What’s the difference between a rabid, senselessly-violent pit bull and a hockey mom?

The pit bull is most likely a Democrat who will try to commit his/her outrages behind the cover of a fraudulent (or just-plain risible) claim of equivalence.

Not as snappy as “lipstick?”  Sorry.  I don’t have a speechwriter.

Tomorrow is the big finale! Join the Northern Alliance and AM1280 for the debate-watching party of the season!

AM1280 The Patriot is hosting a debate viewing party at Trocadero in Minneapolis (it’s right by the Monte Carlo, on Third Avenue at First Street North) for the final debate, a week from tonight!  Join the NARN – I’m one of ’em – for an evening of fun and politics!

We’ll have free appetizers and a cash bar (and let me tell you – nobody does appetizers like Trocadero!). The debate goes from 8pm CST to 9:30pm CST and doors will open at 7:30pm-ish.

Admission is free – but please RSVP at the handy AM1280 RSVP Page so we can plan accordingly.

Sign on up and join us tomorrow night.  And stay tuned for details about the Patriot’s election-night coverage!

We’ll see you there!

Ed Matthews – GOP-endorsed candidate for the Fourth CD – is debating Betty McCollum tonight. 

Get to Ed’s site, and get the details.

John Kline has been, for a couple of terms now, the Minnesota Second District rep in Congress.  He’s a reliable and solid conservative, and therefore I support him unabashedly and without reservation. While I believe that “endorsing” a candidate would make me sound like a pretentious fop (I’m a blogger, not an institution of any importance at all), I actively encourage anyone who lives in MNCD2 to vote for Kline as many times as you are legally able. 

Not to say Kline’s perfect – no politician is, and indeed none should ever try to be. 

One of his most controversial votes was for the bailout bill.  It’s a vote about which I’m of two minds.  On the one hand, it does continue the national trend of socializing risk and privatizing gain; it will take the sting out of making stupid decisions for financial institutions; it is (or will be, without immense vigilance on the part of the people and their representatives) a socialization of the credit market.  To a free-marketeer, the concept is noxious.

But I also agree with King; this is different from previous downturns in that it’s a meltdown in credit, not liquidity; without credit, the dip and the recovery will be much longer, much more difficult, and much more painful.  So while I’m as dogmatic a free-marketeer as anyone, I can go along with the notion that government can try to spread a net over the abyss – provided that is combined with fanatical vigilance as the recovery gathers to make sure that the nationalization is reversed, and that we don’t repeat the mistakes that led us here.  (This will require a huge leap in the economic and financial literacy of the American people, which will in return require a Republican administration).

Kevin Masrud, however, has taken umbrage at Kline’s support of the bailout bill, and is mounting a conservative Republican write-in campaign against Kline in response.  He appeared with King Banaian on NARN III “The Final Word” yesterday. 

On the one hand, I’m going to continue to support Kline in the coming election (for what little it’s worth; I live in the Fourth district).

I also believe that conservatives should fight like hell to (to use the metaphor I’ve been beating to death for the past year) “pull the party to the right” in the big tug of war I described in this piece, all the way through the caucuses and primaries – and then forgive whatever transgressions against pure Hayekian conservative orthodoxy the candidate holds onto, realize that “the best we can do” is better than “the next worst we can do” come November, and close ranks behind the candidate.  It’s why I support the likes of Tim Pawlenty, Norm Coleman, and John McCain – none of whom are as conservative as I am or as I’d like to see in their offices in an ideal world, but each of which are light-years better than Roger Moe, Mike Hatch, Fritz Mondale, Al Franken and Barack Obama. 

The discriminating reader will note that the caucuses were in February, and the primaries were last month. 

True. 

And the bailout bill came after both. 

The timing of Mr. Masrud’s quixotic campaign is both unavoidable and unfortunate.  Given my tepid, conditional support for the bailout and my otherwise-unabashed support of Rep. Kline, who is absolutely correct on a formidable majority of issues and tepidly (I believe) correct on this one, I’d much rather Mr. Masrud had waited until after the election…

…when i would unreservedly support his push to drive Kline, and all elected representatives, to the right on all financial legislation, up to and including the 2010 caucus and primary season.  This is an effort that can not end in 22 days; it is an effort whose urgency needs to redouble after the election, and to do it again after inauguration day, when the orcs will likely really be at the gates.

UPDATE:  Brain fade.  It was Kevin Masrud, not Jeffrey Williams, challenging Kline.  Blah.

NRO’s Kevin Williamson notes that independents think the media has been unfair to Governor Palin (emphases added):

Strong majorities of the public say the press has been fair to John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But fewer than four-in-ten (38%) say the press has been fair to Sarah Palin. Many more believe the press has been too tough on Palin (38%) than say it has been too easy (21%).

While opinions about Palin coverage are highly partisan, many independents share the view that the press has been too tough on the Alaska governor. Among independents, 41% say the press has been too hard on Palin, 20% say the press has been too easy and 36% say the press has been fair. Republicans overwhelmingly believe the press has been too hard on Palin (63%). Just 7% say the press has been too easy on her. Nearly one-in-five Democrats (18%) agree that coverage of Palin has been too tough.

Williamson reprises a question I asked in the past week or so: 

This brings up a question: Why do conservatives still feel the need to go through the dinosaur media? If you really want to talk ideas and policy, Rush Limbaugh’s show is probably the best forum, if you can get on. Rush doesn’t have a lot of guests, but when he does he gives them a chance to actually articulate their ideas in a developed way. If you’re looking for a place where substantive conservative ideas can get a hearing, there’s talk radio, the better blogs, Glenn Beck, NR/NRO, the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, &c. It’s not so much that these outlets are conservative-friendly, but that they’re interested in ideas. The Wall Street Journal is not going to ask a lot of “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” questions, or game-show inquiries about the deputy fisheries minister of Hoogivsastan. Treating the fossil media as though they were still the only — or the main — game in town only serves to prop them up and to diminish conservatives’ ability to get a hearing for our ideas.

It would be much more interesting to hear Governor Palin spend an hour with Glenn Reynolds than with Katie Couric.

And the Northern Alliance (Volume II, the Headliners) is certainly a contender, too.

As Williamson notes, it’s time for conservatives to start playing to the few media strengths we have.

Texas starts counting their dead voters:

Linda Kay Hill, a homemaker and Louisiana native, died Aug. 2, 2006, of a heart attack, her husband recalled, and is buried at Houston Memorial Gardens in Pearland. But Harris County voter records indicate she –- or someone using her identity –- cast a ballot in the November election that year. Linda Hill of Woodwick Street voted in person on Election Day, records show.

She is among the more than 4,000 people whose names are listed both on Harris County’s voter rolls and also in a federal database of death records, a Texas Watchdog analysis has found.

And dozens of those people, like Linda Hill, have apparently cast ballots from beyond the grave, records since 2004 show. One expert says the number of deceased names used to cast ballots may be higher than what Texas Watchdog’s analysis found.

Instances of dead voters’ names being used to cast ballots were most frequent in three elections, the November 2004 general election, the November 2006 general election and the March 2008 Democratic primary, the analysis found.

So on the one hand, you have Democrats whinging about electronic voting machines, and continuously yammering about the 2000 election which, by any rational measure, was crazy but legal – basically, trying to subvert confidence in the system…

…while they actively work to flood the system with counterfeit voters.

The findings come as the group ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has faced scrutiny in multiple states for allegedly improper voter registrations — including players for the Dallas Cowboys, not in the Lone Star State, but in Nevada. The group’s Nevada offices were raided by state officials earlier this week.

That’s as officials in at least six states may have improperly removed tens of thousands of voters from the rolls or prevented them from registering, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

I used the word “Counterfeit” advisedly:

“This is subverting the ballot,” said John Fund, a Wall Street Journal columnist and author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. “Just like you counterfeit dollars, we take it seriously, if you counterfeit votes we should take it equally seriously, and we should punish people seriously for trying to subvert democracy.”

That law will never pass, of course; way too many people from one of those parties are actively profiting from that subversion.

Or so it’s starting to look.

Just three days until the final Presidential Debate!

Join the Northern Alliance and AM1280 for the debate-watching party of the season!

AM1280 The Patriot is hosting a debate viewing party at Trocadero in Minneapolis (it’s right by the Monte Carlo, on Third Avenue at First Street North) for the final debate, a week from tonight!  Join the NARN – I’m one of ’em – for an evening of fun and politics!

We’ll have free appetizers and a cash bar (and let me tell you – nobody does appetizers like Trocadero!). The debate goes from 8pm CST to 9:30pm CST and doors will open at 7:30pm-ish.

Admission is free – but please RSVP at the handy AM1280 RSVP Page so we can plan accordingly.  The Veep debate was just about a sell-out – don’t miss it!

Sign on up and join us the coming Wednesday, the 15th.

And stay tuned for details about the Patriot’s election-night coverage!

We’ll see you there!

Barack Obama’s explanation of his tax plans if elected is instrumental in illustrating the thin line between lying and nondisclosure. His plan to raise taxes on those that employ a great many of his constituents is a failure to realize the benefit of economic lessons learned. It is also proof of his gross economic illiteracy.

His “Tax Cuts for 95% of Americans” ploy, given the fact that 40% of Americans don’t pay taxes defies basic mathematics. The idea that those above $250K represent the Nation’s upper crust defies the imagination.

Being subject to lower taxes will not be relevant to middle-class American families if their breadwinners lose their jobs. Half of America’s workforce draws a paycheck from small business owners. Further burdening these businesses, especially in challenging times like these, will serve only to harm those that Obama professes to be the messiah they’ve been waiting for. In fact, they will suffer the most.

Make no mistake. We are in a recession.

We need small businesses to do what they have done in most every previous recession. Grow. Hire. Invest. Small business has lead us out of tough times in the past, and if given the chance, will do so this time as well. Unfortunately, in the face of this recession, the American voter, in a twisted manipulation of cause and effect, has been lured into thinking that a Democrat is the answer. They will be dead wrong.

It is a sad commentary that the only upside to the current political tide for business owners and investors, and those that benefit from their success, is that an Obama Administration will be another Carter administration. Maybe worse. In this scenario, voters will awaken to the stark postmortem reality that a vote for a true conservative is a vote for economic prosperity.

In all fairness, Republicans deserve this predicament even if it is the American people that will suffer the most. Opportunities for true reform and fiscal restraint were squandered. President Bush has been one of the most fiscally liberal Presidents in modern times; and he’s a Republican.

The fact remains however, that raising taxes and spending any time in the next eight years, given the economic turmoil that we have just begun to suffer, is the polar opposite of what should be prescribed.

Our nation is amidst a time of unprecedented vulnerability. To think that a liberal majority can somehow resist the temptation to push their socialist agenda, even given the catastrophic consequences it will have for our nation, is a pipe dream.

We are on the precipice of total economic collapse as our system unwinds from a forty year super-cycle of growing consumer and national debt brought on by liberal economic policy and the inability of conservatives to exhibit the leadership to countermand its effects. Barack Obama has been consistently aligned with those that planted the seeds of this crisis while John McCain has been one of only a few voices of caution when leading indicators appeared on the horizon.

Do we face another Great Depression? It’s hard to say with certainty. Given our precarious economic status and the near certainty that liberals will gain unfettered control of fiscal policy, there is cause for concern. Great concern.

In the last Great Depression, fiscal policy was exactly wrong, albeit in hindsight. As the economy weakened, the Fed actually increased rates. The President resisted even short-term deficit spending. Unemployment was higher than it is now.

In this case, the Fed has little more it can do. Deficit spending has been the norm for years. We have a ten trillion dollar national debt; closer to thirty if you count future obligations. Interest rates are already close to the bottom.

The only lever left is to lower taxes and allow the free enterprise system to rescue us via the creation of new jobs and wage growth, which will drive consumerism and investment. Even that takes time. Time we may not have. Ronald Regan’s efforts took more than a year to take effect.

Consider this: lowering taxes and incentives to allow the free enterprise system to pull us out of the grasp of recession; does this sound likely given the trend in the affiliation of our elected officials?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Dow Sends a Message to Obama, Carter, Clinton, Dodd, Raines, Frank and the rest of our nation’s liberal social engineering geniuses:

Ray Suarez – the MPR/NPR talking head responsible for making Talk Of The Nation such an unctuous bore – says asking questions about The One is…well, racist, of course, silly:

The “pseudo controversies” about Obama’s background are symbols for a “racial calculus” hard at work in U.S. politics.

“Racial calculus” is one of those terms, like “political kabuki”, that people use to make a 25 cent theory sound like a dollar’s worth of thought.

Opinions about Obama’s inexperience, his childhood in Indonesia, and the persistent but untrue rumors of him being Muslim are stand-ins for something his detractors cannot admit, Suarez said.

Ray.  Bubbie.  Get a grip.

I’m hosed if I can think of a single credible conservative commentator – one that 99% of us would claim – who’s said word one about The One’s childhood or the “M” word. 

And if talking about his palpable inexperience is “racist”, well, what’s the point of talking about Presidential candidates at all?  I mean, the man makes John Edwards look like a solid professional. 

Particularly, “religion has become a proxy for race,” he said.

And “has become a proxy for race” has become one of the many proxies for McCarthyism.

“Do you now, or have you ever found anything about Barack Obama that led you not to support him?”

Postlude:  Remember all the Ashkkkroft Libertarians – the people who joked about Libertarians before January of 2001, the ones who thought Civil Liberties were the province of Rand-sodden bearded wackoes who lived in compounds in the Rockies, but suddenly became solem civil liberties junkies the moment John Ashcroft was sworn in as Attorney General, and spent the next eight years protecting this nation’s most vital liberties (flag burning, making statues of the Virgin Mary out of poop, and getting calls for people whom there is reasonable probable cause to believe are terrorists)?

Betcha they say not one thing about the liberties that an Obama administration will try to bulldoze; the First, Second and Tenth are all at immediate risk. 

…’til the official beginning of the “home stretch” is coming up on Wednesday – the final Presidential Debate!

Join the Northern Alliance and AM1280 for the debate-watching party of the season!

AM1280 The Patriot is hosting a debate viewing party at Trocadero in Minneapolis (it’s right by the Monte Carlo, on Third Avenue at First Street North) for the final debate, a week from tonight!  Join the NARN – I’m one of ’em – for an evening of fun and politics!

We’ll have free appetizers and a cash bar (and let me tell you – nobody does appetizers like Trocadero!). The debate goes from 8pm CST to 9:30pm CST and doors will open at 7:30pm-ish.

Admission is free – but please RSVP at the handy AM1280 RSVP Page so we can plan accordingly.

Sign on up and join us the coming Wednesday, the 15th.

And stay tuned for details about the Patriot’s election-night coverage!

We’ll see you there!

Camille Paglia, responding as it were to a letter from St. Louis Park, discounts McCain’s ability to hold executive office in favor of Obama’s substantially higher level of relevant experience.

What is her assessment based on?

Like a broken record…he’s run an inspiring campaign. He’s shrewd. He looks good; smells good. The egg justifies the chicken.

Yes, McCain is profoundly patriotic, as were his military forebears. Patriotism, rather than race, may indeed prove to be the determining factor in this election. But I simply don’t see that McCain has the basic managerial ability to run the complex Washington bureaucracy. Obama lacks executive experience too, but he has shown a shrewd ability to captain a national campaign. And Obama’s sober, deliberative temperament seems to me genuinely presidential. In contrast, McCain’s bizarre grandstanding during the Wall Street crisis (such as his embarrassingly unprofessional call for cancellation of the first debate) suggested that he lacks the steadiness of behavior and expression that we have a right to expect in a president.

Then she labels McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign and call to postpone the first debate, in a time of financial crisis and investor panic, as grandstanding; a ridiculous charge given the events as they occurred. The fact that we didn’t have a greater meltdown is not cause for criticism for what was clearly an executive decision to err on the side of precaution.

I know this is editorial bullsh*t but its bullsh*t nonetheless and Obama’s brain dead followers are eating it up like cattle being fed on the way to the rendering plant.

ACORN is allegedly actively abetting voter fraud:

Two Ohio voters, including Domino’s pizza worker Christopher Barkley , claimed yesterday that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they’d already signed up.

Barkley estimated he’d registered to vote “10 to 15” times after canvassers for ACORN, whose political wing has endorsed Barack Obama, relentlessly pursued him and others.

Fearless prediction: watch the media focus relentlessly on everything but ACORN.  I’m guessing electronic voting machines will make a comeback in the next few news cycles…but I digress.  Watch pre-emptive Tic claims of election fraud to get breathless coverage.

No, really.

The wages of the past eight years – of the Dems trying on the one hand to sabotage confidence in the electoral system on behalf of Algore, and on the other to fraudulently gin up votes for their people up and down the ticket – are a much weaker democracy.

The official beginning of the “home stretch” is coming up in a week – the final Presidential Debate!

Will Obama be carried in a sedan chair made out of glued-together foreign contributions?  Will Mac sic Sarah on him before event to shake him up?  (Hm.  Note to self…)

I dunno – but it’d be a lot more fun to watch with a bunch of your closest friends!

AM1280 The Patriot is hosting a debate viewing party at Trocadero in Minneapolis (it’s right by the Monte Carlo, on Third Avenue at First Street North) for the final debate, a week from tonight!  Join the NARN – I’m one of ’em – for an evening of fun and politics!

We’ll have free appetizers and a cash bar (and let me tell you – nobody does appetizers like Trocadero!). The debate goes from 8pm CST to 9:30pm CST and doors will open at 7:30pm-ish.

Admission is free – but please RSVP at the handy AM1280 RSVP Page so we can plan accordingly.

Sign on up and join us a week from tonight, the 15th.

And stay tuned for details about the Patriot’s election-night coverage!

We’ll see you there!

…almost as despondent as Roosh seemed to. 

Mac generally does well in a “Town Hall” format – and I personally don’t like “town hall”-style debates a whole lot.  And like Roosh, my first impression was that Mac was too polite; that he didn’t go inside and mix it up with Obama nearly enough.

And then I thought slept on it, and didn’t feel nearly so bad.

Just as Mac doesn’t need to play to the media (indeed, just as he and Gov. Palin need to outflank them and go directly to the people), Mac doesn’t need to destroy Obama; he needs to convince millions and millions of people who are not political junkies – people not remotely like me, by the way – that he’s someone they can trust to lead this nation during the most difficult time in recent memory.  He needs to appear like a statesman and a leader, not a trench-fighter (that’s Palin’s job – one she’s finally gotten to take on in the past week). 

While last night’s performance was bound to leave doctrainaire conservatives and political junkies [Roosh and Berg raise their hands, glancing nervously about – Ed.] a little unsatisfied, Mac knows that they’re not the ones he needs to win; while that issue may have been in doubt six weeks ago, putting Palin on the ticket guarantees that no movement conservative who’s not in Lori Sturdevant’s rolodex is going to stray.  That means Mac can – and, last night, did – play to the vast horde in the middle who don’t care much for “R” and “D”, but who do balance their checkbooks and watch their 401Ks and whose kids are going to be of military age sooner than later. 

And I don’t think Mac lost a single vote in that crowd last night.

He needed to look like a leader, a statesman, a President.  And I think he did.

John McCain has one more chance to assert himself and as it turns out he needs it.

Because it didn’t happen so much tonight.

John McCain favors the town hall format but the elements that differentiate that format didn’t manifest themselves tonight. Tom Brokaw didn’t allow it, much to the detriment of the process and the value of tonight’s debate.

As moderator, Tom Brokaw displayed a last gasp of vitality in denying Obama’s request at one point to rebut a rebuttal in which McCain took a shot at him. In the next session, Obama couldn’t resist and went there anyway. Thereafter, Brokaw seemed to lose his will to moderate at all.

Not so much so as to allow John McCain to pick up where Sarah Palin left off on the concerns of character and associations that many anticipated would be part of the fare tonight. The format left Obama unscathed here.

The result of all of the above was a restating of well worn talking points and serial question non-answering on the part of both candidates, and from my vantage point, more so on the part of Senator McCain.

John McCain may have taken off the gloves but he didn’t take enough swings and he didn’t land enough blows.

An opportunity missed for sure.

To his credit, McCain was effective at conveying to Americans the reality that the level of entitlements enjoyed currently can not continue.

At the same time, McCain missed the opportunity to truly drive home the idea that Obama’s ridiculous and implausible promise of net spending reductions, bipartisanship and reform fly in the face of his public record while McCain, using the same measure, can more credibly assert that he will actually be able to exhibit and foster fiscal discipline.

Ideology aside, McCain was nervous and a little goofy, settled in and gained confidence, then regressed. Obama seemed consistently confident and poised.

My barometer tonight was Mrs. Roosh, a devout conservative who is much more removed from the day to day blog fodder and media bombardment than I am. Her take on McCain’s performance? She was annoyed.

I think she, like many voters, just wanted some straight answers if not a clear change of momentum in McCain’s favor.

All in all making next Wednesday night’s debate an even more pivotal event.

I’m not enamored by the personal attacks that appear to represent the final chapter in the 2008 Presidential campaign. That is not to say I find them irrelevant.

Obama criticizes McCain for an attempt to distract the American people from the economic crisis that his his colleagues in Congress and his pals at Fannie and Freddie (one of which is now his advisor) caused, and that John McCain warned of, and then responds in kind with more of the same.

Also not a fan of tit for tat, but I am amused at the notion that Obama considers this:

The so-called Keating Five scandal involved McCain, who was in his first term in the Senate representing Arizona, and four Democratic senators, none of whom are still in office. They faced accusations of improperly intervening with federal regulators on behalf of Keating, an Arizona businessman and campaign contributor who was chairman of California-based Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.

On par with this:

Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, which carried out a series of bombings to protest the Vietnam War in the 1970s.

Once again; This:

Unchecked Greed

With This:

Attempting to Kill People and Destroy Public Property with Explosives

Again, this:

A Banking Scandal

With this:  

Domestic Terrorism

Then again…

The Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 ultimately cleared McCain of wrongdoing, though it said he had “exercised poor judgment.”

As for Ayers…he’s unrepentant.

Now I know why so many liberals make all those tittering neo-nazi references about conservatives.

They’re projecting.

And of course, we knew what happened the last time the last couple of dozen times a personality cult took over a major power, don’t we?

Er…don’t we?

Hello?

Over and over we hear the refrain: “the world wants Obama”

The world, however, is mostly pretty stupid – or at least, that’s the tale of the poll:

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, there is no consensus outside the United States that Islamist militants from al Qaeda were responsible, according to an international poll published Wednesday.

The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001.

U.S. officials squarely blame al Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden has boasted of organizing the suicide attacks by his followers using hijacked commercial airliners.

On average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al Qaeda was responsible, 15 percent said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some other perpetrator. One in four people said they did not know who was behind the attacks.

A few years back, a poll showed a third of American Democrats thought as former “governor” Jesse Ventura does – that 9/11 was an inside job.  Perhaps the world shouldn’t feel so bad.

Not.

Respondents in the Middle East were especially likely to name a perpetrator other than al Qaeda, the poll found.

Israel was behind the attacks, said 43 percent of people in Egypt, 31 percent in Jordan and 19 percent in the Palestinian Territories. The U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

In Mexico, 30 percent cited the U.S. government and 33 percent named al Qaeda.

Oddly, it was in the least “developed” parts of the world that Al Quaeda was most-blamed.  Could it be because in places like Nigeria, Al Quaeda isn’t an abstraction?

Or is it because they aren’t exposed to the western news media? 

I’ll take “all of the above”. 

(Via Gary @ TVM)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/09/2360240.htm?section=world

Joe Biden was on a Fantasy World Tour the other night and between he and the fetching Mrs. Palin, he is supposed to be the foreign affairs expert. Not so much apparently. Governor Palin let him get away with some whoppers, a missed opportunity for sure. But this morning she’s getting a little help from her friends.

Biden’s Fantasy World

…what are we to make of Mr. Biden’s fantastic debate voyage last week when he made factual claims that would have got Mrs. Palin mocked from New York to Los Angeles?

Mr. Biden asserted that “When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.’ Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.”

The U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, and no one else has either. Perhaps Mr. Biden meant to say Syria, except that the U.S. also didn’t do that.

Then there’s the Senator’s astonishing claim that Mr. Obama “did not say he’d sit down with Ahmadinejad” without preconditions. Yet Mr. Biden himself criticized Mr. Obama on this point in 2007 at the National Press Club

Sarah Palin may not know as much about the world, but at least most of what she knows is true.

The conventional wisdom is that Senator Obama picked Joe Biden because he’s older, wiser, and serves to shore up Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience.

Turns out, Joes’s just older.

To:  The Broadcast Media

From:  Mitch Berg

Re:  News

All,

When carrying broadcast packages involving Governor Palin on the campaign trail, it is not necessary to use Saturday Night Live’s parody of Governor Palin as a coda to every single piece on the subject. 

The parody may have been news a month or so ago (along with the “news” that SNL finally has perhaps its third passably-funny bit since Norm MacDonald left the cast).  A month later, it is a weekly bit on an (I’ll be charitable) entertainment show.  It happens as regularly as Linday Lohan passing out in a puddle of vomit.  This isn’t even “dog bites man”, it’s “dog piddles on tree”.

Giving Tina Fey a half-week-old last word on every one of Governor Palin’s statements is sort of like appending Zach Braff’s or Hugh Laurie’s impression of a doctor onto every story about healthcare.  To the best of my knowledge, no network news department (except perhaps  MSNBC) does this.

See to this.  Thanks.

That is all.

2006 was a bit of a holiday from the upper midwest center-right blogosphere’s traditional shredding and hooting at the “Minnesota Poll”, the Star-Tribune’s biennial exercise in DFL promotion.  Things generally went to far to the DFL’s favor (we only salvaged the Governor and Lieutenant Governor’s offices in the worst anti-GOP bloodbath since Watergate) that the Strib didn’t need to try to spin, cook and mangle reality in the DFL’s favor.

This year, of course, things are different.  In what should be a slam dunk year for Democrats in Minnesota, which is traditionally as solid-Democrat as a state can get without massive head injuries, Mac is holding steady and competitive in most polls.  And Al Franken has been trailing incumbent Norm Coleman by high single to low double digits.

The Minnesota Poll, of course, induces its own alternate reality, putting Franken up by a blowout-territory 13 points – almost exactly the opposite of a contemporaneous SurveyUSA/KSTP poll. 

Like all Minnesota Polls, it’s done to generate glowing, feel-good headlines for Democrats, and assumes nobody will read the fine print.  The Minnesota Poll showed a 13 point lead for Franken because they sampled so many more Democrats than Republicans.

Details, details? 

Perhaps – except that this poll is used as a rote talking point by every media figure from Nick Coleman through George Stephanopoulos, who tossed it at Tim Pawlenty on Sunday morning (causing Pawlenty to all-but-chuckle at the reference on the air).

The  Minnesota Poll has been shredded, over and over again.  Rumors of its demise in the Strib’s budget cuts would seem to be exaggerated, although not so much as rumors that the poll would have to clean up its act if it expected to help rather than hurt the Strib in these polarized times, when merely acting liberal on demand isn’t enough to guarantee acceptance anymore.