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?  

As in Pork that is.

As Congress debated the historic financial rescue package on Oct. 3, the world economy was hanging in the balance. The House already had rejected Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s emergency $700 billion banking bailout plan. The Senate, hoping to get the House to relent, added $110 billion in “sweeteners” and sent the bill back.

One of those sweeteners jumped out at Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio). It would permit Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to pocket $192 million in federal excise taxes collected from rum-makers in those territories.

“Madam speaker, the Senate’s response to the House rejection of the Paulson plan was to add more spending. So we got tax breaks for rum,” Kaptur said from the well of the House. “You’ve got it right. R-U-M.”

This is an outrage! I rarely drink rum. If this were Brandy or Single-Malt Scotch, I would be in full support. Rum (save 151) is a waste of taxpayer dollars!

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!

About a ten months or so ago, give or take a few weeks, I wrote a brief to-do list to remind me of what needed to be done in re the sorting out of the 35W Bridge collapse.

Among the reminders:

Item #3: Await apology from Nick Coleman: After all, before they’d even found all the submerged cars, the Non-Monkey had blamed Pawlenty, the GOP and the Taxpayers’ League, and the “failure” to raise the Gas Tax, for the disaster, all but accusing them of complicity in murder.

Item #4: Await same from Alice Hausman: The famous truck was still engulfed in flames when Alice “The Phantom” Hausman, Tic from Saint Paul, Chairbeing of the House Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, and subject of an unseemly Lori Sturdevant girl crush, went on WCCO Radio and blamed the disaster on taxes.

Item #5: Await More Of Same From Elwyn Tinklenberg: Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenburg, Transportation Commissioner for DFL-Lite “Independence” Party governor Jesse “The Stealth Tic” Ventura, and perennial Tic candidate for higher office (he’s been pondering running against Michele Bachmann since before Rep. Bachmann was actually elected) did pretty much the same.

The NTSB has released their draft report on the causes of the 35W Bridge Collapse. The forty-year-old freeway bridge – which collapsed on August 1 of last year, killing 13 – collapsed because:

Original designers of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis likely neglected to calculate the size of key gusset plates that eventually failed, a human mistake that culminated 40 years later when 13 people died after the span collapsed, federal safety investigators have found.

They also have determined that corrosion of certain gusset plates, extreme heat and shifting piers did not contribute to the bridge’s collapse on Aug. 1, 2007, according to sources with direct knowledge of the probe. In three weeks, investigators will present their findings to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which will publicly review the draft report in a hearing Nov. 13 at the board’s Washington headquarters. After that, the board will use the draft as the basis for its final report on the probable cause of the collapse and recommendations for preventing future disasters.

In other words, the mistake was made on the drawing board, during the Johnson Administration.

So let’s revisit this:

How about you, Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenburg? Before the last bubble leaked to the surface of the Mississippi River that tragic evening, you were on WCCO blaming Tim Pawlenty for the collapse – albeit silent as a ghost about your own record as Minnesota’s Transportation Commissioner under Jesse “The Punchline” Ventura, where you found the money to build an absurd trolley but precious little for actually maintaining things.

Explanation, E-Tink?

How about you, DFLers; Margaret Kelliher certainly had you all chanting in unison about this time a year ago. Any second thoughts about not only politicizing a lethal tragedy, but being wrong about it?

Eight District Representative Jim Oberstar, who – when the first intimations came out that this was likely an engineering disaster rather than a political one – turned his boundless pettifogging clout to trying to intimidate the NTSB into finding at least some partisan political points for him? Any response?

Alice Hausman – DFL Transportation Committee chairwoman who was on the air with T-Tink before the sun set that night, and who spent the coming weeks figuratively carrying tar and feathers for Tim Pawlenty, Marty Seifert and David Strom? Any second thoughts?

And above all, Nick Coleman. Nick, who went on the air live from the banks of the Mississippi three days after the disaster to blame tax cuts for the tragedy;

Nick, who tittered like a schoolgirl when the first, preliminary word came out that it was a gusset problem.

E-Tink, Alice and Nick; science has crushed your febrile attempts to politicize this tragedy. And before the memory hole claims your loathsome little outburst, I thought I’d take a shot at asking.

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.”

It was Monday October 26, 1987.

One thing that I missed in the confusion of my trip to New York (and, frankly, the effort of untangling it all 20 years later) is that I’d gotten a call from Mark and Bill a few weeks earlier.

They wanted to get the band going again.  They’d tried a couple of different bands with a couple of different groups of people over the previous ten months or so.  I’d only seen one or two of their gigs – working nights got in the way of having much of a bar-based social life. 

But as Bill put it, I was the one who wrote the good material, and who had the drive to try to make it.

“True enough“, I’d thought as I’d planned to try to move my life to New York.

But we did plot one big plot, and I figured I’d have time to do it even if one of the job offers from NYC came through quickly; one of their neighbors owned a recording studio.  And he liked our band.  And he’d cut us a break on recording an eight-track demo. Mark and Bill’s sister’s boyfriend’s band, in fact, had just recorded an album there. The price – $15/hour for an 8-track recording studio – was right, presuming we planned everything perfectly.

The three of us got back together, on my free nights in the week or so before I went to NYC, and played some of the songs we’d done back when we were gigging steadily in the bars. 

And damn, it was fun.

We booked time for the coming weekend. 

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.

So the veto of the gas tax didn’t result in the 35W bridge collapse?

My esteemed overlord hates to say “I told you so.”

Allow me.

Mitch told you so.

Number 1:  When the engineers finally release their report about what actually caused the 35W Bridge Collapse, a lot of regional lefties – Elwyn Tinklenberg, Rep. Alice Hausman, Nick Coleman and others among them – are going to owe the Governor, Lt. Gov/Transportation Commissioner Molnau, the Taxpayers’ League and the “hold the line on taxes” crowd – a lot of apologies for a lot of defamation.

Number 2: None of them will actually give those apologies.

Nick Coleman’s article of August 2nd is no longer linkable. But here are excerpts of Nick’s rabid blather at the time from Roosh Five:

The death bridge was “structurally deficient,” we now learn, and had a rating of just 50 percent, the threshold for replacement. But no one appears to have erred on the side of public safety. The errors were all the other way.

There isn’t any bigger metaphor for a society in trouble than a bridge falling, its concrete lanes pointing brokenly at the sky, its crumpled cars pointing down at the deep waters where people disappeared.

Nick Coleman: Drama Queen. Hack Journalist. Dead Wrong.

Only this isn’t a metaphor.

But when you have a tragedy on this scale, it isn’t just concrete and steel that has failed us.

In a word, it was avoidable.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It’s been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase – the first in 20 years – last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

I’m not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

At the federal level, the parsimony is worse, and so is the negligence. A trillion spent in Iraq, while schools crumble, there aren’t enough cops on the street and bridges decay while our leaders cross their fingers and ignore the rising chances of disaster.

I-35W bridge was doomed from the start

Investigators will say the blame lies with designers who erred in calculating the size of key gusset plates, sources say.

Original designers of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis likely neglected to calculate the size of key gusset plates that eventually failed, a human mistake that culminated 40 years later when 13 people died after the span collapsed, federal safety investigators have found.

They also have determined that corrosion of certain gusset plates, extreme heat and shifting piers did not contribute to the bridge’s collapse on Aug. 1, 2007, according to sources with direct knowledge of the probe.

Elwyn Tinklenberg, Rep. Alice Hausman, Nick Coleman will undoubtedly not be reachable for comment. Mr. Coleman’s resume can probably be found on Monster.com.

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

One of my co-workers recently got his car – a relatively popular imported model – stolen.

A few days ago, he got a call.  The car’d been found.  He went to the salvage yard where it’d been delivered.

He came back to the office, perplexed; the car, which was in mint condition (it was a ’94, but my co-worker likes to tinker, apparently), was actually in better condition than when stolen.  More to the point, it’d been heavily modified; upgraded suspension, new wheels, all sorts of new, cool parts.

All of them stolen as well, naturally.

They’re still trying to figure out how to settle that one.

There are a lot of movies whose sequels should not have been made. The first installment sucked bad enough.

The pay-as-you-go Social Security system is another such performance for which a sequel would be inadvisable to say the least.

A lot of Conservatives are concerned that a Democratic Trifecta may lead to a level of catastrophic creativity not seen since The New Deal.

Unfortunately, we don’t even have to wait for the election to see some of the most obtuse products of this alliance.

If you have a 401(k) or equivalent retirement plan, you’ve probably been watching nervously the past few weeks as your nest egg has shrunken owing to the current turmoil in the markets.

Well, it could be worse. But don’t take heart, for what we mean is it could get worse. The market turmoil has some politicians on Capitol Hill eyeing the end of the 401(k) as we know it.

We have a Social Security system that is currently running on fumes, backed by a trust fund containing a treasure trove of I.O.U.s.

We have a generation of taxpayers that hold little hope of ever recouping their contributions, many (most?) of which aren’t saving enough to make up for it. What is the solution?

Take away the tax benefits of saving into a 401k including the incentive the employer has to match contributions.

In exchange for what?

Another Social Security benefit. Guaranteed by whom?

The U.S. Government.

The same government that has pissed away $10,000,000,000,000 (and counting).

What would the money be invested in?

Special “Government Bonds” that would pay inflation plus three percent. Forfeit a bouquet of shares in a carefully arranged and assorted arrangement of global enterprises that have averaged between 8 and 12 percent per year over periods of time that easily fit twice within the average career span. Trade them for a share of the magnificent crater that forty years of tax-once, spend-thrice government corruption and mismanagement has left for us and the next twenty generations.

Sounds swell.

I’ll take my chances with the stock market, thank you.

Democrats think Americans are too stupid to save for retirement. The sad thing is, they might be right. Most don’t save enough. We know that.

As usual, the Democrats think it’s the government’s job to confiscate the hard-earned assets of the self-reliant, the prudent, and the hard-working and dole it out to the spendthrifts, the lazy, the leeches who can’t or won’t do anything for themselves…but vote.

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!”

Mail delivery stops in on a Chicago-area block  deemed too dangerous by the Post Office:

Dozens of mailboxes remain empty after the post office suspends service in one south suburban neighborhood…The U.S. Post Office seems to think that this is one of the most dangerous blocks in the country. People who live on it say they haven’t gotten any mail delivered to their homes in almost two weeks.

How dangerous?

“Between robberies and shootings and delayed police response, several things going on, that would make it unsafe,” said Harvey resident Venus Jones.

One of those shootings on the morning of October 10th reportedly happened yards away from the mail carrier. That’s when the mail stopped on Marshfield between 151st and 152nd streets, but the post office didn’t tell anyone.

“Some of the people didn’t even know that it was being held at the post office,” Jones said.

Now Jones, who says her own home has been broken into three times in 30 days is talking to her neighbors about the mail problem and what should happen next.

Sounds bad.

Good thing the rights of the the law abiding citizens in the area to own guns are more tightly restricted than any place in the country!  Goodness knows how bad it’d be then, right?

It was Sunday, October 22, 1988. My last day in New York City.

I had a late-afternoon flight out of the city. I slept in a bit, waking up around 10ish. I packed my stuff, ran down to a liquor store to get a six-pack of my long-lost second-cousin’s favorite beer, which I left with a thank-you card in the ‘fridge, and locked up around 11ish.

And then…I moseyed. Meandered. Took my sweet time. I walked up Broadway a ways, past Union Square, just savoring the flavor of the place a little more.

But finally I couldn’t put it off any more. I walked down into the subway, and went to Grand Central, and there onto the “7” to LaGuardia. The subway became an “el” after it crossed the river, and I watched Brooklyn and Queens roll past below me, Manhattan receding in the distance. I switched to a bus somewhere in Queens – a very West-Indian neighborhood, if memory serves, and it might very well not – and wistfully watched as the neighborhood slowly switched from a tumbledown scrum to row after row of tidy brick houses – and, finally, the approaches to the airport.

One of those jobs has to pan out. It just has to, I thought. It HAS to. Nobody’s luck is that bad.

I caught my flight home without any major events. We climbed out of the city as the sun started slipping below the horizon. I craned my neck and watched the city fade into the distance behind me.

The flight home was uneventful. I flirted with a cute redhead who was in the seat next to me. She was connecting to Atlanta, I think; we talked for a solid hour; she about her travels (she was in sales), I about the job hunt. She seemed fascinated – but not enough to miss her connecting flight.

And I left it all behind when the plane landed. It was about 9:30 when we landed. I hurried down to the exit, and took a bus to downtown Saint Paul. That left me a mile to get home; I slung my suit and duffel bags, and started walking. It was a damp, chilly night, and as I walked across Lafayette over Swede Hollow, I felt…vulnerable. Alone. Compared to 4AM the night before, walking down a still-teeming Broadway, I felt like I was the only person on the street, but for the occasional shadow around the occasional corner.

Finally, I shambled up my street to the house. I walked up the stairs and around the back of the house. Passing the living room window, I saw Teresa, standing by the couch, naked, pulling on her underwear, yelling something or other in an angry shriek. I turned my head and went to the back door. “Hey, everybody”, I said with gusto as I rattled the key as loudly as I could in the lock. “Home from New York, baby!”. I opened the door, slowly, and loudly plopped my stuff on the kitchen floor.

“Hi, Mitch”, Teresa said, poking her head around the corner, having donned a burgundy turtleneck and jeans.

“It wasn’t nothing”, I heard Wyatt yelling from upstairs.

“F**K YOU, AS***LE!”, she yelled back at him, walking toward the front door. “NEVER AGAIN, YOU BASTARD!”

“See you, Teresa”, I called.

“Bye, Mitch”, she yelled back.  “BYE, AS***LE!”

“Bye, you crazy bitch”, Wyatt yelled down the stairs as Teresa slammed the door.

I carried my stuff to my garrett at the front of the house. Wyatt slumped down the stairs. “How’s New York?”, he asked, sounding slurred.

“Love it, man”. Christ. He was bombed. “What’s up?”

Wyatt rolled his eyes. “Oh, Ruby called, and she answered the phone and got all weird”

“Crazy, man”.

“No sh*t”.

He opened the door, and walked outside as I slid my door shut, hooked it, and lay down on my bed.

Oh, dear Lord, I hope one of those things comes through for me.

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.

Bren O’Malley – brother of Sheila – is working on the kind of series that could come perilously close to launching me on another endless series – “The 43 Greatest Albums”.

The latest installment?  Prince’s Purple Rain.

Snip:

It opens with ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and the song itself invites insanity. A tightly wound little top spinning on a perfectly polished floor, it gallops along without effort until that guitar solo explodes it until the top becomes a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the diamond studded mirror of a pimped out Cadillac.

And just to introduce some fireworks, I refer you to his review of Nebraska:

OK, fine, ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ is a perfect album but I think ‘Born To Run’ is overrated, ‘The River’ sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of one, and ‘The Wild, The Innocent, and The E-Street Shuffle’ is just embarrassing. At their worst they remind me of a coked out middle manager over-dancing to Journey in white jeans.

Most bands are BANDS. You can’t separate one of the members from the rest. This is why the E-Streeters are ultimately session players and not members of a band. I don’t care how many photos they put on the cover of Bruce leaning on Clarence or Little Stevie or Max. It is Bruce and whoever he brings along for the ride.

Which is why ‘Nebraska’ is perfect. Much of Springsteen’s music in the ’70’s suffered under the weight of ambition. I SHALL NOW CAPTURE THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA IN 4 MINUTES OR LESS, AND BY SPIRIT I MEAN THE DIRTY UNDERBELLY AND THE SOARING HOPE, THE PASSION AND THE DESPAIR, THE EVERYTHING AND NOTHING, THE OVER AND THE UNDER, WHAT THE HELL WAS I SAYING?

Oh, Bren.  We are gonna go ’round and ’round, me bucko.

After I get this new idea for a series off the ground, I mean…

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).