harmonicminer

You really need to check out this Powerline post, and watch the videos they linked here (don’t be impatient, the ad is short) and here.

Entertaining.  And educational.

Is this REALLY what you voted for?

Why it is that this story doesn’t get covered on ABC, CBS, NBC?  NY Times, Washington Post?

You know.

Watch this, from Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute.

I haven’t heard much about this from other sources…. I’m trying to get more information about it.  But if this fellow isn’t exaggerating, this is looking really ugly.

More info here and here and some especially scary nonsense from Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister.

The previous post in this series is here.

A Moral Exemplar?

The University of Notre Dame has announced that Pres. Barack Obama will be the principal speaker and will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree at the university’s commencement on Sunday, May 17. The invitation comes after the president has taken several official actions that directly oppose the Catholic Church’s most sacred teachings. National Review Online asked some of our experts on education and Catholicism for their comments.

At the link, an important discussion on what it can mean for Notre Dame to have invited President Obama to receive an honorary degree and deliver a commencement address, to students who will have been taught (we hope) that abortion is deeply immoral, and who will witness the honoring of a president who supports it.

What, exactly, would a president have to do to be found ineligible for such an honor by a putatively Christian institution?  Apparently, supporting abortion in the most radical way possible is not enough.

Perhaps if he actually ate the babies after the abortions?  An interesting question:  is cannibalism a greater sin than aiding, abetting and encouraging unjust killing in the first place?  I think not.  After all, they’re already dead, right?  It’s a shame to waste them.  (And besides, for the pro-abortion crowd, they never did have human rights anyway, did they?  I mean, being just lumps of tissue and everything.  How immoral can it be to eat something that has no civil rights, anyway?  Isn’t that the same as cattle ranching, or hunting and eating what you kill?)

So, I think we have conclusively demonstrated that even if Obama ate aborted babies, he would still get an honorary degree from Notre Dame, a Christian university, since abortion is a greater sin than cannibalism (if someone else did the killing), and promoting abortion did not disqualify him.

Ah, but if Obama was well known as an industrial polluter, shooter of wolves from helicopters, corporate raider/downsizer, Pentecostal snake handler, and believer in young-Earth Creationism, and had still managed to get elected, would Notre Dame have invited him to receive an honorary degree and address impressionable undergraduates ?

Probably not.  Some sins really do matter.

The next post in this series is here.

Which Obama will show up for presidential debates? – Yahoo! News

Which Barack Obama will show up for the first presidential debate?

It could be the tone-deaf debater who condescendingly told Hillary Rodham Clinton during a Democratic debate that she was “likable enough.”

Or perhaps the confident candidate who absorbed a jab from Clinton about using her husband’s former advisers and responded with a devastating one-liner of his own: “Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me as well.”

For a man known as a powerful speaker, Obama has rarely wowed people in political debates. He can come across as lifeless, aloof and windy.

But Obama didn’t make any serious mistakes in the many debates during the Democratic primary, or when he was running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. He sometimes showed flashes of wit and charm. And, with a couple of exceptions, he got better with time.

“A year ago, he was not nearly as polished,” said Timothy O’Donnell, a professor at the University of Mary Washington and chairman of the collegiate National Debate Tournament. “He equivocates less. He’s quicker with examples.”

Continue reading “Obama should have taken the chance to practice”

As usual, the Obama campaign is still playing catchup to Sarah Palin. Now the big question is whether she actually crossed the border into Iraq by a half-mile, or stayed at the border.   Obama camp suggests lies over Palin visit to Iraq – Yahoo! News

The question of whether Sarah Palin has ever been to Iraq pushed Obama aides Saturday to accuse the McCain campaign of outright lies, distortions and distractions to the American people.

Since Republican presidential nominee John McCain tapped the Alaska governor to be his running mate on Aug. 29, questions about her experience have been fueled by her relatively brief tenure in office, as well as a dearth of foreign travel.

What matters isn’t how many countries she’s visited, or even how many heads of state she knows on a first name basis.  What matters is the judgment and values of the candidate.

When Russia invaded Georgia, Obama’s first response was to hope that both sides would exercise restraint, in a perfect-pitch-for-the-left rendition of moral equivalence, the natural born instinct of leftists everywhere.  That tells us what we need to know about Obama’s judgment and values.  Obama’s warm reception during his grand international P.R. tour doesn’t change who he is, a person who can’t quite define evil, and isn’t quite sure what we should do about it….  in his own nuanced way, of course.

I doubt an academic study can be found to demonstrate that shaking hands and chatting about inconsequentials with foreign leaders (the usual meaning of “getting to know them”) has produced better decisions than are reached by simply considering the facts at hand.  Roosevelt “met” with Stalin, and still gave away half of Europe.  Bush met with Putin and “saw into his soul”, and still didn’t understand, it would seem, what a fascist Putin would turn out to be.  Kennedy “met” with Kruschiev, and that resulted in the Cuban missile crisis when the Communist dictator decided that Kennedy could be rolled.

It’s decisions based on evidence that matter, not face time.  And tourism is not a pre-requisite for the Presidency or vice-Presidency, much as the Left might wish it was.

In the meantime, whether Palin made it 2500 feet into Iraq, or stayed at the border, matters not a whit.  The Obama campaign must really be spooked by this lady.  They should be…  she is something beyond their experience, a genuine person who simply says what she means.

OH, and the lead sentence to the quoted article is truly hilarious:  Imagine, the Obama campaign was “pushed” into calling the McCain campaign liars.  Gee…  you mean they just couldn’t help themselves?

If you have any sense, you’ll simply ignore all AP reporting in this election cycle.  In what pretends to be a news article, the AP claims that McCain’s claims skirt the facts. This bit of magnificent analysis is by one Charles Babington.  The only hint given to the reader that it is mere opinion, and not NEWS, is the word “analysis” in the title. By rights, it has no place in a list of “news stories”, and should be clearly marked “editorial by left leaning writer”, but of course the AP isn’t that interested in helping you discern the difference. Here’s the first paragraph:

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He said Friday that Palin never asked for money for lawmakers’ pet projects as Alaska governor, even though she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone’s taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

This is risible. 80 percent of families don’t PAY income tax. About 40% of families pay no federal income tax. Obama wants to simply GIVE non-tax paying people a “tax cut” by sending them a check. In many cases of the 60% who DO pay income tax, the “tax cut” will amount to more than the taxes they pay.   He will pay for this by raising taxes on the top 5%. There are a couple of names for this: “welfare” is the polite one. Pure class-warfare socialism is another.

Further, if you ask the people in Alaska who “killed the bridge to nowhere”, they will say Sarah Palin.  Sarah Palin’s political enemies in Alaska say that she killed it.  Palin’s political friends say she killed it.  80% approval rating is hard to argue with.  But of course, Mr. Babington (one wonders if this is mispelled…  should it be Blabington?), from his olympian position as an AP flack, knows things that no one in Alaska knows, being so much smarter than the average Alaskan.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain’s skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama’s campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

Since this “news” story is full of factual holes, one can only hope the voters disregard it.  This diatribe goes on for a dozen more paragraphs of distortion about McCain and Palin, until at last, we get this sop to evenhandedness:

Obama, of course, has made exaggerated or questionable assertions as well. Earlier this year, for instance, he repeated a claim that more black men are in prison than in college, after news accounts refuted it. He also used a McCain remark about having troops in Iraq for “100 years” to exaggerate McCain’s proposals for being fully engaged militarily in that country.

THIS is the best this writer can find to document Obama’s false claims and questionable assertions?  What diligence.  What attention to detail.  What thorough research.

Voters are going to have to be very careful this season.  The major media are so far in the tank for Obama that they present pure opinion/spin pieces as if they are news.  A simple challenge to anyone who doubts this: try to find an AP piece, by ANY writer, ANY time in the last 6 months, that is this negative about Obama.  Since the AP seems to think it’s OK to disguise pure opinion as news, surely, if they were being evenhanded, they would publish at least ONE that was negative about Obama in the radical way that this piece is negative on McCain. 

Start looking.  I’ll check back next week to see if anyone found anything and put it in the comments area.  Oh:  and if, by some miracle, you find one, can you find another one? 

I love it when the libertarians and conservatives square off and start punching. It’s always instructive, and is a good tonic for those who believe “the right” is monolithic.

Claremont Institute fellow Michael M. Uhlmann has a dismissive review of The Cult of the Presidency in the current issue of National Review: “It’s Not Just the Executive,” September 15, 2008. (Here it is if you get NR Digital, otherwise it’s available in the print edition). It seems to me that the review largely consists of inaccurate characterizations, unsupported assertions, and non sequiturs. But hey, I’m the author, and understandably biased, so check it out and judge for yourself.

Uhlmann writes that “The bulk of Healy’s book is devoted to various sins, offenses and negligences of the Bush administration.” That’s a bizarre statement, given that the book has nine chapters and an introduction, and only three of those chapters cover GWB’s tenure. In fact, the “bulk of the book” is devoted to demonstrating that, as I write in Chapter Two, “the problems of the modern presidency did not begin when George W. Bush emerged victorious from 2000’s seemingly interminable Battle of the Chads” and that–despite what some on the Left seem to believe–those problems will not vanish in January 2009 when he heads back to the ranch to cut brush.

Read it all.

Obama being THE ONE and everything, do you ever find yourself wondering if there are any Obamas left in the alternate universes of the multiverse?

I’m trying to remember:  I used to live in an alternate universe myself, and I’m pretty sure there was no Obama in it.  Maybe there’s a reason he’s so accepting of “illegal aliens“…  Just ask yourself:  if the Obama we know is from another universe, how would we know?  Would it be the sparks when he makes an entrance (no border fences will be stopping this guy)?  Or something else?    Maybe like this?.

If Obama starts in with the flashy kung fu stuff, I’m outta here.