ANOTHER ONE OFF THE RESERVATION:

Ferraro Happy About Palin, Won't Reveal for Whom She's Voting (Jake Tapper, August 31, 2008, POLITICAL PUNCH)

Former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro told National Public Radio's Jacki Lyden that she was happy to see Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- who mentioned Ferraro in her remarks Friday -- on the GOP ticket.

"For 24 years I've been saying, 'It's great to be the first, but y'know, I don't want to be the only,'" Ferraro said. "And so now it is wonderful to see a woman on a national ticket." [...]

As for whom Ferraro will vote, the former congresswoman from Queens, N.Y., said, "I'm like one of you people, I'm sitting here working on my, on my decision. Y'know I'm a Democrat and I am a person who feels very strongly about issues that are facing this country so when I go into the booth I will make my decision."

And you thought the Obama camp was angry about Hillary's favorable reaction? Can't these dang women stick to the talking points?

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YOU'D THINK A CONVENTION WHERE GOD ADDRESSED US FROM A TEMPLE...:

Dead Heat (Mark Halperin, August 31st, 2008, The Page)

From CNN/Opinion Research Center:
Obama 49, McCain 48

...might produce some bounce. It's almost as if we're worshiping false idols...

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PRICELESS!:

Questions for Bobby Jindal: The Convert (Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON, 8/31/08, NY Times Magazine)

Did you always want to be in politics?

It was not something I anticipated doing. I always thought I’d go to medical school. I got accepted into medical school and did not end up going.

Where were you accepted?

At Harvard.

Wow. Why would someone with so much knowledge of biology sign a bill allowing the biblical story of Creation to be taught in science class?

Ah, the self-certainty of the 13%.

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FOR FUTURE CONSIDERATION:

10 Questions for Tom Wolfe (Radhika Jones, 8/31/08, TIME)

What are your feelings on the current state of fiction? Andrew Herold, JOHANNESBURG

There's so little of it now that it's pathetic, and it's pathetic all over. Writers come from master-of-fine-arts programs now. If you add up the college education of Steinbeck, Hemingway and Faulkner, you get to spring break of freshman year.

When he puts it that way it raises the question whether the death of newspapers might not also be linked to all journalists now being college educated?

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WELL, AT LEAST HE DIDN'T CALL HER SKINNY:

Biden On Palin: "She's Good Looking" (MIKE MEMOLI, 8/31/08, Hotline)

Joe Biden is already conceding one thing to Sarah Palin.

"Well there's obvious differences," he joked during a roundtable discussion on the economy this afternoon. "She's good looking."

MORE:
The Fighter Pilot and the Moose Hunter: McCain’s V.P. pick has electrified the base—for good reason. (Lisa Schiffren, 31 August 2008, City Journal)

[P]alin worked her way up the political ladder, rising on talent (she’s likable and a good speaker) and incremental achievement. She didn’t marry into power, and no one handed her anything. This is what conservatives say they want in female and minority candidates for high office. Further, she’s a reformer and a Washington outsider in a year when, as Republicans know, their own party is part of the problem. She represents real “change,” to adopt a word of the moment, and for Reaganites who have been waiting for the first post-Reagan conservative generation to rise to power, Palin represents “hope” as well.

Now about that woman thing: some commentators object that Palin was chosen primarily as a sop to female voters, especially disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters. Well, of course the McCain campaign wants to entice those women to vote for the Republican ticket. Putting together coalitions is how elections are won. Women happen to be 52 percent of the electorate. Ignoring them, let alone insulting them as Barack Obama is perceived to have done, is politically foolish. Some worried that McCain would pick a token woman, such as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas—she of the long Washington tenure, liberal Republican views, and few accomplishments (though she does look the part). Instead, he surprised many by picking Palin.

Is it irresponsible to put a half-term governor in the vice presidential slot? It depends on her record. But surely for a Washington novice, the vice presidency is more appropriate than the presidency. A half-term governor has more claim to leadership and experience than does a one-third-term U.S. senator who has risen through a big-city political machine. Palin is a woman of action, moreover, who has used her political capital at every stage to fight corruption and bad policy. It’s hard to find anyone in politics who does that; pols “save” their capital instead, as Obama has done by voting “present” on numerous occasions, lest spending it cost them something somewhere down the road. Her personal profile—raising five children, hunting, fishing, and being a real NRA member—make an appealing contrast with the overly cerebral, political calculations of those who merely hold positions and whose lives have been led in the service of their résumés.

Add to all this that Palin was a brilliant choice compared with everyone else McCain was considering.

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OWHO?:

McCain Scores Point in PR Wars: Unveiling of VP Pick Designed to Dim Post-DNC Buzz (Michael Bush, August 29, 2008, AdAge.com)

The biggest news the day after the Democratic National Convention wasn't Barack Obama's electrifying speech or the fact that it drew a bigger TV audience than the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. By midday today, Mr. Obama's face had been replaced on the home page of nearly every major news outlet by a seemingly unknown bespectacled woman from Alaska waving her hand while John McCain grinned in the background. [...]

[Nick Ragone, senior VP-director of client development and author of three books on presidential history] said the key to the announcement was a clever "leak that there's going to be a leak" strategy from McCain's supporters. Reportedly, the McCain camp began whispering in the ears of reporters that there was going to be a leak about Mr. McCain's selection either right before or after Mr. Obama's speech. That leak never came, but it had the pundits guessing and waiting for most of the night.

"Then this morning they leaked it in dribs and drabs about who it wasn't going to be," said Mr. Ragone. "It truly was genius; it was a double-leak strategy that really took a lot of the energy out of Obama's speech. And then, to kick it off they went with Gov. Palin, which just blew it out of the water. You have to hand it to the McCain people, they played this brilliantly."

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DEFENDING THE REPUBLIC AGAINST THREATS FROM ABROAD...:

Iranian Conservative Attacks President on Economy (AP, 8/31/08)

A top conservative cleric close to Iran's supreme leader criticized the economic policies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying they threaten to keep Iran from its goal of becoming a regional superpower by 2025.

The remarks by Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri, published Sunday, came just a week after supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei strongly backed Ahmadinejad, praising him for "standing up" to the West and urging him to plan for a second four-year term.

But Nateq Nouri, a confidant of Khamenei, said the strong support didn't mean the president was immune from criticism. And, according to his comments at a banking conference, Iran's economy is faltering.

...doesn't grow the economy.

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WE DON'T GET IT:

Obama: Palin against equal pay (Athena Jones, 8/31/08, First Read)

At an economy town hall here Sunday afternoon, Obama said his rival's pick for vice president was against equal pay for equal work.

“We're gonna make sure that equal pay for equal work is a reality in this country,” he said. “You know, John McCain's new VP nominee seems like a very engaging person, a nice person, but I've got to say, she's opposed like John McCain is to equal pay for equal work. That doesn't make much sense to me.”

Does she make less than Governor Murkowski did?

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IN CASE YOU WONDERED WHY THEY'RE SO TERRIFIED TO HAVE HER ON STAGE WITH JOE BIDEN:

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LET'S HOPE THEY DO:

Diminishing Palin: How the left will try. (Dean Barnettm, 08/31/2008, Weekly Standard)

Starting with Gerald Ford, the inside-the-beltway class and its amplifiers in the media have routinely decided that Republicans who seek national office are dullards. Literally every Republican candidate for president since 1980 has had his intellect belittled. Even Bob Dole, a candidate who had spent decades proving his remarkable mental acuity in Congress, had to face such salvos because his age had allegedly dulled his mental edge. Sound vaguely familiar?

Of course, no such scrutiny greets Democratic candidates. Barack Obama can't make it through a 30 second extemporaneous statement on his campaign bus without a profusion of "ums" and "ahs." And yet Obama's stumbling diction has yet to interest his worshippers in the press the way that George H.W. Bush's periodic wrestling matches with the English language did. For those fortunate enough to have forgotten the 1988 presidential race, Michael Dukakis's principal talking point was that he was more competent, i.e. more intelligent, than Bush.

During the 2004 campaign, the New York Times's Howell Raines wrote, "Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than (George W.) Bush? I'm sure the candidates' SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead." Of course, Raines could have done some research before making such a sweeping statement, but that wouldn't have been nearly as enjoyable. Take it from one who knows--polemicizing is much more fun and much less work than analyzing.

If Raines had bothered with research, he would have found he was wrong on all counts. Kerry's college transcript which included four D's in his freshman year at Yale was a special embarrassment given that candidate Kerry had boasted about his serious pursuit of scholarship compared to the president's frat-boy frivolities. But in Raines's defense, how could he have known that research was necessary? Everyone understood that Kerry possessed a blazing intellect while Bush was some village's missing idiot. Everyone among the self-satisfied liberal media, anyway.

The pattern continues. When Barack Obama trotted out Washington warhorse Joe Biden as his vice presidential pick, the media immediately clucked "gravitas" and "experience." Okay, we can't deny the "experience" angle, as Biden has occupied a Senate seat since Obama was 11 years old. But one would think that "gravitas" would imply a political record noteworthy for more than just its length. Guys like Sam Nunn are respected by members of both parties; during his long stay in the senate, Nunn was always serious and often correct. Until Barack Obama plucked him out of tiny Delaware, Joe Biden's principal renown was for talking too much and saying too little.

And yet the media has credulously treated Biden as a serious figure, a courtesy they did not extend him during either of his presidential runs. One can only imagine how inquisitive reporters would handle a Republican nominee for vice-president who graduated 86th in his law school class of 95 as Biden did. As for Biden's unfortunate history with plagiarism, the less said the better. [...]

So in order to bring down Palin, her malefactors on the left will have to argue a lack of "readiness," which with the thinly credentialed Obama on the other ticket can only serve as a shorthand for lack of intelligence.

One of the main reasons that Intellectuals think there's something the matter with Kansas is that in every open election --and in a number featuring an incumbent--since at least the turn of the 20th century the candidate who is viewed as most intelligent has lost.

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THE REAL SAM'S CLUB REPUBLICAN:

Palin's good for women - and not because she is one (S.E. CUPP, August 29th 2008, NY Daily News)

For the sake of this argument, let's pretend the attractive mother of five isn't a woman, and let's call her Sam.

Sam Palin has impeccable conservative credentials. He's a reformer, he's pro-life, he's for small and effective government and he's for drilling domestically, even if it's in his own state. He supports capital punishment and opposes same-sex marriage. He shocked eco-activists looking to put polar bears on the endangered species list by revealing that in his state, the population has actually risen. He's forceful with big oil companies, but, like McCain, wants to address climate change in serious ways.

Furthermore, he's likable. He's a family man. Sam hunts. Sam fishes. He plays with his kids, one of whom has Down syndrome.

And he was elected governor of Alaska as an antidote to government corruption and fiscal irresponsibility. He's found creative ways to bring money to his state (he sold a private jet belonging to the state on eBay for $2.7 million), and made $237 million in budget cuts.

Though he's only been governor for two years, he served as a mayor and city councilman since 1992. And of the three candidates on these national tickets - McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden - he's the only one to actually have run anything. Sam's been successful as a businessman, a mayor and a governor. He brings youth and an everyman appeal to the ticket, he softens McCain and he appeals to the conservative base.

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BEFORE THE RING WAS CLUTTERED WITH BIMBOS AND 'ROIDAL FREAKS:

Wrestling pioneer 'Killer' Kowalski dies at 81 (ESPN.com , 8/30/08)

Kowalski, a 6-foot-7, 285-pound wrestler, earned his nickname in 1954 by dropping Yukon Eric during a match in Montreal. He became famous for various moves, including a grip called the "Killer Clutch."

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BUT, IN THE MORNING, TIMMY WOKE UP ONLY TO FIND THAT THE MAGICAL UNICORN RIDER...:

Political Realities May Pose a Test to Obama’s Appeal to Young Voters (MICHAEL FALCONE, 8/31/08, NY Times)

Ian Bowman-Henderson scraped together $300 — cashing in his high school graduation checks — to pay for a round-trip plane ticket from Cincinnati to Denver for the Democratic National Convention. But as the week wore on, he said he was not sure if the money had been well spent.

Mr. Bowman-Henderson, 19, and some other young voters who were part of the nucleus of Mr. Obama’s presidential bid said the convention process had left them marginalized as more centrist views on issues like offshore drilling took hold.

“We understand the politics of compromise and that Senator Obama has to be the president of everyone, not just the president of youth,” Mr. Bowman-Henderson said. “But we picked him because we didn’t want the same kind of politics — that’s what set him apart.”

...was just another Northern liberal hack.

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SHE'S EVEN GOOD FOR THE JEWS:

Alaska - Chabad Rabbi: Sarah Palin a Great Friend To The Jewish Community (VIN News, 8/31/08)

In light of recent media reports attempting to connect Republican VP nominee Gov. Sarah Palin with controversial historian and Nazi sympathizer Pat Buchanan, VIN News has learned that the Alaska governor has demonstrated strong support for Alaska’s Jewish community. In particular, Gov. Palin signed a resolution in June of 2008 recognizing Israel’s 60th anniversary and the unique relationship between Alaska and the Jewish State, especially the fact that Alaska Airlines played a critical role in the rescue of 40,000 Yemenite Jews in 1948 and 1949.

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THE VERY REAL POSSIBILITY EXISTS...:

IT AIN'T SO, JOE (Celia Cohen, 8/31/08, Delaware Grapevine)

It was an unbearable turn of events, from one of the most daring political breakthroughs in Delaware political history to unspeakable grief, and there is no reason to make the accident appear worse than it was.

While campaigning in Iowa for the Democratic presidential nomination, however, Biden did.

“Let me tell you a little story,” he was quoted as saying last Friday in the New York Times.

“I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected November the 7th. And on December 18 of that year, my wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree. A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly – and I never pursued it – drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly, and killed my daughter instantly, and hospitalized my two sons, with what were thought to be at the time permanent, fundamental injuries.”

Except there was no drinking. There was not even speeding. The truck’s brakes checked out, as well. It was not the driver’s fault.

...that Barrack Obama chose as his running mate a man who is not just a braggadocious blowhard but a pathological liar. Is there anything about him that isn't his own invention?

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IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING WHO'S WINNING THE EXECUTIVE EXPERIENCE ARGUMENT...:

Check out this bit, which implicitly concedes the only thing the Unicorn Rider has ever run is his presidential campaign, though, you'd think the stories of him disavowing everything the staff does might be germane to even this bogus example.

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I'VE GOT IT! SHE'S A FAT, BALD, WASHINGTON INSIDER!:

Kerry attacks Palin as "Cheney-esque" (Martin Kady II, 8/31/08, Politico)

Democrats have come up with a new line of attack line against John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin, saying she's another Dick Cheney.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) described Palin as a member of the "flat-earth caucus," who McCain picked purely to please the conservative base.

They're gonna need a bigger padlock on the Cabana.

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WHILE PALTRY BY COMPARISON TO HIS RUNNING MATE...:

Taking command - The McCain way: Fiery style was forged as a young Navy officer (Scott Helman, August 31, 2008, Boston Globe)

It was a fleeting moment, but pure McCain - loyal, combative, disdainful of protocol. And it serves as a window into his first major experiment in leadership, a 27-month stint, from 1975 to 1977, as the second in command and then commanding officer of the Navy's largest air squadron. It was here, at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, that he tested his capacity to inspire, and to build a constructive Navy career after nearly 5 1/2 years of captivity in North Vietnam.

McCain led less by dry competence than by his outsize personality and the force of his reputation. Charismatic and combustible, McCain had a leadership style that was relatively unorthodox for the Navy, but he had never been one to stay within the lines. And while he initially hoped to rise through the Navy ranks, McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, was passed over for a higher command for reasons that remain unclear. His skills would lead him down another path.

Elements of the John McCain voters know today were evident during his command of the unit, a shore-based squadron known as VA-174 that trained pilots and maintained roughly 50 A-7 Corsair II attack jets. He answered to his own code of morality and justice. He showed empathy for people's hardships and personal failings. He was warm toward Navy men and women on his good side, and could explode at those who weren't.

In many cases, his creative approach to solving problems paid dividends; but his volatile personality, and his freewheeling social life, rubbed some people the wrong way.

In the end, McCain and his superiors both seemed to conclude that his skills were better suited to a politician than a Navy admiral.

...it's revealing that this is more executive experience than either of the guys on the other ticket bring to the table.

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IF ONLY HE WEREN'T SUCH AN IDIOT...:

Troop ‘Surge’ Took Place Amid Doubt and Debate (MICHAEL R. GORDON, 8/31/08, NY Times)

When President Bush speaks to the Republican convention on Monday, he is expected to tout the “surge” of forces in Iraq as one of his proudest achievements. But that decision, one of his most consequential as commander in chief, was made only after months of tumultuous debate within the administration, according to still-secret memorandums and interviews with a broad range of current and former officials.

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IN CONSIDERING HOW W WILL BE REMEMBERED...:

Ending Tyranny: The Past and Future of an Idea (John Lewis Gaddis, American Interest)

So what might shift contemporary impressions of President Bush? I can only speak for myself here, but something I did not expect was the discovery that he reads more history and talks with more historians than any of his predecessors since at least John F. Kennedy. The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they’ve appeared, and I’m hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I’ve found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn’t read the latest book on Lincoln, or on—as Bush refers to him—the “first George W.” I’ve even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results. [...]

So is there a Bush Doctrine, and if so will it meet this test of transferability? To answer this question, I’d look first for a statement delivered in a suitably august setting: Durable doctrines don’t appear as casual comments. Then I’d look for one that’s clearly labeled as a policy, not as a portrayal of adversaries or an explanation of methods for dealing with them: That’s why terms like “Axis of Evil” or “preemption” don’t constitute doctrines. Finally—especially in an historically conscious president—I would look for historical echoes.

The speech that best fits these criteria is the one President Bush delivered from the steps of the Capitol on January 20, 2005. As a student of Lincoln, he would have attached special meaning to the term “second Inaugural Address.” That was the moment to draw lessons from a past extending well beyond his own, to apply them to a current crisis, and to project them into an uncertain future. And indeed the President did announce—in a single memorable sentence—that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” [...]

If the Bush Doctrine was meant in that sense—if ending tyranny is now to be the objective of the United States in world affairs—then this would amount to a course correction away from the 20th-century idea of promoting democracy as a solution for all the world’s problems, and back toward an older concept of seeking to liberate people so they can solve their own problems. It could be a navigational beacon for the future that reflects more accurately where we started and who we’ve been.
Making Choices

It could be—but sometimes a speech is just a speech. If Bush meant to shift the direction of American foreign policy, he and his advisers have since been remarkably quiet about it.99. The most recent authoritative expression of Administration thinking, Condoleezza Rice, “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World”, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2008), makes democracy promotion the top foreign policy objective, while assuming that the collapse of tyrannies will follow. The President did acknowledge, however, that ending tyranny would require “the concentrated work of generations”, and in doing so he implicitly recognized that it’s not just the presidents who give them who determine the significance of presidential pronouncements. How they are remembered is at least as important, and how they are later used is even more so: It’s worth recalling that the Monroe Doctrine was dormant for decades until subsequent Administrations saw fit to revive it.1010. The standard account is still Dexter Perkins’s three-volume The Monroe Doctrine, published between 1927 and 1937.

I think that future presidents should regard Bush’s second Inaugural as signaling a shift from promoting democracy to ending tyranny, as a call for an overdue correction of course. My reasons go back to another idea Berlin developed in his 1958 essay, which is that there is no such thing as a single good thing. There are multiple good things, and it isn’t always possible to have them all at the same time.

Democracy is clearly a good thing. But so, too, is freedom from anarchy, which is why states five centuries ago—none of them as yet democracies—first began organizing themselves. So, too, is personal security, which is why, even in democracies, we allow the state to use force when necessary to maintain order. So, too, is predictability in one’s dealings with others, which is why democracies have laws enforced by judges who act independently of popular sentiment. So, too, is economic sustainability: Democracy can hardly flourish when people are hungry.

The United States, as a mature democracy, has the luxury of enjoying all of these advantages simultaneously, but this was not always so. As Zakaria points out, democracy established itself in this country only after these other safeguards had been put in place, and it took even longer for this to happen in Great Britain, the country that invented representative government. Democracy did spread widely in the 20th century, but that was only because the British and later the Americans wielded their power in such a way as to secure its prerequisites, not least by fighting and winning three world wars, two hot and one cold.

Since the Cold War ended, the United States has neglected these prerequisites. There was no clearer demonstration of this than those three Iraqi elections of 2005, in which the citizens of that country risked their lives to go out and vote. That was, in one sense, moving and reassuring, a victory for democracy, you might say. But it was, in another sense, a defeat for democracy, because people should not have to risk their lives to go out and vote. The fact that they did so reflected a failure on the part of the United States, after invading Iraq, to lay the foundations necessary to ensure democracy’s survival there. It’s as if we’d tried to rebuild one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces without first securing its footings: The façade was impressive, but the cracks soon began to appear.

Nor has this error been confined to Iraq. We seem puzzled that democracy is not taking hold to the extent that we hoped it would elsewhere in the Middle East, as well as in Russia, China, Africa, and Latin America. The democratic tide that began rising with the end of the Cold War now appears to have crested and to be receding. But was it ever likely that democracy would root itself in those parts of the world where people fear anarchy more than they do authority? Where the struggle to survive is a more urgent priority than securing the right to vote? Where the immense power of the United States gives rise to greater uneasiness than it does reassurance?

That is why I think a return to our roots is called for. Promoting democracy without its prerequisites can only breed disappointment abroad and disillusionment at home. It suggests that we think we know better than other people do what is best for them—and it too often confirms that we do not. It leaches legitimacy from our priorities.

But only tyrants are apt to defend tyranny. A focus on ending it could move us beyond distracting debates over where democracy can be transplanted and how long this might take, allowing concentration instead upon the single greatest prerequisite for democracy, which, as Franklin D. Roosevelt once reminded us, is freedom from fear. It is from this that all the other freedoms flow.

Since World War II, international law has moved toward recognizing this principle. From the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, through the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, through the emergence over the past decade of a widely acknowledged “Responsibility to Protect”, the old assumption that sovereignty shields tyranny has been discredited—whatever the practices of a few regimes like those in Sudan, Myanmar and Zimbabwe. The fact that there are so few suggests the progress already made: A global commitment to remove remaining tyrants could complete a process Americans began 232 years ago.

This, then, should be our standard: to respect the ways in which people elsewhere define their fears, not to impose our own fears upon them. That may mean working with authoritarian regimes when there is more to fear than their authoritarianism—when the trajectory is toward making democracy possible, even if it’s still a long way off. But it also requires resisting regimes—and terrorist movements—whose course lies in the opposite direction: toward making themselves the source of all fears, rather than the safeguard against them. Tyranny is being enslaved to fear, and it will be quite enough, for the next few decades at least, to secure emancipation.

...it is vital to keep in mind that Ronald Reagan would be considered a failure if the Soviet Union still existed or had expanded. Of course, Reagan's point was it wouldn't and couldn't. What he grasped but none of the Realists did was that Communism happens not to work. In order to believe that Reagan could have failed you have to be, to some extent, a Marxist.

Similarly, W will be remembered as a success so long as the Islamic world continues its perfectly predictable evolution towards liberal democratic protestant capitalism--an evolution that was artificially arrested by post-WWI colonialism and the post WWII decision to prop up dictatorships, both of which denied people self-determination--and doesn't become Islamicist. Of course, to believe that Mr. Bush could fail you have to be, to some extent, a believer in the efficacy of Islamicism.

The truth of the matter is that British generals and American Presidents get credit for winning the various battles of the Long War even though none of them were losable: the trick is just to be there at the right time and to declare that you intend to win. History takes care of the rest.

MORE:
The Final Days (PETER BAKER, 8/31/08, NY Times Magazine)

George Bush does not want anyone feeling bad for him. Hates the idea, in fact. Why should anyone feel bad for him? He knew what he was getting into, and he is doing what he thinks is right. But as he enters the twilight of his presidency, he finds it both a liberating and a deeply frustrating time.

With the war in Iraq finally going better, the dark cloud that dominated the White House for the past few years has lifted. The overnight reports Bush finds on his Oval Office desk each morning now list fewer casualties in Iraq, easing a burden friends say has weighed on him. It now looks as if the surge, one of the riskiest presidential decisions in a generation, has been vindicated. And Bush seems to be making progress getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons while winning a string of Congressional battles that would under other circumstances be seen as legacy victories — a bipartisan deal on wiretapping, war financing without strings, expansion of his global AIDS program.

As a result, friends say that Bush, who just turned 62, has been looser lately, more relaxed, more willing to joke around and even do a little dance for the cameras from time to time. He sees the end and has been thinking about life after the White House back down at the ranch and a in new home in Dallas. “You can hear his Texas accent creeping back into his voice, rather than the I’m-the-president, no-accent kind of voice,” observed an old friend from Texas.

Yet there are no valedictory days for Bush. For years, he got no credit for a long-running economic recovery, in part because of popular anger over Iraq. Now, it seems, he gets no credit for the improvements in Iraq because of deep discontent over the tattered economy. Housing and energy crises have only deepened public disaffection. While Iraq stabilizes, Afghanistan seems to be unraveling. Russia has been rampaging through its neighbor Georgia, undeterred by Bush’s consternation. As John Weaver told me, “They look better on Iraq, but they look worse on everything else.” So many onetime loyalists have turned on the president that when the former White House press secretary Scott McClellan came out with his break-with-the-boss book in May, Bush sighed and told an aide to find a way to forgive him or risk being consumed with anger.

The General’s Dilemma: David Petraeus, the pressures of politics, and the road out of Iraq. (Steve Coll September 8, 2008 , The New Yorker)

General Petraeus commands the war from a lakeside palace built by Saddam Hussein in 1992. Modular office cubicles now fill its five dozen marble-floored bedrooms. The General occupies a high-ceilinged room furnished with a mahogany desk and conference table, video screens, flags, and wall-mounted maps. (He also maintains a smaller office at the U.S. Embassy in the International Zone, formerly known as the Green Zone, in central Baghdad.) When I visited him in late July, Petraeus seemed reflective, open, and at times even wistful about the approaching end of his third Iraq tour.

The challenges of civil-military relations that he must manage these days are considerably less intense than they were a year ago, principally owing to the decline of violence in Iraq under his command. Iraq today is a far from stable or normal country: about two million refugees remain outside its borders; nearly three million remain displaced within the country; and car bombs periodically kill and maim civilians. Yet it is a much more peaceful place than it was last summer. The number of daily attacks recorded by the U.S. military has fallen from a peak of about a hundred and eighty in June, 2007, to about twenty in early August of this year. Violent deaths of Iraqi civilians, while difficult to measure, have also dropped steeply, although the figure remains high: about five hundred per month, at a conservative estimate. Fatalities among U.S. military personnel have declined from a hundred and twenty-six in May, 2007, to just thirteen this past July, the lowest total of any month since the war began, in March, 2003.

The surge was designed to change Iraqi politics by providing the security needed to induce a national reconciliation; this has not occurred, although there has been progress of a tentative nature. In the United States, however, the surge has had more obvious political effects. The Iraq war is no longer the most important issue on the minds of voters (the economy is), and election-year debate about the war, formerly an argument about strategic failure, now must also account for provisional successes.

Indeed, because of the reductions in Iraq’s violence, General Petraeus has been cast in the Presidential campaign’s emerging narrative as a sort of Mesopotamian oracle, one that must be consulted or honored by the two remaining candidates. In July, Senator Barack Obama went to Iraq and saw the General; he was rewarded, courtesy of Petraeus’s energetic press aides, with an iconic photograph, printed in many dozens of newspapers, which showed the Senator aboard a command helicopter, smiling confidently at the General’s side. A few weeks later, Senator John McCain, while speaking at a nationally televised forum hosted by the evangelist Rick Warren, invoked Petraeus as one of the three wisest people he knew; McCain called the General “one of the great military leaders in American history.” Afterward, on the campaign trail, the Republican Senator attacked Obama for not being as staunch an acolyte of Petraeus as McCain has been.

Within the Army itself, as the field commander who has presided over the only sustained drop in Iraq’s death toll since the war began, Petraeus has become the most influential general of his era. Recently, the Army Secretary asked him to chair a panel to select about two per cent of the Army’s full colonels for promotion to brigadier or one-star general; through this assignment, Petraeus helped to identify the men and women who will lead the institution for the next decade or more. The National Defense Strategy paper issued by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates this summer bears the imprint of Petraeus’s ideas about military doctrine, particularly his belief that the Army must organize itself to be as competent at stabilizing impoverished countries as it is at high-intensity combat. Beginning in mid-September, as the leader of CENTCOM—Central Command—the General will oversee all U.S. military forces between Pakistan and Egypt and attempt to apply lessons from his Iraq campaign to the intensifying war in Afghanistan.

Petraeus’s influence has spread within the Pentagon even as some military officers continue to debate exactly why violence in Iraq has declined, how the role of the surge should be interpreted, and how its strategic costs should be assessed. This internal discourse is not widely publicized; it takes place in privately circulated white papers and in specialty periodicals such as Small Wars Journal. One of its provocateurs is Colonel Gian Gentile, a historian at West Point, who has served two tours in Iraq, most recently in 2006, as a cavalry squadron commander in Baghdad; he argues that Petraeus’s command has had only a marginal effect on events, and that the recent fall-off in violence has been due mostly to local causes, such as a decision by Sunni tribes to turn against Al Qaeda, which began before the added deployments. “If we convince ourselves that it was the surge that was the primary cause for the lowering of violence, that may convince us that we can tackle another problem like Iraq in the future and have the same results,” Gentile told me. “It pushes us into a sort of dogmatic view of ourselves.”

Gentile’s view represents a minority dissent within the Army, but it reflects the persistence of debate about the war’s implications among the military professionals who have borne its burdens. The surge is a particularly complex subject; the term is not easy to define, because the scope of Petraeus’s command has encompassed much more than the deployment of additional American combat troops, as ordered by Bush. These days, when “the surge” is employed as a shorthand label, it is usually intended to refer also to the application of new battlefield tactics by Petraeus and his commanders, and to the political work carried out by the General and Ambassador Ryan Crocker during 2007 and 2008. (Crocker arrived in Iraq shortly after Petraeus, in early 2007, and they have worked together closely.) By that broader definition, many independent analysts and, by now, many Democrats, including Obama, credit Petraeus and the surge for the relative quiet in Iraq. The General’s command has certainly benefitted from unplanned events—the turn by Sunni tribes, above all. And yet “it was Petraeus who had the wit to seize on that and exploit it,” Toby Dodge, a British political scientist who has occasionally advised the General, said.

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SEMIOTICS, WHERE EVERY SYMBOL MEANS WHATEVER I WANT IT TO MEAN:

Obama Amid the Pillars Of an Ancient Culture (Philip Kennicott, 8/31/08, Washington Post)

Is race involved in the criticism of Obama's "temple"? Perhaps.

Consider an academic debate that roiled classical studies in the 1980s and '90s. This was the "Black Athena" controversy, which centered on claims of Martin Bernal -- a professor of ancient Eastern Mediterranean cultures -- that Greek culture was essentially cribbed from Afro-Asiatic roots. Bernal's book is not held in high repute today, but it fostered an important debate about the role of racism in classical studies.

The vitriol of the discussion also demonstrated the extent to which "classical" culture is equated with "white" culture, even on the most superficial level: white temples, white statues, white marble. Which turns out, of course, to be an illusion of history. Greek temples and statues were routinely painted with vibrant colors.

Efforts to use race against Obama often have centered on a stark juxtaposition of architectural ideas with Obama's blackness: One cartoon circulating on the Internet shows Obama painting the White House black; the controversial July 21 New Yorker cartoon in which he appeared as a terrorist inside the White House, rendered the Oval Office with precise neoclassical details: an arched alcove, molding and wainscoting.

The debate, then, isn't about arrogance, or Greek gods, or hubris. It's about whether Obama can lay claim to an architecture, and a culture, that is perceived as both our collective inheritance, yet is also deeply coded as European and white.

Whereas our analysis of the Unicorn Rider in the temple was a joke, this one's apparently serious. Of course, if the GOP released an image of Barrack Obama in an obviously ancient Greek setting Mr. Kennicott would claim it was homophobic.

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IF HE'D START A WAR WITH RUSSIA JUST TO HELP MAVERICK...:

White House: Bush Unlikely to Attend GOP Convention Due to Hurricane Gustav (Fox News, August 31, 2008)

The White House says it is unlikely that President Bush will attend the Republican National Convention on Monday as scheduled because of concerns about Hurricane Gustav.

...you better believe he'll take advantage of the opportunity not to give Democrats ammo at the convention.

---

WHILE IT'S NICE OF MODO TO BE HONEST ABOUT THE LEFT'S FEAR...:

Vice in Go-Go Boots? (MAUREEN DOWD, 8/31/08, NY Times)

It’s easy to see where this movie is going. It begins, of course, with a cute, cool unknown from Alaska who has never even been on “Meet the Press” triumphing over a cute, cool unknowable from Hawaii who has been on “Meet the Press” a lot.

Americans, suspicious that the Obamas have benefited from affirmative action without being properly grateful, and skeptical that Michelle really likes “The Brady Bunch” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” reject the 47-year-old black contender as too uppity and untested.

Instead, they embrace 72-year-old John McCain and 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose average age is 58, a mere two years older than the average age of the Obama-Biden ticket.

...she does sound a tad bitter that she's going to have to go full-on Cougar to get anyone to notice her instead of the vp at the next White House Correspondents Dinner.

---

IF YOU'RE GOING TO RUMOR MONGER SHOULDN'T THEY BE BENEFICIAL TO YOU, NOT HARMFUL?

So the Left appears to have settled on three rumors about Sarah Palin, but I have to confess I don't even understand how any of them are supposed to hurt her or help Obama:

(1) that the Palin's married eight months before the birth of their first child.

Okay, wouldn't the point be that they got married and had the kid?

(2) that Trig Palin isn't her child, but her daughter's.

Suppose that this were true, wouldn't people just find Ms Palin even more remarkable for not just having her daughter bring the child to term but then raising him herself? Contrast that to Barrack Obama's expressed wish to help kill such a "mistake".

(3) that Trig is Ms Palin's son but his Down Syndrome was caused by how hard she works.

There you go, that'll go over great with working women, huh?

Why not go after the one genuine scandal, that she wanted the psycho who threatened to kill family members and tasered her nephew fired frm the State Troopers?, Long-Standing Feud in Alaska Embroils Palin (James V. Grimaldi and Kimberly Kindy, 8/31/08, Washington Post)

The trouble between Wooten and the governor's sister broke into the open after an alleged incident in February 2005. Palin told an internal affairs investigator that she overheard on a speakerphone Wooten arguing with her sister and threatening to kill their father. Fearful for her family members' lives, Palin said she drove to her sister's house and watched the argument through a window.

"Wooten's words were, 'I will kill him. He'll eat a [expletive] lead bullet, I'll shoot him,' if our father got the attorney to help Molly," Palin said in an e-mail she wrote in August 2005 to the chief of the state police. "I heard this death threat, my 16-year-old son heard it (Track Palin), Molly heard it, as did their small children. Wooten spoke with his Trooper gun on his hip in an extremely intimidating fashion, leaving no doubt he is serious about taking someone's life who disagrees with him."

According to the e-mail, the alleged argument occurred after Palin's sister, who uses her previous married name of Molly McCann, questioned Wooten about her husband attending a trooper-sponsored event in January with another woman. There is no record of police charging Wooten for the alleged threat. Through his attorney, Wooten declined to comment for this article.

On the day that the governor's younger sister filed for divorce -- April 11, 2005 -- Palin's father, Chuck Heath, a retired teacher then in his late 60s, called state police to file a complaint about Wooten. He handed the phone to his daughter Molly, who told state police that her husband had threatened her father's life and had drunk beer while driving his police vehicle home. Later, she told police that Wooten had shot a "cow moose" without a license and Tasered his 10-year-old stepson.

A month later, Sarah Palin, then chairing the state oil and gas commission, was interviewed by a state police investigator about the argument. She told investigators that when she arrived at the house she could see Wooten "waving his arms." She said she thought, "He is gonna blow it." She said she left for a meeting without calling police.

On Aug. 10, 2005, Palin sent an angry, three-page e-mail to Col. Julia Grimes, head of the state police. "My concern is that the public's faith in the Troopers will continue to diminish as more residents express concerns regarding the apparent lack of action towards a Trooper whom is described by many as 'a ticking time bomb' and a 'loose cannon.' "

Palin noted, "Wooten is my brother-in-law, but this information is forwarded to you objectively," and asked Grimes to treat the information objectively.

Keeping Wooten on the police force, Palin wrote, "would lead a rational person to believe there is a problem inside the organization."

She characterized Wooten as a hard-drinking bully who held himself above the law and threatened her family.

MORE:
The Palin Breakout (Hugh Hewitt, 8/31/08, Townhall)

Scan the lefty blogs and you will see furious, even unhinged, attacks on Governor Palin.

-Choice of Sarah Palin energizes California delegates: 'She's a hero for us,' says one, as they arrive in Minnesota for the Republican National Convention. (Dan Morain, 8/31/.08, Los Angeles Times)

[O]n Friday, [Mike Spence, head of the California Republican Assembly] was in the hotel banquet room with the Council on National Policy, the influential group of religious and other conservatives, when Palin's selection was announced. Like others there, he stood and applauded. "This energizes disaffected Republicans," Spence said. "This is exactly the message of change that was needed."

California's Republican Party long has been split into conservative and moderate factions. Moderates tended to embrace McCain. Conservatives were critical. Whether the state's most conservative Republicans would fall in line behind McCain had been in doubt. Not now, though, with Palin on his ticket.

Several delegates cited Palin's decision to have a baby, 4-month-old Trig, knowing he had Down syndrome.

"We have a lot of pro-life rhetoric," said delegate Tom Bordonaro, the San Luis Obispo County assessor. "She has been there and made the choice. She made the choice for life."

Delegate Miryam Mora, 26, will be voting for the first time in November, having gained citizenship a few months ago. Mora grew up in El Monte, the daughter of migrant farm and garment workers, and was the first in her family to graduate from college.

She is taking leave from her job to volunteer full-time for McCain. When McCain selected Palin, Mora became more certain that she had made the right choice in supporting the Republican ticket. "I'm so amazed by her story," she said, noting that Palin is a mother of five, was involved in the PTA and "took on her party" by running against Gov. Frank Murkowski.

Her decision to have Trig affected Mora too: "She was faced with a decision of having an abortion, and she decided she was going to be there for him. . . . It shows a lot about her character."

The Left is objecting to her choice of life where Obama would have opted for death.

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HARD TO BE MORE CLOSELY ASSOCIATED WITH THE GRIZZLY BEAR...:

Why John McCain's beauty queen running mate has a grizzly bear on her office wall (Caroline Graham, 31st August 2008, Daily Mail)

They are not the accoutrements normally associated with an American vice-presidential candidate. First, there is the snarling grizzly bear skin draped over the sofa in her Anchorage office.

Then there is the large stuffed Alaskan king crab on the coffee table, a bizarre trophy that is one of her proudest possessions.

But former beauty queen Sarah Palin, who will become America’s first female vice-president if the Republicans win November’s election, is hardly your typical politician.[...]

Last December, Sarah posed for Vogue magazine but Sally said: ‘I didn’t really like the pictures. They had her in fur. She looked too glamorous. The Sarah I know is the girl in sweatpants, her baby in her arms.

‘Sarah doesn’t really wear make-up. She’s much more at home with a gun than a mascara wand.’

...than former Vice President Teddy Roosevelt:

MORE:
Palin electrifies conservative base (JONATHAN MARTIN | 8/31/08, Politico)

The selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate has electrified conservative activists, providing a boost of energy to the GOP nominee-in-waiting from a key constituency that had been previously had been lukewarm – at best – about him.

By tapping the anti-abortion and pro-gun Alaska governor just ahead of his convention, which is set to start here Monday, McCain hasn’t just won approval from a skeptical Republican base – he’s ignited a wave of elation and emotion that has led some grassroots activists to weep with joy.

Serious questions remain about McCain’s pick – exactly how much he knows about her and her positions, past and present, on key issues. But for the worker bee core of the party that is essential to any Republican victory there are no doubts.

In fairness to Senators Obama and Biden, we wept at that vp selection too.

MORE:
Palin Made an Impression From the Start: Fellow Maverick Survived McCain's Thorough Vetting Process, Aides Say (Dan Balz and Robert Barnes, 8/31/08, Washington Post)

Their first encounter was last February at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington. Sarah Palin was one of several governors who met privately with Sen. John McCain, by then well on his way to capturing the Republican presidential nomination, and her directness and knowledge were impressive.

Later that day, at a largely social gathering organized by his campaign, McCain spent 15 minutes in private conversation with the first-term Alaska governor. "I remember him talking about her when he came back," a McCain adviser said. "He said she was an impressive woman. He liked her."

But few people outside McCain's inner circle were privy to just how much of an impression Palin had made that day.

In the months of speculation over whom McCain would pick as his vice presidential running mate, Palin's name occasionally surfaced but rarely as a serious choice. But by the time she arrived in Arizona last Wednesday to meet first with two top McCain advisers and then the next day with the candidate and his wife, Cindy, the job was hers to lose.

McCain's VP pick stirs excitement, bafflement among women (Lisa Wangsness, August 31, 2008, Boston Globe)

At the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in St. Paul, which will host the Republican National Convention this week, women in this critical swing state expressed a range of first impressions. There was genuine excitement that a woman could become vice president. There was bafflement that McCain picked someone with so little experience to join his ticket, even anger from those who viewed the choice as clumsy tokenism.

But two things were clear: The 44-year-old Palin intrigued them as much as any vice presidential pick could have, and few know enough about Palin to have a real opinion.

-Palin Pick Makes Everyone Happy (Reid Wilson, 8/31/08, Real Clear Politics)

[B]y picking Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, a little-known fiscal and social conservative just two years into her first term, John McCain executed that rare political feat: He made everybody happy.

Reactions from Republicans across the spectrum were not just positive, they were downright ecstatic. Movement conservatives and professional strategists frequently find themselves disagreeing on what is best politically, but Palin is one of the rare points of agreement.

-Sarah Palin -- Dream Girl (Debra Saunders, 8/31/08, Real Clear Politics)

Bingo.

For weeks, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been the Republican whom conservatives barely dared to hope could become John McCain's pick as his running mate. [...]

Is she short on experience? Yes. Voters will have to watch her performance on the campaign trail to judge how she responds to high-stakes politics and the international arena.

That said, as a governor, Palin she has more experience running a government than Obama, who began serving his first term in the U.S. Senate in 2005. And unlike Obama, Palin has shown herself willing to challenge her jaded ethical policies within her party. That's change.

As McCain said Friday, Palin is "exactly who this country needs" to help him confront "the same old Washington politics of me first and country second."

---

DOWN TO DETAILS:

Prose watch: Obama acceptance speech (VICTORIA MCGRANE & HARRY SIEGEL | 8/30/08, Politico)

Here’s Politico’s past-due look at those points in Obama's speech where the poetry and prose diverge on closer examination. Of course, McCain will be coming in for the same treatment shortly. [...]

Health care

Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible health care for every single American. If you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don't, you'll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves. And as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.

Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between keeping their jobs and caring for a sick child or ailing parent.

The space here, as was revisited ad nauseam during the primary, is between “affordable [and] accessible” and “universal.”

The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, estimates that Obama’s plan would reduce the uninsured by 18 million in 2009 and 34 million in 2018, which would still leave 34 million Americans without coverage.

The Obama campaign says the plan will save a typical American family up to $2,500 a year and will cost $50 billion to $65 billion a year (about $200 per American) once it’s up and running. The Tax Policy Institute estimates his plan will cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years — while stressing that’s their best guess based on what is, after all, campaign poetry, not governing prose.

His campaign says that he can cover the up-front costs of implementing his plan with the new federal funds that would come in by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, and it also says that costs would be reduced through the administrative savings in the health care system it would create. (Solid rule of thumb: “New administrative efficiencies” offered by candidates amount to “number a staffer half-guessed, then multiplied by three.”) [...]

Paying for it all

Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I've laid out how I'll pay for every dime — by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don't help America grow. But I will also go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less — because we cannot meet 21st-century challenges with a 20th-century bureaucracy.

As with almost all politicians, the how-I’ll-pay-for-it bit is understandably less verbose than the what-I’ll-buy-you list.

Even so, this is a particularly pain-free promise for a politician who otherwise likes to stress that “this won’t be easy."

According to an Aug. 28 report by the Tax Policy Center, “Both John McCain and Barack Obama have proposed tax plans that would substantially increase the national debt over the next 10 years.”

And while ending corporate loopholes and tax havens has long been a popular proposal on Capitol Hill, it has remained something politicians can promise to end precisely because it's not ended so easily. Not only do the groups that benefit from the tax code fight against changing it, but when it does change, there’s invariably a new loophole to fit through.

And, business groups would add, changing laws to increase revenue amounts to a business tax hike by another name.

Finally, two other notable omissions: His speech made no mention of his call to eliminate tax breaks for oil and gas companies or to create a new windfall profits tax for them.

This was the speech where the Unicorn Rider was finally going to spell out in detail what his airy rhetoric means in concrete policy terms, so let's read the speech as if it were a legislative/governing agenda and see what the change is he's talking about, Sen. Barack Obama Addresses Denver National Convention at Invesco Field (August 28, 2008)

So -- so let me -- let me spell out exactly what that change would mean if I am president. [...]

I'll eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.

I will -- listen now -- I will cut taxes -- cut taxes -- for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

Outstanding! George W. Bush has cut taxes every year of his presidency, it'd be nice to continue the trend. Further complexifying an already Byzantine tax code is unfortunate--you'd probably save those businesses more by simplification than by cuts--but we take what we can get. We're a bit confused though, because Mr. Obama is a sitting Senator and if he just submitted the bill to do this the GOP would happily help him pass it. What's he waiting for?

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as president: In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East. [...]

As president, as president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America.

I'll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars.

OBAMA: And I'll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy -- wind power, and solar power, and the next generation of biofuels -- an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced.

Excellent. You can hardly ask for better than a Democrat who's willing to build so many nuclear plants that we stop importing oil. Unfortunately, he's picked the worst way to innovate, having the feds pick and choose new technologies, rather than just using gas taxes to create an incentive for open innovation. And helping people buy cars seems not just a dubious way to reduce energy consumption but an awfully big corporate subsidy.

I'll invest in early childhood education. I'll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries, and give them more support. And in exchange, I'll ask for higher standards and more accountability.

W hasn't really left him any choice on this one, has he? NCLB has been so successful that standards and accountability are here to stay.

And we will keep our promise to every young American: If you commit to serving your community or our country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.

The reason college is so expensive is that it's one of the most heavily subsidized industries in America, so tossing more federal money at schools seems counterproductive, particularly given the fact that the sheer numbers of people attending college already demonstrates that it is, if anything, too affordable. But National Service is a nice enough idea and if you have to use college money as an inducement and aren't willing to just make it compulsory so be it. Charlie Rangel may have something to say about that though.

Now -- now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible health care for every single American.

If you have health care -- if you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don't, you'll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves.

And -- and as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.

Let's take Paul Krugman's word for it that Mr. Obama's health plan costs about $4400 per newly insured person and grant Democrats the benefit of the doubt that people without coverage both need it and can't afford it. That much money would buy them catastrophic health and fund an HSA which would allow them to acquire wealth even as it provided a health care safety net. That would seem preferable to just transferring money from taxpayers to insurance companies and a health care industry that's already consuming more and more of our GDP. Giving folks an incentive to save their money rather than waste it on bogus tests -- as well as gving providers an incentive to lower the costs of such tests -- would even help reduce the nation's medical bill.

Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between keeping their job and caring for a sick child or an ailing parent.

Why not? We know the Democrats are the materialist party but do they really consider jobs and human relationships coequal? It seems especially odd to be making it more burdensome--both in regulatory and monetary terms--to employee people at a time when even countries like France are trying to make it less so because they've crippled their own economies.

Now is the time to change our bankruptcy laws, so that your pensions are protected ahead of CEO bonuses, and the time to protect Social Security for future generations.

Not much by way of specifics there, but it seems fair to ask both why the CEO's pension should be protected but not his bonus and why a Social Security program that was designed eight decades ago should be preserved as is. Isn't Mr. Obama supposed to be the candidate of change? How about just applying the market principles that are now universally accepted in order to make SS into a modern program?

And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day's work, because I want my daughters to have the exact same opportunities as your sons.

A certain absence of specifics there too. Equal pay is easy enough to define but what makes work "equal"? And notice the switch he pulls there, changing from equality of compensation to equality of opportunity? What job is it that his daughter isn't allowed to do but your son is?

Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I've laid out how I'll pay for every dime: by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don't help America grow.

No matter Mr. Obama's reputation for naivete, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that this absurd claim is a function of cynicism rather than a genuine belief that there are hundreds of billions of dollars a year just waiting to fall into his lap by closing a few loopholes. Not that it really matters which taxes he raises to get this money--we all end up paying for it sooner or later as the corporations pass the increased costs on to us. Making the vtaxes less direct just makes them less efficient.

But I will also go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less, because we cannot meet 21st-century challenges with a 20th-century bureaucracy.

The Court already ruled the line-item veto unconstitutional, so maybe he means he'll amend said document or appoint judges who read it differently?

As commander-in-chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm's way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.

I will end this war in Iraq responsibly and finish the fight against Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I will rebuild our military to meet future conflicts, but I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression.

W, Maverick, and General Petraeus haven't left him much choice as regards Iraq: how would he continue a war that's already won and winding down?

And we know diplomacy alone doesn't either stop nuclear proliferation or aggression. His suggestion that it does can't help but call his judgment into question.

We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country.

One of the signal achievements of the past couple of decades has been driving down the number of abortions, to the point where there are now fewer than at any time since 1974, when Roe was still a shiny new toy that held out the promise of bringing eugenics to the ghetto and ridding us of the poor. But given Senator Obama's stated desire to abort his own grandchildren if his daughters don't want them, his rhetoric about reducing "unwanted pregnancies" seems a summons back to the culture of death.

The -- the reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than they are for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.

We'll set aside for now the curious implication that blacks in the inner city have different rights that rural whites, and just note that he favors gun control of some sort or another.

I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in a hospital and to live lives free of discrimination.

Why? If people should be free to make some aberrant choices with their lives (though presumably even Mr. Obama would place limits on how far they can deviate from the norms) why oughtn't we be free to treat them differently on the basis of those decisions? No one much cares if you go and visit your partner at St. Joseph's Hospital, but why should St. Joseph's Church have to employ you regardless of your immorality?

You know, passions may fly on immigration, but I don't know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.

Which is it? Do we want to bring families together so long as one of them makes it here or do we want to ban them from employment? Are we welcoming, or forbidding to the next generation of Americans? The latter, with its suggestion that we should maintain their illegal status is unworthy of someone who wishes to lead the country. Fortunately, he's not serious. Either he or President McCain will pass amnesty early in their term unless W beats them to the punch by executive fiat.

What we have here is a rather mixed bag. On a number of issues he'd be W's third term (or Clinton's 5th), but on several big ones he's an extremely retrograde figure, taking us back to the 70s, rather than ahead. It's almost as if Democrats don't live in the world where IRA's and 401k's and Welfare-to-work and HSA's and housing vouchers and school vouchers have changed the way we think about how best to provide people with a safety net. It's as if they're the last ones to hear about the End of History.

This is also apparent in the way Mr. Obama failed to mention the broader project of liberalizing the Middle East, Asia and Africa and his silence about the wide alliance of democratic allies with which we work to contain and transform those states which have been laggard. Of course, the Democratic mantra is that W has shredded our alliances, but the reality is just the opposite. Not only have such disparate places as Mongolia, India, Indonesia, and Colombia been knit into an Axis of Good, but we have entirely new relationships with places we helped liberate--like Liberia, Haiti, and Southern Sudan-- with places that are reforming under American pressure, Libya--and with a whole series of states that have elected pro-American governments, often replacing anti-American ones: France, Germany, India, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, South Korea, and on and on. One hardly expected Mr. Obama to have much to say about foreign policy, but a more historically aware leader might have noted the opportunity that's being handed to him to bring about change in our few remaining and increasingly isolated and nervous foes: Burma, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba. Some acknowledgment that he at least understands the geo-political situation that he could inherit would have been welcome.

Despite the Clinton years, the Democrats seem to be stuck to some considerable degree in the 1970s and this speech would have been better given at the 1972 convention. Back then we really were isolated because of a war, faced unfriendly governments even in the West, had genuine economic problems we weren't facing up to, thought ever more permissiveness was the path to human happiness, and believed that only socialistic institutions could provide us the type of welfare net that the Depression had scared us into thinking we required. In 1970s America it was not irrational to believe that democratic capitalism had failed or was failing and that we were faced with decline.

But, seemingly unnoticed by the party that gathered in Denver, quite a bit has happened since then. New Zealand, Chile, and Margaret Thatcher's England innovated Third Way programs that bring market forces to bear on social programs. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Pope John Paul II, the Moral Majority, MADD, Ronald Reagan, and others reversed the slide into decadence and reminded us that moral choices matter. And the Cold War turned out not to be a twilight struggle, but just one more discrete battle in the Long War that has seen the Anglo-American/Judeo-Christian model trump all comers, Islamicism being just the latest failed alternative. Where though is the evidence that the Democratic Party has evolved along with the rest of us? Where the New Democrat reforms to SS, health care, education and housing? Where the recognition that individuals have responsibilities not just "rights"? Where the celebration of our values and their continuing victory over great evils, like those represented by Charles Taylor, Castro, the Kims, Saddam, and Osama?

We've just been through three decades of reasonably rapid change as globalization has worked to force other countries to become more like us in political and economic terms while making our economy more interconnected with and dependent on others. These changes have been almost uniformly healthy--giving us a more peaceful and affluent nation and world--but they, understandably, scare folks. This global extension of freedom is, by its very nature, destabilizing, not just toppling regimes abroad but businesses, industries, institutions at home and radically rearranging demographics, human relations, and power distributions. As always in politics, we are arrived at the basic question: do people now want more security, even if it means less freedom, greater isolation, and a reduction in our aspirations? Mind you, this is not as open and shut a case as it often appears to conservatives. We need to understand that for many on the Left and the far Right there is something to be said for withdrawing from the world and focusing on the self. After all, just because the last time we went through a bout of protectionism, isolationism, and nativism it triggered the Great Depression and WWII doesn't mean that the same would happen this time. Or, at any rate, we can convince ourselves that things would be different this time around. But that does seem to be the kind of change that Senator Obama is talking about, a reaction to the change of the Reagan/Clinton/Bush era and a retreat into the more secure world of the Second Way, where our own government is the solution to all of our problems and who cares about anyone else anyway. You can see why some find this kind of dependency on the state to be comforting, but it's strange to consider it idealism and it's awfully hard to reconcile with what we've traditionally considered the American Experiment. In that sense at least, Mr. Obama offers a deeply unAmerican vision of the future.

MORE:
John F. McCain (Peter Ferrara 08.29.08, Forbes)

On taxes, America suffers from the second-highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. American corporations face a 35% federal tax rate, averaging 40% with state income taxes. In contrast, the average corporate tax rate in the European Union has been slashed from 38% in 1996 to 24% today. Ireland has a corporate tax rate of 12.5%, which has caused per capita income to soar from the second lowest in the E.U. 20 years ago to the second highest today. Corporate tax rates in India and China are lower as well.

How are American corporations supposed to compete? How are they supposed to provide good jobs at good wages while paying tax rates that are two-thirds higher than their competitors, and more? [...]

Barack Obama, by contrast, seems to have proposed tax-rate increases for just about every federal tax. He proposes to increase the top two individual tax rates. He would increase the capital gains tax rate by 33%. Ditto that for the tax rate on dividends. He has proposed Social Security payroll tax increases of 16% to 32% for families making over $250,000 a year (that would have a minor effect on the long-term Social Security deficit while arbitrarily punishing these families with effective negative real rates of return from Social Security). Mr. Obama's health plan would also impose a new payroll tax on employers. He would reinstitute the "death tax" (estate tax) with a top rate of 45%. He has also proposed several increases in corporate taxes, including a "windfall profits" tax on oil. Nothing Obama said in his speech Thursday night changed these troublesome proposals.

Mr. Obama's protectionist trade policies would also result in higher tariffs.

Changes in Politics (Thomas Sowell, 8/29/08, Real Clear Politics)

Despite the incessantly repeated mantra of "change," Barack Obama's politics is as old as the New Deal and he is behind the curve when it comes to today's economy.

Senator Obama's statement that "our economy is in turmoil" is standard stuff on the left and in the mainstream media, which has been dying to use the word "recession."

Not only has the economic slowdown failed to reach the definition of a recession, the most recent data show the U.S. economy growing at a rate exceeding 3 percent-- a rate that many European economies would die for, despite our being constantly urged to imitate those countries whose end results are not as good as ours.

Barack Obama's "change" is a recycling of the kinds of policies and rhetoric of the New Deal that prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s far beyond the duration of any depression before or since.

These are the same kinds of liberal policies that led to double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates and rising unemployment during the Carter administration. These are "back to the future" changes to economic disasters that need repeating.

Make no mistake, the political rhetoric of FDR was great. For those who admire political rhetoric, as so many of Barack Obama's supporters seem to, FDR was tops. For those who go by actual results, FDR's track record was abysmal.

-DNC Filled With the Same Faces & Ideas (David Broder, 8/30/08, Real Clear Politics)

The Democrats had themselves a successful convention -- at the price of appearing quite conventional. [...]

No one is likely to argue that the speech here "changed politics in America." His jibes at John McCain and George Bush were standard-issue Democratic fare and his recital of a long list of domestic promises could have been delivered by any Democratic nominee from Walter Mondale to John Kerry.

There was no theme music to the speech and really no phrase or sentence that is likely to linger in the memory of any listener. The thing I never expected did in fact occur: Al Gore, the famously wooden former vice president, gave a more lively and convincing speech than Obama did.

-Obamanomics? Oh boy. (Colby Cosh, 8/31/08, National Post)

About three-quarters of the way through Sen. Barack Obama's Thursday speech accepting the Democratic nomination, he started reciting a list of political problems that he believes can be magically solved by appealing to Americans' "sense of higher purpose"—which, as it turns out, translates to "making a trite statement of principle and then running away from the actual issue as fast as possible." A sample: "We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country." Real profound, Senator, but the actual problem is that (loosely speaking) about half the people explicitly favour reducing unwanted pregnancies by permitting abortion, and about half explicitly don't.

Stating the fact that everyone's in favour of fewer unwanted pregnancies, ceteris paribus, does less than nothing to help. Should a woman running a gauntlet of protesters outside an abortion clinic tell them "Surely, ladies and gentlemen, we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country, and if you'll excuse me I'm about to go reduce them by precisely 1.0"?

I was so head-clutchingly irritated by the evasiveness of Obama's "higher purpose" litany that it took me a little while to notice that the last item was not only an appeal to the stupid, but stupid in itself.

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HOW HARD COULD IT BE?:

You have been invited to join orrinj's Private Group in Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Premier League.

In order to join the group, just go to the game front page and click on the "Sign Up" button to create a team. After completing registration, or if you already have a team, click the "Create or Join Group" button and follow the path to join an existing private group. Then, when prompted, enter the following information...

Group ID#: 20397
Password: ericjulia

Given that both Brothers are beating Jim in Chicago (now Binghamton) the answer is: not hard. But we need some more folks to join so poor Jim can pull ahead of someone...

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VP CONTEST:

No one had both, but if you got one send us your address and we'll send a book.

Thanks,
OJ

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THIS DOESN'T REALLY SEEM LIKE THAT HARD A QUESTION, BUT FOLKS ARE STRUGGLING WITH IT:

Obama: 'I feel confident about my choice' (Ben Smith, 8/31/08, Politico)

Asked at a press conference Saturday night to respond to McCain's argument that Palin has more executive experience than the Democratic ticket, Obama and Biden laughed. [...][

"I feel confident about my choice."

The office that Barrack Obama is seeking is President of the United States, which is described as follows:

United States Constitution: Article II

Section 1. The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

So, when we arrive at the question of whether he has sufficient relevant experience to quiet our doubts we would simply ask: of what institutions, corporations, organizations, polities, etc. has he been the chief executive, the ultimate decision-making authority?

Our answer is: The Harvard Law Review, if we choose to count it as significant.

The truth of the matter is that many Senators are lifelong legislators, rather than past executives, and that's why we rarely elect them president. Not to mention that the legislators we have elected (and those who were primarily creatures of the legislature--like LBJ, despite his vp experience) have been such disasters. The sole exception may be Abraham Lincoln, but they aren't growing the Great Emancipator on trees.

The best presidents have been men with experience as governors (with a couple generals thrown in): Washington, Polk, FDR, Ike, Reagan, Clinton, and W, for example.

There are, in the Senate today, a few former governors who would certainly be considered to have the requisite experience, temperament and judgment to be good presidents: Evan Bayh & Lamar Alexander come to mind most readily.

It just so happens that Barrack Obama and Joe Biden are not two of those so qualified and that John McCain's main exercise of executive authority came in the military, where he was, of course, subordinate to others.

Indeed, if we look at the two tickets and ask which of the 4 persons thereon is most qualified the unavoidable answer is the Governor of Alaska, and former mayor, Sarah Palin.

There are plenty of reasons to favor or disfavor each of these four people--their politics, their personality, their values, etc.--but if the sole criteria by which we were judging them was their Constitutional qualification, then it is obviously the executive who is best suited to be Executive.

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Palin Has Long Experience: Dealing With Big Oil in Home State (RUSSELL GOLD, August 30, 2008, Wall Street Journal)

As the politics of energy engulf the presidential contest, Sen. John McCain has picked as his running mate a politician with firsthand experience of the industry and its tactics.

Since becoming Alaska's governor in 2006, Sarah Palin has pushed oil companies to move faster with projects to expand oil and gas production. She is widely credited with reviving a long-stalled effort to build a natural-gas pipeline from Alaska's Prudhoe Bay energy fields to the Lower 48 states.

In a state that is dependent for its operating revenue on taxes and energy royalties paid by oil companies, she has negotiated with the state's big producers, Exxon Mobil Corp., BP PLC and ConocoPhillips.

"Sarah Palin is pro-development and is supportive of oil and gas development in an environmentally conscious way, but she is very tough on the companies. She doesn't think that when the state of Alaska leases oil and gas to big oil, it means big oil gets to call all the shots," says Drue Pearce, an appointee of President George W. Bush who directs the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Alaska Natural Gas Transportation Projects.

Palin Fought for Reform in Alaska (FRED BARNES, August 30, 2008, Wall Street Journal)

She has no experience in foreign or national-security policy -- unlike Joe Biden, the veteran Democrat she'll face in the nationally televised vice presidential debate in October. But she's an expert on one of this year's biggest issues -- energy.

Because Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has relatively little experience in national affairs, the bar has been lowered this year for national candidates. This helps Mrs. Palin. As a governor, she has more executive experience than Mr. Obama. [...]

Mrs. Palin is no feminist. Instead, she appeals to almost every conceivable grouping of conservatives. She's pro-life on abortion, pro-gun (she hunts), pro-drilling for oil (including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), and is as hawkish about cutting government spending as Mr. McCain himself. She's also an evangelical Christian.

A rule of thumb in politics is that you win more votes by energizing your base than by persuading undecided voters. Mr. McCain's strength is wooing undecided independents, moderates and soft Democrats. He's weaker with conservatives. He often seems inclined to ignore them. Now he has a running mate who can take up the slack.

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IN NO PROFESSION IS THERE MORE TO BE IRONIC ABOUT THAN POLITICS:

Hidden Depths: The scion of a family of warriors, John McCain seems easy to venerate—or caricature. But he is more complex than you may think. (Jon Meacham, 8/30/08, NEWSWEEK)

[M]cCain is not a neo-Victorian, or a neo-Eisenhower. In ways difficult to discern but central to understanding him, he is a very modern figure who is at once heroic and ironic, stoic and sometimes short-tempered, ambitious and rebellious. John McCain is no sun-belt Cincinnatus. He is an eager, cold-eyed politician who has sought the White House for a decade, compromised and reversed himself and believes he is an actor in a grand, unfolding saga. He is also more comfortable with shades of gray than he appears—a sense of nuance rooted, it seems, in an early life in which he at once revered his father and felt sorry for him. McCain has long lived with complexity, and Democrats who try to dismiss him as stubborn or Republicans who venerate him as unflinching miss a crucial truth about the man: he is an adept political juggler, as he has always been an adept emotional one.

Early on, he had to be. It was the only way to make sense of a great and glaring contradiction at the center of his universe: his father—strong, honorable, noble—was also an alcoholic, a binge drinker who, under the influence, became what McCain calls "a totally different person." Adm. Jack McCain was not to be mindlessly celebrated or mindlessly condemned. He was a man of parts, of strengths and weaknesses, and his son learned to take the occasional bad with the usual good.

Presidents tend to come from one of two kinds of families. There is either no father at all (Andrew Jackson, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton) or a dominant one (the Adamses, the Kennedys, the Bushes). Barack Obama belongs to the first category, the son of a man he met only once. McCain embodies the second. He was clearly driven to live up to the example of his grandfather and his father, heroes and leaders of men, but McCain's dad was not what he seemed.

The McCain story is both obvious and murky. The title of McCain's first book—"Faith of My Fathers"—sums up the obvious part. He grew up in the shadows of, and on the shoulders of, noble ancestors who had long proved their virtue in life and their virtuosity in war. During an interview aboard his campaign plane en route from Orlando to Atlanta in August, I asked McCain about the influence his father had on him. He had been gone a lot, McCain replied, but "my mom, who really idolized my dad, had the effect on us of kind of idolizing him."

Then, in a quiet, steady voice, McCain told me: "Yet at the same time I became aware, I think when I was either in my very earliest teens or even before that, that my father had a struggle with alcohol. And I watched him fight and fight this sickness … So I not only idolized him but I also understood that he had flaws like all of us, and probably his greatest was his struggle against alcoholism, which made him a very religious man. He prayed every night on his knees; he was very religious, because he saw hell combating [alcoholism, a struggle that] he knew he could not successfully win by himself."

I asked the obvious next question: did you ever worry about your own risk for alcoholism? McCain's answer was quick and clear: "No," he said. "You know, I never did. Because I just didn't have the inclination. I could tell early on. I of course went to happy hour. I of course had drinks with my squadron mates, et cetera. But I never felt any particular appetite for alcohol, nor did I …" He pauses for the briefest of beats, then says: "Oh, I'm sure there were times in my squadron life when I overindulged, but almost never. I just didn't. I'm sure the example of my father may have had some kind of effect."

His father's example made him devoted but wary, romantic yet skeptical, obsessed with strength but understanding of weakness. He saw the man he most wanted to be like at the worst of moments. Where the father failed, the son would strive to succeed. And so, restless and relentless, John Sidney McCain III has fought a lifelong campaign to live up to the legacy of his family, redeem its largely unknown faults and add his own honorable chapter to the story—a story that begins in the distant past, in the warrior class of Europe.

The McCains are an ancient tribe. One branch of the family traces its lineage to Charlemagne. In the New World, McCains have served in America's armed forces since the Revolutionary War. They fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, chased Pancho Villa with Pershing and made their greatest marks in the epic clashes of the 20th century, from World War I to Vietnam. (And now, in the 21st, two McCain sons are in uniform. One will graduate from Annapolis next year, and another, a Marine, recently returned from Iraq.) McCain's father was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, an elite group of descendants of Washington's officers that is headquartered at the elegant Anderson House on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington (Pauline and Albert Gore raised their son next door at the old Fairfax Hotel). "His evident pride in claiming such distinguished ancestry gave me the sense not only that I had a claim on my country's history, but that it would fall to me to represent the family when the history of my generation was recorded," McCain wrote. His grandfather had stood with MacArthur aboard the Missouri as the Japanese surrendered; his father, a submariner, won the Silver Star.

This history hung heavy on the young McCain; the legacy was at once thrilling and daunting. His grandfather was Annapolis class of 1906, and rose to be an admiral; his father was class of 1931, and did the same. His father fell in love with his mother, Roberta Wright, the daughter of a successful oil wildcatter who, having moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, retired at 40 to raise his twin daughters. Roberta met Jack McCain when she was a freshman at the University of Southern California and he was serving aboard the USS Oklahoma, then home-ported at Long Beach. Roberta's mother, Myrtle, was opposed to the match, but her father, Archibald Wright, did not object when Roberta told him she was eloping to Tijuana with the young naval officer. There, joined by McCain's father, the two were married in 1933 in a bar called Caesar's—the origin, Roberta likes to note, of the Caesar salad. Beautiful, adventurous, wealthy and game for the itinerant life of a Navy family, Mrs. McCain (now 96) was determined that her three children (Sandy, born 1934; John III, born 1936, and Joe, born 1942) would grow up with an appreciation of their father's service. "My mother did a good job of keeping him alive for us—your father this, your father that," McCain told me. "She was very good at reminding us of him and of his example." A loving woman, she was also skilled in the arts of stoicism and strength in the face of adversity. She kept things together, and things going, no matter how difficult the moment—and difficult moments were a constant fact of life for a Navy family. "The relationship of a sailor and his children is, in large part, a metaphysical one," McCain once wrote. "We see much less of our fathers than do other children. Our fathers are often at sea, in peace and war. Our mothers run our households, pay the bills, and manage most of our upbringing … It is no surprise then that the personalities of children who have grown up in the Navy often resemble those of their mothers more than those of their fathers."

And yet, McCain noted, "our fathers, perhaps because of and not in spite of their long absences, can be a huge presence in our lives. You are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honor. By your father's calling, you are born into an exclusive, noble tradition. Its standards require your father to dutifully serve a cause greater than his self-interest, and everyone around you, your mother, other relatives, and the whole Navy world, drafts you to the cause as well."

Born in the Panama Canal Zone, John III was a part of this world from the very beginning, a world that, for all its sense of tradition and palpable example of duty, was also oddly transitory. His rootlessness made him restless, curious and somewhat emotionally guarded. Looking back years later, McCain wrote: "All my life I had been rootless, part of a tradition that compensated me in other ways for the hometown it denied me. But without a connection to one place, one safe harbor where I could rest without care, I had lived my life on the move, never entirely at ease … The landscape and characters passed too rapidly to form the attachments of common love that quicken your heart when age and infirmity have slowed your walk and deprived your restlessness of its familiar expressions."

As a child he found—and now, as a man, he still finds— comfort and order in books and poems about love and war. A voracious reader (and rereader), McCain has long used literature as a refuge and an inspiration. Distant trumpets are not so distant to him. The epigraph of his second book is taken from Thucydides' funeral oration of Pericles: "Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action." He loves James Fenimore Cooper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, Wouk (even the more obscure ones, like "Youngblood Hawke" and "Don't Stop the Carnival")—and, above all, Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which he first read, entranced, after picking it up by accident in his father's study when he was 12.

Books helped him smooth the rough edges of a combative disposition. As a small child he would, if angry, hold his breath until he passed out; his parents had to plunge him in cold water to rouse him. Later, though he adored his grandfather and his father, at some level he resented the inevitability of his own naval career.

The Navy—always, always the Navy. On Christmas mornings, once the family had opened presents around the tree, Jack McCain would excuse himself, walk upstairs, put on his uniform and go to the office. He adored his wife and his children, but admitted that he loved his father above all others. John McCain believes that if his father had been asked to describe his family relationships, Jack McCain would have said, "I'm the son of an admiral and the father of a captain."

Educated at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., and then at the Naval Academy (a place, McCain said, "I belonged at but dreaded"), John McCain found outlets for the ambivalence he felt about having a preordained future. He was a scamp and a cut-up who was highly skilled at amassing demerits at both institutions. (He liked to slip into Washington from Alexandria to the bars and what he called "the burlesque houses" on Ninth Street NW.) Once, when he feared he was close to failing out of Annapolis, he wrote off for information about how to join the French Foreign Legion. On discovering that there was a nine-year service requirement, McCain decided the Navy was not so bad after all.

There is a kind of egotism in McCain—he loves attention, always has, and takes glee in confounding the expectations of the institutions of which he is a part. Hence the misbehavior at Episcopal and at Annapolis. And in a way, his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate fits his lifetime pattern of merrily challenging the conventions of the cultures he loves, from the military to Congress to presidential politics.

For all his antics and ambivalence, though, he has always had a strong sense of honor, especially in his relationships with comrades in arms.

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IS JOURNALISM REALLY A B.S. DEGREE?:

Palin on issues (David Hulen, 8/30/08, Anchorage Daily News)

Lots of people are scrambling to learn more about Palin. Among the questions we've been getting are request for her positions on this national issue and that national issue. The fact is that Palin, as governor, hasn't had to develop or present positions on a lot of national issues.

Here's a candidate survey we published in October 2006, shortly before the election. We sent out written questions to candidates, and they returned responses.

Sarah Palin

Republican

Web site: www.palinforgovernor.com

Age: 42

Spouse: Todd Palin

Children: Track, Bristol, Willow and Piper

Occupation: Commercial fisherman, volunteer coach/manager

Education: Wasilla High School, 1982 graduate; University of Idaho, B.S. degree, journalism, 1987

Employment history: Media; utility; full-time mayor/administrator, 1996-2002; and commercial fisherman

Military service: None

Previous public offices held (include dates) and offices run for: Former mayor of Wasilla, Wasilla City Council, president of Alaska Conference of Mayors, Alaska Municipal League, Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, former chair of Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, 2002 candidate for lieutenant governor

Comments

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NEVER TOO EARLY TO START LEAVING A TRAIL OF BROKEN PROMISES, EH?:

Obama vs. Baldilocks: A blogger's African dad came here on the same airlift as Obama's dad. All similarities end there (Max Taves, August 21, 2008, LA Weekly)

Los Angeles blogger Juliette Ochieng has a lot in common with the man who might be the next president, Barack Obama. A lot.

Both were born to Kenyan fathers of the same tribe (the Luo) from the same province (Nyanza), and both of their fathers came as boys to America aboard the same airplane. Growing up, neither Ochieng nor Obama knew their fathers, who both abandoned their American mothers and left their American-born children behind. Both of their fathers returned to Africa in the early 1960s and became friends, bonding at Kenyan bars over their favorite drink — Scotch. Both Ochieng's and Obama's mothers contracted ovarian cancer. (Hers survived it; his did not). Both Ochieng and Obama were born in the U.S. in August 1961 — only weeks apart.

But for someone with parallel beginnings, Juliette Akinyi Ochieng is quite different: Evangelical Christian. Working class. Military veteran. Pro-life. Conservative Republican.

Ochieng went to Los Angeles City College, not Harvard. Although she was born in Chicago — Obama's political birthplace — she lives in South-Central Los Angeles, where she grew up. And since 2003, she has written a blog, luoamerican.com/baldilocks, better known as Baldilocks, a reference to her fashionably close-shaven head. Her soft speech belies her harsh yet thoughtful commentaries on black politics and national security from a conservative perspective.

Last month, she penned an essay for her site and for Republican-oriented pajamasmedia.com, bemoaning blacks' loyalty to the Democrats. Last week, as Russian tanks rolled through Georgia, Ochieng, who worked for years as an Air Force Intelligence cryptologist-linguist specializing in Russian and German, mused about that conflict.

"She was very shaped by her experiences in the military," says fellow blogger Patrick Frey, the deputy district attorney who founded Patterico.com. "She has very strong opinions, and she's a very religious person. She's very warm and hospitable."

Recent visitors to her site cannot miss her new mission: Making good on a promise to a Kenyan school named in honor of Barack Obama.

It's a promise, she says, that Barack Obama broke.

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THEY HAVE A NAME FOR CANDIDATES WHO PANDER TO VOTERS...."MR. PRESIDENT":

Zogby Poll: Equilibrium in the POTUS Race! (Zogby International, 8/30/08)

Republican John McCain's surprise announcement Friday of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate - some 16 hours after Democrat Barack Obama's historic speech accepting his party’s presidential nomination - has possibly stunted any Obama convention bump, the latest Zogby Interactive flash poll of the race shows.

The latest nationwide survey, begun Friday afternoon after the McCain announcement of Palin as running mate and completed mid-afternoon today, shows McCain/Palin at 47%, compared to 45% support for Obama/Biden.

I suppose we should give the Unicorn Rider some credit for having the courage to pick a running mate who didn't help him at all and then giving an acceptance speech that was so specific as to what he'd do that it didn't even produce a dead cat bounce. So, kudos, also-ran.

MORE:
Let Palin Be Palin: Why the left is scared to death of McCain's running mate (William Kristol, 09/08/2008, Weekly Standard)

A spectre is haunting the liberal elites of New York and Washington--the spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism, rising out of the American countryside, free of the taint (fair or unfair) of the Bush administration and the recent Republican Congress, able to invigorate a McCain administration and to govern beyond it.

That spectre has a name--Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska chosen by John McCain on Friday to be his running mate. There she is: a working woman who's a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who's broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who's a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who's a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who's a leader.

So what we will see in the next days and weeks--what we have already seen in the hours after her nomination--is an effort by all the powers of the old liberalism, both in the Democratic party and the mainstream media, to exorcise this spectre. They will ridicule her and patronize her. They will distort her words and caricature her biography. They will appeal, sometimes explicitly, to anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice. All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.

That's why Palin's spectacular performance in her introduction in Dayton was so important. Her remarks were cogent and compelling. Her presentation of herself was shrewd and savvy. I heard from many who watched Palin--many of them not predisposed to support her--about how moved they were by her remarks, her composure, and her story.

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HM

McCain’s Mrs. Right : Gov. Sarah Palin came out of nowhere to win the John McCain veep sweepstakes. Well, not quite nowhere. (Evan Thomas and Karen Breslau, Aug 30, 2008, Newsweek)

Sarah Palin posed for a photo spread in Vogue, but that's about as far as the glamour goes. She piles her hair up in a librarian's bun and wears what she calls "schoolmarm" glasses (one blogger compared her to "Tina Fey's sexier sister"). She was at one time a beauty queen, Miss Wasilla 1984, in her hometown, population: 7,000 or so. "We were really surprised when she wanted to do it," her father, Chuck, told the Vogue reporter. "That wasn't her thing." Basketball and hunting were more like it. Palin regretted the whole beauty pageant experience. "They made us line up in bathing suits and turn our backs so the male judges could look at our butts. I couldn't believe it!" she told Vogue.

She tried being a sportscaster for a while, but ended up as a politician, or rather an anti-politician. She seemed to love to take on the good ole boys, to get in the face of the state's Republican political establishment and Big Oil, the two dominant forces in Alaska, at least until Palin came along. She smiles a lot and has a thick skin, laughing off reporters who write about her black go-go boots or leering bloggers, like the Washington, D.C.-based Wonkette, which dubbed her "the hottest governor in all 50 states." She is fearless and natural, and it's no wonder she charmed a fierce contrarian like John McCain. "He saw a lot of himself in her," says campaign manager Rick Davis. Whether she can help or hurt his candidacy is another question. She is not just the first Republican woman to run for vice president. She is about as far from conventional notions of a safe, reassuring No. 2 type as can be imagined.

Palin is an American original. She calls herself a "hockey mom" and manages to juggle the lives of her five children (the last, born with Down syndrome, is less than 5 months old) while running the state of Alaska and routinely antagonizing the powers that be. Last fall a NEWSWEEK reporter visited her office in Anchorage. The governor's office overlooks the sparkling Cook Inlet, ringed by mountains, except right smack in the view is a skyscraper adorned with the name CONOCO PHILLIPS in giant letters, a reminder of the prominence of Big Oil in the state capital. The throw rug on her couch is the skin of a grizzly bear shot by her father, a retired teacher turned "nuisance-control specialist" (varmint hunter for hire) whose pickup truck bears the sticker VEGETARIAN—OLD INDIAN WORD FOR "BAD HUNTER." (Palin herself is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association; for years, she or her husband caught all the fish or shot all the meat that her family eats.) As she spoke to the reporter, she juggled two BlackBerrys and a cell phone, with one always buzzing. She seemed unfazed, indeed to be having fun. As strands of hair fell from her librarian's bun she deftly executed an intricate "don't drop the BlackBerry while fixing the bobby pin" maneuver, several times.

One of Palin's first acts as governor was to sell the governor's jet on eBay.

Campaigns Shift as McCain Choice Alters the Race (ADAM NAGOURNEY, JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY, 8/30/08, NY Times)

A day after Mr. McCain announced his decision, catching almost everyone but his inner circle by surprise, both sides were trying to gauge the risks and opportunities of having a young, relatively inexperienced, socially conservative woman on the Republican ticket.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic Party had prepared advertisements and lines of attack directed at the two men who had been most prominently mentioned as vice-presidential possibilities for Mr. McCain — former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota — but had not considered Ms. Palin a likely enough choice to do the same for her. A new advertisement linking President Bush to Mr. McCain was quickly put together, but it contained only a fleeting mention of Ms. Palin.

That tentativeness reflected what Mr. Obama’s advisers said was their struggle to figure out how to challenge the credentials and the ideology of a woman whose candidacy could be embraced by many women as a historic milestone. Once formally nominated at the Republican convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul this week, Ms. Palin, who was elected governor two years ago, will be the second woman chosen by a major party as a vice-presidential candidate.

Mr. Obama’s campaign does not plan to go directly after Ms. Palin in the days ahead. Instead, it is planning to increase its attacks on Mr. McCain for his opposition to pay equity legislation and abortion rights — two issues of paramount concern to many women — as it tries to head off his effort to use Ms. Palin to draw Democratic and independent women who had supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. [...]

James C. Dobson, the influential conservative Christian leader who said in the primaries that he could never vote for Mr. McCain, said the selection of Ms. Palin had won him over. If he went into the voting booth today, Mr. Dobson told the talk radio host Dennis Prager on Friday, “I would pull that lever.”

Comments

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EVEN MOTHER NATURE WANTS MAVERICK TO WIN:

McCain May Curtail, Suspend Convention Due to Gustav (Mark Halperin, August 30th, 2008, The Page)

The GOP candidate tells Fox News that the convention may be trimmed, altered or even suspended for a day or two due to the storm.

A one day convention with short speeches from the ticket is the beau ideal. If the Democratic Convention had been one day it wouldn't have harmed the Unicorn Rider so much.

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LANGLEY DELENDA EST:

Why CIA Veterans Are Scared of McCain: Four years ago, the candidate called the CIA a "rogue organization"; now he's advised by a former Chalabi promoter and Agency basher. No wonder the spooks are spooked. (Laura Rozen, August 29, 2008, Mother Jones)

Tall, broad-shouldered, mustached, Michael Kostiw looks like the former oilman and CIA case officer in Africa he once was. Now, as Republican staff director for Sen. John McCain on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, Kostiw, 61, is probably the closest top former CIA official to the Republican presidential candidate, and is discussed as a possible candidate for a senior intelligence position should McCain win the presidency. But his relationship with his former Agency is complex. Standing in his large office in the Senate Russell building on a quiet day during August congressional recess, Kostiw shows off a pair of wooden statuettes that were given to him by an African nation's ambassador—and longtime top official in his country's government—to Washington. The envoy, Kostiw says, is an old contact that he proposed trying to recruit two decades ago when he was a CIA case officer in the country. But his Agency boss at the time waved him off the recruitment, saying, "That guy isn't going anywhere."

It's a small but telling anecdote in an almost two-hour conversation with a man whose career trajectory from CIA Soviet East Europe division operations officer to Texaco oilman to cochair of the International Republican Institute to top Porter Goss and McCain Senate aide may signal what a McCain presidency would mean for the intelligence community—and why many from the CIA are quietly worried about a McCain presidency. The Bush years have been brutal for the CIA, which was pilloried for getting Iraq intelligence wrong while accused of downplaying and withholding intelligence from the White House that would have justified military action. Many current and former US spies expect a McCain administration guided by neoconservatives to treat them with hostility and mistrust. They also say McCain would likely weaken the CIA by giving broad new spying authorities to the Pentagon, which CIA officials believe is more amenable to giving policymakers the intelligence they want, while being subject to less congressional oversight.

These critics point especially to the McCain campaign's top national security adviser Randy Scheunemann—who ran a front group promoting war with Iraq and the fabrications of controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and who has lobbied for aggressive NATO expansion. Scheunemann's record, they argue, encapsulates everything wrong with the past eight years of Bush leadership on intelligence issues, from a penchant for foreign policy freelancing and secret contacts with unreliable fabricators, to neoconservatives' disdain for the perceived bureaucratic timidity of the CIA and State Department, to their avowed hostility for diplomacy with adversaries. If McCain wins, "the military has won," says one former senior CIA officer. "We will no longer have a civilian intelligence arm. Yes, we will have analysts. But we won't have any real civilian intelligence capability."

Such is the sorry history of the CIA that we've never had any capability, just the agency. Maverick should tear down the building and salt the earth.

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CASH COW:

Palin Selection Already Paying Dividends to McCain (Elizabeth Holmes, 8/30/0-8, WSJ: Washington Wire)

Regardless of the banter about his choice, John McCain selection of Sarah Palin has already proved profitable. The McCain campaign raised $4 million Friday with the announcement of the Alaska governor joining the GOP ticket. [...]

The McCain campaign is already burning through money because campaign-finance laws, which McCain must abide by in exchange for federal funding, require them to empty their primary coffers before the end of the month. “We have three days to spend it!” one senior aide said Friday night, elated by that day’s haul.

Random Observations--Mainly about Our Sarah (Peter Augustine Lawler, 8/30/08, No Left Turns)

5. It’s impossible to overemphasize how happy the various kinds of social conservatives are here at the convention about the choice. I won’t name names, but I’m including famous professors at leading institutions. Many of them have never really liked or trusted McCain. Strangely enough, they trust her. And they now trust him more.

6. Biden--whom I’m on record as admiring--must be miserable. He can’t attack her, and he better not be condescending toward her. He better not say something "inappropriate" about Sarah or her family. His record on such matters is not encouraging.

Can you believe Maverick picked a woman just because she'd thrill his party?

MORE:
McCain unveils a secret weapon for culture wars (Father Raymond J. De Souza, 8/30/08, National Post)

Yet for all that novelty, Palin’s selection indicates that this election will be in large part about the culture wars, with abortion at the centre.

Governor Palin is pro-life, as is Senator McCain. Their political positions are dramatized in their own families. John and Cindy McCain adopted a sick Bangladeshi baby in 1991; now 17, Bridget McCain started life in an orphanage run by Mother Teresa’s Sisters. Cindy McCain met her on a trip to Bangladesh, and her heart was moved to take her back to Arizona for medical care, and eventual adoption.

Governor Palin and her husband have five children. The youngest, Trig, was born this past April. He has Down syndrome. Like most cases now, he was so diagnosed in utero. Unlike most such babies, he is still alive. Pre-natal diagnosis of Down syndrome is normally a death sentence. Abortion usually follows within days. The Palins chose life for Trig.

“I’m looking at him right now, and I see perfection,” Palin said. “Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?”

In the combustible world of American abortion politics, there are very finely-calculated degrees of difference. For example, while both Obama and Biden are pro-choice, their positions are not the same. Obama is in favour of federal funding for abortion and permitting partial-birth abortion. Biden is against both. As the most extreme pro-abortion candidate for president ever, Obama voted against the “born alive” act in Illinois, which mandates medical care for babies which survive attempted abortions. Even Hillary Clinton, along with Joseph Biden, supported the federal “born alive” act. In fact, the latter passed unanimously.

The Palin selection indicates that the McCain campaign wishes to sharpen this contrast.

Sarah Palin: Queen of YouTube (Belinda Luscombe, 8/30/08, TIME)

She has a sense of humor — and of opportunity. Here she gives late-night comedian and resident alien Craig Ferguson honorary citizenship of Alaska and shamelessly promotes her state, even asking him to visit and "partake of rich, succulent wild Alaskan salmon." In response, Ferguson calls her a "naughty librarian."

Reading Sarah Palin (LAURA FITZPATRICK, 8/29/08, TIME)

Palin's writing doesn't give much insight into her conservative policy positions, but it does put on display some of the other, personal qualities that make her an appealing choice for McCain. She has written repeatedly criticizing other state politicians' possible ethical transgressions, targeting both Republicans and Democrats in her calls for reform. She sprinkles her pieces with quotes from Plato, Henry Kissinger, and her state's constitution, but also uses expressions like "doggone it" and praises Alaskans for their work ethic and love of freedom and community — a possible asset in a campaign that has focused on questions of elitism and being in touch with voters. [...]

Perhaps even more important than the issues, the op-eds hint at what Palin's campaign style will be like between now and November. Palin — a former co-captain of a state champion girls basketball team, a self-styled "hockey mom" and a distance runner — writes that she relishes the competition that is key in both the sports arena and the political one. "Competition defines and refines a person," she says. "It really is nothing to be afraid of." During her 2006 run for governor, she pledged transparency and praised "clean campaigns that stick to the issues — and stick to the truth."

-Palin Power (Jonathan Martin, 8/30/08, Politico)

My mention below of just how juiced many in the grass roots of the GOP are about Palin has only brought forth more stories and anecdotes of what this pick means.

Here is one from an Ohio source I know to be reliable:

Speaking about GOP grass roots on fire, here in Cuyahoga County we have four victory centers, and in mine alone in the all-important city of Parma, I had 47 calls between 12:30 and 2 p.m. yesterday, all asking how they could volunteer and how they could get a yard sign, a ton of independent women

The RNC, clearly hoping to push this angle, has also sent over an internal memo from Political Director Rich Beeson with their own examples. This one, from Waukesah County, Wisc., stands out.

-INTERVIEW: New Palin interview ( Kyle Hopkins, 8/30/08, Anchorage Daily News)

I got a brief chance to talk to Gov. Sarah Palin on the phone today from Pennsylvania, where she has a rally in a couple hours.

Here's the recording.

McCain Gets $7 Million Bounce from Palin Pick (Matthew Mosk, 8/30/08, The Trail)

Sen. John McCain has taken in $7 million in contributions since announcing Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, a top campaign aide said today.

The money bounce may owe to Palin's appeal with conservative donors, many of whom said privately they had planned on sitting out the campaign this year.

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SHE HAS OBVIOUS APPEAL FOR HAMPSHIREMEN:

The hostess with the moosest (Mark Steyn, 8/30/08, National Review)

[G]overnor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

Second, it can't be in Senator Obama's interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans' vice-presidential pick is "even more" inexperienced than the Democrats' presidential one.

Third, real people don't define "experience" as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about.

The whole hunting, snow-mobiling vibe definitely works in places like this.

But, as Mr. Steyn intimates, here's all you have to know about how Beltway-bound the Obama campaign is: they think Joe Biden is well known.

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BEING AN OLD DEMOCRAT HE CAN'T BE EXPECTED TO ADVOCATE TAKING RESPONSIBILITY:

Obama vs. his staff (KENNETH P. VOGEL, 8/30/08, Politico)

Obama disavowed his campaign’s first response, telling journalists that “I think that, uh, you know, campaigns start getting these, uh, hair triggers and, uh, the statement that Joe and I put out reflects our sentiments,” he said.

Obama disavowed his campaign’s first response, telling journalists that “I think that, uh, you know, campaigns start getting these, uh, hair triggers and, uh, the statement that Joe and I put out reflects our sentiments,” he said.

Earlier in the same availability, however, he told reporters that John McCain “wants to take the country in the wrong direction. I'm assuming Gov. Palin agrees with him and his policies” — echoing Burton’s claim that “that's not the change we need, it's just more of the same.”

The latest disavowal of his staff’s comments on his behalf or in his name continues a tactic Obama employed repeatedly during his contentious battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

When confronted about a campaign memo during the primary criticizing Clinton’s ties to India that referred to her as “D-Punjab,” Obama called it “a screw-up on the part of our research team” and said “it was stupid and caustic.”

And when the late Tim Russert asked Obama at a Las Vegas debate about his campaign’s efforts to push the storyline that Team Clinton was stoking racial tensions, Obama said “our supporters, our staff, get overzealous. They start saying things that I would not say.”

He carries being reactionary a tad too far when he avoids W's "fault" of being overly loyal to his staff.

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A DISH, SERVED COLD:

Hillary Rah-Rahs Palin (August 30, 2008, ABC News: Political Punch)

I think it would be fair to say that the Obama campaign wishes Sen. Hillary Clinton's statement on Gov. Palin were harsher.

"We should all be proud of Governor Sarah Palin's historic nomination, and I congratulate her and Senator McCain," Clinton said. "While their policies would take America in the wrong direction, Governor Palin will add an important new voice to the debate."

Here, Barry, let me just give that a twist...

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THE INSULARITY OF THE INTERNATIONALISTS:

The Democrats and Latin America (MARCELA SANCHEZ, 8/30/08, THE WASHINGTON POST)

For months, Barack Obama's disconnect with Latin America has left many officials and observers in the region wondering what a Democratic administration would mean for future relations. Now the search for an answer continues with Obama's choice of a running mate.

Sen. Joe Biden was picked not just for his appeal to working-class white voters, but also for his reputation as a foreign policy expert. But those hoping that Biden's presence on the ticket would beef up the inexperienced Obama in Latin America might be disappointed.

During his 35 years in the U.S. Senate, the last 10 in leadership positions on the Foreign Relations Committee, Biden has participated in just four congressional trips south of the border, two to Colombia and two to Mexico. Biden's experience and interests are elsewhere – Europe and the Middle East, particularly Iraq. He has almost a “blank slate” on Latin America, as Peter Hakim, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, put it.

The Unicorn Rider and his vp pick are nowhere more conventional than in their Atlanticism. Asia, Africa, and Latin America better hope Maverick wins and continues the attention they got--for the first time ever--under W.

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DEFLATING ORIGINS IS JUST ANOTHER WAY OF LYING ABOUT ACHIEVEMENTS:

Joe Biden's deep (but mythical) blue-collar roots (Steve Chapman, August 31, 2008, Chicago Tribune)

Joe Biden once got in trouble for plagiarizing a speech and inflating his academic record. So it will not surprise you to find that his famous working-class background turns out to be mythical. But it may surprise you to learn that Biden isn't the one who has trouble with the facts. [...]

[T]he legend of Joe Biden, born in a welding shop, dies hard with political reporters, who find it easier to romanticize a gritty, hardscrabble childhood than a conventionally comfortable one.

The facts are there for anyone who wants to look at them. When Joe Biden Sr. died in 2002, his obituary in the News-Journal of Wilmington reported that when he married in 1941, "he was working as a sales representative for Amoco Oil Co. in Harrisburg."

It went on, "Biden also was an executive in a Boston-based company that supplied waterproof sealant for U.S. merchant marine ships built during World War II. After the war, he co-owned an airport and crop-dusting service on Long Island." Upon moving his family to Delaware, the News-Journal said, Biden "worked in the state first as a sales manager for auto dealerships and later in real-estate condominium sales."

Executive, co-owner and manager? Those titles identify the jobholder as solidly middle class, if not better. They fall in the category of white-collar occupations, not blue-collar.

Biden's first ad: "Scranton" (Ben Smith, 8/30/08, Politico)
The campaign will run the ad, which ties Biden's biography to Obama's and stresses the Delaware senator’s Scranton roots in northeast Pennsylvania.
Not that you ever expect Senator Biden to tell the truth, but starting out lying seems excessive even by his low standards.

Comments

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A BREED APART:

A Prolific Pair (Kevin Vance, August 29, 2008, Weekly Standard)

With Gov. Palin's five chlidren and McCain's seven, the presumptive GOP nominees have more offspring than any major-party ticket since 1920.

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A RACE, NOT A RELIGION?:

In Israel, A Clash Over Who Is a Jew: Ultra-Orthodox Contest Conversions (Griff Witte, 8/30/08, Washington Post)

Yael converted to Judaism in 1992, and for the next 15 years she lived in Israel, celebrating the major holidays and teaching her children about the Jewish faith.

But when she and her husband sought a divorce last year, she said, the ultra-Orthodox rabbis in charge of the process had some questions. Among them: Did Yael observe the Sabbath? Did she obey the prohibition on sex during and after menstruation?

Dissatisfied with the answers, the rabbis nullified her conversion. Yael did not need a divorce, they ruled, because she had never been married. She had never been married because she had never been Jewish. And because she had never been Jewish, her children were not, either.

"I was in shock. I couldn't believe it," said Yael, 43, who would allow only her Hebrew name to be published out of privacy concerns. Blond, blue-eyed and athletic-looking, Yael is baffled by the ordeal. "My kids grew up Jewish," she said. "They don't know anything else."

Yael's personal trauma has become a cause for Israeli soul-searching over what it means to be Jewish, a term that carries both religious and ethnic dimensions.

Which is why the Arabs can just wait and Palestine will fall into their laps--the secular don't have kids and the Orthodox insist only their own kids are Jews. There's a recipe for oblivion.

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PEGGING THE INCOHERENCE METER:

Makeover Model for McCain (David Ignatius, August 31, 2008, Washington Post)

Let's assume that John McCain is not crazy and that he wants to show America he will steer a different course in foreign policy than George Bush's while remaining faithful to his party's values and traditions. How does he do that? How can he present himself as both a change agent and a force of continuity? [...]

The real model for McCain is what Sarkozy did after he took office in May 2007. While asserting that he was maintaining the fundamentals of French policy, he changed many of the visible signs. Sarkozy stopped feuding with the United States, he moved to bring France back fully into the NATO alliance and he altered the pro-Arab tilt of French policy in the Middle East.

In making these changes, Sarkozy assaulted (ever so stealthily) the legacy of received wisdom about foreign policy known as "Gaullism." That approach tended to define French interests in reaction (and often, in opposition) to those of the United States. This arrogant style was costly, and Sarkozy decided to get rid of it. His France was going to be a team player again.

By changing the software, Sarkozy was able to mobilize French diplomacy for what has proved to be a remarkable turnaround over the past year.

Mr. Ignatius is normally a sensible, if overly orthodox, columnist but this makes so little sense that if you read it enough times your ears may start to bleed. The great change that Nicholas Sarkozy brought to France was to reorient it from continental Europe towards Anglo-America, to the point where he made it clear he wanted to replace Tony Blair as W's lapdog. Mind you, it's not just that Sarko decided that France should stand with the good guys on geopolitical matters, rather than play footsie with the evil regimes as is its historic wont, but he's also launched an assault on France's archetypal Second Way model.

Yet, Mr. Ignatius thinks that emulating Mr. Sarkozy will tend to distance Maverick from W? Whahappen?

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MAVERICK GETS HIS ROVE ON:

Obama loses spotlight to new rival (CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 8/29/08, Politico)

Just 12 hours after delivering a historic acceptance speech, Barack Obama was no longer the story.

The Democratic nominee and his running mate, Joe Biden, left Denver on Friday for a three-day bus tour of battleground states, pressing populist themes as they rolled through struggling western Pennsylvania but finding themselves overshadowed by the newly minted Republican ticket.

John McCain’s surprise choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee reshaped the first post-convention day for the Democratic Party, robbing its candidates of the full media spotlight.

Obama ad: Despite Palin, McCain isn't change agent (JIM KUHNHENN, 8/30/08, Associated Press)

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama begins airing an ad Saturday that responds to rival John McCain's selection of a running mate, carefully avoiding any direct criticism of Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor whom McCain chose for the GOP ticket.

When the McCain campaign went so hard after the Unicorn Rider for dissing Hillary a couple of us were talking and said how Maverick really needed to pick a woman running mate to fit the narrative. But, no one actually thought he was that smart politically. You knew that's what Bush/Rove would have done, but John McCain, for all his charms, has never displayed real tactical or strategic chops until just recently. Maybe this old dog can learn new tricks.

At any rate, your opponents already obliterated their own argument when they have to say: "Yes, she's a huge change, no, he isn't a candidate of change"

MORE:

A valentine to evangelical base (Joseph Williams, August 30, 2008, Boston Globe)

"She's somebody I've been watching since her name started floating" as a potential vice presidential candidate, said David Domke, a political science professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. "She is wildly popular in Alaska. She's pro-life and conservative. That plays well" with GOP conservatives. "She is a kind of valentine to the evangelical base of the party."

She is opposed to abortion except to save the life of the mother. When she learned that her infant son would be born with Down's Syndrome, she said she never considered ending the pregnancy. When Trig was born in April, she penned a note to loved ones in the voice of "Trig's creator, Your Heavenly Father," rejecting sympathy for her son.

According to an October 2006 profile in the Anchorage Daily News, Palin opposes stem cell research, physician-assisted suicide, and state health benefits for same-sex partners.

Earlier this year, she told the newspaper that schools should not fear teaching creationism alongside evolution. "Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. . . . Healthy debate is so important and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both. And you know, I say this too as a daughter of a science teacher."

McCain choice impacts energy debate (H. JOSEF HEBERT, 8/30/08, AP)

If Democrats hoped to paint Republican John McCain a pawn of Big Oil, their task has become a bit more complicated with the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

While an ardent advocate for more drilling - off Alaska, off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the off-limits Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - Palin also has shown she's not shy about confronting the likes of Exxon Mobil, BP and ConocoPhillips.

As the presidential campaign moves into high gear in the coming weeks, McCain and Democratic nominee Barack Obama will duel over two overriding energy issues: whether to expand offshore oil drilling into areas long off-limits and whether to impose new taxes on the biggest, wealthiest oil companies enjoying tens of billions of dollars in windfall profits.

Palin, a popular governor in a state that for decades has been closely tied to oil, may be a political novice, but she is anything but a newcomer when it comes to these two issues. And her emergence as McCain's No. 2 and possibly the country's next vice president, could shift the campaign's energy debate.

Husband of veep choice is snowmobile racer (RACHEL D'ORO. 8/30/08, Associated Press)

[T]odd Mitchell Palin can claim accomplishments beyond his marriage to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the surprise running mate of Republican presidential hopeful John McCain.

Todd Palin is a veteran oil-field worker and commercial fisherman affectionately dubbed Alaska's "first dude." He's a man who took college courses but does not have a degree, yet can hold his own in sophisticated circles, even hosting a reception for five former Alaska first ladies earlier this month.

A father of five, he's also a four-time winner of the world's longest snowmobile race, billed as the most grueling. It's a sport the 43-year-old lifelong Alaskan is so passionate about that he's continued to compete even after his wife took office in December 2006.

In this year's 2,000-mile Tesoro Iron Dog contest, Palin and racing partner Scott Davis were trying to defend their 2007 championship when Palin broke his arm in a crash. It was 400 miles from the finish line, but he refused to quit, coming in fourth, cheered on by the parka-clad governor waving a checkered flag.

With Pick, McCain Reclaims His Maverick Image (Dan Balz, 8/30/08, Washington Post)

John McCain's advisers predicted weeks ago that the presumptive Republican nominee would use his national convention week to try to recapture his image as a maverick reformer and shake up the presidential race. He did just that Friday with his surprise choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate.

McCain's selection of the nationally untested Palin is the most unlikely choice of a running mate since George H.W. Bush tapped then-Sen. Dan Quayle in 1988, a move as risky as it was bold. The decision brings the senator from Arizona immediate dividends with his base and eventually, perhaps, with swing voters. But it comes at potentially significant cost to his effort to discredit Democratic nominee Barack Obama as unprepared for the presidency.

The choice of Palin, the first woman named to a Republican presidential ticket, adds another chapter to a campaign that, mostly on the Democratic side, has been about breaking down racial and gender barriers in America. McCain's hope is that, with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) now on the sidelines, Palin can help close a sizable gap with Obama among female voters that threatens to block his path to the White House.

We don't get it: what has Obama ever governed? Or Biden? (Or Maverick for that matter?) In what sense is she not the most experienced of the 4?
A Tenacious Reformer's Swift Rise (Amy Goldstein and Michael D. Shear, 8/30/08, Washington Post)

A decade later, the nickname resurfaced when she was a 28-year-old political novice on the Wasilla City Council. She turned on a veteran council member who had coaxed her to run for office, blocking a bill that would have steered business to his garbage-hauling firm.

The moniker was revived once again in 2003, when Alaska's governor, whom she would later unseat, appointed her to a state oil-and-gas commission. As a brand-new member, she challenged the ethics of the panel's leader, the chairman of state's Republican Party, forcing him ultimately to resign.

Since long before she became Alaska's youngest -- and first female -- governor 20 months ago, Sarah Louise Heath Palin has been making her mark as an unlikely upstart. Yesterday, she did it again, accepting Sen. John McCain's surprise offer to be his running mate.

Palin, a 44-year-old mother of five who hunts caribou and was once a beauty queen, rose to the statehouse by challenging the corruption that has become endemic in Alaska, even if it meant taking on the Republican establishment there, including the former governor and the state's congressional delegation.

Although her résumé does not fit the mold of most vice presidential nominees, her acts of dissidence appear to have endeared her to McCain, who regards himself as an independent-minded Republican. Her evangelical Christian faith -- she believes in creationism and is adamantly opposed to abortion -- may help him court skeptical social conservatives. And the fact that her eldest son joined the Army and is leaving soon for Iraq reinforces McCain's own military heroism.

McCain's VP choice reassures evangelicals (ERIC GORSKI, 8/30/08, AP)

John McCain's running mate was raised in a Pentecostal church, has called herself "as pro-life as any candidate can be" and already has energized conservative religious leaders who worried the Arizona senator would choose an abortion rights supporter.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is "straight out of veep central casting," said Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religion Liberties Commission. Land said he urged the McCain camp to consider the political unknown.

Gary Bauer, one of McCain's most enthusiastic evangelical supporters, called it a "grand slam home run" that is "guaranteed to energize values voters." [...]

Not only does Palin oppose abortion as a matter of policy, but she chose to give birth to her youngest child, a son, after a prenatal exam indicated Down syndrome. Studies show that about nine in 10 pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.

"That will resonate in a big way," said Quin Monson, a Brigham Young University professor who studies religion and politics.

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, who initially said he could not vote for McCain but has since opened the door to an endorsement, called Palin "an outstanding choice that should be extremely reassuring to the conservative base" of the GOP. Dobson added that the ticket "gives us confidence he will keep his pledges to voters regarding the kinds of justices he would nominate to the Supreme Court."

"It's an absolutely brilliant choice," said Mathew Staver, dean of Liberty University School of Law. "This will absolutely energize McCain's campaign and energize conservatives."

Social conservative is beloved in Alaska (STEVE QUINN AND CALVIN WOODWARD, 8/30/08, Miami Herald)

She brings a strong anti-abortion stance to the ticket and opposes gay marriage -- constitutionally banned in Alaska before her time -- but exercised a veto that essentially granted benefits to gay state employees and their partners.

''She stands up for what's right, and she doesn't let anyone tell her to sit down.'' McCain said in introducing her to an Ohio rally. ``She's exactly who I need.''

Said Palin: ``I didn't get into government to do the safe and easy things. A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not why the ship is built.''

Whereas the Unicorn Rider's entire acceptance speech was a plea to return the American ship of state to harbor and mothball it.
Palin No Pushover on Pipeline Project: The Alaska governor and McCain running mate championed a natural gas pipeline deal that replaced a proposal she had called a giveaway to Big Oil (Christopher Palmeri, 8/30/08, Business Week)

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USEFUL IDIOTS (via Greg Hlatky):

An American adventurer's death in El Salvador: Joe Sanderson traveled the world for years until his death amid leftist rebels fighting El Salvador's U.S.-backed military regime. More than 25 years later, a diary he kept reveals details about his life. (Héctor Tobar, 8/23/08, Los Angeles Times)

Joe Sanderson is one of two Americans known to have fought and died with the guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the leftist rebels whose war against El Salvador's U.S.-backed military junta was one of the last conflicts of the Cold War. [...]

He had joined an army made up mostly of peasants, college students and union activists -- along with a smattering of foreigners recruited by the international solidarity movement that supported the rebels' cause against a military government associated with right-wing death squads.

"It seems strange to call the M-1 I'm using La Virgencita [the Little Virgin]," Sanderson wrote in his diary after a crazed firefight in which he and enemy soldiers shouted insults at each other in Spanish. "Polished stock, definitely a beauty . . . at least as guns go."

Sanderson's nom de guerre among his companions was "Lucas." He often worked alongside Carlos Consalvi, alias "Santiago," a Venezuelan-born activist who ran the rebels' clandestine radio station, Radio Venceremos. Consalvi rescued the diary and has it in the collection of the San Salvador museum he founded to preserve the rebels' history.

"Lucas was a good friend, a person who lifted our spirits with his optimism," Consalvi said recently. "The American government spent millions of dollars fighting us. But we had one American on our side." [...]

"He was the intellectual and idealist in the family, and was more like my father," said Steve, now 68. "I was the more practical and conservative one and more like our mother."

Steve graduated from college and became an accountant, like his mother, Virginia Coleman. Joe studied theology at Hanover College in Indiana, but dropped out his senior year. Then he hit the road.

In the years that followed, Joe filled Urbana mailboxes with postcards and envelopes emblazoned with colorful stamps: a gray parrot from Nigeria, a zooming jet from the Republiek van Suid-Afrika, a mosque from Jordan.

Steve says the arrival of a letter from Joe was an occasion usually celebrated with a family dinner. "My mother would call and say, 'Come on over, we got a letter from Joe.' "

After the meal, the family would listen to Coleman read Joe's letters. His words brought exotic locales into their living room: the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the dun plains of Iraq, the waters of Lake Victoria in Uganda.

In 1969, Joe reached Nigeria, then in the midst of civil war. He got a job administering vaccines to babies in refugee camps. The job was grim, but Sanderson's letters home described his duties and the war with his usual sardonic humor. "The Red Cross," he wrote in one, "is desperate for workers to hit the bush and drink gin, contract malaria and get shot at for breakfast."

He also journeyed to the 38th Parallel separating the Koreas, founded a "hippie hospital" in the Bolivian mountain town of Sorata and posed as a journalist covering the Vietnam War.

When he returned home to the U.S. periodically, he painted flagpoles and church steeples -- the hazardous work allowed him to raise cash for his travels.

His mother tried to get him to settle down and pursue a career.

"When your kid is 19 and he's a wandering hippie, that's OK," Steve said. "But when your kid is 30, or 40, and he's still a wandering hippie, you realize that's what he's going to be." [...]

At 5-foot-11, with blue eyes and sandy hair, he stood out. In an army made up mostly of teenagers and 20-year-olds, he was a wise viejo, or old man.

Veterans of his rebel column still recount stories of his wartime deeds. They remember him as a "metaphysical" philosopher and raconteur who loved the works of Ernest Hemingway.

"He'd wear jeans and a beige shirt, and a red bandanna . . . but never a uniform, because he wasn't a military-type guy," said "Eduardo," a Mexico City surgeon who staffed a rebel hospital and asked that his real name not be printed. The two men talked for hours about religion and flying.

Several of the skills Sanderson had mastered as an Illinois youth turned out to be quite handy to the guerrillas.

"I always wanted Lucas next to me, because he was an excellent shot," said Jose Ismael Romero, then a 25-year-old rebel leader known as "Comandante Bracamontes."

Once, Sanderson challenged the comandante to a shooting contest -- and won.

Unbeknownst to his comrades, Sanderson had taken and passed a National Rifle Assn. marksmanship test in Illinois. Jorge Melendez, a.k.a. "Comandante Jonas," a rebel commander Joe refers to as "the Whale" in his diary, remembers a long discussion with Sanderson over the rebels' poor shooting skills.

"Look, hombre," he remembers Sanderson telling him. "The M-16 is a good weapon, a very versatile weapon. The problem is that the comrades don't know how to use the M-16. You have to teach them how to use it properly."

So, our local rag reran this one, and we were wondering who would find it cute that this guy fought with communist terrorists, when Mr. Hlatky sent this one, The expatriate: Around the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, a small crowd of foreign sympathisers came to help build the Maoist dream. Sixty years later, one of them is still there. Michael Donohue, 8/14/08, The National)

Almost six decades later, Shapiro is still here – a robust 92-year-old Chinese citizen with white hair, a strong handshake, and an exceptionally well-preserved Brooklyn accent. Part of a wave of westerners who settled in Beijing in the early Mao years to sign up for the “socialist experiment,” Shapiro is one of a tiny few who lasted long enough to experience the entire, ongoing era of Communist rule – and to see China stage an Olympic opening ceremony last Friday night that gave almost no acknowledgement to Mao’s legacy.

Shapiro has spent much of his life trying to explain his adopted home to the West, first by translating Chinese literature into English, then by writing books of his own. In 1963, he traded his US passport for a Chinese one. Twenty years later he became a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a prestigious body that makes recommendations to the Party leadership. He is not the only foreign-born member of the CPPCC, but he is the only one to have had a bar mitzvah (which took place when Calvin Coolidge was the American president).

On a Friday afternoon earlier this summer, Shapiro sat at a small table in his modest, neatly kept bungalow a minute’s walk from Qianhai Lake – in one of the oldest and best-preserved neighborhoods in Beijing – and talked about his past. [...]

A couple of hundred other foreigners shared Shapiro’s sentiments. Some had fought for the Communists in Spain. A few were fleeing the Red Scare in the United States. Several had already spent years in China, hoping for revolution. In the 1950s they united behind the Maoist task of ending selfishness, eliminating class difference and eradicating bourgeois ideology from the world.

China gave them official “foreign expert” status and a comfortable place to live, usually in the Friendship Hotel on the outskirts of Beijing. [...]

“Certainly some good came of the ‘cultural revolution.’ The turmoil bubbled a lot of scum to the surface – class enemies, sycophants, opportunists, cowards. At the same time the honest, the courageous, the dedicated showed their colours in overwhelming numbers. For millions of young people who never experienced exploitation in the old society, it proved graphically what class struggle was all about.”

How quaint....

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THE NAME IS SCARY:

Lion's Head Stew (Miami Herald, 8/29/08)

• 2 teaspoons minced ginger

• teaspoon sugar

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 1 tablespoon cornstarch

• ¾ teaspoon soy sauce

• 1 teaspoon dry sherry

• 1 tablespoon egg white

• ½ teaspoon sesame oil

• 10 ounces ground turkey

• 2 green onions, minced, white and light green portion only

• Cornstarch for coating meatballs

• Canola oil or vegetable oil for frying

• 1 teaspoon cornstarch

• 1 teaspoon soy sauce

• 1 teaspoon water

• 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

• 12 ounces baby bok choy, halved lengthwise, thoroughly washed, drained well; see cook's notes

• 3 cups chicken broth

• Optional for serving: cooked rice

In medium-large bowl, combine first 8 ingredients, stir to combine. Add turkey and green onions. Gently mix with clean hands. Gently form into 1 ¼-inch balls (mixture will be loose); you will have about 8 meatballs.

In large, deep skillet, heat 1-inch oil on medium-high heat. Roll meatballs in cornstarch, lightly coating entire surface. Brown meatballs on all sides. They should be very well browned and a little crusty. Drain on paper towels.

In small bowl, combine 1 teaspoon cornstarch, 1 teaspoon soy sauce and 1 teaspoon water; set aside.

In wok or large deep skillet, heat 2 tablespoons oil on high heat. Add 1 tablespoon minced ginger and bok choy; stir-fry for about 30 seconds. Cautiously add broth. Bring to simmer. Add meatballs and lower heat to medium; gently simmer about 10 to 12 minutes. Stir in reserved cornstarch mixture and simmer until mixture thickens ever so slightly. If serving with rice, put a small scoop of cooked rice in the bottom of 4 bowls. Divide meatballs between the bowls and top with soup and vegetables.

Finally got to see Jar City and at one point Erlender picks up a sheep's head on the way home which he proceeds to eat in one of the more disturbing scenes ever committed to celluloid.

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OBAMA '08, CHANGE HUBERT HUMPHREY BELIEVED IN!:

Obama The Orthodox (Michael Gerson, August 30, 2008, Washington Post)

In substance, Barack Obama's convention speech could easily have been given by Al Gore or John Kerry -- and, in various forms, was given by Kerry and Gore. It was all in there: the lunchbox economic populism -- based on the assumption that most Americans are filling their lunchboxes with scraps from Dumpsters. The attacks on corporations, millionaires and other sinister job creators. The touching faith in the power of diplomacy.

This is not to say that these themes are ineffective -- both Gore and Kerry almost became president with them. And these nominees did not possess even half of Obama's political skills.

In tone, Obama's big speech was small, partisan, often defensive and occasionally snide. "I've got news for you, John McCain," he exclaimed. "We all put our country first." It was a pattern for the night: I'm not weak -- you are the one who hasn't killed bin Laden with your bare hands. I'm not inexperienced -- you are the one who is old and out of touch. None of this assault was made with grace or wit.

And some of the attacks were simply unfair. Is it really credible to blame McCain for a tripling of oil imports during his time as senator? What does it mean that McCain "won't even follow [bin Laden] to the cave where he lives" -- that McCain is cowardly? that he knows where bin Laden hides, and won't tell the rest of us? that he doesn't believe in fighting al-Qaeda?

In craft, Obama's speech was aggressively unexceptional, as if he set out to be unmemorable.

The Obama campaign has become so reactionary that in order to dodge the celebrity appellation he went for boring.

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Testa's Italian Gazpacho Soup (Miami Herald, 8/29/08)

• ¼ cup olive oil

• ¼ cup lemon juice

• 1 (10-ounce) can beef broth

• 1 (46-ounce) can tomato juice

• ¾ of a medium onion, finely chopped

• 6 ripe medium tomatoes, finely diced

• 3 celery ribs, finely diced

• 1 (14-ounce) can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed

• 1 (14-ounce) can white beans, drained and rinsed

• 4 ounces (raw weight) orzo pasta, cooked and drained

• 1 tablespoon minced fresh oregano

• 1 tablespoon minced fresh basil

• 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce

• 1 tablespoon salt

• 1 teaspoon pepper

• Garlic to taste

Combine all ingredients in a large glass bowl. Cover and refrigerate overnight before serving.

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ULTIMATE MICROWAVE OATMEAL (Miami Herald, 8/29/08)

• 1/3 cup old-fashioned uncooked oats

• ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 1 tablespoon light brown sugar, honey or maple syrup

• 2 tablespoons raisins

• 1 tablespoon toasted, chopped walnuts (optional)

Place the oats and 2/3 cup water in a microwave-safe cereal bowl that has a capacity of at least 2 cups. Microwave, uncovered, on high, until the oatmeal is thick and almost all of the water is absorbed, 1 ½ to 2 ½ minutes depending on the power of your microwave. Remove the bowl and stir in the cinnamon. Let the oatmeal stand until all the water is absorbed, 30 seconds to 1 minute.

Sprinkle the brown sugar, raisins and walnuts evenly over the oatmeal.

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YOU KNOW YOU'VE BIFFED WHEN THE CANDIDATE HAS TO DO THE DAMAGE CONTROL HIMSELF:

Obama Distances Self From Campaign Spox Attack on Palin (Jake Tapper, August 29, 2008, ABC News: Political Punch)

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was just now asked about the conflicting statements from his campaign on Sen. John McCain's, R-Ariz., pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate -- first, an attack by a spokesman, then a congratulatory statement by Obama and running mate Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

"I think that, you know, campaigns start getting these hair triggers," Obama said at Pennsylvania Biodiesel Inc. in Monaca, Pa.

Obama Campaign Attacks, And Backtracks, on Palin (Elizabeth Holmes, 8/29/08, WSJ: Washington Wire)

Even before John McCain and Sarah Palin took the stage to make the Republican presidential ticket official, Barack Obama’s campaign slammed the choice of the young Alaska governor.

“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” Bill Burton, Obama campaign spokesman said in a statement that hit reporters inboxes at 11:47 a.m. EDT. [...]

[T]he damage was done. The McCain campaign was taken aback by the punch thrown by Obama’s staff. The night before McCain aired an ad congratulating Obama on becoming his party’s nominee. “It is pretty audacious for the Obama campaign to say that Governor Palin is not qualified to be vice president,” said McCain Communications Director Jill Hazelbaker. “She has a record of accomplishment that Senator Obama simply cannot match….Senator Obama has spent his time in office running for President.”

The Democrats spent the rest of the day dialing back and offering kind words instead of criticism.

The Palin Gamble (Tim Fernholz | August 29, 2008, American Prospect)

John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin is a gimmick, a desperation pick. It's a last-ditch attempt for McCain to be a maverick again and recapture his reformist credentials. Despite her image, Palin has ethics problems of her own, and she and McCain share George W. Bush's conservative politics. Worst of all, though, her lack of experience raises serious concerns about her basic fitness for office, and McCain's willingness to put his campaign before the good of the country.

Palin does bring a few advantages to McCain's campaign. She reinforces McCain's standing with his conservative base.

All they left out is that she's an uppity bitch who doesn't know her place and only the Stupids would vote for a young woman governor.

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TO GET SOME SENSE OF HOW BADLY THIS DISCOMBOBULATED THE DEMOCRATS...:

The Palin Stunner (Chris Cillizza, 8/29/08, washingtonpost.com)

John McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his vice presidential running mate is a stunning surprise almost certain to recalibrate the race heading into the fall election.

The McCain campaign had make little secret of the fact that they wanted to pick a woman as the Arizona senator's running mate, believing that the rift caused by the protracted primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton gave them an opportunity to pick up scads of disgruntled women. [...]

In choosing Palin, McCain also doubles down on the maverick argument; Palin is the face of reform in the Republican party nationally and is clearly not of Washington -- a key element of her biography given how negative voter sentiment toward the nation's capital is currently.

Palin is also strongly pro-life and well liked by conservatives of all stripes, and her selection will be greeted with a huge sign of relief among those within the Republican base who feared that McCain might pick a pro-choice candidate like Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) or former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge.

...consider that their lines of attack thus far are that the Governor is unqualified, which not only undercuts their own ticket but is sure to infuriate women and that the choice of Ms Palin represents a pander to the Right, which undercuts decades of Leftwing rigamarole about how conservatives hate women.

Her first appearance with Maverick had two especially impressive features: first her nods to Democrats like John Glenn and Geraldine Ferraro; and, second, her refutation of the Unicorn Rider's reactionary acceptance speech when she said a ship in harbor is safe, but that's not the purpose for which it was built.

Moreover, while Senator Obama talks about change but dodges townhalls, picks a Washington insider as his vp, and gives George McGovern's acceptance speech, Maverick comes out of the blocks with a woman vp from as far outside the Beltway as you can get.

MORE:
-Stand By Your Woman (Karlyn Bowman 08.29.08, Forbes)

First, John McCain has changed the political conversation. If commentators waxed ecstatic about Obama last night, they will have to move on now. The Obama convention story is yesterday's news. A fresh face like Palin's and a photogenic family will dominate the headlines this weekend as the news coverage moves to Minneapolis.

And those headlines will generate GOP enthusiasm, a second factor that will be important in the fall. All spring and summer, the Democrats have been more enthusiastic about their nominee than the Republicans about theirs. Their excitement was palpable in Denver. The Palin pick will revive the Republicans and rally the conservative base that's been lukewarm about the top of the ticket. Republicans have a reason to be motivated, and they will go into their convention and into the election with a new energy.

In mid-August, Gallup looked at the gender gap among whites and found that McCain had a 20-point lead among non-Hispanic white men, but tied Obama among white females. A woman on the Republican ticket could move some women into the Republican column.

Third, the biography is boffo in political terms. Not only hers, but her husband's. Palin is a young governor with five children, one of whom is serving in the military. She is married to her high school sweetheart. She coached the basketball team. She comes across as one of us. Her husband is a card-carrying union member and outdoorsman.

Palin tough target for Obama to hit (Lisa Lerer and Tim Grieve, August 29, 2008, Politico)

John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate presents the Obama-Biden campaign with an unwelcome and unexpected challenge: How do you go after a 44-year-old mother of five without once alienating the female voters you’ve just spent the last week trying to win back?

The answer so far: Not very well.

Minutes after the McCain campaign confirmed that Palin would be the Republican’s VP pick, Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the Alasaka governor as a lightweight.

McCain, he said, had put "the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency."

Almost immediately, the campaign seemed to reconsider its tough-guy approach.

Conservative Activists Praise Palin as McCain’s VP Pick (Susan Davis, 8/29/08, WSJ: Washington Wire)

John McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate was praised by social and fiscal conservative activists today as a vice presidential candidate that will energize the conservative base, and perhaps appeal to Hillary Clinton supporters who have not warmed to Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

“This is the strongest pro-life team with the strongest pro-life platform in the history of the Republican Party,” said Ken Blackwell, chairman of the Coalition for a Conservative Majority. Palin, 44 years old, gave birth to a son in April with Down Syndrome, a factor that abortion opponents said gives her credibility and contrasts her against Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden who supports abortion rights. Both candidates are Catholic.

Palin, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, is also popular among gun rights activists. Sandra Froman, who sits on the NRA Board of Directors, touted Palin as an “outstanding” selection and that gun rights activists would be “energized” with her on the ticket. McCain has a mixed record with the NRA, having supported policies they oppose, such as closing the so-called gun show loophole.

Transcript: TIME's interview with Sarah Palin (Jay Newton-Small, 8/29/08, TIME)

Time's Jay Newton Small interviewed Alaska Governor Sarah Palin by phone on Aug. 14, less than two weeks before her surprise selection as John McCain's running mate. [...]

What, on a real practical level here, the GOP has got to do, though, between now and the election, is to convince Americans that it is our energy policy that is best for our nation and the nation's future, that if we are to become energy independent and if we are to become a more secure nation then we had better start supplying our very, very hungry markets across the nation with American supplies of energy. And up here in Alaska we're sitting on billions of barrels of oil. We're sitting on hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas onshore and offshore. And it seems to be only the Republicans who understand that companies should be competing for the right to tap those resources, and get that energy source flowing into these hungry markets so that we will be less reliant on foreign sources of energy. In a volatile world, relying on foreign regimes that are not friendly to Americans, asking them to ramp up resource production for our benefit, that's nonsensical.

The GOP agenda to ramp up domestic supplies of energy is the only way that we are going to become energy independent, the only way that we are going to become a more secure nation. And I say this, of course, knowing the situation we are in right now — at war, not knowing what the plan is to ever end the war we are engaged in, understanding that Americans are seeking solutions and are seeking resolution in this war effort. So energy supplies and being able to produce and supply domestically is going to be a big part of that. And the GOP agenda is the right agenda in that respect, but the GOP is going to have to prove to Americans in following weeks that we can safely, responsibly and ethically develop these resources. That, of course, has been a problem for the GOP. And a problem up here in Alaska. We have state lawmakers serving time in prison right now... other lawmakers whom the FBI is probing right now... because they have been found, some, to be corrupt in oil and gas issues, having taken bribes. That does not bode well for the GOP. And that's gotta change.

What has been your crowning achievement in office so far?

We have protected our state sovereignty by taking on the big oil industry interests, making sure that there is not going to be any undue influence on the oil industry, that our state administration and our state lawmakers will be making the decisions we will be making... based on sound, solid, unbiased information, not being corrupted by, in the case that I'm speaking of now,[an] oil service company's undue influence that has corrupted some lawmakers. We have set in place ethics laws, overseeing agencies and offices to make sure that never happens again in Alaska. So that's something we're very proud of. And we have allowed measures to be put in place now where we can prove very, very sound and strict oversight of oil and gas development so that we can prove to the rest of the nation that we are ready, willing and we are able to safely develop our resources. So that Alaska can be contributers, we can be producers, so we don't have to be takers from federal government. but can be supplying the rest of the U.S. with American resources finally.

Gov. Sarah Palin: Midnight runs and caribou dinners: Coming Saturday Sept. 6 in the debut issue of WSJ. Magazine, a conversation with Gov. Sarah Palin about her unusual workout and fitness routine. Preview excerpt (JEN MURPHY, August 29, 2008 , WSJ Magazine)

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BE VEWY, VEWY QUIET, HE'S HUNTING PUMAs:

McCain Chooses Palin as Running Mate (MICHAEL COOPER and MITCHELL L. BLUMENTHAL, 8/30/08, NY Times)

In a surprise move, Senator John McCain announced here Friday that he had chosen Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, shaking up the political world at a time when his campaign has been trying to attract women, especially disaffected supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I’m very happy today to spend my birthday with you, and to make a historic announcement in Dayton,” said Mr. McCain, who turned 72 on Friday, explaining that he had been looking for the running mate who can “best help me shake up Washington.”

In choosing Ms. Palin — a 44-year-old social conservative and mother of five who has been governor for less than two years — the McCain campaign reached far outside the Washington Beltway during an election in which the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack http://www.brothersjuddblog.com/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id=1#Obama, is running on a platform of change.

If he learns nothing else from W, let's hope it's this: always throw the deep ball.

This isn't just a great call in terms of the appeal to disaffected women voters and the pro-life movement but the contrast to Joe Biden at the VP debate will be devastating. The contrast of the cool young executive to the hot-headed Beltway hack is delicious.

Democrats appear to have settled on two lines of attack: (1) she's too inexperienced--that'll go over well with women who were told experience didn't matter when it was Obama vs. Hillary; and (2) she's not well known--based on the mistaken belief that because everyone inside the Beltway knew Joe Biden he was a national figure.

MORE:
And Along Came Palin (David N. Bass, 8/29/2008, American Spectator)

[W]hile media pundits write the evangelical movement's obituary, political reality shows that the Christian right is far from dead, and that social issues are and will remain a major component of conservative governance.

The proof: John McCain's announcement on Friday that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will be his running mate. The news came after weeks of GOP insiders floating names like Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge as potentials to fill out the ticket. Instead of these pro-abortion alternatives, McCain picked a reliable pro-lifer.

It was a calculated blow against Obama, who has been courting evangelicals for months in hopes of carving off a few votes for himself. The Christian right, in general, hasn't trusted McCain. The choice of Palin assuages some of that concern. It also might pry away some disgruntled women who had supported Hillary — an unmistakable jab on McCain's part considering Obama has been vying to swipe a few evangelical voters.

Some will argue that Palin's pro-life views don't matter because, if elected, her post as vice president would have little policy-making power. That would be true with an ordinary candidate on the ticket's top slot, but the likelihood of McCain seeking a second term at the age of 76 is slight. If McCain wins, his veep pick would be the presumptive Republican nominee in 2012 and the standard-bearer for the party.

The choice of Palin is also evidence that McCain needs to give more than lip service to evangelical voters. That's smart, because, effectively mobilized, they have the power to give him the presidency. And the reality is that social issues are high on the hierarchy of importance for a good portion of the American electorate.

The headlines over the last two weeks prove it. Even leading up to the Democrat's convention, the Obama campaign had to play defense on the issue evangelicals care about most, and one of the defining social issues of our time: abortion.

Obama's bungling of the question of when human life begins at Rick Warren's forum on August 16 was the start.

-Sarah Palin a risky VP choice for John McCain: She should appeal to conservatives and to women. But she's light on experience - the same criticism McCain has leveled at Barack Obama. And her unfamiliarity could haunt the GOP campaign. (Michael Finnegan, 8/29/08, Los Angeles Times)

John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate poses high risks for the Republican presidential hopeful.

She carries potential to strengthen his tepid support among conservatives. Republicans hope that Palin might also help McCain broaden his appeal to women, including a portion of those who voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But McCain's gamble on Palin threatens to undercut one of his key arguments against Obama, namely that the first-term senator from Illinois is too inexperienced to be commander in chief. Palin has been governor of Alaska, one of the nation's least populated states, for less than two years. Before that, she was mayor of Wasilla, a town with fewer than 9,000 residents.

Here's the revealing thing: if he picked her when she was mayor she'd still have had more executive experience than the entire Democrat ticket.

MORE/MORE:
How Palin Came to the Top of the List (Jan Crawford Greenburg, 8/29/08, ABC News: Political Radar)

It wasn't until Sunday night that John McCain, after meeting with his four top advisers, finally decided he could not tap independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to be his running mate. One adviser, tasked with taking the temperature of the conservative base, had strongly made the case to McCain that it would be a disaster for the party and that the base would revolt. McCain concluded he could not go that route.

The next day, McCain studied the three men at the top of his shortlist: Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge. All had different strengths and negatives, but McCain was not satisfied. None of them had what McCain believed he needed to do -- and would have done -- with Lieberman.

McCain wanted to shake up the ticket.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's name was in the mix as an unconventional choice for months, but she had not been considered a front-runner. So, over the next few days, with McCain continuing to believe he needed someone who had more of a maverick streak than his other choices, lawyers reviewed her vetting information. They kept their activities from even some in McCain's most senior inner circle.

The story behind the Palin surprise (JONATHAN MARTIN | 8/29/08, Politico)

John McCain today announced a running mate whom he met only six months ago and whom he spoke with just once on the phone about the position before offering it in person earlier this week.

McCain’s first encounter with Sarah Palin came at a Washington meeting of the National Governors Association in February, according to a campaign-provided reconstruction of how the little-known Alaska governor was thrust into the national spotlight. The two discussed the position by phone on Sunday before McCain invited her and her husband to Arizona to formally make the offer. McCain, joined by his wife, Cindy, did just that yesterday morning at their home near Sedona, Ariz.

By picking somebody he and most Americans barely know — an out-of-the-blue decision that sent shock waves of disbelief through the political world and still has jaws agape — McCain has taken a considerable gamble. [...]

Palin, say some GOP strategists, brings considerable strengths to the ticket: She’s from just about as far from the Beltway as possible, ran and won as a reformer in a state that was aching for one, is acceptable to the party’s right wing, and has a fascinating-yet-familiar life story of success and achievement that embodies the American Dream.

“It reinforces in real time McCain’s greatest brand: reform,” said Mary Matalin. “And it epitomizes ‘shares your values.’”

“I feel a tingle up my spine,” she crowed, praising the McCain campaign’s secret-keeping and boffo execution here today.

And then there are Palin’s two most visible traits.

“We’re a party that desperately needs women and desperately needs young people,” noted Ed Rollins, a longtime Republican consultant. And the 44-year-old Palin brings both of those qualities.

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CAN I GET A WITNESS!?!....WHAT? NO?:

Of him, America knows so little (CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, August 29, 2008, THE WASHINGTON POST)

Barack Obama is an immensely talented man whose talents have been largely devoted to crafting, and chronicling, his own life. Not things. Not ideas. Not institutions. But himself.

Nothing wrong or even terribly odd about that, except that he is laying claim to the job of crafting the coming history of the United States. A leap of such audacity is odd. The air of unease at the Democratic convention this week was not just a result of the Clinton psychodrama. The deeper anxiety was that the party was nominating a man of many gifts but precious few accomplishments – bearing even fewer witnesses.

It's odd how much this moment resembles the end of The Candidate. Except that I caddied for Don Porter and he was a cheap [#@%&*], whereas Ms Clinton seems a nice enough lady.

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PALIN BY COMPARISON

McCain picks Alaska Gov. Palin as running mate (August 29, 2008 | CNN)

Press release

Via The Mother Judd: John McCain, here is your vice president (May 21, 2008 | Nat Hentoff | Jewish World Review )

Sarah Palin - Wikipedia

Comment away!

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YOU KNOW HE'S A SAFE PICK WHEN THAT'S THE BEST THEY CAN DO:

Obama Camp on Pawlenty: Bring It On (ABC News: Political Radar, August 28, 2008)

The Obama campaign signaled a willingness on Thursday to go after Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, R-Minn., for the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse...

Faulty Design Led to Minnesota Bridge Collapse, Inquiry Finds (MATTHEW L. WALD, 1/28/08, NY Times)

Investigators said Monday that the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, which collapsed into the Mississippi River on Aug. 1, killing 13, came down because of a flaw in its design.

The designers had specified a metal plate that was too thin to serve as a junction of several girders, investigators say.

The bridge was designed in the 1960s and lasted 40 years. But like most other bridges, it gradually gained weight during that period, as workers installed concrete structures to separate eastbound and westbound lanes and made other changes, adding strain to the weak spot. At the time of the collapse, crews had brought tons of equipment and material onto the deck for a repair job. [...]

“This is not a bridge-inspection thing,” said one investigator, “It’s calculating loads and looking at designs.” The investigator spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the investigators’ findings before the announcement Tuesday.

MORE:
-Minnesota: Governor: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) (Almanac of American Politics)
-Extreme Makeover: Tim Pawlenty's proletarian chic. (Noam Scheiber, June 25, 2008, The New Republic)

As it happens, it was Pawlenty--the son of a truck driver from the blue-collar enclave of South St. Paul--who first coined the Sam's Club phrase back in 2001. At the time, Pawlenty found himself in a fight for the gubernatorial nomination with a millionaire political novice named Brian Sullivan. Sullivan had spent a minor fortune touting himself as the embodiment of conservative purity. Pawlenty's response was to paint Sullivan as an economic elitist. He wondered if Sullivan might reinforce "the stereotype of the Republican Party ... that we're all a bunch of wealthy snobs" and urged the party to reach out to member's of "Sam's Club, not just the country club." That Pawlenty not only won the nomination, but went on to win two terms as governor of a Democratic state, has, not surprisingly, turned heads in Washington. Even Ted Kennedy has pronounced him "one of the most persuasive Republicans I've ever heard."

-Tooting the Horn of Pawlenty: Meet the first Sam's Club Republican. (Matthew Continetti, 05/07/2007, Weekly Standard)

It was back in 2002 that Pawlenty first said the GOP needed "to be the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club." Back then his embrace of his state and regional populist tradition was a curiosity, a political epiphenomenon lost in a national sea of regnant Bush Republicanism. Today Bush Republicanism is on its way out. The most successful GOP governors--Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, Rick Perry in Texas, Charlie Crist in Florida, and former governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts--like their conservatism à la carte. They emphasize certain conservative policies--low taxes most of all--but dismiss others. Meanwhile, in Washington policy circles, wonks and flacks are busy sketching out an alternative Republican agenda that combines social conservatism with an active government tailoring economic policies to help working families. Pawlenty's slogan--"The party of Sam's Club"--is the working title on a forthcoming book from Doubleday by WEEKLY STANDARD contributors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam.

Behind all this new thinking lies a political reality. Independents are moving rapidly away from the Republican party. According to the National Exit Poll, Republicans lost independent voters by a staggering 18 points in 2006. A recent Pew survey reveals Democrats have a 15-point advantage over Republicans when voters are asked the party with which they identify.

Nowhere is the Democratic advantage more clear than with voters 18 to 29 years old. Voting patterns among this cohort shape the political environment for years to come. In the 1984 presidential election, 18- to 29-year-olds voted 40 percent Democratic and 59 percent Republican. In the 1986 congressional election, 18- to 29-year-olds were pretty much split down the middle, voting 51 percent Democratic and 49 percent Republican. One could argue such voting patterns helped set the stage for conservative governance.

After more than a decade of mirroring general electoral trends, however, the youth vote has veered left. In 2004, 18- to 29-year-olds went Democratic 54 percent to 45 percent. In the 2006 congressional elections, these voters went Democratic 60 percent to 38 percent, making them one of the most Democratic groups in the country--voting for the donkey at about the same levels as union members. If this youthful cohort continues to vote in similar ways as it grows older, the GOP is in serious trouble.

It is out of such a climate that politicians like Tim Pawlenty emerge.

At first the South St. Paul native wanted to be a dentist. He would be walking down the street and see the local teeth-cleaner--Dr. Vogel--driving his Buick Riviera, parking it in a reserved spot, and would think, Wow! This is awesome. To practice dentistry--to make money as a professional--was to enhance one's status. It was also a way to transcend difficult circumstances. Pawlenty's mother died when he was 16. His father was a truck driver who lost his job not long after her passing. Pawlenty was his family's first college graduate. He went to the University of Minnesota.

"I went to college pre-dentistry and got into organic and inorganic chemistry," he says. "And back then you had to get pretty close to a straight-A average to get into dental school, and I think I got a B- or something in either organic or inorganic chemistry, and I was discouraged and going through--you know--pretty much soul-searching as a 19- or 20-year-old kid, and I went to see a career counselor at the U--who happened to be some graduate student who I'm sure they gave a stipend to be a career counselor in their free time--and it was, you know, this zen-like thing in his office, and he said, 'What do you love to do, you know? What's your passion? What do you like to do, what books do you read on vacation?'

" . . . Long story short, I just told him I like current events, I like history, public policy. And he said, 'Well, go into something you love and do well, and whatever you love is what you'll do well in.' So that propelled me to go start taking some political science classes."

Pawlenty worked with the College Republicans and switched his major to political science. It wasn't long before he realized he probably wouldn't be able to find a job with a bachelor's in poli-sci: Holy cow, I'm going to be unemployed! I'm going to be selling hot dogs on a street corner over here if I don't get a graduate degree. So he went to law school--"Not because I had some innate love of the law. . . . I wanted to get a degree and wanted to get a job." He interned with a local state senator, practiced law, and was elected to the state house in 1992.

It's impossible to review Pawlenty's career in politics without mentioning Republican Norm Coleman, now the senior senator from Minnesota. Time after time Coleman's political decisions directly affected Pawlenty's electoral fortunes. "Norm Coleman is a very gifted senator and wonderful senator and a friend, he was a pretty well-known Minnesota political figure because he had been [the Democratic] mayor of St. Paul, dynamic, well-connected, well-financed," Pawlenty says. It all started when Pawlenty wanted to run for governor in 1998 but the decks were cleared for Mayor Coleman, who had switched parties and had an institutional advantage. Pawlenty deferred to Coleman, who went on to lose to Reform party candidate Jesse "The Body/The Mind" Ventura in a close race.

In 1999 Pawlenty was elected majority leader of the Minnesota House of Representatives. The Republicans had a one-vote majority, the Democrats held the senate, and Ventura was governor. Pawlenty was young and untested. "His colleagues saw something in him," says Minneapolis attorney Scott Johnson, one of the Powerline bloggers. "Tim held that majority together, which is so hard to do."

Johnson recalls meeting Pawlenty in 2000, at a lunch with some Republican lawyer friends. "I couldn't believe what a talented guy he was," Johnson says. "There's nobody he can't talk to. He's impossible to dislike. And that's such a rare commodity on the Republican side."

Pawlenty was thinking of running for the U.S. Senate against Democrat Paul Wellstone, who was up for reelection in 2002. Coleman was planning to run for governor once again. But the White House thought Coleman would be a stronger Senate candidate than Pawlenty. Coleman decided to follow advice from Washington and move into the Senate race. Pawlenty started receiving phone calls from national Republicans urging him to step aside for Coleman--again. "For a number of days leading up to that there was a whole series of calls saying, 'Look, nobody knows who you are, you don't have any money,'" Pawlenty says, breaking out into a hiccupy laugh. "'Norm's going to get the endorsement, and you're just chasing the wind.'" Pawlenty didn't know what to do. Then one day a call came from Dick Cheney telling him to move aside. "That was kind of the icing on the cake."

Pawlenty won a contested Republican gubernatorial primary and scraped by in the general election, winning 44 percent of the vote. It was a close election in a Republican year, both nationally and in Minnesota. Coleman won the Senate seat (he ran ahead of Pawlenty, taking 50 percent of the vote), and Republicans increased their majority in the state house.

Pawlenty's first task on assuming office was to confront the state's $4.2 billion budget deficit. The newly elected governor had promised to erase the deficit without raising taxes. He did so. And he kept busy. He signed a law requiring a waiting period for abortions and another allowing permit-holders to carry concealed firearms. He threw out the state's lax education requirements and passed new, tougher standards. He won passage of a drug reimportation bill. He poured resources into alternative energy--one of his favorite subjects and proudest accomplishments. He talks with rare interest about biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol and wind power. "Under my watch we've doubled the proposed requirements for ethanol in gasoline here," he says. "We implemented the first in the nation biodiesel requirement in our diesel fuel, 2 percent soy oil. We're one of the nation's leaders in wind energy production. And it's largely part of some tax credits we put into law on my watch as governor."

The second half of his first term had its disappointments. Democrats gained in statewide elections in 2004 and the state confronted another budget crunch. In 2005 the state was on the edge of a government shutdown. Then it leapt off the edge. "And those were very difficult negotiations," Pawlenty says.

The shutdown lasted eight days. "That was very difficult, very contentious," Pawlenty goes on. "And the decision to do that, stare down, was tough. We ended up getting it resolved, making some compromises. Looking over the abyss into a government shutdown--that was a challenge." Pawlenty vetoed some Democratic tax bills, but agreed to raise the state cigarette tax. This lost him some friends on the right.

Not enough to prevent his reelection, however. Pawlenty is beginning his second term eager to strengthen his education reforms, pour more money into alternative energy subsidies, and try to recover what was lost of his antitax reputation by combating the state Democratic majority's efforts to raise taxes.

-Minn. governor rides his rapport with McCain: Speculation increasing on Pawlenty as VP pick (Michael Kranish, July 28, 2008, Boston Globe)

As Senator John McCain campaigned across New Hampshire early this year, one of his favorite traveling buddies was his longtime friend, Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota.

McCain told voters that Pawlenty reminded him of a joke about two men in prison: One inmate turned to another and said, the food was better in prison "when you were governor."

Some politicians might resent being compared to a convict, but Pawlenty, no matter how many times he heard the joke, laughed appreciatively. And, no matter how many times he introduced McCain, Pawlenty lavished praise on the Arizona Republican as if it were his only chance.

The rapport between the two men, evident throughout long days on the campaign trail, now is being cited as one of the main reasons that Pawlenty has risen in speculation as McCain's possible running mate.

While much of the recent buzz has surrounded former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, his bitter primary fight with McCain and the lack of a personal relationship could hurt Romney's chances.

If McCain is looking for a close friend whose loyalty is beyond question, Pawlenty could be his vice presidential pick, political observers said. Pawlenty might also help McCain win Minnesota, where a recent poll showed the race is statistically tied.

-Pawlenty Looks to National Stage (MONICA DAVEY, 8/08/08, NY Times)

[T]hose who have followed his political rise here say Mr. Pawlenty’s personal story — his direct, everyman appeal to ordinary people — is among his most powerful attributes.

Long before the polls began suggesting that Republicans could face trouble in November, Mr. Pawlenty, now in his second term, was urging his party to become “the party of Sam’s Club,” not just the country club.

“We need everybody — to grow the party and to move forward,” Mr. Pawlenty explained in a recent interview. “One of the most powerful reasons people go to Sam’s Club or Target or Costco is they want value, and Republicans are well suited to be the party that says, ‘We’re going to have a limited but also effective government.’ ”

Mr. Pawlenty can talk about such things from experience. He now lives in the well-off suburb of Eagan, but holds blue-collar credentials. He grew up in South St. Paul, then a working-class town where life revolved around the stockyards, where his father drove a truck, where he played hockey, where his mother died of cancer when he was still a teenager, and where he went on to become the first in his family to graduate from college.

For Mr. McCain, whose campaign would not comment about the vice-presidential selection process, Mr. Pawlenty might be appealing on other fronts. At 47, tall and runner-thin, Mr. Pawlenty is the same age as Senator Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee. He also carries qualifications important to many conservatives: opposition to tax increases, longtime attendance at a church with a pastor who leads the National Association of Evangelicals and a mostly consistent conservatism on social issues.

-Pawlenty Is As Good As It Gets (Lisa Schiffren, 8/16/08, National Review)
-Losing the mullet, angling for veep: Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has a shot at being John McCain's No. 2 -- and it's not just because of the snazzy new haircut. (Mike Madden, Jul. 03, 2008, Salon)

What has Republicans buzzing about Pawlenty, though, isn't so much his hairstyle as his political style. He's won election twice in a key battleground state that the GOP has long dreamed of taking back at the presidential level, and that will host the Republican convention in September. He's young enough to balance out McCain's age, but experienced enough after two terms in office to claim he's been tested. Social conservatives like him; his pastor, the Rev. Leith Anderson, heads the National Association of Evangelicals. And week in and week out, as one of the McCain campaign's most visible surrogates on cable news, Pawlenty is proving he has no trouble delivering sharp lines against Barack Obama with a smile. (Like other potential McCain running mates, Pawlenty has issued bland denials that he's seeking the job, always leaving plenty of wiggle room in case he's asked.)

"I think Barack Obama's book 'The Audacity of Hope' perhaps should be retitled 'The Audacity of Hypocrisy,'" Pawlenty said Sunday on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." He followed up later with a dig at Obama and Hillary Clinton's joint event in New Hampshire: "They shouldn't have had the meeting in Unity, N.H.; they should have had it in Political Expediency, N.H., if there is such a community." The attacks look harsh written out, but they flowed by smoothly in Pawlenty's laid-back Minnesota tone. On TV, he comes across as easygoing and natural, even when he's sticking the dagger in an opponent. Even Democrats in Minnesota credit him for being personable and friendly (though they say that doesn't make him any easier to work with in the statehouse).

Pawlenty's blue-collar roots also look attractive to many Republican strategists. His father drove a truck in the Twin Cities for years. Pawlenty was the first person in his family to go to college. He says he's a "Sam's Club Republican," not a country club Republican, although he has hewed toward conservative economic policies since he was first elected in 2002.

"He's been a conservative governor in a fairly liberal state, and managed to maintain his popularity pretty well doing it," said former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, now a D.C. power broker who's staying neutral in the vice-presidential sweepstakes because he's also close with Rob Portman, another contender, and backed yet another, Mitt Romney, in the GOP primary. Weber said Pawlenty has a "Reaganesque appeal" to Republicans who know him.

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THIEVES IN THE TEMPLE:

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IF ONLY THE UNICORN RIDERS POINT...

Why Doesn’t Plagiarism Matter? (Jonathan Beecher Field, 8/26/08, Inside Higher Ed)

Remembering this sense of exhilaration I sensed in seeing a new field of political possibilities makes the sense of betrayal I feel today even more powerful. By choosing Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama has insulted academics — students and teachers alike — a constituency that was significant in bringing him the nomination of his party. Especially in a year that has seen two prominent political careers hamstrung by sex scandals, and in an era where choosing vice presidential candidates seems to be foremost an exercise in avoiding skeletons in the closet, it’s surprising that Biden’s record of plagiarism did not disqualify him from Obama’s consideration. [...]

To a degree, appropriating Kinnock for a stump speech is an understandable offense. There is not the presumption of original and unique authorship in the words that come out of a politician’s mouth. Just ask Peggy Noonan. However, the phrasing of Biden’s speech, prefaced Kinnock’s sentiments with language that indicated that these were his thoughts. This incident suggests the same kind of troubling indifference to the truth that has been a hallmark of the current administration, but on its own, perhaps not worthy of ending a political career.

The incident in law school is more concerning, at least from the perspective of any educator. The kind of wholesale plagiarism Biden evidently committed, copying chunks of a law review article into a paper with his name on it, suggests an inclination toward the kind of malfeasance present in the Kinnock incident. In every class I teach, I spend time talking about citation, and why it is so important for scholarship. As part of this conversation, I emphasize that acknowledging sources is a condition of membership in the community of scholars: if scholars do not acknowledge sources, they do not belong in this community. By way of illustration, I have sometimes shared the Emory University report on the conduct of former history professor Michael Bellesiles, who undermined a provocative and compelling argument about gun ownership in early America with gross violations of scholarly norms for citation. The report demonstrated serious concerns about his scholarshop and led to his resignation. If Bellesiles had chosen a less contentious subject, he would not have had legions of NRA supporters going through his footnotes, and he might well still hold his tenured position at a prestigious university. However, he presented his research in sloppy and dishonest fashion, and he lost his job.

The point of sharing this report is to establish that citation is not a question of memorizing MLA, APA, or Chicago styles — whimsical shibboleths involving italics and parentheses — but that citation is the foundation of honest scholarship. [...]

Biden’s dishonesty matters to me in two ways. It suggests something of Biden’s character, indeed, in a realm more relevant to doing his job than was John Edwards’s philandering to his. The other reason is selfish. Now that Barack Obama has deemed a plagiarist worthy of the vice-presidency, it becomes more difficult for me to make the case in the classroom that plagiarism matters. More broadly speaking, Obama’s choice has made it harder for me, and for my colleagues across the United States, to defend the principles that form the foundation of scholarship.

...was to smack down academics. Instead he just seems not to have cared about Senator Biden's character.

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GOOD, PAWLENTY:

McCain makes decision on running mate (LIZ SIDOTI, 8/28/08, AP)

Republican presidential candidate John McCain decided on a running mate early Thursday, and one top prospect, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, abruptly canceled numerous public appearances.

The Arizona senator will appear with his No. 2 at an Ohio rally on Friday, aides said, though they provided no details on McCain's pick.

Without explanation, Pawlenty called off an Associated Press interview at the last minute, as well as other media interviews in Denver, site of the Democratic National Convention.

Even setting aside morality, it's a simple matter of math, Poll: John McCain Would Lose 10 Percentage Points With Pro-Abortion VP (Steven Ertelt, August 28, 2008, LifeNews.com)

A new ABC News poll finds presidential candidate John McCain would lose as much as 20 percent of his support should he select a pro-abortion running mate. With such a decision adding him the backing of just 10 percent of voters, McCain would suffer a net loss of 10 percent.

The poll underscores the importance for pro-life voters and most Republicans of picking a pro-life running mate such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

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WE CAN'T TURN BACK, LET'S TURN BACK:

To Chairman Dean and my great friend Dick Durbin; and to all my fellow citizens of this great nation;

With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

Let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates who accompanied me on this journey, and especially the one who traveled the farthest — a champion for working Americans and an inspiration to my daughters and to yours, Hillary Rodham Clinton. To President Clinton, who last night made the case for change as only he can make it; to Ted Kennedy, who embodies the spirit of service; and to the next vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, I thank you. I am grateful to finish this journey with one of the finest statesmen of our time, a man at ease with everyone from world leaders to the conductors on the Amtrak train he still takes home every night

To the love of my life, our next first lady, Michelle Obama, and to Sasha and Malia — I love you so much, and I’m so proud of all of you.

Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story — of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren’t well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.

It is that promise that has always set this country apart — that through hard work and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together as one American family, to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams as well.

That’s why I stand here tonight. Because for 232 years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women — students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors — found the courage to keep it alive.

We meet at one of those defining moments — a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more.

Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.

These challenges are not all of government’s making. But the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.

This country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work.

This country is more generous than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he’s worked on for 20 years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.

We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.

Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and independents across this great land — enough! This moment — this election — is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On Nov. 4, we must stand up and say: “Eight is enough.”

Now let there be no doubt. The Republican nominee, John McCain, has worn the uniform of our country with bravery and distinction, and for that we owe him our gratitude and respect. And next week, we’ll also hear about those occasions when he’s broken with his party as evidence that he can deliver the change that we need.

But the record’s clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time. Sen. McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than 90 percent of the time? I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to take a 10 percent chance on change.

The truth is, on issue after issue that would make a difference in your lives — on health care and education and the economy — Sen. McCain has been anything but independent. He said that our economy has made “great progress” under this president. He said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. And when one of his chief advisers — the man who wrote his economic plan — was talking about the anxiety Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a “mental recession,” and that we’ve become, and I quote, “a nation of whiners.”

A nation of whiners? Tell that to the proud autoworkers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made. Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as they watch their loved ones leave for their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know.

Now, I don’t believe that Sen. McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn’t know. Why else would he define middle class as someone making under $5 million a year? How else could he propose hundreds of billions in tax breaks for big corporations and oil companies but not one penny of tax relief to more than 100 million Americans? How else could he offer a health care plan that would actually tax people’s benefits, or an education plan that would do nothing to help families pay for college, or a plan that would privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement?

It’s not because John McCain doesn’t care. It’s because John McCain doesn’t get it.

For over two decades, he’s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.

Well, it’s time for them to own their failure. It’s time for us to change America.

You see, we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.

We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma. We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was president — when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.

We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job — an economy that honors the dignity of work.

The fundamentals we use to measure economic strength are whether we are living up to that fundamental promise that has made this country great — a promise that is the only reason I am standing here tonight.

Because in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton’s Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill.

In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own while she worked and earned her degree; who once turned to food stamps but was still able to send us to the best schools in the country with the help of student loans and scholarships.

When I listen to another worker tell me that his factory has shut down, I remember all those men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I stood by and fought for two decades ago after the local steel plant closed.

And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman. She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight, and that tonight is her night as well.

I don’t know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine. These are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as president of the United States.

What is that promise?

It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.

It’s a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers and play by the rules of the road.

Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves — protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.

Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who’s willing to work.

That’s the promise of America — the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.

That’s the promise we need to keep. That’s the change we need right now. So let me spell out exactly what that change would mean if I am president.

Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.

Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

I will eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.

I will cut taxes — cut taxes — for 95 percent of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as president: in 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

Washington’s been talking about our oil addiction for the last 30 years, and John McCain has been there for 26 of them. In that time, he’s said no to higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars, no to investments in renewable energy, no to renewable fuels. And today, we import triple the amount of oil as the day that Sen. McCain took office.

Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stopgap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close.

As president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I’ll help our auto companies retool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America. I’ll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars. And I’ll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy — wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can’t ever be outsourced.

America, now is not the time for small plans.

Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy. Michelle and I are only here tonight because we were given a chance at an education. And I will not settle for an America where some kids don’t have that chance. I’ll invest in early childhood education. I’ll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability. And we will keep our promise to every young American: If you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.

Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible health care for every single American. If you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don’t, you’ll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves. And as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.

Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between keeping their jobs and caring for a sick child or ailing parent.

Now is the time to change our bankruptcy laws, so that your pensions are protected ahead of CEO bonuses; and the time to protect Social Security for future generations.

And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.

Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I’ve laid out how I’ll pay for every dime — by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don’t help America grow. But I will also go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less — because we cannot meet 21st century challenges with a 20th century bureaucracy.

And Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America’s promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our “intellectual and moral strength.” Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can’t replace parents; that government can’t turn off the television and make a child do her homework; that fathers must take more responsibility for providing the love and guidance their children need.

Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility — that’s the essence of America’s promise.

And just as we keep our keep our promise to the next generation here at home, so must we keep America’s promise abroad. If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next commander in chief, that’s a debate I’m ready to have.

For while Sen. McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats we face. When John McCain said we could just “muddle through” in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell — but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives.

And today, as my call for a time frame to remove our troops from Iraq has been echoed by the Iraqi government and even the Bush administration, even after we learned that Iraq has a $79 billion surplus while we’re wallowing in deficits, John McCain stands alone in his stubborn refusal to end a misguided war.

That’s not the judgment we need. That won’t keep America safe. We need a president who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past.

You don’t defeat a terrorist network that operates in 80 countries by occupying Iraq. You don’t protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can’t truly stand up for Georgia when you’ve strained our oldest alliances. If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice — but it is not the change we need.

We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans — Democrats and Republicans — have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.

As commander in chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm’s way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.

I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I will rebuild our military to meet future conflicts. But I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation; poverty and genocide; climate change and disease. And I will restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace, and who yearn for a better future.

These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.

But what I will not do is suggest that the senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism.

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America — they have served the United States of America.

So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.

America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices, and Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past. For part of what has been lost these past eight years can’t just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits. What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose — our sense of higher purpose. And that’s what we have to restore.

We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination. Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This, too, is part of America’s promise — the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.

I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that’s to be expected. Because if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.

You make a big election about small things.

And you know what — it’s worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn’t work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it’s best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.

I get it. I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don’t fit the typical pedigree, and I haven’t spent my career in the halls of Washington.

But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s been about you.

For 18 long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said "enough" to the politics of the past. You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us — that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it — because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.

America, this is one of those moments.

I believe that as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming. Because I’ve seen it. Because I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it in Illinois, when we provided health care to more children and moved more families from welfare to work. I’ve seen it in Washington, when we worked across party lines to open up government and hold lobbyists more accountable, to give better care for our veterans and keep nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands.

And I’ve seen it in this campaign. In the young people who voted for the first time, and in those who got involved again after a very long time. In the Republicans who never thought they’d pick up a Democratic ballot, but did. I’ve seen it in the workers who would rather cut their hours back a day than see their friends lose their jobs, in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb, in the good neighbors who take a stranger in when a hurricane strikes and the floodwaters rise.

This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores.

Instead, it is that American spirit — that American promise — that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

That promise is our greatest inheritance. It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours — a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.

And it is that promise that 45 years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.

The men and women who gathered there could’ve heard many things. They could’ve heard words of anger and discord. They could’ve been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.

But what the people heard instead — people of every creed and color, from every walk of life — is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

“We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise — that American promise — and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

The notion that the American Dream is at risk or that the next generation faces a difficult time realizing it is drastically at odds with reality:
Second-Quarter GDP Surprises (Tony Crescenzi, 8/28/08, The Small Business Standard)

The U.S. economy expanded more quickly than expected in the second quarter, growing at a 3.3% pace instead of the 1.9% pace projected in the advance estimate for the quarter released a month ago. Forecasters expected a reading of 2.7%.

The bulk of the surprise was in the inventory data, which subtracted 1.4 percentage points from the headline figure (GDP would otherwise have grown at a 4.7% pace, if not for a drop in inventory investment), instead of the 1.9 percentage points reported in the advance estimate. Obviously, with inventories down and not up during the quarter, the upward revision to inventory investment poses no problems for the economy.

A second factor in the upward revision was a sharp upward revision to net exports, which added 3.1 percentage points to GDP instead of the 2.4% reported in the advance estimate. The increase was roughly as expected. The enormous gain was the most since 1980 and the fourth largest of the past 50 years.

Durable goods post strong increases in July, June (Associated Press, August 27, 2008)

Orders for big-ticket manufactured goods turned in a second consecutive strong monthly performance in July, a far bigger-than-expected gain led by a huge jump in demand for commercial aircraft.

The Commerce Department said today that orders for durable goods rose 1.3 percent last month, far above the slight 0.1 percent increase economists had been expecting.

The July increase matched a 1.3 percent rise in June, which was revised up from an earlier reading of 0.8 percent. Both months turned in the strongest gains since a 4.1 percent surge last December.

Economists had been expecting a far weaker showing in July reflecting their views that the manufacturing sector is being battered by the slowdown facing the overall economy. Instead, the report showed surprising strength in a number of areas.

Scores Stable as More Minorities Take SAT (Maria Glod and Michael Alison Chandler, 8/27/08, Washington Post)

SAT performance held steady for 2008 high school graduates even as participation rose among minority students and those who are part of the first generation in their families to go to college, the College Board reported yesterday. [...]

Nationwide, the number of students taking the SAT surpassed 1.5 million for the first time, up 8 percent from five years ago and almost 30 percent over the past decade. Forty percent of test-takers were minority students, up from 39 percent last year, and 36 percent were among a group described as first-generation collegegoers, up from 35 percent.

College Board officials considered the boost in participation evidence that the high school students who aspire to a college degree are growing more ethnically and economically diverse.

Number of Americans without health insurance falls (Lisa Girion, 8/27/08, Los Angeles Times)

In all, the number of people without health insurance dropped last year to 45.7 million, from 47 million in 2006, according to the bureau's annual report on income, poverty and health insurance. That's a drop to 15.3% of Americans from 15.8%.

Census: Income rose, middle class grew in 2007: But child poverty also rose, according to the new report. (Ron Scherer, 8/27/08, The Christian Science Monitor)

The standard of living rose and the middle class grew while the number of wealthy actually shrank somewhat compared to 2006. At the same time, the official poverty rate was basically unchanged. And the number of Americans without health coverage fell for the first time during the Bush administration.

Those are some of the conclusions from the US Census Bureau's annual survey, a report that gives scholars a longer view of the nation's economic health.

"It's a good solid report," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

Glimmers of good news in US housing reports (The Associated Press, August 26, 2008)

While no one is ready to call the bottom of the worst housing collapse in decades, there were glimmers this week that the severity is waning.

The decline in home prices is starting to ease and in some cities values are starting to rise again. Existing home sales rose slightly from June to July, and the glut of newly built homes on the market fell to a five month low last month.

"The bottom of the housing downturn is coming into view," said Moody's Economy.com Chief Economist Mark Zandi.

Aug. consumer outlook up more than expected (Associated Press, 8/27/08)

Americans felt better about the economy in August, as a barometer of sentiment posted the biggest boost in two years amid falling gas prices. [...]

The Conference Board, a private research group, said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index rose to 56.9, up from a revised 51.9 in July. That's the largest gain since August 2006 and is ahead of the 53 expected by economists surveyed by Thomson/IFR.

U.S. Reports Drop in Homeless Population
(RACHEL L. SWARNS, 7/29/08, NY Times)

The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday. [...]

Dennis Culhane, a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of this year’s report, acknowledged that “there are a lot of people in tough housing situations who don’t get counted.” He said the government needed a standard measure and asked communities to count people living in shelters and on the street.

He described the decline in chronic homelessness as “pretty remarkable.”

Mr. Culhane said that Congress and the Bush administration had pushed local communities to focus on finding solutions for the chronically homeless, who accounted for about half of the people living in the nation’s shelters in 2000. HUD has financed the development of between 10,000 and 12,000 new units of supported housing targeted for that population every year over the past four years, he said.

“It affirms the very significant change in policy shift that took place” over the last six years, said Mr. Culhane, who studies homelessness trends and policy, referring to the decline in the numbers of chronically homeless. “We’re moving in the right direction, without a doubt.”

Farewell to world peace?: The Georgian conflict ended 1,716 days of no war between nations. But trends favor peace (Charles Kurzman and Neil A. Englehart, August 29, 2008, CS Monitor)

[Y]ou may not have noticed that the world was at peace. But ever since India and Pakistan signed a cease-fire in November 2003, there have been no wars between governments. That's 1,716 straight days of world peace. Russia's invasion ended the streak on Aug. 8.

The previous record had been just over 600 days, from the end of the second Taiwan Straits crisis in 1958 to border skirmishes between Ethiopia and Somalia in 1960.

Survey Says: People Are Happier: The 2008 World Values Survey found that freedom of choice and tolerance—and not simply wealth—have lots to do with a rise in happiness (Matt Mabe, 8/21/08, Business Week)

Happiness hunters have done it again. They've used an army of pollsters and a mountain of data to uncover the world's happiest countries. But this year, there are some unexpected winners—for unexpected reasons.

The World Values Survey, which has compiled data from 350,000 people in 97 countries since 1981, found Denmark to be home to the planet's most contented citizens (again) with Zimbabwe as the most miserable (again). Classic Scandinavian front-runners like Sweden and Finland were nudged out of the top 10 by Puerto Rico and Colombia. El Salvador placed a surprising 11th, beating out Malta and Luxembourg. Further down the list came the U.S., ranked in 16th place.

Directed by University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart and administered from Stockholm, the survey found that freedom of choice, gender equality, and increased tolerance are responsible for a considerable rise in overall world happiness. The results shatter the more simplistic and traditionally accepted notion that wealth is the determining factor, says Inglehart. [...]

This year, the analysts were shocked by their findings. Reported happiness had actually risen in 40 countries and decreased in just 12. Inglehart, who has been involved in this research for 20 years, says the results defied conventional wisdom on the subject of happiness, which has held that levels remain more or less static.

Why would we risk changing all these positive trends by even 10%?

Especially peculiar here is the invocation of JFK--who started the Vietnam War, countenanced a coup and the assassination of our Vietnamese ally, and lost the Cuban Missile Crisis--as the sort of foreign policy president you'll be. If you're serious about not intervening anywhere except defensively why not invoke Jimmy Carter? He even fits with the energy riff.

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IN CASE YOU DON"T FEEL LIKE GOING TO TEMPLE TONIGHT:

Scout's honor: Burn Notice ’s honest con job (CHARLES TAYLOR, August 26, 2008, Boston Phoenix)

One of the great jokes on Burn Notice, which is now in its second season on USA (Thursdays at 10 pm), is that it gives us an American spy who is neither a Continental wanna-be nor a shamus by another name. Instead, Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) is another established American icon: the Boy Scout. [...]

The creators have also given Michael a crew of gifted second bananas. Gabrielle Anwar as Michael’s ex Fi (short for Fiona, rhymes with tea), a former IRA terrorist, and Bruce Campbell as Michael’s buddy Sam, a retired Navy SEAL, are spectacularly funny. The hatred Fi and Sam express toward each other has nothing to do with buried attraction and, as critic Laura Miller has pointed out, everything to do with the jealousy of warring siblings vying for a parent’s attention. Whenever violence threatens to break out, Anwar shows both an excited gleam and contentment, anticipation and afterglow, all in one.

Campbell, whose lantern jaw is now padded with flesh (it matches his gut) and lined with bearish stubble, has the utter lack of vanity that can make a performer seem more appealing, even sexier, than the most chiseled he-men. In a succession of Tommy Bahama shirts swaddling his girth, he acts as if he were the hottest thing going and nearly convinces you. Anwar and Campbell — each afforded a chance to savor the sight of the other one getting tossed around — put on something like a deadpan Punch and Judy show, where withering looks replace the battering. When he’s around their squabbling, Michael does a slow burn that never erupts. This spy isn’t just a Boy Scout, he’s a den mother.

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NOT PERSECUTION, JUST PROSECUTION:

Before Bergman and "The Crucible": Carl Dreyer's erotic witch-hunt drama "Day of Wrath," made in Nazi-occupied Denmark, resurfaces with shattering clarity after a digital restoration. (Andrew O'Hehir, Aug. 26, 2008, Salon)

I watched "Day of Wrath" all by myself, early on Saturday morning, at an impromptu screening arranged by the IFC Center, and it was an electric, unforgettable experience, something like the first time I saw a Bergman or Kurosawa or Tarkovsky movie and felt the full expressive, aesthetic and emotional power that film can achieve. I mention Bergman by design; if you're a fan of the late Swedish master, you absolutely need to see "Day of Wrath," which strikes me as a pivotal influence on and presence within Bergman's greatest films, including "The Seventh Seal," "Smiles of a Summer Night" and "Fanny and Alexander." Let's put it this way: This picture features a clergyman anxious to please his God, but tormented by doubt; an elderly husband cuckolded by his own son; a woman unjustly accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake; and a plot that involves the murky borderlands between erotic passion, magic and pure accident. ("Day of Wrath" was also reportedly an influence on Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible.")

Unlike Bergman, Dreyer was not raised in a devoutly religious family, and he views the spiritual and personal struggle of Absalon Pederssøn (Thorkild Roose), an aging clergyman married to the young and beautiful Anne (Lisbeth Movin), with something like dispassionate sympathy. Absalon is not a cruel or indecent man at heart, but he lacks moral clarity or courage. He has taken Anne's girlhood from her and participates in the horrific persecution of Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier, in a wrenching performance), a local widow condemned as a witch. Dreyer shows us the village notables, dressed like the guys on the Dutch Masters cigar box, standing around calmly while the witchfinder tortures this half-naked old woman into a confession. It's nothing personal; in fact, they're trying to save her soul. It's the most disturbing scene I've seen in a motion picture in years. (Although Dreyer remained in occupied Denmark until 1944 and made this film under the Nazi regime, the Danish public, and underground resistance, understood where his sympathies lay.)

Before her burning -- another shocking scene -- Herlofs Marte calls down a curse upon Absalon and the rest of her persecutors.

So she was a witch, just like Arthur Miller was a Stalinist.

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THE BAD COP:

Iranian cleric blasts Ahmadinejad (THE JERUSALEM POST, 8/27/08)

An Iranian cleric accused President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of betraying the people and called on reformers to unite to defeat him in next year's elections, according to an interview in a German newspaper quoted by Reuters, Wednesday.

"Ahmadinejad is not complying with the will of the people," The Financial Times Deutschland quoted Grand Ayatollah Bajat Sanjani as saying. "This is a major threat, a big danger," the cleric added in an unusually direct personal attack.

The newspaper also said Sanjani accused Ahmadinejad's government of breaking the law, seriously violating personal freedom and illegally empowering the Revolutionary Guard.

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MADD'S FUNDAMENTAL INSIGHT IS AKIN TO THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENTS...:

Drunken-driving deaths fall in 32 states (KEN THOMAS, 8/28/08, Associated Press)

Drunken-driving deaths fell in 32 states in 2007, the government reported Thursday, but alcohol-related fatalities increased among motorcycle riders in half the states. [...]

Overall, alcohol deaths were down nearly 4 percent compared with 2006, when nearly 13,500 people died on the highway.

...you can achieve incrementally what you couldn't via Prohibition.

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THAT'S ALL THE ELECTION BOILS DOWN TO...:

The New Party (Thomas B. Edsall, 8/28/08, Huffington Post)

The nomination of Barack Obama will test whether the new Democratic coalition has grown strong enough to fend off Republican assaults to produce the first presidential victory for a non-Southern candidate in 44 years - and the first victory for a black in the history of the nation.

The Obama campaign has accelerated a transformation already underway in the Democratic electorate. 2008 appears likely to mark the death knell for what remained of the New Deal coalition - the coalition that was crucial to the early elections of such politicians as Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy.

In its place is a Democratic alliance that initially emerged during George McGovern's 1972 campaign, became competitive in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, and that now appears to be solidifying as the core of the party: a combination of "haves" -- socially liberal, well-educated whites, especially the young, and "have-nots" -- black and Hispanic minority voters.

...is can you turn the clock back 44 years to the sort of liberalism LBJ foisted on an unsuspecting nation, because of which he couldn't even run for re-election. Bill Clinton showed Democrats the way they could win -- by running as Republicans (New Democrats) -- but the true believers naturally want to give the Second Way (the Old Democrats) one last try, just like the Labourites who want to cleanse themselves of Blairism.

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THERE JUST ISN'T MUCH TO FIGHT ABOUT AT THE END OF HISTORY:

Farewell to world peace?: The Georgian conflict ended 1,716 days of no war between nations. But trends favor peace (Charles Kurzman and Neil A. Englehart, August 29, 2008, CS Monitor)

[Y]ou may not have noticed that the world was at peace. But ever since India and Pakistan signed a cease-fire in November 2003, there have been no wars between governments. That's 1,716 straight days of world peace. Russia's invasion ended the streak on Aug. 8.

The previous record had been just over 600 days, from the end of the second Taiwan Straits crisis in 1958 to border skirmishes between Ethiopia and Somalia in 1960.

We've got as few dictatorships left to topple, a few guerilla movements left to root out, and some of the devolution into constituent parts could be violent (Chechnya, Kurdistan, Hezbollahstan, Pashtunistan, etc.) but the big questions are settled and there is no viable alternative to liberal democratic protestant capitalism.

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NOW THAT'S WHAT WE'RE TALKIN' ABOUT:

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WE'RE WITH JOE:

MSNBC prez defends convention team (MICHAEL CALDERONE | 8/27/08, Politico)

In addition to Olbermann, MSNBC personalities Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough and David Shuster were involved in Denver controversies.

On Monday evening, Olbermann interrupted Scarborough while he was talking about McCain being competitive in the polls. “Jesus, Joe, why don’t you get a shovel?” Olbermann remarked.

On “Morning Joe” the following day, a clearly agitated Scarborough went off on Shuster during a discussion of Iraq, which quickly devolved over several cringe-worthy minutes into personal attacks, such as Scarborough telling the world how his colleague missed the show three times by oversleeping. "Are you Rip Van Shuster?” Scarborough asked. “Have you been sleeping for the past couple of months?”

But Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, became enraged when Shuster made a reference to “your party.” Asked by Scarborough what his party was, Shuster said he was an “independent.”

"I feel so comforted by the fact that you're an independent,” Scarborough said, in a mocking tone. “I bet everybody at MSNBC has independent on their voting cards. Oh, we're down the middle now.” (Shuster left the set, but returned later to hug it out, "Entourage"-style.)

That night, Scarborough told NPR that he “get[s] frustrated by people who have an obvious partisan bias that don't proclaim that bias.”

Why not just declare that MSNBC has an agenda and let the partisan guns rip? It's not like the networks fool anybody.

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IT'S ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU BELIEVE IN THE WISDOM OF CROWDS:

No surrender: The gnarled maverick outpolls his party and might even beat Barack Obama. But what sort of president would he be? (The Economist, 8/28/08)

But part of the credit for the way Mr McCain outperforms his party must go to Mr McCain himself.

For one thing, the senator from Arizona is a redoubtable campaigner. It is hard to name another politician who is such a mediocre public speaker, and yet so effective. His speechwriter, Mark Salter, prepares him elegant texts that he stumbles through like a man of homely tastes choking on nouvelle cuisine. His voice has no range; he stresses the wrong words. Yet people listen, because they think he means what he says.

He projects the blokeish persona of a man who used to drink too much, crash planes and chase women. On the campaign trail, he wolfs culturally significant junk food—“Pronto Pup” deep-fried hot dogs in Grand Haven, Michigan, or “concrete” frozen custard in St Louis, Missouri—with apparent relish. He has a stock of awful jokes, which he repeats so often that his staff have the punchlines printed on T-shirts. Unlike his more nuanced opponent, he couches straightforward convictions in simple terms. And he salts his message with earthy anecdotes and self-deprecating asides.

Mr McCain is at his best taking questions from unscreened voters, something most politicians seldom dare to do. He seems empathetic, albeit in a gruff, grandfatherly way; and crucially, unlike most politicians, he lets dissatisfied questioners ask follow-up questions until they run out of puff.

Even as bad a campaign as Senator Obama is running, he'd be smoking Mitt or Rudy--the Beltway choices--right now. Funny how the liberalization of the selection process has saddled Democrats with loser after loser but taken power away from the GOP insiders and the Eastern Establishment so that we nominate conservative winners from the Southwest

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GEORGE W BUSH, SUPER-GENIUS:

Vladimir Putin accuses Bush of provoking Georgia conflict to help John McCain (Tony Halpin, 8/28/08, Times of London)

Vladimir Putin accused President Bush tonight of orchestrating the war in Georgia in a plot to get John McCain elected to the White House.

Geez, even Russian autocrats realize Senator Obama's weaknesses.

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THE UNICORN RIDER HAS MADE EXACTLY ONE CHOICE IN HIS POLITICAL LIFE THAT WE'RE ALL PRIVY TO...:

Joebama: Joe Biden brings both strengths and weaknesses to the Democratic ticket (Lexington, 8/28/08, The Economist)

[M]r Biden, like the man whose identity he tried to purloin, is a notorious wind-bag. He loves nothing more than the sound of his own voice. And when he talks the sentences and paragraphs tumble over each other with no obvious end in sight. Members of the audience just have to cross their fingers and hope.

But Barack Obama’s choice of Mr Biden as his running mate has nevertheless been greeted with widespread applause...

...and that was "a notorious wind-bag."

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WHILE THE LEFT IS CORRECT THAT RACISM IS A KEY PART OF THIS ELECTION...:

Obama Needs to Take a Stand on Race and Other Issues (JUAN WILLIAMS, August 28, 2008, Wall Street Journal)

More than 90% of black Americans are now on board with that story line, and according to polls, more than a third of black voters say his race is either the most important factor or one key factor in explaining their support for Mr. Obama. His race is at least a key issue for about a quarter of white voters as well, and that percentage is going up. Many white voters -- especially young people -- appreciate Mr. Obama as the biracial candidate capable of moving America to a new day, and past its legacy of endless racial tensions.

...an objective observer would have to conclude that Senator Obama is the beneficiary, not the victim, of that racism.

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HONESTLY, THEY AREN'T TRYING TO CARICATURE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY:

Flags, cheers, discipline and doubt: Barack Obama struggled this week to unite his party (The Economist, 8/28/08)

THERE were two conventions in Denver this week. One was a joyful event. Cheered on by throngs of jubilant activists, the Democratic Party’s brightest and most boisterous speakers praised Barack Obama extravagantly and rejoiced that in a mere four months the Bush-Cheney tyranny will be over.

The other convention, which took place mostly behind the scenes, was more bitter. Some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters still cannot believe that Democratic primary voters spurned their brilliant and battle-tested candidate for a smooth-talking novice. And despite the party’s heroic efforts to present a united face to the cameras, the cracks kept showing. [...]

Since the policy differences between Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama are slight, the Clintonites who care most about policy are typically content to switch their allegiance. Greg Rodriguez, for example, a gay stay-at-home dad from California, says he could not vote Republican because “anyone who says I shouldn’t be allowed to adopt children is anti-gay.” He has brought up two children with disabilities, having “rescued them from the foster system [when] good white straight parents didn’t want [them].” So he says he will back Mr Obama “all the way”.

But not all voters focus on policy.

And precious few are gay.

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THE PARTY OF DEATH:

Unnecessarily Evil (Linda Hirshman, Aug. 12, 2008, Slate)

The Democratic Party platform of 2008 finally dropped its old abortion language ("safe, legal and rare"), which had asked that women not have abortions unless they absolutely must. The 2008 platform, just announced, says instead, "The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right."

Bill Clinton wasn't exactly a moralist, but at least he felt queasy enough about abortion or understood the puritanism of the country well enough to pretend to some moderation. Senator Obama seems never to have met the baby he wouldn't kill...on principle, of course.

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ON THE OTHER HAND...:

Mount Olympus... (Mike Murphy, 8/27/08, TIME)

I think the normally shrewd Obama campaign has a blind spot about tomorrows big speech at Invesco field. The Pepsi center is the visual “home” of this convention. Having Obama do his big finish in another venue screws up the visual vernacular of the convention. Turn off the sound, and watch the tape. In the end it will look like two different conventions; one visually dominated by Clintons, another by Obama. That is a message of separation, not unity.

...would it really be suitable for a god to speak from the same stage that mere mortals have sullied? Ideally he'd address us from atop a cloud.

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MAY?:

Many, Many People To Blame, Before We Blame A-Rod (STEVEN GOLDMAN | August 28, 2008, NY Sun)

[T]he $200 million Yankees, playing for their lives, are calling not on Red Ruffing, Whitey Ford, or Ron Guidry, but on Ponson, or that their stretch-run starting rotation also includes Darrell "Five-Run" Rasner and Carl "You Break It, You Bought It" Pavano. Rodriguez didn't design the pitching staff. He did not fail to do what other teams do every season, and have done for years while the Yankees have spent their millions on Roger Clemens, David Wells, Mike Mussina, and other veteran imports — that is, take talented pitching prospects such as Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy and teach them how to succeed in the majors.

Rodriguez didn't force Melky Cabrera to stop hitting, then demand that the Yankees ignore the problem for months. He didn't trigger the decline phase of Derek Jeter's career. It seems unlikely that he encouraged Robinson Cano to phone in major parts of his season. Nor did he make the call to open the season with Joba Chamberlain in the bullpen — or Ross Ohlendorf, or Billy Traber. or LaTroy Hawkins. He didn't require Joe Girardi to pursue his answer to the famous Gene Woodling and Hank Bauer platoon, "Jason Giambi and Nonentity du Jour." [...]

Unless he's moonlighting as some kind of bizarro batting coach, he didn't prevent Shelly Duncan from carrying his fluke 2007 hot streak into 2008, or prevent Morgan Ensberg from contributing off the bench. He didn't run the last half-dozen Yankees drafts, the ones that left the farm system without ready upper-level position players of any stripe, and it's improbable that Brian Cashman asked for his input on a Johan Santana deal.

In short, due to a very typical combination of errors, oversights, injuries, bad luck, and those random developments that can unmake any team's season, the Yankees failed to field a championship team, something that's been apparent going back to May, which they finished with a season record of 28-27. Still, it's all Alex Rodriguez's fault because he had a lousy game against the Red Sox in a game that had a million-to-one chance of meaning anything anyway.

If it took you until May to realize how bad their defense was, that they'd wildly overestimated their young guys (other than Hughes), and that the combination of Joe Girardi and Joba the Hutt was a visit to Dr. Andrews waiting to happen then you can't follow baseball very closely.

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HE'S LOOKING FOR WORSHIPPERS, NOT VOTERS:

Avoiding A Long, Disappointing Fall: A thorough diagnosis of what's been ailing the Obama campaign. And suggestions for a cure. (John B. Judis, 8/28/08, The New Republic)

[T]his summer the Obama campaign has made the crucial error of conducting itself as it were on the verge of a landslide victory, comparable to Lyndon Johnson's win over Barry Goldwater in 1964. And it is still displaying the same overconfidence.

After securing the nomination in June, Obama's first priority had to be healing the rift between himself and Hillary Clinton. Candidates who can't put nomination battles behind them well before the convention usually lose. Think of Goldwater in 1964, Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Walter Mondale in 1984. There are only two candidates I can remember who succeeded in overcoming intraparty rifts during the convention--John Kennedy in 1960 and Ronald Reagan in 1980--and they did it by nominating their primary opponents to be vice president.

Obama, who evidently did not see a nail-biting election looming, chose not to do that, and is reaping the consequences. I didn't think so last spring, but I realize now that Obama would have been better off had he chosen Hillary Clinton. Of course, he might have faced a nightmare in January 2009 with Bill and Hillary in the White House, but at least he would have been more assured of making it there. As it is, he may not be able to count on Clinton's fundraisers in the fall, he may not be able to count on all of her voters, and states that might have been in play with the two Clintons in tow--Florida, Arkansas, and Missouri--probably won't be.

Obama's pursuit of a 50-state strategy (now mercifully reduced to eighteen) is another sign of overconfidence. This summer, for instance, he spent money advertising and opening up field offices in Georgia. He has even appointed a coordinator for gay Georgians. That's fine, but Obama doesn't have a prayer of carrying Georgia in the presidential election. That's the kind of calculation you make if you think you're Johnson in 1964 and not Kennedy in 1960. Or if you think that field operations have the same effect in a general election that they do in a party caucus. From my experience, Obama's field operations were actually superior to those of Hillary Clinton in West Virginia, a state where he won 26 percent of the vote. They were superior in California, too, which Obama also lost. Field operations can be important, but as Karl Rove showed in 2004, they have to be carefully targeted.

Finally, Obama's rejection of McCain's proposal to hold weekly town meeting debates probably stemmed from overconfidence.

You bet--he ducked unscripted performances because he thinks he's great at them... Actually, there's one big reason Democrats should be scared about tonight's scripted appearance: supposedly Senator Obama is writing the speech himself. The last big set piece speech he gave that was purportedly self-authored was that catastrophic defense of the Reverend Wright. One assumes that this "I'm my own speech writer" shtick is an attempt to appear smart, but, in fact, it's just another decision that makes you question his judgment.

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FOUR MORE YEARS!:

Second-Quarter GDP Surprises (Tony Crescenzi, 8/28/08, The Small Business Standard)

The U.S. economy expanded more quickly than expected in the second quarter, growing at a 3.3% pace instead of the 1.9% pace projected in the advance estimate for the quarter released a month ago. Forecasters expected a reading of 2.7%.

The bulk of the surprise was in the inventory data, which subtracted 1.4 percentage points from the headline figure (GDP would otherwise have grown at a 4.7% pace, if not for a drop in inventory investment), instead of the 1.9 percentage points reported in the advance estimate. Obviously, with inventories down and not up during the quarter, the upward revision to inventory investment poses no problems for the economy.

A second factor in the upward revision was a sharp upward revision to net exports, which added 3.1 percentage points to GDP instead of the 2.4% reported in the advance estimate. The increase was roughly as expected. The enormous gain was the most since 1980 and the fourth largest of the past 50 years.

Nice for the short term, but in the longer term how does the currency of the only viable developed country not become so strong that imports swamp exports. Of course, our most significant import is going to be the investments of people whose countries are dying.

Related articles by Zemanta

• U.S. economy grows at faster pace than expected
• US GDP rebounds with 3.3% growth

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YET STILL YOU WONDER...:

...why the Democrats hate capitalism?

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EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE W:

Leader faces opposition to change (Kevin Donnelly | August 28, 2008, The Australian)

IT'S hard to disagree with Kevin Rudd's education revolution speech delivered at yesterday's address to the National Press Club.

Like the Prime Minister, The Australian is on record as arguing for a back-to-basics approach to curriculum, increased school accountability and for giving principals freedom to hire and fire staff.

Like the Prime Minister, in columns on these pages and in Dumbing Down, I have signalled teacher quality and a rigorous curriculum as crucial to raising standards and argued that under-performing schools need to be given additional support and made to suffer the consequences if they fail to improve. [...]

Many of the initiatives spoken about yesterday mirror overseas developments that have been shown to help overcome disadvantage.

There are a number of caveats. As discovered by the then Howard government when it sought to introduce A to E reporting, defend choice in education and get rid of post-modern gobbledegook in the curriculum, there are many opposed to reform.

The Australian Education Union, recalcitrant state governments and pressure groups such as the NSW Public Education Alliance are committed to the status quo. Rudd's comment, "I know some will resist these changes", is an understatement, and it will take political will to achieve change.

The Democrats belief that this is a moment when people want to follow them back to 70s is put paid not just by our politics but those of nearly all our democratic allies.

MORE:
The end of new Labour (Neal Lawson, 28 August 2008, New Statesman)

Whatever Gordon Brown decides to do as he considers relaunches and reshuffles, something is glaringly apparent: the new Labour project, initiated, perhaps unwittingly, a quarter of a century ago by Neil Kinnock and accelerated to dramatic effect by Tony Blair after 1994, is finished. The centre left needs a new paradigm in thinking and action, one as different from new Labour as this was from the creed it superseded. But a new left project that mixes commitment to principle with a lust for power in equal measure has to be built on an understanding of the rise and fall of new Labour.

For the century before new Labour, the centre left put all its hopes in the basket of the bureaucratic state. The combination of economic Fordism and the elitist politics of Fabianism and parliamentary Leninism created a bureaucratic model of top-down state reform. For the 30 years between 1948 and 1978, the bureaucratic state ruled supreme. It died as society became more complex, decentralisation became popular and we witnessed a welcome end to the age of deference.

The failure of the state was the most important cause of the right-wing response, a market state which ruled for an equivalent 30-year period from 1978 until now.

It's the notion that they need to go backwards that has them trailing even a flock of doofuses like the Tories.

MORE/MORE:
The Iron Lady at Twilight: On Thatcher's Legacy (NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT | August 27, 2008, NY Sun)

You would not know it from talking to most Brits, but the reforms Lady Thatcher urged upon Britain's sluggish economy and on its political, social, and business culture, and her resolution of the national quandary so aptly observed by Dean Acheson — "Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role" — have left them prosperous as never before. London is now the undisputed, if unofficial, capital of Europe, a magnet for every young European who wants to get ahead.

Her legacy is not just in unearthing the entrepreneurial zeal that had been heaped beneath years of benign neglect by well meaning souls who set out to shield the British from the vicissitudes of the free market, but in the sense of national purpose she restored to Britain and the free world by the simple act of standing up to bullies.

It was after her triumph over the strutting Argentine general, Leopoldo Galtieri, in the Falklands — a victory that transformed her fortunes from a likely one-term failure into a worthy successor of Boadicea and Elizabeth I — that she emerged as a powerful presence on the world stage. From her new vantage point she went on to battle a succession of tinpot tyrants, including the communist gerontocracy clinging to power in the Kremlin.

Since her party ousted her in 1990 in a typically passionless British coup, she has remained a prophet largely ignored in her own country. While Americans worship her, the British have found it hard to forgive the hectoring and sometimes brutal fashion in which she harried them into changing their ways.

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BY THEIR LACK OF HUMOR SHALL YOU KNOW THEM:

Teachers upset over Prime Minister's Pink Floyd tribute (The Local, 28 Aug 08)

Sweden's largest teachers union has expressed its dismay at Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's decision to burst into song at the Polar Music Prize ceremony in Stockholm on Wednesday.

Members of Pink Floyd, who received the annual prize along with American soprano Renee Fleming, sat in the crowd as Reinfeldt sang 'We don't need no education', capping his one-line performance with an emphatic 'Yeah'

"If the Prime Minister decides to sing for the people of Sweden I wish he would least choose to sing lyrics that did not proclaim our lack of a need for education," union chairwoman Metta Fjelkner said in a statement.

Ms Fjelkner is going to be really upset when the prize goes to Bob Geldof next year....

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NOW TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL:

You know how you'll sometimes come upon a really bad highway accident and traffic slows down to rubberneck at the wreckage? It would come to a halt to gape at this, Sox on Mariotti's split: 'It's about time': The self-proclaimed tough-guy columnist never faced his targets, and that's the main reason he was considered a coward in clubhouses (CHRIS DE LUCA, 8/28/08, suntimes.com)

And now Mariotti says the printed page is a dinosaur. He has embraced the Internet as his new forum.

We're talking about a columnist who detested bloggers -- mainly because he was easy fodder for their biting humor. He acted as if he stood on a level above bloggers. Most of the better bloggers have the kind of wit he couldn't touch.

Are bloggers bad? Absolutely not.

But those of us who work at newspapers have one edge over the blogging world. We have access to the players, coaches, managers and front-office executives. We can talk to key figures on and off the record to get insight unavailable to others. It's a privilege most of us don't take lightly. To not use it to our advantage is a waste -- of our energy and the readers' time.

''I think people stopped believing what he was writing because we let the fans know what the real situation was and how he was dealing with the athletes,'' Guillen said. ''Not just the White Sox or Cubs, all athletes. He never showed up. He just said what he wanted to say without ever showing up.''

Not once in the last eight years can I recall seeing Mariotti in the Cubs' or Sox' clubhouse. With a press credential that allowed him access to every major sporting event and every major figure, he hasn't broken a single story in that time. He says Chicago is a weak market, the competitive edge gone. He has only himself to blame.

When Lou Piniella was hired by the Cubs, the Sun-Times reported it first. Mariotti had no role in that major story. He says the market has gone soft. If that's true, he played as big a role in the softening as anyone else.

He called his colleagues soft, forgetting we're the ones who had to face his targets on a daily basis. We were the ones who had to deal with the anger that he was too cowardly to face himself. We got the quotes that made up the bulk of his columns.

In spinning his story to the Chicago Tribune, Mariotti depicted the Sun-Times as the Titanic, and it was clear the self-proclaimed tough guy was knocking over the old women and children to be the first to jump ship.

''I'm a competitor, and I get the sense this marketplace doesn't compete,'' said Mariotti, who will remain a regular contestant on an ESPN game show.

''Probably the days of high-stakes competition in Chicago are over. To see what has happened in this business ... I don't want to go down with it.''

Stand-up guy to the end.

Sun-Times editor Michael Cooke said it best.

''We wish Jay well and will miss him -- not personally, of course -- but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days,'' Cooke said. ''A paper, like a sports franchise, is something that moves into the future. Stars come and stars go, but the Sun-Times sports section was, is and will continue to be the best in the city.''

Today, it's a little better.

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TAKE AN EHRLICHING AND STOP TICKING:

Japanese Women Shy From Dual Mommy Role (Blaine Harden, 8/28/08, Washington Post)

In numbers that alarm their governments, Asian women are delaying marriage and postponing childbirth.

In Japan, the percentage of women who remain single into their 30s has more than doubled since 1980. The trend is similar in Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and the booming Chinese cities of Shanghai and Beijing.

Feminine foot-dragging on the way to the altar has been identified by demographers as perhaps the primary reason for the region's plunging birthrates. Of the 10 countries or territories at the bottom of a 2008 CIA ranking of global fertility rates, six, including Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, are in the Asia-Pacific region. South Korea also ranks near the bottom.

"Women on Strike," a recent report on Japan's falling birthrate by the securities firm CLSA, noted that the number of children per married Japanese woman has held steady for three decades. "This suggests that the decrease in fertility is due almost entirely to an increase in women of reproductive age not getting married and not having children," the report said.

The triumph of the self.

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SECRETS OF THE TEMPLE:

In Denver, the end of capitalism (David Harsanyi, 08/27/2008, Denver Post)

Well, it's no wonder Democrats didn't want former President Bill Clinton to speak on the economy. Some delegates might have had the temerity to wonder: Hey, why did we experience all that prosperity in the '90s?

It certainly wasn't due to populism, or isolationism, or more government dependency, or any of the hard-left economic policies being preached nightly by speakers at the Democratic National Convention.

No, it was capitalism — more of it, not less of it.

Naturally, every political convention features its share of demagoguery. But buried beneath all the idealistic talk in Denver are some ugly details. [...]

Bill Clinton once told us that the era of big government was over. This Democratic Party seems to feel the era deserves a comeback.

Hard to be a Second Way party when every Anglospheric nation--plus France, Germany, Italy, etc.--has rejected them.

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THE VALIDITY OF THE JFK COMPARISON:

Mission Accomplishment: Democrats try to pad Obama’s resumé. (Ramesh Ponnuru, 8/28/08, National Review)

Former president Clinton got more creative. Saying that “Obama is the man for this job,” Clinton justified this conclusion by pointing to such traits as his “ability to inspire people,” his “intelligence and curiosity,” and “his policies.” He asserted, without attempting to back up the claim, that Obama had shown “a clear grasp of foreign policy and national security challenges.” His other qualifications included “his family heritage and his life experiences,” which “have given him a unique capacity to lead our increasingly diverse nation in an ever more interdependent world.”

Clinton listed only two actual Obama accomplishments, both from this year: He got through a “long, hard primary” and showed great judgment in picking Sen. Biden as his running mate.

Though he does surpass the Unicorn Rider, the only 20th Century president Joe Biden would have been more qualified than is John F. Kennedy.

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WHEN THE TRUTH IS WORSE THAN A LIE:

A Consistent Yet Elusive Nominee (JODI KANTOR, August 28, 2008, IHT)

DENVER — From the earliest days of his presidential campaign, Senator Barack Obama’s aides have heard the same mantra. He repeated it after debates and appearances, after victories and defeats. “I need to get better,” he would say.

In the way Mr. Obama has trained himself for competition, he can sometimes seem as much athlete as politician. Even before he entered public life, he began honing not only his political skills, but also his mental and emotional ones. He developed a self-discipline so complete, friends and aides say, that he has established dominion over not only what he does but also how he feels. He does not easily exult, despair or anger: to do so would be an indulgence, a distraction from his goals. Instead, they say, he separates himself from the moment and assesses.

“He doesn’t inhale,” said David Axelrod, his chief strategist.

But with Barack Hussein Obama officially becoming the Democratic presidential nominee on Wednesday night, some of the same qualities that have him just one election away from the White House — his virtuosity, his seriousness, his ability to inspire, his seeming immunity from the strains that afflict others — may be among his biggest obstacles to getting there.

There is little about him that feels spontaneous or unpolished, and even after two books, thousands of campaign events and countless hours on television, many Americans say they do not feel they know him.

When Bill Clinton said he didn't inhale you knew he was lying, but it was like when your little brother got busted doing something and alibied up. The Unicorn Rider is so contrived that you'd believe him, but there's a price to be paid in politics for that level of artificiality.

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IT'S NOT JUST THAT THEY'RE WEAK AND ISOLATED...:

Georgia War Shows 'Weak' Russia, U.S. Official Says (Glenn Kessler, 8/28/08, Washington Post)

Russia's conflict with Georgia is the sign of a "weak" Russian nation, not a newly assertive one, and Moscow now has put its place in the world order at risk, the top U.S. diplomat for relations with the country said in an interview yesterday.

"There is a Russia narrative that 'we were weak in the '90s, but now we are back and we are not going to take it anymore.' But being angry and seeking revanchist victory is not the sign of a strong nation. It is the sign of a weak one," said Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

"Russia is going to have to come to terms with the reality it can either integrate with the world or it can be a self-isolated bully. But it can't be both. And that's a choice Russia has to have," Fried said.

...but that they're making the case for an independent Chechnya, etc. They've accepted the Anglo-American redefinition of sovereignty as a function of self-determination by a people, rather than exercise of control by a central power.

MORE:
The politics of recognition: Attacks on Russia for recognising breakaway regions in Georgia are riddled with hypocrisy: Moscow is playing a game invented by the West. (Philip Hammond, 8/28/08, Spiked)

‘Unjustified and unacceptable.’

That is how British foreign secretary David Miliband described Russian recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia, he insists, must ‘abide by international law as the basis for resolving this crisis’. Similarly, President George W Bush has denounced recognition as ‘irresponsible’, urging Russia to comply with UN Security Council resolutions and to respect Georgia’s ‘internationally recognised borders’.

Yet Russia is closely following rules made in the West.

Just a few months ago, there was a situation that was almost an exact mirror image of the present. In February, the US and Britain were among the first to recognise the formal independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo, having brought about its de facto independence from Belgrade by military force in 1999.

Acceptance of your standards by your enemy is a victory.

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ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE FILES:

Bill Clinton and 'Addicted to Love,' Really? (Morgan E. Felchner, 8/27/08, US News)

Plenty will be written on the substance of the speech later, but someone who apparently doesn't have a keen sense of irony chose to play him off the stage with "Addicted to Love" by Robert Palmer.

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DEMOCRATS VS REALITY:

U.S. to hand back Anbar, once Iraqi flashpoint (Reuters, 8/28/08)

U.S. troops will on Sept. 1 hand over control of Iraq's Anbar province, once the heart of a bloody Sunni Arab insurgency, reflecting a dramatic drop in violence across the country, an Iraqi official said on Thursday.

Iraqi forces will officially assume control of the vast region west of Baghdad, said Major-General Tareq al-Dulaimi, the provincial police commander.

Anbar, whose insurgency once posed the greatest challenge to U.S. forces and Iraq's Shi'ite-led government, became a relatively peaceful place after Sunni tribal leaders turned against al Qaeda militants and formed neighbourhood police units that became a model for security efforts across Iraq.

Iraq now has security control of 10 of its 18 provinces.

General David Petraeus, U.S. commander in Iraq, said last month he hoped to add at least two more provinces to Iraqi control by the end of the year, in addition to Anbar.

At least the Unicorn Rider is such a neophyte he's only gotten the Iraq War wrong, his running mate also opposed the Contras and SDI. Apparently, on the Left, when they say you are a foreign policy expert it means you were on the losing side in the Cold War and the WoT.

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A CHURCH, NOT A CAFETERIA:

Pelosi gets unwanted lesson in Catholic theology (RACHEL ZOLL, 8/28/08, AP)

Roman Catholic bishops consider her arguments on St. Augustine and free will so far out of line with church teaching that they have issued a steady stream of statements to correct her.

The latest came Wednesday from Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik, who said Pelosi, D-Calif., "stepped out of her political role and completely misrepresented the teaching of the Catholic Church in regard to abortion."

It has been a harsh week of rebuke for the Democratic congresswoman, a Catholic school graduate who repeatedly has expressed pride in and love for her religious heritage.

Cardinals and archbishops in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York and Denver are among those who have criticized her remarks. Archbishop George Niederauer, in Pelosi's hometown of San Francisco, will take up the issue in the Sept. 5 edition of the archdiocesan newspaper, his spokesman said.

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DON'T STOOP TO THEIR LEVEL:

McCain selects his VP (MIKE ALLEN & JONATHAN MARTIN, 8/27/08, Politico)

Sen. McCain has chosen his running mate and the person will be notified on Thursday, a senior campaign official said.

A friend said McCain had pretty much settled on his selection early this week, and it crystallized in the past few days. Campaign manager Rick Davis flew to McCain's cabin in Sedona, Ariz., a few days ago to confer, and another meeting about the choice was held with top aides Wednesday.

The news leaked on the third night of the Democratic National Convention, detracting attention from speeches by former President Bill Clinton and the Democratic ticket mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.

Obviously in an era when Democrats take their losses to the Court and play the sorts of games they did with the NJ ballot after Bob Torricelli self-imolated, the GOP feels free to play hardball, but let's hope Maverick lets the Unicorn Rider have his big day tomorrow rather than announcing his VP to try and distract the press. It's hardly an urgent announcement and there has to still be room for courtesy in our politics.

NB: The good news is that it's definitely not Mitt or Joe Lieberman.

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I'M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, MS REIFENSTAHL:

Dems fear Invesco effect (CHARLES MAHTESIAN, 8/27/08, Politico)

Senior Democratic officials are expressing serious concerns about the political risks posed by Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium Thursday evening.

From the elaborate stagecraft to the teeming crowd of 80,000 cheering partisans, the vagaries of the weather to the unpredictable audience reaction, the optics surrounding the stadium event have heightened worries that the Obama campaign is engaging in a high-risk endeavor in an uncontrollable environment.

A common concern: that the stadium appearance plays against Obama’s convention goal of lowering his star wattage and connecting with average Americans and that it gives Republicans a chance to drive home their message that the Democratic nominee is a narcissistic celebrity candidate.

Even by the appalling standards of recent Democratic nominees--remember John Kerry acting out Miss Saigon on stage four years ago?--these guys make a staggering number of unforced errors.

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OBAMA/BIDEN, BAD FOR THE JEWS:

Poll shows voters support military action in Iran (Bruce Finley, 8/27/08, The Denver Post)

A poll released Wednesday found 63 percent of voters support U.S. or Israeli military action against Iran if diplomacy fails.

Joseph Biden has shown a softness toward Iran (Yossi Melman, 8/28/08, Ha'aretz)

[F]or more than a decade now Biden's attitude toward the Islamic Republic has been soft and conciliatory. It is no wonder that the senator and soon to be Democratic candidate for the vice presidency is the favorite senior American politician of the regime in Tehran. This was manifested in the praise that was heaped on him by one of the most important clerics on an official television channel. This happened in the context of Biden's opposition to President Bush's policy in Iraq, the criticism he expressed of Israel's moves in Lebanon in the last war and most particularly his statements against any American or Israeli attempt to attack Iran to halt its nuclear program and prevent it from achieving nuclear weapons.

Ayatollah Mohammed Kashani, who is close to the spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, praised Biden for his opposition to the military option and said, in a sermon in Tehran in December 2007, "The senator said rightly that Israel was not able to suppress Hezbollah in Lebanon, so how can the United States deal face to face with a nation of 70 million?" As is the custom, the cleric's words were greeted by his audience with cries of "Death to America."

Three months earlier Biden had been one of the few senators who opposed the declaring of the Revolutionary Guard, the military arm, by means of which the ayatollahs have succeed in holding the reins of government for 30 years, a terror organization. The proposal to designate the Revolutionary Guard a terror organization was the climax of a process that had coalesced gradually in the administration. At the start of 2007, the various intelligence branches in the United States assessed that the Revolutionary Guard is behind the wave of terror attacks on American soldiers in Iraq that exacted huge price in terms of hundreds of casualties. The National Intelligence Estimate of August, 2007 states explicitly that "Iran has been intensifying aspects of its lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants" and notes the number of attacks carried out by means of laying explosive charges (similar to those Hezbollah used against Israel Defense Forces soldiers in southern Lebanon) "has risen dramatically."

Despite their clear opposition to Bush's policy, most of the senators from the Democratic Party realized that the intelligence estimate is so assertive and the data so well-founded and reliable that they could not ignore it and could not allow their loathing for the administration and the president to bias their judgment. Therefore, they joined their Republican colleagues and supported the proposal to declare the Revolutionary Guard a terror organization and thus try to harm its financial capability. This must be made clear: The Revolutionary Guard is not just a military force but, just as importantly, also an economic empire that makes it the largest and wealthiest concern in the country.

---

WHILE IT'S AN INTERESTING ACADEMIC QUESTION WHAT SENATOR BIDEN WOULD DO IN THE JOB...:

The Anti-Cheney?: How Biden would compare to Bush's No. 2. (Michael Hirsh, 8/27/08, Newsweek)

This week, Obama's choice of Joltin' Joe Biden as his vice- presidential running mate, particularly coming after the tenure of perhaps the most powerful veep in U.S. history, Dick Cheney, raises a few serious questions.

...the one comparison we can make at this point is their drastically different experience at the pint where they were chosen as running mates. Dick Cheney was the most qualified vice president upon taking office in the country's history. Not only had he been Secretary of Defense in wartime but was a former presidential chief of staff, the man who actually runs an administration on a day to day basis. Joe Biden has been a Senator....for a really long time.

---

WE KNOW THE UNICORN RIDER DIDN'T KNOW JOE BIDEN...:

Business dealings of Biden family could be problematic for him: His brother and sons have close ties to a law firm that has benefited from the senator's congressional votes. (Chuck Neubauer and Tom Hamburger, 8/27/08, Los Angeles Times)

When Joe Biden's brother and son wanted to buy a hedge fund company two years ago, they turned for financing to a law firm that had lobbied the Delaware senator's office on an important piece of business in Congress -- and in fact had recently benefited from his vote. The firm promised James and Hunter Biden that it would invest $2 million, and quickly delivered half of it.

That deal eventually fell through and the money was returned. But it highlighted the close ties that Joe Biden and his family have developed with SimmonsCooper, an Illinois law firm that specializes in asbestos litigation -- a multimillion-dollar line of business that was under threat in Congress.

In addition to providing financing for the hedge fund deal, SimmonsCooper picked the law firm of another of Biden's sons, Beau, to work with it on dozens of asbestos cases in Delaware. "It was only natural that we worked with my friend Beau Biden and his firm," said Jeffrey Cooper, former managing partner of SimmonsCooper.

And SimmonsCooper employees have donated about $200,000 to Biden's campaign efforts since 2001, making the firm his No. 1 donor. All told, SimmonsCooper employees provided much more money to Biden than to any other senator during that period.

His family's financial dealings could be troublesome for Biden, who tonight becomes part of a Democratic presidential ticket that has vowed to reform Washington's traditional money culture.

...but had he never read Richard Ben Cramer? Are we supposed to trust the judgment of the only guy inside the Beltway who doesn't realize Senator Biden is a man on the make?

---

BECAUSE IT'S COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM IN ACTION THE LEFT CAN'T ACKNOWLEDGE THE SUCCESS:

Headway with the homeless: Through a concept called 'housing first,' America is finally reducing homelessness. (CS Monitor's Editorial Board, August 28, 2008)

From 2005 to 2007, the number of chronically homeless fell 30 percent, to 123,833, according to a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) report last month. The overall number of homeless fell to about 672,000 people. (Merely counting the homeless is quite a feat.)

Congress began to push "housing first" in 1999 by ordering HUD to funnel a third of its homeless funds into permanent housing. Then, under President Bush, HUD began to provide incentive money to communities that focus on the chronically homeless. Now there are 345 such communities – local governments, charities, and businesses – working with 10-year plans to reduce or end homelessness.

Thanks, W

---

IS SHE LETTING HER BROTHERS WRITE HER COLUMN AGAIN?:

High Anxiety in the Mile High City (MAUREEN DOWD, 8/27/08, NY Times)

[T]his Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru.

“What is that feeling in the air?” I asked him.

“Submerged hate,” he promptly replied.

Except that you can inevitably see the hate poking through like Scylla. The Obama supporters (are delegates from caucus states called caucasians?) hate the 80s, 90s & 00s; Bill for forcing the Third Way on them; George W. Bush; and Hillary, for not bowing down to the Obamessiah. But if they turn loose the hate they're looking at a Dukakisesque blow-out, so they're stuck pretending and the pretense is too thin to convince.

---

SUPPOSE WE ANALYZE THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN ALONG THE LINES THE PC POLICE APPLY TO THE REST OF US:

You know how we're always being told that Senator Obama's opponents are trying to scare the white women by portraying him as the hypersexualized black man of myth? Well, check this out:
The Look Obama's Going For (Campaign Standard, 8/27/08)

Is framing him within broken phalluses therefore an intentional bid to make him unthreatening?

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JUST IN CASE...:

A Syrian-Israeli Breakthrough? (David Ignatius, August 27, 2008, Washington Post)

Of all the wild cards in the Middle East deck, this one may be the most intriguing: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appears ready for direct peace talks with Israel, if the United States will join France as a co-sponsor.

That's the word from senior advisers to Assad, who spoke with me here this week. The same assessment comes from top French officials in Paris. A direct meeting would raise the Syrian-Israeli dialogue to a new level; so far, it has been conducted indirectly, through Turkey.

The Syrians would like to see a clear signal from the Bush administration that it supports the peace process and that the United States is prepared to join the French as "godfather" of the talks. But Syrian officials are pessimistic and say they doubt that the administration, which has sought to isolate and punish Syria, will change its policy in the few months it has left. That would disappoint some of Assad's advisers, who prefer to move quickly, rather than wait for a new U.S. administration to organize its foreign policy priorities.

...you thought there was any danger that the Realists would learn anything from Iraq. Fortunately, Maverick is unlikely to prop up a Ba'athist dictator and the Unicorn Rider is already seen as so weak that he can ill afford to begin an administration by doing so.

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EXPLAIN AGAIN WHY THE FOLKS MEETING IN DENVER WANT TO MAKE US MORE LIKE EUROPE?:

Aging Population Spooks EU (Der Spiegel, 8/27/08)

It is clear who will be paying the pensions off British retirees in the not-too-distant future: the children of the country's immigrant population. The rest of Europe may not be so lucky. The EU has known for years it is sitting on a demographic time bomb but new statistics released Tuesday predict just how close the problem looms.

Deaths will overtake births in Europe just seven years from now, according to an official EU study conducted by Eurostat. The shrinking population is due to "persistently low fertility" according to the report.

Once deaths outnumber births, migration will become the only source of population growth. But from 2035 on, even positive net migration will no longer offset the negative impact of fewer births, predicts Eurostat.

Shrinkage aside, the EU's population will grow older in the next 50 years, with only two people of working age for every person aged 65 or more by 2060, the report says.

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FOUR MORE YEARS!:

Durable goods post strong increases in July, June (Associated Press, August 27, 2008)

Orders for big-ticket manufactured goods turned in a second consecutive strong monthly performance in July, a far bigger-than-expected gain led by a huge jump in demand for commercial aircraft.

The Commerce Department said today that orders for durable goods rose 1.3 percent last month, far above the slight 0.1 percent increase economists had been expecting.

The July increase matched a 1.3 percent rise in June, which was revised up from an earlier reading of 0.8 percent. Both months turned in the strongest gains since a 4.1 percent surge last December.

Economists had been expecting a far weaker showing in July reflecting their views that the manufacturing sector is being battered by the slowdown facing the overall economy. Instead, the report showed surprising strength in a number of areas.

Scores Stable as More Minorities Take SAT (Maria Glod and Michael Alison Chandler, 8/27/08, Washington Post)

SAT performance held steady for 2008 high school graduates even as participation rose among minority students and those who are part of the first generation in their families to go to college, the College Board reported yesterday. [...]

Nationwide, the number of students taking the SAT surpassed 1.5 million for the first time, up 8 percent from five years ago and almost 30 percent over the past decade. Forty percent of test-takers were minority students, up from 39 percent last year, and 36 percent were among a group described as first-generation collegegoers, up from 35 percent.

College Board officials considered the boost in participation evidence that the high school students who aspire to a college degree are growing more ethnically and economically diverse.

Number of Americans without health insurance falls (Lisa Girion, 8/27/08, Los Angeles Times)

In all, the number of people without health insurance dropped last year to 45.7 million, from 47 million in 2006, according to the bureau's annual report on income, poverty and health insurance. That's a drop to 15.3% of Americans from 15.8%.

Census: Income rose, middle class grew in 2007: But child poverty also rose, according to the new report. (Ron Scherer, 8/27/08, The Christian Science Monitor)

The standard of living rose and the middle class grew while the number of wealthy actually shrank somewhat compared to 2006. At the same time, the official poverty rate was basically unchanged. And the number of Americans without health coverage fell for the first time during the Bush administration.

Those are some of the conclusions from the US Census Bureau's annual survey, a report that gives scholars a longer view of the nation's economic health.

"It's a good solid report," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

Glimmers of good news in US housing reports (The Associated Press, August 26, 2008)

While no one is ready to call the bottom of the worst housing collapse in decades, there were glimmers this week that the severity is waning.

The decline in home prices is starting to ease and in some cities values are starting to rise again. Existing home sales rose slightly from June to July, and the glut of newly built homes on the market fell to a five month low last month.

"The bottom of the housing downturn is coming into view," said Moody's Economy.com Chief Economist Mark Zandi.

Aug. consumer outlook up more than expected (Associated Press, 8/27/08)

Americans felt better about the economy in August, as a barometer of sentiment posted the biggest boost in two years amid falling gas prices. [...]

The Conference Board, a private research group, said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index rose to 56.9, up from a revised 51.9 in July. That's the largest gain since August 2006 and is ahead of the 53 expected by economists surveyed by Thomson/IFR.

Funny, America looks far different from the back of a unicorn....

---

FITTING FOR THE PAGAN PARTY:

Obama Speech Stage Resembles Ancient Greek Temple (Reuters, August 26, 2008)

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's big speech on Thursday night will be delivered from an elaborate columned stage resembling a miniature Greek temple.

Shouldn't they really be having a human sacrifice to kick the night off?

---

CHANGE YOU CAN CASH IN ON!:

Obama, Biden's Son Linked by Earmarks (James V. Grimaldi and Kimberly Kindy, 8/27/08, Washington Post)

Sen. Barack Obama sought more than $3.4 million in congressional earmarks for clients of the lobbyist son of his Democratic running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, records show. Obama succeeded in getting $192,000 for one of the clients, St. Xavier University in suburban Chicago.

So we face a tough call as to which part of the story is more revealing: that the Unicorn Rider is just another Cook County hack or that he's such an insignificant legislator that he could only secure a paltry $192k?

---

FROM WHENCE DERIVES THIS ODD DEMOCRATIC NOTION...:

Obama's Pick for Vice President Is Catholic. But the Bishops Deny Him Communion ( Sandro Magister, August 27, 2008, Chiesa)

In an interview with the "Christian Science Monitor," Biden said that he believes his positions are "totally consistent with Catholic social doctrine."

But this is not the view of Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver, the city in which the Democratic party is officially presenting Obama and Biden as its candidates for the presidential election.

In interview with the Associated Press, Chaput said that Biden's support for the so-called "right" to abortion is a serious public error. And he added: "I presume that his integrity will lead him to refrain from presenting himself for Communion."

During these same days, from Rome, another American archbishop, Raymond L. Burke, has spoken out on the same question and along the same lines: he, too, says communion should not be given to pro-abortion Catholic politicians.

Neither Burke nor Chaput is new to taking stances like these. In 2004, on the eve of the previous presidential election, Burke advocated withholding communion from the Democratic candidate for the White House at the time, John Kerry, also a "pro-choice" Catholic.

In June of that year, from Rome, then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had sent to the United States bishops' conference a memorandum stating the "general principles" on this question.

Ratzinger's memorandum was private, but www.chiesa published it in its entirety. It sided with the unyielding bishops like Burke and Chaput.

...that religion is a function of genetics rather than faith?

---

LIKE BLAMING LONGSTREET FOR LOSING THE CIVIL WAR:

Blaming A-Rod seems perfectly acceptable (Ken Davidoff, August 26, 2008, Newsday)

We often talk about the game finding a particular player. But Tuesday night, it felt like this whole 2008 Yankees season hoisted itself from its hammock and staggered around, tossing aside empty whiskey bottles and half-eaten bags of Cheetos, until it tracked down Alex Rodriguez.

Good Lord. Talk about a beautiful wedding of perception and reality.

A-Rod doesn't deserve the most blame for this playoff-free Yankees season, not with the overall numbers he has tallied. But Tuesday night, in the season's most important game, the $275-million man earned the scorn of Yankee Stadium like he rarely has before.

An 0-for-5 with seven stranded teammates on base and a fielding error, in a brutal, possibly fatal, 7-3 loss to the Red Sox, will work people into a pretty good lather.

A-Rod is at .308/398/582 28 78 16 (412) and only plays 3b because of the ego of the guy to his left.

Meanwhile, Brian Cashman not only put together one of the worst defensive teams imaginable (Giambi should have had the ball on which Rodriguez got an error) but failed to address the team's manifest pitching problems and left the young pitchers in the dubious care of notorious arm-wrecker Joe Girardi, so that none of the three are in the majors now. It's a team built for failure. Blaming one of the few guys who isn't one is crazy.

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DOESN'T THE IDENTITY POLITICS SURROUNDING THING ONE...:

Barack Obama's agenda so far is a no-show: The Clinton situation is blocking discussion of the economy. (Doyle McManus and Robin Abcarian, 8/27/08, Los Angeles Times)

This week's Democratic convention sought to relaunch Barack Obama's presidential campaign by doing three things: Healing the party's internal rift, showing voters who Obama is, and spelling out more clearly what he would do as president, especially on the economy. But at the halfway point, the convention still seemed, at best, to have accomplished Step 1. [...]

[A]s for how Obama would tackle the voters' top concern, the nation's slumping economy, the convention has barely made a mark. And that has even some Obama backers fretting.

"We'd rather be talking about his economic program, sure," said an Obama advisor who spoke on condition of anonymity because the campaign has sought to portray an air of serene confidence. "We'll get there," he added grimly.

...tell us exactly who he is and what he'd do?

---

HOW MANY CRAZY PILLS DO YOU HAVE TO TAKE...:

BBC denies interference in al-Qaida coverage (Oliver Luft, 8/27/08, guardian.co.uk)

The BBC has denied that its editorial independence was compromised after it emerged that a Radio 4 documentary about Islamic extremism bore similarities to a programme described in a leaked Whitehall document as one at which anti-al-Qaida propaganda was put forward. [...]

Yesterday's Guardian splash, by home affairs editor Alan Travis, quoted a leaked document from a Whitehall counter terrorism unit established under former home secretary John Reid, called the research, information and communication unit.

This document claimed the unit was targeting the BBC and other media organisations through which it could "channel messages" as part of a propaganda push designed to "taint the al-Qaida brand".

...before you're Bright enough to think it inappropriate for the public media to oppose your nation's enemies? Imagine if the head of the BBC had tried explaining to Churchill that they needed to remain neutral as between Britain and Hitler?

---

ACTUALLY, IF SENATOR OBAMA HAD HIS WAY...:

Anti-abortion activists unfurl sign on mesa (COLLEEN SLEVIN, 8/26/08, The Associated Press)

Anti-abortion activists unfurled a huge sign Tuesday on a mesa west of Denver equating the Democratic National Convention with abortion, but later removed it at the request of authorities.

The three-line sign on Table Mountain in Golden said "Destroys uNborn Children," with the capital letters DNC lined up vertically.

...it would be "born" also.

MORE:
Poll: Majority of Americans Disagree With Barack Obama on When Life Begins (Steven Ertelt, August 26, 2008, LifeNews.com)

Barack Obama confessed over a week ago that he wasn't sure when life begins and worried the question may be a little "above my pay grade." However, a majority of Americans know when human life begins and they agree with John McCain, who said the starting point is conception.

Zogby International conducted the poll for WorldNetDaily and it questioned 1,099 likely voters from August 22 to 24.

The survey found 59 percent believe human life begins at conception, another 16.8 percent say it happens when an unborn child can survive outside her mother's womb with medical assistance, and just 17.2 percent say human life doesn't begin until birth.

Of course, Senator Obama thinks it's just fine to kill the little mistakes at all three stages.

---

IT LOOKS LIKE TRYOUTS FOR THE FRENCH NATIONAL TEAM (via V. Anne Chaisiriwatanasai):

Barack Obama: White Sox 'serious' ball (Mark Silva, 8/25/08, The Swamp)

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WELL GERALD FORD HAD JOE GARAGIOLA AND IT IS THE PARTY OF FATHERHOOD AND PATRIOTISM... (fossil fuel advocacy alert):

Gasolina! Daddy Yankee Endorses McCain (Michael D. Shear, 8/26/08, Washington Post)

The high school girls standing on the risers behind Sen. John McCain looked like any high school girls would during a talk by someone Paris Hilton might describe as "a white-haired dude." They clapped politely.

And then, when McCain introduced his special guest, they freaked out. They gasped. They put their hands over their mouths. They screamed.

Daddy Yankee, one of the country's top Latino music stars, strode out, wearing mirrored sunglasses. A Puerto Rican reggaeton recording artist, he appeared next to McCain to endorse the Republican nominee and perhaps give him a boost with Hispanic voters.

But for the girls, all that -- and McCain -- was beside the point. What they thought was going to be a boring, political event was suddenly way cool. Yankee turned and hugged a few of the girls, who put their shaking arms around him. [...]

"I just want to say thank you Daddy Yankee," said McCain, who also referred to him as Ramon, since his given name is Ramon Ayala. McCain said Yankee has been married 15 years, had grown up poor in Puerto Rico and made "the right choice" in life.

John McCain shares the stage with Jay Leno and Daddy Yankee (Maeve Reston, 8/26/08, Los Angeles Times )

The audience of more than 100 students seemed sleepy for McCain's opening remarks about the importance of voting and the national leaders who have come from Arizona.

But they perked up when he promised a "special guest" and "a great American success story."

McCain built up the suspense by withholding the guest's name at first, but then gave it away, saying, "One of his most famous songs, I know you're very familiar with: 'Gasolina' " -- drawing gasps of surprise from the crowd -- and then finally said, "Well, here he is, Daddy Yankee."

Though McCain has sometimes shown surprising familiarity with rap stars and pop culture references because of the musical tastes of his daughters, it is unlikely that the conservative Republican would have made a point of mentioning the song had he known that the "Gasolina" lyrics are loaded with sexual references. Although there's some debate about what the word "gasolina" means in this context, one thing is certain: It's not a petroleum product.

Sexual allusions? How about the environmental incorrectness?

---

EVERYTHING BUT THE SURGE:

Vets take Obama to task (IKE ALLEN | 8/26/08, Politico)

The 30-second spot, called “I Am the Surge,” features three Iraq war veterans who served in the surge of U.S. military forces into Iraq: Gabriel Herrera, David Thul and Travis Quinlan. [...]

Vets for Freedom Chairman Pete Hegseth, a decorated former Army infantry platoon leader in Baghdad, said in a statement: “Vets for Freedom will not stand by and let the incredible progress of our troops go unnoticed by the American public and lawmakers from either side of the aisle.

Hegseth is at the convention to tell lawmakers, delegates and the press about his observation during a recent return to Iraq.

“It is essential that our top legislators — regardless of party — understand the importance of victory in Iraq, the consequences of defeat and the success of the surge,” Hegseth said. “Sen. Obama has said that he would still oppose the surge if given another opportunity and has pointed to every outside factor but the surge to explain improvements in Iraq. We hope he will listen to the veterans who have served there and support this important resolution for the sake of the troops.”

Here's a prior ad:

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WHICH IS WHY THE HOPLESSNESS OF REALISTS IS UNREALISTIC:

Some FARC rebels ready to quit: But splitting from the guerrilla group can carry big risks (JOHN OTIS, Aug. 23, 2008, Miami Herald)

Once a guerrilla, always a guerrilla.

At least that's the credo of Colombia's largest rebel group, which insists that its foot soldiers remain loyal to the cause even from behind bars.

But in a startling development, more than 700 imprisoned rebels have renounced the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and are calling on the guerrilla army to make peace.

"We are telling the FARC that they no longer have a claim on us," Raul Agudelo, a high-ranking rebel commander, said in a prison courtyard surrounded by gray concrete walls — his home for most of the last five years.

"We don't want to ever again pick up a rifle and point it at a fellow Colombian."

Colombia is one of the surges W doesn't get credit for.

---

STRIP THEM OF EVASIONS AND WHAT DO THEY HAVE LEFT?:

Catholic bishops correct Pelosi on abortion (The Associated Press, 8/25/08)

In an appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Pelosi said "doctors of the church" have not been able to define when life begins and that "over the history of the church, this is an issue of controversy."

Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl, citing the teaching responsibility entrusted to bishops, issued a statement late Monday that read, in part: "Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable."

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput and his auxiliary bishop, James Conley, said in a statement posted on the archdiocesan Web site: "Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a gifted public servant of strong convictions and many professional skills. Regrettably, knowledge of Catholic history and teaching does not seem to be one of them."

Abortion "is always gravely evil, and so are the evasions employed to justify it," the statement continued.

---

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR DAD DID:

Shhh! Americans Getting Richer (James Pethokoukis, 8/26/08, US News)

A few factoids:

1) Adjusted gross income reported on tax returns in 2006, adjusted for inflation, averaged $58,029, up 1.2 percent from 2000.

2) Some 60 percent of the increase in total income went to those making more than $75,000, but less than $1 million a year.

It's Phil Gramm's America, we just live in it...

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BECAUSE POLITICS SHOULD BE FUN:

---

IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN (via Ed Driscoll) [profanity alert]:

The 7 Most Retarded Ways Celebrities Have Tried to Go Green (David Knight, Cracked)

#6. Jennifer Aniston Brushes Her Teeth in the Shower

Believe it or not, six years ago people still used to disagree with us when we pointed out that all comedy is conservative.

---

AND ANOTHER REASON WE NEED MORE RAILWAY LINES...:

The funniest show you've never seen (Raja Sen, August 26, 2008, Rediff)

Created by James Bobin in collaboration with Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement -- who play completely loser-ified alter egos of themselves on the show -- the premise is that of Bret and Jemaine living in New York and peddling their band, the FOTC, searching earnestly for gigs and girls. They are accompanied quite crucially by the Deputy Cultural Attache at the New Zealand consulate, Murray Hewitt (played by Rhys Darby) -- who also happens to be their manager.

On a very basic level, it is the kind of plotline that can wear quite thin indeed -- the humour predictably built around moments of extreme social awkwardness, 'we-aren't-Australian' jokes, and Americans whose only reference point to New Zealand is Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

Yet the humour here is exceptionally quirky, constantly surprising and very, very hard to resist. Just like the New Zealand Tourism posters popping up in the background: 'New Zealand: Don't Expect Too Much, You Will Love It,' reads one, while another, with big white letters over much mountainous terrain, exclaims, simply, 'New Zealand... rocks!!!'

Indeed.

And the songs, the songs. The musical format is used both as organic, when they start jamming out a song around their dining table, or unapologetically surreal, when the entire show suddenly transforms into an 80s ballad video or a madly futuristic Bowie take-off.

The lyrics are maddeningly brilliant -- 'I'm not crying / It's just been raining... on my face,' sing the boys with hilarious sincerity after first-episode heartbreak -- and their approach is earnest, which is what makes it work. Clearly Bret and Jemaine are deluded enough to believe in their music, and, more importantly, the words they're stringing along together.

The fact that they're very talented musicians who can capably sculpt send-ups of varied songstyles -- everything from Duran Duran to gangster rap -- ensures that while the songs are ridiculously funny, they also make for pretty darned good listening.

The Conchords songs came before the series -- winning the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album -- and the show was written around them, which is what makes for 12 staggeringly brilliant episodes perfectly mixing zany, largely understated humour, and loony songs that have led to the band gaining massive YouTube-aided popularity worldwide.

...The Wife listens to the BBC Radio version of the show (torrent here) when she's driving around and ends up laughing so hard she's going to cause an accident sooner or later. The following will most likely be to blame:

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MATERIALIST GIRL PARTY:

Much Higher I.Q. (James Bowman, 8/26/2008, American Spectator)

[E]litism to Americans is not a matter of wealth or birth or education. Even in Europe, where that once was true, the elites are not so defined anymore. Nowadays, in the best spirit of American democracy, anyone can be an elitist. All you have to do is believe that you are smarter than other people and that, therefore, the all the other, less-smart people, if they know what's good for them, should be happy to put you in charge of them. They know better than you do how much money you should be making and how you should be making it and what you should be doing with it once you've made it, for example.

Doubtless the elitists' position on all these things is much more intelligent than yours, but -- wouldn't you just know it? -- a majority of Americans have never quite cottoned to having these things decided for them. They'd rather be governed by some pork-rind eating, country-music listening Skull and Bonesman who at least has the basic courtesy to flatter their tastes than by a self-styled intellectual who peers down at them and their regrettable amusements from a lofty height. Mr. Obama may be the grandson of an African goatherd, but he has all the arrogance of a duke -- considerably more than most dukes nowadays, actually -- when it comes to telling you how to live your life.

We can readily see why, then, Senator Obama should have chosen as his running mate a man who on more than one occasion has said of the President of the United States (who belongs to a different party), "This guy is brain-dead." Joe Biden, another Senator who, apart from a couple of years of practicing law, has spent his whole working life in the Senate and who has a senator's idea of "experience" in foreign policy, having run his mouth about it for 36 years, has an "impeccable" working-class background, but he once told a voter that "I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do." Believe me, it doesn't take nearly so much either of brains or of courage as Mr. Kinsley appears to think in order to attack that kind of political imbecility.

Although it has been clear at least since they made their once-hero William Jennings Bryan an object of derision because he was on the Stupid rather than the Bright side of the Scopes Trial, Democrats seem unable to process the fact that in the Puritan Nation elitism isn't a function of rich vs. poor but of Reason vs. Faith.

---

IN FAIRNESS TO THE UNICORN RIDER...:

Carville: This Convention Has No Message (Jake Tapper, August 26, 2008, ABCNews: Political Punch)

On CNN this evening, Clintonista James Carville voiced his displeasure with tonight's proceedings as having no theme, no message.

"James Carville seems the least satisfied Democrat in here right now," noted CNN's Anderson Cooper. "What's going on James?"

"Well if this party has a message it has done a hell of a job of hiding it tonight I promise you that," Carville said.

...Mr. Carville had a far easier task in '92. With the GOP base angered by the incumbent's reversal on taxes and with a second rightwing candidate in the race, all they had to do was present Bill Clinton as a Democrat who had moved on from the '70s and accepted the Thatcher/Reagan '80s, especially the economics thereof. Once you'd established that Mr. Clinton wasn't a liberal he became a viable alternative, though he still only managed to garner 43% of the popular vote.

But Senator Obama just won his party's nominations by dominating the caucuses, where those who turn out are stuck in the 70s. Because his main opponent was President Clinton's wife, Mr. Obama effectively ran against the Democratic Party of the 1990s, Bill Clinton's New Democrats. Now he has to completely reverse his field and scramble to the Right, which can't help but appear craven or hypocritical. Moreover, he doesn't have the advantage of a well-funded third party challenger from the Right nor of running against the incumbent. Indeed, for the past eight years his own party and the media have crafted an image--though they suddenly realize its absurdity--of John McCain as a Maverick who is nothing like his own party. So Mr. Obama not only has to invert the established narrative about himself but the one about his foe, and that's an awful lot to ask anyone to get done in just four months, nevermind in four days.

MORE:
Michelle Obama’s Two Americas: At the convention, a new and radically different message from the candidate’s wife. (Byron York, 8/26/08, National Review)

In Denver, Mrs. Obama said, “My piece of the American Dream is a blessing hard won by those who came before me.” Those forebears, she explained, were “driven by the same conviction that drove my dad to get up an hour early each day to painstakingly dress himself for work — the same conviction that drives the men and women I’ve met all across this country…That’s why I love this country.”

In Charlotte, Mrs. Obama said, “We’re still living in a time and in a nation where the bar is set, right?…You start working hard and sacrificing and you think you’re getting close to that bar, you’re working and you’re struggling, and then what happens? They raise the bar…keep it just out of reach.”

Had something changed in the last few months? In the early primaries, Mrs. Obama often gave complaining speeches. It was in late February that she said the now-famous words, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” In other speeches, she grumbled — sometimes at length — about having to pay back her college loans. And she, as much as her husband, was associated with the anti-American rants of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The images began to accumulate. By the later months of the Democratic primary race, when her husband was stumbling to victory after a powerful stretch of wins in February, Mrs. Obama’s approval ratings began to slip. She was still not widely known at the time, but it seemed the more voters got to know her, the more they began to have reservations about her.

In May, the Pew Research Center found that 22 percent of people polled had an unfavorable opinion of Mrs. Obama. In July, an Associated Press poll showed that she had a 35 percent unfavorable rating — versus a 30 percent favorable figure. A couple of weeks ago, a the Rasmussen polling organization found that 43 percent of voters had an unfavorable impression of Mrs. Obama.

The lady doth protest too little (Spengler, 8/26/08, Asia Times)

Michelle Obama's negatives in opinion polls are the worst ever registered for a candidate's wife, deep enough, perhaps, to turn the election against Barack. Presumably that is why the Democratic Party wheeled out a chipper, perky, sunny and smiling African-American female who claimed to be Michelle Obama in the keynote slot of its national convention Monday night. This alleged Michelle Obama bore a striking physical resemblance to the candidate's wife observed during the campaign, but the differences in attitude and rhetoric were extreme enough to warrant verification.

Mrs Obama's appearance was the star event on an otherwise lackluster first evening. She was introduced by her brother, basketball coach Craig Robinson, who mentioned that as a child she had memorized every episode of the popular television comedy, The Brady Bunch. [...]

Never before has a candidate's wife delivered a major address to a national convention of either party. The break in precedent stems evidently from the urgent need to remake the image built up by sections of the media of Michelle Obama as a rancorous and resentful woman. But it also may reflect the extraordinary degree of her influence in her husband's campaign. She is reported to have ruled out Senator Hillary Clinton as a vice presidential candidate, although polls showed that Clinton would strengthen the ticket more than any other choice.

Pretty hard to present a unified and coherent message when a part of the convention has to be devoted to making the candidate's wife seem less anti-American.

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