Sunday, November 30, 2008
Top Political News:
Mumbai attack: British men 'among the terrorists'
Two British-born Pakistanis were among eight gunmen seized by Indian commandos who stormed buildings to free hostages, Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, reportedly said.
The Foreign Office earlier said it was investigating reports the terrorists - who slaughtered 175 people included "British citizens of Pakistani origin".
The development came as Gordon Brown called for international co-ordination to combat terrorism in the wake of the attacks.
We’re back to the real war:I the political class versus the citizenry
The last election has brought us united governments under the Democrats. We’ll see where that gets us.
It’s us, the people, versus them, the politicians . . . and their hired functionaries
The next battleground is Tuesday in Georgia. At stake, a Senate in which Democrats could shut off debate if they wish.
http://townhall.com/columnists/PaulJacob/2008/11/30/in_open_contests,_voters_beat_politicians
George Will: New New-Deal 'Jolt' Overestimates Real Impact Of The Old New Deal
Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal.
Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not
A new New Deal would vindicate pessimists who say that history is not one damn thing after another, it is the same damn thing over and over
http://ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=312760807933122
Opinion:
Voting in the wake of Nov 4 -- encouraging trends in Georgia
Al Franken seems to have come a cropper in his effort to take by maneuvering what he could not obtain through the democratic process – the Senate seat in Minnesota.
Minnesota is not a state in which Democrat vote fraud and theft is wide spread and to be expected. Usually, Minnesota elections are fair. (Not that such a history intimidated the liberal “comedian” in the slightest. It now seems Al Franken – who flopped big time in talk radio – is conspiring with Democrat Senate Leader, Harry Ried to craft another option for taking the Minnesota seat.
A special election comes to Georgia Tuesday as incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss faces a challenge from Obama Democrat Jim Martin.
Georgia , unlike Minnesota, is notorious for Democrat schemes and scams being used to steal elections. Making sure an honest count is achieved is as great a challenge as getting the most votes. Early voting offers Democrats new targets for theft, of course. The practice should be prohibited – but don’t hold your breath.
Karl Rove’s firm has just published an analysis of the Georgia vote and its favorable for Saxby Chambliss. It should be. Georgia ceased being a Democrat state several elections ago.
Rove knows about special election politics, and he is particularly savvy about politics in the Southeast. He has a long record in Alabama races, and has owned a home in the Florida Panhandle for about five years, The Panhandle is often regarded as “extreme South Georgia or Alabama” – my own home is in the Panama City vicinity, an area known far and wide as “The Redneck Riviera”.
So those of us who have strong geographic connections to this area, also know about its politice – next to college football – politics are perhaps the most often discussed topics in social gatherings and other occasions. Those politics are heavily weighted to the conservative side of things.
Thus Chambless – a native of South Georgia, should have a leg up going into the election. But forget the “shuddas” and let Rove’s research provide legitimate insight:
I yield the podium to Karl:
<<Early Voting Trends In Georgia’s Run‐Off Election. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) faces off against former State
Rep. Jim Martin (D) on December 2nd in a run‐off election that could determine whether Democrats reach 60 Senators and a filibuster‐proof US Senate. Recent polling suggests Chambliss holds a small lead — a Politico poll released Tuesday showed him ahead by 3 points, 50%‐47%.
Special elections, however, are notoriously difficult to poll because of uncertainty about which voters will show up in a low‐turnout environment. Get‐out‐the‐vote is even more important in a special than in the general. But as we saw this year, early voting patterns can be a good gauge of voter intensity and GOTV.
What does the special election early voting tell us?
So far, early voting suggests turnout will be nowhere as high as the general election was. Through November 24th, just over 150,000 voters had cast ballots early for the run‐off. By comparison, more than 2 million voters cast ballots early for the general election.
The electorate's composition has also changed dramatically. Blacks have fallen from nearly 35% of the early vote in the general to 23% for the run‐off, while white voters have increased from 60% of the early voting pool to75%. According to exit polling of both early and Election Day voters from the November 4th general, white voters went for Chambliss 70%‐26%, while black voters went for Martin 93%‐4%. The gender composition of the electorate has also changed—men, who voted 58%‐39% for Chambliss in the general, have increased from 40% of the general early voting electorate to 48% in the run‐off early voting, while women, who voted 54% ‐ 42% for Martin, declined from 56% in the general election early voting to 52% in the run‐off early voting.>>
Let’s all keep our fingers crossed. Better than that – pray. This is a critical election – as critical as it gets.
Buddy
The morning’s top blogs:
1.
The Odd Story of Romance in Dreams from my Father
By Jack Cashill
I have as much faith in the hypothesis that follows as astronomers do in the big bang or biologists do in evolution, so bear with me please as I, like they, present my evidence in the indicative.
The hypothesis is simple enough, namely that Barack Obama needed substantial help to write his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, and that this help came from the man who has made "unrepentant" a household word, Bill Ayers.
For simplicity's sake, I refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama." He provided the skeletal narrative and likely maintained executive control. Ayers fleshed that narrative out, imposing, where useful, his vocabulary, his rhythms, his style, his observations, his . . .
. . . Obama worries that his world would inevitably yield to his girlfriend's. "I knew that if we stayed together," he writes, "I'd eventually live in hers." In Fugitive Days, Ayers describes how seductive the world of the Oughtons could be: "a perfect marriage, a comfortable career in banking, say, or the law, two golden children, the clubs, the country home."
Despite his obsession with Oughton, Ayers had other lovers, but then again, so did Oughton. This troubled Ayers considerably. He does not say whether this led to their parting, but he was not with her at the end. When Obama says, "I pushed her away," are we really hearing Ayers?
This split led one radical feminist in the underground, Jane Alpert, to chastise Ayers publicly "for his callous treatment and abandonment of Diana Oughton before her death." That death continues to haunt Ayers and almost assuredly found an outlet in Dreams, written six years before his own memoir.
"Whenever I think back to what my friend said to me, that night outside the theater, it somehow makes me ashamed," an unsmiling Obama tells Auma, while scraping the peppers into a pot. That shame is likely Ayers' as are the guilt, the girlfriend, the affair, the visit to the country home, the rowing in the lake, the fateful phone call, the dead body, the dog poop, and probably even the peppers.
More
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/the_odd_story_of_romance_in_dr.html
2.
Barack Obama's plans for the web
By Rajini Vaidyanathan
BBC News, Washington
On election night, as it became clear that Barack Obama had won the election to become the 44th president of the United States, his supporters received an e-mail in their inboxes.
It started like this:
"I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first. We just made history.
"And I don't want you to forget how we did it….."
With a personal sign off at the end saying "Thank you, Barack", it felt intimate, yet this was a mass e-mail, sent to the millions who had subscribed to Barack Obama's campaign alerts.
It's just one example of how the president-elect has used the internet to communicate and create a dialogue with supporters. The Obama campaign's effective use of new media played a big part in his success.
His presence on sites such as such as Facebook and Myspace created online communities which organised supporters to register, campaign, and ultimately go out and vote. He also sent out news via text message, using the medium to inform people of his vice-presidential choice.
In an interview before the election, he spoke of how he wanted to continue that conversation into the White House:
"One of the things that I'm excited about is to transfer what we've learned from this campaign in using technology, into government. I mean, there are huge areas where we can open things up, make things more transparent," he said.
New address list
As President-elect Barack Obama has begun a weekly YouTube address, something he is set to continue into office - a technological twist on the traditional weekly presidential radio address.
His transition team has also set up the Change.gov website to keep people informed of his preparations for government. It follows on from the successful Mybarackobama.com website, set up during the campaign as a place for supporters to meet and interact in the virtual world.
It's thought the Obama campaign employed as many as 95 permanent web staff and spent millions of dollars on its online operations. The reality, once in the White House, could be very different.
David Almacy, who served as Internet and e-communications Director under President Bush from 2005-2007, had a team of just six, and a budget of $1m per year.
The level of resources Barack Obama will throw into a similar set-up is as yet unknown.
Another unknown is how Barack Obama will continue to converse with the 13 million people who signed up to receive his campaign e-mail alerts, and reach out to those who weren't his Twitter followers or Facebook friends. Under privacy laws, the president-elect won't be able to take the e-mail list with him into the White House, though he can e-mail everyone on it to ask if they want to join a new whitehouse.gov e-mail list.
3.
A QUESTION OF MANHOOD – THE CONTINUED RELEVANCY OF WILLIAM AYERS
Nicholas Guariglia
It has been three weeks since the seemingly inevitable occurred. Sen. Barack Obama is now President-elect Obama. My guy lost. Rather than offer an immediate, blame-all, knee-jerk post-election analysis of “What went wrong,” I felt obliged to think it over for a bit — and in the end decided how McCain lost, or how Obama won, was not truly the topic of the hour.
In the aftermath of the election, even Mr. Obama’s most ardent critics cannot help but succumb to the natural inclination to “rally around” the incoming administration. While we wish Obama all the luck in the world, we still cringe with hesitation at the unexamined character of the man the country just elected. I raise these doubts, yet again, because one William Ayers has now, unsurprisingly, only after Obama’s victory, decided to crawl out of his hole, re-release his book, and do the talk show circuit.
Alas, one more time, the implications of what the Ayers-Obama link actually means must be reexamined.
It was not until the final presidential debate that Sen. McCain raised William Ayers’ name to Obama himself. Good, I thought, here’s another chance for the would-be president to prove to me that his long friendship and association with an unrepentant Pentagon-bomber isn’t as big of a deal as I seem to think it is.
Sadly, Mr. Obama took the opportunity to chastise John McCain for talking about Ayers, using an old line every third-grader in the country is familiar with: “I think the fact that this has become such an important part of your campaign, Sen. McCain, says more about your campaign than it says about me.” Basically, Barack was rubber, and McCain was glue.
Let’s be clear: the William Ayers connection says more about Barack Obama than it says about anyone else on the planet. That’s true for one reason only: Obama wanted to become our president and now will become our president. The only thing William Ayers suggests about McCain’s campaign is how inept it was in not raising this association — and a dozen others like it — earlier in the race.
President-elect Obama first said Ayers was just a fellow in the neighborhood, then said Ayers did bad things when he was but a child, and then, upon further revelation, Obama finally admitted he served on multiple boards with him. But its okay, Obama swore, because Ayers is now an “education professor” and the two were working on “education.”
Overlook for a moment how bizarre and radical the Ayers-Obama education “reform” actually was — so radical Hugo Chávez praised it personally to Ayers during a meeting in Venezuela — and instead focus on Mr. Ayers himself.
Ask yourself: if a man who bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, police stations, declared war against the United States, told children to kill their parents, wanted to bring upon a communist revolution across the country, only to get off on a technicality — and today says he wishes he bombed more — was in your company, would you look him in the eye? Would you shake his hand? Would you launch your career from his living room? Would you serve on multimillion dollar boards with him? Would you keep in frequent and friendly contact with him via phone and e-mail until 2005 — at the least — four years after 9/11, when Ayers asserted he was unrepentant for bombing whom he bombed?
Do you know anyone who would have behaved like that? Do you know anybody like our next president?
On a personal level, if a punk like Ayers requested my services, or wanted to further advance my career, I’d do some serious soul-searching. I don’t care if he wanted to begin a joint-venture to help old ladies cross the street. I would very impolitely point my finger in his face, tell him what I thought about him, and walk out of the room — all out of solidarity with the fellow countrymen he bombed and doesn’t feel bad about bombing.
That is how most Americans would react. That is how most men — real men, self-confidant and aware of their surroundings — would react.
Which is what manhood boils down to. That’s what character is all about. I don’t merely dislike Barack Obama’s unbelievably Leftist policies. I disrespect his behavior as a man. I consider it unbecoming of a man. In other words, it is unmanly.
We hear much talk about femininity and what contemporary feminism means for this generation of women. I see no such reason why we cannot discuss its logical gender-converse. Barack Obama’s personal cowardice and impotence while in the company of bad people undermines what modern masculinity ought to be about. His flippant attitude about these characters, and advantageous use of them to further his ambitions and political career, makes him less of a man than most men I know.
I am in no way suggesting women are to be held to lower expectations. Certain traits are not mutually exclusive to gender. But just as independence is considered an integral part of feminism — but not exclusive to femininity — so too forthrightness, internal self-assuredness, personal courage, and individual autonomy are fundamental principles of masculinity.
This has nothing to with Obama’s view on taxes and everything to do with his feeble disposition and fetal-position nature. It has everything to do with his moral fiber, his ethical clarity, and his intellectual strength. It has everything to do with his character and with his manhood.
Manhood is about solidarity, to stick up for your friends, just as patriotism is about solidarity and standing by your countrymen. I know people who get more defensive when you question their favorite sports team than Obama does when someone who has violently attacked Americans requests his hand in friendship.
Manhood is about saying what you believe, regardless of whose listening. It’s about telling someone what you think of them, and telling it to them straight. When has President Hope and Dreams ever done this? When did Obama ever stand up to Ayers? To the crook Tony Rezko? To the racist Jeremiah Wright? To the communist Frank Marshall Davis? Has he ever even stood up to someone in his own party?
Allow me to reemphasize: this inquiry has nothing to do with President-elect Obama’s view on, say, gun control or bailing out the auto industry. Vice President-elect Joe Biden is nearly as liberal as Obama, but I do not believe Biden would tolerate Soviet proxy Frank Marshall Davis lecturing him about “the American way and all that sh*t.” I do not believe Biden would associate with someone who dedicated their book to Bobby Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan — let alone someone who set off explosives at the U.S. Defense Department.
Unlike any other candidate in our history, Mr. Obama became who he is due to a posse of racist preachers, bigot friends, unrepentant ex-domestic terrorists, Marxist father figures, and thug Chicago financial-backers — in essence, bad Americans, and by extension, bad men.
What does this mean? What does this say about Obama as a man?
John McCain struck me, and still strikes me, as the type of friend who would give the shirt off his back for his buddy — because he has already shown he’s the type of American who, if pressed, would give the limb off his torso for his countrymen. If he were a young man again, he’d likely be in his familiar corridors and institutions: the Naval Academy, the U.S. military, the war theater of the hour. Like his sons today, he’d be “in the arena.”
Barack Obama struck me, and still strikes me, as the type of friend who wouldn’t verbally defend your integrity if others were talking poorly about you behind your back — simply because he’s shown he is not the type of American who defends his countrymen when others talk about how many Americans they’ve bombed and declared war against. He strikes me not only as a poor friend — or family member, if you were to ask his mud-hut brother in Nairobi — but a poor leader, a weak individual, and a man of sub-par fortitude.
Mr. Obama recently said he regretted not joining the military, stating he opted not to enlist because we were not at war when he “pondered” the idea. I do not take him at his word. I believe if he could relive his entire life, like McCain, he’d do it the same way all over again; entrenching himself in his familiar corridors, the ultra-Leftist precincts that made him who he is.
How is a McCain supporter, who recognized this disparity of character and maturity months ago, supposed to reconcile this disparity now — in the aftermath of Obama’s triumph?
Read more at:
http://familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1865/pub_detail.asp
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