ABC News: hate crimes surging since Obama's election. Evidence: missing in action.

I just saw a story in ABC News on TV (can't find video of same on the web yet) claiming that hate crimes and Ku Klux Klan recruitment have "surged" since Barack Obama was elected. The teaser before the break really caught my ear, so I listened very carefully to the story, eager to hear how ABC had reached this conclusion.

There was not one bit of evidence offered in support of this thesis. Indeed, much of the story was spent talking about a recent successful lawsuit against some Klan members for the beating of a Native American they took for Latino. There was also some general discussion about how the Klan recruits online and people can participate in hate speech from "the privacy of their bedroom." But evidence of a recent surge in hate crimes or Klan recruitment? Zip. Nada. Zilch.

So I looked for video of the ABC story on the web, and in the process ran across a related story on Yahoo! News making the same claim. Not only was this story (from Agence France Presse) devoid of evidence, it also tried to pin part of the blame on Sarah Palin. Here's the meat of the piece (emphasis mine):

Mark Potok, director of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, said the final weeks of the US election campaign and its immediate aftermath had witnessed "hundreds and hundreds" of hate-related incidents.

"Since the closing weeks of the campaign, we've seen a real and significant, white backlash break out and I think it's getting worse," Potok told AFP.

OK, we've got "hundreds and hundreds" of incidents.  How does that compare to pre-election rates of incidents?  That should be the basis for any claim that hate is "surging," shouldn't it?  But hey who needs evidence when the headline of the article notes that "experts" have noted the increase? 

Potok traced the onset of the incidents to around the time of election rallies by Republican vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin where shouts of "Kill Him!" were reportedly heard from sections of the crowd.

The Secret Service found these allegations to be unfounded.  Yet reports of one guy at one rally morphed into allegations of a racist campaign.

"But what we're seeing now is everything from cross burnings, to death threats, to Obama effigies hanging in nooses to ugly racial incidents in schoolyards around the country," Potok said.

"It's been really quite something. I can't quantify the figures beyond saying that clearly there have been hundreds and hundreds of these incidents."

Brian Levin, a professor from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino also said the rise in hate crimes appeared to fit into part of a longer term trend.

"We don't have exact figures but what I can say anecdotally is that there does seem to be a significant spike in hate crimes from around the election period up until now," Levin said.

Levin also said there was evidence of a surge in traffic on white supremacist Internet websites such as StormFront, whose server crashed on the day after the November 4 election due to the uptick in activity.

Wow, these guys are really crunching the numbers, aren't they?  As for the server crash . . . ah, a little bit of evidence.  Finally.  But if the crash was really due to increased activity, you'd think Storm Front would be pretty proud of that, wouldn't you?  Check their website.  I can't find anything about that (though it is a confusing mess of discussion boards and blogs).  But hey, I'll give 'em the benefit of the doubt on this one, and assume that the servers really crashed and that the overload wasn't fueled by reporters looking for a story.  But it still isn't evidence of an increase in hate crimes.

Levin said he had also noticed a ramping up of the vitriol. "It is harder to gauge but it does seem to be much more severe than usual," he said.

Wow!  Harder to gauge than "We don't have exact figures" and anecdotally-derived "surges"?  That rally is hard! 

For white supremacists, Obama -- who is also reportedly preparing to appoint the country's first ever African-American attorney general, EricHolder -- represented the doomsday scenario espoused by their ideology, Levin said.

"To them Barack Obama is nothing less than the anti-Christ. He not only represents policies that are eroding the white culture and bloodline of the United States; he is a walking, talking symbol of what they would call the 'mongrelization' that has occurred," he said.

"Barack Obama is a perfect storm that incites a nerve within the hardcore racist movement in the United States."

Summing up, then: hardcore racists and white supremacists who hated blacks and saw the country going to hell in a handbasket before the election are even more pissed off now that Obama won the election.  Man, I'm shocked!  I thought they'd all just shut up and go away!

Despite the horrible quality of the reporting, I suspect they're right, at least about an increase in racist anger among those who where already vocally angry racists.  And that may have even resulted in more hate crimes.  But neither ABC News nor AFP even documented the purported increase in hate crimes.  They expect it, so it's true.

Finally, what photo does Yahoo! News use with the story?  A burning cross?  An Obama effigy?  No . . . a Secret Service agent doing his job:

You know, before Obama was elected, there was simply no need for presidential security details!  At least, that's what you'd think from the accompanying caption when you click the photo:

A member of the US Secret Service (R) looks out the back of an SUV as US President-elect Barack Obama's motorcade drives through the streets of Chicago on his way to his transition offices on November 18, 2008. An interracial couple in Pennsylvania who [sic] woke up to find the remains of a burnt cross in their front garden.

In other news, security continues to be maintained at banks, and some guy found $200,000 in the wall of a house he was renovating.  That connection makes about as much sense, anyway.

Again, I have no doubt Obama's election has driven some racists nuts, may lead more of them to commit hate crimes, and may even lead some racist to try to kill Obama.  In fact, I hope the Secret Service is monitoring the hardore racists and taking other measures to increase Obama's (and his family's) level of protection above that afforded past presidents, because I'm worried some nut will try to get at him or his family. 

But is it too much to ask for reporting on this subject to make sense?  How about providing the evidence and rationally connecting it to the conclusion?

Fire is Bad No Matter Who It Hits

There's a horrible fire burning many home in the hills above Montecito, California.

Believe I or not, politic intrudes on my thoughts even as I pray for the firefighters and the people whose property is threatened or has already been destroyed. Why, you ask?

Because it reminds me of another fire almost twenty years ago, when I was in law school, where politics raised its ugly head in the face of tragedy.

You see, Montecito — just south of Santa Barbara — is a ritzy area. And that's putting it mildly.  The homes there are amazing, worth millions, and the town is home (at least part of the year) to many celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey.  So we're talking about some very wealthy people losing their homes and their contents.  The last estimate they gave on the news was more than 100 homes lost.

The fire nearly 20 years ago hit a similarly prosperous area in hills in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Actually, that area was probably less prosperous.  And I don't remember news of of any celebrity residents.

And in the aftermath of that fire, some expressed the sentiment that the fire was not so bad because it had hit some rich folks.  Some went so far as believing that these rich folks essentially had it coming as some kind of karmic justice for trampling on the rest of society.

Don't ask me for links.  (This was nearly 20 years ago.)  Don't ask me for specific instances of people expressing this.  I think these thoughts came from classmates, but they could have come from other sources as well.  But I remember very clearly telling my wife how amazed I was by this reaction.

So, now I'm wondering if it is going to happen again.  I'm no longer on a campus, so I'm not likely to run across the demographic segment most likely to express such sentiments.  I'd like to think no one will be thinking that way his time around.  But I fear that the only thing that may prevent it is the fact that Hollywood types are among those who will suffer loss.

I'm not preemptively castigating people.  I'm hoping there's no one to castigate.

And so begins the list of things we will learn about Obama that we should have learned before the election . . .

"You're all crazy," they said, when we accused the media f being in the tank for Obama. They insisted that they did not report on allegations of close ties between Obama and Jeremiah Wright [in this instance, but take your pick] because the ties were simply too distant or tenuous.

What utter crap.  CNS reports:

“One of the churches that I became involved in was Trinity United Church of Christ,” Obama said in the interview. “And the pastor there, Jeremiah Wright, became a good friend. So I joined that church and committed myself to Christ in that church.” 

Obama began attending the church in 1988 and formally joined Trinity in 1992. Falsani asked, “Do you still attend Trinity?”

Obama answered, “Yep. Every week. 11 o’clock service. Ever been there? Good service.  I actually wrote a book called ‘Dreams from My Father,’ it’s kind of a meditation on race. There's a whole chapter on the church in that, and my first visits to Trinity.”

That is in direct contradiction to what he has said throughout this campaign year.

Would this have made a difference if it had come out earlier?  Who knows.

Bringing it up now, we'll be told, is mere sour grapes.  "Get over it.  Obama's been elected already."

I'm rethinking my disagreement with those who have been saying that the mainstream media is the big loser in this election.  I thought they were wrong because the MSM has been so shameless and consistent in its denials that a huge swath of the public has swallowed the MSM's position.  But revelations like this one may actually make the public question that position.

Assuming the are ever reported in the MSM, of course.

What's next?

H/T: Hotair.

What is in Sarah Palin's future?

With everyone's post-election pontificating on what the Republican Party has to do to improve its brand, I hope some people are paying attention to this (emphasis mine):

Ninety-one percent (91%) of Republicans have a favorable view of Palin, including 65% who say their view is Very Favorable. Only eight percent (8%) have an unfavorable view of her, including three percent (3%) Very Unfavorable.

When asked to choose among some of the GOP’s top names for their choice for the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, 64% say Palin. The next closest contenders are two former governors and unsuccessful challengers for the presidential nomination this year -- Mike Huckabee of Arkansas with 12% support and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts with 11%.

Three other sitting governors – Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Charlie Crist of Florida and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota – all pull low single-digit support.

These findings echo a survey earlier this week which found that Republicans were happier with their vice presidential candidate than with their presidential nominee. Seventy-one percent (71%) said McCain made the right choice by picking Palin as his running mate, while only 65% said the party picked the right nominee for president.

(Of course, it would have been nice if Republicans actually got to choose our candidate, instead of letting crossover voters do it in open primaries.  Until Super Tuesday, McCain did not get the majority, or even a plurality, of the Republican vote in a single open-primary state.)

I'm not saying Sarah Palin should be the Republican nominee for president in 2012.  But I'd like to see her wielding some influence in those red pumps.

H/Ts: HotAir, Slublog.

How McCain blew the economic meltdown issue.

There were lots of things that made me tear my hair out over the McCain campaign.  His refusal to make an issue of Jeremiah Wright, and even criticizing others for doing so, was the biggest.  Second was not looking closely enough at the Ayers issue to put the lie to Obama's claim that their relationship was distant.

Until the economic meltdown, which vaulted to #1 in invoking hair-pulling frustration.  Initially, I was agnostic on McCain's decision to suspend his campaign to return to Washington for this crisis.  (These actions proved to be key in makg independent voters see him as knee-jerk and panicky.)

My agnosticism turned to disgust when, in the ensuing days, I learned that McCain had a very simple case to make that would have been far more effective:  It wasn't deregulation that caused the problem, it was regulation that distorted market incentives, thus encouraging risky loans.  Those loans extended well beyond the lower economic classes they were intended for when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provided a market for such loans, allowing the lenders to make them risk-free (and sticking some other sap down the line with the paper).  Of course lenders made bad loans under those circumstances.

To make McCain's failure worse, he had all the evidence he needed to make the case that Democrats foiled the reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that McCain wanted. Not just a bunch of esoteric documents, but videos of congressman after congressman— including Barney Frank, who ridiculously positioned himself as a savior during he recent meltdown — ridiculously insisting that Fannie and Freddie were fine.  They insisted that tightening credit would hurt the poor and minorities the most, so they balked at reform.  All Republicans got for proposing reform was to be called racists for doing so.

Dave in Texas sums it up nicely at Ace's:

A key opportunity was squandered in the financial crisis, Armey calls J-Mac's reaction "visceral and insecure", choosing to 'suspend' his campaign and promising to bring an end to Wall Street greed.

Dude. Dude. You were handed this mess on a silver platter, with the sound bites, video clips and personal history of having taken two full shots at intervening in the shit within the past 4 years, and this was your play?

Visceral indeed. John and his gut reactions.

Yeah, it was a gut reaction, but McCain could have realized his mistake and made his case, but he didn't, and I'm afraid it was once again for fear of being labeled a racist. 

This crap with being afraid of being labeled a racist has got to stop now.  No one's ever going to see the logical fallacy of that charge if we keep caving in to it.

Surprise! Guantanamo's illegitimacy no longer clear-cut now that Bush won't be president.

Since the prison at Guantanamo Bay was established, what has been the constant refrain of the left and the media (I know, I know, what's the difference) been saying?

"Holding the detainees Gitmo is an outrage!"

"Shut Gitmo down!" (McCain said the same.)

"Gitmo is against our values!"

Two days before the election, a piece in the New York Times essentially said that maybe this Gitmo issue is a little more complicated than we thought:

As the Bush administration enters its final months with no apparent plan to close the Guantanamo Bay camp, an extensive review of the government’s military tribunal files suggests that dozens of the roughly 255 prisoners remaining in detention are said by military and intelligence agencies to have been captured with important terrorism suspects, to have connections to top leaders of Al Qaeda or to have other serious terrorism credentials.

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have said they would close the detention camp, but the review of the government’s public files underscores the challenges of fulfilling that promise. The next president will have to contend with sobering intelligence claims against many of the remaining detainees.

“It would be very difficult for a new president to come in and say, ‘I don’t believe what the C.I.A. is saying about these guys,’ ” said Daniel Marcus, a Democrat who was general counsel of the 9/11 Commission and held senior positions in the Carter and Clinton administrations.

I don't expect the hard core left will see the nuance. Unless Obama closes Gitmo and releases everyone that he can't try in a civilian court, they're going to lambaste him.

Ditto for other security measures. Unless he stops monitoring financial transactions and abandons much of the surveillance that has been going on, he will be exposed as a fraud.

To be fair, the NYT ran this piece before the election, when there was at least still a possibility that McCain could have won. So, to the extent this article cuts the president-elect a break, the paper had no assurance that the recipient of that break would be Obama.

On election day, two days after that piece ran, the Times published an editorial, The Next President, outlining the upcoming challenges, including this:

His administration will also have to identify all of the ways that Americans’ basic rights and fundamental values have been violated and rein that dark work back in.

Certainly, the far left will push for it, but I doubt President Obama will actually roll back much. While this will roil the left (at least, if their criticism to date has been honest), I expect it won't bother much of America and that even the NYT will even stay away from it. The Times disclosed secret programs because their hatred of President Bush was always much stronger than their love of this country. With that hate missing during an Obama presidency, I doubt they'll even work hard at discovering secret programs. And if they discover them, there won't be an expiration date on their promise to keep it secret, as there was with President Bush.

H/T: The Anchoress.

What will the Obama maniacs do now?

This is especially funny satire to me because I love zombie flicks. The Onion on the fate of the Obama-obsessed voters now that he's won it:

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Thank God there are people with a sense of humor today. With Obamageddon just weeks from now, I really need a dose of fun.

H/T: Cassy Fiano.

Is Obamageddon here, or is Steven den Beste's election post mortem correct?

Over at Ace's and at his own site, Slublog recommended Steven den Beste's commentary on the coming Obama presidency, which den Beste titles, "It's not the end of the world." Sure hope not. But there's plenty of bad news in it, and I didn't think anybody could be more pessimistic than me.

Here's one overview, which I really agree with, especially the last sentence:

I think Obama is going to turn out to be the worst president since Carter, and for the same reason: good intentions do not guarantee good results. Idealists often stub their toes on the wayward rocks of reality, and fall on their faces. And the world doesn't respond to benign behavior benignly.

But I couldn't disagree more with this:

Obama and Congressional Democrats will do things that cause harm, but very little of it will be irreversible.

That might be true for simple statutory changes, like union card check, but I think it is a crazy thought when it comes to the creation of new bureaucracies. Can you think of any significant ones we've gotten rid of?

Here's one of the "good" things den Beste sees from the election and the course of the campaign, and another thing I disagree with:

It is no longer possible for anyone to deny that the MSM is heavily biased. The MSM have been biased for decades but managed an illusion of fairness. That is no longer possible; the MSM have squandered their credibility during this campaign. They'll never get that credibility back again.

Oh, how I wish he were right, but I doubt it. Everyone saying this already knew the media was biased, and I don't think the media's pathetic performance in vetting Obama changed the minds of many people about the media except at the margins. The media will continue to deny, deny, deny, and doesn't appear to be the least bit embarrassed by its performance. The ranks of those who think the media is left wing might have grown slightly, but not enough. A large portion of the electorate will reman sheep.

And here are three of den Beste's most frightening predictions for an Obama presidency:

2. The US hasn't suffered a terrorist attack by al Qaeda since 9/11, but we'll get at least one during Obama's term.

3. We're going to lose in Afghanistan.

4. Iran will get nuclear weapons. There will be nuclear war between Iran and Israel. (This is the only irreversibly terrible thing I see upcoming, and it's very bad indeed.)

On those, I sure hope he's wrong.

Bedtime thoughts on election night.

I know there are already thousands of posts up by conservatives expressing their frustration with the election results.  So I knew I could find one that summed up my feelings pretty well, saving me the problem of struggling to come up with the words.  My election night soul mate is John Derbyshire at The Corner:

I'm sour about the GOP too. What did it all get us, those 8 years of pandering and spending? If GWB had turned his face against new entitlements, closed the borders, deported the illegals, held the line on calls to loosen mortgage-lending standards, starved the Department of Education, and declined those invitations to mosque functions, would the GOP be in any worse shape now?

What won this election was the packaging skills of David Axelrod, the swooning complicity of the media, the ruthless opportunism of Barack Obama, and the unprincipled thuggishness of his supporters.

What lost this election was the cloth-eared cluelessness of George W. Bush, the timid squeamishness of John McCain, and the deep lack of interest in conservative principles among Republican primary voters.

Sour? You bet I’m sour. Where was conservatism in this election? Where was restraint in government? Where was national sovereignty? Where was liberty? Where was self-support? And where are those things now? Where are they headed this next four years? Down the toilet, that’s where. Pah!

Ditto.

Racists and rednecks re-elect Murtha! If we can't kick him out of Congress, can we at least kick him out of the fraternity of Marines?

"There's no such thing as a former Marine." That's something every Marine is taught, and it symbolizes the common bond of all United States Marines, past, present, and future.

Long after I left the Corps, I met a young Marine who, upon learning of my service, reminded me that there's no such thing as a former Marine and then said that there was one widely recognized exception to this maxim: Dan Rather. (That exception probably isn't valid because it seems Rather never became a Marine.)

So now, let me propose an exception for someone who was actually a Marine: Congressman John Murtha (D-PA), newly re-elected by his constituents even after labeling them racists, then rednecks.

Maybe I don't have standing to issue this call. Hey, I'll admit, I wasn't that good of a Marine, and I never attained the rank that Murtha did. And Murtha's seen combat, and I never did, so he certainly knows it better than I do.

But Murtha is beyond the pale. I'm not for disowning him because he opposes the war. I'm for disowning him because to further his anti-war cause, he irresponsibly accused Marines of cold-blooded murder so he could use their supposed combat stress as another reason to "redeploy" from Iraq (merrily helped along by MSNBC, of course). Not only has he never apologized, he says he doesn't regret making the statements, notwithstanding that all but one of the Marines (so far) have been exonerated. (Too bad the Marines weren't from his district - he apologized for insulting his constituents.)

You want o oppose the war, oppose the war. But don't do it by defaming Marines.

Am I being unfair? Or does this deplorable conduct pale in comparison to his combined 37 years of active and reserve duty and his visits to wounded servicemen?

Wow, talk about obscene! Schumer says if we can regulate pornography on the airwaves, why can't we impose the fairness doctrine?

Yes, I know he was only making the point that the government has a right regulate public airwaves.  But do you think for a minute that he wasn't trying to take a dig at conservative talk radio with the comparison?

Let's assume Schumer's general point is correct.  What is undeniably true is that the First Amendment's enunciation of the right to free speech  was designed especially for political speech, and that is precisely what Schumer et al. hope to stifle with the fairness doctrine.

H/T: HotAir.

An awful lot of squeaky predictions . . .

Make that an awful lot of predictions of (or wishes for) a squeaker, over at NRO. Rob Long's is the most concise: "To be succinct, I would say this about the election: Build an ark."

One of the more pessimistic in the bunch says that the video below is a pretty good "cinematic depiction of how we conservatives will view election-night coverage" if Obama wins by a big margin:

Frankly, I think that's a lot milder than we're likely to react.

Pray for Ed Morrissey's Optimistic Prediction

HotAir's Ed Morrisey has an optimistic election prediction:

McCain/Palin 273 electoral votes

Obama/Biden 265 electoral votes

He predicts both Ohio and Pennsylvania going for McCain, and I think that may be likely after the release of Obama's comments on coal from last January's San Francisco Chronicle interview. He also gives McCain Florida and North Carolina. As predictions go, I like it better than Allahpundit's:

McCain/Palin 220 electoral votes

Obama/Biden 318 electoral votes

And he only gets there by giving McCain "partly because he and Palin have spent so much time there but mainly because [he doesn't] have the stomach to sketch out a truly gruesome landslide."

Let's pray Ed's right.

Memo to conservative talk radio hosts: Stop saying that the American people are too smart to fall for Obama.

Rush says it (or at least, he used to say it — haven't listened to him in a long time), Sean Hannity says it, yesterday I caught a few minutes of Mike Gallagher, and he said it: "The American people are too smart to fall for [insert liberal tripe here]."  Hogwash.

Yesterday, Gallagher claimed the American people were too smart to fall for Obama.  To which I respond:  Where's your damn evidence?

Last week, finally, I heard a more honest assessment of the public made by Mark Levin.  Catching up on a podcast of last Monday's show, I heard him express his concern that the public will accept the "chrasmatic demagogue" Barack Obama.  His opinion is that 40% or so of Americans at any one time are dolts.  Thanks for being real, Mark.  I agree entirely.

This is why I don't get too upset when someone like Michael Moore says that half the American people are idiots. I agree with him.  He and I just aren't thinking about the same half.

Are you willing to go through a depression for the sake of fighting climate change?

About a month ago, I wrote about whether an economic depression might actually be good for us in the log run.  I don't think that was too wacky a thought to have, because I made clear I was not rooting for a depression, only considering what benefit might be gleaned from such a hardship if it occurs.

Today at Ace's, Kat-Mo makes the case that Barack Obama seems virtually certain to cause great economic hardship through his plans to cause energy costs to skyrocket. It's a long-ish post, but here's the philosophical (as opposed to economic) part:

The problem in this country is that there are too many who have a mythological view of American history. Some where, some how, people have romanticized the "sacrifices" of the depression era along with the great crime wave that accompanied it. Subsistence living on the government dole with long soup lines and 30% unemployment has turned into a national triumph when, in fact, it was a terrible tragedy. When, in fact, our great grandparents and grand parents worked extremely hard to leave that era behind and create a better life for their descendants.

People are willing to vote Obama in because he says the word "sacrifice" within soaring rhetoric, further adding to its "romance" as if accepting a government manufactured crisis "for the greater good" is the thing "we've been waiting for" and will somehow purify the American soul. Someone should remind our erstwhile citizenry that there was a great number of our recent ancestors in the depression era who put sawdust in their bread as a partial substitute for flour because they simply could not afford to buy the flour they needed to make real bread. One could ask exactly how "purifying" was that experience and who wants to repeat it.

I don't think I'm guilty of that romanticization. What I hold in esteem about that era is not that it gave people the opportunity to exhibit great character. I hold in esteem those people who learned great lessons from it. I agree with Kat-Mo that a repeat would be a tragedy.

Even someone hoping for a depression because they think it would be good for the country in the long run, however, are on a better moral footing than Obama, who wants to impose this in the name of fighting climate change:

In fact, the middle class appears strangely willing to sell their votes for about a $500 tax decrease when there is every indication that he is planning to increase the cost of living by ten fold that return and allow Bush's tax cuts to expire, effectively making that "tax credit" nil. It is political slight of hand and it is most egregious because our media and our representatives in government are willing to perpetrate this great scam for some inexplicable reason. "Global warming" is not a good enough reason to impoverish an entire nation. Ask the Europeans who are busy trying to nullify or extend any part of the Kyoto Treaty that has stagnated their industries and added to their increasing unemployment.

Michelle Obama speaks the truth!

Really!

According to the person that posted this at YouTube, this vide is from December 6, 2004. You think Obama "did anything" between then and when he actually started campaigning for president? What was it, two years?

Jonah Goldberg at The Corner wants to know why this wasn't in a McCain campaign ad. I can answer that, I think. A candidate stupid enough to put Jeremiah Wright off limits — indeed, too stupid to see that the relationship is relevant — is stupid enough to put Michelle Obama off limits, too.

I'm not saying go after her personally. I'm saying that insofar as her statements indicate her and The One's joint mindset, they're fair game.

Wow, I can't believe I'm actually hoping that a Huffington Post piece is correct!

At Huffpo today, Earl Ofari Hutchinson says that the recent charges against Obama may not keep him from getting elected, but will dog his administration (emphasis mine):

The much vaunted October surprise turned out to be not one surprise but a succession of surprises. And they all seemed to go bust. Let's tick them off. Obama allegedly broke bread with a Palestinian terrorist and in the process nodded and even spewed anti-Israel, pro Palestinian utterances. Obama's campaign operated as a money laundering front. That is the campaign got stacks of cash from illegal, foreign, and even deceased donors all by gerrymandering the required internet verification screening mechanisms.

Obama praised his infamous, alleged race baiting former pastor Jeremiah Wright as the best the black church has to offer. Obama insisted that the courts didn't go far enough during the civil rights era and should have redistributed the wealth to the black poor. Then there's his Kenyan side aunt who's been living for years in the U.S. illegally and in poverty supposedly with his full knowledge. So the multi count indictment against Obama reads like this. He is an anti-Israel (and closet anti-Semitic) PLO fellow traveler, who washes illegal money, is a stealth race baiter, who wants to mug the rich, and harbors illegal aliens. If one, or more of these charges were true it wouldn't just dump Obama's campaign. It would dump him in a jail cell. The temptation is to howl so hard with laughter at the pathetic absurdity of the charges that tears well up. The charges are, of course, overblown, twisted, and obviously an 11th hour last gasp at muckraking. They have predictably gained no legs in the MSM, and have come way to late in the game to change anything for McCain or against Obama . Yet there's just enough bare fact, distorted and politically connived as they, are in the charges that they are steady grist for the internet Obama rumor, gossip and hit mill.

***

The real danger is that though the October surprises fizzled into non-surprises in October they could morph into real torments for an Obama White House in November and beyond.

***

As for Obama; he will be the most watched president in American history, a wrong sneeze, sniffle or cough will draw criticism. The October surprises that didn't happen in October will be just one more thing to fuel that criticism. Don't write the epitaph just yet for them.

First, if there's any proposition that should make you laugh until your eyes tear up, it's the notion that anything negative in Obama's past would be even highlighted, yet alone aggressively investigated, by the MSM.

Second, I don't want Obama or any president dogged throughout his (or her) term by bullshit allegations. But the ones Hutchinson mentions all have supporting evidence, at least enough to warrant a little further investigation. So I hope these do dog him.

Another "first" for Obama may eventually become permanent — how we will become Sweden.

From her interview on Dennis Prager's radio show broadcast on October 27, 2008:

The bottom line that one can't get away from . . . we are now about to elect a president, for the first time in our history, who believes, as he as indicated, that we are the moral inferior to most of the rest of the world.

That much I liked.  But I disagree with the optimism she expressed for the country if Obama is elected:

The thought that we must all hold, and very deeply, is that we are a very great country and there is no, no election, and no president, no regime — as they now call democracies — that can possibly undo us, and that's really quite important to know.

I just don't think she's right about that.  The way I see it, a new administration can certainly turn around foreign policy, but domestic policy is another matter.  And changes in the latter will lead to changes in the former.

Sure, we'll go down a bad road in foreign policy if Obama is elected.  He evaluate good and bad in terms of what the rest of the world thinks or the United Nations thinks instead of in terms of actual good and bad.  (Ironically, people will call this "courageous.")  But that can be turned around rather quickly by a subsequent administration, even when the career Department of State boneheads are against it.

Domestically, I think we're screwed.  I've explained why before.  Entitlements and other big government will never be reversed.  Ever. Tinkered with, maybe, but that's it.  There will never be a real debate about ending programs.  Instead, the conservative position will simply be how to run them "better."

And as the American public learns to expect more and more of their personal needs to be taken care of by the government, pretty much anything beyond our borders will be considered someone else's problem . . . let them solve it.  Whatever we do, we won't take sides.  Why, that could mean we'll eventually be drawn into something!  Besides, who are we to say that the country committing genocide for the sake of racial purity is any better than the country trying to stop it?  That question would be, to paraphrase Barack Obama on the question of when life begins, "above our pay grade."

Well, you ask, why would that be bad?  Hasn't this worked for Sweden and Spain?  France and Germany?  Why, yes it has.  For one reason: when these countries were creating their socialist utopias, there was still a United States in the world to do the heavy lifting. Who's going to do it when our country — as we've known it since World War II, at least — is gone?

And I wouldn't want to become Sweden even if there were someone to take up the slack.  Dennis Prager makes the case against "change" (or, as Obama more honestly put it recently, "fundamental" change).

Who's selfish, Barack?

I've had about as much as I can stand of this guy, though I suppose I have to thank him for providing us with this to talk about all weekend: "I don't know when they [McCain and Palin] decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness."

Just who's making a virtue out of selfishness, here? Obama is actively promoting people to depend on him, as president, to improve their material standing by taking other people's money. People wanting to keep their own property is selfish, while those demanding that it be given to them are not. Wow.

I know people will be talking all weekend about that quote, but to me, To me, the more damning statements came afterward (emphasis mine):

The next thing I know, they're gonna . . . find evidence of my communistic tendencies because I shared my toys when I was in kindergarten . . . because I split my peanut butter and jelly sandwich with my friend when I was in sixth grade . . . .

Memo to Barack: those were YOUR freaking toys! Share your own stuff as much as you want, that doesn't make you a communist, nor would McCain or Palin use sharing your stuff as evidence of communistic tendencies. Because they are smart enough to know that it is forcing other people to give up all their stuff to the government so the government can dole it out that is the essence of communism. Barack's either too stupid to know the difference or deliberately bullshitting people hungry to be bullshitted. You want to talk about selfish, Barack? Look at your running mate, who's given roughly 1% of his income to charity over the last ten years. UPDATE: Cassy Fiano says it better (then again, I set a pretty low bar):

Look, I get the point Obama’s making. We need to help out our neighbors. No one disagrees with that. The issue here is how. According to Obama, and most liberals, the government must be the one who does all of the helping — and they do that by taking money from other citizens. The notion that Americans (the most generous people on the planet) could possibly be charitable without coercion is a foreign one to Obama. Opposing big government does not make someone selfish, and for Obama to insinuate that shows a lot about his mentality and what kind of America we can look forward to if he wins. Gone will be the America of enterprising hard workers. Why bother, when the government will do everything for you?

Why do heavier women have more sex than "normal sized" women?

I don't agree with these guys at all:

Researchers suspect the stereotype [that overweight women have less sex] could mean overweight women get different messages than thinner women from physicians regarding pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease prevention, and that their sexual behavior might therefore vary. "Some medical practitioners may not do appropriate follow-up with women who are overweight; they might assume they aren't having sex unless they are told otherwise," said Oregon State University Professor Marie Harvey, a specialist in women's sexual and reproductive health issues. "Our analysis demonstrated that obese and overweight women do not differ significantly in some of the objective measures of sexual behavior compared to women of normal weight," said Harvey's colleague, Bliss Kaneshiro, an assistant professor at the School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii. "This study indicates that all women deserve diligence in counseling on unintended pregnancy and STD prevention, regardless of body mass index."

How hard do you have to think to come up with something that bone-headed? If members of the medical community are counseling heavier women differently because of an assumption that they don't have much sex, then shame on them. Not just for depriving these women of good advice, but for thinking something so stupid. The world is full of people of all shapes and sizes and tastes of all sorts. But even if the counseling is different, I really doubt that accounts for the difference. First, I'd like to know how this study defined "overweight" or "obese." Since the article refers to Body Mass Index, I tend to discount this study entirely. (Any system that classifies Michael Jordan during his playing days as "overweight" is suspect.) So if the article considers anyone heavier than Keira Knightly to be overweight, then just throw out the study completely. But assuming the study is a little more reasonable on this, there are sure better explanations than the one quoted above. How about the possibility that women who obsess about their weight to the point they can't even enjoy a meal might just be a little more high strung and less likely to enjoy life than women who are a little more relaxed about food? I have to admit that's a borrowed theory. A friend who's wife was overweight once explained, "You don't want a woman that doesn't enjoy food. A woman who doesn't enjoy the sensual experience of eating isn't likely to enjoy other sensual experiences." I think he was on to something. (Granted, not all thin women are obsessive. Keira Knightly, for instance, reputedly eats like a horse.) Here's another shocking possibility: maybe a lot of men don't go for bean poles. Ever think about that? H/T: HotAir.

Liveblogging the Obama Infomercial

I'm giving it some thought.  (Gee, aren't you just tingling with anticipation?)  But I probably won't.  My Macbook is only a month old, and I don't want to throw it against the wall . . . which tonight's infomercial will probably make me want to do.  Maybe if I was looking for a new laptop anyway . . . 

Obama's Response to the Redistribution Audio (Video) is Crap

OK, I know you've all seen this video, Obama Bombshell Redistribution of Wealth Audio Uncovered:

Obama's response? All he meant was that redistribution would have to be undertaken legislatively rather than in the courts. That's supposed to make me feel better?

The thing is, I think that is exactly what his response was, but that he (more specifically, his spokesman) tried to hide it. Like HotAir, I'll reproduce the response in its entirety (as quoted by Jake Tapper at ABC) to avoid accusations of cherry-picking (emphasis mine):

"In this interview back in 2001, Obama was talking about the civil rights movement -- and the kind of work that has to be done on the ground to make sure that everyone can live out the promise of equality," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said. "Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Obama’s economic plan or his plan to give the middle class a tax cut. It’s just another distraction from an increasingly desperate McCain campaign."

Burton continued: "In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to explain why the courts should not get into that business of 'redistributing' wealth. Obama’s point -- and what he called a tragedy -- was that legal victories in the civil rights led too many people to rely on the courts to change society for the better. That view is shared by conservative judges and legal scholars across the country.

"As Obama has said before and written about, he believes that change comes from the bottom up -- not from the corridors of Washington," Burton said. "He worked in struggling communities to improve the economic situation of people on the South Side of Chicago, who lost their jobs when the steel plants closed. And he’s worked as a legislator to provide tax relief and health care to middle-class families. And so, Obama’s point was simply that if we want to improve economic conditions for people in this country, we should do so by bringing people together at the community level and getting everyone involved in our democratic process."

See that appeal to a conservative view of the role of the courts? Nice feint. In the radio interview, Obama wasn't congratulating the court for recognizing its limits, he was lamenting that those limits existed. Did Obama himself technically recognize those limits? Yes. But he wished they did not exist.

The line that this has "nothing to do with his economic plan" is utter crap. It states his economic goals, and at the end of the statement Obama's spokes-hole says that effecting change "from the ground up" means "getting everyone involved in our democratic process" Get them involved to do what, exactly?

In short, anyone who believes Obama is actually backing away from a redistribution mindset here is fooling himself. Obama did nothing of the sort, either inthe radio interview or in today's statement. All he said — all he said— was that redistribution would have to be accomplished through legislation rather than through the courts.

The crackdown on free speech has already begun.

I'm hoping to post a set of predictions for the first term of an Obama presidency. One of those predictions is that Obama will crack down of free speech -- specifically, political speech in opposition to Obama or his policies.

When you consider the insane charges made against President Bush and the right in recent years, you might be tempted to brush off my prediction . Remember all those folks complaining that their speech -- mostly against the Iraq war -- was being "chilled" merely because people dared to criticize them? Then there are those who wave signs, hold rallies, march through the streets by the thousands, complaining of how "Bushitler" is squashing dissent. Yet they go home at the end of the day when, if what they said were true, they'd be going to jail. In fact, I haven't seen a single person arrested merely for politically opposing President Bush. (And please spare me the crap that people arrested for protesting in ways that interfere with the movement of people or vehicles or otherwise for the time, place and manner of their protest are being arrested for the content of their speech.)

Under an Obama presidency, I'm talking about a legal crackdown, and if you think that is a hysterical prediction, I've got news for you: Obama's trying it even before he gets into office. As Amanda Carpenter points out:

Obama’s lawyers are demanding that the Department of Justice to investigate GOP presidential candidate John McCain, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and other Republican politicians because they have drawn attention to ACORN’s fraudulent activities on the campaign trail.

“Agents of the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee have been striking locally at election officials and boards around the country, sowing confusion and seeking through baseless legal maneuvers to discourage and harass voters and impede their exercise of their right to vote,” Obama for America’s General Counsel Robert Bauer said on a conference call with reporters last week.

Obama’s legal team is specifically taking issue with McCain’s remarks that ACORN’s voter registration fraud “threatens the fabric of our Democracy” and Palin’s assessment that there is a “choice between a candidate who won’t disavow a group committing voter fraud and a leader who won’t tolerate voter fraud.”

Bauer made his request for an investigation in a letter to the DOJ that said McCain and Palin were “sensationalizing this message by repeating it at the state and local level in violation of the law to harass voters and impede their exercise of their rights.”

Former Republican Sens. John Danforth of Missouri and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire are chairing an “Honest and Open Elections Committee” on behalf of the McCain campaign to take action against voter fraud. The GOP has asked Obama to participate, but the Democrats have declined.

Bauer said the committee will impede people from voting rather than safeguarding against voter fraud.

“They get a United States senator who's the head of the Republican ticket doing everything he can to make it harder for them to be -- to vote, making it harder for them to get through the lines quickly, making it harder for them to cast their ballot without impediment, without harassment, without humiliation,” Bauer told reporters.

So, let's get this straight. Speaking out against voter fraud is really voter suppression, while committing voter fraud is simply a way to get out the vote.

Words fail me.

UPDATE: But words don't fail the Wall Street Journal today:

If voter fraud would ever be ripe for investigation, this would seem to be the year with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) having been caught filing thousands of bogus voter registrations in at least 14 states. Acorn's history of deceit and the national sweep of today's scandal demand a federal probe. Safeguarding the integrity of the vote is every bit as important as protecting access to the polls, yet Democrats want Justice to pay attention only to the latter.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers recently sent two letters to Attorney General Michael Mukasey deploring a news leak that the FBI is investigating Acorn, and warning Justice to focus instead on "voter suppression." Barack Obama has also joined in this political intimidation, demanding in two letters that Mr. Mukasey appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Justice staff who he claims are engaged in "unlawful coordination" with John McCain's campaign to pursue "so-called 'election fraud.'" There is zero evidence that such coordination exists, but it is remarkable that a Presidential nominee would dismiss election fraud as a myth.

Republican Endorsers of Obama are Deluding Themselves

Victor Davis Hanson on Republicans endorsing Obama based on their belief that he will govern as a centrist rather than a leftist:

Why do so many conservatives think that an Obama-elect might be prove a centrist, and so why do they use phrases like “I pray” or “I hope” that Obama might turn out, well, not to be Obama?

Jimmy Carter did exactly what he promised: raised taxes, grew the government, told the world he had no inordinate fear of communism, trashed our allies as retrograde right-wing authoritarians—and we got the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian hostage-taking (have we forgotten that the “Great Satan” originated as a slur against Nobel laureate Carter?), communism in Central America, the Cambodian Holocaust, and spikes of 12% inflation, 18% interest, and 7% unemployment.

For his first two years (until 1994 Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America’ revolution, and Dick Morris’s ‘triangulation’), Bill Clinton, as promised, raised taxes, raised spending, tried to ram through socialized medicine, and by fiat wanted to force the military to accept those openly gay.

So why would any conservative think that Obama—friend of Ayers, Khalidi, Meeks, Pfleger, and Wright, veteran of mysterious campaigns in which rivals in 1996 and 2004 simply dropped out or were forced out, erstwhile advocate of repealing NAFTA, controlling guns, stopping new drilling and nuclear plants, zealot for bringing all troops home by March 2008, advocate of a trillion dollars in new spending, and raising the tax burden on the 5% who now pay 60% of the aggregate income taxes, supporter of more oppression studies and racial reparations—would not likewise try to govern as he has lived the last 20 years?

Why would anyone think that an Obama would not wish to enact the visions of those who first backed him—the Moveon.org crowd, ACORN, The Huffington Post, Sen. Reid, Rep. Pelosi, a Chris Dodd or Barney Frank—rather than the late pilers-on like Colin Powell or Scott McClellan? We should remember that, unlike the cases of Carter and Clinton, Obama would have both houses of Congress, and a (Republican) precedent of the federal government intervening into the free market, in the manner of 1932.

I suppose one could hope for a repeat of the first Clinton term, i.e., a move o the center forced by a Republican takeover of Congress. But if Obama has a strong Democratic majority Congress and a filibuster-proof Senate, look out . . . he'll do irreversible damage in those first two years. Then a Republican backlash won't matter.

How John McCain Blew the Ayers-Obama Issue

The way he's handled it appears to have been a net negative for him.

His mistake, which has angered me for weeks, was simply to point out that Ayers and Obama guided the same foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. He left it to the American people to put 2 and 2 together -- that if Ayers was a driving force in the organization, it's probably pretty far outside mainstream values.

In this, McCain made the same mistake that President Bush has made throughout his presidency: do the right thing and just assume that its so obvious the American people will see it. Well, I've got news for you, Senator McCain: the American people aren't that smart.

He could have handled it much better, were it not for his stupid insistence that Obama's relationship with Jeremiah Wright was not a legitimate issue. Stanley Kurtz, seemingly the only journalist in America to bother digging into the issue, pointed out almost two weeks ago that CAC money went to "education reform" programs that shared the same anti-American Afrocentrism as Wright. And that Obama reviewed the proposals:

We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show him commenting on proposal quality. And especially after 1995, when concerns over self-dealing and conflicts of interest forced the Ayers-headed “Collaborative” to distance itself from monetary issues, all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board. Significantly, there was dissent within the board. One business leader and experienced grant-smith characterized the quality of most Annenberg proposals as “awful.” (See “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” p. 19.) Yet Obama and his very small and divided board kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations focused on traditional educational achievement.

Instead of hammering on Obama for associating with an unrepentant terrorist, the McCain campaign should have been hammering on what the two of them were working on together. As Kurtz pointed out, this should have been fair game even under McCain's standards:

John McCain, take note. Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.

Of course, I don't know whether McCain avoided this out of his misguided notion that Wright was off limits, or because he thought the "unrepentant terrorist" refrain would carry more impact. Either way, it was a bad mistake.

Then again, it might have made little difference. Obama would simply deny he knew the details of the proposals he funded, and the mainstream media (and in turn some of the public) would have simply taken him at his word, regardless of the documentation Kurtz has showing otherwise.

Who does al Queda support for president? Who knows?

Some people are trying to attach significance to the fact that various Islamist nutjobs purport to support one or the other candidates for U.S. president this year. McCain was stupid to try to capitalize on Hamas's endorsement of Obama, which really put him on the spot when it was reported this week that an extremist website favored McCain. The most sensible commentary on this comes from the always clear-eyed Melanie Philips, in a Guardian column entitled, "Is America Really Going to Do This?" Writes Phillips:

Personally, I don’t give any credence to the ‘support’ for one candidate over the other that has been expressed by the enemies of civilisation (Iran and Hamas ‘support’ Obama, while an al Qaeda blogger ‘supports’ McCain). Their agenda is simply to sow confusion and promote American recriminations and disarray.

That said, the endorsements, if taken at face value, make sense. Hamas endorsed Obama because they think he will "change" America and the see his pledge of security to Israel as mere election year posturing. The al Qaeda dude says he likes McCain because McCain will keep America in a drawn-out war that will wear the country down.
I think they're both right, but only partially. Obama won't abandon Israel outright, but he certainly sees it as little better than its neighbors (enough to disqualify him as president, in my opinion -- someone with a moral sense that warped has no business in the white house). And McCain will not retreat, but that doesn't mean the war will bankrupt the country.

An Obama-Pelosi government will be "the point of no return."

For those of you resigning yourselves to an Obama victory and telling yourself that at least an Obama presidency would be good for the GOP in the long run because Obama would be so radical that the electorate would recoil in horror and elect a conservative as the next president: Have you people lost your $%#@%$@@ minds?

Listen to Mark Steyn:

I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no return”. It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, “Jimmy Carter’s second term”, but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation — the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up.

You think that once government-rationed health plan is in place, that's ever going to be repealed? Hell, we couldn't even kill off the Department of Education in its infancy when the country turned right with Ronald Reagan. A Republican congress in the 90s couldn't even bring itself to de-fund the National Endowment for the Arts after it sponsored shows featuring a crucifix in urine, a bullwhip stuck up a guy's ass, and a naked feminist rubbing chocolate all over herself to protest oppression or some such shit.

The only things conservatives and/or Republicans have accomplished is to slow down the "progressive" train once in a while. You really think a post-Obama conservative is going to turn it around? No, we will be headed squarely for a European fate. From the same piece by Steyn:

In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the nanny state: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainable”.

There will be plenty more talk of hope if Obama gets elected. My own will be all but gone. (Yeah, I know McLovin' will tell me I'm being too pessimistic.)

UPDATE (10/27/08) : Just catching up on some podcasts, and Mark Levin was really railing on this Friday.

God save me from Republicans for Obama

I took a look at the Republicans for Obama website this morning, and I now understand why these Republicans are for Obama: they are as hope-y change-y as the Democrats that are for Obama. On their "Why Obama?" page, they lay out nine issues, from the national debt to foreign policy, explaining the problems, but here is as far as they get at explaining why Obama is the better man to tackle them:

We need a leader who can lay the foundations of another American Century—someone who can get past our partisan and ideological divisions, as we strengthen our standing in the world and tackle the challenges we face at home. We need a leader who understands our differences, but who also knows the importance of finding common ground. While we continue to debate and address many issues on which we all have strong opinions—abortion, gay rights, the relationship between church and state, to name a few—we need a leader who can command the support needed to break our government’s paralysis and meet the growing challenges we face as a nation.

The bottom line is that Republicans support Obama because he has a broad swath of support. So, to Republicans for Obama, I say the following.

Folks, if your chief criterion for president is someone who can maintain enough popularity to win support of his proposals rather than what those proposals are, then you should never vote for another Republican again. Because every one of them, regardless of policy, is going to be relentlessly savaged by the media and thus -- unless truly able to communicate with the people over the heads of the media and the politicians a la Ronald Reagan -- is unlikely to command similar levels of support.

This desire to follow -- no matter where one is led -- is infantile. Before following, have you considered where Obama will take you?

I'd like to avoid gridlock, too, but movement for movement's sake is an idiotic reason to support someone. I get frustrated in traffic, but I'm not about to drive down the opposite lane into a head-on collision with a firetruck just so I can move out of the gridlock of the bumper-to-bumper lanes.

And finally, please change your party registration now.  As in yesterday.

UPDATE(10/25/08):  Rush is dead-on about the high-profile guys who have endorsed Obama.

What isn't a code word for "black"?

According to at least one idiot editorial writer in Kansas City, McCain-Palin have engaged in racist campaigning by referring to Obama's policies as "socialist."  Because, don't you know, J Edgar Hoover used the word "socialist" to refer to black civil rights leaders.  

More proof that the media needs vetting.  Now, there's a website devoted to just that.  Though it's mostly a placeholder right now, and urges you to work on getting McCain elected right now and save the vetting for later.

H/T: Ace.

Biden Must Have Told Some Whoppers

Joe Biden seemed to spend a lot of time in the debate talking about his past record. I have to think that, with his reputation for reckless accounts of the past, that he was just flat-out wrong.

The one I'm really hoping people will dig up contrary evidence on: his ridiculous assertion that not once since he was set straight by Mike Mansield in his (Biden's) first year in the senate has he questioned other people's motives. Is it really possible that in 35 tears, he hasn't done that?

UPDATE: I knew the blogosphere wouldn't let me down. Ace has 14 Biden lies provided by the McCain camp. Canadian conservatives were also keeping an eye on Biden. I'm still hoping someone will dig up a Biden quote disparaging Republican motives.

Andrew Sullivan Kindly Points Out The Problem with the Media

Andrew Sullivan, the "conservative" whom I think would support every other aspect of the Taliban's governance as long as it allowed gay marriage (but then who wears the veil?), inadvertently points out one of the huge problems with the Mainstream Media by posing this question in a Washington Post compilation of questions for the vice-presidential candidates.

Governor Palin, since you were selected as a vice presidential candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has given more press conferences to American reporters than you have. Why do you have less confidence in the American press and people than the president of Iran does? And when will you dare to face the press for real?

None of what I'm about to say excuses Palin from facing the press, but it's undeniably true, and is implicit even in Sullivan's question.

Here it is.

The press is far more solicitous of Ahmadinejad than of Palin, far more eager to "get" Palin than "get" Ahmadinejad, views Palin as a far more serious threat than Ahmadinejad, indeed sees Palin as far more evil than Ahmadinejad.

Would a Depression be Good for Us?

Image via Wikipedia I could probably write for hours on this, but I'll try to keep it short and sweet.

At the risk of sounding naive, I have a rather radical question: Could a depression or other significant economic downturn actually be good for America in the long run?

Bear with me a few minutes. Keep in mind, I'm not writing this from a "high and mighty" attitude. It's not like I've saved such substantial sums and invested them in gold so that I could ride out a decade-long depression. My finances aren't even in good shape right now, and in my younger days, I was downright frivolous. I'm asking this question from the perspective of someone who would be subject to financial devastation, but wondering if maybe it might be better for me and the country to take our lumps.

I also want to make it clear that I am not hoping for a depression. I wasn't born until nearly 20 years after the Great Depression ended; all I have to go on are the stories I hear about it from parents and grandparents. I can't even imagine how bad it must have been.

So, here goes.

A professional colleague of mine told me last week that he thinks the present financial crisis was brought on not by any political or financial factor, but a cultural one: the refusal of Americans to work toward the ability to buy something when easy credit lets them have it now. I generally concur, though that cultural attitude couldn't have caused as much harm in a more tightly controlled system, i.e. proper foresight by financiers and the government could have prevented this cultural trait from causing such a big problem. (And I found it odd for him to bring it up, since I know he is an Obama supporter, and if anyone has ever promised a free lunch, it's Obama.) In other words, it is a culture of "instant gratification" that got us here.

Mandatory lending requirements that forced banks to give loans to borrowers they would not have accepted without the law played a part, sure. But the law required only a certain portion of a bank's portfolio to be made up of such loans, if I understand it correctly.

I've seen no statistics, but I suspect that middle class refinancing played just as big a role, if not bigger. (If I'm right about that, then we will never see the statistics, because the last thing any politician wants to do is put any blame on the middle class.) The radio commercials the last few years for funky refinancing were ubiquitous. Aside from crazy terms with teaser rates and adjustments that could potentially double or triple the mortgage payment, the ads also encouraged homeowners to borrow against their houses for things like new cars, vacations, boats, and the like. I wonder how many people did so with loans that proved impossible to repay.

Now, think about the people you know who are the most careful with their money. I'm not talking "hide it in the mattress" careful (though those people are undoubtedly in this group, too), but people who spend carefully and save a lot. Who invest carefully. Maybe keep a lot of food in the house and almost never throw anything away.

The people like that in my life are relatives who lived through the Great Depression. Whether you're asking your grandfather why he doesn't replace his 1981 Oldsmobile (perfectly preserved, by the way) or asking why he and Grandma keep enough food in the house to feed a small army, the likely answer is: "I lived through the Great Depression. You can't understand."

I admit it, I can't. All I know is what I've observed. And what I've observed is that I've never run across someone who remembers the Great Depression who spends money readily on frivolities or luxuries, let alone who is a spendthrift or borrows in order to buy luxuries.

For those of us who haven't lived through genuinely difficult hard times, the lessons our betters tried to teach us may not take too readily. The Ant and the Grasshopper . . . little more than an entertaining fairy tale for many, with a lesson that fails to "stick" despite the good intentions of those who told it to us.

I think the general notion that a downturn would be good for the country in the long run underlies many of the "no" votes on the bailout bill in the House of Representatives today. Nobody there is rooting for a depression, either. But I think all of them recognize that at least a serious economic downturn is likely without a bailout — or that a downturn is inevitable, bailout or no, and it is better to have one without the bailout than with it — and that such a downturn would be a "teaching moment" for the populace as a whole. It's not an effort to get back at people who borrowed money they couldn't pay back, or who loaned money to enrich themselves at the expense of their companies; it's a matter teaching the next generation to avoid making the same mistakes. Even though it will also hurt some who have been prudent.

Assuming that a downturn could help in the long run, how long and how severe a downturn would it take to teach these lessons? The stagflation of the 70s slump wasn't enough. Nor was the 1981-1982 recession enough, apparently. Just how bad would it have to get before it would help in the long run?

Again, no high and mighty attitude here. And I hope to hell a depression doesn't happen, even if it would be good culturally for us. But I don't think it's beyond the pale to wonder if it would be beneficial in the long run.

UPDATE (11/03/08): See this post.

Who Needs Nuance in Foreign Policy?

You'll understand better why I posted the video at the bottom of this post if you read the post first.

Sarah Palin's credibility on foreign policy is going to take some time to gel, but the instantaneous criticism that she had no foreign policy experience was a little ridiculous. I mean, if everyone feels that strongly that a candidate has to have foreign policy experience, that pretty much limits your field doesn't it? You'd never have had an FDR or Reagan, and the left's criticism of Palin's foreign policy credentials also would have disqualified Bill Clinton. They were all governors. (Ace has a good post on the "foreign policy experience" of governors generally.)

Some conservatives are getting awfully nervous about Sarah Palin. Some of the criticism is reasonable, some is not.

I think Rich Lowry of The Corner has taken a reasonable approach. I think he was right in his assessment of Palin's performance regardng the "Bush Doctrine" question from Charlie Gibson: that "the truly pro-Palin position is to think she can, should, and will do better than this." I also agreed with him when, in a follow-up, he wrote:

The debate about how many versions of the Bush doctrine there are is serving as fog to distract attention from the fact that, on any reasonable reading, Palin didn't know. I don't see why we all have to be so resistant to admitting this. Let me try to demonstrate: She is totally new to these issues and has a lot of learning to do. There. Is that so hard?

Kathleen Parker calls on Palin to quit (but she bases her view of Palin's inadequacy on her supposed inability to handle the present financial crisis, rather than foreign policy). Kat-Mo at Ace of Spades HQ does a pretty good take down of Parker's piece. Read it all, but this should give you the gist:

Parker gets a load of the Big Financial problem in our face and decides that Palin is incapable of handling the crisis and she should leave the national politics of crashing markets to the idiot national politicians that got us here in the first place. Brilliant idea.

Another conservative going overboard is Rod Dreher, who says he is "well and truly embarrassed for her" because of her explanation of why Alaska's proximity to Russia and Canada givers her some foreign policy credibility. (She certainly wasn't articulate, but her answer wasn't totally off the wall, either. She has the experience most governors have with foreign countries: trade missions.) At least Dreher doesn't agree with Sullivan that Palin should bow out.

Anyway, all of this reminded me of a movie scene involving foreign policy by a "regular guy" president. Bear with me on this before you view the video, because if you're unfamiliar with the story, the video might not make sense.

The scene is from the movie Harrison Bergeron, based on a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., which takes a look at the absurdity of radical egalitarianism: a government that doles out "handicaps" to those with more talent, intelligence, beauty, or other advantage, in order to level the playing field. The theory is that by preventing envy, society avoids revolutionary violence.

All of this is accomplished through a shadow government — totally unknown to the general populace — whose intellect is not handicapped. The shadow bureaucrats advise the actual government flunkies, and do all the actual technical work, but generally don't intervene to change policy. In this scene, Harrison, who has been recruited into the shadow government, walks in as one such bureaucrat is advising the president regarding a tense military standoff with Morocco. I know it's satire, but it makes me wonder if maybe a little lack of sophistication won't be such a bad thing.

And the line about the president being a "steelworker from Scranton" is priceless in light of a certain other VP candidate's attempt to build his "heartland" credentials by emphasizing his early boyhood spent there.

Sarah Palin Swimsuit Competition Video

That ought to get me a few google hits, eh? I can't believe it took four weeks for this to surface. According to the writer at that link, this is the guy that has apparently scooped the rest of the media.

Hat tip: Ace. Who, becuse his traffic is about 500,000 times mine, does not even have to include the word "Palin" in the same post as "swimsuit" to get hits, and can instead title his post, "Here's Your God-Damned Foreign Policy Experience."

Will the financial crisis "affect how you rule the country?"

That's what moderator Jim Lehrer asked Senators McCain and Obama around 6:40 p.m. Pacific time tonight. I was listening in the car and will have to confirm it by looking at a transcript when it becomes available. But for now, I gotta go with what I heard . . .

Is that how Lehrer sees the presidency? Is he voting for a ruler rather than a chief executive? Hasn't the left's chief complaint about President Bush been that he wields too much power? Will I ever stop asking questions?

Then again, maybe Lehrer was on to something. Using my handy Zemanta blogging tool, which finds pictures on the internet that match your blog post based on the text in it I added to the text above the string "king king ruler despot royalty" and repeated that string 51 more times, so those words dominated the post, and here's one of the nine photos Zemanta offered me:

I kid you not.

The Blogosphere's Most Succinct Commentary on Sarah Palin's Republican National Convention Speech

Yeah!

This time, allow me to be the 100,000 . . .

. . . blogger to comment on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, Bristol. I was going to write a post about how the left is wrong that this will sink Palin, and that they are wrong because their view of Christians is so warped. But Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom has already put it so succinctly (emphasis mine):

Many on the left will believe, quite mistakenly, that such an announcement is likely to weaken Palin’s support among “the hard-right conservative base”. But in fact, it will do no such thing — first, because the “hard-right conservative base” that liberal Democrats consistently invoke is largely a caricature that lives only in their minds and as a convenient trope in their rhetoric, from whence it can be trotted out as a foil and a boogeyman on cue[.]

I've seen anecdotal evidence of how a church reacts to difficult situations like this. One of the unwed pregnancies at my old church, which was pretty darn conservative culturally and theologically, was the Pastor's daughter. Granted, she was no longer a teenager and she was living on her own, but she was still very young. Did we run the pastor out on a rail? No. We prayed for his family, especially his daughter, and rejoiced with him when the child was born.

His daughter eventually married the father. According to the leftist charicature, this also should have outraged the congregation, for the pastor's daughter is white and the baby's father is black. Horrors! An immediate stoning, perhaps? No, widely felt gratitude that the child now has a complete, loving family around it.

Shocking, I know.

UPDATE (9/4/08) 

My wife corrects my mistake about the father.  Not black, but some minority that would make this a "mixed marriage" of sorts.