In the wake of the flap the agenda media and the Sorosphere manufactured over Rep. Michele Bachmann’s statements a few weeks ago on Tinglyball with Chris Matthews, I wondered – is it possible to question other peoples’ motivations anymore?

I’m convinced – having not only read the accounts and seen the video of Rep. Bachmann’s appearance, but having talked with Rep. Bachmann about the subject – that Rep. Bachmann meant “people who don’t have the nation’s best interests at heart”, and “people who love America exactly as it isn’t and has never been”, when she said “anti-American”.  And when she said the media should be exposing this, she meant “doing its job, and giving people some means of critically examining candidates’ views”, rather than “witchhunting”. 

Not that facts or context matter, of course.

Are there “anti-Americans” out there?  In the sense that there are people who want America extinguished from the planet?  Probably none in public life that matter, Jeremiah Wright and his invocation of the Sixth Commandment notwithstanding.

But can someone’s commitment to “American” ideals – the things that our founding fathers enshrined, things like “one person, one vote” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, “the rule of law”, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – be criticized?

One of the most popular posts that’s ever appeared on this blog came out four and a half years ago, during a previous spate of demands that nobody question anyone’s motivation (“Don’t you dare question my patriotism!”).  Entitled “You Might Not Be An American If…“, it kinda summed up how I feel about Bachmann’s statement and, yes, the targets:

If You Believe: that America has problems – huge problems – then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that America’s problems make it an inherently rotten concept, then maybe you should think about whether you’re living in the right place. 

If You Believe: …that America’s projection of power around the world is immoral – then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that any projection of American power is inherely unjust because it’s America, then maybe you should be living in, say, Sweden? Just an idea.

If You Believe: …that capitalism is wrong because its inequalities are inherely unjust, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that the free market is inherently, irrevocably evil, perhaps China would be a better fit? Just suggesting…

If You Believe: …that invading Iraq was wrong, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that our temporary administration of Iraq is worse than Hussein’s 30 year reighn of horrors, then perhaps you should rot in hell we need to have an attitude adjustment.

At four years’ remove, I might add a few:

If You Believe: …that racism still exists, and that people (or even just White People) inflict it on others, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that all of America (or just White America) makes its every decision based purely on racism (unless they vote for Barack Obama), then you might be Anti-American.

If You Believe: …the Constitution is a “living document”, then dissent is hunky-dory.
But If You Believe: …that the Constitution is itself a corrupt, vile document that never did anyone any good, then perhaps you should find a different society to live in, just on basic principle.

Wanna swat at Bachmann’s statement?  You gotta bring more game than most of her critics seem to be able to manage.

The Democrat playbook:  Project, project, project.

For example, to draw attention away from the ACORN voter registration scandal, find and relentlessly hammer on any GOP-leaning irregularity you can find.

To cover your own candidates’ wierd past assocations, harp for weeks on Todd Palin’s attendance at a couple of Alaska Independence Party meetings.

To block coverage of real violence, vandalism and intimidation of McCain volunteers and other Republicans, focus on a sad, sick girl in Pittsburgh and her hoax.

Your candidates are all millionaires who’ve never held real-world jobs and get their clothes from Brooks Brothers by the bale?  Burn days of news coverage on Sarah Palin’s tanning bed and RNC-supplied loaner wardrobe.

And for goodness sake, if your Veep candidate is a loose cannon who needs to be hidden from public view, call in your markers with the entertainment industry to carry out a noxiously-sexist, misogynistic campaign against Sarah Palin.

Duly noted, folks.

…had crashed into the green room at Orchestra Hall last night, it could have had a sweeping effect on Minnesota conservatism.

At one point, I was sitting with Senator Coleman, Governor Pawlenty, Representative Bachmann, candidates Erik Paulsen (who will be a guest on the NARN this weekend), Barb Davis-White and Ed Matthews, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager and James Lileks, talking about the campaign locally and nationwide.

Not sure if anyone from the Strib covered “Talk The Vote” – Salem Radio’s cavalcade of stars touring battleground states nationwide to whip up conservative support – but if they had, they’d have found plenty of conservative support, er, whipped up.  Bear in mind, the Patriot’s been pleasantly surprised by turnout at these events before; the “Patriot Picnic” in 2004 drew hundreds more than we’d planned on, and our fabled Final Debate Party in 2004 attracted 700 to the Minneapolis Hilton – not bad, considering we’d had 100 RSVPs and it was a night every bit as cold and miserable as last Sunday was. 

Bear in mind also that this even was announced perhaps ten days ago, to an audience that largely has businesses and jobs and families and responsibilities.  The Patriot’s promotions department had figured maybe we’d fill up the floor level seats.

We filled every seat in the place; the floor and all three tiers of balconies.  There were people standing in the halls and the lobby, the last I checked.  And the crowd?

No lack of energy there.  Sorry, Sorosphere; after weeks of declaring the election already won, it’s just not sinking in with all of us plumbers and hockey moms.  Suffice to say that even if Mac loses, 2010 is going to make 1994 look like a Camp Wellstone sing-along.

The speakers?  Look – there are not three people anywhere in talk radio that can work a friendly room like Hugh, Michael and Dennis.  Especially Prager; you’d never know it from his fairly laid-back radio show, but in front of a room, the guy is like a nuclear reactor with the regulator rods pulled out; he gets the crowd stoked, and as the crowd’s energy picks up, so does his; I’ve never seen him speak from any kind of notes at all, so the whole world is his speech, and eventually he covers the whole world, getting more and more animated as he goes, stopping just short of pounding his shoe on the lectern.  An amazing performance, even allowing for the tactical flub of attacking Sweden at a stop in Minneapolis.

Me?  I’m feeling a lot better about this next week, and the next two years. 

So why is the media so very, very in the bag for The One?

Theories, as they say, are like, um, toes.  Everyone has one.

But Michael Malone – a career journalist and columnist – has a theory of his own.

It’s the editors (managing editors, executive producers, etc), and it’s about self-preservation (I’ve added some emphasis):

Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power … only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country …

Self-preservation has driven people do do stranger things…

Read the whole thing, by the way.

I’ve tried to mentally block out the notion of an Obamessiah presidency.  While I’ve vowed to respect the office if not the person (and, more accurately, the person’s policies; I have little indication that Obama’s not a good, if dull, human being who is the beneficiary of a dicey economy and a scandalously in-the-bag media), I strongly suspect that Obama, whatever his merits as an individual, a father and a human being, will be the worst president of my adult lifetime. 

Gary Miller?  He’s even less sanguine:

In a universe where reason prevailed, the 11th hour bombshell that the presumptive president-elect openly expressed contempt for the American Founding and admiration for Marxist dogma would be met with a 50-state rejection. 

It appears, however, that we do not live in such a universe…With 3-4 vacancies looming on SCOTUS, it is clear that President Obama will use the opportunity to nominate justices for whom “redistributing wealth” is part of the job description.

One of the most glaring differences between Left and Right is that conservatives share a distrust of tinkering with the wheels and levers of government (and those who enjoy the tinkering too much); liberals revel in it, and see it as the highest expression of political art.

And that – combined with an interventionist agenda (“share the wealth!”), the complete lack of vetting, and a personality cult-like following – is going to be a problem in all the ways Gary noted, if Obama wins.

On the odd Saturday night, I can be found sitting in on Marty Owings’ show, “Radio Free Nation, on BlogTalkRadio.  One of the occasional callers is a fellow from Detroit – also a BlogTalkRadio host – who usually hits two talking (or, more accurately, bellowing and slurring) points:

1. “I favor unity.  Americans need to be united!  I want to lead Americans to unity!”
2. “I’m not using any Republican ideas.  Republican ideas are all bool-shee-yut”.

In other words, “let’s have unity; everyone agree with me”. 

I was reminded of the caller when I read this bit – an interview with French lefty philosophe Bernard-Henri Lévy – last week. 

It’s a reminder of the big reason I bailed out on the left over 20 years ago – because so much of what The Left believes is just so utterly awful.

Lévy

Why Obama should be chosen, in my opinion: No. 1, because it would mean really the end — and the complete victory of the battle begun in the ’60s. No. 2, because it will mean the end of a new American evil, which is the dividing, the Balkanization of American society. This is another counter-effect of a great idea, which was tolerance. You so much tolerate that you tolerate the American society to be in separate bubbles having their own peculiarities, and so on.

Obama must stamp out “peculiarities”? 

The first time I read this, I thought perhaps it was an artifact of the translation from French to German (the piece originally appeared in Spiegel) and thence to English.

No such luck:

Obama as president will mean all these bubbles submitted to a real ideal of citizenship.

The “real ideal of citizenship?”

Lévy is part of the intelligentsia – which seems to be a union gig in France – but to me the “real ideals of citizenship” in America are:

• To exist as part of a free association of equals – not a cog in a “unified” machine.
• To pull like hell for what I believe until the election is over, and then support – at least as a matter of principle – the results, as a member of a representative Republic. 

Not, might  I point out, falling in mutely line behind an elected leader’s idea of “unity” just for the sake of stomping out Lévy’s “bubbles”.  Especially when that elected leader’s ideas are so patently awful.

And I think I was right to begin with; there is a loss in translation.  Not so much between languages, but between worldviews.  Lévy – and Obama – seems to believe that “unity”, a lack of “bubbles”, is a useful end in and of itself. 

Indeed, the more of the piece you read, the less it seems Lévy understands of America, or the small-l liberal ideals that this country has, in its better moments, always espoused:

And No. 3, you have another ideal in the America of today, which I call the competition of victims. Competition of memories. If you are in favor of the Jews, you cannot be in favor of the blacks. If you remember the suffering of slavery, you cannot remember too much the suffering of the Holocaust, and so on and so on. The human heart has not space enough for all the sufferings. This is what some people say. Obama says the contrary. It will mean the end of this stupid topic, which is competition of victimhood.

And to believe otherwise is apparently racist. 

Read the whole depressing thing.

I don’t lose a lot of sleep about how other people choose to express their political beliefs. 

Wanna demonstrate?  Chain yourself to a fence?  Make a big papier-mache doll head?  Knock yourself out. 

But one thing Obama supporters consistently do, I gotta confess, rubs me way the wrong way.

Constantly calling the Senator “Barack”. 

No, I know it’s his first name.  And if one were talking to him, calling him “Barack”, while a little informal for my conservative rural tastes, might be one thing.

But I get emails, constantly, from Obama’s campaign, like this one: “Take Election Day off for Barack”

I don’t recall a single piece of literature, ever, saying “Come out and work for Ronald” or “Let’s get behind John and Sarah”.   Not even being partisan here – the whole concept just gives me the creeps. 

Is it just me, or does anyone else think it smacks of personality cultism, just a little?  

Methinks Joe Biden meant that literally.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden did not tell the truth Thursday when hit with tough questions about ACORN from a veteran journalist.

“Aren’t you embarrassed by the blatant attempt to register phony voters by ACORN, an organization that Barack Obama has been tied to in the past?” said Orlando, Fla., WFTV anchor Barbara West.

“I am not embarrassed by it,” Biden replied. “We are not tied to them. We have not paid them one single penny to register a single solitary voter . . . We register the voters ourselves, and so there is no relationship.”

A Newsmax Fact Check shows that Obama has had a long relationship with the group, and the Obama campaign did indeed pay an ACORN subsidiary more than $800,000. The radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a multi-faced creature its founders spun off into about 100 separate legal entities.

The Obama/Biden campaign doesn’t happen to deal in pennies. Dollars, yes. Pennies, no.

A great many Americans are poised to vote against the status quo without regard for whom or what they will get in its stead.

Change? Hope?

Unquantifiable values by design. The deliberate work of a candidate and a campaign to sweep the electorate off its feet with empty promises of a better time and place.

But what of Obama’s Agenda? What designs does Obama have for the Presidency if he wins? That should be the question voters and the media should have asked by now – and haven’t.

When what little detail Barack Obama has selectively, calculatedly seen fit to share with us, coupled with his tactical “present” votes is put in the context of the nature of his associations…The Socialist Party,  Terrorist William Ayers, “God Damn America” Reverend Wright, 2007’s Senator Joe Biden (2007’s Third Most Liberal Senator; Guess who was first), The Corrupt Barney Frank,The Convict Tony Rezko, Demolition Expert and Campaign Adviser Frank Raines…it is clear.

Barack Obama is declaring a War on Capitalism. He wants to redistribute wealth while at the same time punishing those who create it. A shocking level of ignorance of basic economics – heck, even mathematics.

Look at just a few of the things he and congressional Democrats have in mind: Higher taxes on successful entrepreneurs (anyone earning over $250,000), higher taxes on capital gains, higher taxes on dividends, a possible raid on Americans’ 401(k)s, a takeover of America’s private health care industry, strict new limits on what CEOs can make, and the reimposition of the death tax.

Add it up, and Obama will usher in a new era in America — one where capital, the engine of our economic growth and success, is punished severely through the tax code. If Democrats win a filibuster-proof majority in Congress, it’ll be the only form of capital punishment their party will support.

And this is just what we know so far.

From a Chicago Public Radio Interview of Barack Obama in 2001 on the radical Warren Court; a set of ideals and leanings that Barack Obama would never express now, in the throes of a Presidential campaign, but nonetheless reveal the radical leanings of a man America has yet to truly come to know:

…the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and, uh, sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And, uh, to that extent as radical as people try to characterize the Warren Court, uh, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed, uh, uh, by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter if negative liberties-says what the state can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government, the state government must do on your behalf. Uh, and that hasn’t shifted. And one of the, uh, I think, tragedies of the was um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused, uh, I think there was a tendency to lose track the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change [emphasis mine], and uh, in some ways we still suffer from that.

The Stock Market is already factoring it in, but if Obama becomes President, Americans may be in for a surprise. Democrats will be donning “Not My President” bumper stickers, as the true ambitions of an extreme liberal unfold.

Redistribution of Wealth is simply a seemingly innocuous way of saying “raise taxes” and “spend more.” It’s like siphoning the gas out of a car, getting in and turning the key, and Change/Hope-ing it will still take him somewhere.

The effect on our economy could be devastating as legions of economists have already attested. As is it stands, our economy may already need several years to dig out of the challenges we already face, without a liberal super majority making it worse.

Higher taxes lower returns on capital. This means everything — wages, stock prices, real estate — will have to decline further as Obama’s tax hikes take hold. That means fewer jobs.

This reverses what has always been America’s recipe for success: an economy built on low taxes, few regulations, free trade and, in general, letting markets decide winners and losers.

Obama says he’s merely “spreading the wealth” — taking money from those who’ve earned it and giving it to those who haven’t. But we already “spread the wealth.” According to economists Gerald Prante and Andrew Chamberlain, the top 40% of households redistribute $1 trillion each year through the tax code to the bottom 60%. And yes, that includes the middle class.

By the way, the top 5% of earners — those squarely in Obama’s tax-hike cross hairs — already pay 60% of all taxes. Obama’s changes would skew that further.

Worse, many of Obama’s “get the rich” tax hikes are really targeted at successful small businesses that create nearly 90% of all U.S. jobs. Among tax filers with adjusted gross incomes of $200,000 or more, some 67% report small-business income.

This is radical stuff. These are catastrophic positions and beliefs that would otherwise be intolerable to Americans, but that are being advanced part and parcel via the popularity of a candidate, The One, for one simple fact:

He’ s not George Bush.

Don’t forget – tomorrow AM1280 The Patriot will be welcoming Dennis Prager, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt to in the Twin Cities for a humongous listener rally for the election.  We’ll be holding it at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.

It’s called “Talk the Vote” and it’s going to be free to the public (although please give us an RSVP at the website). Bring the kids.  Get your neighbors.  Drag anyone in whose courage is flagging.  It’s go time!

We’ll see you there!

It appears that government computers were used to find information about Sam “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher:

Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher’s driver’s license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate.

Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.

It has not been determined who checked on Wurzelbacher, or why. Direct access to driver’s license and vehicle registration information from BMV computers is restricted to legitimate law enforcement and government business.

Paul Lindsay, Ohio spokesman for the McCain campaign, attempted to portray the inquiries as politically motivated. “It’s outrageous to see how quickly Barack Obama’s allies would abuse government power in an attempt to smear a private citizen who dared to ask a legitimate question,” he said.

The Obama campaign’s response?

Isaac Baker, Obama’s Ohio spokesman, denounced Lindsay’s statement as charges of desperation from a campaign running out of time. “Invasions of privacy should not be tolerated.  If these records were accessed inappropriately, it had nothing to do with our campaign and should be investigated fully,” he said.

Hm.  I don’t know that anyone said “the campaign” did it – but while we’re on the subject, how is it that reams of personal, embarassing, government-access info about someone who dares ask a question of The One finds itself in the public domain almost immediately?

To paraphrase Nick Coleman, let’s connect the dots:

• Regular joe asks Obama a tough question, which Mac seizes on in the debate; Regular joe gets his personal life gone over with a fine-toothed comb in public (likely with the help of illegal and unethical access to government records).
• TV station broadcasts an ad critical of the Obamessiah; The One’s lawyers threaten to take action against the station’s broadcast license.
• Democrats spooling up to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine at their first opportunity.

Feeling audacious?

The bad news:  it looks like an Obama administration is going to be too brittle to take the heat:

[Orlando TV reporter Barbara] West wondered about Sen. Barack Obama’s comment, to Joe the Plumber, about spreading the wealth. She quoted Karl Marx and asked how Obama isn’t being a Marxist with the “spreading the wealth” comment.

“Are you joking?” said Biden, who is Obama’s running mate. “No,” West said.

West later asked Biden about his comments that Obama could be tested early on as president. She wondered if the Delaware senator was saying America’s days as the world’s leading power were over.

“I don’t know who’s writing your questions,” Biden shot back.

Biden so disliked West’s line of questioning that the Obama campaign canceled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the candidate’s wife.

“This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election,” wrote Laura K. McGinnis, Central Florida communications director for the Obama campaign. 

McGinnis said the Biden cancellation was “a result of her husband’s experience yesterday during the satellite interview with Barbara West.”

The Strib endroses Norm Coleman for Senate…

…for all the wrong reasons (emphases added):

Independent judgment, exercised on behalf of the best interests of the country and state, is what we hope to see from our U.S. senators. With that hope in mind, this newspaper recommends the reelection of Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman.

The more independent, pragmatic Coleman emerged when he helped speed money to Minneapolis for a new Interstate 35W bridge; when he promoted tax credits for renewable energy investment; when he pushed for larger Pell Grants for needy college students; when he stood up to President Bush on extending publicly subsidized health insurance, including MinnesotaCare, to more poor children and their parents.

In other words, “we endorse Coleman over a plainly-unqualified Al Franken and vacuous irrelevancy Dean Barkley for reasons Lori Sturdevant would approve of”. 

Endorsements don’t carry that much weight; with reasoning like this one, it’s no wonder.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t support Coleman:  I do.  He’s clearly the best man for the job. 

Any port in a storm, I guess.

Its not just Joe the Plumber that will be hurt by higher taxes and will stop hiring and spending and start firing and scrimping.

It’s “Fred Ex” too. Big business, employing the rest of America that doesn’t work for Uncle Sam, is and will do much the same.

There are few better people to ask about our current economic precipice than Mr. Smith — or, as some people call him, “Fred Ex.” His company has $38 billion in sales, employs four football stadiums full of workers, owns 300 jet airplanes, and tens of thousands of trucks and vehicles. FedEx moves an incomprehensible seven million packages each day to every corner of the globe.

Broken Record: “Middle Class” Americans won’t care about lower taxes or a stimuless check in their hand if they have lost their job or are concerned they may.

Washington Is the Problem

“Look, our capital budget as we went into this year was about $3 billion. We went out to Boeing in July for our board meeting to see the new triple seven, [the Boeing 777] which we have bought. If we had a lower corporate tax rate with the ability to expense capital expenditures, guess what? We’d buy more triple sevens. We absolutely have to cut the corporate tax. Our current tax rate is about 38%. Even Germany has a 25% rate.”

Buying more Boeing 777’s, an American product; made in America by Americans, would mean more good-paying “Middle Class” American jobs. This is but one example. There are thousands of employers, large and small that face the same challenges, brought on by Washington’s corruption, mismanagement and liberal agendas.

Fiscal conservatives understand this. Liberals like Obama and his posse will ramrod their social engineering designs without regard for what damage it will do to the economy, hurting the very constituents they claim to work for.

Check the bottom listing in the Investor’s Business Editorials Daily Tracking Poll…”Displays Flag”

HT John H

After this story, coming on top of a bunch of other similar stories…:

 A woman robbed at knifepoint at a Pittsburgh ATM told police her attacker knocked her down and carved a “B” in her face after noticing a John McCain sticker on her car.

Police say the victim refused medical attention for the wound. An officer saw the injury, but a police report does not describe its size or severity.

…I’m waiting for a huge media expose on…McCain Voters Gone Wild.

When I first saw the story, I was a little leery – I’ve been burned by too many hoaxes.  Still am leery, actually.

But if it pans out, I think our course of action is clear; sanction Rush Limbaugh for creating a “climate of hate”. 

I mean, duh.

UPDATE:  Yup.  Burned again, or so it’s looking.

So look for this apparent hoax to get wall-to-wall coverage, and the all the other similar stories to be completely ignored.

Just saying.

Here’s the question:  do I express surprise that John Stossel has pretty well documented the press’ in-the-bag-for-Obama-itude…

Fifty-seven percent of the print and broadcast stories about the Republican nominee were decidedly negative, the Project for Excellence in Journalism says in a report out today, while 14 percent were positive. The McCain campaign has repeatedly complained that the mainstream media are biased toward the senator from Illinois.

Obama’s coverage was more balanced during the six-week period from Sept. 8 through last Thursday, with 36 percent of the stories clearly positive, 35 percent neutral or mixed and 29 percent negative.

McCain has struggled during this period and slipped in the polls, which is one of the reasons for the more negative assessments by the 48 news outlets studied by the Washington-based group. But the imbalance is striking nonetheless.

…or the fact that people might either be surprised by, or deny, the conclusion?

Oh, yeah – the report wasn’t actually by conservative John Stossel; it was by center-lefty Howard Kurtz.

John McCain today:

“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” McCain told the Washington Times when asked to name his criticisms of the current president.

“Those are just some of them”

He’s hanging an awful lot solely around President Bush’s neck. (I’m pretty sure GWB didn’t cause Global Warming)

Nonetheless I think that’s what you call a Maverick.

Agree or not, I dare Barack Obama to do this. Even Once. Stand on principle. Challenge his party leaders.

He couldn’t even do this with Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko or Rev. Wright.

You can’t vote “Present” as President. But apparently you can exhibit an astounding lack of accomplishments and leadership and be a candidate for President.

Do you think Obama would ever veto anything? Do you think he’ll temper the designs on socialism that Reid and Pelosi have in mind (or will it be his idea?)?

Would he be Congress’ lapdog?

“Ruff!”

But these guys are. And Nobel Prize winners too:

We are equally concerned with his proposals to increase tax rates on labor income and investment. His dividend and capital gains tax increases would reduce investment and cut into the savings of millions of Americans. His proposals to increase income and payroll tax rates would discourage the formation and expansion of small businesses and reduce employment and take-home pay, as would his mandates on firms to provide expensive health insurance.

After hearing such economic criticism of his proposals, Barack Obama has apparently suggested to some people that he might postpone his tax increases, perhaps to 2010. But it is a mistake to think that postponing such tax increases would prevent their harmful effect on the economy today. The prospect of such tax rate increases in 2010 is already a drag on the economy. Businesses considering whether to hire workers today and expand their operations have time horizons longer than a year or two, so the prospect of higher taxes starting in 2009 or 2010 reduces hiring and investment in 2008.

That’s right. The very prospect of raising taxes is already causing pain for Americans as their employers tighten their expenditures and defer hiring, spending and investment.

We conservatives, concerned that a potential lefty supermajority will try to impose the “Fairness” Doctrine to destroy talk radio (the backbone and beating heart of American conservatism today), warn the nation that an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment rights of average Americans is imminent.

“No – what, us?  Noooooooo!” responds the left.  “Why, Barack has even said he won’t push to reinstate the Doctrine!”

To them – disingenuous or naive as the case my be – that closes the discussion.

Of course, it’s not closed. 

New Mexico liberal Senator Jeff Bingaman:

Nah.  Nothing to worry about.

Nahthing!

Look; it’s probably natural for lefties to expect that their elected representatives do have the Constitution’s, and the nation’s, best interests at heart.

It’s just that the documentary evidence doesn’t seem to bear this out in any way.

(Via Maloney)

Mary LaHammer ponders yesterday’s vandalism of the homes of most of the Twin Cities congressional delegation – mostly Republicans (along with Rep. Ellison and Sen. Klobuchar):

 

If these images get a lot of attention I wonder if this could evolve into something like the Rick Kahn comments at Wellstone’s memorial. 

While the partisan in me sort of kind of hopes so (hey, I’ll cop to it), the rest of me does not – I think (and hope) most voters can tell the difference between pinheads with paint and party operatives (and in saying this I’m presupposing the vandalism wasn’t carried out by party operatives or their associates, naturally).

The AP calls the race even:

The poll, which found Obama at 44 percent and McCain at 43 percent, supports what some Republicans and Democrats privately have said in recent days: that the race narrowed after the third debate as GOP-leaning voters drifted home to their party and McCain’s “Joe the plumber” analogy struck a chord.

Three weeks ago, an AP-GfK survey found that Obama had surged to a seven-point lead over McCain, lifted by voters who thought the Democrat was better suited to lead the nation through its sudden economic crisis.

IBD/TIPP? Ditto:

McCain has picked up 3 points in the West and with independents, married women and those with some college. He’s also gaining momentum in the suburbs, where he’s gone from dead even a week ago to a 20-point lead. Obama padded gains in urban areas and with lower-class households, but he slipped 4 points with parents.

And the Zogmeister?

These numbers, if they hold, are blowout numbers. They fit the 1980 model with Reagan’s victory over Carter — but they are happening 12 days before Reagan blasted ahead. If Obama wins like this we can be talking not only victory but realignment:

Wow.  Sounds serious.

Seriously hosed. 

The only reason for polls like this (and the Minnesota Poll) is to try to depress GOP turnout.

Yes, I am declaring a conspiracy.