know plenty of people who aren't "smart" in the sense of an I.Q. score, but who have more wisdom in one little finger than Obama has in his whole body.

And what's even more amusing about Reeves' quote is that Obama says, "somebody who had worked in the White House who -- not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process" told him about taking big chunks of time every day to do nothing but think.

So this advice came from someone in the Clinton White House.

Well, we saw how well the Clinton White House managed time to "do nothing but think."

Bill Clinton's was the master of unscheduled time.

In the Oval Office.

With at least one intern.

Perhaps the Clinton White House could have been a little busier with actual work.

Sorry, Mr. Reeves, but I think you've taken a thin shred of a hope -- an audacity of hope, if you will -- and transformed it into a total myth: Obama the Thinker.

August 3, 2008

Stop War On Iran Protest: Iran Laughs

On Saturday, August 2nd, more fools attempted to get their pro-active pre-surrender message out. Their "emergency call to to action," if you will. They did it in many cities around the country, including Raleigh

A group protesting against a possible war with Iran demonstrated in Raleigh Saturday.

The North Carolina Coalition to Stop War on Iran held a march and rally to protest the growing threat of western-led attacks on Iran. Similar protests took place in 60 other cities across the country.

No other media except WRALbothered covering this protest, and that story only had the above two paragraphs, followed by one about a group protesting to support the US troops. If you check the photo at WRAL, you'll notice they didn't bother getting a good one, kind of blurry, as well as the pre-surrender monkey on the right forgetting what the protest was about.

They have petitions and email campaigns. They want to stop the passage of Resolution 362, which "calls on the President to initiate a land, sea, and air blockade of Iran. Such a blockade is considered an act of war under international law and is clearly meant to escalate tensions and pave the way for an attack on Iran." They have their talking points set. And Iran is laughing at them (CBS)

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted Saturday that Tehran will not give up its "nuclear rights," according to the official Web site of the Iranian leader, in remarks that rebuffed an informal deadline set by the U.N. Security Council's five permanent members and Germany.

Reuters

Iran said on Saturday it would not back down "one iota" in its nuclear row with major powers, voicing defiance on the day of an informal deadline set by the West over Tehran's disputed atomic ambitions.

Most folks do not want to have to go to war with Iran. Most would prefer a peaceful resolution, which is what negotiators from the European Union, the United Nations, and the United States have been working on for years. All to no avail. Iran wants The Bomb. They want to create their own. They will not stop. And they are a country that it is a serious danger to allow to have one, not to mention their Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations. They have threatened to wipe Israel out multiple times. They are a supporter of Middle Eastern terrorism. They have ambitions to control the entire region. They have meddled and killed our soldiers in Iraq.

But, some would prefer blaming the United States for the issue, rather then Iran. This is like blaming the hottie in a mini-skirt for being raped.

They have every Right to protest. Our Founders gave that to them. But, I reckon' our Founders thought folks protesting would have a clue.

Crossed at Pirate's Cove

Continue reading "Stop War On Iran Protest: Iran Laughs" »

Johnny Mac, Just Whose Side Are You On?

With a history filled with cursing, ("F*ck you" to John Cornyn, "A$$hole to Pete Domenici, "F*cking jerk to Charles Grassley, screaming and throwing temper tantrums at fellow Republicans over the years, John McCain seems to save his admiration and glowing praise for Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore.

On Nancy Pelosi, McCain was positively gushing with compliments and niceties:

Nancy Pelosi, praising her as an effective leader and an "inspiration to millions of Americans."

"I respect Speaker Pelosi. I think she's one of the great American success stories," McCain said during an interview with The Chronicle prior to a fundraiser at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

"We talk about (New York Sen.) Hillary Clinton and her inspiration to millions of Americans. Speaker Pelosi has been an inspiration as well" in a role that is "in many ways ... more powerful than the president." {Source: San Francisco Chronicle}

What did he say?? Pelosi "an effective leader", and an "inspiration to millions of Americans"?? Someone who pretty much practices Socialism gets this kind of praise and gushy sentiments from the GOP PRESIDENTIAL candidate, while cursing out Conservative leaders like John Cornyn.

And it didn't end with Pelosi. Without skipping a beat, McCain went on to praise Al Gore for HIS leadership on the phony baloney Global Warming / Climate Change hysteria:

And McCain also had high praise for the 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore and his advocacy on the issue of climate change. McCain recently raised eyebrows in GOP circles by calling "doable" Gore's suggestion that the country could become entirely energy independent through use of renewable resources within 10 years.

"I agree with his goal," the Arizona senator said Monday of Gore's idea. "I may disagree with all the ways of getting there. But I again want to emphasize my respect for the former vice president's leadership on this issue and his continuous leadership. And I am in no way trying to get into a fight with him."
Agreement on goals

McCain said that while he differs with Gore on the importance of nuclear power, "I do believe that his goals and his priorities and the visibility that he's given the issue has been good for America and the world."

I guess it's true that like minds stick together. This won't go over well with the base, which John McCain doesn't seem to care about anyway:

His praise for two Democrats who are regularly in the bull's-eye of the conservative talk radio and the right-wing blogosphere is likely to draw fire from Republican loyalists, who consider Pelosi and Gore to be the evil twins of liberalism.

"It drives the talk radio crowd nuts when McCain does not wage war on Pelosi and Gore," said Hoover Institution media fellow Bill Whalen. McCain, he said, likely was trying to reach out to moderate and independent voters during his San Francisco visit.

McCain is probably in the best shape of his life these days with all the running to the left he has been doing.

Michael "A.J. Sparxx" is a World-Class Athlete Professional Wrestler and blogger at Conservatives with Attitude!

The Great Brain

Jim Lindgren at Volokh (via Insty) is talking about what Barack Obama's teaching job at the University of Chicago was and was not. The question on the table seems to be whether, when or if he was offered tenure, and under what conditions. The obvious point:

I have now talked to four members of the University of Chicago law faculty, including at least one of Obama's campaign donors, and all four of them say that they do not remember voting Barack Obama a tenured or tenure-track offer. ...

All thought that a tenure-track offer might well have been approved if it had been brought to the faculty. All expressed doubt whether the faculty would have made a tenured offer; one professor stated emphatically that it never would have happened, which of course is just one person's opinion. According to those I spoke with, a tenured offer would have been problematic because -- despite his intelligence, teaching ability, and success in law school -- Barack Obama may not have had any scholarly publications (at least they were not aware of any).


Expressed "doubt"? What on earth is the question? This is the University of Chicago -- full tenure for someone with no publications? Selections from the comments:
I would be interested to find out when was the last time that UC made an offer-with-tenure to a candidate who did not already have tenure at another institution.

It's not unheard of for a dean to make promises to a candidate or potential candidate that he can't deliver on. But how unusual is it for a dean at this sort of school to promise an offer that includes tenure to a potential candidate with no scholarly publications?

As an academic . . . I regard it as exceptionally unusual for someone without a single publication ten years after completing his degree would be offered a tenured position at a place like Chicago.

I was a UC undergrad, I am married to a UC PhD, and I have been a faculty wife at several institutions, none of which come close to UC levels of intellectual self-importance. Unless UC is a radically different place than when I was there a quarter century ago, a job-with-tenure (as opposed to tenure-track) for someone without any academic publications to his name is simply unthinkable.

Interestingly, in the comments David Bernstein dissents, and insists it would not have been unusual for the editor of the Harvard Law Review to be offered tenure even at U. of C. in 1991, even absent any evidence of what is called scholarship. I find that impossible to believe, though. There is some red-herring discussion about whether he was perhaps the author of an unsigned HLR student Note... which hardly makes a difference in terms of what we're talking about here.

The point, I think, is that the Obama myth, despite the efforts of some of us to address it on precisely this point, is so inflated that people would actually believe that he would be the subject of a level of unprecedented legitimization of his status as an intellectual based on ... nothing. Nothing.

Originally posted on Likelihood of Success, Ron Coleman's pretty good blog. He also blogs about developments in the law concerning trademark, copyright, new media and free speech on an entirely other pretty good blog, LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®.

Dragons Are Real!

Afternoon break from politics and such. Personally, I find this pretty cool

dragon bonPalaeontologists digging in a brickyard in southern Poland have discovered the fossilised remains of a dinosaur that they say is a previously unknown ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The predator dinosaur, given the working name "Dragon", lived around 200 million years ago, team member Dr Tomasz Sulej of the Polish Science Academy told Reuters.

It was 5 metres (yards) long and moved on two legs. Its longest teeth were 7 cm (2 inches) long.

"This is a completely new type of dinosaur that was so far unknown," Sulej said on Friday. "Nobody even expected that members of this group lived in that time, so this gives us new knowledge about the whole evolution of the T-Rex group."

I'll be interested to see what kind of portrayal the palaeontologists will come up, based on the bones.

I'd also wonder what this does to the whole Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design debate, but, that would be throwing gas on kerosene ;)

Continue reading "Dragons Are Real!" »

In Politics, Perception is King

The pundits can rail against tactics, warn that particular methods of attack are risky, and even lecture candidates about the "low road". But it is the voter who gets the final say about campaign tactics, strategy and messages.

As much as they hate to admit it, Democrats should understand that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's campaign against John Kerry didn't succeed because it was mean, nasty and untrue. It succeeded because more people believed them than John Kerry.

That's why it is interesting to consider the latest Rasmussen poll:

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation's voters say they've seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes ../images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.

Reminds you of the Harold Ford incident, when, in fact, voters rejected the attempt to make an ad run by his opponent into a racist attack. It appears, given the poll numbers, that the same rejection of racism is taking place among voters who've seen the McCain campaign's "celebrity" ad.

On the other hand:

However, Obama's comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.

You'd think, by now, the Obama campaign would have briefed their candidate that the "I look different" meme is not working to their advantage. It is being seen, rightfully in my estimation, as a attempt to differentiate the candidates by race, something the McCain campaign hasn't done. The Obama campain then uses the difference in race to decry "scare" tactics by the other side which supposedly portray Obama as "scary" because he's different.

It isn't selling at all, as indicated by the poll.

So, what are the messages here? For the McCain campaign, damn the pundits, full speed ahead. And for the Obama campaign, drop the "I'm different and they're trying to scare you because of that" routine. It's not working.

Obama Surrogate John Kerry Throws Obama Surrogate Wesley Clark Under The Bus

It's a slow news day, so why not throw a little humor out there? Here's Kerry on today's Meet The Press, interviewed by Tom Brokaw:

MR. BROKAW: We're going to get to all those issues, but I also want to raise what a surrogate for Senator Obama had to say to my friend Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation." This is former General Wesley Clark talking about John McCain. He said, "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president." He described him as untested and untried. With all due respect, Senator Kerry, he could have been talking about your qualifications. You're a Vietnam veteran...

SEN. KERRY: Yeah, I, I don't agree. I don't agree with Wes Clark's comment. I think it was entirely inappropriate. I have nothing but enormous respect for John McCain's service. I had the privilege of standing with John McCain in the, in the cell in Hanoi when we visited there together, when we worked on the issue of Vietnam together. It was an emotional moment. I, I have awe for John McCain's experience as a prisoner of war, and he, and he does understand duty and service. But...

Now, if Clark would go Meet The Press and rebuke Kerry for his age attacks on McCain (calling him "confused" on certain issues - a pattern with Obama and some of his surrogates), things would get really interesting. ;)

In response to Kerry's denouncing of Clarks' attack, some popular liberal bloggers are throwing Kerry under the bus - this in spite of the chunk of time Kerry spent criticizing McCain's "Celeb" ad and defending Obama against the charge that he used the race card, something the junior Senator from Illinois himself conceded on Saturday, a day after his chief strategist David Axelrod made a similar admission.

Related: Tom Maguire has a chuckle-worthy piece taking the NYT reporter Rachel Swarns to task for her - shall we say "inadequate"? - reporting on Obama's views on affirmative action.

Cross-posted from the Sister Toldjah blog.

Prophet of the Gulag

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. Two years ago this October, on the occasion of the even of elections, I wrote on Dean's World the following about how and why I became a conservative. That story began with Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

I recognized that I was a conservative during high school, when in support of a paper I was writing on Solzhenitsyn in a senior-year comparative literature class my ethnic-Polish teacher gave me a stack of American Spectator magazines, one of which included an article on Solzhenitsyn by Malcolm Muggeridge.

The entire gestalt of it just spoke sense to me. Was it a reaction to the tepid, petrified left-wing Jewish labor socialism of my extended family? The anger of a first-generation American (on one side) at a society that seemed (remember, I grew up in the '60's) so inexcusably and utterly unwilling to defend itself against what anyone could see was subversion? "Common sense," as a Princeton friend, later dropout and current Washington operator would later describe it when recruiting me for some Reagan-era campus political / social suicide mission? Maybe it was just the natural inclination of one identified as depressingly adultoid from an absurdly young age and whose picture can be found at the Wikipedia entry for "stick in the mud." I don't really know, but I do remember that when I told my college roommate that I had, upon my return from an Israel program for Jewish searchers, become committed to religious observance, he said, "Well, now at least your religious ethic matches your political one" (or words to that effect).

Be that as it may, it is truth to me, even though politics, and most politicians, turn my stomach. I mean, there is some ethic in there, isn't there?

But at the end of the day, these Democrats are the ones who so undermined the world I remember growing up in, and they continue to do so today. They are not even in the league, for patriotism and love of country and decency, of the Democratic politicians of my early youth -- Lyndon Johnson, Roberty Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey. With McGovern, that ended.

Jimmy Carter sealed the deal. He made being an American embarrassing, humiliating, depressing, hopeless. Wimpy. Apologetic. Cringing. Losing.

I don't believe any of today's Democratic leaders have improved on Jimmy Carter, except that he had the benefit of not having to kowtow, as today's Democrats do, so grossly to identity politics of every right- and- privilege- demanding ethnic and social subcultural group, no matter how subversive; to the hard-left on abortion rights; and he was allowed to be some kind of public Christian.

I wish there were Republicans today who had a quarter of the qualities of Ronald Reagan. Here was a great man, one who never claimed for himself the mantle of a perfect or even particularly virtuous personal life; but he loved his country, knew right from wrong, and -- exercising a quality that I admire for the very scold it places on one such as myself -- his ability, now proved doubly and triply, to make everyone around him think he was a dumbbell when in fact he was sly as a fox.Frankly I think George W. Bush comes quite close to these qualities. But, sadly lacking the Gipper's ability to communicate and being the literal heir to a political tradition of some ideological infirmity to a conservative -- think Jim Baker, the man who made me vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 -- he is not Reagan.Nor are the dizzy denizens of the Capitol statesmen, by and large. Were they ever? The past takes on an undeserved elegance in sepia. The crassness of living, live and unsilenceable color makes today's professional political class seemingly harder to swallow than its predecessors -- red or blue.

But every time I step into the booth I ask myself, If this candidate could choose Ronald Reagan* or Jimmy Carter to make the keynote speech at his or her party's nominating convention, which one would he or she choose?

The choice is simple.

--
* Captain Ed just posted on Reagan as well, so if you're reading this belatedly, click through to Ed's comment.

Cross-re-posted on Likelihood of Success.

August 4, 2008

Interviews With 3 Professional Dating Gurus

Previously on RWN, I put together a couple of articles that featured interviews with conservative women on dating (Part 1, Part 2). The articles were a big hit and I had several people ask me when I was going to do a follow-up with conservative men.

Although I did want to do a follow-up, given that I have a mostly male audience, I didn't think they'd be all that interested in hearing about the dating experiences of right-wing guys. So, in order to adequately cover the male perspective on dating in a way that would be interesting to both men and women, I decided to do some interviews with professional dating coaches.

These men are real life versions of the movie character "Hitch." They get paid, considerable sums of money in some cases, to teach men how to deal with women. All three of the men I got together with for interviews are fairly well known in their field and had a lot of great advice to offer. What follows are the edited transcripts of the interviews. Enjoy!

Wayne Elise

Wayne was the subject of the UK's Channel Four television documentary "Seduction School." He is also the founder and CEO of Charisma Arts which has 15 instructors who run in-field bootcamps and teach men how to meet women. He has written for Esquire and Blender magazine as well as authored an Ebook, "How to Meet and Connect with Women."

Wayne, what do you think the biggest mistake most men make with women is?

Probably coming across as needy. ...They get way too ahead of themselves. They're trying to get a girl into a relationship or into the bed when they need to be living in the moment ...It's a guy's job to have fun and to show a girl a good time.

A lot of guys look at themselves like medicine. They act as if women should take them because they'll be good for the girl. But, that doesn't work in reality. The girl is more likely to want an addicting drug. ...You should be like a drug, better than drugs in a sense. You should be someone who is fun to be with all the time.

On altruism

If a guy tries to come across with a girl he just met as altruistic, saying "you are sexy" or "you're fun to be with" or he's trying to be nice to her, she doesn't trust that because she believes everyone has a selfish motive. So, I tell guys if you want to come across as altruistic, no one is going to believe you.

Why does it seem like more women are interested in you when you're already dating someone that when you're single?

Women flirt with guys who are married, dating, or in a relationship because it feels safe. But, that doesn't necessarily mean they want to break up the relationship...It simply means they feel safe flirting.

Years ago, I used to be a stilt walker. That was my job. I used to walk on stilts at company parties. If you can imagine a guy who is 10 feet tall and wearing sequins -- I was the only straight man who could wear sequins and get away with it.

So, I would go to these events and all these women would always come on to me. They would flirt with me non-stop, saying the most outrageous over-the-top sexual innuendoes -- about being tall and other things being long, but as soon as I got off of my stilts and went up and talked to them, no more flirting.

Because you weren't safe anymore?

I wasn't safe anymore. ...A lot of times women like to flirt, everybody likes to flirt, but it's in a safe environment where they know it has limitations. ...If a girl flirts with a guy who's married and he comes across as if he's really going to hit her, you know, let's go back to my place, a lot of women think that's creepy -- that's going too far.

Do most of your clients tend to prefer casual relationships with multiple women or a serious relationship with one?

I think most guys say they want to play the field and are looking for multiple relationships, but in fact, they really would be very happy in a relationship. My feeling is that most people are happier in a relationship, whether they know it or not.

In your opinion, can you woo any woman if you work on them long enough or is there a point where you might as well say "forget it," this isn't going to work?

It's a case by case basis, but most guys get things out of order and they send relationship signals too soon. They have a crush on a girl or they know a girl at work and they send relationship signals. If there's going to be a relationship, there should be sexual tension. That doesn't necessarily mean sex because I know a lot of people want to wait until marriage ...but I think there should be sexual tension. I think there should be some physical chemistry.

A lot of guys who have crushes are afraid to take it there. They're afraid to show their sexual interest. So, it gets murky. Basically, what happens with a woman and man is that windows open. We call them escalation windows. If you don't step through those windows and take it to the next level, then that window tends to close. There are windows in time that a guy has to go through to advance the relationship and one of the first ones is to show that they're sexual attracted to the girl so that the girl knows that is a possibility going forward. ...Most guys don't do that because they're afraid to scare her away, but the problem is that if they wait too long, then that window can close and the girl may never see the guy in a sexual way anymore and then he gets into the friend zone and it's very difficult to get out of there.

Related question: let's say you get into the friend zone with a woman; is it possible to get out of that?

It's possible...but I always tell guys you have got to be a new man. She has got to see new sides of you and...you have to show her your sexual interest...It's difficult for a man to do that, to show himself as a new man and show a new side of himself.

But, if you want to try it, you should put on some different cologne you've never worn, put on some clothes you've never worn, get your hair cut a little differently, go to a new place with her, and talk about some things you've never talked about before, and tell her you find her sexy. That's the best chance you possibly have at that point.

Now, there's always an absolute rule that you have to be prepared to lose her as a friend. It's one of those things where it's like either friend or possible lover, right now. It's either gonna be flirting and sexual or it's going to be over. That's how it is in my experience.

Continue reading "Interviews With 3 Professional Dating Gurus" »

Some "Post-Racial" Candidate Obama Turned Out To Be.

Via Hot Air, here's what David Gergen had to say about John McCain's latest outstanding ad,

David Gergen: McCain's "Moses" ad is code for calling Obama "uppity"

In which the single dumbest, most paranoid racial charge of the campaign is recycled on national television by a former presidential advisor and current Harvard professor. I said it before but it bears repeating: If you take this logic to its conclusion, there's literally no non-racist way to accuse a member of a minority group of having an outsized ego. Any synonym you can conjure -- elitist, arrogant, "megalomaniac narcissist" (to quote Hitchens) -- can all happily be dismissed as "code," regardless of whether the subject might in fact (a) display his very own presidential seal, (b) be known to describe rural voters in terms that call to mind Cletus the slackjawed yokel on "The Simpsons," and (c) oh, by the way, lead his very own cult with himself as godhead.

Remember when Obama was going to be the anti-Jesse Jackson who helped America put race in the rear view mirror?

Well now, the post-racial candidate is the post-Jeremiah Wright candidate, and it's hard to miss the fact that instead moving us beyond race, Obama and his supporters are actually ramping up the hyper-sensitivity.

As evidenced by Gergen's bizarre criticism, we've gotten to the point where almost any criticism aimed at Obama for any reason is now being treated as some sort of racial attack.

So, let's see: Obama was a member of an anti-white church for 20 years, talks about "typical white people," only won the Democratic primaries because he is black, and now he and his supporters are trying to rule all criticism off limits because of his race.

Some "post-racial" candidate Obama turned out to be.

The Website Of The Day Is Men's News Daily

The website of the day is Men's News Daily.

 


 

The Daily Kos Post Of The Day: McCain Is Accusing Obama Of Being The Anti-Christ

Liberals tend to live in cloud-cuckoo land, where the average conservative is an evil, Nazi-loving David Duke who's hellbent on sticking them in a camp so that we can turn the US into a theocracy. Meanwhile, back in the real world, there's very, very little evidence to support these assertions.

So, the way liberals get around this is by claiming conservatives are speaking in code. No matter how clearly conservatives say what we mean and no matter how obvious our motives are, liberals can always manage to come up with some bizarro world narrative to explain what conservatives REALLY mean.

For example, the latest McCain ad, "The One," takes a powerful and effective shot at Obama's incredible arrogance, the cult-like nature of his campaign, and whether he's qualified to be President.

Absurdly, David Gergen said that the ad was accusing Obama of being "uppity," but believe it or not, the netroots came up with an even wackier interpretation.

According to some liberals, McCain is actually accusing Obama of being the anti-Christ. No...seriously, that's what they're saying.

First off, here's Daily Kos Diarist SoonerG

...The McCain campaign may be creating a belief that Obama is a false messiah, perhaps the anti-Christ himself.

...Is there a real danger that right-wing voters will make the correlation that McCain seems to be implying, that Obama is a messianic leader? That he is a false messiah? That Barack Hussein Obama is actually the anti-Christ?

While he is accusing Obama of using the race card, is he sneaking the ultimate fear card through the back door? How far of a stretch is it for fundamentalist Americans to truly believe that a black liberal with a Muslim name could be the spawn of Satan himself?

Having read the initial book in (the Left Behind) series myself and living in the heart of the bible belt, I know the unfortunate truth. Many ultra right wingers have already been preying upon this fear. Now, with this new attack, McCain seems to be attempting to feed that monster.

I gotta tell you: J.K. Rowling has got nothing on these libs in the creativity department. Sure, she came up with Harry Potter, Muggles, and Quidditch -- but that doesn't compare to the sort of imagination it takes to accuse McCain of painting Hopey McChange as the anti-Christ.

But wait...there's more. Discourse.net actually matches the Daily Kos on their nutty anti-Christ claim and then ups the ante,

Perhaps to most viewers this (ad) will seem like the political equivalent of scoring against yourself as much of it is about how wonderful Obama is, and the attack part involves a clumsy use of Charlton Heston. But there may be a (very evil) method to the madness: SoonerG at Daily Kos suggests that the point of the latest McCain ads is to depict Obama as the anti-Christ. Don't laugh. The first thing I thought of when I saw the ad was that it was a dog-whistle call-out to evangelicals who would be offended by Obama's suggestion that "a light will shine down upon you" and inspire people to vote for him. But it could well be that other people will see it as a more direct appeal (consider, a Google search for "obama anti-Christ" finds "about 990,000" pages).

In light of last week's attack on a Unitarian church for being too "liberal," is it so far-fetched to worry that some unhinged true believer may hear all this and decide he has a call to assassinate the anti-Christ? It's perhaps fortunate that, as one Christian pastor put it to me via email, "the people who believe in the anti-Christ tend to believe that he/she is too powerful for one person to take out with a .30-.06."

Nevertheless, McCain is playing with nuclear weapons here. It's despicable.

Yes, so not only is McCain accusing Obama of being the anti-Christ, he's apparently doing it in hopes of getting B.O. assassinated. See? There's so much you can learn when you can read the conservative code.

PS: Just as a side note, Discourse.net says, "'obama anti-Christ' finds 'about 990,000' pages." Well, "McCain anti-Christ" pulls up 619,000 pages, so it's not as if this association is unique to Bambi.

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Villainous Company: Photoshop: The special edition, Barack Obama Race Card

Cracked: If websites came with warning labels...

Stranahan: I've been banned at DailyKos because Of John Edwards

Egotastic!: Audrina Patridge bikini pictures

You can check out all those links and more by clicking here. Don't forget to bookmark RWN's companion page, CG! Remember, if you're not reading RWN and CG every day, you're not getting the full story!

PS: If you'd like to submit articles to be linked to Conservative Grapevine, register at CG, and then shoot me an email.

It's Not Our Responsibility To Provide Health Care For the World.

The New York Times is running a poor, poor, pitiful me story about an illegal immigrant who, happily, was deported by a hospital that was sued in return for doing a good deed,

Eight years ago, (Luis Alberto) Jimenez, now 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.

What happened next set the stage for a legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Jimenez was deported, not by the federal government but by Martin Memorial Hospital. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and "forcibly returned him to his home country," as one hospital administrator described it.

Since returning home, Jimenez, who sustained a traumatic brain injury, has received no medical care or medication -- just Alka-Seltzer and prayer, said his 72-year-old mother. In the past year, his condition has deteriorated with routine seizures.

...Some advocates for immigrants see these repatriations as a kind of international patient dumping.

Hospital administrators view such cases as costly, burdensome patient transfers that force them to shoulder responsibility for the dysfunctional immigration and health-care systems. In many cases, they said, the only alternative to repatriation is keeping patients indefinitely in acute-care hospitals.

"What that does for us, it puts a strain on our system, where we're unable to provide adequate care for our own citizens," said Alan Kelly, vice president of Scottsdale Healthcare in Arizona.

....In Jimenez's case, the hospital's doctors determined appropriate post-hospital care meant traumatic-brain-injury rehabilitation.

Hospital-discharge planners searched to no avail for a rehabilitation program or nursing home.

Michael Banks, a local lawyer representing Jimenez's guardian -- a cousin by marriage -- took the position that the hospital had a responsibility to provide Jimenez with the rehabilitation, even if it meant paying a rehabilitation center.

But the hospital declined, as Lord put it, "to take out our checkbook" and subsidize Jimenez's care at another institution. "Once you take that step, for how long are you going to do that -- a year, 10 years, 50 years?"

Eventually, the Guatemalan health minister wrote a letter assuring Martin Memorial that his country was prepared to care for Jimenez.

After the guardian and the hospital reached an impasse, Martin Memorial took the matter to court, asking a state judge to compel relatives to cooperate with its repatriation plan. In June 2003, a hearing was held before Circuit Judge John Fennelly.

George Bovie III, a lawyer for Martin Memorial, told the judge: "This is a case about care for a man in this country illegally who has reached maximum medical improvement at our hospital and is ready to be discharged and whose home government" is prepared to receive and treat him.

Banks said in response, "Your Honor, this is a case about a hospital that has failed to do its job properly," adding that the hospital sought to "have this court legitimize its patient dumping."

By the time of the hearing, Jimenez was essentially a boarder at the hospital, wheeling around the hallways and hanging out at the nursing stations.

Diana Gregory, a nurse who supervises case management and discharge planning, said in a recent interview that Jimenez became "like family" to hospital workers, who bought him birthday cakes, knitted him blankets and gave him toys.

According to hospital records, however, it was not all pastries and presents. Jimenez grew depressed and showed signs of regression. Gregory said Jimenez developed some disturbing habits, including spitting, yelling, kicking and defecating on the floor.

So, let's see.

We have an illegal alien who's not supposed to be here in the first place, without health care, who gets hurt. A hospital spends $1.5 million dollars taking care of him, costs that will likely be passed on to American customers of the hospital, to treat a guy who spits, yells, kicks, and defecates on the floor. Then, after shipping him back to his own country, where he should have been all along, they're accused of being heartless and are being sued by a parasitic lawyer and the illegal's family.

It's understandable that people may have sympathy for Luis Alberto Jimenez, but sympathy only goes so far. He wasn't supposed to be here. It's not the hospital's job to take care of the guy for the rest of his life. Americans who go to that hospital shouldn't have to pay more money to cover the costs racked up by people who shouldn't even be in this country.

Luis Alberto Jimenez is a Guatemalan citizen and he should be right where he is; back in Guatemala. If the treatment there isn't adequate, I hate to say this, but it's not our problem. The reality is that there are billions -- and that's billions with a "b" -- of people who don't get the same quality of medical care in their home countries that they would get if they were citizens of the United States -- even indigent citizens of the United States. As sad as that is, we don't have the time, the money, or the responsibility to provide health care for them -- or for Luis Alberto Jimenez, particularly when we have Americans complaining about how expensive our health care is every day.

Thanks To My Co-Bloggers

I wanted to give a special thanks to my co-bloggers at RWN who helped out last week,

Dr. Melissa Clouthier
Katie Favazza
Kathy Shaidle Five Feet Of Fury
Gina Cobb
Ron Coleman from Likelihood of Success
Sister Toldjah
William Teach from Pirate's Cove
Michael Illions from Polipundit
MCQ from QandO
Moonbattery

Top 7 At Townhall Again

My latest column at Townhall, Obama's Top Ten Flaws That Will Cost Him in November, cracked the 7 most read and forwarded pieces this week.

Being on a list like that with columnists like Ann Coulter, Thomas Sowell, and Charles Krauthammer is a real honor.

Energy Greed

A recent CNN headline screams:

Exxon posts record $11.68 billion profit

Wow, that works out to $1,485.55 per second! Those greedy bastards! Down with Big Oil! From now on let's just drill our own in our backyards.

But buried deep in the story we find paragraph 28:

In addition to making hefty profits, Exxon also had a hefty tax bill. Worldwide, the company paid $10.5 billion in income taxes in the second quarter, $9.5 billion in sales taxes, and over $12 billion in what it called "other taxes."

Carpe Diem does a little math on the numbers and comes up with this chart:

ExxonMobile_profits.jpg

ExxonMobile pays $4,114 in taxes per second. Communist goons like Reps Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Maxine Waters (D-CA) might want to think twice about nationalizing a goose that lays such large golden eggs.

Once again we see that if anyone's to blame for the energy crisis driving our economic downturn, it's not the people who provide us with energy, but the parasitical bureaucrats who go out of their way to prevent them from providing it more efficiently — and of course the media sycophants who prop up those bureaucrats.

On a tip from Wiggins. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Pelosi's Opposition to Drilling Explained

Why on earth would Nancy Pelosi go to such extremes as turning the lights off on her fellow Reps to prevent even voting on the possibility of allowing off-shore drilling? Does she want energy prices to keep climbing, and the economy to tank? In a word: yes.

As NewsBusters reports, even George Stephanopoulos has gotten fed up with the non sequiturs Pelousy offers as answers when she's asked why she forbids us from extracting our own oil. On ABC's This Week, he kept at her about why she won't permit a vote. Amid the smoke she spewed in response, we might have the answer:

[M]y flagship issue as Speaker of the House and 110th Congress has been to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reverse global warming.

Forget the first point; not even Pelousy is nutty enough to think that strangling domestic drilling will reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But could it be that forbidding drilling will "reverse global warming"?

Pelousy presumably expects us to believe that the global warming hoax is real, and our use of energy makes it be too hot out. Not drilling our own oil results in a lower supply, resulting in higher prices, resulting in reduced economic activity, resulting in recession or worse — all of which will supposedly save us from global warming by reducing fuel consumption. She wants gas prices high and the economy hamstrung because, in her own utterly unhinged words:

I'm trying to save the planet; I'm trying to save the planet.

Congress is literally being run by a lunatic. Imagine the damage our economy will sustain when she has an ally in the White House.

Nancy Pelosi
Stark raving bonkers and in charge.

On a tip from Burning Hot. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Why is Obama Not Holding a Commanding Lead Right Now?

Violence in Iraq is down to 2003 levels, the Congress is in recess for a month, and frankly we're entering what should be a very slow news period. So you can expect some "inside baseball" posts about the political campaigns as they enter their last 3 months (thank goodness) before the election.

George Will hits on one of the most intriguing aspect of the campaign so far. What does Barack Obama have to do or say to close the deal? This year, by all estimates, should be a walk over for Democrats. Nothing, as concerns their electoral goals, should be in question if you believe the conventional wisdom.

Yet today, Rasumussen points to the first time in their daily tracking poll that McCain has taken a lead over Obama.

Why? Why doesn't Obama have a 10 point lead over McCain?

Will covers recent swing Obama took through Europe and the fact that it brought nothing, in terms of electoral residuals, to the Obama camp:

But polls taken since his trip abroad do not indicate that Obama succeeded in altering the oddest aspect of this presidential campaign: Measured against his party's surging strength in every region and at every level, he is dramatically underperforming. Surely this fact is related to anxieties about his thin résumé regarding national security matters, the thinnest of any major party nominee since Wendell Willkie in 1940. But the fact also might be related to fatigue from too much of Obama's eloquence, which is beginning to sound formulaic and perfunctory.

In other words, people are beginning to look beyond the words as they've become somewhat used to the rhetoric. And perhaps his other point is valid as well. Obama has been in the headlines for 16 or 17 months. Perhaps it is more than just fatigue from "too much of Obama's eloquence". Perhaps it is Obama fatigue in general.

With the tight primary race which kept him in the news, followed by the European trip in which the media fell all over itself to give wall-to-wall coverage, perhaps people are simply growing tired of Obama in general. I mean being behind McCain at any point in this process, given the expectations for Democrats, can't be helped but considered "underperforming" as Will points out.

So what is it? Why is Obama, who everyone agrees is a great speaker and an attractive candidate, running this close to John McCain at this time?

I mentioned this last night on the podcast, and I believe this to be part of the problem - while Europeans love to talk about their disdain for America, Americans, while not quite as open about it as their European brothers, match their disdain for us with disdain for Europe. So trotting off to Europe to stage-manage a spectacle of 200,000 cheering Germans may not be the best way to impress American voters.

Cosmopolitanism is not, however, a political asset for American presidential candidates. Least of all is it an asset for Obama, one of whose urgent needs is to seem comfortable with America's vibrant and very un-European patriotism, which is grounded in a sense of virtuous exceptionalism.

Also beginning to really come to the fore is the lack of resume. 10 years in public office, 5 of which have been spent running for higher office. He is the John Edwards of this election cycle. And Edwards was a 15% candidate, partly because he was so inexperienced that voters were leery of him in a leadership role.

Then there is the blatant fact that we're at war. Not just Iraq which seems to be winding down, but the longer running war in Afghanistan which presently has no end in sight. So the commander-in-chief role is also beginning to come under scrutiny and again his very thin resume is not helping him. Nor is the fact he was dead wrong about the surge.

Domestic issues are where Obama should have a commanding lead, and in most cases he does. The question is, is that enough? The further question is, can he hold on to that lead? The economy is issue number one, and the number one economic issue is the price of fuel. There Obama and the Democrats sit on the other side of the vast majority of Americans who have decided that exploiting our resources of oil and natural gas is something which should be done and done immediately.

And any look at the "why" of his seeming underperformance must also factor in race. Race has been injected into this election as much by Obama and his supporters as anyone. I think you have to assume that some level of the "Bradley effect" is in play in this election as well. But I'll again point out that it isn't Republicans that will be responsible for such an effect - they're not going to vote for him to begin with. If there is a Bradley effect in this election it will be because Democratic voters (or those professing to be Dem voters supporting Obama) will not pull the lever for him in the voting booth because he is black.

All of this combines to make this a very complex campaign season. Obama continues to cast about for a way to portray himself in a pleasing way to the majority of the voters while the McCain campaign seems content, at the moment, to help frame the perception of Obama in a way which most helps them.

I think that right now it is the result of three things - Obama fatigue, success by the McCain campaign in characterizing Obama unflatteringly, and Obama being unable, as of yet, to hit upon the formula of appeal necessary to win in November - which has the numbers this close.

Whether Obama can overcome the Bradley effect, satisfy those concerned about his thin resume and change the perception of him that the McCain campaign is trying to paint remain to be seen (and O-Force One isn't helping). If not, we all may be in for a surprise in November, especially the Democrats and their "can't lose" candidate.

August 5, 2008

Instant Messenger Conversation Of The Day: The Election Explained In About 300 words

Last night, a relatively non-political friend of mine asked me what was happening with the election. Here's what I told her, edited slightly to clean it up.

Anon: What's up? I saw some of your recent posts, John :) ...I was curious as to how you think the election is going.

John Hawkins: It's a toss-up at the moment.

Anon: That's what I'm thinking -- though the Dem's seem worried Obama may have peaked too soon. Question is did he peak too soon or will he continue to go strong?

John Hawkins: Traditionally, Democrats do a little better this time of the year and then Republicans pick up steam from the summer on.

Well, what is happening is that the election is turning into a referendum on Barack. Is he ready to lead? Is he experienced enough to lead? Does he have the judgment? Is he clear about what he is going to do? Etc. And so far, he doesn't seem up to the task.

In a normal year, where the field wasn't slanted so heavily towards the Dems, McCain would absolutely annihilate Barack in a landslide. Obama is actually a very weak candidate. Only in an environment like this can he stay even.

Anon: And he has a lot of people who are backing him.

John Hawkins: He does, but -- and this is a big but -- he ran as an idealist and then when he got the nomination, he immediately tacked way over to the center on a lot of his agenda. That turns off a lot of his supporters and it's disturbing to the general public because as is, he pretty much has no record. So how can they know what he would do when he gets into office?

Skinny ='s Black? The Left Goes Farther Around The Bend On Race

As a general rule, calling the left "oversensitive" about race is like calling the sun "hot," but as Barack's numbers have started to soften over the last few weeks, the Left has started to go around the bend. As a matter of fact, they can't even see the bend at this point.

You've seen all the frantic and bizarre attacks on the most wildly successful political ad of 2008, "Celebrity," but Timothy Noah over at Slate has actually ratcheted it up another couple of levels,

"In the Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick asked, "[C]ould Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next door? "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," an "unnamed Clinton supporter" wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.

Chozick insists that she didn't intend her playful feature about Obama's physique as potential electoral liability to carry any racial subtext. "I can't even respond to that," she told me. "That's ridiculous." Bob Christie, Dow Jones' vice president of communications, phoned me in a flash to reaffirm that message. I believe Chozick and Christie when they say that the Journal never intended skinniness to serve as a proxy for race....

But I firmly disagree that a racial reading of Chozick's story is "ridiculous," and I would counter that any failure on Chozick's part to recognize such is just a wee bit clueless."

...Let's review the basics. Barack Obama is the first African-American to win a major-party nomination for president of the United States. African-Americans are distinguishable from other Americans by their skin color. This physical attribute looms large in our nation's history as a source of prejudice.

The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet. When white people are invited to think about Obama's physical appearance, the principal attribute they're likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama's other physical attributes can't help coming off as a coy walk around the barn. A whole genre of humor turns on this reality. A Slate colleague informs me that an episode of the TV sitcom Happy Days ("Fonzie's New Friend") had its 1950s-era characters nervously discussing the fact that a black man in their midst was so ... skinny. Was it true that skinny people liked fried chicken? That they were good at basketball? And so on.

Now, I don't know how relevant Barack Obama's "skinniness" will turn out to be in the race. At first glance, it does seem like a frivolous topic to write an article about, but the presidential race, from primary to finish, is a nearly two year long experience and it's hard to come up with fresh material. Plus, it's not as if people have never discussed this sort of thing before. In fact, I specifically remember someone telling me that the decisive factor in the 2004 race could be that Kerry was taller than Bush and that it might look bad for W. if Kerry towered over him in the debates.

But frivolous or not frivolous, discussing whether Obama's thinness could make a difference in the election is unequivocably not racial despite the possible existence of some decades old episode of Happy Days.

In fact, if someone made a claim that off-the-wall in conversation, you'd look at them a little differently, a little closer, right in the eyes, so you could see if there was any crazy leaking out of there that you hadn't noticed before. After all, can anybody possibly be this hypersensitive?

I'd say, no, no they can't. To the contrary, what's happening is that the Left is using a variation on one of their favorite tricks: they're trying to shut down debate. You've heard the old phrase, "If you can't beat them, join them?" Well, the Left's version of this is, "If you can't beat them, keep them quiet."

When it comes to someone like John Edwards, they'll simply refuse to report criticism. When it comes to conservative talk radio hosts, they'll try to drive them off the air with the "Fairness Doctrine" -- and when it comes to Barack Obama, they will find "racist" slants on anything and everything negative that is said about the guy in hopes of stopping criticism of him.

It's a vile, dishonest un-American strategy, but it's just what the Left is all about these days.

Conservative Grapevine Promo

Make sure to check out Conservative Grapevine today, where you'll find links like:

Arthur Herman: Climate hysterics v heretics in an age of unreason

Hot Air: Bob Herbert: Why is everyone missing the phallic symbols in McCain's Britney ad?

The Sniper: 5 ways to scare a gal away forever

Cara Ellison: The four most romantic moments committed to film

Egotastic!: Cindy Crawford bikini pictures

You can check out all those links and more by clicking here. Don't forget to bookmark RWN's companion page, CG! Remember, if you're not reading RWN and CG every day, you're not getting the full story!

PS: If you'd like to submit articles to be linked to Conservative Grapevine, register at CG, and then shoot me an email.

The Website Of The Day Is Sister Toldjah

The website of the day is Sister Toldjah.

 


 

The Six Steps To Dealing With Liberal Friends And Family

My pal Rachel Lucas got a question from one of her readers that read,

I'm a former liberal who's made a difficult transformation to a conservative...I'm hopeful that you'll consider a post on how a conservative can deal with liberals, in the situation that the liberals are loving and caring family members. Any advice? On how to make a point while remaining civil, and un-excommunicated?

Here's how you deal with friends, family members, and random people you're meeting on the street who are liberal.

#1) Avoid talking about politics in the first place. I mean, if you think George Bush is the Truman of his time, a man who will be vindicated by history for bringing freedom to the Middle East and your friend thinks he's Hitler, it's going to be hard to bridge the gap -- especially since there are probably 50 issues where you have that big of a disagreement. So, try to stay away from politics in general.

#2) Be big enough to handle disagreements. If you can't handle the fact that your friend thinks Michael Moore is a cinematic genius and that Barack Obama is a "lightbringer," then how are you going to be able to hold up your end of the friendship? You have to just realize that you're not going to agree on some very important issues and deal with it.

#3) Correct them gently. I hate to be this blunt, but in my experience, the average person thinks it's very important to know about politics, but simultaneously, is horribly uninformed about the subject compared to the typical person who reads blogs, listens to talk radio, etc. So as a general rule, most people believe all sorts of things that are ridiculous, completely incorrect, that some "friend of a friend" told them, etc.

With that in mind, if you are well informed, it's generally very easy to make them look like an idiot. Don't do this. Feel free to politely disagree with them if they are wrong and then move on. If THEY ask for a follow-up, explain your opinion, in neutral language -- and then try to move on from politics.

#4) Do you want to be friends or do you want to prove you're right? I'm not saying you should go along to get along, because I don't believe in doing that, but people get very sensitive about how little they know about politics. If you rub it in their faces or make them look like idiots, which incidentally, is what generally makes for a good blog post =D, it's going to upset them. It's one thing to do that to liberal bloggers or liberals in a comment section, whom you probably don't care about one way or the other, but it's another thing to do that to your friends and family. So, let them know you disagree, but don't make a huge issue out of it or humiliate them.

#5) Remember that people are not groups. As a group, liberals suck. They're dishonest, selfish, hedonistic, and slowly eating away at everything that's good, decent, and worthwhile about American society. However, your friend or a family member is not "liberals;" he's just a person. Treat him like an individual and don't try to make him bear the sins of liberals everywhere. That's too heavy of a burden for anyone to bear.

#6) Just realize it may not work. I find that there are liberals and then there are fanatical liberals. Liberals who aren't all that into politics, you can have fairly normal discussions with. On the other hand, the fanatical liberals tend to infuse politics into every part of their life and if you are conservative, they genuinely see you as a bad person just because you don't agree with them. Realistically, you're probably not going to be able to be friends with someone like that, no matter how great you are as a friend, unless you want to be a doormat who spends all your time getting browbeaten and pretending you agree with him.

When Nelly and Election Fraud Get Together...

Election Journal has put together a great video with scenes of St. Louis and valuable information about the city's history of election fraud.

"See Fraud? Cheating? Dirty Tricks? Were you intimidated? Have trouble voting? Someone vote for you? Long lines? Machines break?" If you witness any form of election fraud today in Missouri or elsewhere, please contact the good people at Election Journal.

Cross-posted at KatieFavazza.com.

Birthing A Baby To Save A Baby and Dying At Will: The Ethics Of Saving Or Losing A Life

It seems impossible that 18 years have passed since the controversial decision by the Ayala family who chose to get pregnant with a baby to save their daughter, Annisa, who suffered with leukemia. She needed a bone marrow transplant to save her life, but there were no matches. Her parents had another child who ended up being the perfect match. Both girls are alive and well today. Watch the whole story here.

An ethicist made the argument that it was wrong to have a child, and before the baby could consent herself, take her bone marrow to save her sister. I watched the family, imagined watching my daughter die and can see making the same decision. The thought did occur to me, though, what if the child wasn't a match? How would that reality affect the family? After the older daughter died, would the new child be a solace or source of pain? That's a lot to put on a child. I'm sure the parents thought this through. What say you?

I would have made the same decision as the Ayalas:
Agree
Disagree
  
pollcode.com free polls

This case also reminded me of end of life decisions, too. No one likes to talk about it, but I know for a fact that parents, children and doctors make tough choices every single day in hospitals across America. The Terri Schiavo case was especially divisive because of the nature of her husband's relationship and the questionable circumstances surrounding her coma. At any rate, her case wasn't typical. Most people at the end are suffering and the question is whether to intervene and end it, or less overtly, just remove the life support; or, should nature be allowed to take it's course, meaning that the person dies when the body quits. Again, I'm curious about your reaction to this dilemma.

At the end, people should:
End the suffering if they want.
Let nature take its course.
  
pollcode.com free polls
Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com where I'm talking about how liberal policies are killing Michigan.

Some People Just Need A Beating Or Alternately, You Might Be A Democrat If...

...you're dodging urine and feces in the streets of Denver later this month.

Poo and pee dominated a public hearing Monday on a new law that prohibits people from carrying certain items if they intend to use them for nefarious purposes.

The law, crafted in advance of the Democratic National Convention, was adopted unanimously by the City Council.

But not before a hearing laced with comedy and profanity.

Representatives from some of the groups planning large-scale protests during the DNC this month said the ordinance was unnecessary and accused city officials of fear mongering.

"The intent of this ordinance is to try to smear protesters and make them look as if they are somehow criminal or somehow going to engage in some kind of gross conduct," said Glenn Spagnuolo, an organizer with the Re- create 68 Alliance.

The ordinance makes it illegal to carry certain items, such as chains, padlocks, carabiners and other locking devices. It also prohibits the possession of noxious substances. Two of the most frequently used examples of a noxious substance are a bucket of urine and a "feces bomb."

I'm sorry, but if you throw urine or feces at someone, you deserve to be on the business end of some good, old fashioned police brutality. You're not supposed to be able to say that. You're not supposed to be able to admit that some people just need to be severely beaten, but we would be a better society if beating people who deserved it was more legally and societally accepted.

For one thing, nobody would be thinking about throwing "poo and pee" at people going to a national political convention...

Eduard Weather Drama

Maybe I'm writing too soon and too glibly as the real storm should hit my area around 1 p.m., but dang. The drama around a thunderstorm seems excessive. My mom called my yesterday from Michigan and proclaimed that a tropical storm cometh. She's very concerned about the weather. I pay little attention unless I'm flying on a plane, and even then I don't pay enough attention as my three-hour, storm-delayed trip to Michigan demonstrated. I would have packed healthy food. Alas.

The technology of advanced warning is fantastic, don't get me wrong. In 1900, Galveston Island lost most of its inhabitants because a hurricane struck and there was no advanced warning. So warnings are good. Even this tropical storm popped up in the Gulf seemingly out of nowhere, so it's nice to have the radar and NOAA stuff.

My concern is that there is little perspective. Non-stop crisis mode makes for apathy. The boy who cried wolf and whatnot. I thought of this, too, at the airport, when I heard the Orwellian speaker system drone out the words, "We are at Threat Level Orange (Code Red being nuclear annihilation, I suspect), please watch your belongings..." blah, blah, blah. What good does that do? In the back of everyone's mind now, after 9/11, people just watch more. Do they need to be reminded by a loudspeaker to pay attention?

And another thing: I want this cleared up. Will listening to my iPod during take-off crash the plane? I can tell you the answer to that: NO it won't. I know that it won't because I listened to it three times. The last leg of the journey, an aggressive stewardess who got off on her power just a little too much checked my iPod to make sure it was off--"plane mode isn't good enough, it has to be off". Why? Why does it have to be off?

The big winners in all the scare-mongering are the impotent little men and women who suddenly have lots of power over the compliant and brow-beaten masses. Should a terrorist attack happen in the sky again, it won't likely be Skippy the Stewardess who saves the day. Most likely, it'll be the average guy wedged into 13D taking the fight to the enemy. And when the hurricane hits, the government won't save us. Their lack of planning can make saving ourselves a lot more difficult, but we'll still have to feed, protect, and rebuild ourselves.

I don't like freedoms taken away by needless scare-mongering. There are enough real dangers out there. We don't have to manufacture them.

Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com

Gray Lady Fantasizes about Racists Assassinating Obama

Denver is blowing a fortune on security for the Obamessiah coronation:

[T]he city released a list of expenses related to the convention showing that the police were preparing for large demonstrations and mass arrests and that the department had spent $2.1 million on protection equipment for its officers, $1.4 million for barricades and $850,000 for supplies related to the arrest and processing of suspects.

This is because radical anarchist groups like Recreate 68 have been promising to riot for months. But according to the NY Times, it's also because…

The Secret Service is wary of discussing threats against the people they protect, but with Mr. Obama poised to become the first black presidential nominee, there are special worries. While law enforcement officials say there are no specific, credible threats against Mr. Obama, they expressed concern about low-level chatter on Web sites frequented by white separatists who spew hate about Mr. Obama's race and what they perceive as his liberal agenda.

White separatists? What they perceive as his liberal agenda?

White racists clinging to guns and resisting absorption into the socialist borg are going to be the villains in every script the media writes, regardless of the fact that the people likely to cause trouble will all be voting for Obama (provided they're not too stoned to find the polls). Only in the most secret dreams of liberals is Obama likely to be assassinated, elevating him to unassailable martyr status. There's no shortage of suitably dark-skinned fellow leftists who would scurry to snatch up his mantle.

Alive, Obama is a post turtle, whose hollowness, incompetence, and ultra-left extremism are bound to come to light as the hype runs out of gas — to the immense discredit of the execrable Democrat Party and mainstream media, which have tried to inflict him on the country.

Only dead would Obama be taken seriously for long. Conservatives are the last people who would wish him physical harm. As for political harm, he can be counted on to inflict that on himself.

On a tip from Oiao. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Bill Clinton Forced to Deny He's a Racist

During Stalin's show trials, even the most brutal communist apparatchiks could find themselves accused of being counterrevolutionaries. Likewise, even America's First Black President, the guy with the office in Harlem, who has been said to be blacker than Obama, feels compelled to deny the thought crime of racism:

It's no use protesting his innocence. As universities now teach, all white people are racist. Like the rest of us, Slick Willie can only be redeemed by accepting the punishments deemed just by the Obamessiah.

On tips from Lyle. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Does #dontgo matter?

How do you make Congress #dontgo? Many of you have likely heard about the uproar from House Republicans seeking to address energy costs. How did Republicans and online activists create this uproar, when video cameras were forbidden, the lights were turned off and the House was formally sent off on their taxpayer-funded vacation? It's all about technology.

In addition to the link above, read this post from Patrick Ruffini and this one from Kristen Soltis, both from The Next Right. Both succinctly explain why they believe the "#dontgo movement" matters. Ruffini suggests that the Right can (finally!) on of the offense:

Could #dontgo usher in an era of Republican technological dominance in the post-blogging world? Should we cede the blogosphere to the left, and focus on leapfrogging them in the use of tools most necessary to real-time political action? The answer could be yes.

#dontgo is creating a perfect storm where the emergence of a new technology is married to a pressing need to do something. Republicans had the use of the tools down, but had no pressing to-dos in the early 2000s. As Matt Stoller reminded me in a joint radio appearance yesterday, Democrats had impeachment, the recount, and the Iraq War. We had to defend all these things. And online, it's a lot easier to be on offense than on defense.

In her post, Soltis concludes:

What makes "#dontgo" special is that it felt organic, spontaneous. In a world where pre-planned press events involve advance teams and prepared remarks and canned talking points, suddenly the rules appeared to be thrown out the window. This was the real deal. People let their hair down and said what was really on their minds. And it's that excitement that is just the shot in the arm a lot of the GOP needs to get in gear for November.

What do you think? Vote in the poll below, post a comment or send an email to katie@katiefavazza.com with your thoughts.

Do you think the #dontgo movement matters?
Yes. I think this could change the course of the GOP this November.
No. The momentum will not amount to any substantive change.
  
pollcode.com free polls


Cross-posted at KatieFavazza.com.

August 6, 2008

What Obama Doesn't Seem To Understand About Economics By Betsy Newmark

While Obama had fun calling Republicans ignorant, he is demonstrating, as IInvestors Business Daily writes, that he doesn't understand the effect of taxes on businesses.

In an admission that increased supply means lower prices, Barack Obama, in yet another flip-flop, has proposed releasing 70 million barrels of oil, about a week's worth of imports, from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Last month he told reporters in St. Louis just the opposite: "I have said, and in fact supported, a congressional resolution that said we should suspend putting more oil into the strategic oil reserve," he said then. "The strategic oil reserve, I think, has to be reserved for a genuine emergency," he continued, saying a terrorist attack was an example of such an emergency.

The GOP campaign to "drill here, drill now" has resonated with the American public tired of paying $4 a gallon because of high gas taxes and congressionally restricted supply. Obama's poll numbers have dropped significantly during this effort, something team Obama obviously considers a "genuine emergency."

But as he supports releasing oil from the SPR to increase supply, he proposes a revival of the failed windfall profits tax that in its earlier incarnation decreased domestic supply and increased foreign imports. The man who pokes fun at John McCain's economic knowledge ignores the simple economic truth that when you tax something you get less of it.

He would give more of a McGovern-style handout to familes to help them buy the high-priced gas. That would increase demand and reverse any other efforts to lower prices unless there is a corresponding increase in supply. Releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve only works for a very short term. It's about as short term an action as McCain's weak gimmick of temporarily lifting the federal tax on gas.

And with hurricane season approaching and an ever increasing threat of an Israeli attack on Iran, we should not release the reserve oil, but save it for a real emergency. High prices are not the emergency that was envisioned when the reserve was created.

Oil exploration is a risky business. Vast sums are expended in the search for black gold, with dry holes too often the result. America was built by such risk-taking, motivated in part by the hope of great reward. Without such incentives, few chances are taken.

All this talk about allowing offshore drilling as part of some grand compromise on energy is a con game. Democrats know there will be no incentive to drill for oil if the profits from any success will be confiscated by a government that takes none of the risk. Then they'll criticize the oil companies for sitting on oil

Once upon a time, young America was advised to go west. Today, we should be telling our risk-takers to drill deep.

Drilling alone is note the solution, but it should be an integral part of a comprehensive plan. McCain is proposing more than drilling; he also supports research on alternative energy. The reason he focuses now on drilling is because of the contrast with Obama and the Democrats. Obama ridicules the focus on drilling because it will only come to the market several years from now. But how long before we get all those new alternative forms of energy up to speed to power our nation's energy needs?

Even Jay Leno understands how weak their arguments are against drilling for more oil because it will take 10 years to bring to market.

This content was used with the permission of Betsy's Page.

Conservative Grapevine Promo

Make sure to check out Conservative Grapevine today, where you'll find links like:

The Corner: 25 reasons you may be a racist for not supporting Barack

Cracked: A history of violence: 6 old school games as brutal as GTA

Mort Kondracke: Would Democrats force President Obama to sell-out Afghanistan?

Alex Castellanos: The molten core of Barack: Why Obama can't win

Celeblslam: Jennifer Flavin bikini shots

You can check out all those links and more by clicking here. Don't forget to bookmark RWN's companion page, CG! Remember, if you're not reading RWN and CG every day, you're not getting the full story!

PS: If you'd like to submit articles to be linked to Conservative Grapevine, register at CG, and then shoot me an email.

McCain Vs. Obama: What Sticks.

Last night, I was doing an hour long interview for a podcast show called Skewz (I will link when it's up), and I was asked what I thought was a particularly interesting question.

I had remarked that the public wanted to put a Democrat in the White House because the GOP hadn't done a particularly good job over the last few years, but that the election had turned into a referendum on Barack Obama because the American people are nervous about his inexperience, lack of judgment, and flip-flops.

Then the interviewer asked me why the election hasn't turned into a referendum on John McCain given that George Bush is so unpopular.

Well, the answer to that is that the criticisms that the McCain campaign are making about Obama ring true. People are asking: is this guy ready to lead?

But, on the other hand, the Obama campaign's attacks on McCain are weak. Here's a guy who is famous for being a "maverick" who infuriates conservatives. So, does anyone think he is really going to be just another George Bush? Does anyone think McCain is really in the pocket of oil companies or that he is somehow going to keep us fighting in Iraq for 100 years? Those criticisms are all bogus.

The reason this election is turning into a referendum on Barack Obama, even in a year when the Democrats should be winning in a walk, is because there are some very serious questions about Obama's competence that his campaign has been, so far at least, unable to answer.

The Obligatory Paris' Campaign Ad Post

Paris Hilton did a response -- a really funny one, actually ("Thanks for the endorsement, white haired dude!")-- to McCain's Celebrity ad,

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Whatever you think of Paris Hilton, she deserves some style points for that vid.

As you'd imagine, this immediately made the Drudge Report where it produced this headline,

Paris Drilled

Indeed, Paris is reputed to be quite the fan of drilling and this isn't the first video where she has made that clear =D.

But the McCain campaign deserves some credit, too. This is going to produce more views of their celebrity ad and they had a much better response to the whole thing than the Obama campaign,

UPDATE: Obama spokesman Bill Burton reacts: "Whatever."

UPDATE: McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds emails: "It sounds like Paris Hilton supports John McCain's 'all of the above' approach to America's energy crisis - including both alternatives and drilling. Paris Hilton might not be as big a celebrity as Barack Obama, but she obviously has a better energy plan."

Despite the fact that plenty of people, myself included, have panned McCain for running a listless campaign, over the last few weeks, he has done a far better job than Obama and this response typifies it.

Obama is portrayed as cute, but substanceless and his campaign issued a cute and substanceless response, which confirms the stereotype.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign didn't get huffy about Paris making jokes at his expense, like the egomaniacal one would have. Instead, they stayed on message and launched a controversial, to-the-point attack on Obama that will get lots of press (Obama is responsible for higher gas prices and is less competent than Paris Hilton).

If you're trying to convince independents that you're not old and out of it -- or the typical Republican, which, like it or not is John McCain's shtick -- going to Sturgis, poking fun at Barack Obama, and jousting with Paris Hilton is a good way to go about it.

Vermin Infest Britain's Socialist Hospitals

Imagine hospitals as rife with vermin as Capitol Hill. That will be the situation once Democrats manage to engineer a government takeover of the healthcare industry. Once again, Britain provides a glimpse of a socialist future we would be wise to avoid:

The cleanliness of most NHS [National Health Service] hospitals in England is threatened by frequent invasions of rats, fleas, bedbugs, flies and cockroaches, a report claims.

Figures released by the Conservatives show that 70% of NHS Trusts brought in the pest controllers at least 50 times over a two-year period.

Vermin were found in wards, clinics and even operating theatres. A patients' group said the situation was revolting.

Infestations have included wasps in a neonatal unit and in operating theaters, rats in a maternity unit, and a children's accident & emergency ward taken over by flies. Among the other repugnant creatures found in Britain's socialist hospitals are mice, silverfish, beetles, and bureaucrats, including a spokesman for the Health Protection Agency who shrugs off concerns:

In countries with good standards of healthcare the possibility for insects or pests to transmit infections in hospitals would be very remote.

Yes, but what about countries with socialized healthcare?

rats.jpg
Don't worry. A bureaucrat says they don't transmit infections.

On a tip from Wiggins. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

The Ad I Wouldn't Run: Cindy McCain -- Drug Dealer

Since I am a capitalist who generally has no problem with letting liberals waste their money on ads at RWN, I generally approve just about every ad that comes down the pike.

However, there have been several exceptions over the years. For example, a few weeks back I declined a t-shirt ad that pictured Barack Obama as a monkey. That was just over the line in my book.

Well, I have now declined a 2nd ad this year.

It featured a pothead group running this ad,

Now, I could have simply done the same thing in this case that I did with the United Nations: I took the ad and then I mercilessly mocked the UN on RWN.

However, I thought it was way over-the-top to put the wife of a presidential candidate on a Wanted Poster. Moreover, their message, which is that alcohol is bad for you while marijuana is harmless is complete and utter bullsh*t.

Sure, there are plenty of people who have smoked marijuana, had a good time, and never suffered any ill effects from it. There are also plenty of people who got high and wrecked their cars, got addicted to pot, started on pot and later moved on to harder drugs, or simply wasted a large part of their life sitting around high, watching TV, and eating Cheetos.

Granted, there are lots of people who have screwed their lives up because of alcohol, too, but the idea that we should make another potentially life destroying drug legal just because we already have one that's legal and too societally entrenched to get rid of is nuts -- and it's not something I am going to contribute to, even if I'm paid to do so.

Also see,

In Defense of the Drug War

I'd Vote For Paris--UPDATED

UPDATE:

OK, so I demonstrate, once again that it might be a good idea to take a gander over here before I post. Stink! Sorry, people. While the video is the same, the content, is not however. You've obviously seen the video if you read John's post. I'm removing it and putting a link to the post below, so your eyes don't burn out seeing Paris' naked legs twice.

*******

So, have you seen the best advertising for John McCain, yet? [Note: Obviously, you have..] Yesterday, Paris Hilton released a video putting forth her energy policy. She had to cut the video short because she had to pick a Vice Presidential candidate, bitches, but hey, she makes sense:

My first thought watching this video was Cassy Fiano's, too: "Scary question: if Paris and Barack were your two choices, which would you vote for? I honest-to-God don't know who would be worse."

Well, let's consider what Paris has that Obama lacks:


  1. Job experience--as in, she's had a real job, paid real taxes and had to make executive decisions

  2. Owned a company--forget pie-in-the-sky ideals, she knows what it's like to hire and fire, to haggle with lawyers over contracts, to negotiate.

  3. World awareness--sure it's Ibiza and Paris and London, but Barack Obama has nothing on Paris when it comes to jet setting

  4. Style--Obama has the sunglasses, nose-in-the-air, jacket over the shoulder panache but, Paris throws in the head toss and minces in a way Obama just can't for the camera--although, I have to give it to him, he's pretty damn good.

  5. Policy--While Obama talks one more government bail-out, Paris discusses energy policies that are actually workable and sensible.

  6. Youth--Obama is young and fresh and exciting, but Paris is even younger, and fre...well, younger. Neither one of them seem particularly fresh. Smoking to stay skinny works for them, though. Something for the youth of America to consider.


All in all, Paris is hawt, bitches. Obama seems like, so, totally yesterday compared to her.

Cross-posted at Dr. Melissa Clouthier

Excerpt Of The Day: Thaddeus McCotter Pulls No Punches

Thaddeus McCotter is one of my favorite guys in the House and not just because he actually understands the blogosphere and the concerns that regular conservatives have about the GOP in DC.

He's also a scrapper, which is exactly what the Republican Party needs in DC right now. Take a look at the memo he just unleashed on George Bush for sitting on the sidelines while the GOP is fighting for lower gas prices on the floor of the House and you'll see what I mean,

In a legislative update sent to GOP members and staff on Tuesday, Republican House Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) accused "Beijing George" Bush of throwing House Republicans "under the bone-dry bus" on his way to the Olympics in China.

Today, in his final term, the wildly unpopular President George W. Bush boarded Air Force One bound for the Beijing Olympics and a meeting with his chum Hu Jintao, the dapper ruler of a nuclear armed, communist dictatorship. ... Perhaps our Compassionate Conservative-in-Chief will bring our absent Democrat Congress some 'Made in (communist) China' souvenir t-shirts: 'Bush went to Beijing and all I got was this lousy five week, paid vacation.' "

The memo ends, "Bon Voyage, Mr. Bush! House Republicans will fight on for America!"

Hat tip to Instapundit for the story.

We Can Live With A Nuclear Iran? No, We Can't.

Over at the Atlantic, faux conservative Andrew Sullivan says a nuclear Iran is fine with him and that the people who are concerned about it are really just doing the bidding of those sneaky Jews!

On the Iran question, there can be little doubt that waging a pre-emptive war on the Persian regime is now the principal policy objective of the neocon right. To elect McCain is almost certainly to endorse a new war with Iran within the next four years. Again, this could be justified on the grounds of America's interests and not Israel's. But again, the case is getting a little harder to make. The world and the West can live, after all, with a deterred and contained nuclear Iran. Israel cannot. McCain and Lieberman hold the Podhoretz position on Iran; Obama is a few pragmatic notches away. Those notches - minor to most observers - nonetheless render Obama unacceptable to the Jewish right. Even after his AIPAC speech.

Let's consider what living with nuclear Iran would mean.

First of all, we would not just be living with a "nuclear Iran." We would be living with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear Syria, a nuclear Iraq, a nuclear Saudi Arabia, a nuclear Egypt, a nuclear Kuwait, etc., etc., etc. For all their anti-Israeli bluster, the nations in that region understand that Israel has nukes for defensive purposes. They may hate the Israelis, but they understand that they're fundamentally moral people with no interest in conquering the region. But, Iran? Iran is run by fanatical maniacs with a history of supporting terrorism and making outlandish and violent threats. If Iran builds nukes, all the other nations in the region that are capable of acquiring or building nuclear weapons will do so out of fear of what Iran will do with their nuclear weapons.

Now, once we get to that point -- and we have 7 or 8 unstable dictatorships in nations full to the brim with anti-American, anti-Israeli religious fanatics -- how long do you think it will take for a nuclear weapon to be used in Israel or the United States?

People like Sullivan would say, "Oh, but if they fire a nuke at Israel or the United States, we'll eradicate them! Deterrence worked with the Soviets."

Here's the problem: if they give the nuclear weapons to a terrorist group and a suicide bomber detonates it in Tel Aviv or for that matter, Los Angeles, New York, and Houston, whom do we eradicate in retaliation? The Iranians? The Saudis? The Syrians? The idea that we will definitively know where the nuclear weapon that destroys a city comes from would seem to be a very iffy assumption.

The next step -- and I have actually heard people suggest this -- is that we nuke every nation in the region with nukes if we're hit. Are we really going to do that? Are we going to fire off nukes and kill 100 million people, atop the world's oil supply, all of whom had nothing to do with nuking us? Hell, we get squeamish about killing a dozen civilians when we're going after high value terrorist targets as is. What makes anyone think that the sort of person who will plausibly become President of the United States will have the terrible will required to kill 100 million innocent people to make sure the people responsible for hitting us suffer, too?

PS: I don't think putting McCain in office means a war with Iran -- and I would certainly hope it would never come to that -- but if we got down to the unpleasant choice between war with Iran and letting them have nukes, I would unquestionably favor war with Iran. The consequences of doing otherwise, which would likely include nuclear weapons going off in multiple US cities without our knowing where they came from, would be unthinkable.

Excerpt Of The Day #2: Even The AP Can't Help But Note Obama's Stunning Dishonesty

"Democratic candidate Barack Obama criticized Republican John McCain on Tuesday for taking a page out of "the Cheney playbook" on energy, overlooking his own support of oil-friendly policies that the unpopular vice president helped to craft.

Vice President Dick Cheney, a former oilman, early in the Bush administration helped draft an energy policy that Obama asserted is biased in favor of tax breaks and favorable treatment for big oil. Obama's remarks were an attempt to capitalize on Cheney's unpopularity.

"President Bush, he had an energy policy. He turned to Dick Cheney and he said, 'Cheney, go take care of this,'" Obama said. "Cheney met with renewable-energy folks once and oil and gas (executives) 40 times. McCain has taken a page out of the Cheney playbook." ...

However, Obama himself voted for a 2005 energy bill backed by Bush that included billions in subsidies for oil and natural gas production, a measure Cheney played a major role in developing. McCain opposed the bill on grounds it included billions in unnecessary tax breaks for the oil industry..." -- Tom Raum, Associated Press

Hat tip to Sweetness & Light for the story.

$5 Per Candidate? These Guys Deserve It.

From now through the election, I'm going to be taking an opportunity every week to try to give a boost to some of the Republican candidates who deserve it the most. That'll be through interviews and through fundraising via Slatecard.

Today, I'd like to take a moment give you a very brief rundown on the candidates I'm raising money for through Slatecard.

First off is Sydney Hay. I can tell you definitively that she is the sort of conservative we want in DC because she was Duncan Hunter's campaign manager and I got to talk with her a few times when I worked on the campaign. Sydney is going to be the GOP candidate in Az-01, a key swing district.

Will Breazeale is a diehard conservative and he fought in Iraq. I've met Will a couple of times and I think if he can raise enough money, he can be competitive in NC-07. But, he will need money to make it work.

Duncan D. Hunter is another Iraqi vet. He's running for his dad's seat and I can verify that he is a competent, conservative guy who gets the blogosphere because I worked with him on the Hunter campaign. This is another guy we should really want in Congress.

Sean Parnell is up against corrupt appropriator Don Young in a late August primary and the last poll I saw had him ahead by a nose. Here's my big pitch for Sean Parnell: he's not Don Young.

I don't agree with everything David Cuddy stands for (He's a little too Libertarian for me), but I agree with most of it and I can tell you that he looks like he's the only guy with a realistic shot to knock off corrupt, incompetent GOP nightmare, Ted Stevens. So, Cuddy would be an enormous step up and he may turn out to be our only realistic shot to keep the seat.

Lt. Colonel Bill Russell is going head-to-head with corrupt loud mouth, John Murtha. Need I say more?

As time goes on, I will add more candidates to the list, but I've decided that I would rather start with a small, select group and work my way out rather than a big, expansive list.

What I'm hoping you will do is chip in just $5 to each of these candidates. That doesn't sound like a lot of money, but if 10% of RWN's readers today did it, that would raise nearly $25,000. Given that we're talking about small congressional campaigns, that is not chump change.

So, consider chipping in a few bucks because these candidates are exactly the sort that conservatives should want in DC looking out for us.

Mohammad's Sex Life: When Elites Self-Censor It's Prudence Not Cowardice

Random House killed the publication of a book about Mohammad's wives:

Random House feared the book would become a new "Satanic Verses," the Salman Rushdie novel of 1988 that led to death threats, riots and the murder of the book's Japanese translator, among other horrors. In an interview about Ms. Jones's novel, Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said that it "disturbs us that we feel we cannot publish it right now." He said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."

After consulting security experts and Islam scholars, Mr. Perry said the company decided "to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel."

You've got to be kidding me. Why would anyone fear the practitioners of the religion of peace? It doesn't make sense..

Matt Sheffield of Newsbusters says:

In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a "very ugly, stupid piece of work." The novel, for example, includes a scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha: "the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion's sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life." Says Ms. Spellberg: "I walked through a metal detector to see 'Last Temptation of Christ,'" the controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "I don't have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography."

Of course, that's exactly what has been done to Christianity a number of times in books, film, and song. Ah but Christians aren't known for going around making bomb threats--at least outside the mind of Rosie O'Donnell. Put this down as yet another incident that gives lie to the ridiculous liberal phrase about how courageous they are about "speaking truth to power."

And liberals bristle at being branded a bunch of weenies. They just need to embrace their cowardice and stop trying to pretend otherwise.

Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com

Doing The Jaz McKay Show At 4:07 PM

At 4:00 PM EST, I'm going to be on the Jaz McKay show.

Click on Stickam in the left corner to listen to the show.

Now It's Racist to Notice That Obama Is Scrawny

You would think liberals would get bored looking for coded racism. Since they can find it absolutely anywhere, it must be like shooting fish in a barrel. But then, so is making fun of moonbats like Timothy Noah, who declares that it's racist to notice how scrawny Obama is.

Noah denounces a WSJ piece proposing that Obama's skinniness could be a liability. His keen insight has discerned that by skinniness, they really meant mulatto-ness.

[A]ny discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.

In the interests of full disclosure, Noah hilariously admits:

I phoned my former Journal colleague, Michel Martin, an African-American journalist who is now host of NPR's Tell Me More, which frequently addresses matters of race, to ask whether she was offended. She was not.

Apparently not even blacks who make a living off taxpayer-financed moonbattery can compete with Noah when it comes to sniffing out imaginary racism. He explains his theory:

When white people are invited to think about Obama's physical appearance, the principal attribute they're likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama's other physical attributes can't help coming off as a coy walk around the barn.

In other words, noticing anything whatsoever about Obama is racist. The Obamessiah is so sacred that even naming his characteristics is blasphemous. We've also heard that mentioning his middle name is racist. But his last name also recalls an mortal enemy of America who tellingly is not an Anglo-Saxon. It might be safest to refer to Obama from now on as He Who Cannot Be Named or Described but Only Abjectly Venerated.

On a tip from Silentbob1272. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Border Patrol Agent in Arizona Held at Gunpoint by Mexican Military

The Border Patrol Union Local 2544 is reporting on their website that the Mexican Military was again across the border, and this time they held a member of the union at gunpoint:

A Tucson Sector Border Patrol agent was held at gunpoint by the Mexican military last night south of Ajo. Mexican military personnel crossed over the border and pointed rifles at him. Backup units arrived from the Ajo Border Patrol station, and the Mexican military personnel eventually returned to Mexico. Unfortunately, this sort of behavior by Mexican military personnel has been going on for years. They are never held accountable, and the United States government will undoubtedly brush this off as another case of "Oh well, they didn't know they were in the United States."

The Associated Press confirms the union's claim:

Four Mexican soldiers crossed into a remote area of Arizona and briefly held a U.S. Border Patrol agent at gunpoint before realizing where they were and returning to Mexico, U.S. authorities said.

Border Patrol spokeswoman Dove Crawford said the incident early Sunday on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, about 85 miles southwest of Tucson, was in an area where the border likely was marked only with barbed wire.

This isn't new. As the Union continued, "A few years ago the Mexican military went a step further and put a .50 calibre rifle round through the rear window of a Border Patrol agent's patrol vehicle south of Ajo. Nothing was ever done. Nobody was ever held accountable."

And it happens all the time. This video is from a year ago. They discuss the incursions into America, where the Mexican military is escorting drug smugglers and coyotes and firing on our border patrol agents.

From 2006, Newsmax reports:

Texas law enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents engaged in an armed standoff with Mexican military personnel and drug smugglers just inside the United States along the Rio Grande yesterday afternoon.

Also in 2006, Chris Simcox of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps videotaped Mexican Military members retreating back to Mexico.

It has happened more than 250 times since 1996. That is, it has been reported or seen 250 times. Who knows how many times it has actually happened.

The Mexican military is crossing the border into the U.S.

That's according to records NEWSCHANNEL 5 obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. The 29-page document shows the Department of Homeland Security is tracking the occurrences.

It includes sightings of men dressed in Mexican military uniforms. The document states Mexican government personnel crossed the border more than 250 times since 1996. Some of that activity happened in the Rio Grande Valley.

The union makes note of the fact that the Mexican military usually crosses the border in Humvees, donated to them by you and me, Joe Taxpayer.

Why is it outrageous for us to have our military on the border when Mexico is crossing into the country and pointing guns at our agents?

It's time to lock it down.

Hat Tip: Gateway Pundit

This is cross-posted at All American Blogger, where you can find other great original articles.

August 8, 2008

Q&A Friday #92

Today is Q&A Friday #92 at RWN.

So, if there's a subject you've been wanting me to tackle or an issue you want to hear my opinion on, just ask your question in the comments section. Your question can be about just about anything; politics, ideology, history, blogging, RWN, from a liberal, conservative, or libertarian perspective, movies, music, literature, or TV. Then later today, I'll select some of the more interesting questions and answer them.

Ask away!

PS: My co-blogger, Dr. Melissa Clouthier, said it might be fun to answer a couple of questions as well. So, if you have any questions for her, feel free to fire away.

August 7, 2008

Conservative Grapevine Promo

Make sure to check out Conservative Grapevine today, where you'll find links like:

Ezra Levant: How I beat the legal Fatwa and lost my freedom.

Nerve: A brief history of divorce

Conservatism Today: Conservatism Today's 24 best conservative blogs

Olbermann Watch: Dana Milbank: I was banned from Countdown for defending McCain advisor!

The Superficial: Lydia Hearst is lingerie-ery

You can check out all those links and more by clicking here. Don't forget to bookmark RWN's companion page, CG! Remember, if you're not reading RWN and CG every day, you're not getting the full story!

PS: If you'd like to submit articles to be linked to Conservative Grapevine, register at CG, and then shoot me an email.

Best Idea Of The Day: McCain, Join The Protest On The House Floor.

As you may already know, the House Republicans are raising hell on the floor of the House and demanding that Congress take action to drive down gas prices, while Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are taking a month off on vacation. Think about who's looking out for you and who isn't the next time you go to the pump.

Well now, House minority leader John Boehner has asked John McCain to speak on the floor of the House as part of their protest.

Serious question? Is there anything else that McCain could do in the next month that would have a bigger upside and a smaller downside than accepting Boehner's offer? If he did, he would...

* Generate headlines for his campaign and congressional Republicans.

* Be seen as fighting against high gas prices.

* Help cement his position as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, which he is, by virtue of being the party nominee.

* Fire up conservatives.

* Be standing up against a corrupt batch of incompetent Democrats who went on vacation rather than doing their jobs.

Meanwhile, the more Democrats that attack him and the GOP, the more attention it would draw to the whole situation -- and honestly, that's the last thing the Dems want. They want this whole protest to disappear down the rabbit hole as fast as possible because it makes them look terrible.

That's why McCain should show up and support the Republicans who are fighting the good fight in DC right now.

Not Buying Anything For A Whole Year, Sort Of.

I have to give Doubleplusundead some credit because he found a silly piece in USA Today that could have been, I kid you not, published "as is" in the the Onion as a parody piece.

It's called, "The Final Word: The key to saving money? Just don't spend it" and it begins like so,

With the year more than half over, maybe now is a good time to revisit the pledge I made back in January: the pledge not to buy anything for a year.

I did this five years ago and found the experience cleansing. And not that difficult, oddly enough. Many of you even joined me in my crusade to simplify. Others wrote in to question my sanity.

Now, you might think that's a bold fella. Not buying anything for a year? That must mean he's living in a Unabomber style shack, growing vegetables in the yard, and probably chiseling out his USA Today column on a piece of tree bark and walking 8 miles into town to hand deliver it to a friend who can scan it and email it in for him.

After all, if you aren't buying anything, you aren't buying food, clothes, electricity, internet service, getting cable, or even paying rent. That's what making a "pledge not to buy anything for a year" means, right?

Ehr...wrong.

The rules, which I cleverly made up myself, remained the same and give me an out every now and then.

I'm allowed to buy books and music because they are nurturing things. I can buy gifts for friends and spend for travel. Those are also good things. But just going out and buying things for myself, the answer remains the same.

...My partner, Jack, loves it when I go on these non-buying binges. He reminds me daily I don't have enough money to retire, so he thinks keeping the credit card in the wallet is a very good thing.

...But enough about restraint. It's confessional time. I have bought four things in six months. Two I did not need.

One was a prayer stick, which I probably do need, but an unnecessary purchase nonetheless. Priests in Ethiopia lean against them during prayer. I bought it in Addis Ababa. It was $90. I have no regrets. And best of all, it didn't turn into a sombrero once I got it home.

The second item was a black-and-white photograph of the keyboard of an old typewriter. The letters are worn with use. It spoke to me.

...As for the necessities, I bought shorts from L.L. Bean. I can't say I love them, but it's summer and I needed shorts. Two pair: $54.

The last purchase was a belt, which I also needed. Maybe not this one, but I did need a belt. It's needlepoint, sporting a row of multi-colored nautical flags.

So, if this guy is living out in the wilds of Montana, sleeping in a ramshackle, abandoned shack and carving his column on willow tree bark with one of the teeth that fell out of his mouth because he didn't buy toothpaste, how does he get to the stores where the Ethiopian prayer sticks are? Methinks he might be fudging a bit more than he is letting on about his pledge not to buy anything unless he's a kept man and his "partner Jack" is just buying everything for him.

On the other hand, if Ethiopian prayer sticks are the sort of impulse buys he goes for, I do understand the reason he came up with the idea about not spending money for a year in the first place: he may be buying a wee bit too much crap. So, the idea was probably good, but the execution? That seems to have fallen a wee bit short.

John Edwards Update: The Silky Pony And His Foal

Back on July 30th, I wrote,

........Which brings us to the Democratic National Convention next month.

Certainly John Edwards would have been expected to speak prior to the Rielle Hunter affair breaking publicly and with Edwards denying it, the MSM covering it up, and the lefty bloggers defending him, you've got to wonder if he'll still speak?

Now, your first thought would probably be, "There's no way he ends up at the Democratic National Convention!" However, if he doesn't speak, it's tantamount to an admission that the story is true. After all, what other legitimate reason would he have to miss the convention?

Sure, if Edwards goes, it could be a debacle, but if he doesn't, he has to tell his cancer stricken wife that he was running around on her, his absence will be a story in and of itself, and his political career, at least for the next decade or so until the story goes down the memory hole, is over.

So, what is the Breck Girl going to do? Does he suck it up and demand to be allowed to speak in Denver or does he slink away into political obscurity and shame? Time will tell.

Well, lo and behold, after yet another National Enquirer story that featured pics of the Silky Pony with his foal, there are Democrats publicly saying the same thing I did last month,

Former Sen. John Edwards might have to move quickly to save his spot on the national stage.

With two weeks before their national convention, several prominent Democrats are saying Edwards must publicly address anonymously sourced National Enquirer stories that claim he had an affair with a campaign worker and fathered her baby.

Democrats gather in Denver on Aug. 25 and Edwards, as the 2004 vice presidential nominee and a presidential candidate who won delegates this year, ordinarily would be a speaker.

Instead some Democrats say convention organizers will try to avoid the lingering questions if Edwards himself doesn't talk.

"He absolutely does have to [resolve it]. If it's not true, he has to issue a stronger denial," said Gary Pearce, the Democratic strategist who ran Edwards' 1998 Senate race. "It's a very damaging thing. ... The big media has tried to be responsible and handle this with kid gloves, but it's clearly getting ready to bust out. If it's not true, he's got to stand up and say, 'This is not true. That is not my child and I'm going to take legal action against the people who are spreading these lies.' It's not enough to say, 'That's tabloid trash.' "

...Presidential candidates who lose in the primaries traditionally are invited to address their party's convention, and Politico reported last month that Edwards told others he was promised a primetime speaking slot when he endorsed Sen. Barack Obama. If Edwards fails to clear up the story in short order, he risks party officials deciding not to have him speak or, if they do, creating a distraction from a week focused on Obama accepting the nomination.

"If there is not an explanation that's satisfactory, acceptable and meets high moral standards, the answer is 'no,' he would not be a prime candidate to make a major address to the convention," said Don Fowler of Columbia, S.C., a former Democratic National Committee chair.

Edwards' political currency, which is his value as a public speaker and advocate, declines each day the story goes unresolved, Fowler and other Democratic strategists said.

Incidentally, that story is from the News and Observer, one of few smaller papers that is actually covering the story. A quick check of Google News shows no coverage from the LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, etc., etc., etc.

From my perspective, I think that's great because we'll be pointing to the cover-up of this story in the MSM for YEARS to come as a perfect example of media bias. This is a huge story and it's everywhere on the net, but if you're reading the supposedly unbiased, professional MSM outlets, you know nothing about it because they're trying to protect their boy. Not only is it proof that the mainstream media is heavily biased to the left, it shows why you have to read blogs: because the MSM will hide the truth from you if they think it hurts "their side" -- AKA as liberals.

Speaking of cover-ups, there's another very intriguing part of this story that hasn't been fully explored yet. According to the Enquirer, Rielle Hunter has been getting paid $15,000 a month by a wealthy pal of John Edwards. Is it possible that is just a cover and Edwards is paying him back or funneling the money to him that Edwards originally received through his campaign? Also, another man with Edwards' campaign, a married man, Andrew Young has claimed to be the father. Did Edwards convince him to lie publicly? Did he get any favors in return? Also, Rielle Hunter worked for the campaign as well. Was that pre or post-affair? It's bad enough to hire an employee and cheat on your cancer stricken wife with her, but using money contributed to you to hire that same woman to work for your campaign so you'll have easy access to her is another thing indeed. Oh, there are so many details of the cover-up to explore and that old saying you've heard so many times, "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up," tends to be so very, very true.

Also, another thought: how did the Enquirer get those photos of Edwards inside the hotel room? You have to think a spy camera was put in place before he got there, right? Now, here's the $24,000 question: how did the Enquirer get there before Edwards? Maybe it's just really good footwork or maybe, just maybe, like with the Frank Gifford/Suzen Johnson affair, the woman decided to take a payoff.

If Rielle Hunter has decided to send the Silky Pony off to the glue factory and intends to make as much money as she can off a book before she sues him for child support -- which may or may not be the case -- the big MSM outlets will look even more foolish for not covering the story. That would be just desserts.

The HuffPo Post Of The Day: The Coming Liberal Sell-Out Of Afghanistan

One of things that liberals often say, but don't believe (There's a lot of that going on with the left) is that we need to get out of Iraq so we can focus all of our attention on Afghanistan.

However, once you understand liberals, you come to realize that they believe in talking with America's enemies, sympathizing with them, and trying to understand "how we made them hate us," but they don't believe in aggressively confronting them.

So, with that in mind, I've long thought that if liberals got their way and managed to prevent us from winning in Iraq, they would slowly, but surely turn on the "good war" in Afghanistan, too.

You're probably thinking, "Come on Hawkins, there's no way that is going to happen." To people who say that, I would point back to the fact that the majority of Democrats in the Senate voted for the war in Iraq and said Saddam had WMD's. What do they say today? Back in 2003, would you have ever thought the Democrats would work so hard to deliberately lose the war in Iraq?

Well, I am a big believer in reading what's being said about issues at places like the Daily Kos, The Democratic Underground, and the Huffington Post because often I find that the outliers at places like that are mainstream thought that's believed by large percentages of liberals two years later.

With that in mind, an article at the Huffington Post caught my eye. It's called, "500: Deadly U.S. Milestone in Afghan War." Gee, with what other war did the left keep hyping "deadly milestones" in an effort to undercut the public's support? That was Iraq, wasn't it?

But surely even the liberals at the Huffington Post don't want to cut and run from Afghanistan, right? That's the "good war," we're fighting Al-Qaeda there, NATO is involved, Democratic politicians keep talking about how important it is, and the attacks that were launched at us on 9/11 were planned and executed there.

So, no libs could want us to run from Afghanistan the way they want us to run in Iraq, right?

From the comments section...

peacekitten: if you really are currently serving military and your commanders told you that attrition was the way to fight a war, you have been sold a big steaming pile of BS. attrition is a last resort when everything else you have done has failed.

this is a rich man's war in which no rich man is lifting a finger. and the LIVING, who still own an INTACT SPINE, need to be brought home immediately.

BigFootJesus: Amen again, Peacekitten have you been vetted yet? Obama/Peacekitten 08!!!!

AmandaBC: "The invasion of Afghanistan is widely viewed as legitimate"

Only by conservatives. Yes, that includes the dems...

lornejl: I want both candidates to explain our occupation of Afghanistan, I'm not hearing it from either one of them.

sparkandy: One life lost in a war is one too many.

Nyland8: Refusing to learn the lessons from our failed adventure in Afghanistan does not serve the military, nor does it serve the American public very well. Living in denial about nearly six years of failed policy will not somehow make it go away. The neo-conartist policies of imperial hubris must be abandoned because they are wrong to begin with. There is no military solution the problem. There never was.

Marichu: A country that prides itself on its jurisprudence should not have engaged in a war(s) as haphazardly as we have. With little to no aforethought as to the planning, implementing, various contingencies, reconstruction, and exiting strategies, we went to war. War was not the solution to Afghanistan. Historical precedents were, if not ignored, rendered obsolete. All in all, war is a hideous act, instigated by those who have the least to lose.

BenBernanke: I'd like to feel sorry for you...but as cheney correctly pointed out this is an army of VOLUNTEERS. Now if, on top of it all your loved ones opt to become accomplices in war crimes and crimes against humanity, the solution is simple... get out, don't do the crime... or you will do the time.

I mean yes, it's not an easy path.... but, on the other side of the coin... are you saying that slaughtering innocent civilians is more palatable and easier on your loved one's conscience? and you're asking me to have any kind of sympathy or empathy for such a person, who, on top of everything is betraying the very US Constitution he has sworn ot defend by aiding, abetting and enabling this pack of twice unelected nazi murderers?

Sorry, no can do. He's not fighting to defend my rights but on the contrary, to undermine them. I call that treason.

maxdenn: Get out of iraq and afghanistan. I support the troops. Bring them home.

panama08: We never should have gone into Afghanistan either. That was just as stupid as invading Iraq. After all, 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia (if you want to believe the official fairy tale, that is).

Neaguy: This toll will increase greatly under either a President McCain or President Obama, since both have the same policy of escalation planned.

Withrdrawal, and U.N. supervision is the best option.

Laugh at the HuffPo loonies if you like, but if the Dems get their way in Iraq, you'll be hearing significant numbers of Democrats in Congress, maybe even a majority of them, saying the exact same sort of things.

The Website Of The Day Is DC Wine Pundit

The website of the day is DC Wine Pundit.

 


 

Jed Clampett And Rethinking The American Dream By Harold S. Witkov

Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was shootin at some food,
And up through the ground came a bubblin crude.

Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.

Well the first thing you know ol Jed's a millionaire,
Kinfolk said "Jed move away from there"
Said "Californy is the place you ought to be"
So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly.

Hills, that is. Swimmin pools, movie stars.


Old Jed Clampett sure had me fooled. As a young baby boomer, I thought the Clampetts were living the American Dream. Only in America, could an impoverished mountain family just outside Bugtussle, Arkansas, strike it rich, move to a Beverly Hills mansion, and enjoy the good life.

Now, however, I find myself asking challenging questions about Jed and his family. Did the Clampett's live the American Dream, or were they, in fact, un-American?

To begin with, we all know about that day when Jed took his bloodhound Duke hunting for some food, shot and missed some critter and inadvertently discovered oil on his land. What we do not know, however, speaks volumes. For instance, did Jed have a hunting license and a permit for his gun? Was that destined day during the hunting season? Was the varmint he shot at an endangered species? Why was Duke not properly leashed?

What about the oil leak caused by the stray bullet? Did it damage the environment? What about the eventual oil well? Did anyone do a study as to whether it would have a negative impact on the local possum, muskrat, and crawdad wildlife population? Did Jed care that his oil well might blemish the mountain view of his Ozark neighbors?

Once he moved to his Beverly Hills mansion, did Jed Clampett ever take the time to ask himself the question "Does the move from a mountain cabin to a Beverly Hills mansion have a negative impact on the global environment?" Did he understand the carbon footprint his new mansion would create, or worse, did he care? What kind of light bulbs did the Clampett mansion burn?

The truth is, Jed Clampett and his family lived the Old American Dream, the one with all the materialistic trappings (big house, money in the bank, prosperous lifestyle). If he were a true American of today, Jed would have torn down the mansion, properly inflated the tires and tuned-up the old truck (better gas mileage), skedaddled back to the mountain cabin, and shut down the oil well forever.

Surprisingly, Jed's nephew Jethro once sensed the coming of the New American Dream (the one with zero materialistic trappings). Even though success would no doubt destroy the family oil business, Jethro once tried to invent a pill to run the Clampett's old truck by waterpower. As an alternative energy inventor, Jethro was a complete failure. However, with thinking like that, Jethro Bodine proved he was way ahead of his time. Today, a man like that, could be the next President.

Harold S. Witkov is a freelance writer who submitted this piece to RWN.

I Could Make Everyone Fat Today If I Wanted To

Turns out, everyone is fat, myself included, or nearly everyone is fat, and will for sure be fat in forty years. Women and minorities are hardest hit. A scientist says so, and I believe scientists implicitly because scientists use the scientific method therefore making them scientific:

The new projections, published in the journal Obesity, are based on government survey data collected between the 1970s and 2004.

If the trends of those years continue, the researchers estimate that 86 percent of American adults will be overweight by 2030, with an obesity rate of 51 percent. By 2048, all U.S. adults could be at least mildly overweight.

Weight problems will be most acute among African-Americans and Mexican- Americans, the study projects. All black women could be overweight by 2034, according to the researchers, as could more than 90 percent of Mexican-American men.

Well, let's get this disturbing business over with right now. I've decided that the BMI for both men and women should be a healthy "5". There. Now, everyone is fat. In fact, everyone is morbidly obese.

Please. Sometimes I think the pointy heads are too smart by half. There will be preternaturally skinny people. They exist. We all hate them. These are the people who can eat a whole fattened water buffalo with grease on the side and not gain an ounce. I'm guessing that in 40 years, these freaks will still exist and be loathed even more then. Or maybe, they'll be so rare, that we decide as a culture to worship them--put them in special castles and prostrate our fat bodies before them in awed supplication.

There's another thing. People are living freaking forever now. Fat, globular, rotund people are living to a ripe old age and driving around on their scooters to the Mall. I see them. So, for all the disgusting fatness, is it a big problem? It's kinda like Global Warming (or Climate Change). It's getting hotter, but who says it's a bad thing? Who knows?

And why should the government give a fat grandma's ass if the citizenry prefers to look like corpulent amoebas rolling from one place to another in their XXXXXXL clothes? Do they propose a fat tax? Do officials deem the waste produced and the food consumed by fat people to be problematic? I can see environmental implications here and a vast array of ways for the government to manage American's lives. If these crises keep getting manufactured, the government will get to control everything, including the food you eat, from cradle to grave.

For thousands of years, people have been skinny because they were starving. Now, scientists are bitching because people are fat. There are worse problems than fatness.

Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com

Just A Warning: I Ban "For McCain" Spam

Bizarrely, the McCain campaign is encouraging people to spam the comment sections of blogs with John McCain talking points in return for "McCain Online Action Center" points.

What a great idea, right? I mean, everybody loves spammers on the net! Oh, wait...no, they don't. Also, what exactly is accomplished by posting off topic talking points on blogs? Maybe it's a search engine thing?

Whatever the case may be, it's annoying and unhappily, RWN is on their spam list.

If the McCain campaign would like some more publicity here at RWN, they have a standing offer for an interview with McCain or his veep, whoever that turns out to be, from now through the election. But, don't fill up the comment section with crap. It's annoying, it doesn't really achieve anything, and it looks tacky. Somebody over there should have shot that idea down before it ever went live.

Trendoids Begin to Move on From Enviromoonbattery

Enviromoonbats have exactly one thing going for them. Their antihuman ideology is very trendy, which guarantees the support of our shallow media, entertainment, and political establishments. Fortunately, fashion is a flower that doesn't bloom for very long. Alice Thompson reports that being green isn't cool anymore:

Julie Burchill can't stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don't want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.

Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the "nutbag ecologists" are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but…

People have become wary of environmental causes that can turn out to do more harm than good. They don't want wind turbines marching across Britain's moors when nuclear power stations can do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They worry that washing and bleaching all those non-disposable nappies may be damaging the ozone layer, that the massive incentives for biofuels have distorted the world food market, and that green taxes are actually stealth taxes.

It isn't just that the green movement is as phony as Obama's face on a $3 bill, from the Goracle on down. Environmentalism is a frivolous indulgence that people can't afford in lean economic times:

According to Andrew Cooper, director of the research company, Populus: "There is a direct correlation between how people perceive the economy and the importance they place on the environment. When times are tough people resent paying more to salve their conscience."

They might even come to question whether they have anything to feel guilty about in the first place. Next they'll be questioning the power-mad bureaucrats and greedy profiteers who demand they feel guilty when they've done nothing wrong.

Then will come the backlash. Dupes who fell for the global warming hoax are going to be in for more ridicule than white leisure suits after disco crashed.

On a tip from mega. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

PETA Exploits Grotesque Greyhound Murder

In one of the most gruesome crimes in recent memory, 22-year-old Tim McLean was stabbed to death, apparently at random, aboard a Greyhound bus en route from Edmonton to Winnepeg by Chinese immigrant Vince Weiguang Li, who then presented his severed head to fellow travelers and even ate some of his flesh.

This horrific event inspired the folks at PETA to push their depraved relativism completely over the edge with a new marketing concept:

While it isn't every day that a human is violently attacked and eaten by another human, it's worth noting that it is the norm for many people not to give any thought to the fact that restaurants are serving flesh that comes from innocents who were minding their own business before someone came after them with a knife. How amazingly and conveniently compartmentalized the human mind is…

To stress this very point, PETA will be running an ad in the Portage Daily Graphic comparing the similarities between this gruesome bus butchering and the acts of cruelty and killing performed every day by the meat industry.

The ad:

peta-ad.gif

As CTV.ca reports, the Portage Daily Graphic is based 20 km away from where the murder took place. For obvious reasons, the paper wouldn't run the ad.

If you think there's a difference between a maniac hacking someone up with a knife and eating his flesh and normal human meals, it must be that you haven't grasped the wisdom of PETA President Ingrid Newkirk, who proclaims:

A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.

Ghoulish PETA lunatics have taken nihilistic liberal ideology to the extreme of literally believing there is no difference between humans and animals. They belong in the same mental ward as Li, who no doubt can look forward to a long life at Canadian taxpayers' expense, despite his request to be killed.

On a tip from V the K. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Another Rant: First, It Was Fat, Now, It's Intelligent Black Men

Here's an email I received today. It was one line and summed up the Left quite nicely, so I thought I'd share:

"It's hillarious how terrified all you right wingnuts are of an intelligent, black man!"

Yes, well, it's hilarious how liberals can't find their spell-checker, but I digress. Here is my response to this nonsense:

It's hilarious how sensitive leftists are when black men are criticized for the content of their beliefs, ideology, and character. Why, when they're given the same treatment as white men, they seem to wither under the assault--"they" being the leftists.

I'm friends with and support intelligent, black men and white men and women. Look at my Flickr photos. You'll find me enthusiastically hugging Michael Steele and he's really, really black. But you know what? His color or gender doesn't matter to me. It's his ideas that I agree with.

When liberals stop whining about skin color and start coming up with worthwhile policy solutions, maybe they'll get more respect. In the meantime, cling to the notion that wingnuts are racists. It will make you feel better, but it won't win you elections.

I am so sick of this mindless generalization. Here's a warning now, again: If Obama loses, it's not because he espouses socialist policy and couldn't find the red button if a nuke was sitting on his enormous head courtesy our "friends" in Iran, it's because he's black and Americans, especially, wingnuts, are racist.

Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com

August 8, 2008

Barack Obama: Uppity Or Arrogant?

"I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions." -- Barack Obama

Liberals are almost always insufferably arrogant. It sort of goes with the territory. After all, if you believe that we have to throw religious customs, hundreds of years' worth of societal traditions, and the parts of the Constitution you disagree with into the wastebasket based primarily on your "feeling" that they're antiquated or no longer necessary, then you almost certainly must have an ego the size of a small planet.

That brings us to Barack Obama, who, even amongst liberals, is notorious for being full-of-himself. Conservatives who have pointed this out have been recently accused, rather uncreatively I might add, of calling Obama "uppity."

The whole idea and concept of a black man being "uppity" or acting above his station by doing things white people do...didn't that go out in like the fifties? I was born in the seventies, grew up in the heart of the deep South, in small town North Carolina, and I don't ever recall someone referring to a black man as "uppity." Not to say that there weren't racists in that town (There were) or that no one ever thinks like that anymore (There probably are still a few Robert Byrds out there), but if the Democrats have to reach that far into obscurity to try to keep people from talking about Obama's arrogance, then they must really believe that Obama's tendency to turn his nose up at the Hoi-Polloi is a weak point. Incidentally, they're right -- it is.

The American people don't like snobbish political hacks with delusions of grandeur, like Obama, and the more they get to know him, the less they will like him personally.
Granted, it must be pretty heady stuff for Obama to have teenage girls fainting while he speaks and 200,000 Germans chanting his name. Of course, the average rock star has had those same sort of experiences and most of them are still grounded enough to avoid saying something as conceited as, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." On the other hand, Obama would make a great rock star, wouldn't he? He'd probably be one of those rappers who repeats his own name 50 times in a three minute long song.

It's that kind of arrogance that makes lines like this one just seem to naturally roll off his tongue,

"You got into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

That quote is a window into Barack Obama's world. There are the enlightened few, like Barack Obama, and then there are the "little people" who are bitter and cling to "guns," "religion," or "anti-immigrant sentiment" because their primitive brains have left them frustrated and unable to see the big picture. The "bitter people" need a man like Barack Obama in the White House, a Harvard grad who enjoys arugula and basking in the limelight in Europe, to make the decisions for them that tragically, they're just not learned enough to make on their own.

The deep irony here is that many of the frustrated "bitter" people that Obama peers down on from on high are just as qualified to be President of the United States as he is. Obama has never served in the military, in the House, or as a governor. He has never run a business, was just elected to the Senate in 2004, and has had exactly one hard-fought political victory in his entire career (against Hillary Clinton). So, who would be more qualified to be President: Obama or, let's say, a guy who served a couple of tours in the military, got out, started his own successful small business, and has served a couple of terms on his local city council? I have few doubts that the city councilman would be far more in touch with the real world and more competent to lead the country than someone who was so haughty and dare I say, messianic that he proclaimed,

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

This guy has never run a business, run a state, or served in the military, but he's going to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet? There are people locked away in rubber rooms, drooling on the floor and talking to tiny pink elves, who are less delusional than Obama.

......And that is ultimately the problem with having a President who combines limited experience with towering arrogance. Putting Barack Obama in charge of the United States would be like making a cocky high school class President the new CEO of Wal-Mart. Not only would he not know what to do, he wouldn't know what not to do, or even that he doesn't know the difference.

Conservative Grapevine Promo

Make sure to check out Conservative Grapevine today, where you'll find links like:

David Warren: "If you really want to bring the house down, say something that is obviously true."

Cracked: 5 scientific theories that will make your head explode

Candice Novak: 7 ways your e-mail can get you fired

Popoholic: Kim Kardashian bikini pictures

You can check out all those links and more by clicking here. Don't forget to bookmark RWN's companion page, CG! Remember, if you're not reading RWN and CG every day, you're not getting the full story!

PS: If you'd like to submit articles to be linked to Conservative Grapevine, register at CG, and then shoot me an email.

Q&A Friday #92: The Drop Off In The Number Of Comments.

Question: "I have noticed that, over the past year, there seems to have been a precipitous drop in the number of comments posted at RWN. What is the reason for that? Is it due to more aggressive comment moderating? Is it due to restricted RWN user account registration? Is it because of the existence of the forum section? Or is it some combination of all of these? What I am most curious to know is if Occam's Razor applies: fewer comments because there are fewer visitors to RWN." -- huckupchuck

Answer: Comments have dropped significantly, but it started when RWN turned into a group blog.

I think the primary difference is that previously, RWN had 6 posts per day that were up by 7 AM or so and those posts stayed up all day long. Now typically, RWN has 10-12 posts per day that are spread out across the day. I think the sheer volume of posts has kept the comments from getting as concentrated as they did when RWN was a solo blog.

There are also a couple of other minor factors that may play a role.

* Between the kids being out of school and people going out nights instead of staying in on their computers, RWN takes a small traffic hit every summer.

* RWN has a Forum that is probably draining off some posts.

Q&A Friday #92: Obama's Lead

Question: "What do you think about the contention being thrown around by the left that Obama's lead in the polls is understated because the polls use turnout assumptions that understate black and young-voter turnout this time.

Conservatives are used to left-leaning bias in political polls. Usually a 3% to 4% "lead" for the Dem translates into a dead heat on election day, so I would normally dismiss this as spin, particularly as it relates to "young voters." But I've got to say, the contention that black turnout will be disproportionally greater than the assumptions in the polls this time around seems likely to me." -- RWNReader2

Answer: The polling agencies are capable of adjusting their numbers if they believe the percentages of young and black voters are going to be underrepresented with their current models, so I don't expect that to be a big problem.

That being said, there is one thing the pollsters are going to have trouble accounting for and that's the Bradley Effect which typically features white voters saying they're for Obama or undecided because they're afraid to be labeled as racist for voting against a black candidate.

What you tend to see with the Bradley Effect is that there is a larger than normal pool of undecideds and they break very heavily for the white candidate. When all is said and done, I expect there to be states that Obama consistently wins in the polls that he loses on election day. We'll see if it plays out that way.

Q&A Friday #92: Rape And Abortion

Question: Could you explain to me why conservatives who believe abortion is murder make an exception for rape? I recognize the trauma of raising a baby that was produced through rape but that doesn't justify murdering a child.

Thank you." -- McCain-Obama08

Answer: I don't want to speak for all conservatives on rape and abortion, but my ideal would be having abortion legal only in cases where the life of the mother is in danger. That's because I believe every child, even a child conceived via rape or incest, is a human being and it would be infanticide to abort him.

However, getting pregnant via rape or incest is an absolutely horrific, gut wrenching thing for a woman and as a practical matter, I understand that we're just not ever going to get to a point where 50 +1% of the population of a state is going to be okay with abortion being illegal under those circumstances.

So, as a practical compromise, I favor making abortion illegal except in the case of rape, incest, or danger to the life of the mother. Some people might believe that pro-lifers shouldn't go beyond danger to the life of the mother as an exception, but I don't think we can afford to make perfect the enemy of the good when the lives of nearly 50 million children have been snuffed out via abortion since 1973.

Q&A Friday #92: School Vouchers

Question: "For either Melissa or John: The State of Louisiana is enacting for the first time what is essentially a school voucher program in the greater New Orleans area. It's called a "scholarship" program. In essence, only those Louisiana residents who fall below a certain income threshold are eligible to apply for these "scholarships" and, if awarded, use them to attend private schools. Assuming both of you are supporters of educational voucher programs, how would you respond to a tax-paying resident who just barely doesn't qualify for a "scholarship," but who has sacrificed to send his kids to a private school anyway, who complains about the injustice that someone else will get to send their kid to this school for free while he will still have to sacrifice to fork over the money to send his kid to the same school? Would you consider this clear inequity an acceptable practice simply because it might give a disadvantaged youth an opportunity at a better education? If you do think this inequity is acceptable, would it then be fair to say that you would be supporting a kind of class-based affirmative action program?" -- huckupchuck

Answer: I'd respond to that resident by saying that I agree it is unfair that he's not getting a "scholarship" and that I would like to see the law changed to include him. As a matter of fact, I'd like to see every parent in America given a "scholarship" and allowed to send his kid to whatever school he believes will do the best job of educating him (within reason, of course. The Wahabi school of Jihad shouldn't be allowed to exist in the US, much less be eligible for vouchers). That being said, if the program works for the poor, it'll be much easier to expand it to the middle-class and wealthy later.

"Would you consider this clear inequity an acceptable practice simply because it might give a disadvantaged youth an opportunity at a better education?"

I see it as an acceptable practice because if it works with the "disadvantaged youth," it makes it easier to spread the program across all income levels -- although it is worth noting that poor kids tend to end up getting the short end of the educational stick. That's because if the public schools in the area are terrible, they generally aren't going to have the means to home school or send their kids to private school.

If you do think this inequity is acceptable, would it then be fair to say that you would be supporting a kind of class-based affirmative action program?

No, it would not. Unlike the voucher law, Affirmative Action is based on race and is every bit as immoral and in my opinion, unconstitutional (It clearly violates the "equal protection" clause of the Constitution) as the Jim Crow laws were even if the impact isn't as large.

Quote of the Day from Helen Thomas, My Favorite Liberal

I have to say, I absolutely love raging liberal journalist Helen Thomas, if for no reason other than the fact that she makes us conservatives look so darn good. Honestly, though - is this the face of a woman you want fighting on your side? If this isn't enough reason for a guy to vote Republican...

helen_thomas.jpg

Ok, sorry - I couldn't help myself.

On a serious note, this bitter woman has most recently made the news for her brazen proclamation in a new HBO documentary that she stands alone as the only brave liberal voice in the media. Riiight.

Apparently her standards for what it means to be a true "liberal" are set so high above the rest as to put her in a category all on her own. According to the Washington Examiner,

Yeas & Nays got a sneak peak at Rory Kennedy's new HBO documentary -- "Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at The White House" -- which premieres next month, and Thomas is asked whether most White House reporters are liberal. "Hell no!" she responds. "I'm dying to find another liberal open their mouths. Where are they!"

I suppose when you consider the extreme rancor with which Thomas refers to the Bush administration, she really does make the Katie Couric's and Meredith Vieira's of the media seem like a harmless litter of puppies.

Here's my point: Thomas's reasoning - or lack thereof - reveals the kind of logic typically used by other prominent figures in the media who play innocent when asked about the liberal media bias. Their sense of reality must actually be skewed so far left that they genuinely believe that they are "moderates" who define what it is to be in the center. Either that, or they are just blatantly lying.

In the case of Thomas, I guess I'll give my favorite liberal the benefit of the doubt.

In fact, I almost can't help but agree with good old Helen when she wishes there were others out there more like her. If only there were a way to make her the face of the Democratic party, conservatives and Republicans would be a shoe-in this November.

Cross-posted from Conservatives with Attitude!

Obamunists Appropriate Salute From Star Trek Astro-Hippies

obama-sign-of-progress.jpg

Above you see the new official salute of those who have been assimilated by the Obama Borg.

Rick Husong owns The Loyalty, a production company that believes in "an integrated approach to marketing, production, and design" and promises to "construct powerful messages." He's also a moonbat, and he barks:

Our goal is to see a crowd of 75,000 people at Obama's nomination speech holding their hands above their heads, fingers laced together in support of a new direction for this country, a renewed hope, and acceptance of responsibility for our future. […] We thought, "Let's try and start a movement where even while walking down the street, people would hold up the O and you would know that they were for Obama." You interlace your hands in a circle, the interlacing being a symbol of different types of people coming together and the circle a symbol of unity. We want to see it everywhere, but more importantly we want this sign to take the world by storm.

If the kooky, New-Agey gesture looks familiar, maybe you saw it being used by obnoxious astro-hippies on Star Trek:

There isn't much about Obamania that hasn't been recycled from the era of snot-nosed, dope-addled Flower Children.

Michelle Malkin has come up with some universal gestures and symbols that even better reflect the Obama campaign and its slack-jawed minions, including these:

warning-sign.gif

obasign.jpg

On tips from V the K and Adrian. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Lindsey Graham Is Why The Republicans Lose

Via Eric Odom, via Twitter, the Conservative Belle says this (and this is a big fat quote from her):


There are five Republican senators who are cooperating with five Democrats to make McCain and Republicans look bad introduce an energy solution. Enter Lindsey Graham , John Thune, Saxby Chambliss, Bob Corker and Johnny Isakson. Heroes in their own minds, but they have a plan. Go get your antacid before continuing. You're going to need it.

This "Gang of 10" announced a "sweeping" and "bipartisan" energy plan to break Washington's energy "stalemate." What they did was throw every vulnerable Democrat, and Mr. Obama, a life preserver.

That's because the plan is a Democratic giveaway. New production on offshore federal lands is left to state legislatures, and then in only four coastal states. The regulatory hurdles are huge. And the bill bars drilling within 50 miles of the coast -- putting off limits some of the most productive areas. Alaska's oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is still a no-go.

The highlight is instead $84 billion in tax credits, subsidies and federal handouts for alternative fuels and renewables. The Gang of 10 intends to pay for all this in part by raising taxes on . . . oil companies! The Sierra Club couldn't have penned it better. And so the Republican Five has potentially given antidrilling Democrats the political cover they need to neutralize energy through November.

Gee thanks. And you know who this benefits? The Obamessiah. He is giddy and has praised their efforts. Obama can now ask why The Maverick isn't supporting bi-partisan legislation. Oh, and it helps Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who is in the Gang of 10 and also considered the most vulnerable Democrat seat in the Senate.

Way to go, fellas. This is just the strategy that will prevent that filibuster-proof majority. Riiiiiiight. And for the record, none of these Republican senators are up for re-election this fall. Surprise!


I hate the Senate. I hate the Senate. I hate the Senate. These five Republicans need an ass-whuppin. The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican who tries to be one, too.

No wonder Republican grassroots can't get anything going. They're undone by the "visionaries" at the top.

Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com

Q&A #92: Presidential Looks

Question: This question is for Melissa: Inevitably, presidential electoral contests will always find someone raising the issue of the overall attractiveness of the presidential candidates. And I'm not talking about attractiveness only regarding ideology or policy, but the whole package: physical attributes, comportment, charisma, intellect, etc. A package that might find someone, even if not voting for the candidate for other reasons, to consider him the "hottie" of the two. Since you have written in the past about male/female relationships, I'm curious to know what you think might be the results of comparing McCain to Obama in this regard. Do you think more people will find Obama more attractive than McCain, or vice versa? Why?

Posted by huckupchuck

The best thing to happen to John McCain's campaign so far, was Paris Hilton. When she poked fun at the "old gray haired guy" and when he responded with humor, an intergenerational connection happened. Her acknowledgment made McCain "hip" and funny. I think the pundits got this all wrong, actually, because Hannity & Colmes kvetched, as did O'Reilly, that it lowered the discourse. Well, a candidate has to appeal to all people not just the pointy heads.

On that account, Obama wins the style, youth and hipness factor, hands down. What's funny is that he kinda strikes me as a bland nerd underneath. But Obama's strength, his appeal, is also his weakness. He is criticized for being a lightweight and his aura actually contributes to the problem. He seems more celebrity than serious. So, he has to be careful. And in some respects, I believe the damage is already done. Oh, and he could use putting on some muscle. Good grief! The man is anemic. He looks weak.

Conversely, McCain's style, looks, and delivery could not be more bland. And yet, underneath, the guy is fiery. Part of the problem with him, superficially, is his inability to freely move his upper body. I know, this is harsh. But his physical restraint, imposed by his injuries due to torture, convey a visual frustration, if that makes any sense. It's awkward. And yet, people are constantly reminded that he does have substance. He has lived and suffered. He knows pain and it's not imagined. So, ultimately, I think his style turns out neutral.

If a full mop of hair determines who wins, as some research suggested we'd have had John Kerry as President and John Edwards would be the Democratic nominee. Last election, The Manolo wrote the piece d'resistance about hairstyle and the presidency. The Manolo said this about Bush:

For the example, the current president, George the W. Bush, has the mostly non-descript hair; the sort of the short, no-nonsense, cut-by-the-elderly-barber-named-Mory hair. This type of the hair, it is neither especially inspirational, nor particularly dismaying, and because of this it is part of that broad and undistinguished middle ground, where the majority of the Presidential coiffure may be found. The Bush the Elder, the Harry Truman, the Coolidge, the Wilson, the Harding, the Hoover, and the many, many others presidents of this past century and the half have had this same hair.

And this is the ground a future President has to tread. He has to look appropriate. He has to look serious but have a sense of humor. He has to project authority but not be arrogant. He has to speak well and look pleasing but also be extemporaneous and not be a dandy. In short, the President has to be an everyman and a statesman.

(And for all my feminist pals out there, I'm using the universal "man", because a woman has to walk this line and a few more, but I'm talking to the two candidates here.)

Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com

Q&A #92: Who's Going To Win?

Question: What do you think will actually happen in the election?

Posted by RtWingNtCase

Answer: The election will be nearly as close as 2000. McCain will win by a hair.

Oh, and no matter who wins in 2008, Immigration Reform will be one of the first issues.

Q&A Friday #92: Should We Want High Oil Prices To "Drive Us From Oil?"

Question: "Compromise on Drilling: In today's "Drill and Conserve", Charles Krauthammer called for both drilling, conservation and pursuing alternative energy sources. Although I usually find a lack of reason with the Democrats, I think in this case they are very reasonably concerned that drill-now really will provide short term relief on oil prices. This, in turn, will relieve the current pressure that is spurring development of alternatives. The fear then is that we will go another generation before do anything. (Of course, they cannot admit that they think the high prices are 'good' - it would be political suicide.) My question for you is what I would like to ask Krauthammer: Can we really do both? Aren't the high prices the only thing that will drive us from oil? A few months of 4$ gas has sold more Priuses than 30 years of CAFE standards." -- oldch

Answer: You may not realize it, but you sound like you're wondering if we'd be better off with an old, Soviet style command and control economy where the government directly controls the market.

The reason I say that is because what's happening now is that the market is doing what it always does; the price of gas has gone up and in reaction, people are driving less, looking for more fuel efficient cars, and pushing for drilling to increase the supply.

Why is that occurring when the high price of gas will spur the development of alternatives?

Because people value cheap gas over developing alternatives. That's why advocating high gas prices would be political suicide and it's why Democrats like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi lie through their teeth about what they want to do; it's because unlike the American public, they do put a higher value on getting us off of oil than they do on having cheap, efficient energy to power the country.

So, will the motivation to develop alternative fuels slack off considerably if prices precipitously decline? Yes, it will -- and that's a good thing because as gas prices decline, prices for other products that are dependent on oil will decline, more jobs will be created, and more people will have money in their pockets.

But, what about the long-term? How are we ever going to get off of oil? Well, maybe we won't. If oil turns out to be the cheapest, most efficient, long-term energy source one hundred years from now, chances are we'll still be using oil. If, on the other hand, solar powered tofu windmills are the cheapest, most efficient, long-term energy source one hundred years from now, that's what we'll be using.

So, if the greenies want alternative fuels to be heavily used, the answer isn't to try to force it on people via legislation or by artificially creating higher prices, it's to make a better product that people will voluntarily choose to use.

German Town Imposes Solar Panels on Private Homes

The Nazis and communists are gone now, yet totalitarianism has returned to Germany. A report from Marburg:

The town council took the significant step in June of moving from merely encouraging citizens to install solar panels to making them an obligation. The ordinance, the first of its kind in Germany, will require solar panels not only on new buildings, which fewer people oppose, but also on existing homes that undergo renovations or get new heating systems or roof repairs.

To give the regulation teeth, a fine of 1,000 euros, about $1,500, awaits those who do not comply.

The fine is chump change compared to the cost of solar panels. Marburgers with leaky roofs had better buy some buckets, unless they have a fortune to spare.

If we've learned one thing from enviromania, it's that once the sanctity of private property has been breached, we have no rights. Therefore, there's no limit to the extravagant absurdity bureaucretins can impose.

marburg.jpg
Photovoltaic cells in Marburg, drinking up all that German sun.

On a tip from John P. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

The Silky Pony Admits To Lesbian Affair With Rielle Hunter: Mainstream Media & Daily Kos Hardest Hit

Even though the LA Times, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, etc., etc., did their absolute best to protect him, John Edwards, a man who was reputed to be in the running for Barack Obama's VP slot, was battered so heavily by the National Enquirer, the blogosphere, and talk radio that he felt compelled to publicly admit to having an affair,

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child.

According to friends of Hunter, Edwards met her at a New York city bar in 2006. His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience.

Edwards said the affair began during the campaign after she was hired. Hunter traveled with Edwards around the country and to Africa.

Edwards said his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family became aware of the affair in 2006.

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

Wow, that is just riddled with fascinating little nuggets, isn't it?

First of all, there are two people who got thrown under the bus there (Andrew Young voluntarily got himself into this mess by claiming, probably falsely, to be having an affair with Hunter). One of them is Rielle Hunter, whom Edwards is painting as a whore because she apparently slept with two different married men on the Edwards campaign. Then, even more impressively, there is his cancer stricken wife who he says has known that he has been boffing another women since 2006. Whatever else you might say about Elizabeth Edwards, does she strike you as a mousey "stand by your man" type who knows her man is out cheating on her and says nothing about it? Me? Not so much. However, could I see her letting her wimpy husband claim that publicly so that he could deflect criticism (How can you people get mad at me when Elizabeth has known since 2006 and doesn't mind)? Yeah, that seems more likely.

Then, there is this incredible line,

"Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter."

Ok, let's say that's true. Let's also assume this is true,

"Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her."

What the heck? Let's even say this is true,

"Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008."

So, the affair has long since been over, the baby isn't his, and he doesn't love Rielle Hunter. Ok, that all makes sense...oh, wait a second. If all three of those things are true, why the hell was he meeting her in a hotel room? Just to catch up on old times? Oh, he could have done that over the phone, couldn't he? Well, gee, let's think about this: why does a married man usually have a covert meeting in a hotel room with a woman?

Hmmm...enquiring minds still want to know, but does the mainstream media want to find out?

PS: Once again, this story just proves that if you want to be informed, you've got to read blogs because the mainstream media just isn't going to tell you the whole truth if it hurts "their side."

PS #2: I wonder how dumb they feel at the Daily Kos after banning liberal blogger Lee Stranahan for discussing this?

August 9, 2008

Week-End Links

Here's the Right Wing News guest blogger line-up this week-end.

Saturday
--------
Cassy Fiano
Kathy Shaidle Five Feet Of Fury
Gina Cobb
John Stephenson from Stop The ACLU
Little Miss Attila

Sunday
-------
Ron Coleman from Likelihood of Success
Sister Toldjah
William Teach from Pirate's Cove
Michael Illions from Polipundit
MCQ from QandO

Make sure to give all of them a warm welcome and check out their blogs!

Thought Of The Day: The MSM Vs. The Blogosphere On The Edwards Story

Yesterday, a day when the Olympics began and Russia may have started a war with Georgia, the hot story of the day actually turned out to be John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter.

If you've been reading the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, you first heard about the John Edwards affair yesterday. On the other hand, if you read Right Wing News and the rest of the blogosphere, you first heard the name Rielle Hunter back in October of last year and then learned that Edwards had been caught at a hotel with her two weeks ago.

What's wrong with that story?

If you know the answer to that question, you know a big part of the reason why the mainstream media's audiences have been slowly but surely dwindling for the last few years.

Ezra Levant: one case down, 17 to go

After 900 days, and the work of 15 bureaucrats costing taxpayers an estimated $500,000, the case against the only publisher in the Western world charged for reprinting the Danish Mohammed cartoons has been dismissed.

And Ezra Levant isn't happy about it:

The 11-page government report into my activities is a breathtakingly arrogant document. In it, Pardeep Gundara, a low-level bureaucrat, assumes the role of editor-in-chief for the entire province of Alberta. He went through our magazine article and gave his own thoughts on the cartoons, and pronounced on our magazine's decision to publish them. The government's wannabe journalist makes a spelling error, he gets facts wrong, and he's obviously not good with deadlines. We'd never have hired him at our magazine. But the laugh is on us -- he's apparently our boss, and the boss of all journalists in Alberta. [...]

That is not acceptable to me. I am not interested in Gundara's views about the cartoons. I'm not interested in learning his personal rules of thumb for when I can or can't express myself. This is Canada, not Saudi Arabia.

So what happens now?

Levant is feistier than ever, and his enemies are threatening a counterattack.

It's far from over.


(Kathy Shaidle blogs at FiveFeetOfFury.com. Her new book about Canada's unjust Human Rights Commissions comes out in September.)

Breaking: Actor/Comedian Bernie Mac dead at 50

Sad news this morning:

Bernie Mac blended style, authority and a touch of self-aware bluster to make audiences laugh as well as connect with him. For Mac, who died Saturday at age 50, it was a winning mix, delivering him from a poor childhood to stardom as a standup comedian, in films including the casino heist caper "Ocean's Eleven" and his acclaimed sitcom "The Bernie Mac Show."

Though his comedy drew on tough experiences as a black man, he had mainstream appeal -- befitting inspiration he found in a wide range of humorists: Harpo Marx as well as Moms Mabley; squeaky-clean Red Skelton, but also the raw Redd Foxx.

Mac died Saturday morning from complications due to pneumonia in a Chicago area hospital, his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles. She said no other details were available.

"The world just got a little less funny," said "Oceans" co-star George Clooney.

Don Cheadle, another member of the "Oceans" gang, concurred: "This is a very sad day for many of us who knew and loved Bernie. He brought so much joy to so many. He will be missed, but heaven just got funnier."

"This is a very sad day for many of us who knew and loved Bernie," said Don Cheadle, a member of the "Oceans" gang. "He brought so much joy to so many. He will be missed but heaven just got funnier."

Mac suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease that produces tiny lumps of cells in the body's organs, but had said the condition went into remission in 2005. He recently was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia, which his publicist said was not related to the disease.


Bernie Mac was a rarity in Hollywood, having signed an anti-terror petition (rather than wanting to cuddle with dictators and terrorists), a proud gun owner (rather than wanting the entire world to be at the mercy of criminals with no problems using guns), and thought there was too much skin and sex in movies today (rather than thinking the more shameless nudity you could use, the better). He wasn't your typical celebrity. He didn't toe the Hollywood line, he wasn't a mindless liberal Hollywood zombie, was himself 100% of the time, and was unafraid to express unconventional opinions. He was a great actor, a hilarious comedian, and his death is a great loss.

Please keep his family in your thoughts and prayers. In the meantime, here's a clip from The Bernie Mac Show, for which he won four Emmys and was nominated for many more.

Cross-posted from Cassy's blog. Stop by for more original commentary.

Elizabeth Edwards speaks

She released a statement vowing to stand behind her man:

Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some most recently caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences. None of these has been easy. But we have stood with one another through them all. Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him.

John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007. This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well. Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private. The pain of the long journey since 2006 was about to be renewed.

John has spoken in a long on-camera interview. Admitting one's mistakes is a hard thing for anyone to do. I am proud of the courage John showed by his honesty in the face of shame. The toll on our family of news helicopters over our house and reporters in our driveway is yet unknown. But now the truth is out, and the repair work that began in 2006 will continue. I ask that the public, who expressed concern about the harm John's conduct has done to us, think also about the real harm that the present voyeurism does and give me and my family the privacy we need at this time.


It takes a lot to be able to stick with someone who's cheated on you. And it takes a special kind of person to not only stick with the jerk, but also to stand up and defend him. I highly doubt that the Edwards' are being completely honest and truthful, but you know what? Elizabeth is right in that it is their business. While I get the feeling that she's sticking by him purely for political reasons, it's her decision and I won't lambast her for it.

I will say, though, that I don't quite understand why so many politicians' wives do this. Once, just once, I'd like to see a woman who has been completely betrayed by an egocentric, narcissistic asshole stand up and say so. I'm all for standing by your man, but some things are unforgivable. Cheating on your wife when she's battling terminal cancer would be considered unforgivable in my book. But hey, it's her decision. Either she really loves him, or she really loves the money/power (a la Hillary).

Meanwhile, Rielle Hunter is challenging Edwards to take the paternity test. He says he's happy to take it, because, you know, he's so sure the kid isn't his. My money is on the test coming back positive though. I feel a little bad for Rielle. She's been shoved under the bus so quickly, she never had a chance to know what hit her. Boy, John Edwards is just an all-around great guy, huh?

The family of John Edwards' former mistress, Rielle Hunter, is challenging the former senator to take a DNA paternity test after his claim that he did not father Hunter's 6-months-old child.

In the first reaction from Hunter's family, her younger sister Melissa told ABC News that Edwards should immediately follow through on his pledge to take a paternity test.

"I would challenge him to do so," the sister said.

"Somebody must stand up and defend my sister," she said. "I wish that those involved would refrain from bad-mouthing my sister."


Of course, someone's gotta be held accountable besides John Edwards. And that means Rielle Hunter has to take the fall. Like I said, he's a real class act.

Cross-posted at Cassy's blog. Stop by for more original commentary.

Dems Support Guaranteeed Substandard Health Care for All

The Democratic Party platform will include "guaranteed" health care for all, the AP is reporting today.

It's not clear how Dems plan to achieve this.  A proposal to mandate a single-payer, governmental-run system has been defeated, for now.

But "guaranteed" means "guaranteed," as in "even if you refused to pay for your own health coverage, you'll be covered at someone else's expense."

Front and center, once again, will be questions about the high price and poor quality of "free" nationalized health care.

For years, the liberal media have argued that U.S. health care lags behind that of countries with socialized medicine.  This has led to preposterous "news" articles in which reporters tout lower infant mortality rates in backwaters like Cuba.

This week Dr. Linda Halderman exposed the little secret behind the seemingly low infant mortality rates in countries outside the United States.  Although the exact practices vary from country to country, It all comes down to just not counting most infants who are likely to die in the first 24 hours.

Q: If socialized medicine is so bad, why are infant mortality rates higher in the U.S. than in other developed nations with government or single-payer health care?

A: U.S. infant mortality rates (deaths of infants <1 year of age per 1,000 live births) are sometimes cited as evidence of the failings of the U.S. system of health care delivery. Universal health care, it's argued, is why babies do better in countries with socialized medicine.

But in fact, the main factors affecting early infant survival are birth weight and prematurity. The way that these factors are reported -- and how such babies are treated statistically -- tells a different story than what the numbers reveal.

Low birth weight infants are not counted against the "live birth" statistics for many countries reporting low infant mortality rates.

According to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a premature baby weighing <500g is not considered a living child.

But in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live births. The mortality rate of such babies -- considered "unsalvageable" outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive -- is extraordinarily high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews U.S. infant mortality statistics.

. . .  Some of the countries reporting infant mortality rates lower than the U.S. classify babies as "stillborn" if they survive less than 24 hours whether or not such babies breathe, move, or have a beating heart at birth.

Forty percent of all infant deaths occur in the first 24 hours of life.

In the United States, all infants who show signs of life at birth (take a breath, move voluntarily, have a heartbeat) are considered alive.

If a child in Hong Kong or Japan is born alive but dies within the first 24 hours of birth, he or she is reported as a "miscarriage" and does not affect the country's reported infant mortality rates.

The length of pregnancy considered "normal" is 37-41 weeks. In Belgium and France -- in fact, in most European Union countries -- any baby born before 26 weeks gestation is not considered alive and therefore does not "count" against reported infant mortality rates.

Too short to count?

In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby born who is less than 30 centimeters long is not counted as a live birth. Therefore, unlike in the U.S., such high-risk infants cannot affect Swiss infant mortality rates.

Efforts to salvage these tiny babies reflect this classification. Since 2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 lbs.) were born in the United States.

Once again, the United States and its world leadership in quality health care have been unfairly maligned through the use of misleading statistics. 

How many times will this have to happen before people begin to learn?  The free market almost always works better than government-mandated delivery of services.

By the way, looking at the other side of the life continuum, who's the oldest living person today?  By golly, it's an American -- Edna Parker from Indiana.  And Americans have frequently been the longest-lived person on earth.  But Democrats think they can do better with a heavy dose of bureaucracy.

So the Democratic Party platform calling for "guaranteed" health care for all should be seen for what it is:  A bid to bring guaranteed substandard health care to all.  Democrats certainly do not have a plan to improve the quality of health care most Americans are getting.  Their plan will instead kill free-market incentives, lock in massive new governmental inefficiencies, and generally make a mess of what may currently be the best healthcare system on Earth.

Cross-posted at GINA COBB

August 10, 2008

It's Not Pretty When Mo Dowd Refers To Edwards As Breck Girl

When Maureen Dowd decides to diss a Democrat, one who has had presidential asspirations and was, in fact, very popular in the Nutroots prior to Barry's Messianic ascendancy, well, you know it just can't be good. The substance of her column is

The stunning admission Edwards made to ABC's Bob Woodruff, and in a written statement from Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, was that he's a narcissist.

Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic? Given his diagnosis, I'm sure his H.M.O. would pay.

The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.

Now, some on the Left get why Edwards admitting he was lying about cheating on his wife while she still had cancer while running for President, not to mention that he was having an affair while essentially running for office, some don't. Maybe they will believe Mo

He has an affair with Hunter, while he's honing his speech on the imperative to "live in a moral, honest, just America." A married former aide says he's the father when she gets pregnant, even though she's telling people Edwards is the dad. And one of his campaign donors pays off Hunter to get her resettled with the baby out of North Carolina.

But the Breck Girl wants a gold star for the fact that he sent his marriage into remission when his wife was in remission. That's special.

And there it is: the Breck Girl citation and the point. Edwards was telling people about honesty, morality, and being just, yet, he is being anything but.

In our hearts, we hope that politicians are honest, decent people. In our brains, we know that they are politicians, and we shouldn't expect much. But, the last thing we want is some vainglorious narcissist yapping about 2 America's and America being better, when he himself is anything but, and lies about it.

We'll take the "Edwards got paid $55K to give a speech on poverty" as written.

Crossed at Pirate's Cove

Continue reading "It's Not Pretty When Mo Dowd Refers To Edwards As Breck Girl" »

Late Night Talk Show Hosts Finding It Easier These Days To Joke About Barry Oh

It's about bleeping time:

A writer with one of the leading comedy shows in the US, who preferred not to be named because of continuing sensitivities about how far comedians should go from some network executives, said: "We had a hard time convincing people that Obama is funny for a long time. Our audiences seemed unsure whether to laugh at him. The first black president is not a gag. But that's changing because he's doing more stuff that's easy to mock and people are more familiar with him."

Some of the jokes:

Craig Ferguson: "Barack Obama was in Germany" today, and "he did this speech and 100,000 people showed up. There were so many Germans shouting and screaming that France...surrendered just in case."

Jimmy Kimmel: "They really love Barack Obama in Germany. He's like a rock star over there. Impressive until you realize that David Hasselhoff is also like a rock star over there."

David Letterman: Signs Barack Obama Is Overconfident.

Proposed bill to change Oklahoma to 'Oklabama.'

Offered Bush 20 bucks for the 'Mission Accomplished' banner.

Asked guy at Staples, 'Which chair will work best in an oval-shaped office?'

Having head measured for Mount Rushmore.

Offered McCain a job in gift shop at Obama Presidential Library.

Jay Leno: "Of course, Obama's supporters got him his usual birthday gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh."

Jay Leno: "Obama's people are trying to portray McCain as cranky, and McCain is trying to portray Obama as arrogant, you see. And when Obama was asked what he thought about being called arrogant, well, he said he was 'above having to answer that question.'"

Jay Leno: "See Barack Obama on the news? He's becoming a workout fanatic. He's at the gym, like, twice a day, sometimes three times a day at the gym, yeah, according to his staff. Well, he has to stay in shape to do those flip-flops."

Jay Leno: "Barack Obama back from his big European tour. Did you see him in Europe? People were cheering him, holding up signs, blowing him kisses. And that was just the American media covering the story."

Up until recently, Jon Stewart was a rarity amongst late night comedians/talk show hosts who would dare to make light of The Chosen One, in spite of the fact that there was and is much humor to be shared over the Democrat nominee for president. Others, it seems, were afraid of offending their majority pro-Obama audiences, didn't want to be viewed as racists, and of course there's the strong possibility that some of those same talk show hosts supported BO. All this in spite of the fact that there has been tons of material out there to use against Obama, as I noted in this post.

Oh well. Better late than never.

Cross-posted from the Sister Toldjah blog.

Is the GOP the GOP's Own Worst Enemy in Election 2008?

Investor's Business Daily takes a inside look at the GOP Senate members of the energy issue based "Gang of 10":

Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Bob Corker of Tennessee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Thune of South Dakota -- remember their names if things go badly for the GOP this November.

With the issue of domestic drilling to provide relief for suffering consumers landing right in the laps of embattled congressional Republicans, those five -- none of whom faces any immediate danger of losing his seat -- decided to join with some crafty Democrats and smash to pieces that gift from the heavens. {Source: Investor's Business Daily}

And we all know if the GOP are involved in a compromise with the Democrats, it has to be benefit the Democrats:

The "compromise" they are promoting is actually a wholesale giveaway to Democrats. Touted as a drilling plan, it actually imposes about $84 billion in new taxes on oil companies and keeps the offshore and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling bans.

In the five states supposedly being opened to more drilling -- Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida -- massive regulatory roadblocks and state legislative fights could mean drilling in theory, but precious little in practice. Imposition of an arbitrary 50-mile no-drilling zone denies access to known oil deposits.

Meanwhile, Democrats get oodles of goodies for their environmentalist backers: That $84 billion of the taxpayers' money will be spent concocting green fuels and designing geekmobiles.

Oh, that Lindsey Graham, formerly of the 'Gang of 14' and head cheerleader for Amnesty during the Senate debate on McCain-Kennedy. I have to agree with the columnists moniker of the "Five Stooges" for the GOP members.

Their interference in this major issue, and allowing the Democrats to save face and achieve some goals for their agenda would be a major blow, again, to the GOP, who continue to play the role of enabler to the Democrats liberal agenda addiction.

The Desert Lover

Via Rick, a more-impressive-than-usual sampling of just plain raw unfettered stupidity from the Huffington Post.

We like to belabor the obvious here at The Blog That Nobody Reads...so first, we'll read Ms. Haydn's remarks in full...then some bullet points.

Have you ever gone through a really dry period sexually? At first you get angry that you're being neglected and ignored, and you act out. Then one day you wake up with a sense of nonchalance and you start to marvel at how much you're getting done, and how much easier it is not to care. And then... one day, maybe a stranger comes and begins to romance you and strokes your hair in a sort of contemplative way, uttering the most delightful insights. He touches your hand softly and then a little more firmly, awakening the feelings that you thought you'd left behind, and then you start speaking really poetically and hearing melodies and then suddenly you WANT IN! You want back in the game and you think 'spring is here'... YES WE CAN!

Barack Obama is inspiring us like a desert lover, a Washington Valentino. We who have felt apathetic, angry at two (likely) stolen elections, K-Street hegemony, the "pornography of the trivial"* in journalism and culture; we who are heartbroken over a war we knew was wrong, we who thought (especially after Baby Bush got in a 2nd time) that America got what it asked for; we who stopped wanting to participate 'cause it doesn't matter whether we do or don't; we have a crush. We're talking about it; we're getting involved, we're tuning in and turning out in numbers we haven't seen in ages. My musician friends and I are writing songs to inspire people and couples all over America are making love again and shouting "yes we can" as they climax!

The downside is that when the Republican fear factory goes into full production come election time, and even superdelegate time, potentially causing the Dems to hand-pick Hillary instead of Prince Charming because we are afraid that America will vote McCain over a candidate who is willing to meet with Ahmadinejad, it is quite possible that all the passion and revolutionary spirit being stoked by Senator Obama could turn into an equally powerful force of apathy and even rage. We who never felt like participating in the democratic process before (or when we did our votes were not counted), could end up feeling more disappointed and disenfranchised than ever. It's almost worse than never having cared at all. Beware the wrath of the forsaken lover.

Obama, and also Clinton, must be unequivocal in their rhetoric that the need for unity, which they both so often espouse, doesn't just mean unifying around them. It means really unifying around the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates for every office, and holding them to task for all the promises of "justice and change." We newly impassioned citizens need to feel included and incentivized, no matter who gets the nomination.

If Obama is like a lover who has awakened our desire to dream and participate again after so many years in the desert of political apathy, I would just ask that he be responsible and help us channel our newly stirred passion into something even bigger than him, whether or not it works out: the democratic process.


1. The whole point of the essay is not attributes of the "desert lover," but feelings she has about him when he arrives. Not exactly complimentary to Sen. Obama. Insulting, really, when you think about it.
2. The feelings she has for the "desert lover," in turn, are inspired by, more than anything else, the long period of time that elapsed before he arrived. Even more insulting toward Sen. Obama. Is there nothing remarkable about him worth mentioning? So many others among his fan base insist there is. Ms. Haydn seems to be the exception!
3. Ms. Haydn never once says definitively whether or not she voted in these two elections she coyly hints might have been stolen. Indeed, there is much verbiage to strongly suggest she did not. It would be strange to have such resentment over the theft of elections in which one did not participate, but by the time I'm done reading her screed I wouldn't put much past her.
4. Ms. Haydn further insists that democracy is one of the few things that are "even bigger than him"; I wish she spent a few sentences defining what that means to her. She seems to have affection for it only when it produces an outcome she likes, so I believe she is having an Inigo Montoya moment with democracy. I do not believe it means what she thinks it means.

I have one other observation to make about this piece, or rather about a comment that appeared underneath it. I personally marked as a "Favorite" this remark from "Renoir" in response to a certain "Jake" who put down Ms. Haydn's ramblings as nothing more than a schoolgirl crush:

Hi Jake...Maybe it's a more mature crush than one of an adolescent, as you wittily describe. After all, he's a known entity and we know he's polite to his Mother. Maybe it's the sort of crush that is mature enough to know the Real Deal and brave enough to try to believe again. You know... a winter romance! Just in the nick of time!

I marked it as a favorite because Renoir managed to work in one of my favorite phrases:
I'm still unconvinced that we have a definition for "real deal," of any sort. The kind where, you isolate ten people who've been caught throwing this slogan around, question them in solitude, and you get back fewer than ten unique answers. One uniform answer? Forget it.

And so it falls to me, to pick out a functional use of the term, one that fits all, or most, of the popular uses of it.

Deep breath...here we go.

REAL DEAL: Flattering slang attached to an individual who possesses a unique ability to sell products unneeded.

I cringe in embarrassment for democrats when I review history and see what kind of individual earns all this adoring, heartsick praise from them. It's not a 2008 phenomenon. It's got something to do with being a fairly handsome male, but that isn't it because they've been engaging in a long-term trend of showering "Mr. Universe" type adulation upon gentlemen who were just barely above average in the looks department.

They seem to be confusing mediocrity with excellence. That would make sense; that's exactly what they want the rest of us to do.

But I'm afraid the truth is even darker than that. The one common trait Sen. Obama shares with Sen. Kennedy and Gov. Clinton, is what is the subject of Real Deal. The ability to sell ice cubes to eskimos. To motivate people to do things toward which they would be less than motivated, without the presence of a salesman who is so ambitious and motivated in his sales acumen, that he can make sales that are clearly less than helpful to the buyers' interests.

Basically, to lie.

You review the history of overwhelmingly exciting candidates within the democrat party, and the attribute common to all of those super-exciting candidates is that they can sell things.

This is not good.

When the product is needed and decent, the salesmanship of he who sells it, is a non-issue.

Cross-posted at House of Eratosthenes.

Fighting Against Hydrocephalus to Save My Son!

HydroWALK 2008
"The Fight To Save Cole"

It's that time of the year again as we all come together to raise money and awareness to find a cure for Hydrocephalus and help save my now 3 year old son Cole, and others like him, from this potentially fatal condition.

Last year, with your help, the New Jersey HydroWALK ALONE raised over $55,000 and nationally, over $500,000, was raised in total.

Hydrocephalus is commonly referred to as "water on the brain" and you can read more about the condition here. Many of you have read about and asked about Cole over the time I have been honored to be guest-blogging here.

This past January, I spoke at the Family Research Council's "Blogs For Life" Conference about Cole's story and Hydrocephalus and also appeared on Comcast Newsmaker Show in May.

This year, the walk takes place on Sunday, September 7th and we need your help again. Please click here and donate whatever you can to help us in this fight against Hydrocephalus.

Every 136 minutes, a new baby is born with Hydrocephalus, and yet very few have even heard of Hydrocephalus and no significant advancement in treatment has been made in OVER 50 years!

Cole just turned 3 last week, and also just started to walk in March. He has made remarkable progress over the 3 years; facing over 10 brain surgeries in total so far. Cole actually starts school on September 3rd, (shoot me now!!), and we are sure that will help in his continued improvement.

Even if you aren't able to donate, please add Cole to your prayers.

Thank you again for your generosity, your emails and your prayers.

Leftist AWOL'er Faces 3 Years In The Slammer

The story

Last month 25-year-old U.S. Army PFC Robin Long became the first war resister since the Vietnam War to be forcefully deported from Canadian soil and handed over to military authorities. Robin is currently being held in the El Paso County Jail, near Colorado Springs, Colorado, awaiting a military court martial for resisting the unjust and illegal war against and occupation of Iraq. Robin will be court martialed for desertion "with intent to remain away permanently"--Article 85 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice--in early September. The maximum allowable penalty for a guilty verdict on this charge is three years confinement, forfeiture of pay, and a dishonorable discharge from the Army.

Interestingly, this story, published on Friday at After Downing Street, and posted at the Democratic Undergound on Saturday night, have elicited a grand total of one comment each (it originally appeared on August 7th at Courage to Resist.) What to make of that? Basically, the Leftist troops who deserted, once supported heavily by the Nutroots and other progressives, have, like Cindy Sheehan, John Murtha, and John Kerry, used up their 15 minutes. The Barking Moonbat Patrol understands that this meme of "Courage to Resist" never really went anywhere, as most true Americans see desertion as cowardice.

Furthermore, the Left really doesn't want to discuss anything to do with Iraq, as things continue to get better and better - the Washington Post even tells us how The Surge worked - except to scream in agony "no, really, we are losing in Iraq, damnit!!!!! We have to lose in Iraq! We've invested way to much in defeat. Someone get me a towel to wipe the spittle off my face."

One of the sites I have been reading for quite some time is the official site of Operation Iraqi Freedom. There used to be almost daily reports about killing these terrorists or finding this weapons cache. Now, not so much. The articles are more like

 Omar Abdul Aziz street was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the months that followed the initial surge of Coalition forces into Iraq's capital in the summer of 2007.

But now, one year later, residents of the Adhamiyah District welcomed a new shop to the area - one that will cater to less essential needs. The Adhamiyah Market Council Mall will help the fashion-conscious Iraqi stay hip.

Looks like winning to me. Have fun in jail, Robin.

Continue reading "Leftist AWOL'er Faces 3 Years In The Slammer" »

Operation Continuing Promise

I had a very interesting and unusual week this week (and it precluded me posting here). As a member of the DoD Blogger's Roundtable, I was offered an opportunity which, frankly, I couldn't refuse.

Tuesday evening I boarded the USS Kearsarge, a Wasp class Amphibious Assault ship based in Norfolk VA. As you can imagine, the Kearsarge, commanded by Capt. Walt Towns, is a real, no-kidding, you'd-recognize-it-anywhere Navy warship.
I was given the opportunity, if I wanted too, to do the entire 4 month deployment they were going on, but, unfortunately don't have the time to do that, so I opted to take a short hop on it from Norfolk to Miami, where I experienced a first for myself - that being flown by helicopter off the deck of a Navy warship while the ship was underway. They helicoptered us into Miami to catch an airplane home.

Needless to say I had a fantastic time on the ship, and learned more than you can imagine about amphibious assault ships. For instance, the Kearsarge and others of its class carry a crew of about 1,100. They can also carry about 2,000 Marines. The ship, when fully combat loaded is about 44,000 tons. The best way to describe how it looks is a smaller version of an aircraft carrier. It has a flight deck that runs its entire 800 foot length, with an island to the side that contains both flight control and the bridge.
When they're deploying with a Marine MEU, they'll carry amtracks in the hold and when making an amphibious assault on a hostile shore, the "well" - a huge are near the rear of the ship and below the flight deck - is flooded, the amtracks, loaded with Marines, move down the ramp and into the well, where they're floated and move out of the ship and toward shore.

Its defenses include two RAM launchers which is a lightweight, quick-reaction, fire-and-forget missile designed to destroy anti-ship missiles and asymmetric air and surface threats; two NATO Sea Sparrow launchers. Sea Sparrow is an all-weather surface-to-air and air-to-air missile with all-altitude operational capability that can attack high-performance aircraft and missiles from any direction; three 20mm Phalanx CIWS mounts which provide a "last-chance" defense against anti-ship missiles and littoral warfare threats that have penetrated other fleet defenses. Phalanx automatically detects, tracks and engages anti-air warfare threats such as anti-ship missiles and aircraft; and finally, 4 .50cal machine guns and 4 25 mm Mk 38 machine guns for defense against both airborne and seaborn close-in threats.

Air support comes in various flavors. Three MI 60S Seahawk helicopters act as Search and Rescue birds and also execute long-range Medevac missions. A detachment of 4 CH-53E Sea Stallion heavy lift helicopters is also on board. There are also 12 CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters; 6 AV-8B Harrier attack aircraft and 4 AH-1Z Super Cobra attack helicopters. All are flown by Marine Corps pilots. The CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters are now being phased out of the inventory and replaced by the V-22 Osprey VTOL tilt-rotor aircraft.

The Kearsarge can move along at a pretty impressive clip, about 25 knots when at flank speed. That's because she has two boilers which help generate enough steam to push two geared steam turbines and two shafts at about 70,000 total shaft horsepower. All the steam she generates also allows her to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day.

And in support of the Marines she carries to war, the Kearsarge has a huge medical capability. In her medical spaces she has a 14 bed ICU and a 43 bed ward. Her medical staff is capable of supporting up to 600 patients as well as the crew of the ship.

She is a formidable piece of war machinery with equally formidable capabilities.
Yet on this particular voyage, she's not only committed peace, she's also committed to humanitarian work within countries bordering the Caribbean in Central and South America.

On board, right now, steaming toward the mosquito coast of Nicaragua, she's carrying a volunteer medical contingent from among US military as well as allied medical personnel commanded by Commander David Damstra. There are doctors and nurses from the Airforce, Navy, Marines, Army, Coast Guard and the US Public Health Service as well as from Brazil, Canada and the Netherlands. In all 260 medical personnel from both the military and non-governmental organizations such as Operation Smile and Project Hope will see and treat patients in Nicaragua, Columbia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Guyana. In all, 22 medical sites will be set up and treat the indigenous people in cooperation and at the behest of the national government.

If you're unfamiliar with Project Smile, which is a non-governmental organization, you have probably seen the advertisements which show young children with facial deformities such as cleft lip and cleft palate.

That is one of the NGOs partnering with the Navy and those children will be cared for during their stops in the various countries. Where operating facilities are available on shore, they'll be done there, but where they aren't available, the children will be brought on board the Kearsarge, the surgery done there and they will be kept overnight. And trust me, they'll be pampered by the nurses and corpsmen on board.

As one NGO told me, what the Kearsarge's facilities do is allow them to reach areas that previously were unreachable. Patients who would have had to forego beneficial treatment without the Kearsarge can now be treated. They will be flown aboard, operated upon, kept overnight to insure all is well and then flown back to their home. A cleft lip takes about 45 minutes to repair. A cleft palate takes about an hour and a half. The change in the child's life is both dramatic and forever.

In addition to the medical effort, loaded on the Kearsarge were about 60 engineers. 40 from the Airforce and 20 from the famed Navy Seabees. And while the doctors and nurses are treating patients and changing their lives, the engineers will also be changing lives. The engineering contingent is commanded by Airforce Major Tom Defazio and Navy CW3 David Joiner. What they'll be doing is equally amazing. They'll be building schools and playgrounds at 23 sites in those countries I mentioned.

Right now, on board, they're prefabricating a lot of what they'll do. But in essence what they will do is move into an area for about 2 weeks set up a base camp and then satellite out to the more remote sites. Navy air, to include the heavy lift CH-53E helicopters commanded by LTC Will Bentley, will be helping them move the construction material and equipment to those sites as well.

Once on site, they will build "seahuts", which are standard semi-permanent 16 x 32 plywood structures with a floor and a corrugated roof and wired for lighting. It takes about 210 mandays per hut to build. In many places they'll be building multiple seahuts and joining them. One of those places is Los Altos Columbia, where fire destroyed their school some time ago. During the briefing about the engineering missions, I was shown a picture of a number of very young children there holding a sign in Spanish asking for help in getting a new school. Now they meet wherever they can, so what will happen for them in the next few months will be a God send. They engineers will build 4 seahuts in an "L" shaped configuration which will become the new Los Altos school.

The overall umbrella operation is called Continuing Promise. It is an operation that will continue in various forms in the future. It is a tremendous and praiseworthy effort that I think needs to be given the visibility it richly deserves.

But there is an irony here you can't escape. And it has to do with a warship on a humanitarian mission. On the surface, it doesn't seem to be a fit. But when you dig into it a little you realize that the Kearsarge is a perfect instrument for this sort of work, but not for the reason you might think.

Because she was built to carry United States Marines to war and support them, she has the hospital facilities necessary to treat children and change their lives forever.

Because she was built to carry United States Marines to war and support them, she has the equipment such as Landing Craft and heavy lift helicopters, to move construction materials and equipment to build instead of destroy.

Because she was built to carry United States Marines to war and support them, she provides a platform for humanitarian non-governmental organizations to reach areas in need that they never previously were able to reach.

Because she was built to carry United States Marines to war and support them, she is superbly capable of providing the humanitarian care so many in the developing world so badly need and perhaps, by doing so, she may not have to carry those Marines to war as often as they might otherwise have to go.

That is the hope of Operation Continuing Promise, and that is why it is both an important and worthwhile mission.

Media Matters, but I don't!

Last week was a pleasant enough week, blogging-wise, because I experienced an Instalanche over at Likelihood of Success. Why should you care? Because that brief (not unprecedented) moment of attention resulted in yet another lesson about the way the left sees the role of truth, media and the American way.

I had commented on a story, mentioned by Instapundit, about how pathetically poorly Nancy Pelosi's book was doing. I noted the following:

The sad part for Pelosi is that the practice by which publishers bestow massive donations on their favored politicians via utterly unrecoverable publishing "advances" was barred by the House of Representatives. Therefore she could not get even a fraction of the phenomenal sweetheart advance paid to then Senator-elect Hillary Clinton for her various scribblings -- which, while they were bought by many, still did not come close to earning out the advance paid by a publishing industry supposedly beset by economic crisis.

After Glenn Reynolds picked this up and added it as an "update" to his item, naturally it got a little more attention, and was picked up by the New York Times' Opinionator blog.

A couple of days later, George Soros's Media Matters took matters into its own hands, linking to the piece and huffily insisting that the Hillary Clinton book did, in fact, earn out its advance -- making it the exception that proves the rule, but an exception nonetheless.

Now, here's how the New York Press article I had quoted to support my claim explained its conclusion that, nonetheless, Senator Clinton's book deal was unusually sweet:

Last reports are that Living History sold 1.2 million copies, and bookstores are reporting that sales in the last couple weeks have dropped way off. It seems she could sell a million and a half by year's end--but not much more. There's really no way they could have expected it to, which means that Simon & Schuster effectively altered the ratio of publisher/author earnings for Clinton. Hillary didn't get just 15 percent, the maximum percentage that authors earn in royalties; she got a million to a million and a half more than the 15 percent would have yielded.

This is money that, under the standard ratio, Simon & Schuster would have pocketed. At the median 12.5 percent royalty, under which Clinton earns $3.50 per book, her cut is $5,250,000-and the advance of $8 million represents an overpayment of almost $3 million.

Proceeds from sales of foreign rights and paperback rights have also ratcheted up the book's total earnings, and counted against the advance. Still, it doesn't add up when Living History is compared to another bestseller by a prominent politico that spent weeks on the New York Times best-seller list a few years back (Living History has been on the list for six weeks). This author didn't take an advance at all and instead was paid royalties as the sales of the book went through. He was paid, it was assumed, at the same rate as Hillary-15 percent, though his book was a few dollars cheaper-$24, not $28.

But his total take from the book was $2.5 million, according to a source. This is almost a third of Hillary's eight million. There's no doubt about it; Simon & Schuster took a pay cut on Hillary Clinton.

Still and all, the Press acknowledged that this was a deal that the Simon & Schuster had every legal and moral right to make, and I certainly wouldn't suggest otherwise.

What's cute is how Media Matters gets to this point, and how it deals with its conclusion. Here's an excerpt from the Media Matters piece:

New York Times staff editor Tobin Harshaw, in an August 7 post on The Opinionator blog, uncritically quoted conservative blogger Ron Coleman's assertion that Sen. Hillary Clinton has not "come close to earning out the advance paid by" Simon & Schuster for her 2003 autobiography, Living History. But according to the Times' own reporting, sales of the book have covered Clinton's advance.
And so on. Now, on the right sidebar, there's a section that says, "TAKE ACTION!" and then sets forth the New York Times' contact information. It suggests that readers outraged by this slight to the literary merit of Senator Clinton's pearly pen write directly to Public Editor Clare Hoyt, without explaining why readers don't contact the author of the Opinionator piece, Tobin Harshaw.

That's bad enough, but they also don't suggest contacting the "conservative blogger" himself! That is probably because in the world of Media Matters, the story is that the Times is guilty of political treason -- reporting the "wrong side" of a story on which it should, by right, have been on the "right side." So "TAKE ACTION!" screams Media Matters. Keep fellow travelers in line!

As to the guy who arguably got the story wrong in the first place? Not only is he merely a blogger -- he's a conservative, and not even remotely interested in the truth. Don't bother with him! We're not interested in presenting the whole of a story, or facts contrary to the party line, and we assume he isn't, either. Because for Media Matters, the only reason this stuff matters is to figure out (often at the cost of quite a bit of flop sweat) which side you're on.

Ron Coleman's Likelihood of Success blog experiences occasional moments of mattering a little bit. His intellectual property law blog, LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®, is something else altogether, although not everyone is successful at not confusing the two.

August 11, 2008

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Make sure to check out Conservative Grapevine today, where you'll find links like:

A Big Victory: 27 things I have learned

Dr. Melissa Clouthier: A mean Down's Syndrome grocery bagger?

Holy Taco: 8 people who will ruin your party

Egotastic!: Audrina Patridge bikini pictures

You can check out all those links and more by clicking here. Don't forget to bookmark RWN's companion page, CG! Remember, if you're not reading RWN and CG every day, you're not getting the full story!

PS: If you'd like to submit articles to be linked to Conservative Grapevine, register at CG, and then shoot me an email.

Quote Of The Day: McCain On Why Obama Is Like A Summer Blockbuster

"Taking in my opponent's performances is a little like watching a big summer blockbuster, and an hour in, realizing that all the best scenes were in the trailer you saw last fall." -- John McCain

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Also, there is a new banner that runs at the bottom of every page on RWN. For $125 , you can get that banner, which is not shared, for a month.

Mini-Movie Review: The Dark Knight

Yesterday, I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight, which looks like it's on pace to crack the $500 million dollar mark domestically.

To be honest, I went in wondering if the movie would live up to the hype and for the first 30 minutes of this 2 1/2 hour long flick, things seemed a bit slow.

But from there on out, this wasn't your parents' "Biff," "Boom," "Kaplow," Batman. To the contrary, the last two hours of the movie was violent, intense, and a dark thrill ride piloted by the late, great Heath Ledger who, in his final performance, turned the Joker into one of the greatest villains in cinematic history.

Additionally, for those that paid attention, there was definitely a message in there about the war on terrorism. Even though the Joker was chaotic, violent, and utterly without redeeming qualities, the people of Gotham started to treat the person doing the most to stop him, Batman, as if he were the real problem. Meanwhile, in the process, good people died, morals were tested, and the audience was left with no doubt that even though there were two sides to the fight, there was no moral equivalence between them.

That being said, this wasn't a perfect film. The first 30 minutes were poorly paced, there were some unnecessary scenes throughout the movie, and the fight sequences were very pedestrian. Still, because the Joker was such a great villain and because the movie was so intense, it's still fair to say this is, at a minimum, one of the 5 best super-hero movies of all-time. So, thumbs way up to The Dark Knight.

The Globe: A Bush And Laura Split?

Part of my duty, as a professional blogger, is to read the tabloid stories that most of you are too classy to touch with a 10 ft. pole so that I can let you know whether we have another John Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal or merely the political version of Batboy.

So, when I saw this on the cover of the Globe, I knew I was going to have to step up and buy it.

Bush & Laura Split

Long story short, according to the Globe, Bush is off the wagon and sleeping with Condi, Laura is sick of it, and they're in Splitsville. The Globe says they are already living apart and Laura is buying a home in Dallas.

Is there anything to it?

Well, there are three things that say there isn't.

#1) There are no named sources in the piece.

#2) They post a pic of Bush downing "a cold one" in Germany last year. However, the beer Bush is drinking is non-alcoholic.

#3) They quote Bush as saying, "Laura's over there (in Dallas) trying to buy a house. I like Crawford but, unfortunately, after eight years of sacrifice, I'm apparently no longer the decision maker."

That quote is real; however, Laura doesn't appear to be moving to Dallas solo,

Dallas County may be turning Democratic, but it's about to gain two prominent Republican residents: The Bushes are moving back to town.

First lady Laura Bush was in Dallas on Thursday to introduce a national program designed to expose urban children to nature. Mrs. Bush and students from Williams Preparatory School shook a shrub and examined what fell from it.

First lady Laura Bush confirmed Thursday that she and her husband will return to the area when they leave the White House in January.

"I guess I can announce it in front of the press," Mrs. Bush said at a National Park Foundation event at Williams Preparatory School in Dallas. "President Bush and I will be moving back to Dallas, which is where we lived" before Mr. Bush was elected governor in 1994, she said.

"After 14 years away, we're excited about having this chance to live here again," the first lady said.

It's long been thought likely that the Bushes would come back to the area after his presidency, but Thursday's statement was the most definitive yet that the couple would live in Dallas, where Mr. Bush's presidential library will be built at Southern Methodist University. White House communications director Kevin Sullivan said the couple will split their time between Dallas and their ranch in Crawford.

If Laura were really splitting from W., how likely is it that out of the entire US, she would choose to move to the same city where his presidential library is going to be located?

It doesn't seem likely at all and neither, come to think of it, is this story in the Globe.

The Website Of The Day Is Stop The ACLU

The website of the day is Stop The ACLU.

 


 

6 Big Questions About The Edwards Affair

1) Did the affair begin before Hunter began working with the campaign? If nothing was going on, why did Edwards pay a novice $114,000 to shoot a handful of videos for his campaign?

2) If Edwards' loyalist Andrew Young is really the father of Rielle Hunter's baby, why did his wife consent to having Hunter living under the same roof?

3) Can anyone seriously believe that John Edwards' supporter Fred Baron was paying off Rielle Hunter without his knowledge?

4) Did Elizabeth Edwards really know about the affair back in 2006 or is that just a cover story concocted after the fact? If she did know about the affair, why did she allow Rielle to remain on with the campaign after finding out Hunter had been copulating with her husband?

5) If John Edwards didn't love Rielle Hunter, the baby isn't his, and the affair has been over since 2006, what was he doing meeting in a hotel with her?

6) Why did Rielle Hunter decide not to take a paternity test when establishing who the "baby daddy" was could be worth an enormous sum in child support? Could it be because she was paid a considerable sum of money NOT to take a paternity test that would show he is the father? Furthermore, if John Edwards really believes the baby isn't his, why isn't he demanding a paternity test to put the matter to bed, once and for all?

PS: I do have a working theory about why Edwards came forward with an admission of the affair that opened up all these cans of worms. There's no way to know for sure whether it's right, but it would explain what happened:

ABC had the goods on Edwards and was going to do a damaging piece on the affair. ABC then came to Edwards and gave him an opportunity to do an exclusive interview rather than breaking the story.

Edwards took that opportunity, but felt compelled to lie about a number of things because Elizabeth may not have known the whole truth. So, he either had to go public with a story full of holes or admit to his wife that he was still cheating on her with the woman who'd had his love child.

An Interview With Ron Coleman About Legal Issues For Bloggers And Blog Readers

Last week, I did a phone interview with my RWN co-blogger, Ron Coleman of Likelihood of Confusion and Likelihood of Success. Ron is one the premier internet lawyers out there and has represented numerous bloggers, myself included, in court and/or against legal bullying. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

What's the most common mistake you see bloggers making? What are you seeing people do that could get them sued?

Well, it's fair to say that well over 90% of bloggers are not risking any legal trouble. Most people write their original thoughts, they make legitimate links, and even things like hotlinking graphics, even aside from the copyright issue, are probably not actionable. It's interesting to think about whether if you knocked out someone's website with a hotlink to a graphic, he could come after you on a trespassing theory...

But, if there is any single problem that seems to consistently be out there, it's copyright infringement regarding the use of photographs from news services.

Well, let's talk a little bit about that. One of the toughest areas for bloggers to make a determination about, because it's kind of nebulous in the law, is fair use. Can you give us a quick guideline to follow? How can bloggers steer clear of trouble in the copyright arena?

Fair use is a great doctrine in copyright law, but it's a little hard to apply on an as-you-go basis, especially in regard to photographs. The rule of thumb on all fair use is probably at what one point are you replacing the need for readers to view the original work by providing yours?

For example, the Associated Press' view regarding text is that the headline and the lead paragraph of every story may not be quoted exactly as written in a blogger's story or anywhere else because that is what they sell.

Now, without acknowledging that they are right or wrong about that, it's an internally consistent position. As a general rule, you look at the percentage of work used, but what the AP is saying is in this case -- almost without regard for the rest of the story that's used -- people who are scanning a site that has paid for the Associated Press feed are looking at the headline and the first paragraph. That's the value.

Beyond that kind of special case, you generally want to look at the percentage used and whether, in order to get the full value of the original work, you still need to go to the original or not.

With photos, it's much more complex. I think you can make a rule of thumb regarding photographs that there is usually not a fair use basis to use anything like a recent new picture from a newspaper or some other site on your blog. All things being equal and keeping in mind that there are exceptions upon exceptions, if in doubt, when it comes to pictures, you should not display it on your website.

Now many people say things online that they would never say to another person in the real world. They slander them, make threats, etc. Just to clarify, is there a meaningful legal difference between saying that sort of thing online and saying it in the "real world?"

The real world historically has been divided into two largely conceptual spheres. ...There is a difference between what you say orally and what you say in writing. What the internet has done is given us a hybrid where we act as if we are speaking orally, but we make our comments in writing. So, technically speaking, the law will treat your written comments in the same way it would treat other written comments in a book, newspaper, magazine, or a letter.

On the other hand, a court considering the defamatory effect of internet statements will inevitably consider the question of how seriously do people take comments in the comments thread of a blog? In other words, the test for defamation doesn't change, but the measure of damage would certainly be considered in the context of how authoritative and above the fold a statement is as compared to say, comment #73 in a blog that isn't (particularly well read).

...I am frequently approached with requests to deal with internet defamation situations and overwhelmingly, my advice is...

...Let me guess -- that they would be better off not (suing) because it would just draw more attention to it.

Absolutely, absolutely it draws attention on so many levels and it also gives the defamer the opportunity to put you on trial for the act that you claim never took place because the fundamental question in a defamation action is whether the statement that was made about you is true. So, even if it isn't technically true, it may be damaging enough and as you say, meanwhile inevitably more attention is drawn to the cure than to the damage. It almost never pays.

And people online almost always side with the person being sued.

...I think that it is the case that on the internet, there is a punky attitude that disguises itself as sort of an electronic libertarianism that is unreasonably skewed towards assuming that information wants to be free or the best antidote to a false statement is a corrective statement. I've actually written at length on this topic. Although it's true that defamation on the internet is best ignored, on the other hand, unlike all previous forms of publishing in the history of mankind, it is easier to create more damage, faster, and with fewer consequences on the internet than it ever has been before and American defamation law in particular is probably unreasonably slanted in favor of a very strong presumption against permitting defamation claims to succeed based on what the world looked like 20 years ago....

An issue that has come up more than a few times relates to the privateness of email. If someone reveals the contents of email he receives from you, whether solicited or not, do you have legal recourse?

I'm not aware of any case that says releasing someone's email is actionable. So, probably not.

So, if you send an email, you should be prepared for it to go public, right?

...There's a strong argument for not using your work email for any online playing.

Oh yeah, I've seen lots of disasters happen related to that.

Yeah, you don't want to drag your employer or your employment relationship onto the internet where you have decided to be a troll or have decided to take a controversial stand on a controversial issue.

As a regular person on the internet, what sort of privacy rights do you have?

It depends on where you are located. I can tell you, for example, that in Europe, they have a fetish about privacy.

It also depends, for example, what you're doing. For example, registering for a website has the effect of creating a little law between you and the people who took your registration information. So, you have rights against them that you wouldn't necessarily have with strangers.

The fact is that in the United States, privacy is very, very narrowly circumscribed. ...To a large extent, your problems on the internet involving privacy are not going to be solved in the court. They are just not built for that.

Ron, I really appreciate your time.

The Bear Resurgent

The Russian invasion of Georgia is more than just a military action, it is a statement to the world that Russia is back and seeking to regain its superpower status.

In a carefully chosen military action, it is essentially thumbing its nose at the West and especially NATO.

I say carefully chosen because unlike the Ukraine, for instance, there is very little if anything we can do of any immediacy to help Georgia right now. Mounting any sort of military operation would be extremely difficult without the ability to support them from, say Turkey or Armenia if we're talking about ground and airforces. Getting the permission to do that is very unlikely.

That leaves the sea and the same sorts of difficulties. Again, permission to pushing a fleet through narrows of the Dardanelles is not likely. It would also be of limited military value. And then we'd face a Russian Black Sea fleet.

Rumors of an amphibious landing on the western coast of Georgia seem unlikely. It doesn't appear an operation like that will be necessary. Russian troops have pushed through South Ossetia into the Georgian town of Gori, effectively cutting the country in half. Tblisi is isolated to the east. The other breakaway province of Abkhazia, in NW Georgia, is also effectively in Russian hands.

While Georgia pretty much brought this about by invading South Ossetia Friday, it is obvious by the quick reaction that Russia anticipated the move and was more than prepared to counter it. And their counter-attack was an overwhelming attack with a purpose. It is also obvious that the plan involved going beyond what most observers consider to be the logical stopping point if the purpose was only to repel the Georgian attack into South Ossetia.

Russia, it would seem, is making a statement. One part of the statement has to do with NATO and the reality, not the promise, of the protection it does offer to those former Warsaw Pact nations (and new nations which were formed when the USSR disintegrated). Or said another way, it is demonstrating what NATO is and isn't willing to go to war over - and it seems Russia has a very good handle on that. NATO isn't going to go to war over Georgia. Nor is the US.

Of course that's not what Georgia expected.

As a Russian jet bombed fields around his village, Djimali Avago, a Georgian farmer, asked me: "Why won't America and Nato help us? If they won't help us now, why did we help them in Iraq?"

A similar sense of betrayal coursed through the conversations of many Georgians here yesterday as their troops retreated under shellfire and the Russian Army pressed forward to take full control of South Ossetia.

Of course the expectations of Georgians are pretty unrealistic. A) it was Georgia who started the conflict - NATO is a defensive organization which is under no obligation to back aggression by one of its members (and Georgia isn't yet a member). B) it is obvious Georgia completely miscalculated the Russian response. And C) by the time NATO or the US could actually respond in force, the conflict will be over.

So back to Russia, if part of their action is to demonstrate the impotence of NATO to the new nations formed out of the old USSR, what else is it trying to say?

I think it is saying it is no longer the shambling, bumbling, toothless bear of the recent past. It is demonstrating in a very visible way that it can and will again project power, at least militarily, within its region and do it both swiftly and decisively. If you don't think the Ukraine and other bordering nations aren't paying attention, you're wrong. This will, at a minimum, indeed change the balance of power within the region. While Russia is nowhere near the power it once was, it is no longer an impotent state either, and it has just served warning that it will no longer stand idly by and allow what it considers to be assaults on its sovereignty to go unanswered.

How does that relate to us and what is going on in Georgia? Well, regardless of how resurgent the Russian military is, it still can't stand up to ours and they know it. So they will pick their battles carefully until they feel they're capable of doing so (if necessary). Georgia is perfect example of that. They know perfectly well that neither NATO or the US can really do much, militarily, to aid the Georgians. Russia has a 1.1 million man military, Georgia has about 37,000. The time and basing factors preclude any meaningful intervention on our part. About all we can do is put intense diplomatic pressure on them to stop the invasion and withdraw.

Endgame? Most likely they "get" South Ossetia and perhaps Abkhazia out of the deal. I say "get" meaning they will exercise control over what will become "autonomous regions."

A bit of payback over Kosovo, whose independence the Russians opposed. Georgia will regain its sovereignty but at the price of those two areas and with the understanding that Russia holds the mortgage on it and will foreclose at the slightest provocation and there isn't much the West or NATO is willing or able to do about it.

Crossposted at QandO.

WSJ: "As I Write This Russia Is Waging War On My Country"--UPDATE

Update: And once again, McQ beats me to the punch. Eh, well, this is an important story and my take is a bit different. For what it's worth, I'm not quite sure that Russia plans to stop and let Georgia remain sovereign at all. As of this writing, they look to be pushing into central Georgia. In some respects, the point is moot. Georgia will effectively be helpless before Russia and a more willing partner. It's difficult to be independent with a noose around the neck.

***********

Russia's ongoing assault on Georgia bodes ill for Europe and the world. I do believe that history will show this action to be a seminal moment in the shift in world power. Russia herself is not all that strong, but if she controls Europe, she doesn't have to be strong, just strong enough. Mikheil Saakashvili writes in the Wall Street Journal today:

Ostensibly, this war is about an unresolved separatist conflict. Yet in reality, it is a war about the independence and the future of Georgia. And above all, it is a war over the kind of Europe our children will live in. Let us be frank: This conflict is about the future of freedom in Europe.

No country of the former Soviet Union has made more progress toward consolidating democracy, eradicating corruption and building an independent foreign policy than Georgia. This is precisely what Russia seeks to crush.

The first step in warfare is economic. With this military action against Georgia, Russia wages economic war on Europe. The analogies to Tibet extend only to an imperialistic nation consuming an independent neighbor. Russia's action is entirely different. Putin wants to control the region and Europe sits and watches while he is beginning to do just that.

More from Tigerhawk about the absent anti-war movement.

And, this should encourage you guys, McCain actually saw this coming. Well, so did I, but I don't think this makes me a foreign policy genius It might make Obama a dummy for not seeing it. I'm being generous here.

Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com

Latest Leftist Found in Obama's Closet: George Clooney

Barack Obama's army of 300 foreign policy advisors includes at least one familiar face: the smug visage of perpetually smirking ultra-left movie star George Clooney.

Lately Loony's Hollyweird career has suffered a slight setback, as he's devoted his energies to making pretentious propaganda films that are only watched by masochistic moonbats out of ideological loyalty, in which Americans are always the villains, even in WWII. Amusingly, he recently blew $85,000 on a guffaw-inducing moonbatmobile so as to make a pageant of his environmental piousness.

Quotes that offer some insight into Obama's friend and advisor can be found on Celiberal.

Clooney as a judge of other men:

Let's face it: Bush is just dim.

Clooney as a humanitarian and defender of the Second Amendment:

Charlton Heston announced again today that he is suffering from Alzheimer's. [...] I don't care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association; he deserves whatever anyone says about him.

Clooney on combating terrorism:

I just want someone smart to stand up and shout, "Bullsh*t!" They tell us we're going to war and no one's saying "Bullsh*t" loud enough. And the language! Listen to the language! "Evil." "Evil"? "Nexus of evil"? "Evil-doer"? That's my favorite, "Evil-doer"!

Clooney the historian:

What did Bush do on 9/11? He ran away and hid. Even Reagan knew more about leadership than that, and he was as bad a symbol of America as I can think of, off-hand. But at least he's been in enough cowboy movies to know he had to come out and stand on top of the rubble and be seen shaking his fist or something.

Clooney's habit of poking his nose where it does not belong and acting like a liberal jackass is so pronounced that the UN's Ban Ki-Moonbat named him a "Messenger of Peace," and last year Time magazine listed him as one of the 100 people it wishes were most influential.

If the sky falls and the tasteless joke of Barack Obama's candidacy becomes the Dadaist nightmare of an Obama Administration, Clooney really will be influential. According to the Daily Mail:

George Clooney once famously declared he could never run for public office because he'd "slept with too many women, done too many drugs and been to too many parties."

But now the Hollywood heart-throb has entered the political arena at
the highest level — by becoming an unofficial adviser to US Presidential front-runner Barack Obama. […]

Sources say the actor has tried to hide the pair's friendship for fear his Left-wing views and playboy image would hurt the Presidential hopeful's bid for the White House.

Obama trying to hide his association with an anti-American screwball because of his extreme left-wing views? I could swear I've heard that somewhere before…

Loony is reportedly in constant contact with Obama, via emails, text messages, and twice weekly phone calls. Unsurprisingly, in light of his admitted terrorist sympathies, he is pushing the clueless Obama to side with Palestinians against our ally Israel. He also wants us to surrender unconditionally to the terrorists our troops have been fighting in Iraq.

It looks like John Edwards (aka, Love Lips) is out as Attorney General. But we might still get our share of narcissistic cheese with Clooney as Secretary of State.

george-clooney_barack-obama.jpg
A candidacy getting more alarming by the hour.

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin; on a tip from Burning Hot. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

Want To Succeed? Have Patience & Get To Work

Excellent article by Seth Godin about what it takes to succeed on the internet and everywhere:

The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that's how long it's going to take, guys.

Here's another thing: it's not just patience. It's hard work. One thing I've noticed following people on Twitter is that some people are just working All The Time. Most don't consider it "work". It's their love and they've parlayed it into a job or career, but they're working all the same. Their job gives their lives meaning and mission. In fact, it's likely that their work is their mission.

Lots of smart people have lots of smart ideas that never see the light of day because they never take the risk to work. And it's a daily grind, oftentimes, or can be. And sometimes, the work that you find important other people think is stupid or useless. Conversely, some throw away efforts surprise you because it's well-received. Go figure. Either way, if the work wasn't done and the risk taken, nothing would have been accomplished.

So go to work and hang in there. Success will follow.

Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com

Dems Go After Convicted Felon Vote

Democrats have found a rich new vein for mining votes: convicted felons.

In Alabama, Al Sharpton's younger brother, the Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, will take his "Prodigal Son" ministry into state prisons with voter-registration cards for the first time. The American Civil Liberties Union recently filed suit there and in Tennessee to make it possible for an even larger class of felons to register. In Ohio, the NAACP will hold a voter-registration day at the Justice Center in downtown Cleveland this month to register "people caught up in the criminal justice system," a local official said. In California, a team will stand in front of jails on Aug. 16 to register people visiting prisoners and encourage them to take registration cards to their incarcerated friends or family members, some of whom can legally vote.

In Florida, RINO Governor Charlie Crist recently pushed through a change that made 115,000 felons eligible to vote. The campaign to get them registered is being led by Obamunist civil rights lawyer Reggie Mitchell, who crows:

The majority of people to get their rights restored are Democrats, and if we get them registered, [we] might overtake the state.

Nice work, Crist. At least this might keep you from getting reelected.

That left-wing outfits assume the overwhelming majority of convicted felons would vote Democrat tells you all you need to know about the Party of Decline.

charlie_crist.jpg
Charlie Crist, clueless RINO.

On a tip from Code3. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

August 12, 2008

Russia's Conquering Georgia: Why Does The Left Always Side With The Abusive Husband?

Well, it only took a day or two. I'm surprised how long it took, actually. Fred Kaplan does an excellent job, though, of bringing the irrational rage and absolute venom of the Left towards President Bush to the fore:

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

You know, this analysis deserves an analogy. So, you're a woman married to an abusive jerk. You can't leave. Finally, you have a chance, you divorce. You change your life, but you can't move. You have kids together with the jerk, so you have to stay around. One of the kids, prefers abusive dad. You know what's best, but what can you do? You try to assert yourself. The ex, though, he's no nicer. It pisses him off that you dare defend yourself. He brings his gun over and he shoots you. Attempts to kill you, for having the nerve to defy him. And oh, by the way, he will show the others around where it's at, too. He's above the law, because he's crazy and everyone is afraid of him.

Most friends are outraged at this jerk's actions. He's wrong. He's abusive. He's vicious. But some people go after the woman for daring to believe she could be independent and assert herself. She should have known better. She should never have provoked him. Stupid woman. She deserves what she got. And furthermore, she's a complete idiot for listening to anyone who believed she could be independent.

Why does the Left always, always take the side of the abusive spouse? While they should be protecting the rights of the woman to wear what she wants, screw who she wants, the Left always blames the victim when it comes to freedom and sides with the aggressive, oppressive, dictatorial jerk. Always.

The most important thing Kaplan says, though, is this:

In the long term, the best way to take Russia down a notch (along with Iran, Venezuela, and other hostile powers overflowing with oil money) is to pursue policies and fund technologies that slash the demand for oil. The Georgia crisis should make clear, if it isn't already, that this is a matter of hard-headed national security.

How about blaming Clinton for vetoing the drilling ten years ago? Oil dependence has given these world thugs power they don't deserve. Slash demand? How about increase our supply? Wait. Wait. America is wrong. Always. Wrong. Everything is America's fault.

Cross-posted at MelissaClouthier.com

Combatting Myths About Offshore Drilling By Betsy Newmark

The Washington Post debunks the myths about drilling propagated in the latest anti-drilling ad put out by the the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But there are three "truths" masquerading as fact among drilling opponents that need to be challenged:

Drilling is pointless because the United States has only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. This is a misleading because it refers only to known oil reserves. According to the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service (MMS), while there are an estimated 18 billion barrels of oil in the off-limits portions of the OCS, those estimates were made using old data from now-outdated seismic equipment. In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, the data were collected before Congress imposed a moratorium on offshore drilling in 1981. In 1987, the MMS estimated that there were 9 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. By 2006, after major advances in seismic technology and deepwater drilling techniques, the MMS resource estimate for that area had ballooned to 45 billion barrels. In short, there could be much more oil under the sea than previously known. The demand for energy is going up, not down. And for a long time, even as alternative sources of energy are developed, more oil will be needed.

The oil companies aren't using the leases they already have. According to the MMS, there were 7,457 active leases as of June 8. Of those, only 1,877 were classified as "producing." As we pointed out in a previous editorial, the five leases that have made up the Shell Perdido project off Galveston since 1996 are not classified as producing. Only when it starts pumping the equivalent of an estimated 130,000 barrels of oil a day at the end of the decade will it be deemed "active." Since 1996, Shell has paid rent on the leases; filed and had approved numerous reports with the MMS, including an environmentally sensitive resource development plan and an oil spill recovery plan that is subject to unannounced practice runs by the MMS; drilled several wells to explore the area at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars; and started constructing the necessary infrastructure to bring the oil to market. The notion that oil companies are just sitting on oil leases is a myth. With oil prices still above $100 a barrel, that charge never made sense.

Drilling is environmentally dangerous. Opposition to offshore drilling goes back to 1969, when 80,000 barrels of oil from an offshore oil well blowout washed up on the beaches of Santa Barbara. In 1971, the Interior Department instituted a host of reporting requirements (such as the resource development and oil spill recovery plans mentioned above) and stringent safety measures. Chief among them is a requirement for each well to have an automatic shut-off valve beneath the ocean floor that can also be operated manually. According to the MMS, between 1993 and 2007, there were 651 spills of all sizes at OCS facilities (in federal waters three miles or more offshore) that released 47,800 barrels of oil. With 7.5 billion barrels of oil produced in that time, that equates to 1 barrel of oil spilled per 156,900 barrels produced. That's not to minimize the danger. But no form of energy is perfect or without trade-offs. Besides, if it is acceptable to drill in the Caspian Sea and in developing countries such as Nigeria where environmental concerns are equally important, it's hard to explain why the United States should rule out drilling off its own coasts.

The Post repeats the argument that drilling now won't pay off for a decade. They're ignoring basic economics about how the market would react to such a change in American policy. The Post is correct that we need a comprehensive plan that couples drilling with expanded research in alternative sources of energy as well as nuclear energy.

This content was used with the permission of Betsy Newmark.

Conservative Grapevine Promo

Make sure to check out Conservative Grapevine today, where you'll find links like:

Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Seven Reasons Democrats Have Been Stupid About Obama

Cracked: The 5 most ridiculously unjust religious afterlives

The Corner: 25 more hints you're not voting for Obama

Popoholic: Kate Bosworth bikini pics

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US Immigration Policy. Now With More AIDS

One of the biggest problems with our government today is there are so many people, who want to do so many things that defy all common sense, that incredibly stupid ideas can become law without ever hitting the public's radar. For example,

After more than two decades on the books, a little-known yet strictly enforced federal law barring foreigners with HIV or AIDS from entering the country is on its way out.

Tucked in a bill pledging $48 billion to combat the disease, signed into law by President Bush last week, was language stripping the provision from federal immigration law.

But that change didn't fully lift the entry ban on visitors with HIV or AIDS, which applies whether they're on tourist jaunts or seeking longer stays. The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services still needs to delete HIV from the agency's list of "communicable diseases of public health significance," which includes tuberculosis, gonorrhea and leprosy.

An HHS spokeswoman declined to comment, noting administrators are still reviewing the new law. An April report from the Congressional Budget Office said that, based on information from HHS' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV will be dropped from the list and new regulations will be in place in two years.

Both immigrant and HIV awareness advocates, however, say the toughest hurdle has been cleared, that the lifting of the immigration provision has been a long time coming -- politics finally catching up with medical knowledge.

"Today everyone knows that you can't get AIDS from sitting next to someone on an airplane or sharing a bathroom -- American policy should reflect this," said Victoria Neilson, legal director of Immigration Equality, a New York-based advocacy group that has led a years-long campaign against the ban.

In San Antonio, people in the HIV/AIDS community welcomed the new law, but noted that plenty of people here had already circumvented the travel ban, since the area has been a long-standing destination for unauthorized immigrants.

Jan Patterson, an infectious disease specialist in San Antonio, agreed that the ban has no scientific underpinning.

When HIV first surfaced, researchers didn't know how it was transmitted, but it has long been widely known that HIV is not easily contracted and that even people with full-blown AIDS can live for a long time, said Patterson, who has taught for 15 years at the University of Texas Health Science Center.

Let me tell you what more immigrants with AIDS coming to America means: it means more Americans getting AIDS from them and more American tax dollars being used to treat them.

Yes, it is correct that nobody is going to get AIDS from sitting beside of someone who has it in an airplane, but they can unknowingly get it from them by having sex with them or sharing a needle -- and just wait, because eventually, some immigrant with AIDS will get into the gay scene in San Francisco or hook up with a bunch of heroin addicts in Berkeley and they'll end up being the source of hundreds of infections. Then, the media will report it -- or maybe they won't, remember John Edwards -- and then what? What do you say to the families of the people who get AIDS from an immigrant because of this policy? Sorry your daughter has a death sentence hanging over her head, but we didn't want to hurt the feelings of Brazilians with AIDS?

The problem here is that the politicians have gotten so caught up in political correctness and have forgotten the very first rule of immigrant policy: that is, the purpose of allowing immigrants into the United States in the first place is to benefit the people who are already here.

We Can't Let Russia Get Away With It

I've deliberately refrained from commenting on Russia's assault on Georgia in the last few days because it seemed difficult to add anything beyond the obvious...

* Russia engineered this entire conflict and was waging a war of aggression against a small, democratic state and ally of the US in hopes of intimidating them and the whole region.

* Georgia is not a member of NATO and was therefore, not entitled to any military support from the West during this attack.

* This should prove once again, without a shadow of a doubt, how hapless the United Nations is. Not only did it do nothing of significance during the crisis, one of the primary bad actors on the world scene and the villain in this case, Russia, sits on the UN Security Council.

* We shouldn't let Russia get away with this.

Towards that last bullet point, National Review has some excellent suggestions about how the West should respond to Russia's provocation (which thankfully may be drawing to a close),

In the long term, however, America and its allies must demonstrate that Russia has lost more than it gained from this conflict. One first step must be for the U.S. to agree with its NATO allies to confirm an offer of NATO membership for both Georgia and Ukraine. Poland, the Baltic states, and other central European countries are already calling for an emergency NATO summit that might issue such a declaration. Only Germany seems to stand in the way of such a decision -- and the Germans should be told firmly that their opposition to Georgia membership earlier this year encouraged the siloviki to mount this attack. Time for them to forget Rapallo once and for all, and join the rest of the West in resisting the re-emergence of the USSR.

Second, we should ask Poland and the Czech Republic to hold any necessary referendums on installing a missile defense system to be held at once -- and campaign on the argument that Russia has just shown that it cannot be trusted to be a good international neighbor. Such a victory would lose the Kremlin far more than it gained in the Caucasus.

Third, once the fighting has definitively stopped, the U.S. should offer a generous rebuilding program in Georgia -- to be carried out, in part, by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That is one piece of social work that the Pentagon should relish.

It's now the West, not Russia, that is under the spotlight.

Russia has just used its military to intimidate a small democratic state on their borders. Unless we make them pay a price for it, other nations will learn the wrong lesson from our fecklessness, and we will see more of this same behavior in the future from Russia and from other nations.

Excerpt Of The Day: An October Surprise For Obama

"In October, Obama's former pastor, Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama's blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate. How Obama handles that moment may determine whether he becomes the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." -- New York Mag

Wright is crawling back out from under the bus and delivering a little payback to Barry O. If you're a Republican, you have got to love it!

The HuffPo Astrology Guide For This Week

Arianna Huffington's massive blog The Huffington Post is, I have to admit, getting better and better. Granted, the blog posts are still generally left-wing Koo-koo-ka-crap, but the page does break some news and occasionally has some intriguing off-the-wall posts.

In fact, I think it's fair to say that the HuffPo is now almost as generally entertaining on the whole as Wonkette was back when Ana Marie Cox was running it. Granted, it takes about 100 people to produce as much entertaining material as the real Wonkette did, but they still deserve a smidgen of credit. After all, how much genuinely good material does the Daily Kos put out on a regular basis?

Still, Arianna's experimentation has produced a few real clunkers. For example, they actually have an astronomy blogger who's actually writing dreck like this from "astrologer Phyllis F. Mitz,"

Dear Phyllis,

Life is so intense! Is there anything important happening astrologically this week?

-Marcy NYC

Phyllis says:

Yep. Loads of strong influences are making many people feel a bit shook up.

Some of this intensity is signaled by the August 16th eclipse. It's bringing issues to a head, and in some mighty surprising ways!



Oh well, there you go.

Maybe that was what caused Putin to invade Georgia -- the eclipse. Can we get Democratic blogger Jerome Armstrong AKA Astrologer Jerome in for a 2nd opinion on this?

PS: Yes, I am saying astrology is utterly and completely baseless tripe that has nothing more to it than reading chicken entrails.

McCain's Attack Ad Strategery: Where The White Women At?

The McCain campaign has put out another ad that hits the same themes as the now famous "Celebrity" and "The One" ads,

Hilariously, Jake Tapper over at ABC is cranky because so many white women are featured in the video,

How many young white women professing adoration for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, can you count in this anti-Obama web video that the campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, was sending out yesterday?

One...two...three...four...sure are a lot of young white women in this thing....

Why do you think they put so many young white women professing their love for Obama in what is clearly an anti-Obama video? What would possibly be negative about young white women liking Sen. Obama?

I can explain it, Jake. It's the same stategery that Mike Huckabee's campaign used when they put out his much discussed cross video.

You see, the only people who think it's racist to have white women in an ad with Obama are liberals, who think all conservatives are racist anyway -- while everybody else thinks their complaints are silly. Heck, even Obama must think those complaints are silly because he has had white women in his own ads numerous times.

So, why does McCain put them in there anyway, if libs like Jake Tapper are going to freak out over it? Duh -- because he WANTS THEM TO FREAK OUT OVER IT.

When they freak out, it creates controversy. Controversy creates views of McCain's YouTube videos which hit Obama on the issues -- taxes, for example -- and also hammer home the meta-meme that Obama is a substanceless puffball who isn't qualified to be President of the United States.

In other words, the McCain campaign isn't worried about offending liberals with these ads -- to the contrary, they're counting on it.

Seldom do I use the words "brilliant campaign strategy" and "John McCain" in the same sentence, but he deserves the compliment on these ads.

PS: Jake? Keep it up and there may be a fruit basket in it from the McCain campaign when this thing is all over.

Check Out The RWN Forum

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