:: August ::
Palin: A Rough Record
[time] : John McCain was clear about why he picked half-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. "I found someone with an outstanding reputation for standing up to special interests and entrenched bureaucracies," he said in introducing her in Dayton, Ohio, on Friday. Palin was someone, he noted, "who reached across the aisle and asked Republicans, Democrats and independents to serve in government."
It is a powerful reinforcement of McCain's own political brand: tough, reform-minded, willing to break with his own party for the right cause. And it's true that her high-profile crusade against corruption and complacency in her own state party over the past few years has made Palin the Frank Serpico of Alaska politics: she publicly ratted out her state party chairman; whupped the good old boys' network, as she likes to put it, in a gubernatorial primary; and fought a general election in which the scandal-stained state GOP didn't lift a finger on her behalf. She won only because she had the enthusiastic backing of independents and grass-roots activists.
But in the first major race of her career — the 1996 campaign for mayor of her hometown, Wasilla — Palin was a far more conventional politician. In fact, according to some who were involved in that fight, Palin was a highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.
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March to GOP Convention Turns Violent
[yahoo] : Protesters attacked delegates, smashed windows, punctured car tires and threw bottles Monday, a violent counterpoint to an otherwise peaceful anti-war march at the Republican National Convention. Police wielding pepper spray arrested at least 56 people.
The trouble happened not far from the Xcel Energy Center convention site, and many of those involved in the more violent protest were clad in black and identified themselves to reporters as anarchists. They wrought havoc by damaging property and setting at least one fire. Most of the trouble was in pockets of a neighborhood near downtown, several blocks from where the convention was taking place.
Buckets of Urine, Slingshots, Anit-bus Weapons Seized From RNC Protesters
[twincities] Ramsey County sheriff's deputies found weapons and devices to disable buses - among other items - in searches in the Twin Cities last night and today.
The prime minister will declare that, after having met with all three opposition leaders over the last few days, he no longer has the confidence of Parliament, the sources said. As per tradition, it will then be up to Jean to decide whether to dissolve Parliament and set the election date.
Alaska Governor : VP Selection
[latimes] : Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is as complex as the place she calls home. Plucked from near-political obscurity to become Sen. John McCain's running mate, Palin either has pitch-perfect political instincts or has benefited from a spectacular run of luck that has landed her in the ultimate right place at the right time.
It is easy to see why McCain was drawn to her; their political resumes have much in common. The 44-year-old Republican has sold herself as a political maverick willing to buck her party over principle, an ethics reformer who quit a lucrative job rather than play ball with the old boys' network and a pragmatist who will reach across the aisle to get her agenda enacted. Like McCain, she has at times been a black sheep in her own party. Also like McCain, she has been accused of overstepping ethical bounds on occasion.
"The landscape up here is littered with people who have underestimated her," said Eric Croft, a Democratic former state representative who enlisted her help when he investigated a Republican oil commissioner for ethical breaches. "Maybe she is not ready for prime time, or maybe she is going to litter the national landscape with people who have underestimated her."
[nypost] [...] But Palin is McCain's kind of governor. She took on the corrupt establishment of the Republican hierarchy in Alaska and defeated incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in a GOP primary. The Murkowski family and the family of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens have run the state for decades. Frank served as senator and then gave it up to run for governor. And into the Senate seat slid his daughter Lisa Murkowski, whom Alaska voters dutifully elected. To give you a gauge of how hard it was for Sarah to beat Murkowski for governor in a Republican primary, Stevens has just won his primary for re-election even though he is under indictment!
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Tale of The Tape
As seems often neglected, the two people that are being oddly compared and presented by some as opponents, are not actually up for the same position. Yes, yes, we understand JMc. just had his birthday. Hope he enjoyed it. [redstate]
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Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire
[wsj] : Even as Barack Obama gave his soaring speech Thursday night, his campaign was playing hardball with its critics.
Team Obama has launched an offensive against WGN, the Chicago Tribune's radio station, for interviewing Stanley Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz is a conservative writer who this week forced the University of Illinois to finally open its records on Sen. Obama's association with William Ayers, the unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist.
An Obama campaign email to supporters called Mr. Kurtz a "slimy character assassin" whose "divisive, destructive ranting" should be confronted. WGN producer Zack Christenson says the outpouring of negative calls and emails is "unprecedented." He also notes that it is curious -- because "we wanted the Obama campaign's take" on Mr. Kurtz's findings, but the campaign declined to put anyone on air.
Separately, Mr. Obama's lawyers have also demanded that the Justice Department prosecute an organization called the American Issues Project for running an ad about ties between their candidate and Mr. Ayers.
Obama aides believe John Kerry lost in 2004 because he failed to respond to the "Swift Boat" ads attacking him, and they are lashing out. Sometimes the Obama objections have merit, as when they exposed errors in Jerome Corsi's sensationalized Obama biography. But sometimes they are designed to shut down legitimate questions. "They're terrified of people poking around Obama's life," one reporter told Gabriel Sherman at the New Republic. "The whole Obama narrative is built around the narrative that Obama and [campaign strategist] David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it's not entirely true." The stakes are high. If the full story of Mr. Obama's relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright had been revealed before the Iowa caucus, he wouldn't have won.
Aides claim Mr. Obama "has taken voluntary transparency steps" that allow "his constituents, the media and his political opponents to fully examine him." In reality, anyone questioning the approved story line is liable to be ignored, misled or even bullied. This isn't what reporters expected when Mr. Obama began campaigning for a "new politics" that would bring honesty and openness to government.
Walking the rows of media outlets at the Denver convention, I had no trouble finding reporters who complained the campaign was secretive and evasive. Ben Smith of Politico.com1 has written about Team Obama's "pattern of rarely volunteering information or documents, even when relatively innocuous." Politico asked months ago if Mr. Obama had ever written anything for the Harvard Law Review as a student. The Obama campaign responded narrowly, with a Clintonesque statement that "as the president of the Law Review, Obama didn't write articles, he edited and reviewed them." This month it turned out Mr. Obama had written an article -- but it was published a month before he became president.
Chasing the rest of Mr. Obama's paper trail is often an exercise in frustration. Mr. Obama says his state senate records "could have been thrown out" and he didn't keep a schedule in office. No one appears to have kept a copy of his application for the Illinois Bar. He has released only a single page of medical records, versus 1,000 pages for John McCain.
Then there's the house that Mr. Obama bought in 2005 in cooperation with Tony Rezko, his friend and campaign fund-raiser -- a move the candidate concedes was "boneheaded." Rezko was convicted in June of 16 counts of corruption. (Mr. Obama was not implicated in Rezko's crimes.)
Rezko's trial raised a host of questions. Was Mr. Obama able to save $300,000 on the asking price of his house because Rezko's wife paid full price for the adjoining lot? How did Mrs. Rezko make a $125,000 down payment and obtain a $500,000 mortgage when financial records shown at the Rezko trial indicate she had a salary of only $37,000 and assets of $35,000? Records show her husband also had few assets at the time.
Last April, the London Times revealed that Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born billionaire living in London, had loaned Mr. Rezko $3.5 million three weeks before the day the sale of the house and lot closed in June 2005. Mr. Auchi's office notes he was a business partner of Rezko but says he had "no involvement in or knowledge of" the property sale. But in April 2004 he did attend a dinner party in his honor at Rezko's Chicago home. Mr. Obama also attended, and according to one guest, toasted Mr. Auchi. Later that year, Mr. Auchi came under criminal investigation as part of a U.S. probe of the corrupt issuance of cell-phone licenses in Iraq.
In May 2004, the Pentagon's inspector general's office cited "significant and credible evidence" of involvement by Mr. Auchi's companies in the Oil for Food scandal, and in illicit smuggling of weapons to Saddam Hussein's regime. Because of the criminal probe, Mr. Auchi's travel visa to the U.S. was revoked in August 2004, even as Mr. Auchi denied all the allegations. According to prosecutors, in November 2005 Rezko was able to get two government officials from Illinois to appeal to the State Department to get the visa restored. Asked if anyone in his office was involved in such an appeal, Mr. Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times last March, "not that I know of." FOIA requests to the State Department for any documents haven't been responded to for months.
After long delays, Mr. Obama sat with the editorial boards of the Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune in March to answer their questions about his connection to Rezko. He had no recollection of ever meeting Mr. Auchi. He also said he didn't understand a lot about house buying, and gave vague answers to other questions. Since then, he has avoided any further discussion of the Rezko matter.
Some inquiries could be cleared up if the Obama campaign were forthcoming with key documents. Mr. Obama claims that in buying his house in 2005 he got a low mortgage rate from Northern Trust bank because another bank made a competitive bid for his business, but his campaign won't reveal from which bank. While he has released 94 pages of documents relating to the Rezko sale, they don't include the single most important one -- the settlement statement that shows the complete flow of funds that were part of the house sale. When asked why that last key document isn't being released, the Obama campaign issued a boilerplate statement saying, "we have released documents that reflect every one of the final terms of the senator's purchase of the home." But key data are still being withheld.
The Obama campaign didn't hesitate to criticize Hillary Clinton for not revealing the names of donors to the Clinton Library, or John McCain for releasing only two years of tax returns as opposed to Mr. Obama's 10 years. Those were proper questions. But so too are requests for information from Mr. Obama, a man whose sudden rise and incompletely reported past makes him among the least-vetted of presidential nominees.
Reporters who decline to press Mr. Obama for more information now, whether it be on William Ayers or the Rezko-Auchi partnership, may be repeating an old mistake. Most reporters failed to dig deep enough into the Nixon White House's handling of Watergate before the 1972 election. The country was soon consumed with that scandal. Most reporters pooh-poohed questionable Whitewater real-estate dealings of the Clintons before Bill Clinton's 1992 election. Within months of his inauguration a tangled controversy led to the appointment of a special prosecutor and an endless source of distraction for the Clinton White House.
All presidential candidates resist full examination of their records. But it should be the job of reporters not to accept noncooperation, stonewalling or intimidation when it comes to questions about fitness for the nation's highest office.
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Canadian Election Call Coming?
OK, we've been pretty hard on Mr.Huckabee in the past and now that it's clear that he's long out, well, Huck, after this performance we'll consider you redeemed. No keys to the Vegas Exec. bathroom forthcoming or anything, but, nicely done.
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Profile of Alaska's Sarah Palin
[wsj] When a hockey mom named Sarah Palin ran for governor as a Republican outsider in 2006, she took on not only a sitting governor from her own party but also Alaska's Republican establishment -- vowing to clean up a political system that had been rocked by an Federal Bureau of Investigation corruption probe.
After handily winning, her popularity in Alaska soared as she went on to sack political appointees with close ties to industry lobbyists and shelved pork projects. Gov. Palin has shown similar fearlessness in going after Big Oil, whose money has long dominated the state. She appears, for example, to have forced Alaska's dominant oil producers, ConocoPhillips and BP PLC, to finally get serious about a natural-gas pipeline -- without making any tax or royalty concessions.
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McCain Chooses Sarah Palin as Running Mate
[nyt] In a surprise move, Senator John McCain announced here Friday that he had chosen Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, shaking up the political world at a time when his campaign has been trying to attract women, especially disaffected supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
[timesonline] : John McCain electrified the Republican Party and presidential race today by choosing a young, conservative and little-known governor of Alaska as his vice-presidential running-mate.
The surprise choice of Sarah Palin, 44, a fiscal and social conservative, mother of five, avid hunter and a first-term governor, thrilled Mr McCain’s Republican base and in a stroke virtually wiped out coverage of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. But it also triggered immediate worries over her inexperience.
Mrs Palin was given a raucous reception at a rally in Ohio during a poised and forceful speech in which she displayed clear signs of grit, a muscular, family-oriented conservatism, while also reaching out to the disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton.
Geraldine Ferraro, who ran for the Democrats in 1984 with Mondale and was the first female VP candidate comments on the Palin nomination.
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Now that the rock show of last night is over, the games actually do begin.
Congratulations, Mr. McCain, it's unlikely that you could have chosen more wisely in this selection for VP at this juncture in time. Without a doubt this will shore up and please many people that might otherwise not agree with you and may have simply not bothered come November.
Strategic? Of course. It effectively neuters the prefab attacks that were surely lined up awaiting a Romney selection, and places the Democrats in a position that leaves them only able to underscore the lack of their own selection for president, and the manner in which they have run their operations in this campaign. The comments being tossed out by the always empty, are already telling and hilarious. Inexperienced? Can it truly be possible that these people don't see how foolish this statement makes them seem? Scratch that, as the answer is obvious. Some are actually going as far as to suggest that the "great campaign" that Obama has run is has given him the experience factor. Seriously.
It seems clear that as people find out more and more of Sarah Palin, they like her and generally what they hear. The exact opposite seems to be playing out in some measure in that the more people find out about Barry O's past (if they can jump the hurdles to do so) and accomplishments, the less appealing they find him. It really couldn't be any starker.
Expect new depths of empty rhetoric (amazing enough is the thought new depths of vacancy could be found, but have no fear, the media and talking heads will deliver!)
A brilliant selection? Indeed. One that I frankly didn't think that your camp would actually make. It shall be enjoyable watching the media as they attempt to volley this with further empty allusions and commentary.
-The Cynical Bastard
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Unity Peeps! : Get On The Love Train!
MSNBC : Discontent Between Anchors!?
[nypost] : Animosity among MSNBC anchors has reached a mile-high peak at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, with on-air squabbling between such big egos as Joe Scarborough, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and David Shuster.
Scarborough, who served in Congress as a Republican representative from Florida, seems to be particularly touchy being the only host who isn't openly pro-Democratic.
Yesterday, after Shuster referred to "your party, the Republican Party," Scarborough went off, sparking a seven-minute exchange.
"I will let you know that 'my party,' my party loathes me much more than your party, the Democratic Party, loathes me," Scarborough seethed. "What about your party? What's your party, David Shuster? David, what's your party?"
"I have no party. I'm a complete independent," Shuster replied.
"Oh, I feel so comforted by the fact that you're independent. I bet everyone at MSNBC has 'independent' on their voting cards," said Scarborough.
Scarborough declined to talk to Page Six, but sources say he and NBC anchor Tom Brokaw disagree with MSNBC's decision to position itself as the channel for George W. Bush-haters.
At a forum on Sunday, when Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell called MSNBC "the official network of the Obama campaign," Brokaw said, "I think Keith has gone too far. I think Chris has gone too far."
Insiders say Olbermann is pushing to have Brokaw banned from the network and is also refusing to have centrist Time magazine columnist Mike Murphy on his show.
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Gallup Daily: No Bounce for Obama in Post-Biden Tracking :
McCain creeps ahead, 46% to 44%
[gallup] : It's official: Barack Obama has received no bounce in voter support out of his selection of Sen. Joe Biden to be his vice presidential running mate.
Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Aug. 23-25, the first three-day period falling entirely after Obama's Saturday morning vice presidential announcement, shows 46% of national registered voters backing John McCain and 44% supporting Obama, not appreciably different from the previous week's standing for both candidates. This is the first time since Obama clinched the nomination in early June, though, that McCain has held any kind of advantage over Obama in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.
The race for president has been virtually tied since mid-August. In this period, Obama's support from national registered voters has consistently ranged from 44% to 46%. The 46% currently supporting McCain is technically his best showing since late May/early June, but is not a statistically significant improvement over his recent range from 43% to 45%.
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Media Blackout On A Far-Left Past
Democrats in Denver tried to introduce Barack Obama as a moderate, whitewashing his radical past, and the media are helping them by following the fictional script.
[ibd] On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, CNN, for one, aired an in-depth profile called "Obama Revealed." In fact, it revealed nothing except for CNN's bias.
The special, hosted by White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, started off by asking, "Who is Barack Obama?" — something not a few voters would like to know. It then let the presumptive Democrat nominee mostly answer the question "in his own words."
We learn he earned the nickname "Barry O'Bomber" on his high school basketball team, and that he was a "top student" at Harvard law school. Omitted from the saintly biography are hard truths about his radical ties. Voters hear nothing of his friendship with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers or the late black Communist poet Frank Marshall Davis.
There's no mention of the radical training he received from groups founded by the late socialist agitator Saul Alinsky, or how Obama later taught Alinsky's tactics as a college professor.
CNN glossed over his late Kenyan father's own radical politics by leaving it up to him to describe his "reputation."
"My father had this reputation as being this larger-than-life figure, charismatic, very smart, very engaging," Obama said, "and all those things were true."
It's also true that as a Nairobi bureaucrat, his father proposed a socialist economic plan for Kenya so radical it got him blackballed from the government. CNN left that part out, while also omitting Obama's recent support of Raila Odinga, a Communist-trained politician in Nairobi.
The one smudge in the network's otherwise glowing portrait — Obama's decades-long relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright — was quickly dispatched by noting he had distanced himself from his radically anti-American preacher. However, Obama's abiding faith in black liberation theology — a Marxist version of Christianity — was never even identified by the network.
CNN's coverage is par for the course. There's been a media blackout on Obama's radical past throughout the presidential campaign.
Take the story about his early mentor Davis, a known member of the Communist Party USA. No mainstream media reported on the relationship until Aug. 2, and that was only after IBD and a handful of conservative blogs weighed in on the controversy.
The Associated Press broke the silence with the article, "Writer offered a young Barack Obama advice on life." But it still does not tell the whole story. AP describes Davis as a "left-leaning black journalist" with "allegedly anti-American views" — when in fact, his Soviet allegiances and hatred for America are well documented in congressional reports and his own poems.
The Washington Post did AP one better. It managed to write an entire story on the controversy without identifying Davis by name. (It did have room to mention "the vast right-wing conspiracy" though.)
The establishment media have also ignored a long-lost article by Obama's father that reveals his communist leanings.
The 1965 paper by Barack Hussein Obama Sr., which called for Soviet-style expropriation and other extreme measures, was cited by Politico.com, a Web-based spin-off of the media elite in Washington. But it failed to quote any of his Marxist prescriptions, and in a shocking whitewash, concludes that "his central aim was moderate and conciliatory."
Many of these radical connections are cataloged in a new book, "The Obama Nation," which remains atop the national bestseller list. But CNN and other major news outlets have spent more time investigating its author than Obama, while parroting the Obama camp's line that the book is a "series of lies."
The Post in its coverage repeated word-for-word some of the talking points contained in a 40-page rebuttal of the book by Obama, essentially farming out the fact-checking to a political campaign.
It also noted that the book was being "pushed by conservative book clubs that buy in bulk to drive up sales," and that its publisher, Simon & Schuster, employs "former GOP strategist Mary Matalin" as an editor.
It's plain the media are protecting Obama from his radical past, insulating him from the kind of scrutiny voters need to make an informed choice in November. He got the same pass from the press running for the Senate. In fact, Obama in his latest autobiography said he couldn't believe his "good fortune."
"I was the beneficiary of unusually — and at times undeservedly — positive press coverage," he confessed in "The Audacity of Hope."
He skated into office then. Absent proper media vetting, he'll also skate into the Oval Office. But then that may be the plan.
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Greek Tragedy?
[abc] So all the buzz today was supposed to be about two big Wednesday speeches -- Bill Clinton’s and Joe Biden.
Why, then, is everyone in Denver talking about stagecraft?
It’s simple: Reporters got their first glimpse of the stage where Barack Obama will deliver his speech tomorrow night at Invesco Field. Reuters described the set as similar to a "Greek temple."
Thus a legend -- not the good kind -- was born.
Said one Democrat: "This is a disaster of mythical proportions." Said another: "It's not enough that he wants to be president -- he wants to be Zeus." Said the first: "Will he send down thunderbolts from the mountain?"
Those are the Democrats -- though assuredly not Obama partisans. Cue the Republicans: The RNC blasted around an e-mail referring to the "Temple of Obama."
"Tomorrow you're going to see Obama come down from Olympus to be among us mere mortals," Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, told reporters in Denver.
Senior Obama advisers dismiss the comparisons. There will be columns, they say, but it won’t look like a Greek temple -- or even the White House portico.
"It looks like any state capitol," one adviser tells ABC News. "It's a bunch of columns."
For the candidate who brought you his very own faux-presidential seal, this is not a good perception. Obama aides insist that the set is staying, and that it won't look as bad as it sounds right now; the real backdrop, they say, will be his supporters.
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FactCheck: Claims omit details on McCain record
[wshtimes] : The shotgun-style charges Democratic National Convention speakers fired at Republican John McCain Tuesday night weren't necessarily half-truths. But in some instances, they weren't the whole story either.
Some examples of who said what _ and what they left out:
SEN. ROBERT CASEY JR. of PENNSYLVANIA: "John McCain calls himself a maverick, but he votes with George Bush 90 percent of the time. That's not a maverick. That's a sidekick."
_PENNSYLVANIA GOV. ED RENDELL: "And guess who voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time? Sen. John McCain."
THE FACTS: McCain voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time from January 20, 2001, to when Congress left Washington on its annual August recess, according to a study by Congressional Quarterly. But McCain wasn't always a staunch Bush backer. In 2005, his support for Bush's position on legislation reached a low of 77 percent; last year, when he launched his latest bid for the GOP presidential nomination, he voted with Bush 95 percent of the time.
_IOWA GOV. CHET CULVER: "Now the oil companies are placing their bets on John McCain, bankrolling his campaign, and gambling with our future."
THE FACTS: McCain has received more than $1.5 million in contributions from oil and gas industry employees and their spouses, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Obama has received about $423,000. But the center's analysis found that Obama has received more than McCain from employees of the oil industry's major companies. Employees (and their spouses) of Exxon, Chevron and BP had given more than $93,000 to Obama as of the end of June; McCain had received $75,000, according to the study.
_RENDELL: Said the fact that top McCain advisers have lobbied for oil and gas companies "explains why he wants to give another $4 billion tax break to oil companies."
THE FACTS: The $4 billion in tax breaks for oil companies is part of McCain's plan to reduce corporate taxes overall and does not represent an additional tax benefit for these companies. The corporate reduction McCain has proposed would apply to all corporations, including oil companies.
_MONTANA GOV. BRIAN SCHWEITZER: "At a time when America should be working harder than ever to develop new, clean sources, John McCain wants more of the same and has taken more than a million dollars in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry. Now he wants to give the oil companies another $4 billion in tax breaks. Four billion in tax breaks for big oil?"
THE FACTS: McCain has collected $1.5 million from that industry. But it's a small slice of the $142 million McCain has raised so far in the campaign, ranking 11th on his donor list. Ahead of the oil and gas industry are lawyers, retirees, banking and securities interests, real estate and insurance.
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Bill Clinton Skipping Obama Speech!?
[cnn] : Hillary Clinton will be on hand for Barack Obama's acceptance speech, but according to a source close to former President Bill Clinton, he will not: the source tells CNN that Clinton will not join his wife at Invesco Field Thursday night.
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Clinton Advisers Skipping Obama Speech
[wapo] : A number of Sen. Hillary Clinton's top advisers will not be staying in Denver long enough to hear Barack Obama accept the nomination for president, according to sources familiar with their schedules.
Clinton will deliver her speech Tuesday night. She will hold a private meeting with her top financial supporters Wednesday at noon, and will thank her delegates at an event that afternoon. Former president Bill Clinton will speak that night. Several of Hillary Clinton's supporters are then planning to leave town -- among them, Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's campaign chairman. Another of Clinton's top New York fundraisers, Alan Patricof, did not make the trip to Denver.
Robert Zimmerman, a Clinton supporter who is trying now to navigate between the two camps, will be staying for Obama's speech. But he said in an interview that it would be unrealistic to expect there would not still be some tension between the two camps -- he noted that the same was true with supporters of Gary Hart and, to a lesser extent, Howard Dean.
"This convention provides a very important opportunity for the Obama campaign to bond with the constituencies that supported Hillary Clinton," Zimmerman said. "It's not about Barack or Hillary. It's about bringing in the people here who voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Senator Obama and Senator Biden are, without question, qualified to do that."
Two more longtime Clinton fundraisers -- Mark Aronchick and Hassan Nemazee -- were adamant that, while they are making early exits, it should not be viewed as a snub or symbolic gesture.
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The Cactus Cuties, ranging in age from 8 to 13, sing The Star Spangled Banner. The group is named for the Cactus Theater in Lubbock, Texas.
Magnificient!
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The Biggest Missing Story in Politics
[americanthinker] : The Battleground Poll, the most respected and thorough of all public opinion polls, released its latest results on August 20th. Although many people read this poll for the data on voter preference in upcoming elections, for voter opinions about the two major political parties, for what things matter most to voters, I always zip past this data in the first fifteen pages of poll results and go straight to Question D3, which very quietly and totally ignored proclaims the biggest missing story in American politics and which is the only story, in the long run, that really matters.
I have been tracking Question D3 for a long time, since June 2002, in thirteen straight Battleground Poll results. Americans respond to this question more consistently than to any other question in those thirteen Battleground Poll surveys. People many change their opinions dramatically about Iraq or President Bush or drilling for oil, but not their answer to Question D3.
The Battleground Poll is different. It is bipartisan. A Republican polling organization, the Terrance Group, and a Democrat polling organization, Lake Research Partners, collaborate in picking the questions, selecting the sample population, conducting the surveys, and analyzing the results. The Battleground Poll website, along with the raw data, is "Republican Strategic Analysis" and "Democratic Strategic Analysis." There are few polls that are bipartisan. No other polling organization asks the same questions year after year, none that reveal the internals of their poll results so completely, and none ask anything like Question D3 in every survey. What is Question D3 and what were the results to Question D3 in the August 20, 2008 Battleground Poll? It is this:
"When thinking about politics and government, do you consider yourself to be...
Very conservative
Somewhat conservative
MODERATE
Somewhat liberal
Very liberal
UNSURE/REFUSED"
In August 2008, Americans answered that question this way: (1) 20% of Americans considered themselves to be very conservative; (2) 40% of Americans considered themselves to be somewhat conservative; (3) 2% of Americans considered themselves to be moderate; (4) 27% of Americans considered themselves to be somewhat liberal; (5) 9% of Americans considered themselves to be very liberal; and (6) 3% of Americans did not know or refused to answer.
Sixty percent of Americans considered themselves conservative. Does this mean that most Americans do not know what "conservative" means? No: The question specifically provides an out to people who are not sure about their ideology; it provides an out to people who want to be considered "moderate." Americans reject those choices. They overwhelmingly define themselves as "conservative." This is a huge political story - except that it is not "new" at all. Look at the thirteen Battleground Poll results over the last six years, and how do Americans answer that very question? Here are the percentages of Americans in those polls who call themselves "conservative" since June 2002: 59% (June 2002 poll), 59% (September 2003 poll), 61% (April 2004 poll), 59% (June 2004 poll), 60% (September 2004 poll), 61% (October 2005 poll), 59% (March 2006), 61% (October 2006), 59% (January 2007), 63% (July 2007), 58% (December 2007), 63% (May 2008), and now 60% (August 2008.)
The percentage of Americans who define themselves as "somewhat liberal" or "very liberal" has always been puny. In thirteen straight polls, this percentage has never been higher than 38% (June 2004) and it has usually been much lower.
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Michelle Obama’s Two Americas
[nro] : Denver — Near the end of Michelle Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention Monday night, I got an e-mail from a friend who had been with me at another speech by Mrs. Obama, in Charlotte, North Carolina, last May, on the eve of that state’s primary. “This isn’t the Michelle we know,” my friend said. And indeed, Mrs. Obama’s speech to the delegates here in Denver was worlds away from her address in Charlotte.
In Denver, Michelle Obama described America as a place of hope, a place where people find success during the course of “improbable journeys.” In Charlotte, her America was a dark and ugly place, where people who work hard are knocked down by sinister forces — a place where even young children burst into tears when they realize the deck is stacked against them.
In Denver, Mrs. Obama said, “My piece of the American Dream is a blessing hard won by those who came before me.” Those forebears, she explained, were “driven by the same conviction that drove my dad to get up an hour early each day to painstakingly dress himself for work — the same conviction that drives the men and women I’ve met all across this country…That’s why I love this country.”
In Charlotte, Mrs. Obama said, “We’re still living in a time and in a nation where the bar is set, right?…You start working hard and sacrificing and you think you’re getting close to that bar, you’re working and you’re struggling, and then what happens? They raise the bar…keep it just out of reach.”
Had something changed in the last few months? In the early primaries, Mrs. Obama often gave complaining speeches. It was in late February that she said the now-famous words, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” In other speeches, she grumbled — sometimes at length — about having to pay back her college loans. And she, as much as her husband, was associated with the anti-American rants of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. [...]
So here in Denver Mrs. Obama had a job to do. It wasn’t just to introduce Americans to the Obama family or show another side of her husband’s personality. It was to rehabilitate herself, to take the edge of anger and resentment from her public pronouncements and embrace a wholesome, country-loving, American-Dream-living image. And that’s what her speech at the convention was about.
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VP choice Biden unpopular in Iraq
[reuters] : Across racial and religious boundaries, Iraqi politicians on Saturday bemoaned Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's choice of running mate, known in Iraq as the author of a 2006 plan to divide the country into ethnic and sectarian enclaves.
"This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq," Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters.
"We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time."
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Is everything the Democrats say and do just naturally foolish? Is it premeditated that all actions must be carried out as if partaking in a grade 3 exercise? It has become harder and harder to make a case otherwise as evidenced by the clown show made of the VP selection. Anyway...Biden is the Obama VP selection. Let the fabulist babbling and fairy-tale telling begin continue, senators. This is going to be amusing. Woeful, but amusing.
- The Cynical Bastard
The Word of Joe : Biden says:
A nice selection of Joe's wisdom are enumerated at NRO. We've just picked a couple faves.
[nro] : Biden, on a post-debate appearance on MSNBC, October 30, 2007: “The only guy on the other side who’s qualified is John McCain.”
Biden appearing on The Daily Show, August 2, 2005: “John McCain is a personal friend, a great friend, and I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off, be well off no matter who...”
Assessing Obama’s Iraq plan on September 13, 2007: “My impression is [Obama] thinks that if we leave, somehow the Iraqis are going to have an epiphany” of peaceful coexistence among warring sects. “I’ve seen zero evidence of that.”
Speaking to the New York Observer: Biden was equally skeptical — albeit in a slightly more backhanded way — about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2002, discussing Saddam Hussein: “He’s a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security… “We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2002: “Saddam must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2007, on Hussein’s WMDs: “Well, the point is, it turned out they didn’t, but everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them. He catalogued — they catalogued them. This was not some, some Cheney, you know, pipe dream. This was, in fact, catalogued.”
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Joe "I exaggerate when I'm angry" Biden - Yea, That's The Ticket : Barry Picks Joe for VP
Biden Admits Errors and Criticizes Latest Report
September 22, 1987
[nyt] : Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued a formal statement today acknowledging that he had misstated several facts about his past last April in a campaign appearance in New Hampshire.
But the Delaware Democrat insisted today, as he had Sunday night in an interview with The New York Times, that some of the disputed statements were true and that his misstatements were the product of a faulty memory and the fact that he lost his temper. Mr. Biden, whose Presidential campaign has been shaken by news reports about his unattributed use of speeches from other politicians and a plagiarism incident while he was in law school, said in The Times interview that he was ''frustrated'' and ''angry as hell'' over the reports. [...]
Most of Mr. Biden's statement was in response to a report in this week's issue of Newsweek magazine on a tape recording made by the C-SPAN network of an appearance by Mr. Biden at a home in Claremont, N.H., on April 3. It was a typical coffee-klatch style appearance before a small group. The network regularly records and broadcasts such events as part of its coverage of the Presidential campaign.
The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter's request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as ''Frank.'' Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: ''I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.''
He then went on to say that he ''went to law school on a full academic scholarship - the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,'' Mr. Biden said. He also said that he ''ended up in the top half'' of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was ''the outstanding student in the political science department'' and ''graduated with three degrees from college.'' Comments on Assertions
In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: ''I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate.''
As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: ''I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors - I said 'three' and should have said 'two.' '' Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science.
''With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department,'' the statement went on. ''My name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware.''
In the Sunday interview, Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: ''My recollection is - and I'd have to confirm this - but I don't recall paying any money to go to law school.'' Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse ''on half scholarship based on financial need.'' Says He Also Received Grant
In his statement today, Mr. Biden did not directly dispute this, but said he received a scholarship from the Syracuse University College of Law ''based in part on academics'' as well as a grant from the Higher Education Scholarship Fund of the state of Delaware. He said the law school ''arranged for my first year's room and board by placing me as an assitant resident adviser in the undergraduate school.''
As for the moot court competition, Mr. Biden said he had won such a competition, with a partner, in Kingston, Ontario, on Dec. 12, 1967.
Mr. Biden acknowledged that in the testy exchange in New Hampshire, he had lost his temper. ''I exaggerate when I'm angry,'' Mr. Biden said, ''but I've never gone around telling people things that aren't true about me.'' Mr. Biden's questioner had made the query in a mild tone, but provoked an explosive response from Mr. Biden. 'Legitimate Questions of Press'
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Judge : Content Owners Must Consider Fair Use Before Sending Takedowns
[eff] : In a definitive win for fair use and free speech, a federal judge ruled that content owners must consider fair use before sending takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The case
arose when Universal Music Corporation sent a DMCA takedown notice for a short YouTube video of a toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" emanating from a radio in the kitchen. Universal tried to argue that it had no obligation to consider whether the song in the video was a fair use before sending the notice -- but the judge ruled otherwise, confirming what the EFF No Downtime For Free Speech
Campaign has been saying all along: a copyright owner must consider fair use before issuing a takedown notice that may result in the unnecessary censorship of free speech.
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NYT : The Surge, Clearly, Has Worked
[nyt] : [...] The surge, clearly, has worked, at least for now: violence, measured in the number of attacks against Americans and Iraqis each week, has dropped by 80 percent in the country since early 2007, according to figures the general provided. Civilian deaths, which peaked at more than 100 a day in late 2006, have also plunged. Car and suicide bombings, which stoked sectarian violence, have fallen from a total of 130 in March 2007 to fewer than 40 last month. In July, fewer Americans were killed in Iraq — 13 — than in any month since the war began.
The result, now visible in the streets, is a calm unlike any the country has seen since the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in April 2003. The signs — Iraqi families flooding into parks at sundown, merchants throwing open long-shuttered shops — are stunning to anyone who witnessed the country’s implosion in 2005 and 2006.
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GOP Consider Major Changes in Primary Calendar
[wapo] : Republicans are set to consider a complete rewrite of their political calendar for the 2012 presidential primaries as they gather in Minnesota to officially nominate Sen. John McCain after a tumultuous primary season.
If approved by the delegates to the Republican convention, the new GOP calendar will pack many state primaries into elections on three successive Tuesdays late in the political calendar. The groupings of primaries would rotate every four years so every state would have a chance to go early in the process.
Exceptions would be made for a few states -- including Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and some small states that often get overlooked in the process. But under the proposed GOP rules, most would be locked into specific dates, a change from the freewheeling 2008 calendar, in which many states raced to the front of the pack, pushing voting earlier than ever before.
"In effect we had a national primary this year," said Robert T. Bennett, the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party and a chief backer of the changes. "If we don't make a change, you will have a total of between 36 to 38 states that will be voting the first Tuesday in February in 2012. By spreading out the primary process into some orderly process benefits the system."
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Prophet At Harvard
[townhall] [...] Today it is impossible to deny that Solzhenitsyn was correct about the “evil empire,” and his role in exposing it and bringing it down. But there is another side to Solzhenitsyn that has been largely ignored, and this is his critique of certain trends in Western civilization. Solzhenitsyn raised this subject, no less controversial and for us closer to home, in his famous 1978 Harvard address.
Even though he was second to none in his denunciation of totalitarian socialism, Solzhenitsyn said, "Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively." The whole address is worth reading, but here are some highlights.
On the lack of courage in facing a totalitarian enemy: "The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country...and of course in the United Nations....Such a decline is especially notable among ruling groups and the intellectual elite....They get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists."
On how materialism makes a nation soft: "Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the pursuit of happiness...So why and for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country?"
On what has happened to the rule of law: "People in the West has acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law....If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody might mention that one could still not be entirely right and urge a willingness to show restraint or sacrifice. Everybody operates at the extreme limits of those legal frames....A society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed, but a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either."
On the rights of criminals: "Legal frames especially in the United States are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of legions of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases."
On the abuses of freedom: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Soceity appears to have litle defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror...Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born out of a humanistic concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature."
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Obama on Clarence Thomas
[wsj] Barack Obama likes to portray himself as a centrist politician who wants to unite the country, but occasionally his postpartisan mask slips. That was the case at Saturday night's Saddleback Church forum, when Mr. Obama chose to demean Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Pastor Rick Warren asked each Presidential candidate which Justices he would not have nominated. Mr. McCain said, "with all due respect" the four most liberal sitting Justices because of his different judicial philosophy.
Mr. Obama took a lower road, replying first that "that's a good one," and then adding that "I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he, I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution." The Democrat added that he also wouldn't have appointed Antonin Scalia, and perhaps not John Roberts, though he assured the audience that at least they were smart enough for the job.
So let's see. By the time he was nominated, Clarence Thomas had worked in the Missouri Attorney General's office, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second most prominent court. Since his "elevation" to the High Court in 1991, he has also shown himself to be a principled and scholarly jurist.
Meanwhile, as he bids to be America's Commander in Chief, Mr. Obama isn't yet four years out of the Illinois state Senate, has never held a hearing of note of his U.S. Senate subcommittee, and had an unremarkable record as both a "community organizer" and law school lecturer. Justice Thomas's judicial credentials compare favorably to Mr. Obama's Presidential résumé by any measure. And when it comes to rising from difficult circumstances, Justice Thomas's rural Georgian upbringing makes Mr. Obama's story look like easy street.
Even more troubling is what the Illinois Democrat's answer betrays about his political habits of mind. Asked a question he didn't expect at a rare unscripted event, the rookie candidate didn't merely say he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court's black conservative isn't up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.
So much for civility in politics and bringing people together. And no wonder Mr. Obama's advisers have refused invitations for more such open forums, preferring to keep him in front of a teleprompter, where he won't let slip what he really believes.
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Obama - Bill Ayers - Just Neighbours
[] : Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse. Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon. Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past. Ayers was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an American flag, and told the New York Times just before 9/11 that the notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place “makes me want to puke.” Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama.
Although the press has been notably lax about pursuing the matter, the full story of the Obama-Ayers relationship calls the truth of Obama’s account seriously into question. When Obama made his first run for political office, articles in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald featured among his qualifications his position as chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation where Ayers was a founder and guiding force. Obama assumed the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office, and almost certainly received the job at the behest of Bill Ayers. During Obama’s time as Annenberg board chairman, Ayers’s own education projects received substantial funding. Indeed, during its first year, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge struggled with significant concerns about possible conflicts of interest. With a writ to aid Chicago’s public schools, the Annenberg challenge played a deeply political role in Chicago’s education wars, and as Annenberg board chairman, Obama clearly aligned himself with Ayers’s radical views on education issues. With Obama heading up the board and Ayers heading up the other key operating body of the Annenberg Challenge, the two would necessarily have had a close working relationship for years (therefore “exchanging ideas on a regular basis”). So when Ayers and Dorhn hosted that kickoff for the first Obama campaign, it was not a random happenstance, but merely further evidence of a close and ongoing political partnership. Of course, all of this clearly contradicts Obama’s dismissal of the significance of his relationship with Ayers.
This much we know from the public record, but a large cache of documents housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), is likely to flesh out the story. That document cache contains the internal files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The records in question are extensive, consisting of 132 boxes, containing 947 file folders, a total of about 70 linear feet of material. Not only would these files illuminate the working relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, they would also provide significant insight into a web of ties linking Obama to various radical organizations, including Obama-approved foundation gifts to political allies. Obama’s leadership style and abilities are also sure to be illuminated by the documents in question.
Cover-Up?
Unfortunately, I don’t yet have access to the documents. The Special Collections section of the Richard J. Daley Library agreed to let me read them, but just before I boarded my flight to Chicago, the top library officials mysteriously intervened to bar access. Circumstances strongly suggest the likelihood that Bill Ayers himself may have played a pivotal role in this denial. Ayers has long taught at UIC, where the Chicago Annenberg Challenge offices were housed, rent-free. Ayers likely arranged for the files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to be housed in the UIC library, and may well have been consulted during my unsuccessful struggle to gain access to the documents. Let me, then, explain in greater detail what the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) records are, and how I have been blocked from seeing them.
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Surge for the dollar as global fears rise
[ft] The dollar surged to a two-year high against the pound and a six-month peak against the euro on Friday, as fears about spreading economic gloom triggered a sell-off in commodities.
Against sterling, the US currency notched up its 11th consecutive day of gains – its longest uninterrupted rise in more than 35 years – as markets became increasingly convinced that the US was best-placed to weather the global downturn.
The strong dollar rebound undermined sentiment in the gold market, where prices fell below $800 for the first time this year to $774.90 a troy ounce, almost a quarter lower than early March’s record $1,030.80.
Prices for crude oil, platinum, copper, aluminium, corn and soyabeans have also retreated from records hit this year, prompting speculation that commodity prices have reached a turning point.
“The golden age when commodity prices could only go up is gone,” said Marco Annunziata, chief economist at Unicredit.
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Cyberwar and Real War Collide in Georgia
[newsfactor] Georgia, with a population of 4.6 million and a relative latecomer to the Internet, saw little effects of the DDoS attacks, beyond inaccessibility to many of its government Web sites, which limited the government's ability to spread its message online and to connect with sympathizers around the world during the fighting with Russia.
Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.
Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites with the message: "win+love+in+Rusia."
Other Internet specialists in the United States said the attacks against Georgia's Internet infrastructure Relevant Products/Services began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests -- known as distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attacks -- that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.
Researchers at Shadowserver, a volunteer group that tracks malicious network activity, reported that the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple DDOS attacks. They said the command and control server Relevant Products/Services that directed the attack was based in the United States and had come online several weeks before it began the assault.
As it turns out, the July attack may have been a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar once the shooting started between Georgia and Russia. According to Internet technical experts, it was the first time a known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.
Exactly who was behind the cyberattack is not known. The Georgian government blamed Russia for the attacks, but the Russian government said it was not involved.
In the end, Georgia, with a population of 4.6 million and a relative latecomer to the Internet, saw little effect beyond inaccessibility to many of its government Web sites, which limited the government's ability to spread its message online and to connect with sympathizers around the world during the fighting with Russia.
It ranks 74th out of 234 nations in terms of Internet addresses, behind Nigeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia and El Salvador. Cyberattacks have far less impact on such a country than they might on a more Internet-dependent nation, like Israel, Estonia or the United States, where vital services like transportation, power Relevant Products/Services and banking are tied to the Internet.
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Marxist Brother
: [...] [townhall] : I simply can’t figure out how he’s managed to convince so many people that he should be the President of the United States. It’s a lot like trying to figure out how Las Vegas magicians make lions and tigers disappear.
To be perfectly honest, I invariably feel that way about the candidates the Democrats try to foist off on us. But, as a rule, guys like Dukakis, Gore and Kerry are just typical party hacks. But at least none of them attended a racist church, they didn’t associate with known terrorists and they usually didn’t display their contempt for national symbols and the U.S. military quite so blatantly.
Liberals have tried to convince me that Obama is brilliant. I find that odd because he has said that there are 57 states, that JFK got the Russians to remove their missiles from Cuba by sitting down and chatting with Khrushchev, and that Iran doesn’t really constitute an actual threat because they don’t spend as much money on weaponry as we do. Funny, but “brilliant” isn’t the first word that comes to mind. But what do liberals know? They were also convinced that Jimmy Carter was intelligent. [...]
Because the MSM adores Obama, they continue to promote the notion of Obama as a great orator, but he is actually no more silver-tongued than your average radio announcer reading ad copy for baby wipes. The fact is that when asked a direct question, the man turns into a blithering idiot, even though you would imagine that by this late date he would have memorized the appropriate lines. Perhaps the problem is that this new-style politician is so driven by polls that from moment to moment he’s not sure exactly how he feels about the 16-month deadline in Iraq, the surge, offshore drilling for oil, election financing or dividing the city of Jerusalem.
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Nannyfornia
Could the frenzy of puritanical edicts from California's politicians - banning everything from trans fats to plastic bags - be a foretaste of what Barack Obama's America will be like?
[timeonline] Welcome everyone, to Nannyfornia: Birthplace of the Ban, Capital of the Clampdown, Mecca of the Moratorium. Or you could just call it the new Mild, Mild West.
[...]
...is Nannyfornia providing us with a glimpse of what Obama's America might look like? After all, Obama is a classic banner. He recently proposed banning all toys from China. He banned his own staff from wearing green clothing during his recent trip to the Middle East (green is the colour of the Hamas flag). He banned the New Yorker magazine from his press plane after it depicted him as a terrorist in a political cartoon. He wants to ban “excessive” profits by raising capital gains tax. Why? Because he thinks it's fair. No matter that the state's revenues from the tax have always gone up whenever the rate has been lowered.
Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Association, is one of many Americans who fears all this prohibition is going too far. “The Government here in California is banning a food product simply because it's not healthy,” he complains. “What do you ban next? Bacon fat? The possibilities are limitless.”
But is it all the fault of emboldened Democrats? Without a doubt, he says. He describes the Democratic-controlled legislature in California as “an activist government that thinks it knows what's best for us”.
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I'm running for president because of...because I got two daughters just like you. America is...is no longer what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don't want that future for my children. I want...I want America to be better, to be stronger, to be more unified, to be more prosperous, to be kinder, to be more tolerant. 
- Barack Obama answers the question, asked by a 7-year-old girl, why is he running for president.
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Anti-Business States Awash In Red Ink
[rcm] Shortly after he was confirmed as governor of New York earlier this year, David Paterson told a group of business executives that when he received congratulations from old friends he hadn’t heard from in years, he was surprised how many no longer lived in New York. "All of them basically said the same thing," Paterson told the group. "'Good luck in New York state, but we can't pay the taxes. The opportunities aren't there.'”
After that experience, Paterson presumably can understand the complaints of corporate executives recently surveyed by Development Counsellors International, which advises companies on where to locate their facilities. More than four in ten of them have ranked New York as the worst state to do business in--second only to California in unfavorable mentions. The most common gripes included high taxes and anti-business regulations. Joining New York and California on the list of most unpopular states were New Jersey, Michigan and Massachusetts.
The DCI study, coming as it did amidst growing talk of state fiscal crises around the country, is particularly revealing. Of the approximately $48 billion in accumulated budget shortfalls that the 29 states with projected deficits are facing, $33 billion, or two-thirds of the gap, is concentrated in those five states considered by corporate executives to be the least friendly to business. Meanwhile, among the five states ranked as having the best business environment, Texas and North Carolina have no projected budget gaps, and Georgia, Tennessee and Florida are facing shortfalls amounting to about $4.1 billion, or less than one-tenth of the states’ total.
An idealist would assume that those stark numbers would jump out at legislators in the most anti-business states and prompt a bracing re-evaluation of their spending, tax and regulatory regimes, as Paterson advocates. But no such luck. Paterson’s former colleagues in the state legislature are lobbying for a new tax on millionaires, while across the country California’s legislators have called for boosting the state’s top tax rate from 9.3 percent to 11 percent.
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John Edwards : On 'Character'
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Is this the dog days? I don't even know, but I'm dogged and it's been a mofo charlie. Interesting? I suppose. Na. Scratch that. Freakish.
The Dali Bama? Basically have him on ignore, but it is still impossible to not notice that new heights of bold, naked, hypocritical pablum are being reached and served on high, gleefully consumed.
- TCB
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Hillary's Growing Shadow
[rcp -vdh] Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck and neck.
Impossible?
It would seem so. Republican President Bush still has less than a 30 percent approval rating. Headlines blare that unemployment and inflation are up -- even if we aren't, technically, in a recession. Gas is around $4 a gallon. Housing prices have nosedived. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted -- another in a line of congressional Republicans caught in financial or sexual scandal.
Meanwhile, the GOP's presumptive candidate, John McCain, is 71 years old. The Republican base thinks he's lackluster and too liberal.
So, everyone is puzzled why the Democratic candidate isn't at least 10 points ahead. It seems the more Americans get used to Barack Obama, the less they want him as president -- and the more Democrats will soon regret not nominating Hillary Clinton.
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Ezra Levant: How I beat the fatwa, and lost my freedom
[nationalpost] : Some 900 days after I became the only person in the Western world charged with the “offence” of republishing the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the government has finally acquitted me of illegal “discrimination.” Taxpayers are out more than $500,000 for an investigation that involved fifteen bureaucrats at the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The legal cost to me and the now-defunct Western Standard magazine is $100,000.
The case would have been thrown out long ago if I had been charged in a criminal court, instead of a human rights commission. That’s because accused criminals have the right to a speedy trial. Accused publishers at human rights commissions do not.
And if I had been a defendant in a civil court, the judge would now order the losing parties to pay my legal bills. Instead, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities won’t have to pay me a dime. Neither will Syed Soharwardy, the Calgary imam who abandoned his identical complaint against me this spring.
Both managed to hijack a secular government agency to prosecute their radical Islamic fatwa against me — the first blasphemy case in Canada in over 80 years. Their complaints were dismissed, but it is inaccurate to say that they lost: They got the government to rough me up for nearly three years, at no cost to them. The process I was put through was a punishment in itself — and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam.
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.
In his report, Gundara presents as “fact” his personal opinion of the Muhammad cartoons. He says they’re “stereotypical, negative and offensive.” That’s one viewpoint. Others have a different view. Why should anyone care about Gundara’s personal opinion? Do I need permission from him — or anyone other than my conscience — before I publish things in the future? Is this column okay by him?
Gundara forgave me and the Western Standard our sins because, according to him, the offensiveness of the cartoons was “muted by the context of the accompanying article” and we ran letters both for and against the cartoons in our subsequent issue. He also acquitted us because “the cartoons were not simply stuck in the middle of the magazine with no purpose or related story.”
Let me translate: You’d better be “reasonable” in how you use your freedoms, or you won’t be allowed to keep them. You’d better not run political cartoons “simply stuck in the middle” of a magazine. You’d better have a “purpose” for being “negative” that is approved by bureaucrat, when he finally gets around to it three years later.
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.
My dismissal is not a victory for freedom of the press. Because Alberta’s press is not free — it is now subject to the approval of the government. But Canadians have the right to a free press in spite of the government. We have the right to break every one of Gundara’s petty and subjective rules.
Exactly two months before I was acquitted, another Albertan was sentenced by the HRC on the exact same charge: “discrimination” in a newspaper. Five years ago, Reverend Stephen Boissoin wrote a controversial column about gay rights. It passed all of Gundara’s home-made rules: It was in the context of a broader debate; it was followed by many opposing letters to the editor; it had a “purpose,” etc. But Rev. Boissoin was fined $7,000 and banned for life from giving sermons or even sending private e-mails that were “disparaging”. To top it off, he was ordered by the HRC to write a public renunciation of his faith.
It’s obvious why I was acquitted and Boissoin was convicted. I’ve been a political pain in the neck for the HRC. Rev. Boissoin? He was quiet, so he’s roadkill. But neither of us are free — we both have to have our views checked out by the government.
Of course I’m glad to be done with this malicious prosecution — though my antagonists can still appeal my acquittal.
But two years ago, the HRC told me if I paid a few thousand dollars to my accusers and gave them a page in our magazine, I’d be set free. Most victims of the HRCs accept deals like that, and it’s certainly cheaper than a 900-day fight. But getting the approval of the HRC’s censor is morally no better than their shake-down attempt. Whether I have to pay off a radical imam or appease a meddling bureaucrat, it’s still an infringement on our Canadian liberties.
National Post
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Hysterics v Heretics in an Age of Unreason
[theaustralian] It has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.
In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.
Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.
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Palin: A Rough Record
[time] : John McCain was clear about why he picked half-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. "I found someone with an outstanding reputation for standing up to special interests and entrenched bureaucracies," he said in introducing her in Dayton, Ohio, on Friday. Palin was someone, he noted, "who reached across the aisle and asked Republicans, Democrats and independents to serve in government."
It is a powerful reinforcement of McCain's own political brand: tough, reform-minded, willing to break with his own party for the right cause. And it's true that her high-profile crusade against corruption and complacency in her own state party over the past few years has made Palin the Frank Serpico of Alaska politics: she publicly ratted out her state party chairman; whupped the good old boys' network, as she likes to put it, in a gubernatorial primary; and fought a general election in which the scandal-stained state GOP didn't lift a finger on her behalf. She won only because she had the enthusiastic backing of independents and grass-roots activists.
But in the first major race of her career — the 1996 campaign for mayor of her hometown, Wasilla — Palin was a far more conventional politician. In fact, according to some who were involved in that fight, Palin was a highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.
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March to GOP Convention Turns Violent
[yahoo] : Protesters attacked delegates, smashed windows, punctured car tires and threw bottles Monday, a violent counterpoint to an otherwise peaceful anti-war march at the Republican National Convention. Police wielding pepper spray arrested at least 56 people.
The trouble happened not far from the Xcel Energy Center convention site, and many of those involved in the more violent protest were clad in black and identified themselves to reporters as anarchists. They wrought havoc by damaging property and setting at least one fire. Most of the trouble was in pockets of a neighborhood near downtown, several blocks from where the convention was taking place.
Buckets of Urine, Slingshots, Anit-bus Weapons Seized From RNC Protesters
[twincities] Ramsey County sheriff's deputies found weapons and devices to disable buses - among other items - in searches in the Twin Cities last night and today.
Authorities said the items came from "key members of the RNC Welcoming Committee," a self-described anarchist group.
Five people have been arrested and four properties have been searched, according to the sheriff's office. [...]
St. Paul's mayor said this afternoon that free speech rights are separate from criminal behavior. "We have worked very, very hard to make sure we've protected people's right to exercise free speech," Coleman said. "To pick up a protest sign, that's fine. If you're here to pick up a brick or some other instrument there's a problem."
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Canada's Harper to Call For Oct. 14 Election
Harper will visit Jean at Rideau Hall, her official residence in Ottawa, to establish the election date, the officials told the Canadian Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The prime minister will declare that, after having met with all three opposition leaders over the last few days, he no longer has the confidence of Parliament, the sources said. As per tradition, it will then be up to Jean to decide whether to dissolve Parliament and set the election date.The official election call is expected to be made either Friday or Saturday.
"It will happen between [September] 5th and the 7th," a senior government source told the Canadian Press. [...]
The news came just hours after Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion came out of a brief meeting with Harper in Ottawa saying he had no doubt Canadians will face an election this fall.Calling the meeting a "charade," Dion said the two were unable to agree on how to make the upcoming session of Parliament, slated to begin Sept. 15, more productive.
"There is no agreement … but there wasn't one six months or 12 months ago," Dion said outside the gates of the prime minister's official residence, less than 30 minutes after the meeting began. "There's nothing new there. It's nothing but an excuse."
Dion said Harper looked directly into his face during the meeting and told him there will be a vote this fall.
The Conservatives had set Oct. 19, 2009, as the date for the next federal election. However, the prime minister has recently suggested he is ready to pull the plug on his current minority government.
"The prime minister is not going to respect the fixed-date election legislation that he himself proposed and got passed in the House," Dion said.
The Liberal leader said he told Harper "it was really unfortunate that he has so little respect for the rule of law here in Canada."
Harper has said fixed election dates do not apply to minority governments. His spokesperson, Kory Teneycke, said Monday that a fall election called at the behest of the prime minister is perfectly legal.
"The fixed election date law provides for this exact situation. It's not a violation of that law. Mr. Dion may not understand what that law is, but this is clearly provided for," Teneycke said.
"If Mr. Dion wanted to avoid an election date … he would give some assurance that the government could survive until [2009]."
::::Alaska Governor : VP Selection
[latimes] : Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is as complex as the place she calls home. Plucked from near-political obscurity to become Sen. John McCain's running mate, Palin either has pitch-perfect political instincts or has benefited from a spectacular run of luck that has landed her in the ultimate right place at the right time.
It is easy to see why McCain was drawn to her; their political resumes have much in common. The 44-year-old Republican has sold herself as a political maverick willing to buck her party over principle, an ethics reformer who quit a lucrative job rather than play ball with the old boys' network and a pragmatist who will reach across the aisle to get her agenda enacted. Like McCain, she has at times been a black sheep in her own party. Also like McCain, she has been accused of overstepping ethical bounds on occasion.
"The landscape up here is littered with people who have underestimated her," said Eric Croft, a Democratic former state representative who enlisted her help when he investigated a Republican oil commissioner for ethical breaches. "Maybe she is not ready for prime time, or maybe she is going to litter the national landscape with people who have underestimated her."
[nypost] [...] But Palin is McCain's kind of governor. She took on the corrupt establishment of the Republican hierarchy in Alaska and defeated incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in a GOP primary. The Murkowski family and the family of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens have run the state for decades. Frank served as senator and then gave it up to run for governor. And into the Senate seat slid his daughter Lisa Murkowski, whom Alaska voters dutifully elected. To give you a gauge of how hard it was for Sarah to beat Murkowski for governor in a Republican primary, Stevens has just won his primary for re-election even though he is under indictment!
But Palin uncovered Republican corruption in the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which she had been appointed to lead. She reported the violations of ethical regulations by her co-commissioner (who also happened to be the Republican Party state chairman). Barred by state law from going public with her charges, she quit and revealed her accusations. She was vindicated when her co-commissioner agreed to pay a $12,000 fine for breaking the state ethics law.
Then, in true McCain style, she took on the state attorney general over his corruption and forced him to resign. Finally, she challenged Gov. Murkowski himself in a primary and won 51 percent of the vote in a three-way contest. Since then, she has line-item-vetoed huge parts of the state budget that she found wasteful and has cleaned house from top to bottom.
Her appointment demonstrates the crucial flaw in the Democratic attack on McCain: the accusation that he is another George W. Bush. Bush chose Cheney. McCain chose Palin. That's emblematic of the difference between them.
Now McCain needs to follow up this bold choice by articulating the many differences between his views and those of the Bush administration.::::
Tale of The Tape
As seems often neglected, the two people that are being oddly compared and presented by some as opponents, are not actually up for the same position. Yes, yes, we understand JMc. just had his birthday. Hope he enjoyed it. [redstate]
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Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire
[wsj] : Even as Barack Obama gave his soaring speech Thursday night, his campaign was playing hardball with its critics.
Team Obama has launched an offensive against WGN, the Chicago Tribune's radio station, for interviewing Stanley Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz is a conservative writer who this week forced the University of Illinois to finally open its records on Sen. Obama's association with William Ayers, the unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist.
An Obama campaign email to supporters called Mr. Kurtz a "slimy character assassin" whose "divisive, destructive ranting" should be confronted. WGN producer Zack Christenson says the outpouring of negative calls and emails is "unprecedented." He also notes that it is curious -- because "we wanted the Obama campaign's take" on Mr. Kurtz's findings, but the campaign declined to put anyone on air.
Separately, Mr. Obama's lawyers have also demanded that the Justice Department prosecute an organization called the American Issues Project for running an ad about ties between their candidate and Mr. Ayers.
Obama aides believe John Kerry lost in 2004 because he failed to respond to the "Swift Boat" ads attacking him, and they are lashing out. Sometimes the Obama objections have merit, as when they exposed errors in Jerome Corsi's sensationalized Obama biography. But sometimes they are designed to shut down legitimate questions. "They're terrified of people poking around Obama's life," one reporter told Gabriel Sherman at the New Republic. "The whole Obama narrative is built around the narrative that Obama and [campaign strategist] David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it's not entirely true." The stakes are high. If the full story of Mr. Obama's relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright had been revealed before the Iowa caucus, he wouldn't have won.
Aides claim Mr. Obama "has taken voluntary transparency steps" that allow "his constituents, the media and his political opponents to fully examine him." In reality, anyone questioning the approved story line is liable to be ignored, misled or even bullied. This isn't what reporters expected when Mr. Obama began campaigning for a "new politics" that would bring honesty and openness to government.
Walking the rows of media outlets at the Denver convention, I had no trouble finding reporters who complained the campaign was secretive and evasive. Ben Smith of Politico.com1 has written about Team Obama's "pattern of rarely volunteering information or documents, even when relatively innocuous." Politico asked months ago if Mr. Obama had ever written anything for the Harvard Law Review as a student. The Obama campaign responded narrowly, with a Clintonesque statement that "as the president of the Law Review, Obama didn't write articles, he edited and reviewed them." This month it turned out Mr. Obama had written an article -- but it was published a month before he became president.
Chasing the rest of Mr. Obama's paper trail is often an exercise in frustration. Mr. Obama says his state senate records "could have been thrown out" and he didn't keep a schedule in office. No one appears to have kept a copy of his application for the Illinois Bar. He has released only a single page of medical records, versus 1,000 pages for John McCain.
Then there's the house that Mr. Obama bought in 2005 in cooperation with Tony Rezko, his friend and campaign fund-raiser -- a move the candidate concedes was "boneheaded." Rezko was convicted in June of 16 counts of corruption. (Mr. Obama was not implicated in Rezko's crimes.)
Rezko's trial raised a host of questions. Was Mr. Obama able to save $300,000 on the asking price of his house because Rezko's wife paid full price for the adjoining lot? How did Mrs. Rezko make a $125,000 down payment and obtain a $500,000 mortgage when financial records shown at the Rezko trial indicate she had a salary of only $37,000 and assets of $35,000? Records show her husband also had few assets at the time.
Last April, the London Times revealed that Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born billionaire living in London, had loaned Mr. Rezko $3.5 million three weeks before the day the sale of the house and lot closed in June 2005. Mr. Auchi's office notes he was a business partner of Rezko but says he had "no involvement in or knowledge of" the property sale. But in April 2004 he did attend a dinner party in his honor at Rezko's Chicago home. Mr. Obama also attended, and according to one guest, toasted Mr. Auchi. Later that year, Mr. Auchi came under criminal investigation as part of a U.S. probe of the corrupt issuance of cell-phone licenses in Iraq.
In May 2004, the Pentagon's inspector general's office cited "significant and credible evidence" of involvement by Mr. Auchi's companies in the Oil for Food scandal, and in illicit smuggling of weapons to Saddam Hussein's regime. Because of the criminal probe, Mr. Auchi's travel visa to the U.S. was revoked in August 2004, even as Mr. Auchi denied all the allegations. According to prosecutors, in November 2005 Rezko was able to get two government officials from Illinois to appeal to the State Department to get the visa restored. Asked if anyone in his office was involved in such an appeal, Mr. Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times last March, "not that I know of." FOIA requests to the State Department for any documents haven't been responded to for months.
After long delays, Mr. Obama sat with the editorial boards of the Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune in March to answer their questions about his connection to Rezko. He had no recollection of ever meeting Mr. Auchi. He also said he didn't understand a lot about house buying, and gave vague answers to other questions. Since then, he has avoided any further discussion of the Rezko matter.
Some inquiries could be cleared up if the Obama campaign were forthcoming with key documents. Mr. Obama claims that in buying his house in 2005 he got a low mortgage rate from Northern Trust bank because another bank made a competitive bid for his business, but his campaign won't reveal from which bank. While he has released 94 pages of documents relating to the Rezko sale, they don't include the single most important one -- the settlement statement that shows the complete flow of funds that were part of the house sale. When asked why that last key document isn't being released, the Obama campaign issued a boilerplate statement saying, "we have released documents that reflect every one of the final terms of the senator's purchase of the home." But key data are still being withheld.
The Obama campaign didn't hesitate to criticize Hillary Clinton for not revealing the names of donors to the Clinton Library, or John McCain for releasing only two years of tax returns as opposed to Mr. Obama's 10 years. Those were proper questions. But so too are requests for information from Mr. Obama, a man whose sudden rise and incompletely reported past makes him among the least-vetted of presidential nominees.
Reporters who decline to press Mr. Obama for more information now, whether it be on William Ayers or the Rezko-Auchi partnership, may be repeating an old mistake. Most reporters failed to dig deep enough into the Nixon White House's handling of Watergate before the 1972 election. The country was soon consumed with that scandal. Most reporters pooh-poohed questionable Whitewater real-estate dealings of the Clintons before Bill Clinton's 1992 election. Within months of his inauguration a tangled controversy led to the appointment of a special prosecutor and an endless source of distraction for the Clinton White House.
All presidential candidates resist full examination of their records. But it should be the job of reporters not to accept noncooperation, stonewalling or intimidation when it comes to questions about fitness for the nation's highest office.
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Canadian Election Call Coming?[cbc] Prime Minister Stephen Harper will meet with Liberal Leader Stephane Dion in Ottawa on Monday to talk about whether an election is the way to settle differences among the parties in a Parliament that Harper says has become increasingly dysfunctional.
The Labour Day talk is scheduled for 4 p.m. ET at the prime minister's residence at 24 Sussex Drive.
The prime minister has met with other opposition leaders in the past two days, ostensibly to determine whether there is common ground to avoid a fall election.
Meetings with NDP Leader Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Québécois have so far followed a similar script: the opposition leaders emerged to say Harper is intent on calling an election this week, with a vote to be held in mid-October.
Dion asked to meet with Harper on Monday, despite asserting earlier that he had no time in his schedule before Sept. 9.
Government officials have said Harper is prepared to call an election any time after Tuesday.
::::OK, we've been pretty hard on Mr.Huckabee in the past and now that it's clear that he's long out, well, Huck, after this performance we'll consider you redeemed. No keys to the Vegas Exec. bathroom forthcoming or anything, but, nicely done.::::
Profile of Alaska's Sarah Palin
[wsj] When a hockey mom named Sarah Palin ran for governor as a Republican outsider in 2006, she took on not only a sitting governor from her own party but also Alaska's Republican establishment -- vowing to clean up a political system that had been rocked by an Federal Bureau of Investigation corruption probe.
After handily winning, her popularity in Alaska soared as she went on to sack political appointees with close ties to industry lobbyists and shelved pork projects. Gov. Palin has shown similar fearlessness in going after Big Oil, whose money has long dominated the state. She appears, for example, to have forced Alaska's dominant oil producers, ConocoPhillips and BP PLC, to finally get serious about a natural-gas pipeline -- without making any tax or royalty concessions.
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McCain Chooses Sarah Palin as Running Mate
[nyt] In a surprise move, Senator John McCain announced here Friday that he had chosen Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, shaking up the political world at a time when his campaign has been trying to attract women, especially disaffected supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.[timesonline] : John McCain electrified the Republican Party and presidential race today by choosing a young, conservative and little-known governor of Alaska as his vice-presidential running-mate.
The surprise choice of Sarah Palin, 44, a fiscal and social conservative, mother of five, avid hunter and a first-term governor, thrilled Mr McCain’s Republican base and in a stroke virtually wiped out coverage of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. But it also triggered immediate worries over her inexperience.
Mrs Palin was given a raucous reception at a rally in Ohio during a poised and forceful speech in which she displayed clear signs of grit, a muscular, family-oriented conservatism, while also reaching out to the disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton.
Geraldine Ferraro, who ran for the Democrats in 1984 with Mondale and was the first female VP candidate comments on the Palin nomination.
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Now that the rock show of last night is over, the games actually do begin.Congratulations, Mr. McCain, it's unlikely that you could have chosen more wisely in this selection for VP at this juncture in time. Without a doubt this will shore up and please many people that might otherwise not agree with you and may have simply not bothered come November.
Strategic? Of course. It effectively neuters the prefab attacks that were surely lined up awaiting a Romney selection, and places the Democrats in a position that leaves them only able to underscore the lack of their own selection for president, and the manner in which they have run their operations in this campaign. The comments being tossed out by the always empty, are already telling and hilarious. Inexperienced? Can it truly be possible that these people don't see how foolish this statement makes them seem? Scratch that, as the answer is obvious. Some are actually going as far as to suggest that the "great campaign" that Obama has run is has given him the experience factor. Seriously.
It seems clear that as people find out more and more of Sarah Palin, they like her and generally what they hear. The exact opposite seems to be playing out in some measure in that the more people find out about Barry O's past (if they can jump the hurdles to do so) and accomplishments, the less appealing they find him. It really couldn't be any starker.
Expect new depths of empty rhetoric (amazing enough is the thought new depths of vacancy could be found, but have no fear, the media and talking heads will deliver!)
A brilliant selection? Indeed. One that I frankly didn't think that your camp would actually make. It shall be enjoyable watching the media as they attempt to volley this with further empty allusions and commentary.
-The Cynical Bastard
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Unity Peeps! : Get On The Love Train!
MSNBC : Discontent Between Anchors!?
[nypost] : Animosity among MSNBC anchors has reached a mile-high peak at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, with on-air squabbling between such big egos as Joe Scarborough, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and David Shuster.
Scarborough, who served in Congress as a Republican representative from Florida, seems to be particularly touchy being the only host who isn't openly pro-Democratic.
Yesterday, after Shuster referred to "your party, the Republican Party," Scarborough went off, sparking a seven-minute exchange.
"I will let you know that 'my party,' my party loathes me much more than your party, the Democratic Party, loathes me," Scarborough seethed. "What about your party? What's your party, David Shuster? David, what's your party?"
"I have no party. I'm a complete independent," Shuster replied.
"Oh, I feel so comforted by the fact that you're independent. I bet everyone at MSNBC has 'independent' on their voting cards," said Scarborough.
Scarborough declined to talk to Page Six, but sources say he and NBC anchor Tom Brokaw disagree with MSNBC's decision to position itself as the channel for George W. Bush-haters.
At a forum on Sunday, when Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell called MSNBC "the official network of the Obama campaign," Brokaw said, "I think Keith has gone too far. I think Chris has gone too far."
Insiders say Olbermann is pushing to have Brokaw banned from the network and is also refusing to have centrist Time magazine columnist Mike Murphy on his show.
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Gallup Daily: No Bounce for Obama in Post-Biden Tracking :
McCain creeps ahead, 46% to 44%
[gallup] : It's official: Barack Obama has received no bounce in voter support out of his selection of Sen. Joe Biden to be his vice presidential running mate.
Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Aug. 23-25, the first three-day period falling entirely after Obama's Saturday morning vice presidential announcement, shows 46% of national registered voters backing John McCain and 44% supporting Obama, not appreciably different from the previous week's standing for both candidates. This is the first time since Obama clinched the nomination in early June, though, that McCain has held any kind of advantage over Obama in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.
The race for president has been virtually tied since mid-August. In this period, Obama's support from national registered voters has consistently ranged from 44% to 46%. The 46% currently supporting McCain is technically his best showing since late May/early June, but is not a statistically significant improvement over his recent range from 43% to 45%.
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Media Blackout On A Far-Left Past
Democrats in Denver tried to introduce Barack Obama as a moderate, whitewashing his radical past, and the media are helping them by following the fictional script.
[ibd] On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, CNN, for one, aired an in-depth profile called "Obama Revealed." In fact, it revealed nothing except for CNN's bias.
The special, hosted by White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, started off by asking, "Who is Barack Obama?" — something not a few voters would like to know. It then let the presumptive Democrat nominee mostly answer the question "in his own words."
We learn he earned the nickname "Barry O'Bomber" on his high school basketball team, and that he was a "top student" at Harvard law school. Omitted from the saintly biography are hard truths about his radical ties. Voters hear nothing of his friendship with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers or the late black Communist poet Frank Marshall Davis.
There's no mention of the radical training he received from groups founded by the late socialist agitator Saul Alinsky, or how Obama later taught Alinsky's tactics as a college professor.
CNN glossed over his late Kenyan father's own radical politics by leaving it up to him to describe his "reputation."
"My father had this reputation as being this larger-than-life figure, charismatic, very smart, very engaging," Obama said, "and all those things were true."
It's also true that as a Nairobi bureaucrat, his father proposed a socialist economic plan for Kenya so radical it got him blackballed from the government. CNN left that part out, while also omitting Obama's recent support of Raila Odinga, a Communist-trained politician in Nairobi.
The one smudge in the network's otherwise glowing portrait — Obama's decades-long relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright — was quickly dispatched by noting he had distanced himself from his radically anti-American preacher. However, Obama's abiding faith in black liberation theology — a Marxist version of Christianity — was never even identified by the network.
CNN's coverage is par for the course. There's been a media blackout on Obama's radical past throughout the presidential campaign.
Take the story about his early mentor Davis, a known member of the Communist Party USA. No mainstream media reported on the relationship until Aug. 2, and that was only after IBD and a handful of conservative blogs weighed in on the controversy.
The Associated Press broke the silence with the article, "Writer offered a young Barack Obama advice on life." But it still does not tell the whole story. AP describes Davis as a "left-leaning black journalist" with "allegedly anti-American views" — when in fact, his Soviet allegiances and hatred for America are well documented in congressional reports and his own poems.
The Washington Post did AP one better. It managed to write an entire story on the controversy without identifying Davis by name. (It did have room to mention "the vast right-wing conspiracy" though.)
The establishment media have also ignored a long-lost article by Obama's father that reveals his communist leanings.
The 1965 paper by Barack Hussein Obama Sr., which called for Soviet-style expropriation and other extreme measures, was cited by Politico.com, a Web-based spin-off of the media elite in Washington. But it failed to quote any of his Marxist prescriptions, and in a shocking whitewash, concludes that "his central aim was moderate and conciliatory."
Many of these radical connections are cataloged in a new book, "The Obama Nation," which remains atop the national bestseller list. But CNN and other major news outlets have spent more time investigating its author than Obama, while parroting the Obama camp's line that the book is a "series of lies."
The Post in its coverage repeated word-for-word some of the talking points contained in a 40-page rebuttal of the book by Obama, essentially farming out the fact-checking to a political campaign.
It also noted that the book was being "pushed by conservative book clubs that buy in bulk to drive up sales," and that its publisher, Simon & Schuster, employs "former GOP strategist Mary Matalin" as an editor.
It's plain the media are protecting Obama from his radical past, insulating him from the kind of scrutiny voters need to make an informed choice in November. He got the same pass from the press running for the Senate. In fact, Obama in his latest autobiography said he couldn't believe his "good fortune."
"I was the beneficiary of unusually — and at times undeservedly — positive press coverage," he confessed in "The Audacity of Hope."
He skated into office then. Absent proper media vetting, he'll also skate into the Oval Office. But then that may be the plan.
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Greek Tragedy?
[abc] So all the buzz today was supposed to be about two big Wednesday speeches -- Bill Clinton’s and Joe Biden.
Why, then, is everyone in Denver talking about stagecraft?
It’s simple: Reporters got their first glimpse of the stage where Barack Obama will deliver his speech tomorrow night at Invesco Field. Reuters described the set as similar to a "Greek temple."
Thus a legend -- not the good kind -- was born.
Said one Democrat: "This is a disaster of mythical proportions." Said another: "It's not enough that he wants to be president -- he wants to be Zeus." Said the first: "Will he send down thunderbolts from the mountain?"
Those are the Democrats -- though assuredly not Obama partisans. Cue the Republicans: The RNC blasted around an e-mail referring to the "Temple of Obama."
"Tomorrow you're going to see Obama come down from Olympus to be among us mere mortals," Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, told reporters in Denver.
Senior Obama advisers dismiss the comparisons. There will be columns, they say, but it won’t look like a Greek temple -- or even the White House portico.
"It looks like any state capitol," one adviser tells ABC News. "It's a bunch of columns."
For the candidate who brought you his very own faux-presidential seal, this is not a good perception. Obama aides insist that the set is staying, and that it won't look as bad as it sounds right now; the real backdrop, they say, will be his supporters.
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FactCheck: Claims omit details on McCain record
[wshtimes] : The shotgun-style charges Democratic National Convention speakers fired at Republican John McCain Tuesday night weren't necessarily half-truths. But in some instances, they weren't the whole story either.
Some examples of who said what _ and what they left out:
SEN. ROBERT CASEY JR. of PENNSYLVANIA: "John McCain calls himself a maverick, but he votes with George Bush 90 percent of the time. That's not a maverick. That's a sidekick."
_PENNSYLVANIA GOV. ED RENDELL: "And guess who voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time? Sen. John McCain."
THE FACTS: McCain voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time from January 20, 2001, to when Congress left Washington on its annual August recess, according to a study by Congressional Quarterly. But McCain wasn't always a staunch Bush backer. In 2005, his support for Bush's position on legislation reached a low of 77 percent; last year, when he launched his latest bid for the GOP presidential nomination, he voted with Bush 95 percent of the time.
_IOWA GOV. CHET CULVER: "Now the oil companies are placing their bets on John McCain, bankrolling his campaign, and gambling with our future."
THE FACTS: McCain has received more than $1.5 million in contributions from oil and gas industry employees and their spouses, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Obama has received about $423,000. But the center's analysis found that Obama has received more than McCain from employees of the oil industry's major companies. Employees (and their spouses) of Exxon, Chevron and BP had given more than $93,000 to Obama as of the end of June; McCain had received $75,000, according to the study.
_RENDELL: Said the fact that top McCain advisers have lobbied for oil and gas companies "explains why he wants to give another $4 billion tax break to oil companies."
THE FACTS: The $4 billion in tax breaks for oil companies is part of McCain's plan to reduce corporate taxes overall and does not represent an additional tax benefit for these companies. The corporate reduction McCain has proposed would apply to all corporations, including oil companies.
_MONTANA GOV. BRIAN SCHWEITZER: "At a time when America should be working harder than ever to develop new, clean sources, John McCain wants more of the same and has taken more than a million dollars in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry. Now he wants to give the oil companies another $4 billion in tax breaks. Four billion in tax breaks for big oil?"
THE FACTS: McCain has collected $1.5 million from that industry. But it's a small slice of the $142 million McCain has raised so far in the campaign, ranking 11th on his donor list. Ahead of the oil and gas industry are lawyers, retirees, banking and securities interests, real estate and insurance.
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Bill Clinton Skipping Obama Speech!?
[cnn] : Hillary Clinton will be on hand for Barack Obama's acceptance speech, but according to a source close to former President Bill Clinton, he will not: the source tells CNN that Clinton will not join his wife at Invesco Field Thursday night.
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Clinton Advisers Skipping Obama Speech
[wapo] : A number of Sen. Hillary Clinton's top advisers will not be staying in Denver long enough to hear Barack Obama accept the nomination for president, according to sources familiar with their schedules.
Clinton will deliver her speech Tuesday night. She will hold a private meeting with her top financial supporters Wednesday at noon, and will thank her delegates at an event that afternoon. Former president Bill Clinton will speak that night. Several of Hillary Clinton's supporters are then planning to leave town -- among them, Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's campaign chairman. Another of Clinton's top New York fundraisers, Alan Patricof, did not make the trip to Denver.
Robert Zimmerman, a Clinton supporter who is trying now to navigate between the two camps, will be staying for Obama's speech. But he said in an interview that it would be unrealistic to expect there would not still be some tension between the two camps -- he noted that the same was true with supporters of Gary Hart and, to a lesser extent, Howard Dean.
"This convention provides a very important opportunity for the Obama campaign to bond with the constituencies that supported Hillary Clinton," Zimmerman said. "It's not about Barack or Hillary. It's about bringing in the people here who voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Senator Obama and Senator Biden are, without question, qualified to do that."
Two more longtime Clinton fundraisers -- Mark Aronchick and Hassan Nemazee -- were adamant that, while they are making early exits, it should not be viewed as a snub or symbolic gesture.
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The Cactus Cuties, ranging in age from 8 to 13, sing The Star Spangled Banner. The group is named for the Cactus Theater in Lubbock, Texas.
Magnificient!
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The Biggest Missing Story in Politics
[americanthinker] : The Battleground Poll, the most respected and thorough of all public opinion polls, released its latest results on August 20th. Although many people read this poll for the data on voter preference in upcoming elections, for voter opinions about the two major political parties, for what things matter most to voters, I always zip past this data in the first fifteen pages of poll results and go straight to Question D3, which very quietly and totally ignored proclaims the biggest missing story in American politics and which is the only story, in the long run, that really matters.
I have been tracking Question D3 for a long time, since June 2002, in thirteen straight Battleground Poll results. Americans respond to this question more consistently than to any other question in those thirteen Battleground Poll surveys. People many change their opinions dramatically about Iraq or President Bush or drilling for oil, but not their answer to Question D3.
The Battleground Poll is different. It is bipartisan. A Republican polling organization, the Terrance Group, and a Democrat polling organization, Lake Research Partners, collaborate in picking the questions, selecting the sample population, conducting the surveys, and analyzing the results. The Battleground Poll website, along with the raw data, is "Republican Strategic Analysis" and "Democratic Strategic Analysis." There are few polls that are bipartisan. No other polling organization asks the same questions year after year, none that reveal the internals of their poll results so completely, and none ask anything like Question D3 in every survey. What is Question D3 and what were the results to Question D3 in the August 20, 2008 Battleground Poll? It is this:
"When thinking about politics and government, do you consider yourself to be...
Very conservative
Somewhat conservative
MODERATE
Somewhat liberal
Very liberal
UNSURE/REFUSED"
In August 2008, Americans answered that question this way: (1) 20% of Americans considered themselves to be very conservative; (2) 40% of Americans considered themselves to be somewhat conservative; (3) 2% of Americans considered themselves to be moderate; (4) 27% of Americans considered themselves to be somewhat liberal; (5) 9% of Americans considered themselves to be very liberal; and (6) 3% of Americans did not know or refused to answer.
Sixty percent of Americans considered themselves conservative. Does this mean that most Americans do not know what "conservative" means? No: The question specifically provides an out to people who are not sure about their ideology; it provides an out to people who want to be considered "moderate." Americans reject those choices. They overwhelmingly define themselves as "conservative." This is a huge political story - except that it is not "new" at all. Look at the thirteen Battleground Poll results over the last six years, and how do Americans answer that very question? Here are the percentages of Americans in those polls who call themselves "conservative" since June 2002: 59% (June 2002 poll), 59% (September 2003 poll), 61% (April 2004 poll), 59% (June 2004 poll), 60% (September 2004 poll), 61% (October 2005 poll), 59% (March 2006), 61% (October 2006), 59% (January 2007), 63% (July 2007), 58% (December 2007), 63% (May 2008), and now 60% (August 2008.)
The percentage of Americans who define themselves as "somewhat liberal" or "very liberal" has always been puny. In thirteen straight polls, this percentage has never been higher than 38% (June 2004) and it has usually been much lower.
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Michelle Obama’s Two Americas
[nro] : Denver — Near the end of Michelle Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention Monday night, I got an e-mail from a friend who had been with me at another speech by Mrs. Obama, in Charlotte, North Carolina, last May, on the eve of that state’s primary. “This isn’t the Michelle we know,” my friend said. And indeed, Mrs. Obama’s speech to the delegates here in Denver was worlds away from her address in Charlotte.
In Denver, Michelle Obama described America as a place of hope, a place where people find success during the course of “improbable journeys.” In Charlotte, her America was a dark and ugly place, where people who work hard are knocked down by sinister forces — a place where even young children burst into tears when they realize the deck is stacked against them.
In Denver, Mrs. Obama said, “My piece of the American Dream is a blessing hard won by those who came before me.” Those forebears, she explained, were “driven by the same conviction that drove my dad to get up an hour early each day to painstakingly dress himself for work — the same conviction that drives the men and women I’ve met all across this country…That’s why I love this country.”
In Charlotte, Mrs. Obama said, “We’re still living in a time and in a nation where the bar is set, right?…You start working hard and sacrificing and you think you’re getting close to that bar, you’re working and you’re struggling, and then what happens? They raise the bar…keep it just out of reach.”
Had something changed in the last few months? In the early primaries, Mrs. Obama often gave complaining speeches. It was in late February that she said the now-famous words, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” In other speeches, she grumbled — sometimes at length — about having to pay back her college loans. And she, as much as her husband, was associated with the anti-American rants of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. [...]
So here in Denver Mrs. Obama had a job to do. It wasn’t just to introduce Americans to the Obama family or show another side of her husband’s personality. It was to rehabilitate herself, to take the edge of anger and resentment from her public pronouncements and embrace a wholesome, country-loving, American-Dream-living image. And that’s what her speech at the convention was about.
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VP choice Biden unpopular in Iraq
[reuters] : Across racial and religious boundaries, Iraqi politicians on Saturday bemoaned Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's choice of running mate, known in Iraq as the author of a 2006 plan to divide the country into ethnic and sectarian enclaves.
"This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq," Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters.
"We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time."
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Is everything the Democrats say and do just naturally foolish? Is it premeditated that all actions must be carried out as if partaking in a grade 3 exercise? It has become harder and harder to make a case otherwise as evidenced by the clown show made of the VP selection. Anyway...Biden is the Obama VP selection. Let the fabulist babbling and fairy-tale telling - The Cynical Bastard
The Word of Joe : Biden says:
A nice selection of Joe's wisdom are enumerated at NRO. We've just picked a couple faves.
[nro] : Biden, on a post-debate appearance on MSNBC, October 30, 2007: “The only guy on the other side who’s qualified is John McCain.”
Biden appearing on The Daily Show, August 2, 2005: “John McCain is a personal friend, a great friend, and I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off, be well off no matter who...”
Assessing Obama’s Iraq plan on September 13, 2007: “My impression is [Obama] thinks that if we leave, somehow the Iraqis are going to have an epiphany” of peaceful coexistence among warring sects. “I’ve seen zero evidence of that.”
Speaking to the New York Observer: Biden was equally skeptical — albeit in a slightly more backhanded way — about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2002, discussing Saddam Hussein: “He’s a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security… “We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2002: “Saddam must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2007, on Hussein’s WMDs: “Well, the point is, it turned out they didn’t, but everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them. He catalogued — they catalogued them. This was not some, some Cheney, you know, pipe dream. This was, in fact, catalogued.”
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Joe "I exaggerate when I'm angry" Biden - Yea, That's The Ticket : Barry Picks Joe for VP
Biden Admits Errors and Criticizes Latest Report
September 22, 1987
[nyt] : Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued a formal statement today acknowledging that he had misstated several facts about his past last April in a campaign appearance in New Hampshire.
But the Delaware Democrat insisted today, as he had Sunday night in an interview with The New York Times, that some of the disputed statements were true and that his misstatements were the product of a faulty memory and the fact that he lost his temper. Mr. Biden, whose Presidential campaign has been shaken by news reports about his unattributed use of speeches from other politicians and a plagiarism incident while he was in law school, said in The Times interview that he was ''frustrated'' and ''angry as hell'' over the reports. [...]
Most of Mr. Biden's statement was in response to a report in this week's issue of Newsweek magazine on a tape recording made by the C-SPAN network of an appearance by Mr. Biden at a home in Claremont, N.H., on April 3. It was a typical coffee-klatch style appearance before a small group. The network regularly records and broadcasts such events as part of its coverage of the Presidential campaign.
The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter's request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as ''Frank.'' Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: ''I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.''
He then went on to say that he ''went to law school on a full academic scholarship - the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship,'' Mr. Biden said. He also said that he ''ended up in the top half'' of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was ''the outstanding student in the political science department'' and ''graduated with three degrees from college.'' Comments on Assertions
In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: ''I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate.''
As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: ''I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors - I said 'three' and should have said 'two.' '' Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science.
''With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department,'' the statement went on. ''My name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware.''
In the Sunday interview, Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: ''My recollection is - and I'd have to confirm this - but I don't recall paying any money to go to law school.'' Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse ''on half scholarship based on financial need.'' Says He Also Received Grant
In his statement today, Mr. Biden did not directly dispute this, but said he received a scholarship from the Syracuse University College of Law ''based in part on academics'' as well as a grant from the Higher Education Scholarship Fund of the state of Delaware. He said the law school ''arranged for my first year's room and board by placing me as an assitant resident adviser in the undergraduate school.''
As for the moot court competition, Mr. Biden said he had won such a competition, with a partner, in Kingston, Ontario, on Dec. 12, 1967.
Mr. Biden acknowledged that in the testy exchange in New Hampshire, he had lost his temper. ''I exaggerate when I'm angry,'' Mr. Biden said, ''but I've never gone around telling people things that aren't true about me.'' Mr. Biden's questioner had made the query in a mild tone, but provoked an explosive response from Mr. Biden. 'Legitimate Questions of Press'
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Judge : Content Owners Must Consider Fair Use Before Sending Takedowns
[eff] : In a definitive win for fair use and free speech, a federal judge ruled that content owners must consider fair use before sending takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The case
arose when Universal Music Corporation sent a DMCA takedown notice for a short YouTube video of a toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" emanating from a radio in the kitchen. Universal tried to argue that it had no obligation to consider whether the song in the video was a fair use before sending the notice -- but the judge ruled otherwise, confirming what the EFF No Downtime For Free Speech
Campaign has been saying all along: a copyright owner must consider fair use before issuing a takedown notice that may result in the unnecessary censorship of free speech.
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NYT : The Surge, Clearly, Has Worked
[nyt] : [...] The surge, clearly, has worked, at least for now: violence, measured in the number of attacks against Americans and Iraqis each week, has dropped by 80 percent in the country since early 2007, according to figures the general provided. Civilian deaths, which peaked at more than 100 a day in late 2006, have also plunged. Car and suicide bombings, which stoked sectarian violence, have fallen from a total of 130 in March 2007 to fewer than 40 last month. In July, fewer Americans were killed in Iraq — 13 — than in any month since the war began.
The result, now visible in the streets, is a calm unlike any the country has seen since the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in April 2003. The signs — Iraqi families flooding into parks at sundown, merchants throwing open long-shuttered shops — are stunning to anyone who witnessed the country’s implosion in 2005 and 2006.
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GOP Consider Major Changes in Primary Calendar
[wapo] : Republicans are set to consider a complete rewrite of their political calendar for the 2012 presidential primaries as they gather in Minnesota to officially nominate Sen. John McCain after a tumultuous primary season.
If approved by the delegates to the Republican convention, the new GOP calendar will pack many state primaries into elections on three successive Tuesdays late in the political calendar. The groupings of primaries would rotate every four years so every state would have a chance to go early in the process.
Exceptions would be made for a few states -- including Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and some small states that often get overlooked in the process. But under the proposed GOP rules, most would be locked into specific dates, a change from the freewheeling 2008 calendar, in which many states raced to the front of the pack, pushing voting earlier than ever before.
"In effect we had a national primary this year," said Robert T. Bennett, the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party and a chief backer of the changes. "If we don't make a change, you will have a total of between 36 to 38 states that will be voting the first Tuesday in February in 2012. By spreading out the primary process into some orderly process benefits the system."
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Prophet At Harvard
[townhall] [...] Today it is impossible to deny that Solzhenitsyn was correct about the “evil empire,” and his role in exposing it and bringing it down. But there is another side to Solzhenitsyn that has been largely ignored, and this is his critique of certain trends in Western civilization. Solzhenitsyn raised this subject, no less controversial and for us closer to home, in his famous 1978 Harvard address.
Even though he was second to none in his denunciation of totalitarian socialism, Solzhenitsyn said, "Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively." The whole address is worth reading, but here are some highlights.
On the lack of courage in facing a totalitarian enemy: "The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country...and of course in the United Nations....Such a decline is especially notable among ruling groups and the intellectual elite....They get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists."
On how materialism makes a nation soft: "Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the pursuit of happiness...So why and for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country?"
On what has happened to the rule of law: "People in the West has acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law....If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody might mention that one could still not be entirely right and urge a willingness to show restraint or sacrifice. Everybody operates at the extreme limits of those legal frames....A society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed, but a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either."
On the rights of criminals: "Legal frames especially in the United States are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of legions of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases."
On the abuses of freedom: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Soceity appears to have litle defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror...Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born out of a humanistic concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature."
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Obama on Clarence Thomas
[wsj] Barack Obama likes to portray himself as a centrist politician who wants to unite the country, but occasionally his postpartisan mask slips. That was the case at Saturday night's Saddleback Church forum, when Mr. Obama chose to demean Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Pastor Rick Warren asked each Presidential candidate which Justices he would not have nominated. Mr. McCain said, "with all due respect" the four most liberal sitting Justices because of his different judicial philosophy.
Mr. Obama took a lower road, replying first that "that's a good one," and then adding that "I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he, I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution." The Democrat added that he also wouldn't have appointed Antonin Scalia, and perhaps not John Roberts, though he assured the audience that at least they were smart enough for the job.
So let's see. By the time he was nominated, Clarence Thomas had worked in the Missouri Attorney General's office, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second most prominent court. Since his "elevation" to the High Court in 1991, he has also shown himself to be a principled and scholarly jurist.
Meanwhile, as he bids to be America's Commander in Chief, Mr. Obama isn't yet four years out of the Illinois state Senate, has never held a hearing of note of his U.S. Senate subcommittee, and had an unremarkable record as both a "community organizer" and law school lecturer. Justice Thomas's judicial credentials compare favorably to Mr. Obama's Presidential résumé by any measure. And when it comes to rising from difficult circumstances, Justice Thomas's rural Georgian upbringing makes Mr. Obama's story look like easy street.
Even more troubling is what the Illinois Democrat's answer betrays about his political habits of mind. Asked a question he didn't expect at a rare unscripted event, the rookie candidate didn't merely say he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court's black conservative isn't up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.
So much for civility in politics and bringing people together. And no wonder Mr. Obama's advisers have refused invitations for more such open forums, preferring to keep him in front of a teleprompter, where he won't let slip what he really believes.
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Obama - Bill Ayers - Just Neighbours
[] : Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse. Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon. Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past. Ayers was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an American flag, and told the New York Times just before 9/11 that the notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place “makes me want to puke.” Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama.
Although the press has been notably lax about pursuing the matter, the full story of the Obama-Ayers relationship calls the truth of Obama’s account seriously into question. When Obama made his first run for political office, articles in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald featured among his qualifications his position as chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation where Ayers was a founder and guiding force. Obama assumed the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office, and almost certainly received the job at the behest of Bill Ayers. During Obama’s time as Annenberg board chairman, Ayers’s own education projects received substantial funding. Indeed, during its first year, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge struggled with significant concerns about possible conflicts of interest. With a writ to aid Chicago’s public schools, the Annenberg challenge played a deeply political role in Chicago’s education wars, and as Annenberg board chairman, Obama clearly aligned himself with Ayers’s radical views on education issues. With Obama heading up the board and Ayers heading up the other key operating body of the Annenberg Challenge, the two would necessarily have had a close working relationship for years (therefore “exchanging ideas on a regular basis”). So when Ayers and Dorhn hosted that kickoff for the first Obama campaign, it was not a random happenstance, but merely further evidence of a close and ongoing political partnership. Of course, all of this clearly contradicts Obama’s dismissal of the significance of his relationship with Ayers.
This much we know from the public record, but a large cache of documents housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), is likely to flesh out the story. That document cache contains the internal files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The records in question are extensive, consisting of 132 boxes, containing 947 file folders, a total of about 70 linear feet of material. Not only would these files illuminate the working relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, they would also provide significant insight into a web of ties linking Obama to various radical organizations, including Obama-approved foundation gifts to political allies. Obama’s leadership style and abilities are also sure to be illuminated by the documents in question.
Cover-Up?
Unfortunately, I don’t yet have access to the documents. The Special Collections section of the Richard J. Daley Library agreed to let me read them, but just before I boarded my flight to Chicago, the top library officials mysteriously intervened to bar access. Circumstances strongly suggest the likelihood that Bill Ayers himself may have played a pivotal role in this denial. Ayers has long taught at UIC, where the Chicago Annenberg Challenge offices were housed, rent-free. Ayers likely arranged for the files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to be housed in the UIC library, and may well have been consulted during my unsuccessful struggle to gain access to the documents. Let me, then, explain in greater detail what the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) records are, and how I have been blocked from seeing them.
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Surge for the dollar as global fears rise
[ft] The dollar surged to a two-year high against the pound and a six-month peak against the euro on Friday, as fears about spreading economic gloom triggered a sell-off in commodities.
Against sterling, the US currency notched up its 11th consecutive day of gains – its longest uninterrupted rise in more than 35 years – as markets became increasingly convinced that the US was best-placed to weather the global downturn.
The strong dollar rebound undermined sentiment in the gold market, where prices fell below $800 for the first time this year to $774.90 a troy ounce, almost a quarter lower than early March’s record $1,030.80.
Prices for crude oil, platinum, copper, aluminium, corn and soyabeans have also retreated from records hit this year, prompting speculation that commodity prices have reached a turning point.
“The golden age when commodity prices could only go up is gone,” said Marco Annunziata, chief economist at Unicredit.
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Cyberwar and Real War Collide in Georgia
[newsfactor] Georgia, with a population of 4.6 million and a relative latecomer to the Internet, saw little effects of the DDoS attacks, beyond inaccessibility to many of its government Web sites, which limited the government's ability to spread its message online and to connect with sympathizers around the world during the fighting with Russia.
Weeks before bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.
Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in Lexington noticed a stream of data directed at Georgian government sites with the message: "win+love+in+Rusia."
Other Internet specialists in the United States said the attacks against Georgia's Internet infrastructure Relevant Products/Services began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests -- known as distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attacks -- that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.
Researchers at Shadowserver, a volunteer group that tracks malicious network activity, reported that the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had been rendered inoperable for 24 hours by multiple DDOS attacks. They said the command and control server Relevant Products/Services that directed the attack was based in the United States and had come online several weeks before it began the assault.
As it turns out, the July attack may have been a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar once the shooting started between Georgia and Russia. According to Internet technical experts, it was the first time a known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.
Exactly who was behind the cyberattack is not known. The Georgian government blamed Russia for the attacks, but the Russian government said it was not involved.
In the end, Georgia, with a population of 4.6 million and a relative latecomer to the Internet, saw little effect beyond inaccessibility to many of its government Web sites, which limited the government's ability to spread its message online and to connect with sympathizers around the world during the fighting with Russia.
It ranks 74th out of 234 nations in terms of Internet addresses, behind Nigeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia and El Salvador. Cyberattacks have far less impact on such a country than they might on a more Internet-dependent nation, like Israel, Estonia or the United States, where vital services like transportation, power Relevant Products/Services and banking are tied to the Internet.
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Marxist Brother
: [...] [townhall] : I simply can’t figure out how he’s managed to convince so many people that he should be the President of the United States. It’s a lot like trying to figure out how Las Vegas magicians make lions and tigers disappear.
To be perfectly honest, I invariably feel that way about the candidates the Democrats try to foist off on us. But, as a rule, guys like Dukakis, Gore and Kerry are just typical party hacks. But at least none of them attended a racist church, they didn’t associate with known terrorists and they usually didn’t display their contempt for national symbols and the U.S. military quite so blatantly.
Liberals have tried to convince me that Obama is brilliant. I find that odd because he has said that there are 57 states, that JFK got the Russians to remove their missiles from Cuba by sitting down and chatting with Khrushchev, and that Iran doesn’t really constitute an actual threat because they don’t spend as much money on weaponry as we do. Funny, but “brilliant” isn’t the first word that comes to mind. But what do liberals know? They were also convinced that Jimmy Carter was intelligent. [...]
Because the MSM adores Obama, they continue to promote the notion of Obama as a great orator, but he is actually no more silver-tongued than your average radio announcer reading ad copy for baby wipes. The fact is that when asked a direct question, the man turns into a blithering idiot, even though you would imagine that by this late date he would have memorized the appropriate lines. Perhaps the problem is that this new-style politician is so driven by polls that from moment to moment he’s not sure exactly how he feels about the 16-month deadline in Iraq, the surge, offshore drilling for oil, election financing or dividing the city of Jerusalem.
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Nannyfornia
Could the frenzy of puritanical edicts from California's politicians - banning everything from trans fats to plastic bags - be a foretaste of what Barack Obama's America will be like?
[timeonline] Welcome everyone, to Nannyfornia: Birthplace of the Ban, Capital of the Clampdown, Mecca of the Moratorium. Or you could just call it the new Mild, Mild West.
[...]
...is Nannyfornia providing us with a glimpse of what Obama's America might look like? After all, Obama is a classic banner. He recently proposed banning all toys from China. He banned his own staff from wearing green clothing during his recent trip to the Middle East (green is the colour of the Hamas flag). He banned the New Yorker magazine from his press plane after it depicted him as a terrorist in a political cartoon. He wants to ban “excessive” profits by raising capital gains tax. Why? Because he thinks it's fair. No matter that the state's revenues from the tax have always gone up whenever the rate has been lowered.
Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Association, is one of many Americans who fears all this prohibition is going too far. “The Government here in California is banning a food product simply because it's not healthy,” he complains. “What do you ban next? Bacon fat? The possibilities are limitless.”
But is it all the fault of emboldened Democrats? Without a doubt, he says. He describes the Democratic-controlled legislature in California as “an activist government that thinks it knows what's best for us”.
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I'm running for president because of...because I got two daughters just like you. America is...is no longer what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don't want that future for my children. I want...I want America to be better, to be stronger, to be more unified, to be more prosperous, to be kinder, to be more tolerant. - Barack Obama answers the question, asked by a 7-year-old girl, why is he running for president.
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Anti-Business States Awash In Red Ink
[rcm] Shortly after he was confirmed as governor of New York earlier this year, David Paterson told a group of business executives that when he received congratulations from old friends he hadn’t heard from in years, he was surprised how many no longer lived in New York. "All of them basically said the same thing," Paterson told the group. "'Good luck in New York state, but we can't pay the taxes. The opportunities aren't there.'”
After that experience, Paterson presumably can understand the complaints of corporate executives recently surveyed by Development Counsellors International, which advises companies on where to locate their facilities. More than four in ten of them have ranked New York as the worst state to do business in--second only to California in unfavorable mentions. The most common gripes included high taxes and anti-business regulations. Joining New York and California on the list of most unpopular states were New Jersey, Michigan and Massachusetts.
The DCI study, coming as it did amidst growing talk of state fiscal crises around the country, is particularly revealing. Of the approximately $48 billion in accumulated budget shortfalls that the 29 states with projected deficits are facing, $33 billion, or two-thirds of the gap, is concentrated in those five states considered by corporate executives to be the least friendly to business. Meanwhile, among the five states ranked as having the best business environment, Texas and North Carolina have no projected budget gaps, and Georgia, Tennessee and Florida are facing shortfalls amounting to about $4.1 billion, or less than one-tenth of the states’ total.
An idealist would assume that those stark numbers would jump out at legislators in the most anti-business states and prompt a bracing re-evaluation of their spending, tax and regulatory regimes, as Paterson advocates. But no such luck. Paterson’s former colleagues in the state legislature are lobbying for a new tax on millionaires, while across the country California’s legislators have called for boosting the state’s top tax rate from 9.3 percent to 11 percent.
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John Edwards : On 'Character'
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Is this the dog days? I don't even know, but I'm dogged and it's been a mofo charlie. Interesting? I suppose. Na. Scratch that. Freakish.The Dali Bama? Basically have him on ignore, but it is still impossible to not notice that new heights of bold, naked, hypocritical pablum are being reached and served on high, gleefully consumed.
- TCB
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Hillary's Growing Shadow[rcp -vdh] Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck and neck.
Impossible?
It would seem so. Republican President Bush still has less than a 30 percent approval rating. Headlines blare that unemployment and inflation are up -- even if we aren't, technically, in a recession. Gas is around $4 a gallon. Housing prices have nosedived. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted -- another in a line of congressional Republicans caught in financial or sexual scandal.
Meanwhile, the GOP's presumptive candidate, John McCain, is 71 years old. The Republican base thinks he's lackluster and too liberal.
So, everyone is puzzled why the Democratic candidate isn't at least 10 points ahead. It seems the more Americans get used to Barack Obama, the less they want him as president -- and the more Democrats will soon regret not nominating Hillary Clinton.
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Ezra Levant: How I beat the fatwa, and lost my freedom
[nationalpost] : Some 900 days after I became the only person in the Western world charged with the “offence” of republishing the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the government has finally acquitted me of illegal “discrimination.” Taxpayers are out more than $500,000 for an investigation that involved fifteen bureaucrats at the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The legal cost to me and the now-defunct Western Standard magazine is $100,000.
The case would have been thrown out long ago if I had been charged in a criminal court, instead of a human rights commission. That’s because accused criminals have the right to a speedy trial. Accused publishers at human rights commissions do not.
And if I had been a defendant in a civil court, the judge would now order the losing parties to pay my legal bills. Instead, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities won’t have to pay me a dime. Neither will Syed Soharwardy, the Calgary imam who abandoned his identical complaint against me this spring.
Both managed to hijack a secular government agency to prosecute their radical Islamic fatwa against me — the first blasphemy case in Canada in over 80 years. Their complaints were dismissed, but it is inaccurate to say that they lost: They got the government to rough me up for nearly three years, at no cost to them. The process I was put through was a punishment in itself — and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam.
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.
In his report, Gundara presents as “fact” his personal opinion of the Muhammad cartoons. He says they’re “stereotypical, negative and offensive.” That’s one viewpoint. Others have a different view. Why should anyone care about Gundara’s personal opinion? Do I need permission from him — or anyone other than my conscience — before I publish things in the future? Is this column okay by him?
Gundara forgave me and the Western Standard our sins because, according to him, the offensiveness of the cartoons was “muted by the context of the accompanying article” and we ran letters both for and against the cartoons in our subsequent issue. He also acquitted us because “the cartoons were not simply stuck in the middle of the magazine with no purpose or related story.”
Let me translate: You’d better be “reasonable” in how you use your freedoms, or you won’t be allowed to keep them. You’d better not run political cartoons “simply stuck in the middle” of a magazine. You’d better have a “purpose” for being “negative” that is approved by bureaucrat, when he finally gets around to it three years later.
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.
My dismissal is not a victory for freedom of the press. Because Alberta’s press is not free — it is now subject to the approval of the government. But Canadians have the right to a free press in spite of the government. We have the right to break every one of Gundara’s petty and subjective rules.
Exactly two months before I was acquitted, another Albertan was sentenced by the HRC on the exact same charge: “discrimination” in a newspaper. Five years ago, Reverend Stephen Boissoin wrote a controversial column about gay rights. It passed all of Gundara’s home-made rules: It was in the context of a broader debate; it was followed by many opposing letters to the editor; it had a “purpose,” etc. But Rev. Boissoin was fined $7,000 and banned for life from giving sermons or even sending private e-mails that were “disparaging”. To top it off, he was ordered by the HRC to write a public renunciation of his faith.
It’s obvious why I was acquitted and Boissoin was convicted. I’ve been a political pain in the neck for the HRC. Rev. Boissoin? He was quiet, so he’s roadkill. But neither of us are free — we both have to have our views checked out by the government.
Of course I’m glad to be done with this malicious prosecution — though my antagonists can still appeal my acquittal.
But two years ago, the HRC told me if I paid a few thousand dollars to my accusers and gave them a page in our magazine, I’d be set free. Most victims of the HRCs accept deals like that, and it’s certainly cheaper than a 900-day fight. But getting the approval of the HRC’s censor is morally no better than their shake-down attempt. Whether I have to pay off a radical imam or appease a meddling bureaucrat, it’s still an infringement on our Canadian liberties.
National Post
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Hysterics v Heretics in an Age of Unreason
[theaustralian] It has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.
In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.
Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.
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