…and Jesus was a community organizer.

But then so was Lenin.

…I’m going to count up all the blogs that’ve started as vendettas against or responses to the various NARN and MOB members…

…that’ve quietly fizzled as the “writers'” energy and stockpile of “ideas” pooped out.

I have no idea at the moment what the number is, but it’s gonna be big.

It would appear Barack Obama’s candidacy for President has a popular edge over John McCain’s outside the US among those queried. Probably because John McCain didn’t go on a whirlwind rock star tour. McCain is probably more concerned with what Americans think of their government than what the rest of the world thinks.

Democrat Mr Obama was favoured by a four-to-one margin across the 22,500 people polled in 22 countries.

It is interesting to note however, when you stack the electoral votes allocated to each of the countries whose citizens were polled, Obama and McCain are dead even.

Here’s a complete list of the countries included in the poll, along with the number of electoral votes in each:

Australia (0)
Brazil (0) 
Canada (0) 
China (0) 
Egypt (0) 
France (0) 
Germany (0) 
India (0) 
Indonesia (0) 
Italy (0) 
Kenya (0) 
Lebanon (0) 
Mexico (0) 
Nigeria (0) 
Panama (0) 
Philippines (0) 
Poland (0) 
Russia (0) 
Singapore (0) 
Turkey (0) 
United Arab Emirates (0) 
United Kingdom (0)

First Brett Favre, returns to the NFL via the Jets after being snubbed by the Pack.

The Results: Mixed

Then Lance Armstrong, returns to cycling after three years’ hiatus and a marriage to Sheryl Crow.

The Results: TBD (although he saved on TP)

And let’s not forget, JRoosh returned to blogging after a twenty four hour hiatus after being invited by Mitch Berg to join SITD.

The Results: You tell me

Seriously, I thought the above would make a good excuse to publicly thank Mitch Berg for the opportunity to be a part of a very important blog, one in an impressive array of MOB/True North/NARN Blogs, during a very important time in America.

I appreciate the feedback and commentary from each and every visitor, even if we vehemently disagree.

The next 50 or so days are going to be riveting.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program…

Al Franken got around 2/3 of the vote yesterday.

In the DFL Primary, where the usual margin of victory among endorsed DFL candidates compares to those of Robert Mugabe or Leonid Brezhnev – conservatively, 100+%.

Gary Gross:

Frankly, these totals must be giving Franken’s campaign alot of heartburn. If they aren’t, they should be. As Michael said here, this is a “total embarassment” to Team Franken. To say that Franken doesn’t appeal to central Minnesota voters is understatement. Frankly, I don’t see Franken’s appeal to independents or moderates.

The Unhinged Left is his base. It doesn’t extend beyond that, which means that he’s toast this November. Any statewide candidate that can’t appeal to voters beyond their traditional base is history.

Michael Brodkorb:

I thought it was reasonable to ask if Al Franken would get less than 90 percent in the primary election. I thought Franken would get over 90 percent.  But Franken got less than 90 percent and 80 percent…he even got less than 70 percent.  As of 11:49 p.m., Franken has only received 65 percent of the vote in the DFL primary election.

Tonight’s primary results are a total embarrassement for Team Franken.

And Al Franken’s organ-grinder blogpet Aaron Landry:

Analyzing primaries can many times be a fruitless adventure, but hey, why not? Here’s a couple numbers I found interesting:

While Priscilla Lord Faris got 29% of the vote, for some strange reason the amount of people that chose to vote in the DFL column was just shy of double that of the GOP.

Right.  Because it’s a contested vote.  That draws people.  

I think there are some people on the right that wouldn’t believe that DFLers in Minnesota outnumber GOP’ers 2 to 1.

And, silly as we might look, we’re supported by the last couple of election results, in which we finish between two and six points out of the majority.   

Who are all these people voting in the DFL slot?

I dunno, but a third of ’em don’t seem all that thrilled by A-Frank.

District 41B voters ignore Neil Peterson’s desperate lie and advance Jan Schneider to the general election.

Schneider won by a handy 57/43 margin.

Peterson, in this Strib clip, sounds graceless and petulant in defeat:

“We got blown right out,” Peterson, a two-term House member, said of his primary race against Jan Schneider, who had won the GOP endorsement in March. “It was the state [Republican] party that beat me, it wasn’t the candidate.

“It’s just like the Cosa Nostra; they decide to put a mark on you,” he added. Peterson said he suspected his override vote was the principal reason for his defeat, and said “I’m probably the only Republican in history whom the Republican Party has targeted.”

It was the candidate that beat you. Actually, two; Schneider has the right message, and Peterson has the wrong one. The override vote was just a noxious turd atop the sewage sundae that’s been Peterson’s career as a Sturdevant Republican who’s voted with the DFL 52% of the time during his two-term stint in the House.

Mary LaHammer:

Rep. Neil Peterson fom Bloomington had character and spunk and that’s always appreciated in the press.  But once again, you can’t bite the hand that feeds you:  local party activists.

There’s a worthy observation, there, GOP legislators; you’re not in office to please Lori Sturdevant or Cathy Wurzer or Nick Coleman.  You’re there to serve the district that sent you to office.  And if you got elected with the support of a party, you owe something to the party’s principles.  Go ahead and vote your conscience and defy those principles if you feel you must – it’s a matter of your personal integrity.  But realize that there’ll be consequences, and that while Lori Sturdevant may paint your toenails, she’s not necessarily going to help you with the people who matter.  The voters. The people who sent you to St. Paul in the first place.

Goodbye, and good riddance.

Now, it’s time to get Jan Schneider elected.

I missed the first two days of the convention due to a family emergency. I didn’t actually get a lot of news; i didn’t go near downtown Saint Paul.

Unfortunately, I had to depend on the news media for information. It was that bad.

Like most party conventions, the RNC was pretty much a scripted, predictable pageant, up until Palin’s speech a week ago (for which I was in attendance), so there wasn’t much news.

Now, the mass of protesters – which turned out to be 1/5 to 1/10 as big as “organizers” had originally predicted? They got media coverage. Not only were most of the mainstream media gamboling about among the clots of the disaffected upper-middle-class whites on the street, but practically half of the “demonstrators” were calling themselves “media” as well. So the protests? Yes, they got covered.

Well, let’s be clear; the parts of the protests that the agenda-driven leftymedia wanted covered – alleged police overreaching and alleged excessive force – got covered in slathering detail.

Other stories? Like, atrocities committed by the anarkids?

You can scan the lefty alt-media a long time and find no reference to anything like this:

One 80 year old delegate had to be hospitalized from the violence by the Leftists.

The Alabama delegation was one of the buses that was attacked today in Minnesota.

The Leftist, anarchist, Obama-supporting radicals attacked RNC delegates today at the Xcel Center and sprayed them with a toxic substance.

An 80 year old RNC delegate had to be hospitalized!!

With all the video cameras the likes of the Minnesoros Independent were deploying, you’d think this bit of video might have gotten some play. Molly Priesmeyer would probably breezily quip that they’re all just a bunch of old white people; but if she did, it’d be more coverage than all the rest the “citizen journalists” of the lefty altmedia devoted to the lethal attack on people exercising their First Amendment rights.

They certainly didn’t cover this:

As the Connecticut delegation was getting off a bus near the Xcel Center, a group of protesters broke free from authorities and attacked the delegates.

Connecticut delegate Rob Simmons told FOX 9 that a group of protesters came toward his delegation and tried to rip the credentials off their necks and sprayed them with a toxic substance.

The unknown substance burned their eyes and stained their clothes.

One 80-year-old member of the delegation had to be treated for injuries, and several other delegates had to rinse their eyes and clothing.

Or, um, this?:

…a busload of Cub Scouts were en route to the convention, where they were to present the colors to open the convention. A group of protesters–liberals, Obama supporters, or whatever–blocked the road, surrounded the bus, and attacked it, rocking the bus back and forth, denting and scratching the sides, and generally terrifying the children trapped inside. The left-wing protesters attacked a number of buses in the same way, but there is something especially despicable about attacking a group of Cub Scouts.

(UPDATE: Powerline isn’t so sure about this one anymore.  Let’s wait a bit on that).

This? No? Never mind.

I know some of you leftymedia types read this blog. Where were you when your people attacked the delegates? Most of these attacks occurred before the first demonstration, on 9/1 (which was “highlighted” by anarkids smashing things and attacking the police).

No, I don’t expect an answer. I’ve been asking leftymedia types to answer that one for a week now. Not one has ponied up yet.

The leftymedia is shocked, shocked that the police – who did know about the attacks – didn’t treat the demonstrators, or the lefty alt-media with whom they were pretty much indistinguishable, with kid gloves and greet them like heroes of liberal tolerance.

Charter schools know their market.  Increasingly, their market is low-income urban parents who are disgusted with the performance of their local public school districts:

The Minnesota Department of Education recently announced the approval of 11 new charter schools state-wide, eight of which will be opening in the Twin Cities or first-ring suburbs. This year’s crop follows a current trend in charter schools: aggressively pursuing poor and low-income families who are dissatisfied and disillusioned with public school systems, particularly in Minneapolis. Six of the eight say they will explicitly market themselves to these families.

One of eight Saint Paul families has deserted the public system; the number is higher in Minneapolis.

Hugh Hewitt is a great friend, and was a crucial benefactor behind the launch of the Northern Alliance Radio Network.  He’s one of the five best radio talk show hosts out there.

But if he has one habit that irritates the bejeebers out of me, it’s his constant focus on “credendials” – as if an opinion, story or statement by someone with a BA in History from Northern Arizona is, in and of itself, of less veracity or value than the same one from someone who went to Harvard Law.

That someone gets out of high school and goes to an Ivy League college at 18, and then moves on to an Ivy League post-grad school (especially Law School) at age 22, tells you something.  Yes, it tells you that student is most likely pretty smart. It also tells you that at age 12 or 13, they knew they wanted to focus on getting the kind of grades and prerequisites they needed to get into the Ivy League.  That kind of focus has tradeoffs, just as does the maniacal focus one needs to become a doctor or a professional athlete or a full-time musician; someone who’s that focused on academia during junior high is trading off some other experiences that will be of use in their lives.

Some lefty critics titter about John McCain’s ranking at the Naval Academy, near the bottom of his class.  Of course, most of those critics couldn’t have gotten into the USNA in the first place – but that’s really beside the point.

Because as James Robbins notes in National Review, it’s actually a strength:

Some have suggested that McCain’s low class ranking reflects negatively on his fitness to lead the country. But there is no clear relationship between Academy class rank and leadership qualities. For example, Jimmy Carter, the only Naval Academy graduate to serve as president to date, graduated 59th out of a class of 820, so draw your own conclusions. Seventeen class anchors [people at the very rock bottom of their classes] have attained flag [admiral] rank, and many low-ranking graduates have gone on to brilliant careers. This tracks with the thesis I developed in my book Last in Their Class; the bottom of the class tends to produce a different kind of leader than the top. Those who wind up at the foot are often there by choice. They could do better if they studied, but they would rather trade class ranking for other pursuits. They tend to be the risk takers, the innovators, usually very well liked and in their own way driven. They know how to get into trouble, and more importantly how to get out of it. They also tend to have more than their share of luck.

To them, I suspect, life is a richer, more interesting place, and they are most likely better, more interesting people than they’d be if they’d spent eight years concerned only with banging out A’s.

Which is one of the things that makes ’em leaders.  Robbins notes that 17 “anchors” have gone on to serve as admirals; I’d love to see if that many valedictorians got flags.

Hey, wait. That’s not funny.

Comedian Al Franken Wins Minn. Senate Nod

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Comedian Al Franken grabbed the Democratic nomination Tuesday for U.S. Senate in Minnesota, setting up a showdown with Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.

What?

Not “Statesman” Al Franken?

Not “former State Representative” Al Franken?

Not “Entrepreneur” Al Franken?

Not “Former Mayor” Al Franken?

Not “former War Hero” Al Franken?

Not “Prominent Attorney” Al Franken?

Not “former Professor” Al Franken?

Not “Community Organizer” Al Franken?

Not “(failed) Radio Political Commentator” Al Franken?

Not even “long-time Minnesota Resident” Al Franken?

The AP, ostensibly not able to apply any other credible label to Mr. Franken, listed him as “Comedian” Al Franken.

Even less funny, 163,000 Minnesotans actually went out of their way to cast a primary vote for a candidate listed as a “Comedian.”

Seriously, folks (pun intended) are you telling me the best candidate the DFL in Minnesota can muster is a vulgar, tax-dodging, carpet bagging “Comedian?”

That’s all ya got?

Is this thing on?

By now everyone is buzzing about the federal government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Riddle me this:

1. Whose idea was it?
2. Was it smart?
3. Was it necessary?
4. Could it have been prevented?
5. How did this happen?

The answers to these questions are easy.

1. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson
2. Yes
3. Yes
4. Yes
5. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac knew that the federal government would bail them out if they ever got into trouble

The Chicken and the Egg.

More on “Whose idea was it?”:

WASHINGTON — President Bush may be the nation’s first M.B.A. president, but when Mr. Bush and a small coterie of advisers met in the Oval Office last week to complete their plan to rescue the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, there was no question who was in charge.

It was Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. who first proposed the idea of a government conservatorship, and broached it with Mr. Bush while the president was at his ranch in Crawford, Tex. It was Mr. Paulson who set the guiding principles for the subsequent deal; Mr. Bush endorsed them, a departure from usual White House practice, in which the president articulates principles for his underlings to follow.

Had the federal government not taken over these giants, we would most likely have experienced what is called a systemic breakdown of our nation’s financial system resulting in most likely a recession (already likely by most accounts) or even the next depression.

The moral of the story? You can’t have a free market system unless you truly have a free market. The implied bailout of these mortgage giants, which until this week were public companies, allowed (encouraged?) them to take unnecessary and unmitigated risks.

Risks otherwise unadvisable, especially given the small margin of extra return that could have potentially been delivered to investors, had the potential upside been fully realized.

And now the taxpayer has become the beneficiary of the not yet fully realized downside.

So who’s the idiot (sorry) uninformed overseer behind the formation of this disaster in the first place?

Care to wager as to what party he represents?

Taxpayers are now on the hook for as much as $200 billion to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and if you want to know why, look no further than the rapid response to this bailout from House baron Barney Frank.

Asked about Treasury’s modest bailout condition that the companies reduce the size of their high-risk mortgage-backed securities (MBS) portfolios starting in 2010, Mr. Frank was quoted on Monday as saying, “Good luck on that,” and that it would never happen.

There you have the Fannie Mae problem in profile. Mr. Frank wants you to pick up the tab for its failures, while he still vows to block a reform that might prevent the same disaster from happening again.

Could it have been prevented? (Yes – emphasis mine)

At least the Massachusetts Democrat is consistent. His record is close to perfect as a stalwart opponent of reforming the two companies, going back more than a decade. The first concerted push to rein in Fan and Fred in Congress came as far back as 1992, and Mr. Frank was right there, standing athwart. But things really picked up this decade, and Barney was there at every turn.

That is what happens when Democrats are allowed to stand behind our nation’s cash register. They’re like one of Donald Trump’s ex-wives…only you and I get to pay the bill.

One of the great linguistic crimes of the left in recent years is their attempt to hijack the term “tax cut” to refer to what are, in essence, payoffs to specific constituencies.

During the 2000 and 2004 elections, in a spate of almost-honesty trumping marketing, the Gore and Kerry campaigns referred to them as “targeted tax cuts” – allowing the audience to ask “Targeted?  At whom or what?”

The answer, of course:  anyone whose vote the Democrats want to buy.

As a Republican, of course, I favor across-the-board cuts in both taxes and spending.  I also acknowledge that many of the most popular tax cuts that fall short of that goal are “targeted”, in a sense.  The Mortgage Interest Deduction is targeted at homeowners; Capital Gains Tax cuts are aimed at stockholders and others who directly or indirectly buy or sell investment securities, equities or property; the Death Tax is aimed at people who die.  These have one thing in common; they affect the vast majority of the American people, most of whom own houses and participate in the market (directly or via their 401K funds, and all of whom will eventually enter the probate and inheritance system, presuming the Democrats leave them any property to bequeath).  Home owners, direct and indirect investment and probate cross all party, demographic, regional and social lines.

Democrats’ “targeted cuts”, however, try to slice the pie into much finer slices, each of them a constituency they need, essentially to rebate some of the cost of the higher spending back to the groups, classes and other slices they need to keep happy.

Hence Al Franken and his proposal to give a post-secondary tax deduction, which Aaron Landry misleadingly labels a “tax cut”. 

From a Franken press release today:

A college diploma is more than a dream for Minnesota families – it’s practically a requirement for middle-class prosperity. But with George W. Bush in the White House and Norm Coleman in the Senate, that prosperity has slipped out of reach for Minnesota’s middle class. My tuition tax cut will bring college within reach for 10 million students nationwide. And it will take a step towards restoring America’s middle-class promise: that hard work can bring prosperity to your family.

Landry:

The average student loan debt in Minnesota jumped over $6K during the first three years of Coleman and is the 5th in the nation. Coleman’s continually voted against students, such as letting tuition tax deduction expire, opposing $4.9 billion for Pell grants.

Of course, one of the reasons a postsecondary education is so expensive is the immense subsidy from the government.  It’s Economics 101; when more money is made available to pay for something for which there is a limited supply, the price will rise.  The price of postsecondary education has risen much  faster than inflation over the past thirty years; anecdotally, tuition at my very modestly-priced alma mater has nearly tripled since I was in school, while average incomes have not. 

So Franken isn’t proposing a “tax cut”, so much as a “rebate” of a price increase caused by the government’s own subsidies, which are the primary inflationary pressure on tuitions in the first place.

At any rate, getting into college isn’t the biggest problem facing Americans’ entry into the middle class; graduating from high school knowing enough English, math and citizenship is.  And on that front, Franken promises only more of the status quo.

Not even a “tax cut” to help people secede from the system that Franken’s biggest supporters, the Teachers’ unions, broke in the first place.

But I digress.

Let’s just make sure we keep our terms straight, OK?

I’ve seen quite a few “demonstrators” and “professional media” from this past week claim that the police were “out of control” last week at the RNC – even accusations that there was a “police riot”.

And let’s make one thing clear; I oppose police overreaching. Indeed, since an Obama administration would likely try to shut down conservative talk radio and regulate political blogs, I oppose all government overreaching.

But let me ask you all; where was the overreach?

Let’s allow for the moment that I, too, am concerned about some of the reports of excessive use of mace on people who weren’t actively resisting the police. It’s technically and legally a gray area (whether it should be or not is another entire discussion), but let’s acknowledge some mutual concern here, and move on.

And let’s balance that by acknowledging the concern I have that the local lefty media and Sorosphere is trying to ignore both the threat that did exist before the convention – threats to “shut down” the convention, kidnap or harass delegates and so on – as well as the violence that did happen (the sandbag attacks and bum-rushing of the various incoming buses on the first day), to say nothing of the constant, peek-a-boo refusal of the various protest groups to renounce, condemn and work against violence. This was the background against which law enforcement had to work, and it was a daunting one.

With that out of the way, please, “demonstrators” and “professional media”, take a whack at answering these questions, if you please:

1. At any time, did the Police try to shut down a permitted demonstration that was operating during its permitted time?
2. If so, were significant numbers of the demonstrators involved engaged in violent or destructive behavior?
3. Did the police do anything against any protester taking non-violent part in a legally-permitted protest? And remember, by “legally permitted protest”, I mean a protest operating under a permit that had not either expired or been voided due to the demonstration veering outside its permitted limits (because demonstrators have to follow the law, too).
4. In an “overwhelming display of law-enforcement power”, the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department executed (ahem) five search warrants and arrested, um, six people before the convention started. The thirty-page affadavit claimed that the six were parts of a conspiracy to commit all manner of mayhem on the convention – chains across freeways, kidnappings, pee-and-poop bombings, tieing up traffic and worse. Which of the Ramco Sheriff’s claims do you contest, and why?

I’m genuinely curious.

Neil Peterson was perfectly fine ditching the GOP last spring, when he joined with the rest of the Override Six to stab Governor Pawlenty and his district’s voters in the back by voting to kill the veto of the DFL’s Transporktation bill, the biggest tax hike in Minnesota history.

But with the primary here today, it’s another story:

That’s a voters’ guide card mailed to residents of District 41B, listing Peterson among the endorsed Republicans in today’s primary.

Of course, Peterson was not endorsed. Jan Schneider was.  The 41B GOP rejected Peterson by a staggering, Georgia Tech Vs. Cumberland-like margin at their convention.
Peterson’s scurrilous dirty trick is clearly aimed at duping the disengaged voter into pulling the lever for him. It is a lie.

If you are a 41B Republican, don’t be fooled, please. Vote Schneider.

If you know a 41B Republican, don’t let them be fooled.

Peterson trashes the Republican party – until he believes he needs it to stay in office. This can not be allowed to succeed.

Vote Schneider in 41B.

Joe Repya notes the big number from the RNC – or rather, the lack of number:

For months leading up to the Republican National Convention the anti-war crowd in the Twin Cities boasted that they would have 50,000 to 100,000 people protesting on the streets of Saint Paul during the RNC. Well, they didn’t even come close.

The major media and the St. Paul Police estimated that at the height of the protests on Monday, September 1st, that maybe 8,000 to 10,000 people were present. The protest organizers have unions who bused in marchers (the AFL/CIO, the Teachers Union and Service Employee International Union) to thank for what pathetic numbers they did muster.

The media gave much more coverage to some 400 to 500 anarchists that rioted in the streets by breaking store windows and destroying automobiles. Naturally the anti-war organizers whined about it to the media by complaining that they didn’t get the coverage they deserved. Frankly, they deserved nothing. You have freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean others have to listen to what you say.

And remember – your right to swing  your fist ends not only where my face begins, but your parade permit ends when it says it ends.

Just like ours did.

I’ve heard a number of you complaining that the mainstream media “ignored the story” of your protests.

Let me set you straight; the protests were “dog bites man”.  You were not, as a rule, newsworthy.  A gathering of BDS sufferers?  It happens every weekend in these parts.

Inside the building, a woman was selected for Vice President; she electrified the party; she may have turned the election inside-out.

Outside:  A bunch of petulant arrested adolescents stomped and screamed and occasionally threw things.  If you have children, it’s a daily thing.

Get over it.

Today is the “Day of Armor” in Ukraine – a military holiday celebrating Ukraine’s tank crewmen.

So if you see a Ukrainian tanker today, say “Поздравляю Вас, матрос  taнkoвй” .

Or something like that.

It was Thursday, September 8, 1988.

Wyatt and Shane and I had moved to the big, tumbledown house in Swede Hollow the previous week.

Wyatt quickly claimed the big upstairs bedroom. The other two were kinda…well, crummy.

I saw that the front living room had a couple of pull-out partition doors that could be pulled out and hooked shut to become walls. I claimed that one; Shane was happy to claim the other two.

The good news: the living room had plenty of room for me, my “desk” (an old banquet table) and a big, beautiful stained glass window and looked out on the street. The bad news? The street was a crummy little ditch lined with decrepit buildings largely full of drug dealers and lowlifes.

Like, I guess, at this point of my life, me.

I had a nice thick curtain, too.

I settled in.

“Flyover Land” – the part of this country between the Hudson at the Sierras, with a few islands like Minneapolis and Chicago and Boulder, outposts of faux-coastal-transplant cosmopolitanism – is a place that exposes a lot of ignorance on the part of people who don’t live in it.

And we all know that ignorance breeds fear at least, and hate at worst. The coastal media treats “flyover land” with a mix of superstitious stupefaction and condescension.

And via accident or design, the McCain/Palin campaign is pouncing on it. For me, the most memorable line of Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech was her smacking of Obama’s hypocrisy – pandering to blue collar workers and farmers one day, tittering about God and guns and the Bible the next behind closed doors in San Francisco. 

I say right now – it will be the deciding factor in this election. The “Red/Blue divide” in 2000 and 2004 was a demographic happenstance, a series of blotches on a map. In this election – says me – it’s going to be the fulcrum on which McCain and Palin put the lever that lets them move a mountain.

Did I say ignorance and hatred? Bill Maher, as near a posterboy as exists for smug establishment liberalism, wrote in Salon (via Peg Kaplan):

New Rule: Republicans need to stop saying Barack Obama is an elitist, or looks down on rural people, and just admit you don’t like him because of something he can’t help, something that’s a result of the way he was born. Admit it, you’re not voting for him because he’s smarter than you.

No, and I’m smarter than Bill Maher too. But we both digress.

Karl Rove described Obama as “the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini, and making snide comments about everyone who passes by.” Unlike George Bush, who’s the guy at the country club who makes snide comments, and then passes out. Now this characterization, of course, was something Mr. Rove just completely pulled out of his bulbous, gelatinous ass, but remember this is America, a land where people believe anything they hear. One of McCain’s ads casts Obama as “the one,” implying he thinks he’s the Messiah. Good, maybe he can raise McCain from the dead.

Barack Obama can’t help it if he’s a magna cum laude Harvard grad and you’re a Wal-Mart shopper who resurfaces driveways with your brother-in-law. Americans are so narcissistic that our candidates have to be just like us.

And there you have it. We – the lumpen proles in flyoverland – should shut up and fall in line behind our betters.

If you live between the Hudson and the Sierras (outside Chicago, the Twin Cities, Boulder, Austin or Santa Fe), you are a rube, good only for paying taxes and defending the nation. Otherwise, shut up.

That is the attitude – indeed, it’s accepted with near-religious certainty – of the east and west coast media. And McCain, by accident or design, knows it and is capitalizing on it. This attitude – and Mac and Sarah’s response – threatens to do something that the last four GOP candidacies haven’t been able to manager; re-form the Reagan Republicans.

That storied electoral mass – blue-and-white collar voters from the nation’s less-fashionable zip codes – may or may not pay much attention to politics, but they know the economy, because they live in it. They know national security, because it’s their brothers, sons, daughters, cousins…them that serve in our military in vast geographic disproportion.

It’s the part of this nation that takes the flag seriously, and had anscestors not only in World War II, but in Vietnam and the first Gulf War.

It’s the part of the nation that sees this ad (go and watch it) and not only feels a clutch in the stomach for the subject, and thinks “Yes, Lee Greenwood is a sap, and his song is mawkish and hypersentimental, but &*#$*#, I do feel a swell in my heart when I see the flag go by”.  They shop and Walmart and watch NASCAR – and, for that matter, have BAs in English and raise kids and write rings around Bill Maher.

The hatred is more than just a matter of this campaign.  The Guardian’s Nick Cohen traces its recent roots:

In Britain, the most snobbish attacks on Margaret Thatcher did not come from aristocrats but from the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who opined that Thatcherism was the ‘anarchism of the lower middle classes’ and the liberal Jonathan Miller, who deplored her ‘odious suburban gentility’. More recently, George Osborne, of the supposedly compassionate Conservative party, revealed himself to be a playground bully when he derided Gordon Brown for being ‘faintly autistic’.

 And it’s not just a matter of personality, whether Thatcher’s, Palin’s, or even Bush’s:

Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right.

In this, American liberals are no different from the politically committed the world over. David Cameron knew that he would never be Prime Minister until he had killed the urgent hatred of the Conservative party in liberal England. A measure of his success is that hardly anyone now is caught up by the once ubiquitous feeling that no compromise is too great if it stops the Tories regaining power. Hate can sell better than hope.

Seeing the left vent its conventional “wisdom” over Palin, so it seems.

And yet…it’s not working:

But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk. On the one hand, the media treated her as a sex object. The New York Times led the way in painting Palin as a glamour-puss in go-go boots you were more likely to find in an Anchorage lap-dancing club than the Alaska governor’s office.

On the other, liberal journalists turned her family into an object of sexual disgust: inbred rednecks who had stumbled out of Deliverance. Palin was meant to be pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her child when really it was her wanton teenage daughter’s. When that turned out to be a lie, the media replaced it with prurient coverage of her teenage daughter, who was, after all, pregnant, even though her mother was not going to do a quick handover at the maternity ward and act as if the child was hers.

When a hate campaign goes wrong, however, disaster follows. And everything that could go wrong with the campaign against Palin did. American liberals forgot that the public did not know her. By the time she spoke at the Republican convention, journalists had so lowered expectations that a run-of-the-mill speech would have been enough to win the evening.

It’s the true genius of the McCain/Palin strategy; the Reagan Coalition always saw themselves as the underdogs – and the left (thanks, Bill Maher!) was happy to oblige the impression!

As it was, her family appeared on stage without a goitre or a club foot between them, and Palin made a fighting speech that appealed over the heads of reporters to the public we claim to represent. ‘I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion,’ she said as she deftly detached journalists from their readers and viewers. ‘I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.’

Anyway – keep condescending, lefties.  Keep trying to slap that glass ceiling above an actual woman of accomplishment who should be a hero to feminists (if feminism were still about, y’know, empowering women).  Keep attacking a very typical middle-American family, with accomplishments and problems all rolled into one.  Please, please have Bill Maher keep telling Middle America what a bunch of dumb schlubs we all are, and how lucky we are “The One” deigns to walk among us at all.

It does our work for us.

A post-convention wrap-up: 

The RNC convention bump has McCain up +1.0. Time will tell if that will stick. The USA Today poll, Obama’s favorite isn’t good news for him. McCain +10.

Of late, polls of polls have shown Senators Obama and McCain deadlocked. But McCain clearly has the momentum right now…voters by the thousands in attendance to see McCain/Palin.

56 days to go.

Can America really be split exactly down the middle?

How accurate are polls at predicting the outcome of the election to come?

Is the liberal media behind the design of most of them? If so, do we assume McCain is doing better than he is?

When Americans step into the booth, hand on the lever, are they ready to vote for an African American President for the first time in history?

Conservatives – if the GOP candidate were Colin Powell, would race be even more a factor?

Personally, I hope race is no longer a factor but am I naive?

Is McCain, the more historically conventional candidate, the default if voters enter the booth undecided?

…or will they stay home?

Speaking of staying home, will Obama once and for all be the candidate that gets young, first-time voters to vote? If so, will they all vote for him?

If the polls continue to reflect a shift in momentum to McCain/Palin, should Obama dump Biden, in an unprecedented admission of a poor choice of VP, and select Hillary?

Is that what lunch with Bill is about? Change?

Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Undecided…all are welcome: Discuss. Pick any (or all) question(s) you’d like.

What do you think? 

Congratulations America. You just bought half the homes in America.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Federal officials on Sunday unveiled an extraordinary takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, putting the government in charge of the twin mortgage giants and the $5 trillion in home loans they back.

Under conservatorship, the government would temporarily run Fannie and Freddie until they are on stronger footing.

Which is to say forever?

Time will tell if this move will only serve to lengthen the “house cleaning” that the market would have delivered without the government’s intervention. Institutions of this size represent a pillar in our economy and financial infrastructure, and it’s hard to say whether a free market approach, a government intervention or something in between is indicated.

Treasury secretary Paulson hints that this may not be a permanent takeover.

Government support needs to be either explicit or nonexistent, and structured to resolve the conflict between public and private purposes,” Paulson said. “We will make a grave error if we don’t use this time out to permanently address the structural issues presented by the GSE’s,” he added, a reference to the companies as government-sponsored enterprises.

How much will this cost? No one knows yet. It will have a “B” in front of it.

Paulson said the Treasury Department would provide as much money as needed to keep the companies’ capital reserves from falling below the levels that would trigger rules that automatically put them into receivership.

I guess they were right…

Critics have long argued that Fannie and Freddie were taking advantage of the widespread assumption by investors that the federal government would bail them out if they got into trouble. Administration officials as well as the Federal Reserve have argued that the two companies used those implicit guarantees to borrow money at below-market rates and lend money at above-market returns, and that they had become what amounted to gigantic hedge funds operating with only a tiny sliver of capital to protect them from unexpected surprises.

Is there an upside?

Probably. The stock market should react favorably. Mortgage rates should fall almost immediately. 

The future? With a Dem-controlled Congress…guess who’s next:

Don’t Bail Out Detroit…Bury It

Bob Collins over at NewsCut is going to be liveblogging MPR’s “Midmorning” show. The subject?:

Does a candidate’s gender really make a difference? That’s one of the questions we’re exploring this morning during the first hour of MPR’s Midmorning.

A better question, perhaps – to whom does it make a difference?

How many Hillary Clinton supporters out there want to vote for a woman – any woman? (Check out the podcast of Ed and my broadcast from the convention last Thursday, with the two Hillary supporters who’d switched to Palin while driving home from the DNC).

Still – read some of the “feminist” response to Palin’s nomination; it seems the only “gender” issue that matters to most of them is abortion.

Ironically, among the base at whom Palin was really aimed – the Reagan coalition of 1980 – Palin could have been male, female, black, Hindu, or damn near anything, as long as he/she conveyed the three emerging messages of this campaign:

1. Flyover land matters
2. The GOP needs to be the party of integrity
3. America – *%$$ yeah!

(Along with “Drill oil, split atoms, create energy”, of course).

Dear Teenager,

It was fun meeting you out on the other day, out on Sixth at Saint Peter, and having the little discussion we had. Part if it is that you seem a lot like I was, almost thirty years ago. Passionate, smart, full of piddle and vinegar to change something – and also full of information you’ve gotten from your peers, your teachers and, I can only presume, your parents that is just plain wrong.

You said a few things during our conversation that I felt deserved some answers. And while I took a whack at it last Wednesday, I’m going to do a bit more thorough of a job this time around.

No, This Is Not A Police State: You were upset at the police response to the protests, especially the Monday (and, I presume, Thursday) events which involved a bit of violence. You said the police were “systematically violating the First Amendment”.

With all due respect, no – and it seems that you and a lot of people much older and who should be much wiser than you are just as confused as you are on this subject. Let me explain a few things:

• The Law is what it says. Not what you want it to be. Not even what you really really want it to be. The law says that groups of over 25-odd people need a permit to demonstrate; permits have conditions, like time limits and routes. If your demonstration (of 25-or-so or more people) goes outside those limits, you’re breaking the law. At an event like the RNC, you need a permit because the police and city don’t want big crowds of completely different people bumping into each other and breaking into violence.
• The demonstrations that got broken up violently were, as far as I’ve heard, operating outside their permit conditions; late, or on the wrong route, or something.
• You may not have agreed with the police response – and for that matter, I’m still thinking about some of it – but the fact was (or seems to be) that the police followed the rules (see above; the rules as they are written down, not necessarily the way you want them to be); they left permitted demonstrations alone, and gave big, non-permitted demonstrations time to disperse after the orders to disperse were given.

“The Police Overreacted”: Look, I’ll keep an open mind, but so far what I’ve seen is this: the cops gave lawful orders to disperse several times. An order to disperse a crowd is like an order for an alleged drunk driver to get out of a car; if you disagree, you need to take it up with a judge, not a cop.

Furthermore, from what I’ve seen and heard from others, the police pretty much did everything they could to avoid trouble until the demonstrators flagrantly disregarded the law. At the first march on Thursday, when hundreds of protesters were bottled up on th John Ireland overpass, the police just stood there. They’d have been well within the law to have arrested everyone on that bridge. They didn’t (thus boring many of the demonstrators to death, so they didn’t stick around for the louder, more disruptive riot later in the evening).

It’s all “The People” vs. “The Rich”: I refute you thus: George Soros is a Democrat. I am a Republican. Keep your stereotypes – which in an older person are called “bigotry”, but you’re young, so we’ll just call it “ignorance” and “mindlessly parroting what other people have told you” – to yourself,thanks.
More as the opportunity arises.

Predictably, the local lefty “alternative” media (for those of you for whom the Strib, WCCO and MPR aren’t left enough) is up in a snit over the treatment journalists got at the convention…

…er, wait.  Look at the coverage the Sorosphere gives the convention; see how often the term “media professional” pops up.  Interesting turn of phrase.

But I digress.  It’s interesting  the number of “Journalists” whose only “story” at the convention involved tramping around with a bunch of people whose primary mission (at a high level, not necessarily among any individual protester) was to “shut down the convention” and provoke a police overreaction.

Among “journalists” who seem institutionally incapable of recognizing, much less “reporting”, a couple of key facts; that…:

1. …if you’re protesting in a group of over 25 or so, and you have no permit, you have an illegal assembly.  And no, that doesn’t chill free speech, because…
2. …permits are issued pretty much for the asking in Saint Paul, except when EVERYONE wants one, in which case there’s a lottery. As there was, last spring.  Permits are issued so that groups of, say, klansmen don’t get to demonstrate at the same time and place as, say, Holocaust survivors.    And…
3. …if your “demonstration” goes outside the time and place specified on the permit, your assembly is illegal.  And…
4. …when you’re at an illegal assembly, the Police have every right to tell you to leave. And…
5. … when the police tell you to leave, it’s called a “lawful order”.  You have no more business arguing with cop about an order to disperse than you do to try to try to talk your way out of showing one your drivers license when you’ve been pulled over.  It’s the law.  And…
6. …if you resist, stall or dink around with lawful orders, you can be warned – and then force can be used to enforce the order.

Now – if any of you “media professionals can show me any stories where…:

1. …the police regulated the content of any of the legal protests, or…
2. …regulated the content of any “media professional”‘s coverage of any event, or…
3. …broke up a legal, permitted protest where nobody was committing violence,

…then let’s talk.

And then we’ll talk about the double standard you “media professionals” practice; you condemn the police for treating “media professionals” (and dipsticks with video cameras who claimed to be “journalists”) who were standing around at illegal assemblies as what they were – poeple who are breaking the law.  And then you turn around and support the Obama campaign, an administration that will make the “Fairness” Doctrine a matter of policy, which will suppress genuine, legal speech with the full weight of the federal government.

We’re talking about a group of “media professionals” (and amateurs, not that a blogger is one to crab about that) whose only focus was the protests and whatever happened to them.  They cared not an iota about what happened in the Xcel Center (beyond the fact that the objects of their stereotypes and bigotry were going to be meeting there); they certainly didn’t cover the dark side of the protesters on whom they slathered endless, favorable, victim-mongering coverage (while the “demonstrators'” sandbag attacks on buses and the harassment of delegates on their way to the convention somehow never got covered.  Go figure!).  No, these “journalists” already had their stories written before they arrived in downtown Saint Paul. 

And that’s not really “journalism”.

So maybe if we conservatives peed in buckets, slept under  bridges and didn’t shower for a few weeks…?

On the show last Saturday, Ed and I got a phone call from “Doug”, a volunteer driver who ended up spending most of the convention shuttling MSNBC people around the Cities.

And yow – what a phone call.  Ed has the audio from the phone call – it’s about six minutes.  Give it a listen.

Ed summarizes:

• According to Doug, MS-NBC apparently took no chances on questions from the crowd.  Rather than get caught with a question that might make Republicans look good, their producer pre-screened questioners, and Chris Matthews pretended it was random.
• Republicans were good tippers.  MS-NBC stiffed the drivers.
• Media people talked in the cars about how effective the Republican convention turned out to be, while publicly saying something else entirely.

Now, reading this bit here – which criticizes Ed’s piece (and, by extension I suppose, mine) on the subject – there are a few legitimate questions about this segment:

…much as I realize that MSNBC is now a left leaning network, mostly at night, this sort of “bottom of the barrel” type of scraping to find dirt on networks that don’t agree with your political ideologies is, quite frankly, childish and immature.

There was no “scraping”; Doug called us, unsolicited.  And

You think Fox News doesn’t pre-screen people on their network? Please. Don’t make me laugh.

I won’t make you laugh, but I might make you learn something, with any luck.

Of course Fox (and everyone else) screens people.  The objection is to screening to find people that precisely fit the narrative that’s already been written.
And finally:

Okay, first of all, were any precautions taken to ensure that this guy was not some sort of crank caller? I highly doubt this.

We – our producer Matt, in this case – did the usual phone screen.  It’s not impossible to think there was a crank.

So we’ll do what bloggers do; cast the question open to the legions of experts out there.

Were you a volunteer at the convention?  Were you in the audience on MSNBC?  What did you see?

My gut says the guy was on the level.  But what the heck; let’s shoot for confirmation.