Would someone please draw a dark line of distinction between what we call a scandal in Illinois and business as usual in New York? Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is accused of trying to sell a vacant Senate seat, while New York Gov. Paterson is expected to give a Senate seat to the woman whose family can raise lots of money for his benefit.
There’s the enormous I-should-have-had-a-V8! moment as the mainstream press collectively thwacks itself in the forehead, realizing it blew it again. The New York Times — which, according to Wall Street analysts, is weeks from holding editorial-board meetings in a refrigerator box — created the journalistic equivalent of CSI-Wasilla to study every follicle and fiber in Sarah Palin’s background, all the while treating Obama’s Chicago like one of those fairy-tale lands depicted in posters that adorn little girls’ bedroom walls. See there, Suzie? That’s a Pegasus. That’s a pink unicorn. And that’s a beautiful sunflower giving birth to a fully grown Barack Obama, the greatest president ever and the only man in history to be able to pick up manure from the clean end.
I have no doubt that that parent is miserably thinking about how her kids will feel when all their classmates have new Christmas presents, and they have nothing to show. What makes me mad is that we've created an environment where the most magical thing that can happen to a child is to be given a few pieces of plastic glued together in China.Megan McArdle
In short, Mr. Obama, your political philosophies represent everything that is wrong with our country. You represent the culture of government dependence instead of self reliance; Entitlement mentality instead of personal achievement; Penalization of the successful to reward the unmotivated; Political correctness instead of open mindedness and open debate. If you are successful, you may preside over the final transformation of America from being the greatest and most self-reliant culture on earth, to just another country of whiners and wimps, who sit around looking to the government to solve their problems.
Were I Palin, I'd first point out that balancing the budget of a working family with five kids gives her more experience than Obama in relating to families out there.
Mesi is the only political candidate I know who has admitted to a serious brain injury before running for office. Some might call that a prerequisite.
Richard Danzig, who served as navy secretary under the former president Bill Clinton and is tipped to become national security adviser in an Obama White House, told a foreign policy conference in Washington... "Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security."
At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.
Obama said the Rev. Wright he heard defending himself on Monday was not the Rev. Wright he met 20 years ago. This is the political equivalent of the 'It's not you, it's me' speech. He might just as well have said, 'I love Rev. Wright. I'm just not in love with him anymore. Hey, can I have my CDs back?'
If it takes Obama 20 years to notice that his pastor is a traitorous, racist nut-job, it will probably take him his full term of office to realize that the U.S. has been invaded and subdued by al-Qaida. Let's just hope President Obama pays closer attention during national security briefings than he did during 20 years of the Rev. Wright's church services.
Global warming theory has been around for a while; I learned it as a college student in about 1970. But it didn't get much traction then because the Earth was in a deep freeze. Some years later, environmental hysteria focused on global warming rather than cooling because, coincidentally, the climate started to warm. That warming has stopped, at least for the time being, and many scientists believe that a harsh cooling trend will begin around 2020. If that happens, environmental activists will be urging us to burn all the carbon fuels we can get our hands on in order to stave off the next Ice Age, much as they advocated an international project to paint the polar ice caps black so as to absorb more heat in the 1970s.
I'm voting for Barack Obama."
"Why?"
"He's the only candidate who can really change this country."
"Change it into what?"
"A country full of hope."
"Hopeful for what?"
"Change."
This answer goes against our intuition that, with two unopened doors left, the odds are 50-50 that the car is behind one of them.
Mr. Obama's message is we "need unity" because all Americans are victims, racial and otherwise; he even mentioned working for change by "binding our particular grievances."
At its core, his speech is more not less divisive. For his real message about Jeremiah Wright and his words was: It’s a black thing; you wouldn’t understand.
The price of oil may be the best automatic stabilizer that we have. The economy soars and the price of oil increases, imposing an automatic synthetic "tax" that dampens growth. The opposite is also true; the price of oil now falls because the economy is softening, and that will put a lot of money in the hands of American consumers. Oil is already down almost 12% from its peak. If a typical suburban family buys, say, 2000 gallons of gasoline a year, the price savings embedded in a 12% reduction will exceed the silly one-time payment from the stimulus package that passed the Senate today. If oil were to retreat to $60 with concommitant declines in the price of gasoline and heating fuel, the savings for a typical family would dwarf the artificial stimulus in the rebate bill.
The problem with you Nazi assnuggets is that you forget some of us still live in states where freedom of speech is real, not “symbolic”. You can say whatever you like, sure; but we can say whatever we like, too, and there’s not one damn thing you can do about it, skippy - threats of “prosecution” notwithstanding.
There is another kind of honor, however, which is uniquely bestowed by one's adversaries and enemies. It is the honor one acquires by defying temptations of popularity, by the acceptance of long odds, by suffering, by what is called the nobility of the last-ditch defense.
Both parties are convinced that government is exceptionally skilled at doing things they want more of, and entirely incompetent when it comes to things they don't like. Every candidate is a candidate for change, using the failed ideas of the past, to create a brave new world for the children
Big people have a server at the "office". The office is a boring place where big people go and do boring things.
The Dems of 1864 seemed to be going through the same emotions many of them are going through today. Harry Truman understood people, and warned us, in 1943, how people would act after World War II.
